Community celebrates its (apparently real) return!

Will Community actually return on February 7 as NBC has promised us, or will this be another October 19 situation? (By the way, NBC, thanks for totally ruining by birthday by cruelly yanking my Community away!) Only time will tell, but this epic Steve Porter remix of moments from the show's third season is good news.



You tried to destroy Community, NBC, but you only made it... MORE AWESOME!

EW.com re-imagines Game of Thrones as a CW-style soap opera

As part of the magazine's year-end round-up of the best and worst everything in pop culture, Entertainment Weekly created a clever promo for Game of Thrones, if the epic aired not on HBO but on the CW.



While highlighting the pairings of Ygritte and Jon Snow and Daenerys and Ser Jorah was the obvious way to go, I quite enjoyed the way EW took advantage of the excellent chemistry between Peter Dinklage and Conleth Hill to imply a somewhat plausible romance between Tyrion and Varys. Plus, the Tyrion/Varys (Varion? Tyrys?) pairing would leave the door open for an excellent love triangle between the Imp, the Spider and poor, loyal, left-out Bronn. Spin-off series, anyone?

The Girls season 2 trailer is here

The sophomore season of Lena Dunham's much-discussed series is heavy on the Shoshanna (yay!), but generally lacking in Donald Glover.

Zosia Mamet and Alex Karpovsky of Girls.

I had something of a complicated relationship with the first season of HBO's Girls. (Of course, given the endless discussion that surrounded the series, having an uncomplicated relationship with the show would have been almost impossible). The series got better and funnier as the first season came to a close, but I still had some real issues with the way Dunham portrayed issues of sex and relationships among twenty-somethings, issues that kept me from ever fully connecting with the titular girls and their many awkward and hilarious problems.

The just-released trailer for the second season, however, got me excited for Girls' return by smartly emphasizing the comedy and allowing the audience to laugh at Hannah and her friends' often unrealistic expectations and world-views. Plus, it highlights the series' greatest asset: Zosia Mamet, whose Shoshanna was the funniest, most likeable and most criminally underused character of the first season.

The trailer demonstrates a couple of notable blindspots: Shoshanna and Ray telling Marnie (Allison Williams) that she's pretty, but not beautiful enough to be a model, rings false to anyone with eyes, and the blink-and-you-missed-it appearance by Donald Glover doesn't do much to generate excitement over  the Community favorite and actual non-white person making an appearance on a show that came under so much scrutiny for its lily-white cast.

However, these two misses are made up for by the myriad of funny lines and mocking character insights that the clip dishes up. From Adam's (Adam Driver) incredibly creepy song and stalker-y text messages, to the sight of Shoshanna and Ray repeatedly getting it on, to Marnie's oblivious self-obsession and the zen veneer Jessa (Jemima Kirke) uses to mask her naivete about her marriage to Thomas-John (Chris O'Dowd), there's a lot of promise in this two-minute spot. Now we'll just see if the second season can live up to it.

The best lines and moments from the Girls trailer:

• Seriously, how hilariously creepy is Adam's break-up song?
• "This is what happens when you break up with a sociopath." Truer words, Hannah, have never been spoken.
• "You tend to overthink things, and that's an issue for you." On the one hand, overthinking things is definitely an issue for Hannah. On the other hand, Jessa married a smarmy investment banker without even knowing his address.
• "And I know that I always said he was murdery in a sexy way, but what if he's murdery in like a murder way?" Adam does have a kind of charismatic serial-killer vibe to him.
• The re-appearance of The Lonely Island's Jorma Taccone as a sexually aggressive artist is as improbable as it is funny.
• "What are you wearing?" "Oh, a shirt!" It's mostly Dunham's inflection on the last line, not to mention her absurd neon mesh tank top, that sells this one.

The official World War Z trailer finally debuts

The zombie action in the Brad Pitt-starring adaptation of Max Brooks' novel looks great, but the clip ignores the geopolitical savvy that made the book so compelling.

After years of reports on the embattled production of World War Z - which has been plagued by so many obstacles, including illegal weapons caches, fluctuating release dates, and about a thousand different writers being brought in to retool the script - the trailer for the film (directed by Marc Forster, produced by and starring Brad Pitt) is finally here. And, not going to lie, it's pretty cool.



Awesome shots of massed zombies crawling up a wall like flesh-eating insects aside, however, the trailer does nothing to dispel the serious doubts I have about the adaptation's ability to capture the novel's greatest strength: the terrifying realism of the ways various governments respond to the threat of the zombie apocalypse. (Major SPOILERS for those who haven't read the book). World War Z is as much about social upheaval and foreign policy as it is about the actual zombies, and one of the best parts of the book is reading about individual nations' reactions to the end of the world, from Israel instituting border checkpoints where guards threaten to shoot infected persons on site, to French citizens taking refuge in the labyrinthine Paris sewers, to the United States military worrying more about the effectiveness of their photo-ops than their zombie-killing strategy.

