As the third season of the social satire draws to its finale, the costumes featured in the series are selling out fast
The third season of The White Lotus finishes on Monday, marking the end of group chats and column inches devoted to the Thai hotel and its super-rich guests.
Michel Drucker fête sa guérison et ses 60 ans de carrière avec la sortie d’un nouveau livre, « Avec le Temps… ». Le « parrain » du Paf y livre encore quelques secrets, sur sa longévité, son enfance et son amour des gens.
Michel Drucker fête sa guérison et ses 60 ans de carrière avec la sortie d’un nouveau livre, « Avec le Temps… ». Le « parrain » du Paf y livre encore quelques secrets, sur sa longévité, son enfance et son amour des gens.
Old pals Ewan McGregor and Michael Grandage prepare for their new play, My Master Builder, by chuckling about everything that could go wrong and has
For today’s Observer New Review I had the not-exactly-onerous assignment of spending an hour with the actor Ewan McGregor and director Michael Grandage, as they prepared to put on a new play, My Master Builder, in London’s West End. The two men go way back, and mostly they were cracking each other up with knockabout old stories – much of which there wasn’t room for in my article. McGregor recalled one of his first roles on stage, as Orlando in As You Like It, and how when Simon Callow – multiple Olivier and Bafta award winner – played the part in 1979, he walked out on stage at the National Theatre only to promptly forget the first line of the play.
“If you’re a woman and you’re about to have a baby, everybody tells you nightmare stories about childbirth,” said McGregor. “And when you’re an actor about to do a play, everybody tells you terrible things that have happened on the stage.”
The standup comedian and broadcaster on realising he was funny, Parenting Hell and avoiding the spotlight
Born in south London in 1986, Rob Beckett is a comedian and broadcaster. He started on the standup circuit in 2009, performing at the Edinburgh fringe in 2012 with his show Rob Beckett’s Summer Holiday. Television quickly beckoned – after hosting ITV2’s I’m a Celebrity spin-off series, he became a panel-show regular, appearing on programmes including 8 Out of 10 Cats and Taskmaster, as well as the travel series Rob & Romesh vs … . In 2020, he launched the hit podcast Parenting Hell with comedian Josh Widdicombe. He is married and has two daughters. His current tour, Giraffe, continues until April 2026.
That’s my dad in the background but, aside from that, I’ve got no other details. It might have been on holiday, possibly at my dad’s mate’s place in Spain. We always went there – he gave it to us for cheap, but I’m not sure why. You don’t ask questions in my family.
The hit HBO series satirizes luxury vacationers’ privilege. That hasn’t slowed demand for branded collaborations that sell the show’s lavish lifestyle.
This blackly comic, propulsively fun tale of a disgraced hedge fund manager turned crook is all about the one-time Don Draper. He lifts the whole thing
Jon Hamm has one of the great TV faces. Square-jawed and ruggedly suave, it’s the face of a matinee idol with a dangerous edge. The quiff is well-coiffed but grey-flecked. That Marlboro Man chin looks unshaven by lunchtime. Those hooded eyes have a weary, lounge lizard quality. One of his first Hollywood parts was a 1997 episode of Ally McBeal, where he played the aptly named “Gorgeous Guy at Bar”. A decade later, Hamm became the alpha face of a certain prestige drama. Ad Men, was it? Mad Dogs? Something like that.
Your Friends & Neighbors (Apple TV+, 11 April)is a fitting new vehicle for Hamm’s slippery good looks. The launch episode is bookended by shots of his big, mildly befuddled face in screen-filling closeup. This show knows exactly what’s it’s doing. It is blackly comic, frothily fun and highly moreish.
