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The Night Shift has come to an end.

NBC has canceled the low-profile medical drama after four seasons, the network confirmed on Friday.

Launched in the summer of 2014, the series about ER doctors on the overnight shift at a San Antonio hospital featured Eion Macken, Jill Flint, and Scott Wolf in its cast. Ratings had dropped in recent seasons: Season 4, which wrapped in August, averaged 5.6 million viewers and a 1.0 rating in the 18-to-49-year-old demo in L+7, which was down 17 percent and 29 percent respectively from its season 3 average.

“We want to thank our amazing creators and executive producers, Gabe Sachs and Jeff Judah, for their dedication and stellar work; a cast and crew that were second to none; and the city of Albuquerque, N.M., which graciously opened its arms to us,” NBC Entertainment president Jennifer Salke said in a statement. “For four seasons The Night Shift gave audiences a window to heroic doctors, nurses and all-star medical workers who never hesitated to give their blood, sweat and time to help those most in need.”

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It seems Jon Snow knows nothing of how much Rose Leslie hates April Fool’s Day.

Kit Harington learned the hard way that his fiancée does not celebrate the prank-centered holiday, despite his family being avid observers of the April 1 celebration.

On The Jonathan Ross Show, Harington revisited a video of a prank he played on Leslie earlier this year. She opens the fridge and recoils in horror shrieking, saving the Brita filter in her hand before sinking to the floor in terror.

What was it that scared Leslie so much? A Game of Thrones prop head made to resemble a dead Jon Snow. “After that she was in tears and I was there going, ‘April Fool’s!'” he explained. “It didn’t go down well.”

Though the two are now engaged to be married, it seems the prank was a major sticking point for the couple. “She pretty much told me if I ever did it again that would be it,” said Harington.

Watch the video above to witness the full horror of Harington’s prank.

As 9to5Mac reports, the Dow Jones newswires had a bit of a shakeup this morning after a "technical error" led to the announcement of some rather ridiculous fake news. Dow Jones reported that Google would be buying Apple for a mere $9 billion -- which...

Accenture, a global management consulting and professional services firm, exposed sensitive information such as private keys, credentials, and secret API data of its Fortune 500 corporate clients on the web via four publicly-accessible servers.

At GTC Europe, Nvidia announced its next-generation AI computer for Level 5 autonomous vehicles with 10x the performance of its current Drive PX 2 system.

We’ve all been there. Someone you know has purchased a shiny new television, and they’re happily showing it off to you in all its high-resolution glory. 

But once you start up a movie, something looks a little bit...off? Somehow? It’s as though the extra clarity of the new television is somehow making the film look worse. Film sets look like… well… sets, and CGI no longer blends into the real environment like it should. 

Some people seem to think this is just an inevitable consequence of buying a fancy new TV, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, what you’re witnessing is more commonly referred to as motion smoothing, or the ‘soap opera effect’, and is caused by your TV aggressively processing its video in a way that actively makes content look worse. 

It’s a problem that’s gotten so bad that a group of Hollywood’s top directors has banded together to try and get the technology killed off. Over the weekend the director of Guardians of the Galaxy, James Gunn, tweeted: 

Since this original shot was fired, a host of other directors have since pledged their support for the cause. 

So what is motion smoothing, why do directors hate it, and why do television manufacturers insist on including it in their sets?

The 'soap opera effect'

Put simply, the ‘soap opera effect’ is the unintended consequence of your television’s motion-smoothing technology. 

Although most televisions these days feature a panel that refreshes 60 times over the course of a second, most content is still filmed at 24 frames per second. 

In order to smooth out this motion, most televisions now include some form of motion smoothing technology (although almost every manufacturer seems to have a different name for it). This technology will artificially insert more frames into a video in order to reduce motion blur, and make movement in general appear smoother. 

This works great for sports where it can be a struggle to keep track of a fast-moving ball, but it’s not as good for films, where the extra frames make everything look fake and unnatural. 

The problem with motion-smoothing comes down to the fact that, fundamentally, your TV is trying to add extra information to an image that simply isn’t there. Think of it like ‘colorizing’ black and white photographs. Here, you’re trying to guess what colors should have been in the original image, and as such it’s never going to look quite as good as an image that was originally shot in color. 

A TV is doing the same thing, but with motion instead of color. 

