It’s no secret — America likes things supersized. Take the Big Mac, the Lincoln Navigator and the collective rear ends of J.Lo and Kim Kardashian. But when it comes to putting on live TV events, it’s possible TBS just took the proverbial 17-layer, chocolate-stuffed cake with the 25-Hour Angie Tribeca Binge-A-Thon.

Not because TBS played their new slapstick police-procedural straight for over a day. Because of the all-night event they put on to do it. That is, from 9pm ET Sunday to 5am ET Monday, season one of ‘Angie Tribeca’ ran while being glued together by a variety show’s worth of live, in-studio comedy ridiculousness.

There was a bit of self-reverential torch-passing from comedy legend Carol Burnett…

A Whip/Nae Nae dance number from the ‘Angie Tribeca’ cast…

And a hardcore rock riff from Aubrey Plaza who shared her true feelings on not being cast in ‘Angie Tribeca.’

It was a night of 1,000 oddities. There were also taped segments with Conan O’Brien, Samantha Bee and Jason Jones — and live cameos in-studio with people like Amy Smart, Ana Gasteyer and whoever this amazing guy was.

Then there were interviews. Namely ours with Steve and Nancy Carell (creators of ‘Angie Tribeca’), Rashida Jones and even 15 random minutes in a dressing room with John Michael Higgins and David Koechner (aka Champ Kind). That’s not as lurid as it sounds.

It was an event unlike any before it — so here are our best bites from the night, buffet-style:

Rashida Jones on what slapstick can do to a woman (while talking to us next to a men’s room): 

“There was one scene at the end of last season where I stopped knowing how to say words. I must’ve done upwards of 15 takes and was like, ‘Holy Shit, you really don’t know how to talk anymore.’ My brain just died.”

Show co-creators, Steve Carell and Nancy Carell on the birth of ‘Angie Tribeca’ and what it’s like to work with your spouse: 

Steve: “We were just trying to make each other laugh. We weren’t looking to create a show together. This wasn’t part of any master plan. It was just a silly idea… a happy accident.”

Nancy: “We work really well together I think. We don’t have a lot of friction between us, which is good I guess.”

Steve: “I like how she qualified it as ‘a lot.’ Notice how she didn’t say we don’t have any.”

John Michael Higgins and David Koechner on guest starring in separate ‘Angie Tribeca’ episodes:

John: “They did everything they could to humiliate us… and they very nearly succeeded in both of our cases. I was stripped, shaved and painted…my entire 52-year-old body… and then filmed for mass consumption. It was deeply undignified.”

David: “I am bone white, so they had to paint me tan. ‘Cause I had to run around in a diaper.”

Comedian and Binge-A-Thon Show Host, Deon Cole on what it’s like to do an eight-hour live TV show:

“Live TV is crazy. This is the longest I’ve ever been on live TV talking… ever. It’s the most stressful thing!”

Hayes MacArthur, ‘Angie Tribeca’ police detective J Geils on what to expect from ‘Angie Tribeca’ season two:

“We made the show a little darker to look even more like those procedural dramas that we’re sending up…CSI, NCIS, Law & Order.  We wanted it to be like if you were watching the show and the sound was ff, you’d think you were watching one of those procedural dramas… until you see something like a dog driving a car.”

If you missed the binge, worry not. The entire first season can be watched on the TBS website. Season two is right behind it, premiering Jan. 25 at 9:30pm ET on TBS.

You can’t cook up a story like this. Not with a degree from Le Cordon Bleu. Or even one of those really good spatulas from Bed Bath & Beyond.

In what one might call a recipe for disaster, a dozen bakers have met their demise in the last few weeks – 13 total. It has everyone asking questions – like how could something like this happen? And will their rugelach orders be ready on time?

It’s virtual pandemonium.

Luckily, two promising young L.A.P.D. detectives from the Really Heinous Crimes Unit are on the case: Angie Tribeca and Jay Geils. The former, Ms. Tribeca, is known for brandishing 50 shades of lip-gloss and falling in love with every partner she’s had since the Eisenhower Administration. (Strange because she wasn’t even alive then.)

As for Geils, rumor has it that he’s tall and his blood runs cold because his angel is a centerfold. Here’s the hard data proving that.

Tribeca and Geils arrived at the scene to find the latest baker body getting its chalk outline done with Reddi-Wip — the proverbial icing on the death. As for cause of death, at first, the conclusion was a suicide – death by pastry bag.

But that wasn’t it. After further evaluation, Dr. Edelweiss in the coroner’s department made a startling revelation. “You see these holes…I’m thinking that somebody fired a gun into them.”

Turns out, the baker had seemingly been murdered – and not by a disgruntled female customer who was recently denied the chance to have her cake and eat it too.

This promising revelation led Tribeca and Geils to prestigious and somewhat suspicious wedding planner Jean Nate, who offered nothing during her initial line of questioning.

That’s when Officers Tribeca and Geils did what any other dedicated cop partners would do to pry deeper to get answers from the cagey wedding planner around the baker’s death…

They hired her and decided to get married.

To see how they do the wedding, whose parents paid for it and what their first dance number was, you’ll just have to watch the episode when it airs tonight, Monday 9/8c. Or catch it On Demand. Or online at TBS.com. Or even hire a team of acrobats to re-enact the episode in tableau. 

Come to think of it, that last part… not very practical.

In the year 2016, it’s true… women are everywhere. At work. On the streets. In politics. I guarantee if you look out your window right now, you’ll probably see one.

That’s why stand-up comic Beth Stelling (also known as “the white Tisha Campbell”) is one of the most uniquely qualified people to put all these women in their proper places. Stelling is young. She’s female. She’s the person we hired to man The Desk. If that’s not serendipity, I don’t know what is.

Stelling covers a lot of ground on The Desk‘s season premiere. She dedicates herself to “an equal smearing of the sexes.” Hits Chris Christie below the belt buckle. Talks about a cutthroat presidential race that until recently had a “record number of two females.” Even shares that she was “medically denied access to all the Internet comments on her videos.”

Slight overshare? Maybe. You decide.

Don’t forget to catch a new episode of ‘Angie Tribeca’ on Mondays at 9/8c on TBS. Executive produced by Nancy and Steve Carell, starring Rashida Jones. It’s the kind of funny that makes you spit milk out at other people (…even if you don’t drink milk).

Fox Searchlight

It was revealed last year that Emma Stone and Steve Carell were signed on to star as Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs in the upcoming tennis drama, The Battle of the Sexes.  We haven’t heard any buzz about this this movie since then, but the folks over at Fox Searchlight released a promotional photo for the film with the duo on Wednesday. The photo depicts the famous 1973 press conference before the second Battle of the Sexes match which featured a then 29-year-old Billie Jean King and 55-year-old Bobby Riggs who came out of retirement to take on the reigning queen of tennis. Emma Stone looks a tad bit like a young Jodie Foster rather than Billie Jean King, but maybe she’s been working on her serve.

Entertainment Weekly reported that Sarah Silverman and Alan Cumming have been added to the cast as well. Silverman will be playing World Tennis Magazine founder, Gladys Heldman and Cumming is slated to play tennis player, designer, and Billie Jean King’s friend, Ted Tinling.

Battle of the Sexes is directed by Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton. The team also worked with Carell when they directed the 2006 film, Little Miss Sunshine. Shooting for Battle of the Sexes began this week, however there is no word on a release date for the film.

(Via Variety)

NBC

As fans of The Office know, there’s no denying that Michael Scott wasn’t exactly the most eloquent wordsmith. He was constantly trying to inspire his employees and showcase what he believed to be a deep wellspring of business and life wisdom, only to consistently put his foot in his mouth. Despite Michael’s lack of self-awareness he would often come close to saying something deep, only to muck it up in the end. So, with that in mind, let these Michael Scott quotes and self-reflections inspire you, or almost inspire you.

“Make friends first, make sales second, make love third. In no particular order.”

NBC

The first part of this business pep talk isn’t half-bad. Sure, it’s weird to have your boss tell you to “make love,” and Michael on more than one occasion crossed over into sexual-harassment territory with his staff, but the friends and sales part is solid. A salesperson who can’t build and maintain solid relationships with clients isn’t going to be closing much. The second part of the quote is where Michael screws things up and ruins an almost solid piece of advice.

“Fool me once, strike one. But fool me twice, strike three.”

NBC

This Michael Scott gem isn’t quite as bad as George W. Bush’s famous fumbling of this famous saying, but it’s not far off. If anything, it tells us that Michael probably gets fooled on a regular basis in life and that Dwight had little to fear about sneaking around behind his boss’ back.

“People will never be replaced by machines. In the end, life and business are about human connections. And computers are about trying to murder you in a lake. And to me the choice is easy.”

NBC

Michael couldn’t stand it when Ryan moved past him on the corporate ladder at the end of season three and wanted nothing more for the new Dunder Mifflin website than to fail. In the end, Ryan’s online shopping cart didn’t fare so well and his launch party was a bust, leaving Michael to ponder the role of technology in the workplace. “Life and business are about human connections,” okay, seems spot-on… “And computers are about trying to murder you in a lake,” and there’s the sharp left turn everyone was waiting for.

“Would I rather be feared or loved? Easy, both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me.”

NBC

This one seems like it would fit in perfectly with the thinking of an out-of-touch dictator or perhaps a sociopath. Michael makes it very apparent how much he desires to be liked and viewed as the cool boss in the eyes of his employees. So much so that he regularly puts it above being respected and finds himself in the position of company doormat. All in all, this little nugget of leadership wisdom isn’t particularly terrible, it just doesn’t really capture how Michael’s employees generally feel about him.

“Is there a god? If not, then what are all these churches for? And who … is Jesus’ dad?”

NBC

A Michael Scott spin-off web series where he gives philosophy lectures would have been completely idiotic, and I would have watched every second of it. Michael fashions himself as a deep thinker but routinely shows that he has no idea what he’s talking about within seconds of opening his mouth. Feel free to throw this line out in Sunday school and get ready to watch the jaws drop.

“I’d like to start today by inspiring you. May I borrow someone’s textbook, please? You cannot learn from books. Replace these pages with life lessons and then, you will have… a book worth its weight in gold.”

NBC

Ryan really should have known better than to invite Michael to speak to his business-school class. No good was ever going to come from the situation, and the entire ordeal likely had students changing their majors by the end of the afternoon. Michael starts off promising to inspire them, but only ends up destroying a textbook and cheating a student out of a couple hundred bucks. And if the embarrassing speech wasn’t enough, he also ruined a perfectly good round of Frisbee earlier in the episode.

“Yesterday I was scraping some gunk off my wall sockets with a metal fork and I gave myself the nastiest shock. And when I came to, I had an epiphery. Life is precious. And if I die I want my son to know the dealio. The dealio of life.”

NBC

It would have been great to get a quick flashback to Michael accidentally electrocuting himself, but then again, we didn’t get to actually see him burn his foot on a George Foreman grill either. Regardless, the act of stupidity obviously had an impact on Michael (he did have an “epihery,” after all), because he felt inspired enough to make a video for his unborn son. You can’t fault the guy for wanting to pass down some knowledge “if” he dies, but no great wisdom ever started with “dealio.”

“You know sometimes, to get perspective, I like to think about a spaceman on a star incredibly far away. And, our problems don’t matter to him, because we’re just a distant point of light. But he feels sorry for me, because he has an incredibly powerful microscope, and he can see my face. I’m okay. No, I’m not.”

NBC

“Stress Relief” was full of Michael kicking himself when he was down and after the roast he headed to a nearby playground to “get perspective.” In Michael’s mind the entire universe truly does revolve around him with even far-off space people checking in on him to make sure he’s feeling alright. There’s a certain poetry to Michael’s torment, and you almost feel sorry for him — until he looks up to the sky and waves to his spaceman.

“I, understand — nothing.”

NBC

Michael and Charles clashed right from the start because, well, Charles is a boss who behaves like a boss. It’s not long before Charles confronts Michael in the parking lot and tells him how things are going to run in the office moving forward. Rather than put together anything even resembling a well-thought-out rebuttal to Charles’ management style, Michael goes with the third-grader approach. Stupid or possibly brilliant?

AMC

Breaking Bad was infamous for its use of the F-word. Vince Gilligan never overused the King of Curses; he sprinkled them throughout the five-season series. That way, when Skyler said, “I f*cked Ted,” or Mike demanded, “Shut the f*ck up and let me [CENSORED] in peace,” the word landed like a bomb. (I’m censoring another word there for the nine people who haven’t watched Breaking Bad yet.) A lack of uncensored cursing won’t be an issue in Bryan Cranston’s next movie, Last Flag Flying, which the Hollywood Reporter describes as a “sort of” sequel to 1973’s The Last Detail.

The shirtless comedy-drama adapted from a novel by Darryl Poniscan — which was nominated for three Oscars, including Best Actor for Jack Nicholson and Best Supporting Actor for Randy Quaid — is known for its excessive cursing. Here’s a sample quote: “I am the motherf*cking shore patrol, motherf*cker! I am the motherf*cking shore patrol!” And another: “I hate this f*cking chickensh*t detail.” It will be up to director Richard Linklater — who knows a thing or two about spiritual sequels — to replicate the f*cking chickensh*t dialogue. Linklater will be working from Poniscan’s novel of the same name, a 2005 follow-up to The Last Detail.

Helping him out will be Cranston, Steve Carell, and Laurence Fishburne. They’ll play the roles originated by Nicholson, Quaid, and Otis Young, characters now “living in a post-9/11 American life: the former Naval Petty Officers come to the aid of their former prisoner who needs their help to bring home the body of his son, the latter who was killed in Iraq. The request that sends them back retracing their journey from Norfolk, VA, to Portsmouth, NH.” F*ck.

(Via the Hollywood Reporter)

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Jerome Bettis will always have a place in the hearts of Notre Dame fans. He’ll be a legend forever in Pittsburgh. And he may never have to buy a drink again in his hometown of Detroit. But for another group entirely, he’s that football player who appeared in the third season of The Office.

It’s almost unthinkable that it’s been 10 years since Bettis made a cameo in the workplace drama. The episode premiered on Sept. 26, 2006. Since then, Bettis became a commentator and got himself inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame. Stars from The Office like Steve Carell and Ed Helms became bonafide stars in Hollywood. Jim Halpert (John Krasinski) was in that Benghazi movie. Writer Michael Schur (who played Cousin Mose in the show) created Parks and Recreation with Greg Daniels, as well as Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and The Good Place. The Steelers won another Super Bowl in 2009. And you found your way to this website to read about it in the year 2016. Fun times.

But why was Bettis the one picked in the first place?

That’s the magic of television contracts. Bettis retired from football after Super Bowl XL and joined NBC for their Football Night In America show. NBC, of course, was the home of The Office. When the show needed a football player for “The Convention,” they went to NBC, and Bettis got the call.

