Between schooling us on sexual health as the Fairy God Bottom and snatching purses with Bob the Drag Queen, Zach is truly making a career for himself as a queer comedian!
Daniel Levy of "Schitt's Creek" speaks during the Pop TV segment of the 2020 Winter TCA Press Tour at The Langham Huntington, Pasadena on January 13, 2020 in Pasadena, California
Amy Sussman/Getty Images
Holy Schitt, Dan Levy just announced a new family comedy series, and it sounds like the next best thing to aSchitt’s Creek revival.
During Netflix’s 2025 upfront presentation today, the streamer announced that Levy had created a yet-untitled comedy series in which he will star, showrun, and co-executive produce (alongside Rachel Sennott).
Starring along with Levy are beloved comedic actress Laurie Metcalf (The Conners) and Taylor Ortega who just starred in the Netflix series The Four Seasons.
While details remain largely under wraps Netflix did share the official logline, "Two deeply incapable siblings are blackmailed into the world of organized crime." Presumably the trio of actors will be playing mother and siblings and the set up sounds rife for the kind of comedy that Levy excels at. Honestly we’re just delighted to have him heading back to our screens.
And we’re not the only ones thrilled by the news. "I'm so excited to be bringing this truly chaotic family story to life with Netflix," Levy said in a statement. "Thrilled with the team we’re building both behind the scenes and in front of the camera. Taylor Ortega is going to become a household name and it's been my life's mission to get to call Laurie Metcalf 'mother.' Looking forward to getting to share this with everyone."
As for when we will get to see the 8-episode limited series, that’s still a bit of ways off. Production begins later this year.
Gives us plenty of time to rewatch Schitt's Creek from top to bottom… again.
The handsome actor and TV creator's latest show, Overcompensating, is the passion project that he's thrilled to finally share with the world.
Skinner plays Benny, a closeted former football player, who has a hard time coming to terms with his sexuality while venturing off to college. The plot hits home for Skinner, as he had a hard time navigating his own coming out journey at a young age.
"It was inspired by my experience of coming out and feeling so confused the entire time, even when I started to come out. I hadn't seen that on screen yet. I felt guilt, I felt confused... I didn't know who I was anymore. I didn't know if people would still love me," Skinner tells PRIDE.
As Benny's story progresses each episode, audiences will certainly resonate with his mixed feelings as he deals with the pressures of becoming a young adult in college.
"I see the beauty in so much of it and I think the beauty is finding the people that you can come out to. I think for so many of us, it's these safe spaces created by women that are around us. That was the inspiration and I was like, let's also put it at college and make it disgusting!"
Shenanigans certainly play out in all of the diverse storylines on Overcompensating. It's college after all, and these characters also explore their sexualities through some very steamy and awkward hookups.
"This feels true and honest and this is how my experience was. Sex can be terrifying, bizarre, weird, hot... I think you can have sex dreams in college! All of these should feel how they really feel. If it felt honest to us, we were going to have it."
Benny isn't the only character to deal with some identity issues while trying to life his best life in college. Skinner's costar Wally Baram plays Carmen, who experiences her own fair share of chaotic situations that leave her questioning everything.
"I would not make these choices, but it's part of [Carmen's] journey. The rest of her journey is so messy and beautiful in a way that I really related to. She just can't quite figure out how to make it work socially. It was nice closure in a way," Baram says.
As if the intriguing plot wasn't juicy enough, Charli xcx also makes a cameo as herself in the hilarious series and provided the majority of the show's soundtrack from her iconic discography.
"Charli has been sonically impactful forever. At some point in the show, we would love to have a little bit more XCX World. Maybe you'll hear some of those unreleased tracks! The Angels are really fed. It was like, first takes that you're watching. I'm so excited for her and for people to see it," Skinner concludes.
Overcompensating premieres Thursday, May 15 on Prime Video. To see the full interview with Benito Skinner and Wally Baram, check out the videos at the top and bottom of the page.
Is there anything more terrifying — and ripe for comedy — than a weekend away with you and your partner’s parents? Only one thing that could make that pressure cooker more intense: A demon, of course. Or so Kent Sublette, writer of HBO’s new queer horror comedy The Parenting believes.
