HBO has made a name for itself for not only delivering strong original content like “The Sopranos” but deeply biased documentaries like “Reagan.”

Now, HBO’s main competitor Showtime is backing a new documentary on Vice President Dick Cheney. The channel hired R.J. Cutler, the producer behind the pro-Clinton documentary “The War Room,” to give us a new look at President George W. Bush’s vice president and confidante.

Tentatively titled, “The World According to Dick Cheney,” the film will take a look at one of the most powerful vice presidents in history. Here’s director R.J. Cutler’s take on the upcoming film from a Showtime press release:

Like it or not, we live in a world defined by the domestic and international vision of Dick Cheney — perhaps the single-most influential non-Presidential figure in American political history,” said Cutler. “But for all the debate that his re-emergence in the public eye has caused, the fact is that Cheney the man remains an enigma, and the  manner in which he utilized his power and experience to become such a dominating political figure, have been left largely unexplored. This documentary will shine a balanced and multi-dimensional light on this truly polarizing figure.

Will “The World According to Dick Cheney” be a fair representation of the veteran political figure?  We’ll have to wait and see, but consider this snippet from a piece Cutler wrote about how “The War Room” got such unfettered access to Clinton’s campaign.

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There’s no denying Don Cheadle’s charisma and talent as an actor. He’s born to do what he does. Much like Kenneth Branagh, when he speaks we don’t really want to see or hear anything else. He owns the area around him. We sense an ease in what he’s doing. He’s a chameleon who captures the voice and movements of any character thrown at him. But even Cheadle’s charisma can’t save a slightly typical and slightly partisan show premiering on Showtime tonight.

“House of Lies,” debuting at 10 p.m. EST, follows a team of management consultants led by lethal-in-a-board-room Marty (Don Cheadle). The supporting characters, however, simply fill out stereotypes. The two other men on Marty’s team exist for little more than to give some cheap, sitcom like laughs, and Kristen Bell exists as a foil for Marty. There’s supposed to be a sexual tension or, at least, tension between the two, but the script never sells the chemistry and neither do the two actors (mainly Bell, who still looks like she belongs in high school).

The show begins by thrusting us into the hectic mess that is Marty’s life. We are introduced to his ex-wife, whose management consultant team is number one (Marty’s is number two). We are introduced to Marty’s shrink father, his son who’s going through a very strange gender crisis, and Marty’s clients. Once we enter the business world Marty inhabits, the writing gets wooden and the politics go left… way left. (more…)

**The following contains a ton of spoilers**

The first season of the Showtime series “Homeland” mercifully came to an end last night. I say “mercifully” because, while I will never get the hours I invested in the series back, I will not be subjecting myself to season two.

To recap so far, the series follows CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) tracking recovered U.S. Marine Sgt. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), who she suspects of being a sleeper terrorist who was turned by his captor, al Qaeda commander Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban).

The CIA is also tracking Brody’s former sniper team partner Tom Walker (Chris Chalk), who is also suspected of working for Nazir. Agent Mathison has been placed on administrative leave for removing classified documents from Langley and because her superiors learned she suffers from bipolar disorder, which precludes her from having security clearance.

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It looks like conservatives skeptical about the new Showtime terrorism series “Homeland” were right after all.

I had hoped that show co-producers/co-writers Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa of “24″ fame would be able to bring us a story that did not paint America as the villain but actually called the terrorists the bad guys. I have been let down, again.

Let’s review what has happened so far in “Homeland,” which airs at 10 p.m. EST Sunday nights, to lead me to this conclusion. The show started with American prisoner of war Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) being recovered from Iraq after being held captive for eight years. A CIA officer suspected him of having been turned against his country by his Islamist terrorist captors. This is not out of the realm of possibility, and the Islamist terrorists were still being pursued.

During the investigation into terrorist leader Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban), the CIA started to suspect a Saudi national professor of helping Nazir funnel money into the terror organization. Not so fast. The professor’s American wife was actually the one helping the terrorists.

