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The year of Wet Leg continues! The viral British post-punk band has been relentlessly building up the hype for their self-titled debut album, which is arriving in just one week, with infectious singles, crazy music videos, NPR Tiny Desk concerts, and some great late-night performances. Last night, they returned with the latter, playing the idiosyncratic anthem “Too Late Now” on The Late Late Show With James Corden.

The track is from November, and, at the time, the pair said it was about “sleepwalking into adulthood.” But, halfway through, it feels as if they’re waking up as the instruments stop and they speak-sing, “Now everything is going wrong / I think I changed my mind again.” The chaos of the song is intensified in this live performance as they shred on their guitars and coordinate their twirling dance moves. Their signature deadpan is even more amusing when you can see how blank and unbothered they look when uttering depressing lines like, “This world is pretty harrowing.” The music, though, bursts with excitement and a sense of celebration in typical Wet Leg fashion, mostly because of their disarming humor: “I just need a bubble bath / To set me on a higher path.”

Watch the performance above.

While people may be actively trying to move on from that fastly evaporating memory of that time we all watched Netflix and got really good at faking enthusiasm on a Zoom call, Judd Apatow probably can’t, not when his two most recent projects are so connected to that time, creating a question that the writer and director said he has been asking himself: “Do people need a comedy about this?” The answer is, unsurprisingly nuanced. So too are the projects and their connection to the pandemic.

With The Bubble (which you can stream on Netflix), it’s unavoidable. Commenting on the ways Hollywood trudged along during the shutdown (while also making the film itself in the shutdown), Apatow tells us, ” Everyone I know who has been in bubbles really relates way too much to what’s in the movie.” But there are relationship dynamics and commentary on the studio system that will still resonate no matter your feelings about where we are in the pandemic. To Apatow, this isn’t just a pandemic project, it’s also something that relates to The Larry Sanders Show for its behind-the-scenes focus (in this, Karen Gillan, Keegan Michael Key, Pedro Pascal, David Duchovny, Apatow’s wife Leslie Mann and their daughter Iris Apatow hang around on palatial estate while filming a dinosaur epic)

With his new book, Sicker In The Head, Apatow’s interest in long-form interviews with comedians — something he began doing when he was 15 — continues against the backdrop of the pandemic in that people were more available and perhaps a little more open to going deep into a discussion about their lives when Apatow wrote the book, a sequel to 2015’s Sick In The Head. This all makes for a fantastic set of conversations with the likes of Sam Bee, Hasan Minhaj, Amber Ruffin, David Letterman, and many more.

While culture in the time of COVID, The Bubble, and Apatow’s new book dominate the conversation, there is also a quick bit about his now infamous Oscar night tweet and what it feels like to be a polarizing figure. Here’s Judd Apatow.

This film [and the book, to a lesser extent] have such a deep connection to the pandemic. As you’re watching this unfold over the last half a year where a lot of pop culture is moving away from telling stories rooted in that, does panic set in because the movie is so rooted in the pandemic?

I think I thought about it the entire time and still do. Do people need a comedy about this? What would be the purpose of that comedy? I chose to write about isolation and how the world tries to keep moving forward even though everything has changed. So some of the satire’s about Hollywood, how ego-driven people deal with a shutdown. It’s about studios feeling the need to keep the machine moving even through all of this. I wanted to explore what happens when you take a pause and think about your life. We all talk about the Great Resignation and that’s part of what the movie is about, people whose whole lives are about trying to stay famous and trying to get all of their self-esteem from this business and then suddenly it all drops out from under them. And then they desperately try to keep it going by making this flying dinosaur movie. So it was a silly premise to talk about things that a lot of us are dealing with in our own way, how are we managing this.

You don’t have the budget of a Jurassic World, but how important was it to make this feel not distractingly terrible in terms of the way it looks when you’re showing the dinosaurs?

Well, I wasn’t sure what my budget was going to be. So when I started, I thought, well, maybe you never see the dinosaurs. Maybe you only see these people dressed in tights, the motion capture actors, the Andy Serkis-type people. And then I thought, well, maybe when you see the dinosaurs, it’s always half-finished and it’s like a crappy pencil drawing of dinosaurs or the roughest animation and it’s temp. But then we started talking to the people at Industrial Light and Magic about how we could do it, and we realized it might be really funny if every time you cut to the set, you’re just in the movie and it looks exactly like Jurassic Park and then suddenly something goes wrong and it falls apart and you reveal all the green screens and how shitty the set actually looks. And that forced me to try to understand how to do the highest level special effects.

