Month: November 2022

For the last two years, Fox News has had to thread a very specific needle. On one hand, they don’t want to enrage former president Donald Trump by admitting that he lost re-election in 2020. On the other, they don’t want to get sued, again. It must be exhausting! Every now and then they piss the big guy off big time, as happened when a correspondent straight-up reminded viewers that Biden won.

That person was Marie Harf, a rare liberal commentator on the network, who used her time on The Faulkner Focus to speculate about the 2024 presidential election. “There’s a lot of bedwetting that goes on in the media and Democratic circles every four years about who our nominee is going to be,” Harf said. “Joe Biden beat Donald Trump pretty handily in 2020. And if Donald Trump runs again I believe that Joe Biden can win again.”

There were probably a number of MAGA heads who blew their gasket at that one, especially because Harf dropped it so casually. But few were as irate as Trump himself.

“Fox News treats ‘TRUMP’ every bit as badly as they did in 2015, before I later won the Election,” Trump railed on his rinky-dink Twitter clone, writing, as he sometimes does, in the third person, though also in all-caps and quotation mark. He continued:

“Fox was brutal then, and not too good now. This lightweight failure in the Obama Administration, Fox News Contributer Marie Harf, is allowed to say anything she wants, without rebuttal – and others likewise. I beat Crooked Hillary Clinton, and then beat Biden by much more. Fox is afraid to say what REALLY happened in that farce of an Election – IT WAS RIGGED AND STOLLEN. Get tough Republicans!!!” [all sic]

Not only is Trump refusing to move on from something that happened two years ago, but he’s reportedly planning to sow more chaos over the midterm elections — at least if GOP candidates don’t win. Anyway, fasten your seatbelts, it’s gonna be a bumpy couple weeks/months/years.

(Via Mediaite)

For the last few years, alumni of the Harry Potter films have had to do a tricky dance. On one hand, some of them owe their careers to the world created by author J.K. Rowling. On the other, they feel the need to distance themselves from her loud anti-trans beliefs. Among those is Daniel Radcliffe, who penned an open letter about Rowling at the height of the backlash against her. Now, as Rowling has refused to back down, he’s reiterated that stance.

“The reason I felt very, very much as though I needed to say something when I did was because, particularly since finishing ‘Potter,’ I’ve met so many queer and trans kids and young people who had a huge amount of identification with Potter on that,” Radcliffe told IndieWire in a recent interview. “And so seeing them hurt on that day I was like, I wanted them to know that not everybody in the franchise felt that way. And that was really important.”

Radcliffe’s letter ran on the site for the Trevor Project, which runs the largest suicide prevention hotline for LGBTQ+ youth. “Transgender women are women,” Radcliffe wrote. “Any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people and goes against all advice given by professional health care associations who have far more expertise on this subject matter than either Jo or I.”

In the new interview, Radcliffe reflected on writing that letter. “It was really important as I’ve worked with the Trevor Project for more than 10 years, and so I don’t think I would’ve been able to look myself in the mirror had I not said anything,” he said. “But it’s not mine to guess what’s going on in someone else’s head.”

Through Rowling has never apologized for her beliefs — quite the contrary — she hasn’t been ghosted by Warner Bros. Discovery, which produces and distributes films in the Harry Potter-verse. Over the summer, they even announced they remained happy to work with her.

Radcliffe, meanwhile, has moved on, with no interest in returning to the role that made him a household name. Instead, he’s doing what he wants, namely playing Weird “Al” Yankovic.

(Via IndieWire)

It’s easy to feel a small amount of smug superiority over how batshit some of the folks are that Jordan Klepper talks with in his regular forays outside various MAGA rallies and hootnannies for The Daily Show and specials like tonight’s Jordan Klepper Fingers The Midterms: America Unfollows Democracy (which airs at 11:30 on Comedy Central), but that isn’t the point of the exercise.

