There has rarely been something as good for Monday morning water cooler talk than HBO Sunday nights. All the way back to The Sopranos and Sex and the City up through Girls and Game of Thrones, HBO’s Sunday night line-up creates all kinds of next-day chatter amongst friends, family and co-workers, who discuss the company’s thought-provoking, exciting and controversial shows. This Monday is no different as Sunday night, Aaron Sorkin‘s latest TV show The Newsroom premiered.
The show, which was created by the Oscar-winning writer of The Social Network and creator of TV shows like The West Wing, stars Jeff Daniels, Emily Mortimer, John Gallagher, Jr., Alison Pill, Thomas Sadoski, Olivia Munn, Dev Patel and Sam Waterston. It tells the behind the scenes story of a nightly cable-news TV program. Reactions following the premiere range from calling it the best show on TV to a huge misfire from Sorkin. If you don’t have HBO, you were in the dark about the show. Until now.
HBO has posted the entire 72 minute pilot episode, directed by Greg Mottola, online. Check it out below. Read More »
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Unless you’ve been offline for the past few days you’ve likely read about the fact that, in the final episode of the first season of HBO’s Game of Thones, former President George W. Bush makes an appearance as a decapitated prop head on a stake. It’s a minor cameo — no one seemed to notice when the episode originally aired (on June 19, 2011) or when the season hit DVD (on March 6 of this year).
But a Reddit user pointed out that the commentary track for that episode featured producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss commenting on the fact that the prop head was made to resemble Bush, and the story blew up fast. The producers apologized, and HBO apologized, but that isn’t enough — HBO has pulled the episode from the HBO Go service and iTunes, and is halting shipments of the existing DVD and Blu-ray copies of the season. Read More »
The final scene of The Sopranos has become something of TV legend. After six seasons of drawn out brilliance, creator David Chase places his star family in a New Jersey diner. Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ is playing on the jukebox. Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) orders some onion rings for the table as the camera moves to several suspicious people. His daughter, Meadow, is awkwardly trying to park her car outside. The tension is unbelievable because we all know this is the final scene in Sopranos history and something epic is about to take place. Every moment could be the last one. The Journey cresendos, the door of the diner opens, Tony looks up, silence and cut to black. In that instant, about twelve million people checked their cable box to see if it had malfunctioned. Then the credits rolled.
Chase’s ending was controversial, legendary and is debated to this day. One Vanity Fair reader, however, has a simple, almost brilliant interpretation of the ending and you can read it below. Read More »
HBO has released a third full length trailer for season one of Aaron Sorkin‘s return to television — The Newsroom. In the series, Jeff Daniels plays “a big-time, buttoned-up news anchor who finally lets his real personality fly, and then has to deal with the career fallout that results.” Watch the trailer embedded after the jump, and leave your thoughts in the comments below.
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Cary Fukunaga impressed us with his first two features, Sin Nombre and his version of Jane Eyre, and he has been looking at interesting follow-up projects that include a Civil War heist film, and a sci-fi thriller for Universal. But it looks like his next project will be an eight-episode ‘event series’ called True Detective, starring Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey as a pair of cops on a seventeen-year hunt for a Louisiana serial killer.
HBO has just picked up the show with a straight to series order, and Fukunaga will direct all eight episodes. Read More »
HBO has released a second full length trailer for Aaron Sorkin‘s return to television — The Newsroom. In the series, Jeff Daniels plays “a big-time, buttoned-up news anchor who finally lets his real personality fly, and then has to deal with the career fallout that results.” Watch the trailer embedded after the jump, and leave your thoughts in the comments below. Read More »
HBO Films’ Hemingway & Gellhorn is already a realistic contender for next year’s Emmys and it hasn’t even aired yet. The made-for-television movie is directed by Philip Kaufman, the guy who wrote/directed The Right Stuff, The Wanderers and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and served as a writer on Raiders of the Lost Ark. Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman play iconic American writers Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, who shared an ardent but destructive love affair in the 1930s and 1940s after covering the Spanish Civil War alongside each other. Watch the trailer embedded after the jump. Please leave your thoughts in the comments below.
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Fans of The Wire jump at the chance to wax poetic about what some consider television’s all-time best show and this post is no different. A video has come online detailing the visual style of David Simon‘s landmark HBO drama which, if you’re familiar with the show, is kind of surprising. Ask anyone what they love about The Wire and “visual style” probably won’t make the top ten. The style, if it can even be called that at times, is largely clinical and straightforward, a crutch for the pitch perfect dialogue, characters and story. Or so we’re lead to believe.
In this 30 minute video essay, Erlend Lavik hypothesizes the visual style of The Wire is much more significant and impressive than generally considered. Check it out below. Read More »
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