We worked with Roger Guyette who has worked with J.J. Abrams in a lot of his movies and Star Wars and he was the essential person who taught us how to do it and storyboarded with us. And he actually pitched some of the funniest jokes in those sequences. It’s so much work. There’s like 15 minutes of dinosaur material in the movie, maybe less. It took a thousand meetings to get that right. I don’t know how people do The Avengers and have thousands of people fight thousands of people. To me, it would take 25 years to finish the movie.

You’re not putting yourself up for a Marvel movie gig at any point soon?

I think all roads lead there at some point. It’s like the draft.

I spoke with David Duchovny a few months ago and he mentioned how you and him talked about Garry Shandling and how much you thought about him while you were on set. And he said that you had said that you thought about him every day. Curious what you’re willing to share about how you kind of felt his hand in the process, his influence, and his memory while you were there.

I mean, I was thinking about Garry’s philosophy about the work because he really believed that if you created a fully dimensional human character and got to the core of who they were, it would naturally become funny because we’re all trying to be happy. We’re all trying to get through the day. He believed that everyone wears a mask. We present ourselves to the world the way we want to be seen, but it’s actually not who we are down deep and then we go home and we cry and we’re insecure and we fall apart, but we might present as completely having our shit together. And we see that all the time when people reveal their true selves. And he always said that it’s very rare that people are very direct and honest and real with you.

With a movie like this that’s basically a relative of The Larry Sanders Show (it’s behind the scenes of the making of an action movie, not a talk show), I would think of Garry when I was writing the scenes for every character. David Duchovny is the one who wants the movie to be good and, in his head, he thinks it’s a pro-environmental message and he has great pride in the movie, and he doesn’t think of it as corny. And he’s really willing to fight hard to make it good, even though it probably can never be good. And that’s some of the comedy of it… is that he wants it to be great and it will never be great. And he’s also willing to sacrifice his time with his family and his child to get that done. So he’s lost some sense of what’s important in life, and the ridiculousness of that and the mistakes of that become comedy. That was Garry’s style.

Turning to the book, these are your peers and obviously, you’ve established yourself now many times over, but do you still feel to a certain extent like a fan? Do you still feel like an outsider to a certain extent with any of these?

I always feel like a fan. I mean that’s really the root of everything I do. So when I meet someone like Harry Trevaldwyn, the guy who plays the COVID supervisor in The Bubble and he’s done nothing except put up funny videos on Instagram, there’s a part of me that feels like, “Oh, he’ll be great for the movie and I hope he does a good job.” And there’s another part of me that feels like, “Oh, I just met a new Steve Martin.” And I’m as excited by that as I was when I was 14 years old, and it doesn’t even matter if he ever becomes famous. I just know he’s great. It’s like hearing a new band that you love and sometimes it doesn’t matter if they get successful, it’s just you connect with them.

So that’s the most important part for me is my love of comedy and the people who do it. So I’m intimidated. Sure, I’m not completely relaxed talking to David Letterman because he had such an enormous impact on my life and in the lives of a lot of people in comedy in ways he doesn’t understand because he inspired us to take chances. He showed us what was possible and at certain moments we needed him to anoint us and put us on the show and give us the breaks that led to good things happening.

You talk about discovering a new comedian for the first time, hearing that voice for the first time. How important is it for you, again as you go along in your career, to keep your eyes open and ears open for that new thing as opposed to just sort of playing with your familiar toys and the comics that you know?

Well, I mean you fall in love with things in your life like a band and it does take work to look for something new and to open yourself up to be touched in a new way. I like working with new people because it’s fun to try to crack the code of how they would tell their story, how they would work as a star of a movie. So for a lot of these projects, I’m finding someone that I believe in as a performer and a presence but also someone that has a great story or an interesting inner life that I think will lead to a great film.

So if I meet somebody like Billy Eichner, who just wrote a movie with Nicholas Stoller called Bros for our company, I know he’s hilarious and I’m also interested in what he wants to say on screen and how does he want to develop his persona? It’s the first studio-made gay rom-com. It’ll come out in the fall and it’s been a four-year process of him working with Nick Stoller, writing the script and Nick directing and all of us discussing what a movie like this could be. And that’s very exciting. And part of what is really fun about it is how hard Billy Eichner will work because it’s so important to him. And it was the same way with Pete Davidson and Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham. That moment where people are given that opportunity just leads to so much passionate effort.