Oh sure, laugh to keep from crying, but not so much that you miss the message. As he said to me last week, he’s just reflecting the world back to us, something that puts the onus rightly on all of us to be moved by and realize what we’re seeing, not just assume that there are grown-ups who will stop the inmates from taking over the asylum. Because, as should be clear, the grown-ups are on the ballot next week and it doesn’t seem like they’re cruising to victory.

We spoke with Klepper about those odds, what might come next for American democracy, and the shock, exhaustion, curiosity, and quest for understanding that seems to color the world of these specials.

I feel like every time we do this I’m checking on you. Are you okay? Has anyone spit on you? Have you been made to cry because you’ve been called a cuck? But, this time, I mean I care, but, I kind of need you to make me feel better.

Oh?

How do you feel about the midterms and the state of democracy as someone who has been on the ground or driven into the ground?

Yeah, you came to the wrong guy. Making you feel good about the state of the world? I just reflect it, you do with it what you will.

Scream, run, cry.

Get you excited enough to vote? I think that, probably, one excursion out in the sun, doing your civic duty, that might be the best I can give you. Let’s see. This is a consequential midterm and it had us curious: election denialism, it’s on the ballot for 60% of Americans. What does that look like? And, frankly, it looks pretty intimidating and it sticks. We started out having a conversation about whether you accepted the last election and then we stumbled into having conversations about, “Will you accept this next election?” And, it feels like, that answer’s already been written. Most of the people we talk to will not. And so, you can already see the cancerous effect of this kind of conversation to the point where, “Oh, if you don’t get what you want, there’s a much easier way than accepting defeat. Just don’t accept defeat.” And, I see that happening across the country right now. Who wins and loses? I don’t know but, I do think democracy is probably not on the winning side of it all.

Have you lost the ability to be shocked by any of this at this point?

It’s hard to shock me. You will surprise me. A man told me that Joe Biden was executed at Guantanamo Bay and that James Woods is playing Joe Biden with a voice box. That surprised me. Didn’t see that one coming.

Because you don’t think James Woods has the range?

[Laughs] You’re right. I’ve seen him recently, he can’t pull that off.

In the special, you explore the possible consequences of election denialism and the term Civil War comes up. How realistic is that? I think you and I have joked about a couple of times previously about it and it seems like it keeps tiptoeing closer and closer.

It keeps getting closer to closer. I sat down with Rep. Adam Kinzinger, and he didn’t dance around it. In fact, he says, “I used to not want to talk but I think it’s important we do.” Yeah, it is a possibility. We’ve talked a little bit about this before, it’s a misunderstanding of what that might actually look like. And, I don’t have any magic ball here but, looking at something like what happened in Northern Ireland with The Troubles, I could see violence, I could see things happening in the streets, very localized frustrations. When you don’t have a trust in the democratic institution, and when you don’t have a shared reality or bedrock information source to come from, I think that puts everybody in a very precarious place.

So, we’re going to have a midterm election where there’s a lot of people who deny the results and they think that people who are in office are not legitimate. We are set up to have an election where we vote for somebody and then we have electors chosen by somebody else who is not choosing what the state chose. Those are dangerous places for a country to be in.

That feels like the most dangerous place, that happening, and also the most realistic possibility.

We thought that there were protections in the American experiment through the bureaucracy and the redundancy of some of its positions. But now you have the Secretary of State position being very important to, not only this election but, what’s going to happen in 2024. And, if you can get enough people out there who put somebody in there who believes, “I’m going to put my allegiance to this party over my allegiance to this country,” which, used to be a shocking opinion and, now, it’s almost a requirement for one half of the political spectrum right now. Well, that’s going to put us in a really scary place in 2024.

It feels kind of like closing time. It feels like the last call, sort of.

So much of what we had faith in is a general, good-natured desire to put the country first, which is the great irony around “America first” is it’s calling out the initial bullshit of what we all expected was actually the case in reality is like, “Oh no, you just gave away the game,” and you see it now. You also have a party that is losing its electoral base and so they’re fighting harder than ever to shore up the ways to win elections. And you’re like, “Oh really? Oh, shit. The Secretary of State can just do that? That seems like a flaw.” “Oh wow, if we got this many people, we do the lines here. Oh, they can do that? Well, that also seems like a flaw.” Yeah, it turns out those founders, those slave owners, didn’t have it all figured out.