The premise of the episode was that Michael Scott (Carell) and Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson) attended a paper convention, and while there, they ran into Jim (Krasinski), who had recently joined a rival branch of the company. The convention was no different from any other trade show. There were vendors, giveways and freebies, silly contests, and special guest appearances. Bettis was one of the special guests who paper salesmen could chat up, get autographs and take pictures with.

The network got in touch with Bettis thinking maybe he’d be averse doing it, and that he’d have to be coaxed a little bit. That was not the case.

“They asked me if I was interested in doing it,” Bettis told UPROXX while doing some promotion for an Uber + DIRECTV campaign in which he sat in the backseat and ended up watching football with unsuspecting riders in Pittsburgh during the Steelers’ loss to the Dolphins. “And they’re telling me it’ll be a quick shoot and all that. What they didn’t know was I was a huge fan of The Office. I was like, ‘absolutely, I’d love to.’ So we started coming up with what they wanted me to say.”

A startruck Scott invites Bettis to a hotel party (in room 308 – by the elevator, more foot traffic), and Bettis politely says maybe. But Michael keeps pressing, and Bettis flatout tells him no.

“We only did like two takes and it was as hilarious as ever,” Bettis said. “I had to hold myself back from laughing. It was a great moment for me because I was a fan of the show.”

Part of the magic of The Office was two-fold. Carell had a habit of staying in character even while people were laughing around him, which would cause more people to laugh, and the scene to break down entirely. And so much of what he did was improvised. Which was exactly the case with Bettis’ scenes.

The cameras kept rolling, and Michael would ask Bettis a whole bunch of things, to which Jerome’s answer always had to be “no.” Want to go to the pool? No. Meet us at the jacuzzi. No. Some of it made the show, and some of it didn’t, but it as Bettis puts it, it was ad-libbed almost the whole time.

The most memorable line from the episode was uttered by Michael Scott as he’s walking away from his interaction with Bettis.

“Why do they call him “The Bus”? – Dwight
“Because he’s afraid to fly.” – Michael

And even that line was thought of randomly by Carell.

“That was something he said off the cuff,” Bettis said. “That was the genius of him, his ability to play off The Bus nickname. That was pretty cool.”

After Crash won Best Picture, it's fair to say our rubrics for what constitutes “Oscar-worthiness” shifted a bit. Every year it seems like we find ourselves with another shocking set of Oscar nominees, and sometimes that shock is a good thing (Hooray, Melissa McCarthy!) and sometimes it's a bad thing (All white acting nominees again?). 

Today, we celebrate a list of performers, actors, and songwriters who blew our minds by grabbing an Oscar nomination. Some are well-known nominees and others slipped in under our collective radar. Altogether, they're a weird bunch of Academy-ready stars. 

Richard Linklater has long since earned my eternal loyalty as an audience member. I may not love every film he makes, but I know that when he sets out to make a movie, there”s going to be some reason, some idea, some element of the story that Linklater couldn”t resist. He has such an interesting relationship to time in his films, and he is far more motivated by character than he is by plot, which I like.

Like many filmmakers his age, he”s had a long and public interest in the films and filmmakers of the ’70s. When Darryl Ponsican published a sequel to The Last Detail as a novel, Linklater was immediately attached, and he was going to make the film with Jack Nicholson and Randy Quaid both reprising their roles from the original. That was huge news at the time, and I remember how exciting a prospect that was. I love Hal Ashby”s original film, and the description of Ponsican”s sequel novel Last Flag Flying makes it sound like a solid foundation for a movie a full 23 years later.

There”s been no public word about Linklater”s film since those first announcements a decade ago, and I”d forgotten about it completely. Now word comes of casting for the film, and it sounds like Linklater is finally making the film for Amazon Studios with Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston, and Laurence Fishburne stepping in for Nicholson, Quaid, and Otis Young.

In the 1973 film, Randy Quaid played a young navy recruit who had been busted for something, and two Naval petty officers (Nicholson and Young) have to pick him up and transport him to prison, where he”s going to spend a lot of years locked in a dark hole. They make some detours along the way to give Quaid a chance to sample life, and it”s a great dark funny trip of a movie. In this new film, the one-time prisoner reaches out to the two petty officers to ask them for help in getting the body of his son, killed in service in Iraq, shipped home for burial. Grim stuff, but there”s real potential there.

They”re talking about shooting in November, so this must be close to ready. It”s a nice surprise when something fell off the radar for long enough to forget about it completely, only to surface again as something that”s actually going to happen. Here”s hoping we”re seeing this film by this time next year, because it sounds like it could be great.

Meanwhile, Linklater”s Everybody Wants Some is on-demand and on DVD and Blu-ray now.

Note: apologies for the video autoplay

Sophomore year Late Show host Stephen Colbert dropped by Bravo’s flagship late night show, Watch What Happens Live, to chat with Andy Cohen Thursday night about his career, the current state of American politics, and Donald Trump, among other topics of conversation. But to keep things from getting too serious, as he is wont to do Cohen played a game of “Plead the Fifth” with his guest, in which he asked Colbert a series of questions that he could opt out of only one.

Pulling no punches, Cohen started out the first round of questioning with “Shag, Marry, Kill” — his TV friendly take on the popular party game — only in this case Colbert was asked to choose between his former Daily Show colleagues: Jon Stewart, Steve Carell, and John Oliver. Without spoiling anything, Colbert was surprisingly able to answer with little hesitation, and his answers all made perfect rational sense. (Although who wouldn’t marry Jon Stewart, honestly.)

Further questioning revealed the dumbest politician Colbert had ever interviewed, or in this case met (Texas State Representative Louie Gohmert), but Colbert plead the fifth — for obvious reasons — when it came down to which celebrity he would never want to interview again.

Later, Cohen got Colbert to open up about what it was like being passed the Late Night torch from his predecessor, the great David Letterman, who gave him a warm welcome by regaling him with old stories passed down from Jonny Carson about Jack Benny and handing him the metaphorical keys to the freight elevator — which is a lot more poignant than it sounds.

NBC

It seems like every show that has gone on to the great studio lot in the sky is getting a second life these days, so many fans are left hoping that their favorites may eventually get a second life. I mean, if it can happen to 24 and The X-Files, the sky’s the limit, right? Well, Steve Carell decided to channel his inner Michael Scott and joke that The Office would return for more awkward, paper-selling shenanigans, inspiring a fan-freak out…

…before quickly backpedaling to comment on the return of Will & Grace instead.

Surprisingly enough, fans of The Office had… opinions. It was like Scott’s Tots all over again. RIP your mentions, Steve.

B.J. Novak, Ryan the Temp if you’re nasty, also chimed in, proving that the love between this team continues even if the show is over. He certainly has more loyalty than Ryan ever had.

Was it a dick move by Carell? Kind of. Some fans will probably keep hope alive that the Scranton team will return to our television screens, but that may be an instance where it should be left alone to our memories and rewatch binges. Just ask everyone who got excited about the X-Files reboot.

Ahead of Super Bowl Sunday, Honda has released this minute long spot the company plans to run during the big game, advertising the 2017 CR-V with a slew of celebrity cameos. Or more specifically, the spot features cameos of the celebrities younger selves as seen in their high school yearbooks, who — thanks to the magic of CGI — have some important words of encouragement for a whole new generation of upcoming high school grads.

A fresh-faced Tina Fey kicks off the spot by saying, “When you start out, you might not know where you’re going, or what you’re doing, or why you’re carrying this red rose with you,” (yearbook photographers and those dang roses) and from there Robert Redford continues, “You just keep going, keep your focus, and avoid the distractions,” as all the teenage girls around him sigh dreamily. The rest of the ad features Amy Adams, Magic Johnson, Steve Carell, Missy Elliott, Stan Lee, Jimmy Kimmel, and Viola Davis, who all stress the importance of believing in yourself and following your dreams.

While it’s all very moving, we have to give a shout out to poor Fred Savage who only gets to do the voice over for the commercial instead of actually appearing in it himself — although to be fair, he was technically already pretty accomplished by the time he graduated high school. Either way, Kevin Arnold gets no respect.

NBC

Remember Michael Scott and Holly Flax? Of course you do. They were the only couple (aside from maybe Ryan and Kelly) on The Office that you didn’t grow to resent. I’m projecting a bit here, but Steve Carell and Amy Ryan did a bang-up job on the NBC series and they’ll soon be aligning forces once again for something a bit bleaker.

Deadline reports that Ryan has joined the cast of the Steve Carell drug-addiction drama Beautiful Boy. There’s still a relationship factor, mind you. It just might be as storybook as The Office.

Ryan will play Vicki, Nic’s mother and the ex-wife of Carell’s David, who was cut out of her son’s life after David won primary custody. She begins to work with David for the sake of Nic’s health.

Based on David Sheff’s 2008 book Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction, the film currently has Belgian filmmaker Felix van Groeningen attached to direct and will be shepherded by Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment.

It’s all subject to the quality of the finished product, but Beautiful Boy sounds like awards nip. Acclaimed actors, weighty subject matter, a respected Belgian director and drug sadness? The festival circuit will embrace this with open arms.

(Via Deadline)

Stephen Colbert set the bar high for his show on Tuesday by announcing a special unofficial reunion from The Daily Show last week. Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Samantha Bee, Rob Corddry, and Ed Helms rejoined Colbert to look back, share jokes, and bond together over the current political situation. While Colbert did mention James Comey being fired by President Trump to start the show, he had to put it on the back burner for the night.

To open the show, Jon Stewart and Colbert ended up showing the man they’re really serving after leaving their positions over at Comedy Central. With a delicious sandwich in hand and a refreshing Coca-Cola, Stewart and Colbert go to serve current Daily Show host Trevor Noah. It’s fitting, although a little sad when Stewart doesn’t have his own show to promote. At least not yet.

After the monologue, the entire group got together to look back at Colbert’s last day at The Daily Show. It’s a sketch full of fun wigs, frosted tips, yogurt, and jokes about Steve Carell’s body hair. There’s so many little jokes tossed in throughout and visual gags, it’s likely worth its own breakout for fans. Also, having Oliver play Steve Carell really helps to amp up any and all jokes about the Oscar-nominated actor.

CBS

I would’ve killed for a new “Even Stevphen” installment, but this was pretty damn good.

Jon Stewart is the first guest out, which is fitting considering it was his name under the title of The Daily Show and he’s apparently the one who gave Colbert his potty mouth. They talk a bit about #FireColbert, try to understand why the crowd cheered for James Comey getting fired, and address Stewart’s current role of shoveling real sh*t as opposed to fake bullsh*t on Comedy Central.

They also save some time for Bill O’Reilly getting fired from Fox News — incorrectly comparing a visit to the network to the mines in Raiders Of The Lost Ark, only to be corrected by Colbert immediately.

Once the full group gets out to sit and chat with Colbert, it’s pure gold. Not only does the show put together a nice montage of all the first or early field pieces for the group, Colbert shares his own story about having to run from the Klan on his first or second segment on the show. This also includes a few jokes at the expense of the origins of the show with Craig Kilborn and Lizz Winstead, mostly about how Comedy Central seems to have forgotten that era of the show exists. It was a good one, though, and they should really put something together. No matter, the Klan story is worth sitting through the entire show — not that you wouldn’t have either way.

It was well worth all the hype and a reminder of just how good The Daily Show was for all those years. We also got to see Colbert’s favorite Daily Show moment with Stewart before the whole thing ends.

(Via The Late Show)

Steve Carell was never a bad-looking guy (The Office season one notwithstanding), but no one has exactly confused him for a stud, either. But recently, in the hyperbolic words of BuzzFeed, “Guys, Steve Carell Just Got Insanely Hot And I Don’t Know How To Feel About It.” Ever since Carell appeared in London last week to promote Despicable Me 3 — starring some real hunks, the Minions — and a Twitter user wrote, “Honestly take your Goslings and your Zayns Malik and give me 2017 Steve Carell,” he’s been asked about his new look numerous times.

“I am so sick of people just looking at me for my physical attributes,” Carell joked to ET. “It’s just genetic. There’s nothing I can do… I’m bursting with pride. That’s very nice.” On Tuesday’s The Tonight Show, after host Jimmy Fallon called him a “stud muffin,” the Battle of the Sexes star said, “My wife finally said she’s in love with me. It’s exciting.” After Fallon teased him for joining the silver fox club (founding members: Anderson Cooper, Roger Sterling, and George Clooney), Carell replied, “There’s a bracelet you get, and mine says Steve and on the other side, [it] says, hunk of man meat.”

He’s come a long way since being a 40-year-old virgin, and The Office fans, who are used to Prison Mike, aren’t sure how to handle Scott getting hot.

Feeling some Colbert withdrawal since The Colbert Report ended? The video above might just do the trick. Back in 1994, Stephen Colbert ended his storied run at the Second City theater in Chicago with a rollicking musical performance.

With a little help from some familiar faces — including an introduction by his understudy, Steve Carell — Colbert performs a medley of some old chestnuts that he performed with the troupe. Make sure to listen for his Strangers With Candy costar Amy Sedaris making a crack about his “funny ears.”

Tip of the hat (no wag of the finger) to Splitsider for digging it up.

Via Vulture

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As soon as Amy Ryan (The Office, Birdman) saw me, she started laughing – which, if that reaction came from anyone but her, would probably be distressing. Before you read this, you should probably know that Amy Ryan and I have a history of, let’s say, odd interviews. It’s a rare journalist/interview subject relationship in which the two of us do not know each other at all outside of these interviews, yet it’s now just a known thing that when we sit in front of each other professionally we are probably going to goof around.

This time, though, the setting is at a bar on Park City, Utah’s Main Street, where the cast of Jared Hess’s new film, Don Verdean is celebrating after the film’s Wednesday night Sundance premiere. Ryan plays Carol, an assistant to Sam Rockwell’s title character – an archeologist who finds himself facilitating a series of scam jobs retrieving religious artifacts in exchange for accolades and lots of money. It’s a quirky comedy that is very much from the mind of the director of Napoleon Dynamite.

Ahead, we try our best to communicate in a noisy bar, which I will blame on the fact that, at one point, I used an awfully embarrassing choice of words.

You have a really big part in this and it made me happy.

It made me happy, too. I want to do more comedies.

You did The Office.

I know, I just want to do more. I’m getting greedy.

Was The Office the first time people thought about you with comedy? I think people think of you as funny now.

If you stand next to Steve Carell on line, even at the dry cleaner, they’re going to think you’re funny.

You get hit in the stomach with a rock in this movie and you got to do a funny moan.

I stole the moan.

What does that mean?

It says in the script I’m moaning, but there’s a classic clip on YouTube about the grape stomper. Do you know that one?

I think so?

It’s a snarky, bitchy local newscaster at a wine festival stomping grapes and she’s getting really cantankerous about it. Then she falls off the little makeshift stage, and that’s that sound, “Ohhhhhhhh.”

OK, I know exactly what you’re talking about now.

I’ve got to credit that lady, whoever she is.

How much of your free time do you spend watching YouTube videos of people being hurt?

Mostly when people send them to me. But, when I’m traveling and I can’t sleep at night, I’ll watch YouTube or trailers of movies.

