Saul may never see Jesse again; The Strain gave us shivers and scares; so does Christopher Walken; True Detective to maybe speak Irish; 1970’s to birth a Gosling/Crowe thing with moustaches; Parenthood to make us cry even harder; George R.R. Martin’s favorite bird isn’t a raven; Disney to destroy animation forever; Elisabeth Hasselbeck spit-flecks as a Fox News robo-troll; and JayZ and Beyoncé to march into your living room while you eat noodles.
If for no other reason than Breaking Bad being one of the best television shows we’ve ever seen, excitement and expectation for spin-off, Better Call Saul, is high. Though, we expect the combination of AMC and the hysterical Bob Odenkirk to work their magic yet again. And so does AMC. They’ve already ordered a second season and the show hasn’t even premiered. Here’s everything Vulture knows about the show so far, in short:
- Better Call Saul will be set six years before Saul and Walter White meet, circa 2002
- Saul was known as Jimmy McGill, “a small-time lawyer searching for his destiny” and Mike will be there as his “fixer.” (Haha! Will Mike have hair?)
- Not so much a comedy as dark humor
- It could jump back and forth in time
- Michael McKean (Lenny from Lenny and Squiggy on Laverne and Shirley — if you don’t know any of these references, you are too young to exist) has been cast as Saul’s brother
- Giancarlo Esposito might also return as drug kingpin Gus. (Or at least they aren’t ruling it out.)
[Some Spoilers] FX’s The Strain, a wormy globule of a vampire show, aired last night to mostly good reviews. We’ll say, good, with the exception of lead Corey Stoll‘s (House of Cards) inexplicable, yet certifiably Nicolas Cageian hairpiece that served as an internet irritant and distraction of gigantic proportions while the show aired, despite its number of chills and gross-out moments. (You’ll have to watch the scene in the morgue on your own time, folks). The show was filled with enough water cooler fodder that will have everyone discussing the pros and cons of Neil Diamond, whether it’s ever a good idea to follow either a strange sound or voice into a vast cargo hold or a room full of dead people, and also if it’s in your best interest to take the advice of wizened old Van Helsing types who tell you “burn the bodies and decapitate the heads.” (Yes.) All in all a good time was had at the good old Strain rodeo and heart worms dinner show. [People], [Zap2it]
We’re afraid, very afraid…and slightly agog. Christopher Walken, a citizen belonging to the Scary Mofos of the World Club, and also dancing enthusiast of manic largesse, has been cast as Captain Hook…wait for it…in NBC’s Peter Pan Live!, the follow-up to NBC’s The Sound of Music Live! which starred Carrie Underwood as A Wooden Dollface that Was Not Julie Andrews. UMMMMMMMMMMM! This news makes us want to hide under the kitchen table. And also watch with our hands over our eyes while we scream at all the sure to be creeptastic moments that has Walken menacing a legion of boys who’ve run away from home in search of never growing old. If that isn’t something for an FBI watch list we just don’t know, but regardless, this will be on teevee so we can watch it all shake out with either a bang or a fish-flop not experienced since The Sound of Music Live! heard the artistic death knell around the fifteen minute mark, despite the rubberneckers (many) who continued to watch the final throes until it blessedly hobbled off screen and into DVR recorded posterity and inane hilarity. ALSO, THIS WILL BLOW YOUR MIND UNTIL YOU’RE DEAD. [Vulture]
The next season of True Detective will have not two but four leads! How fabulously coupley! Will everyone get married? Will it be like SisterWives? Will it be like Law&Order: SVU and we’ll get to watch Benson and Stabler solve crimes while Munch and Tutuola look on excitedly? We certainly hope so. Well, not for Ice T and Richard Belzer to show up, but for some really good actors who can play cops well. Maybe two lady duos or a set of two guy-girls like the classic pairings from Remington Steele, Hunter, and Moonlighting, or one of each. Oh, geez. We’re so excited for this. Well, unless they’ve decided to go with actors that would bore us like Jessica Alba and James Franco, because that would mean a lot of standing around looking confused while pondering the role of pot brownies in one’s life and the rough, but certainly sensual, feel of Seth Rogen’s leg hair, at least for one of them. That’s why the question we should ask ourselves is, instead of wondering who they’ll get to make the show great, let’s think about who they could get that would just about make you watch network television? And not just any network, but NBC. Omg! Omg! For us that’s like Anne Hathaway and Adam Sandler. We’re not sure what could be worse than that. [Vulture]
