Entertainment

The Peabody Awards announced Thursday, May 2, that it will be bestowing two special honors on two funny people. 

Trailblazing Blazing Saddles director Mel Brooks will be receiving the Peabody Career Achievement Award, and Abbott Elementary creator and star Quinta Brunson will take home the Peabody Trailblazer Award on Sunday, June 9, at a ceremony at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles.

Peabody’s executive director Jeffrey Jones hailed EGOT winner Brooks “as not only one of the most beloved comedians of all time,” but a man who “literally set the standard for television comedy from its earliest days.”

Jones adds, “Across TV, film, theater, and recordings, Mr. Brooks is in a league of his own.”

Jones called Emmy winner Brunson “a refreshingly creative force in network television comedy” and added both names were singled out “not only for their extraordinary contributions as storytellers, but particularly for their use of comedy to tell stories that matter, enriching the lives of so many.”

Both awards were selected by a unanimous vote of the Peabody Board of Jurors, the announcement explains, noting the pair will be celebrated live at the 84th Annual Peabody Awards ceremony — its first in-person event since 2019 and the first one ever to be held in Los Angeles.

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FX’s Emmy-winning docuseries Welcome to Wrexham debuts May 2 at 10 p.m. ET, streaming the next day on Hulu.

The show centers on Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney‘s unlikely purchase of — and even more unlikely, their successful shepherding of — the underdog Welsh Wrexham football club.

With the stars as co-chairs of the team, and not an insignificant infusion of money and talent, the working-class city’s beloved team has been promoted to the English Football League — League Two after 15 long years of losses.

Reynolds tells ABC News the show is really about people. “From the get-go, the people in Wrexham have been so unabashedly brave and forthcoming with their stories, and I think that’s why this show has connected; that’s the big beating heart of this show,” the Deadpool franchise star says. 

He continues, “Their stories are the stories of people in working class, smaller market towns all over the world.”

“The thing that I think we’re most excited about is … this year, FX and Hulu has given us an opportunity unlike anything else, where we get to have the docu series be almost congruent with the season,”Reynolds teases, adding, “We’re going to learn in almost real time, how this how this shapes up for the community of Wrexham.”

He adds, “This season is looking like another nail-biter.”

Always Sunny co-creator McElhenney sums up what it’s like for him this season, quipping, “Joyous and then miserable and then joyous and then miserable and then triumphant and hopeful and then, in the doldrums of misery. That’s kind of the way it goes.”

Reynolds calls it “pretty anxiety inducing,” adding, “Who would have thunk that … we would be back in this kind of dogfight at the top?” 

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A heart-wrenching love story is at the center of the new limited series The Tattooist of Auschwitz, which tells the true story of a man and woman who managed to find love in one of the bleakest places on earth. All six episodes are out Thursday, May 2.

Jonah Hauer-King stars as title character of the series — one of several projects over the past year exploring various stories of the Holocaust — and tells ABC Audio these stories are “fertile ground for an examination of humanity, and we have so much to learn from it.”

“I don’t think we’ll ever truly process it or make sense of it. And I think that’s why there are all of these different responses to it,” he says.

“I don’t think there will be … an exhaustive retelling or a definitive retelling, because there are too many people involved. There are too many people that suffered and were affected,” he adds. “And so that’s going to spin off in a million different ways.”

Hauer-King hopes the series “[shines] a light on what can happen when humanity leaves us. And so I hope that it can be an advocate for love, and for humanity and ultimately for peace.”

Going to work every day in a recreated concentration camp was unsettling and surreal for Hauer-King, who says, “When you have these sets meticulously recreated and are looming over you and that’s your workplace every day, it would be ludicrous to suggest that it’s not going to have this really profound effect on you, because it is frightening and the associations of that — and it’s a very iconic, you know, frighteningly iconic image.”

The Tattooist of Auschwitz also stars Harvey Keitel and Melanie Lynskey.

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Dan Schneider filed a defamation lawsuit on Wednesday against the creators of the Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV docuseries.

Attorneys for the former television creator, who is featured in the docuseries, which was released in March about what allegedly went on behind the scenes at Nickelodeon in its heyday, has claimed that the filmmakers behind the series “falsely state or imply that Schneider” “sexually abused the children who worked on his television shows.”