The film, which is now streaming on HBO Max, follows gay couple Rohan (Nik Dodani) and Josh (Brandon Flynn) as they face this watershed moment in their relationship. The couple gathers their respective families up for a weekend in an idyllic cabin in the country where, unbeknownst to Josh, Rohan is also planning to pop the question. Not intense enough? It just so happens that the house is already occupied, by a 400-year-old demon and the ghosts of its previous victims.
Brian Cox, Nik Dodani, Brandon Flynn, Edie Falco, Dean Norris, Lisa Kudrow
Courtesy of HBO Max
The origin of this story actually came from Sublette’s own personal experience. “It’s loosely based on a trip that my husband and I took with our parents when we first started dating,” he tells PRIDE. “It was wonderful. They got along, but a friend of ours let us use his house in Connecticut for three days. Three days is too long for that. So it was stressful. We would joke that the only thing that would make this more intense is if this house was haunted.”
He wasn’t the only one to channel real-life experiences into this project. Dodani connected with the anxiety his character Rohan felt in bringing his Type A mother (Edie Falco) and silently imperious father (Brian Cox) into a house with Josh’s more relaxed and classically Midwestern parents (Lisa Kudrow and Dean Norris). “Meeting your partner’s parents is truly one of the most terrifying things in the world, no matter who you are, whether you’re gay or straight or anything in between,” he tells PRIDE. “This movie is about...the way we turn into teenage versions of ourselves around our parents, or the desperate need for everything to go perfectly, or, like, the fear of the people we love maybe not loving the people we’re bringing into the family.”
Nik Dodani, Dean Norris, Lisa Kudrow
Courtesy of HBO Max
It’s a fairly universal experience, so the choice to center this story around a gay couple feels significant, and not lost on Dodani. “Having a couple like Josh and Rohan at the center of it is really exciting, but at the end of the day it really is just like a relatable human story with a demon,” explains.
For his part, Flynn also pulled from personal experience in his role as the more laid back — but prone to putting his foot in his mouth — Josh. “I’m just a crass kid from Miami who says whatever, and has no filter,” he shares with PRIDE. So, there were a couple of moments that I was just like, ‘Oh, I’ve been here before!’”
While The Parenting features lots of cheeky humor — dick jokes fly freely throughout — there’s actually something very wholesome about the whole endeavor. At its core, the film is about acceptance and family, both of the by birth and found variety. These are exemplified by Norris’s character, Cliff, who is Josh’s father and Sara, played by Vivian Bang, the couple’s chosen family who finds a way to insert herself into the weekend, where she belongs.
Nik Dodani, Vivian Bang, Lisa Kudrow
Courtesy of HBO Max
“Your chosen family are just as pivotal and essential, as your family,” Bang shares with PRIDE, on the importance of her character’s inclusion in the story. “My friends are so meaningful to me. I have such good friends, and so Sara is literally the friend that everyone needs.” Despite not receiving an invite to the weekend, Sara finds a reason to insert herself into it. “I just understand Sara viscerally, just feeling so slighted for not being part of the family, when she knows that she belongs and she’s gonna make a space for herself at the table. Or in this case, a house that’s haunted by a 400-year-old demon,” she says with a laugh. She acts as both a support system for the couple and often as a mirror when they don’t want to face uncomfortable truths, whether that’s being avoidant about things with their parents or accepting that there’s an actual literal demon in the house.
Driving home the theme of family and acceptance is Cliff who, in one of the quieter moments of the film, tells his son just how much he cares about him — but also how much he admires him. It’s incredibly sweet and moving and a moment that Norris hopes resonates with parents of queer kids. “He’s very ham-handed, he doesn’t have a filter, he talks a little too much, but the most important thing for me, for that character, was that he [does] love his son [and is] unconditionally and completely accepting of him,” Norris tells PRIDE. “That kind of drives him through the movie, because he’s like, we’re going to make this weekend work.”