Were you a Napoleon Dynamite fan?

Yes, 100 percent.

I just watched it again recently. It’s still good. I didn’t know if it would hold up.

There are movies I loved as a kid that I’m thinking of showing to my nieces, who are 14. It’s like, “Are these movies funny, or am I just a young idiot?’

What movies?

The classic comedies that I loved that I like to quote were Fast Times at Ridgemont High…

That’s still a great movie.

These are all great, like Young Frankenstein, Airplane!, Meatballs.

Those are all great, but I still have movies on my list that aren’t quite as good, like Brewster’s Millions.

Brewster’s Millions! Own it.

You should be in the Brewster’s Millions reboot.

Done. My lawyer is here tonight, I’m going to tell him.

What does that mean?

He’s like powerful, I guess.

So he can save you from the Brewster’s Millions reboot?

No, I want him to start making the deal.

We’re at Sundance, this is how it happens, right?

I thought you and I were just doing one of our little famous improvs we do.

People I’ve told that I was talking to you again seemed excited. We have a lot to live up to.

We have to step it up then.

I hope people understand how noisy of an environment we are in.

Not like that Al-Qaeda holding cell we were in last time.

Speaking of last time, Birdman is cleaning up on awards.

Yeah, isn’t that great? It’s amazing.

People really do love it.

People love it. It’s not just about an actor’s world, although it takes place in a theater about an actor. It is ego. We all have egos.

You seem too nice to have an ego.

Haaaa! Haa!

I’ve never once got a vibe from you like, “I’m f*cking Amy Ryan.”

Oh, really? That could cause a scandal. Did you hear what Mike Ryan just said? That sounds incestuous.

I can’t believe I said that.

Mike Ryan just said, “I am fucking Amy Ryan.” That’s weird! [A fan stops by our table and says, “I just wanted to say hi.”] Your timing is perfect!

To clarify, I meant it as, “I’m the shit,” which you don’t do.

My mom has me on Google alert, so you’re going to have to say I said “Frenching Amy Ryan,” or something.

I think we did it again. We have another weird interview.

OK. Now, we’re going to meet up on Goosebumps?

If I get a list of people and your name is listed, I will request it every time. I’ll write your biography someday.

And then when the Steven Spielberg movie comes out, we’ll clean it up and get real serious.

Which is still called The Untitled Steven Spielberg Cold War Thriller. But last time you told me to refer to it as The Untitled Amy Ryan Cold War Thriller.

[Laughs] I did?

Yes. I’m at least voting for that title.

I’ll second the vote.

Mike Ryan has written for The Huffington Post, Wired, Vanity Fair and New York. He is senior entertainment writer at Uproxx. You can contact him directly on Twitter.

I don’t know about you guys, but Bruce Almighty just doesn’t hold up for me over the years. Maybe my tastes have changed, maybe it was never that great in the first place. But this video, which puts a death metal spin on one scene from the movie, makes me wish for a whole new version in which Jim Carrey goes Metalocalypse on everyone and turns Planet Earth into a volcanic, Satanic hellspace. That’s a reboot I could easily get behind.

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Steve Carell dialed into the Howard Stern Show today to discuss his upcoming Oscar nomination for Foxcatcher, which he apparently has 125-to-1 odds of winning. (Note: Variety last called 30-to-1 on January 15th, so I’m not sure where this updated info is coming from.) At any rate, Howard Stern claims to have not been all that impressed with Michael Keaton’s performance in Birdman; instead he’s championing the Academy voters to give Foxcatcher another shot.

Howard finally prods Steve Carell into a little bit of competitive trash talking, saying: “You are 50 times better than Keaton on any given day, when you match up those two performances,” to which Carell responds, “…But mostly as a human being.” OH IT’S SO ON. Red carpet boyfight!!!! Ten bucks says Giuliana Rancic gets caught in the ensuing melee and then Ryan Seacrest tries to break it up and gets decked in the face. Best Oscars ever.

(In all seriousness, Steve Carell is still basically the nicest person ever. And we all know Bradley Cooper is probably gonna get it for American Sniper, anyway.)

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Move over Kim Kardashian, it’s the boys’ time to bare it all.

The reality TV star may have made a noble first attempt at breaking the internet with her full-frontal, booty-licious spread in Paper magazine but The Daily Show is taking it a step further with their sexy #TBT clip of comedians Steve Carell, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert:

The magical moment first occurred back in 2001 as part of the Comedy Central show’s “Moment of Zen” segment. Shirtless, hairy and posing provocatively together while sultry, soothing jazz croons in the background, the video is, as one user Instagram user commented, the “definition of sexy.” Enjoy watching three grown men, one of whom is an Oscar nominee, throw away any ounce of pride they may possess in the name of comedy. Bravo gentlemen, bravo.

ABC

Before he was a Daily Show correspondent, the beloved star of The Office and Anchorman movies, and an Academy Award nominee, Steve Carell was just another struggling actor-comedian. In 1997, with just The Dana Carvey Show and a non-speaking part in Curly Sue under his belt, Steve Carell landed a role in a series called Over the Top, starring Tim Curry and Annie Potts. This was probably huge for him at the time, although Over the Top was canceled after only three episodes.

To add insult to injury, before the series was canceled, Carell suffered the abuse of a critic for the now defunct “teevee.com,” who wrote not just a scathing review of Over the Top, but targeted Steve Carell’s performance in particular. Carell has saved the review over the years and read it on last night’s Late Show with David Letterman. I have taken the liberty of transcribing it:

I wish I could say that Carell is bad, but that would imply that I have some frame of reference to judge him against. Carell screeches, wheezes, his eyes bulge — and that’s when he’s standing still. Trust me when I say this is not a road you wish to travel. The truth is, I have never seen anything like what I saw last Tuesday night. I’ve stood in a freezer full of dead people at the morgue. I’ve seen a man’s scalp pulled back over his nose. But I can honestly say that until Steve Carell’s turn in the premiere of Over the Top, I have never known true horror.

If you’re thinking, come on, it couldn’t have been that bad — let me just stop you right there. According to Wikipedia, Carell’s character is listed as Yorgo Galfanikos, a “psychotic Greek chef.” So it was probably that bad. Not that you can blame a guy for taking a crap role early in his career.

Here’s Carell telling the story, along with a delightful tale about how Stephen Colbert apparently tried to hire the guy who wrote the review:

We weren't kidding back in December when we wrote about how this year's Best Actor pool may have been the greatest ever. Two months later, and we seemingly have the tightest race in this category in at least 12 years. And let's put an emphasis on “seemingly.”  

From a pundit, industry and Oscar fan perspective, it appears as though three of the five nominees have a legitimate shot to celebrate on Oscar Sunday. First up is “The Theory of Everything's” Eddie Redmayne. The 33-year-old Brit has already won a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award and, as expected, the BAFTA Award in this category for his incredible portrayal of Stephen Hawking in the popular biopic.  

Redmayne's main competition for most of awards season has been “Birdman's” Michael Keaton. The veteran actor was the apple of critics groups' eyes, earning honors from the National Board of Review and, by our count, 20 other organizations. He took home the Globe for Best Actor – Musical or Comedy and managed two Best Actor honors from the Critics' Choice Awards. While he lost at the SAG Awards, “Birdman” did win Best Ensemble. That means you could easily make a case that there is support for the movie and his performance within the actors branch. Because of his long and legendary career, Keaton arguably knows more Academy members than his competitors and is seen as an icon for the lasting impact of his earlier work. Is there a faction of the membership that wants to give him an Oscar so he can finally join the club? You bet there is.

Once their respective films had screened in September it confirmed what many had foreseen in the summer, a race between Redmanye and Keaton for the win with “The Imitation Game's” Benedict Cumberbatch being a potential party crasher.  What wasn't necessarily foreseen was the wild card entry of “American Sniper's” Bradley Cooper. “Sniper” debuted somewhat late in the season and that contributed to the actor finding himself out of the SAG race (he'd been nominated three times previously) and not earning yet another Golden Globe nod (he'd been nominated for his last two films).

On Oscar nomination day, however, Cooper was riding some high profile support and “Sniper's” incredible box office to effectively knock “Nightcrawler's” Jake Gyllenhaal or “Selma's” David Oyelowo (take your pick) out of the final five. In the weeks since, the R-rated “Sniper” has crossed the $300 million mark and many believe a Cooper win could be how the Academy collectively rewards the film. The 40-year-old is also nominated for the third year in a row. The last time that rare feat happened? 2004 when Renee Zellweger won Best Supporting Actress for “Cold Mountain.”

Momentum is a powerful thing in Oscar land. Just ask Adrien Brody, who won this category facing stiff competition from Jack Nicholson (“About Schmidt”), Daniel Day-Lewis (“Gangs of New York”) and Nicholas Cage (“Adaptation”). The big difference between Brody and Cooper, however, is that the former had earned SAG and BAFTA nods, the latter did not. So is Cooper's perceived ascension more a case of wishful thinking from the media? Is it really still coming down to a “pick 'em” between Redmayne and Keaton?

It's important to note that Redmayne, Keaton and fellow nominee Steve Carell (“Foxcatcher”) have been working the circuit, literally, for months. You name an awards season event and they have probably been there. Cooper has been in the mix more recently, but considering how much he's played the game the past two seasons, he didn't hesitate to jump into the fray. The fact that Cumberbatch was barely able to campaign due to his work schedule is an example of how a potential winner can become an also-ran in a competitive season. (Nope, it's not always about the quality of the work itself, unfortunately.)

And yet, history may be on Redmayne's side. Statistically, only twice has an actor won both SAG and BAFTA Best Actor awards and lost the Oscar over the 21 year history of the SAGs. Hollywood also loves transformational roles, from Daniel Day-Lewis in “My Left Foot” to Jamie Foxx in “Ray” and Matthew McConaughey in “Dallas Buyers Club” this past year. And, as silly as this sounds, have we mentioned how Redmayne has wonderfully charmed voters from New York to Los Angeles and back again? This is an incredibly tough race to call and anything may happen on Oscar night, but it's hard to bet against Redmayne at this point.

That doesn't mean we won't be on the edge of our seats as that envelope is opened, however.

Biggest campaign moment: While you might think it was Cooper crashing the Oscar nomination party, it was actually Carell's inclusion that was more of a surprise. After receiving a supporting nomination from BAFTA, it seemed like he might be in danger of diluting his votes, while the early guild results had many believing “Foxcatcher” was not adored by the industry (eventually evidenced by missing a Best Picture nomination). Ultimately, the strength of his transformative performance (a theme, perhaps?) pushed him through in a competitive field.

Should have been here: Where do we start? “Nightcrawler's” Gyllenhaal, “Selma's” Oyelowo, “Mr. Turner's” Cannes winner Timothy Spall, “A Most Violent Year's” Oscar Isaac, “Unbroken's” Jack O'Connell and “Interstellar's” Matthew McConaughey would all have been worth nominees, and you could easily argue that Gyllenhaal or Oyelowo could have won.

Who will win: Eddie Redmayne, “The Theory of Everything”
Who should win: Eddie Redmayne, “The Theory of Everything”

There is only one correct way to prepare for the Oscars: resentfully watching every bad, dubious, or weird movie starring this year's honorees and feeling smug about it. StreamFix is here to help. Here are five weird choices streaming on Netflix to get you caught up on some of the 2014 nominees.

“Chalet Girl” with Felicity Jones

Felicity Jones would have more of a chance at an Oscar if she just called herself “the other Carey Mulligan” and dealt with it. Anyway, remember “Chalet Girl”? It was about Felicity Jones and Ed Westwick enjoying wonderful times on the slopes. Let us consult The New York Times' review for some insight into this cinematic journey: “'Chalet Girl' may not be particularly creative or genre busting or even a great example of a romantic comedy. But its premise might make you smile.” I know I always go to the movies for the faint possibility of a smile, so look this one up now. Also: Can we look up Ed Westwick because I think he got lost somewhere in a 2011 smirking fit and hasn't been seen since.

“The House of the Spirits” with Meryl Streep

NEV-ER FOR-GET that Meryl Streep and Glenn Close once costarred in a movie together. And it was a magical movie. And psychic powers were involved. And Winona Ryder, Jeremy Irons, Vanessa Redgrave, Antonio Banderas, and William Hurt were there too. And that they all paled in comparison to the movie's true star, Teri Polo, who continues to cast spells on Meryl and Glenn to this very day.

“Frida” with Edward Norton

Truly, this movie is not that strange. It's mostly very good! Salma Hayek brings all the cast-iron integrity you want in good Kahlo cosplay. But it's like the entire world forgot that Edward Norton once played Nelson Rockefeller in this film. I love, love, love movies that cast a half-dozen random actors as glamorous historical figures. Remember that time we made Hugh Grant play Chopin in “Impromptu”? Or when Kathy Bates barked about good writing as Gertrude Stein in “Midnight in Paris”? This is one of those occasions! Also be sure to enjoy Geoffrey Rush has that old rapscallion Leon Trotsky.

“Bewitched” with Steve Carell

Ohhhhhh. This movie. I don't know how the idea of a real-life witch trying out for a remake of “Bewitched” became a real movie, but here we are. Somehow it goes underreported that Steve Carell played the role of Uncle Arthur in the in-movie remake. Fast-forward through Will Ferrell's endlessly repetitive tantrums to get to Carell throwing down some mad Paul Lynde snickering. (Stephen Colbert also appears as a production-side TV guy.)

“Labor Day” with JK Simmons

There was a time we thought Kate Winslet was infallible. Then, after she won an Oscar, that movie “Carnage” happened to her. What the hell was that? Roman Polanski telling four disinterested actors to yell “GRR!” at each other? I'm still processing it. Then last year “Labor Day” happened to Kate Winslet, proving that even the most talented actress can't amp up a total dud. But give it up for JK Simmons in one of his many minor roles as he faithfully serves up skills alongside Tobey Maguire, James Van Der Beek, and Clark Gregg.

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Emma Watson was too busy not dating Prince Harry to attend the Oscars on Sunday night, but she still made her presence known. The Harry Potter star has added “activist” to her portfolio of skills, including launching the HeForShe campaign, which aims to bring together “one half of humanity [men] in support of the other half of humanity [women], for the benefit of all.”

It’s a noble and worthy endeavor, and during the Academy Awards, Steve Carell, who was nominated for Best Actor for his work in Foxcatcher, wore special HeForShe cufflinks.

Dear Steve Carell,
You were pure genius in Little Miss Sunshine (one of my all time favourite films), my brother became obsessed with you after Anchorman, I wanted to marry you or have you adopt me after Crazy, Stupid, Love, I hated that guy you played in The Way Way Back, and then you were mind-blowing in Foxcatcher. I think you’re so awesome and today you are wearing ‪#‎HeForShe‬ Monique Péan cufflinks at the Oscars to support Gender Equality. Couldn’t be more proud! THANK YOU.
Love,
Emma x

“You miss 100 percent of the cuffs you don’t link — Wayne Gretzky”
— Michael Scott

Steve Carell has been on an amazing journey in his career, from his beginnings on The Dana Carvey Show and a failed sitcom, to being a correspondent on The Daily Show, and then to legitimate A-list movie star status with films like Anchorman and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and now garnering his first Oscar nomination for Foxcatcher. So, let’s take it back to where it all started, when Steve Carell was just a goofy kid performing in his Second City graduation show.

