A number of shows have started to re-examine old episodes in light of recent discussions about racism, with both The Office and Community among those that have removed or edited episodes where blackface was used for comedy. Three episodes of Scrubs that feature blackface have been removed from rotation on streaming services, at the request of creator Bill Lawrence.
In a new episode of Fake Doctors, Real Friends, a Scrubs rewatch podcast featuring stars Donald Faison and Zach Braff, the two actors invited Lawrence and fellow actor Sarah Chalke (who also appeared in blackface) to discuss the episodes and the decision to remove them.
Series creator Bill Lawrence started the show by taking full responsibility for the episodes. “I did see some things directed at Donald and Zach and Sarah,” he explained. “And everybody should know that the reason the word showrunner exists in television is that you’re the gatekeeper, and anything that get allowed on a show you have to ultimately take responsibility for.”
The group discussed how changing values over the years impacted how the scenes were read. “At the time I delineated in my mind between the traditional ‘blackface,'” Braff explained. “When we were doing this I never equated it. I was like, ‘oh it’s a fantasy where I’m trying to be my best friend.'”
“Any joke was passable as a joke as long as it was meant to make people laugh.” Faison added, as they mused on instances of blackface in comedy unrelated to Scrubs.
“We almost thought that we had, in a bad way, a ‘free pass’ to not have those thoughts,” Lawrence confesses. “Because we were so proud of ourselves for doing a very diverse show, in front and behind the camera.”
The full episode is worth a listen, as it deconstructs the mistakes the team made on Scrubs back when it was being produced.
Lawrence has also said that the offending episodes are likely to return at some point with the blackface scenes edited out. “It’s a pandemic, I don’t really have an editing facility up right now,” he explained, saying that the first priority was to pull the episodes out of rotation.
It’s been 10 years since the end of Lost, Damon Lindelof’s and J. J. Abrams’ intense, strange fantasy show, and the ending of the final season is still hotly debated and discussed. Now one of the show’s stars, Josh Holloway, has weighed in on the ending with a very straightforward view of why it was good–for his character, at least.
Holloway, who played bad boy Sawyer on the show across its entire run, spoke to Collider about his current role on Yellowstone, and was asked what he thought of the Lost ending. Asking if he was “personally happy” with how his character’s plot concluded, he said that he was, because Sawyer made it through.
“Yes, I am,” Holloway told Collider. “He survived.” He went on to say that Sawyer didn’t necessarily grasp everything happening in the show, and was focused on making it through. “There came a point where Sawyer just didn’t understand any of the s*** that was going on and didn’t care,” he explained. “He was like, ‘I don’t give a s***. I’m gonna survive. I’m gonna survive this s***, and I don’t even know why.’ But he did, and he made it.”
Holloway said that he’s glad he’s not a writer himself, because he wouldn’t know how to end a show as huge as Lost, and he can point towards the writers if anyone was displeased with his character’s arc. “The problem with a great hit show, with an amazing, intricate, layered story is that there’s no way out of it,” he contemplated. “Look at The Sopranos, it just ended. S***, how do you do it?”
J. J. Abrams went on to direct two Star Wars films after Lost, while Lindelof was showrunner on 2019’s Watchmen, GameSpot’s TV show of the year.
Ubisoft teases its own battle royale game, Hyper Scape, with a teaser website for a fictional tech company called Prisma Dimensions. The website details that more information on Hyper Scape is coming on July 2. It’s reportedly launching for PC and consoles on July 12 with cross-play.
The Last Of Us Part II will not be getting story DLC, but an online mode is still on the way. Unlike the first game, which got the Left Behind story DLC, director and co-writer Neil Druckmann stated on a Kinda Funny podcast that the story for The Last Of Us Part II is finished. Lastly for today’s Save State, Call Of Duty: Warzone is getting a big update that adds a 200 player mode, as well as new modes and gear.
Meanwhile, Play For All keeps on trucking. Play For All is multi-week summer gaming celebration and charity event featuring special guests like Troy Baker, Danny O’Dwyer, and many familiar GameSpot faces. We’ve already raised thousands of dollars for #BlackLivesMatter and COVID-19 Relief Efforts thanks to all of you! Be sure to tune in every day between 12 PM and 2 PM PDT for interviews, livestreams, and everything in between.