What makes this effect worse is the fact that a television is trying to do all this work in real time as it receives and transmits the data. It can’t afford to spend the time getting a frame looking perfect because it has to generate around thirty of them every second. 

Why you should leave motion-smoothing on

And yet, despite all the issues with motion-smoothing, it’s still pretty essential for all modern televisions. Bear with me. 

Part of this has to do with the fact that, as outlined above, motion-smoothing looks pretty damn good when it comes to sports, but it also has benefits for cinematic content like James Gunn and his ilk produce. 

The world of cinema has clung pretty tightly to the 24 frames per second standard over the years, and for the most part, the world of TV and online video has done likewise (the exception being the PAL territories of the world who prefer 25fps for… uh… reasons). 

Now, I don’t have an issue with 24fps as a standard, but it creates a lot of problems for 60Hz televisions. In an ideal world, TVs would be able to refresh at 24Hz, so they could neatly refresh once for every frame. 

However, with a refresh rate of 60Hz, TVs need to work out a way of dividing 24 frames into 60 refreshes, and this leads to problems. 

The standard way of dealing with this is to show the first frame twice, the second same thrice, the third frame twice, the fourth frame thrice, and so on. By the time the panel has refreshed 60 times, all 24 frames will have been shown. 

But this 2:3 ratio isn’t ideal, and creates a certain amount of judder that’s especially noticeable during panning shots. 

In an ideal world we’d all have 120Hz televisions that can neatly show 24 frames per second, but while we’re still predominantly relying on 60Hz screens a certain amount of motion-smoothing is going to be needed. 

Too much motion-smoothing creates the soap opera effect, but two little leaves your content juddering as your TV struggles to fit a square peg into a circular hole. 

To avoid the worst of both worlds we’d suggest leaving motion-smoothing on, but turning it to its absolute minimum setting. 

When you should absolutely turn it off

That said, there are certain occasions when you should absolutely turn off motion smoothing entirely. 

Chief amongst these is gaming in all its forms. The additional processing power creates input lag, which will make games feel sluggish and unresponsive. 

Trust us on this, just leave it off. 

Thankfully, some TVs allow you to change settings on an input-by-input basis. If you TV allows it, then we’d suggest turning off motion-smoothing completely on the HDMI input that your games console is plugged into. 

Then again, if you use your games console for any kind of media playback then this solution isn’t going to help you much. 

Will we ever not need motion smoothing?

It’s clear that the state of television technology at the moment will make motion-smoothing pretty essential for the immediate future. 

There’s just no foolproof way of playing back 24fps content on a 60Hz screen without introducing judder. 

In the longer term 120Hz panels could at least partially solve the problem, but even these will create issues with PAL’s 25fps content. 

In fact, to solve these problems for both 24 and 25fps content you’d need at least a 600Hz screen, which isn’t going to be possible anytime soon. 

So, for the time being at least, it seems motion smoothing is going to be a necessary evil. The realities of refresh rates mean that it’s not going anywhere anytime soon, and any attempt to kill it off is a bad thing for film-fans everywhere. 

• For our top TV picks, check out our guide to the best 4K TVs or, if you're looking for a TV bargain, check our full guide to Black Friday. 

The next Star Wars film won't hit theaters until December 15th, but there's a new trailer that just aired during Monday Night Football. Star Wars: The Last Jedi brings Luke Skywalker back into the story -- along with the final appearance of Carrie Fi...

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As Blade Runner 2049 finally hits, we look back at the influence the original Ridley Scott film had on movies, TV and more.

Fresh off their Outstanding Writing Emmy win for the standout episode “San Junipero,” the creators and cast of Black Mirror opened New York City’s 2017 PaleyFest with a brand new episode, titled “U.S.S. Callister.” Afterward, Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker, executive producer Annabel Jones, and the cast of the new episode — Jesse Plemons, Cristin Milioti, Jimmi Simpson, and Michaela Coel — held a panel moderated by New York Times reporter Dave Itzkoff to discuss the new episode and the show in general. Here’s what we learned.

Black Mirror takes on Star Trek

Without giving away too many details, suffice to say that part of “U.S.S. Callister” is an extended riff on tropes and archetypes from the original Star Trek. This means there are quite a few lens flares (“we kept calling it ‘J.J. Mode,’” Brooker joked), and Plemons gets to channel his inner William Shatner. This being Black Mirror, though, there are several twisty takes on the material, and not a few echoes of Harlan Ellison’s classic sci-fi/horror story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.” Brooker says it was conceived of as an “adult Toy Story.” Though it was written some time ago, the episode ends up with some timely echoes about “living under a tyrant,” per Brooker.

