Innholdsfortegnelse for Award Special 19A, June 16, 2022 i The Hollywood Reporter

For as fecund as Peak TV has been during the past decade, the glut hasn’t exactly yielded boundless perfection. In between all the flavorless revivals, franchise extenders, true-scandal dramas and star-studded gimmicks, this season I found myself grasping for simple shows that radiated unaffected warmth and vulnerability. I wanted sincerity. I wanted quietness. I wanted friendships. This spring, I faithfully clung to a few comedies that drew me in with their incomparable leads, all actresses in later middle age whose characters undergo artistic rebirths in the second half of their lives. Few shows this year have offered me greater viewing pleasure than Somebody Somewhere, Better Things, Julia and Hacks because it’s delightfully invigorating to just watch women of a certain age being themselves, no apologies necessary. These series are as…

VARIETY TALK SERIES Jimmy Kimmel Live! The reigning dean of late night, who’s been Emmy-nominated every year since 2012, has had a buzzy homestretch this season: He swapped shows with Jimmy Fallon on April Fools’ Day, delivered a tearful May 25 monologue about the Uvalde shooting, and on June 8 hosted President Joe Biden’s first in-person appearance on a late night talk show since taking office. The Late Late Show With James Corden After missing a nomination the past two years, Corden brought back “Carpool Karaoke,” crossed the 1,000-episode mark and welcomed big guests, like Tom Cruise on May 23. But the polarizing talker (e.g., there’s a petition to keep him out of the Wicked film adaptation) announced that the 2022-23 season would be his last. The Amber Ruffin Show…

The level of talent (and comic timing) at The Hollywood Reporter’s Reality Emmy Roundtable was in no short supply, but there was still a moment of giddy reverence when one particular participant entered the chat. Will Arnett (Fox’s Lego Masters), Nicole Byer (Netflix’s Nailed It! and ABC’s Wipeout), Padma Lakshmi (Hulu’s Taste the Nation and Bravo’s Top Chef) and Jonathan Van Ness (Netflix’s Getting Curious and Queer Eye) each appeared to adjust their posture a bit when Lizzo, creator and host of Watch Out for the Big Grrrls, first appeared on the early May Zoom. The unwieldy TV genre that brought the fivesome together led to an equally broad conversation that vacillated between light — “under-titty sweat” is an issue that affects many — and deeply serious, as it did…

On The Cleaning Lady, Elodie Yung plays Thony De La Rosa, a Cambodian Filipina doctor who moves to the U.S. to seek treatment for her son, Luca, who has a rare and life-threatening disorder. Living in Las Vegas on an expired visa, Thony finds work as a cleaner — until she witnesses a violent crime and is offered a job as a doctor for an organized crime syndicate. Series star Yung, showrunner Melissa Carter and writer Miranda Kwok, who also developed the series, joined THR to discuss how the show incorporated Yung’s own cultural background into her character and how they’re tackling subjects rarely seen in a broadcast crime drama like immigration documentation. Elodie, how did this project come to your attention and what were your first reactions to it?…

Isabel May is one of the most promising young stars in Hollywood. She’s a 21-year-old who until recently was known, if at all, for playing one of the two leads on the Netflix sitcom Alexa & Katie, which ran from 2018 through 2020; a recurring part on the CBS sitcom Young Sheldon during that same time span; and the lead in the 2020 indie film Run Hide Fight. But then she was cast as Elsa Dutton, the central character on and narrator of Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone prequel 1883, and when that 10-episode Paramount+ limited series began rolling out late last year, quickly becoming a ratings hit, it was obvious that a new star was on the scene. During a recent episode of THR’s Awards Chatter podcast, May — who bears…

Season two of HBO Max’s The Flight Attendant is grander, deeper and more real, stars Kaley Cuoco and Zosia Mamet tell THR, sitting side by side on a couch in Cuoco’s home, where they’ve been living together during production of the second season. The two real-life friends play best friends on the show, which in its second go-round follows flight attendant Cassie Bowden as she becomes an asset for the CIA but soon realizes that a woman pretending to be her is causing havoc around the globe. Cuoco and Mamet talk to THR about how the show blended with real lives (including Cuoco filing for divorce from equestrian Karl Cook around the same time season two was starting to film), their acting processes and how it deepened their friendship. How…

AND JUST LIKE THAT (HBO MAX) And Just Like That is not a Sex and the City reboot. It’s also neither a revival nor a reimagining. Sure, the new show shares DNA with the polemic and revolutionary HBO comedy that aired from 1998 to 2004 and spurred an entire generation’s obsession with cosmos, designer shoes and Manhattan brunches, but And Just Like That doesn’t even attempt to resurrect millennium nostalgia. Its developers know the world is not the same. They don’t want it to be the same. The two shows are built around (most) of the same characters, but the flounce and fizziness of the original series are largely absent from this moodier and more self-serious one. But just because SATC was fun and AJLT is somber doesn’t mean the…

I’m somebody who went to college and didn’t take a single science or math class when I was there,” explains Simon Kinberg. “Unlike someone like a James Cameron, for whom that is their vocation, science is not something that comes naturally to me.” In other words, he surmises, “I need Astrophysics for Dummies.” A lifelong fan of sci-fi, from Isaac Asimov to Aliens, the prolific writer-producer has put his stamp on the genre with entries like The Martian and his latest, Apple TV+’s drama Invasion. The series, co-created with David Weil, tells the story of an alien invasion through the eyes of five ordinary people. When creating his science fiction, Kinberg wants it to feel as grounded as possible, so he sought out experts from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as…

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was still on trial for wire fraud when The Dropout showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether was finishing the final scripts for the Hulu limited series. “I had the idea of ending the series with Elizabeth at Burning Man with her new boyfriend,” Meriwether tells THR, but she notes that pulling off a shoot like that would have been too costly. “I was told I could either have music in the last few episodes or I could go to Burning Man. I realized I had to come up with another idea.” The replacement for a costumed romp in the desert was this penultimate scene in the series, when Holmes (Amanda Seyfried) is finally confronted by someone close to her about her deceptions that led to the downfall of Theranos.…

Sydney Sweeney, along with the rest of us, saw her character Cassie take an emotional turn in the second season of HBO’s hit Euphoria. From embarking on a secret relationship with her best friend Maddy’s ex-boyfriend Nate (Jacob Elordi) to a chaotic end of Maddy’s birthday party, Cassie is front and center this season and, while battling her inner demons, has sparked some great meme-able moments that have taken the internet by storm. Sweeney talks to THR about diving into Cassie’s darkest places and the other buzzy HBO show in which she starred this season, The White Lotus. How was this season of Euphoria different for you than the first? I was definitely given a lot more real estate to be able to explore Cassie, between Cassie’s relationships, her own relationship with…

Adapting one of Ingmar Bergman’s seminal works for American television is an ambitious and daunting task. But writer-director Hagai Levi brought a contemporary spin to his HBO limited series based on the acclaimed 1973 Swedish miniseries Scenes From a Marriage: He gender-swapped the roles, having Jessica Chastain’s Mira leave her husband, Oscar Isaac’s Jonathan. (In the original, it’s Erland Josephson’s Johan who asks Liv Ullmann’s Marianne for a divorce.) But even with the roles reversed, the new series is just as provocative — and emotionally harrowing — as the original, which was so popular upon its airing that it was blamed for rising divorce rates in Europe. Chastain and Isaac spoke with THR about how they learned to let go of their long history as friends to create a shared…