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For a show that prides itself on being a feminist wonderland, ABC’s “The View” insulted a lot of women last week. During Friday’s broadcast of the daytime talk show, host Whoopi Goldberg spoke about an interview Hillary Clinton did with NPR where she said that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told her that there would be women who would vote against her because of pressure from their husbands. “I think there is a point to that. It’s not just that women hate other women,” co-host Joy Behar mused. “I think that women vote in their interest, economic interest, just like the...

Research firm eMarketer cuts TV ad-spending forecast on accelerating pay-TV declines Winter is here for cable and satellite TV operators. American consumers are cancelling traditional pay-TV service at a much faster rate than previously expected, according to research firm eMarketer. In 2017, a total of 22.2 million U.S. adults will have cut the cord on cable, satellite or telco TV service to date — up 33% from 16.7 million in 2016 — the researcher now predicts. That’s significantly higher than eMarketer’s prior estimate of 15.4 million cord-cutters as of the end of this year. Meanwhile, the number of “cord-nevers” (consumers...

'We Can Do Better' landed at the network with a sizable penalty attached. Free of the Star Wars Han Solo movie, Phil Lord and Chris Miller are turning their attention back to the small screen. The Last Man on Earth creators have sold single-camera comedy We Can Do Better to ABC. The comedy, which landed at the Disney-owned network with multiple outlets bidding and a significant penalty attached, revolves around a soccer mom who deals with her newly "woke" life in the South as a parent, wife, American citizen and daughter of a hardcore conservative parents. Last Man on Earth...

AMC has put in development a drama based on Wesley Lowery’s bestselling nonfiction book They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice. It comes from Brad Weston’s Makeready and writer LaToya Morgan (Into the Badlands, Turn: Washington’s Spies). Published in 2016 by Little, Brown & Company, the book was acquired by Makeready last fall. It examines how decades of racially biased policing in segregated neighborhoods with failing schools, crumbling infrastructure and too few jobs has led to the high-profile cases of police brutality in Ferguson, Cleveland, Baltimore and elsewhere and the birth of...

This is the worst fall for new TV shows in the decade I’ve been a professional TV critic. And it’s hard to find one much worse in all the years I’ve been cognizant of “new fall TV” as a concept, since the late ’80s. The comedies didn’t make me laugh. The dramas made me roll my eyes. Even with the boom in platforms making new TV, there’s but one show I’d recommend wholeheartedly and a smattering of others that made me say, “There could be something there if they work out the kinks.” The vast, vast majority of the new...

A re-imagining of Steven J. Cannell’s 1981 cult classic The Greatest American Hero is flying back to development with a new creative team, a big new commitment and a big twist. ABC has given a put pilot commitment to the half-hour single-camera project. In it, the unlikely (super)hero at the center — Ralph Kinley (played by William Katt) in the original series — is Meera, an Indian-American woman. The Greatest American Hero comes from Fresh Off the Boat writer-producer Rachna Fruchbom and Nahnatchka Khan’s Fierce Baby. 20th Century Fox TV, where Fierce Baby is based and Fruchbom recently signed an...

The late-night comedy show took yet another surprising stance of late, criticizing the anti-fascist collective for its tactics. Occasionally, The Daily Show will surprise its (mostly left-wing) viewers by echoing the overheated rhetoric emanating from the right-wing echo chamber. This week, for example, the late-night comedy program defended Melania Trump’s decision to wear designer stiletto heels to tour the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Texas. (Of course, the tony first couple ended up comforting a grand total of zero survivors, and the best evidence the White House could muster to back Trump’s assertion that he’d witnessed “first hand”...

Richard Anderson, the Emmy-nominated actor who played Oscar Goldman in both hit 1970s series “The Six Million Dollar Man” and “The Bionic Woman,” died August 31. He was 91. Anderson’s credits spanned more than 180 film and TV roles over six decades after starting his Hollywood career as a messenger at MGM. But he will be best remembered for playing Goldman, the handler of the bionic duo played by Lee Majors and Lyndsay Wagner. Combined, the series ran for 150 episodes and several TV movies — two of which Anderson produced.

Indian American model-turned-author Padma Lakshmi recently slammed US President Donald Trump, saying he is a “menace to society”. She was speaking at the 8th Mountain Echoes Literary Festival in Thimphu, Bhutan. This is not the first time the author has lashed out against the US president. Last year, during the run-up to the elections, the Variety magazine quoted her as saying: “Even if he wasn’t the racist buffoon that he is making himself out to be, I probably wouldn’t vote for him. But as an immigrant, I obviously don’t see his worldview as mine.” She added: “We are a country...

COMEDIAN Kathy Griffin has posted a bizarre, grovelling letter she claims she received from a high-powered US TV executive and was ordered to forward on to US President Donald Trump in the hopes of rehabilitating her career. The controversial comic weathered her biggest scandal yet in June when she posted footage from a photo shoot in which she held a dummy Trump severed head aloft. Reaction from both sides of the US political divide was swift and brutal, and Griffin apologised as networks and brands rushed to disassociate themselves from her. The scandal certainly hurt Griffin’s career — and also...

