- ‘Great Expectations’ serves up another grim revision of a Charles Dickens classic CNN
- ‘Great Expectations’ Review: Olivia Colman in an FX/Hulu Dickens Adaptation That Strains for Edginess Hollywood Reporter
- BBC’s Great Expectations review: Charles Dickens classic gets a gritty, sexy overhaul Express
- FX’s ‘Great Expectations’ Goes to the ‘Dark Places’ Charles Dickens Couldn’t TV Insider
- How to watch Great Expectations online: Release date and time Tom’s Guide
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: Dickens
‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Renewed for Season 8 — Kim Dickens Returning
Madison Clark lives! During Sunday’s Talking Dead, not only was it revealed that Fear the Walking Dead had been renewed for Season 8, it was announced that Kim Dickens would be reprising her role of Alicia’s mother, who’s been thought to be dead since way back in Season 4. (Click here to read how she was believed to have expired.)
Given the way that the show’s original leading lady left the show — or at least her unstoppable character did — much fanfare surrounded her imminent return to the fold in the back half of Season 7. “If there were a Mt. Deadmore, Kim Dickens’ face would be on it,” said Scott M. Gimple, Chief Content Officer of the Walking Dead Universe, in a statement. “Madison Clark is a foundational character to [our world] — heroic, complex, an everyperson who becomes a warrior and then a force of benevolence. Kim Dickens’ raw talent, strength and brilliance will electrify the Walking Dead Universe once more, and we couldn’t be luckier to have her back.”
On top of all that — oh yes, there was more — the Walking Dead spinoff dropped a trailer for Season 7B and disclosed its return date: Sunday, April 17. In the pulse-pounding clip, we get a good hint of just how intense the Strand vs. Alicia war is going to get. “You have your army,” Victor intones in that way that only Colman Domingo can. “I have mine.”
Yes, yes, but will Alicia survive both this kerfuffle and the walker bite that she’s convinced will soon turn her into a meandering zombie? That remains to be seen. All the post-apocalyptic drama will say is that “in the second half of Season 7, months have passed after the nuclear blast, and the only one thriving is Victor Strand. Having built a fiefdom, he callously selects who will have a chance at life. The other members of the group have suffered immensely, but out of that has come a fierce determination to live, even if it means taking Strand’s tower by force and continuing the search for Padre, a mythical place no one is sure really exists.
Sounds like a pretty good time, no? Watch the Season 7B promo above, then hit the comments. Do you think that the series that was cruel enough to kill Rufus would let Alicia die before reuniting her with her mother?
City Councilman Andre Dickens will become Atlanta’s next mayor, CNN projects
Dickens and Moore had advanced to the runoff after no candidate in a wide field received a majority of the vote earlier this month. The sitting mayor, Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms, had announced in May she would not seek reelection.
Leading up to Tuesday, polls suggested the contest was close with a large swath of the electorate still undecided.
Dickens, a former businessman and nonprofit leader, has served on Atlanta’s City Council since 2013.
In a race that focused on a recent spike in violent crime as well as controversy over an effort by the residents of the wealthy community of Buckhead to break off from the capital and create their own city, Dickens — who previously served as the chair of the City Council’s Public Safety Committee — laid out a public safety plan that prioritized community policing and boosting police resources.
Dickens’ proposal calls for increasing the police force by 250 officers during his first year in office while requiring new training for every police department employee on de-escalation techniques and racial sensitivity.
Ahead of the November 2 general election, shooting incidents had increased dramatically from 406 at that point in 2019 to 629 this year, according to an October 23 report from the Atlanta Police Department.
When Dickens takes office, he also faces concerns about low morale at the Atlanta Police Department and the number of officers who departed the force since June 2020. Tensions were high after Bottoms called for the firing of the officer who shot Rayshard Brooks in the parking lot of a Wendy’s in June of 2020. Bottoms said she had asked the officer be let go from the force one day after the deadly shooting, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported at the time.
