Television

Queen Latifah‘s CBS series The Equalizer is on its way to becoming a franchise, as a potential spinoff is in the works.

Deadline reports that The Equalizer is gearing up for a spinoff by introducing two new characters for a backdoor pilot situation (even though CBS isn’t officially calling it a backdoor pilot).

According to Deadline, Episode 516, which will air in the spring of 2025, will introduce the two new characters and how they interact with Queen Latifah’s character Robyn McCall. Joseph C. Wilson, who will write the episode, will also executive produce the spinoff.

CBS is casting for a “skilled younger female martial artist, weapons expert and criminologist with a secret origin story” who turns to McCall when she needs help. CBS is also casting for “an older male former top CIA operative.

Both characters will be introduced as guest starring roles, but the actors playing those characters will have the option to become series regulars to make way for that proposed spinoff.

The Equalizer is one of CBS’ most popular dramas, earning a fifth season renewal. The original TV series aired in the late 1980s, paving the way for The Equalizer film series starring Denzel Washington.

Netflix has released the first look images for its upcoming limited series, Zero Day, which stars Angela Bassett and Robert De Niro, and features Bassett playing the president of the United States. De Niro plays the former president.

Lizzy Caplan, Jesse Plemons, Joan Allen, Connie Britton and Matthew Modine also star in the series. Bill Camp, Dan Stevens, Gaby Hoffmann, Clark Gregg and McKinley Belcher III are also a part of the cast.

What is ‘Zero Day’ going to be about?

Here’s the official description:

ZERO DAY is a limited series starring Robert De Niro as respected former U.S. President George Mullen, who, as head of the Zero Day Commission, is charged with finding the perpetrators of a devastating cyber attack that has caused chaos around the country and thousands of fatalities. As disinformation runs rampant and the personal ambition of power brokers in technology, Wall Street, and government collide, Mullen’s unwavering search for the truth forces him to confront his own dark secrets while risking all he holds dear.

Bassett plays President Evelyn Mitchell, “the current president of the United States. Mitchell is a brilliant and perceptive political tactician who hires Mullen to take on an unprecedented role in American history.”

De Niro’s Mullen is a “hugely popular but complicated former US president who’s pulled out of retirement to head the Zero Day Commission, an unprecedented group of experts tasked with investigating a devastating global cyberattack.”

When does ‘Zero Day’ premiere?

Zero Day premieres Feb. 20 on Netflix. The limited series will have six episodes.

The series is written and executive produced by Eric Newman and Noah Oppenheim. Lesli Linka Glatter directed all six episodes and executive produces.

Michael S. Schmidt also serves as writer and executive producer. De Niro and Jonathan Glickman executive produce as well.

Check out additional first-look photos below as well:

Photo: Netflix

Photo: Netflix

Photo: Jojo Whilden/Netflix

Photo: Jojo Whilden/Netflix

Photo: Netflix

Photo: Jojo Whilden/Netflix

Photo: Netflix

When Euphoria returns for its long-gestating third season, it will be without another one of its stars.

Storm Reid, who plays Gia Bennett on the HBO series, confirmed to Rotten Tomatoes that she will not be returning to the show, which is set to film next year.

She revealed the news to them on the red carpet at the Academy’s 2024 Governors Awards red carpet.

“I’m very excited for Season 3,” she said. “Unfortunately, Gia’s not returning to the third season, but I am so, so indebted to the cast and the crew of that show, to HBO. Euphoria’s a really special thing and I’m so glad that that’s a part of my legacy and that I was a part of such a cultural phenomenon… can’t wait to see what Season 3 has in store.”

Reid starred as Gia, the younger sister to the lead character of the series, Zendaya’s Rue, in the first two seasons. The show, which premiered in 2019, last aired in 2022.

Though the full Season 3 cast hasn’t been officially confirmed, it was reported back in July that “principal cast” members, including Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney, Hunter Schafer, Jacob Elordi, Maude Apatow and Alexa Demie. Colman Domingo has also indicated that he would be back on the HBO drama.