Like many creative endeavors, not everything that was planned for Red Dead Redemption 2 made it into the game. The studio already spoke about how five hours of content was cut, and now the actors who play Dutch and Arthur Morgan have shared more insight on the content that was cut from the game.
Speaking to GameSpot, Arthur Morgan actor Roger Clark said Rockstar decided to cut one mission involving Arthur and Dutch. We don’t know the full context of the scene, but Morgan said it involved an action sequence on a train. “There was one that got cut that was kind of fun where we take out some Boston bounty hunters on a train,” he said.
Benjamin Byron Davis, who plays Dutch, said of this mission: “We spent a lot of time on that. That was going to be … oh, I hate that that got cut. It got cut because I guess they couldn’t get it up to snuff.”
Clark said Rockstar isn’t afraid to cut content if it doesn’t live up to the studio’s goalposts. “That’s the thing–you’ve got to be willing to kill your babies. You can’t put everything in,” he said.
Davis said he’s happy in the end. “I do my best not to want what I don’t have. I don’t know that I need another mission with Arthur and Dutch,” he said.
Davis alluded to how this mission was not the only one to be left on the cutting room floor.
“When you’re working with Rockstar, you really never need to worry. Because anything that doesn’t work, they don’t use it,” he said. “The amount of good things that they let go of is … well, that’s too much information.”
Also during our interview, Davis spoke about how we was over the moon when he got the call to return as Dutch after the first game. Dutch’s role in the first game was much smaller, and Davis didn’t originally envision a future for the character.
“The first one was such an amazing experience, and in a lot of ways, it was a dream come true because I had been a gamer and I had a sense that actors were part of how these things were put together and I thought it looked like a good gig,” he said. “But I didn’t really realize when we were doing the first one how amazing it was going to be. I didn’t understand the full scope of Dutch as a character.”
“So when it was over, I was hopeful that I would get a phone call to come back but it wasn’t a guarantee and they certainly … there hadn’t been plans when we did the original to do that. So when I got that call, I was about as excited as I could be about anything except for the fact that I couldn’t tell anybody I was doing it.”
Davis also shared that, on the first Red Dead, the total time he spent on the project was about six months. This included a week or two of performance capture and three hours in the voice over booth. For the sequel–which is a prequel– Dutch’s character was expanded to become one of the central figures. This required a lot of work. Davis said he did three times the amount of work on Red Dead Redemption 2 in the first week alone than he did for the entirety of the first game.
“So I booked the job, and when I finally signed the contracts and they sent me the first 100 pages of the script that I had to memorize, I was both excited–I had to get to work–but then I also became a bit intimidated because I was so proud of the first one,” he said. “I honestly had some fears about, ‘What if we can’t do better?’ I shared those fears with our director Rod Edge on the first day of performance capture, and he put me right at ease and said, ‘We’re gonna do better than the first one.’ And I think he was right.”
You can check out GameSpot’s full interview with Clark, Davis, and Sadie Adler actress Alex McKenna in the video above.
GameSpot’s Play For All–a celebration of all things gaming–is ongoing. Join us as we bring you the summer’s hottest news, previews, interviews, features, and videos, as well as raise money for COVID-19 relief efforts and Black Lives Matter with the help of our friends from around the gaming world. Check out the Play For All schedule for more.
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In one of the year’s bigger NFL offseason moves, the New England Patriots have signed former Carolina Panthers QB Cam Newton to fill the void after Tom Brady left for the Buccaneers.
We’ve yet to see Newton in a real Patriots jersey, so EA Sports has stepped in to show the athlete in his new jersey in Madden NFL 21. It’s shocking to see someone other than Tom Brady leading the Patriots, but change is the only constant, and a new era of football in New England is about to begin.
As it happens, Newton isn’t technically confirmed to be the new Patriots QB for this year. He needs to beat out Jarrett Stidham and Brian Hoyer, the Patriots QBs who are currently leading the team during practices. Newton is expected to be the starting QB on opening day–after all, the Patriots are paying him $7.5 million USD for just one year.
As for Madden NFL 21, the professional football game is scheduled for release in late August on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. It will be released on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X when those systems release this holiday.
First impressions of Cyberpunk 2077 have started rolling in after a number of journalists spent time with a demo of the upcoming CD Projekt game. However only IGN’s preview seems to have unearthed a very important feature of the game: that you can, in fact, pet the cat.
