‘The Big Bang Theory's John Ross Bowie To Join Max Spinoff, Reprising Barry Kripke Role
EXCLUSIVE: Gweat news for woyaw Big Bang fans: another popular character from the hit CBS sitcom is poised to return for the upcoming spinoff on Max. John Ross Bowie, who played plasma physicist Barry Kripke on The Big Bang Theory, is joining fellow alums Kevin Sussman (Stuart Bloom), Brian Posehn (Bert Kibbler) and Lauren Lapkus (Denise) on the offshoot from franchise boss Chuck Lorre and Warner Bros. Television.
Since the project is still in development and has not been officially greenlighted, Bowie — just like Sussman, Posehn and Lapkus — has signed a WBTV talent holding deal with the purpose of starring in the proposed offshoot.
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As Deadline reported exclusively in December, Big Bang co-creator Lorre has recruited feature writer Zak Penn and fellow Big Bang co-creator Bill Prady for the spinoff, with the trio co-writing the script and set to executive produce the single-camera series.
Bowie was a mainstay on the original series. His character Barry Kripke quickly became a fan favorite when it was introduced in Season 2 and continued to recur for the rest of the series' 12-season run. A Caltech plasma physicist and string theorist, Kripke was known for relentlessly teasing his colleagues — with most of his barbs directed at his string theorist rival Sheldon (Jim Parsosn) — and for his distinct speech pattern. He has rhotacism, pronouncing 'r' and 'l' as 'w', making him sound a bit like a cartoon character.
The addition of his recurring role on Big Bang, Bowie starred on the ABC comedy series Speechless. He also recurred on another Chuck Lorre CBS comedy, United States of Al. His feature credits include Jumanji: The Next Level. Bowie, who is a regular performer at The Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Los Angeles and New York, is repped by Innovative Artists.
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Cosmopolitan
an hour ago
- Cosmopolitan
‘Ginny & Georgia' Season 3 on Netflix Tackles Painful Periods
New episodes of Ginny & Georgia season 3 went online on Thursday and there is practically no adolescent issue that this mother-daughter dramedy hasn't covered. Losing your virginity? Check. Getting into a huge fight with your bestie? Yep. Getting drunk at a house party? Got that covered. Learning that your mom killed your stepdad? Also check. Okay, maybe that last one isn't so typical, but you get the idea. So it's no surprise that in season 3 of Ginny & Georgia, the Netflix hit is tackling that infamous coming-of-age milestone: periods. For the past two seasons, fans have watched high school sophomore Ginny and her core group of girlfriends, Max, Abby, and Norah try to survive Wellsbury High. In classic teen show fashion, every character has their own issues. Max is a girl-crazy drama queen (literally, she's an actor), Abby is struggling with body dysmorphia and bulimia, and now, in season 3, Norah's got period problems. Throughout the newest season, Norah is either on her period, waiting for it, or complaining about it. 'My period is so irregular, I can't even predict when it's going to happen,' she says in episode 6, right before getting all of her friends to take pregnancy tests with her. The very next episode, her pregnancy scare is forgotten, but her mysterious period ailments continue. 'My mom took me to the gyno, which was pointless because they just ask me a hundred different questions. And you don't know your family history when you're adopted.' (Yep, the show also has an adoption subplot.) The doctors ran tests, Norah explained, but still can't figure out what's going on. Well, I have a pretty good guess. I first got my period when I was 11, and for five years, when doctors asked me if my periods were heavy or irregular, I shrugged and said, 'No.' I didn't know any better. What I didn't tell my pediatrician was that I was bleeding through super tampons and maxi pads, staining my pajamas and sheets, and downing Advil to deal with my period cramps. Despite having two sisters and a whole gaggle of girlfriends, I truly thought that my period was normal because I had learned to live with it. I never thought to compare notes. Then one morning during a particularly heavy period, I took a step out of bed and a blood clot flew out of my underwear and onto the carpet. I had bled through the super plus tampon I was wearing and my overnight maxi pad. The next time my doctor asked me if my periods were heavy, I finally said, 'Yes.' Unlike Norah, I was overweight, so my doctor already suspected I had a hormonal issue and sent me to an endocrinologist straight away. A few doctors appointments and 8 to 10 vials worth of blood tests later, I was diagnosed with PCOS—Polycystic Ovary Syndrome. It's a hormone disorder believed to be hereditary that can cause, among other things, excess facial hair, heavy or irregular menstrual cycles, weight gain, and ovarian cysts. Some women don't have a lot of symptoms; others have all of the above. At the time, the criteria for PCOS was extremely vague, and the possible treatments were basically nonexistent. (In case you need a reminder: Women's health is underfunded, under-researched, and undervalued.) Effective medical treatments for PCOS are hard to come by. When I asked about next steps, my