Image Credit: Fox
I ended up putting myself through another episode of one the worst reality shows of all time, because 1) I’m a disgusting masochist in general and 2) more specifically, having temped during the worst summer of my life at a nearly identical company two towns over in Illinois, these dummies felt like family and I had to find out what happened. BARELY ANYTHING! But before I hit “delete series,” here are tonight’s Winners and Losers. READ FULL STORY »
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Oprah Winfrey, one of the richest women in America, put on a cap and gown earlier today to receive an Honorary Doctor of Laws Degree from Harvard University and then gave the commencement speech.
Oprah took the crowd through her journey from rural Mississippi to Cambridge and the many places (and faces) in between. The TV mogul declared that her speech was for those who “felt screwed by life.” From there, she discussed her teenage years, how last year was the worst of her professional life, and how this commencement speech helped her decide to turn things around (Spoiler: She sings!). “There is no such thing as failure. Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction,” she told the graduates. She then shared with them the one question everyone from President Obama to Beyoncé has asked her at the end of her more than 35,000 interviews: “Was that okay?”
Watch Oprah’s commencement speech below: READ FULL STORY »
Well, I’m spent. And I’m not even that into cute/sad animals or country music! Here’s Miranda Lambert performing “The House That Built Me” during tonight’s Healing in the Heartland benefit concert in Oklahoma on NBC. You feel like crying first thing in the morning, correct? That’s what everyone wants to see from you right now? Perfect: READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Greg Gayne/FOX
I didn’t mean for this to happen, but after salivating (with a full stomach, gross) over contestant Jonny’s “Lobster Crackerjack” within the first few minutes, I found myself watching two full hours of MasterChef. The auditions are over and the finalists have been revealed. What else have you been missing? Spoiler ahead… READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Tyler Golden/NBC
After last night, The Voice is officially on it’s way to the Top 6 and quickly falling into the all-too-familiar pattern of last season. With the shocking elimination of Team Adam’s Sarah Simmons and Judith Hill — both of whom my colleague Adam Carlson and I had pegged for the final four — America has once again sided with Team Blake. Deja vu, anyone? READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Bravo
Acting guru and ex-Parisian pimp — seriously — James Lipton has never had trouble attracting big names to Inside the Actors Studio, which began airing on Bravo in 1994. Lipton’s first interview was with former Actors Studio president Paul Newman; the show’s first season also featured heavy hitters like Alec Baldwin, Sally Field, Dennis Hopper, Arthur Miller, Neil Simon, and Stephen Sondheim.
Nearly 20 years later, Lipton has chatted with hundreds of boldfaced names both awe-inspiring (Meryl Streep! Morgan Freeman! ) and… occasionally less awe-inspiring (was anyone really yearning to hear J. Lo describe her craft?). And naturally, those visits have produced days’ worth of footage containing innumerable gems. So, on the eve of the show’s big 250th Episode Spectacular — which airs tonight at 7 p.m. ET and will feature repeat visitors Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, Barbara Walters, and, er, Jennifer Lopez again — we looked back at some of our favorite moments from episodes past.
No, there wasn’t a new episode of Game of Thrones this week, but here’s a thought that’s been cheering us up: Sean Bean will be back on TV come 2014, starring in the new 10-episode TNT drama Legends from producers of Homeland and Sleeper Cell. Based on the book by spy novelist Robert Littell, Legends centers on Martin Odum (Bean), an undercover agent working for the FBI’s Deep Cover Operations division who begins to question his own identity when a stranger suggests that Martin isn’t the man he believes himself to be. (Watch a trailer below.)
“I got a call from [Homeland and 24 EP] Howard Gordon through my agents. Of course, I like Howard’s work,” Bean told EW backstage at Turner’s upfronts earlier this month. “We had a good talk about the character and what his vision was, and that’s what excited me — the idea of this guy who goes undercover and is constantly changing his appearance, and his mannerisms, and to some extent his psyche. It’s sort of like being an actor. Because he’s so convincing in dangerous situations, he has to actually be that person, and then he gets a little mixed up in his head about who he actually is. It’s an exciting premise for a show.”
To find out who Bean really is, we gave him a quick EW Pop Culture Personality Test. Watch that video first to find out when he yells at the TV, which movie made him cry, what film he has to watch every time he spots it on cable, what his most prized pop culture possessions are, and which song is his guilty pleasure. READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Alo Ceballos/Getty Images
In retrospect, we should have known something was up with Amanda Bynes back in the summer of 2010, when she retired from acting, then un-retired from acting, then deleted her original Twitter feed altogether. Since then, The Amanda Show‘s former lead has been behaving more and more erratically — getting in multiple car accidents, dramatically altering her appearance, and declaring on her latest Twitter account that she wants the rapper Drake to “murder [her] vagina.”
And then came May 23, when Bynes was arrested for criminal possession of marijuana, tampering with evidence, and reckless endangerment. (She allegedly threw a bong out of a window in her New York City apartment.) The incident has catalyzed an even odder spate of behavior for the ex-Nickelodeon star, including wearing a ratty platinum wig to court and claiming that she’s going to sue the NYPD for both sexual harassment and making a false arrest.
How did she get here? Though the real story probably begins when a 7-year-old Bynes appeared in her first commercial (for Buncha Crunch) in 1994, let’s start instead a little more than a year ago, when Bynes had her first brush with the law.
Image Credit: Ron Jaffe/AMC; AMC
Betty Hofstadt Draper Francis. That’s a lot of names — as many as Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, as many as Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. And this season, Betty has felt like several different people at once. In the season premiere, she somehow achieved the moral high ground in an interaction with a gaggle of dirty hippies, and then immediately ceded the moral high ground, dying her hair brown for vague-but-definitely-weird reasons. When Martin Luther King was shot, she was a nagging ex-wife on the phone to Don (drunk as usual) and a chastising mom for Bobby (unusually sentient). When husband Henry announced his intention to seek higher office, she was proud of him…and when he mentioned that, as a result, she would become a public figure, her face became unreadable again, maybe scared, maybe excited.
A couple of episodes later, Betty reappeared, suddenly slim and blonde again — the old Betty, the Phoenix arisen, reborn through Weight Watchers and perhaps a TBD cocktail of diet pills. In the speed-freak episode, she was the justifiably angry mother, chastising her shifty ex-husband and his actress second wife for leaving her children at home. But this past weekend, Betty hadn’t just forgiven Don; she shared a steamy night with him at sleepaway camp. “Ah,” you may have been thinking, “Now that they’re no longer married, Betty has fallen for the impossible Don Draper charm.” But no: In bed together, Betty revealed a fascinatingly in-depth understanding of Don’s problematic nature. She was using Don, really, which might not be so bad; but she also felt sorry for him, which constitutes a complete up-ending of the Betty-Don power dynamic from the beginning of the series. Mad Men typically feels impeccable created and curated and planned down to the tiniest micro-detail, which makes the shifting zig-zag of Betty’s recent arc — brunette! blonde! fatsuit! Daisy Dukes! — an intriguing conundrum. What’s the deal with Betty? READ FULL STORY »
