It’s that confidence that Ramakrishnan says she hopes to infuse in Devi, for ideally many seasons to come. “In a later episode, Devi’s trying to figure out her identity because she feels too Indian, but sometimes not Indian enough,” Ramakrishnan says. “When I was Devi’s age, I could relate to that feeling of being the odd one out out.” Because of that, she wants viewers to feel a sense of pride, whether they’re South Asian or a different culture. “There’s really somebody—and something—for everybody.”
Believe me, there is. Never Have I Ever has the resident hottie (get ready to crush on Paxton Hall-Yoshida, played by the charismatic Darren Barnet), a hilarious therapist played by Niecy Nash, and even tennis great John McEnroe appears as the narrator. (I’d tell you why, but that’s kind of a spoiler).
But best of all is Ramakrishnan, who is an absolute delight as the boy-crazy, hot-tempered Devi. In the first few minutes of the pilot, she prays for a few essentials—like being invited to a party with drugs “just so I have the opportunity to say, ‘No cocaine for me, I’m good.'” There’s a boyfriend request, too: “I just want him to be a stone-cold hottie who could rock me all night long.”
Ramakrishnan says unlike Devi, getting a boyfriend and losing her virginity was never something she actively sought out in high school. Where they do align: “We are very similar in terms of academics,” she says. “I was always on top of my game and trying to be the best at everything. I was a perfectionist.” Naturally, she connected with Kaling and Lang—two of the hardest working people in Hollywood—who gave Ramakrishnan valuable advice on her last day of filming: “Stay authentic. And no matter what, don’t try to be anybody else but me.”
Jessica Radloff is the Glamour West Coast editor. You can follow her on Instagram at @jessicaradloff14.
Carlin Ross spreads her legs and moves the lamp deeper between her thighs.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” a voice just over her shoulder says.
“It is,” Ross agrees, staring at herself in a mirror, transfixed. She drops her hands, delicately, smoothing them over the outline of her vulva.
For just $12.99 a month, you can join the millions of people who’ve watched Ross touch herself on camera whenever you want. But if you’ve devoured Love Is Blind or Tiger King, you’ve already shelled out for Ross’s show-and-tell. She’s on Netflix.
Carlin Ross is the woman who was filmed having an orgasm on The Goop Lab, Netflix’s TV show with Gwyneth Paltrow about her lifestyle empire, Goop. Ross and her coconspirator, the famed 90-year-old sex educator Betty Dodson, school Paltrow and her Goop employees on human biology, sexism, and self-doubt, and then Ross demonstrates as Dodson coaches her to an orgasm, using a special technique. The camera crew—and anyone who has a Netflix password—has full permission to look on.
How did a fast-talking New Jersey mom who was raised a Christian fundamentalist wind up teaching Gwyneth Paltrow the difference between a vulva and vagina? How did a former property lawyer help Goop—a women’s lifestyle brand famous for dubious claims about women’s genitals—create a revolutionary piece of sex education? What was she doing last month at a Walgreens in suburban Jersey ringing up a carton of cigarettes, a packet of condoms, and a box of hearing aids?
Ross is a nice lady from the suburbs who has a serious sweater collection, a kid, and a dog. Still, the answer to all of these questions is that she does what she wants and doesn’t take any shit. (Also, the condoms were for sex toys that she hands out during workshops; the cigarettes and hearing aids were for Dodson, who has taken to smoking and drinking Champagne in her 90s.)
Ross spits facts and talks about sex education like a rapper—because she can and because she feels she has to.
“I really believe that not telling young women about their bodies or giving them access to health care is systematic abuse at the level of genocide,” Ross says, a few minutes into our interview.
“You have to love your body to have an orgasm,” she says. “You have to feel entitled. The most unattractive man in the world still feels entitled to an orgasm. But women, we always feel like, ‘Maybe if I’m skinnier?’”
And: “If you’ve had an orgasm, you’re not a virgin.”
And: “Sexual freedom for women is a life goal, my reason for being.”
