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anniversaries Mar. 2, 2023

The Chicken and the BabyForty years ago this week, M*A*S*H signed off with an emotional jab at network TV’s commitment to sanitizing the ugly stuff.

By Matt Zoller Seitz

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Top Image: James Minchin/Trunk Archive I have a long history with Mad Men. I wrote episode reviews for Vulture and The New Republic. I published longer essays about the series in the print edition of New York Magazine, and stand-alone pieces in other venues. Throughout season seven, I went on radio programs and podcasts to talk about the show. Given all this, when I decided to publish a book about the show, Mad Men Carousel — and then, years later, during the 2020 pandemic, started writing about the series yet again — my friends would ask, “Haven’t you had enough? [Read More]

Mad Men showrunner Matt Weiner is a notorious spoiler-phobe who tries to keep every detail of his show under wraps, but what he considers to be a spoiler may surprise you. Co-star Rich Sommer tells the Huffington Post, “It seems simple, but Matt was like, ‘Oh, God, no, don’t ever tell [the press] that you’re not wearing bow-ties anymore.’ And with my new glasses, we were shooting on location and there were a ton of paparazzi and he told me, ‘Take off your glasses. [Read More]

From Daphne, at LCT3. Soon, at Playwrights Horizons, Alexandra Tatarsky will stage her solo performance about “a young Jewish woman who thinks she is a small German boy who thinks he is a tree.” Last spring, Agnes Borinsky’s The Trees — about a brother and sister who calmly, miraculously take root in a public park — unfurled its tender, quizzical branches at the same venue. Now Renae Simone Jarrett brings her new play, Daphne — which dances with an Ovidian transformation myth where a woman becomes a tree — to Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theater (ending the Playwrights monopoly on surreal arboreal drama). [Read More]

500 Days of Summer, oh la la. Two months ago, we looked out on the upcoming slate of film releases and boldly declared that 2009 would be the Year of the Werewolf, with hairy-faced Lycans finally putting an end to the box-office hegemony of vampires — but that was way before Paul Blart: Mall Cop made $39 million over four days this weekend. Even though the coming weeks and months will bring wolf-starring movies like Underworld 3, The Wolf Man, and First Howl, we’ll also see April’s Observe and Report, in which Seth Rogen plays a racist mall security guard, and the new, just-announced-today Fox sitcomWalorsky, which follows “the exploits of an ex-cop who now patrols a shopping mall in Buffalo, NY” (Fox claims to have picked up the show prior to Blart’s baffling MLK Day success). [Read More]

last night on late night Mar. 18, 2010

Late Night: St. Patrick’s Day Pot JokesPlus Jimmy Fallon’s drinking ballad, on our regular late-night roundup.

By Dan Duray

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Seriously, what’s Bob Benson’s deal. We know something is up, but what? Last week, we presented many theories, like Benson is an investigative journalist and/or murderer. Recently, talking with the New York Times, James Wolk, the actor who plays Benson, opened up about his personal favorite theory: “They’re hilarious. I can tell you my favorite one. Someone said he was Peggy’s son, time-traveling back from the future. [starts laughing] I laughed for like 10 minutes. [Read More]

A bunch of very famous people are getting together to make a movie. Tuesday evening it was reported that Margot Robbie would be joining an as-yet-untitled David O. Russell drama that already included Christian Bale, and today The Hollywood Reporter has the news that Michael B. Jordan will join them as well. Jordan is coming off the quietly very well-reviewed Just Mercy, which he starred in and produced, and he’s on his way to more blockbuster fare like the third Creed film and an adaptation of Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse. [Read More]

If you don’t frequent certain beautiful, strange corners of the internet, it might have escaped your knowledge that there are some X-Men movie fans who would love to see a reality where young Magneto (Michael Fassbender) and Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) forget about their mutant battles and instead bake cakes together in a rather suggestive manner. Luckily, Graham Norton has found evidence of these fans and not only proudly paraded their fan art in front of the two movie stars, but also called on audience members to reveal their fantasy art commissions. [Read More]