Innholdsfortegnelse for Award Special 34A, November 18, 2022 i The Hollywood Reporter

In Nanfu Wang’s docuseries Mind Over Murder, the town of Beatrice, Nebraska, is still struggling with a 38-year-old tragedy. Six people were convicted of raping and murdering a woman in 1985, but DNA evidence exonerated them decades later. The six-part HBO series chronicles the extended miscarriage of justice with a focus on the town’s unique coping mechanism: A local community theater did a staged reading of court records and transcripts. It’s storytelling as confrontation therapy and, in one of the year’s best TV offerings, it’s an exploration of how our insatiable appetite for true crime, so often presented in voyeuristic terms, can be healing for those most personally involved with the tragedy, and for our societal wounds. Throw in the myriad examples of true-crime content that have contributed to the…

8 SIMPLE RULES (2002-05) Cuoco starred as Bridget Hennessy on the ABC sitcom about two parents (played by John Ritter and Katey Sagal) raising three teenage kids. Ritter died suddenly in 2003, and the show continued for another two years. THE BIG BANG THEORY (2007-19) Created by Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady, the comedy ran for 12 seasons — the longest-running multicamera sitcom in TV history — and also starred Jim Parsons, Johnny Galecki, Simon Helberg and Kunal Nayyar. HARLEY QUINN (2019-PRESENT) Cuoco voices the title character in this HBO Max animated series, which also features the voice talents of Lake Bell, Alan Tudyk, Tony Hale and Jason Alexander. In August, the show was renewed for a fourth season. MEET CUTE (2022) Cuoco starred alongside SNL’s Pete Davidson in Peacock’s…

THE SANDMAN The term used for decades to describe Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman was “unadaptable,” which is why Allan Heinberg, a long-term fan of the graphic novels, was well aware of the project’s narrative challenges when it was his turn to pitch a take to Gaiman and executive producer David Goyer. “It is led primarily by Neil’s voice narrating you from panel to panel. How do you tell the Sandman’s story without Neil guiding you where you need to go and telling you why?” he asks. Add the matter of making the audience care about a lead character that is naked and silent for most of the first episode, and after that emotionally distant. “How do you get the audience to invest in him and be curious about him?” adds…

Black Bird (APPLE TV+) Dennis Lehane’s new six-part drama is based on James Keene’s memoir In With the Devil: A Fallen Hero, a Serial Killer, and a Dangerous Bargain for Redemption. Despite its true-crime trappings, the adaptation is never especially authentic or convincing on any factual level. It is, however, thoroughly unsettling and anchored by exceptional performances by Paul Walter Hauser, Taron Egerton and Ray Liotta, who collectively more than compensate for myriad flaws of structure and focus. Our hero is Jimmy Keene (Egerton), a onetime high school football star turned drug dealer. After a bust that also yields illegal firearms, Jimmy is sentenced to 10 years in prison, much to the chagrin of his ex-cop father (Liotta). Because he’s confident, hunky and a good listener, Jimmy gets an offer…

I’m a regular goddamn Murder, She Wrote,” declares private investigator Theodora Birch (Noma Dumezweni) to overwrought New Jersey patriarch Dean Brannock (Bobby Cannavale) in Ryan Murphy’s The Watcher. But, in her pitch to identify the culprit terrorizing the new suburban homeowners with threatening letters in the Netflix mystery, the PI could be referring to her enigmatic self. “She’s an Agatha Christie-type. You don’t know who she really is or where she comes from. You like her so much, and you believe she’s telling the truth. But is she?” asks Lou Eyrich, Murphy’s longtime costume maestro and series producer. In a dark diner, Theodora makes her first impression in a vintage ’70s Lanvin trench over a black turtleneck and trousers, with a graphic-print head wrap. “She’s covered up, undercover,” adds Eyrich.…

On Sept. 30, musician and actor Scott “Kid Cudi” Mescudi dropped two big projects that shared a single title: Entergalactic. His eighth studio album and a corresponding Netflix animated special — originally conceived as a TV series with producer Kenya Barris, then redeveloped as a 90-minute feature told in chapters — Mescudi’s Entergalactic is an ambitious cross-platform project, blending music and a narrative arc to tell the story of a New Yorkbased artist named Jabari (voiced by Mescudi) who is on the verge of finding creative success. But after a meet-cute with his photographer neighbor Meadow (Jessica Williams), Jabari must decide if he can make room in his life for a romantic relationship. “I’m always trying to do something new,” says Mescudi, who began the project by writing the music…

