It's only Wednesday, but there's been enough big-time entertainment industry news this week to make our heads spin, from Lena Dunham's Girls revival and Euphoria creator Sam Levinson's HBO departure to trailers releases for upcoming films by two very different directors: Greta Gerwig and Ben Shapiro. Below, I tried to make sense of it all. Young Thug’s Getting a Trial Documentary The past few years have seen a handful of rappers walk on high-profile cases that almost certainly spelled life sentence doom.
Who can forget A$AP Rocky dramatically leaping over the stands into Rihanna’s arms when the verdict went his way. Lil Durk’s current outlook seems way more promising than it did this time a year ago. Even Diddy got off relatively easy compared to the charges he faced.
But no trial in the hip-hop world has been quite as dramatic, full of twists and turns, and populated with a host of colorful characters like the Young Thug YSL trial. The fallout from the two-and-half-year ordeal is still rippling across rap: Thug is trying to find his footing musically after two years in jail, leaks of his prolific not-so-private phone calls from the pen affected everything from Atlanta geopolitics to Kendrick Lamar, and Gunna continues to surge as a formidable solo artist despite the dissolution of his once-fruitful musical relationships with the likes of Thug, Lil Baby, Future, and more. And of course there’s Brian Steel, the beguiling defense attorney who’s now become a sort of Johnnie Cochran to the rap stars following his success with YSL.
All of that is to say, this trial is ripe for the documentary treatment—hopefully it lives up. The Girls are Back in Town It’s been awhile since we had a notable revival of a truly beloved, once-important property, but Lena Dunham is about to shake shit up with this one. After years of essays, rewatches, and reappraisals by fans arguing that Dunham’s seminal HBO series Girls was actually, despite its lightning rod status, still underrated, Dunham announced plans to return to Greenpoint.
The whole gang—Allison Williams, Zosia Mamet, Jemima Kirke and even Andrew Rannells—is set to appear for a five-episode run that’ll start production early next year, a decade after the original's series finale. Last year, Dunham riffed about how the quartet’s lives might have ended up; let’s see if those ideas hold up. This could go full And Just Like That…, or it could be the “Voice of a Generation’s” grand return.
Sam Levinson Parts Ways With HBO Finally, some good news coming out of the greater Warner Bros studio. He’s your problem now, Amazon—we will be there to watch the fire. Ben Shapiro’s Death Row Records Big Ben is moving like Suge Knight over at the Daily Wire.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
