Apple TV says ‘Shrinking’ will return for season 2 in October
Apple TV+
Apple TV+ has revealed its Jason Segel/Harrison Ford dramedy Shrinking will return for a 12-episode second season on Oct. 16.
Co-created by Segel and Ted Lasso writers Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein, the show’s second season will debut with two installments, followed by one new episode every subsequent Wednesday until a Dec. 25 finale.
In addition to Segel and Ford, Shrinking stars Jessica Williams, Luke Tennie, Michael Urie, Lukita Maxwell and Ted McGinley. Christa Miller also appears, and Goldstein will pop in as a special guest star in season 2.
An ongoing dispute between ABC News’ parent company, Disney, and DirecTV will apparently leave millions of customers in the dark for Tuesday night’s presidential debate on ABC.
Disney had announced it would allow viewers to watch the face-off between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris via “a three-hour feed of ABC News coverage to all impacted DirecTV customers at no cost,” adding, “[W]e want all Americans to be able to view tonight’s debate at this important moment in our history.”
Disney-owned networks, including ABC, Freeform and ESPN, have been dark for more than 11 million DirecTV customers since Sept. 1.
However, The Hollywood Reporter said Tuesday afternoon that DirecTV rejected Disney’s offer, after countering the provider wanted all channels returned through Sept. 16.
Disney reportedly refused.
“Unfortunately, returning only Disney’s ABC stations from the entire portfolio of channels for a limited 3-hour window will cause customer confusion among those who would briefly see the debate only to lose the channel again shortly after,” DirecTV’s statement said, according to the trade.
At issue is a dispute over the two companies’ so-called “carriage agreement” — the fee the satellite TV service pays Disney for access to its programming. Disney is seeking a higher fee, but DirecTV claims in a complaint to the FCC filed recently that Disney is negotiating in “bad faith.”
The presidential debate airs Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET on ABC.
Variety is reporting Lionsgate has dropped Eddie Egan, the marketing consultant reportedly behind a scuttled campaign that used fake reviews from real critics in an effort to promote Francis Ford Coppola‘s Megalopolis.
As reported, a now-deleted trailer used phony negative review quotes for Coppola classics including The Godfather and Apocalypse Now in the promo for Megalopolis, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May to some real-life negative reviews.
Sources tell Variety it wasn’t Lionsgate or Egan’s “intention to fabricate quotes,” but “an error in properly vetting and fact-checking the phrases provided by the consultant.”
That said, the trade prompted Chat GPT to write negative reviews of Coppola films in the style of popular reviewers and the “results were strikingly similar” to the ones seen in the trailer, so it appears an AI program was used to create them.
Lionsgate pulled the trailer on Wednesday, the day it debuted, saying, “We offer our sincere apologies to the critics involved and to Francis Ford Coppola and [Coppola’s studio] American Zoetrope for this inexcusable error in our vetting process. We screwed up. We are sorry.”
Lionsgate will release Megalopolis in theaters on Sept. 27.
Daryl Dixon and his post-apocalyptic ride-or-die Carol Peletier are back together again in the new trailer to The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – The Book of Carol.
The trailer shows Melissa McBride‘s character Stateside, and looking for her long-lost friend — who had been kidnapped and shipped to France.
While Norman Reedus‘ character has adjusted to life there, he dreams about going back to America, and the friends he left behind. “I wonder if they’re still thinking about me,” he expresses.
Unbeknownst to him, Carol hatches a plan to commandeer a plane to fly to France to find him. As a title card professes, “Some bonds have no borders.”
While both characters are seen separately fighting enemies both alive and undead in Europe, the trailer ends with a moment that fans have been excited to see since the pair parted ways in the finale of The Walking Dead in 2022: Daryl is shown in the foreground, while Carol saunters into frame, out of focus.
The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – The Book of Carol, which is the second installment of Daryl Dixon’s spinoff series, debuts on Sept. 29 on AMC and AMC+. The spinoff has already been renewed for a third season.