Next, we learned that Brody was not the American soldier who had been turned; it was actually his presumed dead sniper team partner, Tom Walker (Chris Chalk), who was working with the terrorists.
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USA Today:

The team behind 24 has a new take on terrorism in Homeland, premiering Sunday on Showtime (10 ET/PT).

The show revolves around two damaged protagonists: Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), a Marine sniper missing in Iraq since 2003 and presumed dead, then discovered as a prisoner of war; and CIA counterterrorism analyst Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), who had been warned by an informant a POW was “turned” into a traitor and now suspects Brody is tied to an imminent attack. 

He’s welcomed home to suburban Washington as a hero and treated as a “poster boy” for the war, but he’s having problems readjusting to society and his family. She’s bipolar — she calls it a “mood disorder” — and is obsessively tracking Brody after a misstep that derailed her career as a case officer.

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Fans of caustic comedian Nick Di Paolo will finally get to see his act on the small screen this month.

“It’s the first time I can really be uncensored and [audiences] can see a nice chunk of me,” the Boston native says of his new Showtime special “Raw Nerve.”

Well, there were a few bits snipped away.

*Language warning*

“I mentioned Cialis in a joke, and Showtime is owned by Viacom that’s part of CBS and [the Cialis company] advertises on CBS. ‘We have to take that out,’” Di Paolo says of their reaction.

Another bit involving racial humor, which he calls “a bit too scary … but nothing outrageous,” also got sliced.

“When the DVD comes out after the broadcast will put it all back in,” he says.

Still, “Nick Di Paolo: Raw Nerve,” debuting at 9 p.m. EST April 30 on Showtime, lets the public see a rare species of Standupitus Comicus. Di Paolo is unapologetically to the right of center and was mocking President Barack Obama long before folks like Jon Stewart realized the president might not heal the world as advertised.

Di Paolo isn’t surprised his first hour-long special ended up on Showtime, not HBO.

“Their comedy hero is Bill Maher. My ideology and comedy sensibility is completely different … they never really gave me a sniff,” he says.

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It is not often that a promo for a television show causes spine-tingling chills.  In fact, I don’t think one has ever affected me that way – until this summer, that is.  The show is Dexter and it has had me captivated since the day I first discovered it during the television writers’ strike of 2007-08.  To fully explain what caused the chills might require providing spoilers to those who have not seen the first four seasons, but I’ll do my best to stop short of that. (Do not follow the links to the promo or the longer trailer unless you have already seen Season 4 in its entirety.)

Dexter is an hour-long drama following the adventures of serial killer, Dexter Morgan. The fifth season of the series premieres on Showtime September 26.  If you are not already watching, I highly recommend you purchase or rent (or stream or download or whatever you do) the first four seasons of the series before watching Season Five.  Without seeing the development of the characters and storyline in seasons 1-4 you will never fully appreciate the show. 

I discovered Dexter a few years ago on CBS when the lack of original content resulting from the writers’ strike sent the networks to reality shows and cable for available programming. CBS “borrowed” the first season of Dexter from their sister network, Showtime.  Before seeing the show, I was curious, but skeptical that viewers could identify with a serial killer.  And maybe they don’t actually identify with Dexter, but if they are like me, they fell in the love with the character anyway.  (more…)

Patrick Goldstein and much of the butt-boy entertainment media have either outright ignored director Oliver Stone’s anti-Semitic comments or have dug a deeper hole for their credibility in attempting to explain why they shouldn’t have to hold their favorite anti-American director to the same standard as the director of the “The Passion of the Christ” after his 2006 incident. Unfortunately for them, this ploy might not be working. According to some excellent reporting in The Wrap, media mogul and Clinton confidante Haim Saban is showing some moral consistency, and he’s claiming that WME Chairman Ari Emanuel is as well.

