FYC: "Jane the Virgin" For Best Comedy Series

Team Experience shares their preferred picks in top Emmy categories as voters ready their ballots. Here's Denny...

Jane the Virgin shouldn't work. But it does, in every way, in every episode. Based on a Venezuelan telenovela, the show tells the story of Jane (luminous Golden Globe winner Gina Rodriguez), a straight-A college student working at a posh Miami hotel as she completes her degree in Education, who gets accidentally artificially inseminated.

Showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman pulled off a miracle with Jane's first season. There is not a single bad episode. NOT. ONE. And that feat is even more impressive when you consider what a high-wire act each episode of Jane is: Each episode juggles an ever-expanding cast of major characters, multiple flashbacks, in-show telenovelas, fantasy and/or dream sequences, one character (Jane's abuela Alba) who speaks exclusively in subtitled Spanish, and a third-person omniscent narrator who has become a character in his own right.

Oh yeah, and onscreen text, including the only onscreen twitter hashtags that are not only usable but laugh-loud funny. AND real-world issues that surround the show's beautifully-written Latina/o characters

All of this may sound like too much, but somehow it isn't. There's a lightness of touch here missing from most TV comedies - heck, most TV shows PERIOD. The show is able to earn copious amounts of tears while still remaining one of the funniest shows on TV, thanks in equal part to the remarkably assured writing, the tremendous performances (#emmyforrogelio), and the smart direction on display.

While it's true that Emmy hasn't noticed anything on The CW before, honoring Jane the Virgin with a nomination for Best Comedy Series would not only add diversity to the usually lily-white category, it would add credibility. It would show that Emmy voters not only care about quality, but that they don't care where they find it.

P.S. Two brilliant FYC ads if you haven't seen them after the jump...

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Musical News & Tom Hardy in London Road

Manuel here. I’m still drunk on showtunes after last night’s Tony Awards (so glad I finally bought my tickets to Fun Home yesterday, anticipating its various wins!), so what better way to keep the mood going than continuing to talk musicals!

And while I could point out NBC’s The Wiz cast Stephanie Mills (the original Dorothy) as Auntie Em, or that Paul Dano’s Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy opened to respectable reviews this weekend, or that we should all be actively anticipating that Dolly Parton TV movie musical, "Coat of Many Colors," or that Spike Lee’s Chiraq (a musical comedy adaptation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata set in Chicago) has cast Jennifer Hudson, Kanye West and Dave Chappelle (with rumors of Common joining the cast), I realized I needed to talk about London Road which opens this Friday in the UK:

London Road, which includes Olivia Colman and Tom Hardy in its ensemble cast, is an adaptation of the award-winning National Theatre production about the arrest of Steve Wright, an Ipswich man who was convicted of murdering five sex workers in 2008. Rufus Norris's film uses the dialogue from the real townsfolk who were interviewed by author Alecky Blythe as they came to terms with the fact that a serial killer had been living in their community.

I mean, you had me at “Olivia Colman and Tom Hardy” but it sounds like a fascinating show (anyone catch it in London?) and an intriguing film adaptation. Check out the trailer below:

There’s no US date set for this yet, but I can’t be the only one looking forward to seeing Tom Hardy sing (he must sing though the trailer gives me no indication that he does), can I? It just makes me confident that more challenging musicals may make it to the screen. Last Five Years already made it, but what other unorthodox musicals do you think would be well-suited for the screen?

Podcast: Smackdown Companion 1979

You've read the new Supporting Actress Smackdown. Now hear its companion podcast. Our panel widens its view from the supporting nominees to talk about the unique cinematic landscape of the late 1970s, the women's lib movement and concurrent movie gender wars, and which movies give the best period punch and which we've misremembered completely.

Host: Nathaniel R
Special Guests:  KM Soehnlein,  Kristen Sales, Bill Chambers, and StinkyLulu.

Contents

• 00:01 Introductions and memory vs. reality w/ Breaking Away
• 03:20 Gender Wars of 1979. Misogynistic or merely non-coddling and complicated? 
• 09:00 Cynicism and Optimism in Starting Over and Manhattan, which is particularly self-critical and discomforting
• 15:50 Contextualizing the movies. 1979 versus what was to come with shifting tastes. Do people still make movies about "how we live now?"
• 21:00 Meryl Streep's command of subtext and Kramer vs. Kramer as a film 
• 28:00 The oddity of Starting Over's comedy - we recommend
• 31:30 Movies we wish we had had to watch for the Smackdown: Alien & All That Jazz and non-nominated supporting actresses
• 36:45 Final random observations: valium, money in 1979, and new actors who weren't yet famous
• 39:00 Meryl Streep then vs Meryl Streep now. Of course we spend the last five minutes on Meryl Streep.

And because we joke about it - Here is Candice Bergen's off-key hit single "Better Than Ever" from Starting Over.

Please to enjoy and continue the conversation in the comments. You can listen at the bottom of this post or download from iTunes tomorrow. THE NEXT SMACKDOWN IS AT THE END OF JUNE. WE'LL BE LOOKING AT 1948 SO ADJUST YOUR QUEUES ACCORDINGLY.

Smackdown Companion 1979

Tony Awards 2015 Live Blog

Tonight's festivities will be hosted by Tony winners Kristin Chenoweth ("You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown") and Alan Cumming ("Cabaret") and if Cheno doesn't win herself later on for "On the Twentieth Century" it's going to continue to be forever weird to refer to her as a 'Featured Actress' Tony winner from before she was even KRISTIN CHENOWETH and still not a Best Actress winner. Cheno only having one Tony? Unthinkable!

...and that's my new philosophy! ♫

Anyway... LIVE BLOG FROM THE SHOW (UPDATED WITH PHOTOS & VIDEO CLIPS) after the jump

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Melissa McCarthy Rules the Box Office Yet Again

This weekend I was too caught up in 1979 (see the Smackdown) and birthday festivities (the celebration of meeeee!) to see any new pictures -- though Spy was previously seen and Rose Byrne is magnificent! The weekend box office went pretty much as people expected, Melissa McCarthy still being a huge draw. Though it remains a mystery how there were ten million dollars worth of people who missed HBO's Entourage. Who knew?!

WIDE RELEASE
June 5th-7th Weekend
01 Spy NEW $30 
02 San Andreas $26.4 (cum. $92.1) 
03 Insidious Chapter 3 NEW $23
04 Entourage NEW $10.4 (cum. $17.8)
05 Mad Max Fury Road $7.9 (cum. $130.8) Review & Podcast
06 Pitch Perfect 2 $7.7 (cum. $160.9) Review 
07 Tomorrowland $7 (cum. $76.2) Review 
08 Age of Ultron  $6.2 (cum. $438) Review & Marathon & Podcast
09 Aloha $3.3 (cum. $16.3) Review
10 Poltergeist $2.8 (cum. $44.4)

What did you see this weekend? Or are you busy counting down the minutes until the Tony Awards to think about the movies?