Joe Manganiello was the one to file for divorce from Sofia Vergara. He cited irreconcilable differences. There’s a prenup. [JustJared]
Doja Cat explains why she’s “thrown fits” her whole career. [OMG Blog]
Jennifer Lopez finally gave fans a new On The J.Lo newsletter. [LaineyGossip]
A Haunting in Venice’s trailer makes it seem like Agatha Christie was writing ghost stories and horror… and she did not. [Tom & Lorenzo]
Tony Leung: still hot. [Pajiba]
An explainer on Oppenheimer’s R-rating for sex scenes. [Jezebel]
Julia Fox’s bikini waxer is not on strike. [GFY]
It really is bonkers how many women have “I’m the client, not my husband” stories. All of these stories are completely infuriating. [Buzzfeed]
Queen Latifah is surprised that she was the first female rapper to be inducted into the National Recording Registry. [Towleroad]
Gwyneth Paltrow’s Gucci look in the Hamptons. [RCFA]

Prince George’s tenth birthday is Saturday, July 22. I would imagine that the Princess of Wales will release some new birthday portraits tonight or tomorrow, then the Sunday papers will probably get a few extra ones for their front pages. There’s been more buzz and royal embiggening about this birthday, I guess because it’s seen as a “big birthday.” Will we get this kind of birthday rollout for his 13th birthday? Or his 16th? Those feel like “bigger” landmark years to me, but whatever. So how will George spend his birthday? At home, with school friends, like a normal kid. Katie Nicholl royalsplains:

George’s birthday party: According to Nicholl, the Prince and Princess of Wales “are known to celebrate big birthdays, but they are known to do it below the radar. I’m told that this birthday party will be family, of course, close friends, friends from his old school, [and] friends from George’s new school, but it’s not going to be showy in any way. A lavish party, where there’s a huge expense, is just not William and Kate’s style. She still always bakes the cake, she will be doing a tea party, I’m told there’s going to be something of a football theme involved in the celebrations,” Nicholl added.

Nicholl makes it sound like they’re doing witchcraft: She also explained that the party will either be held at Windsor Castle or, more likely, at the family’s home in Norfolk. “There’s more space there and of course it’s where they’re completely protected. So whatever does happen will stay very firmly behind closed doors.”

George and his spare: “He seems to enjoy being in the public spotlight far more than he used to,” Nicholl shared. “I think he’s definitely finding his feet and coming into his own… This is a big birthday for him, it’s an important birthday, and he strikes me as someone who is very comfortable in his own skin, and very grateful for the support of Charlotte, particularly. You don’t often see George without Charlotte. I think they’re very much a team, and she plays this important supporting role. But I do think we’ve seen George become perhaps a little less reserved, a little bit more outgoing and certainly thriving from having the support of Charlotte and Louis by his side.”

George’s future role: “George is absolutely aware of the role that lies ahead of him and he knows that his father will be king next, and after that he will be crowned king, and who knows what the landscape is going to look like? But he’s absolutely aware of his destiny.” Which is why his parents are “very anxious not to burden him with that weight and responsibility.”

The normal Wales family: “I think what they’re trying to do is raise him with that balance of normality,” Nicholl said. “And he does have a surprisingly normal life… they live in a four-bedroom cottage, they don’t even have live-in help, because there just isn’t the space, and there’s a very, very heavy influence from Kate’s family, the Middletons. Carol and Mike are very involved with George, Charlotte and Louis.”

[From ET]

God, this makes me dreadfully sad for Charlotte. Just eight years old and already forced into a position of “supporting” her future-king brother. Will they let Charlotte become her own person? Or will she always be defined by her need to support George, to be the spare, the supporting player, never the main character?