Like the Anti-Defamation League, Saban is far from satisfied with Stone’s “clumsy association with the Holocaust” apology, calling it “sooooo transparently fake.” And as a money-where-his-mouth-is supporter of Israel, my guess is that Saban’s taking issue with all this crazy talk coming from Stone about how his January miniseries will prove Hitler was a “scapegoat” who deserves to be put in “context.”

A furious Haim Saban has mounted a campaign to get Showtime to cancel its planned airing of Oliver Stone’s 10-part series, “A Secret History of America,” in the wake of anti-Jewish remarks by the outspoken director.

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Leave it to Oliver Stone to come up with the idea of a miniseries to put the likes of Stalin and Hitler “in context.” Oh, and for good measure, let’s toss in Joe McCarthy, whose mission was to expose Communists in the U.S. government.

What makes him a natural for this kind of project is Stone’s admiration for Fidel Castro – his documentary  about the Cuban dictator (shelved by HBO – kudos to them) attempted to “portray the human figure” – and Hugo Chavez (whom he “warmly embraced” when on some kind of fact-finding tour of Latin America).

Do they share a wardrobe?

What is it with Hollywoodites and dictators? Michael Medved tries to explain:

“Many people in the entertainment industry feel guilty about their own wealth. They know that they earned it in an arbitrary way, not because they are so much better than someone who’s still working as a waiter in Beverly Hills, but they earned it out of luck. They believe that all capitalism works that way – that people have goodies showered on them not because of their own hard work or creativity, but because of good fortune and luck. That guilt produces this fascination with socialism.”

Feeling guilty, guys? Why not give that excess money to a worthy charity? Or you could decline the big-buck paychecks and ask for something a little more in keeping with what, say, someone working at a convenience store would earn. But I digress. (more…)

Oliver Stone’s latest desperate grasp at relevance is a new cable series that, among other things, promises to finally place der Furher into der context.  Now, this is where I’m supposed to be outraged, but I’m just not feeling it.  Ollie, I know you’d like us to believe that this isn’t just a pathetic stunt, that this brainstorm was inspired by some peyote-spawned fire demon’s whisperings inside your drug-addled cerebellum and that if we’re truly edgy we won’t dare ignore your remarkable vision.  But I think you’re once again just trying to freak out the squares and this square, for one, is mighty bored.

Stone’s scripts for Midnight Express and Scarface blew our collective minds with staggering violence and raw language.  Then he directed Platoon – an awesome film if you dig sophomore-level meditations on the duality of good and evil leavened with gunfire.  JFK came along and demonstrated that Kennedy was murdered not by the commie misfit who actually did it, but a conspiracy made up of big business, the government, the military, the Trilateral Commission, the Knights Templar, Prince Olaf of South Ruritania, and everyone else on Earth except Lee Harvey Oswald and JFK himself – or was he in on it too?  After that, Stone was ready to completely abandon the constraints imposed by concepts like “story,” “characters” and “coherence.”  Natural Born Killers was the result, the perfect Oliver Stone film – all controversy, great visuals, and nothing that made anything remotely like sense. (more…)

Did you know celebrities have a right to speak their minds about politics courtesy of The First Amendment? Or that the 1960 Kennedy/Nixon televised debate changed the way we saw politicians forever? “Poliwood,” a new film “essay” from director Barry Levinson, uncovers those nuggets and much, much more.

The film, set to bow at the Starz Denver Film Festival this weekend and already airing on Showtime, does offer more than just those recycled themes. It’s an occasionally fascinating look into the modern actor’s mindset as well as the anger the general public feels when they hear celebrities pontificating on events of the day.

Director Barry Levinson

We’re also given a peek at the passions driving some celebrities to speak out on the issues. Yet the film is emblematic of Hollywood productions which strain to achieve balance but come up mostly empty.

The bulk of the film features liberal celebrities from the Creative Coalition, a nonpartisan group, maneuvering around last year’s Democratic National Convention in Denver. (more…)