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    A South Park Halloween: latest episode destroys Trump over White House demolition

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    The second episode of South Park’s abrupt 28th season was meant to air this past Wednesday (the immediately preceding season 27 was just five episodes) but ended up being pushed back to Friday. This worked in the show’s favor, since tonight’s installment, titled The Woman in the Hat, is very much a Halloween special.After shuttering Tegridy Farms, the Marsh family find themselves rudderless, living out of motels while patriarch Randy looks for work (thanks to the federal government shutdown, he can’t go back to his former job as a government geologist). Out of desperation, Randy moves his family into the old folks’ home where he’s stashed his elderly father.This leads a bitter Stan Marsh to lament that “South Park sucks now … and it’s because of this political shit”. Reminiscing about simpler times when the boys used to do things together, he teams up with best friends Kyle and Kenny, as well as Kyle’s uber-stereotypical relative from New York, Cousin Kyle, to launch a new meme coin. Cousin Kyle works his “savvy Jew-jitsu” to “screw a lot of people out of their money”.Meanwhile, in Washington DC, President Trump oversees the destruction of the White House’s East Wing. Although he’s promised his lover Satan that the remodeling is for a new nursery for their forthcoming love child, he fully intends to build yet another party space for himself. Trump’s plans get derailed when he receives word from his inner circle – including a brown-nosed Pam Bondi (her face covered in literal feces, or “rectoplasm”) and a ghoulish Stephen Miller – that unknown forces are conspiring to kill his and Satan’s baby. Despite attempting to force an abortion himself, an already paranoid Trump is freaked out by the news, and he finds himself haunted by the ghostly specter of wife Melania, appearing as a ghostly figure from out of a J-horror film, a la The Ring or The Grudge.(The true murderous mastermind behind everything, JD Vance, continues to plot with co-conspirator Peter Thiel, who is keeping a demonically possessed Eric Cartman on ice.)These disparate threads converge when Cousin Kyle seeks out White House approval for the boys’ crypto dump, only to find himself part of an impromptu seance alongside Trump, Bondi, Miller, Vance, Don Jr, Kristi Noem and FCC head Brendan Carr (still suffering from injuries sustained a few episodes back). A ghostly wrath descends upon the party and threatens to expose both Trump’s Epstein ties and Vance’s power grab until Cousin Kyle, ravaged by guilt, admits that “crypto’s just a money-laundering scheme for the rich to get richer!” Cut to a screeching Fox News alert announcing that Bondi – her entire face still covered in feces – has indicted Cousin Kyle for crypto fraud. He gets sentenced to 10 years in prison, while Bondi vows to “indict anyone who says bad stuff about our amazing president”.Back home, a defeated Stan realizes that “there’s just no really going back to the way things used to be”. Kyle attempts to console him, promising that things will return to normal at some point down the line, but the dark, Shining-esque note that the episode closes on casts doubt on this.Another solid building block in what, when all is said and done, promises to be South Park’s most ambitious season (or two seasons) yet. While the show has always tackled current events, its never folded them into its long-term storytelling in such a way.At the same time, series creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker clearly recognize that the fervency of these latest seasons’ political satire is alienating some of their longtime fans, who likely feel that the show has gone too far in this direction. The self-satirizing within this episode may not placate those critics, but it puts Stone and Parker’s perspective into sharp relief: as the world has changed, so too has South Park. Per voice-of-reason Kyle, there’s no point in trying to go back to simpler times – all anyone can do is “make the most of where we are”. More

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      Jon Stewart on Trump’s taunts of an illegal third term: ‘We know he’s thought about it’

