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Ice Cube and his BIG3 basketball league will be the subject of a newly announced documentary series produced by him and a veteran awards producer.
According to reports, the veteran rapper will be producing the not-yet-named documentary series through his Cube Vision production company along with Jesse Collins Entertainment. Described as “Welcome to Wrexham and Cheer meets basketball”, the series will follow one of the teams from the three-on-three basketball league in addition to giving viewers a look at Cube’s path in creating and running a sports league from the ground up.
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Dionne Harmon and Madison Merritt also will serve as executive producers on the project with Cube, Kwatinetz, and Collins. Collins is best known for his company’s work in producing awards shows and television specials which include the BET Awards and Black Girls Rock! Jesse Collins Entertainment has a multi-year agreement with ViacomCBS Cable Networks and a first-look film agreement with Paramount Players and Viacom’s other film entities.
The BIG3 first launched in the summer of 2017 after it was first announced by Ice Cube and entertainment executive Jeff Kwatinetz in January of that year. The league would captivate audiences with innovations like the 4-point shot and the inclusion of former NBA stars and legends such as Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, Julius “Dr. J” Erving, George “The Iceman” Gervin, Gary Payton, Stephen Jackson, Allen Iverson, and Clyde Drexler as players and coaches. The league also featured women greats such as Lisa Leslie and Nancy Lieberman as coaches. Drexler now serves as the league’s commissioner.
The series also promises to take a look at the league’s $1.2 billion lawsuit against Qatari investors that was filed in 2018. The suit turned into a rollercoaster situation that would see then-CEO Roger Mason Jr. fired and accused of bringing the aforementioned investors in to pay him and other executives while shortchanging the league. Mason would allege he was fired in retaliation for his own lawsuit against BIG3 claiming that Kwatinetz made racial remarks. Another wrinkle occurred when Ice Cube and the BIG3 took out a full-page ad in the New York Times asking then-President Donald Trump and his administration to side with them in their lawsuit. One investor, Ahmed al-Rumaihi, would eventually be given full diplomatic immunity that December.
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Late-night host Bill Maher is under fire for his “boneheaded and wrong” recent comments on gun violence and race in Chicago in a segment on his show.
The Real Time with Bill Maher panel segment this past Friday (April 21st) featured Maher and University of Washington professor Daniel Bessner in a discussion on race, crime, and poverty. During that discussion, Maher asked Brown University professor & economist Glenn Loury about Chicago: “Like Chicago, most of the shootings are young Black men killing other young Black men. Is that not correct?” When Loury answered in the affirmative, Maher responded: “OK, much more than what the cops do. Why doesn’t anybody talk about that? Why aren’t there a hundred giant Black celebrities, who would have the respect of those people, saying, ‘What are you doing to yourselves? Why are you killing each other?’”
Bessner responded that other factors “’ more linked to social conditions, socioeconomic conditions, the disbelief that there is anywhere to go in terms of improving your lot in society,’” had to be considered, to which Maher dismissively replied, “You sound like the Mayor-Elect,” referring to Brandon Johnson, the recently elected mayor of Chicago and Chicago Teachers Union activist considered more progressive than the previous mayor, Lori Lightfoot. Maher and Loury would then say more “moral leadership” would help the situation. Bessner disagreed, saying the change would require that Johnson “attack it at the level of socioeconomics, not culture.” Right-wing outlets including Fox News amplified Maher’s Chicago comments – ironic as his opening monologue on the show skewered the network over its $787 million defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems.
Maher’s comments were criticized heavily by Ben Burgis of The Daily Beast, who pointed out how Maher’s rise as someone who was antiwar in the 2000s has given way to him devolving into more conservative positions. “But that doesn’t mean he’s ever been a leftist in any deeper sense. If you want to hear old jokes about Sarah Palin reheated and served up as jokes about Marjorie Taylor Greene, watch Bill Maher. If you want to hear well-thought-out analysis of what’s wrong with our society, then — at least on nights when Daniel Bessner isn’t on Bill’s panel — you’re better off changing the channel,” he concluded.
Maher has been no stranger to making racist comments, which include his statement that using the N-word “isn’t racist.”
Chlöe and Halle Bailey were up for some sisterly competition as they went head-to-head on the Monday night episode of the Jimmy Fallon-hosted NBC game show That’s My Jam.
The sister duo was forced to battle each other in a game of Mixtape Medley Showdown, in which they were tasked with putting their own spin on several hit songs to see who could potentially out-sing the other and pull a victory for their team. Breakup songs was the theme of the game, and saw Chlöe and Halle single anthemic heartbreak hits primarily from the 2000s.
