#_author:Ken Tucker

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girlfriends acorn tv

Girlfriends

Girlfriends: There’s woman-power in this story of female friendship What could be more timely than a new show about female friendship and unity? Girlfriends, a new comic drama premiering on the streaming service Acorn TV, is a striking example of this, with a remarkable cast. The British series centers around three long-time friends played by Phyllis Logan (Mrs. Hughes of Downton Abbey), Miranda Richardson (numerous films including Damage and the Harry Potter movies), and Zoe Wanamaker (Mr. Selfridge). At the start of the premiere, Logan’s Linda loses her husband—literally: They’re on a sea cruise, she walks into their stateroom, the window’s open, the sea is churning, he’s gone. Presumed dead, Linda returns from her holiday a widow. She reunites with Richardson’s Sue, a magazine editor feeling the pinch of ageism in her company’s office politics, and Wanamaker’s Gail, who’s stressed caring for her elderly mother and her petty-criminal son. Friends for over 40 years, the trio used to sing pop songs together and dreamed of a Spice Girls-style stardom before there were Spice Girls. Now in late middle-age, they’re all facing down their failures in life as well as plotting their next acts.

Created by writer Kay Mellor (creator of such excellent British series as Band of Gold and Playing the Field), Girlfriends trades on some standard older-ladies-doing-wacky-things humor, but that’s just to put you at ease. In very different ways, men have let down each of these women, and much of the show is about their realization that they only have each other, and their own inner resolve, to depend upon. Linda is positioned as the central figure in the first episode, and Logan’s fluttery demeanor and long, crinkly hair take her miles away from prim Mrs. Hughes in Downton. As the premiere hour proceeds, though, Richardson is the real scene-stealer: The ways she makes Sue’s hurt and anger at being replaced by a younger woman at work sting is at once piercingly dramatic and frantically funny—it reminds you that Richardson, considered a dead-serious actress here in America, once had a lot of madcap fun in the great Rowan Atkinson series Blackadder.

Girlfriends is also an excellent series to introduce you to Acorn TV, if you’re not already familiar with it. The streaming service is loaded with British programming for the Anglophile in you, ranging from the familiar (Doc Martin, Midsomer Murders) to shows you ought to know and love, such as Detectorists, Janet King, and 800 Words. Get hip to it.

Girlfriends is streaming now on Acorn TV.

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'Godless' will make you believe in Westerns again

Merritt Wever and Michelle Dockery in ‘Godless’ (Photo: James Minchin/Netflix)

To those of us who love the Western genre, any attempt to revitalize the form, on big screen or small, is considered not just welcome but heroic. It’s difficult to do something new in one of modern entertainment’s oldest genres. The format started shooting blanks commercially some time in the 1990s, soon after the 1989 TV miniseries Lonesome Dove. What was the last big-hit theatrical Western? Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Unforgiven? And do you know anyone under the age of 50 who paid money to see the excellent 2007 remake of 3:10 to Yuma? So throw your 10-gallon hat into the air and give a hoot and a holler for Godless, the latest benefactor of Netflix’s give-em-a-binge largesse. A seven-hours-plus honest-to-gosh Western created by writer-director Scott Frank, Godless features cowboys on horses, lots of shootin’ and ropin’, and a feminist twist so thoroughly integrated into the premise, no ornery dude can possibly complain.

In Godless, the frontier town of La Belle is mostly inhabited by women: A coal-mine disaster killed off all the able-bodied men, and some of the women have used this tragedy as an opportunity to enjoy a new freedom. Most notable among them is Merritt Wever’s Mary Agnes, who totes a rifle and talks as tough as any male gunslinger. Wever, who won an Emmy for her far more meek character in Nurse Jackie, has a great time in this juicy role. Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery shows up as a frontier woman living on the outskirts of town. She takes in a mysterious fellow named Roy Goode, played by Jack O’Connell (Skins, Unbroken), who’s being hunted by Frank Griffin, a ferociously sadistic bad-guy played at the very precipice of amusement by Jeff Daniels.

