Television

Nothing is scarier than team dances

Welcome back to Dancing With the Stars. This week the stars are swapping spandex for spider webs as they hit the ballroom floor for some interpretative dance on the Halloween tip. The creepy clown who is stalking the DWTS set isn’t the only terrifying thing on this week’s show, because after a string of guest judges kept his seat warm, the show’s wayward judge, Len Goodman, finally returned from two-timing on Dancing With the Stars with Strictly Come Dancing. If you like even scarier thoughts: team dances are also on the agenda for this week. It’s a night of horror all right.

Here’s what happened on Dancing With the Stars:

Tommy Chong and Peta Murgatroyd: It seemed that the quick step would get the best of the last old man standing on the show, but Tommy managed to pull off the fast-paced routine with panache and style. The judges — even Len (or, rather, Julianne Hough who regularly out-Lens Len)— loved the magic-themed routine. Turns out Tommy has made it further in the competition than any other senior citizen who dared don sparkles and bronzer on the ballroom floor, a fact that brings Peta to tears. (She probably cries at Kleenex commercials too.) 28/40

Lea Thompson and Artem Chigvintsev: In the rehearsal footage it appeared that Lea was cracking under the pressure of the Argentine tango, but they channeled the fear of slipping further down the leaderboard (they are currently in fifth place out of eight dancers) to hone their dance. As Lea cried on the dance floor, truth speaker Julianne suggested they give themselves a break, which is the best advice ever doled out on this show. Then Bruno Toniolo fell off his chair groping Julianne in excitement over the dance, and it made you wish the show had instant replay so you could watch it on a loop. Fingers crossed it will be GIF’d tomorrow! 34/40

Bethany Mota and Derek Hough: Derek picked on Bethany throughout their rehearsal-footage reel, which is the No. 1 sign of a Derek Hough Routine for the Ages. Their paso doble was dynamic and dramatic with a black-and-red theme and a shirtless drum corps. It would definitely be worth watching over again and not just for the shirtless men. Len thought the atmospherics overpowered the dance itself and yearned for the days of a simple paso doble, but the rest of the judges were more than happy to dole out 10s. 39/40

Antonio Sabato Jr. and Cheryl Burke: With Antonio holding down the last spot on the leader board, Cheryl knew she has her work cut out for her. She planned a Viennese waltz to the classic “I Put a Spell on You” that was simple enough for Antonio to handle, but challenging enough to hopefully sate the judges. Unfortunately, “the spell didn’t work” for Carrie Ann Inaba, and the other judges quickly agreed in less eloquent terms. Antonio didn’t mind the criticism, though. He announced that he was “doing it for the fans” and then pointed at the upper echelon of the ballroom stadium and got the entire balcony pregnant. 27/40

Michael Waltrip and Emma Slater: Michael’s jive to “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” turned into a Halloween house of horrors once he hit the judges’ table. Len bluntly told Michael that he was “surprised he made it to Week 7″ and told the NASCAR star that he was “running on empty.” Julianne called it “kind of a nightmare,” Bruno said he broke a record for being off time, while Carrie Ann called it “a great freestyle … but it was supposed to be a jive.” 20/40

Janel Parrish and Val Chmerkovskiy: At long last, Janel decided to tap into her Pretty Little Liars fan base and set a Viennese waltz to the PLL theme song. She got back into character as Mona, tortured a Val doll and even got to kill off her partner at the end of the routine. The audience — including a number of PLL peons … er, supporting cast — loved the dance, but A had clearly gotten to the judges already, and they mysteriously decided that the routine had a few problems. 31/40

Alfonso Ribeiro and Witney Carson: After an injury-addled week, Alfonso managed to keep his body together long enough to deliver a respectable rumba set to a live performance of Ella Henderson’s “Ghost.” For the judges, it was a breathe of fresh air that made Bruno willing to risk another tumble by enthusiastically critiquing the routine. Len appreciated that Alfonso didn’t “hang about washing windows,” which is a perfect example of a Len-ism. Alfonso used the opportunity of being on live, national television to announce that his wife is pregnant again and make d-ck joke at his own expense. 36/40

Sadie Roberton and Mark Ballas: Mark choreographed a dramatic zombie-themed paso doble routine set to the ominous tones of Kongos “Come With Me Now.” While the routine was an audience-pleasing blend of Thriller and The Wizard of Oz, the judges thought the theme got the best of the routine and the content was lost. Luckily for them, fans choose who stays and goes and it was a fun routine. 30/40