doctor shrugged their shoulders, gave me a prescription for birth control, and told me to lose weight (which, oh, by the way, is harder to do when you have PCOS). Over 15 years later, it seems not much has changed. At the end of the season, Norah's period mystery remains unsolved. She doesn't know why her periods are irregular or why she has bad cramps. And after years of just dealing with it, she seems resigned to just barreling through. I feel her pain. While I assume that she'll get a hard-fought diagnosis of either PCOS or endometriosis in season 4, it's also possible that she'll never get the answers she's looking for. Ask any woman with PCOS or endometriosis and they'll tell you it took years for them to even go to a doctor to discuss period pain, let alone be diagnosed. And that's partly due to the fact that many women just don't know that these conditions exist. In modern America, period pain is often dismissed, and uterus-related conversations are still taboo. Even in teen shows like Gilmore Girls or Gossip Girl, characters don't acknowledge their periods until there's a pregnancy scare plot. Young women like Norah might not learn about PCOS or endometriosis from their friends or their mothers or even their doctors—so I'm hoping that at least for some teens and tweens, Norah's storyline on Ginny & Georgia can fill in the gaps. And if a hormone disorder is the cause of her period problems, I hope she gets diagnosed faster than I did.
Forbes
an hour ago
- Forbes
What The Streaming Wars Reveal about Bad Strategy
Rooftop party and viewing in Los Angeles. Created By Michelle Loret de Mola using Midjourney Max just pulled a classic Hollywood move: the reboot. Two years after Warner Bros. Discovery stripped away the iconic 'HBO' from its name, they've decided to bring it back. Max will now be called HBO Max…again. This will be the streaming service's fifth name change. They were HBO Go in 2008, then HBO Now in 2015, then HBO Max in 2020, then just Max in 2023, and now (hopefully, finally) back to HBO Max. On the face of it, this just seems like bad brand management. But there's a bigger lesson to be learned here. These changes were more than just rebrands: each new name came along with a fundamentally different business strategy. HBO succeeded when it relied on its own creativity. And then stumbled when it tried to copy competitors. For decades, HBO had a unique playbook. It focused on a combination of recently released movies, exclusive live events, and original series. While broadcast television depended on advertising, HBO used a subscription model. HBO played a leading role in what has been called 'television's second golden age.' It greenlit shows that shaped the culture, like The Sopranos, Sex and The City, The Wire, and Game of Thrones. At its core, HBO's playbook was all about the curation and production of prestige content. Of course, that was before the consultants came in. In June 2018, Time Warner, HBO's parent company, was acquired by AT&T for $85 billion. Shortly after completing the acquisition, John Stankey, the new CEO of WarnerMedia decided to change the playbook. To Stankey, HBO's tightly curated, time and resource-intensive model didn't seem scalable. He wanted a broader, more mass market platform with more content, more engagement, and more subscriber growth. In a town hall to HBO employees, Stankey emphasized, "We need hours a day. It's not hours a week, and it's not hours a month. We need hours a day. You are competing with devices that sit in people's hands that capture their attention every 15 minutes. I want more hours of engagement." Stankey believed substantially more content would increase viewer engagement, and that would provide more data, in turn enabling monetization through advertising and subscriptions. In short, HBO's new strategy would be to stop being HBO and start trying to be Netflix. And who wouldn't want to be Netflix? Netflix was the company that slayed Blockbuster, reinvented TV distribution, disrupted Hollywood, and rewrote the rules of what it meant to be a media company. Today, Netflix enjoys a half trillion dollar market cap that is double that of Disney and 22 times that of Warner Bros. Discovery. There was just one problem with that playbook: HBO isn't Netflix. What followed was seven years of wandering in the wilderness, as HBO struggled to emulate the Netflix model. Frustrated with the new strategy, HBO CEO Richard Plepler walked away in 2019. HBO's original content was folded into Warner Bros.' extensive library of content and relaunched as HBO Max. And while global subscriptions for HBO Max reached 69.4 million by October 2021, much of that growth came because we were all locked up at home during a pandemic. Unable to drive further growth from its acquisition, AT&T spun off WarnerMedia to create Warner Bros. Discovery in 2022. And things got even worse. Warner CEO David Zaslav doubled down on the Netflix playbook by dropping the HBO name altogether and flooding the platform with content from Discovery and Food Network. Suddenly, the platform that brought you The Wire was pumping out shows like Dr. Pimple Popper and My 600-lb Life. The end result of this copycat strategy was external confusion, internal demoralization, and financial underperformance. In recent months, Warner Bros. Discovery execs have begun to concede that they simply