Gigolo Comedy Pays Off for HBO

Latest incarnation has its 'flaws'

(NEWSER) - The riches-to-rags story of an eccentric mother and daughter—relatives of Jackie O, no less—who gained fame for their destitute existence in a 1975 documentary gets another retelling in HBO's Grey Gardens. Critics aren't overly excited:

• The movie "fills in bittersweet blanks” left by the original documentary, writes Joy Press in Salon, forcing fans “into a trade-off: Our curiosity is sated, but we lose some of the most haunting shades of gray."

We don't care about platforms, Michael Wolff argues, we care about shows

(NEWSER) - Sunday should have been a banner night for HBO, with Game of Thrones and the premiere of its latest "zeitgeist-courting" show Girls. But Michael Wolff didn't tune in—though not for lack of trying. Wolff and his companion "don't have HBO. And, it turns out, after some hurried calling around, nobody we know has HBO. They all did; now, they don't," he writes in the Guardian . Pretty much everyone he called deemed HBO either too expensive, too "uncool," or both. "If I were HBO, I'd find this alarming." More»

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»