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    After Netflix Success, ‘Suits’ Opens Another Firm

    The creator of the legal drama didn’t expect to make any more spinoffs. But after “Suits” became a rerun hit on Netflix, “Suits LA” was born.On a January morning, attractive people in tailored attire stood in a sun-skimmed California courtroom, arguing a motion in the murder trial.“Bring the venom!” the director, Anton Cropper, said encouragingly.This was on the set of “Suits LA,” a sibling of “Suits,” the legal procedural that ran on USA for nine seasons, from 2011 to 2019. (It is also a cousin of “Pearson,” a short-lived “Suits” spinoff.) Back in the courtroom, a clash over evidentiary rules turned vicious as one lawyer hissed at another, “You immoral piece of filth!” Time, it seemed, had not mellowed the mildly glamorous, majorly cutthroat world of “Suits.”The original “Suits” had done well on USA during its run — well enough to be renewed and renewed. But its hold on the cultural imagination was never especially strong and its reviews were, like the Season 1 suits themselves, muted. “Though the series begins amusingly enough, it quickly descends into cloying buddy escapade,” The New York Times wrote in 2011.It wasn’t much lamented when it ended, and as late as a year and a half ago, Aaron Korsh, the show’s creator, claimed another “Suits” spinoff was unlikely. Case closed.But when “Suits” moved to Netflix in mid 2023, it set a record for the most total weeks and the most consecutive weeks at the top of the Nielsen streaming ratings. Pacey, witty, cast with good-looking actors (Meghan Markle among them) and smart — but not so smart that you couldn’t follow along while also answering a few emails — “Suits” was the nice lawyer show an exhausted America needed.From left, Gabriel Macht, Patrick J. Adams and Rick Hoffman in “Suits.”Ian Watson/USA NetworkWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Nick Jonas, Sadie Sink and More Had Broadway Debuts as Kids. Now They’re Back.

    Nick Jonas, Sadie Sink and Christian Slater are among this year’s unusually large cohort of stars who first appeared onstage as tweens or even younger.The New York stage has some notable nostalgia this year: More than a half-dozen performers in significant roles made their Broadway debuts as children. Some were in hits and some were in flops; they experienced joy and (in one case) trauma. A few have appeared onstage with regularity, while others pursued music or film and are now returning. Here they reflect on those early experiences.☆ ☆ ☆Nick JonasNick Jonas was just 8 when he landed a part as a Tiny Tim understudy in a 2000 production of “A Christmas Carol” at Madison Square Garden (Frank Langella was Scrooge). A year later, at 9, he made his Broadway debut as Little Jake in a revival of “Annie Get Your Gun” then starring Reba McEntire.He did two more Broadway shows in rapid succession: At 10 he played Chip, a teacup, in “Beauty and the Beast,” and at 11 he played Gavroche, a street child, in “Les Misérables.”Though he became a successful pop star in the years that followed, the stage kept calling: At 19, he returned to Broadway in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” And this spring, at 32, he is returning in the first Broadway production of Jason Robert Brown’s much-loved “The Last Five Years.”Like many of the actors interviewed here, Jonas said that in theater he found a group of peers who understood him in a way that classmates often did not. At school, Jonas said, “I definitely felt like I was strange to them.” But onstage, he said, “I finally felt like I was around my people.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Stephen Colbert Crowns Trump the Troll King

    President Trump referring to himself as a king “is the thing presidents are not supposed to do,” Colbert said on Thursday.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.King of the RoadOn Wednesday, President Donald Trump pre-emptively announced on social media that New York City’s congestion pricing “IS DEAD, Manhattan and all of New York is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!”Referring to himself as a king “is the thing presidents are not supposed to do,” Stephen Colbert said on Thursday.“Yes, the classic domain of an all-powerful king. Yes, it’s what all kings do: regulate local toll roads. [imitating a king] ‘Behold! Camelot has been saved, for I have pulled Excalibur from the median strip of the Cross Bronx Expressway.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“But you know he’s trolling us, and we shouldn’t take the bait. But with this guy, every troll is a trial balloon. So, here we go. Mr. Trump, America will never bow before any king not named ‘Burger,’ for he hath made us all part of the royal family.” — STEPHEN COLBERTColbert remarked that even though Trump has been “busy cosplaying as the czar of the Lincoln Tunnel,” congestion pricing has significantly reduced traffic and increased support for Broadway shows and local businesses.“Now, obviously, this seems like a good thing, so Donald Trump ruined it.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Governor Hochul immediately said congestion pricing wouldn’t end, posting, ‘The cameras are staying on.’ Governor, I love your defiance, but you know Trump loves cameras. This just means he’s going to do his next press conference strapped to the hood of a Camry.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (DOGE Dollars Edition)“DOGE-head Elon Musk says he’s considering giving 78 million Americans $5,000 per household. Half of these households will be benefiting from a DOGE dividend; the other are just his child support.” — GREG GUTFELD“I mean, the Dems are already floundering against DOGE, but DOGE plus a dividend? It’ll be more popular than that mall tour I did with Menudo.” — GREG GUTFELD“Perhaps it’s not exactly right. ‘Right’ would be all the cuts go to preventing a full default on the debt; otherwise, we’ll face an economic crisis that would make the Depression look like a trip to Sandals with Trace Gallagher.” — GREG GUTFELDThe Bits Worth WatchingTaylor Tomlinson explored the social media trend of mostly shirtless men doing meal prep on Thursday’s “After Midnight.”Also, Check This OutKenturah Davis, an artist in Altadena, is continuing the legacy of her parents, Keni Arts and Mildred Davis, who are also artists in Altadena, a community in Los Angeles County.Phylicia J.L. Munn for The New York TimesThis year’s Frieze Los Angeles highlights Altadena’s Black art legacy in the wake of the Eaton Fire. More

