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: Bennifer, masters of their craft. Girls5eva is extremely my jam. Fat Will Smith has already disappointed us. Already dreading the Elon Musk SNL. The best magazine cover of the […]
Kevin Fallon
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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. Bennifer Is Back?! On Saturday, you can watch Jennifer Lopez in a makeshift enchanted forest wearing a shimmering bodysuit with dramatic bell sleeves that eclipse her own height as she leads […]
On any given episode of Saturday Night Live, the “Weekend Update” segment, hosted by Colin Jost and Michael Che, is either the sharpest or the most painful part of the night. Part of that is owed, of course, to the almost impossible production schedule of a weekly TV sketch show meant to be topical and lacerating up to the minute of its 11:30 pm launch—a challenge […]
Over the years on the drama-filled, blissfully batty-and-booze-soaked seasons of The Real Housewives of New York City—the standard-bearer when it comes mixing the perfect reality TV cocktail of comedy, delusion, pettiness, and pathos—there have been fights about brunch invitations. There have been arguments over Trump, informed voting, and civic duty. There has been slut-shaming and sex positivity, “women supporting women” and frenemies betraying them, skinny dips […]
Trixie Mattel’s makeup is its very own cultural phenomenon. The eyes are both big and small, extreme and feminine: jet-black eyeliner that swoops up from her tear ducts to her temples, like mirror-image cheese wedges occupying 30 percent of her face. Shocks of stark-white accents set off the massive eyelashes that rise off her face like Venus flytraps. The contouring is cartoonishly severe, transforming Brian Firkus […]
Trinity is an “invisible” spy, accomplishing missions impossible because, as a plus-sized Black woman, society doesn’t see her. Elisa is the leader of gang orientation, instructing new members on updated work-from-home procedures and paid parental leave policies. Commanch Pitters II is a “Blackstorian” who explains that, in 1896, two Black women were eaten to death by zombies after being the first people to arrive at a […]
Between 1970 and 2005, Samuel Little allegedly murdered 93 people, according to his own confessions. That means he killed more people than Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, and Ted Bundy combined. He claims to be the most prolific serial killer in American history. So why don’t you know his name? Starz’s new true crime docuseries Confronting a Serial Killer, premiering Sunday night, details how Little, who […]
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: Let ‘Younger’ Age Us Out of TV’s Horrible Pandemic Era Have we maybe, finally, reached a time when our favorite TV series don’t feel the social responsibility to awkwardly […]
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 Dance Floor Is About to Get Pfizer-ed Up I don’t want to brag, but this week Lady Gaga called me an “artist.” Yes, obviously it was directly to me and […]
Mare of Easttown is one of those shows that makes it hard to fall asleep after watching. It may not seem that way after its scene-setting, though still engrossing, premiere on HBO Sunday night, but the mystery-thriller speeds through a winding maze of twists, startling you after each hairpin plot turn. Marketing materials tease the Kate Winslet-starring drama using a line of dialogue that compares solving […]
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. Watch This Really Interesting Documentary! Donor 5114 is 6’1” tall. He’s of medium build with straight brown hair and brown eyes. His skin is slightly olive, and he tans easily. He […]
For the first time in what was, for some of them, over 20 years, members of The Real World’s inaugural New York season were reuniting. Norman, who became the “first reality TV star” to come out as bisexual (the de facto first, because there weren’t any other reality stars), was hugging Julie, the Southern “fish out of water” who helped birth the TV-as-a-fishbowl format. Eric was […]
For almost a decade, Adam Neumann convinced millions of people he was a genius. Actually, that may not be hyperbolic enough. He convinced them he was a messiah, or at least one in his own mind. He is the co-founder and former CEO of WeWork, the company that set up flexible shared workspaces for start-up companies by selling them as not only desks and square footage, […]
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: Melting down over the Real Housewives scandal. Laughing at the best Instagram account right now. They’re spending how much on Knives Out? The only Benson-Stabler reunion moment I care […]
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 Real Housewives of Having No Real Money It is my hope that every pop-culture enthusiast gets to one day experience the unbridled thrill Real Housewives fans feel when one of […]
Hazel heaves open a sewer lid in the middle of the desert and hurls herself out of the ground. Soaking wet and gasping for breath, she nurses the bloody wound on the back of her head. The escapee’s visible distress quickly transforms into a gleaming smile of relief. She turns to the glistening white monolith of a building behind her, and gives it one of the […]
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. Chrissy Teigen leaving Twitter is suddenly something I care about. Tina Turner’s documentary is obviously something I care about. My favorite Jessica Walter Arrested Development moment. The Nanny is coming to […]