Chlöe was first up to the mic, singing a classic track from their mentor Beyoncé’s catalog: Destiny’s Child’s 2001 hit “Survivor.” The tracks seamlessly blended into one another, with Halle following with her rendition of Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated.”
Other hit songs that were featured in the medley included Nelly and Kelly Rowland’s “Dilemma” going up against Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats”; Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way” against Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”; and Olivia Rodrigo’s “Good 4 U” against Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone.”
After putting on an equally impressive vocal showcase for the audience, the score didn’t seem to matter to the competing sisters: The pair hugged it out onstage and soaked up applause from the audience.
Watch Chlöe and Halle play Mixtape Medley Showdown — as well as Slay It, Don’t Spray It — in the videos below.
Over the last two decades, documentaries about the late Tupac Shakur have become a cottage industry of sorts. The best of them — like Lauren Lazin’s Tupac: Resurrection, which largely draws from the artist’s own words, or Peter Spirer’s Thug Angel, which covers Tupac’s early life and his mother’s impact on him — have used insightful interviews and probing analysis to shed light on one of the most influential yet misunderstood music artists of the 20th century. Others, like A&E’s Who Killed Tupac? series or countless homemade YouTube productions, felt more like salacious true crime, less interested in Tupac the generationally gifted (if flawed) man, than in a gunned-down rap star caught amid the East Coast-West Coast feud of the ‘90s, dead at 25 after a Las Vegas shooting.
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Allen Hughes’ Dear Mama, a long-gestating five-part series beginning on FX April 21, is unlike any of the myriad Tupac docs before. Filled with rare footage, previously unheard vocal takes and significant interviews with those in Tupac’s close orbit — from family members to early managers to peers like Snoop Dogg — it presents a fully-realized portrait of both the musician and the man, while devoting equal screen time to the life of his mother, Afeni Shakur, who oversaw Tupac’s estate until her death in 2016. A singularly complex woman, Afeni was a member of the Black Panther party and part of the Panther 21, a group of activists who were tried and ultimately acquitted in a high-profile trial between 1970 and 1971, where Afeni both defended herself and cross-examined witnesses.
Tupac Shakur in ‘DEAR MAMA.’
FX
“There have been a million pieces done on him, but none of them really did the trick as far as understanding completely that narrative and that human being and the complexities and the dualities,” Hughes tells Billboard. “You talk about the surface stuff, but there was never a deep dive. I wanted to understand.”
Dear Mama comes at a time when Tupac remains a massively important figure in both hip-hop and popular culture at large. Since Snoop Dogg acquired Death Row Records, the legendary rap label’s discography has returned to streaming services — helping ensure that Tupac’s still-fresh, urgent music will be heard widely 30 years after its release. (Music executive Tom Whalley, who signed Tupac to Interscope Records and was a close friend of his, is the current trustee of the Shakur Estate; Shakur’s sister Sekyiwa is currently engaged in ongoing litigation with Whalley).
Music documentaries can easily fall into a number of traps — veering into hagiography, relying on the same handful of oft-quoted interview subjects, or zooming too far and coming across like a Wikipedia entry. Some directors have evaded those traps by honing in on a specific era of their subject’s life or career, as Alan Elliott and Sydney Pollack did with Aretha Franklin in Amazing Grace, or Peter Jackson managed in his Beatles series Get Back. Hughes had another idea: as he saw it, Afeni was not only a remarkable figure in her own right, but the key to doing her son’s story justice. “I said, ‘I’m down to do it, but I’d like to make it a five-part series, and the narrative would be as much about his mother as it is about him,’” Hughes explains.
Afeni Shakur in ‘DEAR MAMA.’
FX
Working with his twin brother, Albert, as the Hughes Brothers, Allen, 51, rose to prominence directing hit films like Menace II Society and The Book of Eli, as well as the controversial feature documentary American Pimp. He entered the documentary world solo with 2017’s The Defiant Ones, an acclaimed four-part look at the relationship between Interscope Records founder Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre. Whalley reached out to Hughes — who had worked with Tupac during his lifetime, notably on 1991’s brilliant “Brenda’s Got a Baby” video — following the success of that HBO series.
He was hesitant. Back in 1994, Tupac was set to play a starring role in Menace II Society, but an on-set argument with him and Hughes escalated into a physical fight between the two men, and associates of the artist beat the director. Tupac left the cast, and their relationship fractured. “When I sat with [the estate], I was reluctant to do [the documentary] because of my own personal reasons. I just didn’t know if I wanted to [deal with] what I was gonna be forced to, personally,” Hughes recalls. “I didn’t know if I wanted to go on that emotional journey, but I said, ‘Give me a few days, let me think about it.’” Ultimately, he decided not only to move forward, but to confront the incident head-on in Dear Mama — turning the camera on himself at the end of the second episode, and being interviewed about what transpired.
