HBO Girls Season 4 preview
Comedy

Will smarter “Girls” be just as fun?

“This season of Girls is the girls making smarter choices and realizing that life is still hard,” says Lena Dunham of her hit HBO comedy, which returns for Season 4 on Sunday, Jan. 11, at 9pm ET/PT. Smarter choices? This is still Girls, right? Season 4 finds Hannah (Lena Dunham) trying to prove herself as a writer and struggling with critical peers at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her love for Adam (Adam Driver), who has become a selfish diva since landing a Broadway role, complicates things. Marnie (Allison Williams) has a burgeoning music career and romance with Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). […]

Empire on FOX
Drama

Inside the chess match of FOX’s “Empire”

“I need you to sing like you are going to die tomorrow. Like this is the last song you will ever sing,” music mogul Lucious Lyon instructs a songstress in the recording studio. But he might as well be talking about himself. With the intensity and intrigue of a Shakespearean history play, FOX’s new drama Empire (Wednesdays beginning Jan. 7 at 9pm ET/PT) depicts a family’s power struggle for the Empire Entertainment throne. From creators Lee Daniels (Lee Daniels’ The Butler) and Danny Strong (Game Change), Empire plays like a chess match with money, fame, love and power the ultimate prize. […]

Rob Lowe and Paz Vega star in Beautiful and Twisted on Lifetime
Drama

Rob Lowe gets “Beautiful And Twisted” On Lifetime

Full disclosure: I love me a juicy Lifetime original movie. If it’s based on the kind of salacious true-crime tale that launched several salacious true-crime TV networks, so much the better. If it features Rob Lowe behind the wheel of the Batmobile, and arguing with his onscreen wife while sporting only a pair of Batman briefs … color me sold with a capital S. “Here’s the thing — if you want me to say yes to a part, if I get to wear Batman underpants, it’s a safe assumption that I’m gonna say yes,” jokes the famously self-deprecating Lowe (see […]

Angela Bassett directs Yaya DaCosta on the set of Lifetime's Whitney.
Interview

Lifetime’s Whitney: Angela Bassett on telling Houston’s love story in her directorial debut

Celebrated actress Angela Bassett was dining with her pal and Betty & Coretta producer Larry Sanitsky when the prolific filmmaker mentioned his struggle to find the right director for his newest project — a biographical film about the late pop superstar Whitney Houston. Bassett, who bonded with Houston when they filmed 1995’s Waiting to Exhale and hoped to spread her wings in the entertainment industry, wondered if fate had come calling. “To be at the helm of this, you go in knowing that she’s so beloved and she’s so magnificent that there are going to be some who are not going […]

Comedy

We talk Galavant — and Alan Menken — with Joshua Sasse!

And now for something completely different: A TV comedy that’s a little bit Disney romance and a whole lot Mel-Brooks-meets-Monty-Python reverie — all set to rollicking music by Disney’s celebrated song guy, Alan Menken. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Galavant, a four-week, star-studded musical hoot featuring Psych’s Timothy Omundson as King Richard and Joshua Sasse (Rogue) as the titular knight Galavant — a duo locked in tuneful, comical battle for the love of Madalena (Mallory Jansen), the savvy beauty who owns both their hearts. Or their hormones, at any rate. “A friend of mine said it’s a bit like The Princess […]