“He’s just a very polite, properly raised, I was going to say kid,” Paltrow tells VF before correcting herself. “He’s a man who takes his work really seriously and is a fun partner.” That’ll get them through Hot Ones Versus.
What you hope you never, ever, ever have to worry about is the subject of Netflix’s new series, Adolescence. The four-part British crime drama tells the (fictional) story of Jamie Miller, a 13-year-old suburban boy who’s ripped from bed in the morning, accused of murdering a classmate. Created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham — who also plays Jamie’s dad, Eddie — the show is an emotional gut punch, aided by the fact that each episode is shot in real time in one take.
There’s a lot going wrong here: A lack of any real sexual chemistry between Grant and the ladytestants; Grant saying “I love you” completely unprompted; production giving Zoe the absolute worst date. But for me, what is such an absolute bummer is Grant continuing to objectify the women. Now, he’s not objectifying them by talking about their bodies or how sexy they are; and maybe a little bit of that would be helpful, even, to show us chemistry between Grant and the top three. No, I mean that he keeps referring to them as “a wife” or “a mother,” reducing them to the role they’ll play in his life. Where is “partner”? Or “girlfriend”? Or “Sugarlips”? The most egregious instance is when he says, “When I saw Zoe with her friends and family, I saw a wife.” Zoe was transported to another plane of existence, and she became A Wife. Grant has not said anything meaningful or specific about any of the women except where they rank on the A Wife scale.
“Appreciate my MSG family for taking such good care of me and I need to shout out the crew that had to clean that up. Appreciate you!” Morgan added in his post. “More importantly, the Knicks are now 1-0 when I throw up on the court so maybe I’ll have to break it out again in the playoffs 😅”
The trailer introduces an original Japanese Breakfast song … and Johnson as Lucy, a matchmaker who is willing to stop random guys on the street to see if they’re potential customers. Some of her clients have very specific criteria (“nothing over 20 BMI,” “more grown” but still young), while others are a little more open (“I’m trying to settle”). A friend and a celebratory cake inform us that Lucy is responsible for nine marriages — which is shy of Love Is Blind’s record but still pretty good. According to an official synopsis, she’s “torn between the perfect match and her imperfect ex.” It’s pretty easy to tell who’s who: Pascal’s character meets her at an event where Evans’s character is a waiter who already knows her drink order. One man sleeps with her in a $12 million apartment, while the other man lives with roommates but has a rich past with her. She’s entertaining both connections, but her overall stance on relationships seems to be getting more complicated. “I don’t think I’m very good at my job, anymore,” she says at one point, later musing that people get married “because they’re lonely, and because they’re hopeful.”
The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick premiered earlier this month at South by Southwest, ushering in what could be a big year for Ohs and Harris. Ohs had edited the documentary Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play., and Harris was attracted to his fluid Mike Leigh–ish filmmaking process, which he’d also employed on the similarly microbudget indies Jethica and Everything Beautiful Is Far Away (the latter starring Julia Garner). So they decided to make one themselves. What resulted is a chamber piece about a dispirited urbanite named Yvonne (Chao) who retreats to a country house where her friend (Hernandez) is residing with a couple (Harris and Cusati-Moyer) who rattle off crunchy platitudes about mugwort, organic produce, and the restorative power of a sunrise.
Not directly. Jamie’s story itself is not based on a specific person or event, but per Birmingham Live, Graham noted that real reports of knife crime did give him the idea for what the series would be about. “I’d read an article in the paper about a young boy stabbing a young girl, and it made me feel a bit cold,” he said. “Then about three of four months later, there was a piece on the news about a young boy who’d stabbed a young girl.”
Gossip and confrontation are the pillars of good reality television writ large, but what makes a great season of Below Deck is more specific and somewhat counter-intuitive. It helps the show when the crew is tight — we saw this last season after the Devil (Luke) and his fork (Laura) left. One of the joys of watching the crew work together is to commiserate with them about the general loathsomeness of entitled rich guests. By the time they get a couple of days off, we almost feel as if we, too, have earned the break. Watching a good Below Deck cast is like having a really cold beer after a really long day; or like sending your best friend a three-minute voice memo about all the shit that happened at work that day. It’s soothing because it’s a way to exorcize the demons that have been lodged into your soul by a job. At its strongest, Below Deck speaks directly to that instinct. When that appeal starts fizzling out like Bri and Harry’s lukewarm relationship, our engagement also begins to drag.
The trailer for The Wedding Banquet has a lot to explain. The “comedy of errors” plot is twisty and complicated, with six major characters to introduce, but it can’t seem too twisty or else the audience won’t get that this is a light comedy. Luckily, there’s some handy title cards, like “Lee wants a baby with Angela” and “Min wants to stay with Chris,” along with a few choice lines, such as “I don’t even want to be an American! The trains are so slow and I never know what to tip!” to help everybody out.
• The Ratliff Family (Jason Isaacs, Parker Posey, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Sarah Catherine Hook, and Sam Nivola): This family hails from the South, giving them a connection to Southern charm. However, their dynamics remind us of another Bravo family – it’s as if we are unsure whether this isn’t Meredith Marks and her kin? (In fact, have you ever noticed how striking Meredith’s eldest son is?)
• The Ratliff Family (Jason Isaacs, Parker Posey, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Sarah Catherine Hook, and Sam Nivola): This family comes from the South, which gives them a Southern Charm vibe. But their dynamics make us think of another Bravo family – it seems like we might be mistaken in thinking that this isn’t Meredith Marks and her relatives? (You should take a look at her oldest son; he’s quite striking!)