You mention Pete. That was one of my favorite interviews from the book that I read. With that and with a lot of these really, when it’s someone that you know, how much of it is your exploring and finding out new information that you didn’t know about their backstory and about their journey and how much it is just trying to help them kind of tell that story in a new way while connecting with them?

Usually, I know some of it and then they go deeper and tell me more. I interviewed Pete extensively for the film. We wanted to do a very extensive interview where we could use pieces of it to create documentaries about the making of the film and about Pete to educate people when the movie came out. And I took that interview and put it into the book. So we tried to go as deep as you could go. And with that interview, I hope that what his childhood experience was could come alive for people. What is the trauma of that experience? How does a young person process it? How does that lead to the choice to become a comedian and a writer and an artist? Because it tunes you into something. You become an observer, you become empathetic to other people, and you have so much in you and you want to find a way to express it. And for Pete, that meant writing comedy, sometimes dark comedy as a way to express himself. And then the film and everything that he does on Saturday Night Live. And a lot of people had difficult childhoods that led to them looking for a way to express it.

Pete is polarizing, I guess you could say. With everything that just went on [with the Oscars and Apatow’s tweet], you may be walking into that space as well where you’re someone who is a polarizing figure to an extent. With the tweet and everything that happened there, what is it like to experience that? And also, when you see some of the criticism over it, is it something you look at constructively?

I think everyone disagrees about everything right now. I don’t think you can state your opinion about anything without losing half the room and that’s an unfortunate part of our discourse right now. So if you say, “I don’t think we should deal with problems by resorting to violence,” oddly a lot of people will speak up and say, “I disagree with you.” And there’s not much you can do with that. You can’t change everybody’s mind. It’s impossible to get everybody on the same page, but I think people should be able to express themselves if they do it in a non-toxic way. And, unfortunately, a lot of what happens when people are debating these things is meant to injure.

‘The Bubble’ is streaming on Netflix and ‘Sicker In The Head’ is available to buy wherever your book-buying is done.

The Grammys are this weekend and now, just days out from the event, The Recording Academy and CBS have announced an additional artist added to the already-stacked lineup of performers: On April 3, Lady Gaga will take the Grammys stage.

Gaga joins a list of performers that includes Silk Sonic, Carrie Underwood, J Balvin, John Legend, Maria Becerra, BTS, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, Lil Nas X with Jack Harlow, Brandi Carlile, Brothers Osbourne, Nas, HER, Jon Batiste, Chris Stapleton, Ben Platt, Cynthia Erivo, Leslie Odom Jr., and Rachel Zegler. Foo Fighters were previously also included, but it was confirmed they dropped out of the show after canceling all upcoming performances due to Taylor Hawkins’ death.

Gaga has six nominations this year, all in conjunction with Tony Bennett: Record Of The Year; Best Pop Duo/Group Performance; and Best Music Video (all for “I Get A Kick Out Of You”); as well as Album Of The Year; Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album; and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical; (all for Love For Sale). Gaga will presumably not be joined by Bennett for the performance, as the 95-year-old singer’s song/manager confirmed last year Bennett has retired from performing due to his age and Alzheimer’s disease.

Find the full list of 2022 Grammy nominations here.

Phoenix Rising, a new documentary on HBO that debuted at Sundance, actually became a two-part documentary on the fly. The pivotal moment occurred in January 2021 when Evan Rachel Wood came forward (on Instagram) to name Marilyn Manson (real name Brian Warner) as her alleged abuser, whom she had spoken about for several years. This discussion had already generated speculation about Manson, given the timeline (for grooming, domestic abuse, and terrorizing) regarding her testimony in front of Connecticut lawmakers for Jennifer’s Law and for California’s Phoenix Act. These laws (respectively) make more resources available for survivors and extend the statute of limitations for sexual assault cases.

As one can imagine, Evan’s articulation of Manson’s name expanded the scope of the Amy Berg-directed project, which already included Manson and Wood’s relationship in addition to exploring her earlier formative years. The project dives deep into details of Wood’s accusations, including allegations that she was “essentially raped on camera” by Manson during the filming of 2007’s “Heart-Shaped Glasses” video. She maintains that she had agreed only to simulate sex, and Wood further describes how the violence of this relationship only grew more harrowing. She accuses Manson of isolating her and dismantling her identity (after preying upon a young woman who was 19 years his junior). As the documentary also aims to prove, Wood is not alone, and several other women in this project put forth similar accusations against the singer.

