The rapper Cyhi the Prynce once said on Kanye West’s “So Appalled,” “If God had an iPod, I’d be on his playlist.” The method of music storage might be outdated now, but playlists loom larger than ever in the streaming era of music-listener culture, with subscription services like Apple Music and Spotify acting as the presumptive deities. For the latter service, there seems to be playlists for pretty much any mood and situation.
Bad Bunny has everything you need to get through quarantine: music, inspirational messages, and now, sketch comedy. The rapper joined Kenan Thompson (as former Boston Red Sox player David Ortiz) in “Big Papi’s Cooking Show” on this week’s Saturday Night Live. Ditching the bad for big, Big Papi’s “Puerto Rican cousin” Big Bunny joins the show to offer you two quarantine essentials: “big ass pots,” large enough to fit “22 different animals, even big ones like llama and yak,” and big ass sweatpants, presumably for after you eat 22 different kinds of meat.
A$AP Rocky. Over the past three days, A$AP Rocky has been releasing new songs on SoundCloud, placing each one under a different genre hashtag: Tuesday’s “5ive $tar$” was labeled hip-hop and rap, Wednesday’s “Above” alternative rock, and yesterday’s “Money Bags Freestyle (Dean Blunt Meditation)” ambient. What unites the songs, besides their brevity, is their silence. The tracks feature some of Rocky’s sleepiest flows to date over beats often so drowsy they barely qualify as beats.
“I got that one from the kids in the hall.”–Sid Caesar, blaming his writers whenever a joke would bomb
It’s taken me many years to wrap my head around the concept of television writers. It seems like I’ve always more or less operated under the assumption that people on TV just wandered in front of the cameras and were cool/funny, and then they went and cashed their massive paychecks. This felt doubly true for sketch comedy shows, going back to Monty Python’s Flying Circus, where each of the six members of the troupe were credited as creators, writers, and performers.
All things considered, Sunday night’s Game of Thrones finale ended pretty well for House Stark. Bran is the King on the Iron Throne, with Bran himself being the only person who saw that coming. Sansa is Queen in the North and currently rocking a great gown. Jon Snow had to murder the woman he loved, yes, but at least he’s still alive and back at the Night’s Watch, where he’s got a new mandate that includes being nice to the Wildlings and, I assume, eventually rebuilding the gigantic hole in the Wall.
Ted Danson as bartender Same Malone in Cheers. Thirty-five years after it first premiered, Cheers remains a sitcom benchmark, a comedy institution that left an indelible mark on the modern television landscape. Over the course of its 11 seasons, Cheers perfected the workplace–cum–surrogate family template established by The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Taxi. It helped introduce TV audiences to the viability of will-they, won’t-they relationships, multi-episode arcs, and disconnected cold opens.
For all of Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s world-stopping power, they can’t control the powers that be – the Billboard charts. Despite dominating the conversation, music industry, and universe with their surprise joint album, Everything Is Love, they ultimately weren’t the favorites on this week’s Billboard 200. Instead, they lost out to, of all things, a boy band (just when you thought those were a dying art!). Separately, Bey and Hov nabbed No.
The Cabin in the Woods made a decent $14.8 million this weekend at the box office — not exactly at the high end of horror movie openings, but a respectable haul for a movie that’s been on the shelf for years. Still, if you pay attention to online chatter, Cabin may as well have been a blockbuster, for all the hype and sterling reviews it got (92 percent fresh at Rotten Tomatoes is nothing to sniff at.
From Back to the Future: The Musical, at the Winter Garden. I think I first encountered Doc Brown and Marty McFly as a little kid on an amusement-park ride at Universal Studios, which I remember was confusing because I hadn’t yet seen any Back to the Future movies. Still, there was a certain elemental logic to the odd-couple pairing of a cool misfit kid and a local mad scientist as long as you didn’t think too hard about the logistics of their meeting.
July 27, 2016 12:15 pm By Sofia Lyons Share Share Tweet Pin It 40 Photos Photo: Getty Images; Netflix BoJack Horseman, Netflix’s adult animated series about a ‘90s sitcom star turned sad, alcoholic has-been (who also happens to be an anthropomorphic horse) returned for a third season last Friday. As expected, it delivered more shenanigans — both hilarious and deeply depressing — from BoJack and his animal and human cohorts, who are voiced by a star-studded cast including Will Arnett, Amy Sedaris, and Allison Brie.