Godless is loaded with characters and plots. Sam Waterston has a highly entertaining turn as a marshal whose bristly mustache seems like a supporting character itself; Scoot McNairy is a different lawman — one who’s slowly going blind, but not before he, too, hunts down the much-sought-after Roy Goode. There is an enclave of black farmers outside of La Belle, who just want to be left alone — which means they won’t. There’s Whitey Winn (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), a cocky young deputy who twirls a pair of pearl-handled revolvers and seems like a nod to Ricky Nelson’s character in the great Howard Hawks Western Rio Bravo. Indeed, the spirit of classic Westerns hovers over Godless — writer-director Scott Frank is awfully fond of invoking, numerous times, the famous doorway shot in John Ford’s immortal The Searchers.

Scott Frank is an exceptional writer: His screenplay for 1998’s Steven Soderbergh film Out of Sight is a modern classic; last year he debuted as a novelist with the sleek and twisty thriller Shaker; and he co-wrote the script for what’s arguably the best superhero movie thus far, Logan. Frank is working here with his Out of Sight partner Soderbergh, who’s an executive producer of Godless. There are times when it seems as though Frank is so excited by this rare opportunity to do his big Western, he’s crammed in too much. You’re midway through Godless and you might think, wait, why haven’t we seen McNairy’s Sheriff Bill McNue in a couple of hours? How, exactly, does Dockery’s Alice Fletcher connect to the town of La Belle? And, wait a minute, there’s a German portrait painter (Christiane Seidel) living in that town?

But ultimately, the sheer pleasure of Godless defeats any reservations you may have about it. Daniels is both hilarious and scary, and clearly having a great time pulling on his scraggly beard as this project’s ultimate villain. And there’s a long, well-staged shootout at the end that is both very-traditional-Western and something totally new, because more than half the shooters are women, with guns blazing. It may sound like an odd thing to say that it’s exciting to see women shooting guns and getting shot while in action, but it is, simply because you have never seen a large group of women in control of their destinies in the Western genre like this before. The landscape in which this long movie is set may be, as Daniels’ Frank Griffin declares it, “godless,” but this Western suggests that being man-less ain’t necessarily a bad thing.

Godless is streaming now on Netflix.

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love s3 netflix review

Love: Paul Rust, Gillian Jacobs. Netflix.

The best Love story has returned to Netflix Love returns to Netflix for a season that finds young lovers Mickey (Gillian Jacobs) and Gus (Paul Rust) in a good place romantically. This in itself is a tricky challenge for a TV series: Where’s the conflict if things are going well for a couple? Turns out, this is no problem for the endlessly inventive Love. The new season as conceived by co-creators Judd Apatow, Rust, and Lesley Arfin takes full advantage of its Los Angeles setting, locating episodes in a wide array of places: backstage at the filming of a teen TV series; in L.A.’s underground wrestling scene; a weekend road trip to Palm Springs; and an emotionally exhausting wedding (not theirs).

In the past, Mickey has struggled with the realization that she’s an alcoholic, and her love life has been such a complicated, unhappy mess, she came to think she was a sex addict, too. In the new season, Mickey is sober and discovering that one big hurdle is feeling secure enough to admit she may actually be happy. You can feel in Jacobs’ performance everything that’s gone on with Mickey up to this point. Jacobs has made her character the kind of person who’s always ready to toss aside easy comfort to dive deeper into any situation or relationship. Being with Mickey can be thrilling–at any moment, she can be brashly funny, fumingly angry, or daffily romantic—which also means she can be exhausting. Jacobs has found a way to play that character in such a way that Mickey is endlessly surprising rather than easily irritating.

