This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here.
This week:
- Lizzie McGuire turns 30 in New York.
- Megan Hilty gives one of my favorite performances of the year.
- The terrible, horrible Clueless reboot idea.
- A surprising turn in the Ronan Farrow saga.
It has already been announced that the millennial-cherished Disney Channel series Lizzie McGuire is being rebooted with original star Hilary Duff and is set to air on the streaming service Disney+. This week, however, Duff herself gave an interview about what fans, many now grown and in their thirties, can expect from the series, which follows Lizzie as a 30-year-old navigating life in New York City.
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“I think to myself, where can we go?” Duff told E! News. “What are the struggles of a 30-year-old right now? What are the pressures that life throws in front of a woman who is 30 and doesn't have all the things yet?”
We’ve been burnt before, sweetie. Remember Friends, that show about twentysomethings with no real jobs, gigantic Greenwich Village apartments, and all the time and money to spend at a coffee shop all day? The lives of young professionals struggling to make it in, as my mother likes to call it, “The Big Bad City,” haven’t exactly been portrayed authentically on screen.
Luckily I am [redacted] years past 30 myself, and am hereby volunteering as a consultant for the show, to ensure grown-up Lizzie McGuire rings true. Here are some notes for the writers:
Will she talk about student debt? Will she cancel plans at the last minute? Will she host a birthday dinner in the Lower East Side, as if that’s not a pain in the ass to get to for everyone? Will she try to defend the notion of getting a cat to her roommate, as if it’s not asinine to do so when you’re sharing a 500-square-foot apartment?
Will we see her figure out how to buy an air conditioner on Craig’s List? Will we see her text 15 of her friends asking how one gets an air conditioner from Morningside Heights to their apartment? How many times will she wonder aloud how many calories are in a bottle of wine? How much will she talk about Succession?
Will she randomly blurt out, to no one, “So many emails, ugh?” Will she talk about the percentage of her budget devoted to umbrellas bought when it’s already raining? How many bottles of Tums will there be? WILL SHE MENTION THE L TRAIN????
Will she slowly find herself purchasing an entirely new wardrobe because one day her body just poofed out, like when you open a can of biscuit dough, and nothing fits her anymore? Will she wake up to seven empty beer cans and the Google search results for “Hunter Biden shirtless” on her laptop, confused by the entire tableaux? Will 17 minutes of each episode of this new Lizzie McGuire chronicle the time she spends staring at herself in the bathroom mirror fiddling with her neck skin?
Will she order Seamless to treat herself for a hard day’s work, but have to switch it from this credit card to that credit card to keep the balance down? (And did she also do the same thing yesterday?) Will she weep to no one?
Just some story ideas. I’ll accept an executive producer credit, and no less.
Like vegans and people who do CrossFit, you know someone who watched the burned-fast-and-bright NBC musical series Smash because they will bring it up to you, likely twice, in any conversation, unprompted. That’s why everyone I’ve ever come into contact with knows who Megan Hilty is.
She co-starred on Smash which, boiled down to its core, was about a veteran Broadway actress (Hilty) and a young ingenue (Katharine McPhee) vying to play Marilyn Monroe in a new musical, while Debra Messing modeled scarves. I bring this up because A) I always do, and B) because Hilty is delivering another dynamo performance in a Lifetime movie that premieres this weekend.
She plays Patsy Cline in the biopic Patsy & Loretta, chronicling the country legend’s friendship with Loretta Lynn (played by Tony-winner Jessie Mueller). Hilty is fantastic in it: a sparkplug dame, a gilded steel magnolia, a powder keg of pathos, and, of course, astonishing in the scenes where she performs Cline’s songs.
The film is a lovely, remarkable antidote to the channel’s signature dreck—case in point, last week’s College Admission Scandal—and totally worth your time. We all must support Megan Hilty.
It was announced this week that an hour-long series based on Clueless is being shopped around. But there’s a twist! A heinous, garbage twist. Without further ado, here is Deadline’s description:
It’s tempting to be like, “This is totally buggin’” or “as if!” But the truth is this depraved idea requires more vitriol than quoting the sacred source material it purports to bastardize back to it. STAY AWAY FROM CLUELESS, YOU MONSTERS!
There is unbelievable, headline-making, controversial, and galvanizing reporting in Ronan Farrow’s new book Catch and Kill, and I encourage you to read, absorb, and consider it.
But I urge you, above all else, to peruse this Twitter thread as well, in which clips are posted of Farrow reading the audiobook version and doing his own character voices, from “Tough Ukrainian Guy” to Trump to Rosie Perez. (Scroll through here.)
What to watch this week:
Jojo Rabbit: This one is going to get a lot of people riled up. (I really liked it.)
Watchmen: Hellooooo.
Maleficent: Mistress of Evil: When Angelina Jolie and Michelle Pfeiffer are in the movies, we show up.
The Lighthouse: Robert Pattinson mermaid sex! (Really.)
What to skip this week:
Zombieland 2: Double Tap: Presumably somebody asked for this.
Catherine the Great: Eh.
