The next TV series from David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the creators of Game of Thrones, will be an alternate-history drama depicting an America in which the southern states won the Civil War and slavery is still legal, HBO announced yesterday. In this timeline, slavery, the official premise states, “has evolved into a modern institution.”
It has become common—standard, even—for TV networks to reboot bygone shows for a new audience with updated casts and storylines. Usually, though, they don’t announce plans to do so before the original show has even gone off the air.
As its plot darkens, Game of Thrones is trying to lighten the mood.
Winter is here. Finally.
The Television Academy announced the nominations for the 2017 Emmys this morning, and for the 17th year in a row, HBO led the pack, this time with a whopping 111 nominations.
Zaldrīzes ñuhe tale ipradas!
Outside of baseball and Wimbledon, there isn’t much going on right now in major professional sports. Basketball and hockey leagues have ended their seasons, the English Premier League and Spanish La Liga are still a month away, and American football teams have yet to even begin training camp.
As the real Tour de France slogged into its eighth stage last week, HBO needed only 40 minutes (and a whole lot of movie stars) to hilariously spoof cycling’s dark history with performance-enhancing drugs.
It’s only July, but 2017 has already provided us a full year’s worth of great movies and TV shows.
From The Godfather, Part III to Matrix Revolutions, there’s a long history of otherwise great trilogies disappointing fans and critics alike with their final installment. But one of this summer’s biggest blockbusters looks poised to buck the trend, and could perhaps go down as the best final trilogy film ever made.
Goop, the lifestyle brand owned by actress Gwyneth Paltrow, promotes and sells an assortment of wellness products ranging from “Sex Dust” to “Chill Child: Kid Calming Mist” to “Trauma Repair Flower Essence Blend.” The last of these purports to “stabilize and sooth emotional trauma”—a claim that seems tame in comparison to Goop’s latest obsession, healing stickers, which recently caught the attention of late-night comedy’s very own lifestyle connoisseur, Stephen Colbert.
Netflix has produced yet another unexpected summertime hit, this time in the form of a delightfully bingeable series about female professional wrestlers in the 1980s. GLOW, released last week, is equal parts hilarious and pensive, matched only in wildness by the real-life all-female wrestling league on which it’s based.
The 2017 Emmy nominations are nearly upon us: Voting on the prestigious TV awards ends next week, and the nominations themselves will be revealed live on July 13 (the ceremony takes place in September). But you don’t have to wait until then to know the best TV shows of the year.
The catalog of films based on recently ended television shows is not impressive. Downton Abbey, the series that brought literal gold to the golden age of TV, will soon join it.
HBO is still trying to adapt the “unadaptable” Watchmen, and it may have finally found the right person for the job. The network has tapped The Leftovers and Lost creator Damon Lindelof to turn the beloved graphic novel into a TV series, Variety reported.
“When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die,” Cersei Lannister ominously tells Ned Stark in the first season of HBO’s Game of Thrones. When you play this impossible Game of Thrones quiz, however, you just die. Repeatedly.
Star Wars fans, cover your ears. The Book of Henry, an upcoming film by Star Wars: Episode IX director Colin Trevorrow, is getting ruthlessly hammered by critics, leaving some worried about the future of the Star Wars franchise.
Predictably, the reboot of The Mummy—this time, with Tom Cruise!—is getting destroyed by critics. Out of 137 critics on Rotten Tomatoes, 113 have given the film a negative review, and audiences aren’t loving it either. The news gets worse for Universal Pictures, which has planned an entire “Dark Universe” of monster movies after The Mummy. Many of the reviews reduced the film to the most monstrous insult of all: a bad pun.
Wonder Woman is an indisputable commercial and critical success. It dominated the box office this weekend, beating projections on its way to a massive $100 million opening in the US—the most ever for a film directed by a woman. And its 93% score on Rotten Tomatoes is one of the highest ever for a superhero film.
Who knew that the greatest mystery of The Leftovers was hidden in a Rihanna song this whole time?
Hollywood is running out of classic 1980s films to revive, so now it’s moving a decade later for inspiration.
Damon Lindelof is not going to hide. That’s the lesson he’s lived by his entire career as one of television’s best and most transparent writers—and perhaps his biggest regret is the one time he strayed from that principle.
On Sunday, Sofia Coppola won the best director award at Cannes for her film The Beguiled, becoming only the second woman in the 70-year history of the prestigious film festival to win the prize.
If you’ve just watched tonight’s penultimate episode of The Leftovers, you’re probably feeling at least one of three things: Awe, bewilderment, and catharsis. Justin Theroux, whose brilliant double performance forms the bedrock of the episode, said that working on the HBO show has made him feel all three.