Though much of their rhetoric on the need for a safer Atlanta was similar, Dickens took a different approach than his opponent with regard to how he would handle policing in the city.
While Moore suggested removing Police Chief Rodney Bryant from his position, Dickens said he would not immediately replace Bryant and instead would give Bryant 100 days to improve the department.
Andre Dickens Is Elected Mayor of Atlanta
ATLANTA — Andre Dickens, a veteran City Council member, was elected mayor of Atlanta in an upset on Tuesday night after promising voters that he would help guide the city in a more equitable direction.
Mr. Dickens, 47, will step into one of the most high-profile political positions in the South after defeating Felicia Moore, 60, the City Council president, in Tuesday’s runoff election.
In a first round of voting, Ms. Moore had bested Mr. Dickens by more than 17 percentage points. But on Tuesday, Mr. Dickens had about 62 percent of the vote when The Associated Press declared him the winner at about 10:30 p.m.
Mr. Dickens, a church deacon, delivered an upbeat, roof-raising victory speech to supporters, noting his humble upbringing in the working-class neighborhood of Adamsville, his engineering degree from Georgia Tech and the daunting problems he has promised to tackle.
“We are facing some generational problems in our city,” he said. “Atlanta is growing in population and in wealth. Businesses are flocking to the city, yet we still have people living on our streets. We have people working at our airport just to meet last month’s rent. People are still fighting to stay in their homes in the city that they love.”
But if there was “any city in the world” that could face these issues, he added, “it’s Atlanta.”
The mayor’s race unfolded at a time of promise and peril for Atlanta. The city’s population grew 17 percent in the past decade, to about 499,000 people, and a number of major technology companies are expanding their footprint in the city in hopes of increasing diversity, given that nearly half of city residents are Black.
But like many U.S. cities, Atlanta has been struggling with spikes in a number of violent crime categories, including murder. In May, the city’s political future was thrown into doubt when Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms announced she would not run for re-election after a first term in which she was forced to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, a high-profile police shooting of a Black man, Rayshard Brooks, and racial justice protests that occasionally became violent.
As other killings rocked the city, public safety emerged as the key issue in the mayor’s race, giving an early boost to former Mayor Kasim Reed, who argued that his experience made him uniquely qualified to solve the crime problem. But Mr. Reed, who left office in 2018, also brought significant political baggage, with numerous members of his administration convicted or indicted on federal corruption-related charges.
Mr. Reed’s complicated past was a likely factor in the surprise outcome in the initial balloting, when Mr. Dickens nudged out the better-known Mr. Reed to secure a spot in the runoff against the first-place finisher, Ms. Moore.
Since then, Mr. Dickens and Ms. Moore endeavored to distinguish themselves in the nonpartisan race, despite the fact they are both liberal Democrats who share many of the same policy goals.
Both supported hiring more police officers, encouraging the reform of police culture and increasing Atlanta’s stock of affordable housing.
Both candidates also opposed a controversial effort to allow Buckhead, an upscale, majority-white neighborhood, to secede from Atlanta, taking with it a substantial chunk of the city’s tax base. This potential divorce, which has been fueled by crime concerns, would require approval by the Republican-dominated State Legislature and a subsequent vote by the neighborhood’s residents. To derail the plan, the next mayor will need to deploy the bully pulpit and engage in nimble and strategic lobbying of Republicans who control the Statehouse.
During the campaign, Ms. Moore, a real estate agent, leaned into her reputation as a thorn in the side of previous mayors, including Mr. Reed. Before he left office, she argued that he should be held accountable for the corruption on his watch. She reminded voters that she backed legislation creating a new inspector general for City Hall as well as an independent compliance office, both in reaction to the scandals that dogged the Reed administration.
“I am actually like the outsider that’s on the inside, fighting against corruption, fighting against the status quo, sometimes fighting the established order of things,” Ms. Moore told a recent audience at a mayoral forum.