And it looks like one of those leads will be undecipherable speaking, Colin Farrell. Um, yay? Well, okay, we guess. He’s supposedly “deep” in negotiations, and that’s fine we guess. Is the Mcconaughey/Harrelson a really high bar to meet? Yup. Can Farrell pull it off? Maybe. We just assume he’ll freeze into place that drunken bewildered face he always uses when things go “wrong” in a movie. If nothing else he has “expressive and perplexed eyebrowing” down pat. And that says…something. We still think there could be a zinger thrown in there like Seth Macfarlane, and then we’d have to kill everyone. [Vulture]
Russell Horrible Javert and Ryan Gosling, sire of the upcoming Ryan Gosling-Eva Mendes celebrity offspring, have agreed to be in a movie together wherein they’ll play 1970’s detectives named Jackson Healy and Holland March; both will investigate the death of a porn star. Can’t you just imagine the two of them, a svelte Gosling, and a seven hundred-year-old Russell Crowe, both kitted out in flared pants with generous helpings of polyester, smoking cigarettes in public places, and pointing their pistols at smack dealers and diamond smugglers? It’ll be fantastic. The wah-wah sound of a police siren while they’re in hot pursuit. The gritty city. The buzz of a busy police precinct. The seductive allure of the porn industry; moustaches, water beds, chest hair, cologne. The audience will be transported. We haven’t thought about the 1970’s in a movie since Bradley Cooper had a Mike Brady perm. And that was exactly months ago. It’s really so soon for the 1970’s again, isn’t it? Didn’t we just do this, daddy-O? Weren’t there enough gritty detective movies about the 1970’s in the 1970’s? It’s like our time machine doesn’t erase mutton chops. No one remembers how terrible mutton chops were until you get into the time machine from the 1970’s, step out into the 2010’s, and realize what an abomination mutton chops really were, but by that time, you’re already out in the world, and everyone has seen the mutton chops. So now you’re embarrassed as well as hot faced because you’re wearing mutton chops, which are like tiny blankets knitted by lemmings made only for your cheeks. So that’s what happens when Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe go back in time to the 1970’s. We’re left with this guy and his chops. [Vulture]
On the show that just chokes the tears out of you, Parenthood, NBC’s one little program sailing along in a lifeboat amongst a sea rife with television chum, will have one main story line for its sixth and final season. WHAT?! Did we know next season would be the last?! Nobody told us. Anyway, showrunner Jason Katims says, “One of the things I wanted to do for the season was to find one larger story that influences everybody on the show. The story is going to be introduced in the first episode and play throughout the season. It’s a huge new challenge for the family and one that we didn’t see before … In this case, I feel like I want to to do something that starts at the beginning of the season, by the way there will be as many story lines going on as usual, but this will be something that tracks us throughout the year.” Oh, Good God. Plague. And Death. And Volcanic ash will rain from the heavens. This is what happens on this show every season. It always leaves us crying and keening and shaking our fist at the unfairness of cancer and Asperger’s, and marital problems. Now he’s telling us about something huge coming like a probable pox apocalypse of some sort? Kleenex indeed. [Vulture]
George R.R. Martin, maniacal disaster troll, who will literally kill anyone in his books, is tired of people speculating about his death. Well, as his death would relate to the completion of his seventh book. That’s right. It would appear no one really cares if the 65-year-old lives a long life unmarred by sickness or disease because that’s the hope of all humans. No, this is about seeing George R.R. eating a bacon cheeseburger and hoping his arteries stay intact because “Good God, what about Westeros?!” Hmmm, we wonder if anyone ever sends him wild boar for his birthday as a joke? Or wears chain maille to any wedding he attends? That would be terrible. For now though, if you just wonder out loud about the future of Game of Thrones in the event of Martin’s untimely demise, he’d just like you to know, “I find that question pretty offensive, people speculating about my death and my health,” he said, in an interview with the Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger. “So f**k you to those people.” Noted. So everyone who’s ever wondered about how the books will end if Martin, well, ends…stop being jerks. This guy should be able to live in peace without the world either counting down his years like a ticking timebomb or asking him when he’s going to supply fans with their next fantasy fix. It’s like GoT fans are a legion of Joffreys or something. Get over yourselves! All of you. [Uproxx]
