Latest from What To Watch in Cbs-all-access

When do new episodes of 'Star Trek: Picard' premiere?

amelia.emberwing@futurenet.com (Amelia Emberwing) — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 19:41:44 +0000

We've waited for some time for new episodes of Picard. Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, we didn't know when the series would even begin filming again (let alone what a premiere date would look like). However, thanks to Paramount+'s First Contact event, we now have more details about Picard and a whole host of other Star Trek properties.

While there isn't a solid release date just yet, we can expect Season 2 sometime in 2022. So far as announcements go, the biggest thing dropped by Paramount was less the release date and more the fact that the trickster Q will be returning to Picard in Season 2.

Other cast members returning to set include Brent Spiner, Alison Pill, Isa Briones, Evan Evagora, Michelle Hurd, Santiago Cabrera, Jeri Ryan and Orla Brady alongside Patrick Steward's Jean Luc Picard and John de Lancie as Q.

The returning cast members and the nefarious Q won't be the only familiar faces in Season 2, either. Whoopi Goldberg has also been personally invited by Stewart to return as Guinan. She confirmed her return back in January of this year. When Goldberg's The View cohost Joy Behar joked about keeping the blonde streaks in her hair, Stewart replied with “She can do whatever the hell she wants.”

Now that we know Season 2 a vague timeline for Season 2, fans can expect more information to be dropping in the coming months. In the meantime, there's still plenty of Trek to catch up on while you wait! All of their series, including the surprising Star Trek: Lower Decks can be found on Paramount+.

The ‘Frasier’ reboot has been greenlit for Paramount Plus, but it might be missing one key character

Martin Shore — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 10:59:21 +0000

Yesterday evening, ViacomCBS officially announced the Frasier reboot series that was already rumoured to be in production.

Kelsey Grammer is poised to return in this new, Paramount+ exclusive series as Dr Frasier Crane once more. He said: “Having spent over 20 years of my creative life on the Paramount lot, both producing shows and performing in several, I’d like to congratulate Paramount+ on its entry into the streaming world.”

He added: “I gleefully anticipate sharing the next chapter in the continuing journey of Dr. Frasier Crane.”

Whilst we don’t have further story details, nor an official release date, we did notice there was one big name missing from the Frasier reboot announcement: David Hyde Pierce.

David Hyde Pierce played Frasier’s neurotic younger brother, Niles Crane, in the original show, but his return was not confirmed anywhere in the press release. As Grammer is currently the only confirmed star set to return in the revival, we have no idea whether Roz or Daphne will return in the new show, either.

The lack of news about other key members of the show has sent some fans wild on social media, with one claiming Paramount Plus “might as well pack up and go home” without David Hyde Pierce on board for the Frasier reboot.

A new frasier series without David Hyde Pierce? The folks at paramount plus might as well pack up and go home.February 25, 2021

Here’s what ViacomCBS said in the Frasier reboot announcement:

"Kelsey Grammer will reprise his celebrated role as Dr. Frasier Crane in the new original comedy series FRASIER. Grammar will executive produce along with writers Chris Harris (“How I Met Your Mother,” “The Great Indoors”) and Joe Cristalli (“Life in Pieces,” “Perfect Harmony”), and Gramnet Productions Tom Russo and Jordan McMahon. The series will be produced by CBS Studios in association with Gramnet Productions, exclusively for Paramount+."

CBS also teased the news in a thread of announcements about upcoming shows on Paramount+, where they said the new show will have ‘have everything you love about the original: coziness, great writing, and of course, a cast led by @KelseyGrammer’.

Also bringing back Frasier, one of the most highly acclaimed, most successful comedy series of all time. The revival will have everything you love about the original: coziness, great writing, and of course, a cast led by @KelseyGrammer. #ParamountPlus pic.twitter.com/cZKAOtw6WFFebruary 24, 2021

Paramount+ (CBS All Access after its upcoming rebrand) is home to a huge range of content including everything from the world of Star Trek and the upcoming Spongebob spin-off, Kamp Koral. The Frasier reboot will join a library of over 6,000 episodes of comedies, including every classic episode of beloved sitcoms like Frasier, Cheers and I Love Lucy.

MORE: See our full Paramount+ review

How to watch Atalanta vs. Real Madrid in the 2021 Champions League Round of 16

Martin Shore — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 17:05:26 +0000

If you’re wondering how to watch Atalanta vs. Real Madrid in the 2021 Champions League, we’ve got you covered.

This is the first time Atalanta and Real Madrid have ever faced off in the UEFA Champions League. The only other time Atalanta have faced a Spanish team was in last year’s round of 16, where they played (and beat) Valencia. Currently, Atalanta is in second place in Group D, sitting on 3-2-1, with 11 points overall.

Real Madrid has the record for the longest consecutive run of knockout stage appearances for any Champions League team. The 2020/21 season is Real Madrid's 24th appearance in the round of 16, and they currently hold first place in Group B ahead of German Bundesliga team Borussia Mönchengladbach. Their current record at the time of writing is 3-1-2, with 10 points overall.

As the first leg of the round of 16 comes to a close, here’s how to watch Atalanta vs. Real Madrid in the 2021 Champions League Round of 16.

How to watch Atalanta vs. Real Madrid anywhere in the world

If you’re going to be away from home but don’t want to miss the match, you always tune into your preferred service using a VPN.

A virtual private network reroutes your network traffic through a set of servers of your choice in a different country. So, if you’re normally in the UK and watch through BT Sport but you’re elsewhere, you can make it look like your device is still back home.

Because your VPN is handling all your network data—encrypted or not—you need to be able to trust your VPN provider. This is why we’re fans of ExpressVPN.

ExpressVPN is one of the simplest and most affordable ways to watch what you want, wherever you want to watch it. Plus, it'll help keep your network traffic away from other users.

And it's a great way to watch all the Champions League games on your preferred device, no matter where you are in the world.View Deal

How to watch Atalanta vs. Real Madrid in the US

If you’re wanting to keep up with the Champions League in the US, you’ve got a couple of great options to choose from.

CBS will be showing every single Champions League match live on CBS All Access (and not on their traditional broadcast network). They’ve shown every game from the group stages so far and will be showing every game up to and including the Champions League final in May 2021.

CBS All Access (soon to be Paramount Plus) costs just $5.99 a month with ad breaks in on-demand content, but you can choose a $9.99 monthly subscription to remove them if you'd prefer.

Alongside exclusive live coverage of the Champions League, you can find everything from the Star Trek Universe as well as great shows like The Twilight Zone and the upcoming Spongebob spin-off Kamp Koral on CBS All Access.

For Spanish-language Champions League coverage of the game in the US, head to TUDN (formerly Univision Deportes).

The match kicks off at 3:00pm ET on Wednesday, February 24 in the US.

How to watch Atalanta vs. Real Madrid in the UK

In the UK, the way to watch these two European teams clash is with BT Sport. They have the broadcast rights to the Champions League this season.

BT TV customers can get BT Sport for an extra £10 a month, and it can also be added to Sky, Virgin Media and TalkTalk TV packages. If you’d prefer not to be locked into a contract, you can pick up the BT Sport monthly pass.

For just £25, the BT Sport Pass gets you every single BT Sport channel for 30 days. This nets you access to select Premier League and FA Cup matches, the UEFA Champions League as well as a range of other sports including rugby and UFC.

Whatever you watch TV on, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to watch BT Sport. You can install the BT Sport app on mobile and tablet devices, in-browser, PlayStation, Xbox, NOW TV devices, Apple TV, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV devices, Chromecast, Roku players and some smart TVs, too.

So long as you have a VPN, it’s worth remembering you can access your preferred method outside of the UK, too!

The match starts at 8:00pm GMT on Wednesday, 24 February in the UK.

How to watch Atalanta vs. Real Madrid in Canada

Catching Atalanta vs. Real Madrid is easy in Canada, as you’ll just need a subscription to DAZN.

DAZN costs $150 a year for an annual subscription, or you can pay $20 a month if you want to pay monthly. In the long run, the annual subscription is a huge saving, as it works out at $12.50 a month.

DAZN has become quite popular in Canada, and now gets a huge variety of sports. This range includes Champions League and Premier League football, darts, cricket, boxing, wrestling, MMA and more.

The match kicks off at 3:00 p.m. ET on Wednesday, 24 February.

Super Bowl 2021 led to new records for CBS All Access ahead of Paramount Plus transition

phil.nickinson@futurenet.com (Phil Nickinson) — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 14:47:07 +0000

Super Bowl LV was a record-setting game in all sorts of ways. It was the first time one of the final two teams was playing in its home stadium. (To say nothing of winning, too.) It was the first time the stands were mostly filled with cardboard cutouts. It was anything and everything Tom Brady.

And Super Bowl LV set all a bunch of records for CBS All Access, parent company ViacomCBS said today.

While it didn't give any hard numbers for the streaming side of things, CBS All Access say a record number of subscriber sign-ups, unique devices, streams and time spent watching. (Again, that's according to the company itself.)

All told, some 96.4 million viewers watched the game across all platforms, which includes traditional CBS broadcast, CBS Sports and NFL digital platforms, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Kansas City Chiefs individual mobile platforms, Verizon Media properties, and ESPN Deportes.

The game — a pretty lopsided 31-9 win for the Bucs — saw an average per-minute viewership of 5.7 million, the highest for any NFL game, and up 65 percent from Super Bowl LIV in 2000. This also was the first NFL game to see more than 1 billion total minutes streamed. (And since you've asked, yes, you'll be able to watch the NFL on Paramount+.)

On the broadcast side, the Kansas City market led the ratings with a 59.9, up 8 percentage points over the Chiefs win last year. Boston scored a 57.6 rating, and Tampa a 52.3 rating.

So all in all, it was a good weekend for CBS All Access, which is preparing to wind things down before becoming Paramount+ on March 4. The Paramount+ price will still be the same as CBS All Access (at least for now) — $5.99 a month or $59.99 a year if you don't mind advertising, and $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year if you want to get rid of advertising.

For even more, check out our Paramount Plus review.

And you can save 50 percent off a year's subscription to Paramount+ if you go ahead and sign up for CBS All Access now and use code PARAMOUNTPLUS.

'The Stand' 1.08 Review: The Stand

amelia.emberwing@futurenet.com (Amelia Emberwing) — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 13:59:04 +0000

This post contains spoilers for The Stand.
Check out our previous review here.

The Stand hasn’t been the easiest show to keep up with. For a long time—most of the series, really—it’s felt like the showrunners made every possible choice that would make the story they were adapting devoid of any meaning. That’s still true, of course, but I’ll be damned if “The Stand” isn’t the best chapter of the story by a mile.

When things open, it’s all pretty bleak. Larry Underwood (Jovan Adepo), Ray Brentner (Irene Bedard), and Glen Batemen (Greg Kinnear) are on trial for sneaking into New Vegas. It’s all a show, of course, but Lloyd Henreid (Nat Wolff) misses the message. Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t do something about quickly enough. That Glen was always one to run his mouth. He’ll philosophize you until the cows come home, and that’s exactly what he did with his last words. Knowing his life was about to end, he chose to remind the people of New Vegas that Randall Flagg (Alexander Skarsgärd) only has one thing on any of them: fear.

Though Glen takes about eight bullets to the torso, he does exactly what he meant to. By sowing doubt among Flagg’s followers, we immediately see the leader of New Vegas’ powers start to dwindle. But that’s not all he’s going to lose before it’s all said and done. Think what you will of Mother Abigail’s methods—she knew exactly what she was doing. Or He did. You can take your pick, but I’m going to stick with the old witch.

Nadine’s (Amber Heard) situation has not change since we last saw her (mostly because it’s been, like, an hour). She’s a walking skeleton that also happens to be very pregnant, and that walking skeleton wants to speak to Larry Underwood one last time. I’m not encouraging evil creeps to be better at being evil creeps, but that’s probably something Flagg should have ensured never happened. Hubris, man. It’ll getcha!

Nadine Cross was a kind woman. That kindness mattered and I stand by any damnations I’ve thrown in The Stand’s direction over robbing her of that. With that said, it’s real nice to see this new ending for the character. There’s autonomy to her end in ways that were absolutely absent in King’s novel. She might have given into the demon, but she called her own shots until the bitter end. We love a girl who will throw herself out of a window rather than let a man use her body to take over the world.

When Flagg tries to use Nadine’s nearly liquified head to remind Larry that there’s no hope left to be had, he instead helps ensure his own demise. By showing him that he was able to sway Nadine, he only confirms that his followers can be turned. Larry’s last words turn into a frightened chant among some of the crowd: I will fear no evil.

Apparently, he won’t fear a giant cloud floating into a casino and electrocuting everyone around him, either. Known in King’s novel as the “Hand of God,” said cloud starts zapping pretty much everyone it can reach. We do, however, get to see some of our favorite monsters blasted into oblivion before the Nuke that Trashcan Man (Ezra Miller) brought the New Vegas (rather than the air strip it was meant for) goes kaboom.

For the first time, The Stand has felt like it meant something. This episode isn’t just pretty to look at like all those that came before it, it actually has something to say. I’m not here to tell you that one winner out of eight is enough of a reason to start the series, but if you’ve already come this far and are trying to decide whether or not to continue before King’s new ending in the finale, this is an episode worth tuning into.

“The Spongebob Movie: Sponge on the Run” and "Kamp Koral" premiere on Paramount Plus March 4, 2021.

Martin Shore — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:15:18 +0000

ViacomCBS just released a new trailer for “The Spongebob Movie: Sponge on the Run”, announcing that both Sponge on the Run and previously-announced original spin-off series Kamp Koral will premier on Paramount+ on March 4.

Sponge on the Run was originally scheduled for a full-scale theatrical release last year, but instead got pushed back for a VOD release in the US due to COVID-19. The movie is the first all-CGI Spongebob movie, and follows the Bikini Bottom gang on their wildest adventure yet.

The press release summarises Sponge on the Run as follows:

“When SpongeBob’s beloved pet snail Gary goes missing, a path of clues leads SpongeBob and Patrick to the powerful King Poseidon, who has Gary held captive in the Lost City of Atlantic City. On their mission to save Gary, SpongeBob and his pals team up for a heroic and hilarious journey where they discover nothing is stronger than the power of friendship.”

The new trailer also announced that Sponge on the Run will be available on a variety of VOD storefronts on the same day at a suggested retail price of $19.99.

In the press release, ViacomCBS also mentioned that Kamp Koral: Spongebob’s Under Years, the first-ever Spongebob Squarepants spin-off series, will be available on Paramount+ on the same day. Kamp Koral is a CG-animated prequel series that follows a 10-year-old Spongebob Squarepants and his friends at Kamp Koral, their summer sleepaway camp.

There, they spend their time building underwater fires, catching wild jellyfish and swimming in Lake Yuckymuck at the “craziest camp in the kelp forest”.

Kamp Koral’s first 6 episodes will be available to stream on March 4 exclusively on Paramount+. From then, the remaining episodes from the first 13-episode season will roll out on Paramount+ at a later, yet-to-be-announced date. Will it become one of the best shows on Paramount+? We'll just have to see.

CBS All Access becomes Paramount+ on March 4, the very same day that you can watch Sponge on the Run and Kamp Koral on the platform. Not only will it be home to all the latest Spongebob goodness, but Paramount+ will also play host to a huge range of content including everything from the Star Trek universe, The Good Fight, and The Twilight Zone.

ALSO: Check out our Paramount Plus review.

Rebranding is very difficult at any time, but especially when you’re hosting Super Bowl 2021. Paramount+ recently released a trailer for its new service, which shows off even more of the brands you can expect to see on the service.

Pricing for Paramount+ will stay in line with CBS All Access, so you can expect to pay $9.99 a month if you want to get rid of ads.

The trouble with 'The Stand's Frannie Goldsmith

amelia.emberwing@futurenet.com (Amelia Emberwing) — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 17:47:48 +0000

This post contains spoilers for The Stand.

The Stand makes several questionable choices in its first episode, but one of the most noticeable offenses – outside of the choice to tell the story in a non-linear format – was the depiction of Frannie Goldsmith’s (Odessa Young) character. This isn't a question of acting. Odessa Young will do a lovely job as Frannie if this first episode was any indication. No, the question here is the way the writers have started her story. When this piece was originally written, I had pointed out that there was still plenty of time for the series to course correct. Now, after the penultimate episode, it has become abundantly clear that the writers saw no importance in Frannie Goldsmith's spine or integrity.

To provide those who haven’t read the book with some context, we meet Frannie right as she discovers she’s pregnant in King’s novel. Before the virus takes hold of the world, Frannie meets up with Jess to discuss their situation. The baby’s father is sweet, and soft, and truly does believe that he loves Frannie and will be there for their child. However, after some frustrating signs, she decides to go it alone when it comes to raising her child. And in telling her parents.

Frannie has a close relationship with her father, but she and her mother have butted heads most of her life. Fred Goldsmith is shocked at the news, but ultimately supportive. Carla Goldsmith, on the other hand, threw a fit so strong that her laid back husband stepped in and went so far as to slap her in an attempt to get her out of it. This fight leaves Frannie scared she’ll have no support, but she’s still stalwart in her decisions to leave Jess, keep her baby, and share her news with her family. She leaves home long enough for her mother to cool down. But Carla would be dead two days later as one of the first victims of the plague.

Our meeting of Fran gives us a clear outline of who she is as a person: young, and a little scared, but a stubborn and smart woman who knows what she wants. The Stand might be a beast of a novel to adapt, but it feels like a real misstep not taking the time to introduce these characters in the way that we got to know them in the novelization. Showrunner Benjamin Cavell may be convinced that this isn’t a show about a pandemic, but excluding the people that our survivors lost takes away key traits that we learn about them early on. And I say that about a character whose family we do meet in “The End.”

The Stand’s premiere gives us a glimmer of the woman Frannie Goldsmith is when we see her determination to bury her father – a moment dutifully depicted nearly to the letter. Beyond that, it’s a lot of reliance on those around her. And no, this isn’t an ill-conceived shot at her attempted suicide. People who attempt suicide in a normal situation aren’t weak, and a girl trying to off herself after she believes she’s lost absolutely everything is even more understandable. But that moment does set up an opportunity for Harold Lauder (Owen Teague) to swoop in and be her white knight.

Rather than take the time to depict Fran as the frightened but decisive and strong-willed young woman we meet in the novel, “The End” illustrates her as a horrified girl in need of a savior. The world’s ending. Many of us would be scared and in need of saving – especially after what she went through. But that’s not who Frannie is, and to see her solely depicted that way from the jump is disappointing.

We honestly don't see much of Frannie in the series—despite her playing a major role in the narrative. (Then again, the same can be said for Nick Andros (Henry Zaga.) Through all the shifts and changes, the moment of Mother Abagail's (Whoopi Goldberg) death is played pretty much to the letter sans one key moment: Frannie's objection.

When Mother Abagail tells the Council that they're meant to schlep across the Rocky Mountains with nothing but the shirts on their backs, Frannie goes into a rage. She's lost everything, and now she's being told by some old crone who just got done abandoning them that her boyfriend is meant to walk to his death for the good of humanity. That is hot nonsense, and it matters that it's called out as hot nonsense! The (very logical) protest adds meaning to the ultimate outcome. But because the series has decided that this character needs to be toothless, there isn't so much as a peep from Frannie.

The scared, strong woman that walked through the pages of King's novel has been traded in for some kind of demure housewife who just allows whatever's meant to unfold around her. Her strong protests to the spies? Gone. Her banter with Stu? Gone. Any aspect of her stubborn and occassionally fierce personality was thrown in the pits with the rest of the corpses and the character deserved way better representation in 2021.

'The Stand' 1.07 Review: The Walk

amelia.emberwing@futurenet.com (Amelia Emberwing) — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 14:00:55 +0000

This post contains spoilers for The Stand.
Check out last week's review here.

We’ve reached the part in The Stand where the gas pedal is essentially on the floor. It’s unlikely that we’ll see any down moments before the series wraps up next week. Which is convenient, because it feels like we spend approximately a week on a walking montage in “The Walk.” Episodes should be true to their name, but maybe we don’t have to take it that far. Nick Andros (Henry Zaga) is dead, the Boulder Free Zone is in shambles, and Mother Abagail (Woopi Godberg) has a message for the Council. The prophet tells Stu Redman (James Marsden), Larry Underwood (Jovan Adepo), Ray Bretner (Irene Bedard) and Glen Bateman (Greg Kinnear) that they are to head to New Vegas. They are allowed no food, water, or transport from the town, they must simply hoof it to Vegas. Does that sound insane? That’s because it is. And Frannie Goldsmith (Odessa Young) is supposed to say so. Ardently, in fact! But there’s none of that here. The Council simply agrees to the prophet’s last words and prepare for their venture across the mountains.

While that all unfolds in the Boulder Free Zone, Harold Lauder (Owen Teague) and Nadine Cross (Amber Heard) make their way to Vegas before they’re caught on the mountainside. Harold tells Nadine he’s done, that he doesn’t want her anymore, and that Flagg (Alexander Skarsgärd) will grant him a woman who makes her look like a troll. In response, Nadine helps Harold off the side of a cliff. That’s reductive, of course, she’s really trying to do him a favor, but he was a gnat and he had it coming.

