June 2015 Archives - Channel Guide Magazine

Not Shackled By Forgotten Words: CNN brings Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me to television

June 24, 2015 Lori Acken 3

CNN presents the television debut of the feature-film documentary Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me Sunday at 9/8CT. Glen Campbell’s music has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. My parents played his LPs on the weekends and gave me change to play “Wichita Lineman” and “Gentle On My Mind” on the jukebox at the local bowling alley and supper clubs. The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour was required family viewing — and a very good time, indeed. And as I got a little older, my friends and I bellowed Campbell’s crossover hits “Southern Nights” and “Rhinestone […]

HBO’s “The Brink”: Jack Black’s Tenacious Diplomacy

June 18, 2015 Ryan Berenz Comments Off

HBO’s new dark, satirical political comedy The Brink, premiering Sunday, June 21, at 10:30pm ET/PT, stars Tim Robbins as a hard-drinking U.S. Secretary of State Walter Larson, Jack Black as disinterested diplomat Alex Talbot and Pablo Schreiber as drug-dealing Navy fighter pilot Zeke Tilson. “This job sucks ass. I should’ve asked for secretary of the interior. No one’s going to take you away from a hooker in the middle of the night to save Mount Rushmore,” Tim Robbins snarls in HBO’s new series The Brink, which does to present U.S. policy in the Middle East what Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove […]

Matthew Modine on TNT’s “Proof” and life after death

June 4, 2015 Barb Oates 3

What if you had all the money in the world and all you wished for was one question to be answered? Cancer-stricken billionaire Ivan Turing has a short time left on Earth and needs to know if death truly is the end, so he sets out to hire his own researchers. That’s the premise behind TNT’s new thought-provoking drama Proof, starring Matthew Modine and Jennifer Beals. “He, like Steve Jobs, began his business working out of his garage, tinkering, building things that the world has never seen or imagined before, and he’s parlayed that into an incredibly successful industry,” says […]

True Detective Season 2 star Taylor Kitsch: “I’ve never walked away from something as excited and proud as I am of this”

June 2, 2015 Lori Acken 2

Praise and pity for True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto. The first season of his mega-award-winning HBO drama was widely (and justifiably) trumpeted as unlike anything else in TV history, luring Matthew McConaughey back to the small screen and blowing viewers’ and critics’ minds with a spine-tingling mystery that turned water-cooler talk into an impromptu psychology class. So how would the guy handle Season 2? The short answer: Move the series to California and assemble an even larger A-list cast into an intricate tale of cops, career criminals and politics that, like Season 1, unravels from a single, strange murder. Though […]

Another Period — Comedy Central pokes fun at the Kardashians of the past

June 1, 2015 Lori Acken Comments Off

Comedy Central’s latest scripted series, Another Period, is a sort of Downton Abbey for people who loathe Downton Abbey — messy, ribald and hilarious, but also surprisingly well researched. Series stars and longtime pals Natasha Leggero and Riki Lindhome (Garfunkel and Oates), who created the show from a short film they made with the same premise, spent time in the show’s Newport, R.I., home base to get a feel for the era and setting in which their turn-of-the-century socialite sisters Lillian and Beatrice Bellacourt lived. Then they threw a big ol’ voyeur-TV bomb right in the middle of all that gentility. “Riki and I had actually […]

UnREAL — New Lifetime dramedy examines the harsh reality of reality TV

May 20, 2015 Lori Acken Comments Off

UnREAL premieres Monday, June 1 at 10/9CT on Lifetime. Can you be a feminist and still love The Bachelor? Better question: Can you be a feminist and admit to loving The Bachelor? Best question of all: Can you be a feminist and actually work on The Bachelor? It’s a lot to digest — just ask writer/producer/director Sarah Gertrude Shapiro. When Shapiro was in her early twenties, she spent a few years working as a producer on ABC’s reality behemoth during its fourth and fifth seasons (that’s the disastrous “Bob and Estella” and “Jesse and Jessica” for those of you keeping score). […]

7 Questions with Cristián de la Fuente of Lifetime’s Devious Maids

May 20, 2015 Channel Guide Staff Comments Off

Lifetime’s spicy hit series Devious Maids from executive producers Marc Cherry and Eva Longoria returns June 1 in a new Monday night time slot. This season’s regular cast will be joined by a handful of familiar faces including Naya Rivera (Glee), John O’Hurley (General Hospital), Nathan Owens (Days of Our Lives) and Chilean hunk Cristián de la Fuente, a veteran of Spanish-language telenovelas such as Valiant Love. De la Fuente says he’s thrilled with his juicy role, but he couldn’t confirm rumors that he plays Ernesto, Rosie’s mysterious first husband. “I don’t want them to kill me — literally — because, you know, a […]