Lisa Kudrow, Dean Norris
Courtesy of HBO Max
This juxtaposition of raunchy humor and heart was a big part of what made director Craig Johnson (The Skeleton Twins, Special) excited to come on board the project. “This one reminded me of the movies I grew up with as a kid in the ‘80s. I’ve always wanted to do something that was a little freaky and spooky. I grew up with Poltergeist and Creepshow and Beetlejuice and Gremlins and all of these kinds of freaky, subversive, funny, scary movies, and you don’t see them as much these days,” he tells PRIDE. “When I read The Parenting, I instantly wanted to do it. I thought this was the perfect version of this kind of movie for me.”
There’s also a real sense of joy that radiates from the film, which Norris reveals started with true camaraderie on set. “It was so much fun. We literally bonded the day we all landed there. I shared a house with Lisa Kudrow, and Parker Posey and Edie Falco were right around the corner. We just all hung out, cookouts, movie nights, game nights, just fun stuff. We would do all kinds of improv riffs,” he recalls, adding, “then get Brian Cox in there, and it was just, like no weird ego stuff at all. Everyone just appreciated and respected everybody, like, immediately. It was amazing, probably one of the most amazing off-set cast experiences that I’ve ever had.”
Nik Dodani, Brandon Flynn
Courtesy of HBO Max
But it wasn’t just laughs for the cast of the horror comedy — there were some scares as well. Flynn revealed that during filming they stayed in a supposedly haunted hotel, and one night they decided to see if they could make contact with its ghostly inhabitants. “We did have a seance,” Flynn reveals. “We were living at this hotel called the Colonial Inn, in Concord, Massachusetts, and it’s haunted. Nik was staying in the bride’s suite, so we had the seance in Nik’s suite because the front desk person was a clairvoyant and brought along a witch with him. We tried conjuring her, but she didn’t come.”
Parker Posey
Courtesy of HBO Max
However, according to Bang, her costars did a better job communicating with the dead than they thought. “I think we conjured some spirits, because I did have some experience with it, and now I’m a total believer, without a doubt that there are some energies,” she says. “The attendant at the inn that we were in told me my wing was not haunted. And then he said, ‘I think you guys conjured something because now it is.’” But that’s not all: Bang says that after they attempted the seance, she began seeing signs of the supernatural in her room including fog and a mysterious ring of purple lights.
Spooky? Funny? Yeah, that sounds about right for this charming horror comedy throwback.
The Parenting is now streaming on HBO Max. Watch the trailer below.
Shane Gillis attends the 17th Annual Stand Up For Heroes Benefit on November 06, 2023 in New York City.
Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Bob Woodruff Foundation
Shane Gillis seems to stir up controversy everywhere he goes, and yet, somehow, he’s still one of the most successful podcasters and comedians out there.
Despite that, he’s managed to score comedy specials, TV shows, and even multiple hosting gigs on SNL.
But who is the controversial comedian, and what led to him getting fired?
Who is Shane Gillis?
Gillis is a comedian, podcaster, and actor who found early success when he started doing stand-up comedy in 2012. In 2017, he started the podcast Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast with his co-host and fellow comedian Matt McCusker. According to the Influencer Marketing Hub, the successful podcast was the most subscribed to Patreon account in 2024, wracking up more than 71,000 paying listeners.
After a controversy that led to his firing from SNL, Shane went on to put out multiple comedy specials, had a recurring role on Pete Davidson’s TV show Bupkis, and co-created and starred in the show Tires for Netflix, which has been renewed for a second season.
Gillis will also appear in the upcoming movie Easy Waltz — in a role that was originally written for Norm Macdonald prior to his death — and he stared in Bud Light’s Super Bowl LIX commercial.
Why was Shane Gillis fired from SNL?
Gillis was fired as a cast member on SNL in 2019 before his debut episode after a recent podcast episode resurfaced where the comic could be heard making racist remarks, NBC News reports.
Just days after it was announced that he was hired as a new cast member for season 45 of SNL, a clip of him using an anti-Asian slur and racist imitation of an Asian accent went viral.
The clip came from an episode of Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast where the two hosts were “joking” about Chinatown. “Let the f------ ch---- live there,” Gillis said in the podcast.
