Category: media

Back when he was an up-and-coming 28-year-old with a child on the way, the comedian signed a contract with Comedy Central for what became Chappelle’s Show which allowed the cable channel’s parent company, ViacomCBS, to distribute reruns of the series in perpetuity with no additional payments to Chappelle. Now, having discovered that the show is being streamed by HBO Max and CBS All Access (and, via those services, on Netflix), he is telling his fans, “Boycott Chappelle’s Show. Do not watch it unless they pay me.” (Netflix, with whom Chappelle currently has a contract for specials, promptly took the series down.) – CBS News

“Very Special Episodes — i.e., the ones in which a TV series would take a break from its regularly scheduled programming to deal with a difficult or controversial subject (like The Next Generation‘s two-part school shooting arc) — are as old as television itself. Case in point: Leave It to Beaver grappled with divorce, and The Andy Griffith Show tackled alcoholism. But they really took off in the 1970s when TV legend Norman Lear wove the social issues of the era into his numerous prime-time hits.” And, as schlocky as some of them could be, people actually learned from them — a lot. – Mel

Toy Story might have been the first fully digital production, but its exhibition depended upon recording those digital images onto analogue film strips. This was a technology that had been in use, largely unchanged, since moving pictures first appeared a century earlier. – The Conversation

Snap is launching Snapchat Spotlight, which will show users a stream of publicly submitted posts surfaced based on personalized content algorithms. Snapchatters who contribute to Spotlight are eligible to get a cut of more than $1 million daily, doled out based on popularity. It’s a bid by Snap to keep top creative talent on its platform — as it faces growing competition from short-form video rivals TikTok and Instagram. – Variety

While this year has been rough for most, D’Amelio has had an extraordinary 2020 by anyone’s standards — never mind a teenage schoolgirl who little over a year ago was just filming dance videos in her bedroom. Not only has her profile on the app grown exponentially from just 1 million followers a year ago, but her career outside of TikTok has also exploded. – CNET

Some things have improved – and others have far to go. Studi: “We’re getting to see Natives in contemporary situations and still bringing it as skins — as Indians. It’s never enough, and never soon enough, but we’ve got to live with the world we have.” – Yahoo! Entertainment

The Hallmark Channel has delivered tens, nay, hundreds of Christmas movies over the years. They’re mostly romances, and all of those romances were heterosexual. Heck, the Hallmark Channel even removed an advertisement that had LGBT content last year. But things have changed, at least a little bit, in 2020. – Los Angeles Times

The announcement that Wonder Woman 1984 would be opening in the U.S. on Christmas Day, in some theatres but mainly on streaming via HBO Max, was Hollywood’s true acknowledgement that streaming is the thing during the uncontrolled pandemic. (But what about measurements to come?) – The New York Times

Michael Watson began his career in the camera department and worked his way up – and his job in HBO’s Lovecraft Country wasn’t easy. “On a visual level, [it is] a really fascinating show that offers a lot of different creative challenges. It’s a period piece. It actually takes place in many different periods, but none of them are the present day. And it’s playing around with a lot of genres … like classic horror and H.P. Lovecraft and science fiction. I mean, there’s even a role playing game style dungeon crawl in one episode.” – Slate