Category: Entertainment News Feed

LOS ANGELES (AP) — “Severance” could separate itself from the competition and reach the upper echelons of the Emmy Awards when nominations are announced Tuesday morning.

The dystopian workplace drama from Apple TV+ achieved a convergence of acclaim and audience buzz for its second season that often leads to the kind of Emmy dominance enjoyed in recent years by “Succession” and “Shogun.”

But a flowering of Emmys tends to follow HBO’s “The White Lotus” wherever it goes, and HBO Max’s newcomer “The Pitt” could challenge for nominations and for wins when the trophies are handed out in September.

All will benefit from the absence of “Shogun,” which last year led all Emmy nominees with 25 and set a record for wins in a season with 18. Its second season is still in the early stages of production and it shouldn’t be around for next year’s Emmys either.

“Severance” has become a signature show for Apple TV+. The streamer has gotten plenty of Emmy nominations for dramas including “The Morning Show” and “Slow Horses,” and “Ted Lasso” was downright dominant on the comedy side.

But Apple has lacked the kind of breakaway prestige drama that HBO seems to produce perennially.

Adam Scott and Britt Lower are virtual locks for lead acting nominations for what amounted to dual roles as their characters’ “innie” work selves and “outie” home selves. Tramell Tillman is just as likely to get a nod for playing their tone-shifting, pineapple-wielding supervisor, and Ben Stiller is bound to get a directing nomination.

“Severance” got 14 nominations for its first season in 2023, but won just two, for its music and its title sequence.

Nominations will be streamed live beginning at 11:30 a.m. Eastern at Emmys.com/nominations.

Two categories were announced early on “CBS Mornings.” The nominees for talk series are “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” “Jimmy Kimmel Live” and “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

The nominees for reality competition series are: “The Amazing Race”; RuPaul’s Drag Race”; “Survivor”; “Top Chef” and “The Traitors.”

What else may get 2025 Emmy nomination

Apple TV+’s Hollywood satire “The Studio” could draw a host of comedy nominations for its first season as it takes on previously dominant Emmy veterans like “Hacks” and “The Bear.”

“The Studio” star and co-creator Seth Rogen could get nods for acting, writing and directing, and the show’s all-star guest stars, including Zoë Kravitz, Martin Scorsese and Ron Howard, may also add some novelty to the nominations.

“Hacks” star Jean Smart has won best lead actress in a comedy for all three previous seasons of the HBO Max series, and is the favorite for the fourth. The show won best comedy series last year too.

“The Bear” set a record for comedy nominations with 23 last year for its acclaimed second season. This year, its third season is up for Emmys (even though its fourth has already aired). It got a more lukewarm reception, leaving its status coming into the nominations murky.

“The White Lotus,” HBO’s darkly comic resort drama, submits all the members of its big ensemble cast in supporting categories, which they tend to dominate. Its Thailand-set third season included ballyhooed performances from Walton Goggins, Carrie Coon, Parker Posey and Sam Rockwell among several others.

“The Pitt,” HBO Max’s prestige medical procedural starring “ER” veteran Noah Wyle, had reached the top tier of most prognosticators’ Emmy prediction lists by the time its first season ended in April. Wyle, who was nominated five times without a win for “ER,” could join Scott to make best actor in a drama a two-man race. And the show’s other doctors and nurses, played by lesser known actors, could draw nominations if “The White Lotus” cast leaves them any room.

Last year, the British Netflix production “Baby Reindeer” was surprisingly dominant in the limited series categories. This year, it will surprise no one if the Netflix British crime drama “Adolescence” does the same in the same categories. It was probably the most acclaimed show of the year. Fifteen-year-old Owen Cooper, who plays the 13-year-old accused of a killing at the center of the story, is likely to get one of several acting nominations.

How streaming has changed TV and the Emmys

All the shows are living in the splintered world of the streaming era, and the like the Oscars its most acclaimed nominees rarely have the huge audience they once did. While an impressive average of 10 million people per episode watched Wyle on “The Pitt” at some point on HBO Max, according to Warner Bros. Discovery, 30 years ago an average of 30 million sat down on the same night and watched him on “ER” on NBC.

The broadcast networks have largely become Emmy non-entities, with a few shining exceptions. ABC’s “Abbott Elementary” has annually drawn plenty of comedy nominations and should get its share this year. And Oscar-winner Kathy Bates is a front-runner for the best actress in a comedy Emmy for her role on CBS’s “Matlock.” She would be the first person nominated in the category from a network show since 2019, and the first to win it since 2015.

CBS will air the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards from the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on Sept. 14. Nate Bargatze is slated to host.

