All the Showbiz News, Celebrity Gossip, Music News , Movie & TV notes of the day…from BasinLife.com
THURSDAY NIGHT TV:
MASTERCHEF (8p ET, FOX) — New. The cooks produce a dish with their own version of homemade sausage in less than an hour.
HOLLYWOOD GAME NIGHT (9p ET, NBC) — New. Two contestants step into the ring with wrestlers Brie Bella and Nikki Bella. Other celebrity guests include Lester Holt, Chris Sullivan, Michael Ealy and Natasha Leggero.
SEASON FINALE: FAMILY FOOD FIGHT (9p ET, ABC) — New. The final two family teams face an amuse-bouche challenge.
BIG BROTHER (9p ET, CBS) — New.
SERIES FINALE: ELEMENTARY (10p ET, CBS) — Elementary ends after 7 seasons.
SERIES PREMIERE: WHY WOMEN KILL (CBS All Access) — Lucy Liu, Ginnifer Goodwin and Kirby Howell-Baptiste star in this new series from Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry. It follows the lives of three women living in three different decades: a housewife in the ’60s, a socialite in the ’80s, and a lawyer in 2019, each dealing with infidelity in their marriages. Jack Davenport (Pirates of the Caribbean), Sam Jaeger (Parenthood), and Reid Scott (VEEP) also star.
What’s Happening…
COMPANY LOOKING FOR SUPERFAN TO WATCH 25 HOURS OF FRIENDS _ A company is looking for a Friends obsessed superfan to watch 25 hours of the TV show in honor of its 25th anniversary. In return, internet provider Frontier Communications said the superfan will receive $1,000 and a Friends Fandom Fun Pack consisting of a Friends T-shirt, Central Perk mug, popcorn, treats, and a 12-month Netflix subscription. • LINK
THIS IS HOW MUCH TV WE WILL WATCH IN A LIFETIME _ The average TV fan will sit through an eye-popping 78,705 hours of programming during their lifetime. An average of three-and-a-half hours a day is spent watching television — a total of 1,248 hours a year.
… Over the average adult lifetime, this will mean TV fans will immerse themselves in 3,639 films in the comfort of their own home, as well as watching a staggering 31,507 episodes of TV shows.
… The average household will have two arguments a week over what to watch and more than half of those polled would struggle if they only had one TV between them.
YOU LOVE TARGET. SO DOES BRITNEY SPEARS. SHE MADE 80 TRIPS TO TARGET LAST YEAR _ If you’re looking for Britney Spears, you can probably find her at her local Target. According to financial documents filed in her conservatorship case (obtained by The Blast), the 37-year-old pop star total assets at the end of 2018 were valued at $59,079,755.76. And while she spent much of 2018 on tour, which ran from July to October, she did find time to make over 80 different trips to Target. She also made a number of trips to Ralphs and Home Depot, spending just over $66,000 on household supplies.
BIG BANG THEORY MIGHT LAND ON HBO MAX _ The streaming wars are just getting started, and the biggest battlefield yet is sitcoms. Rumors have emerged of a big deal for HBO Max, as the streaming service is looking to purchase The Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men for a combined $1.5 billion. HBO really wants to launch with a big, powerful streaming library.
… This marks the second huge deal for HBO Max in recent months, as the service already paid $425 million for Friends, which has long been a Netflix centerpiece.
… Soon consumers will have three powerhouse streaming services to choose from: Disney+, HBO Max and Netflix. In addition, The Office recently landed at NBCU, and rumor has it streaming services could wage a bidding war over Seinfeld in the near future. With its new acquisition of Fox, Disney is strategically deploying The Simpsons and Family Guy as it figures out what content will live on Hulu and what will live on Disney+.
LIAM HEMSWORTH RELEASES STATEMENT ABOUT MILEY CYRUS SPLIT _ Liam Hemsworth has released an official statement for the first time since the announcement of his separation from Miley Cyrus. Hemsworth posted a photo of a sunset to Instagram along with his statement: “Just a quick note to say that Miley and I have recently separated and I wish her nothing but health and happiness going forward. This is a private matter and I have not made, nor will I be making, any comments to any journalists or media outlets. Any reported quotes attributed to me are false. Peace and Love.”
HARRY STYLES TURNS DOWN ROLE OF PRINCE ERIC IN LITTLE MERMAID _ Actor-singer Harry Styles has turned down an offer to play the role of Prince Eric in Disney’s live-action remake of The Little Mermaid. One of the individuals said that Styles is a fan of the project but respectfully declined. On Tuesday, both AMC Theatres and Regal Cinemas inaccurately tweeted that Styles had been cast in the role. Both theater chains later deleted the tweets.