can't compete head-to-head with Netflix. As JB Perrette, the president of streaming, said in an interview, 'We started listening to consumers saying, 'Hey, we don't really want more content, we want something that is different, we want to end the death scroll with something that is better.'' It turns out no one wants a second-rate Netflix when they can already subscribe to the real thing. They want an alternative. They want HBO. Over the past year, Max has regained momentum by focusing more on quality, adult shows like The White Lotus and The Pitt instead of trying to provide a firehose of entertainment for everyone. The return to being called HBO Max is a long-overdue recognition that this is where its future lies. WarnerMedia made the same mistake with other properties, too. The company hired McKinsey to develop a growth playbook for CNN. Trying to emulate Disney+, they decided to launch CNN+. But guess what? Anderson Cooper isn't Iron Man. Wolf Blitzer isn't Obi Wan Kenobi. The service was dead in a month. According to Nielsen, Warner Bros. Discovery drew 1.5% of viewing time in March. This was less than Disney, Amazon, Paramount, Roku, and Tubi. Netflix dominated, with 8% of total viewership. The lessons from the streaming world apply to every industry: the minute you stop asking what makes you special and start copying others, you've already lost. You have to be creative. You have to come up with your own playbook for growth. It's a mistake to think you can succeed by copying the strategies of successful competitors. Trying to win by benchmarking high-performing peers feels safe. It has persuasive appeal when presented in a PowerPoint deck. A huge industry of consultants has grown up around it, adding to the illusion of safety. And it's an easy way to win short-term praise from the business press and investors. In reality, though, benchmarking is a fast track to mediocrity. Copying others only tells you what worked yesterday for someone else, when what leaders need to focus on is what will work for them tomorrow. Great companies aren't built on copycat playbooks — they succeed by doing something original based on their unique strengths. Even while others were trying to copy it, Netflix stayed true to its own unique playbook based on global content, viewer data, and rapid iteration. When the company took out $2 billion in debt in 2018 to help finance a surge in original content, skeptics questioned whether its strategy was sustainable. But it wasn't a gamble — it was an investment based on data. Unlike traditional studios, Netflix knew exactly what its viewers were watching, where, for how long, and when they dropped off. It used those insights to launch hit shows like Bridgerton, Squid Game, and Stranger Things. Netflix also localized content early, producing Korean hits for South Korea and Indian dramas for South Asia and the Middle East. By the end of 2024, the skeptics had been silenced — Netflix's subscriber numbers topped 300 million, more than double the total at the end of 2018. Netflix operates on the premise that it will win by doing things its own way. For its part, Disney could have fallen into the trap of trying to chase Netflix when it launched its Disney+ streaming service in 2019. But rather than flooding the zone with content, Disney realized that its winning playbook depended on developing content around signature franchises like Star Wars, Marvel, and Pixar. These worlds are ultimately more than content — they're emotional ecosystems. And Disney knows how to turn emotions into revenue streams — through a flywheel of fan engagement, merchandise, theatrical releases, and theme park rides. For that reason, Disney doesn't define success solely through streaming metrics. It also pays close attention to loyalty, lifetime customer value, park attendance, and toy sales. Netflix and Disney+ succeeded by developing their own unique playbooks. HBO lost its way by trying to be something it wasn't. Influenced by consultants and consensus thinking, it was led into the sea of sameness, where companies go to die…or at least spend years treading water. To be sure, that doesn't mean you shouldn't watch and learn from competitors. But there's a big difference between stealing a page from someone else and trying to copy their whole playbook. The risk of doing that is threefold. First, it means you're playing to someone else's strengths, not your own. Second, it means you're focusing on what worked yesterday, not tomorrow. And third, you end up the same as everyone else, and sink into mediocrity. So if benchmarking isn't the answer, what is? The path to success lies in writing your own playbook, starting by answering five fundamental questions that define who you are and your vision for the future. HBO's latest reboot has been greeted with its fair share of sniggers and eye-rolls. But it shows that the company is waking up to what made it great in the first place. That's a good thing, giving it a shot at renewed success. The path forward for HBO isn't about going bigger or trying to please everyone. It's about going bolder, with fewer, better stories that shape the culture. In the end, the companies that come out on top aren't the ones chasing the crowd. They're the ones bold enough to say: This is who we are. This is what we believe. And this is how we win. No benchmarking required.
