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Geek Tyrant
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
First Poster Art for the KING OF THE HILL Revival Series — GeekTyrant
Hulu has released the first poster art for Mike Judge and Greg Daniels's revival of the hit animated series King of the Hill , and it shows us that times have changed. As for the setting of the series, it previously reported that the revival would be set 15 years after the original show ended and center on the middle-class Hill family living a normal life in Texas in the wake of Trump's presidency. It was previously revealed that Bobby is 21 years old and he became a chef. It was explained that he has "loved food his whole life." He has a fusion restaurant, and his career as a robata chef "was inspired by his most cherished memory of all — weekends spent grilling with his dad.' A biography for Bobby further details that Bobby is a "self-taught chef" and "one of the youngest contestants on King of the Grill." Pamela Adlon, who voiced Bobby Hill on the original show, will return to voice the character. She said: "We're in the second season [creating] the reboot, and Bobby is 21. 'He's a chef in a fusion restaurant in Dallas. And it's been incredible. It's just been really fun. I think it's been freakier for Mike and Greg to think about Bobby going from 12 to being 21 and having a relationship and being a person. 'But don't we all go through that with our kids and our friends' kids? It is shocking when I see my friends' kids and they're all grown up. And I'm like, 'Wait a second, what just happened?' So, it's just a little bit of a mess." Craig Erwich, president, ABC Entertainment, Hulu and Disney Branded Television streaming originals said in a previous statement: 'We are all so excited to welcome back Hank, Peggy and Bobby, and to see what they have to say about the world we live in and continue the conversations we began years ago. 'This show has all of the perfect ingredients to meet this moment in animation at Hulu, and we're so thankful to be having those conversations alongside this talented group.'
ABC News
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier on why he wanted to join the Marvel Cinematic Universe
For Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier, he knew he wanted in on the project upon hearing that Florence Pugh (Midsommar, Oppenheimer) would be involved. "I'm such a big Florence Pugh fan," Schreier tells ABC Entertainment. "Ever since Lady Macbeth, I just felt like [you have to take] any opportunity you have to work with her, in any context." The 36th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), Thunderbolts* sees Pugh, as Black Widow assassin Yelena Belova, leading a group of criminals and super-powered misfits who are forced to band together against a common enemy who wants them dead. New York's streets take yet another punding in Thunderbolts*. (Pictured, l-r) Sebastian Stan, Hannah John-Kamen, Florence Pugh, Wyatt Russell and David Harbour. ( Supplied: Disney ) Also reprising their roles from previous MCU properties are Sebastian Stan as Bucky, Wyatt Russell as John Walker, Hannah John-Kamen as Ghost and David Harbour as Red Guardian. And yes, that is indeed an asterisk at the end of Thunderbolts, but no, don't bother looking for a footnote at the end of this article explaining why. There has been a lot of online speculation about the asterisk, but you'll just have to wait until the end of the movie to find out what it means. I've previously been on record as a comic book nerd who now suffers from comic book movie fatigue. Bigger set pieces, louder explosions, more cameos and even more wink-wink Easter eggs can only take you so far before the eventual diminishing returns. How much more destruction can New York City take at this point? (If you've seen the trailers, you already know that The Big Apple has once again not been spared.) "Working on a Marvel movie is always so bonkers, like, 'We're gonna do that?'" Pugh told The Hollywood Reporter. ( Supplied: Disney ) But the good news is — other than succumbing to some overly familiar MCU beats at the end of the film — Thunderbolts*, for the most part, is a decidedly different and genuinely fresh entry in this ever-expanding cinematic universe. The film is a well-written, well-acted, action-packed thrill ride that is a Trojan horse for an earnest, if not especially nuanced, exploration of themes such as isolation and depression. Indie creatives, assemble! Schreier looks understandably exhausted on our video call (likely from hours of fielding similar questions to the ones I'm about to ask), but is otherwise affable and engaged. He asks me about the guitars I have behind me, and he's so nice that I feel bad about cutting him off, but I only have 11 minutes of his time and I'd rather not spend three of them talking about the guitars in my study gathering more dust than Red Guardian's couch. "[Thunderbolts*] takes place in such a short amount of time that it always felt like it could exist in its own kind of contained corner of the universe," Schreier says. ( Supplied: Disney ) Bringing in Schreier, best known for his work on Netflix hit series Beef (2023), was a good move for Marvel. "From the moment I got hired," says Schreier, "[Marvel Studios president] Kevin [Feige] did come in and say, 'Yeah, take it and run with it. Make something different, take a different approach.'" Of course, indie auteurs making