Two other cast members will not be back for Season 3, including the late Angus Cloud, who tragically died of an accidental overdose in 2023. Barbie Ferriera also stated she wouldn’t return in 2022.

Blavity’s Shadow and Act has the exclusive trailer premiere for the new Tubi project, Jokes On Us: New Voices in Comedy.

It is the first original comedy special for the streamer. The project will have 15-minute sets from up-and-coming comics Cris Sosa, Danielle Mora and Grant Moore.

It is also the very first feature project from Tubi’s Stubios, where, as the streamer notes “has allowed fans to get into the driver’s seat to help decide what they want to view on the platform.”

Here’s the official logline for Jokes on Us:

Comedy newcomers, Cris Sosa, Daniella Mora and Grant Moore riff on self-identity, sugar daddies, and subway etiquette in a lively night of laughs.

Watch the trailer below:

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Issa Rae, a mentor in Tubi’s Stubios initiative, said in a prior statement: “I loved being involved in the development process. Resources matter, and between myself, Tubi and the team at ColorCreative, we’re thrilled to support these talented creators and, hopefully, fast track their careers.”

Jaleel White has revealed the reason he remains against a reboot of the hit sitcom Family Matters. 

As the actor is on a press tour for his forthcoming memoir, Growing Up Urkel, he is opening up about his decision to decline interest in rebooting the ABC show, despite producers encouraging him that it would be a great look, Complex reported.

“Somewhere around 2013, 2014, I was approached by one of our former producers that Netflix had interest in doing a reboot of Family Matters on the heels of Fuller House having done so well,” he said. “And that didn’t make any sense to me.”

Family Matters ran on ABC from 1989 to 1997 was popular due to beloved characters like Steve Urkel, who White portrayed in the show. 

While he was a standout cast member alongside actors like Jo Marie Payton, Reginald VelJohnson, Darius McCray, Kellie Shanygne Williams, and a host of others, White says that initially it was “never intended” for him to be the star of the show. 

For him, following the model of the reboot for Full House simply would not work for Family Matters and despite his ideas for a better storyline, he says his ideas were shut down by the former executive producers who approached him with the idea of bringing the show back.

“I didn’t feel that it was right for us to have to copy what Full House had done to fit inside someone’s business model to capture the magic that made our show make sense,” White explained. “What I imagine for any reboot effort would be inspired by what really happened. How Family Matters came to pass is actually a greater story than what was made up inside the show.”

What was the story that White thought would be best to tell?

The Steve Urkel character is what put White on the map, so his idea of a reboot included the steps that it took to get him there. Specifically, he was hoping to highlight the nine years that he managed to pour into his role while also “growing up on a studio lot and in public school at the same time.”

“That, to me, was the greater story that needed to be told for today,” said White.

This isn’t the first time that White says the idea to do a Family Matters reboot was completely off of the table, using his voice deepening with age and the fact that Steve Urkel being married to Laura was not the most interesting plot.

“If Michelle had been here, I might have given it the old college try to create the triangle of Michelle and Kellie, but without that, I just don’t want to do it as a straight Fuller House reboot, it wouldn’t work, he explained during ’90s Con 2024 in September. 

He also said that Urkel’s iconic nasally tone actually did more harm to him over the years than good.

“I spoke to a doctor,” White recalled. “What happened is during puberty I spoke at the same pitch for extended periods of time. If the pitch had been going all over the place I wouldn’t have damaged it quite as much. It’s been in remission and I’m fine now.”

When does Growing Up Steve Urkel come out?

White’s memoir, Growing Up Urkel is published by Simon & Schuster and releases on Nov. 19.

Melody Rodgers has had her share of disagreements with the other ladies of Love and Marriage Huntsville, and you can always bet that her fans, coined as the Melometers, will come to her defense. In a recent episode, Melody and Stormi Steele got into a heated argument over Rodgers’ fans. Steele feels that Rodgers’ fans often take it too far trying to defend the Huntsville Queen Bee. Steele also feels Rodgers should interject, which Rodgers disagrees with, causing the women to come to an impasse at what was supposed to be a nice dinner.

