Kevin Fallon

If you’re old enough in America, you know that Bruce Springsteen showing up to perform in a primetime special alongside some politicians means shit is serious. The Boss turns up on TV when things have gotten real bad, when there is intense spiritual and patriotic rebuilding to do. And so he’ll kick off the rebuilding that needs to happen with a tune that manages to somehow […]

The golden dove brooch on her chest could be seen from the moon, but even that was just a diminutive accessory overshadowed by Lady Gaga’s broad, beaming smile as she nailed her rendition of the national anthem at the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on Wednesday. She was broadcasting something bigger than her fashion choices, bigger than her often over-the-top celebrity persona, and, arguably, […]

It’s the 2021 hype-up conundrum: How do you get people excited to party when you’re the people who have been explicitly telling them not to party and also no one can go party because it is a pandemic? The Biden Inaugural Committee’s kick-off celebration to the week of swearing-in events was, then, about as awkward and as confusing as you might expect. A dogged effort to […]

This week, the world as I know it was turned upside down by the news. Sex and the City is being rebooted, sans Kim Cattrall. On the one hand, that’s like having sex without… having sex. On the other hand, I will devour every episode of this and have already drafted a grassroots army to help fashion voodoo dolls of any and every person caught speaking […]

The joke’s on me for thinking someone was going to make the pandemic fun. Not that it has been fun, and not even that it should be. But the last months of watching the morose, superficial, and, most often, aggrieved regurgitations of life in the early days of quarantine have been such an uninsightful slog that the lively and slick trailer for the new film Locked […]

This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here. This week: Vanessa Kirby Should Win an Oscar The opening sequence to Pieces of a Woman, which was released on Netflix Thursday, is devastating, to the point that there is a […]

This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here. This week: A look back at how much we forgot about in 2020. The things to look forward to in 2021. Hilaria Baldwin, obviously. My new crush, Bridgerton’s Jonathan Bailey. The […]

The year of the pandemic is ending similarly to how it began, with people begging Hollywood to, please, stop. There have been no sequels, thankfully, to the ghastly video organized by Gal Gadot of her celebrity friends crooning verses of John Lennon’s “Imagine” in an adventurous array of keys. That was an exhausting, narcissistic stunt orchestrated in the early days of quarantine, the point of which […]

This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here. Hahahaha That Was This Year?! There is a rumor that I was actually happy at one point in 2020. The alleged incident was said to have taken place on February 2, […]

It’s a bit of a Scrooge-y Christmas season for all of us, and so Shonda Rhimes gave us Regé-Jean Page, as a little treat. Page is the male lead of Bridgerton, the new period soap opera that marks Rhimes’ first project to air from her massive Netflix deal. The Daily Beast’s Obsessed Everything we can’t stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture. […]

This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here. It’s Kelly Clarkson season. The epidemic of bad finales. Vaccine narcissism. Tainting Lizzie Maguire. The worst casting news ever. The Terrible Flight Attendant Finale Was So Frustrating It’s extremely annoying when […]

This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here. Make the Yuletide Gay If I had to pinpoint the exact moment in this last four-year hellscape when I was reminded there was still hope for humanity, it would probably be […]

This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here. Sometimes there are people who wonder why journalists and culture writers spend so much of their time parsing celebrities’ behavior and writing pieces about what their actions mean. Thanks to a […]

For much of the past year, a meme that may or may not be true, circulated pointing out that William Shakespeare wrote his masterpiece King Lear during a pandemic, essentially asking: So what are you going to do? It was probably intended to inspire and motivate, but in many ways really just shamed people. Whatever the interpretation, it seems that Taylor Swift saw that meme, said […]

If we’re going to keep saying, “This is just like an episode of Veep…” at the very least we deserve an actual episode of Veep out of it. That’s somewhat behind Sunday night’s fundraiser for America Votes’ Show Up For Georgia, in which star Julia Louis-Dreyfus, showrunner David Mandel, the comedy’s cast, and special guests including Stephen Colbert and Don Cheadle will gather virtually for a […]

This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here. This week: The Flight Attendant is good! The Saved By the Bell reboot is also good! I Hate Suzie? Good, too. How To With John Wilson? More like How To Be […]

There have been, by my rough count, approximately 789 TV reboots, revivals, reimaginations—however Hollywood types want to sheepishly spin it—that have been unleashed in recent years. It’s an oppressive assault on creative originality and manipulation of nostalgia that, outside of a select few (wonderful) examples, rarely pans out beyond the pre-release press and excitement, or a well-thought out premiere episode. So it’s no small praise, then, […]

