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Hulu's Ramy Is Going to Be Your Next TV Obsession


As a millennial and a first-generation American, Ramy has a different outlook on life than his parents. Understandably, millennials are an easy target, but do you think there are any areas in which we should cut them some slack?

RY: I think millennials can get a bit of slack on still living at home. There used to be this stigma of, “Oh, you’re still living at your parents house?” But now it’s like, “Of course you are. Why wouldn’t you be?” There are real economic things to consider. But that being said, avocado toast is insane. It’s very expensive.

A large part of Ramy’s experience involves dating and his parents’ desire to for him to marry a Muslim woman. Have your parents ever tried to set you up before?

RY: No, they haven’t. My parents have been very cool about knowing what I’m trying to prioritize and giving me my space, so it hasn’t come up. My dad came here from Egypt and started working, so he didn’t get married until he was in his early 30s, which was a bit older for our culture. So I think my parents are like, “Oh, he still has time.” The pressure in the show is much different than in my real life.

Craig Blankenhorn/Hulu

That pressure would be a lot to contend with.

RY: I will say that the pressure [to be in a relationship] from Ramy’s friends in the show, though, is real. It’s this circle of practicing Muslim guys who are like, “Bro, you got to get married,” while every other group of guys is like, “Bro, don’t get married. Look at my life. Fucking live while you can.” That’s the trope. I’m the outlier with all my dudes who are practicing Muslims. Everyone’s married, has a kid on the way, and barely scratching the surface of 30. That’s super real.

How do you feel about the way we date today?

RY: I think we’re overwhelmed by the illusion of choice. There are all these apps and this idea that there’s someone better out there. It sounds kind of corny, but I don’t think you really find someone until you understand what you want. For a while I’ve known that there are just certain things I want to achieve before I bring in that energy. I haven’t really had a long-lasting relationship because I’ve known that it’s just not my time yet. But I feel that once you switch the gear and genuinely set your life up for what you want, you get what you want. It’s very internal.

So are you focused on work rather than dating right now?

RY: Yeah, I think there’s a balance that can come, but I always think about wanting to reach a level of creative understanding with myself and my work. Then it will make more sense to add people to this equation.

And would you do so via dating apps?

RY: Sure, why not? I don’t think it’s a bad way to meet people. You can actually get a little bit of a glimpse of something—it might not be much, but you can understand how good someone is at marketing.

Between Ramy and your upcoming HBO standup special, you’re quite a busy guy. How do you unwind?

RY: It sounds crazy, but I find myself unwinding when I do standup. There’s something about the grind of production, so when I’m able to go on stage it’s really fun. I always view it as an opportunity to talk with people while I still get to be louder than them, which is my favorite thing. But also, praying five times a day, which I don’t always do, helps me on set and in the writers room. It’s really grounding and a good way to mark time and get organized.



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Hulu's 'Can I Steal You For a Second? The Ringer’s Guide to Colton’s Season' Review: This 'The Bachelor' Special Will Shock Even the Biggest Superfan


To say I was unhappy about this season of The Bachelor ending would be an understatement. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy that Colton Underwood has found love with Cassie Randolph (and potentially lost his V-card), but I’ve gone into full panic mode over what I’m supposed to do with my Monday nights for the next two months. (The Bachelorette premieres May 13, but who’s counting?)

So I started scrolling through Hulu the other night to see if I could find something to fill my Bachelor void, and let me tell you, I struck gold. Can I Steal You For a Second? The Ringer’s Guide to Colton’s Season—starring former Bachelor Ben Higgins, former Bachelorette Rachel Lindsay, The Ringer’s Juliet Litman, and E!’s Lauren Zima—is a hilarious one-off special that recaps the latest season while providing some juicy behind-the-scenes info about the show.

Let’s recap what I learned, shall we?

“I think it’s more like, ‘Enjoy it,’” Rachel revealed of the advice she received before kicking off season 13 of The Bachelorette. “Everybody’s nervous. It’s the first time, you know, for some people, you’re ever on camera. For the lead it’s the first time you’re holding this role. You don’t get any direction.”

Ben agrees: “Zero direction. Chris [Harrison] is standing there like, ‘All right, here you go’ and the limo pulls up. No coaching, no direction.”

This worked for Rachel when she competed on Nick Viall’s season of The Bachelor. “I was like, ‘No, I sweat easily. Like, I can’t. I’ve got to be the first one out to meet Nick.’ They were like, ‘OK,’” she recalls.