When it comes to TV, Mexican telenovelas are known for being some of the most dramatic shows out there. Some of the best known titles to come from the genre include Rubí, Jane the Virgin and Timeless Love, but this November, Netflix is bringing a heated family falling out to live via Sisters’ Feud, which comes from the mind of José Ignacio Valenzuela. The original show isn’t based on a book or true story, though it does heavily feature themes of sexual assault and violence against women, so it might not be an ideal watch for all audiences. Per Tudum, the 20-episode program takes place in a fictional Mexican town, with Ana Serradilla and Claudia Álvarez playing sisters Perla and Antonia, respectively.

Now that Sisters’ Feud is available on Netflix and audiences have had time to digest the telenovela’s twists and turns, we’re breaking down the show’s shocking ending. Early on in the series, viewers learn that Antonia and Perla grew up in poverty, and the former is clearly jealous of the latter, who’s generally deemed “better” and “prettier” than her. When Perla fell in love with a handsome man named Bernardo, Antonia married him out of spite to hurt her sister, but upon finding them together on her wedding day, Antonia took the opportunity to exact her ultimate revenge against Perla.

Perla and Jacinta’s Chance Encounter Allows Them To Take Down Antonia

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During her emotional reaction to Perla and Bernardo’s infidelity, Antonia causes a car crash that she claims rendered her unable to bear children in an attempt to guilt her sister into carrying one via IVF. Perla refuses to help Antonia, leading her to take desparate measures to have the baby she’s been dreaming of. The latter captures Perla, forcing Bernardo to assault and impregnate her; Antonia ultimately kidnaps the child and leaves her sister for dead, though the little girl – named Jacinta – winds up living at an orphanage after just four years in her aunt’s care. At the time, Antonia adopted a boy named Pedro who she and Bernardo went on to raise together.

While growing up in the orphanage, Jacinta’s life is anything but normal. As she grows older, the young woman is eventually incarcerated after allegedly attempting to kill a man who tried to sexually assault her after she obtained a fake identity card. Just when it seems like the odds are stacked against her, Jacinta reconnects with Perla behind bars, giving them a chance to plot their revenge against Antonia. Their plan is to expose her and Bernardo’s crimes by ousting them from their controversial mining company; the mother-daughter duo’s first step is to buy a majority stake using money from Perla’s friend, Efrian. While the plot works in their favor at first, Antonia manages to win back her rights with the help of corrupt governor Sanabra. However, when Perla discovers the mine was illegaly obtained, support behind Antonia quickly dwindles, leaving her with nothing.

Pedro’s Feelings for Jacinta Lead To an Untimely Demise

For her part, Jacinta finds a way to gain work as a staff member in Antonia’s house, allowing her to connect with Pedro, who’s set to marry Sofia (the daughter of the family mine’s second-largest stakeholder. Sadly, he’s diagnosed with a rare kidney disease that can only be healed from a donated kidney from one of his biological parents. Unfortunately for Pedro, Antonia previously killed his biological father to avoid any legal or inheritance drama; after the groom-to-be’s mom gave up her kidney to save her son, Antonia killed her too.

As he recovers from surgery, Pedro falls in love with Jacinta. The two wind up conceiving a child and starting a relationship, but Lucas (Pedro’s half-brother) also has feelings for Perla’s daughter. He and Pedro fight, harming the latter’s new kidney and his shot at survival. Lucas is ultimately jailed for his actions, but later promises his grandfather he plans to become a better person. Amid the turmoil, Pedro and Jacinta still decide to get married, welcoming a baby girl named Itzel (the fake name Jacinta used to get into the house as a servant). In an emotional peak of Sisters’ Feud, Pedro breathes his final breath with his daughter in his arms.

‘Sisters’ Feud’ Ending Explained

Netflix

At this point, it seems as though Perla has won the Sisters’ Feud, only needing to get a confession from Antonia to confirm her arrest. As it turns out, Antonia had been siphoning off money and gold for years to protect herself should things with Bernardo go wrong. Perla found out about this stash and relocated it for her safe keeping, knowing she could use it to lure Antonia. As the ending of the Netflix original nears, Antonia is wanted for the murders of Pedro’s biological parents, along with Carla (the owner of Jacinta’s orphanage), plus the attempted murder of Bernardo, Perla, Pedro, Jacinta, Jacinta’s unborn child and Efrain – not to mention countless other crimes.

