-Ok, so I might have listened to Ariana’s new song287 times today. What can I say? It was a rough week.
–Sophie Turner revealed a one of the hardest parts of starring in Game of Thrones: “For the first few seasons I was allowed to wash my hair because I was an aristocratic young girl, but toward season five they started asking me to not wash my hair and it was really disgusting.”
–Justin Beiber and Hailey Baldwin have sent save the date cards for their wedding celebration.
-Sony has finally (FINALLY!) cut ties with R Kelly. Their RCA Records label has dropped him on the heels of the Lifetime documentary.
-Also, a former music label intern is accusing him of sexually abusing her as a teenager, which she’ll talk about on tonight’s Dateline.
-Arrow’s 150th episode sounds… kind of funny? Fine, I’m back in.
–Nic Pizzolatto and HBO are reportedly fighting over the True Detective season 3 finale. Has there ever been someone who needs to just get out of his own way more than this guy?
–Mariah Carey‘s war with her ex-assistant is insane. Blackmail! Secret recordings! NDAs! Pee!
-It’s interesting that Netflix considers its biggest competition not HBO, but Fortnite.
–Kumail Nanjiani and Issa Rae are starring in a rom-com together and I’m here for it!
-On the Graham Norton Show, they aired an old clip of Timothée Chalametrapping about math and it was amazing. The also aired a clip of 10-year-old Saoirse Ronan winning a radio contest.
-According to Vulture, David Letterman recently interviewed Kanye West for the second season of his Netflix talk show. I don’t want to hear from either of those dudes so that’s a definite skip.
–Natalie Portman is the latest celeb to push for inclusion riders in Hollywood contracts.
-This is an interesting look at how Spotify’s revenue modelmakes it impossible for mid-level artists to be fairly compensated.
-Bless Twitter shippers for alerting me to the fact that Karen Page shows up in episode 11 of the new season of The Punisher. I can just skip to that, right?
–Jesse Eisenberg and Alexander Skarsgard race for stock market quotes in the trailer for The Hummingbird Project.
–Gugu Mbatha-Raw as a woman who discovers she has superhuman abilities in the Fast Color trailer.
-I actually love Saoirse Ronan‘s new cover of Harper’s Bazaar UK (and the inside photo spread is to die for), but I get why people don’t love it. The “spirit of Great Britain” line doesn’t really work for when you’re featuring an Irish actress.
-I dig this Aya Cash interview about moving on from You’re The Worst, her friendship with costar Chris Geere (“Chrissy and I are total opposites in every sense. He’s got all this light, positive energy. Compared to him I’m a f*cking ditch. He likes John Mayer. Oh my God, he loves One Direction. I listen to Perfume Genius, and he always says ‘why do you listen to this sad shit?'”), and her attempts at spon-con (“I knew if you have a certain amount of [Instagram] followers you could get a bed, and I contacted them, you probably know which company I’m talking about, and they were like, No, now it’s 600,000 followers that you need for the bed, and I had like 50-thousand something. I was like, ‘F*ck!'”)
–Scarlett Johansson says it’s “useless” to fight back against the deepfake porn that uses her face, which is probably true but deeply depressing.
–Diddy hired his girlfriend a personal trainer, and then reportedly broke up with her due to suspicious that they were hooking up. Maybe this is just karma for implying that your longtime girlfriend needs to get in better shape?
-The CW is moving forward with a Batwoman stand-alone series starring Ruby Rose which kind of surprises me because after she was introduced in this year’s crossover, the buzz about her character seemed to die out. If anything, everyone seemed to be talking about how Tyler Hoechlin deserves his own Superman show.
-Luther’s new season has begun airing in the UK and this one clipmakes me want to see it NOW.
-It’s funny; everyone’s talking about how the newly announced Coachella lineup is the weakest one yet, but it’s the first time I’ve seriously considered going back in years. Yeah, the main draws aren’t really headliner caliber (except Ariana Grande) but the mid-level acts are great (Janelle Monáe, Christine and the Queens, Kid Cudi, CHVRCHES, the 1975, Weezer, etc.). Also, the Idris Elba DJ setwould be hilarious.
-Meanwhile, Kanye West‘s camp says that he was negotiating to be a Coachella headliner but it fell through over disagreements about the stage design.
-Black Mirror: Bandersnatch star Will Poulter was driven off of Twitterbecause people are terrible.
-Margot Robbie and Michael B Jordan share notes about acting while “basically naked” in a new interview.
-2018 felt like a decent year in terms of well-reviewed movies by women filmmakers (Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Destroyer, Private Life, You Were Never Really Here, The Rider, Leave No Trace, etc.). But most women were confined to the indie film world. In fact, the number of women directing top Hollywood films dropped again in 2018, with women directing only 8% of last year’s highest-grossing movies.