Gus is a writer and would-be director whose career has been going exactly nowhere; living in Los Angeles, surrounded by wealthy successes in the entertainment industry as he labors at a menial job as a tutor, hasn’t exactly making him feel any better about himself. A big chunk of the new season addresses the idea that, while he seems like the steady, sensible one in their relationship, Gus has always been just as deeply screwed up as Mickey is. In this final season of the show, there’s a reckoning with his own neurotic behavior, and Rust shows himself fully up to this challenge as an actor.

Love also delves more deeply into its supporting cast. Claudia O’Doherty gets a number of lovely showcases for her Bertie, Mickey’s whimsical Australian roommate. The idea is to make her something more than whimsical and Australian, and Love accomplishes that very well, as her relationship with her boyfriend–the dim, ursine, and almost-lovable Randy (Mike Mitchell)—takes unpredictable turns. There are also a couple of excellent episodes spotlighting Iris Apatow’s Arya, the teen TV star whom Gus tutors. Apatow—daughter of Judd—has a way of communicating a groundedness that’s wise, while maintaining a spikey adolescent edge. The new season of Love made me ache once again with nostalgia for its L.A. setting—few TV shows make the city look so cozy and inviting. If Mickey and Gus don’t remind you of passionate or frightening or warm moments in relationships you’ve had, you’re a cold fish indeed.

As it happens, I watched the final season of Love just before watching another upcoming Judd Apatow production—his staggeringly great, two-part HBO documentary The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling, coming up on March 26—which left me mightily impressed at the range of Apatow’s ability to tease truth, pain, and drama out of comedy. Spend this weekend binging Love—oh, and before you go searching the internet for it, I’ll save you time by telling you that the beautiful song that closes out the 10th episode is Loudon Wainwright III’s 1985 tune “Lost Love.”

Love is streaming now on Netflix.

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The new season of Donald Glover's 'Atlanta' is amazing

ATLANTA Pictured (l-r): Brian Tyree Henry as Alfred Miles, Donald Glover as Earnest Marks. CR: Guy D’Alema/FX

Near the start of the season-two opener of Donald Glover’s Atlanta, we learn that Earn Marks—our central protagonist played by Glover, the Princeton-educated young man who’s managing the career of his burgeoning-rap-star cousin Alfred “Paper Boi” Miles—is homeless, spending his nights sleeping in a storage container. For any other character on any other TV show, Earn’s situation would represent deep failure—a normal show would spend a good part of its season dramatizing how Earn arrived at this place, and how pained he is by it. But instead, Atlanta–whose new season begins Thursday on FX–dispatches with Earn’s dilemma within the first half of the premiere, and moves confidently on to a startlingly great subplot about an alligator loose in the environs of Atlanta. It’s an animal under the minimal care of an angry, slightly addled man played with superb subtlety by the classically un-subtle comedian Katt Williams.

This is just one example of the way Atlanta continues to be unlike anything else on television. Glover and his close collaborators—writer Stephen Glover and director Hiro Murai—construct this show in a series of individual set-pieces. One scene doesn’t always clearly connect to the one preceding it, but neither they (as creators) nor we (as audience) are perturbed about that: Each scene is so good, so absorbing, that these jumps become smooth.

In each of the three episodes made available for review, there is at least one long scene that places you in a context you are unlikely to have been in before. There’s the moment, for example, when Earn and Brian Tyree Henry’s Paper Boi put in an appearance at a Spotify-ish online music company. The idea is for Paper Boi to promote his music, glad-hand the executives—you know, extend his brand. Instead—well, I’m not going to spoil it. In another episode, Earn and his girl Van (Zazie Beets) just want to go out for a nice date, but they’re constantly confronted with instances of racism that lead them to decide to—nope, I’m not going to spoil that, either. A big part of the joy of watching Atlanta is having your expectations overturned.