Amy Berg was gracious enough to speak with us about the film. She’s no stranger to harrowing subject matter (Deliver Us From Evil, West Of Memphis, The Case Against Adnan Syed), and with this project, she hopes to communicate relatability (with Evan’s plight) to survivors of domestic abuse. It’s worth noting that — two weeks before Phoenix Rising was due to debut on HBO — Manson sued Wood while alleging “malicious falsehood” over her abuse claims, which he continues to deny. Yet Berg, Wood, and HBO pushed forward with the release as planned.

Hi Amy, I’m fiddling with Zoom camera mode, which is a great start to talking about this subject.

Yeah, and it adds a whole other layer when you’re dealing with a really heavy film, and you’re not really in the production offices either. That adds more to the isolation trauma, I guess, or something.

You’re used to difficult subject matter, but this might have topped the charts. How do you distance yourself from trigger points while doing the work that you do?

Well, yeah, I mean, I had a really strong team during the edit, and that’s how we kept it on point. Nowadays, we can work with Trello, the app that we use. We can make cards online, it’s like having a cork board [wildly gestures], so we just had to support each other, and we stayed with the story that we were trying to tell in the edit. And that was the way to keep some distance, but it’s tough. I’m not gonna lie to you and say that it doesn’t seep in. It does.

And you gotta take a load off at some point.

More so during the pandemic because you don’t have a production office, you know, for the bulk of this period that we were shooting. We didn’t really have a central office, so it was just like what we’re doing right now.

Have you been watching the Twitter conversation about this film?

Oh, I’ve been doing press for 24 hours, are you talking about today?

Yes, there’s a lot of support for Evan’s advocacy and this project, but there are (of course) trolls from toxic fandom.

I do wonder if people who are so against it actually watched the film. Because all that I saw with some of yesterday was “she has no evidence.” That’s what I kept seeing, over and over again, and I feel like the documentary shows a lot of evidence, so I’m wondering whether they’ve even seen the film, you know?

Yeah, and this film takes us back in time. I can’t speak for everyone else, but I remember, back around 2006 when Evan and Manson started dating, that something seemed very “off,” even then. Did you catch that vibe, too?

Yeah, I definitely did, and I haven’t really thought about this in a long time, actually. Because I’ve been so in this film, but I do remember, and I wasn’t a fan of Manson, and I didn’t know that much about him. I just remember the image of those two, definitely, was all over the place. And headlines everywhere, at Perez Hilton…

I seem to remember a headline (somewhere else, not Perez) that read something like, “Evan Rachel Wood Must Hate Her Parents.” Not fantastic.

And the media has traditionally been very good at making women feel like, you know, the names that they called her in the film. Calling her a “whore” and just chastising her publicly, and just kind of this culture that we have been accustomed to, and it’s so wrong. It puts you in the wrong frame of mind about everything. Because you’re constantly judging on something that you don’t know anything about. I’m really excited that we were able to un-peel this onion and tell this story because it was just really this young girl who was just trying to find her way and got caught up in the wrong thing. And it’s important to tell that story.

Obviously, there was a point when the project expanded. That was the moment when Evan posted on Instagram, but how was the flow going until that point, where you tied in her family history?

The film’s chronology is in real time. We got into her backstory right away, so we could understand everything that had happened historically before [Manson touring technician/personal assistant] Dan Cleary had tweeted [a thread] in August 2020, or it might have been early September. When Manson’s last album came out, Cleary tweeted, and that was a turning point in the documentary at that time because it was the first time that a man in the music industry stood up for Evan. And kind-of, the floodgates were open at that point. It bought so much stuff up, so that’s when we started to follow her through the investigation and talking to other folks and dealing with her family and then publicly naming him. It all happened in real time.

It was sobering to watch how, even with Evan having the public profile that she did, she found it so hard to get out of that relationship. What do you want to communicate to women who have no support network and find it similarly hard to exit dangerous situations?

Well, Evan tried to kill herself multiple times, and she didn’t have any resources at the time, and she feels that something propelled her to look at her life and know that it was worth living, at the time that she was dying, basically. I guess there is a more public conversation about domestic violence, and there are resources, and we’re trying to make sure, through the film’s website that people have access to the right phone numbers. But it’s just important to start communicating this more. We hear the vocabulary words of “grooming” and “gaslighting,” but do we really understand what they mean? Do we understand that, if we’re in a situation that is abusive? That’s what the film is designed to convey, to be more relatable. So she seems to have a certain stature, but she was a victim as well.