Team Itsy Bitsy: As Team Captain, Bethany chose Janel, Lea and Michael, who was the self-professed “weakest link” and made matters worse by missing rehearsal for a charity event. The routine to Iggy Azalea’s “Black Widow” started in a foggy forest and ended on a plus-sized spider web and was filled with fun bits in between. The judges thought the spider women “killed the number” and applauded Michael for not messing up too badly. Tom Bergeron took the opportunity to tell the team members that all of them (including Michael) were safe and that all of Team Creepy was in jeopardy. 36/40

Team Creepy: Alfonso’s team — Sadie, Tommy, and Antonio — set their circus-themed freestyle to the Rocky Horror campy soundtrack staple, “The Time Warp.” The routine was fun and frivolous with a few moments of brilliance and their energy was only slightly dampened by the fact that they had just found out they were all in jeopardy of elimination. They earned 32/40, meaning Derek held on to his undefeated team dance streak.

In Jeopardy: Alfonso and Sadie were quickly freed from the confines of jeopardy purgatory, leaving Tommy and Antonio to twist in the jeopardy winds.

Who Went Home: Antonio was sent home to return to his day job of being a professional hunk.

"I’m itching, man. I’m overdue"

HBO and the True Detective crew have remained tight-lipped about the next season of the hit show, confirming last month only that Colin Farrell and Vince Vaughn will be featured.

Now Taylor Kitsch, the star of the 2006 drama series Friday Night Lights who has been largely absent from the screen in the past year, has confirmed that he, too, has jumped on board for True Detective‘s second season.

Kitsch told AdWeek–which reported that the actor is nearing a deal, citing unnamed sources–that he will be working on the show.

“I’m really excited. I’ve just been prepping,” he said. “It’s been almost a full year since I’ve been on camera, so I’m itching, man. I’m overdue.”

The show is slated for eight episodes, like the first season, and begins production this fall in California.

[AdWeek]

The gangster series come to an end by returning to its beginnings, and Nucky's.

Spoilers for the series finale of Boardwalk Empire below:

In the end, Boardwalk Empire went out exactly the way you would expect a gangster story to: with a Tommy gun.

Yes, it turned out that the young, ambitious drifter that Nucky met earlier this season was in fact Tommy Darmody, returned to Atlantic City to get revenge for lives ended and ruined, and in the process–we have to assume, seeing him dragged away in Nucky’s fading vision–throwing away his own.

The reveal may not have surprised detail-oriented fans, who been calling Tommy’s identity in Internet comments from his first appearance as “Joe Harper from Indiana” earlier this season. But it was a thematically dead-on ending for a series that has, beginning to end, told stories about the old preying on the young–Nucky killing Jimmy, the Commodore raping Gillian–abuse and sickness passing through the generations like a family heirloom. In the process, Tommy brought Boardwalk Empire‘s tragic circle to a close–its acts of violence, greed and abuse building on one another until they ended in a pile of corpses and torn-up dollar bills.

Tommy pulled the trigger. But there was another young man haunting this episode, haunting the entire series, shadowing Nucky’s present and his past, who may have done Nucky in as surely as Tommy did. His name: Ragged Dick.

We never saw him in Boardwalk Empire, of course, because he only existed in books. He was the hero of a series of didactic stories by Horatio Alger, about a shoeshine boy who goes from literal rags to riches through hard work and clean living. He wasn’t just a character but a symbol of the culture Nucky grew up in, a time of megafortunes and few safety nets, when poor children were smugly told they could bootstrap themselves into middle-class fortune.

Even at the time, Alger’s stories were controversial; they were mocked by social critics and parodied by satirists. But they were powerful, and they stuck, in ragged Nucky’s mind above all. In the first season, Nucky compares young, hungry Jimmy to Ragged Dick; in a flashback earlier this season, an older man does the same to young Nucky. In season three, Gyp Rosetti finds the book while poking around Nucky’s office; last season, Nucky gives a copy to nephew Will (another surrogate-son figure). And the spirit of Alger’s Ragged Dick runs through the series other references to the sanctimonious fables kids were raised on in Nucky’s day, like the children’s magazine, Golden Days for Boys and Girls, in the final season premiere:

Be honest and true, boys!
Whatever you do, boys,
Let this be your motto through life.
Both now and forever,
Be this your endeavor,
When wrong with the right is at strife.

