Lori Acken | 2/52 | Channel Guide Magazine

My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding Season 2 finale preview

May 3, 2013 | By Lori Acken
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It’s time for a two-hour, two-episode Season 2 finale, My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding fans, and it all begins Sunday night, May 5, at 8/7CT. In the first, “All Bets Are Off,” we have the dual tales of Romanichal bachelors Rodell Stanley, 20, and Teddy Lee, age and last name unknown. Rodell isn’t going to be a bachelor much longer, though, because he’s planning to marry 16-year-old Dorothy Martin, baby sister of the birthday-king twins Tommy and Teddy from the “Double Wedding, Double Trouble” episode a few weeks back. Even though Rodell professes to have lascivious thoughts about every [...]

Drop Dead Diva Season 5 premieres June 23 on Lifetime

May 3, 2013 | By Lori Acken
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Faithful fans battled for and won a fifth season of Drop Dead Diva, Lifetime’s unique and charming dramedy about a shallow model who dies suddenly and is resurrected in the body of a plus-sized attorney. The 13-episode Season 5 premieres Sunday, June 23 at 9pm ET/PT, followed by the series premiere of Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry’s eagerly awaited new nighttime soap Devious Maids. The Season 5 premiere — aptly titled “Back From the Dead” — picks up where Season 4 left off, with Jane (Brooke Elliott) searching for her fiancé Owen (Lex Medlin, Southland) after he saw her share [...]

Breaking Amish Brave New World — we talk with Kate and Sabrina

May 1, 2013 | By Lori Acken
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Even before it hit the airwaves last fall, TLC’s reality shocker Breaking Amish stirred up a hotbed of controversy. On a near-daily basis, reporters and former friends of the five cast members revealed the truth behind the supposedly naïve Amish and Mennonite twentysomethings getting their first taste of life in New York City. The show became an instant smash. Now Amish-exile newlyweds Abe and Rebecca Schmucker, rising model Kate Stoltzfus and rebel Jeremiah Raber, and the show’s sole Mennonite Sabrina High are back for a second season called Breaking Amish: Brave New World, which premieres May 12. Attempting a fresh start [...]

Behind the Candelabra: Steven Soderbergh, Michael Douglas and Matt Damon on the year’s most talked-about telefilm

May 1, 2013 | By Lori Acken
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Depending on how you look at it, the genesis for Behind the Candelabra, HBO’s extravagant and surprisingly emotional Liberace biopic, happened nearly 14 years ago — or more than 40. The film’s director, Steven Soderbergh, 50, says he watched the beloved pianist and “World’s Greatest Showman” with his parents as a kid and recognized that this was no ordinary entertainer. Revisiting those old clips years later, Soderbergh knew his opinion hadn’t changed a bit. By then, he was filming his 2000 Oscar-winning smash Traffic with Michael Douglas. “I was in the middle of playing the drug czar and Steven said, [...]

Dance Moms Season 3 Episode 18 recap: Apple Sass

April 30, 2013 | By Lori Acken
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So we’ve reached the midterm of Dance Moms Season 3, Dance Moms nation. Everybody ready for a couple of reunion shows and a dab of a spring break before we have back at it come summer? But first we have two hours of midseason finale to get our tanks on “full” and get us through, so let’s get to it. While Abby’s taking stock of what numbers we have to get crackin’ on now that The View is behind us, Kelly actually asks her permission to take the solo-less Brooke to see a music manager. Abby says she’ll think about [...]

Dog and Beth On The Hunt recap: Big Trouble in Little Clovis

April 29, 2013 | By Lori Acken
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This week on Dog & Beth: On The Hunt, Dog, Beth and Leland steer the mobile command center to gritty Clovis, New Mexico, near the Texas border, to come to the aid of Hank Bayless. Hank has been in the bail bonds industry for 30 years as the proprietor of Hank’s Bail Bonds. His daughter Rebeccah and granddaughter Ruby also write bonds, along with newbie Dawn. Bounty hunters Oscar and Will provide the muscle of the operation. Hank is ready to retire, but he has a guy or two he wants to capture before he turns the business over to [...]

My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding preview: Family feuds and angel wings

April 26, 2013 | By Lori Acken
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Coming this Sunday on TLC’s My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding, there is no wedding at all. Instead, we discover that three families featured in the past are actually interconnected. And none by much of anything good. To get you prepped, here are the basics. Aspiring pop singer Jackie Dee from a couple weeks back is a member of the Small clan — and, it turns out, the sister of Pookie, the boy who convinced Nukkie, the 14-year-old daughter of AGW and Gypsy Sisters star Nettie Stanley, to run off with him at the end of Season 1. As the [...]

Dear Mom Love Cher: Cher honors her roots in a charming Lifetime special

April 25, 2013 | By Lori Acken
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When I was a kid, I wanted to be Cher. Well into adulthood, I have yet to change my mind. From her early days as the exotic half of Sonny & Cher to her stunning reinvention as an award-winning movie star — and her poster-child status for women with independent hearts, lively love lives and bold fashion choices throughout — Cherilyn Sarkisian LaPiere Bono Allman has always been my kind of dame. Turns out, she comes from a long line of them. I talked with the entertainment icon for her can’t-miss Lifetime special Dear Mom, Love Cher and discovered a [...]

Dance Moms Season 3 episode 17 recap: The View, Screw You, And Cathy, Too

April 23, 2013 | By Lori Acken
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As we open this week’s episode, Dance Moms nation, the Pitt Crew is setting up shop at Stepping Out Studios in New York City. Because not only are we all going to appear on The View, but we’re also attending a competition while we’re out here. The Masters of Dance competition. Our first time ever. It’s basically another in10sity Dance thing — in Bernardsville, New Jersey, not the Big Apple proper — so we’re hardly new to the setup, but whatever. We’re going. And so are Cathy and the Lad Apples. This is hardly a surprise. The pyramid has a [...]

VOD Spotlight: Matt Damon and John Krasinski in “Promised Land”

April 23, 2013 | By Lori Acken
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When Matt Damon and John Krasinski set out to bring what Krasinski calls an “exploration of modern-day American identity” to moviegoers, the pair zeroed in on a tableau happening across the land — rural communities mired in economic conditions that virtually guarantee their extinction mulling modern-day solutions that could save them, even as those solutions irreparably alter the literal and figurative foundation on which the towns are based. In the resulting film, Promised Land, the pair chose the current hot-button environmental issue of hydraulic natural gas extraction — better known as “fracking” — as the do-or-die dilemma of McKinley, a [...]