When National Geographic selected the subjects for the first two seasons of its critically lauded Genius anthology series, there was a collective nodding in agreement: Yes, Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso are geniuses. They are worthy! They are taught in schools! They are complicated, mysterious, and a little dangerous! They are, of course, men! The selection of Aretha Franklin for the third installment of the series […]
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: My favorite new reality show. The best TV opening scene I’ve seen…maybe ever? Justice for Tinsley Mortimer. A really pure, nice video to cleanse your life. And Harry Styles […]
In the documentary series Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil, Demi Lovato reveals the details of the night she overdosed in 2018, including that she had three strokes, a heart attack, suffered brain damage, and has lingering blind spots in her vision: “I don’t think people realize how bad it actually was.” She discusses the drugs she took that night: heroin and crack cocaine, which she […]
At the start of Sunday night’s Grammy Awards, host Trevor Noah joked that this year’s show would be “the biggest outdoor event this year besides the storming of the Capitol.” But the best thing about the telecast was that it never seemed bogged down by the Big Event burden that has rendered so many other pandemic-era award shows almost unwatchable. Coming a week after last week’s […]
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 Oscar Nominations That *Should* Happen In hindsight, maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised that the coronavirus became such a harrowing global pandemic. Months before Tom Hanks confirmed he […]
Early on in the HBO Max series Genera+ion, a high-school girl watches a YouTube video on how to deliver a baby as her friend, who claims to not have known she was pregnant, goes into labor in a mall bathroom. A twin brother and sister are both eager and anxious to sexually experiment with a guy… the same guy. Errant spunk shoots into someone’s eye. Dick […]
Any interview conducted with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry was going to be juicy, especially at this state of their royal exodus and in the midst of such a treacherous tabloid maelstrom. But only Oprah Winfrey could have produced what we saw on CBS Sunday night: A generation-defining interview. A global event. Blockbuster television. But, more importantly, actual substance; finally, into the gale of the constantly […]
It’s not news that the Golden Globes, as an awards show, are a bit of a joke. But, my, has that joke gone stale. The joke resurfaces every few years, sometimes from the ceremony’s stage itself. In 2016, host Ricky Gervais dinged them as “worthless,” likening the honor to “a bit of metal that some nice old confused journalists wanted to give you in person so […]
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: Watch these good movies! Lololol another streaming service. The TV montage video of the week. Martha Stewart, icon. Maya Rudolph, ICON! Another Freaking Streaming Service? It’s at the point […]
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 Good Movies Have Finally Arrived If there is one thing that’s become certain about “These Uncertain Times,” as they’ve been so dramatically dubbed, it’s that time has become both meaningless […]
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 surprise bop of 2021. The best show on TV right now. Barb and Star 4ever. One of the best Idol auditions ever. Extremely, extremely good news. Please, For […]
When the news broke that Rush Limbaugh died Tuesday at age 70, in an unusual occurrence, other celebrity names began trending in connection with him: The people he had cruelly mocked. Chelsea Clinton, for example, spiked as a trending topic. “Everyone, the Clintons have a cat. Socks is the White House cat. But did you know there is also a White House dog?” Limbaugh said once, […]
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 Justin Timberlake backlash intensifies. You need to watch Judas and the Black Messiah. The only Super Bowl thing to care about. (It’s cheese-related.) Still the best Britney Spears […]
Everything about the Superspreader Bowl, as this weekend will inevitably become, seemed intent on manufacturing the image that everything in the country was business as usual: unnecessary football game, excessively large crowd, dangerous partying, and hyperbolic capitalism passed off as entertainment, pandemic be damned. At least the halftime show was an essential reminder that we are still in the midst of a dystopian hellscape, no matter […]
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 best show you should watch RIGHT NOW. I watched a lot of Sundance things and here’s what was good. The Golden Globes is embarrassing and we say ENOUGH! […]
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. ‘Pushing Daisies’ Is Finally Back From the Dead We are closing in on the one-year anniversary of the last time I went into an office for work. I remember scoffing at […]
It took exactly 111 minutes from the start of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival for there to be an outrageous bidding war. The premiere film at this year’s virtual festival—rather than the fanfare at the Eccles Theater in Park City, couches around the world were the primo seats—certainly set a tone for an unprecedented outing that had everyone in the industry wondering how the movie, and […]
It goes without saying that, lately, we’ve been preoccupied with what we’ve lost. The immediate reaction is sadness and anger, but lingering behind that is a wistfulness, especially if you broaden things from the personal to the universal; when you think about what we’ve lost as a culture. Alex Trebek, Regis Philbin, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Lewis, and, just this last week, Larry King, Hank Aaron, […]