This season, Atlanta has a subtitle: Robbin’ Season. As in a line uttered by the spacey Darius (Lakeith Stanfield), “It’s robbin’ season: Christmas approaches, and everybody gotta eat.” The show gives us examples of the way black citizens are exposed to extremes of behavior that most white citizens never even imagine happening to them. In interviews to promote the new shows, Glover has been adamant that he doesn’t want Atlanta to be a show filled with “teachable moments”; he doesn’t want it to “tackle important issues”; you’ll never see a “very special episode” of Atlanta. Nevertheless, Atlanta is putting black lives onscreen in a way they’ve never been before. That artistic achievement is in itself an educational; it is indeed very special. The fact that the show also makes you laugh hard and gasp in shocked surprise is what makes it almost constantly amazing.

Atlanta airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. on FX.

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Review: Pacino's 'Paterno' revives the pain of the Penn State sex abuse scandal

Al Pacino as Joe Paterno in HBO’s ‘Paterno.’ (Photo: Atsushi Nishijima/HBO)

In Paterno, the new HBO film about Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, Al Pacino plays the title role with a quiet voice and small gestures. It’s a performance unlike many of the ones he’s best-known for, such as the coke-head gangster in Scarface (1983) or the feral cop in Heat (1995). For Paterno, Pacino dons big-framed, yellow-tinted glasses, and his large, sad eyes are almost obscured — it’s one way the actor communicates the regressive shame that overcame his real-life character.

Paterno, premiering April 7, re-tells the story of the scandal that broke in 2011 about the multiple sexual assaults Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky committed against young boys over decades. Sandusky is the villain of this piece, but he barely registers here: This film is about the culture of complicity that grew up around Sandusky’s crimes, primarily because no one wanted to tarnish or slow down the awe-inspiring triumphs that Paterno was scoring as the winningest coach in college football. It’s an unusual way to tell this story, but Pacino and director Barry Levinson pull it off, scoring their own, more low-key, triumph.

The script by Deborah Cahn and John C. Richards takes us along two tracks: How the Sandusky story was investigated and reported by Sara Ganim, a reporter for the Harrisburg Patriot-News, and how the revelations affected Paterno and his family. Ganim is played by Riley Keough (The Girlfriend Experience, Logan Lucky) as a tough reporter who, while still in her 20s, is an already-hard-bitten woman: She’d been reporting on the Sandusky rumors for years without anyone paying much attention. (Ganim eventually won a Pulitzer Prize for this reporting.)

Once the national media gets involved, the insular college town is engulfed in the scandal. The Penn State area’s nickname — “Happy Valley” — became a bitter irony, and Levinson is great at sketching in the local culture. Paterno summons up the worship of “JoePa” that dominated State College, Pennsylvania for a long time. Paterno and his family — including his wife, Sue, played by Kathy Baker, and his son Scott, played by Greg Grunberg — are overwhelmed by the depravity and long history of Sandusky’s crimes. Sandusky himself, played by Jim Johnson, remains pushed to the edges of this story, intentionally so: The focus is on the victims and the repercussions of Sandusky’s evil actions.

For Joe Paterno, it means a forced reckoning with himself. This is the third HBO collaboration between Pacino and Levinson — Pacino was Jack Kevorkian in You Don’t Know Jack, and played the title role in Phil Spector, for which Levinson was executive producer. The pair work in concert here, Levinson frequently shooting Pacino in tight close-ups, to let us see Paterno’s internal struggles. Paterno was in his 80s when the scandal erupted, and his reactions are partly those of a confused old man. But the film also shows us Paterno owning his own guilt, going over his memories of working with Sandusky, trying to pin down where and how he might have stopped the coach, measuring how much blame he must take upon himself. It’s a very good performance in a very good film that avoids sensationalizing the crimes in order to explore pain on many levels.

Paterno airs Saturday at 8 p.m. on HBO.

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'Life Sentence' lightens up a cancer diagnosis

Life Sentence — Lucy Hale — Photo: Jack Rowand/The CW

Light and whimsical about a subject that’s dark and heavy, Life Sentence is the CW’s new Wednesday-night show, paired with the similarly young-adult fiction of Riverdale. In Life Sentence, Lucy Hale, from Pretty Little Liars, is Stella, a young women who was given a diagnosis of fatal cancer eight years ago. Things have been just ducky ever since: She has a super-supportive boyfriend (Elliot Knight) and the love of a warm family headed up by her dad, played by Nip/Tuck’s Dylan Walsh.