Now, you got involved with the project when Evan was working on the Phoenix Act. At that point, were you aware of how many women would eventually come forward with allegations against him?

They had told me that it was over 20 people that they had heard of at that time, so once she testified in Sacramento, even though she didn’t name him, there was a lot of conversation that started happening. So I don’t think we know how many people have been abused by him at this point. It’s a small group that we talked to, but I’m sure that these kinds of stories are not isolated. When somebody has these kind of patterns, I imagine that we’ll be hearing a lot of other stories.

Obviously, you can’t talk about his lawsuit.

Thank you for answering that question! I definitely cannot.

Can you comment on the timing of his filing?

Look, it’s not a surprise. A major film is coming out on HBO with a high profile, so it’s not a surprise that this would be a retaliatory action, but I just cannot comment on the lawsuit.

There’s one line in the film — and Evan’s brother said it, that Manson is a “wolf in wolf’s clothing” — which hit incredibly hard.

Yeah, everything that her brother said was so thoughtful and impactful. He was the one constant in her life, for her whole life. And he called things out in a way that was both sensitive and spot-on. His words were very impactful from the get-go.

Brothers are the best. And I don’t want to say that I enjoyed the subject matter of the film, but I appreciate the way that it was handled.

Thank you! And thank you so much for your time.

‘Phoenix Rising’ is currently streaming on HBO Max.

As The Saga of the Slap continues, Oscars producer Will Packer is defending how the all-consuming Will Smith and Chris Rock moment was handled despite the chaos that ensued behind the scenes. During an in-depth interview with Good Morning America, Packer walked through what happened from the moment Rock left the stage to the surreal moment when Smith, who was still in the building, took the podium and received a standing ovation while accepting the Oscar for Best Actor.

According to Packer, Rock was the one who fought to keep Smith in the building and out of handcuffs, which the LAPD was ready to do. As for the Academy members applauding Smith, Packer claims it had nothing to do with The Slap. Via Variety:

“It wasn’t like this was somebody they didn’t know,” Packer said. “It doesn’t make anything that he did right, and doesn’t excuse that behavior at all, but I think that the people in that room who stood up stood up for somebody who they knew, who was a peer, who was a friend, who was a brother, who has a three decades-plus long career of being the opposite of what we saw in that moment. I think these people saw the person that they know and were hoping that somehow, some way this was an aberration…I don’t think that these were people that were applauding anything at all about that moment.”

As for the conflicting reports on whether or not Smith was asked to leave the building, Packer denied reports that he spoke to Smith and told the actor he wanted him to stay. The Oscars producer said he never had any conversations with Smith directly after The Slap, but he was told that Academy members wished to “physically remove” Smith from the building, which obviously, didn’t occur. However, Packer did say that Smith reached out the next morning and apologized for the incident.

(Via Variety)

Sky Ferreira‘s debut album, the 2013 Night Time, My Time, is a whirlwind of alt-rock that became a staple of 2010s indie music almost instantly. The wait for her follow-up Masochism has been torturously long; last year, though, she said it would be “actually coming out this time” when it was put on a list of most anticipated albums of 2022. Though fans remained skeptical, Ferreira’s mother built up the suspense by sharing a photo of her daughter on her Instagram Story with the words, “new album coming March.”

So, of course, the grunge-pop star waited until the last day of March to prove herself. She posted a teaser clip on Instagram yesterday—only 18 seconds of a searing, heavy sound floating aimlessly behind her airy, echoey vocals. The art says “Don’t Forget,” which many are interpreting as the title of this possible single. The caption reads: “remember me?”

In 2019, Ferreira released the song “Downhill Lullaby” and appeared as a featured guest on Charli XCX’s self-titled album on the song “Cross You Out.” She has also expressed struggles in the past regarding her record label, which have definitely impacted her ability to release a full album. Fingers crossed that those issues have been sorted out…

Several beloved series are screeching back into town in April.

That’s one highlight of what’s happening this month, which will lead to so much TV that you’ll never have time to watch it all. Not only is Breaking Bad prequel Better Call Saul returning for the final season (and possibly tying together the timelines), but Ozark will bring you the second half of its final, supersized season. Both of these shows could end up killing fan-favorite characters, so prepare yourselves accordingly.

Speaking of untimely deaths, Natasha Lyonne’s Russian Doll is returning to do the Groundhog Day thing in a different way than it did last time. And Barry is looking to put an end to all the death, but good luck with that, pal. Expect return seasons of additional popular series (The Flight Attendant, Woke) and a few gangster-evoking offerings as well. Here are the must-see TV offerings for the coming month.