(Laughs) Well, how much of the sort of ideology of “no fucks given because no consequences felt” thing comes from an awareness of where the media is. I like to use the analogy that it’s almost like Jurassic Park when the dinosaurs realized the fence wasn’t working. That’s what it feels like.

I like the Jurassic Park analogy. I think you have a political class who realize they can turn off the fences whenever they want and there is no consequence. And then, you have an electorate that is just getting bad information. And, we look at the media diet and it’s showbiz. And so we keep thinking that news is something that is a social utility, a public utility, that we’re always going to get the best version of it instead of, it’s showbiz and you’re going to get the thing that could sell the most McDonald’s hamburgers. You’re going to get the thing that can make Elon Musk’s Twitter more profitable.

So, what do we get? We have a bunch of people who are consuming the most entertaining pieces of information they can. And the one people who had control over the switch, just were taught you don’t actually have to be fair with the switch. You can kind of do whatever you want. And the founders didn’t see that coming. They didn’t know about this social media and they also didn’t know that there’s a bunch of people who want to hold on to power and are so afraid of being called a sore loser that they’re willing to burn it down just to keep that job.

We’ve seen, especially on the left, just a reflexive eye roll to any kind of New York Times, “Let’s go to a diner and find out what Trump voters think,” kind of thing. Do you ever worry that you’re going to get kind of sucked up into the gears of something like that because you are putting a microphone in the faces of Trump voters to find out what they think? Even if, obviously, there’s a little bit of a different focus.

Sure. Well, I think, for me, it’s always curiosity. I think we are definitely heading to our own echo chambers in a way where we only want to hear what we want to hear, but we live in a democracy where we all vote on things and they have consequences and we’re seeing that take place with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. We’re seeing that take place with climate change, with all sorts of things. And so, even though we might lose, we might get frustrated at hearing what the other side has to say, we are affected by it. I do think that will continue to be a curiosity and an interest and it’s important for us to look into it and to see what are the beliefs that are being held. And not just from a cynical point of view. Hopefully, it’ll come from a point of view where maybe there’s a little bit of understanding where they come from. You’re not always getting that there, but I think checking in as to what your neighbors are thinking at least is helpful from the point of view of at least you know what they’re stockpiling.

(Laughs) I haven’t seen the special yet, but I know there’s a focus group element where you ask people what they’ll bring to a Civil War. So what do you specifically bring to the table for a civil war? What’s your skill set?

(Laugh) I think satire.

Oh yeah, that’s going to go real well for you.

I think I’m going to be loading my satirical gun on that battlefield and, I really think, as long as quips and insights can really do the deed in a civil war, I should be fine. Somebody once said you can’t dress a wound with a joke, but I’m going to really put that to a test.

Last question, delicately trying to weave this in. Obviously, your name has come up with Trevor leaving, not asking about that directly but, I’m just curious about what your approach is to being in the rumor mill and having your name come up. How does that work with ego?

That is such a hilariously delicate way of putting this.

(Laughs) Thank you, I try. It was like a Faberge egg of a question. But do you pay it any attention?

I can’t say I dive too deep into it because I’ve been through this before and there’s going to be a million people with insights that don’t really affect your life so you just keep on doing your thing. For me, I’ve still got a job to do with The Daily Show. I’m still going out. I think that midterms are super important. So, I think that’s where I put my head. I love The Daily Show. I was a fan of Craig Kilborn. I got brought on by Jon Stewart and I worked with Trevor Noah and so I have a lot of pride in that institution and hope for the next steps within it. And so, I’m flattered to be a part of any kind of conversation, but I got a job to do and my goal is to make The Daily Show great right now. And then, we’ll see what happens next.

That was a pretty delicate answer, too.

