Quiet since November, The Problem with Jon Stewart is set to start up again on AppleTV+ on March 3.
23.01.2022 - 01:19 / variety.com
Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticDeep into W. Kamau Bell’s new four-part documentary, “We Need to Talk About Cosby,” panelists are asked to describe who Bill Cosby is, as if to a person who had never heard of him before. Does one lead with his phenomenal career successes as a comedian and actor? Or the crimes of which he’s been credibly accused — and for which he was convicted in 2018, before that conviction was overturned on a technicality in 2021?It’s a familiar question, one of separating the art from the artist — so familiar, indeed, that Bell literally asking, in voice-over, “Can you separate the art from the artist?” five minutes before the documentary ends feels a little trite.
But what has come before does an elegant job of setting forth why the entanglement of fame and wrongdoing is especially pernicious in Cosby’s case. In this series, a part of the Sundance Film Festival’s virtual programming Saturday before launching on Showtime Jan. 30, Bell marshalls incisive commentary and archival video.
In doing so, the comic and director who is a self-proclaimed “child of Bill Cosby” less makes a case than presents a problem. It remains for viewers to decide what to do with Cosby’s legacy. Prior to the widespread airing of allegations that Cosby drugged and raped women, our cultural understanding of him ran along parallel tracks.
For one thing, his comedy coexisted with a thrumming backbeat of rumor and innuendo about his misdeeds, before the story eventually blew open. (Bell even shows us instances of Cosby, in his stand-up and his sitcom, joking about drugging women.) Even before that, though, Cosby was at once entertainer and national hero, a position he embraced. Bell, through commentators he interviews on-camera
.Quiet since November, The Problem with Jon Stewart is set to start up again on AppleTV+ on March 3.
Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticMuch in the vein of “The Girl on the Train” or “The Woman in the Window,” HBO Max’s new limited series “The Girl Before” depicts the aftereffects of trauma taking place within the mind of a troubled woman. Also like those projects, it’s neither as acute as it thinks it is or as fun as viewers may want it to be. This British show — which is adapted by J.
Bright Road (1953), Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), and 1974’s comedy Uptown Saturday Night, which the actor and singer directed. That film, in particular, is notable for its cast, which includes Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Flip Wilson, Richard Pryor, Calvin Lockhart, Roscoe Lee Browne, and Bill Cosby.Also on the bill, Robert Altman’s 1996 jazz-noir Kansas City, in which Belafonte plays a gangster named “Seldom Seen.” The film also stars Jennifer Jason Leigh, Miranda Richardson, and Steve Buscemi.The channel is also highlighting the innovative independent works of Melvin Van Peebles, a one-man creative force who often starred in, wrote, directed, and composed his films.Of the four entries, the most notable are Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), in which a Black man outruns white police authorities (the score, by Van Peebles, was performed by Earth, Wind & Fire) and Watermelon Man (1970), a renowned social comedy starring Godfrey Cambridge and Estelle Parsons, in which a white bigot wakes up to find his skin has turned Black.Also on tap: The Harder They Come (1972), featuring reggae artist Jimmy Cliff as a singer who faces down corruption in Jamaica’s music industry.
A judge on Friday in Los Angeles appeared strongly inclined to allow Bill Cosby to invoke his Fifth Amendment privilege and avoid giving a deposition in the lawsuit of a woman who alleges he sexually abused her when she was 15 in the mid-1970s. At a hearing to argue the issue, Superior Court Judge Craig Karlan agreed with Cosby's attorney that the 84-year-old has a reasonable fear of again facing criminal charges for one or more of the many sexual assault allegations that have been publicly aired against him and has a right to avoid saying anything under oath that might lead to such charges. "It does appear he has a reasonable fear of prosecution, and if new information came out, that could cause a prosecutor to change their mind," Karlan said.
SANTA MONICA, Calif. -- A Los Angeles judge on Friday appeared strongly inclined to allow Bill Cosby to invoke his Fifth Amendment privilege and avoid giving a deposition in the lawsuit of a woman who alleges he sexually abused her when she was 15 in the mid-1970s.At a hearing to argue the issue, Superior Court Judge Craig Karlan agreed with Cosby's attorney that the 84-year-old has a reasonable fear of again facing criminal charges for one or more of the many sexual assault allegations that have been publicly aired against him, and has a right to avoid saying anything under oath that might lead to such charges.“It does appear he has a reasonable fear of prosecution, and if new information came out, that could cause a prosecutor to change their mind,” Karlan said.
R Kelly has been granted a two week extension on the deadline to file an appeal against his conviction in the New York courts last year.The extension was required after he contracted COVID-19 in prison. His new lawyer Jennifer Bonjean says her client is “doing well” but that his illness is making it hard from him to discuss the case over the phone.At trial last September, Kelly was found guilty of building and running a criminal enterprise that allowed him to prolifically groom and abuse young people, often teenagers.