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      Late-night hosts reacted to Donald Trump’s taunts about an illegal third presidential term and his demolition of the East Wing of the White House.Jon StewartFrom his Monday night post on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart assessed the threat of Trump attempting to run for a third term as president, which is illegal under the 22nd amendment to the constitution.Asked by reporters for his thoughts on comments by Steve Bannon that he had a plan for such a campaign, Trump answered: “I would love to do it … I have my best numbers ever.”He also claimed, however: “I haven’t really thought about it.”“That’s the tell for whenever he’s asked about something that he is definitely going to do that is dubious legally, ethically or morally,” Stewart noted. “He says he hasn’t thought about it. But of course we know he’s thought about it because he already has the merch,” he added, pointing to “Trump 2028” hats that Trump has displayed in the Oval Office.“What’s interesting about Trump is he’s actually worked through the various scenarios of running for a third term that he has not thought about,” said Stewart, pointing to Trump’s further comments that “I think the people wouldn’t like that. It’s too cute.”“Too cute? No, that’s why you don’t go to Build-a-Bear as an adult,” Stewart replied. “Running as the vice-president to skirt the 22nd amendment isn’t cute. But he’s the kinda guy who’s like ‘I respect Americans too much to play games. If I’m going to run again, I’m going to rip off the constitution’s head and shit down its neck.’“Indications are very clear he’s gonna do it,” he continued, “because you don’t move into a house, knock down a wing and build a 90,000-sq-ft ballroom for the next guy.“Trump’s not a house-flipper,” he added. “He’s not Ellen. He’s in it for the long haul.”Jimmy KimmelJimmy Kimmel returned from a weeklong family trip to Ireland with renewed perspective on his home country. “In case you’re wondering what people in other countries think about what’s going on here in our country, I’ll tell you: they’re worried about us,” he said. “They’re very worried. They’re worried about us in the same way you worry about a nephew who you maybe haven’t seen for a few years and he shows up at Thanksgiving missing all of his front teeth? That kind of worry.”People in Ireland, Kimmel reported, had a lot of questions for him about Trump, including: “Why is he knocking down part of the White House?”“I don’t know. Nobody knows,” he answered. “I don’t think he even knows.“Back here at home, the unrest continues to rage out of control. Antifa terrorists are destroying government – oh wait, that’s the White House,” Kimmel joked over a photo of the demolished East Wing. “That’s what Trump did on purpose, without permission, to the White House. I told you we should’ve made him put down a security deposit!”Nevertheless, Trump’s treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, defended the move on NBC News: “I think this was a judgment call by the president. The president is a master builder. I don’t know, I assume that maybe parts of the East Wing, there could’ve been asbestos, there could’ve been mold.“There could’ve been some old Chinese food, could’ve been ghosts! We don’t know,” Kimmel joked. “All we know is that the only solution was to completely smash the whole place down. I wish the master builder would master-build in private like the rest of us do.”Seth MeyersOn Late Night, Seth Meyers also touched on the Trump 2028 hats seen on his desk during meetings with congressional Democrats.“It’s so weird to make a hat for a thing that can’t happen,” said Meyers. “Wearing a Trump 2028 hat is like wearing a hat that says Super Bowl champion New York Jets.”“So Trump put some hats on the desk during a meeting with Democrats,” he continued, “and the Democrats in attendance definitely thought it was weird.”As the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat from New York, told CNN: “it was the strangest thing ever.”“Come on, the strangest thing ever? Don’t you live Brooklyn?” Meyers laughed. “If someone Rollerbladed into a Brooklyn deli wearing a full mermaid costume, the only thing anyone would say is ‘the usual, Jeff?’“It’s not even the strangest thing Trump has done,” he continued. “Not long before that meeting, he wandered on to the roof of the White House.“Think about how insane this is: this was supposed to be a meeting about keeping the government open, making sure troops get paid and families get nutrition assistance and air traffic controllers can do their jobs,” Meyers added. “And instead the president’s main interest was trolling.“Trump can’t help himself,” he concluded. “The Maga movement cares more about trolling libs than making government function, which is why he keeps going on about this unconstitutional third term.”Stephen Colbert“It was a beautiful day here in America because Donald Trump was out of the country,” said Stephen Colbert on the Late Show. To start the week, Trump was on a “field trip” to Asia, where “he’s going to tear down the Great Wall and put up a ballroom,” Colbert quipped.The trip includes stops in Japan, South Korea and Malaysia, where Trump danced to a marching band in a way that Colbert could only describe as “shuffling and swinging his wrists like a low-battery Chuck E Cheese robot”.In Japan, the new prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, reportedly planned to gift Trump a gold golf ball. “It is so sad to see how easy it is to butter up the president of the United States,” Colbert remarked. “OK quick, Trump’s visiting, what are we going to get him this time? Gold burger? Gold TV? Have we tried spray-painting a woman gold?”Colbert also touched on the fourth week of the ongoing government shutdown. “The longer it goes, the more used to having no government we get and then the less likely it is to ever end,” he said.The shutdown is now restricting military pay. But on Friday, an anonymous donor – later identified as Timothy Mellon – gifted $130m to pay troops during the shutdown. “I know that sounds nice, I get it, but I don’t like the idea of the armed forces having a private sponsor,” Colbert said. “I don’t want our next invasion to be code-named ‘Operation Chili’s New El Diablo Triple Dipper Rib Tips: Can You Stand the Heat?’” More

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      BBC reporters cannot wear Black Lives Matter T-shirts in newsroom, says Tim Davie

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      BBC journalists cannot wear T-shirts in the newsroom supporting the anti-racist movement Black Lives Matter, the corporation’s director general has said.Tim Davie said the BBC stood against racism but it was “not appropriate for a journalist who may be covering that issue to be campaigning in that way.“You cannot have any assumption about where people are politically. You leave it at the door, and your religion is journalism in the BBC. And I tell you: the problem I’ve got is people react quite chemically to that.“So you can’t come into the newsroom with a Black Lives Matter T-shirt on. We stand absolutely firmly against racism in any form.“I find some of the hatred in society at the moment utterly abhorrent, personally, really upsetting, but that is a campaign that has politicised objectives. Therefore, it is not appropriate for a journalist who may be covering that issue to be campaigning in that way.“And, for some people joining the BBC, that is a very difficult thing to accept. And it has not been an easy thing to get done this, and we wrestle with it every day.”Speaking about diversity and impartiality at the BBC at the Cheltenham literature festival, Davie also drew a parallel with impartiality when reporting on mainstream political campaigning.“I feel very, very strongly that if you walk into the BBC newsroom, you cannot be holding a Kamala Harris mug when you come to the election – no way, that’s not even acceptable,” he said.The BBC director general also said his “number one priority” was “trying to navigate a course where you are impartial” and that required “elements of diversity”, adding that “socioeconomic diversity” was something that “hadn’t been talked about enough”.He added: “It is absolutely a big battle, and I’m getting questions: ‘Why are you giving a voice to Reform?’, ‘Why are you doing this?’ We’re not giving a voice, we’re covering – covering what people are interested in, covering the reality of what people feel.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDavie was also asked whether he felt safe when he had been shouted at and people had come into his personal space.He said: “It’s not for the faint-hearted; these jobs in public life now, I mean, they are really quite demanding. I’m no great Californian hippy, but you have to look after yourself, you really have to.” More

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      A rightwing late-night show may have bombed – but the funding behind it is no laughing matter

