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Any bozo can watch TV. It takes nothing to plonk your butt down, jab at a remote, and spill Dorito crumbs on your neck while the pretty people on your box fight alien invaders.

To be a true TV fan requires homework. You have to learn the extra stuff that makes you somebody that’s hard to watch TV with – somebody who knows the behind-the-scenes reason why that character’s hair looks weird in that Christmas special cameo (they’re wearing a wig after shaving their head for a Marvel role), why there are only 12 episodes in that season (writers’ strike), or why two main characters barely feature in the same scene for eight seasons despite both mostly living in the same Westerosi castle (acrimonious break-up).

True TV fans know about Easter Eggs and running gags and fourth-wall-breaking references. They know to look in the back of shot for aliens in South Park,...

Exclusive: Entertainment veterans Elisabeth Rohm and Kara Feifer have partnered to launch Rohm Feifer Entertainment, a film and television production company that will look to tell inspirational, female-forward stories steeped in true crime and true narratives that resonate with audiences of all kinds.

Already, the company with offices in L.A. and New York has made a deal with Village Roadshow Television to develop the series I Will Be Good, inspired by Bryan Smith’s article for Chicago magazine. Written by Karen Croner, it will tell the story of a $53 million bamboozle: how Rita Crundwell, the trusted comptroller of the small Illinois town of Dixon, pulled off the biggest municipal embezzlement in U.S. history to date without anyone noticing. The project will be executive produced by Meryl Poster.

Rohm and Feifer are also taking an IP-based procedural out to market this year, led by Ed Bernero (Criminal Minds), based...

Peter Werner, the Oscar-winning director known for his television work that spanned five decades and included helming episodes of such popular series as Moonlighting, A Different World, Justified and Law & Order: Svu, has died. He was 76.

Werner died Tuesday morning in Wilmington, North Carolina, his younger brother, Tom Werner (producer on The Cosby Show, Roseanne, That ’70s Show, The Conners), told The Hollywood Reporter. “He had a torn aorta that the doctors weren’t able to repair. So sudden,” he wrote in an email.

As a student project while attending the American Film Institute, Peter Werner directed the 1976 short film In the Region of Ice, which was based on Joyce Carol Oates’ short story and starred Fionnula Flanagan. The project won the Oscar for live-action short film.

His career kicked off from there, with Werner helming a 1977 episode of Family. The ABC drama counted Mike Nichols and Aaron Spelling as executive producers.

Presented by:

We now know that hit animated sci-fi sitcom comedy Rick and Morty will be coming back for a fifth season in just a few months. But maybe that’s not soon enough for you. Maybe you need more Rick and Morty right now. Perhaps you just unsealed your very last packet of coveted szechuan sauce and yet you find yourself still unfulfilled! Your Funko Pop! Rick sitting on a toilet just isn’t doing it for you anymore! You need official merch autographed by the cast and crew! You need to be drowning in Rick and Morty goods!

Well, therapy is expensive, but, luckily, trading cards are more reasonably priced and Cryptozoic Entertainment has published three seasons worth of Rick and Morty trading cards to fill that emptiness you feel inside! The base cards display iconic moments from the series, but there are also rarer autograph cards signed by the voice actors,...

Kyra Sedgwick, Kim Raver, Ashley Williams, Elisabeth Röhm, and Robin Givens all have something in common: they are actors who recently hopped into the director’s chair.

The five female filmmakers looked back on their journey to director at TheWrap’s annual Power Women Summit, speaking on a panel titled “Broader Focus: View from the Director’s Chair,” moderated by Tanya Lopez. Executive Vice President, Movies, Limited Series & Original Movie Acquisitions, Lifetime & Lifetime Movie. The panel was presented by Lifetime.

“I was the person who never had that voice — my voice was, ‘you will never direct,'” Sedgwick said. “I’ve been working professionally as an actor from the time I was 16 and I’d worked with a lot of legendary directors, all of whom were men… my loving husband kept saying to me, ‘you have such big opinions about the way things are directed… what about the concept of you directing one day?...

