If you thought Downton Abbey had jumped the shark by (spoiler alert!) murdering its leading man in the most heart-wrenching display of automotive deus-ex-machina since the O.C., and that it wasn’t long before the show’s inexorable decline into unwatchable TV territory, well, you might be right.
But that doesn’t mean that the show is going Read More
After yesterday’s news that Kevin Clash, the voice of Elmo on Sesame Street for the last 28 years, had officially taken a “leave of absence” at the PBS show after a man came forward and accused Mr. Clash of innapropriate relations when he was 16-years-old, it was only a matter of time before the evidence started piling up. Though Mr. Clash claimed that the relationship between himself and the now-23-year-old young man began only after the boy turned 18, a letter that TMZ was given by the accuser showed genuine remorse on Mr. Clash’s part. Read More
Though its hordes of U.S. fans are still waiting for the third season of Downton Abbey to begin airing on PBS, that season ended last night in the UK with 10.1 million viewers, according to Deadline, making it the show’s highest-rated season yet for Brit broadcaster ITV. Read More
Video
Several weeks ago, PBS Digital Studios released a Bob Ross mashup called “Happy Little Clouds.” It was the follow-up to the studio’s Mister Rogers Auto-Tune smash hit, “Garden of Your Mind,” and it was all sorts of wacky. What are you doing, PBS? Public Broadcasting isn’t supposed to be hipster-cool!
But following the “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it,” theorem, we now have a Julia Child remix, “Keep on Cooking.” It’s making us kind of hungry. Read More
Kudos to PBS for getting on the ball with this whole Internet/meme fad. Unlike some stations owned by the billionaires over at Viacom, the Public Broadcasting Service doesn’t have the money to go after every copyright infringement on YouTube. Instead, they’ve creatively solved the problem of people re-appropriating old clips of their shows by doing it themselves at PBS Digital Studios: where they turn out impressively self-aware videos auto-tuning the syndicated stars of the network.
It’s all for the LOLs, of course, but it’s also ingenious viral marketing for a network that’s biggest draw is a guy who paints “Happy Little Clouds.” Read More
WNET, the local member station of PBS, is to announce today its new iPhone app, MetroFocus–a mobile version of the site of the same name. The app is to feature original WNET content on local news (particularly culture news) in video form as well as the ability to save location-based stories and visit the Read More
Downton Abbey, the Masterpiece franchise about life at a stately British manor, began with the sinking of the Titanic; its recently-concluded second season took on the Great War and the influenza outbreak. It’s a series about people unaccustomed to change suddenly dealing with staggering new technological and sociological realities, those who have long enjoyed a Read More
Attendees at AOL and PBS’s recent joint “Makers Lunch” at AOL Studios in the Village posed in front of a bank of monitors featuring images of Katie Couric, Condoleezza Rice, Sandra Day O’Connor, and other famous femmes. They were celebrating the launch of Makers.com, a site that features video interviews with a number of lady machers who broke Read More
Z’oh my heavens, Mr. Crawley! Terms of Endearment star Shirley MacLaine will be joining the cast of Downton Abbey, which has replaced This Old House and Ken Burns documentaries as PBS’ must-see TV.
Ms. Maclaine will be playing the proud American mom to ex-pat Lady Cora (Elizabeth McGovern) on season 3. (This visit will not go over well with Dame Maggie Smith’s Lady Grantham, we’re sure.)
This news was accompanied by rumors that other stateside cameos might be in the works, so we made several educated guesses as to which American actors could hold their own against the upstairs/downstairs scheming of the McGovern household.
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While we’re anxiously awaiting the March return of Mad Men after its year-long hiatus, we have to admit that the time off has given Jon Hamm the opportunity to show off his comedic side. 30 Rock, Bridesmaids, that time he did a reading for Jon Glaser about The Butthole Surfers, The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret, Between Two Ferns, and the upcoming Friends with Kids directed by (and starring) Mr. Hamm’s long-time girlfriend Jennifer Westfeldt are just a few examples.
Of course, you’ll never know where Jon Hamm might pop up next…like on a PBS Kid’s cartoon, perhaps? Read More