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      A group of conservative donors spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop a rightwing version of late-night talkshows like the Tonight Show and the Late Show, leaked documents reveal, in a further indication of the right’s ongoing efforts to overhaul American culture.News of the effort to pump conservative viewpoints into the mainstream comes as entertainment shows and the media at large are under severe threat in the US. In September, Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show was taken off the air, under pressure from the Trump administration, after Kimmel’s comments after the killing of Charlie Kirk, while Donald Trump has launched multiple lawsuits against TV networks and news organizations.Four pilot episodes, each of which has been watched by the Guardian, were made of the rightwing chatshow. It was promoted by the Ziklag group, a secretive Christian nationalist organization, which aims to reshape culture to match its version of Christianity. In an email in 2022, Ziklag – which ProPublica reported spent $12m to elect Trump last year – urged its members to stump up money for the project, called the Talk Show With Eric Metaxas.“For too long, the late-night talkers on network tv have filled the airwaves with progressive rants and outright mockery of anyone who espouses traditional American values,” the Ziklag email read.The Talk Show With Eric Metaxas, Ziklag wrote, will “change that forever”. The email said the show needed $400,000 to $500,000 to film five pilot episodes, “which will be presented to digital distributors, networks and tv ownership groups”.The Guardian sat through nearly four hours of the Talk Show, and found it to be an almost exact copy of existing late-night shows, just worse: with hack jokes about tired issues and has-been, conservative guests. The show was never picked up, presumably to the chagrin of Ziklag and its investors, who had lofty expectations.Your browser doesn’t support HTML5 video. Here is a link to the video instead.“Spoiler alert! The secular elites who currently reign over late-night tv are about to find out the joke’s on them!” Ziklag’s pitch email read. It lauded Metaxas, a conservative radio host and author who was an eager proponent of the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, claiming: “His comedic bent has gone largely unnoticed until now that is…”Unfortunately, across the four pilots, Metaxas’s comedic bent was noticeable only by its absence.“Big news in the world of show business,” Metaxas began the first episode. “Harrison Ford will be returning for a fifth Indiana Jones movie. Yeah. In this one Harrison will find an ancient artifact … by looking in the mirror.”There were a few titters from the audience, and scattered applause. Metaxas, appearing nervous, continued with the one-liners:“Barbie’s longtime companion, Ken, just turned 61 years old. Yeah. And he said the perfect gift for his birthday would be to finally get a prostate.”This time there were some audible groans. Metaxas stuck at it.“In India, doctors removed 526 teeth from a seven-year-old boy’s mouth,” he chortled. “The boy is recovering nicely. However, the Tooth Fairy declared bankruptcy.”Ziklag claimed the show would welcome “guests who are routinely shadow banned on other talk shows”, and quoted Metaxas as saying: “It’s kind of like Stalin has air-brushed these people out of the culture.”But the common theme among the guests was that they had been naturally phased out of existing talkshows due to their irrelevance.The first episode featured an exclusive interview with Carrot Top, the 60-year-old prop comedian. Carrot Top showed Metaxas some of his props, including a bottle of Bud Light that had a torch in the bottom of it and a dinner plate that had a hole in it. Carrot Top managed to say absolutely nothing of interest during the three-minute tête-à-tête, before Metaxas cut back to the studio.“Tonight’s show is loaded with talent,” Metaxas announced to the live audience. The guests included a TikToker – “for our generation, Tic Tac was a breath mint”, Metaxas quipped – Tammy Pescatelli, a comedian who has been absent from the limelight for at least a decade; and Danny Bonaduce, best known for his work on the 1970s sitcom the Partridge Family.Throughout the episodes – as Metaxas sang a song with a terrified-looking Victoria Jackson, a self-described conservative Christian who was a cast member on Saturday Night Live from 1986 to 1992 and has claimed Barack Obama is an “Islamic terrorist” – and as he continued with awful jokes about some scientists who had developed a robot that could build furniture but “cannot promise that the robot won’t swear”, it was hard to see what the point of this was.In its email, Ziklag said it was offering the opportunity to invest as part of the “Media Mountain”, a reference to the Seven Mountain Mandate, a theology popular among the Christian right. The theology proposes that Christians should seek to take over seven spheres of influence in public life: religion, the government, the media, education, culture, entertainment and business.Chris Himes, who produced the Talk Show, said the show was not intended to be a “rightwing late-night show”. The aim, Himes said, was “to create a broad, throwback late-night program for the entire country – not just one side”.“These are not partisan or ‘right-wing’ shows. Think Letterman or Dick Cavett in tone: humor first, with no space for snark or ‘clapter’,” he said in an email.“Sadly, much of late night over the past decade has shifted from being genuinely funny to becoming a vehicle for tribal signaling – even occasionally straying into messaging far beyond comedy. We believe the country deserves something better.”Himes added: “To be clear, a ‘right-wing’ late-night show would be a terrible idea. What we’re building is something more essential: a genuinely funny, unifying alternative.”In the pilot episodes, there were guests who were known for rightwing politics, but Metaxas largely didn’t ask them about those politics. In episode three, he seemed to decide he needed to at least say a bit of something to satisfy the rightwing donors funding this enterprise, but that came in the form of going over well-trodden ground about liberals.“Botanists have discovered a meat-eating plant in Canada,” Metaxas said in his intro. “Researchers determined that the plant started eating meat because it just got tired of explaining its vegan lifestyle.”He continued: “Detroit’s sanitation workers – I just read this – they’re threatening to go on strike. Detroit’s mayor said not to worry, because Detroit will continue to look and smell exactly the same.”Another quip ventured into current affairs: “Gas costs a fortune. It’s insane how much it costs. And who would have thought that the best deal at the Shell station would ever be the $3 microwave burrito?”Ziklag’s pitch to investors had promised big-name guests. It didn’t deliver apart from an interview – heavily touted by Metaxas – with film-maker Ron Howard. The interview turned out to be from a press junket, where directors or actors sit in a room for eight hours and basically anyone with a press pass can schedule time to question them.It’s unlikely Howard knew he was appearing on what Ziklag described as a “faith-friendly, late night alternative”, but that’s perhaps irrelevant, given networks clearly passed on what is a confused, drab copy of shows that are actually successful.But while Metaxas’s effort to shoehorn a conservative show into the mainstream may have been lamentable, the fact that wealthy rightwingers are attempting to do so should be cause for concern, given the threat television is under from Trump.Earlier this year, CBS scrapped the Late Show with Stephen Colbert – Colbert had repeatedly mocked Trump – weeks after CBS’s parent company settled a lawsuit with Trump. Trump has also called for late-night show hosts Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, who have both criticized the president, to be fired, while the president has overseen NPR and PBS being stripped of funding, having decried “biased media”.The Talk Show was a terrible product, memorable only for dreadful humor and snooze-inducing interviews. In the current climate, however, it serves as a reminder that the right wing is waging a well-funded war on the media that is unlikely to end soon. More