Jodie Foster is directing an episode this season

“U.S.S. Callister” has a more epic scale than Black Mirror viewers may be accustomed to. Unlike, say, “The Entire History of You” — an intimate story set in familiar suburban environments — this new episode spans multiple big sets, including the titular spaceship. But there will still be stories on a smaller scale this season, including one episode directed by the legendary Jodie Foster.

“The privilege of doing an anthology is you have that range. So you can do big space stories, and small indie stories,” Jones said. “Jodie Foster’s directing one for us, which is wonderful, and it’s so different in tone and scale and story.”

‘San Junipero’ was the first episode written for Netflix

“San Junipero” winning the Emmy was well-deserved — not least because it breaks from the traditional Black Mirror tone. Its story is based on love, not paranoia or resentment, and it actually has a happy ending for once. According to Brooker, some of this came from the fact that “San Junipero” was the very first episode he wrote for his show’s new home.

“‘San Junipero’ was the first one I wrote for Netflix, and it was a deliberate attempt on my part to go slightly off what I thought the show was,” Brooker said. “Because until then, we’d done six episodes and a Christmas special, and every single one had been nihilistic and bleak, so I was like ‘f–k that.’ And I’d read someone online complaining that with the show going to Netflix it will be Americanized. So I was like, alright, f–k you, California, here we go.”

Pitching ‘The National Anthem’ was an experience

Anyone who’s ever recommended Black Mirror to a friend knows that it can be dicey since the very first episode is an absurd satire in which the British prime minister (played by Rory Kinnear) is manipulated into having sex with a pig. Brooker admits that pitching “The National Anthem” was a weird experience — and that weirdest of all, Channel 4’s main point of contention was not what you might think.

“There was a meeting where I had to pitch that to the channel. That was an interesting afternoon,” Brooker said. “Their main question was not about the story or anything but just, ‘does it have to be a pig?’ So I also suggested a frozen supermarket chicken, but eventually, we went back to pig.

Charlie Brooker is now alerted to every bad thing that happens in the world

At one point, Itzkoff asked Brooker if random people now pitched him Black Mirror ideas based on their own experiences with technology or the news. Brooker responded that he instead has a slightly different problem.

“What happens more is I’m just immediately alerted to any horrible development in the world,” Brooker said. “People just email or flag or tweet me going, ‘This is quite Black Mirror-esque! Look at this horrible thing!’ So I can’t escape the world.”

The fourth season of Black Mirror is expected to arrive on Netflix later this year.

If your family dies and you clone them, are they still your family?

This is the question posed by Keanu Reeves’ new sci-fi film Replicas, which had the world premiere of its first trailer at New York Comic Con today. Reeves was in the house to talk about the film, which he produced and stars in, along with executive producer Clark Peterson and director Jeffrey Nachmanoff. (Head here to find out what Reeves thinks of the new Matrix movie rumors.)

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Even though season 8 will have Game of Thrones‘ fewest episodes ever, the production might spend as much time filming as before — increasing the evidence that GoT will return in 2019, skipping next year entirely.

Liam Cunningham, who plays Ser Davos Seaworth, told TV Guide on Thursday: “ definitely going to be bigger and what I hear is longer,” he said. “We’re filming right up until the summer. When you think about it, up until last season we’d have six months to do ten episodes, so we’re way more than that for six episodes. So that obviously will translate into longer episodes.”

GoT normally films for about six months, typically wrapping around December (the recent seventh season, which aired in the summer for the first time, shot from August to February). The final season starts shooting this month. If the production continues filming “right up until summer” that’s six months, at least, as Cunningham points out (and some rumors peg the season’s length of production as even longer).

As for the production length, GoT showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss first told EW they plan to spend a year and a half making the final season. EW also first reported that GoT might not return to 2019. With production not wrapping until summer, a 2019 rollout seems like an increasingly sure bet given the extensive amount of post-production required for the fantasy hit. Plus HBO’s other big splashy genre title Westworld is returning after nearly two years sometime in 2018 — there’s no premiere date yet — so it’s a good bet HBO will put its spotlight on the badass bots next year while focusing its Game of Thrones efforts on promoting season 7 for that fall’s Emmy consideration.

