‘House of the Dragon’ premiere… Meghan’s podcast has arrived… University of Texas at Austin to teach Taylor Swift… Scott Disick had a scary car crash… and Harry Styles is Rolling Stone’s first-ever global cover star

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The first episode of the “Game of Thrones” spinoff “House of the Dragon” premiered last night. 9.986M people in the US watched, making it HBO’s biggest premiere of all time. A new episode will air every Sunday night at 8pm Central through October 23. Meantime, after merging with Discovery, HBO Max has been cutting costs by cutting a ton of movies and TV shows. The latest cuts include over 200 episodes of “Sesame Street,” and six planned animated projects that include two Batman series, two Looney Tunes series, a Steve Urkle animated Christmas special, and more. The co-creator of the cartoon series “Little Ellen” — which is based on the life of a young Ellen DeGeneres — found out her show was getting axed after two seasons. Jennifer Kelly says they had already completed 20 episodes for the next two seasons that will never be released. She told Variety, “It’s really devastating. I’ve worked on a million things that have never seen the light of day, but it’s pretty rare that you get this far down the pipe — it’s literally done — and it’s still not going to see the light of day.”

Back in 2020, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced their multi-year partnership with Spotify. And now, after all this time, the first episode of Meghan’s podcast has officially dropped. “Archetypes” was released this morning, and Meghan’s very first guest is her longtime friend Serena Williams. In the teaser, Meghan said, “This is Archetypes — the podcast where we dissect, explore, and subvert the labels that try to hold women back. I’ll have conversations with women who know all too well how these typecasts shape our narratives. And I’ll talk to historians to understand how we even got here in the first place.”

Students at the University of Texas at Austin have the opportunity to take a deep dive into the lyrics of Taylor Swift. The course “Literary Contests and Contexts — the Taylor Swift Songbook” will be offered to undergraduate students in UT’s Liberal Arts Honors program. According to the UT English Department’s Facebook post, the class will be an “introduction to literary studies and research methods” that uses Taylor’s songwriting as a foundation.

Officers in Malibu responded to a single car crash early Sunday and found Scott Disick was the driver and sole occupant of the Lamborghini SUV. According to a statement, “It was determined the primary cause of the traffic collision was speed and alcohol was not a factor. Mr. Disick suffered minor, non-life threatening injuries and declined medical treatment. He was picked up from the scene by family members and his vehicle was towed away per his request.” Earlier in the day, Scott was photographed holding hands with Kimberly Stewart. After a string of much-younger women, Scott’s dating an older woman. He’s 39 and Kimberly is 43. The two of them were actually first linked back in 2015, but Kimberly’s mom said at the time that the two of them were strictly friends.

Harry Styles is Rolling Stone’s first-ever global star, appearing on 14 editions of their magazine around the world. In the interview, Harry talks about everything from his two new movies to accusations of “queer baiting” to his fans’ relationship with Olivia Wilde. As far as queer baiting, Harry has never put a label on his sexuality and he’s never publicly declared he’s dating anyone. He said, “I’ve never talked about my life away from work publicly and found that it’s benefited me positively. There’s always going to be a version of a narrative, and I think I just decided I wasn’t going to spend the time trying to correct it or redirect it in some way.” Harry doesn’t like the amount of hate Olivia gets from a small group of his fans. Olivia was asked about it and she told Rolling Stone that the majority of Harry’s fans are “deeply loving people” and that the “toxic negativity is the antithesis of Harry and everything he puts out there.” She said, “I don’t personally believe the hateful energy defines his fan base at all. The majority of them are true champions of kindness.”

 

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