HBO Struggles for Post-Sopranos Hits

(NEWSER) - Some things are certain: death, taxes, and Cinemax showing women with their shoes on having sex late at night. Soft-core porn is "in our DNA," an exec with the parent company of "Skinemax" tells the LA Times . "We're not running away from it." Neither are its premium-cable competitors, which are hardly relegating racier content to late night. Consider HBO's True Blood and Showtime's explicit Californication. More»

Claire Danes shines in title role as animal behavior expert

(NEWSER) - Temple Grandin, the renowned animal behaviorist who credits her achievements to her autism, values "tangible results" over emotion—and so does her HBO biopic. The eponymous film, debuting tomorrow, "avoids the mawkish clichés" so typical of made-for-TV movies, instead delivering "a movie that is funny, instructive, and also intangibly charming," writes Alessandra Stanley in the New York Times . More»

Once out-and-proud network is now just an HBO wannabe

(NEWSER) - Showtime, which has an openly gay president and used to be the home of “the two most sexually explicit gay dramas ever,” has failed its queer audience completely, Aymar Jean Christian writes. Sure, networks in general have backed off gay-centric programming after realizing “they could get a gay audience by writing just one or two marginal characters,” but Showtime, which had huge hits in Queer as Folk and The L Word, “deserves to be chastised for its blatant de-gaying.” More»

'Joey' star heads to Showtime, playing himself

(NEWSER) - Five-plus years after Friends left the air and nearly 4 after Joey went to the big cable box in the sky, Matt LeBlanc is headed back to TV—playing himself. Joey Tribbiani's alter ego has landed a part on the Showtime spoof Episodes, Reuters reports. " I am so glad I got the part," LeBlanc, 42, said in a statement. "Seeing someone else play Matt LeBlanc would have been devastating ." More»

Bad choices put 'Sex and the City' star's career at risk

(NEWSER) - Not that she asked, but Mike Harvkey has some advice for Sarah Jessica Parker: Stop listening to your agent, and start paying attention to Jennifer Aniston. Since her groundbreaking HBO show went off the air, Parker has made decisions so catastrophic they make him "wonder if Parker reads the scripts that cross her desk." Of the second Sex and the City movie, he warns, "SATC 2: Electric Boogaloo will be striking soon, another nail in the shiny pink coffin." More»