Marvel movies is nothing new. Ang Lee (Hulk, 2003), Taika Waititi (Thor Ragnarok, 2017) and Chloe Zhao (Eternals, 2021), among others, have lent their talents to Marvel, with various levels of success. What we've never seen is Marvel going to such lengths to make sure we know their new film is taking a different direction. They even dropped an alternate trailer just to tell you that Thunderbolts* features the director and writers from Beef (Schreier, Lee Sung Jin, Joanna Calo), the cinematographer of The Green Knight (Andrew Droz Palermo), the production designer of Hereditary (Grace Yun), the editor of Minari (Harry Yun) and the composers of Everything Everywhere All At Once (Son Lux). Loading YouTube content That's an enviable creative team for any A24 film, and a breath of fresh air for Marvel. The Avengers are not walking through that door Part of the studio's challenge with their recent films is that many of the franchise's household names — such as Iron Man, Thor and Captain America (Steve Rogers) — have been taken off the board. As main antagonist Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (played by the always brilliant Julia Louis-Dreyfus) says early in the film, "The Avengers are not walking through that door." "It's got a lot of grit and it's very raw and it's ... like old-school Marvel," Louis-Dreyfus told Carson J Kelly. ( Supplied: Disney ) Thunderbolts* instead features a discount-store Black Widow (Pugh's Yelena) and cosplay Captain America (Russell's John Walker) among other B and C-level Marvel characters. But the film cleverly leans into this. The Thunderbolts are not heroes. And rather than going too big picture, the film has the characters dealing with the small but very immediate concerns of their own personal safety, as they are also left to ponder the wisdom of their life choices and the consequences of past trauma. Schreier says he was excited about this idea from the start. "Those early discussions were just about how to flip the kind of expected narrative about a team of bad guys sent to do covert missions," he says. "[It's] really more a story about people that were being discarded and sent to kill each other and sort of thrown away." "On most of the Marvel films that I've worked on … it's always been very inclusive," Sebastian Stan told The Hollywood Reporter. ( Supplied: Disney ) And getting to play with lesser-known characters is an opportunity rather than a challenge, he says. "You don't necessarily have that weight of expectation and you have some license to kind of take these characters in different places and tell new stories with them. And we really tried to embrace that, and use it to our advantage." Light and shade The film's most impressive achievement is that it's able to tread that fine line between playful and pathos. Thunderbolts* may be first-and-foremost a popcorn crowd-pleaser, but it also deals with some heavy themes — such as mental health, loneliness, loss, rejection and shame. This is due in no small part to the excellent ensemble cast, all of whom are given scope to show their range. But it's Pugh's Yelena that particularly stands out. "I think that she just really pops off the screen in almost everything that she does," Schreier says of Pugh. ( Supplied: Disney ) The English actor brings believable depth to a character that, up until now, had mostly been a Cold-War-era Russian stereotype. "Actors like Florence can really give you all those sides of a character and can find the humour, even if it's coming from a dark place, so it doesn't just feel like the movie is flat or only living in darkness," Schreier says. "You can feel like there's a texture to it that hopefully does feel earned when we get to those places." But much of the credit should also go to Schreier and his team of indie cool creatives, who manage to keep all the balls in the air while telling a story that treads a little off the beaten path for the MCU. "I was coming off of doing a show called Beef, where we explored a lot of the same themes, and [we] also found the tonal balance where there are really funny moments and also a lot of heartfelt moments and it goes to some dark places," Schreier says. "I think that we always just believed that these stories didn't need to be niche stories anymore, that there was a universality to feeling like this, even if it seems like an odd fit for a big summer action movie." Loading YouTube content
ABC News
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Please Like Me's Tom Ward on writing Étoile with Gilmore Girls creators
Australian TV comedy writer and producer Tom Ward was living in rural Aotearoa/New Zealand with his young family when he got the call. Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, executive producers of Gilmore Girls and The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, had read one of his scripts. Not only that: they were interested in hiring him to write on their upcoming ballet dramedy series, Étoile. A few days after the Please Like Me Star talked with the couple in late 2022, he got another call — this time from his agent. Photo shows A man in a blue room looking into a mirror. Josh Thomas on how he stumbled into being an audience surrogate for millennials around Australia. "He was like, 'Hey, remember how you promised that if you went for this job, that you'd move to New York with your family?'" Ward tells ABC Entertainment. "I was like, 'Yeah, I remember saying that thing that I was obviously going to say just to get this meeting.' " He was like, 'Well, now you do have to move to New York … because you're going to be working on this show.' " While Ward says he "wouldn't recommend" trying to secure US visas for an entire family over the Christmas period, they pulled it off. Within two months, they'd swapped summer in rural Aotearoa/New Zealand for Brooklyn in the depths of winter. Why Tom Ward wanted to explore the weird world of dance Ward, who has "absolutely watched some Gilmore Girls", says he "felt a definite kind of spiritual connection" to Sherman-Palladino and Palladino before he even met the Emmy-Award-winning couple. He says they share a "similar gaze" to that of Josh Thomas, creator and star of Please Like Me. "When they look at the world, [they see] the theatrics of life that can exist around everyday drama," Ward muses. Much of Ward's career has revolved around this idea, from his writing on He immediately saw Étoile's potential as an extension of that work. Loading YouTube content The show sees two flailing rival ballet companies in New York and Paris trade their top talent for a year, and launch tandem seasons and a transatlantic marketing campaign to publicise the move. The desperate plot to boost dwindling ticket sales and improve reviews just so happens to be funded by a weapons manufacturer's blood money. At first, NY ballet company exec Jack McMillan (played by Luke Kirby, pictured) is in denial about the fact the future of the dance is in question. ( Supplied: Prime Video ) The series primarily follows Jack McMillan (The Marvelous Mrs Maisel star Luke Kirby), the nepo baby/executive director of the Metropolitan Ballet Theatre in New York, and Geneviève Lavigne (Charlotte Gainsbourg), the cutthroat head of Le Ballet National in Paris; the competing execs once enjoyed a romantic entanglement and still have the tension to show for it. Then there's Cheyenne Antonius (Lou de Laâge), the equally despised, feared and revered titular "danseuse étoile", (lead dancer) who is so good at what she does that her volatility has been permitted in Paris. But will she get away with that behaviour in New York? Tobias Bell (played by Gideon Glick, pictured) is one of the dancers and choreographers caught up in the swap who really wish they hadn't been. ( Supplied: Prime Video ) Among others, Cheyenne swaps places with Tobias Bell (Gideon Glick, another Mrs Maisel alum), the brilliant but exceedingly particular choreographer who struggles with all the change that comes with a move to France. There is drama, and a lot of it, but the mesmerising ballet performances interspersed throughout offer a reprieve, as well as a reminder of what every character in Étoile is fighting for: a world in which such artistry survives, and might one day thrive again. We're not in Stars Hollow anymore — Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino's latest show is the definition of grand. ( Supplied: Prime Video ) From Please Like Me to table reads in Paris Ward is still reeling from the experience of bringing Étoile's first season to the screen from the writers' room. Everything about it felt novel, from heading into work at a real film lot in Brooklyn ("it looks like the set of 30 Rock"), to Sherman-Palladino's office. Loading Instagram content "It's a sight to behold in itself — that's all I'll say. It's gorgeous," Ward teases. When pushed a little more, he adds: "OK, all I'll say is: multiple chandeliers." The scale of the production was so much larger than anything Ward had worked on in Australia, and so was his role. "For my episode, I had the responsibility of making sure the script made it to screen, and that was another real showbiz moment," he says. "The reading of my script happened in Paris because that's where we were shooting [at the time]. "It was quite surreal to be sitting in what was the set for this unbelievable Paris ballet studio, watching all these incredible actors read my episode." And working with veteran TV creators Sherman-Palladino and Palladino, he says, was "an amazing and huge learning experience". "I'd never worked with people with that much experience under their belt, [or who] understand the value of personality in a writers' room. " Their instincts for what works and what doesn't makes the whole process feel like a well-oiled machine. " Indeed, Étoile is the result of years of exploration by Sherman-Palladino and Palladino into not only dramedy, but the weirdness of the dance world. ( Photo shows Emily, left, wears a white wedding dress and veil as she cuts a pink and red cake with Tom, right, both smiling. This is the story of how Emily Barclay and Tom Ward's relationship started between takes. First, there was the iconic dance teacher Miss Patty, who ran a chaotic studio in their enduring cult hit Gilmore Girls; then there was their far less successful 2012 dramedy, Étoile feels like a natural evolution from those two series; it's as fast-paced and zingy as you'd expect of any Sherman-Palladino, Palladino offering, with the compelling side characters their shows produce so well. Gilmore Girls and The Marvelous Mrs Maisel fans will delight in many familiar faces. It also tends towards The Marvelous Mrs Maisel in its massive scale, level of darkness, maturity and Jewish representation. Étoile was When asked what we can expect from him in the future, he coyly says: "You can say, 'Totally exciting things.'" Étoile is streaming now on Prime Video.