Of course, a two-minute trailer would never be able to capture the complex political machinations that drive so much of Brook's novel. And the book's format - a series of interviews with dozens of unrelated characters, only a few of whom show up more than once - would be incredibly difficult to adapt into anything resembling an action-packed zombie film. (If only Steven Soderbergh hadn't already made Contagion; that film's multiple narratives, geopolitical intelligence and heartfelt character moments would have been perfect for World War Z). However, the trailer's focus on Pitt's apparent heroism - driven, of course, by love of his wife (Mireille Enos) and two adorable daughters - makes the film look like a fairly generic disaster narrative, where the book was anything but.

None of this is to suggest that I won't be buying a ticket when the movie comes out: after all, trailers are often misrepresentations of the films they're advertising, and that final shot of the massed zombies swarming up a seemingly impenetrable barrier is pure nightmare fuel. In order to really do justice to Brooks' book, however, World War Z will have to move beyond the simple disaster-movie narrative and do something much more difficult; convince viewers that what they're watching is not a mere story about the end of the world, but a documentary. And it will have to do all that while maintaining the unrealistic fiction that zombies would, in fact, be fast rather than shambling.

The Rising Profile of Leslie Odom Jr.

The Smash star and self-proclaimed blue-collar actor tells guest blogger Eva Mckend about enjoying his time in the spotlight and exceeding his own expectations.

Leslie Odom Jr.

By Eva McKend

Seventeen years ago, the musical RENT found its way into Leslie Odom Jr.’s living room. The actor can’t recall if he saw it on 20/20 or another news program, but what he does remember is walking into the now defunct HMV store in his hometown of Philadelphia. Odom had to track down the music.

Soon after, the 13-year-old came up with a plan. He would work on his acting, singing and dancing until he was 30, get a role in the musical and perform in the show for at least ten years.

But the young Odom’s dreams came faster than he ever envisioned when he nabbed a spot in the production’s chorus four years later.

“RENT really gave me the confidence to pursue this [acting] with my whole heart. It changed my life when it came into my living room and when I stepped on the Broadway stage,” he explained in an exclusive sit-down interview with Pencils Down, Pass the Remote in New York’s Bryant Park.

It was this early confirmation he would get once again at twenty-two after graduating from Carnegie Mellon’s School of Drama. Odom landed a role on CSI: Miami within 48 hours of moving to California. His friend had to drive him to the shoot—Odom didn’t have a car.

“I went to LA with fifteen hundred dollars and a dream. The question was, am I going to get out there and not have a ticket home. I prayed about it,” said Odom.

Steven Moffat, Amelia Pond, and the Complexities of Doctor Who

"The Angels Take Manhattan" is the culmination of Moffat's delve into the Doctor's decidedly destructive tendencies.

Caitlin Blackwood as the young Amelia Pond in "Let's Kill Hitler."

There's a definite philosophical dividing line between the Russell T. Davies/Christopher Eccleston/David Tennant era of Doctor Who and the Steven Moffat/Matt Smith seasons. That difference began, sneakily, to manifest itself in the very first Moffat/Smith episode, "The Eleventh Hour," but it didn't really come to the fore until the sixth and (currently airing, pretty fantastic) seventh seasons. This underlying change in philosophies mostly concerns the way the show treats its central character, 1200-year-old time-traveling adventurer The Doctor, and the effect that he has on the people who travel with him, fight with him, and love him.

Davies' Doctor, as embodied by Eccleston and Tennant, is (almost) never anything less than a full-on hero. There are moments when the show acknowledges his destructive impact, sure - Donna has to save the Tenth Doctor from his own rage when he drowns the Racnoss queen, and he power-trips when trying to change a fixed moment in time in "The Waters of Mars" - but, all in all, the Davies-era series shied away from taking a hard look at the tensions between the good intentions of its hero and the broken people left in his wake.

2012 was apparently the year of kick-ass women on TV

Flavorwire just came out with a supercut called "TV's Year of Kick-Ass Women," which celebrates the girls and women who rocked the small screen this year.



While I don't disagree with Flavorwire's Michelle Rafferty when she calls this year's crop of female characters "intelligent, empowered and awesomely flawed," the supercut leaves out a number of TV's best ass-kicking women. It was nice to see 30 Rock's Liz Lemon, Up All Night's Reagan and the women of Community alongside the (more traditionally) badass Nikita and Olivia Dunham, but where were The Vampire Diaries' Caroline and Rebekah? Why not include Archer's Lana Kane next to Selina Meyer of Veep? Why is Lady Sybil the only Crawley who gets a place on the list, rather than Lady Mary or the Dowager Countess? And while I wholeheartedly support the presence of Daenerys Targaryen and Brienne of Tarth, where exactly were Arya Stark and Cersei Lannister?