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National Geographic Presents: IMPACT with Gal Gadot (National Geographic on YouTube) — This short-form documentary series will run for six episodes to tell powerful stories of women who are leading violence-and-poverty-stricken communities. From Brazil to Puerto Rico, Michigan, California, Louisiana, and Tennessee, this series will show these women standing up while remaining unafraid to dream and lead. Yes, surfing happens, but so does a whole lot of transformation. Each episode will release weekly before debuting as a full-length documentary special on the Nat Geo channel.

9-1-1 (Fox, 8:00pm) — A drunk driver causes a deadly freeway pile-up, and Athena races to save lives while Maddie’s doing the labor thing.

9-1-1: Lone Star (Fox, 9:00pm) — A horrific car accident leads to Grace and Judd battling for their lives while their past goes into flashback mode.

Running Wild With Bear Grylls (Nat Geo, 9:00pm) — Bear Grylls is still doing his daredevil-in-nature thing, and this week, Bear goes off the map with Dave Bautista.

Pray, Obey, Kill (HBO, 9:00 & 10:00pm) — Tonight will see a double-dose installment of a five-part documentary series from investigative journalists Anton Berg and Martin Johnson in a project directed by The Bridge‘s Henrik Georgsson. Follow along while Berg and Johnson retrace what happened on a frigid night when a small Swedish village saw a woman murdered and a neighbor shot before a nanny confessed to the acts of violence while citing a strange motivation. This led to a scandalous tale of a love triangle and a link to a prior suspicious death. Yet is the whole mess tied to the local tight-knit Pentecostal congregation and its charismatic leader, who referred to herself as “The Bride of Christ”? Get ready for an unpredictable true-crime ride.

Black Lightning (CW, 9:00pm) — Anissa springs a surprise on Grace, and the FBI has Jefferson in their sights. It’s visit time.

Debris (NBC, 10:00pm) — A dangerous operation leads Bryan and Finola toward rescuing George Jones, while Maddox and Ferris have different opinions on the mission.

Breeders (FX, 10:00pm) — Martin Freeman’s starring turn in this comedy enters the sophomore season with new parenting challenges. This week, Ally’s feeling pressure, and no one’s helping her while Jackie and Jim are hoping to move to the coast.

The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon — Michael Strahan, Emmy Blotnick

Late Night With Seth Meyers — Catherine Zeta-Jones, Emmanuelle Caplette

In case you missed these picks from the weekend:

Chadwick Boseman: Portrait Of An Artist (Netflix documentary) — Following the Black Panther and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom star’s too-soon death last August, the streamer fathered an all-star team for this documentary that aims to explore “Boseman’s extraordinary commitment to his craft [and] an intimate look at the Oscar-nominated actor’s artistry and the acting process which informed his transformative performances.” Settle in for a long list of participants, including Viola Davis, Danai Gurira, Spike Lee, Phylicia Rashad, and Glynn Turman. This one will be available for a limited 30-day window, so don’t let it languish in your queue for too long.

Spy City (AMC+ original series) — Preacher‘s Dominic Cooper stars as an English spy in 1960s Berlin, right before the Berlin Wall goes up. He’s tasked with locating a traitor among the Allies or in the UK embassy, and he’s possibly surrounded by spies and double agents. He’s also dancing around the threat of nuclear war while American, British, and French troops are barely separated from their East German and Soviet counterparts. Good luck?

Monday afternoon was blessed with two of baseball’s quirkiest traditions: morning baseball and position players pitching. The Boston Red Sox hosted the Chicago White Sox on Patriots Day at Fenway Park, with an 11 am first pitch that usually coincides with the running of the Boston Marathon.

With no Marathon due to the still-ongoing coronavirus pandemic (it’s set to run in the fall) baseball was the star of the show, and Boston earned a split of the four-game series by jumping all over Chicago ace Lucas Giolito for six runs in the first inning, washing him out of the game in the second inning after getting just three outs. It was a laugher on a great morning/afternoon for baseball in Boston, and it got even more hilarious in the seventh inning when Tony LaRussa started throwing position players into the game to pitch.

With the score 10-4, DH Yermín Mercedes made his first ever pitching appearance for the White Sox in the seventh inning. Mercedes was a curious choice for the role, especially considering he’s been one of the best hitters in the AL early this season. It was actually his first ever Major League appearance in the field, as he had just one plate appearance last season after eight seasons in the minors before this spring.