Also: the constant repetition of “Kate and William don’t have live-in help” is always fascinating to me. No one is flatly denying that Will and Kate have tons of household staff, it’s just that their staff don’t live-in. Nanny Maria has her own apartment or cottage somewhere, and various chefs, gardeners, helpers and maids are also on the Windsor property too, I would assume. What will happen when one of those people decides to gossip? Like… I’m fascinated by the arrangement at Adelaide Cottage and just how thoroughly it’s become Kate’s separation house.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.

The Invictus Games in Dusseldorf are coming up soon! Invictus is coming to Germany from September 9th through the 16th. Prince Harry will absolutely be there throughout the games and it’s my hope that Meghan joins him for the whole week. At last year’s games, Meghan was there for about three days, which was spectacular, but… yeah, I just hope she’s there for the whole shebang. Anyway, there’s something else happening around that same time, people! Baldemort is coming to New York on September 18. We shall call this Prince William’s Don’t Forget About Meeee Tour.

Prince William is making the trip across the pond! The Prince of Wales, 41, will return to the United States to attend the second Earthshot Prize Innovation Summit in New York City on Sept. 19, Kensington Palace announced on Wednesday.

Co-hosted by The Earthshot Prize and Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Summit will unveil the fifteen 2023 Earthshot Prize finalists who are trailblazing climate solutions to repair our planet by 2030. The Summit, held during New York Climate Week, will also convene previous Earthshot Prize winners and finalists with policymakers, global business leaders, philanthropists and climate activists to scale their innovative solutions. Michael R. Bloomberg, Global Advisor to the Winners of The Earthshot Prize, will also address the assembled guests.

The 2023 Earthshot Prize awards ceremony will take place in Singapore on Nov. 7. There, five winners across the Earthshot categories — Protect and Restore Nature, Clean Our Air, Revive Our Oceans, Build a Waste-Free World and Fix Our Climate — will be announced as the recipients of £1 million each to help implement their environmental solutions.

Prince William will spend two days in New York — both Sept. 18 and Sept. 19 — and also undertake a number of additional engagements and meetings.

[From People]

Something similar was thrown together at the last minute last year, only William had to cancel his trip to New York when his grandmother died. Hilariously, Peg’s big New York “tour” was only conceived when Harry was invited to speak at the United Nations one year ago for Nelson Mandela Day. Remember the hysterical crying and screeching from Salt Island when Harry spoke at the UN? William demanded that he be allowed to speak at the UN too, only it looked like Michael Bloomberg could basically only arrange for William to conduct meetings in some United Nations conference room. I absolutely expect that William will try to do something similar for this trip. Jealousy is basically the only thing motivating William at this point. Also expect the Windsors to act up something fierce during the Invictus Games.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.

It was as predictable as the sun rising in the east – as soon as there was a backlash against Jason Aldean’s pro-lynching song “Try That in a Small Town,” there was a backlash against the backlash. CMT did the right thing by pulling the music video – which was staged at the site of an infamous lynching – this week after the video had only been airing for a few days. Other musical artists and gun-control advocates have been slamming Aldean for the song and the video. So of course the GOP and their wingnuts are tripping over themselves to declare Aldean as their favorite son of the south.

Conservatives are vigorously defending country singer Jason Aldean after the video for his controversial song, “Try That in a Small Town,” was pulled from CMT rotation following accusations that the tune promotes gun violence and sundown towns.

While Aldean has fired back at his critics, claiming allegations that he released a “pro-lynching song” are “not only meritless, but dangerous,” the video itself was filmed at Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee—the site of the 1927 mob lynching of Henry Choate, an 18-year-old Black man who was dragged through the streets before he was hanged from the building’s window.

With the tune’s in-your-face message prompting Democratic lawmakers to condemn it as a “heinous song calling for racist violence,” and the video no longer in CMT’s rotation, it was just a matter of time before the right-wing outrage machine rallied around behind Aldean and the song itself.

Longshot GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who has made anti-wokeness a key component of his campaign, tweeted out the video on Wednesday while complaining about the “cancellation” of Aldean’s song. According to Ramaswamy, the same critics blasting “Try That in a Small Town” are the ones who glorified an inflammatory Ice-T track that conservatives wanted to ban in the early 1990s.