Boy. I don’t know. (Laughs)

It just rubs off. That was good. I think we got it.

Do you know who’s getting it? Have you heard?

I don’t, but I’ve talked to you. I’ve talked to Roy. I just talked to Hassan a couple of weeks ago. I’m trying to keep all my bases covered.

Okay, Roy and Hassan. were they as delicate as I was?

I didn’t ask Hassan about it, but Roy answered it really well. It was more about work-life balance with the Roy question. I was delicate there, too. I’m pretty good at this.

I’ll take it.

Always a pleasure. I look forward to the next time. You need to add some stuff to those shelves, man.

I just moved, this is sad. Embarrassing.

Yeah, a little bit. Next time I hope to see some baubles.

Some Emmys, that’s what we need.

(Laughs) There you go. Absolutely. Get some advice from Trevor. Trevor was like an absolute pioneer in the shelf game with the at-home shows.

I think yours is better. You know what, his leans more toward corporate shtick. I mean yours feels lived in. You don’t have to give Trevor too much credit. He’s on the way out. That wasn’t his shit. (Laugh) That clearly looks like your stuff. Are those DVDs? Are we still watching DVDs?

No, those are Star Wars VHS. Those are the original trilogy that’s in my bunker just in case. So, that way, I don’t have to watch any of the extra digital effects. I don’t have a VCR, but I have the VHS.

If there’s a civil war, we’re not getting our streaming. So get your VHS back, Princess Bride and double down.

Yeah. I’m going to have to use them as trade in the new apocalypse, basically. No walking Jabba in these, this is the uncut, good stuff.

(Laughs) Well, good luck with that. I think that’s as good a plan as ever.

‘Jordan Klepper Fingers The Midterms: America Unfollows Democracy’ debuts November 1 at 11:30PM ET on Comedy Central and on Paramount+ the next day.

In what could have been the latest instance of a celebrity feud beginning firmly in the “let them fight” side of the drama spectrum, James Corden and Ricky Gervais were briefly at odds over a joke plagiarism scandal that was somewhat squashed by a Twitter apology.

It’s the latest drama for Corden, the Late Late Show host who was the talk of the food and beverage industry when he was abruptly banned from a fancy restaurant until he kind of apologized for some bad behavior. And Gervais, well, he’s absolutely interested in some joke policing these days, even if other comedians aren’t exactly taking his word as law anyway.

In this case, however, Gervais did seem to have a reason to be upset. As Variety noted, the drama stems from a Halloween night episode of the Late Late Show, where Corden made a joke about Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition that sounds extremely similar to a joke Gervais made years earlier during a stand-up special.

“When you see Elon Musk talk about Twitter he does this thing where he goes, ‘Well, it’s the town square,’” Corden said (via Insider). “But it isn’t. Because if someone puts up a poster in a town square that says ‘guitar lessons available,’ you don’t get people in the town going ‘I don’t want to play the guitar! I want to play the piano, you piece of shit!’”

“That sign wasn’t for you, it was for someone else,” Corden added. “You don’t have to get mad!”

As some have put together on Twitter, the jokes do play out almost identically, save for a few words dropped or added.

As Variety noted, in a now-deleted tweet, Gervais sarcastically said that the “bit about the town square advert for guitar lessons is brilliant.” But that tweet was likely deleted because Corden worked fairly quickly to (kind of) make amends. Given that the evidence here is pretty damning, Corden took to his show’s Twitter to offer a mea culpa and credit Gervais for the “brilliant” joke.

“Inadvertently told a brilliant Ricky Gervais joke on the show last night, obviously not knowing it came from him,” Corden said. “It’s brilliant, because it’s a Ricky Gervais joke. You can watch all Ricky’s excellent specials on Netflix.”

By this morning, Gervais himself seemed a bit more understanding of the mix-up, (sarcastically?) blaming someone in the writer’s room for borrowing his joke and repackaging it in the context of Twitter’s new owner.

All in all, it’s impossible to know every joke ever told, of course, but when something as blatant as this happens it’s clear that someone made a big mistake.

