Television

NBC

The former ‘America’s Got Talent’ judge claims she ‘ended up staying sick for two months straight’ while serving as a judge on the show because of Cowell’s cigarette smoking.
May 28, 2020
AceShowbiz – Gabrielle Union has spoken in detail about her “America’s Got Talent” experience for the first time since being axed from the show’s judging line-up.
The “Bad Boys II” actress was fired from the show’s panel of judges in November 2019 after just one season, amid reports suggesting her departure was linked to concerns she had raised about several controversial incidents which took place behind the scenes, creating a “toxic” work atmosphere.
Speaking to Variety, the star confirmed the speculation, explaining, “At the end of all this, my goal is real change – and not just on this show but for the larger parent company. It starts from the top down.”
Reflecting on her decision to complain about Simon Cowell’s cigarette smoking, she admitted raising her concerns on her first day was ill-judged as she was “coming onto a set and you are literally met with the very definition of a toxic work environment, and it’s being carried out by the most powerful person on the production.”
She continued, “I couldn’t escape. I ended up staying sick for two months straight. It was a cold that lingered, and turned into bronchitis, because I couldn’t shake it. It impacted my voice, which affects my ability to do my job.”
“It was challenging to tend to my illness without being made to feel like I’m responsible for my own sickness. It put me in a position from day one where I felt othered. I felt isolated. I felt singled out as being difficult, when I’m asking for basic laws to be followed. I want to come to work and be healthy and safe and listened to.”
Gabrielle went on to detail a racially charged incident when Jay Leno was a guest, revealing he “made a crack about a painting of Cowell and his dogs, saying the animals looked like food items at a Korean restaurant.”
The “Breaking In” star explained, “I gasped. I froze. Other things had already happened, but at this point, it was so wildly racist.” Despite being told the moment would be edited out, Gabrielle said, “You cannot edit out what we just experienced… To experience this kind of racism at my job and there be nothing done about it, no discipline, no company-wide email, no reminder of what is appropriate in the workplace?”
Gabrielle also confessed she’d hoped network bosses “might be more conscientious in exposing” racial inequalities after co-judge Julianne Hough had previously come under fire for dressing as a character from “Orange Is the New Black” in full blackface in 2013. And she added the show’s handling of hair and make-up was poor, revealing, “Some contestants get the full Hollywood treatment, and then some are left to dangle.”
Meanwhile, NBC bosses responded to the investigation into all of Gabrielle’s complaints, insisting, “Through the investigation process, it has been revealed that no one associated with the show made any insensitive or derogatory remarks about Ms. Union’s appearance… The investigation has shown that the concerns raised by Ms. Union had no bearing on the decision not to exercise the option on her contract.”

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WENN

The Spice Girls singer is set to teach young students on creative writing while the ‘Glee’ actor is enlisted to help the kids with musical theater for ‘Celebrity Supply Teacher’.
May 28, 2020
AceShowbiz – Geri Horner is heading back to school to help young students with their creative writing.
Bosses at the BBC have tapped the Spice Girls star for the 20-episode CBBC series, which aims to bring a primary school curriculum to the small screen for U.K. viewers continuing to learn at home during the coronavirus pandemic.
Gushing about the opportunity to help primary school kids, the singer and children’s author said, “Sharing the power of words on CBBC was a lot of fun.”
The “Wannabe” star has written several books over the years, and will help young aspiring writers by teaching them how to write a great story and develop a character, as well as how to create the perfect setting and plot for their work.
Geri, who is mother to daughter Bluebell, 14, and three-year-old son Monty herself, will also show students around her farm and explain how her animals help inspire her stories.
Several other stars have been tapped for the show, including “Glee” star Matthew Morrison, who is set to teach musical theatre, and Kaiser Chiefs frontman Ricky Wilson, who will be on hand for art lessons.
Dame Darcey Bussell will also make an appearance to teach dance, while acting duo and “Emmerdale” stars Jeff Hordley and Zoe Henry will be on hand for lessons.
Paralympic gold medallist Ellie Simmonds is set to talk about ocean geography with children while Former Economic Secretary to the Treasury Ed Balls will teach history.
Chef Heston Blumenthal will also be heading into the kitchen to teach children how to make the perfect strawberry ice cream sundae.
“Celebrity Supply Teacher” is set to begin airing on on CBBC and BBC iPlayer from June 8, 2020.