“Jason Aldean writes a song defending the values that ALL Americans used to share – faith, family, hard work, patriotism – only to be immediately sacrificed at the altar of censorship & cancellation,” he wrote on Twitter. “These are the same people who cheer songs like ‘Cop Killer’ & the glorification of sex and violence in hip-hop. Stand strong against these hypocrites and opportunist frauds, @Jason_Aldean. It’d be a real shame if the song hits #1. We’ll do our part & play it at our rallies.”

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem posted a video on Wednesday declaring herself “so impressed” with Aldean’s single, adding that her “good friend” helped write it. Continuing with the pandering, Noem said she had initially “hoped the video would be shot in South Dakota,” but now she’ll let the “persecuted” Aldean “play anywhere” in her state and “facilitate” any concert appearances by the artist, including at the governor’s mansion.

[From The Daily Beast]

It keeps going and going – right-wing pundits and conservative columnists are now chiming in how wokeness has come for Jason Aldean, that Aldean has been “canceled” by the left-wing mob. Literally the only thing that’s happened is that CMT said “we don’t want to air this trash on our network.” That’s it. The music video is still on YouTube, country music radio is still playing the song and I’m sure people are still streaming it. Nevermind the fact that Aldean’s album is still available for purchase – it hasn’t been banned anywhere either. No one is blocking his concerts or tours either. This is the new dumbf–k culture war, guys. Forget Bud Light, forget Hunter Biden – the new battleground is “the government should force CMT to air Jason Aldean’s lynching song!”

.@Jason_Aldean I’m from a small town. Even people in small towns are sick of violence.There’s nothing small-town or American about promoting violence. You should know that better than anyone having survived a mass shooting.

This is not American or small town-like. It’s just lame https://t.co/cuOtUO9xjr

— Sheryl Crow (@SherylCrow) July 19, 2023

Uvalde? Small town.
VA Tech? Small college town.
Newtown? Small New England town.
Parkland? Small town that had just been voted Florida’s *safest* town.

Most mass shootings occur in *small towns* @Jason_Aldean. Your listeners are dying. https://t.co/NlUN8uBzZ2

— yung auntie (she/her). (@MsPackyetti) July 17, 2023

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.

Prince Harry’s Spare is a massive bestseller. Millions of copies of Spare have been sold worldwide in dozens of languages. Harry’s audiobook narration has been listened to millions of times as well. The memoir might be the single most successful venture from the Sussexes. Obviously, the British media faces a conundrum: how do they turn this incredible publishing story into a negative? Lying about what Harry wrote didn’t work. They ended up giving him millions of dollars worth of free publicity and drove up sales even more. They’ve tried crying about Spare endlessly. They’ve tried quoting Harry accurately, because his memoir is now part of the historical record and his version is now the record of so much of the past three decades. So now they’re trying a new tack: making wild claims about how people bought the book and then left it behind during their holidays.

Prince Harry’s memoir Spare is the ‘most dumped’ book by holidaymakers this summer, it was claimed today. The 416-page diatribe has reportedly been left in rooms, bins and by pools at holiday hotspots across Europe and further afield, including in Spain, Greece and Turkey.

Tour operator On The Beach said it had received 100 left-behind copies of the autobiography from fed-up hotel workers so far this summer, with school holidays only just getting underway.

Chief customer officer Zoe Harris told the Sun: ‘We’ve never witnessed anything quite like it. Lost property offices in our most popular resorts are brimming with copies of Spare. We thought it was funny at first but, over the past few months, several other hotels have been sending the books back.’

She said the company now has ‘bookcases full of them’ and that she has been forced to ask hotels to ‘please stop sending them over otherwise we’ll never get rid of them all.’

She added: ‘Maybe we should all take a leaf out of Harry’s book and spare ourselves the bother in the first place.’