Who could have guessed that this rhyming lumberjack was destined for stardom? At least he had the hairy part down, anyway.

(Via Mental Floss)

Second City has been pretty awesome about releasing vintage clips of performances by some very familiar famous people, and today brings us yet another gift: shirtless Steve Carell. In this short video from a performance titled Are You Now, Or Have You Ever Been Mellow?, the Oscar-nominated Carell doffs his shirt and dons a blond wig to play the very sexy romance novel cover model Fabio, complete with Beyoncé Hair Fan (which we’re just going to have to rename the Fabio Hair Fan because Fabio came first; sorry, Beyhive). But who is that providing the voice of Fabio while Carell anime-mouths silently? That’s the one and only honey-voiced Stephen Colbert.

Keep ’em coming, Second City. As many Carell-Colbert-Fabio videos that you can find.

Source: Splitsider

Comedy Central

With Jon Stewart’s run as host of The Daily Show coming to an end, it seems like a good time to recall some of the classic segments we no longer see on the show. These were flagship segments in Stewart’s early years, but they eventually faded from sight. These five recurring bits represent some of the best work of the early years of The Daily Show.

Ad Nauseam

Out of all the retired Daily Show segments, this one really feels like it should still exist today. After all, the oversaturation of TV commercials is greater than ever, and they’ve now found their way into Hulu and YouTube. There could be probably be a great Ad Nauseam segment based on those repetitive Rob Lowe DirecTV commercials. As it stands, we can remember that for a few years, The Daily Show was offering the most intelligent critique of consumer culture that you could find.

This Week in God

Who doesn’t miss the God Machine? In the early- to mid-2000s, it was one of the best parts of the week. For years, Stephen Colbert hosted this segment looking at religion, but when he left to do The Colbert Report, Rob Corddry took it over. When Corddry left in 2006, the segment was retired, which is a shame because it was one of the most consistently funny bits on the show, and it offered a surprisingly diverse look at various religions.

Produce Pete with Steve Carell

This segment is representative of the era when The Daily Show acted as a parody of other news shows, before evolving into a show that focused more on Stewart’s political commentary. Here, Carell plays a produce “expert” who tries to be upbeat and jovial, and but can’t hide the bitter resentment stewing within him. After watching the above segment, I have no interest in learning how to can peaches, which was exactly what Carell was going for.

NBC

Of his iconic TV character from the American version of The Office, Steve Carell once said, “If you don’t know a Michael Scott, then you are Michael Scott.” Actually, it was Ricky Gervais who said that to Scott in regard to his character, David Brent, from the U.K. version of the series, but the basic idea behind it remains terrifying to devoted fans of the hit NBC series. Nobody ever wants to be as awkward and prone to humiliating mistakes both in and out of work like Michael Scott was, but he was certainly a character who was far more realistic than a lot of people realized.

Adapted and developed by Greg Daniels for NBC, the American version of The Office debuted on March 24, 2005, and viewers and critics were intrigued from the start. More than 11 million people tuned in to watch the remake of the British series’ pilot, and it was met with negative reviews from critics who were disappointed that it seemed like a cheap carbon copy. The following week, though, Daniels’ series proved that it could and ultimately would shine on its own, as the episode “Diversity Day” introduced us to the real Michael Scott, and how this horribly awkward goon of a Dunder Mifflin boss would affect the lives of his poor office drones. (In the event you’ve never seen it, the full episode is available on YouTube for $1.99.)

“Diversity Day” has long been praised and remembered by critics as one of the best episodes of the entire nine-season run (IGN, TV.com and Entertainment Weekly each ranked it No. 3 all-time, for example). Some might argue that other favorites like “Fun Run,” “Gay Witch Hunt” and “The Dundies” were more enjoyable, but no episode defined the entire series quite like “Diversity Day.” For the 10th anniversary of the debut of the American version of The Office, we spoke with some of the cast and crew to find out how this episode was made, and how much it means to them a decade later.

“The Dana Carvey Show” was a short-lived ABC comedy series that last just seven episodes in 1996, but the writing staff featured heavyweights like Stephen Colbert, Robert Smigel, Steve Carell, and Louis CK.

The “Louie” star visited Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show” to discuss how he specifically torpedoed Fallon's dreams of appearing as a cast member. Apparently Fallon gave a great audition, but he terrified CK. It's awesome. 

Sony

Primetime broadcast sketch comedy shows don’t exist for a reason. Though it’s all underwritten by intense brain power, sketch comedy requires a certain level of emotional immaturity and recklessness to pull off, as well as a broad approach to what is and isn’t worth talking about. Broadcast comedy is as narrow as a pinhole when it comes to what will and won’t be acceptable to the masses. It’s not down to a formula — there are shows like Seinfeld that surprisingly take hold while offering a refreshingly different product — but the networks tend to play it safe while pushing the weirder fare (what little there is left on broadcast) to late night.

It’s hard to know if ABC knew what it was getting when they gave Dana Carvey a half-hour in primetime for a variety show in 1996. They probably expected 10 minutes of George Bush impressions, some songs about broccoli, and a bit of the Church Lady to bring it on home every week. A sort of sanitized version of what he had done during his legendary run on Saturday Night Live. But what they got was the product of Carvey allowing former SNL and Late Night with Conan O’Brien writer Robert Smigel and Louis CK to run wild and blend the former’s penchant for the weird and silly with the latter’s love of brashness and boundary pushing (which has earned him so much success with Louie).

Armed with a staff of writers and performers that included Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Jon Glaser, Charlie Kaufman, Dino Stamatopoulos, Spike Feresten from Seinfeld, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt co-creator Robert Carlock (but not Jimmy Fallon), The Dana Carvey Show was unlike anything on television at the time. Brilliant, funny, and dead after just seven episodes. Thankfully, the final product is scattered in bits across the Internet and YouTube (and collected in a DVD box set), allowing us the chance to appreciate something that feels both ahead of its time and above the sketch comedy offerings that we’re used to today.

Bill Clinton Breastfeeding Puppies

Sony

For some reason, I can’t find the full version of this sketch online and it’s not worth posting something that cuts out before the then sitting President of the United States nourishes puppies from his teet. Honestly, I wouldn’t even include the sketch here based on its comedic merits alone, but its notable because this was the way that Dana Carvey, Robert Smigel, and Louis CK decided to introduce their show to America, and thanks to ABC, they were able to see that it was the precise moment that damned their show and caused millions of viewers to flee in terror. It’s also the moment that The Dana Carvey Show sounded the horn and let comedy fans know that they were going to be fiercely and recklessly different. And Louis CK is the demented fellow who came up with the idea in the first place.

Waiters Who Are Nauseated By Food

This is just a silly sketch featuring Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell as two waiters who want to throw up anytime they talk about or hear others mention food. Carell’s exaggerated dry heaving is what really makes this sketch work and he and Colbert play off each other really well. Something that comes from having worked together at Second City in the ’80s and ’90s.

Skinheads From Maine 

Just a couple of bigots relaxing on the porch, whittling a hate stick for the purpose of beating Spaniards. This sketch would never live on broadcast TV today and it’s probably too politically incorrect for cable. Are the writers trying to make the point that racism and bigotry exist where you least expect them? Is this high-minded satire, or did they just think that it would be funny to have stand-ins for the “Bartles and Jaymes” guys talking about Jews controlling the weather? To some, the latter might not be a good enough excuse for the language used, and I don’t think a contemporary show would want to deal with the blowback that would come from trying to sell something that gets laughs out of two guys talking about gay bashing.

Leftover Beatles Memories

Carvey subtly trolls the censors as Paul McCartney by demonstrating the dangers of using the word “Peanuts” with the right accent and Smigel and Colbert follow as Ringo Starr and George Harrison, with the latter getting the payoff after a long set-up when he cooly admits that he killed a man once.

The Drow-Z-Boy

We’ve all seen ads for Jazzy scooters that promote increased mobility for elderly folks, but this takes that concept to the extreme thanks to a recliner that becomes an exoskeleton for the elderly. Carvey didn’t feature a lot of ad parodies, but this is the kind of thing that would have been an instant-classic on SNL.

The Ambiguously Gay Duo

Robert Smigel’s Ambiguously Gay Duo lives in the zeitgeist thanks to SNL, but it debuted on Carvey. More evidence that Carvey, Smigel, CK, and their staff were onto something and that this show could have flourished on the right network.

NBC

For seven classic seasons of The Office, Steve Carell delighted and horrified viewers as Michael Scott, the idiot savant boss of the fictional paper company, Dunder-Mifflin. While he usually meant well, Michael Scott almost always said and did the wrong thing. Fans cheered him on anyway. Here are a few of his best lines:

1. “The worst thing about prison was the… was the Dementors.”

2. “Sometimes I’ll start a sentence and I don’t even know where it’s going. I just hope I find it along the way.”

3. “Occasionally I’ll hit somebody with my car. So sue me.”

NBC

4. “You know what they say. ‘Fool me once, strike one. But fool me twice… strike three.”

5. “Then suddenly she’s not your ho no mo.”

6. “Would I rather be feared or loved? Easy. Both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me.”

7. ” You don’t know me. You’ve just seen my penis.”

NBC

8. “I love inside jokes. I’d love to be a part of one someday.”

9. “I’m not superstitious, but I am a little stitious.”

10. “It’s a pimple, Phyllis. Avril Lavigne gets them all the time, and she rocks harder than anyone alive.”

Excuse us for a moment as we pick our jaw off the floor.  We've just watched the first preview for the drama “Freeheld” which is pretty much a lock to debut at the 2015 Toronto Film Festival in September. Trailers are meant to sell a film to a wide audience and are not always indicative of the final product (see “The Gift”).   Still, “Freeheld” has to be better film than the initial trailer Lionsgate has just released for it.  It has to be.

The new movie is based on the true story of Laurel Hester, a New Jersey police officer diagnosed with terminal cancer who fought her local county employer for the right to pass her pension on to her partner.  Her battle was first chronicled in an acclaimed 2007 documentary with the same title.  Once you check out the new preview embedded at the top of this post you'll begin to understand our concern.

A movie starring Julianne Moore, Ellen Page, Michael Shannon, Steve Carell and Josh Charles has to be better than this, right?  A movie directed by Peter Sollett, the man behind “Raising Victor Vargas” and the underrated “Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist,” has to be better than this, right? Steve Carell's performance cannot be as shrill and stereotyped than what we're seeing in this trailer, right?  Lionsgate just cut this preview to look like a Lifetime TV movie to pull in the older female audience, right?  

Right?

“Freeheld” opens in select theaters on Oct. 2 and nationwide on Oct. 16.

It’s not as difficult as Weekend Update anchor on SNL, but being a Daily Show with Jon Stewart correspondent is no cakewalk. You’re fighting for precious little airtime, and sometimes with your own boss. But if you do have a successful Daily Show stint, chances are good that you’ll make it in Hollywood. The list of former correspondents is stacked with above-the-line names like Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Josh Gad, Olivia Munn and John Oliver, among others.

The video above looks back at the first appearances from many of the show’s “most distinguished alumni,” as well as what they’ve done since leaving The Daily Show. I wonder if Carell knew that years after reporting live from Oakdale, Nebraska, he’d play guitar for Dane Cook.

Probably.

(Via Digg)

All through the run-up to Jon Stewart's final “Daily Show” last night, fans were treated to clips of Stewart's greatest hits and best running gags, be it his disdain for Arby's or his impression of Mitch McConnell by way of Cecil Turtle from “Looney Tunes.”

Stewart opened Wednesday night's penultimate episode by looking at the notion of Stewart's “Daily Show” as a savage “destroyer of worlds,” by replaying some of his harshest attacks on ISIS, the banks that got us into the financial crisis, and FOX News. Each look back concluded with news footage proving that not only had Stewart not successfully ruined any of his foes, but that they were all more powerful than before.

“The world is demonstrably worse than when I started!” he vented. “Have I caused this?!?!?”

It was an appropriate, and probably necessary, note to hit. For all that Stewart has been rightly celebrated as a watchdog against the dishonesty rampant throughout politics and media – and, to many of his viewers, a more trusted newsman than his allegedly more serious counterparts at Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC – there's only so much even the best satirical newscast can accomplish. These final weeks of his “Daily Show” had celebrated the many fine and funny things Stewart did over 16 years, but as an arch-enemy of exaggeration and lies, it would have been out of character for him to not acknowledge that he ultimately provided far more laughter than substantial change in policy or public discourse.

And with that note out of the way on Wednesday, Thursday's beautiful series finale could focus on the very real aspects of Stewart's legacy, starting with the amazing collection of talent he and his staff assembled over those 16 years. In an opening segment that consumed nearly the entire running time of a traditional “Daily Show” episode, 28 past and present “Daily Show” correspondents – everyone from Steve Carell and Josh Gad to late '90s mainstays Mo Rocca and Vance DeGeneres – came out to pay homage to Stewart and riff on their on-screen personae. (Even Wyatt Cenac, whose “WTF with Marc Maron” discussion of a fight he once had with Stewart provided the one ugly bump of this victory lap, turned up, for a joke about how awkward things now were between them.) 

The trip down memory lane concluded, as it should have, with Stephen Colbert coming out to say goodbye to the man who made his own career possible. At first, he and Stewart joked around about a “Lord of the Rings” metaphor where Stewart was Frodo and Colbert was Sam, but then Colbert stunned his old boss by halting the attempt to go to commercial so he could say some more heartfelt words. As Stewart, who Colbert said had told people to never thank him, squirmed and protested, Colbert showered genuine praise on Stewart both for what he brought to the show (“You were infuriatingly good at your job!”) and the huge opportunities he provided for Colbert and the rest of the correspondents. By the end of it, Stewart was trying to duck his face out of view of the camera to hide how much he was crying. It was “The Daily Show” equivalent of when Bette Midler reduced Johnny Carson to tears on his penultimate “Tonight Show” – only with more jokes, like Colbert's insistence that he was the “Son of a poor Appalachian turd miner” saved from getting “dung lung” by Stewart.

That segment – which also featured sarcastic farewells from many of the politicians and news anchors who had been Stewart's targets over the years, plus original “Daily Show” host Craig Kilborn – was followed by a “Goodfellas”-style tracking shot (scored to The Crystals' “Then He Kissed Me”) through “The Daily Show” offices to meet the many staffers who contributed so much to the on-air product without the fame of a Stewart or John Oliver. Together, those two segments were Stewart's way of saying that these people – the ones who worked on-camera and the many more who worked behind it – were the show's legacy, far more than any tangible change he was largely unable to effect in the awful way our media and politics function.