Owen Teague’s performance as Harold Lauder remains the diamond in the rough of The Stand. Honestly, there’s not a bad performance in the bunch, but Teague brings a little something extra to his performance of the deplorable Harold. When he’s hurled from his bike, he takes a large branch through the chest and breaks his leg. He lays in the desert for an undetermined amount of time, but it’s long enough for him to reflect on the monster he allowed other people to turn him into. His final manifesto is one of apology, acceptance, and a reiteration of the fact that all of his choices were just that: his. He wasn’t forced or coerced. He allowed the world to turn him, he made his decisions, and he paid the price for it.

Harold eats a bullet as soon as he finishes his last pages.

With that, the Council heads on their walkabout. Frannie plays dutiful wife, takes a picture of the group, and takes in young Joe (Gordon Cormier) while Larry heads to Vegas with the others. What comes next is a walking sequence that feels much longer than it actually is, but if it looks boring and it sounds boring it’s probably, well, freaking boring. Things do ramp up after some time. Or, rather, they ramp very down.

Before she passed, Mother Abagail warned that one of the four would fall. While they took that to mean death, what it really meant was that Stu was going to fall off a cliff and shatter the hell out of his leg. Unable to go on, he sends the rest of the wanderers on without him with Larry now in charge. Touching moments are had between both he and the musician, and with his begrudging best friend Glen. The latter leaves his painkillers behind to help ease things for Stu, also noting that if he takes more than three at once he won’t wake up. It’s said with as much of a wink as expected, but what really matters here is that the Vicodin isn’t all that Glen leaves behind.

Kojak (Very Good Boy) separates from the group and heads back to guard Stu while he remains stuck in the trench. Stu tries to be a big man and send the pup away, but Kojak’s not having it. No dead friends on his watch!

Glen does notice his loyal good boy is missing, but he, Ray and Larry find themselves picked up by Lloyd Henreid (Nat Wolff) and his cronies before they’re able to find the dog. Awful nice of Randall Flagg to send a limo to pick up the visitors from the Boulder Free Zone. Though, he may just be in a good mood because Nadine’s carrying his spawn before the episode’s over.

While we’re seeing more and more happen as we near the finale (next week), there’s simply no emotional connection in this show. Harold was emotional on his own, but no one doing anything seems to have any weight. Frannie just lets Stu leave, Glen and Larry hardly have a response to the mayhem around them, there’s no response to Nick’s death, no concern about the spies they sent to die… this list could go on and on. Every change that his been made to this miniseries feels like it was intentionally made to rip anything meaningful from the story. The Stand is over eleven hundred pages. There is plenty of content to be removed! And yet, everything that’s been pulled are the beats that give this story any kind of impact.

Paramount Plus has a trailer —and it's ... funny?

phil.nickinson@futurenet.com (Phil Nickinson) — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 11:36:39 +0000

Rebranding is hard, and ViacomCBS has a lot of work to do between now and March 4, when CBS All Access becomes Paramount+. Being a company that shows shows, video seems like the perfect medium to present that change — especially since CBS is broadcasting Super Bowl 2021 on Feb. 7. That's a lot of eyeballs.

And those eyeballs already have something on which to feast.

You might have caught a couple promos during the NFL conference championship games on Jan. 24. They're also now on the new Paramount Plus YouTube channel — which already has been rebranded from CBS All Access and seen all of the old videos hidden away. And instead of just being some sort of corporate dribble, these new spots are actually funny.

More: The best shows on Paramount+
Also: See our Paramount Plus review

"Expedition Roll Call" features some of the biggest stars you'll find on Paramount Plus. It's narrated by Sir Patrick Stewart — Jean-Luc Picard himself from Star Trek: Picard. And climbing Paramount Mountain (alt. 13,800 feet) you'll see Survivor's Jeff Probst leading the way, torch in hand. Plus Shemar Moore from the S.W.A.T. series. Gayle King and Norah D'Donnell from the CBS News team. Capt. Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) from Season 2 of Star Trek: Discovery, and the upcoming Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Tom Selleck from Blue Bloods and Simone Missick from All Rise. The Paw Patrol gang. Spock (Ethan Peck) from Star Trek: Discovery. Beavis and Butt-Head. James Corden on a snowmobile, with Dora the Explorer riding behind him. Former Pittsburgh Steelers coach Bill Cowher. (Because you can watch the NFL on Paramount+.)

And Snooki. "I"m too hung over for this," she says, bringing up the rear of the pack headed up the mountain. On brand, always.

There's a second video, as well, with Dora and Map leading the way. Coach Cowher throws the red flag, though — a talking map isn't quite as impressive to him (or DJ Kahlid and his Grammy).

It's definitely a fun way to introduce everyone to the new Paramount Plus brand, which soon will be home to everything you've come to know and love on CBS All Access. The price will remain the same for now — $5.99 a month if you don't mind ads, and $9.99 a month if you want to get rid of advertising.

The latest Paramount Plus trailers

Paramount Plus has ramped up the promotion as we continue toward the March 4 transition — and that included more spots during Super Bowl LV, which was broadcast on CBS.

In the end, it was all about — Patrick Stewart!

'The Stand' 1.06 Review: The Vigil

amelia.emberwing@futurenet.com (Amelia Emberwing) — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 14:59:13 +0000

This post contains spoilers for The Stand.
Check out our last review here.

Things are heating up in The Stand as we see ourselves inching closer to the finale. “The Vigil” focuses largely on the missing presence of Mother Abagail (Whoopi Goldberg), but we also see some important developments in New Vegas by way of the Trashcan Man (Ezra Miller), and the very unfortunate end of a trigger-happy lackey that killed the wrong person. The series has been pretty rough so far, but we’re currently on a two-episode uptick on quality. It’s been a nice reprieve, but it also highlights there are just some things that are past saving at this point.

Mother Abagail’s departure is supposed to come with deep meaning. However, because The Stand paints her as the messiah her novel counterpart insisted against, it’s mostly just them being scared that they don’t have anyone with “all” the answers anymore. Still, she’s gone and the town is sad. The searches carry on as they’re meant to, and Harold (Owen Teague) and Nadine (Amber Heard) inch closer to completing their last task in Boulder: killing the council.

Meanwhile, in New Vegas, we finally meet the Randall Flagg (Alexander Skarsgärd) we’ve been waiting for. When Judge Harris (Gabrielle Rose) is unceremoniously murdered by one of Lloyd Henreid’s (Nat Wolff) watchmen, Flagg shows off the quiet terror that’s meant to be a key aspect of the character all along. There’s no shouting or loud theatrics, just a quietly furious Randall Flagg who has exactly one man to blame for his plan going sideways. The scene’s delicious. It’s palpable in the way that makes your stomach tighten as you wait for the boogie man to pounce. I don’t know where this Flagg has been, but if he leaves again it’ll be a damn shame.

Though he'll never know it, The Walkin' Dude's fury is unfounded. Judge Harris never knew about Tom Cullen (Brad William Henke) coming to town. It's currently unclear if he made it out of New Vegas with any information that may help the camp back home, but Moon Man makes it out of Dodge before Flagg and his cronies can find him. Poor dude had to bury himself in some corpses, but he got away from the mean lady who called him the "R" word, and that's what's important.

It's a bad day to be a lackey in New Vegas. (Image credit: CBS All Access)

The introduction of Ezra Miller’s Trashcan Man was largely underwhelming, but we’ll see him come more into play in later episodes. What is interesting is the decision to have the brutal showdown between Judge Harris and the border lackeys take place off screen. Did we honestly gender bend this character just so we could rob her of her coolest moment? It’s gruesome, don’t get me wrong—more than one person loses a face—I just don’t understand why we’re shying away from the gore now. Especially in an episode that has less of it than its counterparts! Besides, Judge may die, but she gets to ruin her assailant’s days in the process! It’s a strange thing to remove given that we spent time on the lead-up to her departure and her time in the hotel as she bided her time.

So far, The Stand can be summed up with a very terse “choices were made.” While those choices have largely be the wrong ones, few arcs suffered more than that of Nick Androse (Henry Zaga). Nick is not only supposed to be one of the most important players in the story, he’s also supposed to be the non-believer when it comes to Mother Abagail and all of this God and the Devil nonsense. Yet, here we are with someone who’s hardly in the story and has somehow found himself as Mother Abagail’s devout servant (except for that whole spy thing). His death—which we see in “The Vigil”—is meant to be a jarring surprise. Instead, it finds itself in the same category as much of the rest of this miniseries: meaningless.

Frannie (Odessa Young) knowing about the bombs and pleading with Harold is a shift that, at the time of writing this review, I still haven’t decided if I like or not. A large part of me prefers the narrative where the town is caught by utter surprise, but I’d be remiss not to acknowledge how great the scene between Harold and Frannie is. She’s not meant to lie to him when she tells him she’s always cared. In the novel, her character very much does (despite frequent annoyance). None of that is shown in this story. Hell, it’s barely even mentioned, really. Sacrificing these characters’ backstories cannot be resolved by adding strong moments between actors later in the season. The performances can be exceptional and still mean nothing when those who haven’t read a 1100-page book have no context to how they feel because it was deemed unimportant during the adaptation process.

In the end, they do find Mother Abagail. What is meant to be the cause for the townspeople to get away from the house ends up being a throwaway moment at the end of the episode, but we’ll undoubtedly see the fallout from her excursion next week.

'The Stand' 1.05 Review: Fear and Loathing in New Vegas

amelia.emberwing@futurenet.com (Amelia Emberwing) — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 13:59:04 +0000

This post contains spoilers for The Stand.
Check out our last review here.

The Stand continues this week with two primary plots. In Las Vegas we have Dayna Jergens (Natalie Martinez) and Tom Cullen (Brad William Henke) on reconnaissance, with Judge Harris (Gabrielle Rose) hiding out somewhere on the outskirts of town to try and scatter their arrivals. Meanwhile, in Boulder, Frannie’s (Odessa Young) suspicious of Harold (Owen Teague) and all of his creepy grins, and Mother Abigail (Whoopi Goldberg) finds out about the council’s spies. The story, as it stands, moves forward in an adequate enough way. However, I wonder if there’s any real “saving” the series at this point.

We open in Vegas, where Dayna meets Julie Lawry (Kat McNamara) and Lloyd Henreid (Nat Wolff). As promised, Henreid is now Randall Flagg’s (Alexander Skarsgärd) right hand man. As for Julie? Well, Julie just knows where to go to keep herself nice and comfy.

Before long, we shift to Nadine (Amber Heard) and Harold in Boulder. We’re right on the heels of their first murder, and Harold is reconciling with what he must become in ways that make little sense for the character. That said, that reconciliation doesn’t last long. He catches Frannie in a lie when she invites him over for dinner as a guise so Larry Underwood (Jovan Adepo) can search his home. These scenes are mostly vehicles of discomfort, but they do show off Harold’s impressive camera collection. He even plants one in Frannie and Stu’s (James Marsden) bedroom for good measure.

“What would you care? You gave me to Harold.”
“No, Nadine. I gave you purpose.”

This exchange between Randall Flagg and Nadine Cross has been ringing in my ears since I watched “Fear and Loathing in New Vegas.” It’s not that it’s surprising that The Stand’s lead antagonist speaks about his future bride as a possession. That’s expected. It’s that it’s exactly how this series sees the character of Nadine. Her fall mattered, her kindness mattered, and while we did see a bit of said kindness for a fleeting moment this week, they’re traits that are stolen from her in CBS All Access’ depiction of the story.

You know what else mattered? Randall Flagg’s quiet creepiness. This character is supposed to fill you with dread and unease. Everything about him is meant to be disconcerting. We know for a fact that Skarsgärd is more than capable of playing all of the above with an unnerving amount of charm — so which showrunner is telling him to turn that all the way off every single episode and how do we get in a time machine and tell them to stop?

We’ve obviously discussed this frustration before, but the iconic scene between he and Dayna Jergins drove home just how much cheap thrills have been traded for genuine terror in the most reductive, lazy ways possible. Even the terror of Flagg’s disciples is nearly non-existent. (Sorry you couldn’t get it up, Lloyd!) The scene between Dayna and Flag is — as far as I’m concerned — one of the most iconic moments of King’s novel. It’s depiction in the series is relatively close to what happens on the page, but it lacks the big punch because Flagg simply isn’t what he’s supposed to be. We’ve got shining eyes and loud voices, and maybe a cheap magic trick from the Walkin’ Dude every now and then, but it just doesn’t measure up. All the same, Natalie Martinez absolutely crushes it in this role from start to finish.

This chapter’s final frustration is the departure of Mother Abigail. In defense of the episode, it’s not at fault for Abigail Freemantle being meaningless in The Stand. That all occurred well before she went on her (canon) walkabout. As with so many other things in this series, the moment is made meaningless because the lead-in to it means nothing. When they announced this adaptation, they assured that they’d shift from the Magical Negro trope. Instead, the trope remains present and the character is meddling in decisions that she has to actively avoid for her character to have purpose.

When it’s all said and done, “Fear and Loathing in New Vegas” is one of the prettier episodes of The Stand. There’s entertainment to be had here, whether you’re looking for the spectacle of New Vegas or the quiet sleuthing in Boulder. It’s all empty. But at least it looks good!

'The Stand' 1.04 Review: The House of the Dead

amelia.emberwing@futurenet.com (Amelia Emberwing) — Thu, 07 Jan 2021 22:20:19 +0000

This post contains spoilers for The Stand.
Check out our last review here.

There’s a bit of a good news/bad news situation going on with this week’s episode of The Stand. The good news is that “The House of the Dead” is the best episode of the series so far. The bad news is that has been a very, very low bar to clear. That bit of (well earned) snark aside, this week offers some emotional beats that connect in ways none of the others have, and introduces us to the feisty Julie Lawry (Katherine McNamara).

The story begins with the council trying to manage the fallout from last week’s visitor. His sudden appearance and subsequent death have left the townspeople of the Boulder Free Zone decidedly on edge. The lack of power with winter fast approaching isn’t doing much for anyone’s disposition, either. Larry Underwood (Jovan Adepo) helps the crowd cool down long enough for them to let Stu Redman (James Marsden) speak, but it’s Harold Lauder (Owen Teague) who “saves” the day.

Teague’s performance as Lauder has been the most impressive aspect of the series by far. Making Harold’s character sympathetic is a tall order to begin with. Making his character sympathetic while we learn his story out of order is damn near impossible. But, Teague manages to pull it off to some degree. His creepiness is omnipresent, though we receive incremental reminders that he was once just a scared little boy.

All the same, scared little boys who grow up to be monsters are still just that.

We’ve discussed some of the frustration with Nadine Cross’ (Amber Heard) depiction in this mini-series, which “The House of the Dead” only expands on. Not only is any of her crisis of conscience gone, she also seems to be more of a driving force in Harold’s descent rather than a partner to his villainy as she’s meant to be. While we’ve seen Harold’s desire to off Stu Redman, he seems much more hesitant than he should be at this juncture in the story. Let me tell you: if we’re going for the redemption arc of a mediocre, sad, white boy after he was “tainted” by a temptress in the year of our lord 2021… woof.

“The House of the Dead” marks the beginning of the two’s team-up. They collect their explosives from a ski lodge (of which there are none in Boulder, as it’s not a ski town, but alright), and happen across Tedd Weizak (Eion Bailey) as he works to shut off any extra lights that might blow the power grid when they turn it back on. Harold’s only real friend takes a bullet to the chest – shot by one Nadine Cross – well before his death is meant to occur, and by the wrong hands.

While the committee had plenty to worry about this week, there’s also the question of who will be sent to Las Vegas to learn more about everyone’s would-be tormentor(s). Three members of the Boulder Free Zone will go: Dayna Jurgens (Natalie Martinez), Judge Harris (Gabrielle Rose), and Tom Cullen (Brad William Henke). None of them are to know of the others or tell anyone of their plans. You'll recognize Dayna from earlier in the episode when she brains a dude for trying to rape Frannie Goldsmith (Odessa Young). But it's Tom Cullen that sparks a particular debate due to certain cognitive disadvantages, but the group ultimately agrees that sending him along is the best move.

The most successful emotional beat of the series so far takes place upon Tom’s departure, but first we have to learn why it matters. The non-linear format continues to be messy, however we do get the first time it really works with the two characters.

When Nick Androse (Henry Zaga) and Tom encounter Julie for the first time, it’s in an abandoned hardware store. The vixen makes it pretty clear that she’s headed to Vegas very early on in their meeting. Some shining moments include a profuse use of the “R” word and telling Tom to go drink Clorox. Despite her behavior, the gem of a human isn’t thrilled to lose the first people she’s met in the apocalypse. She shows her remorse by, well… shooting at them. Tom saves Nick’s life when he hears her cock the gun, and the two flee for their lives arm in arm.

The brief scene goes a long way to illustrate their connection before we see Tom prepare for his departure in the “present”. The two’s hug goodbye is the first time anything emotionally impactful has hit its mark in a series about the end of the world. That’s rough for the series as a whole, but it doesn’t pull away from the meaningfulness of their separation.

Whether or not “The House of the Dead” marks a minute turning point in the series remains to be seen. There is, at the very least, a whole lot of action coming our way!

Star Trek: Discovery season 3 finale review: "That Hope Is You", Part 2

leighmonson@outlook.com (Leigh Monson) — Thu, 07 Jan 2021 14:00:38 +0000

This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Discovery.
Check out our review of last week's episode here.

In spite of its episode title, the season finale of Star Trek: Discovery’s third season is not really a thematic bookend to its premiere. It certainly functions as a mostly satisfactory conclusion to this season of television, albeit in a manner that has to split the baby between action setpieces and actual philosophical depth and emotional closure, but it mostly does a very good job at using its marginally extended runtime to give almost every major character something to do, tie up the Emerald Chain conflict in a neat bow, and bring Su’Kal to the confrontation with his worst fears. All that is fine and good. However, the devil’s in the details, and some choices that were almost certainly made to set up next season feel pretty questionable at this point, at the very least because they feel combatively unsatisfying.

To address the elephant in the room that I was personally most anxious about, we still know next to nothing concrete about how Gray (Ian Alexander) fits into this series. Apparently, he can manifest to more people than Adira (Blu del Barrio) when in the radiated holodeck, but he serves little plot function and is no more a realized character than a problem for Adira to obsess over. I’ve been willing to give this subplot the benefit of the doubt, considering how impactful its introduction was, but at the end of the season, we’re still left with a writer’s room teasing that the queer burial trope could eventually be subverted for Gray while holding his partner in a developmental holding pattern. How tediously frustrating and, above all, boring.

Further disappointment abounds in the decision to promote Michael (Sonequa Martin-Green) to the captaincy in the final moments of the season. It’s played up as a big reward for Michael’s ingenuity and bravery, assented to by Tilly (Mary Wiseman) and enforced by Admiral Vance (Oded Fehr), but to be frank, this twist is bullshit. Not only does it completely undermine the growth in leadership demonstrated by both Saru (Doug Jones) and Tilly in equally extreme circumstances, thereby leaving their character arcs flapping in the wind, but it also contradicts Michael’s trajectory for the entirety of this season, if not the entirety of the series. Michael’s biggest character flaw is that she has trouble separating what she wants most for herself from what is best for Starfleet, and though that might be interesting to explore from a captain’s chair, the narrative conceit of a Trek show that isn’t focused on a captain protagonist remains one of the most novel aspects of Discovery’s cast makeup. To take that away so suddenly and without proper set-up... Well, it's simply illogical.

Thankfully, there’s enough of a fully realized episode going on here that it’s still an enjoyable ride, fumbled character arcs aside. The action choreography as Michael and Book (David Ajala) fight off Osyraa (Janet Kidder) and the Emerald Chain makes for a very entertaining bid to take back control of the ship, while Tilly and the bridge crew’s struggle to sabotage the nacelle to prevent Osyraa’s escape from justice adds a tangible ticking clock that is only further complicated after Osyraa cuts off their life support. It’s not exactly the most intellectually satisfying half of the episode – the throwaway line that the Emerald Chain entirely dissolves with Osyraa’s death is laughably simplistic – but it’s a fun conclusion to a season-wide villain conflict that was, in retrospect, half-baked at best.

Much more gratifying is Saru’s connection with Su’Kal (Bill Irwin), bringing the fellow Kelpien out of his shell to confront his greatest traumas and to venture into the outside world. This is a perfect mirror to Saru’s own growth from a timid officer to a confident captain, and it’s genuinely moving to watch someone with lived experience in fear to help someone similar move past his own. There aren’t really any mysteries left to solve about Su’Kal’s role in causing The Burn, so it’s simply satisfying to see a new character's arc come to a close and to give closure to an emotional thread that ran through the season.

The final shot of the episode is a quote from Gene Roddenberry, alluding to the rarity of human connection and the beauty it has to heal and create anew. In a season all about forging connections between cultures pulled apart by tragedy – a tragedy which was itself caused by a traumatic separation of mother and child – this is an apropos sentiment, even if that never was the most resonant message in any part of the season but this final arc. Though I have more than a few major concerns about what Discovery’s fourth season might entail, I do think this season has earned these writers the benefit of the doubt. We can only hope that the heights of this season weren’t an anomaly and that the future of the Federation continues to boldly go, if not to where no one has gone before, then to some strange new interpretations of its worlds.

