HBO Max

“Friends” finally sets its reunion

“Friends” fans will finally get their reunion – a year later than first planned.
HBO Max says it will have the special on May 27. It will be unscripted, with all six stars (shown here), plus assorted guests, including Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Cindy Crawford, Tom Selleck, Reese Witherspoon and James Corden; Ben Winston, who produces Corden’s late-night show, will produce and direct. Read more…

Festival stuffs our TV’s with classic films

For movie buffs – deprived of the cinema experience for a year – there’s a tad of good news:
Now we can all catch the Classic Film Festival. It will start with the 1961 “West Side Story” (shown here) at 8 p.m. ET (5 p.m. PT) Thursday and will sprawl across four days (May 6-9), two networks (Turner Classic Movies and HBO Max) and 95 years.
For a decade, the festival was just for people who could get to Los Angeles. In classic theaters, it showed great movies, interviewing some of the stars and filmmakers. Then came the COVID impact: Read more…

From Bugs and Elmo to Tony Soprano, new streamer goes max

So here people are, emerging from two months of socially responsible tele-viewing.
They’ve spent the pandemic with Netflix or Disney+, with Apple or Acorn or Amazon or whatever. Now they’re ready to do something else, maybe mow the lawn or play with a child or …
Or not. A new streaming service, HBO Max, debuts Wednesday (May 27) at $15 a month. With everyone from Bugs Bunny (shown here) to Tony Soprano, it’s capable of gobbling up many more months of quarantine time. Read more…

Super-streamers go to the Max

Let’s consider this the ultimate name-dropping.
HBO has just sent a reminder that it’s super-streamer, HBO Max (shown here with “Game of Thromes,” will arrive May 27. That brought my knee-jerk reaction:
What terrible timing, I figured. Disney+ has grabbed more than 50 million subscribers during this stay-at-home phase. Max will arrive just as we’re finally leaving home and strolling into the sunshine.
Will yet another super-streamer succeed? As the HBO name-droppers put it: “Ross, Rachel, Penny, Sheldon, Rick, Morty, Princess Bubblegum, Big Pussy, Mr. Big, Chandler Bing, Elmer Fudd, Diana Prince, Jon Snow, Dorothy … Bruce Wayne and (more) certainly think so.” Read more…