Mercedes got into a bit of trouble but only gave up one run, getting some help from a lineout that became a double play. It was a bit odd to go to a position player this early in the game, but it was weird circumstances for Chicago on the morning after a 7-inning doubleheader with the starter going just 1+ inning. Which is why LaRussa went with another position player in the eighth. Danny Mendick came to the mound in the bottom half of the inning, which is where the real fun started. His first pitch? A 60 MPH “changeup” that actually plunked Marwin González. It was hilarious.

The “uh oh” on the White Sox broadcast had some real Carl Lewis vibes to it, which basically sums up the day pitching for the White Sox. González could have absolutely gotten out of the way, but the pitch floated in there from way out of the strike zone so he may have just been surprised it broke as much as it did because it was moving so slowly. But while it was an inauspicious start for Mendick, he got through a scoreless inning and Chicago didn’t have to send another pitcher out in the 11-4 loss. Mendick did get a nice strikeout on a 64 MPH pitch, though, and they tossed the ball into the dugout for a nice souvenir there.

In any event, morning baseball continues to be just delightful. See you all next Patriots Day.

Most of us did some tumbling moves as kids, from somersaults to cartwheels. A chosen few could pull off more impressive moves, like handsprings and backflips. But guaranteed, no kid that any of us knew could do anything close to the feats 5-year-old Li Jiamin can do.

A video of Li doing 80 back handsprings in under a minute (some people counted 82—it’s really hard to keep track without making yourself dizzy) has gone viral, with more than a million views on Twitter alone.

At first, you might assume it’s a looped video (I know I did). But watch the way the wrinkles build up in the side and top of the mattress. If there’s a loop in there somewhere, it doesn’t account for most of the flips, and when you see what else Li can do, the feat becomes a whole lot more believable.

Li lives in the city of Xinzhou in northern China, and her martial arts-trained father serves as her trainer. In another video filmed in the same location at their home and shared by the South China Morning Post, we can see her doing a similar number of back handsprings on a red mat on the same sofa. We also see her walking around on her hands, walking upstairs backward on her hands, doing backflips off the sofa, and more.

Li started doing flips when she was four and practices for two hours a day, according to the video. Her father says she could bend over backward after just three days of training and has been practicing daily since then.

That doesn’t mean tumbling has always been easy for Li. She works hard, even when practice becomes mundane or difficult. Her father says she almost gave up in the beginning, but he pushed her to continue until she got the hang of it, and once she was successful, she became happy and confident. It’s been a gradual process to work her way up to 80 back handsprings in a minute.

Li’s father says she is resilient and determined, which is pretty obvious. “My daughter is very tough, unlike other kids,” he told the Post. He said she always follows his instructions, even when he gives her tasks that are extra challenging, like holding a handstand for 10 minutes.

Her father also said that her extraordinary skill is due to her starting her training so young. “If she started training after the age of 12, she wouldn’t be able to do 80 flips continuously no matter how hard she tries,” he said.

Li’s goal is to break the Guinness World Record. She may end up becoming a professional gymnast, but she may not. Her dad hopes she will become a police officer or join the army. “I just want her to study hard and be an educated person, nothing else,” he told the Post.

Chinese girl performs 80 somersaults in 1 minute

youtu.be

In this video, it’s pretty clear that Li’s father is raising his daughter with a strong sense of discipline and also a strong sense of support. We see lots of positive reinforcement, and it’s hard to imagine a kid who wouldn’t be proud to show off such amazing, hard-earned skill.

As far as the Guinness World Record goes, most highly physical categories have a minimum age requirement of 16, so Li has a ways to go to be able to compete. Since the current female world record is 53 consecutive back handsprings, Li should have no trouble smashing it, if she’s able to keep up her current astonishing pace.

In the meantime, we’ll just marvel at her ability and try not to get woozy watching her flippin’ amazing flipping feats.

A surprising new poll out of Texas found that actor Matt McConaughey has more support to be the next governor of Texas than the incumbent, Republican Greg Abbott. The actor increased speculation about his plans to run for governor in 2022 last week when he said it’s a “true consideration.”