Stella is literally preparing for her death — there’s a cute scene in which she asks a baker who specializes in wedding cakes to make her a “funeral cake” — and she’s cool with telling strangers in the cheeriest manner possible, “I’m dying!” Then she receives a new diagnosis: She’s cured! The key to Life Sentence then begins to reveal itself: As those around Stella acclimate themselves to the news, they reveal that things are not so rosy in their lives — that, indeed, they have been keeping secrets from her and putting on happy-faces that now melt into sad or angry or anxious ones.

It’s a nifty idea: a deconstruction of the sappy advice to “live every day as though it was your last.” You can see why the CW was intrigued by this set-up from show creators Erin Cardillo and Richard Keith: Girl escapes death and lives not-so-happily ever after. Hale is a winning presence, all wide eyes and cute Peter Pan collars. One of the producers is Bill Lawrence, creator of Scrubs, so the show has a handle on quick jokes and comic reaction-shots. The show gives Stella a job as a barista in a coffee shop where she can be super-kooky while running into kookier kustomers — er, customers.

When the people around Stella start getting real with her about their struggles, Life Sentence also struggles at finding the proper tone. Her parents’ marriage collapses when Stella’s mom (Gillian Vigman) falls in love with another woman. Her brother (Jayson Blair) is a living-at-home layabout who peddles speed to stressed soccer moms. And her boyfriend tells her he’s really not going to continue to go outside when he needs to fart — he was just being polite while he thought she was dying. Can you see that these various confessions carry very different degrees of seriousness and weight? Life Sentence doesn’t — it treats everything as a potential excuse for slapstick wackiness. The dialogue is often trite (“It’s my turn to think about my needs”) whenever it’s not implausibly eloquent and aphoristic (“You beat certain death; I think you can learn how to handle uncertain life”).

While I doubt I’ll be checking in on Life Sentence again, it does seem to have a challenge to solve going forward: Four or five episodes in, will it matter any more that Stella used to be considered a dying woman? If it’s anything like real life, no, it won’t. In which case, doesn’t Life Sentence turn into just another romantic comedy about a wide-eyed hero and her wacky family?

Life Sentence airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on The CW.

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In the new Fox News vs CNN smackdown, CNN is the loser

Sean Hannity, Fox News

On Thursday afternoon, CNN president Jeff Zucker called Fox News “a pure propaganda machine” that “does incredible disservice to this country.” Speaking to a group of media professionals, Zucker compared Fox News to the Russian government-run news service TASS, and added that “the idea that [Fox] is a news channel, I think, is really not the case at all.” It didn’t take long for Fox News to strike back.

On Thursday evening, two of Fox’s prime-time shows went after CNN and Zucker. At 8 p.m., Tucker Carlson basically did the juvenile, “I know you are, but what am I?” approach, flipping Zucker’s statement and calling CNN “state TV.” Carlson dubbed Zucker “an agent of foreign governments.” At 9 p.m., Sean Hannity went below the belt, as it were. He called Zucker “the king of porn”—this, because of CNN’s coverage of alleged Donald Trump paramours Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal.

And indeed, Hannity had a point here: On Thursday night, Anderson Cooper spent an ungodly long amount of time deposing McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate. Cooper seemed endlessly interested in hearing details about McDougal’s supposed “dates” with The Donald (it was during a time before he was President). Among Cooper’s hard-hitting questions: “Did he have any nicknames for you?” Honestly, what is the news value in this? If CNN’s aim is to prove that Trump behaves boorishly, well, the President proves that himself every single day he spends in the White House. In other words, this ain’t news. And nothing that McDougal alleges is in any way a crime—indeed, she says she loved the guy.