“I think it’s a big misconception that we know about all the drama that’s going on in the house,” Rachel said. “They truly do separate us, and the only time we know that there is drama is if you just happen to hear it in the house, like if someone is yelling like crazy, or if someone comes and tattles on the next person.”

Ben added, “When somebody does come to you with, ‘Oh, these people aren’t here for the right reasons’ or ‘This person’s mean and they’re fighting in the house,’ it’s good for us because it gives us information that we wouldn’t have and it allows us to make a fair judgement when it comes to rose ceremonies.”

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“I would go with general terms like, ‘Hey boo, hey you, hey there,’” Rachel admitted, confirming that it wasn’t until midway through her season of The Bachelorette that the names fully started to register for her. Ben, however, took a more strategic approach to remembering names when he was the Bachelor: “I did word associations. So when somebody would come up out of the limo and say, ‘Hi, I’m Rachel and I like sports,’ I would, in my head, come up with a little song.”

Ben admitted that during his first one-on-one date with Lauren Bushnell, they filmed in a hot tub that was completely cold. “It was cold because there was no electricity,” he confirmed. “So it was just like, cold water that you’re sitting in and acting like it’s hot.”

Ben revealed that when he was on Kaitlyn Bristowe’s season of The Bachelorette, he was never told if he was the first, second, or third person that she had a fantasy suite date with. “I didn’t know what order I went and I didn’t care,” he said. I don’t think I’d want to know.”



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Hulu's *The Act* Review: It's Horrifying, Human, and So Hard to Stop Watching


Hulu‘s new true-crime series The Act, now streaming, delivers its first big shock in episode two, when all of Gypsy Rose Blanchard (Joey King)’s teeth are pulled out at the request of her own mother. Dee Dee (Patricia Arquette) puts her daughter through such a heinous procedure to help her, presumably, but the entire thing feels sinister. Does Gypsy really need this done? The fact you have to ask is disturbing in itself.

The aftermath is just as hard to watch. Gypsy’s miserable. She cries in the bathtub while her mother assures her fake veneers are on the way. One day, two days, three days go by—but still, Gypsy has no teeth. She’s so upset about it that she tells Dee Dee she no longer wants to attend an upcoming charity event, where she’s supposed to collect a monstrous check.

It’s only in the midnight hour—right as Gypsy’s about to go on stage—that Dee Dee gives her the veneers. “Thank you, mommy, but why didn’t you give these to me before?” Gypsy asks. To which Dee Dee says, “They just came this morning, fresh from the dentist. It’s like Cinderella at the stroke of midnight. Does the glass slipper fit?”

The timing is strange, to say the least. At best, it’s a coincidence. At worst, Dee Dee purposefully kept the veneers from Gypsy and sprung them on her to look like a hero. This type of psychological manipulation is rampant in The Act, which is based on the Munchausen by proxy horror story that rocked the world in 2016. You remember it: Dee Dee Blanchard intentionally made her teenage daughter, Gypsy, sick for most of her life. In June 2015, Gypsy retaliated by conspiring with her online boyfriend, Nick Godejohn, to murder her mother. HBO highlighted the case in the documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest. It’s a grisly, unfathomable story. And now, the brains behind The Act want to humanize it.

“Over the years people have asked me, ‘Is this or that person in the story a psychopath?’ or, ‘What’s wrong with these people?’ Ultimately, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them,” Michelle Dean, who wrote the BuzzFeed article that inspired The Act, tells Glamour. (She’s also credited as a co-showrunner and screenwriter on the series.) “I think we all have our pathologies. Dee Dee’s was deeper than most, and Gypsy’s was deeper than most because of what her mother did to her. It was a lot more human than the crazy tabloid profile of the story.”



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Aidy Bryant Is Living Her Best Life With Hulu's Shrill


Annie has an epiphany at a “Fat Babe Pool Party,” where she sees women of all shapes, sizes, and colors enjoying themselves without a care in the world. It leads to one of the most poignant monologues in the show. “I’ve wasted so much time and energy and money…for what? For what?” Annie says to her roommate, Fran (Lolly Adefope), and a new friend they meet at the pool party. “I’m fat. I’m fucking fat. Hello? I’m fat!”

Bryant experienced a similar “a-ha” moment in her own life. “At a certain point, after all the dieting, weird exercise programs, or Weight Watchers—all these different things that I had tried—I didn’t look any different,” she says. “I didn’t super care, but people were telling me that I was supposed to. So I was like, ‘I’m going to wash my hands of this.’ I just started trying to be healthy for myself and put all that energy into trying to achieve my dreams.”

