When season six of the satirical HBO series about a self-defeating female politician was written and shot, pretty much everyone involved assumed that Hillary Clinton would be president when the show aired this spring. This means that everyone involved figured that the new storyline – about the aftermath of former President Selina Meyer’s defeat in a very close election – would be a counterfactual. No such luck: as Willa Paskin observes here, “when Veep actively tries to avoid imitating life, life goes and imitates it.”
Category: media
What Would It Look Like If The Biggest TV Network Looked For Opportunities To Broadcast Arts? (The BBC Is About To Show Us)
The BBC will “create opportunities for arts organisations of all sizes to show their work on the BBC via a £4m fund, ‘Artists First’, that will commission artists and organisations to make new works for broadcast and online. The new Culture UK partnership, with Arts Council England (ACE), the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the Arts Council of Wales and Creative Scotland, will also see the development of three major broadcast and live event festivals each year.”
State Of Maryland Might Replace Trump Cuts To Its PBS Funding
“What that means is that if President Donald Trump’s controversial call to zero out funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting were to take effect, Maryland would be giving MPT $3 million to replace it – the sum that MPT is scheduled to receive from the federal government through the CPB. The commitment appears to be open ended. It’s not just for one year.”
Traditional TV Networks Will Die And FANG Is Taking Over
“People often reminisce about the ‘good ole days’ when there were four major networks: ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox. We are transitioning to a world where there will still be four networks, just not the four networks you’re used to. FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google) is delivering actionable data to advertisers in ways that traditional broadcasters simply can’t.”
Yes, Let’s Do Talk About Hollywood’s Gender Gap
The director of “Whale Rider” and “The Zookeeper’s Wife” always turned down invitations to speak on panels about being a woman director … until she realized nothing had changed during her decades of being in the industry. Nikki Caro says, “It was less ‘Why can’t I?’ and more ‘What the fuck is going on here?'”
How Stephen Colbert Finally Learned To Win At ‘The Late Show’ (And It’s Not Just The Current Occupant Of The White House)
Basically, he got a production manager. “The deal was, he said, ‘Listen, let me make these decisions and don’t try to take them back from me,'” Mr. Colbert remembered. “And I said, ‘O.K., well, don’t debate with me what’s funny.'”
What Would Monsters Actually Sound Like?
Turns out that’s a pretty tough question when reptiles are involved. “We asked paleontologists, who’ve been trying to figure out what dinosaurs sounded like for decades. It’s hard to get an answer because the vocal organs used to make sounds, like the vocal cords in our throat, are mostly made of flesh. And flesh doesn’t fossilize.”
How Does Hollywood Get Professor Life, And Tenure, So Wrong?
Basically, because it’s not really a subject for TV. “The actual process of professor tenure is so exquisitely boring that there is no way an accurate depiction would be anything anyone, anywhere, would watch on purpose.”
The Motion Picture Academy Has A New ‘O.J. Rule’ That May Change How The Oscars Deal With Documentaries
You could call it “the O.J. rule” after this year’s winner, or you could think of it as “the Netflix rule” – in other words, if something is intended primarily for streaming consumption, that makes it ineligible for the Oscar documentary prize.
Writing ‘Homeland’ During The First Months Of The Trump Presidency
It wasn’t pretty, says one of the showrunners. Plots had to change quickly to keep up, or even partially keep up, with the changing times: “What began to happen in real life felt in some ways so much more dramatic and so much more terrifying than what we were dramatizing on television.”