In light of his racist “jokes,” Gillis was fired and never appeared as an SNL cast member. In an interview, he gave a weak apology for his offensive comments but said he planned to keep making taboo jokes.
"I’m a comedian who pushes boundaries,” he wrote on Twitter (now X). “I sometimes miss. If you go through my 10 years of comedy, most of it bad, you’re going to find a lot of bad misses. I’m happy to apologize to anyone who’s actually offended by anything I’ve said."
A spokesperson for SNL executive producer Lorne Michaels told NBC News that they were unaware of his history of racist jokes when he was hired. “We want SNL to have a variety of voices and points of view within the show, and we hired Shane on the strength of his talent as a comedian and his impressive audition for SNL. We were not aware of his prior remarks that have surfaced over the past few days. The language he used is offensive, hurtful and unacceptable,” the spokesperson said.
Gillis also faced backlash when listeners discovered he had used homophobic slurs during a bit on his podcast about “hot Southern boys” being sexually assaulted during the Civil War. On past episodes of his podcast, he can also be heard calling gay people "fa----ts" and transgender women "ladyboys."
Why was Shane Gillies asked to host SNL?
Years after getting canned before ever appearing on the show, Gillis hosted an episode of SNL in 2024, but his monologue went over like a lead balloon.
He mocked his dad for being a volunteer assistant girls’ high school basketball coach, talked about his relatives with Down syndrome, and compared spending time with his sister’s diverse family to “the craziest Uber pool you’ve ever been [in],” before making a bizarre gay “joke.”
“You remember when you were a little boy and you loved your mom, you thought she was the coolest? You remember when you were gay?” he asked. “Do you remember when you were just a gay little boy? Every little boy is just their mom’s gay best friend. There’s literally zero difference. I was gay for my mom.”
Despite his first appearance not being well received — critics said he “struggled” and “bombed” — he has been asked back and will host for the second time on March 1.
He may have been fired, but Michaels has stood up for the comedian and may be behind him being asked back twice. “I thought, You haven’t seen what we’re going to do, and what I’m going to try to bring out in him, because I thought he was the real thing,” Micheals said according to Forbes, who also reported that the SNL creator and producer criticized people for “judging everybody on every position they have on every issue as opposed to, ‘Are they any good at the thing they do?’”
Did Bowen Yang get Shane Gillis fired from SNL?
Bowen Yang, who is in his sixth season as an SNL cast member, started as a writer on the long-running comedy show before getting hired as a cast member at the same time as Gillis. Since Yang is the show’s first Chinese-American cast member and an out gay man, and Gillis has made both anti-Asian and homophobic “jokes,” it has led to people assuming Yang was behind Gillis being fired. But SNL creator Michaels has blamed the executives at the top for Gillis being asked to leave, Entertainment Weekly reports.
In 2023, Gillis released his Netflix exclusive comedy special, Shane Gillis: Beautiful Dogs, which the New York Times called “dumb and smart, cocky and self-mocking, homophobic but relentlessly self-aware.”
Shane Gillis will appear on SNL on March 1, 2024, on NBC or stream it on Peacock and Hulu.
Edie Falco, Brandon Flynn, and Nik Dodani in 'The Parenting.'
Max
Starring Brandon Flynn, Nik Dodani, Parker Posey, and Lisa Kudrow, The Parenting is a "hilariously terrifying" new film premiering on Max this month.
The movie follows a young couple, Josh (Brandon Flynn) and Rohan (Nik Dodani), as they plan a trip to introduce their respective parents. However, things don't really go as planned. Between family dynamics, relationship drama, and even a poltergeist, the gays are seated to watch The Parenting as soon as it is released.
The official trailer for The Parenting just dropped Friday, and you can watch it below.
Besides Flynn, Dodani, Posey, and Kudrow, the star-studded cast of The Parenting also includes Vivian Bang, Edie Falco, Brian Cox, Dean Norris, among others.
The film was directed by Craig Johnson (Alex Strangelove, Special) and written by Kent Sublette (who was a writer for Saturday Night Live between 2007 and 2024).
