Continuing their tradition of film-level standards and things with "True" in the title, HBO will next year premiere the new series True Detective. Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson recreate the magic chemistries of Edtv and Surfer, Dude to star as the honest-to-god detectives, while Sin Nombre and Jane Eyre director Cary Fukunaga directs. There's not a firm air date yet, but here's a brief teaser setting up the mystery of why Matthew McConaughey is suddenly a respectable actor doing projects you actually want to see.
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If the first teaser for Clear History left any doubt that that was Larry David under all that fake hair, let the below bout of suddenly-exasperated shouting assure you that this Christ-like figure is indeed LD, our messiah of comic peevishness returned in movie form to suffer for Sour Grapes and yell at Jon Hamm.
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At last gawkishly lurching out on his own, The Office and Extras co-creator Stephen Merchant this fall premieres his first series effort sans Ricky Gervais with HBO's Hello Ladies. Here's a very brief trailer to show that, even without Gervais, you can rest assured there's still some painful awkwardness and abortion humor in here. Phew.
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Still no new season of Curb, but this August, Larry David will at least give us an apparently more-hirsute form of improvised hysterics with the original movie Clear History. Premiering on HBO, the largely-ad-libbed comedy stars David as a marketing executive who gets into an argument with boss Jon Hamm and drops his 10% stake in their electric car start-up; disgraced when the company soon becomes a billion-dollar success, David's Nathan Flomm changes his name and retreats to an island, where he later finds himself again confronted by Hamm's obnoxious success in business and genetics. Arguments on social norms and personal taboos presumably ensue.
EW has just debuted a teaser and first image from the film, and from the looks of it, this could be a major departure for David. Mostly in that there won't be any "bald/four-eyed fuck" jokes in this, because L.D. looks like Patrick Stewart as a vacationing caveman. Anyway, there's also a short promo for the film, where you can see David's new, flowing locks blow in the breeze of a convertible. Have a look below.
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As part of their commitment to produce compelling non-fiction and continue forcing James Gandolfini to make his bones, HBO is planning some new, original films to look at the life of Nora Ephron and laugh at some paleontologists.
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Following a third-season premiere that saw Game of Thrones hit a new audience high of 4.4 million viewers, HBO has unsurprisingly decided they will see where this goes, renewing the series for a fourth season. The next ten-episode order is expected to air in early 2014, and to chronicle the latter half of George R. R. Martin's A Storm of Swords. It's also expected that now the S's in the title will be dollar signs, like with Arli$$.
Based on the theory that Liberace and his longtime companion may have had more than friendship going on beneath all those layers of rhinestone cape, Steven Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra premieres later next month on HBO. Here's a new trailer, giving us our first only line of dialogue and a brief glimpse of stars Michael Douglas and Matt Damon sharing champagne in a bathtub, thus setting the film's tone of dude's just chillin' out drinkin', no funny business. Just bros bein' bros.
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If you're one of those people who likes to wait for a series to be over before you catch up on it, know that it sometimes gets really annoying how you're like that. Also, know that you can now get going with Enlightened. Despite getting largely-positive reviews, a Golden Globe for star Laura Dern, and a way for Mike White to be on television without resorting to reality game shows, HBO has canceled the comedy-drama after its second season failed to bring ratings up enough. Sorry, fans of Enlightened. There's always talking about how maybe there could be a movie some day.
Neglectful of his duties since 2006's middling For Your Consideration, Christopher Guest at last returns to his sworn task of making Fred Willard look like a jackass with Family Tree. This time, Guest's usual mockumentary approach has been stretched out into an HBO series, which follows a dumped and unemployed 30-something (Chris O'Dowd) channeling depression into an international journey to research his family's heritage. Naturally, with Guest at the helm, it turns out that heritage includes Willard, Michael McKean, Ed Begley Jr., Bob Balaban, Don Lake, and, thus far, a worrisome lack of Eugene Levy. But he'll probably show up later in the series. Or he'll show up pounding on the glass from inside your television, his greed having resulted in a Tales from the Crypt-esque ending where he now only exists within the American Pie universe. Either way, can't wait to see him!
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Veep and Game of Thrones are soon returning to HBO, bringing all-new seasons promising even more hilarious government bungling. Here are some new trailers. Both make explicit promises of torture, but only one includes the line "Jolly Green Jizz-Face." I'll let you be surprised by which that is.
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The amount of breasts examined on HBO programming will soon not be something we can joke about, as the network is reportedly now developing Cancer Vixen, a film about one New York woman's struggle with breast cancer.
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Well, there's still no new Louie until next year, but fear not, Louis CK will still keep you entertained with television. Just in a slightly less-often depressing way. He's got a stand-up special debuting on HBO next month, and now there's a very meta promo to tell you about it. He puts on a suit for you, so the least you could do is watch.
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Prepare yourself for the glamour of the stylish sixties, and the glitz of putting on a fur-trimmed cape and playing a piano, with some new promos for the new Mad Men and Steven Soderbergh's Liberace film, Behind the Candelabra. Will it be Liberace or Don Draper who this season wears more spangled military uniforms? Begin the debate below.
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If the first couple teasers for Game of Thrones' new season left you wanting for, say, absolutely anything beyond voice-over and a bird, this latest trailer should leave you a little more satisfied. It promises a really big fire. It promises everyone dying. It promises everyone giving icy stares to everyone else. It promises a dragon going after a boat. It still does not promise any jousting chimps. George R. R. Martin needs to get on that.
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Nobly sustaining Adrian Grenier's acting career, just as Grenier sustains the similarly-squashed wine grape, Warner has given a greenlight to subsidiary HBO to go ahead on a film version of Entourage.
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The Bored to Death film Ted Danson brings up every time someone invites him to a party is finally being recognized as a real thing.
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If the aristocratic, WWI-era, British melodrama of Downton Abbey is not British enough nor melodramatic enough for your British-melodrama de-sensitized mind, HBO's upcoming Parade's End may be what you're looking for. Its secret? Benedict Cumberbatch constantly on the verge of tears/kisses!
The miniseries, which already ran on BBC Two last summer, begins in the US on February 26. It focuses on Cumberbatch's Christopher Tietjens, a WWI infantryman upset about his country's changing culture and torn between his adulterous, increasingly-estranged wife and an embryonic Michelle Williams literally begging for kisses. It's enough to make a Cumberbatch cry, if only he didn't have such a stiff, British upper-lip, unable to either cry or kiss. He'll just almost cry and kiss, a lot. Here's the trailer:
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With a unique combination of live Beyoncé performances, found Beyoncé footage, and talking Beyoncé heads, director Beyoncé takes a serious look at the close subject of being Beyoncé in Life Is But a Dream, a feature-length Beyoncé documentary heading to HBO next month. Here's the trailer, in which Beyoncé reveals her ambitions, her fears, her baby bump, but nothing about what it was like to work with Steve Martin and Jean Reno on The Pink Panther. Some things must remain private.
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HBO has released another not-all-that-revealing teaser for the third season of Game of Thrones, premiering March 31. This one involves the malformed raven of dream, and you can tell he's really smug about that bonus eye. Have a look below.
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Following up on successful documentary projects about George Harrison and Fran Lebowitz, HBO and Martin Scorsese are teaming to now inform the masses that Bill Clinton was once a U.S. President before becoming just a symbolic reminder of a time before everything seemed quite so hopeless.
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