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
Scientists Calculate That the Entire Big Bang Must Have Taken Place Inside a Black Hole
The standard model of cosmology may be the best explanation we've got for why the universe is the way it is and how it all came to be. But it's not the only explanation. Enter black hole cosmology. It's a radical idea which proposes that the Big Bang — the rapid unraveling of an infinitely dense point, believed to have given birth to the cosmos as we know it — actually took place in a black hole, which itself formed inside a larger "parent" universe. Ergo, all of us — and every star, planet, galaxy, and internet rando — are living inside one of these mysterious singularities. Enrique Gaztanaga, lead author of a new study published in the journal Physical Review D and a professor at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth, isn't the first to propose this controversial idea. But his team's research offers a new model for imagining how this hypothetical scenario took place. "Our calculations suggest the Big Bang was not the start of everything, but rather the outcome of a gravitational crunch or collapse that formed a very massive black hole — followed by a bounce inside it," Gaztanaga wrote in an essay for The Conversation. Certainly, there are a lot of holes you could poke in the standard model. Why is there more matter than anti-matter, when the universe should be uniform? Why did the universe undergo a period of "cosmic inflation" in which it expanded at faster than light speeds, then stopped? And why does its present day rate of expansion appear to be different depending on how we measure it? Gaztanaga's main gripe seems to be with our current understanding of a singularity. To him, the idea of the universe starting as a point of infinite density is immensely unsatisfying. "This is not just a technical glitch; it's a deep theoretical problem that suggests we don't really understand the beginning at all," he wrote. Gaztanaga also takes aim at other convenient cosmological constructions like dark energy, which is intended to explain why the universe's expansion is mysteriously accelerating. This hypothetical force is thought to make up 68 percent of the universe but is completely unobservable, leaving room for different-minded scientists to call its existence into question. Rethinking singularities could neatly resolve many of these conundrums. We return to Gaztanaga's paper. "Gravitational collapse does not have to end in a singularity," he wrote for The Conversation. "Our maths show that as we approach the potential singularity, the size of the universe changes as a (hyperbolic) function of cosmic time." This is a bold claim. The consensus is that gravitational collapse — like a star imploding into a black hole — must result in an infinitely dense singularity. What Gaztanaga is arguing happens instead is that the collapse not only halt short of completely crushing the matter, but reverses course — a "bounce," in his terminology. "What emerges on the other side of the bounce is a universe remarkably like our own," Gaztanaga explains. "Even more surprisingly, the rebound naturally produces the two separate phases of accelerated expansion — inflation and dark energy — driven not by a hypothetical fields but by the physics of the bounce itself." It's a fascinating explanation, but there's a lot that remains to be proved. It relies on discounting some very well-established physics behind singularities. The standard model may not be perfect, but it's the standard for a reason. It'll take a lot more to dethrone it, and Gaztanaga is optimistic that future missions like the European Space Agency's ARRAKIHS, which will study invisible structures of dark matter to test the model, could reveal the answers we're looking for. More on cosmology: Astronomers Confused to Discover That a Bunch of Nearby Galaxies Are Pointing Directly at Us
