Brow Beat

Mariska Hargitay

NBC

I see a lot of murders every week. I love police procedurals, and homicide is, generally speaking, a prerequisite of the genre. It’s the rough equivalent to a bout of dizziness in a medical drama or the arrival of a good-looking stranger in a soap opera—a familiar event that jump-starts the plot machinations. The poor victim is just an excuse for the cops, criminologists, and consulting detectives to show off their smarts.

That’s why I wasn’t too outraged back in April when Vulture’s Margaret Lyons looked at this season’s scripted TV dramas and found that 109 of the 125 shows had “depicted or described in detail a rape or murder.” It’s a shocking statistic, but as a fairly sensitive viewer, I know that all murders are not created equal. I can’t watch creepy psychopath series like The Following, Hannibal, or Criminal Minds—and, on the other hand, cozy mysteries like NCIS and smart procedurals like The Good Wife wouldn’t give anyone nightmares.

This week, though, television kept me awake on a couple of occasions.

Michael Douglas and Matt Damon in Behind the Candelabra

HBO

On the Spoiler Special podcast, Slate movie critic Dana Stevens talks in detail about new and forthcoming movies with a guest. You can listen to past Spoiler Specials here, and you can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. Note: As the title indicates, each installment contains spoilers galore.

In this week’s episode, Dan Kois, Slate’s Senior Editor and resident Steven Soderbergh Completist, joins Dana to discuss Soderbergh’s last film, Behind the Candelabra, which will air on HBO on Sunday. Does Michael Douglas succeed in embodying the notoriously flamboyant Liberace? Is this film a fitting finale for Soderbergh’s long career?

This and many other questions are debated in the podcast below. Elsewhere on Slate, you can read about the film’s accuracy and Liberace’s piano skills. Enjoy.

Liberace and Michael Douglas as Liberace.

Courtesy of Allan Warren/Wikimedia Commons; Courtesy of HBO

Steven Soderbergh’s HBO movie Behind the Candelabra chronicles the turbulent five-year romance between famed concert pianist Liberace (played by Michael Douglas) and his young lover Scott Thorson (Matt Damon). Based on the 1988 memoir by Thorson, the film unveils the lavish lifestyle of the performer and the intimate circle of friends, lovers, and businessmen who surrounded him. This version of Liberace dons wigs, showers affection on Scott, and shows no shame about his sexuality—at least behind closed doors.

According to Douglas, Soderbergh first mentioned to him the idea of a Liberace project on the set of Traffic in 2000, and it wasn’t until a few years later that Thorson’s memoir gave him the proper entry point for the story. “I read the book and I thought, okay…I know how to get in,” Soderbergh has said. “It’s got a sort of finite period of time that we’re dealing with.” In fact, it appears that, despite the many several autobiographies and biographies that he could have drawn on—not to mention Thorson himself, who’s still living—the book really was the essential basis for Soderbergh’s story. “I did not talk to Scott before,” Damon said of preparing for the role. “I talked to Steven about whether I should and we decided it would be better not to. We got everything we needed from his book. I think meeting him before I did it, 30 years after this happened, wouldn’t have been helpful."

How closely does Soderbergh hew to Thorson’s story of life with Liberace? Pretty closely—though the accuracy of Thorson’s book itself is another matter. Below, we’ve taken a look at a few key characters and events to see just how faithful the movie is to the book.

Prince performs during the 2013 Billboard Music Awards on Sunday

Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Prince has always been a political artist, but most often he’s expressed his politics through songs about sex. His new single “Fixurlifeup,” on the other hand, takes a different tack. The video, which flashes the lyrics in front of images of the band and protesters and the American flag, puts politics out front.

Adam Scott, Ari Graynor, Chris Hemsworth, Connie Britton, Michael K. Williams, Sandra Bullock

Previously.TV

This article originally appeared on Previously.TV, a brand-new TV commentary and recap site created by Tara Ariano, Sarah D. Bunting, and David T. Cole, the original founders of Television Without Pity. Visit Previously.TV for more.