If Boardwalk Empire has had a consistent theme, it’s been to systematically, repeatedly undermine this righteous, golden lie. In Nucky’s world, being honest and true may not always get you killed, but it doesn’t get you glory. The folks standing tallest at the end of the series–the real-life characters who would get written into history–are the violent, like Luciano and Lansky, or the conniving, like Joe Kennedy. From the beginning of this season’s flashbacks, the Commodore made clear that he thought Nucky’s Alger-driven morality was not just wrong, but despicable: “You think you deserve something for trying hard,” he tells him, contemptuously, like it’s the worst human insult imaginable.

As we have all season, we know where this flashback is going to lead: with Nucky procuring Gillian into “service” to his pederast mentor. His own dad a miserable drunk, Nucky has two fathers, Horatio Alger and the Commodore, and they don’t like each other. He wants to be the Honest and True Boy, but the only way not to disappear is to become the Commodore’s boy.

He makes his choice, and spends the rest of his life trying to reconcile the two. Which is where we met him at the beginning of the series–trying to be corrupt but not brutishly criminal, to be a bootlegger but work like a legitimate businessman. He would eventually kill and get bloodied, but his preferred weapon was his Magic Bankroll, which he would produce to peel off bills and make problems go away. In “Eldorado,” at last, the magic fails him; Tommy tears up Nucky’s second payoff in his face. “You showed me,” Nucky says.

Not yet. But he’s about to.

Boardwalk Empire‘s ending was all about finality. It spread its major deaths across the final three episodes, but with a few exceptions–Margaret, the institutionalized Gillian–if you had made your predictions on the principle that any non-historical figure would leave feet-first, you would not have done too badly. Like HBO’s Rome, this was a docufiction hybrid, with an emphasis on the little people and also-rans who would turn out to be history’s redshirts. Its greatest stories were at the margins–Richard Harrow’s, Chalky White’s–and whenever possible, it wrote out their epitaphs on the wall in bullet holes.

That was Boardwalk Empire‘s philosophy from the beginning. Producer Terence Winter was a writer for The Sopranos, but he notably did not agree with creator David Chase about closure and unanswered questions. It was Winter who lobbied Chase, unsuccessfully, to tell the audience what happened to the Russian from the “Pine Barrens” episode. And Winter had pointedly said that he was not going to end Boardwalk with a finale like The Sopranos‘ cut to black.

And boy, did he ever not give us a Sopranos ending here. Is Tony Soprano dead? You and I will be before anyone stops arguing that question. But is Nucky Thompson dead? Yes! BLAMMO! He is totally, 100%, no-ambiguity, direct-shot-to-the-head, glazed-over-eyes, fading-vision, last-fleeting-memory-of-childhood dead! He has shuffled off this mortal coil and joined the choir invisible, he is an ex-Nucky! (He is also, by the way, less fortunate than his real-life inspiration, Nucky Johnson, who lived until 1968.)

But it was not only Nucky whom “Eldorado” gave closure; for most of the hour, the episode was a closure machine, a series of long goodbyes and exit scenes designed to give the audience the sense that each story was well and thoroughly finished. Narcisse, having put down Chalky White in the season’s most powerful episode, is gunned down (again, bullet to the head to silence doubters). Capone gets ready for jail, saying goodbye to his deaf son in a scene that recalled how affecting Stephen Graham could be when not he was not made to play Capone as a cackling maniac. Nucky has a last dance with Margaret. Luciano toasts his victory with the Five Families. You may have wanted a different ending, but you can’t say that you did not definitively get one.

I’m not saying that Boardwalk Empire was the anti-Sopranos, exactly, or that it was built for people who hated The Sopranos‘ ending. I’m sure there are people who loved both. But it was at least a kind of counterrevolution against The Sopranos‘ narrative style. David Chase’s story took expectations of the mob story and upended them, made them caustically ironic. Winter took a gangster story, largely from life, and had it do what you expect gangster stories to do, right down to ending with a whacking. It did it beautifully, with tremendous attention to detail, great performances and an acute sense of the history and ideas of the time. But on a channel that’s made an art of rethinking the mob story, the Western, the fantasy saga, Boardwalk Empire was, unapologetically, the thing that it was.

In the end, I prefer The Sopranos, up to and especially the ending. But that’s subjective, and it’s not really fair to hold that against Boardwalk Empire. It was itself to the end, and it ended pretty well by its own standards. The flashback structure of the season may have been, as Andy Greenwald wrote in Grantland, an attempt to retcon empathy into Nucky’s story–but it did show how he carried his downfall in him from the beginning.