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      ‘No reason not to be all in’: is Saturday Night Live ready to meet a major political moment?

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      Paul Simon sang The Boxer. New York mayor Rudy Giuliani appeared with firefighters. When producer Lorne Michaels asked: “Can we be funny?”, Giuliani replied: “Why start now?”It was September 2001 and, just 18 days after the worst terrorist attack in US history, Saturday Night Live’s blend of satire, silliness and live music was back on the air. “In bad times, people turn to the show,” Michaels told Rolling Stone magazine 20 years later.SNL turns 50 this month and must once again try to meet the moment. This time, the crisis is not external but taking place in late-night TV comedy itself. In recent weeks, the genre has become the canary in the coal mine of US democracy.Over the summer, CBS announced the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, ostensibly for financial reasons, though notably Colbert is a longtime Trump critic and CBS owner Paramount had been seeking government approval of an $8bn merger with Skydance.On 17 September, ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s show over comments he made after the assassination of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk. Hours before the suspension, the Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, warned that local broadcasters who aired Kimmel could face fines or loss of licences and said: “It’s time for them to step up.”The move prompted an outcry over freedom of speech. ABC parent Disney faced pressure from Kimmel’s fans, some of whom cancelled subscriptions to the company’s streaming services Disney+ and Hulu. Kimmel returned to the air six days later and mocked Trump: “He tried his best to cancel me and instead he forced millions of people to watch this show.”Now the spotlight shifts from CBS and ABC to America’s other major network: NBC. When SNL returns on 4 October, Bad Bunny will host with Doja Cat as the musical guest and five new featured players following several cast departures. But no moment will matter more than the “cold open” in how it deals with the current climate.View image in fullscreen“This would be one of the biggest, most important cold openings in the 50-year history of the show,” says Stephen Farnsworth, a co-author of Late Night With Trump: Political Humor and the American Presidency. “But in the past, when Saturday Night Live has faced a major challenge, like they did in the wake of 9/11, they’ve risen to the occasion.”SNL’s mockery of Trump has at times earned the wrath of his supporters and the president himself, but Farnsworth advised against pulling punches, saying: “Saturday Night Live will face charges that it isn’t going far enough or that it went too far pretty much no matter what they do, so there’s no reason not to be all in.”Farnsworth, the director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, adds: “It’s striking that a man who desires the spotlight as much as the president does, who wants to be a public figure as badly as he has over the years, doesn’t understand that criticism is part of the package that comes with power.”Launched a year after the Watergate scandal toppled Richard Nixon, SNL features sketches and live musical performances. But it is also known for covering politics and featuring politicians. The weekend update segment provides ongoing commentary while cast members often parody presidents, candidates and other figures.The most famous include Gerald Ford (Chevy Chase), George HW Bush (Dana Carvey), Bill Clinton (Darrell Hammond), George W Bush (Will Ferrell), Sarah Palin (Tina Fey), Donald Trump (Alec Baldwin) and Joe Biden (various cast and guest actors). Trump is now portrayed with aplomb by James Austin Johnson.Susan Morrison, author of Lorne, a biography of Michaels, recalls: “When Alec Baldwin was doing him, Trump was furiously tweeting right about SNL: it wasn’t funny, FCC should investigate, Lorne was over. Watching Alec Baldwin do his thing, it almost felt like bear baiting. It was so fun to watch the back and forth, and don’t anticipate that they’re going to pull back.”Politicians have also appeared as hosts or in cameos. Al Gore, John McCain, Jesse Jackson and Sarah Palin have all featured. Trump hosted in 2004 and, more controversially, in 2015 during his presidential run. Hillary Clinton appeared multiple times, including alongside her impersonator, Kate McKinnon, and Kamala Harris took part before last year’s election.The show picked up 12 Emmys recently for its 50th season and anniversary programming, including an award for outstanding variety special. Saturday’s episode will be scrutinised closely for how it deals with Trump’s attack on comedy, free expression and democracy – and whether it can make a serious point in a funny, unsanctimonious way.View image in fullscreenMorrison continues: “Lorne and his very smart writers will come up with some clever but on-the-nose way of dealing with this. The thing that it’s important to remember about Lorne is he’s been doing this for so many decades. He’s outlasted so many slates of executives. He’s a survivor. As Conan [O’Brien] told me, in the Game of Thrones of show business, Lorne would be the last man standing.“That isn’t to say that he’s going to cave but he will figure out a way to address this and stay on the air. I also don’t think the people at NBC or Comcast or the FCC are going to mess with him. He’s too much of a statesman in the TV business. But he’s going to come up with a way of dealing with it and addressing it and he’ll be funny about it.”Conservatives have long accused SNL of bias, arguing that the show disproportionately lampoons right-leaning figures while going easier on Democrats. Former head writer Tina Fey openly acknowledged a “liberal bias” in a 2003 interview, fueling the narrative. But Michaels insists that it is nonpartisan and willing to mock both sides.Morrison adds: “It isn’t to say he would ever be an apologist for the Trump regime; nobody could have expected that politics would jump the shark in quite this way. But he certainly would not hesitate to make fun of Democrats even now if they merit it and that’s part of it.“To quote Jim Downey, one of the show’s longtime writers, you never want the show to seem like it’s the comedy division of the DNC [Democratic National Committee]. Lorne is committed to that and that will help here as well.”David Litt, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama dubbed “the comic muse for the president” for his work on White House Correspondents’ Association dinner monologues, acknowledges that he has been on the receiving end.“I was in the audience at SNL when their cold open was about the Obamacare website crashing,” he said. “I was working at the White House at the time and I remember thinking, I’m not having fun. Everyone else in the audience seemed be having a better time than I was.”Writing comic material under time pressure is tough, Litt says, and that will be the SNL team’s top priority for the new season. He said: “This is a show that rises to a pretty intense challenge every week and I assume they’re going to be thinking about rising to the exact same challenge, which is, how do we turn around a show that is good and funny because that’s hard enough without having the president of the United States breathing down your neck.“That’s part of what infuriates Trump so much about comedians. It’s not that they’re making fun of him, it’s that the audience is laughing. It’s connecting. If Kimmel or Colbert or weekend update was making a joke about Trump and the audience was rejecting that joke, I don’t think Trump would care. It’s the fact that it exposes him as still, despite everything, a fundamentally laughable person, or at least a human person.”Litt, whose new book, It’s Only Drowning, is about his unlikely friendship with a Joe Rogan fan, adds: “I can’t imagine that people are going to be sitting around a writers’ room saying, how do we address this as though they were journalists. I think they’re saying, how do we do funny stuff? Because doing funny stuff is really hard.”SNL has already used up one potential Trump gag. Its cold open on 9 November last year, the first weekend after Trump won the presidential election, was entitled SNL for Trump and had cast members sarcastically trying to get on Trump’s good side, singing: “We will, whatever you want.” The sketch was a satirical take on the public figures and institutions that had shifted their stances or expressed deference to Trump for political or personal gain.Bill Carter, author of the book The Late Shift and executive producer of the CNN docuseries The Story of Late Night, says: “The gauntlet has been thrown now and, if they don’t do something, they will disappoint people. People will be expecting their take and their take won’t be the most obvious one. It’ll be some creative way of approaching it. They have a very good Trump right now so they ought to use him.”Trump has frequently railed against SNL over the years and is likely to be watching its return with fingers poised for a hot take on the cold open. But like Morrison, Carter thinks it unlikely that SNL will suffer the same fate as Colbert or Kimmel.“Unlike those shows, Trump cannot say this has terrible ratings and does not make money,” he says. “Saturday Night Live does not have terrible ratings. In fact, with the right host, it will often be among the most watched shows on television. And it has the best demographics on any show on television except for sports.“The idea that they would abandon that show is nuts, because if they did, some streaming service would say, we’ll put on Saturday Night Live. It’s 50 years that show’s been on. It’s had an audience all those times of a new generation of viewers. It continues to do that so it’s a tremendously valuable franchise. NBC is not walking away from that show. I don’t care what pressure they put on it.” More