The super-slick, super-sick Rick and Morty brand is known for many things: the warped, borderline-abusive dynamic between its titular characters, its deliciously dark humour, the gleefulness it takes in capsizing the conventions of a thousand genre tropes. Then there are the catch-phrases, and the colourful cast of supporting characters – everything from fatally-depressed Mr Meseeks to embedded family friends like Mr Poopybutthole. What really characterises it though, is death. That it’s not the first association you make with the show is possibly a by-product of there being so damn much of it that it stops registering.

There are long deaths, slow deaths, good deaths, bad deaths, sad deaths, funky deaths, perfunctory deaths, ironic deaths, iconic deaths, horrid deaths, hilarious deaths and hectares of borderline disturbing deaths.

Here are the most gruesome, in all their gory glory, season by season. (It’s a testament to Rick and Morty’s perpetually heavy...

In 2015, Michaela Coel’s screenwriting debut was the brilliant Chewing Gum, an E4 comedy that earned her two Baftas, an Rts win, several nominations and a considerable weight of expectation for what she’d write next.

What Coel wrote next is I May Destroy You, a BBC-HBO co-production announced last year under the working title of January 22nd. It’s the autobiographically inspired story of Bella (played by Coel), a young London writer whose drink is spiked on a night out. When she tries to piece together the events of what happened, Bella goes on a personal journey through trauma and pain that examines questions of sexual consent, liberation and exploitation in contemporary London.

Arriving on HBO and BBC One this June, here’s the latest trailer and more…

I May Destroy You Geek Lowdown

How many episodes are there? 12 x 30-minute episodes in season one

Air date:...

This summer, Lifetime brings your favorite novels to life over three consecutive weekends in June.

Joining previously announced Book to Screen titles, Pride & Prejudice Atlanta premiering June 1 and Adriana Trigiani's Very Valentine on June 8, the Book to Screen summer movie series continues with three Jane Green titles.

Tempting Fate, starring Alyssa Milano (Insatiable), also marks executive producer Kim Raver’s (Grey’s Anatomy) directorial debut, premieres on Saturday, June 15 at 8Pm Et/Pt.

To Have and To Hold, starring Erika Christensen (Parenthood) debuts on Saturday, June 22 at 8Pm Et/Pt and Family Pictures, starring Justina Machado (One Day at a Time) and Elisabeth Röhm (Law & Order), airs on Saturday, June 29 at 8 Pm Et/Pt.

Lifetime's Book to Screen series will continue later this summer with five V.C. Andrews titles, based on the Casteel Family novels.

Based on Jane Green’s New York Times best-selling novel of the same name,...

Phylicia Rashad; upcoming series “David Makes Man,” “The Terror: Infamy” and “Los Espookys”; and some panels dedicated to female storytelling have joined the eighth annual Atx Television Festival.

Rashad will be honored with this year’s “Award in Television eXcellence” and will take part in a Q&A discussion around the event. This award celebrates her iconic roles on “The Cosby Show,” “Empire,” “This is Us” and “David Makes Man.”

Speaking of “David Makes Man,” the upcoming Own drama will host a pilot screening at the festival, followed by a panel discussion with showrunner Dee Harris-Lawrence and cast members Rashad and Akili McDowell. The show centers on a 14-year-old prodigy from the projects who is haunted by the death of his closest friend and relied on by his hardworking mother to find a way out of poverty.

Atx will also feature a premiere screening and panel for HBO’s upcoming primarily Spanish-language comedy “Los Espookys.

As a woman and a feminist, I’d like to offer this observation: There is nothing that can make you hate the word “female” like sitting in the audience of a panel devoted to women who make film or television.

