Linda Holmes

Linda Holmes appears in the following:

A Look Ahead At The Landscape Of TV To Come

Sunday, August 09, 2015

Twice each year, all the major TV production houses bring critics to Beverly Hills, Calif. to introduce their latest shows. This summer, the sheer volume of new, scripted material is overwhelming.

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5 Things We Learned From ShondaLand

Wednesday, August 05, 2015

Tuesday's Television Critics Association press tour presentations from ABC wrapped up with a panel devoted to the network's scripted ace in the hole: Shonda Rhimes, who created Grey's Anatomy and Scandal and is an executive producer of How To Get Away With Murder. Rhimes and her producing partner, Betsy Beers, ...

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A Pig, A Frog And Two Producers: 'The Muppets' Talk About Returning To Prime Time

Tuesday, August 04, 2015

Most of the panel discussions that happen at the Television Critics Association press tour currently underway in Beverly Hills have something critical in common: the panelists are humans. (Please hold your jokes about Hollywood. The critics in attendance have made them all.)

Tuesday morning, that all changed when ABC presented ...

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Tina Fey Accidentally Explains How Netflix Is Like Podcasting

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Tuesday was the first day of the summer press tour for the Television Critics Association. Press tour is an event that goes on for a couple of weeks, in which TV networks bring in personnel from their new shows (and sometimes their existing shows) for panel press conferences where the ...

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Pop Culture Happy Hour: 'Trainwreck' And 'Ant-Man'

Friday, July 24, 2015

This week brings two summer movies into our field of vision: an unconventional romantic comedy and a shrunken (in the good way) superhero adventure.

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Too Good To Be True: TV Reporter Was In On Magicians' Photobomb

Friday, July 24, 2015

It had all the elements of an Internet hit: Two magicians hijack a TV news update, performing in the background behind an oblivious reporter. The video quickly went viral in Britain — but then it emerged that the Sky News team was in on the joke.

Both Sky News and ...

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'I Really Like You': Amy Schumer Makes A Fine 'Trainwreck'

Friday, July 17, 2015

The comedy Trainwreck, written by Amy Schumer and directed by Judd Apatow, takes a few risks with the romantic comedy formula on which it ultimately relies. Plus: LeBron James!

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Pop Culture Happy Hour: 'BoJack Horseman' And People We're Pulling For

Friday, July 17, 2015

This week's show brings back into the studio — well, remotely anyway — our original producer and music director Mike Katzif, now ensconced in New York working for the lovely people at NPR's Ask Me Another. Mike joins us for a talk about the Netflix comedy BoJack Horseman, ...

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'Sex And Drugs' And Boredom In The Golden Age

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

The new FX comedy Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll* stars Denis Leary as the decaying former singer of a briefly scorching New York band whose speedy self-immolation was brought about by debauchery and betrayal. The band was called The Heathens, because they were heathens. The singer is named ...

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Pop Culture Happy Hour: 'Key And Peele' And Crowds Of Critters

Friday, July 10, 2015

This week's show features our great friend Gene Demby of NPR's Code Switch and opens with a discussion of Key & Peele, the Comedy Central sketch show that's just come back for its fifth season. We look at some of what's to come in the early part of season five, ...

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A Very Silly '7 Days In Hell'

Friday, July 10, 2015

Where new levels of quality go, new levels of parody are sure to follow. So it makes sense that a strong run of historical sports documentaries, particularly from ESPN's 30 For 30 series, would give rise to a spot-on mock-documentary like HBO's 7 Days In Hell, airing Saturday night.

7 ...

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The Happiest Strippers In Film History Dance Through 'Magic Mike XXL'

Wednesday, July 01, 2015

Pinpointing the most important conversation in Magic Mike XXL is, admittedly, a little like pinpointing the most important zoological computer model in Jurassic World, but let's do it anyway.

The most important conversation in Magic Mike XXL, a joyfully raucous follow-up to 2012's moodier, indie-er Magic Mike, takes place between ...

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'Zoo': Welcome, Crazypants Television Of Summer!

Tuesday, June 30, 2015

I want to own up to something right away: I was predisposed to laugh at CBS's summer action/drama/kookoopants series Zoo. I find the idea of a menace-driven show called Zoo inherently hilarious, in part because "zoo" is a word made up of exactly two sounds, both of which are naturally ...

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Pop Culture Happy Hour, Small Batch Edition: Audiobooks

Monday, June 29, 2015

During our recent time with charming Bostonian librarian Margaret Willison, we managed to sit her down for a chat about audiobooks. We discovered that while I am a frequent listener to a variety of kinds of books (as I wrote about recently), Margaret uses them in a very ...

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Pop Culture Happy Hour: Judy Blume's New Book And Lifetime's 'UnREAL'

Friday, June 26, 2015

This week's show finds us cracking open Judy Blume's new adult novel In The Unlikely Event (it's an adult novel as in a-novel-for-adults, not an adult novel as in "too sexy for polite company). Joined by our friend and librarian-in-chief Margaret Willison, we talk about the structure of the book, ...

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The Weird — Weirder? — Thing About The Ferrell-Wiig Lifetime Movie

Friday, June 19, 2015

Back on April 1 of this year, The Hollywood Reporter broke the news that Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig had secretly filmed a Lifetime movie called A Deadly Adoption. This was kind of confusing, because ... it was April 1, after all. Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig are ...

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Why The Key Character In 'Inside Out' Is The One Who Isn't There

Friday, June 19, 2015

Villains are staples of stories for kids. Making them bigger, meaner, madder, more impossible to defeat — that's how you build the ideas of fear and then, inevitably, of courage. A small person faces a giant, or a witch, or a wolf, or Jafar, or Cruella De Vil, or the ...

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Pop Culture Happy Hour: 'Inside Out' And Moms And Dads In Love

Friday, June 19, 2015

I'm just going to tell you right off the bat, you guys: we really liked Inside Out. This does not exactly make us outliers in the critical landscape, but we sit down this week with the great Kat Chow of NPR's Code Switch team to talk about the film. It's ...

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The Heat Is On With These Summer Romance Novels

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

NPR Books is focusing on romance novels this summer. And our recommendations are not so-called "bodice rippers" or historical romances — they're contemporary.

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'Modern Romance' And The Emerging Audiobook

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Audiobooks have traditionally been tricky to get right and even harder to make special. Very often, they're literally just books read aloud, to the best of the ability of a single, usually highly skilled reader. In fiction, you get readers who are asked to provide voices for however many characters ...

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