The poll by The Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas at Tyler found that in a hypothetical contest, McConaughey garners 45% support, with Abbott getting 33%, and 22% saying they would vote for someone else.

Democrats (66% to 8%) and Independents (44% to 28%) broke highly in favor of McConaughey. However, Abbot still holds a decent lead over the actor with Republicans (56% to 30%).

The actor’s support in the state most likely comes from the goodwill he’s created as an A-list Texas native because he hasn’t said much when it comes to political policy.

The star of “Dallas Buyers Club” held a star-studded benefit for victims of Texas floods in February. He’s also officially joined the faculty of his alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin, as a professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film.

The actor stresses the fact that when it comes to the political policy he’s a moderate but that doesn’t mean he’s wishy-washy.

“I’m a ‘Meet You in the Middle’ man,” McConaughey said according to USA Today. “When I say ‘aggressively centric,’ that sometimes gets parceled over there with ‘Oh, that’s a shade of gray, a compromise.’ And I say, ‘Bullshit. That’s a dare. Right now, that’s radical. You wanna be brave?”

McConaughey believes that taking a centrist approach gives people more leeway to make the best decisions.

“Because you got more agility, cause you got more adaptability,” she said. “Because there’s different situations for different sides. Sometimes the left is better at this, sometimes the right. There’s different choices for different circumstances.”

He also believes that the political stereotypes do more harm than good.

“The left thinks the right’s racist and the right thinks the left’s socialist. Well, that ain’t true,” McConaughey said. “Then you go, well, the left is for empathy, compassion and solidarity; well the right’s for resilience and work ethic and responsibility. I’m like, I like all six of those. Those are values that our mamas taught us. The right and the left don’t have ownership of those, excluding the other side.”

The only firm policy stance the actor has taken is on gun control. In 2018, he spoke at the March for Our Lives rally in Austin calling for a ban on assault weapons for civilians, restricting high-capacity magazines, and strengthening background checks.

“Those are the three main stipulations,” McConaughey said at the rally, “and to those three, I can say — if you can say it with me — all right, all right, all right.”

It’s unclear whether the actor’s lack of clear positions is a clever way to avoid alienating the millions of people who go to see his films or part of his personality. Anyone who’s seen his series of car commercials for Lincoln can attest that he seems to hold a rather abstract view of the world.

It’s also questionable whether the political center that he’s trying to appeal to actually exists. People often talk about wanting bipartisanship and more moderate candidates, but those candidates tend not to fare very well in primaries.

The poll found that Democrats prefer a progressive candidate over a centrist (51% to 25%) and only 20% of Republicans are interested in voting for a centrist.

But if he runs as an independent, all bets could be off. After all, it was both the far left and far right who wrote off Joe Biden’s centrist 2020 presidential campaign as “out of touch.” And we all know that worked out “alright, alright, alright” for the commander-in-chief.

Since the pandemic hit, NPR’s Tiny Desk concert series has gone remote, which could be seen as either a positive or a negative. It’s a bit of a bummer that artists aren’t able to play in the classic titular performing space, but it is neat to see what environments they choose for their sets in lieu of that. The latest participant in the series is Rina Sawayama, who took to an office building with giant windows, which offered a stunning panoramic view of a city skyline.

It wasn’t just Sawayama, though, as she was joined by a full band and string quartet. Her set consisted of three songs from her 2020 debut album Sawayama: “Dynasty,” “XS,” and “Chosen Family.” While Elton John didn’t feature on the latter track, like he does on the latest version of the song, Sawayama did decide to perform the track in the style of the new recording.

Sawayama was also happy she was finally able to perform some of her songs live for the first time: “DYNASTY LIVE FINALLY !!!! to think this was the first time I performed it ….,” she tweeted.

Meanwhile, Sawayama just celebrated a major life milestone, as she turned 30 years old over the weekend, on April 16.

Check out Sawayama’s Tiny Desk performance above.

Disney+’s first live-action Star Wars series, The Mandalorian, was nominated for 13 Emmys, including Outstanding Drama Series. That puts pressure on the streaming service’s Marvel shows, WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, to also be factors during awards season. But only one of them will compete against Baby Yoda.

Nate Moore, the vice president of production and development at Marvel Studios, told IndieWire that WandaVision will compete in the Limited Series categories at the 2021 Emmys, while The Falcon and the Winter Soldier will be submitted as a Drama Series.