The story of the “Most Beautiful Boy in the World” unfolds like a dark thriller. It’s a story about the perils of child stardom. It’s a cautionary tale about the exploitation of young stars and the commoditization of beauty. It’s a horror story about the stripping of one’s agency at a young age and the reverberating effects that has on the rest of their life. It’s […]
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. We Don’t Appreciate Wendy Williams Enough It has come to my attention that Wendy Williams: What a Mess, the documentary on the dirt-dishing daytime TV supernova’s life, career, struggles, and triumphs, […]
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 […]
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. As these last weeks have brought the first crop of scripted TV shows that directly tackle the coronavirus pandemic, I’ve come to the conclusion that I want to watch the coronavirus […]
When The West Wing began airing 21 years ago, in 1999, Aaron Sorkin’s brand of earnest civic mindedness took to the cultural mood and political moment like a duck to water. That lake has since been blown up. Still, you see the shrapnel in the opinions of armchair politicos whose hearts sing the ballad of both-sidesism, and in the professional pundits who treat the Emmy-winning show […]
Elizabeth Marvel is as tickled by the lame joke as everyone seems to be while making it. The stage and screen actor, best known for roles on Homeland and House of Cards, stars in Hulu’s Helstrom, the latest TV series tie-in to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), based on characters from Marvel Comics. She’s Elizabeth Marvel, about to star in Marvel’s Helstrom. Marvel and Marvel. Get […]
I can’t tell you what a balm it was to watch Michelle Pfeiffer talk to a cat. That’s literal and figurative, as is everything in French Exit, the quirky bisous of a film that closed the New York Film Festival this week. Pfeiffer’s character both is and isn’t actually talking to a cat, just as this is and isn’t a celebration toasted to a major gala […]
“That was the worst SNL monologue I’ve seen in years.” “@nbcsnl please never let this bill person host ever again.” “Bill Burr can fuck off. #SNL” “I can’t believe I’m able to tweet after clawing my eyes out.” It probably is worth noting that those are the immediate reactions of gay men on social media after comedian and King of Staten Island star Bill Burr’s Saturday […]
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: Everyone is talking about Emily. (The one in Paris.) Two reasons to keep watching SNL. Things that made me happy! Things that made me angry! What can’t Mariah Carey […]
It’s around the fourth time that Jake McDorman and his The Right Stuff co-star Patrick J. Adams joke about him Zooming from his “murder room” that McDorman lets out a nervous laugh. “OK now I’m feeling like maybe this joke isn’t going to look good in writing,” he says, cringing—though still giggling—from his dark, tarp-strewn kitchen, where he’s been relegated for interviews during a house renovation. […]
Gloria Estefan is suspicious of the Red Table. “What is it we used to say guys?” she asks her niece, talk show host Lili Estefan, and daughter, musician Emily Estefan, who are gathered on a conference call. “It’s the color of the table!” Lili says, as if accusing a furniture hue of witchcraft. “Or they’re drugging us!” Emily adds. Laughing, Gloria gets the final word. “They’re […]
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: In a real soggy-bottom mood. The Masked Singer is terrorizing me. Dolly Parton may save us all. But not if Carole Baskin ruins us first. Something that made me […]
Chris Rock’s greatest performances are as Chris Rock. There’s his stand-up comedy, and the many times he’s played himself, or versions of himself, Woody Allen-style, on TV and in movies: Louie, Top Five, I Think I Love My Wife… Don’t be fooled. Those are great performances, deftly allowing the indelible, too-large-to-stifle “Chris Rock-ness” to breathe through the characters. But they’re also a testament to how hard […]
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: Me: Cast gay actors in gay roles!!! Also me: Unless it is Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth in this movie that will absolutely destroy me!!! I can’t explain why […]
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. Celebrities Really Want Our Attention The celebrities, bless their hearts, are doing their best. They are armed with a powerful artillery of good intentions, paving, if not the road to hell, […]
There’s something that happens when watching PEN15, especially if you are a millennial, especially if you were 13 years old in the year 2000, especially if you can recite with perfect inflection the spoken-word monologue in Mandy Moore’s “Candy.” You look at stars, creators, and writers Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle playing a game of M.A.S.H. while gossiping over their see-through landline phones. You take in […]
Contrition is bad TV. Maybe that’s why it almost never happens. Don’t be mistaken. There have been iconic televised moments of apologies, moments that set the zeitgeist aflame when they happen and which debate over burns for ensuing decades. But they’re never satisfactory, because television, let alone celebrity, is not a hospitable host to earnest regret. And those watching at home, so cynical and so bloodthirsty, […]