And speaking of Ricky Gervais jokes, here is one!

[via Variety]

There are a few really good things about HBO shows. For one, the episodes can be really long because they don’t have to revolve around those silly little ad breaks. Another perk is that there is a ton of cursing and nobody can do anything about it! Finally, and most importantly (depending on who you ask) HBO has a notoriously lax nudity policy, which allows for really great creative freedom! And also allows for your screen to be filled to the brim with butts. That’s television, baby!

If you tuned into the new season of The White Lotus, you must have noticed that they have been really leaning into the nudity aspect of it all. In the first episode, Theo James’ character is fully nude in front of Aubrey Plaza’s character Harper (who is not his wife, for the record). This set up a tense dynamic that will no doubt get even more complex as the season goes on.

James said that there was actually a lot more nudity that didn’t make the cut. “The initial version we shot was way too much. So, we did a more subtle version. They toned it [down].” James told Entertainment Tonight. Just imagine what the original scenes must have looked like. Probably something like this.

Still, James’ scene made waves online, with many viewers focused on his…swimsuit!! Or lack thereof!

Maybe if everyone brought this energy to The Time Traveler’s Wife then we could have gotten a second season!!

The White Lotus airs Sundays at 9 pm on HBO. Please proceed with caution.

As legend has it, The Watcher letters (and harassment) stopped after the terrorized family left the building. Ryan Murphy recently adapted the based-on-real-life story for Netflix, and although some vocal viewers were disappointed at the lack of a concrete ending, that aspect of the show matches up to what happened in real life. Or rather, it matches what didn’t happen, given that even though the show toys with hypotheticals, no one actually determined the identity of The Watcher.

The show is remains worth a watch, but there’s a new wrinkle because the real-life mystery has actually been fueled by how the harassment simply evaporated. The Broadusses/Brannocks relocated and apparently went back to a peaceful life, and the newest owners of 657 Boulevard (as detailed by The Cut’s followup reporting to their original article) seemed to have no further issues. And barring “a confession or a DNA match,” it looked like this story would fade into the pop cultural annals of history.

Not so fast, though? The New York Post reports (while claiming to have viewed new police records) that the house’s current owners have called police dozens of times, including for unknown reasons. It’s very mysterious:

The current owners of 657 Boulevard in Westfield, New Jersey — the property otherwise known as the real-life home from “The Watcher” series — have made 58 calls to police since they moved in back in July 2019, The Post can report.

The Post notes that the Westfield Police relayed a lack of developments (or “threatening communications”) for the new owners as of October 2021. However, if the new report is to be believed, there have been calls made for several reasons, including a medical call but also the owners feeling “spooked by something” along with concerns of possible burglary-related activity and tripped alarms in the basement. However, the police reports remain under wraps, and no new activity has been confirmed by other sources. So, take this with a grain of salt, but it sure makes the O.G. story seem spookier.

(Via New York Post)

WandaVision‘s Agatha spinoff just added an up and coming Netflix star. Heartstopper‘s Joe Locke has reportedly joined the cast of Agatha: Coven of Chaos, which will focus on Kathryn Hahn’s character following her first encounter with Elizabeth Olsen’s now fully-powered Scarlet Witch.

As always, details around Locke’s character are being closely guarded, but that hasn’t stopped fan theories from running rampant with a stab at his identity. Via The Wrap:

Online speculation has suggested he could be playing an older version of Billy, one of the kids that Wanda had in Westview (she also spent much of “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” trying to get back to them). Besides Locke and Hahn, Emma Caulfield Ford has also been confirmed to return to the series, playing her “WandaVision” character Dottie.

Locke playing Billy Maximoff (or Wiccan as he’s more commonly known in the comics) would track as the collection of Disney+ originals have been slowly building a Young Avengers team in the background. However, how Billy could even exist in the current MCU will be an interesting mystery considering he was revealed to be a manifestation of Wanda’s magic and imagination in the WandaVision series finale. (In other words, not real.)