The holiday company said it would be giving away the discarded copies online. The highly-anticipated tell-all book sold 3.2million copies in the first week of its release back in January this year – 1.4million on the first day alone. It became the fastest selling non-fiction book in the UK since records began in 1998.

[From The Daily Mail]

Congrats to Harry, he is now the John Grisham of memoirists. Grisham, one of the most popular and prolific authors of the past century, has probably seen his paperbacks left behind at vacation spots all around the world. For years, copies of Grisham’s legal dramas could be found anywhere you looked. I think The DaVinci Code was like too – everyone had a copy, copies were always being left behind. It’s quite a big deal for an author to get to that level, where your book is so ubiquitous that everyone has a copy and there are spare (heh) copies lying around wherever you go. Anyway… thanks to all of those people for buying Harry’s book and leaving Spare behind for the next vacationer to read.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid.

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Ooh, this story hit a nerve for me personally because my new landlords have just brutally hacked into a 120-year-old cypress tree behind my apartment. Allegedly this was done to “improve” the “view” but it’s making my apartment hotter (less shade) and giving the pedestrians in the back alley an “improved” (totally unimpeded) view of me. It’s also a horrible thing to do to such a beautiful, healthy old tree that was home to many squirrels and birds. Anyway, my petty dispute aside, there are far more nefarious tree trimmings afoot! NBCUniversal decided to “prune” the ficus trees along one side of its LA campus, and it was a real hack job. They cut back all the branches.

Coincidentally, they did this just as the SAG-AFTRA union started striking alongside the WGA and both unions were picketing there, in the midst of a brutal heat wave. Then the LA City Controller started to investigate, because it was pretty obvious that this ‘tree trimming’ was about making things uncomfortable or hazardous for striking workers by removing any shade. The studio tried to say that they “always trim these trees in summer” but there’s photo evidence that they haven’t done this before. And guess who didn’t get the required permit to trim these trees, either?

The boundary of NBCUniversal’s lot is now a flashpoint for the on-the-ground mistrust of Hollywood’s double strike. On July 18, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA filed mirrored complaints with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging NBCUniversal had engaged in “illegal conduct” by having picketers march along blocks of Lankershim Blvd. sidewalk on the west end of its campus which were improperly obstructed by the studio’s ongoing campus construction work. The filings contend that the studio has ignored an advisory from the Los Angeles Police Department to establish concrete barriers for pedestrian safety.

Hours after The Hollywood Reporter first publicized the Labor Board complaints (the studio says it will cooperate with any agency inquiries), L.A. City Controller Kenneth Mejia — an outspoken progressive who holds the municipal office that audits government agencies — tweeted that his department would be “investigating the tree trimming that occurred outside Universal Studios where workers, writers, and actors are exercising their right to picket.”

The WGA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement, SAG-AFTRA noted: “Suspiciously timed construction that has forced picketers into streets without proper safety rails, and now tree trimming eliminating shade during a record heatwave, has forced SAG-AFTRA to determine that it cannot safely send its members to picket at NBCUniversal.” The actors’ union added that, through the Labor Board and other means, it was working along with the Writers Guild “to remedy this egregious violation of our members’ rights.”

The studio did not have proper permits for tree trimming: Typically, tree-trimming along public sidewalks is handled by the Los Angeles Department of Public Works’ Bureau of Street Services. Shortly after this article was first published, L.A. City Councilwoman Nithya Raman, whose jurisdiction includes the Barham Blvd. sidewalk, tweeted that she’d looked into the matter with BSS’ Urban Forestry Division and “found that no permit was issued for any tree trimming at this site.” She also shared a statement from the bureau indicating that a compliance notice had been issued to NBCUniversal and that its enforcement arm would consider an administrative citation or hearing. Prior to joining the L.A. City Council, Raman herself picketed during the 2007 WGA work stoppage in support of her husband, TV writer Vali Chandrasekaran (Modern Family, 30 Rock).