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There’s a statistical likelihood that your image of Steve Carell is based primarily on “The Office,” and on the films “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Anchorman” before that. In the streaming age it wouldn’t even be surprising if one of those venerable comedies was the last thing you watched him in. What are the odds that when you think of Carell you think of “Welcome to Marwen” or “Battle of the Sexes” or “Last Flag Flying,” recent movies whose box office ranged from poor to dismal?It’s too bad, because he was great in all of them, in ways that went beyond his considerable skills as a comedian. Carell’s reinvention of himself as a dramatic actor, beginning roughly with “Foxcatcher” in 2014, has been remarkable. That’s why “Space Force,” his new 10-episode series on Netflix (beginning Friday), is particularly disappointing. If we’re going to get five hours of Carell onscreen, did it have to be such a step backward?“Space Force,” which Carell created with the writer and producer Greg Daniels, his collaborator on “The Office,” tries to do a couple of things and doesn’t succeed in any very interesting or funny way at either.It is, most obviously, a satire of some of the habits and attitudes of Donald J. Trump. Carell’s character, Gen. Mark R. Naird, is put in charge of the newly formed Space Force, a branch of the military established by a Twitter-loving president to protect the satellites off which his inflammatory tweets bounce.The president of the show is unnamed and unseen but familiar. In addition to his Twitter habit, he presides over a chaotic administration and “has a name” for developing countries that can’t be repeated. The show’s humor largely flows from the scrambling, slapstick attempts of Naird and his team to satisfy the commander in chief’s “boots on the moon by 2024” pledge, and to thwart his warlike impulses as other countries, most gallingly China, steal his thunder.Fused with the relatively up-to-date political burlesque, though, is another element that harks back to Daniels’s heyday on “The Office” and “Parks and Recreation.” It’s a more sentimental workplace and family sitcom, focused on Naird’s relationships with his wife, Maggie (Lisa Kudrow), and his teenage daughter, Erin (Diana Silvers), who resents the move from Washington to the space base in rural Colorado; and with his cynical science adviser, Adrian Mallory (John Malkovich).There’s a workable comic framework in this bipartite structure. Naird seems designed to bridge a certain contemporary cultural gap. He exhibits traits that could be identified as Trumpian — a tendency to browbeat and second-guess the scientists who work for him, a readiness to question the loyalty of those with roots in exotic places like China or Belgium — though the show correlates them with his gung-ho military background rather than any political beliefs or ugly prejudices.At the same time he’s pointedly portrayed as a caring father and husband, and someone who will, at the last extreme of presidential impetuosity, take a stand against needlessly provoking other nuclear powers. Like a lot of sitcom dads, he’s a little deplorable, but he puts a human face on it. (In terms of “The Office,” he has some Michael Scott in him but he’s a lot more capable.)Carell has no problem making both sides of that equation believable and engaging — he’s a master of the quick shifts and reversals the part requires. But he’s too good for the material, which never takes off. The loony parts aren’t sharp enough, despite the efforts of Carell and crack performers like Noah Emmerich, Jane Lynch and Diedrich Bader, playing awfully broad stuffed-uniform stereotypes as Naird’s fellow joint chiefs.Malkovich is pleasingly louche as Mallory, and Silvers is funny as the angry daughter, but their scenes with Carell are bland and overly sincere and run on too long. (The episodes, at a full 30 minutes, generally feel padded.)The saving grace of the show could have been Kudrow, who, as always, can make you laugh anytime she wants, with a roll of her shoulders or a disgusted expression. But she’s not onscreen much, and her character is barely sketched — she’s part of a running joke that may pay off if the show gets another season. Still, the funniest thing in 10 episodes of “Space Force” is a five-second shot of her hair. More