Still, Stewart made one last attempt at getting his message across, with a blunt and searing commentary about how “bullshit is everywhere” – in politics, in news, and in every accepted part of our modern lives, down to the iTunes user agreement.

Having concluded 16 years of silliness and savagery, and clearly overcome with the realization that he was about to voluntarily leave what he called “the most beautiful place I have ever been,” Stewart took one of the holdover elements from the Kilborn era and flipped it, promising the audience “my moment of zen.” It turned out to be Stewart's fellow New Jerseyans Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, who tore through “Land of Hope and Dreams” and the climax of “Born to Run” as Stewart and his many co-workers hugged, danced, and sang along before Stewart said his final words in this job: “Thank you. Good night.”

It was a love-fest, as befits a show adored for so long by so many, but laced with enough humor throughout (including Oliver mocking Stewart for having to deal with commercials, and Larry Wilmore complaining that “The Nightly Show” got bumped because Stewart's finale was running long) to not feel like hagiography.

It was long and self-indulgent at times, but almost all of that was in service to the people around Stewart, rather than himself, and the joy of everyone to be together one last time was palpable.

It was the perfect goodbye. I think I'll go to Arby's to celebrate it. 

NBC

Steve Carell became a household name thanks to his wildly popular Michael Scott on The Office. But while he may have been a fan-favorite and often had good intentions, Michael Scott was a terrible boss. Whether he was sparring with HR, indiscreetly dating a superior, or being just plain mean at Christmas parties, Scott didn’t often display the leadership skills needed to successfully manage an office. Sure, these blunders were cringingly hilarious on-screen, but they would be a nightmare in an actual workplace.

Michael fancies himself an excellent boss and leader, but he couldn’t be more mistaken. He lacks the tact and the rationality required to be a great boss, but no one would watch a comedy about a good boss. No, part of what makes The Office great is Michael’s constant, outrageous failure.

Diversity Day

If you want to see a hilarious portrayal of white privilege and how not to handle it, watch Michael blunder through Dunder Mifflin’s diversity training. Hey, Larry Wilmore!

Fake Firing

Michael fancies himself a student of comedy, so he thinks that it would be hilarious to emulate The Jamie Kennedy Experience and fake-fire his employees. In the pilot episode, he tries this prank out on Pam, with heartbreaking results. You would think that he would have learned his lesson the first time, but he whips out this winner again, this time with Stanley as his victim. It does not go well. At all.

Sexual Harassment

Everybody likes a good dirty joke, but they are not always appropriate in the traditional workplace. Additionally, many enjoy some innocent flirting in the workplace. As is his wont, Michael takes it all too far. When he realizes that he is the cause of the additional harassment training, Michael lets loose a tirade of dirty jokes and some uncomfortable flirting with Phyllis.

Gay Witch Hunt

When Oscar comes out of the closet, Michael is forced to face a lot of the prejudices and homophobia that had come across in his office demeanor. Of course, he fails to be understanding and makes Oscar’s moment about himself instead. While he is indeed contrite about all of his previous slurs, forcing Oscar into the most awkward television kiss of all time was definitely not the way to handle it.

The Golden Ticket

Sure, many companies use promotional discounts to offer incentives for their current customers or to drum up new business. This is not a new thing. However, most companies make sure that their biggest customer isn’t lucky enough to receive the bulk of the discounts, potentially bankrupting the company. Michael isn’t a planner, though, and he didn’t think this one through. The kicker is that he tries to blame the entire debacle on Dwight, and then when it actually turns out to be a good thing, he tries to take the credit back.

Health Care

Michael isn’t great with conflict, so he has a tough time picking a new, cheaper healthcare plan for his employees. Instead of handling it like a manager, however, he hands the task off to Dwight. When Dwight picks a terrible plan, Michael doesn’t want to deal with real world ramifications, so instead he placates the group with the promise of a great surprise. Unable to improvise anything major, Michael gets them all ice cream sandwiches. So not only is the surprise a total letdown (chipwiches or GTFO), the Scranton branch is also stuck with a horrible healthcare plan because Michael couldn’t do his job.

Utica Raid

A boss is supposed to be a role model for his employees, and it is safe to say that, while Michael is many things, a role model he is not. When Michael decides that the best way to respond to Karen trying to poach Stanley is to play a prank on the Utica branch, Dwight and Jim probably should have realized that this was only going to end terribly. Instead of handling the situation with maturity and openness with Stanley, Michael chooses option B: dressing up in ridiculous disguises and destroying office equipment.

Prison Mike

This is a prime example of Michael taking a passing comment way too far. When the Dunder-Mifflinites make some innocent jokes that their workplace is worse than actual prison, Michael turns it into a teachable moment. The problem is that Michael obviously knows nothing about prison and the entire presentation devolves into horrible (but still hilarious) stereotypes.

An Ill-Advised Roast

Comedy roasts can be very funny, but it’s usually best to leave them to the professionals. When morale plummets, Michael decides that the best way to handle it is to organize a roast so his employees can razz him to his face. Unfortunately, Michael has incredibly thin skin. First rule of roasts: be able to handle the insults. Sure, Dwight gets extra nasty, but the situation should never have arisen in the first place.

Scott’s Tots

This one is bar none the biggest Michael Scott blunder because it has the most horrifying ramifications. Michael makes a lot of promises that he cannot keep, but promising a classroom full of kids that he will pay for their college is just a bridge too far. When it becomes clear that there is no way that he can follow through on his initial promise, he gets them computer batteries instead. Michael’s done a lot of questionable things on his quest for friendship and intimacy, but this was definitely the worst.

Dreamworks

A hefty majority of the humor in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues comes from the channel 4 news team. While they all had a shared sense of male entitlement, the members of the KVWN boys club all brought a different aspect of the stereotypically macho mentality of the 1970s to the big screen.

Ron (Will Ferrell) was a textbook alpha male, Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd) was the womanizer, and Champ Kind (David Koechner) was a bit of a burly brute. But, for many, the standout of the crew was Brick Tamland (Steve Carell), who often displayed the mental fortitude of a broom handle.

Even though the rest of the news crew felt a collective responsibility to keep Brick out of harm’s way, they also had a lot of fun at his expense through his impulsive actions and willingness to do whatever they said. But that’s also led to a whole lot of laughs.

Enjoy some of the laughs from the Anchorman films once again by looking at Brick Tamland’s best quotes.

“I’m Brick Tamland. People seem to like me because I am polite and I am rarely late. I like to eat ice cream and I really enjoy a nice pair of slacks. Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48 and am what some people call mentally retarded.”

We all know that one kid that ate glue back in elementary school. Brick Tamland is an example of what happens when teachers don’t care enough to make that same kid stop. But modern day science and I.Q. scores tell us that he could’ve benefited from a little extra help.

“I DON’T KNOW WHAT WE’RE YELLING ABOUT!”

Brick was often clueless and just did whatever he felt was right at the time, which was often the least expected thing imaginable. In this scene, he felt the best thing to do was just to follow everyone else’s lead and make “LOUD NOISES!” even if he didn’t know what anyone was yelling about.

“I would like to extend to you an invitation to the pants party.”

Brick’s that one friend in the group that’ll do whatever you tell him to for a good laugh. That’s all fine and dandy until he butchers his lines and becomes his own punchline. Sadly, he wasn’t quick enough on his feet to avoid taking the rest of the team down with him.

“I love lamp. I love lamp.”

Love is a complicated concept that many of us fail to understand. So you can’t really blame Brick when he tried to fake it and ended up looking more foolish than usual. But given how insistent he was, you may have to take his word for it. When a man says he loves lamp, he really might just love lamp.

“Yeah. There were horses, and a man on fire, and I killed a guy with a trident.”

The fight scene in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy is one of the go-to classic moments. After the KVWN team headed back to the station to lick their wounds, they recapped just how out of hand things got.

“Behind me is the miracle of birth. Soon, a stork will fly overhead delivering a baby panda. Let’s me see if I can get a look at what’s going on there. Oh God! No… I don’t understand!”

There’s a reason that we can’t tell children where babies really come from. To serve as an example of what could happen, Brick, who has the emotional maturity of a child, has his belief in the stork completely destroyed when he gets a glance of a panda giving birth.

“Hey, Ron! I’m riding a furry tractor!”

At the end of Anchorman, the crew ends up in a bear pit to save Ron. Somewhere in that adventure, Brick went from being in danger of being eaten to riding a grizzly bear, bareback.

Note: If you never knew how big a bear was (they’re huge, by the way), this scene adds some perspective.

“Brick was a great man and I will miss him so much and I will not rest until I find his killer. It’s hard for me to believe that he is gone. [cries] I feel like I just saw him yesterday. When I got the news I didn’t even know how to make sense out of it. Why?! Why?! Why did you take him from us?! BRICK IS DEAD!”

It usually takes real skill and a lot of hard work to fake your own death. But something tells me that probably wasn’t the case with Brick. Which would explain why he showed up to deliver a eulogy at his own funeral in this hilarious scene.
“A black man follows me everywhere when it’s sunny… I call him Leon.”

It’s actually not surprising that Brick isn’t bright enough to know the difference between black people and shadows. It’s not his fault. It just sucks that he has a bad habit of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. (Let’s be honest though, there was never a “right” time to say this.)

“I can’t hear you, Ron!”

Brick got sent out of the station – not sure whose decision that was – to give a weather report and thought it would be clever to act like he couldn’t hear Ron back in the studio… by answering all of his questions. This may have been a practical joke that went way too long.
“Ron I don’t have any legs!”

The invention of the green screen was probably pretty shocking when it first hit the scene. Meteorologists all over the world had to learn to point at an empty space and imagine something being there. And they also had to learn to not wear anything matching the color of the screen. Which is apparently a lesson Brick missed out on.

“Ron, you’re a good man. But you’ve fallen victim to your own ego and your own hubris. And before others can forgive you, you must learn to forgive yourself… I’m wearing two pairs of pants.”

[Gasp] In Anchorman 2, Brick surprised everyone by having a seriously out of character experience when he was able to reach deep down and deliver the moral of the news team’s latest drama. But it was so short-lived that he immediately followed it up with an ordinary Brick-like statement.

Universal Pictures

The 40-Year-Old Virgin is already celebrating its 10-year anniversary because, man, you’re getting old! A lot has happened in that time. The careers of Seth Rogen and Steve Carell have skyrocketed, and Paul Rudd, well, he continues to mysteriously look exactly the same. The movie was a huge hit upon its release and helped usher in raunchy R-rated comedies like Superbad, Pineapple Express, and This Is the End. Perhaps more importantly, though, it showed that even the most romantically clueless of people can find love.

To mark the 10th anniversary of the Judd Apatow classic, let’s look back at all the love lessons one can pull from Andy’s trials and tribulations on the path to losing his virginity.

Don’t put your crush on a pedestal.

Remember, your crush is just another human being. Not some mythical Greek god/goddess that is to be fawned over and begged for a coffee date on a Thursday afternoon. They do stupid and gross stuff all the time, just like every other human being walking the planet. So, stop worshiping at the altar of Pussaliath.

Ask questions — just not in a serial killer-type way.

Amazingly, Andy manages to spark some interest in Beth by never doing anything but repeatedly asking her questions. Granted, he does it in the most creepy way possible, but Cal’s advice of “just ask questions and be kind of a dick” works like a charm. People like to talk about themselves, and Andy’s showing interest by channeling his inner David Caruso and asking nothing except questions. If it works for David Caruso and it works for Steve Carell, it’ll work for you.

Leave a lasting impression.

Andy’s manager Paula is a sexual-harassment suit waiting to happen, but there is still knowledge that can be pulled from her inappropriate behavior. Mainly, leave a lasting impression that will haunt — or at least linger — with your crush. Maybe don’t go up and sniff them like they’re a musk ox in heat, though. That’s just creepy.

Throw out a little innuendo.

Andy’s throwing out sexual innuendo and he doesn’t even realize it. As clueless as he is, it works on Elizabeth Banks like a charm. Yes, she’s a drunk nymphomaniac, but the point is that even a seemingly safe line like “I hope you have a big trunk, because I’m gonna put my bike in it” can get the ball rolling toward the bedroom. (Note: This can also backfire horribly as in the case of Paula and Andy.)

Turn on the charm.

Okay, so there’s really nothing charming about Paula’s interactions with Andy or her story about statutory rape. If anything, this whole interaction should probably be reported to corporate, and Paula might want to talk to a professional. The lesson here: A little charm can go a long way. Just don’t look to this scene for any of it.

Make sure you look your best.

It’s important that you look your best if you’re to have any hope at catching your crush’s eye. Maybe that means eliminating “the whole Teen Wolf thing you got going on,” or maybe it means simply getting a haircut and putting on a decent pair of pants. Whatever the case, don’t be afraid to take the necessary steps to look your best — EVEN if it means enduring excruciating pain and looking like a hairy jack-o-lantern.

Universal Pictures

Communicate with confidence.

Being that phones are now used almost exclusively for texting and scrolling through social media, the chances of you asking the object of your affection out through a phone call are probably slim. However, if you do decide to blow their mind and actually make a phone call, try your best to sound relaxed and friendly. People can actually hear if you’re smiling when you speak. Ah, forget it. Just send a text with “Sup? :)”

Know when to throw in the towel.

Sometimes your love interest just isn’t going to have any interest back. There’s nothing sadder than somebody continually trying to make sparks fly when there are none. Whether it’s trying to win back an ex or generate interest in somebody completely new, sometimes there’s just nothing there, and it’s better to cut your losses and move on. You don’t want to be Dave and miss out on a good thing like Gina because you were too busy pinning over a love that was never meant to be.

Follow up and reach out.

One of the few things Andy actually gets right in his pursuit of Trish is that he follows up after she gives him her card and stops by her store to ask her out. Yes, he’s a bit stiff and nervous in their interaction, but the important thing is that he didn’t let the opportunity pass him by. Just remember that after you ask your crush out to get the hell out of there as fast as possible before you do something stupid and give them a reason to change their mind.

Use it or lose it.

Universal

I’m not saying that your sexual organs will shrivel up and die if you never use them — though I’m not saying they won’t, either. But the big takeaway message from Andy’s conquest to lose his V card is that, unless you take a chance and really put yourself out there, you’re going to end up missing out on a lot of good stuff. Those nights of taking three Excedrin PMs and watching Boner Jams ’03 are going to get real old after a while.

Getty Image

Earlier this week, Bruce Willis announced that he was leaving the ensemble cast of Woody Allen’s new film due to a conflict with his upcoming appearance in the Broadway adaption of Stephen King’s Misery. Today, the day has been saved (or at least the production schedule of the film has been saved), as Steve Carell has agreed to step into the role. Deadline explains:

He now joins a cast that includes Blake Lively, Parker Posey, Kristen Stewart, Jesse Eisenberg, Jeannie Berlin, Corey Stoll, Ken Stott, Anna Camp, Stephen Kunken, Sari Lennick and Paul Schneider. The swap-out keeps the production on schedule for the pic, which as usual is being kept under wraps. It shoots this month in New York and Los Angeles.