From hyper-intelligent analysis to heated arguments, the 21st-century home of buzzy chatter about big television shows is Reddit. We go behind the scenes to hear about millions of Severance and White Lotus fans, wild freebies – and accusations of racism
They say that ancient civilisations celebrated significant televisual events by gathering around a plastic watering hole in a building known as an “office”. These so-called “water-cooler moments” were characterised by buzzy chatter, as colleagues chewed over what they’d seen on TV the night before. “Who shot JR?” they asked. “You can’t kill everyone at a wedding!” they cried. Tissues were passed around because “She got off the plane!.”
Today, there are too many streaming apps and too few days in the office for people to catch up in quite the same way. Instead, online forums dedicated to dissecting TV episodes are thriving: on Reddit, more than 776,000 people have joined a subreddit about The White Lotus, while 765,000 discuss everything that happens in Ben Stiller’s dystopian workplace thriller Severance. Like colleagues around a cooler, people praise their favourite characters and share theories about what will happen next. Unlike colleagues around a cooler, they also accuse each other of being stupid, bigoted and perverted.
‘Vertical dramas’ consisting of minute-long episodes are booming, with market predicted to be worth $14bn by 2027
Found a Homeless Billionaire Husband for Christmas. The Quarterback Next Door. Revenge of the XXL Wife. My Secret Agent Husband.
These may sound like cringey fantasies, but they’re actually titles of “vertical dramas”, a new form of episodic television that is gripping millions around the world.
Will Gaitok go rogue? Might there be an incest-related shooting? Could primates do it? Here’s a rundown of the top rumours around the last episode’s looming death (or deaths)
It all began with a dead body, before the HBO hit flashed back to a week earlier. Now satirical spa drama The White Lotus is set to solve all its mysteries in the third season finale, titled Amor Fati (which translate as “love of fate”, Latin fans).
The Thailand-set series opened with Zion’s meditation session being interrupted by gunfire. As the panicking student waded through the resort’s ponds to look for his mother, Belinda, an unidentified corpse floated past him face-down. Who was it? Who pulled the trigger? And will anyone squat over a suitcase?
This tale of a terminal cancer patient’s newfound horniness upends every expectation you have for on-screen sex – as well as the definition of a soulmate. It leaves you longing for more
Sex is for men. This is a lesson we learn from a very early age. Maybe it is a nice lesson to learn if you are a man, though I imagine the pressure to be seen to know all about it from the off could feel a teensy bit much now and again. I’d probably take that over the internalised shame and alienation from your own body – and from one of the main drivers of pleasure that exists – so that we may all enjoy perpetuating the species, though, I think.
(Why yes, this is all about me! And yes I did grow up Catholic, which can’t have helped. You’re such a sweetheart for noticing!)
A decade after the finale, new fans are flocking to Glee, causing its songs to shoot up the charts. The internet’s ablaze with TikTok dance homages, Reddit threads – and tons of hate watchers
The year is 2009, and Glee has hit like a cultural earthquake. Every week, millions of people around the world tune in to watch a group of American high school misfits belt out musical theatre and pop hits, turning show choir into mainstream entertainment. The cast’s cover of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ becomes an anthem, spending 37 weeks in the UK charts, catapulting its young stars to overnight fame. Glee clubs start in schools across the US and beyond, and Ryan Murphy’s show develops a devoted fanbase – myself included – who proudly call ourselves Gleeks. Online, we dissect every episode on Tumblr, trade theories and wear our fandom, plus the merch we bought to prove it, as a badge of honour.
But by the time Glee came to a close in 2015, all its magic had faded. The Guardian reported that “few will mourn its passing” as the show’s last season premiered. A string of increasingly absurd storylines and poor song choices left a dwindling viewership and even the most diehard fans drifting away. Or so we thought – because 10 years after its finale, the show is back with a vengeance.
This bizarre drama stars the Hollywood actor as a dead bounty hunter brought back to life by the devil to do his bidding. Sadly, it also includes horrifying country music
There is nothing very new to see in The Bondsman. How much you enjoy it will depend on how much you enjoy Kevin Bacon (laconic, hard-bitten Kevin Bacon, not Tremors Kevin Bacon and not Footloose Kevin Bacon), how much you enjoy tales of demonic possession in a small town in southern America and how much you enjoy the sound of partly severed heads, blown-out tracheas and bloodied fingers. I am seven degrees of separation from liking this last aspect.
