Awards HQ May 24: Emmy Host Frontrunners, ‘The Boys’ Billboard Exclusive, Variety Show Conundrum Variety 2 hrs ago
May 24, 2021, which means it’s 7
days until Emmy eligibility ends on
May 31;
June 17;
June 25;
June 28;
July 13;
Aug. 19; and
Sept. 19.
More from Variety
Whew. Last week was quite a marathon: WarnerMedia/Discovery. Talk of Amazon potentially acquiring MGM. The Upfronts Formerly Known As The Network Upfronts But Now Barely Mention The Networks. And so much more.
The aftermath of all of those landmark moves is still to come. But perhaps now, with summer approaching, we can spend a little more time focusing on an this year’s increasingly interesting Emmy race.
Exclusive: Taylor Schilling on the COVID craziness of her new pandemic satire series The Bite
Fri May 21, 2021 at 9:30am ET
Taylor Schilling. Pic credit: CBS Studios and Spectrum Originals
If it is too soon for you to have a sense of humor about the pandemic, then The Bite from creators Robert and Michelle King may not make your binge-watch list, but if you can appreciate the dark humor of this story about a pandemic within a pandemic, then put these six episodes in your must-see queue.
The Bite, from Spectrum Originals, is the story of two New York City apartment dwellers, Rachel (Audra McDonald) and her upstairs neighbor Lily (Taylor Schilling), two strong women who are dealing with the COVID pandemic as best they can, working from home, when a new strain of the virus arrives with a much more lethal bite to it.
Premieres
Format
As with
BrainDead, the tonal whiplash between campy absurdity and straight-faced drama takes some getting used to. But unlike that series, there’s nothing beneath the surface to justify committing to this zany premise. Beginning with a news report on “COVID fatigue,” the shows follows Dr. Rachel Boutella (Audra McDonald, giving this material her all) as she wearily goes through another day of Zoom appointments alone in her Brooklyn apartment, while her fellow doctor husband Zach (Steven Pasquale) is away helping spearhead the CDC’s COVID-19 response plan. We learn the pair are struggling to reconnect after a bout of infidelity, a bit of characterization that ends up not really paying off, just like a lot of the early setup. Meanwhile, Rachel’s upstairs neighbor Lily (Taylor Schilling, leaning more into how goofy all this is) continues her dominatrix work remotely, while prepping for a memoir on her life and profession to come out a book her editor is pr
Video of "The Bite" - Official Trailer - Premieres May 21 on Spectrum Originals
The Good Fight and
The Bite follows two neighbors Rachel (Audra McDonald) and Lily (Taylor Schilling) as they try to deal with the new normal in NYC by working from home during a global pandemic. While Rachel juggles her telemedicine clients and a shaky marriage to a CDC doctor (Steven Pasquale) who works in Washington D.C., her upstairs neighbor Lily tries to convince her Wall Street clientele that her services (which you can guess from the trailer) can be provided through a video screen just as well as in person.