Star Trek: Discovery is available to stream on Paramount Plus.

'The Stand' 1.03 Review: Blank Page

amelia.emberwing@futurenet.com (Amelia Emberwing) — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 15:00:47 +0000

This post contains spoilers for The Stand.
Check out our last review here.

A tweet was circulating about a week ago that said something along the lines of “This ain’t your grandma’s The Stand. This one’s meaningless.” Let me tell you, I’ve been thinking about that a lot. “Blank Page” marks the third episode of the miniseries, in which a ton has happened. And yet, with all that’s occurred, it continues to feel as if very little of it means anything. King’s novel might have been long-winded, but at least it had a point.

All the same, we’re here to talk about the miniseries, so let’s talk about it.

“Blank Page” doesn’t focus on one key player in the way that the two before it did. Instead, we see a mish-mash of Nadine Cross (Amber Heard), Larry Underwood (Jovan Adepo), Nick Androse (Henry Zaga), and Stu Redman’s (James Marsden) stories. Nick’s story is absolutely important enough to warrant his own lead-in similar to Stu and Larry’s episodes, but it seems showrunners Josh Boone and Benjamin Cavell are content to condense his past and cut out any meaningful backstory he has.

Speaking of backstories, we learned more about Nadine Cross this week. Girl has some weird times every time she picks up a planchette (the Ouija board doodad). Those weird times are because she is, for all intents and purposes, betrothed to Randall Flagg (Alexander Skarsgärd). That’s not something you’re supposed to find out until we’re about 3/4 through the story, but again, who cares if the narrative here matters?! Who cares that there’s supposed to be conflict over Nadine heading to Flagg? That she’s not supposed to be dying to get to him?

Here’s the thing, folks. It’s not my job to tell you about the source material. It’s my job to break down whether or not an adaptation is a successful one. But it’s the fact that The Stand is so unsuccessful so far that makes me continually turn back to things that are supposed to be happening. Liberties are required when it comes to stories like these. Adaptations are supposed to do something new in a way that compliments the source material and draws new fans into the fold. But there’s nothing in this story to inspire new fans to stick around.

In fact, I cannot fathom someone who doesn’t know the underlying story here having one damn inkling about what’s happening throughout this series right now. That’s not a question of viewer intelligence, either. So far, the series has told you that Nick Androse is important, but done nothing to show it. We’re supposed to be terrified of Randall Flagg, but nothing about Skarsgärd’s performance is delivering that fear. And we know that he’s capable of it, so the question then becomes “what in the world is going on in that director’s chair?”

There was an attempt in “Blank Page” to drive home the discomfort that Flagg is meant to convey. A poor soul stumbles into the Boulder Free Zone with clear signs of crucifixion. And not that fake, fluffly, bible crucifixion, either. Whoever’s doing this knows to ram those spikes through the wrists so their prey doesn’t slip off the cross. That's a good, solid kind of spook there.

Had this moment been left to the looming fear that it was obviously Flagg rather than going with the big, in-your-face possession moment, it might have hit its mark.

But it didn’t.

Star Trek: Discovery season 3 episode 12 review: "There Is A Tide…"

leighmonson@outlook.com (Leigh Monson) — Wed, 30 Dec 2020 15:00:24 +0000

This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Discovery.
Check out our review of last week's episode here.

Of all the places I expected Discovery to take its penultimate episode of the season, I was not expecting it to perform an extended Die Hard riff, complete with a winking nod to John McClane in the form of Michael (Sonequa Martin-Green) losing her shoes. It’s a bizarre stylistic choice, to be sure, but it’s also an exciting one, providing an underlying action dynamic for an episode that still has a lot on its mind, particularly when it comes to the relationship between the Emerald Chain and the Federation.

As Osyraa (Janet Kidder) Trojan Horses her way into Federation Headquarters aboard Discovery, Book (David Ajala) and Michael propel their way into Discovery’s docking bay, causing havoc that the Emerald Chain is not immediately able to respond to. One overdue exchange of “I love you” later, Book lets Michael go to take back the ship, so that she may crawl through the vents and confront Emerald Chain goons as she searches for a way to sabotage.

Book, meanwhile, is taken to join the bridge crew, held hostage as Osyraa calls for a meeting with Admiral Vance (Oded Fehr). Tilly (Mary Wiseman) and the bridge crew don’t get much to do this episode besides a token subterfuge of their gullible guards, and they mostly act as a cheerleading squad as they realize Michael’s accomplishments throughout the ship. Though I’m not expecting this ragtag bunch to take on the whole captured ship by themselves just yet, there just isn’t much for them to do while remaining captured, personal bodyguards or no.

Much more interesting this episode is Stamets (Anthony Rapp), imprisoned in the engine room with an Emerald Chain scientist who wants to know all he can about the spore drive. This subplot is initially set up as if this scientist is a torturer and Stamets is going to have his knowledge forcibly extracted – or, worse yet, have his consciousness destroyed so that he can be a tool for use of the spore drive – but the Emerald Chain scientist displays much more compassion than you’d initially expect. This is our window into the main philosophical thrust of the episode, which shows that maybe the Emerald Chain beyond Osyraa is not as torturously evil as we’ve been led to believe.

This comes into greatest focus in the discussions between Vance and Osyraa, who parley for an opportunity to cease the conflict between the Emerald Chain and the Federation. Osyraa calls for a union of their organizations and resources, offering up a picture of the Chain as a system of governance more representative of its people than the gangsters they initially appear to be. The ideological schism between the two competing galactic governments is a fascinating one: after The Burn, the Federation upheld its moral ideals at the cost of hoarding its resources and technology from outposts that were too costly to maintain. The Emerald Chain, on the other hand, established a wider base of law and order, but it resorted to capitalism and slavery achieve its power. From the Chain’s point of view, they did what was necessary to reestablish governance in a power vacuum, and Osyraa’s offer, to concede their gains and use of slavery in return for joining the Federation in a bid for legitimacy, is a compelling conflict between ideological purity and pragmatic sacrifice. It’s a conflict I wish the show had found more room to explore prior to this episode, which would have made Osyraa’s refusal to be held accountable for her war crimes sting all the harder as it causes the peace talks to collapse and pushes the Federation and the Chain to war.

The other major emotional turning point arrives when Michael finally saves Stamets from his interrogator, only for their motivations to diverge. Stamets is understandably traumatized by the prospect of leaving Hugh (Wilson Cruz) and Adira (Blu del Barrio) back on the fatally irradiated planet, so he pleads with Michael to let him jump them back. But Michael knows that the Federation will need Discovery to fight off the Emerald Chain, so she makes the tough choice to incapacitate Stamets and blow him out into space so that he can be safely recovered by Federation Headquarters, preventing Discovery from jumping away with the spore drive. Though this subplot once again highlights how contrived Adira’s trip down to the planet really was (and also makes Stamets’ relationship to Adira more paternal than I personally read it), it establishes a deep emotional rift between Michael and Stamets that might not easily recover, especially in a single remaining episode this season.

Overall, this is an exciting, engaging episode that is faulty not so much for its content as for how it highlights storytelling missteps of the season that preceded it. The Emerald Chain and Osyraa are a much more interesting villain than this entire season made them out to be, and the reveal of their depths feels rushed as a result. I’m convinced we needed at least one episode dedicated to Adira and Stamets, rather than allowing their familial relationship be a background element that’s focused more on the mystery of Gray (Ian Alexander) than on their growing connection. As the bridge crew discovers the sentient sphere data controlling an army of robots in a climactic bid to take the ship back, I wish those robots had been better established in an earlier episode. Discovery has really stepped up its game this season in terms of episodic storytelling, but if they are still going to insist on season-long story arcs, they need to find a balance between the baby and the bathwater. Even so, next week's finale promises to be an interesting one, with a lot to wrap up and a lot to potentially tease for next season.

Star Trek: Discovery is available to stream on Paramount Plus.

Star Trek: Discovery season 3 episode 11 review: "Su’Kal"

leighmonson@outlook.com (Leigh Monson) — Thu, 24 Dec 2020 14:00:48 +0000

This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Discovery.
Check out our review of last week's episode here.

A pervasive worry I’ve had throughout this season is that Discovery would not be able to bridge the gap between keeping a season-long mystery going and sticking the landing with answers that were simultaneously satisfying and not explicit pandering or convenience. “Su’Kal” could have been too heavily foreshadowed, too tied in to already established canon, too singular a point to allow the galaxy of Star Trek’s far-future to feel vast and diverse. Thankfully, this episode is none of those things. In fact, what’s most shocking is that “Su’Kal” somehow manages to have the best of both worlds as an away-mission episode with an intriguing high-concept hook while simultaneously raising the stakes for the season and ending on a riveting cliffhanger.

The away mission comes into focus as the Discovery finally investigates the signal broadcast from the apparent source of The Burn. What they find is a Federation ship, crashed into a planet made almost entirely of dilithium, cloaked in radiation, and exhibiting a singular life sign on board. Saru (Doug Jones) deduces this must be the child of the last surviving Kelpien scientist on board the downed vessel, and he decides to lead the rescue team in an attempt to save the 125-year-old survivor. Accompanying him are Hugh (Wilson Cruz) and Michael (Sonequa Martin-Green), the latter of whom is concerned that Saru is allowing his desire to reunite with another Kelpien to cloud his judgment. Tilly (Mary Wiseman) is left in charge of the ship, bolstered by a pep talk from Michael but still confident in her abilities to lead.

Transporting down to the ship sparks a truly bizarre turn of events, as the trio find themselves a winter landscape. More shockingly, Hugh turns into a Bajoran, Michael turns Trill, and Saru becomes human for everyone in the audience who was curious what Doug Jones actually looks like. It’s a very TNG kind of twist that seems to primarily exist so that Saru is not immediately recognizable as a Kelpien to the childlike survivor, but it feels like the kind of holodeck chicanery that has been sorely missing from this iteration of Trek. And this is a holodeck program, albeit a vast and crumbling one, populated by glitching programs who redundantly attempt to raise the surviving Kelpien into adulthood. The Kelpien, whom we eventually know as Su’Kal, retains a Kelpien adolescent’s fear of the unknown and seems immune to the radiation that threatens his would-be rescuers, presenting a quandary for the rescuers as they have to navigate the holographic defenses of his psyche and must find a way to get him to understand the freedom they offer.

Tilly, meanwhile, holds the captaincy when things go to hell and Osyraa (Janet Kidder) shows up to take control of Discovery. Though Osyraa’s taunts toward Tilly feel a little too knowledgeable and pointed for an antagonist who has no personal history with Tilly, it’s still satisfying to see Tilly hold her own as a captain and be her own form of self-confident badass, much like her mirror universe self but without the self-seriousness or sadism. The fact that this culminates in a cliffhanger where the standoff results in Osyraa taking over the ship is genuinely nerve-wracking, especially as it leaves the away team abandoned in a radioactive environment with a ticking clock for their survival and makes the Discovery an active weapon against the Federation.

What works best about this episode, though, is how the reveal of The Burn’s origins doesn’t feel forced or contrived. There’s something almost poetic about a single, emotionally disturbed creature, mutated in utero and attuned to a specific element, unknowingly causing a universe-shattering event simply because fate left him alone without a family. It gives the reverberating lullaby a potent meaning, turning it into a tragic coda that reflects how the consequences of one person’s suffering have the capacity to cause a society to crumble. It’s an inversion of Spock’s classic aphorism: the needs of the individual are the same as the needs of the many.

With the Discovery crew captured, Adira (Blu del Barrio) beamed down to the surface with anti-radiation drugs – how they know those drugs will be needed on the surface is a bizarre point of contrivance that I’ll let slide – to accompany Hugh and Saru on their continuing journey to reach Su’Kal, and Michael reunited with Book (David Ajala) aboard his ship, next week’s episode seems primed to barrel forward with more action and revelations. I’m just grateful Discovery seems to be sticking the landing this season.

Star Trek: Discovery is available to stream on Paramount Plus.

Star Trek: Discovery season 3 episode 10 review: "Terra Firma", Part 2

leighmonson@outlook.com (Leigh Monson) — Thu, 17 Dec 2020 14:00:30 +0000

This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Discovery.
Check out our review of last week's episode here.

Writing a two-part episode of a television series is a tricky business. There’s a certain weight of expectation that comes with separating the beginning and ending of your story with a week of anticipation and build-up, and Star Trek has a long history of understanding that the second half of a two-episode arc should do more than just play into expectations. Unfortunately, the cold fact of the matter is that “Terra Firma” did not need to be two episodes, as this week's installment resolves its conflicts in some rather predictable ways. But that doesn’t mean that it fails to hit the emotional beats it needs in order the bring Georgiou’s story in for the landing. It just means that it probably could have done so better with a punchier single outing.

Picking up from where the first half left off, the majority of the episode finds Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) dealing with the aftermath of foiling Terran Michael’s (Sonequa Martin-Green) coup yet declining to kill her as a traitor. Georgiou instead has her placed in an agonizer, a torture device operated by Captain Killy (Mary Wiseman) with the express purpose of bringing Michael back into the loyal fold. For as drawn out as Michael’s reeducation and hunt for her co-conspirators is, the turnabout of the episode is fairly obvious, culminating in a showdown where Michael once again leads an attack on Georgiou. It demonstrates the inevitability of the betrayal as a consequence of her and Georgiou’s lifetime of toxic relationship, and Georgiou’s resulting death in the Terran timeline is a fitting end to her darkest impulses.

It’s especially fitting because the focus of this episode is equally on how Georgiou has gone soft in the eyes of her followers but is really demonstrating an increased capacity for empathy. Sure, she’s relying on torture to bring Michael to her side, but she states outright that she doesn’t understand how else to help her and realizes her failure anyway. That last vestige of her darkness is in stark contrast to how she treats the enslaved Saru (Doug Jones) as a confidant and ultimately passes on the knowledge that letting his threat ganglia fall off will give him the strength to fight back against his oppressors. That’s a level of compassion that the old Georgiou would have never displayed, and Saru pointing out how she cannot possibly be the same emperor he knew only puts a finer point on how she has grown over the last two seasons.

After Georgiou’s death, we bounce back to the Prime universe, where Michael has been monitoring Georgiou’s unconscious body for less than a minute. With the theatrics out of the way, Carl (Paul Guilfoyle) reveals himself to be a personification of the Guardian of Forever, a cute throwback nod to the original series episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” even if it doesn’t really hold any plot significance beyond the utility of testing Georgiou’s morality and sending her on her way to a time where her molecular state isn’t in danger of collapsing. The final conversation between Michael and Georgiou before she enters the Guardian’s portal is heartfelt and sweet, proclaiming a love for one another that isn’t based on the mirrored personas each of them miss, but on mutual respect for the person they’ve spent time with these last few years. This is further emphasized by the memorial held on the Discovery, where everyone’s ribbing frustration for Georgiou is laced with genuine affection for a crew member lost.

Shoehorned into this episode is a resolution to the overarching plot conflict that was shoehorned into the previous episode, wherein Book (David Ajala) does his research and offers the use of Emerald Chain technology to hack the Kelpien ship at the source of The Burn. This does little besides set up the conflict for next week and reiterate Saru’s compromised emotions, so it’s a bit jarring for the episode to take a break from its emotional climax to Georgiou’s story for an extended tease.

But on the whole, for as ultimately predictable as “Terra Firma, Part 2” ended up, it’s still a satisfying conclusion to Georgiou’s tenure on ‘Discovery’. Its predictability isn’t entirely the show’s fault, as it’s been well known for a while that a Georgiou-centric spin-off show was in the works that would necessitate her departure. Yet even as I find myself wishing for a single episode that explored Georgiou’s growth in a more concise and pointed way, I find this level of indulgence forgivable to give Yeoh and the mirror universe the melodramatic bows they deserve. The emperor is dead. Long live Georgiou.

Star Trek: Discovery is available to stream on Paramount Plus.

'The Stand' 1.01 Review: The End

amelia.emberwing@futurenet.com (Amelia Emberwing) — Thu, 17 Dec 2020 14:00:18 +0000

There’s no arguing that The Stand is one of Stephen King’s masterpieces. Even with the story being too long and perhaps splitting off with one too many characters – especially if you read his most recent version – it’s clear now more than ever that at the root of the novel is a timeless tale not just of good vs. evil but of the United States’ pandemic response. But we’re not here to talk about the novel. We’re here to take a look at the first episode in the CBS All Access The Stand miniseries.

“The End” is a curious episode of television. Fans of the novel should be prepared for some key differences in characters they’ve grown to know over the years, while those who are coming into The Stand blind need to know that they’re going to be lost at first and that’s okay.

There’s no easing into what’s going on with the pandemic the characters are facing. Instead, we learn of the Captain Trips virus right off the bat. There’s no wondering about what’s hit the world – it’s immediately confirmed that the virus has killed 99% of humanity. While this isn’t necessarily a story detriment, it does take a little bit away from the character perspective. Everyone we meet is going through what they know as a potentially extinction level event, and there’s no time in the series premiere to watch them reconcile with that in any meaningful way. There are character responses across the board, to be sure. But it’s all very much the episode telling us what the survivors are feeling rather than showing us in a way that will stick.

Part of that lack of response might be because of how the story is perceived by series creator, Benjamin Cavell. He mentioned that he’s never seen The Stand to be a story about a pandemic in a recent virtual panel discussion. While the bigger story conversation in The Stand is about a battle of good vs. evil when not babysat by laws and government, I feel like a lack of understanding of why the pandemic portion of the story is important might be what led to this minimized reaction to the end of the world.

The lack of response might also be exacerbated by the fact that we kick right off into the pandemic. Perhaps it's difficult to feel what all of these characters have lost because we have no understanding of what that is. Readers of the book may remember, but it's not a series' job to cater to those who have read a thousand-plus page novel. We get a glimpse of Frannie's dad, and we know Harold's family sucked, but that's not enough to really drive home that the people who died are real people who mattered to our survivors.

What "The End" does appropriately illustrate is how badly you do not want this virus. The 99% of humanity that finds themselves susceptible can expect a whole host of nasty symptoms that primarily include runny nose, cough, fever, more phlegm than you've ever seen in your life, and swelling of the neck. And we're not just talking about some aggravated glands, here. Victims bullfrog it until they basically die in their own snot, cook themselves to death, or both. Sexy way to go, right?

Without any spoilers, it’s worth diving into those character changes so longtime fans can be ready for the shifts. Stu Redman (James Marsden) is much less of the good ol’ Texas boy you remember, but not in any kind of offensive way. We meet Frannie Goldsmith (Odessa Young) at a later part of her journey, which would be fine if it didn’t rob her of the independence that’s clearly set up for her at the very beginning of King’s story. Meanwhile, Harold Lauder (Owen Teague) is much farther along in his all-grins switch than you may expect. Of these three shifts, the only one that’s concerning is Frannie. With that in mind, there’s plenty of time for the series to illustrate her self-sufficience outside of her burying her parents, just as there’s plenty of time to show these characters reconciling with what they’re experiencing over time.

What there isn’t time to fix is the damage that “The End” may cause to the interest from first-time viewers. As mentioned before, there’s a lot to get through in The Stand. To do so, there is already a lot of time hopping from character to character. The premiere also introduces time jumps into that. These jumps, while likely intended to differentiate the series’ overall narrative structure from King’s and to give the viewer more of an idea of what’s to come, do not benefit “The End” in any capacity. They’re jarring and hard to follow even if you know the source material, so I can see why some new to the story might lose interest quickly. For some easy context there, "The End" shows you moments that occur in chapter one, and then hops to something that won't happen until chapter fifty-two.

I say that in hopes that it will prepare you for it and perhaps pull out some of the sting rather than deter you from checking out The Stand. There’s a lot of potential here. Way more than we’ve come to expect from miniseries’ adapting King’s work in the past, at least.

The big stand-out of “The End” is Owen Teague’s performance as Harold Lauder. You might immediately learn of his plans for the future of the survivors, but you also feel for him in a way that you wouldn’t anticipate. Frannie’s story is sacrificed a little bit for that, which I don’t care for, but credit where credit’s due on the Harold saga. You want to protect him. You’re also immediately skeeved out by the persona he puts forward. That’s a tough balance to nail as an actor, and Teague seems to do so effortlessly.

Though it's a very mixed bag of an episode, and certainly an odd premiere, "The End" gives you enough hope that there's something to look forward to in the coming episode. It reveals a lot of its cards as a series right off the bat, but still doesn't even scratch the surface in some other respects. The Stand is a difficult source material to take on, but I'm intrigued enough to stick it out.

The Stand will premiere on CBS All Access on Thursday, December 17th.