But Bacon is Bacon, and if he is slightly sleepwalking through his role here as Hub Halloran, tracker of ne’er-do-wells with warrants against their names, well, it is hardly inappropriate given that, for most of the eight episodes, Hub is dead. He is killed by local heavies hired by Lucky Callahan (Damon Herriman – you’ll know him when you see him), the new boyfriend of Hub’s ex-wife Maryanne (Jennifer Nettles), seeking to eliminate the competition.
I’ve become addicted to the show. But as a scientist I wonder: how many couples actually stay together?
It has finally happened. After a decade of avoiding the show, my wife and I decided that we would try out the new season of Married at First Sight. We consume quite a bit of reality TV, so it’s not that we avoided it precisely, but something about the idea of watching people struggle to build a healthy relationship amid a storm of cameras and manufactured drama just never drew us in. At least until we watched Married at First Sight and realised it was actually kind of fun.
Relationship drama makes for addictive viewing. But after watching most of a season of weird “marriages”, screaming matches and couch quizzes accompanied by deep and meaningful music, one part of the show has struck me as really weird. Everyone keeps referring to the saga as an “experiment”. From the narrator to the experts who counsel the hapless couples on their relationship dramas, the entire show seems to be calling the experience a social experiment for which we don’t know the outcome.
How many couples stay together until the end of filming?
How many couples stay together after filming is completed?
How many couples are still together and is it fewer than we’d expect?
Cristóbal Tapia de Veer’s music was one of the breakout stars of HBO’s vacation thriller. But in an exclusive interview, the composer revealed that he had ooh’ed his last loo-loo.
Actor says he had to hear I’ll Be There for You so many times, he could no longer bear it
The Friends actor David Schwimmer spent years unable to listen to the theme tune of his smash-hit comedy, he revealed yesterday. According to the star, he was forced to hear it so many times at the height of his fame that the mere sound of it made him feel miserable.
“I’ll be really honest, there was a time for quite a while that just hearing the theme song would really … uggh,” he said during an appearance on Matt Lucas and David Walliams’ Making a Scene podcast.
New tariffs will be unveiled at the White House Rose Garden — because “when you elect a reality TV star, you get all your economic policy via rose ceremony,” said Stephen Colbert.
As she reveals her tougher side in a Liverpool gangland drama, and fearfully prepares to tread the boards in New York, the actor talks about body image, big hair and the blind faith that has always driven her
Saoirse-Monica Jackson has done some dramas where everyone was quite sober and all her jokes fell flat. But This City Is Ours was different, not least because of the number of Scousers on set, the Derry Girls star explains. “It wasn’t, like, so serious,” she says. “We had craic off-camera.” However, while it was fun to make the buzzy new BBC crime drama (the female cast members named themselves the Muffia) the end result isn’t fun – although it is gripping. Featuring betrayals, love and a lot of violence, the show stars Sean Bean as a Liverpool drugs boss, while Jackson plays Cheryl Crawford, the wife of one of his underlings.
Cheryl is on the periphery, though her voice-of-experience warnings ring loud. “There’s nothing good about our men,” she tells Diana, the partner of a senior gang member. Jackson has lived in Liverpool for a couple of years now – which helped with the accent – and it was a treat to be back in her own bed at the end of a day’s filming. A lot of hair extensions helped with the look. “It was so heavy, so hot, to be under it every day,” she says with a laugh. “Our amazing hair and makeup designer, Adele Firth, really wanted to get the picture across of some girls in Liverpool – they take such pride in themselves. Every occasion is an occasion to really get dolled up.” Jackson found herself intrigued by Cheryl. “I think if, like her, you grow up around these types of people, or they’re adjacent to your family, that can blur the danger for you.”