“He was young, Tupac was young, and if they both had to do it over again, they would have done things differently,” says Atron Gregory, a friend and former manager of Tupac’s who participated in Dear Mama. Gregory says he was initially surprised to hear Hughes would be directing, but upon reflection he realized that he was well-suited to take on the project.
Nick Grad, president of FX Entertainment, says he saw Hughes’ approach as a way to continue to build out the network’s burgeoning documentary branch, which includes Hip Hop Uncovered (about America’s criminalization of rap music) and a collaborative series with the New York Times, which recently included an episode about legendary producer J Dilla. But Grad says he more broadly saw Dear Mama as a perfect fit within FX’s wider slate of innovative projects.
“We decided if we’re going to get into documentary, we have to approach it using the same criteria that we do with our scripted shows,” he says. “How original can it be? Is this something that people are still hopefully going to be talking about in 10 years, in 20 years?”
Early episodes focus heavily on Afeni’s involvement with the Black Panthers in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s and how that affected young Tupac’s life. (Afeni was famously pregnant with Tupac while in prison.) Hughes explores similarities in mother and son’s temperaments — and the ways that malicious men within the Black liberation movement took advantage of them, while the U.S. government was simultaneously attempting to dismantle and punish anyone attempting to disrupt the status quo. “Early in episode one, [Tupac’s aunt] Glo talks about Afeni, saying she was a wonderer and a wanderer, [and] not aimlessly,” Hughes says. “Everyone describes Afeni and Tupac as twins.” As the series progresses, its focus shifts to how Tupac struggled to reconcile his activist ambitions with his celebrity, and the mental toll that took.
Afeni Shakur in ‘DEAR MAMA.’
FX
Though Dear Mama is comprehensive, Hughes says he is not trying to offer definitive moral conclusions. That meant handling the legal trouble in Tupac’s life by focusing on accounts from those who were there — an approach that leads to some of the series’ most powerful moments, like the vivid description (down to a recreation of the shooter’s stance) of Tupac shooting two off-duty cops, one of whom he’d seen hit a Black man, on Halloween 1993 in Atlanta. It also leaves some events more uncomfortably murky, like the 1994 New York case in which Tupac was convicted of first-degree sexual abuse, but ultimately acquitted of sodomy charges, following an incident with a young woman and some of his associates at the Parker Meridien hotel (Tupac spent several months in an upstate New York prison and at Riker’s Island, though he maintained his innocence). In Dear Mama, his aunt Glo says that Afeni “felt sympathy for the woman, but she never doubted that Tupac was innocent.”
“For all the alleged crimes he was caught up in or were litigated, if you weren’t a friend or family that was there, I’m not relitigating,” Hughes says of his approach. “It’s only through the eyes of people who were there or close to him and how it dovetails back into the dynamic with his mother. It’s not a normal documentary in the way of ‘Let’s go explore.’”
Tupac Shakur in ‘DEAR MAMA.’
FX
Dear Mama largely eschews hitting the well-trod beats in Tupac’s life. “I think that there was so much energy put on West Coast, East Coast, feuding, when Tupac went to jail in New York, and then when he [signed] with Death Row,” Gregory says. “‘California Love’ was so huge, and [his 1996 album] All Eyez on Me was so huge. I think people forget the first five years of his career. “ Hughes spends considerable time on Tupac’s adolescent days at the Baltimore School for the Arts; his time with early managers Gregory and Leila Steinberg; and his formative time spent on the road with the joyous Bay Area rap collective Digital Underground. That commitment to covering the often-glossed-over aspects of the artist’s life — in particular his relationship with Digital Underground — was a major reason Gregory agreed to participate.
When the series does explore Tupac’s signing with Death Row, interviews with Gregory and Black Panther-turned-manager Watani Tyehimba stress that Tupac was aiming to make positive changes in his life post-prison before Suge Knight became involved with the label. (With the support of Interscope, Knight famously helped bail a broke Tupac out of prison, on the condition that he sign a contract with the infamous label). At the time, members of Tupac’s inner circle were uncomfortable with the decision and the influence Death Row could have on him.
“He was happy, excited. He had money and he was free. But sometimes, progression is a digression, because the environment was bad for him,” says Snoop Dogg — a then-Death Row artist who advocated for the label signing Tupac — in Dear Mama.