After 38 years on the air, Saturday Night Live has become not just an American institution but, for a certain kind of performer, the means of his or her coronation as a bona fide star. For this reason, the timing of one’s first time hosting the show is like a referendum on one’s career: Like, Neil Patrick Harris might be earning great ratings as the titular star of Doogie Howser, M.D., but it’s probably wise to wait twenty years or so to follow his work and make sure he’s not just a flash in the pan. Whereas getting Drew Barrymore circa E.T.? Pretty safe bet. (Well, it turned out to have been.)

When SNL returns this fall for Season 39, it will have 20-odd opportunities to boost the profiles of actors, musicians, and (ugh) athletes—some of whom will have never hosted before, but have reasons to want the SNL bump. Not that we have a say (though, frankly, we should), we’ve made a list of the first-time hosts we’d like to see this season who actually have a half-decent shot at doing it. I repeat: this is people we want to see, not repeat hosts we’ll definitely see (Michael J. Fox, Sean Hayes) or hosts we’ll probably see without wanting to (Anna Faris, Jaden Smith). Setting odds on likeliest hosts is a totally different thing. Let’s proceed.

Let’s get this straight up front: I am now writing a blog post, not blogging a blog.

For many, using the word blog when you mean blog post is an understandable mistake. Most who make it are new to blogging, or aren’t fluent in the language of the Web. But over the last several months it’s become clear to me that the tendency to make this error has infected even some of the most Internet-savvy denizens of the Web. And it needs to stop.

Macaroni Peas.

Photo by James Ransom

Dinner vs. Child is a biweekly column about cooking for children, and with children, and despite children, originally published in Food52 and now appearing on Brow Beat. You can read previous installments of Dinner vs. Child here. You can read Day’s Slate blog about infancy, How Babies Work, here.

This week: How peas got a bad rap.

Why do children have to eat their peas? As in: eat your peas.

There is, after all, no vegetable that requires less inducement to eat than peas. 

I have a clear memory of Isaiah, at almost three, mowing down a row of sweet peas with the methodical rigor of someone who has stumbled upon something good and is determined to extract every last bit of pleasure from it: snap, chew, step. I remember being worried that he would eat all the sweet peas. (I am a horrible, selfish parent.) I remember that he basically did.

This wasn’t because he was an especially good eater, or because he especially liked to eat vegetables out of the garden. It was because he’d discovered we were growing dessert.

Bret Michaels in Rock My RV

Travel Channel

I feel bad for my FedEx guy. Several times a week, he climbs two flights of stairs to hand-deliver the latest emissions from the world of television. Yesterday, he brought a magnificent bounty: the season premiere of a Syfy series I’m fond of, an exciting addition to TNT’s roster of ampersanded investigators, and a new reality show featuring the Rock. Clearly, these particular DVDs were well worth the wear and tear on his calf muscles, but that isn’t always the case. Each week brings announcements of new reality series featuring some combination of superannuated stars, home makeovers, and family businesses, and those packages make me feel guilty about the fuel wasted to bring them to my home.

I admit it: I initially dismissed Rock My RV With Bret Michaels as yet another cookie-cutter example of reality dross. But since I spent my adolescence cooped up with my parents in an RV (or a “motor caravan,” as we call them in England), I decided to give it a chance. I’m glad, I did, because the show, which premieres on the Travel Channel this Sunday, is the best reality makeover series I’ve ever seen. It’s a magnificent mashup of the best elements of a whole bunch of reality sub-genres wrapped up in a rock-star package.

Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto in Star Trek Into Darkness

Courtesy of Zade Rosenthal/Paramount Pictures

On the Spoiler Special podcast, Slate movie critic Dana Stevens talks in detail about new and forthcoming movies with a guest. You can listen to past Spoiler Specials here, and you can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. Note: As the title indicates, each installment contains spoilers galore.

In this week’s episode, Stevens is joined by J. Bryan Lowder to discuss Star Trek Into Darkness, the follow-up to 2009's reboot of the Star Trek franchise directed by J. J. Abrams. Is this movie better or worse than than the previous Abrams outing? How well does it fit into the broader Trek universe?

These and many other questions are debated in the podcast below. Enjoy.