“[The decision] came about sort of as the series was launching, but it was something we were thinking about even as we were making it — not because we think, ‘Oh my God, it’s so great,’ but because it does feel a bit more dramatic than some of our typical stuff,” he said. “As this is sort of our first foray into television, even if it’s Disney+, we thought [the category placement] was appropriate for what the show is trying to tackle.”

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier could return for season two (“Hopefully at the end of this season, you will see the potential for what we could tell in a subsequent season,” Moore teased), but WandaVision is definitely over. So it will compete for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series, like recent winners Chernobyl and Watchmen.

“I think WandaVision is a show you can only do once. She can’t go back into that reality. That is such a complete arc of what that character can do and what that story wanted to do, whereas Falcon and Winter Soldier is really about dealing with, to me, the legacy of what a superhero is, through the lens of Captain America and his shield, but ultimately through the lens of all these different characters. And that’s a story I think you can revisit in subsequent seasons because it’s an evergreen story. It’s a conversation.”

If “Agatha All Along” doesn’t win Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics, there will be rioting in the streets. The 2021 Emmys air on September 19.

(Via IndieWire)

Over the course of his legendary career, DMX had about as much success on the charts as anybody: His first five albums all managed to peak at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. Now, after his passing, the late rapper is continuing to have an impact on the charts, as on the new chart dated April 24, he had an album come so close to placing on top.

Taylor Swift is No. 1 on the current Billboard 200 with Fearless (Taylor’s Version), but the 2010 compilation The Best Of DMX managed to finish the week at No. 2 and become the rapper’s seventh top-ten album. This is up from No. 73 last week, which was the album’s chart peak at the time. Additionally, two of DMX’s studio albums — 1998’s It’s Dark And Hell Is Hot and 1999’s Flesh Of My Flesh, Blood Of My Blood — re-entered the chart, at No. 46 and 107, respectively.

The Best Of DMX features some of the rapper’s biggest hits, including all of his RIAA-certified singles: “Get At Me Dog,” “Slippin’,” and “X Gon’ Give It To Ya.” It’s not surprising that the rapper’s music has shot up the charts, as his streams increased by nearly 1,000 percent after his death. He is also set to be memorialized at Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

When I was a kid my family and I would occasionally visit my cousins up in Mendocino County, a few hours north of San Francisco. A land of twisty roads, rugged terrain, and massive redwoods, I always found something indescribably eerie about the place, where towering, thousand-year old trees distort and block out bright sunlight that lasts well past 10 pm in the summer. It wasn’t until recently that books and television shows began to bolster and explain these childish suspicions — that this was a slightly kooky, slightly lawless sort of place, hostile to outsiders and historically a magnet for outlaws and oddballs, a sort of Appalachia with turquoise jewelry.

Coming on the heels of Netflix’s Murder Mountain, from 2018, which was set in Humboldt (the “Emerald Triangle,” referring to the marijuana-growing region comprises three adjoining counties, Humboldt, Mendocino, and Trinity) Hulu’s Sasquatch is another docuseries (this one thankfully only three episodes) exploring a murder-mystery in California’s far-north weed country. Debuting April 19th from director Josh Rofé and host David Holthouse (pictured), the twist in Sasquatch is that the murders, as you might imagine, were initially alleged to have been committed by a Sasquatch. Or… Sasquatches.

Sasquatch is surprisingly effective at convincing you that this might actually be possible, and it helps that host David Holthouse overheard the story in a legitimately terrifying moment. But whether “Bigfoot did it” is less important than the picture the show paints, of a time and place where people could believe that Bigfoot did it.

The Emerald Triangle has long been a magnet for kooky people, and when back-to-the-land hippies began to take over from loggers (descended from pioneers and gold rushers, the starry-eyed dreamers of a different age) in the sixties, they built communes. They attracted cults. Jim Jones and the People’s Temple moved into a spot near Ukiah. The Manson Family had a house in Philo. Many of those hippies turned to growing pot (both easy because of Mendocino’s fertile soil and easily disguised because of the rugged terrain, remoteness, and towering Redwoods), which attracted a certain type of person and nurtured a particular lifestyle.