A David Chase might have picked a different final moment, maybe that weird, magical scene on the boardwalk where a Buck Rogers showgirl guides Nucky behind a curtain to see the Metropolis-like image of an early television, and he’s struck dumb at the vision of a future he has no part in. I loved that image; it’s the one that will probably stick with me. But that wouldn’t be Boardwalk Empire. And the final image it did choose was gorgeous: Nucky as a boy, in his own golden days, reaching out for a coin that he thinks means hope but eventually will mean his doom.

Because “Eldorado” is not just the apartment building where Nucky dances with Margaret. It’s Nucky himself–the phrase literally means “the golden one.” Striving for a shiny nugget–a drive echoed in “The Spell of the Yukon,” the Robert Service poem Nucky hears the drunk Princeton boys reciting–is a fitting note to end this series on. Like young Nucky, flailing and grasping under the ocean waters, Boardwalk Empire went for the shiny gold. It didn’t know how to do otherwise.

Read next: Meet The Real Gangs of Boardwalk Empire

Relatively light on walker slayings but still plenty gruesome. Also, who ordered the carpaccio?

See correction below.

Episode three. The metaphors accrue.

The third episode of the fifth season of AMC’s The Walking Dead opens in the courtyard of an elementary school where the remaining Termians are enjoying roasted Bob shank. Bob, you might recall, was abducted in the final moments of the previous episode and woke up to find his captors working through the gristle on his leg meat, like a cross between The Raft of the Medusa and that scene in Red Dragon where Hannibal Lecter serves the Baltimore symphony board of directors a dish of clumsy flutist.

(For fans of Telltale Games’ excellent The Walking Dead: Season One, it also recalls the woebegone happenings at the St. Johns dairy farm in episode two, ‘Starved for Help.’ Download it here for iPad and iPhone.)

The cannibalism—and some of the attendant culinary musings by the group’s leader Gareth—are supposed to be stomach churning. (And they are!) But mostly they raise questions of hunger in the world two years on from the apocalypse. What does it cost to satiate your appetites now? And what can the pursuit of nourishment turn you into?

Shots of the Termians eating human flesh are interspersed with shots of the hungering walkers clawing at the windows nearby, trying to get in. The glass is going to break sooner or later, or as Gareth puts it “nothing lasts too long anymore.” But the point seems to be that the division between the living and the living-dead is already transparent. And that, pretty soon, it might not be there at all.

(To me, Gareth—both in the book and on the show—vaguely parallels the unnamed protagonist of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, primarily for falling into traps of his own making and for the harshness of his self-imposed rules of conduct. Too bad he won’t be around long enough to be developed more fully.)

In any case, Bob’s horror turns to sardonic laughter as he reveals that he’s been bitten. As far as taunts go, “you eatin’ tainted meat!” is hard to top.

Back at the church, Gabriel is pushed to confess his sins. He shut himself inside his sanctuary while his congregation begged to be let in. The group, having discovered Bob is missing, fights about what to do and Glenn mediates between the half that wants to go on to Washington and the half that wants to deal with the Terminus and wait for Daryl and Carol to return.

Ultimately, half the group heads off to find the Termians just moments before they break into the church. The showdown that follows is tense and wonderful and proves the show’s writers could easily forgo the walkers and still have something compelling to present. The whole thing is an ambush, which ends with Rick and company hacking Gareth’s group to bits with machetes. Objecting to the violence, Gabriel says “This is the lord’s house!” To which Maggie replies coldly, “No, it’s just four walls and a roof,” hence the name of the episode.

Bob, meanwhile, dies stoically having had a chance to say goodbye to everyone, including his girlfriend Sasha. Recalling Goethe’s Werther, he concludes that “nightmares shouldn’t change who you are.” The group splits in two and, later, we see Daryl emerge from the darkness before saying “come on out” to someone whom we can’t quite make out before the credits roll.

Zombie Kill Report
1 bullet and 1 riffle butt to the head by Sasha; 1 riffle butt to the head by Glenn; 1 knife to the skull by Maggie; 1 gun shot to the head by unseen; 1 knife to Bob’s temple by Tyreese (does it count?).
Estimated total: 6

Recipe
The Termians spit out the “tainted meat,” but don’t stick around long enough that we find out whether or not cooking flesh decontaminates it. (What would Mark Bittman say?) We’ll probably never know.