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    In Stephen Graham’s World, Nice Guys Finish First

    The British actor, who stars in the new Hulu show “A Thousand Blows,” has built a career playing intimidating bruisers. But behind the scenes, he’s a peach.In 2012, the actor Stephen Graham and his wife were having a quiet dinner at a chain chicken joint in London when a young man approached the table. The man, James Nelson-Joyce, told Graham that he had just left drama school and wanted to be an actor, too. Many would have sent the 20-something away with some polite encouragement, but Graham asked for Nelson-Joyce’s email, and kept in touch, offering him regular advice and eventually recommending the younger actor to his agent.More than a decade later, Graham and Nelson-Joyce are playing brothers in “A Thousand Blows,” a rip-roaring new Hulu drama set in the grimy East End of London in the 1880s.Graham’s character, a bare-knuckle boxer known as the East End Gladiator, is of a type with the intimidating bruisers that he built his career playing, including a skinhead English nationalist in Shane Meadows’s “This Is England” and Al Capone in HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire.”.But over cups of tea on a recent gray afternoon in London, Graham, now 51, choked up while recounting his history with Nelson-Joyce. It means a lot, he said, laughing at the tears in his eyes, to be able to pass “the baton on” to younger actors. It also reflects Graham’s ethos that “you’re never above anyone, and you’re never below anyone.”This egalitarian approach also applies when Graham works with some of Hollywood’s biggest names. In an email, Leonardo DiCaprio recalled that on the set of Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York” more than 20 years ago, Graham’s “fearless unpredictability kept everyone on their toes. But more than that, he brought truth to every scene.”Graham with James Nelson-Joyce, who plays his brother in “A Thousand Blows.”Robert Viglasky for Disney+/ HuluWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Review: In ‘Liberation,’ the Feminist Revolution Will Be Dramatized

    Bess Wohl’s moving new play, about a group of women in 1970s Ohio, explores the power of sisterhood and the limits of motherhood.How much would you give to see your mother again as she was in her prime — which is to say, before she had you?That’s one of the be-careful-what-you-wish-for scenarios that Bess Wohl dramatizes in “Liberation,” her gutting new play about the promise and unfinished business of feminism. All the clenched fists and manifestoes in the world cannot point its second-wave characters, or even their nth-wave daughters, to the sweet spot between love and freedom. Indeed, the play’s warning, if not quite its watch cry, is: “It’s almost impossible to have both.”At any rate, it hasn’t been working for the six women who meet on Thursdays at 6 p.m. on the basketball court of a local rec center in a backwater Ohio town in 1970. There, amid banners celebrating local team championships — boys’ teams only, of course — they try to make of their random sisterhood a lifeboat to survive the revolution they seek. On the agenda: consciousness raising, problem sharing, political action and self-love prompts. Yes, at one session they all get nervously naked.But “Liberation,” which opened on Thursday at the Laura Pels Theater, is neither satire nor agitprop. As directed with cool patience by Whitney White, the better to let its climax sear, and with a cast led by Susannah Flood and Betsy Aidem each at the top of her form, it is gripping and funny and formally daring. In a trick worthy of Escher, and befitting the complexity of the material, it nearly eats the box of its own containment, just as its characters, lacking other emotional sustenance, eat at theirs.The burden of the trick falls mostly on Flood, whose role is a superimposed, asynchronous portrait of at least two women. The main one is Lizzie, a young journalist stuck on the wedding beat at the local paper, with obits thrown in as a sop to her demand for equality. (In a way, the two beats “are the same thing,” she says.) Denying that she is the group’s leader, though she made the fliers and booked the room, she wants a revolution without having to give up anything to get it and while honoring everyone’s contrasting ideologies. History tells us where that approach typically leaves the left.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘The Eastern Gate’ Is a Lean and Mean Spy Drama

