TV
The Office Removes Scene, Community Pulls Episode over Blackface
Two more beloved NBC comedies — The Office and Community — are either removing or altering episodes due to blackface. For The Office, the scene in question appears in the Season 9 episode, “Dwight Christmas”, which originally aired on December 6th, 2012. The moment occurs as Rainn Wilson’s Dwight Schrute is portraying the German Christmas folklore character Belsnickel. It’s revealed that Belsnickel is often accompanied by Zwarte Piet, or Black Peter, a character described as “a slave boy often portrayed in colorful pantaloons and blackface.” When his colleagues object to the concept, Dwight shoots a text to Nate (Mark Proksch). The scene cuts to Nate outside, dressed as Black Pete was described, who turns away before entering the party. Rather than pull the episode altogether, the sce...
Family Guy Actor Mike Henry Will No Longer Voice Cleveland
Mike Henry, the longtime voice of Family Guy’s Cleveland, has announced he’ll no longer play the character. “It’s been an honor to play Cleveland on Family Guy for 20 years,” Henry wrote in a tweet posted Friday. “I love this character, but persons of color should play characters of color. Therefore, I will be stepping down from the role.” Henry voiced the character of Cleveland Brown since Family Guy’s premiere in 1999. He also starred in the spin-off series, The Cleveland Show, which ran for four seasons. Henry becomes the third white voice actor this week who’s stepped aside from playing a person of color. Earlier, Jenny Slate announced she would no longer voice Missy on Big Mouth, and Kristen Bell dropped out of playing Molly on Central Park. Family Guy was recently renewed for an...
The Simpsons Will No Longer Have White Actors Voice Characters of Color
After years of criticism, producers of The Simpsons have announced that white actors will stop playing people of color on the show. According to a statement obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, “Moving forward, The Simpsons will no longer have White actors voice non-White characters.” As the longest-running primetime scripted series in television history, The Simpsons hasn’t always aged gracefully. Springfield’s white main characters may live in a multicultural neighborhood, but the cast has never reflected that diversity. In 2017, comedian Hari Kondabolu released The Problem With Apu, a documentary about representation of marginalized groups. It studied the issue through the lens of character Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the stereotypically Indian-American Kwik-E-M...
Netflix’s Dark Traverses Time, Space, and Understanding in Its Final Season: Review
The Pitch: When will the sleepy German town of Winden finally catch a break? When we last left the chronologically-challenged cast of Netflix’s Dark, the apocalypse, the product of two warring factions battling for control of time travel across two centuries, is finally here. And if that’s not enough, young lynchpin Jonas Kahnwald (Louis Hofmann) learns that the scope of this battle is bigger than he previously thought when he’s swept away to an alternate Winden where he never existed — his recently-killed girlfriend Martha (Lisa Vicari) now wears the yellow raincoat of responsibility for this temporal conflict. While Jonas tries to return to his reality and stop the apocalypse from coming to both versions of his world, the rest of Dark‘s four main families — including Charlotte ...
The Bachelorette Returns to Capture All the Quarantine Horniness
Isolation can be lonely, but the fantasy romances of The Bachelorette are returning to comfort us with roses, bottles of wine, and long kisses angled just so for the cameras. According to Variety, The Bachelorette is the first major series to resume production after industry-wide coronavirus lockdowns. Now, producers are sprinting to get a new crop of hot people into quarantine. The idea is to take a few dozen strapping hunks, cut them off from human contact, check their temperatures, and dump them at the feet of one lucky gal (Clare Crawley). Tastefully-edited horniness ensues. The whole cast and crew will quarantine together on location. Everyone will be tested before they enter, and as filming progress they’ll be subjected to regular thermometer probes and nasal swabs. It...
Top 10 TV Shows of 2020 (So Far)
Our Mid-Year Report comes to a captivating conclusion today as we reveal the Top 10 TV Shows of 2020 (So Far). In case you missed it, be sure to revisit our previous mid-year lists for top albums, songs, metal albums, and films. Television’s always been there. There’s a reliability to the boob tube that gives us solace day in and day out. It’s the reliable notion that no matter how awful things get in real life, you can always eject, curl up on the couch, and escape into a story. Well, rest assured, television has been working overtime in 2020. As billions of people across the world stay locked inside — we can only hope — the small screen has become less of a life line and more of a permanent member of the family. Fortunately for all of us, we’ve been living in a time of Too Much Televisio...