Mr. Dickens is the chief development officer at TechBridge, a nonprofit organization that uses technology to help amplify the work of other nonprofits. During the campaign he emphasized his role in increasing the minimum wage for city employees, as well as spearheading the creation of a city transportation department. Mr. Dickens, who was endorsed by Mayor Bottoms and former Mayor Shirley Franklin, argued in recent weeks that Ms. Moore had spent more time criticizing others than racking up her own achievements over the course of her long career.
“She does nothing and I do a lot,” Mr. Dickens said in a recent interview.
Both Ms. Moore and Mr. Dickens are Black. Tuesday’s election extends a streak of Black mayors in Atlanta since the election of Maynard Jackson in 1973 despite a recent influx of white residents that caused the share of Black residents to decline from a slight majority to 47 percent of the population, according to an analysis of 2020 Census figures.
Felicia Moore, Andre Dickens Will Compete for Atlanta Mayor; Kasim Reed Falls Short
ATLANTA — The mayoral election in Atlanta produced a surprise result, as Kasim Reed, a former two-term mayor once considered a front-runner in the race, failed to finish in either first or second place, denying him the chance to compete in the Nov. 30 runoff and ending his surprising political comeback bid.
Felicia Moore, the City Council president, finished first in Tuesday’s race with about 41 percent of the vote, followed by Andre Dickens, a city councilman, who narrowly bested Mr. Reed with about 23 percent of the vote. Both Ms. Moore and Mr. Dickens had attacked Mr. Reed for the series of corruption scandals that unfolded on his watch at City Hall, resulting in numerous indictments and guilty pleas from high-ranking city officials.
Amid the controversy, Mr. Reed, who had been one of the most high-profile politicians in the state, virtually disappeared from the political stage after leaving office in January 2018. He officially returned to the scene in June, announcing that he would seek a third term after the current mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, declared she would not run for a second term.
Mr. Reed led a crowded field of contestants in early polling with a message heavily focused on a promise to fix the city’s violent crime problems. In a statement on Thursday afternoon, he thanked Atlanta voters and congratulated Ms. Moore and Mr. Dickens.
“When I declared my candidacy for mayor in June, I had one goal: to restore safety in every neighborhood across our city,” Mr. Reed said. “Like many others, I witnessed the tapestry of diverse communities that make up our city be torn apart by surging levels of violent crime.”
But the corruption concerns appeared to have dragged him down, even as he reminded voters that he had never been charged or indicted after a lengthy federal investigation of his administration.
Like Mr. Reed, both Ms. Moore, 60, and Mr. Dickens, 47, have promised to get a handle on violent crime. Both candidates have also focused on affordable housing, an increasingly hot topic in a rapidly gentrifying city.
Because so much of the race leading up to the election was focused on Mr. Reed and questions about his fitness for office, it is unclear how Ms. Moore and Mr. Dickens will seek to differentiate themselves in the runoff phase, and which lines of attack they might try against each other.
On Tuesday night, after The Associated Press had projected that Ms. Moore would advance to the runoff, she hugged and shook hands with supporters and volunteers as “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas played.
Ms. Moore said the election was about “a new Atlanta — an Atlanta where everyone’s going to feels safe.”
“An Atlanta,” she continued, “where when you spend your money for your taxes and your services, you’re going to get them.”
In a late-night speech to supporters, Mr. Dickens also celebrated. “You chose a path to the future tonight,” he said. “The people decided that it was time to save the soul of our city, and to move this campaign forward into the runoff.”
Mr. Dickens, who joined the City Council in 2013, is a product of Atlanta’s public school system who earned an engineering degree from Georgia Tech. In recent years he has focused on ways to help disadvantaged people find jobs in the city’s growing technology sector.
Ms. Moore has served on the City Council for more than two decades after serving as head of her neighborhood association. During the current campaign, she has emphasized good-government reforms she championed at City Hall, where she was an outspoken critic of perceived excesses in the Reed administration.
Both Mr. Dickens and Ms. Moore are Black. Their advancement into the runoff ensures that the city’s streak of electing African American mayors, which stretches back to 1973, will be unbroken, despite a significant influx of white residents in recent years.