Donald Trump has some ideas about fighting the coronavirus. “We hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light,” the president says, to the bafflement of nearby aides. “Supposing, I said, you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or … in some other way,” continues the president, gesturing toward her —Her? I should explain. The words are 100 percent Donald J. Trump’s. The actions belong to the comedian Sarah Cooper, whose homemade lip-syncs of the president’s rambling pandemic-related statements have become the most effective impression of Mr. Trump yet.How to medical pic.twitter.com/0EDqJcy38p— Sarah Cooper (@sarahcpr) April 24, 2020
Ms. Cooper posted that first video, titled “How to Medical,” to TikTok and Twitter in April. In a 49-second tour de force, Ms. Cooper illustrates his musings on light and disinfectant using a lamp and household cleaning products, playing the president’s puzzled aide in cutaways.She captures her Trump entirely through pantomime. She crosses her arms and bounces on her heels, like a C.E.O. filibustering through a meeting while the staff suffers. Plenty of wags seized on Mr. Trump’s bleach prescription for easy jokes, but her performance gets at something deeper: the peacocky entitlement of the longtime boss who is used to having his every whim indulged, his every thought-doodle praised as a Michelangelo.Ms. Cooper has been on a tear since, her karaoke Trump holding forth on the math of disease testing and wrestling with what it means to test “positively” for a virus. Channeling the president’s announcement that he was taking the drug hydroxychloroquine (against prevailing medical advice) as a Covid preventive, she’s a manic Willy Wonka, handing out a blister pack of pills to herself as a girl in pigtails.Long before he was elected, Donald Trump posed the challenge of being easy to imitate, and thus nearly impossible to satirize. Everyone has a Trump, and when everyone has a Trump, no one does.A big problem comes when a writer tries to take the president’s belligerent spoken jazz (“I know words. I have the best words”) and force it into comedic 4/4 time. Even the most lacerating satire has to impose coherence on Mr. Trump, which — like news reports that try to find a narrative in his ramblings — ends up polishing the reality, losing the chaos essential to the genuine article.Which maybe destined Donald Trump to be the TikTok president. The service was built around the concept of lip-sync videos, and to spoof this president, the perfect script is no script.Before Ms. Cooper’s “How to Medical,” other TikTok users riffed on a Trump ramble about the power of “germs.” Kylie Scott posted “Drunk in the Club After Covid,” lip-syncing Mr. Trump’s words as a rambling inebriate, finding 80-proof logic in the teetotaler president’s musings.“The germ has gotten so brilliant,” she mouths — cradling a drink, squinting her eyes and spiraling a finger toward her temple — “that the antibiotic can’t keep up with it.” (A TikTok search on “#drunktrump” yields a growing crop of examples.)In 2008 Tina Fey hit on a version of this with her “Saturday Night Live” impression of Sarah Palin, some of whose best lines were verbatim or near-verbatim quotes. But even Ms. Fey put some English on Ms. Palin’s English, as with the line “I can see Russia from my house,” which some people later mistook for a real quote.With Ms. Cooper, there’s the added frisson of having Mr. Trump — who boasted of sexual assault, ran on xenophobia and referred crudely to African and Caribbean countries — played by a black woman born in Jamaica. (Compare the “S.N.L.” sketch that used as a punchline the idea that Leslie Jones wanted to take over the role of the president.)It’s more than just irony. There’s something liberating about Ms. Cooper taking on a subject she couldn’t be expected to mirror, much as Melissa McCarthy was freed to imagine a hyper-aggro version of the former press secretary Sean Spicer.Instead, Ms. Cooper’s Trumpian drag is partly a caricature of performative masculinity. (Mr. Trump’s lifelong public persona has also been a caricature of performative masculinity.) There’s something provocative in a woman trying on a male politician’s unexamined confidence, his viewing of the other people in the room as temporarily useful props.It’s part an impression of Mr. Trump, part an attempt to ask whether a woman could get away with what Mr. Trump does and what that might look like. (Ms. Cooper wrote a 2018 humor-advice book titled, “How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings.”)Other Cooper videos are more minimal, like a 12-second clip of the president touting his economic record: “We are bringing our country back and a big focus is exactly that, with the, uh, minorities, specifically, if you look at, uh, the Asians.”There’s no outfit or staging. Ms. Cooper does all the work with her eyes, which dart around frantically on each “uh,” before landing somewhere offscreen and pointing on “Asians.”This is another theme of her Trump, the insistent confidence betrayed by microexpressions of terror. From Ms. Cooper’s lips, the president’s sentences become plywood bridges he’s trying to nail together, one shaky plank at a time, over a vertiginous Looney Tunes canyon.Beyond capturing the moment, Ms. Cooper’s Trump says something about what makes a good political impression. Too often, people judge it by the Rich Little standard — how much you manage to look and sound like the subject.Mimicry is a neat trick, but it’s not satire unless there’s an idea of the person, which can hit closer to the core than a pitch-perfect imitation. What Ms. Cooper and company are developing is comedy not as writing, but as a kind of live-action political cartooning.And it has applications beyond Mr. Trump. The comedian Maria DeCotis performs Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s briefing digressions about family life in quarantine as a kind of stir-crazy sitcom, in which she plays the New York governor, each of his grown daughters and one daughter’s boyfriend.All these pieces prove that creativity eventually finds ways to work its way out of apparent dead-ends: not just how to make comedy under quarantine but how to ridicule a self-satirizing political moment. Comedians are not the only people to look at our current reality and say, “I have no words.” As it turns out, you don’t need any. More