But of course, Hannity had to take things to an extreme—it’s why the Good Lord put him on TV, after all. He roasted CNN retroactively for not covering the alleged sexual misadventures of (you know that I’m about to write, don’t you?) the Clintons, his perennial, eternal targets.

Nevertheless, if Jeff Zucker thinks he’s going to win this war, he’s mistaken. His CNN doesn’t have shows that are pure opinion-asserters the way Fox News has. Fox can drown out Zucker’s objections with ceaseless prime-time derision. What Zucker said about Fox as a “propaganda machine” was (intentionally?) an echo of the exact same phrase used by former Fox News analyst Ralph Peters said earlier this week, when he resigned from Fox, his conscience too sullied to go on. It almost doesn’t matter that the description of Fox as primarily propaganda is true. These days, whoever can repeat the same message, over and over, to the most viewers, becomes the source of the “truth.”

Anderson Cooper 360 and Tucker Carlson Tonight air weeknights at 8 p.m. on CNN and Fox News respectively. Hannity airs weeknights at 9 p.m. on Fox News.

[kentuckertv]

seven seconds netflix review

Seven Seconds

Seven Seconds is Netflix’s new well-acted downer The grim tale of a child’s murder being solved by troubled people, Seven Seconds is this Friday’s new prestige Netflix project. Binge on this one over the weekend, and you might be excused by your boss for not showing up on Monday due to an emotional hangover. One bright victory for this new 10-part series is that it’s a great showcase for Clare-Hope Ashitey as a lawyer with a drinking problem and a complicated personal life.

The crime and who committed it are revealed early on in Seven Seconds. An off-duty cop (Beau Knapp) accidentally drives into a kid on a bike, killing the youth. His cop colleagues convince him to cover up the incident. Why? The most corrupt officer explains his thinking succinctly: “A white cop and a black kid? Don’t you read the news?” All of the drama flows from this set-up, with race and class and the vagaries of the judicial system providing the subtexts.

The agonized family of the dead boy is headed up by Regina King, whose sorrow and fury have been tapped in similar ways in recent years in ABC’s American Crime and HBO’s The Leftovers. As the matriarch of a Jersey City lower-middle-class family, King’s Latrice Butler is a strong-minded church-goer, but her strength and her faith are sorely tested by grief and her encounters with the legal system. Ashity’s K.J. Harper is the assistant district attorney assigned to the case, and the first time we meet her, she’s drunk, so we know she’s not going to be the most efficient public servant to aid Latrice and her family in seeking justice for their son’s death.

Between the corrupt cops and the drunk lawyer, the movie comparisons start piling up. I began to wonder whether K.J. was going to be like Paul Newman in The Verdict—an alcoholic who pulls himself together long enough to secure a win. I started looking at all the scenes of cops sitting in crappy cars talking crudely and being reminded of films like Training Day and Copland. Seven Seconds was created by Veena Sud, the writer-producer who also oversaw The Killing, the show that made many of us aware of Joel Kinnaman and Mirielle Enos for the first time. But The Killing had its flaws, so Sud is not a rookie when it comes to slow pacing and frustrating plot turns. Like The Killing, Seven features some great acting, and there are numerous strong scenes spread over its 10 episodes that periodically make you think, “Gee, this cast is awfully good. So why am I a little bored?”

Whether you get caught up in Seven Seconds depends on how impatient you are with its nods to other TV shows and movies it reminds you of. The series would certainly benefit from some editorial tightening—reducing its number of episodes to five or six would have made it considerably more exciting. As its stands, Seven Seconds is admirably acted, but it’s a slow grind.

Seven Seconds is streaming now on Netflix.

