Let's give it up for the original immigrants—Vikings is back for season four on History Nov. 30, and creator Michael Hirst said it’s the most emotional season yet. We knew that Vikings can kick serious butt, but we didn’t quite know about their softer sides.
“We still have the epic battle scenes, but at the same time, the new season has moving and intimate and compelling story lines,” said Hirst.
Vikings is an Irish-Canadian coproduction. Hirst initially envisioned the series ending with a Viking ship, its inhabitants starved, thirsty and half-dead, rolling up to North America. But now he wants to explore what happens after they make land. With 20 episodes for seasons four and five alike, he may be looking at as many as 90 hours of Vikings when it’s all said and done. “I might be the one crawling up to the beach when I get there,” Hirst said. “But I want to get there.”
Of course, History will have to sign off on anything beyond season five. “No one has approved this,” Hirst, a Yorkshire man, conceded. “But that’s my dream.”
Sticking with the British guests, we’re enjoying The Traffickers on Fusion, hosted by Briton-by-way-of-Afghanistan Nel Hedayat. The globe-trotting host enjoys her trips to America for, among other things, the thought-provoking Netflix documentaries she can’t get back home, including Dear Zachary and Poverty, Inc.
And some other unscripted fare: “I looooveThe Kardashians,” Hedayat said. A little sugar, she suggested, is OK for one’s diet. “I’m a 28-year-old woman of the world…I can do that,” she said. “It’s OK.”
Finally, we salute another citizen of the world, Alan Cumming, ebullient host of the International Emmy Awards in New York. Not two weeks before the starry event, the same New York Hilton ballroom hosted Donald Trump and his supporters as they cheered election results. “I feel it’s my moral obligation to inform you that, on Nov. 8, this hall was the venue for one of the darkest, most negative and utterly destructive moments in the history of this country!” thundered Cumming, formerly of The Good Wife.
A mixture of industrial-strength sage burning and the consultations of various gurus, said Cumming, had cleansed the air. “We do not have to breathe the same foul, ignorant and bigoted air so recently exhaled by the Cheeto Jesus,” quipped the Scotsman.
The election informed many—nay, most—of the jokes throughout the Emmys presentation. Nick Sandow, who plays the prison administrator on Orange Is the New Black, quipped about how the president-elect complimented him on his performance, then offered him a post heading up the U.S. prison system.
Cumming, meanwhile, credited Ernst & Young for delivering Emmy ballots free of hacking or rigging. He gushed: “Even WikiLeaks cannot crack our firewall!”
