Sorry for the delay in getting this morning’s newsletter out on time - I was distracted by an episode of We Bare Bears. I’ve never seen it before and it turns out… it’s hilarious.
A scripted series based on the life of former NFL player Colin Kaepernick is in pre-production at Netflix.
Colin in Black & White, a six-episode drama, will explore the high school years of Kapernick - providing insight into the experiences that led to his activism today.
Read: The LA Times
Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence appeared on the Scrubs podcast Fake Doctors Real Friends to discuss the reasoning for pulling the blackface episode of the show. He’s incredibly frank about why they did it to begin with:
“It starts with ignorance,” he said. “We almost thought that we had… a free pass to not have those thoughts [about the history of blackface] back then because we were so f—king proud of ourselves for doing a very diverse show, in front of and behind the camera. [We had a] great black-and-white friendship that exists as a real black-and-white friendship, a great interracial couple… It was almost a block of arrogance where we were like, ‘We’re so good at what we’re portraying and doing and showing that we could never venture into muddy waters.’ And even now, with that same ignorance, we never really connected the two of those things until now. You do the reading, and it’s not any different.”
Source: TVLine
As per The Australian, Aussie streamer Stan is set to lose its content deal with ViacomCBS’ Showtime. Shows currently in production will continue on with Stan (Billions being the highest profile series), but older library titles and any new shows will debut elsewhere.
It is expected that the Showtime content will move to the new ViacomCBS streaming service that will replace All Access.
News Corp, which owns both The Australian and Stan’s competitor Foxtel made this graphic to showcase the “Big losses” to Stan. I’m not convinced that most of these meet the definition. But sure.
Source: The Australian
Something some might see as the righting of the ship, some of the more contentious voices are being deplatformed in the US right now.
First there’s YouTube, which just banned Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer, and more for hate speech.
YouTube began cracking down on supremacist channels in June 2019. The company issued updated rules prohibiting “videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status.” Channels that repeatedly brush up against this type of content but don’t cross the line will receive other penalties, including losing access to YouTube’s Partner Program and not being able to monetize their videos.
Source: The Verge
Meanwhile, Trump’s Twitch account was temporarily suspended for ‘hateful content’. The content has been removed and the account lives on.
Source: The Verge
Speaking of horrible things on YouTube, Chris O’Dowd has publicly derided the Imagine video that he appeared in with a whole bunch of other celebs. Appearing on the Louis Theroux podcast, he explained that he thought it was for kids.
O’Dowd says the idea came about during “that first wave of creative diarrhea” during the pandemic and that the video “was just a bunch of people running around thinking that they had to do something when we really didn’t.” He also says that “any backlash was fairly justified” and describes how “bizarre” it was to be “part of that maelstrom” when the video started to be mocked online.
Read more: The AV Club
Netflix has an animated series based on the 2017 game Cuphead. They’ve just released the first look:
Bunk as the new voice of Cleveland? Sounds good. Who’s gonna be the first to tell him that they stopped making The Cleveland Show back in 2013 and he’s been a Family Guy supporting character since?
Kerry Washington is also hard up for a gig, apparently.