[kentuckertv]

laura ingraham apology david hogg fox news

Laura Ingraham, host of Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle

Laura Ingraham’s fake apology to David Hogg exposes deep Fox News cynicism On Thursday, Laura Ingraham suddenly apologized for insulting and ridiculing school-shooting survivor David Hogg—but only after losing at least half a dozen advertisers to her Fox News show, and under the threat of losing more. The previous day, Ingraham felt not a twinge of decency when she tweeted an insult about Hogg getting rejections from a number of colleges, sneering that he was whining about it. In response, Hogg called for an advertiser boycott of her Fox News show The Ingraham Angle. By late afternoon, Nestle, Hulu, Wayfair, Johnson & Johnson, Expedia, and TripAdvisor, among others, had yanked ads from The Ingraham Angle.

Laura Ingraham could not act quickly enough to recant her previous contempt for the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student, and had the gall to dress her groveling in the cloak of religion. “On reflection, in the spirit of Holy Week, I apologize for any upset or hurt my tweet caused him or any of the brave victims of Parkland,” she said, and invited Hogg to appear on her show.

  Any student should be proud of a 4.2 GPA —incl. @DavidHogg111. On reflection, in the spirit of Holy Week, I apologize for any upset or hurt my tweet caused him or any of the brave victims of Parkland. For the record, I believe my show was the first to feature David…(1/2)

— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) March 29, 2018

Ingraham’s comments attempting to humiliate and silence Parkland, Florida, student aren’t unusual for her. She kicked off a different #resist movement recently when she told LeBron James to “shut up and dribble.” And hers are not the only offensive comments coming from Fox News personalities. The channel has run deeply cynical “news” segments suggesting that the Parkland students calling for more extensive gun control laws are “political pawns,” and on President Trump’s favorite TV show, Fox & Friends, co-host Pete Hegseth—recently in the running and rejected to head up the Veterans Administration—heaped contempt “They shouldn’t be giving me lessons on the Second Amendment—they should be in civics class.”

Ingraham was awfully quiet about her apology—or indeed, the entire subject of gun control—on her Thursday show. The brazen insincerity of Ingraham’s apology–along with this abject demonstration that she was happy to completely contradict her supposedly tough, sincere disagreements with the March for Our Lives organizers including Hogg—is indicative of what really goes on with Fox News personalities like Ingraham. They push and push and push the edge of what is indecent outrage, and when they go over the line and start being punished for it, they fold. Ingraham’s time-period competitor, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, did a segment on Ingraham on Thursday night, noting that “the only reason Ingraham has a job on Fox News” is because of the prime-time schedule changes that needed to be made when Bill O’Reilly was kicked off the channel, and that O’Reilly had been losing advertisers over sexual-harassment charges. Ingraham faces a similar ad loss, and was, O’Donnell’s speculated, “following her bosses’ orders [to apologize] to save her job.”

In declining to accept Ingraham’s apology, David Hogg tweeted, “I will only accept your apology only if you denounce the way your network has treated my friends and I in this fight.” I don’t think that’ll happen. But I also didn’t think this young man could send such fear into the corridors of Fox News, so… I guess anything’s possible.

The Ingraham Angle airs weeknights at 10 p.m. on Fox News.

[kentuckertv]

A 'Will & Grace' Christmas: In the holiday spirit, with accents

Holiday editions of sitcoms are a venerable tradition, if rarely very funny. (The exception: Every Thanksgiving episode of The Middle. Really; check them out.) On Tuesday night, Will & Grace attempts a jolly Christmas episode and succeeds on the strength of its stars’ performances. Through a setup too strained to bother summarizing, the bulk of the half-hour finds Will (Eric McCormack), Grace (Debra Messing), Jack (Sean Hayes), and Karen (Megan Mullally) in turn-of-the-20th-century garb, portraying New York City residents under duress. Titled “A Gay Olde Christmas,” the premise features Karen heading up a large Irish immigrant family, with Jack an equally Irish tough sailor. Will sports a handlebar mustache as a hardhearted landlord; Grace is his wife, a funny girl named Fanny. (And yes, there are a couple of Barbra Streisand Funny Girl jokes.)

