Jon Stewart’s Daily Show Replacement: Trevor Noah?

TV Tattle

Jon Stewart’s Daily Show replacement: Trevor Noah?
The South African comedian, who joined The Daily Show late last year, “is gaining consideration as a potential successor to Jon Stewart,” according to Variety. Meanwhile, Deadline (Variety’s sibling publication) says Noah “is considered the most likely candidate to replace Stewart as show host.”

Does The Walking Dead have a books problem?
This season’s storytelling problems may be due to the likelihood that all the writers and producers have read the books, unlike the vast majority of viewers. As Tim Goodman notes, “If Game of Thrones is going too fast for the books, the books are making The Walking Dead lose its storytelling pace by moving too quickly for the TV version to keep up with. And that’s no way for the show to stay in the conversation about great television.” PLUS: Finale will have “sad losses,” and why Daryl Dixon must die.

Don’t binge-watch The X-Files: It has aged horribly
That’s according to Alex Gabriel, who binge-watched Season 1. “Sure, there are exceptional one-off stories, but on trying to marathon the show, I realized, much to my dismay, that not only were the monsters of the week often not all that good, but they also caused the whole series to plod,” he says. “Only the fact that I’m a completist made me finish season 1 rather than give up halfway through. While the effects are creepy, the look bleak, and the Anderson–Duchovny dynamic a high point, a plurality of its episodes are, to be blunt, boring. At least three or four times, I fell asleep.”

Has TV turned into a Buzzfeed “Remember the ’90s?” listicle?
With this week’s Coach and X-Files news, here are 10 more ’90s TV shows that need to be remade, including Wings and Suddenly Susan. PLUS: Here are 17 facts you might not know about Coach.

George R.R. Martin: I’m not writing a Game of Thrones episode for Season 6
“Writing a script takes me three weeks, minimum, and longer when it is not a straight adaptation from the novels,” Martin writes on his LiveJournal. “And really, it would cost me more time than that, since I have never been good at changing gears from one medium to another and back again. Writing a season six script would cost me a month’s work on WINDS, and maybe as much as six weeks, and I cannot afford that.” PLUS: Peter Dinklage accidentally reveals a spoiler.

Jon Hamm looks back at key Don Draper Mad Men episodes
Season 1’s The Wheel episode was, he says, “an important moment in the development of the character, where people go, ‘Oh, this guy’s not just a sweet-talking guy in a fancy suit. He’s a soulful person.’ It was beautifully shot. We didn’t really want to use a working slide projector, they’re crazy noisy, so we had some digital thing. But the slides looked wrong somehow. We had to fix that and make them smudgy. At some point we ended up just running the slide projector in the room.” PLUS: Mad Men cast toured the White House on Friday, is Mad Men all about Sally Draper?, the pilot almost used a Björk song, and what the cast took home from the set.

Leonard Nimoy’s son is planning a Spock documentary
For the Love of Spock will be narrated by the other Spock, Zachary Quinto.

Buffy‘s James Marsters joins Jenji Kohan’s HBO Salem Witch Trials drama
He’ll play Reverend George Burroughs on The Devil You Know.

How the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt theme is connected to a 30 Rock episode
Composer Jeff Richmond says “Peeno Noir” originated in a Season 6 episode featuring Denise Richards.

Christine Baranski would like to see a Good Wife musical episode
“I keep waiting, but it’s not in our style,” she says, adding: “I’m waiting for Diane to have her Sondheim moment. She would sing ‘I’m Still Here’—maybe in season eight.”

Sherlock co-creator calls Season 4 “bloody frightening”
Season 4, says Steven Moffat, “is going to be… I suppose you’d say… consequences. It’s consequences. Chickens come to roost. It’s dark in some ways—obviously it’s great fun and a Sherlock Holmes romp and all that—but there’s a sense of… things… coming back to bite you. It’s not a safe, sensible way to live. It’s hilarious and exhilarating some days, but some days it’s going to be bloody frightening.”

Vince Gilligan: “I think it would be a shame” if Better Call Saul ended without Walter White and Jesse Pinkman cameos
“I think it would be a shame if we get through, knock on wood, a healthy number of seasons of ‘Better Call Saul without seeing those gentlemen or without seeing the wonderful actresses,” he says. “The trick is to not overdo it. The trick is to not stunt it.”

Julia Louis-Dreyfus refers to her new Veep hairstyle as the “Dustin Hoffman”
The new presidential “power ‘do” is actually a wig. “”I was fascinated by how people are so judgmental about how women look, and male politicians don’t get that s – – -,” she says. . “A change of hairstyle often gets more attention than legislation they’re trying to put forth. Also, it makes sense that Selina might be trying to identify her character. So I thought, let’s give it a shot.”

Why are Ellen’s slot machines so popular?
At Northern California casinos, it’s not unusual to see large groups of people form around the Ellen slot machines.

Here are 9 Grey’s Anatomy plots that you didn’t know started in the pilot
In the series debut, Meredith’s mother didn’t know who Meredith was, which led to the reveal that she has Alzheimer’s. PLUS: Shonda Rhimes reminisced on Twitter.

Empire is the first black drama that doesn’t “feel ghettoized or defensively assembled”
“I’ve never seen anything that gets away with everything Empire gets away with — murder, basically,” says Wesley Morris. “I’ve never seen anything on network television this shameless; this overwritten yet perfectly plotted; this ludicrously costumed, art-decorated, choreographed, soundtracked, acted, and directed; this hormonal, this … black.”

Count down the 40 best sketch-comedy shows of all time
From Key & Peele to SNL.

HBO’s Going Clear is a riveting documentary about Scientology
Alex Gibney’s Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief isn’t as good as the book it is based on, but the film does take on what is behind the controversial religion.

Killing Jesus is a shallow telling of the Jesus story
The Jesus Christ in the Nat Geo movie, played by Haaz Sleiman, is “something of a cipher, without much charisma or divinity,” says Matthew Gilbert. “He’s just another man in Killing Jesus with a bad wig, eating from plateware that looks just a little too Pottery Barn for the first century. The movie doesn’t work to give us a sense of who he might have been and why so many were drawn to him; it just assumes we already know the answers.” PLUS: The film is unrelentingly drab, and it has a truly terrible opening with Kelsey Grammer.