While she attempts to secure her gold back from Perla, Efrain and his team swoop in to capture Antonia. In her anger, the notorious criminal points her gun at Perla, but the latter stops police from shooting her in a moment of empathy. This seems to impact Antonia profoundly, as she turns the gun back on herself and dies by suicide. Despite all that’s transpired between them, Perla is devestated by this, crying out while trying to catch her sister’s body.

Even with the tragedy, the final moments of Sisters’ Feud still provide reason to celebrate. Firstly, co-commissioner Consuelo uses her powers to clear Jacinta of murder charges so she can focus on raising her daughter. Elsewhere, Efrain and Perla end up together in the end, even with Efrain and Consulo spending intimate together throughout the series. Finally, since she didn’t marry Pedro, Maximo’s daughter, Sofia, was able to come out as lesbian and marry her girlfriend, Ana. Julia, who suffered abuse at the hands of Maximo, started a firm to provide support for other victims.

If you’ve been keeping up with the latest Hulu original shows, you may have seen trailers for the series Interior Chinatown, starring Silicon Valley‘s Jimmy O. Yang. The series, which drops on Nov. 19, has already garnered a lot of buzz for its off-the-walls narrative, humorous presentation and highlighting of talented Asian performers. Early on in the trailer for Interior Chinatown, a police press conference is held, which highlights an investigation into a missing woman and connections to an impending gang war. This, and other factors presented in the trailer, led many fans to feverishly research the new show, questioning if it was based on a true story. While we can confirm that Interior Chinatown is not actually based on any one true story, the project does take inspiration from a wide array of human interest tales, making certain moments feel quite true to life.

First and foremost, Interior Chinatown is based on a 2020 novel of the same name, written by revered American author Charles Yu. While the characters and situations presented in the text and adapted for the screen do not depict real people, Yu has explained that he was inspired by many Asian Americans, including his personal experiences. To get a full picture of this inspiration and its effect on Yu’s work, we’ll have to dive into the narrative of Interior Chinatown and fully unpack the characters, themes, and central concepts at play. If you haven’t had the chance to read the novel or watch the series just yet, don’t worry, as the following write-up will be entirely spoiler free. Of course, if you want to go into Interior Chinatown as blind as possible, be sure to bookmark this page and return after streaming the new hit show.

What Happens in ‘Interior Chinatown’?

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The plot of the 2020 Interior Chinatown novel centers on an unremarkable Asian-American man named Willis Wu. While navigating the basic encounters of his everyday life, Wu feels constantly marginalized by societal structures all around him. The book utilizes a humorous screenplay-style format to center Wu as a “Generic Asian Man,” which explains why his racial identity precludes him from taking center stage, even in his own life. Instead, he is relegated to imaginary roles such as “Delivery Guy” and “Background Oriental Male,” in a poignant satire of typical Hollywood casting. All the while, Willis Wu longs to fulfill a role like “Kung Fu Guy,” which he believes to be the highest honor an Asian person can achieve on the screen. As the narrative kicks into high gear, Wu travels down a path that changes his life, elevates him to a central force and enlightens his perception.

The televised version of Interior Chinatown follows a mostly faithful path to the novel, though it does offer a few significant deviations from the text. For starters, the show does away with the screenplay format, which obviously wouldn’t work in a visual medium. Instead, Willis Wu is reimagined as a struggling character actor, who routinely fails to get work beyond the generic roles often offered to Asian American talent. While hunting for a big break, Wu supplements his income by working at a restaurant in Chinatown. As Jimmy O. Yang’s Willis remarks at the start of the show’s trailer, “In Chinatown, nothing ever changes… I feel like I’m a background character in someone else’s story.” This all shifts for the series’ protagonist when he witnesses a crime and becomes enlisted to serve as an undercover accomplice in a police investigation.