The Winter 2019 Television Critics Association press tour is comprised of dozens of press conferences and panels, some of which took the forms of cooking demonstrations, musical performances, and live table reads. These gimmicks are fine; the TCAs are nothing if not a marathon, and the effort to do something different is appreciated.

However, too often the TCAs treated “women make TV” as its own gimmick, as if assembling a collection of TV producers who share a gender was enough to create a satisfying or insightful presentation.

Consider these four panels over the last 16 days:

NBC’s “Women of Drama” panel, featuring Jennifer Carpenter of “The Enemy Within,” Retta of “Good Girls,...

Lifetime Network kicked off Sunday’s TCA presentation with an announcement from Rob Sharenow, president of programming at A+E Network, saying they have 78% female directors. The industry is averaging 17%.

The network introduced a panel featuring female actors-directors including Kim Raver, Alyssa Milano, Monika Mitchell, Erika Christensen, Janice Cooke, Ginnifer Goodwin, Angela Fairley, Rhonda Baraka, Tiffany Hines, and Claire Scanlon, who discussed the importance of reaching a minimum 50/50 gender equity by 2020.

By working towards equality in Hollywood, the question as to whether male characters will suffer got a chuckle from the panel.

“I think female directors take that into consideration more than maybe a male director would,” Milano, who stars in Jane Green’s Tempting Fate, said. “I know that Kim was very adamant about making sure that all the characters were equally as developed.

The female directors I’ve worked with in the past has given people their equal opportunities.

In 1999 Monika Mitchell wrote, produced and directed a short film that she took to festivals. At the time, she recalled Sunday at a Television Critics Assn. press tour panel, when her name came up in the credits there were so few women helming projects that she overheard an executive say, “Monika’s a funny name for a guy.” In the two decades since that experience, she has crossed mediums between film and television, working most recently on Lifetime’s original movie “Jane Green’s To Have and to Hold,” while the industry around her has made slower advances. Currently there are 17% women directors, while only approximately 15 months after the #MeToo movement went viral men such as Louis C.K. and Les Moonves are getting back to work.

“We can’t put all these men on an island and say, ‘Ah they’ll figure it out, let them eat themselves.’ … I think...

Actress Kim Raver and filmmaker Manu Boyer re-listed a sophisticated contemporary bungalow in the still somewhat gritty and funky but none-the-less sought after heart of Venice, Calif., with a new and lower price of $3.399 million. Married since 2000, the couple have owned the modestly sized but, for most people, still prohibitively pricey property since 2006 when it was acquired for $1.735 million. Originally designed by Venice architect Lise Claiborne Matthews with later renovations by the Venice-based architecture firm Gabor + Allen, the low-profile two-story contemporary is secured behind a rusted steel gate and all but invisible behind a tall wall and a higher hedge on one of Venice’s pedestrian-only “walk-streets” just outside the urbane Abbott Kinney shopping and dining district with three and potentially four bedrooms and three bathrooms in 2,018-square-feet.

Airy, open-plan interior spaces feature molding-free expanses of gallery white walls perfect for displaying artwork and an interesting, industrial-meets-country cottage mix of...

Lifetime announced at TCA today an ambitious slate of original movies for 2019. Among the 75 films planned for next year are a series of telepics and documentaries from veteran newswoman Robin Roberts along with book franchises from authors V.C. Andrews and Victoria Christopher Murray.

The A+E Networks-owned cable net unveiled today a major production deal with Roberts for movies and docs under the Robin Roberts Presents banner to debut next year. It also is in development on Murray’s Seven Deadly Sins anthology, reteaming with producer T.D. Jakes, and has commissioned the first three books — Lust, Envy and Greed – to debut next year.

Andrews’ five-book series about the twisted relationships of the Casteel Family also being turned into movies. First up is V.C. Andrews’ Heaven, starring Annalise Basso, Julie Benz, Chris William Martin and Chris McNally.

Those projects join the previously announced Jane Green three-picture deal. The first movie,...