In the 90s, when the “war on drugs” and operation CAMP took a hard line on pot-growing and brought military tactics and draconian sentences to marijuana growing, the locals turned conspiratorial, suddenly suspicious of one another and hostile to outsiders (Larry Livermore, who gets interviewed in Sasquatch, wrote a great memoir about this period). It’s in this environment, of paranoid pot growers, under-the-table seasonal workers, and tweekers living in remote camps in the rugged wilderness, that the rumors of a Sasquatch murder took hold. Josh Rofé’s docuseries sets out to discover not only whether it’s true, but how and why it got started. I spoke to him via Zoom this week.

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Can you tell me how the project came about?

It was February, 2018, a friend of mine, Zach Cregger, he’s one of the executive producers on the show. He mentioned a podcast that he really thought I should listen to called Sasquatch Chronicles. It’s people calling up with their encounter stories. I listened to 11 episodes in four days and was immediately obsessed with it, more specifically with the visceral fear that I was sensing. I was less hung up on whether or not I believed the details, what I was so taken by was these people seemed really afraid recalling these things that they said that they saw or encountered in the woods. Cut to a week later, I’m thinking, okay, I’m going to do a Sasquatch something, I don’t know what that is specifically. And then that morphed into, “Well, what if I could find a murder mystery that is wrapped up or somehow intertwined with the Sasquatch story?” I reached out to David Holthouse who was a colleague of mine already, we at the time were working on a show called Lorena that I made. He’s been an investigative journalist for about 25 years and a Gonzo journalist, so he’s really seen and done a lot of crazy things. I reached out to David and my exact text to him was, “Hey, this is the craziest text I’m going to send you for the next five years. I would like to find a murder mystery wrapped up in a Sasquatch story, and if that exists, pursue it as the next project.” He wrote me right back and said, “I love it. I got one, I’ll call you in five”.

[Slightly incredulous] So he just happened to have that story, like even separate from you wanting to do a Sasquatch show?

Exactly! Then he tells me this story about how in 1993, when he was 23 years old, he was a young Gonzo journalist burning it at both ends, learning the hard way that not everybody gets to be Hunter S Thompson. He needed to escape his circumstances, so he went up to Northern California to visit a buddy who was working on a cannabis farm. And while he was up there, somebody came running into a cabin that he was in and said, “Three people have just been murdered at another farm, further up the mountain and all the eyewitnesses have the same account.” The story was that either a Sasquatch, or multiple Sasquatches, tore these guys to pieces. These guys said that they had seen the bodies literally torn limb from limb and strewn about amongst really a massive patch of weed worth about a quarter million back then.

The Emerald triangle seems like it’s basically the perfect storm for creating Sasquatch sightings. Can you describe why that might be?

Are you saying everybody’s high? And so they’re seeing what they think they’re seeing?

I mean… it could be a factor.

You know, what’s wild, David talks a little bit about this in the show, and then there were other things that he said that didn’t make it in, but when you’re in those woods, they’re just, the trees are so big and the forest is so dense and your phone doesn’t work and you can’t hear any traffic, and now you’ve been out there for a while and the sun is starting to go down and it just, it really does look prehistoric. It’s the kind of place that if suddenly a Brontosaurus walked by, you’d say, “Oh, that makes sense.” It’s a place that your senses seem to function differently when you’re out there. A bit of paranoia seeps in, if you’re out there long enough. Weed culture aside.

No, I mean my uncle and cousins grew up in Mendocino County and I visited once or twice when I was a kid, and I always had a sense of it as this eerie place. I don’t really know why I thought that. There’s just something about it that seems eerie. Was that part of what you wanted to explore in the project?

I mean, it was one thing to hear David tell this story to me that night on the phone, but then once we got out there, it really just smacks you in the face and becomes apparent that, “Wow, this is an incredibly cinematic landscape.” I wasn’t expecting it to have this creepy vibe, just as a baseline. And then David starts talking to certain people and you learn that, “Oh, this is a hub for the criminal underworld.” And you add that on top of the rumors of violent Sasquatch and all of a sudden you just don’t feel safe anywhere up there. I know that everybody I made this with when we were on our shoots, we really sort of had this sense of, we better not overstay our welcome. Because we’re sort of already doing that with our first foot on the ground. And so it was just sort of, everything was just sort of tension-filled and adrenalized.