    Office politics are global politics in this intense Polish series on Max.Nothing is fair in love or war in the fast-paced Polish spy drama “The Eastern Gate” (in Polish and Russian, with subtitles or dubbed). The show, on Max, is intense, tricky and surprising. “Don’t trust anyone,” the characters constantly warn one another. And, well — don’t.Ewa (Lena Gora) is a Polish spy, and at the outset she is undercover at a glamorous party. Only she isn’t there to hobnob with her boyfriend’s icy mom, she is there to gather information about said mom’s involvement in nuclear bomb making.A lot of shows begin with scenes of shocking violence, but few stick with it the way “Gate” does. Outside of “Cobra Kai,” I’m not sure there’s a show with more kicking. Oh, there’s punching, eyeball-squishing, wrist-wrenching and plenty of shooting, too, but all the ways people can kick or be kicked are on vicious display here. It’s not morbid or gratuitous, though: It’s part of the show’s percussive insistence, heard also in its hostile knock-knock-knocks on car windows or in the startling clack of a bolt in lock.The initial mission does not go exactly to plan, and in the fallout Ewa gets sent to Minsk, Belarus, where her bosses suspect a leak within their own intelligence program. How do you look over your shoulder and listen to the voice in your earpiece all at once? The show is set in 2021, and Ewa et al.’s espionage work focuses on the relationships between Poland, Belarus and Russia, and on managing Russian influence as crises deepen and the body count grows.Office politics are global politics here, and international conflict is just an embodiment of interpersonal conflict: Sniffing out Russian moles and arguing about NATO policies are Ewa’s and her colleagues’ love language. Or maybe not “love,” but … maybe. On one mission, Ewa’s handler tells her the safe word is “Don’t hurt me.” When an intelligence official bungles an operation, his boss snarls, “I’ll start a [expletive] war against you myself.”“Gate” is lean and mean in the best ways. All the logs are going on the same fire here, and the heat does not abate. Three of its six episodes are available now, and new episodes on arrive Fridays. More

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    Inside Lorne Michaels’s Archive of ‘S.N.L’ History

    But nothing tested the show like Sinead O’Connor’s musical appearance on Oct. 3, 1992, when she stunned viewers — and the producers — by tearing up a photograph of Pope John Paul II, declaring, “Fight the real enemy.” Two years earlier, O’Connor had drawn wide criticism for joining the cast member Nora Dunn in pulling […] More

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    George Clooney Is Making His Broadway Debut With ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’

    George Clooney has been sneaking outside to smoke.Not like his friend Barack Obama used to, when he was running for president and his wife, Michelle, was after him to quit. Clooney doesn’t even like smoking.“I had to get better at inhaling,” he said. “I go outside so the kids don’t see and smoke a little bit.” He plans to switch to herbal cigarettes when he makes his Broadway debut next month in a stage adaptation of his 2005 movie, “Good Night, and Good Luck.”Smoking has been unpleasant, he said, because in his Kentucky clan “eight uncles and aunts all died of lung cancer — it’s a big deal.” He noted that his aunt Rosemary Clooney, the torch singer and movie star, was 74 when she died in 2002 from complications of lung cancer. “My dad’s the only one that didn’t smoke, and he’s 91.”Clooney, looking slender in a black Theory shirt and navy pants, sat on a rose-colored couch late last month at Casa Cipriani, a hotel at the bottom of Manhattan. He would sit there for the next five hours, until the sun set over the bay, not bothering with lunch, not looking at his phone, not checking with his minders, just spinning ensorcelling tales about love, Hollywood and politics like a modern-day Scheherazade.Unlike in the film, where he took on the nonsmoking role of Fred Friendly, the producer of the CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, on Broadway Clooney will play Murrow himself, who had a three-pack-a-day habit and died in 1965 at the age of 57 of complications from lung cancer. A decade before his death, Murrow was one of the first to report on links between smoking and lung cancer on his show, “See It Now.” It was the rare episode in which he didn’t light up.In the film version of “Good Night, and Good Luck,” George Clooney, standing, played the news producer Fred Friendly, while David Strathairn, seated in the background, played Edward R. Murrow.Melinda Sue Gordon/Warner Independent PicturesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More