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Streamliner At your service. Streamliner At your service. Peacock is one of the younger players in the ongoing streaming wars. The service is bankrolled by 70-plus years of NBC content, and as such, its coffers boast such all-time binge Hall of Famers as The Office and 30 Rock. (Not to mention vintage classics like Cheers and Family Ties.) Peacock is considerably more experimental with its deployment, with a free variant and a TV-channel facsimile, which breaks up the Netflix-standard episode dump we’ve become accustomed to over the past decade. [Read More]

Hard science fiction only rarely rouses the mainstream. That’s understandable. Such books are intimidating. With their quarks and parsecs and quantum theories, they’re a literary world away from the human-scale struggles of most general fiction. Chinese hard science fiction would seem to face an even steeper road to readership. Add stark cultural and political differences to an already forbidding genre, and popular wisdom would suggest the writer has no chance of success in the West. [Read More]

The folk singer on her memoir, Hadestown, and reckoning with the 1990s. Photo: Victoria Stevens Less than two minutes into our interview, Ani DiFranco says the word fuck for the first time, and it sounds like music. The f is fricative and percussive, much like DiFranco’s habit of thwacking the side of her acoustic guitar as she plays it. Then comes the vowel sound, which has a gentle lilt that mirrors the way DiFranco sings: in dulcet tones that sometimes give way to a guttural growl. [Read More]

Whether you consider This Is Us a deeply moving drama, a cheesy, schlocky soap, or an entertaining mix of both, it’s hard to deny just how big an influence the NBC series has had on pop culture since its debut in 2016. From the career revivals of Mandy Moore and Milo Ventimiglia to the surge in similarly serious ensemble series like A Million Little Things and Little Fires Everywhere to the sheer number of awards bestowed on breakout star Sterling K. [Read More]

To Do: March 1–15: Our biweekly guide on what to see, hear, watch, and read. TV Alaska Daily Warm hearts and cold cases. ABC, March 2. It’s rare for a network series these days to distinguish itself from the pack, but there’s something endearing about this news-reporting drama, which returns for the back half of its first season. Although it began withHilary Swank playing a big-city hotshot disgruntled about taking a job in Anchorage, it has become a warm ensemble celebration of shoe-leather local journalism. [Read More]

Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday, and maybe he was deserving and maybe he wasn’t. I’m in no position to judge, since I like every album he’s ever released, even the bad ones. I can confidently say, though, that Dylan is a world-class weirdo. He was born different, that’s for sure, but living for so long under intense scrutiny probably didn’t help tamp down any interpersonal oddness. [Read More]

A year and a half after Armie Hammer was first accused of sexual misconduct (and possible cannibalism), the disgraced actor is once again making headlines for reportedly losing his wealthy family’s financial support, switching career paths, and taking on a job selling time-shares at a Cayman Islands resort. Why is it getting harder and harder to distinguish real life from The White Lotus? In case you’re a little confused about how we ended up here — or if you made the wise choice to mute Hammer’s name on Twitter ages ago — we compiled a timeline of the allegations against the Call Me By Your Name actor, his alleged victims’ statements, and his whereabouts leading up to … an alleged $67,000 unpaid balance to AmEx and his first interview in two years, in which he admits to being emotionally abusive and shares new details about being “massively” broke. [Read More]

Even the most devout readers of George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” book series were surprised by how some aspects of the Red Wedding played out (it should go without saying that spoilers abound from here on out in this article), and were handed yet another reminder that HBO’s adaptation of the epic fantasy novels isn’t always going to stay true to the source material. But while season two took a few liberties (Daenerys’s dragons getting kidnapped, for instance), this past season shuffled even more timelines, amalgamated even more characters, and twisted even more plot points as the one-book-per-season pace was pushed out the window like an overcurious Stark brat. [Read More]

Filmmakers have long had an insatiable fascination with the shipwreck: the awesome, towering walls of water, the deafening roar of the wind, the high drama of that inevitable “we’re going under” moment. The onscreen shipwreck promises both visual magnificence and emotional grandeur. It is, in a way, the perfect cinematic gambit. It is also an effective yet simple visual metaphor. “Here’s what happens,” the cinematic shipwreck seems to say, “when the power of nature rips away our carefully constructed world from beneath our feet. [Read More]

Per Deadline, IMDb TV is currently developing a TV reboot of Cruel Intentions, the 1999 film that starred Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, and Reese Witherspoon. The cult hit was originally based on Les Liaisons dangereuses, a French novel about narcissistic exes who delight in manipulation, seduction, and betrayal. This time around, the story will be set at an elite college in Washington, D.C., where two step siblings are determined to stay at the top of the Greek life hierarchy. [Read More]