How CBS All Access 'The Stand' fixed Stephen King's most problematic characters

aaronwpruner@gmail.com (Aaron Pruner) — Thu, 17 Dec 2020 06:28:31 +0000

After 26 years, Stephen King's The Stand is hitting the small screen, once again. The nine-episode limited series, which hits CBS All Access on Thursday, December 17, is chock full of the deeply-flawed heroes and villains that made the author's novel such an enduring hit. But as we gear up to revisit Captain Trips, and the havoc this virus causes, it's worth noting that some of the show's most important characters have received a worthwhile upgrade.

As we saw with Mick Garris's 1994 mini-series, it can definitely be a challenge translating King's work from the printed page to TV. Much like that project, the upcoming adaptation sports a packed cast — from James Marsden as Texan good-guy Stu Redman and Amber Heard as Nadine Cross to Alexander Skarsgard as the iconic King baddie Randal Flagg and Nat Wolff as his right-hand-man Lloyd Henreid.

But for the purposes of this article, we're going to focus on three folks who play very distinct roles in Stephen King's apocalypse: Whoopi Goldberg's 108-year-old prophet Mother Abigail Freemantle, Jovan Adepo's drug-addled musician Larry Underwood, and Brad William Henke's developmentally disabled Tom Cullen.

Let's start with Mother Abigail. A legendary character in Stephen King's extensive repertoire of legendary characters, the 108-year-old Black woman finds herself receiving messages from God after Captain Trips ravages most of the world's population. She ends up visiting the survivors in their dreams, beckoning them to come find her in Colorado. For all intents and purposes, she's the light-side to Randal Flagg's sinister darkness.

And with her character comes a genre trope King has used a lot in his stories: "The Magical Negro." Basically, the concept takes shape in the form of a supporting Black character with supernatural insight or powers that comes to the aid of the tale's white protagonists.

This trope played out with characters like Dick Halorann in The Shining and John Coffey in The Green Mile. But The Stand's Mother Abigail Freemantle came first.

In Garris' mini-series, actress Ruby Dee brought the religiously devout character to life in a manner that leaned heavily into that magical aesthetic. And as show-creator Benjamin Cavell explained to select members of the press during the official junket for The Stand, humanizing Mother Abigail and the rest were at the forefront of his mind.

(Image credit: CBS All Access)

"From the very beginning, we were talking to Whoopi about, essentially, that we couldn't fall into that," he explained. "At all costs, Mother Abigail had to be a real person with real contradictions and real doubts. She's very grounded in reality, and yes, she was obviously in touch with something and getting messages from something, but she's sort of in the dark about a lot of it and where it was coming from."

It's worth remembering that The Stand first hit bookshelves in 1978 and multiple revisions of the novel have been published since then. To bring the adaptation into the year 2020, it's understandable that the characters and events from the story get a refresh. And turning Mother Abigail into a flawed human is an interesting, resonant choice.

A subtle, yet important change to the story comes in the form of Larry Underwood, who's played by Jovan Adepo (Watchmen) here. Stephen King's original iteration of Underwood was that of a white man co-opting Black music for his own fame. The character was brought to life in the original mini-series almost verbatim to the way he was written, but in the upcoming CBS All Access iteration, Underwood is a Black man, which takes that antiquated race plotline out of the mix entirely.

Adepo, who revealed during the show's press junket that he took inspiration directly from modern-day blues artist Gary Clark Jr., said the change in his character was already decided before he came on-board.

"I think that those are important conversations to have for sure," he said. "I think Josh [Boone] was very clear that he wanted my version of Larry Underwood and he wanted it to feel organic. But more than anything, though, I think that his personality, his core, and his essence are what people have come to really admire. And I think he's just an imperfect guy, who is that guy that we've all seen, or that person that we've all seen before, who has all the tools to be successful if they could just make some kind of effort that isn't impulsive."

(Image credit: CBS All Access )

Then, of course, there's Tom Cullen, the developmentally disabled man who is one of the standout heroes from the book. In the original mini-series, Cullen was brought to life in a manner that felt a lot like Lenny from "Of Mice and Men." And while this character is played by Henke, an actor who does not have a mental disability, Cavell pointed to the character development that went in to fleshing out the "Moon Man" to make him more than the hollow caricature audiences were used to seeing.

"He [was] really inhabiting the trope of like, 'Oh, this is a child trapped in an adult body.'," Cavell revealed. "[Co-executive producer] Taylor [Elmore] and I talked a lot about this and talked to Brad William Henke, who plays Tom Cullen, about it. In our experience, a person who's developmentally disabled isn't in the dark about the idea that they have deficits or that they have differences in the way that they process information or navigate the world. It was very important to us and to Brad, too, to have Tom not in the dark about having his deficits or challenges. It was very important for us to try to be honest about that experience, and not play him as a trope, but as a real person who lived a life before Captain Trips."

(Image credit: CBS All Access)

Whether these updates stick the landing remains to be seen, but there is something to be said for proper on-screen representation, especially in a Stephen King story. And for Whoopi Goldberg, who revealed during the Television Critics Associated press tour panel, that she is a die-hard horror fan and has been champing at the bit to play Mother Abigail for decades, this is a step in the right direction.

"I'm riding what Stephen wrote for me," Whoopi Goldberg said during a panel for the Television Critics Association press tour. "Ehe is the representation of what is supposed to be the light, and of course, when you are human, you are flawed. She is probably not as 'Magic Negro' as she was maybe 30 or 40 years ago. She's a little, I think she's a little more of a person who is trying to get a whole bunch of people to do some things that maybe they don't believe in. You know it's basically I'm doing The View.'"

"Now when she's 108-years-old," Cavell continued, "she finds that, 'Oh, wait, I'm the messenger of whatever this power is, that's talking to me?' That's just as much of a surprise to her as it is to anybody else. And she's trying to roll with it."

The Stand premieres on Thursday, December 17 on CBS All Access.

'The Stand' showrunner Benjamin Cavell discusses why the tube necks needed to be just right

aaronwpruner@gmail.com (Aaron Pruner) — Tue, 15 Dec 2020 18:44:44 +0000

The Stand premieres on December 17 on CBS All Access.

Is now the perfect time for a post-apocalyptic Stephen King series about a world-killing virus? That's the question everyone seems to be asking as the premiere of CBS All Access's highly-anticipated adaptation of The Stand looms right around the corner. But as show-creator Benjamin Cavell told the members of The Television Critics Association, "I've never regarded 'The Stand' as a book about a pandemic."

For those unfamiliar with the tale, The Stand (which many consider Stephen King's best work) is a book that follows the last of humanity after the world's population is decimated by a man-made virus known as Captain Trips. These remaining survivors end up being coveted by two supernatural beings: the 108-year-old prophet Mother Abigail Freemantle (Whoopi Goldberg), and the demonic Randal Flagg (Alexander Skarsgard). These factions end up facing off in a supernatural battle that'll ultimately decide the fate of the world.

It's been 26 years since the original Mick Garris-directed miniseries explored King's material and, needless to say, a lot has changed in the world. Just three years ago, when Cavell began production on the project, the word COVID wasn't a thing being uttered by anyone. But there were some similarities to The Stand already brewing in our society. The polarization and cultural divide that has become the daily norm is a concept that burrows right into the core of King's iconic tale.

"The pandemic in the book exists as a kind of mechanism to empty out the world so that there can be this really elemental struggle between good and evil or, I hesitate even using those words, but between the forces that are united behind Mother Abagail and the forces that are united behind the Dark Man," Cavell explained. "King has been very upfront about the idea that this book was his attempt to do, 'Lord of the Rings' in America, and in order to empty out America for the walk to Mordor, there needs to be something, and that something was Captain Trips."

We'd be remiss if we didn't acknowledge that it's been 42 years since Stephen King's original version of The Stand was published. A number of revisions have hit the shelves since, and King has even authored a new coda for the upcoming program, which will be featured in the final episode. With all that said, the spirit of Stephen King's tale has persevered.

“First there’s chaos, and then there’s reintegration,” King told Vanity Fair earlier in the year. “So it’s a question of, do things reintegrate in a way that’s good, or do they reintegrate in a way that’s Hitlerian and bad? It could go either way, so I wanted to write about that. I wanted to put those two forces in conflict.”

The conflict in question is the biggest focal point of the series, as it is in the book, but to say The Stand isn't a show about a pandemic during a pandemic underscores this specific part of the story.

We say this because, unlike Garris's 1994 mini-series, Cavell's adaptation of King's book doesn't at all shy away from showing Captain Trips in all its gruesome glory. Where Garris mostly sidestepped showcasing the damage of the virus, beginning his version of The Stand in the aftermath of the plague, Cavell and company adhere uncomfortably close to their representation of Captain Trips. The book is filled with descriptions of victims smattered in mucus, constant uncontrollable choking, and the froglike tube necks that signify a person is close to death. And that is all here.

"The tube necks are such an iconic part of the book and it felt important to us in really doing a faithful adaptation of that story," Cavell said. "We really tried to ground it all in a really visceral, deeply felt, believable reality, which is why we worked so hard with prosthetics [...] to make those tube necks feel really horrifying and to match the descriptions in the book. We spent a lot of time talking about it and really trying to dial in that look and strike that balance between being faithful to the description on the page, but also having it feel on-screen like something that's really grounded and real and visceral."

(Image credit: CBS All Access)

Obviously, the timing here is all a bit unfortunate. Will viewers want to tune into a series about a virus that ends the world? Especially with what's going on in the world right now? That remains to be seen. But, as Cavell revealed, the surrealness of all of this is not at all lost on him.

"I won't say it wasn't surreal for all of us when we were in Vancouver in the early part of this year and kind of realized what was happening and were following the news and our last day of shooting in Vancouver was March 11," he explained. "We wrapped actually at daybreak on March 12. We obviously were rolling with it the same way everybody is. But our task has always been to adapt the book. And that's, you know, that's what I think we've done."

Everything you need to know about 'The Stand'

Samantha Nelson — Thu, 10 Dec 2020 15:53:43 +0000

Stephen King's 1978 post-apocalyptic novel The Stand is set in a world that's been decimated by a plague, and the latest adaptation had been in the works well before current events made the subject matter more unsettling. King's novel might not have been written about the world's current situation, but if you've re-read it recently you know just how jarring some of the parallels to a thirty-year-old novel have been.

The limited series starring Whoopi Goldberg and Alexander Skarsgård - and a whole host of others - will be headed to CBS All Access very soon. Here's everything you need to know about the show, starting with the first trailer!

Where Can I Stream It?

All nine episodes of The Stand will be exclusively streaming on CBS All Access, with the first episode premiering on Thursday, December 17th. Don't stress if you miss an episode's "release time." CBS All Access works just like any other streaming service. No need to DVR, etc.! The service is also home to all of Star Trek and The Twilight Zone, making it a real haven for science fiction fans.

What is The Stand About?

Here's where things may get a bit dicey. We know that the CBS All Access series will take some liberties with King's book - hopefully the kind that brings some of the characters into this century - so the "about" here is more focused on King's novel than it is information revealed by CBS All Access. Mostly because there hasn't been any of that just yet! With that in mind, the very basic premise of the The Stand is the process and fall-out of a flu epidemic that wipes out 99% of humanity. Those who survive must find ways to do just that in this empty and strange new world. They wind up settling in Boulder and trying to reform society.

The fate of mankind will be determined by a battle between good, represented by the nurturing 108-year-old woman Mother Abagail (Whoopi Goldberg), and evil in the Dark Man Randall Flagg (Alexander Skarsgård), who has terrible powers.

The adaptation is of King's longest novel - clocking in at 1,152 pages in its longest iteration - meaning we could be here for quite some time if we were to explain everything. But above gives you the basic gist. While it is possible to ingest the complete novel in the time before you have the series, you'd need to be sure there's pretty much nothing else going on in your life. Even if the page count doesn't deter you, it is a great but not at all quick read.

Who's in the Cast?

Short answer? Everybody. King's novel has an aggressive number of characters as it attempts to depict the remaining 1% of humanity and their reactions to this new world. However, there are some key players that we can outline.

Stu Redman (James Marsden)
Larry Underwood (Jovan Adepo)
Mother Abegail (Whoopi Goldberg)
Nadine Cross (Amber Heard)
Tom Cullen (Brad William Henke)
Julie Lawry (Katherine McNamara)
Randall Flagg (Alexander Skarsgärd)
Sergeant Cobb (Daniel Sunjata)
Harold Lauder (Owen Teague)
Lloyd Henreid (Nat Wolff)
Frannie Goldsmith (Odessa Young)
Nick Andros (Henry Zaga)
Joe (Gordon Cormier)
Trashcan Man (Ezra Miller)
Teddy Weizak (Eion Bailey)

... and that's just a quick look. We've put together a more in-depth character guide if you're looking to make more sense of the who's who among all those names. But you'll be meeting all of them soon enough!

When Will It Premiere?

The end of the world begins when The Stand premieres on December 17. New episodes of the nine-episode series release weekly on Thursdays.

'The Stand' character guide - meet the who's who of the new CBS All Access show

amelia.emberwing@futurenet.com (Amelia Emberwing) — Wed, 09 Dec 2020 23:21:12 +0000

We're getting closer and closer to CBS All Access' The Stand. As we near the event, it seemed like the right time to give a little bit of a primer on the who's who of the series. If you haven't read the novel, it's, um... involved. Also highly recommended! But if you don't have time to squeeze in the lengthy novel into your schedule, here's a quick breakdown of the very basic ideas of each character. There are more in-depth profiles of them out there if you want to really dig in, but bear in mind that there's a chance we see some liberties with certain characters. Or at least we hope we see some liberties with some characters!

Stu Redman – James Marsden

(Image credit: CBS All Access)

Stu Redman is a simple man. Unfortunately for him, he’s one of the few members of the world that calls Arnette, Texas home. Though Stu has experienced great loss in his life, he remains a calm and centered protagonist throughout (most of) King’s novel. He’s not here to cause a fuss with anyone, and he’s usually the first to help de-escalate a situation. Given the whole disease that wipes out nearly the entirety of the United States thing, he’s a good man to have in your corner.

Frannie Goldsmith – Odessa Young

(Image credit: CBS All Access )

The Frannie Goldsmith we meet in Stephen King’s The Stand is an independent and sometimes stubborn woman who knows exactly what she wants. Frannie’s got a secret, but at the time of writing this it seems as if CBS All Access’ The Stand series is keeping that under wraps for a little bit. All the same, her extra baggage will both change her life and be an important plot point throughout the series.

Harold Lauder – Owen Teague

(Image credit: CBS All Access)

Poor young Harold Lauder is a victim of situation. Harold’s a bit odd, so he gets bullied more often than not. The thing is, your circumstances only justify so much of a certain kind of behavior. Sometimes Harold’s on your side. Others, well… other times he’s on Harold’s side. He’s a little bit of a wild card, Harold. You want to root for him, but his predictability can become a little bit frustrating after a while.

Nick Andros – Henry Zaga

(Image credit: CBS All Access.)

Can you imagine surviving a disease like Captain Trips and navigating a complex new world while being both deaf and mute? How many people could you possibly communicate when the population’s taken from hundreds of millions to just hundreds? Nick Andros is a kind man who wants to do what’s right by those around him and get the job done. If you want to find out how he loses that eye, you’re just gonna have to tune in.

Larry Underwood – Jovan Adepo

(Image credit: CBS All Access )

"That Larry Underwood is a taker," they say. His momma said it, his girlfriends have said it, and sometimes late at night when he’s being real, real honest with himself he’ll say it too. Larry does mean well, which does amount to something. The young musician might have a selfish streak, but he’ll play an integral part in the new world as one of the last remaining survivors of Captain Trips.

Nadine Cross – Amber Heard

(Image credit: CBS All Access)

Nadine Cross has felt unwanted much of her life. So, while the plague was hard for her in many ways that it was for the others, at least she was no stranger to feeling alone. Once she was a school teacher, now she’s caregiver to a kiddo named Leo (but we’ll probably know him as Joe) and an eventual companion to Larry Underwood. Point of interest: she’ll have some curious connections to Randall Flagg, but that’s the only tease you’re getting from me!

Tom Cullen – Brad William Henke

(Image credit: CBS All Access)

One of Stephen King’s more, shall we say, problematic characters, Tom Cullen is a mentally handicapped man who is one of the unlikely survivors of Captain Trips. Obviously, we’re very likely to see CBS All Access’ iteration of The Stand present the character in a way that’s more socially acceptable to viewers today. While he may not think the way his cohorts do, Tom is quite cheery and desperately wants to be helpful. We see him become a companion to Nick Andros early on in his story.

Julie Lawry – Katherine McNamara

(Image credit: CBS All Access)

Careful with that Julie Lawry. She doesn’t have much of a role in King’s novel, but a short tenure doesn’t mean she’s not integral to the narrative. Julie will play a curious role in Nick Andros’ life – hopefully one where she’s of age this time – and will eventually answer Flagg’s call to come to Las Vegas where she'll find herself in all kinds of mischief.

Mother Abegail – Whoopi Goldberg

(Image credit: CBS All Access)

That might be Abegail Freemantle to you, depending on where your allegiances lie. Mother Abegail is up there in years – 108 to be exact – but damn can she cook. She’s also not half bad at bringing a revolution together. Fancying herself a bit of a prophet (and with all the evidence in the world to back it up) Mother Abegail is an integral part of the stories of Nick Androse, Ralph Brentner and Tom Cullen, as well as the community known as the Boulder Free Zone. Don’t worry, that likely won’t matter to you until we near the end of The Stand.

Randall Flagg – Alexander Skarsgärd

(Image credit: CBS All Access)

The Man in Black, The Dark Man, The Walkin’ Dude, Legion… Randall Flagg is known by many names throughout Stephen King’s novels – about 30 to be exact – but for The Stand purposes you’ll probably just know him as those first three and his “Christian” name. Ok, his Christian name is actually Walter. Just call him Randall Flagg, dangit! After 99% of the population is wiped out, Flagg puts out a call for the remaining heathens to join him in Las Vegas. Yes, he’s absolutely meant to sound like Mother Abegail’s antitheses here. The Walkin’ Dude’s usually pretty cheery, especially when the world’s crumbling around him, but he doesn’t take too kindly to being crossed.

CBS All Access rolls out new family-friendly features

phil.nickinson@futurenet.com (Phil Nickinson) — Wed, 09 Dec 2020 18:52:31 +0000

CBS All Access — home to the bulk of the ViacomCBS catalog, new exclusives like Star Trek: Discovery, The Good Fight, The Stand and The Twilight Zone, as well as the UEFA Champions League in the United States — has just rolled out a new suite of features for families. It also has added even more kid-friendly programming from the likes of Nickelodeon and Nick Jr.

First up is the addition of user profiles. You can have to up six per account, and there are parental controls that can limit what younger kids can watch. (It'll use the service's existing parental PIN for that part.)

CBS All Access also has added more than 800 episodes of children's programming, and it's all available without commercials. That brings more than 1,000 episodes content for kids, including Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, new Danger Mouse and versions of Lassie, George of the Jungle, and Mr. Magoo, Paw Patrol, Blaze and the Monster Machines, Blue's Clues and more.

“We are thrilled to bring even more popular kids hits from Nick Jr. and Nickelodeon to the service, in advance of our upcoming rebrand as Paramount+,” Rob Gelick, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Streaming Services and Chief Product Officer, ViacomCBS Streaming, said in a press release. “We’ve already seen incredible growth in viewership since we began expanding our offering of children’s programming on the service. With today’s new product enhancements, like ‘Kids Mode’ and multiple profiles, we can create customized experiences for each member of the household, while giving our subscribers even more opportunities to discover and watch family programming together, and allowing parents additional peace of mind with the ability to further customize what programming is available to their kids.”

CBS All Access — which in 2021 will become Paramount+ — is available on most every major streaming platform in the United States. It costs $5.99 a month if you don't mind advertising on most of the content. And if you want to get rid of most ads, it'll run just $10.99 a month.

Why The Stand is Stephen King’s masterpiece

hello@kayleighdonaldson.com (Kayleigh Donaldson) — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 22:05:21 +0000

The legacy of one Stephen Edwin King has never been in doubt for readers around the world. The author has sold more than 350 million books, comprised of 61 novels, five non-fiction books, around 200 hundred short stories, a handful of screenplays, and even a musical. He is the master of late 20th and early 21st-century American horror, the multi-award-winning writer who redefined chilling for generations of avid readers. Even if you have somehow managed to get through life without reading a single one of his works, the chances are you're still deeply familiar with his twisted creations. Any writer would be thrilled to have just one of his legendary novels to their name, so it's all the more astounding to remember that one man gave us Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, It, The Shining, The Dead Zone, The Dark Tower saga, Misery, and much much more.

This December, CBS All Access will premiere its miniseries adaptation of The Stand, King's epic 1990 apocalyptic fantasy. While the novel was previously adapted by ABC in 1994 and received a comic book adaptation courtesy of Riverdale's Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, it's never received the big or small-screen treatment it properly deserves. This latest take comes with lofty ambitions and a murderer's row of talent both in front of and behind the camera. The story, which takes place over a staggering 1100 pages, is a grandiose tale of good versus evil set to the backdrop of an America ravaged by a pandemic that wiped out almost the entire planet's population. The remaining survivors find themselves torn between factions, a new social system, and the allure of a charismatic dark man known as Randall Flagg. For King fans, this is a long time coming because The Stand isn't just one of the author's finest works; it's one of the all-time great speculative novels. In 2003, the BBC listed it as one of the 100 all-time must-read books, smack bang in-between Of Mice and Men and Anna Karenina. In 2008, a Harris Poll named the novel as the fifth-favorite book of all time of American readers, four spots below the Bible. There's plenty of competition for the title among his vast bibliography, but there's a reason that The Stand remains Stephen King's masterpiece.