Heartstopper, Netflix’s adaptation of Alice Oseman’s graphic novels about a pair of teenage boys falling for each another while at school, quickly became a word-of-mouth hit for the streamer when it premiered in April. Its sweet-natured storytelling, where whimsical animations are sprinkled amid hallway meet-cutes and swoon-worthy meet-ups, captured the hearts of viewers all over the world. They saw in popular rugby player Nick and quiet drummer Charlie the kind of will-they-or-won’t-they couple that has littered many a (straight) rom-com for decades on screens both big and small. There’s no discussing Heartstopper without talking about its charming leads. As Charlie and Nick, Joe Locke and Kit Connor, respectively, light up the screen. With stolen glances and furtive smiles, the actors capture a specific kind of teenage longing that remains all…

Tatiana Maslany, who is coming off the first season of Disney+’s She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, is no stranger to kicking butt on the small screen. As part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, she plays lawyer Jennifer Walters, who “inherits” the superhuman qualities of her cousin Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) after a freak accident, and starts to attract the attention of nefarious organizations. Maslany is familiar with those, too, as her star-making turn came in the BBC America sci-fi series Orphan Black. Debuting in 2013, it starred the Canadian actress as con artist Sarah Manning, who discovers she was part of an illegal cloning experiment and that someone is plotting to kill her and her clones. Critics were immediately impressed — The Hollywood Reporter’s 2013 review called the series “wildly entertaining”…

Kaley Cuoco is an actress and producer who, at just 36, has already been working in Hollywood for 30 years, making her name on the TV sitcoms 8 Simple Rules, which ran on ABC from 2002 through 2005, and The Big Bang Theory, one of the most popular shows of the 21st century, which ran on CBS from 2007 through 2019 (for 279 episodes, the longest run of any multicam sitcom in TV history). Her most recent show, however, is a single-camera dark comedy: HBO Max’s The Flight Attendant, a program about a stewardess who finds herself in terrifying circumstances and then has to figure her way out of them. She has both starred on and, for the first time in her career, served as a producer of that show,…

Being attached to a big role on one of the most respected television shows in history is the ultimate double-edged sword in entertainment, even more so if that role was as a member of the Italian mob. Michael Imperioli should know that better than anybody, since most people would immediately recognize him as Christopher Moltisanti, one of the most intriguing characters on The Sopranos. But instead of letting himself be typecast in the 15 years since the show ended, Imperioli has been keeping busy in order to buy himself some time. You’ll see him pop up in an indie film, then maybe on an episode of a network crime procedural here, a SAG Award-nominated part in One Night in Miami there — but that next big role on a television…

How did Kate Berlant end up on Prime Video’s A League of Their Own series? “It came about [the way] essentially everything I’m in comes about, which is that somebody knows me and likes my shtick,” she says over Zoom. Turns out a lot of people these days like what Berlant cheekily calls her shtick. In the past five months, she released Would It Kill You to Laugh?, a Peacock special with her frequent collaborator John Early, and a Hulu stand-up special, Cinnamon in the Wind, directed by Bo Burnham, and starred in a solo stage show, KATE, also directed by Burnham, in New York. She also appeared in Olivia Wilde’s feature Don’t Worry Darling — “I’m, like, somehow in this big splashy Hollywood movie” — and is, as previously…

Mo Amer MO (NETFLIX) Amer’s natural, seemingly effortless knack for connection long has been one of his clearest strengths, whether in his stand-up comedy or in his recurring role on Ramy. In Mo, he proves equally able to dig into the darker, sharper corners. His easy smiles and rambling jokes take on layers of anxiety and sorrow as the character wrestles with drug addiction, generational trauma and the everyday frustrations of trying to scrape by in a country that would prefer to forget he exists. As creator and real-life inspiration for Mo, Amer steeps the entire project in his own perspective and identity — but it’s his performance that ties the whole thing together as he embodies the vibrant, empathetic spirit of the show through his irresistible star turn. —…