Unreleased music by Beyoncé along with footage, show plans and concert set lists were stolen from a car in Atlanta rented by the singer’s choreographer and one of her dancers, according to a police incident report.

The theft of the materials, stored on five thumb drives, happened on July 8, two days before Beyoncé began a four-day residency at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Beyoncé was set to take the stage Monday evening for her last night in the city.

The Atlanta Police Department said in a news release Monday it has secured an arrest warrant for a suspect whose identity was withheld.

Two MacBook laptops, Apple headphones, as well as luxury clothing and accessories were also reported stolen, according to the incident report.

Beyoncé’s choreographer, Christopher Grant, and dancer Diandre Blue told police they parked their rental car, a 2024 Jeep Wagoneer, at a food hall in the city at about 8:09 p.m. The pair returned to the car just after 9 p.m. to discover the trunk window had been damaged and two suitcases had been taken.

Grant told officers that “he was also carrying some personal sensitive information for the musician Beyonce,” the police incident report stated.

The report identifies a possible suspect vehicle as a 2025 red Hyundai Elantra. Responding officers were able to identify “light prints” at the scene, and security cameras in the parking lot captured the incident, according to the report.

Officers canvassed an area where the stolen laptop and headphones were tracked by using the devices’ location services, the report stated.

Beyoncé kicked off her highly-anticipated tour in late April, taking her Grammy-winning album, “Cowboy Carter,” to stadiums in the U.S. and Europe. The singer will end her tour with two Las Vegas nights in late July.

NEW YORK (AP) — Martin Cruz Smith, the best-selling mystery novelist who engaged readers for decades with “Gorky Park” and other thrillers featuring Moscow investigator Arkady Renko, has died at age 82.

Smith died Friday at a senior living community in San Rafael, California, “surrounded by those he loved,” according to his publisher, Simon & Schuster. Smith revealed a decade ago that he had Parkinson’s disease, and he gave the same condition to his protagonist. His 11th Renko book, “Hotel Ukraine,” was published this week and billed as his last.

“My longevity is linked to Arkady’s,” he told Strand Magazine in 2023. “As long as he remains intelligent, humorous, and romantic, so shall I.”

Smith was often praised for his storytelling and for his insights into modern Russia; he would speak of being interrogated at length by customs officials during his many trips there. The Associated Press called “Hotel Ukraine” a “gem” that “upholds Smith’s reputation as a great craftsman of modern detective fiction with his sharply drawn, complex characters and a compelling plot.”

Smith’s honors included being named a “grand master” by the Mystery Writers of America, winning the Hammett Prize for “Havana Bay” and a Gold Dagger award for “Gorky Park.”

Born Martin William Smith in Reading, Pennsylvania, he studied creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania and started out as a journalist, including a brief stint at the AP and at the Philadelphia Daily News. Success as an author arrived slowly. He had been a published novelist for more than a decade before he broke through in the early 1980s with “Gorky Park.” His novel came out when the Soviet Union and the Cold War were still very much alive and centered on Renko’s investigation into the murders of three people whose bodies were found in the Moscow park that Smith used for the book’s title.

“Gorky Park,” cited by the New York Times as a reminder of “just how satisfying a smoothly turned thriller can be,” topped the Times’ fiction bestseller list and was later made into a movie starring William Hurt.

“Russia is a character in my Renko stories, always,” Smith told Publishers Weekly in 2013. “‘Gorky Park’ may have been one of the first books to take a backdrop and make it into a character. It took me forever to write because of my need to get things right. You’ve got to knock down the issue of ‘Does this guy know what he’s talking about or not?’”

Smith’s other books include science fiction (“The Indians Won”), the Westerns “North to Dakota” and “Ride to Revenge,” and the “Romano Grey” mystery series. Besides “Martin Cruz Smith” — Cruz was his maternal grandmother’s name — he also wrote under the pen names “Nick Carter” and “Simon Quinn.”

Smith’s Renko books were inspired in part by his own travels and he would trace the region’s history over the past 40 years, whether the Soviet Union’s collapse (“Red Square”), the rise of Russian oligarchs (“The Siberian Dilemma”), or, in the novel “Wolves Eats Dogs,” the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

By the time he began working on his last novel, Russia had invaded Ukraine. The AP noted in its review of “Hotel Ukraine” that Smith had devised a backstory “pulled straight from recent headlines,” referencing such world leaders as Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine,Vladimir Putin of Russia and former President Joe Biden of the U.S.

Smith is survived by his brother, Jack Smith; his wife, Emily Smith; three children and five grandchildren.