This article was featured in 1.5x Speed, New York’s podcast recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it weekly. This article was featured in 1.5x Speed, New York’s podcast recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it weekly. Taylor Tomlinson. The comedy-podcast universe is ever expanding, not unlike the universe universe. We’re here to make it a bit smaller, a bit more manageable. There are a lot of great shows, and each one has a lot of great episodes, so we want to highlight the exceptional and the noteworthy.
Before you ask, no, NBC’s LIVE! A Very Terry Christmas: Cozy 24-Hour Painting Sesh With Terry Crews did not confine the Brooklyn-Nine Nine star to a faux living room somewhere he was forced to paint, sleep, eat and use the bathroom in the simulacrum of a cheery holiday house until he collapsed from carpal tunnel and paint fumes. We know; we asked. Instead, the network is seemingly streaming a relaxing daylong loop of Terry Crews paining a pretty excellent Christmas tree, soothing you with a calm Bob Ross-style patter and sharing stream of consciousness musings such as, “All judgement stops creativity.
The NFL season is only a few weeks old, but the Super Bowl is already on people’s minds. On September 24, the NFL announced that Usher would headline the big game’s halftime show; Taylor Swift fans are making plans to tune into the spectacle in the event that her new love interest, Travis Kelce, and his team the Kansas City Chiefs repeat last year’s appearance; and Tina Fey and Amy Poehler have decided to go head-to-head with the ratings juggernaut by booking a competing tour date.
For five decades, Tom Skerritt has played key supporting roles in some indelible films — from Robert Altman’s revolutionary comedy M*A*S*H to Ridley Scott’s sci-horror masterpiece Alien to Tony Scott’s Tom Cruise–powered action-star watershed Top Gun. The man does seem to have an uncanny ability to pick projects that will have a long shelf life — everything from Up in Smoke and Harold and Maude to Singles, Steel Magnolias, Poison Ivy, and Contact.
Shue (look familiar?) and Fiebig. One year ago today, ABC removed T.J. Holmes and Amy Robach from the anchor desk of GMA3, silencing two TV hosts in love who just happened to be married to different people. Robach and Holmes opened up about their relationship for the first time on their new podcast, Amy & T.J. But somehow, that’s not close to the wildest news in their saga.
The night after Donald Trump won the presidency, A Tribe Called Quest gathered at MoMA PS1 in Queens (where they’re from) to prove there were still things to celebrate. The seminal rap group had overcome decades of bad blood to release their first album in 18 years, which is also their last, and were prepping to appear on Saturday Night Live this week with Dave Chappelle. Technically, this was a listening party for the new album, We Got It From Here, Thank You 4 Your Service, and there were plenty of excited fans in the room scrambling to get selfies with Q-Tip.
Stuck between a Yellowstone and a hard place. You thought the dual strikes would produce some original content while studios had a couple of free months to mind-map new shows? Well, Paramount and showrunner Taylor Sheridan thought otherwise. The network ordered two additional spinoffs of Yellowstone — America’s most-watched series about a family who owns the largest contiguous cattle ranch in the country — currently titled 1944 and 2024.
If there is one benefit to the gruelingly long, impressively ill-conceived WeCrashed, it’s how clear the series is, perhaps unintentionally, in its depiction of one dispiriting truism that fellow scammer shows Inventing Anna and The Dropout have both alluded to but not necessarily prioritized in their narrative: Money is made up, and the “valuation” process is an arbitrary echo chamber.
Admittedly, that is a fairly basic observation about how all these “disruptor” companies made billions of dollars in whatever stage of capitalism we’re currently in.
If Fleetwood Mac and “underrated” could somehow go in the same sentence, we’d be talking about Christine McVie, who died on November 30 at 79. Though never as big of a personality as Stevie Nicks or Lindsey Buckingham, the singer, songwriter, and keyboardist was a cornerstone of the group even before she joined the band, playing keys in studio sessions and painting the album art for 1970’s Kiln House. Once she became an official member (she’d infamously married the bassist, John McVie), she asserted herself as one of the group’s core songwriters.
Sinead O’Connor has died at the age of 56. In light of her passing, we’re re-running this 2022 essay on the singer’s first Stateside performance.
February 22, 1989, the 31st annual Grammy Awards. Among the nominees for Best Rock Vocal Performance, Female are Tina Turner, Pat Benatar, Melissa Etheridge, Toni Childs, and Sinéad O’Connor. O’Connor has performed once on Late Night with David Letterman, but she has yet to appear on primetime American television.