What’s Coming to Shudder in July 2020
Looking to get away this July? Shudder’s got you covered, and the best part is you won’t even need any luggage. Next month, AMC’s horror streaming service has curated an indelible lineup of originals, classics, and premieres in all sorts of locales. Grab your swim trunks and try to survive the body horror within The Beach House. Don’t dry off, though, because you’ll wanna double dip in the testy waters of Lake of Death. And to keep those outdoor activities going, you can wax nostalgic with not one, not two, but all three Sleepaway Camp flicks. Just don’t forget your bug spray! Of course, if beaches and lakes aren’t your thing, perhaps a trip to Thailand will do the trick? Jump into The Pool! Or maybe an Indonesian curse to spice up your summer? Behold, Impetigore! South Korean exorcism? St...
The Politician And Hollywood Star David Corenswet Has A Beautiful Imagination
By Crystal Bell No one is perfect, but David Corenswet comes close. Of course, the 26-year-old balks at such a suggestion (he’s humble, too!) but the facts speak for themselves. While he was a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia-born actor auditioned for the drama division at Juilliard; he graduated from the famed performing arts conservatory in 2016. (“We’re 98 percent sure that I did in fact go and graduate from Juilliard,” he jokes.) He’s also a self-proclaimed Star Wars nerd who started his own a cappella group in high school with his three best friends. “We were briefly called Three Card Monte, and then we added a fourth [member], and so that ruined the whole thing,” he adds. And right now he’s making pesto. The ...
First Look: Here Are The Teen Wolf Cast Members At Their Virtual Reunion
Back in March, Tyler Posey tweeted the following: And now, the Teen Wolf gang is having a “high school” reunion. In a sneak peek of the inaugural installment of the digital format “MTV Reunions”– which will bring together cast members from television’s most memorable shows, all with the purpose of raising money for charitable causes — the man behind Scott McCall explains the context around the tweet and reveals he’d been watching the supernatural series. Right after overloading on another MTV show, that is. “I was bingeing Jersey Shore, and then I started Teen Wolf,” Tyler says in the clip from the special, which will air on the MTV YouTube channel TOMORROW with amplification across MTV News, MTV brand, MTV Vault and Teen Wolf social ac...
Reese Witherspoon “Didn’t Understand What Homosexuality Was” Before Moving to LA
In a new conversation with Regina King, Reese Witherspoon discussed her sheltered upbringing in Nashville, Tennessee. In an interesting moment, the star of Little Fires Everywhere admitted she “didn’t understand what homosexuality was” before pursuing a film career in Los Angeles. The in-depth discussion on sexuality, race, and class came as part of Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series. King and Witherspoon, who have known each other since co-starring in 2003’s Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, and Blonde, tackled some of the weightiest issues of the day. For her part, Witherspoon opened up about her own personal growth in the context of Hulu’s Little Fires Everywhere. While acting in and producing the 1990s-set show, Witherspoon reflected on the blinkered worldview she inherite...
Scrubs Blackface Episodes Pulled from Hulu at Creator’s Request
Scrubs has some literal scrubbing to do. As Variety reports, show creator Bill Lawrence and ABC themselves are pulling multiple episodes featuring characters in blackface from Hulu. There are three episodes of Scrubs in total with various characters in blackface: “My Fifteen Seconds” (season 3, episode 7), “My Jiggly Ball” (season 5, episode 4), and “My Chopped Liver” (season 5, episode 17). In one of them, Zach Braff, who plays the show’s lead character, wears blackface at a party. In another, Sarah Chalke’s character is in blackface during a dream sequence. Lawrence confirmed that Scrubs episodes were being removed after being tagged in a tweet about 30 Rock taking down its own blackface episodes from streaming networks and syndication. When asked if Scrubs could do the same, L...
Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone Returns with All the Same Issues of Its First Season: Review
Welcome (Back) Travelers: Last year, Jordan Peele, Simon Kinberg, and Marco Ramirez tried their darnedest to bring back the magic of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone for CBS All Access. They hid Easter eggs in every episode (clearly, they loved “Nick of Time”), they remade a fan favorite (see: “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet”), and they even digitally resurrected the man himself (see: “Blurryman”). Some of it worked, some of it flopped, but mostly, it went from arriving with a big bang to shuffling away with a soft shrug. Even so, it was an intriguing enough run for a second season, and naturally, CBS kept the series’ trademark door open for 10 more episodes. Looking at the slate ahead, there’s a lot to be excited about: Peele went solo at the typewriter for “Downtime”; award-winning genre writer...