Initially, The Stand was King's fourth novel, published directly after The Shining. At that point in the 1970s, King was on an astounding streak as a writer and burgeoning literary celebrity. 1974's Carrie had made him a star, and 'Salem's Lot cemented his reputation as a horror maestro with a bright future ahead of him. Originally, King has intended to write a book about kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst but found it hard to crack the material. Around this time, he read a news story about the Dogway sheep incident in 1968, wherein over six thousand animals were killed on ranches around the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. That incident led to a ban on all open-air chemical weapons testing, and reignited Americans' fears of airborne threats and our inability to tackle them. King wanted to write his own epic in the grand tradition of The Lord of the Rings, and he found his subject with this looming threat, one that depressingly has never stopped being relevant. After turning in his draft to his publishers, his editors at Doubleday asked him to cut the book down since a 1,152-page hardback doorstop would be too expensive to make it to shelves. King painstakingly dissected around 400 pages of content, and the 1978 edition of The Stand became a more respectable 823 pages. It wouldn't be until 1990 that readers would get to read the complete and uncut story as the author had intended. It's still King's longest novel alongside It.

King’s talent as a writer lies in his ability to tap into the most primal and oft-overlooked fears of humanity. The killer clowns and axe-wielding maniacs may be what springs to mind when you think of his work but what lingers are his deftly created humans and what makes them tick. Fundamentally, King is a writer interested in ordinary people living typically mundane lives who find themselves descending into turmoil, be it driven by their own trauma or their responses to actions out of their control. His greatest characters aren't supermen or wildly gifted heroes waiting for their moment to shine. They're relatable figures with rich internal lives who would typically be one-page bystanders in the books of other authors.

In The Stand, these individuals take various forms, each of them painfully familiar to us, the reader: There's Stuart "Stu" Redman, a stoic everyman well-suited for leadership, even though he doesn’t crave the power or control such a position comes with; Glen Bateman, a retired professor prone to philosophizing and cynicism but with a cheery streak that’s gifted him with a serious bullsh*t meter; Nadine Cross, a teacher dealing with the conflicted emotions over her realization that she may be fated to surrender to the devil himself; and pregnant student Frannie Goldsmith, a woman desperately trying to hold herself and her moral compass together in the face of impossible strife. So much of the novel, as with much of King’s work, is spent inside these people’s heads. Everyone gets a fully realized life, even if they never say a word to another character. Even the dog gets this treatment! King understands that even something as terrifying as the end of the world and a demonic apocalypse will mean nothing if the reader doesn't care about the people involved. Over 1,200+ pages, each member of this sprawling ensemble feels palpably real, even the devil himself, and the stakes feel impossibly high because of that.

There are plenty of stories about how humanity deals with the apocalypse. King certainly wasn’t the first to write about it. What makes The Stand so unique is the sheer agonizing detail it goes into in order to convey just how the most normal individuals cope under extraordinary circumstances. Some strive to maintain order and decency while others enjoy the amoral free-for-fall or are tempted down the dark path by Randall Flagg, one of King’s most terrifying creations. We all like to believe that, even if the world should end tomorrow, we'd do the right thing, but King shows the ways that good intentions slide into bleak cruelty. Sometimes, one is able to free themselves from their previous life, but all too often, the circumstances of our past dictate our every move, even when everything around us has crumbled to ashes.

Alexander Skarsgard as Randall Flagg in CBS All Access's The Stand (Credit: CBS) (Image credit: CBS All Access)

That extends to the novel's climax and the ultimate moral of the story. Bad things happen and they'll keep happening because, as centuries of history have shown us, humanity will never learn its lesson. Even when left with utter decimation and the chance to begin afresh, we rely on old methods, tried and true until they turn toxic. People will always start factions and try to control the populace or go to war with one another over the pettiest of grievances. It takes nothing for one man, satanic or otherwise, to stoke those fires. At the end of the book, Stu notes that 'all any of us can buy is time', because he's painfully aware that the cycle will begin again. And yet he, and the reader by extension, cling to the possibility of peace, even for a day, even if it takes killing off 99% of the planet. King has never been one to avoid total downer endings, but even by his standards, the fascinating balance of hope and realism he teases out with The Stand is unique.

King’s weaknesses as a writer are well-noted. He’s candidly discussed his habit of writing way too much and struggling to cut out the bloat. He’s also, to put it bluntly, often terrible when it comes to writing about race. Mother Abagail, the leader of the "good" survivors and prophet of God, is a classic example of the Magical Negro trope, a wise Black figure of mystical abilities who exists primarily, if not solely, to aid the white protagonists. One scene involves a so-called "black junta", a group of infected Black soldiers who stage a televised execution of their white comrades. The end of the uncut edition sees Randall Flagg being worshipped by a group of dark-skinned indigenous people, signaling a new potential route to the end-times. The N word is used a lot in the book, usually as a sign of a character's ignorance but the endless repetition of the word quickly feels more than unnerving to the reader. As author Nnedi Okorafor noted in a 2004 piece for Dark Horizons, these stereotypes are plentiful across King’s work. He seems to favor writing Black characters either as mystical, near unhuman guides to white people or as Others who speak entirely in caricature. As she explained, "The archetype of the Magical Negro has power in its powerlessness and it is not a positive type, leading to stereotypes, negative assumptions, and limited characterizations of black people in King's work."

CBS has a mountain to climb to ensure The Stand miniseries lives up to its startling source material. King remains prolific and celebrated, but The Stand, for all its faults and poorly aged elements, will forever be a momentous achievement.

Whoopi Goldberg will save us all in the first trailer for 'The Stand' on CBS All Access

phil.nickinson@futurenet.com (Phil Nickinson) — Fri, 09 Oct 2020 19:51:25 +0000

One of the most epic stories of the the apocalypse of biblical proportions is gearing up for a new iteration on one of the most promising streaming services. And we now have the first trailer for The Stand, which will debut on CBS All Access on Dec. 17.

For those who haven't read the epic tome (and you really should), The Stand tells the tale of a global plague that ultimately pits the survivors against each other in a battle of good versus evil. God and the Devil are in human form and lead their people from Boulder, Colo., and Las Vegas.

There's intrigue. There's romance. There are people being awful and wonderful and special and pretty much every emotion and every shred of humanity that you could squeeze into something like this.

And this is the latest iteration of the story — it's been made into a miniseries before. But this is the first time we'll watch it on something CBS All Access, which should provide for a little more leeway than traditional network TV.

Oscar winner Whoopi Goldberg is Mother Abigail on the good side, while Randall Flagg — aka the Dark Man — is played by Alexander Skarsgård.

In addition to Goldberg and Skarsgård, the series features James Marsden as Stu Redman, Odessa Young as Frannie Goldsmith, Jovan Adepo as Larry Underwood, Amber Heard as Nadine Cross, Owen Teague as Harold Lauder, Henry Zaga as Nick Andros, Brad William Henke as Tom Cullen, Irene Bedard as Ray Bretner, Nat Wolff as Lloyd Henreid, Eion Bailey as Weizak, Heather Graham as Rita Blakemoor, Katherine McNamara as Julie Lawry, Fiona Dourif as Ratwoman, Natalie Martinez as Dayna Jurgens, Hamish Linklater as Dr. Jim Ellis, Daniel Sunjata as Cobb and Greg Kinnear as Glen Bateman.

CBS All Access costs $5.99 a month with advertising, or $9.99 a month without. It's available on pretty much every modern hardware platform and on smart TVs, and it's the exclusive home for other new hit series like Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard, and The Twilight Zone.

Star Trek: Lower Decks season 1 episode 9 review: Crisis Point

leighmonson@outlook.com (Leigh Monson) — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 12:58:55 +0000

This post contains spoilers for Star Trek: Lower Decks. Check out our last review here.

“Crisis Point” is a very strange episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks. As the penultimate episode of the season, it’s setting up a season-long background conflict in preparation for its finale. If that tension were allowed to stand on its own, it would make for the kind of dramatic punctuation that wouldn’t feel out of place in the show’s live-action counterparts. However, not only is “Crisis Point” bogged down by the show’s mandate to be a comedy, it’s largely afraid to tell jokes that would undermine its reverence for what it’s parodying, namely the specific tone and absurdity of Star Trek movies as opposed to the main series.

After Mariner (Tawny Newsome) single-handedly frees a society of lizard people from being harvested by the planet’s rat people as a source of food, Captain Freeman (Dawnn Lewis) is infuriated that Mariner violated the Prime Directive and interfered with a planet’s natural social order. As punishment, Freeman orders Mariner to therapy, provoking the hilarious line “It’s the 80s! We don’t have mental problems!” After a visit with the ship’s therapist (Paul F. Tompkins) yields nothing but tortured food metaphors, Mariner crashes Boimler (Jack Quaid), Tendi (Noël Wells), and Rutherford’s (Eugene Cordero) visit to the holodeck, just as Boimler is about to use perfect simulations of the ship’s crew to prepare for a career interview with the Captain. This gives Mariner the idea to hijack the program and turn it into a movie, casting herself as the villain in a confrontational raid of the Cerritos.

The animation team really pulled out all the stops for this episode, replicating the more indulgent facets of Star Trek cinema with appropriate style and grace. There are the obvious small details, like the letterboxed framing and the occasional bit of film grain, but they also nailed the very specific amount of lens flare to be found in even the most banal scenes, as well as every Trek film’s absurd reverence to the majesty of its starship, only to destroy that ship fantastically in the third act. It’s all a very spot-on pastiche, but in the process, it kind of forgets to crack jokes in direct parody of those visual tropes. For example, the sweeping shot of the ship as Captain Freeman and the crew approach is drawn out and excessive, but if you’re waiting for a moment when the show acknowledges the excess for comedic effect, you’ll be left wanting. I’m unsure if the writing is too reverent or if the parody was neutered by studio tampering, but it makes you wonder what the point of the pastiche even is if the show isn’t going to throw even a soft punch.

This doesn’t mean the episode is entirely devoid of jokes — Rutherford’s observation that you can break the internal logic of the story because it’s a movie is hilariously astute — but the bulk of the episode is devoted to Mariner’s maniacal playacting as a warlord nemesis against Captain Freeman. Wreaking bloody devastation against the crew and ship is obviously en route to a therapeutic epiphany before Mariner even realizes it, but in the meantime, it exposes Mariner’s worst impulses in a consequence-free space.

She casts Tendi in the role of an Orion space pirate, revealing her unconscious acceptance of Orion stereotypes in a manner that makes Tendi uncomfortable in the role. She completely disregards Boimler’s desire to use the program he designed to allow him to prepare for his interview, even though he hilariously still tries even in the midst of a warzone. The only one Mariner doesn’t hurt is Rutherford, who is too distracted by breaking character to be best buds with his boss (Paul Scheer). The simulated chaos of Mariner destroying the ship she loves has inadvertent effects on the people she loves. This comes to a head when the climactic showdown isn’t between Mariner and Freeman, but between Mariner and a simulated copy of her best self. This realization that she does love her life, even when frustrated by the Captain’s mothering, allows her to move on and forgive Freeman and, more importantly, herself.

It’s a solid arc for Mariner that only becomes more complicated as Boimler, hoping to cram a bit more for his interview on the holodeck, accidentally learns of Freeman and Mariner’s mother-daughter relationship, causing him to spectacularly fail his interview and introducing a new dynamic for the season finale. I like how Lower Decks can use self-contained narratives with singular high concepts to deliver bits of character development that inform evolving character dynamics. You know, like other Star Trek shows used to. But “Crisis Point” doesn’t know how to balance that with its other mission statement of being an animated comedy, and the love it has for the specific visual panache of Trek cinema just doesn’t translate as the comic gold mine it should.

Star Trek: Lower Decks is available to stream now on Paramount Plus in the US and on Prime Video in the UK.

Star Trek: Lower Decks season 1 episode 8 review: Veritas

leighmonson@outlook.com (Leigh Monson) — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 13:00:55 +0000

“Veritas” feels like it might have been the result of a monkey’s paw wish gone wrong. Technically, it delivers on some things that I’ve wanted Star Trek: Lower Decks to follow through on since it started. I’m happy to see an episode that embraces a single narrative that doesn’t split the focus across multiple competing plotlines, even if it takes a vignette structure to do so. It's nice to see Rutherford (Eugene Cordero) and Tendi (Noël Wells) get space to shine. It's great that this episode doesn’t center Mariner (Tawny Newsome) or Boimler (Jack Quaid) as the de facto protagonist. These all seem like they should be welcome changes of pace for what I’ve seen as the show’s biggest problems in its priorities. However, “Veritas” is attempting something a bit more subversive that necessitates these changes in the short term, doesn’t really signal an intent to reprioritize in the long term, and frankly doesn’t come together in a satisfying way. At least the episode is still funny.

The cold open finds our four main characters thrown into what appears to be an alien dungeon, completely absent of explanation. As the floor rises and elevates the ensigns to a new environment, they are placed in a dark chamber with a sinister alien interrogator while Captain Freeman (Dawnn Lewis) and the other officers hover nearby, stoically contained in a stasis beam. The interrogator demands that the ensigns testify as to the events of the last few days, and each unsatisfactory narrative places an ensign in danger of being dropped in a tank of ravenous eels.

First up is Mariner, who recounts how the ensigns missed a ship-wide red alert signal, forcing her and Boimler to sneak onto the bridge without having any idea what’s going on. Captain Freeman seems to have returned from an alien ship with a map of the Neutral Zone, but the aliens are upset with her expression of gratitude in a peaceful exchange. Boimler, when asked his opinion on what they should do without the pressure of wrong answers, absolutely and repeatedly gives wrong answers. It’s an obviously silly sketch that punctuates on Mariner messing up just as bad, misinterpreting the Captain’s peaceful (and painfully vague) order to show them what Starfleet is made of as a command to fire.

Next up to testify is Rutherford, who gets roped into a covert mission with Lieutenant Shaxs (Fred Tatasciore), only to pass out for large portions of it as his cyborg operating system updates and reboots, causing him to go into autopilot. This leads to a nonsensical series of events that force a bewildered Rutherford to perform a distracting fan dance, navigate across an invisible Klingon Bird of Prey, and get mauled in a Gorn wedding. The absurdity of these vignettes are ridiculous in all the right ways — the fan dance sequence is particularly funny as a guard blatantly points out how distracting Rutherford is — but this ultimately makes for a microcosm of the episode’s larger problem.

The final vignette is from Tendi, who was cleaning the conference room only to be roped into Commander Jack Ransom’s (Jerry O’Connell) covert mission under the misconception that she’s codenamed “The Cleaner.” Though it’s funny to see Tendi completely out of her depth on a mission to reclaim a mysterious package on a Romulan ship, the main comedic thrust of this act is the writers seeing how many ways they can censor dialogue under the pretense of classified information. Is it an overused sitcom gag? Yes. Is it used well here? Also yes.

The episode comes together with Boimler deconstructing the thesis of the entire show, explaining to the interrogator that lower decks ensigns aren’t told anything important and that the holes in their stories aren’t going to shed any light on the exploits of the so-called infallible heroes of Starfleet. The punchline here is that the officers were never on trial, that the interrogator was actually an ambassador that was trapped in the box Tendi helped procure, and that this whole production was actually a party the ambassador was throwing to record the heroics of his rescuers. It’s a fun gag in theory, but it fails a logistical sniff test once you think about it too long.

The episode goes out of its way to lampshade the ensigns’ confusion over how the disparate pieces of their narratives, and the absurdly threatening nature of the ambassador’s party, tie together into a cohesive whole. Captain Freeman’s promise of clarity is met with Boimler and company pointing out numerous plotholes that the frustrated Freeman dismisses. Essentially, the writers are here admitting that they came up with funny scenarios that could be tied together into a loose series of vignettes, but they didn’t have any interest in telling a story deeper than telling the audience they were fools for expecting a story. The nonsense may be the point, but it makes the episode feel disposable, like the twenty minutes you invested in it were wasted, even though it was enjoyable at the moment.

“Veritas” isn’t a bad episode due to its disdain for its audience. There are plenty of funny moments to sustain the episode as a collection of vignettes. But I think my annoyance is best encapsulated when it ends with a cameo from John De Lancie reprising his role as Q, only for the bit to be completely inconsequential and a waste of De Lancie’s talents. You can do better than troll me, Star Trek: Lower Decks. Please don’t make this a habit.

Star Trek: Lower Decks is available to stream now on Paramount Plus in the US and on Prime Video in the UK.

Star Trek: Lower Decks season 1 episode 7 review: Much Ado About Boimler

leighmonson@outlook.com (Leigh Monson) — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 13:00:02 +0000

“Much Ado About Boimler” is pretty close to what I’d consider the platonic ideal of an episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks. It tells two equally compelling stories, has moments of extreme comic absurdity, and manages to capture the pacing and dimension of character that an episode of The Next Generation would, all in about 24 minutes. This is the promise of the show at its best, and it’s episodes like these that keep me coming back.

The cold open introduces us to Tendi’s (Noël Wells) newest experiment in cloning, a friendly golden retriever that she has lovingly named “The Dog.” The other ensigns are at first nonplussed by Tendi’s use of cloning technology to make something so banal, only to end up horrified when The Dog becomes a bastion of body horror when Tendi leaves the room. The Dog is the avenue for a lot of this episode’s greatest visual gags, and while it is not exactly the subject of either of the two main plots, it is a perpetually hilarious background element that punctuates beautifully the realization that Tendi did know about all The Dog’s horrifying transformations, but she just didn’t realize dogs weren’t supposed to do that. Between The Dog and Badgey, Lower Decks is hitting its stride with the kinds of offbeat bit characters that make animated comedies worth returning to.

The plot proper kicks in when the captain and officers go on an away mission, leaving the crew with a substitute captain. Mariner (Tawny Newsome) continues her trend of mocking authority, only for the visiting captain to turn out to be her old Academy friend, Amina Ramsey (Toks Olagundoye). Unlike last week’s Ensign Fletcher, Amina feels more like a fully realized character than a plot device, reminiscing with Mariner about the good ol’ days while asking her to take on greater responsibilities on an away mission to a nearby bog planet.

As Mariner keeps making more and more simple mistakes, it becomes clear that something isn’t quite right with Mariner and Amina’s relationship. It’s actually a clever bit of writing to allow us to forget a core piece of Mariner’s attitude toward the establishment in order to buy into her extreme bouts of clumsiness, but once the crew is called to rescue another vessel from an unknown energy being, Mariner is suddenly the action badass she always has been. It turns out that she anticipated that Amina was going to offer her an officer’s position on Amina’s ship and didn’t want to have to turn her friend down, a sign of Mariner’s continued resistance to the career path expected of her. While the episode culminates in a climactic action setpiece that saves the crew from the lifeform overtaking the ship, it simultaneously juggles dialogue the gives these two women the space to reconcile who they once were together with the people they have become while apart. It’s a touching study of friendship in a show that is singularly focused on the meaning of camaraderie.

Meanwhile, Boimler’s (Jack Quaid) storyline is less emotionally resonant, but also carries the comedy in conjunction with The Dog. After a transporter malfunction — the most classic of Star Trek tropes — leaves Boimler out of phase, he’s left incapable of impressing the visiting crew as his body blares loud transporter sounds and remains transparent and blue. Though Rutherford (Eugene Cordero) is able to quiet the annoying noise, Doctor T’Ana (Gillian Vigman) is unable to cure Boimler and calls upon the mysterious Division 14 to come and deliver him, along with Tendi and The Dog, to “The Farm” for treatment.

Now, the clear allusion of sending an incurable animal to a farm upstate (up-space?) should be lost on no one, and the way Division 14 is presented as a dark and creepy vessel filled with, as the Division officer states it, “dark abnormalities and the clinically obscene,” makes it pretty apparent that Boimler, Tendi, and The Dog have been shuffled off to be disposed of. The other aberrations, led by an ensign whose body has half aged into being elderly while the other half has reverted to childhood, stage a revolution that Boimler immediately rats out in his usual deference to authority, and ends up out an airlock for his trouble. Only the airlock reveals that they actually have landed at a real resort known as The Farm, and the horrifying décor and the officer’s ominous mannerisms were all just misleading quirks of character. It’s a funny (if not unexpected) twist that perfectly culminates when the effects of the transporter malfunction disappear on their own, leaving Boimler unable to participate in the relaxing spa treatments the planet provides.

Overall, “Much Ado About Boimler” brings a lot to the table. The rare division of Boimler and Mariner into separate narratives is a strong choice, and pairing Boimler with Tendi allows for a different kind of comedic banter, borne more of Tendi’s obliviousness and Boimler’s frustrations. Rutherford doesn’t get all that much to do this episode, but that’s fine. The necessary space to explore a new side of Mariner’s past is much appreciated and the balance of all these disparate elements makes this one of the best episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks to date.

