As one of TV comedy’s most established stars, Steve Carell gets sent a fair amount of scripts. Few have spurred him to an instant “yes” like Rooster, written by Bill Lawrence and his frequent collaborator Matt Tarses. “I read the script and it was one of the best comedy pilots I’ve read — period,” Carell tells The Hollywood Reporter in his first interview about the show. “Pilots are the hardest to write. You’re creating a world, you’re introducing it to an audience and you have to do it quickly, efficiently, without feeling like it’s all backstory — and be funny at the same time.” When he finished the first episode, he turned to his wife, Nancy Carell (who also guests in the show), and said, “I’m in.”

Hoda Kotb is returning to the Today show while co-host Savannah Guthrie remains with her family in Arizona as the search for her missing mother, Nancy Guthrie, enters its second week.

HBO Max, the streaming service from Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), will continue its international expansion with launches in the U.K. and Ireland on March 26, top executives unveiled in London on Monday. The streamer will be available directly via its url, as well as via launch partners Sky, which was previously announced, and the newly unveiled Prime Video.

HBO Max’s highly anticipated Harry Potter series, coming to the streamer in 2027, will be “the streaming event of the decade,” JB Perrette, CEO and president of global streaming & games at Warner Bros. Discovery said in London on Monday. At least that!

One of the marquee events of the Winter Olympics is underway with the figure skating competition, with skaters competing for individual medals across men’s, women’s, pairs and ice dance.

Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group CEO Tom Rothman was vocal about championing Black storytelling at the 17th annual African American Film Critics Association Special Achievement Awards, held Sunday at the Maybourne Beverly Hills.

Are you feeling like your football-scouting operation has been taking a beating lately?Do you sometimes wonder why your spreadsheets can’t get generated fast enough? Or perhaps your software coding is going slower than you always thought it would?Most of all, does your kid struggle with not being able to imagine the decor of his bedroom in your new home?If any of these problems resonate — and really, what could be more universal? — has Silicon Valley got an AI product for you.You may have noticed Sunday night that these four instances were prime AI use cases per a series of Super Bowl ads from the industry’s biggest players (Microsoft Copilot, unicorn startup GenSpark, OpenAI‘s Codex and Google Gemini, respectively), either solving challenges that don’t exist day-to-day for most Americans or, in the last case, solving a challenge that may actually be a good thing. Any parenting expert will tell you that temporary uncertainty or disappointment can healthily prepare a child for adulthood. But why risk that brief bout of questioning when AI can Magic Erase it from their lives?Of course, we’re acting like the removal of a childhood-development moment is a byproduct of AI adoption and not the whole point. While these ads and the dozen or so more that aired during the game— from both established players like Meta and Anthropic and upstarts like Ramp AI and Artlist — have different visions for how machine thinking will help us, they are nearly all united by a common ideology. Namely: Everyday life is unruly, unknown, hard. Wouldn’t it be nice if a computer happened along to make it easy and guaranteed?If you arrived unformed into the techno-capitalist parade that is the current iteration of the Super Bowl telecast, you would come to at least one very specific conclusion: technology will soon offload so much of our current toil. “It’ll be whatever we want it to be,” the Gemini mother says to her son about their house — AI is apparently manna now — as onscreen a message flashes “A new kind of help from Google.” A more encapsulating set of credos I cannot imagine. Whatever we want! No limitations or consequences! And new help! Who doesn’t want that? Well, compared to the current kind of Googling — the kind that requires critical thinking — it certainly is new. Better? Less clear.Tech revolutions at heart change the mechanisms by which humans live. The automobile lessened our reliance on the horse. This new revolution will lessen our need for a brain. Whether we want what this digital Che will wreak is another matter. Yes, on the surface, this ad spate is about AI products, which is about massive capitalizations, and Wall Street valuations, and many other -ations you hear on CNBC. But such talk of companies and products abstract, purposefully, what’s really being sold.The abstracting reached its pinnacle (nadir) with an insidious Alexa ad featuring Chris Hemsworth and wife Elsa Pataky. He insisted the smart speaker could go sentient in various wildly extravagant ways and kill him — a classic straw man of painting anyone worried about AI Safety as some kind of tinfoil alarmist while cleverly ignoring the actual dangers, like Alexa’s new policy of nonconsensual constant uploading. (See also under Amazon‘s Super Bowl Ring ad for how it saves all the lost dogs while, oh yes, turning on some kind of Big Brother camera for mass surveillance.)“I would never. I’m just here to help,” Alexa tells Hemsworth, which confoundingly seeks to have it both ways: “An AI can’t have murderous feelings; that’s silly. But it can have feelings of help and love!” (Literally an Alexa ad from earlier this football season starring Pete Davidson has him vulnerably telling a computer screen “I like you, too.”)To think about any of these tech company ads for more than five seconds is to realize how little they stand up to scrutiny. Which is exactly how the brands want it generally: feeling more, thinking less.Of course matters aren’t that simple; we’re just not that naive anymore. By now too many of us are wary of what’s being sold — sensitized by two years of deepfakes and soft slop, chastened by two decades of social media and rage-farming. And indeed, in-between the shiny sales pitches came little glimpses of self-own. Anthropic went after OpenAI for how the latter’s ad-based chatbot could be compromised without appearing to realize that asking sensitive information from a chatbot could be dangerous even when it wasn’t trying to sell you something. I’m not sure relying on an LLM to tell you how to navigate your relationship with your mother is so wise even if it refrains from pushing a cougar dating site.And Artlist.io, a little-known video-generation platform, pitched its tools to NY and LA markets with an ad the company told us that as a result of those tools took less than a week to create — or rather, a polar bear reading a voiceover script told us that while, on screen, dogs roasted marshmallows, horses ate from craft services and a person

Kid Rock headlined Turning Point USA’s MAGA-friendly “All American” Halftime Show alternative on Sunday, with the right-wing organization airing the concert in tandem with Bad Bunny’s official performance in protest over the Puerto Rican superstar’s show.

