Ross and Rachel. Carrie and Big. Clair and Cliff. Ricky and Lucy. These are just a few of the iconic pairings competing for the chance to be EW’s “Greatest TV Couple of All Time.” Check out our full bracket here and vote in the polls below to determine who will move on to the next round. First up — the 16 couples in our “Baby, You’re the Greatest” conference.
Image Credit: Will Hart
Tonight marks the fourth season premiere of The Real Housewives of New Jersey. The reality show has introduced us to some of the mid-Atlantic’s most colorful characters, from fiercely protective big sister and mother Caroline Manzo to Fabulicious! table flipper Teresa Giudice (still a contender on this season of The Celebrity Apprentice) and even Cop Without a Badge heroine Danielle Staub. But these ladies aren’t all that Jersey has to offer. The Garden State has been fertile ground for great fictional characters in pop culture. Below, we run down five of our favorite Jersey-born-and-bred characters. (Sorry, Shore fans! Snooki doesn’t technically count as a fictional character.)
We’re closer to the end of Mad Men then we are to the beginning. Ever since creator Matthew Weiner and AMC finally reached a compromise on the Great Showrunner Contract Negotiation of 2011, Weiner has been declaring pretty definitively that the show will run for a total of seven seasons. That’s still a lot of Mad Men — especially if the show keeps taking 18 months between seasons, we’ll be luxuriating in Don Draper’s beautiful melancholy until 2015 — but Weiner already has a sense of how he’s going to end the show. In a freewheeling conversation with Curb Your Enthusiasm‘s Jeff Garlin at L.A.’s Largo, Weiner said that he knows how the show will end. “I always felt like it would be the experience of human life. And human life has a destination. It doesn’t mean Don’s gonna die. What I’m looking for, and how I hope to end the show, is like… It’s 2011. Don Draper would be 84 right now. I want to leave the show in a place where you have an idea of what it meant and how it’s related to you.” READ FULL STORY »
This past weekend, HBO GO, the premium cable channel’s mobile streaming app, surpassed the 3 million download mark after less than two months on iTunes and the Android market, but the app’s features don’t make those numbers all that surprising. HBO GO allows current subscribers full access to its library of original programming. That includes older series, previously available only on pricey DVD collections, like Sex in the City, The Wire, and The Sopranos. But with the Hulus and the Netflixs of the world, can HBO GO bring anything new to the table?
The answer is simple: Yes. READ FULL STORY »
We all knew Boardwalk Empire was going to remind us a little bit of The Sopranos. They’re both shows about a New Jersey gangster with a messy love life, after all. But here’s something we didn’t expect: Boardwalk Empire is, in fact, every classic HBO TV series combined into one giant package. From period pieces like Deadwood and Rome to silly comedies like Entourage and Bored to Death, from the gritty realism of The Wire and Oz to the dark fantasy of Carnivàle and True Blood, there’s a little something from nearly every part of HBO’s history inside of Boardwalk Empire. Just consult our helpful visual aid below for a completely scientific analysis. (Click on the image to expand!)
(Designed by Jef Castro) READ FULL STORY »
To help celebrate Entertainment Weekly‘s 20th anniversary (one more year and we can finally drink booze!), the writers and editors have carefully curated a list of the 100 greatest characters in pop-culture over the last 20 years. Whether the fictional women, men, ogres, muppets, babies, and cartoon rockers who made our list were initially created before 1990 didn’t matter so long as they made a lasting impact in the culture after 1990. Some characters were so inseparable in our minds and hearts — like a certain highly articulate TV mother and daughter, for example — that we simply listed them together. (Hey, it’s our list, so we get to make the rules.) Rest assured, we carefully deliberated, debated, argued, and bickered over who would make the cut and where they deserved to be ranked; after you take a look at our list, please feel free to do the same in the comments. READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Sylvain Gaboury/PR PhotosJames Gandolfini is among the executive producers attached to and could star in an adaptation of the French-Canadaian single-camera series Taxi 22 for HBO. Dave Flebotte (Desperate Housewives) will write the half-hour comedy, which “revolves around a politically incorrect cab driver in New York City.”
This is good. He has already mastered scenic northern New Jersey. I wonder if all of his customers will demand to be driven through the Lincoln Tunnel to The Meadowlands as a hilarious twist! [Variety]
Image Credit: Mario Perez/ABC; Greg Gayne/Fox; NBCWhen we asked readers to name TV’s best flashback episode, we got more than 1,000 responses. After the jump, you’ll find a poll representing 45 of the most popular and/or passionately-pitched picks. Declare your favorite. Then visit our gallery of 25 Flashback Episodes You Love for a trip down memory lane. READ FULL STORY »
Last night, Chelsea Handler asked Jamie-Lynn Sigler (don’t call her Meadow, or Italian, or Jersey) about Entourage‘s “Turtle dating Jamie-Lynn is like Seth Rogen dating Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up and would totally never happen” sub-plot. Sigler called attention to the obvious: the comparison was made between characters and maybe shouldn’t have been considered so insulting to the actor named Seth Rogen. When Handler egged her on with “You’re dating Turtle [in real life], what do you know?” Sigler gently pointed out that “Jerry’s not a stoner without a job.” So that’s settled. It was never about Seth Rogen; it’s jobless stoners who’d be incapable of scoring hot women. We can all move on to speculating about the ‘Sopranos’ movie Sigler says is probably not going to happen.
