Innholdsfortegnelse for Emmy Special Issue 20A June 2018 i The Hollywood Reporter

With HBO’s dominant comedy Veep absent this year, a slew of other female-driven shows are vying to take the three-time winner’s place in the best comedy series race. Among them are period pieces like Amazon’s new entry, 1950s-set The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Netflix’s ’80s wrestling comedy GLOW, along with contemporary working class series like Showtime’s SMILF and Netflix’s One Day at a Time. The rebooted Roseanne likely also would have been a part of the conversation, but ABC squashed its campaign after canceling the show May 29 due to a racist tweet by Roseanne Barr. Grappling with sexual abuse and gender inequality, these shows’ characters are more relatable and relevant today than ever. It’s not that such series will be rewarded just for having a feminist message, but with…

Much to her own surprise, Christine Baranski has been playing the same character for nearly a decade. But she’s not suffering from the kind of stale material that could easily befall an actor in what is, ostensibly, a spinoff of a Big Four legal drama. Instead, the second season of CBS All Access’ The Good Fight saw Baranski’s liberal lawyer Diane Lockhart comically debating Donald Trump’s infamous “golden shower” tape, flipping grown men in a martial arts dojo and micro-dosing on hallucinogens to cope with the political climate. It’s a stretch from Diane’s seemingly unflappable demeanor on her previous series The Good Wife, albeit one the 66-year-old has welcomed. Did you expect the second season to lean as hard as it did into Trump? I don’t think they’ve ever written the…

Sure, it’s a dream come true to co-create, co-showrun and star in an HBO comedy based on your own life, but it’s also a bit of a mind-bender. “So many actors have the luxury of just going in to play a part, and I just feel like I know too much sometimes,” says Insecure’s Issa Rae with a laugh. “I wish I could turn my brain off!” The 33-year-old Golden Globe nominee, who is in the middle of shooting the third season of the series, took a break to talk with THR about where she draws inspiration for storylines, the handful of projects she’s developing with HBO and what to expect from Insecure’s third season. What was it like going back for the second season after breaking out in the…

BOBBY BERK “I worked at multiple furniture stores in New York years ago that Queer Eye filmed in. And so Thom Filicia would be in there filming. I just remember standing there, watching him, never in a million years thinking that, fast-forward 15 years, I would be taking his place.” KARAMO BROWN “I was on MTV’s Real World at the time when Queer Eye came out. I remember the first time I won an award, I got the award and they were like, ‘It’s a tie! With Queer Eye!’ I never thought that I would one day follow in their footsteps.” ANTONI POROWSKI “My sisters would watch it and I would pass by and watch secretly because I still felt this weird shame in engaging in it. And then I…

From the moment Alison Brie showed up to work on the Netflix series GLOW, it was readily apparent this was going to be a much more intimate acting experience than she was used to. “Right away, we’re putting heads into armpits and crotches,” she recalls, speaking to THR on the show’s L.A. set Jan. 18. “So that’s going to level the playing field pretty quickly. All the bullshit fell away. There’s no room for pretense after that.” What she’s describing isn’t some hazing ritual devised by the show’s creators, Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch. Rather, it’s a reference to the month of wrestling training the cast underwent before the start of both season one and season two of this show based on a real group of women grapplers, The Gorgeous…

Pamela Adlon Better Things (FX) Sam (Adlon) seems to be in relative control of her chaotic life as season two begins, but that changes quickly when she discovers her teen daughter Max (Mikey Madison) has a 35-year-old boyfriend (Arturo Del Puerto). MOST CHALLENGING SCENE THIS SEASON “It had to be doing the dance in the season finale. That was six months in the planning. And from preproduction to the day we did it, it was a secret we kept from Mikey Madison, whom we performed it for. This was a massive kind of thing and everyone was in on it except her. I wanted to get a genuine reaction from her when she saw it for the first time. It was hard to learn the choreography. We had to build…

Better Things (FX) Pamela Adlon teamed with Louis C.K. to create the comedy that centers on a divorced actress raising her three daughters. After sexual harassment accusations against C.K. emerged, FX announced that Adlon, 51, would write her quasi-autobiographical show’s third season without his participation. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (The CW) Co-creator, writer and star Rachel Bloom plays a woman who uproots her life as a New York based lawyer to pursue a happier existence in California. Bloom, 31, won the 2016 Golden Globe for comedy actress, and the show’s original music has received multiple Emmy nominations. SMILF (Showtime) Frankie Shaw’s half-hour dramedy mirrors her own experience as a single mother attempting to make ends meet to provide for herself and her son. The 31-year-old Shaw also stars on the show, based…

Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg have just wrapped the third season of their VH1 cooking show Martha & Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party, and they have, in many ways, learned to step into each other’s worlds. But that doesn’t mean the lifestyle and homemaking guru will be spotted smoking any of her cohost’s favorite herb anytime soon. “I made a pact early on doing this show that I would never enter Snoop’s domain, his trailer,” Stewart tells THR. “I’ve never gone as far as the first steps into his trailer. All the guests go into his trailer, by the way. But not Martha.” Even so, the 76-year-old admits, “I get kind of high from secondary smoke. I’m not a smoker myself, but the smoke is quite thick around the set.” She…

The swift rise and fall of ABC’s Roseanne reboot, canceled May 29 over a racist tweet, generated a tsunami of press. But so did the original series’ launch in 1988, when it scored that season’s highest-rated debut, with 21.4 million households watching. The sitcom drew excellent reviews, though The Hollywood Reporter could probably have omitted its body-shaming comments about Barr being “a beef shank of a woman” and co-star John Goodman “a head-to-toe beer belly.” Still, THR commended the ABC show for having “as many laughs per minute as it has cans of creamed corn on the shelf.” Though Roseanne was well received, there was as much on-set turmoil as there was buzz. Series creator Matt Williams announced he had “elected to move on” because of his “creative tensions” with…

Kaley Cuoco The Big Bang Theory (CBS) She’s starred as aspiring actress Penny on the sitcom (which has won seven Emmy Awards) since 2007, earning a slew of Critics’ Choice and People’s Choice nominations. In the 11th season, Penny met Bill Gates and played maid of honor. Tiffany Haddish The Last O.G. (TBS) The Girls Trip breakout continues to display her comedic chops, playing Tracy Morgan’s ex and a mother of two who has to deal with her children’s father coming back into their lives after 15 years in prison. Megan Mullally Will & Grace (NBC) She was nominated for seven consecutive years for playing Karen Walker the first time around (winning in 2000 and 2006) and reprised the role of the sassy multimillionairess neighbor for the reboot. Rosie O’Donnell…