“Quiet on Set‘s portrayal of Schneider is a hit job,” the suit alleges.

According to the suit, the television creator, who is known for his hit shows like Zoey 101, iCarly and Drake & Josh is suing Quiet on Set filmmakers Emma Schwartz, Mary Robertson, Warner Brothers Discovery, Inc., Maxine Productions and Sony Pictures Television Inc.

Schneider, who released a statement on Wednesday about the lawsuit, said that he is “apologetic and regretful” for behavior as a producer and “will continue to take accountability for it,” but has “no choice but to take legal action against the people behind” the series.

“In their successful attempt to mislead viewers and increase ratings, they went beyond reporting the truth and falsely implied that I was involved in or facilitated horrific crimes for which actual child predators have been prosecuted and convicted,” he said.

Good Morning America has reached out to Warner Brothers Discovery, Inc., Maxine Productions, Sony Pictures Television Inc., Emma Schwartz and Mary Robertson for comment but did not hear immediately back.

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Paul Walter Hauser has been tapped to star alongside Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson in Paramount Pictures’ Naked Gun reboot, according to Deadline. The new movie is based on the Naked Gun film franchise and the TV series Police Squad!, which starred Leslie Nielsen as bumbling detective Frank Drebin. The new project, from Chip ‘N Dale: Rescue Rangers filmmakers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, along with Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer and Seth MacFarlane‘s Fuzzy Door, is set for a July 18, 2025, release …

Amazon MGM is working on a feature adaptation of Colleen Hoover‘s bestselling novel Verity, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Verity follows struggling writer Lowen Ashleigh, hired by the husband of a writer named Verity to complete her unfinished novels after she’s involved in a mysterious accident. Lowen discovers one particular manuscript that leads her to believe things aren’t what they seem and decides to investigate, per THR …

Elizabeth Banks and Jessica Biel will star in the upcoming new Amazon series The Better Sister, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The series, per the outlet, follows Chloe — played by Biel — who travels the world with her lawyer husband Adam and their teenage son, while her estranged sister Nicky (Banks) struggles to make ends meet while trying to stay clean. When Adam is brutally murdered, the prime suspect sends shock waves through the family …

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Max’s Emmy-winning comedy Hacks returns for a third season on Thursday — two years after season 2 began.

The third season sees Deborah Vance, played by Jean Smart, “riding high off the success of her standup special” while her former writer, Hannah Einbinder‘s Ava, “pursues new opportunities back in Los Angeles,” according to the streamer.

The third season was delayed first because of a health issue from which Smart recovered and then Hollywood’s summer of strikes.

Co-star Carl Clemons-Hopkins, who plays Deborah’s driven business manager Marcus, was confident the cast and crew would sync after all the stops, but tells ABC Audio he wondered if the viewers would hang on. “The concern for me came with, ‘Will the audience still be there? Will they still ride as hard for it?'”

The wait for fans will be worth it, he says. The actor says the show “does an acutely brilliant job of bringing soft landings to hard conversations.”

Clemons-Hopkins adds of the series, “It does a really wonderful job of both celebrating comedy and challenging comedy.”

Much of the humor of the show stems from Smart’s comedian character being, shall we say, slightly behind the times with today’s touchy audiences.

“You know, it’s not just a one generation telling your generation you’re wrong because of this,” Clemons-Hopkins insists. “It’s really people from opposing views having conversations, not always agreeing, but both learning and growing and becoming close and being brought closer because of it. And I think that’s a very, very brilliant thing that the season does.” 

Hacks‘ nine-episode third season kicks off with two episodes on Thursday, with two new episodes dropping each week until the season finale on May 30.

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If you only know one thing about The Fall Guy, it’s probably that in one scene Ryan Gosling‘s character sits in a car and cries while listening to Taylor Swift‘s song “All Too Well.” It turns out the filmmakers were going to use a different song, until Gosling stepped in.

Producer Kelly McCormick tells Vanity Fair that The Fall Guy’s director, David Leitch, who’s also her husband, initially had a tune by late singer/songwriter Harry Nilsson playing in that scene. “But it felt a little melodramatic to me in a bad way,” she says. McCormick says around the same time Gosling asked if they should try a Taylor song in the scene.