WENN

Speaking to former co-star Rainn Wilson on his ‘Hey There, Human’ live broadcast, the former star of ‘The Office’ notes on the little time he’d have once the coronavirus lockdown comes to an end.
May 27, 2020
AceShowbiz – John Krasinski has defended his decision to sell his lockdown web series “Some Good News” to ViacomCBS.
The “A Quiet Place” star announced last week, end May 24, that the network would host the program with a new host after a bidding war, with many people accusing him of “selling out” by moving the show from its former free platform to a bigger organization.
However, speaking to former “The Office” co-star Rainn Wilson on his “Hey There, Human” live broadcast, John explained it wasn’t a matter of money, but of how little time he knew he’d have once the coronavirus lockdown comes to an end.
“I knew the two options were always gonna be that I leave it off with eight in my office – which I would love to keep doing this show from my office forever, (but) it just wasn’t sustainable,” he explained. “So I’d need a partner coming on. And it’s funny, in the first episode I said, ‘Why isn’t there a news show dedicated entirely to good news?’ and now we have one of the biggest news programs in America, CBS News, saying that they want to make it part of their permanent news cycle, which is insane.”
“The fact that we were able to accomplish that – in eight weeks it went from not existing to now being on one of these huge news networks – is honestly one of the most amazing honors I’ve ever been able to pull off. And again, it was all due to the community and to the people.”

John added the decision was fuelled by the fact he has to shoot the upcoming third series of “Jack Ryan”, among various other commitments.
The first new episodes of “Some Good News” will be shown on the rebranded CBS All Access this summer, before other ViacomCBS networks get the second run of installments.

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Developed by creator Ryan Murphy, the new anthology series is planned to be named ‘American Horror Stories’ with each episode focusing on a different ghost story.
May 27, 2020
AceShowbiz – A spin-off to hit series “American Horror Story” has been officially given the go-ahead from bosses at the FX network.
They have announced the production is officially in the works as part of their 2020-2021 programming slate, just weeks after creator Ryan Murphy revealed he was developing the venture.
Few details about the new project have been revealed, but the writer/producer plans to name it “American Horror Stories”, and each episode of the anthology series will focus on a different ghost story.

Murphy teased the idea on social media earlier this month, as he shared a photo from a video conference call he recently hosted with his TV cast, including Sarah Paulson, Evan Peters, and Kathy Bates.

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NBC

The new season of the talent competition show also features new judge Sofia Vergara with Heidi Klum rejoining fellow judges, including Simon Cowell and Howie Mandel.
May 27, 2020
AceShowbiz – “America’s Got Talent” returned for season 15 on Tuesday, May 26. The new season featured new judge Sofia Vergara with Heidi Klum rejoining fellow judges, including Simon Cowell and Howie Mandel. Terry Crews, meanwhile, reprised his role as the host.
Pig-friendly act Pork Chop Revue opened the premiere episode. Their act saw one massive pig pushing a carriage at one point. Heidi loved it and the judges decided to send the act to the next round.
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Following it up was dancing duo Bad Salsa which consisted of Sumanth Maroju and Sonali Majumder. Despite the name, their performance wasn’t bad at all as Sofia praised them and said that they “look beautiful together.” Unsurprisingly, they were voted to the next round.
[embedded content] The next performer was young drummer Malik. He offered an amazing performance, enough to make Sofia, Howie and Simon gave him a standing ovation. Malik was moving on! Later, music duo Broken Roots hit the stage to sing a rendition of “Wanted Dead or Alive” by Bon Jovi. The judges were impressed and sent them to the next round.
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Magician Ryan Tricks then enlisted Howie and Simon in his performance. It was “fantastic,” according to Heidi. Simon also said that there’s something he really liked about Ryan. He was moving on! Wrongly incarcerated singer Archie Williams then belted out a powerful rendition of Elton John’s “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” and got a standing ovation.
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The episode also featured performances from singing duo Double Dragon, impressionist Vincent Marcus and a danger act from Moses. The three of them were moving to the next round.
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Concluding the night was a stunning performance from Voices of Our City. The choir group moved everyone especially Terry, who hit the Golden Buzzer for them. With that, Voices of Our City went straight to the live shows.

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FX/Patrick McElhenney

The cult comedy series, which stars Charlie Day and Danny DeVito among others, breaks a 14-season tie with ‘The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet’ after getting renewed for another season.
May 27, 2020
AceShowbiz – Danny DeVito’s cult comedy series “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” will make TV history with a 15th season.
The show, which launched in August 2005, is now the longest running live-action sitcom in American television history after breaking a 14-season tie with “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet”, which ran from 1952 to 1966.
The renewal news, which was announced on Tuesday, May 26, comes after the the show’s creator and star Rob McElhenney revealed during a Television Critics Association event in January, “We’re going to keep doing it forever if people keep watching.”
The series also features Charlie Day, Glenn Howerton and Kaitlin Olson.

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