You talked about it being a hub of criminal underworlds; what are the groups of people that that area is drawing and has historically drawn?

I think a good example of what happened there, which we talk about in the first couple episodes, which is, in the seventies, a lot of hippies went out there and they wanted to get out of the city and they wanted to go live off the land and start lives off the grid. So they went out there and they sort of built utopia — they were growing their own food, they were growing their own weed, the kids were all going to school together. Everybody would get together to play music and eat, and it was amazing. And then all of a sudden, the war on drugs quite literally invaded utopia and the marijuana fields, whether it was a family’s small patch or somebody who had become a bigger supplier and had a football field worth of pot, they were now being targeted by these operations that the U.S. government was putting into play.

And I mean, they were just terrorizing people. I’m talking about tanks and helicopters with guys manning machine guns and setting everybody’s weed fields on fire and arresting people left and right. It was wild. The family dog would come running out, they’d shoot the dog and then arrest the parents. And so there were a lot of these hippies who quickly realized, this is not what I came here for, and I’m leaving. I’m not built for war. And so they left and a lot of them went back to the Bay Area or wherever else that they came from. And then there were other people who knew that they were very much built for war and violence, and they didn’t just double down, they quadrupled down and went further into the woods. As somebody in the show says, who was very much of that world, some of these people, they just flat out became feral. Add ten years of living like that to that person’s experience, and you’re going to end up with a pretty dangerous human, and so there is a subculture of that sort of out there.

Did you ever research any of the cults that sort came through that area? I know there were a few, in addition to like the communes and things like that.

You know not the cults, but one of the things, I’m glad you mentioned that actually because you’re reminding me of something that once upon a time, I thought, “Oh, that’ll be an interesting little side road to go down,” but it didn’t make it in. There was a serial killer named Wayne Ford who was living up there. And, yeah, I mean just wild, terrifying characters, just living in a nice, quaint little cabin in the woods, you know what I mean?

[In 1998, Wayne Ford walked into a Sheriff’s office in Eureka, the biggest city in the Emerald Triangle, holding a woman’s severed breast in a Ziplock bag and confessed to four murders]

It being such an insular place with like no cell service and everybody’s sort of hostile to outsiders, how do you make a documentary in that sort of place? What are the challenges?

Well, first to go through the process of thinking you’re not going to be able to actually do this, and you’re going to fail miserably, and have to tell Hulu, “You know what that thing I told you we were going to do?” Once you’re past the existential crisis of realizing how difficult this world will be to penetrate, you know, David started to develop sources and very slowly, but step-by-step over time he would have these little breakthroughs and he would gain the trust and cooperation of certain individuals. And so it was just a slow one step at a time sort of never allowing the disappointments to pile up to high on your psyche type of process.

What about operational security or whatever, did you have to take any sort of steps to stay safe while you were making it?

We actually looked into security and we couldn’t find anybody who wanted to do it–

You mean just as a consultant or an actual bodyguard?

I mean, to have somebody on the ground with us. And we were basically told “what’s going to happen up there is going to happen whether we’re there or not.” And so for us, this is something that David mentioned in the show on camera, but for us there was this sort of cost and risk analysis that was very much a part of our process. Just, in real-time on the fly, “Oh, we just found out this new thing”, or, “Oh, there’s this new person,” and sure, as the filmmaker you all want to pursue that. “Well, okay. Let’s really break down what the potential fallout could be.” And so it was just it was a lot of that.

You interviewed Larry Livermore who lived up there and wrote a book about it. He also put out the first Green Day album, and I know that Tré was from up there. Did you guys ever try to interview any of those guys?

No, we did not.

Were you with David for all of the shooting or was he kind of having to go off alone some on some of these missions?

I mean, for the shooting, I was with him for more or less everything, except the hidden camera stuff — obviously, he was solo for that. But there was also so much that David did away from the camera with meeting various sources to just sort of attempt to ignite those relationships. I think in many ways those were the most dangerous endeavors that he made during his investigation, was where there’s no camera, there’s no crew, he’s going to meet people, it’s 11 o’clock at night. They’ve changed the location on him three times. And oh by the way, the place he’s showing up to it’s actually closed, but he’s now going to be with that person he was going to meet an eight other people he doesn’t know. There was definitely a lot of that.

