If at any point you thought to yourself the Ashley Tisdale “toxic” mom group saga would be perfect for a scripted show … you just got beat to the punch. The “High School Musical” star is looking to capitalize on this year’s online drama –…

One thing audiences have learned about Malcolm D. Lee over the past three decades is to expect the unexpected. While his name has become synonymous with films like The Best Man, Girls Trip, and Night School, his latest project marks the first time he’s stepped behind the camera for a psychological thriller. With Strung, the veteran filmmaker embraces suspense while assembling a cast led by Chloe Bailey, Lynn Whitfield, Lucien Laviscount, Anna Diop, and Coco Jones for a story filled with mystery and deception.

Premiering as the opening night selection of the 30th American Black Film Festival before arriving on Peacock, Strung follows Layla, a gifted violinist trying to rebuild her life after suffering a devastating personal loss. Unable to secure a coveted position with the Philharmonic, she spends her days teaching music to children while staying with her best friend Jasmine, played by Jones. Everything changes after Layla meets Audra, an affluent woman portrayed by Whitfield, who offers her a live-in position tutoring her gifted granddaughter, Zuri.

Lee immediately knew the screenplay offered something unlike anything he had directed before. “The truth of the matter is I don’t consider myself a one trick pony,” he told ESSENCE. “I love doing comedy, but I’ve always wanted to do different genres. I’ve always wanted to find the right project that would speak to me. And, when the script came across my desk, I was like, ‘Oh, this is really a great page-turner. It’s lean forwardable.’ I was talking back to the script as I was reading it.”

Although Strung marks new territory for Lee, audiences familiar with his previous films will still recognize one defining characteristic. Relationships remain at the heart of the story. Every revelation depends on trust, betrayal, and the complicated dynamics inside one family. Suspense simply becomes the vehicle carrying those themes. Music also plays a major role throughout the film. Rather than using orchestral pieces simply as background, Lee wanted the violin to become part of Layla’s identity while adding another layer of tension.

“[Layla] was already a violinist,” Lee explained. “I thought briefly about making her a cellist, but I was like, ‘That’s not sexy.’” He believes the instrument naturally lends itself to suspense. “It is haunting, it is beautiful, it’s melodic, and it stretches genres as well. Music is such an important element to this movie overall. I love strings in general because they can bring such emotion to a project—I think it was the perfect instrument to center this movie around.”

Finding someone capable of carrying nearly every scene became equally important. Lee says Bailey possessed the emotional range required for the lead’s complicated journey. “We wanted to find somebody who was young and vibrant and beautiful and sexy and also play a range of emotions,” he said. Bailey welcomed the opportunity, though one of her biggest takeaways had little to do with suspense. Working opposite Whitfield became an acting masterclass.

“I am a present person, but Ms. Lynn taught me to be even more present,” Bailey said. “What I admired about her is that, yes, she knows who she is and how people love her, but when it comes to her craft, she does not play with that.” Watching Whitfield remain fully committed during every take left a lasting impression. “Even when the camera coverage was not on her, she still gave 110% for the scene so that the other person could act and give the best reactions in that way,” Bailey added. “As accomplished as she is, she really didn’t need to do that.”

Laviscount, who plays the film’s enigmatic counterpart to Layla, additionally appreciated the director’’s approach behind the camera, particularly seeing Lee apply storytelling instincts developed through years of making ensemble films. “Malcolm’s a master of creating conflict and great characters and it puts them together and it becomes what we’ve grown to love,” he said. “But throwing that danger element on top of it just kind of stretches things in a whole different direction.”

“I learned a lot on this project,” Laviscount added. “Malcolm knows exactly what he wants, how he wants it. I think that you kind of bring what you can to set and yeah, it’s a beautiful compromise.”

Produced by Tyler Perry, Jason Blum, Tim Palen, Lee, and Dominique Telson, Strung represents a new creative chapter for a filmmaker who has spent years expanding his résumé. With suspense replacing comedy and mystery driving the story from beginning to end, Lee proves there are still new directions left to explore.

Strung is streaming now on Peacock.

Jared Polis has done quite a bit over his 25-year career in public service. The Colorado Democrat served six years on the state board of education, 10 years as a member of Congress and this year, he’s wrapping up his second full term as governor — an office he won twice by wide margins.

But it appears increasingly likely that Polis will be known, at least to national audiences, for a single misguided decision.