The best thing about Happiest Season is how excited everyone was that it exists. It’s been over a year since the film was first announced, a press release issued into a collective warm hug by Film Twitter, Gay Twitter, and People Who Like Happy Things Twitter. It is a queer Christmas-set romantic comedy directed and co-written by Clea DuVall, a “how can you not root for […]

In 2015, New York became only the ninth state in the country to require all health insurance plans to cover gender-affirming surgery, a fact that underlines how new—and woefully lagging—recognition of transgender health and dignity is in our culture and its institutions. It meant that, for the first time, all transgender and non-binary people would have access to surgery and medical care. A year later, Mount […]

This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here. This week: Dash & Lily on Netflix: Cute! The Weeknd at the Super Bowl: Meh! Annaleigh Ashford as Paula Jones: Iconic! Nicole Kidman’s green coat: To die for! Celebrity interviewer Leta […]

This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here. “Dash & Lily” Is the Warm Hug We Deserve At its core, Dash & Lily is a cruel taunt. The Christmas-themed romantic-comedy series, which premiered on Netflix this week and has […]

It’s a grotesque, criminal form of sexual predation and abuse. It’s a high-school fantasy. It’s sensationalized tabloid fodder. It’s a pop-culture trope. Both in society and in pop culture, the teacher-student affair has become unfortunately ubiquitous, alternately bastardized in “hot for teacher” celebrations of machismo and exploited—even fetishized—in media-circus scandals that mine salacious details for clicks and ratings. Lost in all of this, however, is the […]

Ever since The Crown first premiered in 2016, its first season covering Elizabeth II’s marriage to Philip in 1947 and coronation at age 27, through the resignation of Winston Churchill in 1955, there has been an unignorable urgency among its Netflix fans to hurry up already. It’s not that fans didn’t savor the show’s sumptuous production or become rapt in its juicy glimpse beyond the palace […]

As the nation is in a fit of laughter that may never stop over the Trump campaign press conference that was, through a hot potato game of incompetence, held not at Philadelphia’s swank Four Seasons hotel but at the Four Seasons Total Landscaping company’s parking lot next to a porn shop, it was only fitting that Kate McKinnon’s Rudy Giuliani made a stop at the Saturday […]

This might have to be fact-checked, but we can say with pretty solid confidence that this is the first time a new episode of Saturday Night Live has aired within 12 hours of the presidential election being called. Oh, and barely two hours after the president-elect’s victory speech wrapped. (And after a football-game delay.) The episode didn’t, as seemingly everyone on Twitter predicted Saturday, open with […]

This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here. This week: Slowly losing our minds. A great election freakout Another great election freakout. A great election tweet. The Queen’s Gambit! Alton Brown’s Election Night Menu How quaint it is to […]

“I’m off the deep end…” took on another meaning in the last days before the election as “Shallow” singer Lady Gaga, who performed the Oscar-winning ballad at Joe Biden’s eleventh-hour rally in the battleground state of Pennsylvania Monday night, found herself as the attack target of Donald Trump under more bizarre circumstances than already typical of the president. After spending the day the target of the […]

Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that Superstore, one of TV’s smartest and most plugged-in, though underappreciated, series produced the best episode of television that has grappled with the pandemic thus far. To be fair, it’s not a tall order, with the efforts from new shows like Social Distance and Love in the Time of Corona to the recent premiere of This Is Us ranging from […]

This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here. The Reason Borat Works Isn’t Actually Borat Who had the Borat sequel on their list of possibilities for an October surprise? By now you’ve likely heard about the film’s shocking Rudy […]

Imagine, if you will, a New York City in which there are actually people. They are everywhere. They’re teeming the streets on their way to work, bumping shoulders as they draw up their jacket collars at a crosswalk on a crisp fall evening. (Remember bumping into people?) They’re on the way to packed cocktail parties, done-up for events, heading to dates, or hurrying to pick up […]

“The fate of the universe is once again on the line,” teased Anthony Russo at the start of Tuesday’s Biden Victory Fund grassroots fundraiser featuring select cast members of Marvel’s Avengers films. It was one of many parallels drawn between the superheroes who assembled to save the world from evil Thanos in the fictional films and the voters uniting at the ballot box to rescue the […]