Fine, great, wonderful. Steve Carell is a gifted actor who will probably perform well in whatever role this particular situation calls for.

But the real story here, in this reporter’s opinion, is that the “Steve Carell Replaces Bruce Willis in Woody Allen Movie” part of this reads like the result of some sort of Hollywood Mad Libs. Like, “[Comedic actor] Replaces [Action Star] in [Famous director] Movie.” So let’s do that. I opened it up to the Uproxx chat room a few minutes ago, and this is what we came up with so far:

– Danny Mcbride Replaces Vin Diesel in Martin Scorsese movie
– Will Ferrell Replaces Tom Hardy In Alejandro González Iñárritu Movie
– Jesse Eisenberg Replaces Jason Statham in Kurosawa Movie
– Michael Cera Replaces Jean Claude Van Damme in Quentin Tarantino movie.
– Rob Schneider Replaces Christian Bale in Christopher Nolan Movie
– David Spade Replaces Sylvester Stallone in Wes Anderson Movie
– Adam Sandler Replaces Daniel Day Lewis in Luc Besson Movie
– Josh Gad Replaces Jackie Chan in Paul Thomas Anderson Movie
– Tim Allen Replaces Denzel Washington in Spike Lee Movie
– Gilbert Gottfried Replaces Clint Eastwood in Clint Eastwood Movie
– Kevin James Replaces The Rock in Michael Bay Movie
– Katt Williams Replaces Liam Neeson in Werner Herzog Movie

That was fun. I would watch THE HELL out of the last one. Yours below.

(Via Deadline)

Netflix/Paramount Pictures/FOX

For nearly a decade, The Office was the crown jewel of the NBC Thursday night comedy block. Between the sharp, hilarious writing and a top-notch cast, The Office went down as one of the best sitcoms in recent history. While it started as a scene-for-scene adaptation of a British version of the show, The Office eventually made the deadpan, mockumentary style of comedy become increasingly popular. Even though it only concluded its run in 2013, its cast has been incredibly busy in the two years since its been off the air. Although it started small, The Office eventually became a springboard for some of Hollywood’s best and brightest. Let’s take a look at what the main cast has been up to since Dunder-Mifflin/Sabre closed its doors.

Steve Carell – Michael Scott

NBC/ Sony Pictures Classics

While he got his start on The Daily Show, The Office is what made Steve Carell a household name. As world’s worst boss Michael Scott, Carell made viewers laugh, cringe, and cry for seven seasons. After he left the show in 2011, Carell became a true Hollywood movie star, headlining Crazy Stupid Love, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, The Way Way Back, Despicable Me 2, Anchorman 2, and Foxcatcher, which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. He shows no sign of slowing down, either, with 11 projects in various stages of production, including the awards-baiting Freeheld and Woody Allen’s latest.

John Krasinski – Jim Halpert

NBC/Paramount Pictures

As one half of one of television history’s best “will they or won’t they” couples, John Krasinski was the charming and likable boy-next-cubicle. Jim Halpert was a legendary pranksman and the winner of Pam Beesly’s heart, and his transformation from unmotivated paper pusher to devoted family man was part of the show’s heart. Since then, Krasinski has done a bit of voice work in Monster’s University, The Wind Rises, The Prophet, and BoJack Horseman. He also co-starred in Aloha, and is starring in Michael Bay’s upcoming 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, and directed and starred in The Hollars, which does not yet have a release date.

Jenna Fischer – Pam Beesly

NBC/ Millennium Entertainment

Jenna Fischer‘s work as receptionist turned sales rep Pam Beesly is one of the oft-overlooked, yet great aspects of The Office. Her vulnerability and quiet determination was a touching thing to behold over the course of nine seasons. Since leaving behind her cardigan collection, Fisher appeared in the film Are You Here and guest starred in an episode of Comedy Bang! Bang! She is co-starring with Rob Lowe in the upcoming series You, Me, and the End of the World.

Rainn Wilson – Dwight Schrute

NBC/FOX

Dwight Schrute is the co-worker you hope you never have, and Rainn Wilson turned him into a hilarious foil for Jim Halpert. Never has there been a weirder character that was so close to the hearts of viewers. Since his assistant to the regional manager days, Wilson started the online content project SoulPancake and appeared in the films Cooties and The Boy, as well as guest starring in an episode of Adventure Time. He also starred in the television show Backstrom, which ran for one season on Fox. He has a few upcoming projects, including the upcoming Smurf sequel, Get Smurfy, where he is taking over the role of Gargamel.

Mindy Kaling – Kelly Kapoor

NBC/FOX

While playing Kelly, who went from mousy background character in the first season to an over-the-top loudmouth, Mindy Kaling was also a prominent writer on The Office. Since then, Kaling has gone on to be one of the most successful cast members. She stars in, writes, and executively produces The Mindy Project, which recently moved from Fox to Hulu for its fourth season. She has also appeared in the films This Is the End and Inside Out. On top of all that, she has her second book, What About Me?, coming out on September 15, and a book co-written with B.J. Novak in the works, as well.

B.J. Novak – Ryan Howard

NBC/FOX

From temp to executive and back again, Ryan Howard was as close to a villain as The Office got. Since then, B.J. Novak‘s film credits include The Internship, Smurfs 2, Saving Mr. Banks, and The Amazing Spider-Man 2. He also showed up on television, too, on a handful of episodes of The Mindy Project, an episode of Community, and in the last season of The Newsroom. Additionally, he wrote a book of short stories, One More Thing, and a book for children, The Book with No Pictures.

Leslie David Baker – Stanley Hudson

NBC/Focus Features

Stanley spoke for office drones everywhere. Staying out of the way and delighting in crossword puzzles and Pretzel Day, Stanley didn’t care about anything office-related. At all. Recently, Leslie David Baker has been working the guest star circuit, doing one episode each of Key & Peele, Marry Me, Austin & Ally, and The Exes. He also had a cameo in Zach Braff’s Wish You Were Here. Maybe he’ll release another music video someday.

Brian Baumgartner – Kevin Malone

NBC/FOX

Every office has a pervert, and Kevin was Dunder Mifflin’s. Following his stint as Dunder Mifflin’s resident idiot, Brian Baumgartner has also bounced around a lot on the guest star track, turning up on episodes of Mike & Molly, Hot in Cleveland, Criminal Minds, and The Bridge.

Angela Kinsey – Angela Martin

NBC/Hulu

Everyone’s favorite Christian stereotype, Angela had a long road to follow before finding love with Dwight. Since The Office, Angela Kinsey has had guest arcs on New Girl, Your Family or Mine, and Bad Judge, while starring in both of Hulu’s parody series, The Hotwives of Orlando and The Hotwives of Las Vegas.

Phyllis Smith – Phyllis Lapin-Vance

NBC/Disney

Phyllis may have found true love with Bob Vance of Vance Refrigeration, but she unfortunately had to endure some cruel jokes at the hands of Michael Scott. Luckily, she usually had the last laugh. Phyllis Smith went on to crop up in The Middle and Trophy Wife in a guest capacity, and had her big breakout voicing the scene-stealing Sadness in Pixar’s Inside Out this summer.

Kate Flannery – Meredith Palmer

NBC/Comedy Central

Okay, maybe Meredith was the office pervert. After getting hit by a car and flashing her co-workers repeatedly as the unstable Meredith, Kate Flannery appeared in the films Cooties, Helicopter Mom, Dial a Prayer, and Slow Learners, while also lending her voice to an episode of Steven Universe and playing Annie Sullivan in an episode of Another Period.

Creed Bratton – Creed Bratton

NBC/TNT

An enigma wrapped in mung beans, Creed spent nine seasons being The Office‘s inscrutable, horrifying weirdo. Despite being over 70, Creed Bratton has worked pretty steadily lately, with the films Saving Lincoln and Band of Robbers, as well as an episode each of Adventure Time, Franklin & Bash, Garfunkel and Oates, Comedy Bang! Bang!, and Netflix’s Grace and Frankie.

Oscar Nunez – Oscar Martinez

NBC/USA

Often treated by Michael like the token minority, Oscar was easily one of the most patient characters on the show. Oscar Nunez played him with a knowing exasperation for the show’s entire run, and was a valuable member of the ensemble. Nunez went on to have guest roles on Family Tree, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, New Girl, Bad Teacher, and Comedy Bang! Bang!, and was a main actor on the sadly cancelled show Benched.

Ed Helms – Andy Bernard

NBC/ Warner Bros.

Despite not joining the show until its third season, Andy Bernard worked his way up to the top, eventually evolving into Michael Scott 2.0. Ed Helms has since gone on to be a comedy star, doing guest appearances on The Mindy Project, Kroll Show, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and BoJack Horseman. He’s also done extensive film work, including The Hangover III, We’re the Millers, They Came Together, and this summer’s Vacation. He’s a member of a bluegrass band called The Lonesome Trio, too, where Helms plays banjo (so Andy), guitar, and piano.

Paul Lieberstein – Toby Flenderson

NBC/CBS

Poor, poor Toby. Hated by Michael and unloved by Pam, Toby was the office sad sack HR representative who just couldn’t catch a break. Paul Lieberstein was also a writer and producer on the show, and that is where his main work has been since The Office‘s conclusion. He produced the final season of The Newsroom, and directed two episodes, as well. He acted in two episodes of the Aaron Sorkin drama, and made a guest appearance on Bad Teacher.

Craig Robinson – Darryl Philbin

NBC

No one could screw with Michael quite like Darryl, giving Michael gentle pushes towards his most misguided impulses. His role grew as the series progressed, and Craig Robinson was given the opportunity to show off his great comedic timing. He’s gone on to work on films like Peeples, This Is the End, Rapture-Palooza, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters, Get On Up, and Hot Tub Time Machine 2. He also guest starred on two episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and is headlining the new sitcom Mr. Robinson.

Ellie Kemper – Erin Hannon

NBC/Netflix

Sweet, simple Erin. Taking over the receptionist desk from Pam after she went on to bigger and better things, The Office introduced Ellie Kemper‘s wide-eyed, naive humor to viewers. Once the camera’s stopped rolling on Dunder-Mifflin, Kemper appeared in the films Identity Thief, Laggies, They Came Together, and Sex Tape. She guest starred in a few episode’s of co-star Mindy Kaling’s The Mindy Project, and had her huge breakout starring in Tina Fey’s hit Netflix series, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

Adam McKay has never been particularly subtle about his political views, and it's been interesting watch the way he's worked things into big broad comedies. It's remarkable that a film featuring The Rock and Sam Jackson dying as cartoonishly as they do in “The Other Guys” can also feature a closing-credits sequence that was more savage and on-point than any documentary released that year about the financial malfeasance in the air.

Now McKay has decided to finally tackle this head-on, and at the exact moment I got an e-mail announcing that “The Big Short” would be closing this year's AFI Fest, the first trailer for the movie also showed up, and I'm excited by what it promises.

I like that Plan B is part of things as well, and obviously the match of material by Michael Lewis and a performance by Brad Pitt invites immediate comparisons to “Moneyball.” McKay adapted the script with Charles Randolph, and the short synopsis offers up a no-nonsense description of what we can expect from the film.

When four outsiders saw what the big banks, media and government refused to, the global collapse of the economy, they had an idea:  The Big Short. Their bold investment leads them into the dark underbelly of modern banking where they must question everyone and everything. Based on the true story and best-selling book by Michael Lewis (The Blind Side, Moneyball),  and directed by Adam Mckay (Anchorman, Step Brothers) The Big Short stars Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt.

It's one of the most eclectic casts that McKay's ever put together, including Melissa Leo, Marisa Tomei, Hamish Linklater, Karen Gillan, Selena Gomez and Rafe Spall, and seeing what McKay does with Bale and Gosling is as exciting as any comedy he's ever made. It's going to be interesting watching the next few Gosling movies. I've seen some stuff from the Shane Black film “The Nice Guys” that is so profoundly different from anything we've seen him do before that it's kind of thrilling. It's also been a while since we've seen him, since his last released film was “Only God Forgives,” so I'm glad to see him showing up in such unexpected places.

“The Big Short” arrives in theaters December 11, 2015.

Paramount

We see it all the time with comedic actors: All of a sudden they’re starring in a drama, often in an attempt to gain some sort of perceived lack of respect. We don’t see it quite as often with comedic directors: The Farrelly brothers have yet to release a solemn meditation on death. Judd Apatow will touch on dramatic beats, but he hasn’t directed a movie about the NSA’s surveillance program.

And yet here’s Adam McKay, the former Saturday Night Live head writer – best known for directing two Anchorman movies, Step Brothers, and The Other Guys – directing a movie about one of the biggest financial collapses in history.

“With Adam, it was because he was obsessed with this,” Christian Bale told me, in a yet-to-publish interview (which will run closer to the film’s December 11 release). “In a very positive manner: Just absolutely obsessed, disgusted with it.” This seems like a good reason to do a movie. Much better than, “I just wanted to try something different.” As it turns out, Adam McKay, the director of Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby, is the perfect person to lead us through the always confusing world of financial collapse and The Big Short is one of the best films of the year.

There’s a moment about 20 minutes into The Big Short where I, as an audience member, started thinking, I like this movie, but I have no idea what any of these people are talking about. This is about the same time that slick huckster Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) breaks the fourth wall, telling the audience, “I bet you have no idea what any of this means.” He concedes we all probably have a vague idea of why the economy collapsed in 2008, enough to make us look smart in a conversation, but we really don’t know what these investment and banking terms really mean. That they are all invented by Wall Street types to make it seem like they are the only people on the planet who could possibly to this job and they are meant to confuse us.

It’s at this point that Vennett introduces Margot Robbie, who is playing Margot Robbie, sitting in a bubble bath. She is here to explain everything in layman’s terms. This is a neat trick and is repeated with other famous people throughout the movie.

Speaking of neat tricks: The Big Short — adapted from Moneyball author Michael Lewis’ account of the collapse — is one of the most self-aware movies I’ve seen. I was watching a scene thinking, There’s no way it went down like that in real life. As soon as I thought that, a character broke the fourth wall and admited it didn’t go down like this. Later, when something absurd happens, a character will break the fourth wall again and tell us that, yes, this actually happened as it’s portrayed in the film. The Big Short is always one step ahead of us, just like its characters are always one step ahead of the market crash.

Ah, yes, our characters: They’re people we find ourselves sort of rooting for, even though they are all benefiting from the economic downfall of millions of people. The Big Short plays like a heist movie, with three separate teams all trying to make billions on the knowledge that the housing market – built on the backs of subprime loans (i.e. shit loans) – will start collapsing when the initial low interest rates start to skyrocket, meaning people won’t be able to pay their mortgages, meaning the banks will default, meaning the world economy collapses.

Christian Bale plays Michael Burry, a genius-savant who is the first person to realize this is going to happen. He convinces his firm to “short” (basically betting something will fail) the housing market, something banks didn’t even do at the time because no one in their right mind would short something as sure of a deal as the housing market. Bale works on his own and spends most of the movie locked in his office listening to death metal. It’s a testament to just how good of an actor Bale is that he made sitting in an office, listening to death metal interesting.