That said, alternate versions of Billy and his brother Tommy were shown in the Doctor Strange sequel, and the MCU is currently embroiled in what’s known as “The Multiverse Saga.” There’s also another option: Online reports are saying that Sacha Baron Cohen has been cast as Mephisto and will appear in the Agatha spinoff. His dark magic could also provide an avenue to bring Wanda’s children into the current MCU’s reality.

Or the kid could just… show up. Sometimes it’s best not to overthink it.

(Via The Wrap)

Legend has it that Kurt Cobain knew Nirvana had “made it” when “Weird Al” Yankovic turned “Smells Like Teen Spirit” into “Smells Like Nirvana.” The lead single from 1992’s Off the Deep End album was Yankovic’s first hit since 1988’s “Bad” (Nirvana knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the charts, but “Weird Al” connected them), but he didn’t actually interact with Cobain in person until months after the song was released.

“I met Kurt Cobain in person a few months after my parody came out. We were both eating in the same restaurant in L.A., and I noticed him at a nearby table with some friends,” Yankovic wrote during a Reddit Ask Me Anything to promote the Oscar worthy (but not Oscar eligible) Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. He continued:

“I timidly went over and thanked him profusely for letting me do ‘Smells Like Nirvana,’ and told him I was now obligated to do any favor that he wished. He turned his head and extended his hand, and said, ‘Polish my nails.’ I loved that guy.”

And we love you, “Weird Al.”

Also, watch Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, which comes to the Roku Channel on November 4.

(Via Reddit)

Megan Thee Stallion’s love for three things — anime, dressing up, and Halloween — is well-documented (in fact, my first post about her for Uproxx was inspired by a viral trend that spun off from one of her cosplay pics on Twitter). She was probably the first star to post a Halloween-themed photo this year (way back on October 1), and her cosplay not only generates viral headlines but also led to her being one of the faces of a video game’s promo campaign when she dressed as one if its most popular characters.

So, of course, she wasn’t going to let Halloween go by without taking the opportunity to once again show her appreciation for anime with a hyper-accurate costume based on one of her favorite shows, My Hero Academia (as well as some flashy photoshop to complete the look). The photos, which she posted on Instagram, capture her costume perfect in dynamic action poses straight out of the show itself. The character, Mirko, is called the Rabbit Hero, one of the many superhero personalities around which the show’s narrative revolves. Mirko is considered the “number five hero” in Japan as well as being its numer one female hero (anime are really big on ranking stuff). Her powers give her incredible jumping strength and massive gams — which makes Meg’s cosplay perfect in more ways than one (shout-out to the adamantium knees!).

Megan’s love for anime hasn’t gone unreciprocated either. Last year, one of her favorite show’s voice actors shouted her out in a fan-favorite line.

It’s rare a member of the Republican Party speaks sense when interviewed by the press but Representative Adam Kinzinger broke that mold a bit this week when he dragged his fellow GOP buddies for being a bunch of conspiracy-peddling cowards.

Kinzinger went on MSNBC to talk about the recent attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, that took place in the couple’s California home. The attacker broke into the Pelosi’s residence in the middle of the night and beat Mr. Pelosi with a hammer, causing serious injury. The man was reportedly looking for the Speaker of the House during the attack and has a history of promoting bizarre conspiracy theories and racism online. While chatting with MSNBC, Kinzinger called out his fellow Republicans who have failed to condemn these far-right groups.

“Liz [Cheney] and I are not courageous. There’s no strength in this. We’re just surrounded by cowards,” Kinzinger said while name-checking one of the only other Republican reps who have spoken out against Pelosi’s attacker. “In complete contrast to cowardism, it looks like courage when it’s just your bare duty.”

Kinzinger also took to social media to air his grievances with members of the GOP who have been more than happy to promote division amongst voters with their whacko conspiracies — looking at you Marjorie Taylor Greene.

It sounds like there might be one Republican in Congress who actually has a moral compass. Who would’ve guessed?