Vintage Finds
Michonne finally has her sword back!

Correction: Maggie unleashes the four walls and a roof line.

The 'Six Feet Under' and 'United States of Tara' vet explains how her Amazon instant hit was inspired by her family

This post originally appeared on Rolling Stone.

One day three years ago, writer-director Jill Soloway got a phone call with some life-changing news: Her father was coming out as a transgender woman. “It was a total surprise,” she says. But as the elder Soloway, now a retired psychiatrist in her late 70s, explained the transition over the phone, “I reacted like a parent myself,” says Jill. “I tried to make sure that the person knows that they’re safe and unconditionally loved.” (To avoid confusion, Jill uses gender-neutral terms like “parent” and “they.”)

The experience became the basis for Transparent, an Amazon Instant series and one of the fall’s best new TV shows. It tells the story of the Pfeffermans, whose patriarch (Jeffrey Tambor) goes from Papa Mort to “Moppa” Maura. The cast also features Gaby Hoffman as Maura’s daughter Ali, Amy Landecker as daughter Sarah, Jay Duplass as son Josh and Judith Light as ex-wife Shelly. Portlandia’s Carrie Brownstein plays Ali’s friend, Syd, and The Office’s Melora Hardin is almost unrecognizable as Sarah’s lover, Tammy. Ultimately, it’s a family drama with a singular purpose: “I wanted to make something that would make the world safer for my parent,” says Soloway.

The prolific Soloway – who has producer credits on Grey’s Anatomy and United States of Tara and won a directing award at Sundance last year for her film Afternoon Delight – had wanted to make a “family show” since her two-year stint writing for Six Feet Under ended nine years ago. “Pretty shortly after they came out,” she says, referring to her parent, “I was thinking, ‘I’ve got a TV show now.’ It just immediately hit me as this is the show I’ve been waiting my whole life to write.”

The show’s first season premiered in its entirety on Soloway’s birthday and, even though critics were buzzing favorably about the show, she recalls being in a fugue state. As she tells Rolling Stone about all the ways making Transparent had been positive for her and her family, it seems as though the feeling of being stunned has transformed into happiness. “It’s exciting to know that it resonates so much with people,” she says. “But it’s definitely a new feeling.”

How long have you had the idea for the show?
Ever since I was working on Six Feet Under, I had an idea of doing a family show. And then the trans aspect made itself clear to me when my own parent came out as trans.

My sister worked on the show — she wrote the seventh episode ["The Symbolic Exemplar"]. She’s kind of, like, my other half. But when I imagined this show, there was always a brother. I actually think Ali and Josh are more like my sister and I are. In some ways my sister and I are like Sarah and Ali, and in some ways we’re like Josh and Ally. But in imagining the family, there were always three kids.

MORE: Jeffrey Tambor on His ‘Transparent’ Transformation

Who are you most like in the family?
I feel like I’m a lot like Josh. I really relate to the feeling of falling in love 10 times a day and wishing I could never stop falling in love. And then there are parts of me in Ali and parts of my sister in Ali. Faith is the person who would be living on her Price Is Right money for a few years, and I’m more of a Silver Lake mom, so in some ways I’m more like Sarah. And my sister Faith is gay, so in some ways she’s more like Sarah. So I think autobiographical stuff is all thrown in a blender and mixed around and evenly distributed amongst all three kids.

How much of the show is autobiographical?
I would say it’s almost 98 percent fictionalized. The Pfeffermans are just very real people. The reason I wanted to cast Jeffrey is because he’s always reminded me of my parent. They really have a very similar sense of humor and that was just immediate. Other than that, it’s not really autobiographical.

My mom had a husband who had frontal temporal dementia, who couldn’t speak, similar to the story of Shelly and Ed. He passed away a few years ago, the same summer that my parent was coming out. So I’d say that stuff is all informed by what was going on in my life at the time. A lot of things that I was experiencing and saying to myself, this feels like a TV show and thinking, “Good thing I have a TV show that I’m writing so that I can process all this stuff.”

Something to help you work through it.
I was really working through it. I felt kind of lucky actually.

What I like about Ali is she seems like a character you could do almost anything with. Is that why you chose Gaby Hoffman?
I saw her in an episode of Louie, and I just loved the way she was talking the whole time and he’s trying to get a word in edgewise and he lets her break up with him. I just loved the way words rolled off her tongue and nothing seemed written. I loved how free she was. I was just like who is this really cool, Jewish lady? And she’s not even Jewish.