Star Trek: Lower Decks is available to stream now on Paramount Plus in the US and on Prime Video in the UK.

Star Trek: Lower Decks season 1 episode 6 review — Terminal Provocations

leighmonson@outlook.com (Leigh Monson) — Thu, 10 Sep 2020 13:00:43 +0000

If last week’s episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks was a bit of a dud, this week saw the show get back on track in ways that actually address many of the issues I had with “Cupid’s Errant Arrow.” Not only do Rutherford (Eugene Cordero) and Tendi (Noël Wells) have a plotline that is more fun and memorable than Boimler (Jack Quaid) and Mariner’s (Tawny Newsome), but “Terminal Provocations” introduced a ridiculous new side character, and it found space for Boimler and Mariner to demonstrate a less antagonistic bond as they confront a foe that they agree is more annoying.

That foe is Ensign Fletcher (Tim Robinson), an old buddy of Boimler’s from the academy that at first seems like a pretty cool guy. After all, he diffuses an antagonistic lunchtime confrontation between Mariner and Doctor T’Ana (Gillian Vigman) and offers to cover for Boimler and Mariner to attend a pop concert being held during their shift. However, things go south fast when they find Fletcher knocked out at his post with a power core missing, all while the captain and officers continue to wage an argument with another alien vessel that's becoming increasingly hostile.

After an accusatory confrontation with Delta Shift — the ship’s night-shifters who look suspiciously similar to their daytime counterparts — they discover that Fletcher had hidden the broken power core in his bunk (like an idiot) and was desperate to find a scapegoat so he wouldn’t get in trouble. The contrived reason for breaking the core? He plugged his brain into it in order to upgrade his brain, Flowers for Algernon style, only for that not to work, because why the hell would it? It’s a bit of a strange shift in the episode to realize that Fletcher is a bit of a moron, but Boimler and Mariner become much more disillusioned by his overwhelming self-interest than his idiocy. As the power core gains sentience after imprinting Fletcher’s desire to be smarter, latching every piece of technology it can to itself, Boimler and Mariner shed the excess weight to their group dynamic and dispose of the threat themselves. It makes for a nice character moment that shows how Boimler has become less rigid and Mariner less full of herself, uniting in a shared passion for keeping the crew safe.

The comedic heft of the episode resides on the holodeck, though, as Rutherford attempts to teach Tendi how to spacewalk. Rutherford introduces Badgey, a holodeck program of his own design that looks like a friendly cartoon Starfleet badge, to teach Tendi a lesson, only for the ship’s power to go offline in the escalating starship battle, disabling the safety protocols on the holodeck. Badgey, in turn, goes berserk, turning against Rutherford and Tendi in a deliciously violent manner, spouting odes about ripping off limbs and tearing away flesh that directly contrast his cute, bouncy proportions.

Badgey is an absolute show-stealer and even though Rutherford and Tendi are once again stuck in a plot that doesn’t advance the narrative of the overall episode, we do get some further confirmation of Rutherford’s feelings for Tendi as he stands in her defense against what is effectively his own blood-lusting son. It’s a character moment that speaks to Rutherford’s integrity, delivered against this show’s answer to Rick and Morty’s Mr. Meeseeks, and moments like this are what show the potential of a Star Trek animated comedy.

The episode’s plotlines dispose of their villains in ways appropriate to their future comic potential. Fletcher is promoted off-ship (and subsequently fired) after Mariner gives him all the credit for the sentient power core getting loose on the enemy ship and accidentally saving the day. Badgey, meanwhile, assumes a friendly persona once again with the restoration of safety protocols, only for the doors of the holodeck to close on his disgruntled visage. We don’t need to see Fletcher again, because at the end of the day he’s nothing but a foil to Boimler and Mariner’s growing friendship. But Badgey has the potential to come back more ludicrous than ever, and I look forward to the day he returns.

Star Trek: Lower Decks is available to stream now on Paramount Plus in the US and on Prime Video in the UK.

Stephen King's 'The Stand' lands on CBS All Access on Dec. 17

phil.nickinson@futurenet.com (Phil Nickinson) — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 21:07:12 +0000

When The Stand premieres on CBS All Access on Dec. 17, you'll be reminded that it's more than a little ballsy to launch a series about a pandemic in the middle of a pandemic. But then again, it's alway a bold act to adapt one of Stephen King's greatest works.

“During the two years we spent making The Stand, we all felt the responsibility of adapting what may be the most beloved work of one of the world’s most beloved storytellers," said show runner and executive producer Benjamin Cavell. "but none of us could have imagined that Stephen King’s 40-year-old masterpiece about a global pandemic would come to be so eerily relevant.”

The Stand — the story of a global plague that ultimately pits good versus evil in a final showdown — is an epic tome unto itself, and it's already been made into a miniseries once before. This time around it features Whoopi Goldberg as the 108-year-old Mother Abigail, Alexander Skarsgård as the Dark Man, James Marsden as Stu Redman, Amber Heard as Nadine Cross, Heather Graham as Rita Blakemoor, Greg Kinnear as Glen Bateman, and Owen Teague as Harold Lauder.

The story stretches out as society falls apart amid the ever-spreading death, then begins to come back together, drawn either to Mother Abigail in the Colorado mountains, or the Dark Man in the Las Vegas desert. And the nine-episode series will close with a new coda written by King himself.

“We’re honored to tell this sprawling, epic story," Cavell said, "including a new coda that Stephen King has wanted to add for decades. We’re so proud of this show and its attempt to find meaning and hope in the most uncertain of times. We can’t wait to share it with the world.”

New episodes will drop every Thursday following the premiere.

CBS All Access is home to the bulk of the ViacomCBS catalog, as well as the only place for new exclusives like Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: Lower Decks, The Twilight Zone, and The Good Fight. It costs $5.99 a month or $59.99 a year with limited commercials, or $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year to go (mostly) commercial-free.

The Apple TV+ Showtime/CBS All Access bundle is now available

phil.nickinson@futurenet.com (Phil Nickinson) — Mon, 17 Aug 2020 17:59:49 +0000

No longer just a rumor, you can now subscribe to CBS All Access and Showtime via Apple TV+ for just $9.99 a month. (And that's after a free seven-day trial.) That'll get you the commercial-free version of CBS All Access (normally $9.99 a month unto itself) as well as the premium Showtime network.

And if you're running Family Sharing through Apple's products, you can share this subscription with up to six family members, provided they're attached to your Apple ID.

“There’s no better time to launch this special bundle,” Marc DeBevoise, ViacomCBS’s chief digital officer and ViacomCBS Digital’s president and chief executive officer, said in a press release. “CBS All Access has recently expanded to now have 20,000+ episodes and movies for fans to enjoy, plus a great slate of new content from exclusive original series, like ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ and ‘The Stand,’ to new programming from CBS like ‘Big Brother,’ ‘Love Island,’ and more.”

To get in on the bundle, just open the Apple TV app on your Apple device and follow the instructed to get in on the free trial.

All of the billing and subscription info — including the ability to cancel — will be handled on Apple's end.

Apple TV+ rumored to be getting a $9.99 bundle with CBS All Access and Showtime

phil.nickinson@futurenet.com (Phil Nickinson) — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 19:40:12 +0000

Apple will offer a discounted bundle that includes CBS All Access and Showtime — along with its own Apple TV+ service — Bloomberg reported today, citing anonymous sources.

The deal could be announced as early as Aug. 17, it reported.

The bundle would coast $9.99 a month — giving a substantial discount on all three services. Apple TV+ costs $4.99 a month, though Apple currently offers a year for free when you purchase a new piece of Apple hardware, like an iPhone or Mac computer. CBS All Access costs $5.99 a month with ads ($9.99 if you want to get rid of most of the advertising), and Showtime normally runs $10.99 a month.

Unknown at this point are any major caveats. Apple TV+ is available on most major platforms, including Roku, Amazon Fire TV and, of course Apple TV. It's also available on some smart TVs. (Noticeably missing is Android TV, though one possible workaround is to watch via AirPlay, if it's supported by your television.)

Apple TV+ launched on Nov. 1, 2019, so the bundle also would come as the first wave of subscribers who get their service for free thanks to a new hardware purchase are beginning to consider whether to re-up as a paying customer, or whether to let the subscription lapse. Apple TV+ has had a decent amount of new exclusive content, but it lacks the depth of a service like Disney+, Hulu or HBO Max.

Nothing is official until it's official, though, so stand by for anything from Apple next week. Or not.

How To Cancel Your CBS All Access Account

kemspivey@yahoo.com (Kemberlie Spivey) — Sat, 08 Aug 2020 17:42:38 +0000

Want to know how to cancel CBS Access? You've come to the right place. A subscription to CBS All Access gives you access to All Rise, Macgyver, Star Trek: Discovery, Twilight Zone, classic CBS programming, and so much more. The CBS All Access app is available for all computers, mobile devices, smart TVs, and streaming devices like Roku, Fire TV, and Apple TV.

After a free seven-day trial, it costs $5.99 a month or $59.99 a year with limited commercials, or $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year to go commercial-free and download episodes to watch offline. However, if you're not satisfied with the content or simply can't afford yet another streaming service, you can easily cancel your subscription.

CBS All Access has your one-stop-shop for all access to some of your favorite CBS shows, but if you’ve exhausted the content, it may be time to cancel your account. For those who want to know how to cancel your CBS All Access account, this step-by-step will guide you through the process. You can easily cancel your CBS All Access subscription from any device, but we recommend doing it from a desktop or laptop computer.

How to cancel your CBS All Access subscription

Canceling your CBS All Access account is so easy it's almost comical, but we're not going to complain about that.

Click here.
Sign in with your CBS All Access credentials.
Confirm your cancellation.

That's it. Yeah, they'll ask you why you're leaving. And you can choose to tell them or now. Your call.

If you choose to restart your CBS: All Access subscription later, CBS: All Access will keep your account open until the end of the billing cycle, or until the end of the free trial period. After that, you can still log in to renew your account, but you will no longer have access to its streaming and on-demand content.

CBS All Access gets a major expansion with addition of 3,500 episodes, new user interface

phil.nickinson@futurenet.com (Phil Nickinson) — Thu, 30 Jul 2020 12:34:44 +0000

ViacomCBS today announced a major expansion and rehabilitation of CBS All Access as part of its plan to create a sort of super streaming service that encompasses all of the media giant's brands.

Chief among the changes is the addition of more than 3,500 episodes from the entire ViacomCBS portfolio, including BET, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon and Smithsonian Channel — to name but a few.

We're also getting news of new original series headed our way in 2021, starting with with the children's series Kamp Koral, as well as a spinoff series from Spongebob Squarepants. (And CBS All Access reminds us that it'll be the only place to watch The Spongebob Movie: Sponge on the Run in early 2021.

CBS All Access now touts more than 20,000 episodes and movies in total, and it's expecting another 50 percent increase in the months to come as more Paramount content comes online.

What's not changed yet is any new branding. ViacomCBS promises "full and rebranded service" to come early next year.

“Today marks the beginning of an exciting evolution of CBS All Access into the subscription streaming home for ViacomCBS and a preview of what’s to come,” Marc DeBevoise, Chief Digital Officer, ViacomCBS and President & Chief Executive Officer, ViacomCBS Digital, said in a press release. “As the first Network to market with a branded direct-to-consumer service more than five years ago, we have the advantage and experience of building it from the ground up, establishing distribution points across all major platforms, creating a service with high user engagement and low churn, and crafting a robust slate of exclusive originals from which we continue to build. By bringing the valuable IP and creative capabilities from across ViacomCBS together in one product, we will deliver to consumers a compelling and differentiated service with something for everyone across news, live sports and on-demand entertainment in every genre.”

The new ViacomCBS content added to CBS All Access includes:

BET: All seasons of Real Husbands of Hollywood, Hit the Floor, and all prior seasons of Single Ladies.
Comedy Central: All Seasons of Chapelle's Show, Strangers with Candy, and six prior seasons of Reno 911.
MTV: All seasons of Laguna Beach and Snooki & Jwoww, prior seasons of Teen Mom 2, seasons of Jersey Shore: Family Vacation and MTV Floribama Shore, and selections from Beavis and Butt-Head, and The Challenge.
Nickelodeon: All seasons of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Rugrats, and Spongebob Squarepants.
Smithsonian Channel: More than 60 episodes of Aerial America, seasons of Air Disasters, and documentaries like The Day We Walked on the Moon, The Green Book: Guide to Freedom, MLK: The Assassination Tapes, and Pocahontas: Beyond the Myth.
TV Land and VH1: Hot in Cleveland, Rupul's Drag Race, Love & Hip Hop.
Paramount Pictures: More films added including The Firm, Charlotte's Web and Scary Movie.

Star Trek: Lower Decks teases out a new scene from Comic Con At Home

phil.nickinson@futurenet.com (Phil Nickinson) — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 19:40:55 +0000

Two weeks out from the premiere of Star Trek: Lower Decks on CBS All Access and we're getting a new look at the animated series.

The new clip features Ensign Brad Boimler (voiced by Jack Quaid) and Ensign Beckett Mariner (voiced by Tawny Newsome) and what we can assume was a healthy fistful of amphetamines.

Just watch and that'll make more sense.

The gist of lower decks is that while Trek has always had the hotshots who ran things and got all the screen time, there was essentially a lower caste that did a bunch of the ... other stuff. Maybe not quite like how in HBO's Avenue 5 there's a crew full of actors and then a handful of actual engineers doing engineer things, and definitely not a Galaxy Quest situation. It's more of there just being folks who don't always get to go on the cool away missions and first contacts and all.

It happens.

CBS All Access is the streaming service from. ViacomCBS that includes a good bit of the CBS catalog, as well as new original series like Star Trek: Picard, Jordan Poole's reboot of The Twilight Zone, and the upcoming Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

It's available on just about every streaming platform (including Roku and Amazon, so you don't have to worry about that) and is available with and without ads.

How to watch BET Awards 2020 live stream: The live music and celebration of the Black community

delgadorh@gmail.com (Roy Delgado) — Sun, 28 Jun 2020 18:12:49 +0000

Source: BET Press (Image credit: BET Press)

Challenging times can often be the hardest to find a reason to celebrate, but that can also make the right celebration more impactful than ever before. The BET Awards have long been a big celebration of the best of Black culture, and in this moment the joy, music, and sense of togetherness can be exactly what our world needs.

The eyes of the world could be on the BET Awards this year unlike any year before, as the show will be on broadcast television. The moment of social change looms large, because the BET Awards has historically been a place for social and political statements. There is also the COVID-19 effect, and while the virtual aspect of the event will make this BET Awards different, it will also be a big live show. A broadcast network can't pass up the chance to have this on air.

With the push towards racial justice and understanding, the BET Awards 2020 will be an important awards show worth seeing. No matter your race or tastes in entertainment, you are likely to find something exciting, thought-provoking, and moving when you watch the BET Awards 2020 livestream.

When are the BET Awards 2020?

The BET Awards 2020 will be held virtually from several different locations on Sunday, June 28, 2020 starting at 8 p.m. Eastern time. The event will be broadcast on several networks, including CBS, BET and BET Her. This will be the first year the BET Awards will be airing on CBS, making it the broadcast premiere.

The BET Awards 2020 will mark the 20th anniversary of the BET Awards, which began in 2001 to honor achievements in music, sports, and entertainment by Blacks and other minority groups. This year's BET Awards will be hosted by Amanda Seales of HBO's Insecure .

Who will perform at the BET Awards 2020?

One of the biggest reasons fans love to tune in for the BET Awards each year are the live performances. Many feature the hottest musical acts of the moment, as well as legends that put their mark on the industry and inspired the newest performers of today.

This year, the BET Awards will use a variety of content produced by the artists from their homes or local spots instead of one shared theater stage. However, with big names up and down the roster, you should expect the same energy and creativity from years past.

This year's performances will include two special tributes in memory of two notable losses in the community. There will be a tribute to The Architect of Rock and Roll , Little Richard, who died in May at the age of 87. Also, there is a tribute planned for NBA legend Kobe Bryant, who died in a helicopter accident in January at the age of 41.

Here are the scheduled performers for the BET Awards 2020.

Alicia Keys
Anderson Paak
Black Thought
Chloe X Halle
DaBaby
D Smoke
Jahi
Jay Rock
Jennifer Hudson
John Legend
Jonathan McReynolds
Kane Brown
Karen Clark Sheard
Kierra Sheard
Lil Wayne
Megan Thee Stallion
Nas
Public Enemy
Questlove
Rapsody
Roddy Ricch
SiR
Summer Walker
Usher
Wayne Brady
YG

How to watch the BET Awards 2020 live stream

Now that the BET Awards 2020 will be simulcast across three different networks, you have more options than ever before to watch the live stream of the show. You won't need cable to see the biggest stars in Black music, films, television, art and culture. There are a wide variety of services that offer either CBS, BET, or BET Her for the BET Awards 2020. They come with a wide range of price points, and most offer a free trial. Review your options, and decide which one works best for you.

Hulu with Live TV

The cost: $55 a month after a one week free trial
Watch Hulu on: Apple TV, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, Chromecast, Roku, Xbox One, Xbox 360, Nintendo Switch, iOS, Android, and browsers
Local channels on Hulu: ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and others. Find your local channels here .
The BET Awards 2020 on Hulu: Yes, with your local CBS station.

More on Hulu with Live TV:

See all Hulu channels
What's new on Hulu this month

Hulu with Live TV

Hot Hulu Summer

Stream every moment of the BET Awards.

Hulu combines a huge back catalog of shows with a large selection of live TV channels. They can include local CBS station, so this year you can see the BET Awards with Hulu.

Sling TV - Sling Blue

The cost: $30 a month after your first month for $20
Watch Sling TV on: Apple TV, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, Chromecast, Roku, Xbox One, LG, Samsung or Vizio smart TVs, iOS, Android, Amazon Fire tablets, browsers and more
Local channels on Sling TV: NBC and Fox on Sling Blue. Find your local channels here .
The BET Awards 2020 on Sling TV: Yes, with BET.

Sling Orange

Sling is a BOP

Sling Blue will get your Sunday night On Chill with the BET Awards.

Sling is the more economical way to get Live Streaming TV channels. It costs about half the price of other services and still gets you access to BET and the BET Awards.

Fubo TV

The cost: $55 a month after a one week trial
Watch Fubo TV on: Apple TV, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, Chromecast, Roku, iOS, Android and web browsers
Local channels on Fubo TV: CBS, Fox, NBC and CW. Find your locals here .
The BET Awards 2020 on Fubo TV: Yes, as Fubo has CBS locals, BET, and BET Her available.

More on Fubo TV:

See all Fubo TV channels
Fubo TV 4K streaming

Fubo TV

We gon' be alright

Steam a great night of music and Black culture on Fubo.

Fubo TV began with a strong sports focus. They now highlight great entertainment channels like BET, along with your CBS locals too. Steam the BET Awards on Fubo.

AT&T TV Now - Plus Plan

The cost: $55 a month after a free trial
Watch AT&T TV Now on: Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Chromecast, Roku, Samsung Smart TVs, iOS, Android, and browsers
Local channels on AT&T TV Now: ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and more. Find your locals here .
The BET Awards 2020 on AT&T TV Now: Yes, with either your local CBS station or BET.

More on AT&T TV Now:

See all AT&T TV Now channels and plans
How to sign up for AT&T TV Now

AT&T TV Now

Dial up the Tempo

They put the 'T' in Tempo.

AT&T TV Now has probably the deepest channel lineup around. See all the great live performances on the BET Awards with BET and CBS on AT&T TV Now.

YouTube TV

The cost: $50 a month after a free trial
Watch YouTube TV on: Apple TV, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, Chromecast, Roku, Samsung, LG, HiSense or Vizio smart TVs, iOS, Android and browsers
Local channels on YouTube TV: ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and more. Find your locals here .
The BET Awards 2020 on YouTube TV: Yes, with your local CBS station, BET and BET Her available.

More on YouTube TV:

YouTube TV

Google gets down

YouTube makes live TV simple, with live performances that bounce.

YouTube TV is one of the easiest streaming services to understand, with a single plan, a ton of channels — including CBS, BET and BET Her as options to watch the BET Awards.

This year is sure to be filled with powerful statements. See the greatest statements from past BET Awards here.

CBS All Access

The cost: $6 a month or $10 a month for commercial free plan after a one week free trial
Watch CBS All Access on: Apple TV, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, Chromecast, Roku, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Samsung or Vizio smart TVs, iOS, Android, browsers and more
Local channels on CBS All Access: Many local CBS stations are available to stream live. Find your local CBS station here .
The BET Awards 2020 on CBS All Access: Yes, they will have the BET Awards streaming live from your local CBS station.

More on CBS All Access:

CBS All Access

All Access Collaboration

Get the BET Awards live plus All Access Originals.

CBS All Access is a one-of-a-kind streaming service. They balance originals with content from their broadcast network, plus live broadcasts including the BET Awards on Sunday.