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      Trump FCC chair to reportedly testify to Senate panel after Kimmel suspension

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      Brendan Carr, the pro-Trump chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), has agreed to testify before the Senate commerce committee following Disney’s decision to take talkshow host Jimmy Kimmel off air temporarily, according to multiple reports.Carr agreed to testify after speaking to committee chair Ted Cruz, Reuters reported, citing a source familiar with the matter on Wednesday, adding the date of the hearing has not been set but was expected after November. Semafor was the first to report on the hearing.Carr, Disney, the White House and an FCC spokesperson did not immediately respond to requests for comment.On 17 September, ABC announced it would “indefinitely” suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s show, hours after Carr had appeared on a conservative podcast and appeared to pressure network affiliates to stop airing the show over comments by Kimmel on the death of the far-right pundit Charlie Kirk.“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr had said, explaining that he wanted broadcasters to “take action” on Kimmel.Nexstar and Sinclair, two major carriers of ABC programming, quickly announced plans to pull Kimmel’s show, seemingly forcing ABC’s hand.Ultimately, ABC decided to bring Kimmel back the following week, and Nexstar and Sinclair followed suit. The network’s decision reportedly followed a wave of cancellations of streaming service Disney+.The show returned on 23 September and hit a 10-year ratings high among adult viewers.Carr’s comments drew criticism from across the aisle. Cruz said some of Carr’s remarks were “dangerous as hell” and compared him to a “mafioso”.During a news conference last week, Carr was asked whether he regrets the phrasing he used when talking about Kimmel, Carr claimed “the full words that I said, the full context of the interview”, were very clear. More

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      FCC chair claims he never threatened TV networks over Jimmy Kimmel