The pursuit of those dreams first took Bryant to Chicago, where she attended Columbia College and became a member of the famed Second City improv group (Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Stephen Colbert are also alumni). The change of scenery—Bryant grew up in Phoenix, Arizona—did wonders for her, both personally and professionally.

“I went to a sporty high school with a lot of very thin, very athletic girls. I always felt like, ‘I don’t fit in, and I should, and that’s what matters,'” she says. “Then I went to Chicago and met these girls who were big, like I was, and fashionable and had boyfriends. They didn’t seem encumbered by their own thinking of themselves. I remember being like, ‘Well, I want to be like them.’ That was a big game-changer for me.”

Not everyone in Chicago was enlightened, of course. Bryant says the first few talent agents she met had limited ideas about where her career could go. “They were basically like, ‘Look, you know, there’s not a lot of roles for your type,'” she says. “At the time, I think I was 21 or 22, they would send me out for mom parts in, like, Walmart commercials where it was like, ‘This is a mom with three kids.’ I think because of my body type they were like, ‘Oh, she’s a mom,’ which is wild.”



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Hulu's PEN15 Review: I Wish Every Teen Girl Would Watch This Show


Junior high is, for me at least, a time worth forgetting. That formative, cringe-inducing time was filled with angst, cliques, and a whole lot of acne. So watching Hulu‘s PEN15, a coming-of-age comedy following two seventh grade girls in the year 2000, was a mixed experience: The rush of seeing the early aughts return, the uncomfortable twinges from remembering the growing pains of those years.

It’s just so scarily accurate. The pivotal slow dance to K-Ci & JoJo’s “All My Life.” Early AIM experiments with away messages, “hot singles” chatrooms, and desperate pleas to your parents to stay off the phone while you’re on the Internet. Gel pens. B*Witched. Butterfly clips. Middle parts. Regret all around.

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There’s a moment in episode three—”Ojichan”—that many woman might find as deeply relatable as I did, regardless of whether a TigerBeat poster of Jonathan Taylor Thomas was on the bedroom wall or not. After spending the majority of the episode masturbating and being consumed by shame over it—to the point that she’s literally haunted by the prospect of her dead grandpa knowing what she’s up to—a distraught Maya (Maya Erskine) confesses to her best friend Anna (Anna Konkle), “I’m like Sam [their male friend who was caught looking at porn earlier in the episode], only I’m grosser because I’m a girl and I’m a pervert. And I really shouldn’t be doing what I’m doing.”

That scene alone is proof why I so desperately needed a show like PEN15 when I was younger. Sam and his buddies crack as many sex jokes as you’d expect from a group of adolescent boys, gathering after school to try and catch a glimpse of boobs on the Spice channel. It’s accepted as normal, something we’ve seen onscreen so many times that it’s become a cliché: Horny Teen Boys.

But I can count on one hand the times I’ve seen a teen series tackle female masturbation, and I was 30 when I saw most of them. Maya feels guilt over something boys are taught to boast about because, like me, she grew up without a show like PEN15 or Netflix’s Sex Education and Big Mouth to reassure her that what she’s doing is normal. To show her that many other girls her age are just as weird and awkward—and, yes, gross—as the boys. That she’s never grosser simply because she is a girl.

Alex Lombardi

“Gross” is definitely something PEN15 leans into—and in doing so, it’s groundbreaking. The fact that Erskine and Konkle are adults playing teen versions of themselves allows them to depict their characters’ burgeoning sexualities with an attention to detail that would be impossible with a younger actor. The first time Maya masturbates, it’s seconds after she’d been playing with two My Little Pony dolls, pressing their nuzzles together to have them make out. It’s deeply realistic—my Barbies were “having sex” with Ken before I even knew what sex really was—because, in the words of Britney Spears, she’s “not a girl, not yet a woman.” Despite knowing I’m not watching an actual teen grind against pillows or wipe her hand on her bedroom carpet when she’s finished, it was hard not to feel challenged by PEN15‘s unflinching portrayal of something I’m accustomed to seeing from only males onscreen. Maya’s shame is my shame, and that’s hard to shake—no matter how many decades I’ve had to unlearn what the patriarchy taught me.

The thing is, puberty is a nightmare. For too long, girls have been relegated to the sidelines in these stories, limited to being some sort of Winnie Cooper type—a chaste, flawless object of affection with perfect manners and not a single zit. But we aren’t immune to the horrors of adolescence; girls can be just as raunchy, just as cruel, just as dorky as the boys who have dominated pop culture’s coming-of-age stories for so long.



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