Like a lot of this new season of Will & Grace, the extent to which you’ll enjoy “A Gay Olde Christmas” depends on how funny you find loads of double entendres for gay sex. The writers make the volume of such jokes part of the joke — I mentally checked out after, “He’s a mustache-bumper.” No — actually, it was earlier; after, “He only travels by tunnel.” You’d think the studio audience would groan; instead, they guffaw. The whole thing is redeemed by the performances. Mullally does the best Irish accent, rolling the syllables around in her mouth with relish. (Yum?) It wouldn’t be Will & Grace if there weren’t a subplot about someone in the closet — in this case, two of them: all of Karen’s nine children (they hide in a closet so the landlord doesn’t evict them) and Will’s landlord character, a gay man in denial, who can barely contain his lust for a T-shirted Jack. It’s amusing to see Jack play against type as a surly macho type.

Toss in a joke about Oreo cookies (I assume they set this episode specifically in 1912 to coincide with the year the Oreo was introduced), a semi-timely joke about Donald Trump’s father, Fred (he would have been 7 years old in 1912), and the keep-things-moving staging of long-time W&G director James Burrows, and you’ve got a solid holiday episode of Will & Grace. I could have done without the Santa Claus is “an old white perv we once trusted” line, though. Is nothing sacred?

Will & Grace airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on NBC.

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Jimmy Kimmel won the Matt Lauer late night joke war

It takes a lot to make The Tonight Show’s Jimmy Fallon offer timely jokes about news events — he’d rather be playing games in a frantic attempt to keep his show’s sinking ratings afloat — but he couldn’t avoid the controversy at his own network over the firing of Today show host Matt Lauer due to sexual harassment claims. On his Wednesday night show, Fallon played off a familiar Today show stunt, saying, “Where in the world is Matt Lauer? Maybe he’s having a beer with Charlie Rose.” Over on CBS, Stephen Colbert was both blunt and sharp: “Lauer once gave a colleague a sex toy as a present. It included an explicit note about how he wanted to use it on her. It’s bad enough he gave her a sex toy, but he also gave her instructions? He found a way to mansplain sexual harassment. ‘You’re doing that wrong, let me get in there.’”

But the strongest monologue was delivered by Jimmy Kimmel, in the sense that it was the funniest, and the one that also incorporated the then-late-breaking news about public radio’s A Prairie Home Companion creator Garrison Keillor’s own harassment scandal. “What happens with Matt Lauer now? Does he have to sit down and do an emotional interview with himself?” Kimmel wondered. He worked in a shocking clip of Kathie Lee Gifford slapping Hoda Kotb’s bottom on a feature they call “Spanky Tuesday.” (Honest to God, I didn’t know that was a thing — thanks for the public service, Jimmy.) Kimmel also joked that Keillor was “apparently asking women to fondle his tote bag.” Not much of a joke to you, but a real thigh-slapper to anyone who’s ever donated to a public-radio fund-drive. So, I hereby decree: Jimmy Kimmel won Wednesday’s late night harassment joke war.

P.S. In a very strangely unfortunate development, Fallon’s late night partner Seth Meyers made no mention of Lauer, or, for that matter, President Trump’s insane tweeting of questionable anti-Muslim videos, because he had pre-taped Wednesday’s show on Tuesday. Why? Meyers explained that he had pre-taped the show on Tuesday because there were too many people blocking NBC outside for its annual Christmas tree lighting. This is weird since Fallon tapes his show in the same building, and he cranked out a new one. Plus, Meyers’s guest was John Oliver. John Oliver! Whose own show on HBO has wrapped up its season, depriving him of a venue for current events, and one that Meyers’s Late Night would have offered him. All the interesting things he might have said about Trump’s tweets or Lauer — a big missed opportunity.

Jimmy Kimmel Live airs weeknights at 11:35 p.m. on ABC. The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon airs weeknights at 11:35 p.m. on NBC. The Late Show With Stephen Colbert airs weeknights at 11:35 p.m. on CBS. Late Night With Seth Meyers airs weeknights at 12:35 a.m. on NBC.

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