Woke: Season 2 (Hulu series streaming 4/8)

The Marshall Todd and Keith Knight-created series about “Keef Knight,” cartoonist, picks up in world where business = wokeness. Keef and his ragtag group of friends are attempting to do the activist thing while also climbing that ladder further as a marketable artist. Those worlds collide in a world where talking trashcans also exist, so expect heavy nerding here and razor-sharp satire. Lamorne Morris, T. Murph, Blake Anderson, Sasheer Zamata, and JB Smoove star, and Maurice “Mo” Marable is still executive producing, so you’re in good hands.

The Kardashians: Season 1 (Hulu series streaming 4/14)

Kim Kardashian drummed up some controversy while recently telling women to, uh, work, so she’s got no new friends these days, but hey, the rest of the family is here and acting like gangsters in in the above trailer where they attempt to sound The Godfather-esque. Kanye West will make an appearance, even though that divorce already went through, and expect the whole family to catch you up with what’s been going in their lavish lifestyle since they quit their E! show after over 20 seasons. One can’t question how the fam’s image-management has kept them going strong, so we’ll see if they can keep going in the streaming realm.

Outer Range: Season 1 (Amazon Prime series streaming 4/15)

Yellowstone, it ain’t. Josh Brolin does, however, portray a rancher in Wyoming, where the expansive wilderness there is quite unlike the terrain of his No Country For Old Men days. There’s sardonic humor here (and Brolin is always fantastic in that department) amid a supernatural mystery after a young woman disappears, and suddenly, a profit-hungry ranch family attempts to intrude on everyone else’s land. There’s a black void lurking, though, which will start to trigger revelations and set off a whole host of troubling and tension-filled happenings.

The First Lady (Showtime series streaming 4/17)

The A-list cast won’t stop here with Viola Davis playing Michelle Obama, Michelle Pfeiffer playing Betty Ford, and Gillian Anderson playing Eleanor Roosevelt. These three enigmatic ladies’ stories will be interwoven through time while the political drama simply swirls around them. In addition, look forward to seeing Dakota Fanning within the cast while Kiefer Sutherland steps up to portray President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Maybe you’re tired of politics these days, but it’s worth reliving some of the more iconic moments of yesteryear to forget the cable news cycle.

Better Call Saul: Season 5 (AMC series returning 4/18)

Another character that cannot die, or the fans will rage: Kim Wexler. The anxiety for her runs high going into the final season (coming to AMC on 4/18) as the spinoff grows ever closer to the Breaking Bad timeline. And since she never surfaces in that flagship series, things feel very ominous, also because those finger guns and Saul Goodmanification do not bode well for her. But maybe she’ll show up in a Cinnabon scene. One can hope!

Mayans M.C.: Season 4 (FX series returning 4/19)

This red-tinged teaser continues to push wartimes between charters, and somehow, EZ and Angel are both alive (although not exactly well) while attempting to deal with fallout from the Santo Padre M.C.’s failed attempt at a widespread, united front. Where, exactly, is Miguel after Emily dumped his ass after learning that he tried to kill her? That’s an underrated part of the drama at this point, and in the background, Felipe’s dealing with betrayal-related consequences as well.

Russian Doll: Season 2 (Netflix series streaming 4/20)

Say it with me: what a concept. The close to perfect first season presented quite a dilemma, which is how to follow up the debut while believably upping Nadia and Charlie’s respective ongoing plights. Also, Charlie’s got quite a mustache now, and Annie Murphy has joined the cast while one of the show’s new YouTube revealed taglines is “The universe is back on its bulls@%t.” This season, there’s a time portal and hauntings from the past and, uh oh, more stairs.

The Flight Attendant: Season 2 (HBO Max series streaming 4/21)

After the events of the last season finale, you’d think that Kaley Cuoco’s Cassie would get her act together and maybe not wake up (hungover) in the middle of a murder mystery again. Think again! Well, we don’t know if liquor is involved this time around because Cassie’s attempting to drop the booze and persist in “making better choices.” She’s still attending to flights and now based in Los Angeles, but somehow she’s how helping out the CIA as a part-time gig. Thankfully, Zosia Mamet and Rosie Perez are back on the scene, and there’s international intrigue afoot again.