Disney has become a thing sent to ruin your childhood. It’s already a little disconcerting walking into a Disney store and among all the flotsam, seeing Star Wars items strewn about the place by people who are all probably secret Chewbacca hero-deniers, who also ridiculously believe the original movies were animated gigglefests featuring singing mermaids or whatever. Now, though, Disney would like to continue on to the zenith of international money explosions by making live action film versions of ninety-year-old cartoons you hold dearly in that part of your heart that’s not filled with fried mozzarella and Guy Fieri’s ultimate cheesecake. This is because Disney is a floating money barge of evil that counts on the zombiefied shuffling of overtired parents who will drag their offspring into a moviehouse to see their latest bad idea festooned with crap ribbons and silly string. Now Dumbo will become a thing people will see live. Will they glue ears on an elephant? Use CGI for the entire thing? Hoist an animal that usually weighs several tons up in the air using a system of pulleys and bubble gum? Perhaps. Perhaps all or none of the above. Maybe they’ll just conk moviegoers over the head with big barrels full of $1000 bills and while you sleep you’ll dream of a soaring pachyderm. It’s either that or actually watch a movie about a flying elephant written by Transformers franchise writer Ehren Kruger. Good Christ. We don’t want that. No, we don’t want that ever. [THR]
Oh, Lord of Ghosts, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, she of football marriage and graduate of Survivor University and most recent spittle-sprayer at Fox News, has thoughts on the confirmed return of Rosie O’Donnell to The View. She knew, she totally knew, ya’ll, that Rosie would be back before any of you knew, or suspected (or probably even cared) because Rosie, that evil plottress, has been planning this for months! That means Hasselbeck gets some sort of golden dipped cookie trophy, maybe. Or maybe she gets to climb a bell tower and exclaim to all the citizens of Fox News Shoutville that she was the only person who could ever see who Rosie really was so she, better than anyone else, knew of her dastardly plans to come back to a show she left, albeit in hindsight, regretfully in the past. “…The very woman who spit in the face of our military, spit in the face of her own network, and really in the face of a person who stood by her and had civilized debates for the time that she was there,” said the Fox News host. Oh, sheesh. Whatever, you she-goose of a person you. We would like to say that we know that you are taking the news of O’Donnell’s return to the show as a moment to remind your Fox News fans (and the media at large) that once you were on another popular show that didn’t just cater to the cave-dwelling, Lazy Boy and Cracklins demographic. That once people listened to you when you weren’t shouting inside an echo chamber while you chewed the big network teevee cud. Now you’re just another “loon in a looney bin” full of assholes and gigantic assholes. So, you know, basically thanks for your input about happenings out in the world where idiot-demons aren’t confirmed co-anchors. You’re doing us all a favor? No. [THR]
Jay Z and Beyoncé will bring their love parade to HBO in September when they’re done with the tour that brought us this hilariously conceived promotional video. Haha! So everyone who spent money so they could watch Beyoncé’ do deep knee bends in person behind thousands of people while you strained your eyeballs to see her smirk on a jumbotron, yes, you can now watch the actual show from your couch naked if you so choose. Or with friends. Or with a Beyoncé fan club. Or with a naked Beyoncé fan club. That’s the beauty of this whole HBO thing, you don’t have to go anywhere. You can sing all the Beyoncé songs at the top of your lungs and no one will look at you as if you murdered a llama with your vocal cords. Well, they might, but at least you didn’t pay to be there and you can tell that person to “Shut their Flesh Moving Lip Hole!” because they didn’t pay to be there. Isn’t that neat the way teevee works? You can also watch Jay Z do whatever it is he does when he’s onstage with his wife at a hip hop show that also has dresses and apparently mesh face coverings. [Vulture]