It took nearly two hours for Carole Baskin to get thrown to the tigers. It was an excruciating wait. Like a big cat stalking its prey, the Dancing With the Stars producers waited a full 117 minutes before going in for the kill, stringing along the scores of new lookie-loo viewers who, judging by the sudden social media interest in the creaky 29th season premiere of […]
There’s something confusing that happens when watching television shows or movies about today’s youths, especially when the aim is to capture their lives with as much authenticity as Call Me by Your Name director Luca Guadagnino attempts in his new HBO series We Are Who We Are. You feel for them. Of course you do. Coming of age is a journey none of us weathered lightly, […]
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 Kardashians Have Been Caught Up With What happens when the TV show that, for more than a decade, was proclaimed the death of culture, art, and civilized society as we […]
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. Must the show go on? Absolutely bonkers casting news. Bemasked couture, the new normal. The only movie I want to see. I’ll take “Big Jeopardy News” for 400. The Casting News […]
Around 11 pm on Thursday night in New York, near a particularly dark and disturbing segment of Donald Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention and amid nationwide unrest in the wake of the Jacob Blake shooting, a series of loud, seemingly endless rumblings echoed throughout the city. Once it became clear that the intense noise was lasting far too long to be thunder or 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. Suddenly I love sports. The bizarre, dark underbelly of Drag Race fandom. Tom Cruise sees a movie. Mariah Carey predicts the future. Catman. The Outrageous Drag Race Fan Bullying Scandal New […]
The shock of Chadwick Boseman’s passing came with layers. There was the fact that this vibrant, talented, generation-defining artist died at such a young age, just 43, after a four-year battle with colon cancer. Then there’s that last part. This actor filmed his Black Panther role in Marvel films, as well as movies like 21 Bridges, Da 5 Bloods, and the upcoming Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom—a […]
In 2002, Matthew and Naomi, the latter eight months pregnant at the time, traveled to Norway for Naomi’s book tour. They were driving overnight to a signing in a remote area of the mountains when a gnarly winter storm hit and made continuing on not only unsafe, but almost impossible. They pulled over and decided to sleep in the car until it was clear to hit […]
Like far too many of us, Jean Smart watched the opening sequence of Watchmen and was shocked. It was horrifyingly violent, pulsing with fear, heartbreak, and an unshakable sense of injustice. We watch as many as 300 Black residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma gunned down, lynched, tied up and dragged by cars, and massacred; in the streets, their apartments, their homes, and the successful businesses they owned […]
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 DNC afterparty nobody asked for. Dolly and Cher to the rescue. Remembering a Drag Race star gone too soon. A foolproof guide to getting a husband. Dolly and […]
Thursday night’s Democratic National Convention ended with Joe Biden accepting his party’s nomination with what may be the best speech of his presidential run: an electric call to action, profound acknowledgement of our nation’s grief, and as close to a “mad as hell” moment as we’ve seen from him as he pledged to lead our country into a stronger, safer, and sane new chapter. It was […]
Much has been made of the Extreme Telethon Energy of the virtual Democratic National Convention, which aired its third night Wednesday with segments shot from all over the country. Billie Eilish and Jennifer Hudson sang. Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama, and, in a brief standout moment, Gabrielle Giffords delivered moving speeches. Kamala Harris made history. Moderating it all, an inspired choice of A-list actress in […]
For The Daily Beast’s membership drive, we’re asking our reporters and editors to tell the stories behind some of their biggest stories. Sitting on a shelf in my apartment is a 3-year-old bottle of Fiji water that Meryl Streep handed me when I interviewed her for her Oscar-nominated role in Florence Foster Jenkins, a film that required perhaps her greatest stretch yet: playing a woman with […]
On Sunday night, a dozen Bravo stars from The Real Housewives, Married to Medicine, and Top Chef franchises gathered for a kind of programming different from what the network’s reality-TV obsessed fans are used to: a roundtable discussion on race and equality titled Race in America: A Movement Not a Moment. Outside of last year’s first-ever BravoCon convention, the historic gathering at the 2019 New York […]
For the majority of us whose bodies have essentially fused to the couch in these months of the pandemic shutdown, the most physical activity we’ve gotten has come while watching episodes of the ’90s game show Supermarket Sweep, which Netflix acquired and made available for streaming in July. The collection of the episodes quickly ranked among the streamer’s most popular offerings, as audiences lost their minds […]
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. Madonna Goes Full Demon Sperm Madonna is nothing if not the Queen of Reinvention. And the Material Girl was at it again this week, sending shockwaves by revealing that her latest reinvention […]
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. Grocery shopping on TV! Thinking too much about Zac Efron’s body. The ahmahzing Happy Endings reunion. Were there tights on the boat? Me, as groceries. You People and the Zac Efron […]