As for Cunningham’s other revelation, that the episodes will be longer, we’re less positive on that one at this point. The actor’s phrasing suggests he hadn’t yet received the scripts and another beloved Ser — Iain Glen (Ser Jorah Mormont) recently gave a very different reason for a longer production time: The final season will typically only have one unit filming at a time — much like a regular TV show. GoT in the past has often had two units — occasionally three, and very briefly even four — shooting simultaneously, typically in at least two countries. “I think this last season will take much longer to shoot because they can only use one unit because we’re all in the same sort of scenes,” Glen said. “We’re all starting to occupy the same territory, we’re all starting to be in the same storylines and so they can’t anymore.”

So that’s two different reasons why GoT will spend so long on six episodes. Both Sers could be right (and we hope they are). We would be shocked if there weren’t at least a couple really long episodes in the final season as the last two seasons had episodes that broke the GoT record for longest-episodes ever. The cast will all know for certain how big those scripts are very soon — there’s a final season table read this Sunday.

Season 8 will be directed by three teams of directors: Previous GoT Emmy winners Miguel Sapochnik and David Nutter, along with the showrunners Benioff and Weiss. For more on the GoT final season and HBO’s prequel plan, check out our GoT FAQ.

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Google has announced its own wireless Bluetooth earbuds, called Pixel Buds.

As reported by The Verge, Pixel Buds will utilize Google Assistant to make calls, play music, and if you also have a Pixel phone, translate 40 languages during conversation.

Pixel Buds, via Google Store

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Warning: This post contains spoilers from the Black-ish season 4 premiere

As promised, Black-ish‘s season 4 premiere didn’t pull any punches when it came to discussing Juneteenth and slavery.

In the Emmy-nominated ABC sitcom’s bold season opener, Dre (Anthony Anderson) teams up with Aloe Blacc to create a musical about Juneteenth because he feels as though there aren’t enough black holidays. At first, his family (and his oblivious white co-workers) are resistant to the idea, but by the end of the episode, the entire Johnson family has come around to it: They (belatedly) celebrate the end of the slavery because they realize they’re tired of ignoring their culture in order to avoid making others uncomfortable.

Along the way, there are several musical numbers that directly address the United States’ fraught history with slavery. The Roots star in (and wrote) a hilarious animated sequence titled “I’m Just a Slave.” Then, the Johnson clan, dressed as slaves in the nineteenth century, perform two Hamilton-inspired, gospel choir-assisted songs. The first one, “We Built This,” bluntly states that slaves built the country, and the groovy “Juneteenth” is a simultaneously fun and sad (think “Angels” by Chance the Rapper) reflection on how life wasn’t immediately better for black people after they received their freedom.

EW caught up with creator Kenya Barris to discuss the episode’s boldest statements, how writing affected his family’s life, and more.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: After watching this episode, my co-worker and I were like, “How did this make it on TV?”
KENYA BARRIS: It’s interesting. It’s one of those things that people are going to love or hate. I feel like one of the interesting things to me is the notion that it makes people uncomfortable is the ironic thing. Yeah, the episode talks about how talking about slavery makes white people uncomfortable, I get that. At the same time, it’s not indicting of anything contemporary. It really is more indicting, if anything, of black culture and being afraid of making of other people uncomfortable, and thus disregarding our own past. I think that was sort of the pitch to the network. But I do think it’s a swing that I’m really proud of.

What was the network’s reaction when you pitched this?
They were very supportive of the script and the episode. I think that they got nervous after it was done because it could potentially be something that has some reactions, but they’ve been supportive.

That idea of disregarding our own past definitely comes up in the penultimate scene in which Dre says that black people ignore Juneteenth and Kwanzaa and watch Portlandia to make others comfortable.
I think that’s at the core of what made me want to do this. When you bring up Kwanzaa or Juneteenth, I know for me, I laugh, like, “Pssh, bulls—t.” Then, I had to sort of check myself and say, “Why am I laughing at that? Why is that some bulls—t?” It’s because I know I’ve been in situations where if I bring it up or talk about what it means, it makes other people uncomfortable, thus I don’t talk about it, and the way for me to deal with it is to joke about how it’s the McDowell’s to McDonald’s of things. That’s not necessarily true, and it’s not necessarily a message that I want to keep forwarding.