MORE: The Best TV of 2014 So Far

You might say the opposite of Judith Light.
With her, I knew that even though America knew her as the Who’s the Boss blonde person and even as the character that I remembered her from on One Life to Live. She’s been playing these Jewish moms on Broadway and that she, herself, was Jewish. When I started to imagine her without blonde hair, I was able to see Shelly in her.

When I was casting her, [actor-filmmaker] Josh Radnor called me to say, “I just hope you realize she’s a magical being. She has spiritual power and can understand people’s emotional lives in an instant.” I was down for that. On one of the early days of the shoot, a bee stung on the top of my head when we were in the park – filming the push-up scene – and then later that afternoon I was shooting a scene with Judith, and she was doing Reiki healing on me and fixed the pain. That and the Vicodin fixed it.

How did you connect with Carrie Brownstein?
Originally, when we were trying to cast Tammy, her name came up. But I always felt Tammy was really tan and blonde, like Lady Diana or someone who spent some time in her childhood on a ranch. And Carrie just seemed too Jewy to play Tammy, but I really, really wanted to work with her, so in the writers’ room we created this character of Syd for her.

You’ve said you really wanted the show to be five people who were equally lovable as well as unlikable. Is that a hard balance to strike?
I’m always going for truth and honesty. I’m a fan of Louis C.K., I’m a fan of Lena Dunham. I love shows about people that other people would consider unlikable, or like the work of Woody Allen and Albert Brooks. I love a kind of shambling outsider protagonist who always feels like they’re “other.” And so the challenge was to make five of those people in the family instead of just one. I’ve written scripts before about a single odd outsider and someone who’s trying to make sense of the world. I like that idea that all five of these people would be connected over their common legacy of feeling different, feeling on the outside.

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What does your parent think of the show?
They love it. All four of us in our family – my sister, my mother and my, I guess you could use the word “moppa” – were all just kind of standing back and watching this thing that feels a bit like a tribute to our family but mostly like something else entirely, something so much bigger than us. We’re just all watching it together and checking in with each other every day. “How are you doing? And what do you think?”

There’s this zeitgeisty moment in the trans community, and this show happened to land in the right place, by accident really. It’s probably a show that couldn’t have been made five years ago, and five years from now [it] wouldn’t have that same feeling of “Holy shit, we’ve never seen this before.” It’s kind of fun actually to be all experiencing this together.

How much work did you need to do with Jeffrey to create Maura?
I keep saying this weird feeling that Maura Pfefferman existed out in the universe, this whole family did. She was waiting for me to notice her and waiting for me to go get Jeffrey so she could appear through him. Somebody said in an email I was sent that Maura felt spiritual to them. I was feeling that a lot when I was talking to our hair and wardrobe people about her costumes and her hair — that she should be a California hippie, kind of a Wiccan, two spirits, high priestess. It all felt so organic.

Early Maura was a little bit more awkward, who hadn’t felt her sense of style…that had one sort of feeling. And I think in the fourth episode when Davina helps her use her own hair on top and use her silver extensions underneath, she really transforms into somebody else. Even the hair and makeup people said that Jeffrey was a certain level of comfort.

I never felt like I was working with Jeffrey to “do” her, I just felt like I was trying to stand back and let her come through.

Do you have ideas for Season Two?
A little bit. I’m starting to see the beginnings of what the characters would do in a second season. But I love the writers’ room process so much. I think more of what I’m going to be doing is trying to stop coming up with too much of it so we can all do it together when we all get back together.

Your parent must be very proud of you.
Yeah, they are. They came to the set on Jeffrey’s 70th birthday actually. It was a really special day. We gave Jeffrey a big cake. And they came to the premiere as well. It was really cool.

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As the disease comes to New York City, 24-hour news wavers between science and sensationalism. But what does Gene Simmons think?

The guest on Friday’s Fox News’s panel show Outnumbered gave a damning assessment of the government’s response to Ebola, after a Manhattan doctor who had recently returned from West Africa was diagnosed with Ebola Thursday night. “In point of fact, we are completely unprepared for things like this,” the guest said. “We can’t even take the simple precaution of not letting anybody from a certain part of Africa come into America before you pass a health test. The fact that this doctor and this nurse [in Dallas] were just allowed to run around… is lunacy.”