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      Brendan Carr, the tough-talking, pro-Trump chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), claimed on Tuesday that Democrats and the media had “misrepresented” critical comments he made about Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talkshow.Television conglomerates including Nexstar and Sinclair opted to pull the show for “business” reasons, Carr argued, not because of anything he said.“There was no threat made or suggested that if Jimmy Kimmel didn’t get fired, that someone was going to lose their license,” Carr said during a press conference that followed the FCC’s monthly meeting.On 17 September, ABC announced it would “indefinitely” pre-empt Jimmy Kimmel Live!, hours after Carr had appeared on a conservative podcast and appeared to pressure network affiliates to stop airing the show over comments by Kimmel on the death of the far-right pundit Charlie Kirk.“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr had said, explaining that he wanted broadcasters to “take action” on Kimmel.Nexstar and Sinclair, two major carriers of ABC programming, quickly announced plans to pull Kimmel’s show, seemingly forcing ABC’s hand.Ultimately, ABC decided to bring Kimmel back the following week, and both Nexstar and Sinclair followed suit. The network’s decision reportedly followed a wave of cancellations of Disney’s streaming service Disney+.Carr’s comments drew criticism from across the aisle. Ted Cruz, the Republican Texas senator, said some of Carr’s remarks were “dangerous as hell”.Asked at a press conference on Tuesday whether he regrets the phrasing he used when talking about Kimmel, Carr claimed “the full words that I said, the full context of the interview”, were very clear.“For a lot of Democrats, this has really been about distortion and projection,” he added. He then accused Senate Democrats of hypocrisy, referring to calls in 2018 for the FCC to review Sinclair’s “fitness to retain its existing broadcast licenses” over a controversial “must-run” video that its stations were forced to broadcast.“The very same Democrats that are saying that I said something that I didn’t are the same ones that engaged in that exact same type of conduct that they claim I did,” he said.With Kimmel now back on air, Carr suggested the entire episode was actually a win for local broadcasters – and a necessary check on the control of New York- and Hollywood-based broadcasters.“What we saw over the last two weeks was, probably for the first time in maybe 20 or 30 years, local TV stations – the actual licensed entities that are tied to specific communities – pushing back and saying that they did not want to run particular national programs,” he said. “They felt like they could stand up for themselves. I think it’s a good thing. And I hope that we can see potentially more of that going ahead.”Asked by the Guardian whether he was disappointed that Nexstar and Sinclair chose to bring back Kimmel’s show, Carr said he did not expect the pre-emption to last “for any sort of real sustained period of time” due to the economic pressures the companies were facing. “These were decisions ultimately were for them to make,” he said.During the meeting, Anna M Gomez, the lone Democrat on the commission, called out Carr’s comments – as he sat a few feet away. “This FCC threatened to go after [ABC], seizing on a late night comedian’s comments as a pretext to punish speech it disliked,” she said. “That led to a new low of corporate capitulation that put the foundation of the first amendment in danger.”While Gomez has been very critical of Carr’s leadership, she has largely refrained from attacking him personally, and has said that she maintains a good working relationship with him.While the FCC meets monthly, Tuesday’s gathering took on added significance and excitement. Outside the FCC building, a mobile billboard truck – organized by the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders – carried the message: “Government can’t control media content.”Inside, the meeting room was unusually packed. Several protesters, organized by the progressive political action organization Our Revolution, wore T-shirts that said: “Federal Censorship Commission”. A few stood up during the meeting and yelled: “Fire Carr, the censorship czar,” and were quickly removed. One sign played on Carr’s tough talk to television networks, telling the FCC commissioner: “Brendan, We Can Do This the Easy Way (You Quit) or the Hard Way (You’re Fired).”When told by the Guardian that the “lengthy” (in Carr’s words) agenda for the monthly FCC meeting included seven wonky action items, one protester expressed frustration that they hadn’t eaten breakfast before arriving early. The man left before the meeting concluded. More

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      We Americans love remaking British TV. Must the UK remake our odious politicians? | Dave Schilling