Philo

The cost: $20 a month after a one week free trial
Watch Philo on: Apple TV, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, Roku, iOS, Android, Amazon Fire tablets, browsers and more
The BET Awards on Philo: Yes, with both BET and BET Her.

Philo is a value focused live TV streaming service, with over 50 channels for only $20 a month. With just one plan, it's simple to know exactly what you will get with Philo. They can be your key to the BET Awards 2020 with BET and BET Her on the channels list.

More on Philo:

Philo Referral Program

Philo

Pharrell to Philo

Get the BET Awards 2020 live on Philo for less than the others.

Philo offers incredible value for live TV channels with 58 channels for only $20 a month. The deep roster of big networks includes BET and BET Her, with two ways to watch the BET Awards.

Season 2 of The Twilight Zone is now available on CBS All Access

Thu, 25 Jun 2020 12:48:54 +0000

Source: CBS Jimi Simpson in Season 2 of "The Twilight Zone" on CBS All Access. (Image credit: CBS)

The wait is over. Season 2 of Jordan Peele's reboot of The Twilight Zone — think a slightly less dark Black Mirror — is now available on CBS All Access . All 10 episodes dropped at the same time, so you can get your binge on.

Peele once again serves as narrator for the anthology, which tackles all kinds of issues through all kinds of genres, through the vehicle of an hourlong thriller. Like the original 1959 series, it not-so-subtly address current social issues, but it's not overly preachy about it.

The list of stars in Season 2 is long, but distinguished.

Michelle Ang
Tim Armstrong
Morena Baccarin
Kylie Bunbury
Colman Domingo
Jenna Elfman
Ethan Embry
Sky Ferreira
Tavi Gevinson
Topher Grace
Tony Hale
Abbie Hern
Nadia Hilker
Gillian Jacobs
David Krumholtz
Greta Lee
Thomas Lennon
Sophia Macy
Natalie Martinez
Joel McHale
Brandon Jay McLaren
Chris Meloni
Gretchen Mol
Paula Newsome
Tawny Newsome
Billy Porter
Jimmi Simpson
Jurnee Smollett
Daniel Sunjata
Paul F. Tompkins
Damon Wayans Jr.

While the entire second (and first) season is available now on CBS All Access, one episode from Season 2 — Meet in the Middle — also has been made available on YouTube, as a way to whet your appetite. Here's the full rundown of episode titles and descriptions from CBS:

"Meet in the Middle": Lonely bachelor Phil (Jimmi Simpson) finds meaningful human connection when he discovers a telepathic link to a stranger named Annie (Gillian Jacobs). Their connection quickly sparks a romance, but not everything is as it seems in this seemingly idyllic fantasy.
"Downtime":** After a recent promotion to hotel manager, Michelle (Morena Baccarin) feels like she's on top of the world, but any cause for celebration is short lived when the nature of her reality is called into question. Colman Domingo and Tony Hale also guest star.
"The Who of You": Struggling actor Harry (Ethan Embry) risks everything to catch his big break, but an impulsive scheme takes a few turns no one saw coming. Daniel Sunjata and Billy Porter also guest star.
"Ovation": The music career of struggling singer Jasmine (Jurnee Smollett) takes off overnight after she witnesses a tragic incident. Jasmine begins receiving rapturous applause everywhere she goes, but she soon realizes the relentless recognition comes at a steep cost. Tawny Newsome, Sky Ferreira, Paul F. Tompkins, and Thomas Lennon also guest star.
"Among the Untrodden": Transfer student Irene's (Sophia Macy) unusual interests make her an easy target at her new all-girls boarding school until she discovers that popular classmate Madison (Abbie Hern) possesses a unique talent.
"8": At the outer reaches of the world, a team of scientists discover a new highly intelligent species, but its existence may endanger more than their research. Joel McHale, Nadia Hilker, Michelle Ang, Tim Armstrong, and Brandon Jay McLaren guest star.
"A Human Face": A grieving couple's (Chris Meloni and Jenna Elfman) move is interrupted by an otherworldly encounter, leading them to second guess what's worth leaving behind. Tavi Gevinson also guest stars.
"A Small Town": A quiet church handyman (Damon Wayans Jr.) uncovers a magical scale model imbuing him with the power to help his struggling small town. But with the sleazy Mayor Conley (David Krumholtz) taking all the credit, will Jason's good intentions be corrupted? Natalie Martinez and Paula Newsome also guest star.
"Try, Try": When the quick-witted Claudia (Kylie Bunbury) has a chance run-in with Mark (Topher Grace) at a museum, he dazzles her with his seemingly miraculous abilities. But after the true source of his charisma is revealed, the encounter takes a dark turn.
"You Might Also Like": Stay-at-home housewife Mrs. Warren (Gretchen Mol) looks forward to acquiring the widely marketed 'Egg,' an enigmatic device that promises to make everything better for everyone forever. But further investigation soon reveals the unsavory truth about this mysterious product. Greta Lee also guest stars.

CBS All Access is the streaming arm of ViacomCBS and features many of the umbrella corporations brands. (It'll be growing larger in the coming months.) It runs $5.99 a month if you don't mind ads, and $9.99 a month if you prefer to get rid of the advertising.

CBS All Access

You've entered ...

The Twilight Zone is back for Season 2!

Jordan Peele and Simon Kinberg are bringing some of the best acting talent around to the second season of The Twilight Zone, which drops June 25 on CBS All Access.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is coming to CBS All Access

Fri, 15 May 2020 15:40:34 +0000

Source: CBS All Access (Image credit: CBS All Access)

Three of your favorite characters from Star Trek: Discovery are getting their own spinoff on CBS All Access . Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has been announced for a time to be determined. It marks the third exclusive Trek series on the streaming service, alongside Discovery and Star Trek: Picard .

Strange New Worlds will follow Capt. Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), Number One (Rebecca Romijn) and Spock (Ethan Peck) in the decade before Pike * Co. ended up on the USS Enterprise.

And some familiar (and unsurprising) names also are penning this series. The premiere was written by Akiva Goldsman, and the story was by Alex Kurtzman, Jenny Lumet and Goldsman. (The latter of which also will stay an executive producer and part of the creative team on Picard.

"Fans fell in love with Anson Mount, Rebecca Romijn and Ethan Peck's portrayals of these iconic characters when they were first introduced on STAR TREK: DISCOVERY last season," Julie McNamara, Executive Vice President and Head of Programming, CBS All Access, said in a press release. "This new series will be a perfect complement to the franchise, bringing a whole new perspective and series of adventures to 'Star Trek.'"

"When we said we heard the fans' outpouring of love for Pike, Number One and Spock when they boarded STAR TREK: DISCOVERY last season, we meant it," Kurtzman also said in the press release. "These iconic characters have a deep history in 'Star Trek' canon, yet so much of their stories have yet to be told. With Akiva and Henry at the helm, the Enterprise, its crew and its fans are in for an extraordinary journey to new frontiers in the 'Star Trek' universe."

CBS All Access is expected to get a major overhaul later this year and into 2021 as it absorbs more content from the ViacomCBS universe. In addition to everything Star Trek , it's also the exclusive home to the Jordan Peele reboot of The Twilight Zone , and The Good Fight .

CBS All Access

Boldly go ...

More Trek is on the way!

CBS All Access already is the exclusive home to Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard. And it'll also be the home for the upcoming Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

CBS All Access

The Twilight Zone Season 2 drops June 25 on CBS All Access

Mon, 11 May 2020 17:50:23 +0000

Get ready to head back into The Twilight Zone . The second season of Jordan Peele and Simon Kinberg's reboot of the classic TV series will land on CBS All Access on June 25. All 10 episodes will be available for binging.

Peele is back as the host, of course, and the Season 2 cast definitely rivals Season 1. Here's who all you can expect to see:

Morena Baccarin
Kylie Bunbury
Jenna Elfman
Ethan Embry
Sky Ferreira
Tavi Gevinson
Topher Grace
Tony Hale
Gillian Jacobs
David Krumholtz
Thomas Lennon
Sophia Macy
Natalie Martinez
Joel McHale
Chris Meloni
Gretchen Mol
Paula Newsome
Billy Porter
Jimmi Simpson
Jurnee Smollett
Daniel Sunjata
Damon Wayans Jr.

If you're new to The Twilight Zone , it's an anthology that dips its toe straight into the realm of the supernatural with a hint of science fiction. The host sets the scene for each episode, which usually features some sort of twist and moral dilemma before the hour's up. Think Black Mirror , just a little less dark and depressing. (Usually.)

Here are the episode titles for Season 2 of The Twilight Zone :

Ovation
You Might Also Like
A Small Town
Try, Try
Meet In The Middle
8
Downtime
A Human Face
The Who Of You
Among The Untrodden

CBS All Access is the streaming arm of ViacomCBS. It currently costs $5.99 a month if you don't mind ads, or you can get rid of ads for $9.99 a month. It's home to exclusive shows like The Twilight Zone , The Good Fight , Star Trek: Picard and more, and it also has much of the CBS catalog, and more than 100 films from Paramount Pictures. And later this year it'll grow even further to include more of the ViacomCBS library.

CBS All Access

Where 'Star Trek: Picard' went wrong

Fri, 03 Apr 2020 16:51:16 +0000

Source: CBS (Image credit: CBS)

Warning: Spoilers ahead: If you haven't yet watched the first season of Star Trek: Picard and want to do so without having some fairly major plot points revealed, stop reading now. Otherwise, soldier on.

You've got to feel for anyone in command of Star Trek: Picard . Never mind the expectations of bringing back some of the most beloved (as well as reviled) characters in the larger Star Trek universe. Forget about the baggage any new crew will be bringing on board. Ignore the helpful suggestions from super fans and backseat bloggers. Any new Trek absolutely was going to be a big ship to steer.

The first season of Picard ended as unfulfilling as it was satisfying. It had us smiling and occasionally wiping away one of those weird things that comes from the corner of the eye as often as it caused an audible "What the fuck?!?!" (It's OK, you can curse now in the Trek universe.)

Star Trek Picard

Shields up

Trek — and Picard — like you've never seen.

Should you watch it? If you're a Trek fan, absolutely, even if it's not (yet) a new classic.

It's hard to nail down the first season of Star Trek: Picard in a single sentence because it's a bit of a mess. There's a lot of nostalgia and a little bit of intrigue. It's a fun watch, if a bit busy and superficial.

Picard struggled because it tried to cram series-sized places and problems into a season-sized box. It was trying to be Battlestar Galactica in a mere 10 episodes — from the initial Cylon attack on the Twelve Colonies to the final goodbyes on prehistoric Earth. That'd be one hell of a story for anyone to attempt to tell in just 10 hours of television, and it's definitely not possible to really get inside any of the characters in that amount of time. You could easily see how Picard could have built from one season to the next. Instead we're done with Dahj far too quickly and turn to Soji instead. Two of the most fascinating characters — Picard's homestead helpers who happen to also be badassess — get little more than a single interesting scene. So much more time could have been spent on the Artifact. Or with the Romulan settlement. Or on Freecloud. Take your pick, really.

Picard was trying to do in a single season what Battlestar Galactica did in four-plus.

Some of the episode-level pacing can be waved away because in the 24th century we'll all be using transporters to hop from France to San Francisco and back before lunch, and we're all just going to have to come to grips with that reality. (It's very much the anti- Game of Thrones in that respect.) The good news is those of us in the real world will have a few hundred years to acclimate. And most of us don't really have a feel for the vastness of space and the actual speed of warp drives. (To say nothing of transwarp conduits.)

But Picard introduced us to a very new Trek reality. Sure, it shares the lineage and pedigree of some of the best of TNG and Voyager . (And as much as I'd love to have seen Wil Wheaton back as Wesley Crusher somehow, he's perhaps best at being himself in The Ready Room aftershow .) Picard is still very much based in the larger Trek universe — literally, figurative, and spiritually.

Picard is a very un- Trek -like show. Every series before it had its arcs, but none more better than when the Borg first entered the picture two thirds of the way through the second season of The Next Generation . (And to be sure, the Borg were far more than a temporary foil of an arc.) But this was back in the late 1980s and early '90s, and the syndicated series was enjoying a couple dozen episodes a season. (In fact, Season 2 was the shortest, with a mere 22 episodes.) Picard doesn't have the luxury. Even living online as it does, the run times for Picard still fit neatly inside of an hourlong show, and a mere 10 hours of storytelling just doesn't match up with the scope of the story being told.

Plus, F-bombs.

CBS

Star Trek: Picard had plenty of good moments drowned out by the noise.

That's not to say there weren't great moments. Sir Patrick Stewart really is as good as he's ever been. Jeri Ryan's return as Annika/Seven of Nine was excellent and added as much depth as any character did in this first season. Michelle Hurd and Santiago Cabrera have a lot left to explore as Raffi Musiker and Cristobal Rios — they barely got to scratch the surface. And the many faces of Isa Briones only got better the more we saw Dahj, Soji and then Sutra. Brent Spiner slips into the old Android suit as if he never took it off. Jonathan Del Arco brought new life to an Ex-B. And if you didn't love seeing the Marina Sirtis and Jonathan Frakes together again, what the hell are you even doing here?

But ultimately Picard also suffered from the same fate of so many other series — a real lack of jeopardy. Sure, we lost a couple legacy characters, but with Season 2 having been green-lit before Season 1 even premiered, we knew Jean-Luc wasn't going anywhere. We knew he wasn't going to die in the Roman Wild Wild West, and we knew he wasn't going to die at the hand of some synth-led, Thanos-scale invading army. (And for as much as I loved seeing Riker swoop in at the last minute, c'mon. Just, c'mon. ...)

Who knows where Season 2 will lead. Maybe Picard, in his new old body (or his old new body?), will find himself leaping from world to world, striving to put right what once went wrong.

Or maybe we'll just have to hold out hope for the Zhaban & Laris Power Hour.

CBS

Star Trek: Picard is now free for everyone as the first season wraps up

Thu, 26 Mar 2020 15:26:00 +0000

Source: CBS (Image credit: CBS)

March 26 marks the end of the first season of Star Trek: Picard . Don't worry, there will be a second season. And you can catch up on ol' Jean-Luc and his new crew (as well as some of his old crew) for free through April 23.

Just one small catch. ST:P is still a CBS All Access exclusive, and that means you'll still need to sign up to watch. Use the code GIFT when you sign up and you'll unlock the first season of Picard . And of course that gets you into CBS' system, so they can hit you up for a full paying subscription afterward.

Still, we're not one to look a gift captain in the mouth. Free Star Trek is good for all mankind, and that's something we could use a little more of these days, for sure.

A photo posted by on

For those who haven't kept up with the former captain of the USS Enterprise (and now former admiral), here's the rundown, mostly spoiler-free:

The Romulan home world was about to be destroyed, along with everyone on it.
Picard led the massive mission to rescue as many as possible.
But androids on Mars — called synths — building the fleet somehow went crazy and killed tens of thousands of people, destroying the fleet and ensuring that far more Romulans would die.
Starfleet banned any sort of synthetic life — a la Cmdr. Data — and Picard retired in protest.
That is, until a mysterious girl shows up needing help, and Picard starts to put the pieces together.

And, yeah, some old friends make new appearances in this series, so it's very much worth watching even if only for the nostalgia.

Once that's over with it's up to you to make your own decision on CBS All Access, which has a number other exclusive shows (both Trek and non- Trek ), as well as much of the vast CBS catalog.

More: Check out the first pictures from the season finale of Star Trek: Picard
Also: Watch The Ready Room aftershow with Wil Wheaton

CBS All Access

Check out all of the benefits

All the Trek, and then some.

CBS All Access is home to every single Star Trek television series, from The Original Series to Picard. It also has other exclusives, and much of the CBS catalog.

Watch the 'Star Trek: Picard' aftershow — 'The Ready Room'

Thu, 26 Mar 2020 15:23:08 +0000

Source: CordCutters (Image credit: CordCutters)

The first season of Star Trek: Picard has wrapped up on CBS All Access . (No spoilers here, but it's really good.) It follows the exploits of the former captain (and now former admiral — OK, there's one spoiler) as he helps a young woman who needs help, and solves mysterious from the back of a panel van.

Haven't see it yet? OK, we'll wait. ... Back? Good.

Here's the thing, though. It's 2020, and that means you haven't have a hot new show without also having a hot new aftershow . And the aftershow for Star Trek: Picard is ... The Ready Room . (So named for the room where, ya know, captains and the like get ready for things.)

But, wait — it gets even cooler. The Ready Room is hosted by none other than Wil Wheaton, who pretty much is the perfect person to do it. (If for some insane reason you need us to spell out why, it's because he acted alongside Sir Patrick Stewart and Jean-Luc Picard in The Next Generation . Ya know, Wesley Crusher.)

So there's that.

As for where you can watch it, well, that's a little more interesting. It's available on CBS All Access, of course, and that means it's available everywhere CBS All Access is available. (Which is pretty much everywhere.) But it's also streaming for free on Facebook , Instagram TV , and on YouTube . So even if you don't watch Picard , you can still catch up on it.

But we highly suggest checking it out.

CBS All Access

Star Trek: Picard

There's only one place to watch Star Trek: Picard — CBS All Access. And after the episode each week you can treat yourself to the aftershow, hosted by Wil Wheaton.

Star Trek: Picard: Pictures, Episode Titles and more

Tue, 24 Mar 2020 16:25:26 +0000

Source: CBS (Image credit: CBS)

Updated March 24, 2020: We've got six spoiler-free pictures from the season finale! Check out the pics here .

This is it, folks. We finally get to the end of the first season of Star Trek: Picard . (And a reminder that it's already been approved for a second season.) They've made it to their destination. The question is now what . ... Things aren't quite going exactly how everyone had hoped.

And you have to wonder, with a second season on tap, just how much resolution we're going to get in this week's finale. Or are we going to get a cliffhanger for Season 2? Only one way to find out.

The season-finale of Star Trek: Picard drops on Thursday. And don't forget to watch Wil Wheaton in The Ready Room after you've seen the episode.

Here's what we know about the initial slate of episodes. (The series already has been greenlit for a second season.) Some spoilers may follow if you've yet to watch any of Picard , so tread lightly.

Episode 101: Remembrance
Episode 102: Maps and Legends
Episode 103: The End is the Beginning
Episode 104: Absolute Candor
Episode 105: Stardust City Rag
Episode 106: The Impossible Box
Episode 107: Nepenthe
Episode 108: Broken Pieces
Episode 109: Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 1
Episode 110: Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2

CBS All Access

Star Trek: Picard

The new home of Star Trek.

If you want to watch Star Trek: Picard, or Star Trek: Discovery, or the upcoming animated Star Trek: Below Decks, you'll need a subscription to CBS All Access.

Episode 101: Remembrance (Jan 23, 2020)

CBS

From the CBS description: At the end of the 24th Century, and 14 years after his retirement from Starfleet, Jean-Luc Picard (Sir Patrick Stewart) is living a quiet life on his vineyard, Chateau Picard. When he is sought out by a mysterious young woman, Dahj (Isa Briones), in need of his help, he soon realizes she may have personal connections to his own past.

Episode 102: Maps and Legends (Jan. 30, 2020)

CBS

We don't have a description for this episode yet. But we find Picard putting his crew together and visiting Star Fleet (presumably not in that order).

Episode 103: The End is the Beginning (Feb. 6, 2020)

CBS and CBS.

No description here, either. But we see the return of ex-Borg Hugh — played again by Jonathan Del Arco — from the fifth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation . And ... Dahj is back?

Episode 104: Absolute Candor (Feb. 13, 2020)

CBS

It's tough to get a read on what's going on here. But Picard is definitely on the move, putting his mission into action.

Episode 105: Stardust City Rag (Feb. 20, 2020)

CBS

The fifth episode — Stardust City Rag. Seven of Nine arrives. The gang heads to Freecloud. And ... there are more hats.

Episode 106: The Impossible Box

CBS

No silly hats this week! But we do get some of Soji as a young girl, and Raffi and Rios seem to be getting a little closer than perhaps we realized?

Episode 107: Nepenthe

CBS

Websters defines "nepenthe" — nə-ˈpen(t)-thē — thusly:

a potion used by the ancients to induce forgetfulness of pain or sorrow or something capable of causing oblivion of grief or suffering

What does that mean for this week's episode? Who knows. Obviously there's a bunch of pain in Soji's past. And probably in her future. Same for Picard, for that matter. And quite possibly for Riker and Troi, who finally make their Picard debut this week!

Episode 108: Broken Pieces

CBS

Things are getting interesting! Soji has gotten off The Artifact and is with Picard & Co. as they start the next part of the plan to figure out just where it is she comes from. Seven of Nine has returned. And ... there appear to be no silly hats this week, either.

Only two more episodes to go!

Episode 109: Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 1

CBS

Two episodes to go! And it looks like we're getting a two-fer. "Et in Arcadia Ego," Part 1 should see Picard and the gang finally make it to Soji's home. But as we saw (spoiler!) at the tail end of Episode 108, apparently it's no big deal for someone to hitch a ride through a Borg transwarp conduit — even if they sat out most of the previous episode.

