Gigolo Comedy Pays Off for HBO

Or at least a movie, pleads Eric Holder

(NEWSER) - The nation's top lawyer has it out for David Simon. AG Eric Holder yesterday ordered the creator of The Wire to start working on another season of the HBO crime drama—and jokingly reminded him that "I have a lot of power." Holder issued his plea to Simon and Ed Burns while appearing alongside three Wire stars at a Justice Department conference focusing on protecting children from drug abuse and exploitation, Reuters reports. More»

Thanks, in part, to Martin Scorsese, Steve Buscemi

(NEWSER) - HBO had critics eating out of its hand at the Summer TV Press Tour, thanks to its biggest, ritziest drama in years. It’s called Boardwalk Empire, and it’s produced and occasionally directed by Martin Scorcese (oooh), written by Sopranos veteran Terence Winter (aaaah), and stars Steve Buscemi (hooray!). With a plot revolving around Prohibition-era gangsters in Atlantic City, the show, set to debut Sept. 19, seems perfectly calculated to make critics swoon, and swoon they did, according to Lisa de Moraes of the Washington Post . More»

(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»