A couple of months ago, the governor waited until late on a Friday afternoon (a time popular with politicians who want their decisions to go largely unnoticed) to announce his commutation for Tina Peters, a convicted felon who illegally tried to use her office in pursuit of pro-Trump election conspiracy theories.

Confronted with bipartisan criticisms of the decision, Polis appeared on CNN and presented a defense that made very little sense and misstated basic factual details, reinforcing concerns that the governor had simply succumbed to Donald Trump’s indefensibly aggressive coercion efforts, even if the Coloradan was reluctant to admit it.

In mid-June, The New York Times reported that Polis’ own clemency board twice voted unanimously to reject Peters’ bid for early release, citing disclosures from two board members. The first vote came in January, and it was soon followed by “an unusual request” from the governor’s office, asking the panel to take a second look because of the “enormous political pressure” Polis was facing from the White House.

Members agreed to review the case anew but still came to the unanimous conclusion that Peters, based on all the available information, simply did not deserve to be released.

The governor ignored his own clemency board in May, and this week, he fired the members who disclosed what had unfolded behind the scenes. The Times also reported:

Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado on Wednesday fired two members of his clemency board after they spoke out against his decision to commute the prison sentence of the election denier Tina Peters.

The board members, Hannah Seigel Proff and Azra Taslimi, had objected to Mr. Polis’s decision in May to release Ms. Peters from prison after pressure from President Trump.

“You breached the required duty of confidentiality by publicly divulging board members’ votes,” Polis wrote in the letters shared with the newspaper.

For her part, Taslimi, a former public defender, told the Times, “He’s saying the public doesn’t have the right to know his own advisory board told him no — twice. He’s not protecting a process. He’s protecting himself from scrutiny.”

The president, meanwhile, welcomed Peters, one of his favorite convicted felons, to the Oval Office this week. Around the same time, Trump published a lengthy item to his social media platform on Tuesday afternoon, writing of the Colorado election denier, “She was put [in prison] because she found Election Fraud, but instead of arresting the people that committed the Fraud, they arrested her! … Just think of it, she caught the Democrats cheating, and they put her in jail for Voter Fraud.”

That’s the opposite of what happened in reality.

Trump nevertheless added that Peters “came to the White House to thank me for getting her released from prison in Colorado.” In other words, as far as the president is concerned, it was his efforts to bully the state into submission, not the governor’s magnanimity, that led to Peters’ release.

In May, Polis said he’s confident that his commutation decision, in time, will be “remembered fondly.” Governor, if you see this, I wouldn’t count on it.

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Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went after acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Bill Pulte, saying that she wished there were career and political appointees across agencies, that were “slow-walking or refusing to share information with” him. “You should definitely be worried about everything. This is a naked partisan takeover of the Director of…

The Society of St. Pius X was excommunicated by Pope Leo for ordaining bishops without his permission. Its issues with the church run far deeper.

(Image credit: Baz Ratner)

This is an adapted excerpt from the July 1 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”

America’s 250th birthday is nearing, a heat wave is gripping much of the country, the price of gas is still hovering around $4 a gallon and Donald Trump is … playing with his favorite new toy.

On Wednesday, the president took a maiden voyage on his new Air Force One. You know, the 747 jet he accepted from the Qatari government, in open violation of the Constitution. 

While Trump has claimed the plane was a free “gift,” it’s worth noting reporting that suggests it may have cost the U.S. government as much as $934 million to make the foreign-owned jet suitable for presidential travel — and that it is not for future presidents to use. According to Trump, when he leaves office in 2029, the jet is planned to be transferred to the foundation overseeing his future presidential library.

The reality is, Trump doesn’t care how any of this looks.

Also, by definition, it was not a gift: CNN reported at the time that Trump asked Qatar for the plane.

And, as we just learned from “Regime Change,” the new book on Trump’s second term by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, at some point after Qatar agreed to give Trump the plane, “It was announced that the aircraft would be a gift, an idea that a senior official would say was ‘generated at the POTUS level.’”

At this point, Trump’s corruption is so frequent and brazen that he is shoving our faces in it.

I’m not just talking about his vanity projects like the ballroom, the Reflecting Pool, the arch, the passport and the restoration of Washington’s fountains — even though a new Washington Post analysis finds that for the past three months, Trump has talked about those projects more than he has talked about healthcare and wages. That stuff is just the tip of the iceberg.

