It's so hard finding good shows about help these days.
PBS' hit Brit import Downton Abbey, which humanizes the servants and nobility with equal sensitivity and wit, is an exception. In the second cable series within a month depicting the class divide between the unhappy rich and the equally conflicted domestics who tidy their fabulous homes if not their messy lives, both extremes of the economic scale are patronized with cartoonish levels of camp and melodrama.
If you liked Marc Cherry's Desperate Housewives, then you're pretty much already seen Lifetime's Devious Maids — what's next, Dangerous Masseuses? The characters and situations may be different, but creator/executive producer Cherry's signature tone of arch cattiness leavened with sentimental schmaltz is unmistakable...
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Maybe Tyler Perry's next movie should be called Madea Saves Oprah's Network.
Just a year ago, OWN's financial losses and struggle for ratings began to concern the Wall Street analysts who follow the venture that Oprah Winfrey co-owns with Discovery Communications. So writer-director-producer Perry, a longtime Winfrey pal, offered his services to create comedies and dramas for the network, which had been built on reality series and talk shows.
Twelve months later, his scripted ...
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John Schneider is about to make J.R. Ewing look like a wimp. The former Smallville and Dukes of Hazzard fave is starring in Tyler Perry's feverish new OWN sudser The Haves and the Have Nots as patriarch Jim Cryer, a fantastically wealthy, power-mad judge who intends to become Georgia's next governor. Yet he's happy to risk it all for the company of some high-priced hookers.
"This is the role that may finally get people to stop calling me Bo Duke," says Schneider, who notes he hasn't gone this dark since he played porn mogul Ram Peters on Nip/Tuck. "I'm usually cast as the guy who lives on a dirt road — the one who'll be there to sandbag your house when you need help. That ain't Cryer."
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Tyler Perry's For Better or Worse is coming back for a third season, but will call a new cable network home.
New episodes of For Better or Worse will air on OWN beginning this fall. Additionally OWN will...
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Jamie Foxx is firing back at Spike Lee for calling his film Django Unchained disrespectful to his ancestors.
"The question for me is: Where's Spike Lee coming from?" Foxx said to London's The Guardian. "He didn't like Whoopi Goldberg, he doesn't like Tyler Perry, he doesn't like anybody, I think he's sort of run his course. I mean, I respect Spike; he's a fantastic director. But he gets a little shady when he's taking shots at his colleagues without looking at the work. To me, that's irresponsible."
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