The last time we spoke, you mentioned how this episode was inspired by something you’d gone through with your family. Has this episode changed how you approach Juneteenth? Do you plan on celebrating it?
I will, actually. It’s something that I want to embrace, and I want my friends to embrace it because I think it’s important. In this country, if you’re Jewish-American or a person of Jewish descent, a horrible contemporary tragedy happened in the Holocaust. Awful! The one thing with that, that gives a little bit of a reset button or a chance is that there is a face that you can put to that evil. There was an end to it and there was a face. If they find out you’re a Nazi and you’re 95 years old, we’re gonna come in your house and drag you out; it’s not okay. There has never been a prosecuted case of slavery. There’s no criminality to it. So, it was just like, “It’s over,” and thus, because it was over and it was never considered “wrong” in the prosecutable, criminal sense of the word, the country doesn’t take it as wrong. There’s a moralistic thing. If you choose to take it and say it was morally wrong, thank you, but there is not like a, “it was absolutely legally wrong.” So, you take people and put them back in society after hundreds of millions of deaths and heritage loss, and now they’re trying to deal with this in a society that, because there was no criminality put to it, you can’t really talk about it. It’s kind of like, “That’s over, guys. Let’s not talk about it.” That’s a hard place for a lot of people to be able to live in this country with, white and black! A lot of my friends who are sympathetic to the situation, it’s hard for them to sort of the idea that there’s no criminality put to it. People just wish that we would stop talking about it, and that’s not fair.

Like with most things, you can’t just ignore it and hope that it goes away. The pain is still there.
Maybe if the country, together, celebrated the end of something on a yearly basis, that would bring a lot more peace and solidarity between a country that’s so clearly still split. But to celebrate that makes people feel that you have to acknowledge that it was real, and you have to acknowledge it was wrong, bigger than the moral sense of it; you have to acknowledge that it was wrong as a human rights violation — one of the grossest examples of a human rights violation in the history of mankind.

The episode has an interesting structure. My colleague Tim Stack compared it to Chicago, in that it cuts away to performances as opposed to having the characters break out into song in the middle of a scene. How did you decide how to incorporate music into the show?
We knew that we didn’t want to do characters all of a sudden breaking out into song. You didn’t want someone to be walking around and all of a sudden,  “Slavery!” We didn’t think that was going to be the best way to handle it. Also, I’m a huge fan of , Hamilton, and just of theatre in general, and how talented this cast is and what they’re able to do. One of our writers last year Gail Lerner had talked about doing a musical and jokingly Juneteenth. At that point, we laughed it off because we were still in that place. Peter Saji, who wrote it, did an amazing job. I think when we were conceiving the episode’s idea, we knew we only had 21 minutes and we , “What are the two numbers we wanted to say?” The Roots came in and did what I think was an amazing piece of animation and music for it.

Did this take longer to put together than a normal episode?
It did not. We only shot it in the same amount of time that we shoot a regular episode. I worked on the music for a while. We have been unbelievably lucky in how we’ve been able to sort of band together and get things done at microwave speed. We only had five days to shoot that episode.

Was there anyone that surprised you when you started working on it and staging it?
Laurence Fishburne. He’s a great actor, but he dances and sings, too? He can just do everything. Tracee , as well. To be honest, all actors are just magic people and they can do anything.

Black-ish airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET on ABC.

A side-by-side comparison of the new Microsoft Windows Mixed Reality HMDs from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung.

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This article contains full spoilers for Marvel's Inhumans. Make sure to read IGN's review of Marvel's Inhumans: The First Chapter.

Marvel's Inhumans: Season 1 might not be leading up to a point where Black Bolt faces down with Daisy Johnson, but ABC's other TV series featuring a cast of Inhumans, Marvel's Agents of SHIELD, has a very important impact on this new series.

Agents of SHIELD introduced the concept of Inhumans into the MCU when Skye unwittingly underwent a Terrigenesis transformation back in Season 2. The season ended with a box of Terrigen crystals falling into the ocean, infecting Earth's water supply and fish population and then setting off a string of Terrigenesis transformations across the globe, spawning a whole bunch more Inhumans.

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Back in 2014, CERN released the data from its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments onto an online portal called the Open Data portal. It was an unprecedented move, making data from the LHC's experiments available to those who don't have access to...

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