And on the controversies surrounding Goop: “There are so many controversies out there; it just seemed like a pimple on the ass of controversy.”
She has to be this succinct. In her decades as a sex educator, she has answered thousands of questions on her and Dodson’s site. “There are only really 10 to 15 questions, and they all boil down to the same thing,” Ross says. “‘Am I normal?’”
Rest easy—the answer is yes.
Ross grew up on the South Shore of Long Island with religious Christian parents who didn’t believe in TV, but did believe in a somewhat radical message of body acceptance—though raised almost a half-century apart, both Ross and Dodson credit their openness around sex in part to their parents walking around their homes naked. It was an abstinence-only education, but one that also involved her mother calmly explaining that the purpose of the clitoris is for sexual pleasure. It was a loving, “Amish-lite” life. And then she went through puberty.
“When you’re a girl, right, everyone listens to you in your family, and your family friends, everyone is nice to you,” Ross says. “And then you get your breasts, and all of a sudden your standing changes, and you become something else. You’re supposed to regulate male sexuality, and your dad’s friends are saying fresh things to you, and groping on mass transit happens.”
When asked if Maldonado-Passage should be in prison, Saff seemed torn. “I think justice was served, but I still don’t wanna see that man die in prison,” he said.
Joe Exotic reportedly went to a Shaman after his husband’s death. Maldonado-Passage’s former campaign manager Josh Dial says the gubernatorial candidate never sought counseling after the tragic death of his husband, Travis Maldonado. “What Joe did was he spoke to a Shaman,” Dial said. “I think it worsened his condition. I’m all for holistic approaches, but sometimes you need real legitimate counseling and medication and he wasn’t gettin’ it.”
Joe Exotic allegedly asked Kirkham to kill Baskin. McHale video chatted with reality TV producer Rick Kirkham all the way from Norway, and boy did he have a lot to say about his time with Maldonado-Passage.
“I mean he asked me to kill Carole one time,” he told McHale when asked if he had thoughts about the murder for hire plot. “But you know, it was like a joke. He was like, ‘I’ll make you a rich man if you kill Carole.”
Still, Kirkham says that the end of his partnership with Maldonado-Passage marked a turning point. “But that’s when he got serious. When I left the park and the zoo burned, the studio burned, that’s when Joe started downhill hard,” he said.
Kirkham regrets ever meeting the eccentric zoo owner. “I too was sucked into the surreal world of Joe Exotic,” he explained. “I will never get over…I still have nightmares, Joel. I still have nightmares today. I had nightmares last night. And since this documentary came out, I’ve had more nightmares about having lived on that park. I want to put this chapter away but it keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger.”
Netflix
Joe Exotic is reportedly terrified of big cats. Perhaps the craziest detail that never made it into the documentary is Kirkham’s claim that Maldonado-Passage was afraid of tigers.
After explaining that he once saw Maldonado-Passage shoot a horse for “tiger meat” after promising its owner to give it a good life, Kirkham admitted to seeing the zookeeper shoot two tigers. “One of them because he was pissed off at the tiger because the tiger nearly bit him one day,” Kirkham recalled.
“The one thing that wasn’t pointed out in the docuseries that’s really important to know, too, Joe was terrified of big cats,” he added later on the video chat. “He was scared to death of lions and tigers. In the shots that you see in there, where he’s in with two tigers—the white one and the other one—the white one is blind and the other one is on tranquilizers. It’s idiotic to think how he’s become famous as ‘the tiger king’ when he’s so terrified of big cats.”
“Wow, I did not know that,” McHale responded. Neither did we. Who else can’t wait for the Carole Baskin series?!
The rumors are true: A new episode of Tiger King is coming to Netflix.
In early April, Netflix released a new interview with Tiger King’sJoe Exotic from prison, which only increased fans’ hopes to see more of the true-crime show, centered on an outlandish zookeeper, Exotic, who was convicted of attempting to hire an assassin to take out his rival, Carole Baskin (along with multiple wildlife abuse charges, including killing five tigers).