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      I’ve always wanted to visit the UK. This might sound absurd to you, considering I’m from California – home of sunshine, half-naked bodies and the studio where they film Jeopardy. What could possibly pull me to the cold, damp, gray shores of England? The oppressively brown food? The dodgy colonialist history? Tesco? No, it was the glowing box that vibrated with whatever passed for culture in my small town: television.British TV was an obsession in my house, via those purveyors of affordable, exotic entertainment at PBS. We’d get classy fare through the Masterpiece Theatre series, but also more downmarket comedies like Are You Being Served? (a variety of sexually obsessed retail clerks trip over each other) or Keeping Up Appearances (lower-middle-class oafs desperately wish they were posh). I had no concept of what people were saying in their thick accents or most of the jokes meant, especially the double entendres.But even the dumb shows seemed smart. I learned more about European history from Rowan Atkinson, Richard Curtis and Ben Elton’s Blackadder series than I ever did in school. British television, especially the comedies, assumed a certain futility to life. It probably won’t get better. In fact, it might get worse. Often. This is a tradition that carried over to other classic sitcoms such as I’m Alan Partridge and The Office, which I discovered in college. If it’s a small-town crime drama or a half-hour comedy, British TV is usually going to express something close to misery by the time the credits roll. In America’s land of good cheer and opportunity, this was like a salve of reality.My obsession with all things British (even the food) carried on into adulthood, but despite that abiding interest, I had never visited the UK until this year. I seemed to have picked the worst year imaginable. Or maybe the best. The country is in the midst of a political upheaval. Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform party is on the march, commanding the polls. Obviously, the first thing I did when I arrived was turn on the television to see how it compared to American media, which feels at all times like Jurassic Park after the electricity went out.In the US, we are obsessed with remaking British TV shows – The Office, Steptoe and Son, Absolutely Fabulous. But the British would rather remake our politicians. They’re just not as good at it.Farage is the English Trump, but only in the sense that he is dangerously unqualified for leadership and therefore believes he is actually qualified. He recently claimed that migrants were “eating swans” in parks. I can imagine a TV executive angrily shaking their fist at the ham-handed adaptation of Trump’s infamous dog comment. “Who would actually eat a swan? You don’t even get it!”Nigel Farage is just not the showman that Trump is, any more than Doctor Who is as flashy as Star Wars or Star Trek. British news is less single-mindedly fixated on him than we are with Trump. Because Farage is so tacky and second rate, it’s been easier for the UK media to shoo him away like a fly up until now. When I was in London this summer, it was the opposite of the wall-to-wall Trumpathon that is America. Maybe that’s why I found ITV’s Good Morning Britain so relaxing to watch. The noticeable lack of screaming or partisan rancor. The reassuring presence of former Labour politician and ex-Strictly Come Dancing competitor Ed Balls. Whatever it is, I came to love my daily dose of dry toast in TV form. One recent GMB episode featured a segment on an app designed to identify and catalog butterflies around the UK. It was sweet, until the presenter reminded the audience that this is important because butterflies are dying off due to the climate crisis. Even cheerful news segments need to remind you that life is a series of tiny hells.I did a few things besides watch TV, though. The Tate Modern is easily the best contemporary art museum I’ve ever been to. I think reading a newspaper in a pub at 11am is as civilized as life gets. I can’t tell if Waitrose is posh or a Trader Joe’s equivalent, but they had everything I needed, plus delicious cheeses I’ve never heard of. The Barbican Estate, where I stayed, is an architectural marvel that could never exist in a place like California. It’s purposefully difficult to get around, has an art gallery and a movie theater, and people crush bottles of wine openly in the courtyard long past bedtime. I found that people took tube etiquette so seriously that I wondered if not giving up your seat for an elderly person was now punishable by stoning. I’m sure there’s plenty of horrendous behavior in London, but I was so eager to enjoy myself that I didn’t even notice. And almost no one I met in London asked me, the dumb American, about Donald Trump. Almost.My one conversation about Trump took place in Whitechapel, a neighborhood known for a series of murders attributed to Jack the Ripper that is now home to a significant immigrant population – particularly people from Bangladesh. A sign was added to the Whitechapel tube station in Bengali, which upset Elon Musk (who is definitely not British) and assorted rightwing politicians obsessed with fighting multiculturalism. I was eager to have a proper British curry experience before flying back to LA and was given a recommendation for a restaurant in Whitechapel by my friend and co-creator of The Inbetweeners, Iain Morris (who is definitely British). I was asked very specifically not to name the restaurant, lest it become discovered by more brutish American tourists like myself. That’s what Dishoom is for, after all.After settling the bill for my meal, the waiter/proprietor asked me what I thought of “him.” The movie had not come out yet, so I realized “him” meant Trump. I said I was generally not a fan, that he would not be fond of a place like the restaurant we were in, and that I definitely did not vote for him. He chuckled, as though I had read him a joke written on a popsicle stick. “Every time an American comes in here and I ask if they voted for him, they say no,” he responded. I surmised that that’s because the people who did vote for him aren’t stopping into a curry house in Whitechapel on their UK vacation.The British and American political dilemmas can sometimes look eerily similar. Trump and Farage have both stuck around far longer than anyone expected. Anti-immigrant and anti-trans sentiment animate the right wings of both nations. The “unite the kingdom” rally feels like a hyper-charged Maga gathering. But, like the quality of our respective cheeses, we couldn’t be more different. Nihilism and a crazed impulse to start over from scratch animates both of our cultural schisms, but while in the US the face of populism is the frozen scowl of Trump, in Britain, it’s the vacuous grin of Farage. A recent feature in the New Yorker described the mood of the Reform party conference as jubilant. Farage is always smiling, which is either comforting to his sympathizers or terrifying for his detractors. Regardless, Reform is capturing Britain’s imagination precisely because of that smile.Labour and the Tories bumble around desperate to prove that they are the most serious, when what the nation seems to want is someone who admits that things aren’t great, but that the country (and the world) have a future. The future Reform offers is a terrifying one that looks a lot more like the worst aspects of modern America, but it’s a vision nonetheless. What afflicts both the US and the UK is a feeling of emptiness, of futility, and a growing realization that we’re all stuck. Technology, grand economic forces we don’t understand, and a dwindling social safety net have left the average citizen in a state of abandonment and isolation. The Democratic party and the Labour party just want things to go back to a mythical state of normalcy, hopelessly nostalgic and out of touch. This has pushed the dreamers, the malcontents and the futurists to the fringes. Maga and Reform seem nostalgic, but what they offer is not a return to anything, but a radical reshaping and perversion of the system that keeps our society functioning.When faced with the grim reality of British TV every day on my trip, I yearned for a bit of good ol’ Yankee razzle-dazzle – a dose of mindless optimism. I think maybe the most potent similarity between our two countries is that we could both use some of that right now.

      Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist More

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      Kimmel controversy highlights ‘wildly dangerous’ consolidation of TV broadcasting

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      If the controversy behind Jimmy Kimmel’s show is a series of dominoes that fell one after the other, from the late-night host making his comments on Charlie Kirk’s killing to ABC halting production of his show, the first domino arguably fell this summer.Months before Kimmel was briefly pulled off the air, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) quietly announced it was seeking to make a major change to broadcasting rules.The change would primarily affect three companies that own more local TV stations than any other company: Sinclair Broadcasting, Nexstar Media Group and Gray Television Inc. All three companies own the maximum number of local TV stations that is legally permitted for a single company to own.That national cap is set by FCC rules and says a single company can’t reach more than 39% of the total national television audience.In June, the FCC announced that it was seeking public comment to raise the cap, which would allow the companies to acquire more local TV stations. In a filing to the FCC, media watchdog Free Press said that changing the national cap would be “wildly dangerous”.“Handing even more media control to a handful of conglomerates and billionaires already so dominant in the space is a wildly dangerous idea, no matter who holds the presidency,” the group said.But by August, Nexstar announced its intention to acquire its broadcast rival Tegna for $6.2bn.“The initiatives being pursued by the Trump administration offer local broadcasters the opportunity to expand reach, level the playing field, and compete more effectively with the big tech and legacy big media companies that have unchecked reach and vast financial resources,” Nexstar’s chief executive officer, Perry Sook, said at the time.Nexstar – already the largest operator of local television stations – oversees more than 200 owned and partner stations in 116 markets across the US. Tegna owns 64 news stations across 51 markets. The deal would be illegal under current FCC rules, as it would put Nexstar over the national cap.Immediately after Kimmel was taken off the air, multiple reports have noted that Donald Trump’s appointed FCC chair, Brendan Carr, blatantly threatened the companies that air Kimmel’s show.“When you see stuff like this, I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said on a podcast. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”Media experts called the move unprecedented.“The FCC is explicitly threatening companies that, if they don’t change their content in some way, they would suffer regulatory consequences,” said Gregory J Martin, a political economy professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business who has researched the effect that media conglomeration has had on local TV news. “That just didn’t really happen before.”Soon after, Nexstar announced it would preempt Kimmel’s show. As a local TV station conglomerate, Nexstar partners with the “big four” networks – ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC – to run their content on its stations. This is where the term “affiliate” comes from. If a station is, for example, an ABC affiliate, that means that the TV station owner has partnered with ABC to run shows like Kimmel’s.That’s why Nexstar’s announcement was such a big deal. When it comes to Kimmel being broadcast on TV, ABC relies on these local TV station owners to get him on the air.After Nexstar’s announcement, ABC announced that it was indefinitely halting the production of Kimmel’s show.The backlash that ensued led to ABC announcing it would continue producing Kimmel’s show. But Nexstar and its competitor, Sinclair Broadcasting, both said they will continue to preempt the show, meaning 25% of TV viewers won’t be getting Kimmel’s show on TV.“Nexstar is continuing to evaluate the status of Jimmy Kimmel Live! on our ABC-affiliated local television stations, and the show will be preempted while we do so,” Nexstar said in a statement. “We are engaged in productive discussion with executives at the Walt Disney Company, with a focus on ensuring the program reflects and respects the diverse interests of the communities we serve.”To media watchdogs, the conflict highlights the size of the media conglomerates such as Nexstar, which critics argue have become too large and too powerful.“This has been a problem at the FCC for quite some time. We’ve been concerned for decades about what happens when you allow media companies to become too consolidated and too influential,” said Timothy Karr, the senior director of strategy and communications at Free Press.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“They become beholden to political power because they have so many entanglements with government agencies regarding merger approvals [and] policy changes that they … soft-pedal their reporting when it comes to criticism of those in power,” he added.Historians often point to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which dramatically relaxed regulations limiting the number of TV and radio stations a single company could own. The law set the stage for media companies such as Nexstar and Sinclair to exist and own a massive number of local TV stations.Over the past few years, political experts have expressed concern that this consolidation has been negatively affecting the quality of local television news. Though the number of local TV news viewers has been declining, millions of Americans still rely on their local TV news. And the funding for these local TV broadcasts comes from the station owners such as Sinclair and Nexstar.The Kimmel affair is not the first time that the station owners have shown their political colors. In 2018, during Trump’s first term, Sinclair directed its local news anchors to read identical scripts criticizing “fake” news stories and “the troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news stories plaguing our country”.Trump defended the decision: “So funny to watch Fake News Networks, among the most dishonest groups of people I have ever dealt with, criticize Sinclair Broadcasting for being biased. Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke,” he wrote on what was then Twitter.When criticizing Kimmel, Carr said that the FCC has to ensure that broadcasters who are using public airwaves are operating in the “public interest”. Martin said that, typically, the “public interest” requirement refers to producing local TV news shows.“That’s how they satisfy their public obligation, by providing informative news shows. It’s never been on the table that they could be interpreted to mean they have to not criticize the president,” he said. “That’s a big, important change in how the FCC operates.”Karr, of Free Press, said that the media watchdog has made it clear, in a filing to the FCC, that the regulator would need congressional approval to change the national reach cap.“We need to be watching the FCC very carefully over the next couple of weeks to see how far Carr will go in removing this huge hurdle to the merger,” he said.The New York Post reported this week that there is also growing criticism of the Nexstar/Tegna deal from conservatives concerned that the Kimmel suspension is “nothing more than a ruse to convince the White House its programming is watchful of leftwing bias” in order to convince the FCC to pass a deal that will hand the media group too much power.When he went back on air on Tuesday, Kimmel took a direct jab at Carr in his monologue, which has now received over 20m views on YouTube. Kimmel quoted the threats Carr made to broadcast networks over his show and said it is “a direct violation of the first amendment [and] not a particularly intelligent threat to make in public”.“You almost have to feel sorry for him,” Kimmel said. “He did his best to cancel me. Instead, he forced millions of people to watch the show.” More