From the four fresh pics we've got (so far) from the March 19 penultimate episode, Picard and Soji are in some sort of lab, but not before a little Indian Jones-style sluething, from the looks of things. This should get good.

Episode 110: Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2

CBS

Here we go! Six initial pictures from the season finale, guaranteed to not actually spoil anything.

How to stream Star Trek: The Original Series

Wed, 18 Mar 2020 13:38:30 +0000

Source: Screenshot (Image credit: Screenshot)

Boldly go: CBS All Access (From $5.99 a month)

Every single episode of the classic Trek

It's sort of hard to overstate the impact that the original Star Trek series — aka Star Trek: The Original Series has had on the past 50-something years of culture. Not just television. Not just film. Not just books. But culture .

And while TOS only lasted three seasons (though this was back in a time in which a season would span more than 10 episodes) over less than three years, there's no mistaking its influence today. Not just in science-fiction, but in countless other genres.

But when was the last time you watched the original Kirk and Spock and Bones and Scott? And, for that matter, where can you watch the original Star Trek in the 21st Century?

The answer turns out to be fairly simple. You can watch every episode of The Original Series — and every episode of every single Star Trek series, for that matter — on CBS All Access.

You've got a couple options here, too. The basic CBS All Access plan is $5.99 a month and comes with limited commercials on most of the shows. But if you bump things up to the $9.99-a-month plan you can watch with fewer commercial interruptions.

And one other improvement over the old days is that Star Trek: The Original Series has been remastered to 1080p resolution. (That's a vast improvement over the 480i resolution used for the original broadcasts.) The audio has been improved as well, moving from a monaural output to Dolby Digital 5.1. So not only will the original Trek look better than it's ever looked, it'll sound better, too. (And if you've never heard a theremin in surround sound, well, get ready.)

CBS All Access is available on pretty much any device you own, including Android and iOS devices, Apple TV, Android TV, Roku, and more.

Star Trek: The Original Series

On viewer

Every single episode, remastered

Watch the series that started it all, with all 79 episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series, remastered in 1080p resolution and Dolby Digital 5.1, only on CBS All Access.

ViacomCBS reportedly looking to build a bigger streaming service on the back of CBS All Access

Thu, 06 Feb 2020 23:01:40 +0000

Source: CordCutters Screenshot (Image credit: CordCutters Screenshot)

Get ready for another streaming service. Maybe.

ViacomCBS — that's the new company formed by the newly merged Viacom and CBS — is "considering creating ... a new streaming service that will build on CBS All Access," CNBC reported late Thursday, citing anonymous sources.

ViacomCBS hasn't announced anything of yet, and CNBC says the new service doesn't even have a name yet. But it would roll all of the company's properties into a single service.

And all those properties are fairly substantial. They include:

BET
CBS Entertainment
CBS All Access
CBS Interactive
CBS News
CBS Sports
CBS Television Studios
Comedy Central
Nickelodeon
MTV
Paramount Network
Paramount Pictures
Pluto TV
SHOWTIME
Awesomeness
Bellator
ViacomCBS Global Distribution Group
CBS Television Stations
CBS Television Distribution
Channel 5
CMT
Colors
Network 10
Pop
CBS Sports Network
Smithsonian Channel
Telefe
The CW
TV Land
VH1
Vidcon
Watch! Magazine
ViacomCBS Corporation

From CNBC :

While ViacomCBS executives haven't made any firm decisions, they are considering creating a service with advertisements that will combine CBS All Access with Viacom assets including Pluto TV, Nickelodeon, BET, MTV, Comedy Central and Paramount Pictures, said the people, who asked not to be named because the product discussions are private.

An ad-free version will also be available, and a premium version of the streaming service will include Showtime, the people said. ViacomCBS executives haven't decided on a name for the service, nor a price, though the base service will probably be less than $10 a month, two of the people said.

In addition to all the major names under the umbrella like MTV, Nickelodeon, Showtime and Paramount, there's another acquisition at play here that makes perfect sense. Pluto TV is a longtime free (as in ad-supported) streaming service that has combined various channels into a single platform. So this sort of thing isn't completely alien to the ViacomCBS family.

It's just that it doesn't yet have anyting that actually makes use of all the tentpoles. And perhaps that's going to change.

The Star Trek: Picard theme song — Making the iconic more personable

Thu, 30 Jan 2020 18:50:23 +0000

Source: CBS (Image credit: CBS)

When you think of science fiction and music, you think of John Williams and Star Wars . And you also think of the iconic themes of Star Trek . There's the unmistakable air of the theme from the original series . And the less-1960s sounding theme from Jerry Goldsmith in Star Trek: The Motion Picture , which paved the way for the more grandiose take that led Star Trek: The Next Generation for so many years.

And for what it's worth, I'm a fan of the theme from the 2009 reboot . It was perfect for what was needed at the time. We didn't have any idea what was going to happen with this reboot, and mostly with actors we'd barely heard of. (Though if you didn't catch Bruce Greenwood in John From Cincinnati a couple years earlier, you missed out.) It was full of the stature and reverance that you'd expect in a Trek franchise, and it got the job done while breathing new life into a line of films that had long since jumped the Tribble.

So what do you do when Trek becomes less about the galaxy at large and more about one man (and those around him) in particular? And it's not like Jean-Luc Picard is just any old man, though that's obviously how many see him this late in his life.

Here, composer Jeff Russo walks us through his thinking in composing the theme for Star Trek: Picard . It's certainly more (if you'll excuse the phrase in this context) down to earth. It's decidedly smaller in scale, but no less dramatic. It's less marching ahead and more taking stock.

Russo says it better, of course.

And, yeah, you heard that right at the end. Because how could you not?

New episodes of Star Trek: Picard premiere on Thursdays on CBS All Access.

CBS All Access

Star Trek: Picard

There's only one place to watch Star Trek: Picard — CBS All Access. And after the episode each week you can treat yourself to the aftershow, hosted by Wil Wheaton.

25 Star Trek episodes (and 3 movies) you should watch before watching Star Trek: Picard

James Bricknell — Thu, 30 Jan 2020 11:44:21 +0000

Source: Corcutters/James Bricknell (Image credit: Corcutters/James Bricknell)

The moment fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation have been waiting for has arrived. The first episode of CBS's new show, Star Trek: Picard, has aired, and the reviews have been extremely positive. So far, the series has given us a taste of the furthest point in time for the Star Trek universe and shows us a Picard that is rekindling a lost fire.

For those of you who are new to Star Trek, or haven't watched in a long time — after all, the last time Jean-Luc appeared on screen was in 2002 — we've put together a list of episodes and movies from across the entire spectrum of the Star Trek canon to help you with the storyline for this first season of ST: Picard.

We have styled the episodes we believe to be essential to the plot of ST: Picard in bold , the rest are background on the characters surrounding Admiral Picard, and of the Admiral himself.

Star Trek: The Original Series

Series 1, Episode 14 : Balance of Terror

Star Trek: The Next Generation

1.13 : Datalore (Data)
2.09 : The Measure of a Man (Data, Maddox)
3.10 : The Defector (Romulans)
3.16 : The Offspring (Data)
3.26 : The Best of Both Worlds, Part 1 (Picard, Borg)
4.01 : The Best of Both Worlds, Part 2 (Picard, Borg)
4.02 : Family (Picard)
4.21 : The Drumhead (Picard)
5.07 : Unification, Part 1 (Picard, Romulans)
5.08 : Unification, Part 2 (Picard, Romulans)
6.10 : The Chain of Command, Part 1 (Picard)
6.11 : The Chain of Command, Part 2 (Picard)
5.23 : I, Borg (Hugh, Borg)
5.25 : The Inner Light (Picard)
6.26 : Descent, Part 1 (Hugh, Borg)
7.01 : Descent, Part 2 (Hugh, Borg)
7.12 : The Pegasus (Picard)

Star Trek: First Contact

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

7.16 : Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges (Starfleet, Romulans)

Star Trek: Voyager

3.26 : Scorpion, Part 1 (Seven of Nine, Borg)
4.01 : Scorpion, Part 2 (Seven of Nine, Borg)
4.02 : The Gift (Seven of Nine)
5.15 : Dark Frontier, Part 1 (Seven of Nine, Borg)
5.16 : Dark Frontier, Part 2 (Seven of Nine, Borg)
7.25 : Endgame, Part 1 (Borg)
7.26 : Endgame, Part 2 (Borg)

Star Trek: Nemesis

Star Trek (2009)

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CBS All Access gives you access to your favorite CBS shows without a cable subscription. Stream Star Trek to all of your devices in HD for a low price.

A breakdown of the different shows

There are a lot of different series of Star Trek out there, and quite a few movies, as well. You don't need to watch every episode of every series, but there are plenty of episodes for you to sink your teeth into. Here's a breakdown of what the different shows are that include some story elements from Picard and how they affect the show.

Star Trek: The Original Series

There is only one episode of the OG series you need to watch, and it's the first time we meet the Romulans. It gives us some backstory into how the neutral zone occurs and why they are the Federation's ancient enemy. This is not required viewing, but it is a fun way to add depth.

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Star Trek: The Next Generation, or as fans call it: TNG, is the home of Captain Picard, and as such has most of the canon you will need to learn all about him as a character, as well as the backstory between he and Data, his android third-in-command. In TNG, we see a Federation that, thanks in no small part to Jean-Luc Picard, is honorable, ethical, and just. It seems that, as the years go by, things change and Picard loses faith in the institution he once believed in.

There are also several Borg-centric episodes where we meet Hugh, as well as, Romulan episodes that show Picard's interactions with them as a nation. The Borg episodes are going to be vital to this first season of Picard, as we have already seen in the first episode.

Star Trek: First Contact

Source: Paramount (Image credit: Paramount)

First Contact is centered around Picard, Data, and the Borg. It will give you a lot of insight into how Picard feels about Data, as well as his experiences with the Borg. Not only is a great movie, but it is also some of Sir Patrick Stewarts best acting in his role as Captain Picard.

The depth of his hatred for the Borg is visible throughout the movie, not just because of what they represent, but because of what they have done to him personally. It's excellent, and you should watch it from start to finish.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

There is just one episode to watch here, but it is a good one. This episode sets the scene for a Starfleet that is not as moral and ethical as we want them to be. Starfleet will do almost anything to get the job done — at least when no one is looking.

Star Trek: Voyager

Source: CBS (Image credit: CBS)

Though we haven't seen Seven of Nine or Hugh yet in Star Trek: Picard, we know they are coming, and they are both former Borg. Seven of Nine plays a massive role in Star Trek: Voyager and is likely to be a big part of this first season of ST: Picard. Voyager also explains what happens to the Borg and gives much more depth to the collective and how they operate.

Star Trek: Nemesis

Star Trek: Nemesis is the last movie in the main timeline that features Jean-Luc Picard and is centered around a conflict with the Romulans. The actions that the characters made in the film seem to be spurring a lot of the plot for this new series, which makes it a pivotable movie to watch.

Not only is this movie filled with Romulan plots and intrigues, but it also explains, in greater depth, how the Romulan Star Empire came into existence and how Data set the scene for this entire series we are about to watch. So yeah, this movie is pretty much pivotable to Star Trek: Picard.

Star Trek (2009)

While this movie isn't entirely necessary for Star Trek: Picard — the timelines split here, so most of the film happens in an alternate timeline — it does explain how the Romulan sun went supernova. In the movies, Spock describes how they tried to stop the sun from going boom, but failed. After that failure, Picard sets out with the fleet to help rescue the Romulans from the explosion.

Actually, I've pretty much told you everything that the movie does, so maybe you don't need to watch it. Your call.

If you had to choose one series

All of these movies and series are great, but time is running out. With Picard now airing every Thursday, you will need to get as many of these backstory episodes in as you can. If you only have time to go through one series, then it needs to be the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and the movies.

Everything you need to know about Jean-Luc Picard is writ large in every season, and his relationship with Data seems to be the linchpin of this new series. You should be able to get through all the episodes you need in short order and be ready for the next episode.

For those who like a physical copy

I love discs. Although I get a lot of my media streamed these days there is still room for big collections of DVD or Blu-Rays on my shelves. If you are like me and want a physical copy then you can grab them right here

NCC-1701: Star Trek: The Original Series Blu-Ray
NCC-1701-D: Star Trek: The Next Generation Blu-Ray
NX-74205: Star Trek Deep Space Nine DVD
NCC-74656: Star Trek: Voyager DVD
NCC-1701-E: Star Trek: The Next Generation Motion Pictures

Star Trek: The Original Series Blu-Ray

Boldly go with the original crew of the Enterprise NCC-1701 — No bloody A, B, C, or D — as they explore strange new worlds and create a universe we will adore for 50+ years.

Star Trek: The Next Generation Blu-Ray

The home of Captain Picard and some of the finest hour long episodes of television I have ever watched. This set is a must for any Picard lover.

Star Trek Deep Space Nine DVD

While The Next Generation has my favorite captain, Deep Space Nine is a better constructed show. Well worth buying the full set.

Star Trek: Voyager DVD

The starship Voyager went further then any Enterprise and broke new ground on the Borg and how to fight them. We also get introduced to Captain Janeway, my second favorite captain, and Seven of Nine, my favorite Borg.

Star Trek: The Next Generation Motion Pictures

I still maintain First Contact is the very best of all the Star Trek motion pictures. You can find it here with all The Next Generation movies.

'Star Trek: Picard' and the Grammys lead CBS All Access to a record month

Mon, 27 Jan 2020 22:01:37 +0000

Source: CBS From left: Orla Brady as Laris, Jamie McShane as Zhaban, and Sir Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard in the second episode of "Star Trek: Picard." (Image credit: CBS)

CBS today announced that January 2020 was a record month for CBS All Access. While it didn't give specific numbers, the press release says that the premiere of Star Trek: Picard and the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards — in addition to postseason NFL — led to a 115 percent increase in the number of total streams for the month. And the monthly number of subscribers was up 180 percent.

And that's with five days (and the second episode of Picard — "Maps and Legends") still to come.

CBS also said that the week of Jan. 19-25 was its second-highest for CBS All Access, "following closely behind the week of the 2019 Super Bowl," which was broadcast on CBS. (This year's game — Super Bowl LIV — is on Fox .)

Zooming in to the single-day level, CBS says Jan. 26 marked the most-streamed Grammys to date, with a new record for sign-ups on the day of the Grammys — some 80 percent higher than last year, and more than 30 percent more unique viewers.

Or, in other words, more people are streaming than ever, and more people are streaming CBS All Access than ever. Not bad.

CBS All Access

Stream away

All the best of CBS!

CBS All Access is the streaming side of the longtime broadcast network. It's got much of the back catalog and current shows, as well as a number of exclusives like Star Trek: Picard and The Twilight Zone.

"STAR TREK: PICARD," "GRAMMYS" DRIVE CBS ALL ACCESS TO NEW RECORD HIGHS

Series Premiere of "Star Trek: Picard" and Last Night's "Grammy Awards®" Drive New Record Month for Subscriber Sign-Ups

"Star Trek: Picard" Drives Largest Number of Unique Viewers and Streams Ever for a Series Premiere on CBS All Access

"The 62nd Annual Grammy Awards" Was the Most-Streamed "Grammys" to Date and Marked a New Record for Subscriber Sign-Ups on a "Grammy Awards'" Sunday

NEW YORK – Jan. 27, 2020 – CBS All Access, CBS' digital subscription video on demand and live streaming service, today announced the service has already hit a new record for subscriber sign-ups in a month, following the premiere of STAR TREK: PICARD, last night's live stream of THE 62ND ANNUAL GRAMMY AWARDS® and a great month of football. January 2020 surpassed the previous monthly record of February 2019. In addition, last week marked the second-best sign-up week ever for the service, following closely behind the week of the 2019 Super Bowl.

In addition to the record month for subscriber sign-ups, STAR TREK: PICARD's premiere also marked a new record for total streams and drove the highest volume of subscribers streaming a CBS All Access original series to date, up more than +115% and +180% over the previous record set by STAR TREK: DISCOVERY, making the series the service's most-watched premiere ever.

"We've seen tremendous continued growth in the service, and the new records we've experienced due to STAR TREK: PICARD, the GRAMMYs and a fantastic season of football are a phenomenal way to kick off what will be a fantastic year for CBS All Access," said Marc DeBevoise, Chief Digital Officer, ViacomCBS, and President and CEO, CBS Interactive. "CBS All Access continues to build upon its great mix of programming – from original series, to sports and special events – and we've strategically programmed 2020 to bring subscribers an 'always on' calendar of must-watch series and events."

Yesterday's GRAMMY Awards marked the most-streamed GRAMMYs on the service to date and a new record for subscriber sign-ups on a GRAMMY Awards' Sunday. It surpassed last year by more than +80% in new sign-ups and +30% in unique viewers, on CBS All Access.

The series premiere of STAR TREK: PICARD is currently available to stream, and new episodes of the series will be available every Thursday exclusively on CBS All Access in the United States. As previously announced, the series was renewed for a second season prior to premiere.

THE 62ND ANNUAL GRAMMY AWARDS® is also now available to stream on-demand for free on CBS.com and the CBS mobile app and available on all other connected TV platforms via CBS All Access.

How to watch CBS All Access on a Samsung TV

Essa Kidwell — Thu, 23 Jan 2020 22:30:36 +0000

NOTE: CBS All Access will become Paramount+ sometime in early 2021.

CBS All Access is an online streaming service for you to watch all your favorite shows and movies, including the new Star Trek: Picard , and the reboot of The Twilight Zone . If you own Samsung TV you can use the official CBS All Access app from the app store. There are two different ways to authenticate your app and we've got the full instructions for you here. Here's how to download and activate your account!

How to install and use the CBS All Access app on Samsung TV

Note: We can't provide a link to the Samsung TV store, but all you have to do is search for CBS in the app store and download it to get access!

Download the CBS All Access app from the app store. It's free!
Open the app on your Samsung TV.
Select Settings from the top right side of the screen.
From here you have the option to Sign in Manually or with a code .
If you want to sign in manually, input your login information and press enter.
If you want to sign in with a code open cbs.com/activate/samsungtv on your browser.
Input the code provided on the CBS All Access app to the web browser page and press confirm.

There you have it! Whether you're signing in manually or with a code, this is how you get access to your CBS All Access account on the Samsung TV.

What is CBS All Access?

CBS All Access is CBS' dedicated streaming service. You can stream your favorite CBS shows, but it also comes loaded with original shows for you to check out like The Twilight Zone and Star Trek: Discovery. Each subscription comes with the ability to watch on two screens and if you upgrade to the No Commercial subscription you can also download shows to watch in Offline Mode.

Aside from all your favorite shows and movies being helpfully categorized on their website, you can also find Live TV options with your account. Every two weeks CBS updates their Live TV schedule for you to watch shows like Big Brother as they air!

Check out the pricing and plan options .

	Limited Commercials	Commercial Free
Monthly Price	$5.99	$9.99
Annual Price	$69.99	$99.99
Offline mode	No	Yes

CBS All Access

Streaming pick

Available to watch just about anywhere

Each subscription to CBS All Access comes with the ability to watch on two screens. You can choose a plan with limited commercials no commercials while you watch classics like Star Trek: The Original Series. You can even claim a free account with CBS All Access if you already have a service with a supported cable provider.

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How to tie a Cape Knot like Jean-Luc Picard's necktie

Thu, 23 Jan 2020 20:23:41 +0000

Source: CBS All Access He may be a retired admiral, but Jean-Luc Picard can still wear a suit. (Image credit: CBS All Access)

There's something comforting about a uniform. Whether it's military, or a black turtleneck, or even just a plain white T-shirt — you get that sense of predictability. No matter what else happens, you've got your uniform. That one thing that you don't have to think about each day. Just put it on, and go about your business.

So what happens when you retire to the French countryside, with only your pit bull (No. 1!) and a couple handlers hanging around? Do you let yourself go?

Not if you're Jean-Luc Picard. In the first episode of Star Trek: Picard , the retired admiral finds himself on the wrong side of an interview about the events that led him to leave Star Fleet. (No spoilers here, but things get a little heated.) What really stood out to me, though, was the fact that dude didn't just get dressed up a little — he went with a an unconventional choice for a necktie.

CBS All Access

Star Trek: Picard

There's only one place to watch Star Trek: Picard — CBS All Access. And after the episode each week you can treat yourself to the aftershow, hosted by Wil Wheaton.

Before we get to Picard's current choice of neckwear, however, it's worth noting that this isn't the first time he's donned silk on Star Trek .

Picard has gone for the standard "I'm just an overworked, underpaid gumshue" sort of look.

And Picard can certainly pull off a white tux.

Or perhaps something a little more historical?

Anyway. Back to Picard's tie during his interview in the first episode of the new series. In Remeberance he's rocking what's known as a Cape Knot. And it's not all that difficult to tie, while adding a good bit of flair to what otherwise is an accessory that's too often just an afterthought.

Take a closer look.

Source: CBS All Access (Image credit: CBS All Access)

That's it. Some triangles, artfully done. And it's not all that difficut a tie to tie. Have a look below, and give it a shot yourself.