The preview unfortunately didn’t go into too much detail on whether there is just a single, pettable cat to be found, or whether multiple are dispersed throughout the game, but it’s still a big improvement on The Witcher 3’s disappointingly Witcher-averse cats. Whether dogs are present or pettable in Cyberpunk 2077 still has yet to be seen.
While “can you pet the dog?” has long been an important question in video game criticism, inspired by the Twitter account of the same name, cats are only just starting to get the same kind of recognition in virtual petting.
The game has unfortunately been delayed again–first scheduled for April, then pushed back to September, Cyberpunk 2077 is now scheduled for a November 19 release on PC, PS4, and Xbox One. CD Projekt Red has also promised that these versions of the game will be playable on next-gen consolesPS5 and Xbox Series X thanks to a free update.
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Family Guy is getting a slight cast shake-up with Mike Henry having stepped away from the role of Cleveland Brown, stating definitively that “persons of color should play characters of color.” Now, as the show looks to recast the character, one experienced actor’s campaign to take over the role is gaining traction.
Wendell Pierce, who famously played Detective William “Bunk” Moreland on The Wire, has stated his desire to take over the role on Twitter. “I am publicly starting a campaign to voice the role myself on The Cleveland Show,” Pierce has stated, tagging in show creator Seth McFarlane.
Of course, The Cleveland Show actually went off the air in 2013, but the character of Cleveland Brown now appears in Family Guy, the show that originated the character.
Wendell Pierce has never appeared on Family Guy, nor The Cleveland Show or Seth McFarlane’s other animated sitcom, American Dad.
At the time of writing, the tweet has been “liked” over 28,000 times.
The remake of Destroy All Humans is due to release for PS4, Xbox One, and PC on July 26, and ahead of its launch publisher THQ Nordic has released a new trailer showing off one of the game’s locations. The level in question is Santa Modesta, which is the game’s third level, if it follows the exact same structure as the 2005 original.
The trailer shows protagonist Crypto running through town, attacking humans with various alien rays, blowing up cars, and piloting a spacecraft to exact further havoc on the townsfolk.
The game’s environmental destruction is also showcased, as you’ll see entire buildings exploding in the trailer below. It certainly looks more technically impressive than the original game.
You can check out the remake ahead of release through a demo on GOG. The $400 special edition, including a 23-inch statue of Crypto, is still available to pre-order.
GameSpot’s Play For All–a celebration of all things gaming–is ongoing. Join us as we bring you the summer’s hottest news, previews, interviews, features, and videos, as well as raise money for COVID-19 relief efforts and Black Lives Matter with the help of our friends from around the gaming world. Check out the Play For All schedule for more.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has been out for over a year on Nintendo Switch and has received five other DLC fighters including Joker from Persona 5, Hero from Dragon Quest, Banjo & Kazooie, Terry Bogard from Fatal Fury, and Byleth from Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Min Min, the sixth DLC fighter to come to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, is from ARMS.
ARMS was released on Nintendo Switch in June 2017 and features characters with extendable arms. They have interchangeable and unlockable fists which they use in battle to see who will be the next ARMS champion. For example, Min Min has a ramen noodle left arm and a dragon right arm. She is a member of ramen royalty who works at the Mintendo Noodle House.
Masahiro Sakurai detailed in his presentation that Min Min is good against heavier characters and has a long reach with her Ramram. Her kick can deflect projectiles, and her Megawatt can KO opponents instantly if it’s fully charged. For her Final Smash, Min Min is joined by the entire base roster from ARMS to deliver an all-out pummeling! Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Fighters Pass Vol. 2 is available now, with five more fighters coming sometime before December 2021.
Turn 10 Studios, the stewards of the Forza racing series, have updated their enforcement guidelines to include a ban on “notorious iconography” including the Confederate flag.
The Forza games allow players to create custom content, but going forward, the developers will be more strict in their enforcement of what is allowed. The list of “notorious iconography” that is not allowed has been updated to include the Confederate flag, as well as the Swastika, SS-runes, Wolfsangel, Black Sun, Arrow Cross, Iron Cross (with contextual clues), and the Rising Sun.
Additionally, the studio will take action against user-generated content that uses phrases like “ACAB,” “FTP,” and “CIP.” Players are also advised against creating stuff that depicts “certain notorious individuals, organizations, or events.”
“Forza has a ZERO tolerance policy for hate speech, violent acts, obscene imagery, and/or cheating,” the developers said. “Anything of this nature will result in a permanent suspension.”