On Tuesday, Trump released nearly a thousand pages of new financial disclosure forms, showing that Trump’s reported income soared to more than $2.2 billion last year, as he took in more than $1.4 billion from crypto and digital schemes alone.

In fact, according to a Reuters investigation, Trump and his sons “have added at least $2.3 billion to the family fortune from their main crypto ventures, while the investors they’ve wooed” have lost a near-identical amount.

In response, a White House spokesperson told Reuters, “All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people.”

But the reality is, Trump doesn’t care how any of this looks. In an interview with The New York Times earlier this year about his sons’ many business dealings, he said, “I prohibited them from doing business in my first term, and I got absolutely no credit for it …  I didn’t have to do that. And it’s really unfair to them.”

“I found out that nobody cared, and I’m allowed to,” Trump added.

That was back in January, and now, over the weekend, the Times reported on a $1 billion mining deal that Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick closed with Kazakhstan, in which contracts are going to businesses with ties to both men’s sons.

In fact, the Times found, the Trump and Lutnick families “have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals, including the Kazakhstan project.” (The White House and the Commerce Department reject any suggestion that the Trump administration was improperly mixing government actions with family business.)

On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that the president’s beloved White House ballroom was being built under a secret $500 million no-bid contract, similar to the ones the administration doled out for the botched reflecting pool job.

White House officials defended the move and said “that they could award the no-bid contract” by routing it through the Executive Residence, which “is not bound by competitive bidding requirements.”

Also on Tuesday, The Atlantic reported on a new White House effort to grant pardons that are tied to the 250th birthday celebrations, setting off a bidding war for clemency. One prominent white-collar defense attorney told the magazine, “It is general knowledge in our practice that for $2 million, you can have a pardon. The clients come to us and tell us, I’ve been told I need to go hire this specific person, and [then] I will get a pardon.”

Suck it up; this is what a great businessman looks like — that’s the White House’s message to Americans who are struggling in their daily lives.

This is the whole game for Trump now. As those reporters, Haberman and Swan, suggest in “Regime Change,” U.S. policy is dictated by whoever appeals most directly to the president and his vanity. 

“Now a CEO could simply ask for something and it was granted,” they write. He would reportedly dictate exact dollar figures to extract from each CEO and, Haberman and Swan report, “within days, millions of dollars, and then tens and hundreds of millions, were pouring into Trump’s various fund­raising accounts.”

But according to the White House, all of this is what Trump voters wanted. When White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly was asked about the Kazakhstan deal on Fox News, she said this is “why Americans elected this president to office.”

“Because he’s an outsider who was tremendously successful in business. Built the New York City skyline. And that’s what Americans wanted. They wanted a businessman in office,” she said. 

Suck it up, this is what a great businessman looks like — that’s the White House’s message to Americans who are struggling in their daily lives and looking up at this guy and his family swimming like Scrooge McDuck in a sea of corruption and greed that is unprecedented in American history. 

Allison Detzel contributed.

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When I looked at the lineup for last month’s Tribeca Film Festival, one movie title really caught my eye: Death Boom. And once I discovered it was not just another horror film, but actually a documentary predicting an impending crisis for Baby Boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964), of which I am but one, […]

The Dan Sullivan saga in the Alaska Senate race is under investigation, sources say

“This is just Call Me by Your Name except the peaches are replaced with jets that go really [redacted] fast.”

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Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce aren’t exempt from Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s 78-degree suggestion … though they’ll have to “Shake It Off” anyway … because MSG has an unconventional temperature system. Here’s the deal … a city official tells TMZ…

Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, will speak with reporters Thursday afternoon about the Trump administration’s investigation into alleged vandalism at the newly renovated Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The probe comes after the National Park Service found the pool’s liner was damaged by what appeared to be a sharp object, prompting the…

A peculiar family rivalry will play out today in Inglewood, California, where Spain and Austria battle it out on the soccer field.

For hundreds of years of history, both countries were ruled by members of a common dynasty: the Habsburgs. Thanks to an extensive, deliberate strategy of dynastic intermarriage, the Germanic clan progressively accumulated territories across Europe, and eventually ended up with members of the family sitting on the thrones of both the Spanish and the Holy Roman Empires (as well as its later, smaller iteration, the Austro-Hungarian Empire).

For centuries, the branches of the clan respectively ruling from imperial