The actor best known for his roles in TV shows including Dr Kildare and The Thorn Birds has died aged 90. We look back at his career on stage and in film and television
Varada Sethu joining series as Doctor’s latest companion, marking first time Tardis team is wholly people of colour
Criticisms that Doctor Who has become too “woke” prove the series is doing the right thing by being inclusive, its new star Varada Sethu has said.
Sethu plays the Doctor’s latest travelling companion, Belinda Chandra, in new episodes airing this month. With Ncuti Gatwa returning as the Doctor, the pairing marks the first time a Tardis team will comprise solely people of colour.
This film shows how a ‘hallucinogenically optimistic’ vision descended into the hellscape we know today. Young, confident men really should not rule the internet …
It turns out that Mike Judge’s supposed sitcom Silicon Valley was a documentary after all. My bad, as the people young and in touch enough with the world to have known this all along may still say.
Twitter: Breaking the Bird is a 75-minute CNN film chronicling the rise, fall and possibly end of the social media site that was launched by a group of eager young things in 2006 amid a widespread belief – at least in the Valley – in the power of the internet to remake the world in radically better ways. This, a co-founder or two has come to consider since, may have been a “hallucinogenically optimistic” view. Well, we were all young once. Although that feels – and in no small measure because of Twitter – like a very long time ago.
From vestment-ripper The Thorn Birds to the steamy Dr Kildare, the actor – who has died at 90 – was known for playing devastatingly attractive and unattainable men
Richard Chamberlain, who has died at 90, achieved exceptional television celebrity by playing devastatingly attractive men whose professions made them unavailable to women.
In The Thorn Birds – a 1983 miniseries that achieved huge ratings for ABC in the US and BBC One in the UK – he was Ralph De Bricassart, a Catholic priest whose vow of celibacy is tested beyond breaking point over four decades by Meggie, a young woman whom he meets on an Australian sheep farm.
Last One Laughing UK, a reality show in which comedians like Mortimer, Daisy May Cooper and Richard Ayoade try to make each other laugh, has gone viral with good reason … it’s a total hoot
As you can probably tell by spending any time on it, Amazon Prime Video is in trouble. Citadel, its $300m Russo brothers-produced international spy thriller series, was met with widespread indifference. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, a show that will end up costing Amazon a billion dollars, is destined to go down as one of the worst investments of all time. Everywhere you look, the platform is wall-to-wall duds.
And yet there is one glimmer of hope. The sole scrap of buzz Amazon has generated in months comes in the form of a cheap little reality show. Last One Laughing UK has been all over social media for the last couple of weeks, clipped up and shared across TikTok, Instagram and X. And this is down to its deceptively simple premise: a bunch of comedians sit in a room together and try to make each other laugh. If they laugh, they’re out. That’s all there is to it.
The drama teachers behind the young actors in the Netflix smash say their lack of recognition ‘has caused wide upset’
Adolescence’s stratospheric success has catapulted its young cast of unknown actors into the limelight. Reams of headlines have suggested that they have come from nowhere – yet the grassroots regional drama schools that trained them say this overlooks their hard work.
To find undiscovered talent for the show, Adolescence’s casting director, Shaheen Baig, visited two northern drama schools that work with children from underrepresented and deprived communities.
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Where other teen shows ramp up the sex, drugs and scandal, this Leeds-set saga about rivalries in a dance school keeps it real – so real it almost refuses to be entertaining
The implausibility of the teen drama may well be the genre’s defining feature. In the 00s, we were subjected to untold glamour and relentless wisecracking by US imports such as The OC and Gossip Girl. The UK equivalent was Skins, in which a group of Bristolian party animals managed to make practically every personal problem known to man look intimidatingly cool. More recently, we’ve had mind-blowing levels of debauchery from Euphoria, mind-blowing levels of sexual literacy and candour from Sex Education and mind-blowing levels of heartwarming niceness from Heartstopper. All of it is ludicrous in its own way.