Barry: Season 3 (HBO series returning 4/24)

After nearly three years off the map (the world’s been busy, alright?), Bill Hader’s finally back in the realm of his contract killer, but Barry’s not into it. He wants out, and he’d like to finally just act instead, but now, it’s time to turn inward and discovery why he started this killing business at all. As it turns out, it’s not so easy to abandon one’s darker tendencies, even when the instruments disappear. Hopefully, there will be more dancing from NoHo Hank to help everyone unravel the really important answers here.

We Own This City: Season 1 (HBO series streaming 4/25)

The Wire creator David Simon goes back to Baltimore in this series that digs further into the police force of Charm City. This show bases itself upon Justin Fenton’s book about Freddie Gray’s death in 2015 and all the law enforcement maneuvering that followed. Jon Berthal portrays a plainclothes unit leader who’s the very definition of corrupt and pocketing all manner of money, gleaned from drug deals and citizens alike. Treat Williams plays one of many investigators who are trying to take down the bad cops, and yup, this is David Simon territory for sure.

The Offer (Paramount+ limited series streaming 4/28)

Believe it or not (side-eyeing pretty much every superhero movie these days) three-hour movies were not typical. They were actually very difficult to pull off, and this 10-part series shows how Frances Ford Coppola (Dan Fogler) wasn’t the only one one who struggled to bring Mario Puzo’s saga to life. Miles Teller portrays legendary producer Albert S. Ruddy, who did a lot of the fighting here, and Giovanni Ribisi portrays crime boss Joe Colombo. The rest of the cast includes Juno Temple, Matthew Goode, Burn Gorman, and Colin Hanks.

Ozark: Season 4 Part 2 (Netflix series streaming 4/29)

Alright, one thing is certain: this season is gonna be violent and probably not end well for the Byrde family, who only wanna flee from their money-laundering adventures and go back to their cushy Chicago lives. Is that even possible at this point? Only these last episodes will tell that tale, and Ruth is hellaciously angry about losing almost everything in the world. She’s the centerpiece of the above teaser, and we’ll see if she can finally rise above that “cursed Langmore” status that she keeps clinging onto. There’s more cursed cookie jar, too, so we’ll see if she can rise above those ashes. She doesn’t seem too afraid to die, but please, don’t let that happen to her.

Shining Girls: Season 1 (Apple TV+ series streaming 4/29)

Following Mad Men, Elisabeth Moss’ career flew sky high, and she moved into leading lady status with The Handmaid’s Tale. Things grew every more gripping with her turn in The Invisible Man, and she’s returning to the horror realm with this adaptation of Lauren Beukes’ novel that feels like the lovechild between Stephen King and Gillian Flynn. Moss portrays a newspaper archivist who survives an assault and heads out with Wagner Moura’s reporter to find out whodunnit, but time and reality keep on twisting.

(Spoilers for Netflix’s Bad Vegan will be found below.)

Ex-celebrity restauranteur Sarma Melngailis, the Bad Vegan subject, has taken umbrage with multiple elements of the Netflix show, which charts how she rose of the New York City restaurant charts and ended up as a fugitive of the law. Sarma first took issue with how she felt “sick” over how Netflix was marketing the show (which “mocked” her cult-like belief in the dog-immortality claim). She also didn’t appreciate the nebulous ending of the show, which didn’t make entirely clear when she had spoken on the phone (it was 2019) with ex-husband Anthony Strangis. That arguably lent the appearance that the two were recently in contact, and joking, and it led to a lot of criticism coming Sarma’s way.

Sarma’s now very upset about promotional images for the show, which show a glammed up version of her, which she compared to a fall-from-grace iteration that shows her looking much worse for wear. Here’s what she wrote on Instagram:

“Me looking like a glamorized villain eating a cash salad is not me. It may help Netflix sensationalize the story, but at my expense, and at the expense of a greater understanding of the larger issue including #coercivecontrol, #narcisssisticabuse, #cultmindcontrol and more.”

Via the New York Post, Sarma also revealed a 2016 letter that she’d written to Strangis, who she accused of using her email account to ask Alec Baldwin for money. She also accused him of brainwashing her and taking everything away from her to support his gambling habit:

“Everything is gone – the restaurant, the brand, my home, my work, my employees, my customers, even all my things: clothes, papers, files, photos, everything. Also, my integrity. And scariest of all for me: my independence. You figured me out – what would work on me. You reeled me in, then got me trapped by borrowing money you’d promise to repay. Only a little at first, but that was the hook. I wanted to be repaid, so I’d let you back in. I’d let you back into my home when I’d resolved to have nothing to do with you again because you were telling me you had cash to pay me back.