Then, of course, Exotic’s other rival, Jeff Lowe, announced on Cameo that Netflix would release one more episode of this truly wild ride. But without a statement from Netflix to back up his claim, there was no way to know for sure.
Until now, that is. On April 9, Netflix announced that an after-show of sorts called The Tiger King and I, hosted by Joel McHale, is coming on April 12. It will feature new interviews with the series’s supporting players, including John Reinke, Joshua Dial, John Finlay, Saff, Erik Cowie, Rick Kirkman, and Jeff Lowe. Hopefully, there will be even more of that Joe Exotic prison interview, as well.
“It’s eye-opening and, hopefully, funny,” McHale promises. Unfortunately, Baskin will not be a part of the eighth installment. “We have not been approached about a new episode and would not participate if asked,” a representative for Baskin told Entertainment Weekly in a statement. It also seems Doc Antle and his wives have been left out.
For more on Baskin and the mysterious disappearance of her former husband, you’ll just have to wait for the Investigation Discovery (ID) series, Investigating the Strange World of Joe Exotic. “Love her or hate her, Carole is now in the center ring of the big-cat circus,” the network said in a statement, per EW. “Is she a selfless crusader and protector of animals who found unimaginable strength despite the mysterious disappearance of her husband? Or are we witnessing Carole Baskin’s master plan finally take effect? Despite her claims of innocence, did she orchestrate the disappearance of Don Lewis to seize control of his fortune, consolidate power and lay waste to her foes? No one seems to be talking–except for one man—and that man is the center of ID’s upcoming investigative series.”
Netflix
With a mini-series also on the way, starring Kate McKinnon as Baskin, it looks like we’ll be getting a lot more Tiger King content for a very long time.
Hollywood on Netflix couldn’t start streaming soon enough.
On Thursday, Netflix released the first set of images from Murphy’s upcoming limited series, Hollywood, starring some of Murphy’s favorite actors, including Darren Criss, Patti LuPone, and Dylan McDermott. Honestly, this show sounds exactly like the gorgeous, aspirational period piece we all need in our lives right now. Here’s everything we know about the upcoming series that you should bookmark on Netflix.
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The plot follows an alternate 1940s Hollywood. The limited series, which Murphy—who has brought you American Horror Story,Glee, The Politician, etc—co-created with Ian Brennan, will mix real Hollywood figures and fictional characters from the 1940s to reimagine what Hollywood could have been. As the show’s creators noted, it’s an “aspirational tale of what ifs.”
“With the present so fraught and the future uncertain, we turned to the past for direction, uncovering buried history to spin an aspirational tale of what ifs,” Janet Mock, the show’s executive producer, writer, and director shared with The Hollywood Reporter. “What if a band of outsiders were given a chance to tell their own story? What if the person with greenlight power was a woman? The screenwriter a black man? What if the heroine was a woman of color? The matinee idol openly gay? And what if they were all invited into the room where the decisions are made, entering fully and unapologetically themselves to leave victorious and vaunted, their place in history cemented?”
It harkens back to another Murphy miniseries. According to Murphy, he’s wanted to create something around an alternate Hollywood universe since he created the FX miniseries, Feud.
“Ever since I did ‘Feud’, I had been working on a piece about the buried history of Hollywood,” he shared with USA Today. “I was very interested, even as a young person, in three people: Rock Hudson, Anna May Wong, and Hattie McDaniel. I’d been sort of noodling with that and then Darren Criss and I had dinner after [‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’] and we were talking about what we wanted to work on next. And we both wanted to do something that would be inspirational, upbeat and that had a happy ending, that was about victories.”
The cast is a who’s who of Hollywood. Want to watch all the coolest people in modern-day Hollywood in one show? Now’s your chance. Like we said above, the cast is stacked with Murphy favorites including Laura Harrier, David Corenswet, Samara Weaving, Holland Taylor, Patti LuPone, and The Big Bang Theory‘s Jim Parsons. That’s just the start of this A-list roster.