Interviews in the doc also highlight the inner turmoil the artist himself experienced. The height of Tupac’s success came at a time when rap was vilified by politicians and the press, and Hughes shows the artist debating members of the media about whether he is a gangsta rapper himself. Clips like these of Tupac himself are revealing, none more so than when the artist talks about his dynamic with Afeni. “Do your mother’s feelings ever get hurt when you talk about how painful and sad you were as a kid?” an interviewer asks. “I always used to feel like she cared more about the people, than her people,” Tupac answers. “But I love her for that — that’s how I am.”
In the end, Hughes says, crafting Dear Mama made him reconsider his own relationship with his mother, who was a passionate activist in the ERA movement, and both challenged and shattered some of his own preconceptions about Tupac. “I thought I knew why he was paranoid because I knew the guy at 19 — you know, young Black male shit. Hennessy, weed, typical stuff, experiencing fame,” Hughes reflects. “What I didn’t understand was that at five, eight years old, the expectation [was] that sometimes he had assignments to sit on a stoop in Harlem and watch out for federal agents all day.
“Can you imagine: with the FBI’s COINTELPRO surveillance program, [which targeted] the Black Panthers and other Black organizations, you’re systematically seeing all of your fathers and mothers and aunts and uncles either killed or put in prison or ran out to some other goddamn country?” Hughes continues. “And you’re always being surveilled, you’re always being dogged by the FBI. Who wouldn’t be paranoid?”
Hughes speaks frequently about finding the “melody” in Tupac and Afeni’s life and letting the story flow from there — and cites a bit of wisdom given to him by a legendary collaborator that ultimately helped him shape Dear Mama into the rarest kind of Tupac project: something genuinely revelatory.
“Denzel Washington taught me something on The Book of Eli,” he says. “I [was] young, I’m trying to do it all. He says, ‘Listen, the universal stems from the specific.’ And it changed my life.”
Up next on SNL will be Pete Davidson as host and Lil Uzi Vert as musical guest.
The lineup for the May 6 episode of Saturday Night Live was confirmed over the weekend. Former SNL cast member Davidson’s return to the sketch comedy show follows April 15’s Ana de Armas-hosted episode, on which Karol G performed.
Davidson left SNL in May 2022, after eight seasons with the cast. He’s readying the release of his upcoming Peacock series Bupkis.
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In February, Lil Uzi Vert claimed their first No. 1 as a lead artist on Billboard’s Hot Rap Songs chart with the single “Just Wanna Rock,” which also peaked in the top 10 on the Hot 100. Their most recent solo full-length album, Eternal Atake, hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 upon its release in 2020.
See the SNL announcement for May 6 below.
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Nicki Minaj is teaming up with 50 Cent as the star and executive producer of a new animated series that he’s producing for Amazon.
According to reports, the “Anaconda” rapper will be the main star in Lady Danger, a new animated series that will make its debut on Amazon’s Freevee network. The series is based on the Dark Horse comic book series by Alex de Campi. The series will be executive produced by 50 Cent through his G-Unit Film & TV company, as well as Minaj. He announced the news through his Instagram account on Wednesday (April 12th), writing: “What you doing today, we working @nickiminaj South Side you already know what it is…I don’t miss.” The news was also shared by Nicki Minaj through her social media accounts as well.
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The series, set in the year 2075, follows a government field agent who stumbles upon a dangerous secret and winds up being left for dead by her team. She’s then resurrected as “an afro futuristic ass-kicking Agent of B.O.O.T.I (Bureau of Organized Terrorism Intervention)” known as Lady Danger. She goes on to fight multiple villains endangering the Earth and its population while keeping her true identity a secret.
Starburns Industries is in charge of the animation, and the series will be written by Carlton Jordan and Crystle Roberson who are also executive producers. The others in that role in the series are Brian Sher, and Paul Young & Mike Griffin of Make Good Content. There are no other details released about the project as of yet.
This series is another in the realm of animation for Nicki Minaj, who previously voiced the character Suglite on Cartoon Network’s acclaimed series Steven Universe. She also had a role in The Angry Birds Movie 2 and Ice Age: Continental Drift in addition to a guest spot on The Cleveland Show. As for 50 Cent, the news makes it another media project under his belt. In addition to his Power series which he developed at Starz under a previous deal as well as the BMF series, he’s also reportedly working on a new original series with Paramount Plus and Lionsgate Television entitled Vice City.
Singer-songwriter-actor Tim McGraw is expanding his business ventures with a new entertainment, media and marketing company called Down Home. The Nashville-based firm is a collaborative effort between McGraw, his management company EM.Co and social content studio Shareability.