Gosling’s Vennett and Steve Carell’s Mark Baum form a loose alliance after Vennett brings this information to Baum’s team. After Baum vets the information by traveling to Florida and seeing first-hand who is living in these mansions, he agrees to invest. This sets Baum off on a crusade against the bullshit that drives our economy, even though he’s about to benefit from its stupidity and/or disregard. This is Carell’s best role to date.

The last team is made up of two young investors, Jamie and Charlie (Finn Wittrock and John Magaro), who long to be “big shots,” and stumble upon this information. Of course, they don’t know exactly what to do with it, so they drag in the retired and mostly unwilling Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt) to guide them.

These three teams work independently of each other, which sets off a winding, back-and-forth narrative that plays more like a crime caper than the destruction of all of our lives. The Big Short is so thrilling and legitimately funny, I tended to forget what the real-life stakes were. There’s a scene when young Jamie and Charlie realize they’re about to become filthy rich and they begin to celebrate. Bratt Pitt’s Ben scolds them … really lays into the two for celebrating what will be the demise of so many people’s lives. He tells the two what the death rate is of people who are unemployed. This is The Big Short being self-aware again, this is Brad Pitt yelling at me, telling me that it’s okay to enjoy this movie, but don’t you dare root for these people.

If only the people actually in charge of our economy were this self-aware. If only Brad Pitt could be there to yell at them, too.

Mike Ryan lives in New York City and has written for The Huffington Post, Wired, Vanity Fair and New York magazine. He is senior entertainment writer at Uproxx. You can contact him directly on Twitter.

It’s sometimes easy to forget that before Steve Carell was an A-list movie star — now appearing alongside the likes of Brad Pitt, Christian Bale, and Ryan Gosling in The Big Short — he was a correspondent on The Daily Show from 1999 to 2005. During his time on the show, Carell often faced off against Stephen Colbert — in the early incarnation of Colbert’s pseudo-conservative persona — in a segment called “Even Stevphen,” although the two men had actually known each other since long before that.

The two friends and former correspondents proved they haven’t lost their love for each other on Monday, when Carell was a guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and the two had a moving reunion to the tune of Orleans’ 1975 hit “Dance with Me.” It’s just two dudes, sharing a song, feeling feelings; the ultimate display of male friendship.

TBS

In an unprecedented and semi-risky move, TBS is set to premiere its first original series of 2016, Angie Tribeca, with a 25-hour, ad-free marathon on January 17. The network will play all 10 of its season one episodes back-to-back multiple times, then return one week later to premiere its second season. It’s brilliant PR on TBS’s part, and a wonderful option for the casual TV viewer who is looking to blow up his or her life for an entire day. But star Hayes MacArthur explains that the groundbreaking binge-premiere wasn’t solely a marketing decision. In a piece over at The Hollywood Reporter, MacArthur quips, “Twenty-five hours is the average length of a very strong pot brownie.”

In other words, guys, TBS wants you to get real stoned and watch 25 hours straight of television. A vaguely terrifying prospect, to be sure, until you consider what you’ll be watching: Angie Tribeca, a satire of police procedurals, stars Rashida Jones as the titular character, features Bill Murray as a flirty grocery-store clerk named Vic Deakins (Vic Deakins!), and sprung from the probably pot-brownie-saturated minds of executive producers Steve and Nancy Carell.

In the article, Steve explains that, at first, Angie was just a strange comedic riff between he and his wife, whose relationship sounds utterly delightful: “The name made us laugh and we built the character based on the name and it expanded over time. We weren’t thinking of pitching a show; we were just riffing.” We get it, Steve and Nancy Carell. Yours is a union of constant joy, laughter, and off-the-cuff-brilliant television pitches.

The show has already drawn comparisons to classic spoofs like Airplane and Get Smart, according to THR; in another interview with USA Today, Nancy admitted that she’s a massive fan of Law & Order: SVU, and drew regular inspiration from the series. “There was a scene [on Law & Order] in the interview room … where the suspect realizes he’s not just a witness. And the music comes up,” she notes, by way of example. The Angie Tribeca riff? “What if the music just comes up and up and up and then nobody can hear [anyone else]?”

Unlike Law & Order, though, Angie Tribeca is a “huge mix” of humor and procedural, according to Nancy. Just like those brownies you’re gonna have to make.

(via THR)

When Steve Carell got his starring role in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, he had been making some marks on The Daily Show and SNL via the TV Funhouse sketches. With Virgin and The Office on NBC, Carell was ready for a big break. But it almost never happened. Carell stopped by Conan on Tuesday and talked a bit about how Universal wanted to pull the plug on the film with only a week of shooting completed.

It seems that the studio had been watching the footage and felt a little awkward about calling it a comedy:

“They said, ‘We’ve been watching footage’ — We’d only been shooting for five days! — ‘We’ve been watching footage and you look like a serial killer.’ “

Judd Apatow had only been shooting some reaction shots in the first week, with no dialogue. This makes Carell look like a weirdo walking around and looking at signs and acting like he’s never seen a boob. Luckily they kept the movie alive and it turned out to be a success. Not that The Office wouldn’t be a success too, it just might’ve taken a little longer. We also wouldn’t have gotten the joy that is Steve Carell getting his chest waxed for a film.

(Via Team Coco)

Now Watch: How Judd Apatow Brings The Comedy Out of Tragedy

TBS

Every time I sing the praises of TBS' “Angie Tribeca” on Twitter, I get one of two responses:

“That's a comedy? I thought it was another boring police procedural.”

and

“That's a real show? I thought it was a viral video parody promoting a product I couldn't quite identify.”

On the one hand, this speaks to what a poor job TBS has done of marketing the show, which will debut with a 25-hour, commercial-free marathon of its first season(*) on Sunday night at 9. On the other, put those two misconceptions together, and you more or less have “Angie Tribeca.” It's a real show, but one so committed to parodying police procedurals like “NCIS” and “Law & Order: SVU” that it's hard to put any one moment in a promo and not have it look like the genuine article.

(*) There are only 10 episodes of that season, so each episode will air several times over the course of a day.

Created by Steve and Nancy Carell, “Angie Tribeca” is a relentless, ridiculous joke machine in the vein of “Airplane!” and “Police Squad,” the short-lived ABC comedy that was later spun off into “The Naked Gun” films. Everything is a set-up for some kind of absurd punchline, and if one doesn't hit, there will be five more coming your way before there's a chance to complain. The show features strange sight gags (including Angie and her partner chasing a criminal dressed like a giant baby), surreal humor (the detective squad includes a Belgian Malinois dog whom everyone treats like a person), constant riffs on the cliches of cop shows (the theme song seems to feature a Roger Daltrey-esque scream, but it's always revealed to be one of the cops howling in anguish for one reason or another), and unexpected wordplay. Take this exchange:

“I read about you in the hospital.”
“I wasn't in the hospital.”
“I was in the hospital. It was in a magazine.”
“The hospital was in a magazine?”
“Yeah, Ryan Seacrest had his 40th birthday there.”

If a high percentage of the jokes would qualify as dad humor, the relentless force of them forgives much of the corniness. In one episode, the cops investigate a crime taking place in the art world, and come upon a painting of a kangaroo with a light switch in the center; it's called, of course, “The Switcharoo.”

With “Airplane!” and “Police Squad,” the Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams used Leslie Nielsen, a performer known for playing deadly serious characters in the kinds of movies and TV shows they were spoofing. The Carells go in a similar direction by using Rashida Jones in the title role. Jones has a lengthy comedy resume, but almost always as the straight woman in shows like “The Office” and “Parks and Recreation,” or movies like “I Love You, Man.” She's game for everything here, from crazy outfits to a running gag suggesting most of Angie's colleagues don't realize she's a woman, but the very calmness that made her such a good foil for Amy Poehler and Chris Pratt in the past serves her well here, too, because material this intentionally stupid demands to be taken seriously to work(*).

(*) In the later “Naked Gun” films, and its many imitators like “Repossessed,” Nielsen started acting like he was in on the joke; unsurprisingly, there were diminishing returns from this approach.

Jones is well supported by Hayes MacArthur as Angie's lovestruck partner Jay Geils, Jere Burns as her volatile captain, Deon Cole as the cop with the canine partner, and Alfred Molina and Andree Vermeulen as the two CSI experts. And because the Carells and Jones have so many friends in the business, there's a constant stream of impressive, amusing guest stars, including Lisa Kudrow, James Franco, Adam Scott, Keegan-Michael Key, and even Bill Murray.

When you swing at every single pitch the way a show like this does, you're going to strike out a lot. But when “Angie Tribeca” connects – say, in a scene in the pilot where Nancy Carell eats ribs while being interviewed by Angie (who in turn has to eat a gyro) – it's hysterical. (If you're looking for the cream of the marathon, I'd suggest the first two episodes, followed “Tribeca's Day Off,” first airing at 11:36 p.m., which not only features Murray, but spends the most time on the dog, who steals every scene he's in.)

TBS has been sitting on this show for a while (Cole filmed the pilot before he made his first appearance as Charlie on “Black-ish,” which aired back in October of 2014.) A second season has already been ordered, but given the initial delay, the marketing, this weird marathon plan, and the fact that new Turner boss Kevin Reilly has dumped a lot of shows ordered by the previous administration, I worry that he may not see in “Angie Tribeca” what I do.

It's not perfect, but it made me laugh a lot and smile even more. In the run-up to TCA, I was given screeners for approximately 8,000 hours of television (give or take), and had to be very judicious about how much time I devoted to any one show. But I would watch a couple of “Angie”s, feel happy, then shift to a more highbrow show that wasn't coming close to hitting its target, and then quickly jump back to another “Angie.” Other series seemingly needed my attention more, but “Angie” was entertaining me so much that I wound up watching all 10, even though I could have written this exact review after the pilot.

Surely there's more room on television for something this silly and fun.

And, yes, I'll stop calling you Shirley.

Alan Sepinwall may be reached at sepinwall@hitfix.com

Reports of the death of live TV have been greatly exaggerated.

To celebrate the premiere of its new slapstick police-procedural Angie Tribeca, TBS is about to put a new twist on America’s favorite pop cultural obsession: TV binge-watching. How, you might ask? By enabling our collective sickness with 25 hours of commercial-free Angie Tribeca episodes — and a star-studded live gala event featuring tons of comedy shenanigans in between.

Official title? “Binge-A-Thon: 25 Hours of Commercial-Free Angie Tribeca Episodes.” And it should be awesome.

In other news, we’re going to be there to live tweet the juicy stuff that happens during the Binge-A-Thon. (‘Cause where there’s live TV, there are things that need tweeting.) Expect exclusive photos from Binge-A-Thon happenings, an interview with Rashida Jones or Steve Carell if we’re lucky, and observations from the eight-hour live event on a CBS soundstage in Los Angeles.

Keep an eye on our Twitter to stay on top of all things Angie.

As for the Binge-A-Thon itself, you’ll be able to watch all the episodes from the first season of Angie Tribeca in a row on TBS (a rather novel concept for a network not named Netflix), with comedy bits performed by the kind of people you actually want to see performing sketches live. Rashida Jones, Steve Carell, Conan O’Brien, Samantha Bee, Aubrey Plaza, Deon Cole and other cast members from the Angie Tribeca show, amongst others. Even Jagger the Dog.

You have a role too (if you want it). That is, you can call into the live show during the faux telethon to ask cast members questions or even serenade Rashida with songs usually fit only for your shower. It’s your call.

The ‘Binge-A-Thon’ starts like right now… and takes place literally until tomorrow, starting at 9 p.m. ET/8c, ending around 5 a.m. PT/8c. Meaning… you’ll definitely want to stay up way too late to celebrate this holiday weekend.

Fox Searchlight / Getty Image

The plan was to meet Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris – the directors of Battle of the Sexes, who lit the world on fire with their directorial debut 11 years ago, Little Miss Sunshine – at a hotel restaurant in Toronto. I had gotten there a little early (as it turns out, the Toronto subway system is much better than New York’s) and asked for a table that was away from other people, since I needed to record all of this. There were two small tables in the corner, so I asked if we could have one of those. The restaurant host hemmed and hawed for a while, finally asking someone if this was okay.

I mention all of this to give you a taste of what covering a film festival is like. I sat at this out of the way table for about five minutes, then in walks Benedict Cumberbatch and sits down right next to be at the other table. And there we sat, with me trying to pretend I didn’t realize who he was. And not to “play it cool,” but more so he wouldn’t think I would try to talk to him, because no one needs that.

What’s funny is, once Dayton and Faris showed up, it would look to the observer like I was interviewing the two of them and Cumberbatch, who is not at all in their movie. It was an odd thing, but this is what happens at festivals. (Part of me thought about trying to introduce them, maybe get something cooking between them! Then I decided this would only be embarrassing.)

Battle of the Sexes, which is only Dayton and Faris’ third film, chronicles both the famous 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) and Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell) and King’s own internal struggles with her sexuality. But what Dayton and Faris didn’t quite realize at the time is that they were also making a movie about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The parallels are undeniable: Riggs goes around saying the most awful things (to be fair to Riggs, he openly admitted it was an act) but the audiences eat it up, which is disturbing. And, as the directing duo discusses ahead, they definitely see these parallels, too – even though, at the time, that wasn’t the full intent. But here we are.

When I was watching this movie, I could not stop thinking about Trump and Hilary. Was that on your mind?

Valerie Faris: Well, Hilary was when we started. And then as we were making it – really, this started in the beginning of 2015.

Jonathan Dayton: So, long before he was the candidate. But man versus woman, in the political arena that we knew was ahead of us, was definitely on our mind. We didn’t know that Trump would be the candidate for the Republican Party, and obviously he ended up being quite Bobby Riggs-ian. You know, I wish he was as benign as Riggs.

Faris: I mean, so many people thought this is never going to happen, until the day of, really.

I couldn’t help but notice was were the people who were listening to Bobby Riggs going, “Well, he’s got some interesting ideas.”

Dayton: Exactly, that he was voicing these outrageous thoughts…

Faris: And people were eating it up.

And he looked like he was feeding off of it. And that seems familiar.

Faris: Maybe it was more — well, actually, I don’t know. They’re both in it for personal gain, I guess.

Dayton: Yeah. So it wasn’t intentional, but our goal was to replicate the forces of the time, which seem to be still very much in play today. So it was as shocking to us as to anyone.

Right after the match, there’s a sign that says “Billie Jean for President.”

Faris: Yeah. I know, it’s so crazy.

Dayton: What’s fun about this is that you just continue to mime what actually happened. And then that takes on a life of its own. But all that was there.

But in a way, okay, it’s very unfortunate everything turned out the way it did, but for your movie —

Faris: [Laughs.] I don’t want to even say that.

Dayton: Yeah. It’s all about us. Yeah.

With all this context, watching the final match, I found myself getting emotional. I wanted him to lose so bad.

