Margo Martindale’s work on the stage and small screen has earned her multiple Emmys, a Tony nomination, and—perhaps the most prestigious honor—having virtually every reference to her name preceded or followed by “beloved character actress.” On everything from Justified to The Americans, Martindale is a consummate and…
As reported by Deadline, character actor Mickey Jones—best known for popping up as a bearded biker or grizzled blue-collar man in loads of movies and TV shows—has died. A rep for Jones confirmed his death, saying he had been suffering from a “lengthy illness.” Jones was 76.
Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d…
FX wants more of Boyz N The Hood director John Singleton’s 1980s drama about the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles. The pilot of the series, titled Snowfall, was ordered by the network last year, but it’s been floating around for a while—it was originally at Showtime way back in 2014. But now FX is 100 percent on…
Steeped as we are in this election year, with dire consequences at stake, you can see how some people might consider thwarting the democratic process in favor of ensuring their desired result. Not that we would ever advocate doing that (ever!). But those looking to skew democracy can find more than a few pop-culture…
The long arm of the Law & Order franchise reached beyond New York City in 2012, when Dick Wolf welcomed firefighters to the procedural fold with the premiere of Chicago Fire. The veteran TV producer has since widened his first-responder focus to include detectives and medical personnel in the Second City, whose big…
Gay characters haven’t had a visibility problem in pop culture in years. But when it comes to minority representation, quality is more important than quantity, and there was a time when most gay male characters were portrayed as stereotypically effeminate nellies. If they weren’t obsessively coordinating weddings,…
The A.V. Club’s list of 2015’s best TV programming came together with the input of more than 30 staff members and contributors, who singled out 105 different shows, miniseries, specials, and telefilms as the year’s best. (A few quick words on the voting process: Participating writers were asked to make a top 15 list,…
Yesterday, The A.V. Club began its survey of the year’s best television programming, counting down from No. 40 to No. 21. Today, we make our cases for the absolute best TV that 2015 had to offer, including fond farewells to old standbys, confident debuts from new favorites, and the latest efforts from ongoing shows…
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association—along with America Ferrara, Angela Bassett, Chloe Grace Moretz, and Dennis Quaid—was up bright and early Thursday morning to announce the nominees for the 73rd Annual Golden Globes. Todd Haynes’ Carol leads the pack with five nominations, although two are in the same…
Welcome to Random Roles, wherein we talk to actors about the characters who defined their careers. The catch: They don’t know beforehand what roles we’ll ask them to talk about.
Love or hate Clerks, Kevin Smith’s 1994 debut film, at least its low-key vulgarity and geeky soliloquies were filled with genuine slacker élan. The same cannot be said of the aborted 1995 Clerks television series, a hacky, nigh-unwatchable PG reconfiguration of the movie into a Saved By The Bell-esque sitcom. The…
Welcome to Random Roles, wherein we talk to actors about the characters who defined their careers. The catch: They don’t know beforehand what roles we’ll ask them to talk about.
AMC has just inked a deal with Justified’s Chris Provenzano that should help keep Stetsons on the air: As part of an overall deal with the network, the former Mad Men scribe is working on an adaptation of Gunsights, a 1979 Western novel from Elmore Leonard (and considered to be his last in the genre).
In 2010, The A.V. Club marked the end of another year with The TV Club Awards, a roundup of the notable TV happenings that fell outside the confines of our best-shows and best-episodes lists. We did the same thing in 2011, but then—silence. The TV Club Awards were placed in mothballs, shelved alongside other defunct…
Welcome to Random Roles, wherein we talk to actors about the characters who defined their careers. The catch: They don’t know beforehand what roles we’ll ask them to talk about.
FX’s Justified may have just ended its glorious six season run, but there are still odds and sods of leftover material (plus the inevitable DVD release) to dull the pain. Here, as part of Entertainment Weekly’s Scene Unseen, series creator Graham Yost describes an epic confrontation planned for season six’s “Alive Day…
Justified ended its solid six-season run last night with an episode that tied everything up quite nicely, with graceful character notes and satisfying conclusions for our principal players. Before you get excited about the Tim Gutterson spinoff that we totally just made up, cozy up to your computer screen with Sean…
Well, I don’t know if anyone saw quite that ending coming. At first glance, “The Promise” is one hell of an anticlimax, an episode in which the most exciting stuff happens 20 minutes in and then the rest of the episode slowly unwinds as it moves toward the end credits. After six seasons, not a single main character…
“He looked like a farmer: that stringy type with hollow cheeks, crow’s-feet, and had the accent to go with it, not Deep South but from somewhere below Ohio. He touched the funneled brim of his Stetson with two fingers and held open his ID case in the other hand, showing his star. He said, ‘Raylan Givens, U.S. Marshals…
