I was talking with a friend recently and this happened.
Showing posts with label HBO. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HBO. Show all posts
Week Links
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver was not on last week, but will be on tonight — and with John Oliver. What are the odds, I ask you?
Oliver and Company
I praised the pleasant surprise that was John Oliver’s hosting of The Daily Show
when Jon Stewart took a sabbatical last summer. And I was not alone. Many TV critics predicted that Oliver would be promoted from correspondent to host of his own show — probably someplace other than Comedy Central, since a third half-hour* of satirical news and punditry there wasn’t likely. That someplace turned out to be HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
Ozy Ozy Ozy
I know that the above pic won’t mean anything to anyone who hasn’t both read Watchmen and seen Game of Thrones, but I’m guessing that a fair percentage of
this blog’s dedicated visitors meet those criteria.
Funny Business
Ricky Gervais is hosting the Golden Globes ceremony again after all.
Last year there was foofaraw from some — including The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which runs the Globes and was one of Gervais’ targets — about his barbed material being distastefully sharp. Many of the world’s most prominent humorists rose up to defend him. I was in the minority position, expressed in my writeup of last year’s telecast, of not minding the acerbity of the jokes but feeling a lack in their overall quality and even quantity; Gervais didn’t seem as sharp to me as usual (in terms of keenness of delivery, not pointedness of content) and he was AWOL for long stretches.
Red Letter
The bloody good news is that I was house-sitting this past week and caught up with
the current season of True Blood via HBO On Demand.
I’d just recently finished Season Two on DVD, and I was really bummed about having
to wait for a whole year to see where things went in Season Three (dodging spoilers all the while). As I’ve mentioned here before, True Blood is a pulpy kick.