Joseph Bologna, an actor, playwright and screenwriter who was so memorable as the egotistical King Kaiser in the 1982 comedy classic My Favorite Year, has died. He was 82. Bologna died Sunday morning at City of Hope hospital in Duarte, Calif. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer three years ago, said his wife of 52 years, actress and screenwriter Renee Taylor. Bologna received an Oscar nomination for adapted screenplay, shared with his wife and David Zelag Goodman, for his work on Lovers and Other Strangers (1970). The couple had first written it for Broadway in a 1968 production directed by...

The “Saturday Night Live” writer who was suspended “indefinitely” after tweeting an insensitive message about President Trump’s youngest son, Barron Trump, has apparently been reinstated by the show. Katie Rich, 34, was credited as a writer for Thursday night’s episode of “Weekend Update: Summer Edition” after she was suspended from “SNL” in January for saying that 11-year-old Barron “will be this country’s first homeschool shooter.” Her tweet led to widespread condemnation, and she subsequently deleted it before tweeting out an apology. “I sincerely apologize for the insensitive tweet,” she wrote at the time. “I deeply regret my actions & offensive...

The world of television and how Hollywood delivers it keeps changing. Streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon have become prestigious brands whose original programming draws a pile of Emmy nominations. In 2017, Netflix has received 91 Emmy nominations, second only to HBO's 111. Hulu has 18 nominations, and Amazon has 16, just a few less than Fox's 21. But as much as technology changes, some things remain the same. The entertainment factories keep ripping on Republican politicians in the crudest terms. Hulu has created a sitcom called "Difficult People." The characters are two unlikeable, self-absorbed stand-up comedians. In the...

EXCLUSIVE: The Munsters are back! NBC is rebooting the 1960s comedy series about a family of lovable monsters with Odd Mom Out creator Jill Kargman and Seth Meyers. Inspired by the original series, the half-hour single-camera The Munsters, now in development, follows members of an offbeat family who are determined to stay true to themselves but struggle to fit in in hipster Brooklyn. (In the original, the Munsters resided at the famous 1313 Mockingbird Lane address in the city of Mockingbird Heights, a fictional suburb in California.) Kargman will write the script and will executive produce with Sethmaker Shoemeyers Productions’...

Fox chairman and CEO Dana Walden said the network is exploring new ways to continue the franchise, even though it released star Corey Hawkins out of his commitment for future installments. “We are really exploring what the future might be, perhaps as an anthology storytelling franchise,” Walden told reporters Tuesday at the Television Critics Association tour in Beverly Hills. “We felt really good about a lot of the last season. It was a hard decision to make, whether to bring it back or not. We let Corey out of his obligation so he could do his Broadway play. It felt...

I live in the Seattle area and just lost all TV connection via Comcast. Is anyone anywhere having similar problems?

Miami Vice is eyeing a return to NBC. The network has put in development a reboot of its signature 1980s action crime drama, with the Fast & Furious duo of Vin Diesel and Chris Morgan producing. The remake, which had been in the works since last season, will be written by Peter Macmanus (The Mist, Satisfaction) and produced by Universal Television, Chris Morgan Productions and Diesel’s One Race TV. No executive producers have been locked in yet, but Morgan and Ainsley Davies of Chris Morgan Productions are expected to serve as EPs along with Diesel and Shana Waterman of One...

A week after HBO's botched announcement of its upcoming slavery drama Confederate, Amazon is partnering with Will Packer for its own alt-history series. The streaming service is developing Black America, a drama that envisions an alternate history where newly freed African Americans have secured the Southern states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama post-Reconstruction as reparations for slavery, and with that land, the freedom to shape their own destiny. The drama hails from prolific producer Packer (Girls Trip, Ride Along) and Peabody-winning The Boondocks creator and Black Jesus co-creator Aaron McGruder. In the show, the sovereign nation formed, New Colonia, has...

There’s general agreement that this is a golden age of television. But less apparent is the fact that it’s also a golden age of animation, spawned by the same subscription video-on-demand companies — such as Netflix and Amazon — that are ushering TV’s shining period. The rise of streaming services — which are ordering season after season of animated shows for children and adults — has created an urgent demand for original content, leading to a surge in jobs at all levels of production. For now, the deluge shows no signs of letting up. “There’s more animation work now than...

The Hollywood Reporter unveiled that PBS and its public broadcasting brethren have written the Federal Communications Commission with a list of complaints. The headline reads, "PBS Wants the Government to Reexamine Hard Stance on Indecency." That's funny, since we haven't seen a "hard stance on indecency" since the Hays Code a half-century ago. And that wasn't even the government. Since then, liberals have successfully thwarted almost any effort to have the federal government enact broadcast decency rules, even those codified by the Supreme Court. By the time Barack Obama became president, all thoughts of regulation were abandoned. In 2012, midway...