… Styles would have starred opposite actress and singer Halle Bailey, who is playing Ariel.
NEW TOOL DESIGNED TO DETECT SPOILERS ISN’T PERFECT _ No one likes an errant spoiler showing up while reading a movie review, but what if there were a tool designed to detect those spoilers? That’s what a group of researchers at the University of California, San Diego set out to make with their AI tool SpoilerNet, capable of accurately identifying sentences that are likely to give away major plot points. But in testing out their new spoiler tool the researchers found that SpoilerNet had its job stacked against it.
… Researchers found that spoiler sentences tend to clump together in the latter part of reviews. But they also found that different users had different standards to tag spoilers, and neural networks needed to be carefully calibrated to take this into account. In addition, the same word may have different semantic meanings in different contexts. For example, take the word “snap”: a word that in any Avengers: Endgame review, might be flagged as a spoiler. But it’s a word that could be used in plenty of other contexts — snap judgment, snap decision. It’s not a foolproof tool by any means.
HUGH GRANT CORRECTLY SAYS PADDINGTON 2 WAS HIS GREATEST FILM _ Actor Hugh Grant has contemplated his cinematic masterpiece, and officially ruled it to be… Paddington 2. No joke. In a recent interview Grant said, “I was presenting I think at the Golden Globes, and they do that thing when you walk out and they say, ‘From the forthcoming Paddington 2, Hugh Grant.’ And someone showed me Twitter afterwards, and it was … people were full of derision … ‘Poor old Hugh. Paddington 2. Sequel to a kids film.’ It’s particularly annoying in the case of Paddington 2, because I genuinely believe it may be the best film I’ve ever been in.” Critics and audiences agreed.
MARILU HENNER INTERESTED IN TAXI REBOOT _ The classic sitcom Taxi ended its run in 1983 after a five-season run across two networks, ABC and then NBC. Actress Marilu Henner — Elaine Nardo on the series — said if there were a reboot, she’d gladly sign on, and that fans already have a reboot name picked out: Uber.
BRUCE LEE’S DAUGHTER TELLS QUENTIN TARANTINO TO SHUT UP _ Bruce Lee’s daughter, Shannon Lee, is responding to director Quentin Tarantino’s latest comments regarding her father’s portrayal in the film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. She told Variety, “He could shut up about it. That would be really nice. Or he could apologize or he could say, ‘I don’t really know what Bruce Lee was like. I just wrote it for my movie. But that shouldn’t be taken as how he really was.’”
… Tarantino recently defended his depiction of the Asian American martial arts legend as an arrogant blowhard: “The way he was talking, I didn’t just make a lot of that up. I heard him say things like that, to that effect. If people are saying, ‘Well he never said he could beat up Muhammad Ali,’ well yeah, he did. Not only did he say that, but his wife, Linda Lee, said that in her first biography I ever read. She absolutely said that.”
… Shannon Lee says, “One of the things that’s troubling in his response is that, on the one hand, he wants to put this forward as fact and, on the other hand, he wants to stay in fiction.”
… The passage in his wife Linda Lee’s book, Bruce Lee: The Man I Only Knew, that Tarantino appears to refer to is a quote from a critic, who wrote that “Those who watched [Bruce] Lee would bet on Lee to render Cassius Clay senseless,” and not from the author herself.
50 YEARS AFTER THEY MET AT WOODSTOCK, COUPLE FINALLY FINDS A PHOTO _ For 50 years, Judy and Jerry Griffin have been telling friends and family the fairy tale story of how they met on the way to Woodstock in 1969 and have been together ever since. The only downside to their meet-up is that they never had any physical proof that they were at Woodstock together — until two months ago. Judy met Jerry on August 15, 1969 — day one of the iconic Woodstock music festival — when her car broke down on New York’s Tappan Zee Bridge, roughly 90 miles from the concert grounds, and she and the two acquaintances she was traveling with decided to hitchhike. Jerry and his friends pulled up in a VW and gave them a ride.
… Incredibly, they’d never seen a photo of themselves from the event that started it all until this summer, thanks to the new PBS documentary Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation, which features a brief bit of footage of a rain-soaked Judy and Jerry huddled together under a blanket. They first saw the image after a friend texted him and Judy a snapshot from the film’s trailer earlier this summer.
… That first ride together in the back seat of Jerry’s pal’s 1967 VW Beetle eventually grew into 50 years of love and marriage, including two sons and five grandchildren.