What Inspired the Themes of ‘Interior Chinatown’?

As stated, Interior Chinatown has many sources of inspiration, including hundreds of tales of Asian Americans who have struggled to rise the ladder in industries such as film and television. Both the book and the show serve as a scathing indictment of Asian stereotypes and the characterization of Asians as a monolith. Even in the show’s trailer, a few characters argue over the nationality of an Asian woman on television, causing The Daily Show‘s Ronny Cheng to quip, “Dude, she’s clearly Korean. Know your Asians!” While this moment serves as a funny aside, it also speaks to the suppression of Asian voices in media. The woman in question reports on a dangerous and escalating violent situation on the streets of Chinatown, and nobody is listening to her because they’d rather speculate on her race.

The narrative of the show turns the streets of Chinatown into its own real-life police procedural, complete with background characters who are assigned no real agency unless they factor into the ongoing investigation. As Charles Yu explained in a 2022 interview with UC Berkeley News, “You could think of Interior Chinatown as kind of like a movie set, but also like a mindset, as well. We’re in a psychological landscape to try to portray what it’s like to be marginalized in the way Willis and his family and the other people in his community feel.” In the same interview, Yu spoke at length about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which is also highlighted and explained within the text of the original novel. This real-life event looms large over actual Asian Americans today and serves as a major inspiration for the Interior Chinatown narrative.

Unpacking the Chinese Exclusion Act

Hulu

While it may seem like quite a leap to go from a centuries-old immigration law to a contemporary story about Asian representation in cinema, the shadow of the Chinese Exclusion Act looms quite large over Interior Chinatown. Yu claims that he first learned about the act while studying American history in college and that the historical significance of the law stuck with him for quite some time. For those who aren’t aware, the act put limitations – and for many periods – full restrictions, on Chinese immigrants entering the United States. It served as the longest-running and most strict exclusionary law regarding immigration in American history, rivaled only by the proposed laws expected to be put into place during the second Trump administration. It was only fully phased out in 1965, meaning large swaths of the Asian American community still have not-so-distant memories of grappling with the exclusionary system.

As Yu points out in the UC Berkeley interview, this immigration law has had a profound impact on Asian American populations over the last hundred years. Specifically, he explained, “We’re really only two or maybe three generations out from the huge change that happened post ‘65 – my parents are post-‘65 immigrants – and that continues to shape a lot of things that are happening now in ways that I don’t pretend to understand fully.” In the narrative, this explains why Willis is discounted not only by his white American peers but in his worldview. His concept that an unnamed “Kung Fu Guy” is the highest honor an Asian can achieve displays his own internalized decision to buy into a system that marginalizes him, even in the rare instances when it seems to be rewarding him.

Additional Influences On The Story

In addition to historical tales of migrant suppression, Interior Chinatown was influenced by groundbreaking works of fiction such as the 1993 film Groundhog Day and Paul Beatty’s 2015 novel The Sellout. Yu confirmed these influences during a 2020 chat with Hyphen Magazine’s Timothy Tau. Groundhog Day and similar “time loop” narratives helped to inspire the cyclical nature of Chinatown, where characters like Willis Wu feel that each day is identical to the last. Conversely, The Sellout helped to inspire some of the themes of systemic racism and suppression of identity, as the novel tackles similar themes concerning the Black community within the United States.

The author-turned-showrunner explained in his Hyphen interview that his entire childhood was mired with a general lack of Asian representation, arguing, “I grew up for a lot of years never seeing any Asian faces or Asian American faces specifically on screen, except for when I would watch Fist of Fury or something… Every few years, there would be an ‘Asian thing of the decade,’ and you think, okay, maybe we’ll start seeing more things now – and then they would go away… I think increasingly, even now, there is a sense of ‘we’re still a perpetual foreigner’ or a ‘not-quite assimilated group’ on many levels because it may be easy to separate us out.” Luckily, Yu does feel that the tides are changing, as he continued, “You see people in roles now, not just in Crazy Rich Asians, but you see Asian American leads on things now and it’s great.”