EM.Co’s Brian Kaplan, also a co-founder of Down Home, will serve as chief strategy officer, while Shareability founder and Down Home co-founder Tim Staples will serve as CEO. The venture is aimed at connecting McGraw’s country music audience with Hollywood and brands by producing film, TV and digital media “that focuses on relatable stories that capture the essence and spirit of everyday Americans,” according to a press release.
Down Home has secured a private investment deal with Nashville-based TriScore Entertainment and The Laurel Group, a boutique merchant bank that continues to advise the company.
At launch, Down Home has an investment and first-look deal in place with Skydance Media. Under the agreement, Skydance will develop film and television projects with Down Home, in addition to channeling IP and other material to the company. Down Home currently has two scripted series in development with Skydance, with plans for additional features and animation. Skydance founder/CEO David Ellison will serve on the Down Home board.
Down Home additionally plans to establish a social content studio to nurture Nashville’s emerging talent, fostering connections across music, sports, entertainment and brands.
“Country music has always been about storytelling,” McGraw said in a statement. “Our stories are honest vignettes of life and family and community. I think there’s a longing for that. For me, that’s Down Home. That’s how I grew up, those are the stories I like to tell, and that’s what I want our company to be about.”
Ellison added, “Tim McGraw is an outstanding artist and entertainer. He is truly gifted at telling stories across mediums that deeply connect with the audience and has built an unmatched community of fans around the world. We are thrilled to partner with him, Tim Staples, Brian Kaplan, and everyone at Down Home as they have created a dedicated infrastructure to tell stories across film, TV, and music, to fulfill a massive demand for authentic, inspiring stories.”
“From 1883 to Friday Night Lights, or songs like ‘Humble and Kind’, Tim McGraw knows how to connect with this audience in a way that can be really powerful for both Hollywood and brands,” said Staples.
“We’re thrilled to be a part of the next chapter in Nashville’s evolution in empowering artists and visionaries to create a new hub for storytelling that combines talent, passion, and innovation,” Kaplan added.
McGraw was represented in the transaction by EM.Co’s Scott Siman and Kelly Clague. He continues his long-time affiliation with CAA.
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Basketball Hall of Famer Charles Barkley is rumored to be the host of a new primetime show on CNN along with anchor Gayle King.
According to reports, the Inside The NBA host and analyst is close to a deal to join the CBS This Morning host to lead a new primetime show on CNN. One source states that there is some risk that the deal won’t be finalized. “No one expects a deal to be finalized right away,” a source close to the negotiations says. However, CNN head Chris Licht is reportedly “optimistic” that the deal is done.
While Barkley has not responded to press requests for comment, he has gone on record before about such a move to the New York Post. “They are trying to pair Gayle King and me,” Barkley said in February. “We don’t have anything set in stone. I’m only considering it because of my respect for Gayle. It would be an honor and a privilege to work with Gayle.” King has not offered any comment, and CNN did not respond to press inquiries.
Reportedly the issue before anything is finalized is CBS News “dragging its feet,” according to a source. The same source says King has been spending the past few weeks in negotiations to rework her current deal to take the job. CBS This Morning is a major generator of ratings and ad profits for the news division, whose parent company is Paramount Global. She and Licht worked together during the 2010s when Licht served as a producer for the company’s news division.
If completed, the new show would be a big opportunity for CNN to boost its sluggish ratings before a pivotal point – the “upfront” sales season where media companies in the U.S. work to sell billions of dollars in advertising before the new slate of programming is aired. Barkley has already signed a new 10-year deal with TNT to remain as a host on Inside The NBA and Warner Bros. Discovery is the parent network for TNT and CNN. The 9 p.m. slot is where the new show would be expected to air – but sources say it would run only Tuesday through Friday, as to avoid competing directly with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow which airs only on Mondays and dominates that primetime slot.
Hulu wasn’t explicitly looking to develop a musical comedy when songwriters Bobby Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, writer Steven Levenson, and director Thomas Kail presented them with Up Here. The platform hadn’t ever done a musical TV show — which, despite well-received past series like Glee, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Schmigadoon remains a relative rarity in the current streaming world.
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But, as head of scripted content at Hulu Originals Jordan Helman remembers it, it was hard to resist this “who’s-who of the heavy hitters of Broadway in the past decade.” Kail is the Tony-winning director of Hamilton (and now Sweeney Todd); Levenson the Tony-winning playwright behind Dear Evan Hansen; and Lopez and Anderson-Lopez the Academy Award-, Emmy- and Grammy-winning married duo behind the music of Frozen, Frozen 2 and Coco (Bobby, who co-created The Book of Mormon and Avenue Q, is also a double EGOT winner).
Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez
Sarah Shatz/Hulu
Up Here is based on a musical of the same name by Anderson-Lopez and Lopez, produced in 2015 at the La Jolla Playhouse. The story of Miguel and Lindsay (portrayed by Carlos Valdes and Mae Whitman) finding themselves, and romance, in New York City in the 1990s — while battling the naysaying voices of their subconsciouses, personified onscreen — was, Helman says, an “irresistible” opportunity for Hulu to enter the musical landscape. Its audiences have responded positively to female-driven soaps and thrillers in the past, but “we had never really approached [a show] through a rom-com lens,” Helman continues. “This felt like a tailored opportunity to broaden the aperture of what we do, but still feeling deeply relevant to the viewers we have on platform.”
For Lopez and Anderson-Lopez, developing Up Here for TV was also an enticing opportunity to expand upon and rethink their original show — which dwelt on the male protagonist’s subconscious. It was freeing as well, allowing them to explore multiple genres in their songwriting. And with each episode functioning like a mini-musical — complete with elaborate singing and dance numbers — they were able to see a much larger than usual quantity of their compositions make it to the final product (those songs can also be heard on the show’s soundtrack, recently released on Hollywood Records).
“We’re from Broadway,” says Bobby. “And we wanted to bring what was great about Broadway musicals and see if we could do our version of it in a streaming series.” Below, he and Anderson-Lopez speak to Billboard about precisely how they did it.
After the production of Up Here at La Jolla, what did you hope its future would be?
Kristen Anderson-Lopez: La Jolla was a huge growth experience. We’d never done book, music and lyrics all together before … while raising two children out of town … and getting infested with bird mites. [Laughs.] That’s a thing that happened! We realized that where we are in our lives, we wanted to work with book writers [going forward]. You can’t address what you need to in production, on all three fronts, overnight, every day. So, we’d started to talk to talk to book writers and had actually identified Steven Levenson as someone with their finger on the pulse of what we wanted to do.
Then life took over: Frozen Broadway, Frozen 2, Coco. There was an Excel spreadsheet somewhere that said we could do nothing else for four years. [Laughs.] So it got put away. But there was always this intention of revisiting it with Steven at some date in the future. And then that date came in 2020 when Tommy Kail called us and said, “Hey, I’d like to do something with you guys on TV” — and we’d fallen in love with Fosse/Verdon [the FX series that Kail directed]. If there’s a president and vice president of the Fosse/Verdon fan club, it’s us.
Bobby Lopez: The production in La Jolla was very different from what we ended up with on Hulu — in that it only really entered the guy’s head, and one of the takeaways was, “Gee, I wish we’d written it so you could see what she’s thinking, too.” We couldn’t imagine rewriting it for the stage in a way that would preserve any of what we had. So, we were a little frustrated.
But when the idea of television came into it — doing a half-hour comedy, where every week we had the structure to write a mini-musical in essence, and end up with 8 mini musicals adding up to a larger grand musical [over a season] — we got very excited. It just seemed like, “This is a new take on the idea, we’ll be able to tell a different story, we’ll be able to change the characters in exciting ways.”
‘Up Here’
Patrick Harbron/Hulu
Did you preserve anything from the original stage show?
Kristen: I’d say the thing that’s preserved is the concept and question of: Can you ever truly know someone? And what does it feel like when a relationship that you assume is, “This is my person” — they become a stranger? And how you realize you’re up against the bubble of your own consciousness.
Bobby: Some of the songs about that theme carried over. For instance, the idea of “I Can Never Know You” — that was a song in the original, and we transformed it into a different song called “Please Like Me” for the show.
Kristen: “Please Like Me” was originally kind of a “I’m Just a Girl Who Cain’t Say No” charm song — an introduction to the female lead — and now it’s about the huge problem she’s battling. I think it probably always was. And we were always curious to see if you could have a song that’s so clearly, “This person needs to grow from this.” But it’s also why you identify with her, because she’s so honest about it.
Even in the expanded streaming world, musical television shows still feel pretty few and far between. Why do you think that is?
Kristen: I can tell you, after doing it for the last three years — it’s very, very difficult to do. TV is always hard to do. It’s always about getting it ready as much as you can, then you have to get lightning in a bottle on the film day, then you have to piece it together. If you add the elements of learning music and choreography, producing music, to something already time-constrained… you’ve added weights to what’s already hard.
