The New Republic

Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries are small, perceptive oddities, so unblinkingly committed to the worlds they investigate that the comedy can seem almost accidental. This is Spinal Tap (1984) spoofs the pretensions and ambitions of aging rockers with mortal seriousness. Waiting for Guffman (1996) does the same for a community theater ensemble in small-town Missouri. Best in Show (2000) makes tightly-wound dog owners into fully likeable monsters. READ MORE >>

Marc Maron is obsessed with intimacy. His own compulsive oversharing is the engine of his successful, four-year-old podcast, “WTF”—structured around candid, raw interviews with comedians that take place in Maron’s garage. It fuels every page of his new book, Attempting Normal, in which he offers disclosures like “This is who I am: I overthink and I ruminate. I’m obsessive. READ MORE >>

When Conan O’Brien took the stage Saturday night at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, he looked a bit like a giant, flame-haired mannequin, smiling tensely and reciting his jokes with one eye trained on his notes. READ MORE >>

As a bureaucratic comedy, HBO’s “Veep” is resolutely conventional. Its Washington is a place where every apparent policy decision is little more than a bit of staging in the endless game of image management and damage control. But the show has always been perceptive about what it means to be a woman in a position of political power. It is peppered with canny details: Vice President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis Dreyfus) is always taking off her heels and putting them on again when someone important walks into the room. READ MORE >>

In the Sundance Channel’s new drama “Rectify,” which premiered last night, a man is released from prison after spending nearly two decades on death row for rape and murder. “Rectify” is the network’s first original scripted series, produced by Melissa Bernstein and Mark Johnson from “Breaking Bad,” and it shares that show’s commitment to the slow burn of character development and plot. But as a drama about an accused killer, “Rectify” occupies a category all its own. READ MORE >>

 As TV networks scrambled Friday to chronicle the manhunt unfolding on live TV, they undertook the parallel project of compiling a portrait of the suspects. Testimonies from classmates of 19-year-old suspect Dzhokar Tsarnaev sounded the refrain of his ordinariness. He took acting and advanced placement courses in high school. In college he played soccer and got high. He seemed by all accounts like a pleasant, mild kid enmeshed in a network of friends. “THOSE WHO KNEW SUBJECT #2 ARE SHOCKED,” read the ticker on CNN at one point. READ MORE >>

Rebel Wilson’s career is clearly on the rise. The 27-year-old Australian comic actress was introduced to American audiences as the roommate of Kristin Wiig’s character in Bridesmaids. She starred alongside Kirsten Dunst, Isla Fischer, and Lizzy Caplan in Bachelorette (2012), playing against type as the sensible ingenue in an ensemble of female basket cases. In 2012 she also appeared as “Fat Amy” in the a capella comedy Pitch Perfect. And last night she hosted the MTV Movie Awards, her first starring role. READ MORE >>

The first two episodes of “Vice,” a newsmagazine show premiering tonight on HBO, feature footage of exploding suicide bombers, a rogue Filipino gunsmith fashioning pistols as a kitten sits inches away, and lingering shots of severed hands and heads. In the pilot, Shane Smith, Vice Media CEO, heads to Afghanistan to interview teenage Jihadists and meet with a Taliban leader. "You see the effects of suicide bombing," Smith says, "and I dunno, it fucks your head up." READ MORE >>

On Monday, 21-year-old Shain Gandee, star of MTV’s “Buckwild,” was found dead inside his Ford Bronco in a muddy ditch. On the reality show—which features the backcountry exploits of a crew of West Virginia twentysomethings—Shain was the sweet, goofy one, the likeable foil to womanizing Tyler and dully good-humored Joey. Shain had a faint pubescent moustache and a drawl so leisurely it seemed digitally slowed. He pined for red-haired Cara and roughhoused with open-hearted gusto. READ MORE >>

In 1991, George R.R. Martin was working on a science fiction novel when suddenly an unrelated scene flashed in his head: a group of children finding a litter of direwolf pups. “It just came to me so vividly,” he told me. The children, needless to say, would become the Starks, protagonists of Game of Thrones, the first book in his best-selling series A Song of Ice and Fire. He soon abandoned the other novel completely. READ MORE >>