__It starts streaming May 1.__The seven-episode limited series premieres on Netflix on Friday, May 1. If you don’t have Netflix by now what are you waiting for? Beyond bookmarking “Hollywood” here are 51 movies you can stream on the platform right now.
Let’s just marvel at some more photos from the series…
In this era of coronavirus social distancing, I’m having trouble keeping myself occupied. Thankfully, Netflix is about to fix that. The streaming platform is adding a slew of new movies and TV shows to streaming next month. Everything from originals like Nailed It season four to modern classics like The Hangover is coming to make this wild time a little easier. And thanks to the Netflix Party plugin, you can watch all these things with your friends. (Here’s how.)
But figure out what you want to watch first. Below, all the titles coming to Netflix in April 2020. (And just so you know, here are the movies and shows that are leaving.)
Available April 1
David Batra: Elefanten I Rummet (NETFLIX COMEDY SPECIAL)
How to Fix a Drug Scandal (NETFLIX DOCUMENTARY)
The Iliza Shlesinger Sketch Show (NETFLIX COMEDY SPECIAL)
Nailed It!, season 4
Sunderland ‘Til I Die, season 2 (NETFLIX ORIGINAL)
40 Days and 40 Nights
Bloodsport
Cadillac Records
Can’t Hardly Wait
Cheech & Chong’s Up in Smoke
Community, seasons 1-6
Deep Impact
God’s Not Dead
Just Friends
Killer Klowns from Outer Space
Kim’s Convenience, season 4
Lethal Weapon
Lethal Weapon 2
Lethal Weapon 3
Lethal Weapon 4
Minority Report
Molly’s Game
Mortal Kombat
Mud
Pokémon the Series: Sun & Moon: S3: Sun & Moon – Ultra Legends
Promised Land
Road to Perdition
Salt
School Daze
Sherlock Holmes
Soul Plane
Sunrise in Heaven
Taxi Driver
The Death of Stalin
The Girl with All the Gifts
The Hangover
The Matrix
The Matrix Reloaded
The Matrix Revolutions
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
The Roommate
The Runaways
The Social Network
Wildling
Available April 2
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Violet Evergarden: Eternity and the Auto Memory Doll
Available April 3
Coffee & Kareem (NETFLIX FILM)
La casa de papel, part 4 (NETFLIX ORIGINAL)
Money Heist: The Phenomenon (NETFLIX FILM)
Spirit Riding Free: Riding Academy (NETFLIX FAMILY)
StarBeam (NETFLIX FAMILY)
Available April 4
Angel Has Fallen
Available April 5
The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Available April 6
The Big Show Show (NETFLIX FAMILY)
Available April 7
TERRACE HOUSE: TOKYO 2019-2020, part 3 (NETFLIX ORIGINAL)
Available April 9
Hi Score Girl, season 2 (NETFLIX ANIME)
Available April 10
Brews Brothers (NETFLIX ORIGINAL)
LA Originals (NETFLIX DOCUMENTARY)
La vie scolaire (NETFLIX FILM)
Love Wedding Repeat (NETFLIX FILM)
The Main Event (NETFLIX FILM)
Tigertail (NETFLIX FILM)
Available 4/14
Chris D’Elia: No Pain (NETFLIX COMEDY SPECIAL)
Available April 15
The Innocence Files (NETFLIX DOCUMENTARY)
Outer Banks (NETFLIX ORIGINAL)
Available April 16
Despicable Me
Fary: Hexagone, season 2 (NETFLIX ORIGINAL)
Fauda, season 3 (NETFLIX ORIGINAL)
Hail, Caesar
Mauricio Meirelles: Levando o Caos (NETFLIX COMEDY SPECIAL)
Jem and the Holograms
Available April 17
Betonrausch (NETFLIX FILM)
blackAF (NETFLIX ORIGINAL)
Earth and Blood (La terre et le sang) (NETFLIX FILM)
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