[From The Hollywood Reporter]

Allegedly the studios have since provided some “cooling tents.” But this has “studio brass ratf–king” all over it. Sorry for my crudeness but that’s just what it is. Management wants to deter the striking workers from picketing, or worse, let them get heat exhaustion. I put nothing past the same people who were quoted as saying that they wanted union members to start “losing their apartments and losing their houses” rather than pay them a living wage. They intend to drag out both strikes as long as possible, partially as a cost-cutting measure (I think) but also to attempt to weaken worker resolve. If the studios are willing to push their workers to the brink of homelessness or worse, of course they wouldn’t balk at cutting down trees so that workers can’t demonstrate. Meanwhile, according to Variety, NBCUniversal’s CEO Brian Roberts was paid $32.1 million in 2022. But it’s the writers and actors who are asking too much. I support the unions wholeheartedly and I hope NBC gets drawn into a petty, annoying hearing process over this with the city and county of Los Angeles. That would really be putting the famously tangled bureaucracy of LA to good use.

Our Office is investigating the tree trimming that occurred outside Universal Studios where workers, writers, and actors are exercising their right to picket.

The trimmed trees are LA City managed street trees.

(Before and after photos below) pic.twitter.com/xczw0bTdh9

— LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia (@lacontroller) July 19, 2023

Universal Pictures, the film production studio behind the highly anticipated Oppenheimer, has been accused of trimming trees that just so happen to line the sidewalks where Hollywood strikers have been picketing. https://t.co/rC2h7euCa9

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) July 18, 2023

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Last weekend, model Barbara Palvin married actor Dylan Sprouse. Y’all know I’m an Old, so I really had to look up Dylan Sprouse and figure out why he was famous (child actor-turned-Gen Z heartthrob). I know Palvin because she’s a seriously famous model (and she had a fling with Justin Bieber years ago). Palvin is Hungarian and they decided to have their wedding in her country, on her parents’ estate, Harlekin Birtok. They invited Vogue to do the wedding-story and the photos are really great. Like, I’m not a Hungarian supermodel but this wedding seemed to be my idea of a perfect wedding – classic, simple, beautiful, not too fussy. They had 115 guests at this wedding and they plan to do a second wedding in California in a few months.

You can see the full Vogue piece here. Dylan and Barbara met six years ago at an event and they had a meet-cute when he cut in line. While they exchanged numbers, she ghosted him for six months before finally responding to him. By 2019, they were living together. He proposed to her last September on a camping trip in California.

Barabara’s wedding gown was Vivienne Westwood and it’s really beautiful! I sometimes think Westwood’s stuff is too much, too overdone, so you can tell that this look was customized for the bride. She also wore Tiffany & Co diamonds – I would have removed the choker, it does nothing for the overall wedding look. Her reception look was a red dress by Philosophy di Lorenzo Serafini.

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Photos courtesy of Vogue & Barbara’s IG.

The Duchess of Sussex has not been back to the UK since the Windsors held her hostage for two weeks when QEII passed away. I sincerely hope she never goes back. I remember, last September, spending too much time worrying about her safety in that very salty island. I also remember suggesting that it would be a good idea for Harry and Meghan to hitch a ride back to the US on Air Force One following QEII’s funeral. At the end of the day, they did not hitch a ride with President Biden, but they did leave soon after the funeral. Now the Daily Mail has “sources” claiming that the Sussexes really did ask the White House if they could hitch a ride back, only to be turned down. Not only that, but apparently the British government actively dissuaded Dr. Jill Biden from attending the Invictus Games in The Hague last year. All of these stories are being billed as “the Sussexes’ political moves are faltering!” Baby, the British government throwing a hissy fit at the FLOTUS is not the political strategy of the winning team.