Celebrities are sharing their thoughts on Bad Bunny’s 2026 Super Bowl halftime performance.

As the search for Savannah Guthrie‘s missing mom, Nancy Guthrie, stretches into its sixth day, Arizona authorities remain hopeful that the 84-year-old woman, who they believe was abducted from her home, is still alive.

The rights to the Ghostface mask has sparked a legal battle, with Spyglass and Paramount Pictures suing a Los Angeles-based special effects studio claiming ownership of the droopy-eyed horror visage.

While preliminary and qualifying rounds for curling, snowboarding and ice hockey are already underway, the 2026 Winter Games officially kick off with the Milano Cortina opening ceremony on Friday, Feb. 6. Since the ceremony will be broadcast live at 11 a.m. PT/2 p.m. ET on NBC, cord-cutters can livestream it on any streaming service that carries the network, including DirecTV (with a five-day free trial), Sling and Hulu + Live TV. The opening ceremony will also air live on Peacock, however the streamer does not offer a free trial.

Ticket scalping could be facing major upheaval in New York, as a state senator is set to bring forward legislation that, if passed, would outlaw reselling concert tickets for more than they were originally purchased for.

Mary Carillo wasn’t supposed to be in the booth for the Milan-Cortina Opening Ceremonies Friday. She was supposed to be prepping some other Olympic segments, or reminiscing about her best Real Sports investigations, or scouting a mixed-doubles tennis tournament in Timbuktu, or whatever it is Mary Carillo does when she’s not in front of the camera. Instead, she’ll be in the booth with Shaun White and Terry Gannon, watching the Parade of Nations and commenting on all those Mariah Carey melismas, gamely stepping in while original host Savannah Guthrie stays in the US. to attend to the tragic disappearance of her mom.Who is Mary Carillo? If you’re a sports fan, you already know. But if you’re one of the millions who’s tuning in Friday just for the pageantry and don’t know your curling from your Kazakh mogul specialists, here’s the skinny on the Brooklyn-born, Florida-residing American treasure.She’s mad sardonic. Tennis fans know Carillo for her wry comments, often delivered with a world-class deadpan, leaving only alert viewers to pick up the joke. Once when the Spanish tennis whiz Fernando Verdasco was playing in a Grand Slam match, the ball caught the tape and hung above the net, an event noted by partner John McEnroe. Carillo asked if that meant something was in the air tonight, Fernando. The only thing better than an ABBA reference is an ABBA reference you have to pay really close attention to get.She’s a former pro tennis player. Many tennis commentators were great champions themselves. Carillo had a solid start, winning the mixed-doubles title at the French Open at just 20 (with McEnroe!). But she never cracked the Top 20 as a singles player, and after a host of injuries, retired at just 23. Fortunately for us, she was pretty good at her second career — she’s been a tennis commentator for nearly 45 years, and fans get visibly excited when they see she’ll be calling a match. Also, she was was a Real Sports correspondent for nearly the entirety of its 29-season run.She provided the all-time best three minutes Olympics outside of the Miracle on Ice.  At the 2004 Summer Games in Athens, Carillo was supposed to give a couple-minute tutorial on badminton, which had been added as a competition sport just a few Games before. She started out doing that, but then somehow, powered along by her own observational skills and suburban-mom frustration, turned it into a Shakespearean monologue about an entire neighborhood piling into her backyard to try to free a shuttlecock from a tree, with everything from javelins to  Roller Blades tossed in its direction and very specific children’s names joining the action as they empty out her garage. And then the monologue just ended. We still didn’t know much about badminton. But we did know Carillo could give Spalding Gray a run for his money.

On Tuesday, Ashleigh Banfield reported on her podcast that Nancy Guthrie‘s son-in-law Tommaso Cioni “may be” the “prime suspect” in the alleged kidnapping of Savannah Guthrie‘s 84-year-old mother, citing a “law enforcement source.” Today, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos called the report “reckless.”

Gore Verbinski has been in director’s jail for most of the past decade, following the back-to-back bombs of The Lone Ranger and A Cure for Wellness. But anyone with fond memories of the retro slapstick antics of his underappreciated 1997 debut, Mouse Hunt, the sleek suspense and scares of his U.S. remake of J-horror insta-classic The Ring or even the helter-skelter energy of his Pirates of the Caribbean franchise starter should be happy to welcome him back.

Dan Trachtenberg, who has spent the last several years reviving and steering the Predator franchise for 20th Century Studios, is planting his flag at Paramount Pictures.

Stegosaurus won’t just play defense with those spine plates — he’ll mess your whole world up with a swing of his tail, allosaurus. (And yes, I know that’s a T-rex in the above photo. My personal favorite dinosaur was not featured in the initial key art release, shame on Netflix. They did, however, include an extreme closeup of an eye; see below.)

One of the marquee events of the Winter Olympics kicks off this weekend with the figure skating team competition.

Heated Rivalry is pumping up book sales, too.

The Jim Henson Company, the puppet-based production house behind The Muppet Show, The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, has been sued by a film producer who ran its feature film department and says he hasn’t seen his share of profits or proper credits on a trio of movies he developed.

SiriusXM reported 31.3 million total paid subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2025. Over the course of the full calendar year, paid subscribers fell by 301,000, even as total monthly churn improved slightly to 1.5 percent in 2025 from 1.6 percent in 2024.

Lisa Kudrow has one big request for whoever is the next owner of Warner Bros. Discovery.

It seems the latest Hollywood beef is between Mark Ruffalo and Kevin O’Leary.