The guest was Gene Simmons. As in Gene Simmons from the face-painted ’70s rock band KISS.

Now, I don’t mean to imply that Simmons lacks the medical authority to talk about Ebola policy. He did, after all, write “Calling Dr. Love.” He’s practically a diagnostic professional! But that comment summed up where a story like Ebola is eventually bound to go once cable news has had enough time with it.

In any breaking news incident, you have the facts and then you have the story. The facts are what happened. The story is why you care–the details, quotes, opinions and fears that make the facts juicy. In cable news, the story generally wins.

So Thursday night, the facts were: Someone in New York City had Ebola. Dr. Craig Spencer, who had been volunteering with Doctors Without Borders treating patients in Guinea, had come back to Manhattan. He’d followed the accepted guidelines for self-monitoring, checking his temperature twice daily, and watching, per the medical organization’s guidelines, for “relevant symptoms including fever.” When he detected a fever that morning–before which, he would not have been infectious–he went to the hospital.

But then there’s the story! The story was that the day before Spencer went to the hospital, he went bowling! He rode in an Uber vehicle! He went jogging and ate at a restaurant and walked in a park. He rode the subway–the crowded subway! None of this, according to medical science on Ebola, presented a danger from a nonsymptomatic person. But it felt wrong in people’s guts. And that makes a better story.

Thursday and Friday’s cable coverage showed plainly this struggle between story and facts. At times, the dichotomy was present in the words and images of the same report. Friday morning on CNN, the top-of-the-hour news noted that Spencer was not contagious, according to authorities, when he went out Wednesday–but only after it ran down the subway-taxi-bowling story and said the city was “on edge.” Anchor John Berman interviewed experts including Daniel Bausch of the Department of US Medical Naval Research, who said “it looks like everything was done right” in the Spencer case. The on-screen graphic: “EBOLA IN NEW YORK: REASON TO WORRY?”

The coverage, like so many stories, has also become an extension of partisan politics. There are midterms coming up: Republicans are invested in a crisis-of-confidence narrative while the Democrats must convey an everything’s-under-control narrative. So on Fox, Sean Hannity was hammering the government for being unprepared, and seemingly every host was hitting the refrain that Spencer was “fatigued” when he went out Wednesday. MSNBC, on the other hand, emphasized the low risk this case posed to New Yorkers along with the generally positive response to New York’s public-health response to date.

As for CNN under Jeff Zucker, it is biased as always toward the juicier story. In a noontime report, correspondent Jean Casarez noted that an NYPD team had photographed some trash outside Spencer’s apartment, and then left. “So it’s still sitting out there right now?” Banfield asked, adding that she’d seen police throwing latex gloves into street trash. Had the gloves been anywhere near any dangerous fluids? Is any of that trash an actual risk? Who knows? There was no further information. But the detail sounded spooky, so the report just left it sitting there, like the recycling bags on the curb.

By midday Friday, the general tone of coverage shifted to one that was less anxious, partly because better news had broken: Dallas nurse Nina Pham was declared Ebola-free in her recovery, and Spencer, it turned out, had not had the 103 degree fever first reported Thursday night, but a much lower 100.3-degree fever–undercutting the insinuations that he might have been sicker on Wednesday. Then too, there seemed to be a growing awareness that Spencer had, after all, contracted the disease by risking his life to help others, and it was maybe unseemly to present him as some kind of arrogant bowling menace.

For now, the news fever seemed under control. But it was a reminder all the same. Ebola may only be spread through contact with infected bodily fluids. Fear and anxiety are much more easily transmitted, through the air.

The Toddlers and Tiaras spinoff got the axe after allegations emerged that Mama June is dating a child molester

The TV network TLC has canceled the reality series Here Comes Honey Boo Boo over allegations that co-star “Mama June” Shannon resumed a romantic relationship with a convicted child molester.

“TLC has canceled the series Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and ended all activities around the series, effective immediately,” TLC said in a statement to Entertainment Weekly. “Supporting the health and welfare of these remarkable children is our only priority. TLC is faithfully committed to the children’s ongoing comfort and well-being.”

Reports emerged earlier this week that Mama June Shannon had reignited a relationship with Mark McDaniel, recently released from prison after serving time for aggravated child molestation of an 8-year-old. Shannon’s family denied the report.

The two-year old Toddlers & Tiaras spinoff reached more than three million viewers at its height.

[EW]