Amid all of the funeral mess, the Sussexes’ staff reached out to the White House: Their staff reached out to the White House to ask if the couple could get a ride back to the United States on Air Force One. It would have been a grand photo-op: Harry and Meghan climbing the steps of the famous blue-and-white 747 to wave alongside the President and First Lady of the United States. But it was an immediate no from the Americans. Sources with knowledge of the decision said there was barely any discussion on the issue, just a general agreement that the request was a ‘non-starter.’ ‘It would have caused such a commotion. It would have strained relations with the Palace and the new King,’ another source told DailyMail.com.

LOL, how would President Biden justify the cost of letting the Sussexes ride on Air Force One?!? The Bidens can invite whoever they want to ride on Air Force One. But there would have been questions on who would pay for the Duke and Duchess to be passengers on the plane. The US government pays for official trips, like the Bidens’ travel to London, but Harry and Meghan aren’t American officials. President Biden pays for his children and grandchildren to ride the plane, the Democratic Party pays for any travel to campaign events, and news organizations pay for journalists who travel on board to cover the president’s activities.

The Sussexes invited Dr. Biden to the Invictus Games in The Hague: A central point of their outreach was the Invictus Games, held in The Hague in the Netherlands in April 2022. It was the first games since the couple had exited the Royal Family. Prince Harry created the games to honor wounded warriors and the event already had been a bonding point between Harry and the Bidens. Both Bidens attended the games when they were held in Canada in 2017. And Jill Biden attended the 2016 games in Florida.

Dr. Biden wanted to go: The First Lady wanted to attend the 2022 games, per a source close to her. She was the mother of a veteran and, through her Joining Forces Initiative, was a huge supporter of the military and their families. And she shared her love of the armed forces with Harry, a veteran of Afghanistan.

British officials threw a tantrum about it: However, British officials, in a working level conversation, conveyed to National Security Council staff that they thought the idea would land badly, a source said. ‘She wanted to go,’ a person familiar with the event told DailyMail.com of the First Lady, but noted the East Wing was concerned the Palace could be hurt if she attended. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and his husband Chasten led the US delegation instead.

[From The Daily Mail]

The Invictus stuff is both fascinating and infuriating. I was also surprised last year when Pete Buttigieg was the highest-ranking member of the American delegation to Invictus, especially given Dr. Biden’s long-standing support of Invictus and veterans. Now the Mail’s own sources are admitting that the British government spent the time and energy to throw a tantrum about it to the First Lady’s office. THAT is the story, not “the Bidens snubbed the Sussexes.” The story is that there are people very high in the British government who are using what little political capital they have to whine, cry and stomp their feet about the Biden administration doing anything friendly with the Sussexes.

I bet something very similar happened with the Air Force One situation too – in the middle of the whole QEII-funeral extravaganza, someone at 10 Downing Street was sent to speak to one of Biden’s senior staff and the topic was “please don’t give Harry and Meghan a ride on your plane.” I truly don’t think the Mail or the Torys understand how ridiculous and, frankly, unhinged this makes them look. No wonder Dr. Biden made a point of telling the press that she read Spare.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.

Against the backdrop of the writers and actors strikes, I wonder how long it will take before the different streaming services run out of new content. Not that it matters much to me personally, since my TV viewing habits form an inverse graph with the escalating output of new series. The more stuff that gets released, the fewer things I watch with each passing year. Part of it is sheer choice paralysis. But Netflix has in part reinforced my commitment-phobia by ruthlessly cancelling so many shows after one or two seasons. Rather than adapting to a “limited series” model that’s a little more common in the UK, where many shows last one season but have a satisfying story ending, Netflix lets their shows end on cliffhangers most of the time. So why would I invest in something new when it’s not likely the story will have a good resolution? But despite industry-wide disruptions from the strikes and general streaming fatigue, Netflix is pretty confident it can get people to sign up or renew their subscriptions. So confident, in fact, that they are eliminating their cheapest ad-free plan, which was $9.99 a month. That means new subscribers have to choose between the $15.49/month Standard plan, or get a worse experience with the ad-supported plan.

