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HOLLYWOOD, California, October 18, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — After Victoria Arlen spent four years in a “vegetative” state, many in the medical establishment had given up on her. Now she’s whirling across a stage competing on ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars.” At age 11, Arlen started showing signs of two rare disorders that caused swelling in her brain and spinal cord. But doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Untreated, she began to lose function in her legs, then her hands and arms. She couldn’t swallow and couldn’t think of the words she wanted to say. Ultimately, her body shut down...

Chelsea Handler just announced on Facebook that she will not be returning for another season of Chelsea, her weekly Netflix talk show. Handler said she is planning to focus on activism, write a book and partner with Netflix on an original documentary that highlights her perspective on the current political climate. Chelsea marked Netflix’s foray into the comedy talk show arena. New half-hour episodes were released three times a week in Season 1 before Handler switched to an hourlong weekly show format in the current second season. The show developed a following as Handler’s fans found her on the new...

It felt like a little bit of history was being made on Monday Night Football as the Tennessee Titans finally snapped their streak of 11 consecutive losses to the Indianapolis Colts. However, as social media sparked with ESPN not showing the playing of the national anthem, another type of history was also being made: Last night’s primetime broadcast of the Titans’ 36-22 victory stumbled to a season low with a 6.1 in metered market results. In a season stained by overall ratings declines and political controversy, that NFL Week 6 rating is down 13% from the early numbers of the...

Roy Dotrice, a British stage, film and television actor who began performing as a prisoner of war in Germany and worked in Britain and America for six decades, notably in one-man shows portraying Abe Lincoln, the diarist John Aubrey and other historical figures, died on Monday at his home in London. He was 94... While he kept a home in London, Mr. Dotrice lived in Los Angeles and worked mostly in the United States after 1980. He appeared in New York stage productions of Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” (1985) and Harold Pinter’s “The Homecoming” (1991). On film, he...

In almost all instances actors portraying real life people look better (often much better) than their counterparts. Sometimes it is shocking to check what real life people look like after watching the actors portray them. However there is one instance I can think of where the actor portraying a real life person was actually uglier than the person he was portraying. That would be in the movie "The Fifth Estate" about Julian Assange and Wikileaks. And who portrayed Julian Assange? Benedict Cumberbatch who looks weird and frightening. I know that Assange hated that movie. I wonder if part of the...

A clip from 2012 has surfaced where America’s conscience Jimmy Kimmel asked Harvey Weinstein, “Do you think people are scared of you in the movie business?”

Tonight marks the 2-hour season premiere of one of television’s top-rated, most critically acclaimed shows — one that curiously gets little media attention. For nine seasons, “Shark Tank” — a competitive reality program in which inventors pitch to a panel of multi-millionaires (and one billionaire) — has been a consistent ratings winner despite ABC airing it in a Friday night graveyard slot. It’s won four Emmys for Outstanding Structured Reality Program. Last August, the show retained its audience against NFL pre-season games. The success of “Shark Tank” has surprised even some sharks. “I thought it was going to be a...

Eric Holder is going to Hollywood. The former U.S. Attorney General has teamed with top producer Jerry Bruckheimer for Main Justice, a legal drama series project, which has been set up at CBS. Written by Sascha Penn (Survivor’s Remorse) and executive produced by Holder and Bruckheimer, Main Justice was inspired by Holder’s life and work. Centered around the U.S. Attorney General, the show takes us into the tumultuous world of the 5th floor of the Department of Justice where he takes on the biggest legal and investigative cases in the country all while being the youngest person to ever hold...

The NFL has long been the cornerstone of the U.S. pay television market. Viewers’ loyalty to their favorite teams and the tradition of watching games on Sunday afternoons (and Monday nights) provided stability and certainty for stakeholders across the TV ecosystem. . . . The question today, however, is what if this entire edifice is just a house of cards? NFL ratings have fallen significantly across all providers over the past seasons and so far 2017 is not looking any better. The only positive element to that decline may be that fewer people have to watch the sad sight of...

Whether you like it or not, the Colin Kaepernick kneeling movement isn’t stopping anytime soon. Shonda Rhimes posted a photo of her, Ellen Pompeo, Jesse Williams and other members of the Grey’s Anatomy cast taking a knee while filming their 300th episode. The photo included the caption “…and we took a knee in solidarity of racial justice” to support the long list of NFL teams that have been doing the same over the weekend. The Oakland Raiders, Dallas Cowboys, and a long list of other teams have been making headlines for taking a knee, linking arms or doing both prior...

Where there’s a will, there’s… The Ray: Quantico and Looking vet Russell Tovey has been tapped to play gay superhero The Ray in The CW’s four-part Arrow-verse crossover, TVLine has learned. What’s more, Tovey will also voice the role of The Ray in CW Seed’s forthcoming animated series Freedom Fighters: The Ray. The official character description for The Ray is as follows: Raymond “Ray” Terrill was a reporter who discovered a group of government scientists working on a secret project to turn light into a weapon of mass destruction. But before he could report on his findings, the project head...

Looks like Roku has ditched XTV due to lawsuits and "pirating" concerns. It's too bad. They had a variety of cataloged quality old-school entertainment. Now how will I satisfy my Dark Shadows addiction?

The Women’s Media Summit, a group of more than 100 leaders from various industries, has issued a white paper outlining a plan of action for “eliminating gender inequity in U.S. entertainment media.” One of its strategies is to “boycott films that score poorly on gender equity.” “Women hold only 3% of above-the-line and greenlighting positions in the media industry and are vastly underrepresented as protagonists and lead characters in film and television,” according to the white paper (read it here). In film, “Women hold only 17% of influential positions behind-the-scenes as directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors, and cinematographers. This...

According to the latest census figures, white people make up 61.3 percent of the American population. Rounding out those numbers, Hispanics (17.8 percent), blacks (13.3 percent), and Asians (5.7 percent), fill in most of the rest of our glorious melting pot. And yet… The oh-so progressive left-wing television industry, the very same television industry that spent almost every minute of Sunday’s disastrously low-watched Emmy Award Show smugly blasting away at Trump and his supporters as unrepentant racists, looks nothing like America. Not even close. In fact, the broad coalition of Trump’s “racist” supporters is much more racially diverse than the...

The Emmys ceremony is a giant production, and TV viewers only get to see a glimpse of the whole shebang. Here are some moments that weren’t featured on TV that we got to witness firsthand at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles. 1. Air conditioners… outside This is the first year that the Red Carpet got air conditioning. After last year’s heat wave, stars and press were treated to much cooler temperatures this year than last year. (Interestingly, the show opened with a sketch in which Allison Janney worried about several problems, including global warming.)

This morning Ed wrote about the anticipated (and delivered) crash and burn of the ratings for last night’s Emmys. I suppose I contributed to that in a small way since I was watching football. In my Twitter feed, I only saw two of the conservatives I follow commenting on the show so that seemed to be a fairly common practice among our tribe. The initial scoring put them in position to be one of the worst rated Emmys outings of the modern era. This led a few timid voices to meekly suggest this morning that just perhaps the show needs...

ABC’s “The View” has denied a report that conservative co-host Jedediah Bila was removed from the show because she asked a tough question to Hillary Clinton last Wednesday. Citing a “source,” The New York Post reported that Bila’s exit had something to do with the way she treated Clinton during the recent interview. Bila asked the former Democratic presidential candidate how she felt about liberals who criticize her new book, “What Happened.” The source told the Post that there were, “a lot of staff who were upset about how that interview was handled.” The Post reported that “The View” executives...

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...