-The biggest surprise of this week is that Bumblebee is still holding strong at 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. Is this what happens when you let a woman write a Transformers movie?
-This also surprises me: worldwide, Aquaman has now made more moneythan Wonder Woman.
-This New York Times article about the exploding popularity of Turkish dramas is certainly making me feel better about my recent TV rabbit holes. They’re so good, but so confusing? Why do they blur out all the alcohol bottles? Why do people say “bon appetit” after they’ve already eaten? What kind of a greeting is “work easy”? I have no idea, but I love it.
–Punisher season 2’s trailerhas been released, along with the premiere date (Jan 18). There’s no mention of Karen, so I’m not interested.
-Speaking of upcoming TV, Better Things season 3 starts Feb 28, and Killing Eve season 2 is coming on April 7 (which is wayyyy sooner than anyone expected).
-Fox’s new celebrity talent show The Masked Singer, based on a South Korean show in which famous people wear masks and compete in a singing competition, is a big hit. Getting an impressive 2.9 rating in the A18-49 demo and 9.2M viewers, last night’s ep was the network’s top-rated series launch since Empire four years ago. Critics seem to love it, too.
–Bill Hader broke down in a new interview when talking about the fact that he only spent 5 days with his kids last summer.
-I really liked this interview with Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer on the end of Broad City and what’s next for them. (Though I wanted to hear more about the legal issues with creating a season premiere produced in a way that looks like Instagram Stories.)
–Mads Mikkelsen plays a man stranded in after an airplane crash in the Arctic trailer.
-Yoga may have been around since ancient India, but according to Gwyneth Paltrow, she’s responsible for it’s current popularity. In her WSJ magazine cover story, she says “Forgive me if this comes out wrong, but I went to do a yoga class in LA recently and the 22-year-old girl behind the counter was like, ‘Have you ever done yoga before?’ And, literally, I turned to my friend, and I was like, ‘She has this job because I’ve done yoga before.'” Needless to say, that quote is NOT going over wellon the internet.
–Cardi B confirmed she and Offset have called it quits, posting in an IG video that “things just haven’t been working out between us for a long time” and they “grew out of love.” Meanwhile, he commented on the post “y’all won,” which is really sad.
-Remember how incredibly charming Sandra Oh and Andy Samberg were when they presented together at the Emmys? Now they’ll get to reprise their chemistry when they host the Golden Globes together. (This awesome news has totally overshadowed today’s pleasant but less exciting announcement that Kevin Hart will host the Oscars.)
-Netflix doesn’t release ratings but reports say Daredevil was Netflix’s 4th biggest show this fall — and still it got cancelled.
-Also, this is a good analysis on what losing Friends might mean for Netflix.
–Tom Cruise is doing god’s work by urging everyone to turn off their TV’s motion smoothing. (Challenge: when you visit other people’s homes over the holidays, try to sneak into their TV’s settings and make sure it’s turned off. It’ll be your gift to them.)
–Chloe Grace Moretz was spotted kissing model Kate Harrison.
–Hannah Gadsby kicked off the Women In Entertainment ceremony with a powerful opening speech: “Men are not creepy. Spiders are creepy. Rejecting the humanity of a woman is not creepiness. It is misogyny.”
-Ooh boy, the latest report on Les Moonves reveals it was way worse than originally reported. CBS’s lawyers’ 59-page report alleges that Moonves repeatedly lied to investigators and destroyed evidence, that CBS had an employee “on call” to perform oral sex on Moonves, that he received oral sex from four CBS employees that appeared to be “transactional,” and that members of CBS’s board knew about Moonves’s alleged sexual misconduct way back in 2007 but did nothing to stop him.
-People got SOOO angryabout that Cut story I linked to yesterday on how Priyanka Chopra is scamming Nick Jonas. I assumed it was a satire but others didn’t — including Sophie Turner and Joe Jonas, who tweeted angrilyabout it. It eventually got taken down, so I guess it really was a story that actually woobified Jonas. Which is so odd.
-It seems like this has been a week of bad takes. This one on peak TV from a few days ago still makes me angry because it’s so misguided, while the editor apologizedfor this piece that claimed Ariana Grande‘s “thank u, next” video was “anti queer”.
-I’m really digging the new trailer for next week’s CW crossover. All their superhero shows feel really bleak right now, so I’m down for some Freaky Friday-style body swapping shenanigans. I want a whole sequence about Barry discovering he suddenly has abs.
-As much as I like superhero TV, I don’t really watch the animated stuff, especially on the big screen. But the way that everyone I know is RAVING about the new Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse film has me curious.
-Good on Dakota Johnson for asking Armie Hammer probing questions that giant line of coke he does on Sorry To Bother You.
-Don’t try to challenge Saoirse Ronan on Bridesmaids trivia; she’ll win.