Bobby: I think we sold this show on the first pitch, to [co-chairman of Disney Entertaiment] Dana Walden. And they were very excited — we all were — and then we realized the process of developing a TV show. A lot of the writing is done during production, whereas musical theater is very iterative as a process: You write a draft of the whole thing, you have to see it in front of an audience to know whether it’s working. And it’s the same in animation, honestly – we screen the first version of the film, and then kind of throw it all out, and at the end of many iterations we have something we know works and we produce that.
TV is much more accelerated. It took a lot of time before we were greenlit, rethinking the concept of who these characters were. It was a high degree of difficulty to not only have these singing characters, but also the concept of being inside their minds.
What are the specific challenges inherent in making an episodic musical, as opposed to one in film or onstage that’s over in about two hours?
Kristen: Every musical has an architectural scaffold to it: You have your opening, your “I want” song, your charm song, your act break, your finale, your 11:00 number. [For a show] you really want to know what the whole is before you start making the parts.
We really had to think architecturally [with this show] as we were breaking the story – toggling between what it is to break a normal streaming comedy and to break a musical. There’s a little bit of a Russian doll aspect: In order to have the whole series, we needed to have a giant overview and know where the key songs were going to be before you could ever film. And then you need to record all those songs. Everything has to be pretty solid before a single actor has ever stood on a soundstage, because the songs get pre-recorded.
Bobby: Which is the opposite of how we usually work. In theater, the cast album is the last thing. In animation, you kind of record as you go. It’s never the very first thing — like, “Hi Mae, I’m Bobby, this is Kristen! Now, if you step inside the booth, let’s record the first song.”
Kristen: I will say, I have never been part of a TV writers’ room, and I absolutely loved it. It was kind of like eight hours of group therapy every day. It’s just really creative people pretending, basically.
You get to play with musical genre so much from episode to episode. Did that feel like a freeing new direction?
Kristen: It was liberating. We could jump all over – you could have a Fiona Apple[-type] song next to a Katrina and the Waves song next to a weird eight-bit mini opera.
Bobby: The original show was vast — it was meant to be like a British mega-musical, it had a big orchestra, it wanted to sound gigantic. This version, we really went small with it, trying to think of it all as one rock band playing the music. Getting to work with the same players every day, it felt like we were making an album, rather than hiring players to be in the orchestra pit. It felt unified by its small, intimate sound.
Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez
Sarah Shatz/Hulu
What was the casting process like? Both Mae and Carlos are great singers, but they’re not huge, over-the-top Broadway voices.
Kristen: At its heart we wanted this to feel like an extraordinary story about ordinary people – so we didn’t want them to be larger than life. We wanted to find those people we’ve seen – or not seen – who really seem like you could see them on the street. They could [ordinarily] be the sidekick on a show, but this is a chance for the sidekicks to be the lead.
Mae brings with her such a beautiful humility; she does feel like, to me, your little sister. She’s so relatable and just lets you see all her emotions. And Carlos … we put poor Carlos through the wringer. He came in five times, because what he had to do was extraordinary. He had to be able to have these intimate scenes, but also dance up a storm and sing and really show us what’s underneath the toxic masculinity, and bare his soul. And he always rose to the occasion.
Bobby: We were 100% behind them vocally. They both have experience singing, and for what they needed to do in this, they really were rock stars. Not to mention the chemistry they have that just sparked.
Kristen: Mae likes to say she’s not a singer — but I spent years raising my kids on her Tinker Bell! She’s an amazing singer.
Bobby: One of my first gigs, I wrote a song on spec for The Jungle Book 2, and if it had gotten selected, Mae would have been the singer. I think she was 10.
Kristen: And Carlos was in Darren Criss’ band at University of Michigan. He went to this hardcore, triple-threat high school that was like the FAME high school of Atlanta — and then he got into Michigan for musical theater, which is like, where you go to become a Broadway star.
You also have big Broadway stars on the show, like Norm Lewis and Brian Stokes Mitchell — but it seems like you’re having fun casting them against type.
Bobby: There’s always a bunch of people we’re dying to work with and haven’t yet, and this was a great opportunity to. Scott Porter, we’d seen in Altar Boyz a long time ago and knew he was an amazing singer and dancer, so to get him onboard was incredible. Brian Stokes Mitchell and Norm Lewis are baritone titans of Broadway.