Netflix is no longer offering its cheapest streaming plan without ads in the U.S. and the U.K., with the company aiming to push value-conscious consumers to sign up for its advertising-supported package.

The Basic plan, which provided a single stream for $9.99/month in the U.S. and £6.99/month in the U.K., is no longer available “for new or rejoining members” in the respective countries. According to Netflix, existing Basic members can “remain on this plan until you change plans or cancel your account.”

The elimination of Netflix’s Basic plan is designed to boost customers on the ad-supported Standard With Ads, which the company first launched last November. In May, Netflix said it had signed up more than 5 million members for its ad-supported plans, with 25% of new subs taking the package.

“Our starting prices of $6.99 in the U.S. and £4.99 in the U.K. [for Standard With Ads] are lower than the competition and provide great value to consumers given the breadth and quality of our catalog,” a Netflix spokesperson tells Variety.

The company dropped the Basic plan in Canada last month. The move to end the Basic plan in the U.S. and U.K. comes as Netflix is set to report Q2 2023 earnings Wednesday after the market closes. Analysts expect Netflix to report a sizable lift from its new paid-sharing program, the company’s attempt to monetize illicit password sharing that launched widely during Q2 in the U.S. and several other countries.

In reporting Q1 2023 earnings, Netflix said that in the U.S., the ad-supported plan already was producing higher overall average revenue per customer (aka ARPU) than the $15.49/month Standard plan. That implies the company was generating at least $8.50/month in ad revenue per subscriber on the Standard With Ads plan.

Netflix’s Standard With Ads provides viewing on up to two devices simultaneously (as with the no-ads Standard plan) but does not provide offline viewing or the option to add an extra member. The plan serves an average of 4 minutes of unskippable ads per hour.

[From Variety]

I think I have the standard plan but I question its value on a weekly basis. Anyway, I think this represents something of a sea change for the streaming model. By essentially forcing their most price-sensitive consumers into watching ads, Netflix is implicitly admitting that their original business model has failed. They already started cracking down on password sharing which was not great for public perception of the brand. I think they will start funneling more and more people at higher price points into watching ads somehow. Maybe the ‘standard’ plan which is the next step up will start having 2 minutes of unskippable ads each hour, instead of the basic plan’s 4. Maybe they’ll explore the a-la-cart nonsense of Amazon Prime. I don’t know what the point is to subscribing to the damn thing if you have to purchase most movies and TV shows separately anyway. I put up with it only because Amazon has a decent variety of older movies and Netflix has systematically removed anything filmed before, like, 1985. But I really think the days of ad-free, all-you-can-watch TV shows and movies–that Netflix pioneered–are going to be over soon. And in the end I’m not so sure it’s a bad thing, when the streaming business model has made working conditions so bad for so many people.

photos from Netflix’s LA headquarters and top shows including Lincoln Lawyer, Quarterback and The Out-Laws courtesy of Netflix

Tom Hiddleston gave Zawe Ashton advice about joining Marvel. [Just Jared]
Are the Murdochs cutting ties with Meatball Ron DeSantis? [Pajiba]
Lainey also believes that Angelina Jolie’s New York Era is upon us. [LaineyGossip]
Tamron Hall’s dress just looks like a bedsheet to me! [Go Fug Yourself]
Forever young John Stamos tried the Aged filter. [Seriously OMG]
A comprehensive review of Barbie. [Jezebel]
Lionel Messi’s wife is already going viral in Miami. [Egotastic]
The Duggars are still anti-LGBTQ. [Starcasm]
Holy crap, some of these things are genuinely unsettling. [Buzzfeed]
Texas Republicans are tripping over their d-cks because of all of the dumbf–k culture wars they started and they alone care about. [Towleroad]
What was your favorite Vanessa Kirby look from the MI promo? [RCFA]