An attorney for Bill Cosby asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to reject prosecutors' recent bid to revive his criminal sexual assault case now that he's been released from prison. The 84-year-old actor and comedian has been free since June, when a Pennsylvania appeals court overturned his conviction and released him after nearly three years. The state’s highest court found that Cosby believed he had a nonprosecution agreement with a former district attorney when he gave damaging testimony in the accuser's 2005 lawsuit.That testimony later led to his arrest in 2015.
Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticSPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you have not yet watched “You Who Cannot See, Think of Those Who Can,” the Jan. 30 episode of “Euphoria.”At the risk of writing too personally about a show that’s all about personal upheaval, I had wondered whether parenthood might turn me off “Euphoria.”I was an admirer of the show’s first season, which aired in 2019, but after becoming a parent in 2020 I suspected that the show’s depiction of American teenagerhood as a broken-down garden of temptation might not intrigue me as it had once before.
Bill Cosby, 84, and his wife Camille Cosby, 77, have had five children during their 58-year marriage. Once affectionately dubbed America’s dad, the comedian’s reputation was tarnished after 60 women have spoken out and claimed that he sexually assaulted them, with the claims ranging from groping to rape. While many of these instances had happened too long ago for him to be convicted, he was able to be tried for sexually assaulting his former friend Andrea Constand in 2004 and was found guilty on three counts of 2018. The decision was reversed due to a legal technicality and he was freed in 2021.
Camille Cosby, 77, has been married to disgraced comedian Bill Cosby, 84, for 58 years. Once known as America’s dad, Bill was accused of sexually assaulting, with claims ranging from groping to rape, 60 women. The crusade against Cosby started when Andrea Constand accused him of assaulting her in 2004 and filed a police report against him in 2005, which he was found guilty of in 2018. 10 years later after the incident took place, between 2014 and 2015, over 50 women came forward and accused him of assault.
Addie Morfoot ContributorW. Kamau Bell expected Bill Cosby to respond to the four-part Showtime docuseries that Bell has produced about the pioneering but now disgraced entertainer. But Bell was surprised by how Cosby chose to comment following the Jan.
Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticThe real crime story at the heart of “Suspicion” is brutal underuse of the show’s biggest star.Uma Thurman is close to the center of the action on Apple TV’s new mystery series. She plays a high-flying businesswoman whose son is kidnapped from a New York hotel.
Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticIn the first two of its four parts, the doc depicts a rising star whose decision to take her career by the reins represented a split from her famous family, through old footage as well as interviews with Jackson closer to the present day. Those interview segments, though, struggle to reveal much about a figure whose poise, and whose commitment to privacy, makes “Janet Jackson” a challenge.
W. Kamau Bell's docuseries, , has many people talking after its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival over the weekend, including the subject of the four-part project.Bell serves as the narrator and co-executive producer for the docuseries that explores the life, career and impact of Bill Cosby, as well as how his sexual assault allegations forever changed his legacy. The series examines the rise of Cosby from comedian to «America's Dad,» and asks if it's possible to separate the art from the artist, especially when weighing his legacy against the 50+ sexual assaults he's alleged to have perpetrated during his career.«Mr.
“We Need to Talk About Cosby” series, which documents his rise and fall from the limelight.The scathing four-part Showtime docuseries from filmmaker W. Kamau Bell is set to debut on Jan. 30.
Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticA comedy mystery should, ideally, be both comic and mysterious.Unfortunately, the new Netflix series “The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window” drops one of its most successful jokes in its title — and doesn’t have much to recommend it as a whodunit, either. A parody of book-club thrillers like “The Girl on the Train” and “The Woman in the Window,” this series stars Kristen Bell as a grieving mother who has descended into substance abuse and who becomes obsessed with a crime she believes she’s seen.
Bill Cosby’s rep Andrew Wyatt has issued a statement regarding W. Kamau Bell’s four-part docuseries “We Need to Talk About Cosby”.
moved on to dogs. Hef’s purported penchant for bestiality is just one of the explosive claims made in the forthcoming A&E documentary “Secrets of Playboy,” out Monday. The damning 10-part series unmasks the once-heralded late mogul — who, until now, has been revered as a god-like stud, slinking around his estate in silk pajamas and a smoking jacket — to reveal the ugly truth about the man who built his sex empire on the backs of vulnerable women. “He was a predator,” Hefner’s ex-girlfriend Sondra Theodore, 65, told The Post. “I watched him, I watched his game. And I watched a lot of girls go through [the Playboy Mansion] gates looking farm-fresh, and leaving looking tired and haggard.”The former Sunday school teacher turned 1977 Playboy magazine centerfold model began dating Hefner after meeting him at a one of his many lascivious mansion parties.
Even the title of W. Kamau Bell’s “We Need to Talk About Cosby” is loaded – because when we talk about Bill Cosby, we’re not just talking about Bill Cosby.