Dreamers is different. It is realistic – jarringly so. That’s both a pro and a con for this Channel 4 drama about a group of teenage dancers living in Leeds. The series – written by Lisa Holdsworth (Waterloo Road) and Gem Copping (EastEnders), and directed by Sara Dunlop – is filmed in a meticulously naturalistic way. The camera tends to linger, documentary-style, on characters, whether they are doing something interesting or not: chatting aimlessly, walking to work, getting a glass of water. It’s very kitchen sink, not least in the sense that there are multiple shots of actual kitchen sinks. (The show’s original title was Dance School, which captures the no-frills, matter-of-fact mode far better than Dreamers.) The dialogue is sparse, underwrought and unusually true to life; the teen banter is believably awkward and sometimes people respond to questions with “I don’t know” and the conversation just sort of ends. Combined with the deluge of dancing footage – which looks brilliant and beautiful for the most part – the Dreamers aesthetic is strong and soothing: dynamic movement punctuated by shots of shabby normalcy, like a Martin Parr photograph brought to life.
After a decade away, the adventurer is off to gain more precious insights into tribal life – from eating weevil larva to taking ayahuasca. It’s still absolutely classic telly
It is, scarily, 20 years since Bruce Parry first brought Tribe to the BBC. The diffident but determined former Royal Marine visited Indigenous people in the world’s most remote places and, by living as one of them, earned a level of trust that previous documentary-makers had struggled to achieve. Parry was more patient, more respectful and more physically courageous than other white interlopers had been. He gained valuable insights into tribal life and the threats to it posed by modernity. Tribe itself was simply cracking entertainment, as involving as it was educational.
Television’s sausage machine has a way of turning the most exotic ingredients into familiar comfort food and, although it took us to the farthest corners of the planet, Tribe soon established a reliable format. Parry’s return follows the winning formula as he travels to meet the 600-strong Waimaha people, deep in the Colombian Amazon rainforest.
Richard Chamberlain, the hero of the 1960s television series Dr Kildare who found a second career as an award-winning “king of the miniseries,” has died. He was 90.
Chamberlain died on Saturday night in Waimānalo, Hawaii of complications after a stroke, according to his publicist, Harlan Boll.
The long and often shocking journey to finding the alleged killer of young women in Long Island is brought to a wider audience in a damning new Netflix series
The film-maker Liz Garbus was on vacation in July 2023 when she got the call that an arrest had finally been made in the case of the Long Island serial killer. Since 2010, when the bodies of four women were found along an isolated stretch of highway near Gilgo Beach, authorities had looked for a presumed serial killer with little progress and plenty of consternation. Garbus was one of the most prominent chroniclers of the grassroots effort to force authorities into action; her 2020 feature film Lost Girls, an adaptation of Robert Kolker’s book of the same name, depicted the fight by a group of working-class women to figure out what happened to their loved ones – all women who participated in sex work on Craigslist – with or largely without police help.
It was the star of that film, Amy Ryan, who alerted Garbus to the arrest of Rex Heuermann, a 60-year-old Massapequa-based architect who regularly commuted to midtown Manhattan. Ryan had played Mari Gilbert, the late mother of Shannan Gilbert, who disappeared in the early hours of 1 May 2010 after meeting a client on Long Island. Mari Gilbert relentlessly pressured the police to remember her daughter, who they dismissed as a prostitute on the run; it took eight months for Long Island authorities to begin a comprehensive search for her, finding instead the bodies of the so-called “Gilgo Four” – Maureen Brainard-Barnes, Megan Waterman, Melissa Barthelemy and Amber Costello, who went missing between July 2007 and September 2010. By spring 2011, authorities identified the remains of 10 possible victims of the same perpetrator. It was long suspected, based on cellphone data, that the killer lived in central Long Island and commuted to the city. In truth, Heuermann was a fairly successful architect who consulted on numerous buildings in New York – including Ryan’s home.
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