Accord to McCormick, her husband was against the idea until they went to see the Eras Tour. McCormick says David was blown away by Taylor’s performance of the 10-minute version of the song. 

“The first time we dropped it in, we knew there was no going back, and we were going to be really upset if we couldn’t get it,” McCormick says.

Luckily, according to McCormick, “Taylor is actually really open to sharing her music with film. We showed her what we had cut, and there were no notes. Thankfully, she … didn’t price herself so far out of our budget that we weren’t able to include her.”

According to Vanity Fair, Taylor hasn’t seen the movie yet, but she did praise the comedic version of “All Too Well” that Gosling and co-star Emily Blunt did on Saturday Night Live on April 13. On her Instagram Story at the time, she wrote, “Watch me accidentally catch myself singing this version on tour.”

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Star Wars: Ahsoka star Ivanna Sakhno has a “major part” in the upcoming sequel to the killer toy movie M3GAN, Deadline is reporting.

Sakhno, who played baddie Shin Hati in the Disney+ Star Wars show, will join returning stars Allison Williams and Violet McGraw for M3GAN 2.0, which was announced shortly after the modestly budgeted thriller became a box office hit in 2023.

The movie, made for a reported $12 million, went on to score more than $180 million worldwide.

James Wan, the mind behind horror movies like The Conjuring series, produced the film with Jason Blum‘s Blumhouse, the production company behind creepy hits including 2016’s Hush and the 2017 Oscar winner Get Out.

The trade reports the original hit’s screenwriter, Akela Cooper, is returning for the 2025 follow-up, joined behind the keyboard by M3GAN director Gerard Johnstone.

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TNT has announced that its hit true-crime anthology series Rich & Shameless will return during the NBA Western Conference Finals with a most appropriate focus: sports scandals.

The series will highlight “the true stories of the successes, failures, thrills, and miseries behind the biggest sports stars to reveal the dangers of making it in the big leagues,” according to the network.

The upcoming season’s installments include NFL champ Brett Favre‘s alleged involvement in a welfare scheme; the New Orleans Saints’ Bountygate scandal, which saw players being accused of deliberately targeting key opponents to injure them; and the murderous aftermath of an attempted rigged boxing match between fighter Tim Anderson and former NFL star Mark Gastineau.

Note: The dates of the first two NBA Finals are not yet locked in; the first game could either air on May 20 or May 22, and the second either May 22 or 24. Check local listings.

Rich & Shameless – “Brett Favre: Out of Bounds” will air after the NBA Western Conference Finals Game One; “Saints, Sinners and an NFL Scandal” will follow Game 2; “Murder, Fixed Fights and the Wannabe Don King” follows Game 3 on May 26; and “Dirty Moneyball: Cuba’s Ransomed Stars” airs after Game 4 on May 28.

The new Rich & Shameless episodes will also be available for streaming on the TNT app.

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As a tie-in to the Ryan Reynolds/John Krasinski family film IF, Baskin-Robbins is helping turn fans’ imaginations into real ice cream.

Starting May 1, the company is launching two new flavors named after the movie’s imaginary friends who come to life onscreen.

There’s Blue’s Boardwalk Bash, inspired by the Steve Carell-voiced Blue from the movie, featuring blue raspberry-flavored ice cream with cotton candy swirls and Oreo cookie pieces.

Blossom’s Berry Twirl is a strawberry and sweet cream concoction; and BR’s What IF Sundae “starts with a piece of confetti cake with two scoops of Blossom’s Berry Twirl, sweet strawberry topping, a dash of rainbow sprinkles, whipped cream, and a cherry on top.”

What’s more, at its online Imagination Station, fans can draw their own Imaginary Friend and have it rendered to life — and doing so nets them 50% off a scoop of ice cream with the purchase of one at participating locations.

The company is also sponsoring a pop-up at Santa Monica Pier in California on May 18 that features Insta-ready picture opportunities and will give someone the chance to win free ice cream for a year.

IF hits theaters May 17 from Paramount Pictures.

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