“Then somehow you’d pull some insane mind-f***kery and would end up borrowing more. How that happened, I don’t even know. Why did I give you more? How did that happen? How did you do that?”

Sarma, as detailed in Bad Vegan, eventually funneled nearly $2 million from her restaurant funds, stiffing investors and depriving her employees of paychecks for weeks. She and Strangis went on the run, staying at hotel casinos and in random places, eventually getting busted for orderi ng Dominos pizza and wings. The story irked a lot of people and also seemed very unbelievable, but sometimes, life really is stranger than fiction.

In the end, Sarma insists that she used her Netflix money to pay back her employees. She’s apparently writing, and maybe that will turn into a book, and she’s made no secret of wanting her own restaurant again and keeping Anthony Strangis far away from her while investing her time with her her dog, Leon. Hopefully, it stays that way.

On Thursday, diabetics across the country breathed a sigh of relief when the Affordable Insulin Now Act—legislation that would lower the maximum insurance co-pay of insulin to no more than $35 per month—passed the House. The final vote, according to NBC News, was a surprisingly close 232-193. What might be less surprising is that the 193 votes against lowering the cost of a drug that could save the lives of countless people, and improve the lives of millions more, all came from Republican voters. (Only 12 Republicans voted in support of the legislation.)

The way Democrats see it, the Affordable Insulin Now Act is all about saving lives. As NBC reported, Michigan Rep. Dan Kildee, one of the bill’s sponsors, told his fellow congresspeople from the House floor ahead of the vote: “As a father of a Type 1 diabetic, I have seen firsthand how the high price of prescription drugs like insulin can harm patients and harm families. When my daughter turned 26 and got her own health insurance, there were months where she spent a third of her take-home pay—because she’s diabetic—on staying alive.”

For Republicans, the matter is not so cut-and-dry. While the bill would reduce the out-of-pocket costs for the millions of insulin-dependent diabetics across the country, those savings would need to come out of someone else’s pocket.

“This bill is an exemplar of the fact that [Democrats] want the government to control our lives in every way they possibly can,” North Carolina congresswoman Virginia Foxx said, calling the plan “a massive power grab that will lead our country one step closer to socialized medicine.”

Insurance companies are also against it. AHIP (formerly known as America’s Health Insurance Plans), an advocacy and trade organization made up of health insurance companies, issued a statement claiming that, “While health insurance providers work to reduce insulin costs, this policy unfortunately does nothing to lower the price of insulin but simply shifts costs to others through higher insurance premiums and copays.”

According to the CDC, 37.3 million Americans—or one out of every 10 people—are currently living with diabetes, and one in five people aren’t even aware they have it. Another 96 million people (more than one in three) have pre-diabetes, and are at risk of being diagnosed. Compounding the problem is the COVID pandemic; a recent, large-scale study found that people who have had even mild cases of COVID are at a 40 percent higher risk of being diagnosed with diabetes within a year of their coronavirus infection.

Forbes reports that the cost of insulin is generally $175 to $300 per vial, and that many diabetes sufferers require up to three vials per month. It’s a life-saving drug, but many simply cannot afford it. Which is partly why diabetes is the seventh leading cause of death in the U.S., killing more than 87,000 people each year.

Needlessly to say, some were flummoxed and outraged over the Republican opposition to the bill.

Now that the bill has passed the House, it will move on to the Senate, who will decide its fate.

(Via NBC News)

In February, Big Thief started the year strong with Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, an expansive 20-track album this is sure to end on some year-end lists. When it comes to promotional performances, the lengthy album has given the band plenty of songs to pick from, especially since the album has so far spawned eight singles.

Well, they were on The Tonight Show and for the broadcast, they went with “Spud Infinity.” Big Thief delivered a remote, pre-taped performance, taking to a simple living room to play the song.

While this is a new performance, hearing the song live is far from a new experience for Big Thief fans, as the group has played the tune on stage as far back as 2017.

In a Rolling Stone feature from earlier this year, the band’s James Krivchenia remembers Lenker showing him “Spud Infinity,” which she didn’t think much of at the time (the track’s lyrics include, “When I say heart, I mean finish / The last one there is a potato knish”). Krivchenia said, “I heard it and I was like, ‘Adrianne, I’m crying right now.’ She was like, ‘But I say ‘garlic bread.’ You can’t say ‘garlic bread’ in a song.’”

Watch Big Thief perform “Spud Infinity” on The Tonight Show above.