It’s a three-episode series. How did you decide on that? Was there a conversation about whether this should be one documentary or how many episodes that you wanted to break it into?

You know, we knew pretty early on, we wanted to do three and part of the reason we wanted it to be a series, as opposed to a feature is just all of these different elements, whether it was the war on drugs, the Sasquatch world let alone the investigation. We really just, we wanted to be able to go in deep on all of those, as opposed to if it’s a feature you can’t spend as much time in some of these pockets and felt like a series really enabled us to let David go down the rabbit holes that he was going to go down and not feel like, “Oh, we have to sort of honor the three-act structure of a feature and move things along at a quicker pace.” Whereas you can live in something for longer if it’s episodic. And so that just, that seemed to lend itself to this story.

‘Sasquatch’ hits Hulu April 19th. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

Earlier this month, Lil Dicky declared, “That’s a wrap on season 2,” presumably talking about his breakout hit FXX series Dave. It didn’t take long, by the way, for FXX to renew Dave for a second season, considering it was the network’s most-watched comedy ever. Anyway, that seems to be what he was referring to, as the premiere date of the show’s second season has now been set for June 16.

Benny Blanco, who appeared in multiple episodes in the show’s first season, is set to return in Season 2. Also making appearances will be Lil Nas X, Doja Cat, CL, Kendall Jenner, Hailey Bieber, Kyle Kuzma, J Balvin, Rae Sremmurd (Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi), Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Lil Yachty, and Kevin Hart, among others.

Press materials also tease some topics to be covered in the new episodes: “Dave knows he’s destined for rap superstardom — but at what cost? With the pressure mounting as he records his debut album, he has to decide if he’ll sacrifice friendships, love, and his own sense of self in order to make his dream come true. Simultaneously exasperating and inspiring to his friends, Dave vows to leave no stone unturned on his quest to become the next superstar.”

Revisit our interview with the show’s GaTa here.

One of the most important things we as a society can do during a pandemic is safely give out awards to very wealthy actors for movies many people could not safely go see in theaters over the last year or so. But apparently, sometimes optics are more important than actually being safe and wearing masks while around people who may or may not be vaccinated against the novel coronavirus.

Variety detailed on Monday the decision from the Academy to not require masks for anyone attending the upcoming Oscars ceremony on April 25, at least not while cameras are rolling on the 170 people who will be allowed to attend the ceremony. It’s all a bit complicated, but what you should not expect is to see anyone wearing a mask during the telecast later this month.

The news was announced on Monday morning during a Zoom meeting with Academy reps and nominees, and studio and personal publicists. Because the ceremony — being held at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles — is being treated as a TV/film production, masks are not required for people on camera, an Academy rep explained.

However, when guests are not on camera, they are being asked to wear masks. For example, masks should be put on during commercial breaks.

Director Steven Soderbergh, who will co-produce the event, did not explain his stance on wearing masks when speaking to the media over the weekend. But he did say the usage of masks will be “central to the narrative” of the show’s festivities, though no one seems to be willing to explain what that means if no one will be wearing them on camera.

He said on Saturday that masks would play “a very important role in the story.” “If that’s cryptic, it’s meant to be,” he added. “That topic is very central to the narrative.”

The meeting included a detailed walk through of what attendees of what they should expect at Union Station. A temperature check will be mandatory. This is after attendees must take at least three COVID tests in the days leading up to the ceremony.

Other award shows put on during the still-ongoing coronavirus pandemic have adhered to different standards. The Grammys, for example, held the ceremony outside and had participants masked unless they were on stage giving out or accepting awards. People nominated for certain categories were essentially moved into and out of the venue space as the show continued, something that will reportedly happen here as well. But while the safety precautions for those attending will undoubtedly be measured, the optics here aren’t particularly great considering mask usage during a pandemic has unfortunately become a political issue, not one of basic human decency and consideration for others.

As vaccinations continue to be more accessible to all American adults as of Monday, continuing to wear a mask when around others in public has become as much about keeping yourself safe as it is about projecting good habits and also limiting the risk of spreading coronavirus to others who have yet to be vaccinated. It’s ultimately more about messaging than mitigation in many ways. Hopefully whatever the “central narrative” is reinforces that because, on paper, this does not seem like a great start.