Kristen: To talk about Stokes for a second: To bring him in to do a hip-hop Dr. Seuss character, to show this side of him that’s so funny – we knew we needed a really charismatic, attractive silver fox. But then he just had this bead on this character that was so funny, and the ability to really commit that teeters on the absurd. And across the board, that’s what we got with all these Broadway performers. Nobody’s afraid of going toward the stylized, so everyone just committed hard to these big emotions in such wonderful, quirky ways.
Musicals, both on stage and in animated form, go through years of workshopping and development, and so much gets left on the cutting room floor. Up Here on the other hand seems to have a much higher quantity of songs – was that liberating?
Kristen: Yeah! Frozen, we wrote 26 songs and 7 got into the movie. Whereas here we wrote 25 songs and 21 are in the show. Although I will say, if you count La Jolla as part of that development process, the math falls apart there.
Bobby: Then it’s like 75 songs. [Laughs.] But yeah — we did toss a few numbers, but we didn’t have the luxury of doing a lot of cutting and rewriting. We killed ourselves making 21 brand new songs in a row, and having to mix and master and produce tracks that you love, it’s a great deal of work. Now, when we listen to the soundtrack, it does play like a cast recording – it feels like a Broadway show, and that’s what we wanted.
American Idol will continue to honor the series’ long history by inviting seven past finalists to mentor season 21’s contestants during Hollywood Week, which begins airing on ABC on Sunday, April 2. The returning Idols are Justin Guarini (season 1), Clay Aiken (season 2), Jordin Sparks (season 6), David Archuleta (season 7), Phillip Phillips (season 11), Catie Turner (season 16) and Noah Thompson (season 20).
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“Having a mentor in Hollywood Week is something we’ve always wanted to explore,” executive producer and showrunner Megan Michaels Wolflick tells Billboard. “We usually have over 150 people come to Hollywood Week, so it’s hard to have one mentor talk to everyone individually. I thought, ‘Who better to mentor on the Hollywood experience than people who have actually been through it.’ Jordin Sparks always speaks so well about this. She feels that Hollywood Week really was a perfect training ground for the music industry, all baked into that week. There’s no one better to mentor this week than people who have been there, and now that we can pull from 20 years of Idols, it was incredible. The people who came back this year were so excited to do it.”
Explaining how this year’s Hollywood Week will be revamped, Michaels Wolflick says, “In the past two years in the ABC era, we’ve done this genre challenge. We would say, ‘Okay, you’re rock. You’re pop. You’re soul/R&B,’ and it was becoming less relevant, because a lot of the finalists were telling us, ‘I’m pop-soul.’ ‘I’m country-rock.’ There was a blurred genre thing going on. So I thought we should explore something else.
“This year we gave all the contestants one of three areas that they wanted to work on: confidence, songwriting or stage presence. It was my challenge to pick two people who would be applicable for confidence. Clay Aiken and David Archuleta were total confidence. Both of them came in second place, and it was funny because when we were first talking to them about it, they said, ‘I still don’t have all the confidence.’ I told them, ‘Yes, but you have more than you came with.’ For the songwriting category, we had Catie Turner and Phillip Phillips, who are both songwriters in their own right. Both of them in their respective seasons brought an artistry to the show that maybe we hadn’t seen. And for stage presence, we have Jordin Sparks and Justin Guarini, two people who commanded the stage in their own way and still do.”
The seventh mentor is last season’s winner, Noah Thompson. “He gave some motivational speeches and was able to talk about his experience from last year. I can’t tell you how many people auditioned this year inspired by him. His friend Arthur signed Noah up [to audition], so we had a lot of people secretly signing people up, which was really cool.”
Addressing the legacy of 21 seasons of Idol, Michaels Wolflick says, “I think American Idol is now like the NFL, where people train their [whole] lives to come on the show. It’s now bigger than a TV show. It’s something you can aspire to be a part of — young singers are born every day.” As proof, the 15-year-old contestants on the current season were born during Idol’s seventh season, when Archuleta was competing on the show.
Michaels Wolflick, who joined the Idol production staff in season 2, says, “If you come on the show, you’re part of the American Idol alumni. You are part of our history. This show has changed lives in so many different ways. When David Archuleta makes news, it’s picked up everywhere. Even though he was on the show in 2008, people still have a passion for him. The investment is real. Carrie Underwood knows to this day when she’s playing to full arenas, there might be a good portion of these people who voted for her. There’s a special connection that all of the alum have to the show. They like to give back to these people who are coming in and the people who are coming in love to talk to them.”
Michaels Wolflick revealed to Billboard that more Idol alums will be returning during this 21st season, including the winner of season 2. “Clay and Ruben [Studdard]’s finale was on May 21, 2003. They’re going to come back and perform on this year’s finale, 20 years to the day.”