Faris: We were joking about it is kind of a wish fulfillment that happens as you’re watching. I’m like, oh, what if that happened? But unfortunately… It was funny, we had a preview before the election. It was a really early preview, like a year ago. And the movie went over really well and we were happy with the response. We had none of the effects or anything in it. But it scored okay. Then we continued to work on it and we previewed it after the election, and it was just like the energy in the room changed, you know? It was really interesting.

A lot of movies played differently after.

Faris: Everything. It’s funny, because we didn’t set out really to do a political drama. We really wanted to kind of focus on the personal.

But you did.

Faris: Personal is political, I think.

Dayton: I mean, the film was always going to have a point of view, and we were excited about that. But I think we didn’t want it to be polarizing. So we didn’t want it to be binary, so that we wanted to keep it complex so that Bobby Riggs, who had his issues, was not just simple.

He was just a clown.

Faris: Exactly. I mean, in some ways, Margaret Court, who is now a Pentecostal minister in Australia, and she’s still incredibly outspoken about…

Dayton: Homosexuality.

Faris: Yeah, anti-homosexual, gay marriage.

Dayton: Oh, yeah. She has a church and she speaks out all the time against lesbians.

Faris: And there was a debate about whether to take her name off of the stadium where the Australian Open takes place. I mean, there was a whole petition back in the spring.

Dayton: She’s so homophobic, yeah.

That’s part of the story I didn’t realize. I didn’t realize there was a match before, between Riggs and Court, that Court lost.

Dayton: Yeah. No, Riggs was a great player.

Even at 55. I didn’t realize that.

Dayton: He was famous for, even in warmups before a match, just playing very sloppily so that the bets would go up.

Faris: And he would call and raise his bet, during the match, because, oh, yeah, there’s no way I’m going to lose this. And he almost never bet on something he didn’t think he was going to win. I mean, so really shrewd. And when you do the research, we just kind of fell in love with his character.

I don’t think a lot of people realize there was the first match or that there was supposed to be a third one with Chris Evert.

Dayton: Right. And for what it’s worth, to anyone who says that he threw the match, what he lost in losing to Billie Jean was far greater than…

People think he bet against himself?

Dayton: Yeah, or that he had a mob debt for $100,000.

Faris: But that he bet that he would lose.

He was going to make a million dollars playing Chris Evert, right?

Faris: Yeah.

So once he lost…

Dayton: It evaporated.

Faris: I mean, he was famous. There’s a really funny episode of The Odd Couple, which, I don’t know if you know that show…

The Jack Klugman, Tony Randall version?

Dayton: Exactly.

Faris: Bobby’s in the whole episode, and then Billie Jean King comes at the end and they play ping-pong together. It’s really funny.

Was Billie Jean King really going through all she was personally about her sexuality at the same time? Or was that time-shifted for the film?

Dayton: No. We condensed some of it, but not that aspect.

Faris: I mean, Marilyn [played by Andrea Riseborough] is at the match. When you look at the picture, when you watch the match, she was sitting actually on the court. We changed it a little so she wasn’t right up there with [Billie Jean King’s husband] Larry, but she was sitting like two seats from Larry through the whole match. And at one point, she massages Billie Jean’s calf during the match.

Dayton: So you just can’t write this stuff.

The way you approach Larry is interesting. He’s played as more understanding than most people might be in his situation.

Faris: Yeah, it’s true. He’s coming to the LA premiere with his kids and his family. Well, you know, they stayed married for another 13 years after the match.

I didn’t realize that.

Faris: She was outed in ’81. So eight years later, she was outed. And then it was five years after that that they divorced. So she stayed in the closet.

Dayton: Yeah, she was in the closet for a long time. So the film ends on this moment of victory, but it’s also sort of unclear. She’s still very much in the closet, and that’s what really happened.

Faris: And that kind of was important to us, to not make light or make it feel like, oh, isn’t that great? Now triumph, victory, and then she became a hero. It’s so really bold what she did at that time. But the marriage thing, her parents were alive and her parents were very homophobic.

Dayton: So, yeah, I think certain audiences don’t understand how hard it was to come out of the closet back then.

What is Billie Jean’s relationship with this match today? I’m sure, sometimes, it’s weird for this to be one of her most famous things, after all she’s done.

Faris: Well, she didn’t really want the spotlight on her, I think, in some ways, because it was a really rough time for her. But I feel like now she’s really embraced it. And she and Bobby became friendly after the match. They spoke the day before he died, they spoke on the phone. So I think she recognized that it brought all this attention to both women’s tennis and it sort of bolstered women’s tennis. And then, also, obviously for the women’s movement.

Dayton: I mean it was this odd thing where clearly, this ridiculous publicity stunt actually made a difference. It’s not like suddenly there was equality, we’re still not there, and we don’t pretend that it was this transformative event. But it was yet another notch.

Faris: It’s a weird thing. I mean I feel like we’ve talked about it being a precursor to the way politics work now. It’s like a sporting event, and whoever wins, you know. It’s reducing politics to…

Dayton: Trump rallies.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

Fox Searchlight

It’s been said that victory has a hundred fathers but failure is an orphan, and in a way the reverse is true of true story narratives. When they suck there’s blame to go around and a million causes — the unearned creative liberties, the important points unfairly omitted, the obvious elements unnecessarily fussed over. When they’re good it seems preordained, as if God told the story and all you had to do was write it down. As if that perfect story (“The Truth”) was just sitting out there waiting to get put on film. “Jeez, why hadn’t anyone made this movie before?”

I’m happy to report that Battle of the Sexes, from Little Miss Sunshine directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (127 Hours, Slumdog Millionaire), is in the second category. Of course, good stories don’t just sit out there waiting to be told, and for as smartly hidden as the filmmakers’ craft is here, the smartest thing they do in Battle of the Sexes is resist the temptation to create easy villains.

In telling the story of Billie Jean King’s epic 1973 tilt with Bobby Riggs, an event so celebrated I remember reading about it in Sports Illustrated for Kids in the ’90s, it’d be easy to personify all of King’s opponents — sexism, homophobia, the patriarchy — as sneering hecklers, of the “girls can’t play baseball!” variety (as seen in A League of Their Own). But that’s a reductive conflict that doesn’t do justice to the reality: that structural discrimination doesn’t usually twirl a mustache (and, as pointed out in The Big Sick, most hecklers just think they’re helping).

Every character in Battle of the Sexes has depth, there isn’t a single one who’s there just to be a speed bump for the protagonists, and that begins with its remarkably nuanced portrayal of Bobby Riggs. Battle introduces Steve Carell’s Riggs with a slow zoom shot, from the streets of New York into Riggs’ highrise office, one cube embedded within a million more identical cubes within a vast metropolis of cubes. We never find out what exactly Riggs was doing up there in that office (boring work stuff, who cares?), but the point is that this guy fears one thing above all else: anonymity, irrelevance.

Emma Stone’s Billie Jean King, meanwhile, opens the film taking a congratulatory phone call from Richard Nixon, only to find out that the head of the big tennis association, Jack Kramer (played by Bill Pullman), is only offering the women players an eighth of what the men are making. King organizes a boycott, which leads to the creation of the Virginia Slims women’s tour, a plucky start-up that King’s agent, Gladys Heldman (played charmingly by a silver-streaked Sarah Silverman, in a very Debi Mazar-esque role) tries to keep together with spit and duct tape like a protective house mom.

Kramer is the film’s real villain, and by casting Pullman — charming and full of gravitas even when he’s being a prick — it makes a strong (and trenchant) statement that deeds count more than words, that the sheen of “respectability” is usually your enemy, not your friend. Evil isn’t a fire-breathing hater, it’s a smiling white man in a suit trying to convince you that he’s just the messenger. Discrimination is more assumption than insult. As Stone’s King tells Kramer, “Bobby’s just a clown. With you it’s for real.”

As she fights to squeeze respect from a dubious public, King is discovering that she’s not only a woman in a man’s world, but a lesbian. Her burgeoning love affair with her hair dresser (played by Andrea Riseborough) is so sweet and natural, that it manages to be touching, sexy, and life-affirming at the same time.

Here again, what makes Battle of the Sexes so special is that it doesn’t cheapen King’s adversity by personifying it in a cheesy villain. King is married at the time, to a comically handsome, square-jawed Aryan played by Austin Stowe. And when he finds out she’s been cheating on him with the hairdresser, he doesn’t scream or call her names or punch a mirror, he just acts extra nice while looking like he’s had the wind knocked out of him, tenderly icing King’s knees and dutifully putting her career before himself. Sometimes being yourself means hurting good people, that’s why it’s so hard. The idea that everyone who stands in the way of our dreams is some hater is just bullshit we feed ourselves to feel good.

Perhaps more could’ve been done with Riggs, and the notion that disingenuously whipping up people’s worst impulses for fun and profit can eventually take its toll, even when you think it’s just a big joke (irony poisoning, we now call it). But Carell is so magnificent at playing the melancholic huckster that the film doesn’t need to belabor the point. Likewise, I wish the film would’ve incorporated more stock footage (something I pretty much always say about biopics/based on true events movies), but the tennis footage works surprisingly well. I was initially skeptical of one of Hollywood’s most willowy, slightly built actresses playing a professional athlete, but whatever combination of personal training, body doubles, and movie magic Battle of the Sexes uses works. And the stock clips it does use, like Howard Cosell calling the match, saying that if Billie Jean King “grew her hair and took off the glasses, she could have a future as a movie star” really give a flavor of the casual sexism of the era.

For the most part though, Battle of the Sexes proves that making a good movie out of a true story isn’t about tricks or flashy filmmaking or even innovative storytelling. It’s about treating every character in it as an individual, someone with independent thoughts and goals who deserves respect.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. More reviews here.

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It’s pretty fascinating that Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying – the opening night movie at the New York Film Festival – is technically a sequel to Hal Ashby’s 1973 movie, The Last Detail. I found this so interesting that I wound up watching both of these films in the same day and, well, there’s not much correlation. Now, you should watch The Last Detail because it’s great (and Jack Nicholson is strutting around the whole movie like his life depends on it), but not as any kind of precursor to watching Last Flag Flying. The two movies don’t fit together at all and was never the point. It’s kind of the same situation we had with Manhunter and The Silence of the Lambs: they’re both adaptations of connected books, yet the two movies have really nothing to do with each other.

In The Last Detail, Billy (Nicholson) and Mule (Otis Young) are assigned by the Navy to take a young seaman, Larry (Randy Quaid), to a prison in Maine because he attempted to steal $40 from a charity box. Both Nicholson and Quaid would receive Academy Award nominations (Nicholson wasn’t particularly thrilled that he lost) and the movie is today considered a classic. But a lot was changed from Darryl Ponicsan’s book. One big change: in the book, Nicholson’s character dies.

When Ponicsan wrote Last Flag Flying in 2005, he decided to bring Nicholson’s character back to life in a Mark Twain, “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” sort of way. Which sets up Linklater’s Last Flag Flying, which brings back the three main characters from The Last Detail, only with some new names and much different relationships.

The film is set in 2003 and Steve Carell plays Larry (I truly think this is one of Carell’s finest performances to date; his portrayal is understand and kind), now referred to most of the film as “Doc.” Bryan Cranston steps into Nicholson’s role, only his name is now Sal and he owns the dive-iest of Norfolk dive bars. Laurence Fishburne plays Mueller, a former hellraiser turned minister.

Doc makes a surprise visit to Sal’s bar (it takes Sal a few minutes to recognize him) and the two catch up over many, many beers. The next hungover morning, Doc asks Sal to drive him to unspecified location, which turns out to be Mueller’s church. The three haven’t seen each other since the Vietnam War and they don’t have a whole lot in common anymore. (Sal is not a big fan of God.) Doc then reveals that his son, Larry Jr., was killed in Iraq and is here to ask Sal and Mueller to accompany him while he picks up his son’s body.

It’s evident these three have a much deeper relationship than they did in The Last Detail. It’s never specifically said (Linklater leaves enough puzzle pieces lying around to get to the gist of what happened), but these three saw action together in the war and something terrible happened.(Also different from the first film: Sal and Mueller were Marines and only Doc was in the Navy; looking this up later I learned Marines use Navy medics in combat situations.) This was not Doc stealing $40 from a charity box. Again, it’s vague, but it’s implied the three were using morphine recreationally, and when someone really needed it, they were out and it was Doc who took the fall and served time for their crimes. Truthfully, I like the way this is handled. I hate sloppy exposition and for one of them to just come out and say it would be unusual. Family members of mine who served in Vietnam absolutely do not talk about it. And for one of them to pull a “remember when” would be disingenuous.

At its heart, Last Flag Flying is a road trip movie and very much in the spirit of the Before trilogy – only with three middle-aged men instead of two lovers. This isn’t an action packed film – the most exciting physical thing this trio does is buy themselves some flip phones – and it’s extremely talky. (I mean, it is a Linklater film.) This is the kind of movie that could also easily be a great play.

But the relationship between Carell, Fishburne, and Cranston feels genuine. It’s weird, they really don’t click at first – like, I suspect, a lot of people wouldn’t after having not seen each other in 30 some years – but by the end these three very different people have a bond. And it culminates with a pretty heartbreaking scene.

It’s also an oddly timed film, one that feels like something that would have come out maybe five years ago when Iraq War movies were more common. With out current political situations, Iraq seems, sadly, pretty far down the list now. And it’s certainly not the main focus of the film – the relationship between Doc, Sal and Mueller is the heart of all this – but it is kind of jarring in a, “Oh yeah, that, too” kind of way. But Linklater gives a wonderful platform for Carell and Fishburne and Cranston to just act and it’s pretty great. And, yes, it’s pretty hard not to tear up by the end and is a worthy follow-up to a great movie (that it doesn’t have all that much to do with anyway).

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

13 years ago, Steve Carell had one of the most recognizable cinematic comedy moments of the past two decades. While getting his chest waxed in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, he screamed out many things while enduring great pain, eventually coming to what became the movie’s defining line: “NOOO, KELLY CLARKSON!”

Since then, Carell and Clarkson have been forever connected in pop culture lore, but they had never actually met each other. That changed last night at the Golden Globes, though: Today, Carell posted a photo of the two of them taken at the ceremony, both sporting giddy smiles, and captioned it, “Finally.” Clarkson retweeted the picture and added, “One of my favorite moments of my life! I love you and your lovely wife!”

Back in November, Clarkson expressed disappointment that the two had never met, telling Today‘s Willie Geist, “I have yet to meet Steve Carell, and I want to be like, ‘So, was it a compliment?’ […] It was pretty hilarious. I do feel gypped, though, because I’ve never met him and I’m a huge fan. It was kind of a pop culture moment, and I haven’t even met him.”

In a behind the scenes clip from the set of the movie, Carell seems to initially underestimate how much getting waxed is going to hurt. While he was laying on the table after the deed had been done, though, Carell said that although there’s a lot of acting in the movies, the pain was very real: “I can now empathize with every woman who has ever had her legs waxed or gotten a bikini wax. I salute you, my comrades.”