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    Stephen Colbert Is Hoping for a Taylor Swift Super Bowl

    With the Kansas City Chiefs in the game, Colbert can’t wait to see “the biggest star in the N.F.L.” (if she can get there from Japan in time).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.‘The Taylor Swift Super Bowl’On Sunday, Travis Kelce and the other Kansas City Chiefs beat the Baltimore Ravens, securing a spot in what Stephen Colbert now calls “the Taylor Swift Super Bowl.”On Monday night, Colbert declared that Swift, who is dating Kelce and brought extra attention to the league all season, is “the biggest star in the N.F.L.” “The whole thing has been great for the N.F.L. and for dads who struggle to bond with their teenage daughters.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Yeah, you’ve got the Super Bowl, and you have Taylor Swift. Ratings are going to be higher than Snoop Dogg at a Willie Nelson concert.” — JIMMY FALLON“But there are so many big questions about the Super Bowl. Can the 49ers contain Patrick Mahomes? Can the Chiefs stop Christian McCaffrey? And the one that most people care about: Can Taylor Swift make it there? ’Cause she has a concert in Japan the day before!” — JIMMY FALLON“It’s just too stressful. Why can’t she just do a concert somewhere closer, like Paris or Venice or New York? They’re all there in Vegas.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Of course, I hope Taylor makes it, because I really want to watch the Apple Music Super Bowl LVIII Halftime Show starring Shaky Footage of Taylor Swift Cheering in a Skybox, featuring Usher.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines ($83 Million Edition)“A jury in former President Trump’s defamation trial has ordered him to pay $83 million in damages. Yeah, in a related story, a bunch of classified documents just turned up on eBay.” — JIMMY FALLON“A Manhattan jury on Friday ordered former President Trump to pay nearly $84 million in his civil defamation case. Well, that explains the new fund-raising amounts.” — SETH MEYERS“Well, congratulations on the payday, Eric!” — STEPHEN COLBERT, on E. Jean Carroll saying she wants to give the money Trump owes her to something he hates“Former President Trump said at a rally in Las Vegas over the weekend that he feels ‘sharper now than I did 20 years ago.’ Of course, based on all of his testimony, he doesn’t remember a single thing from 20 years ago.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingThe “Tonight Show” guest James Corden shared what life is like after leaving “The Late Late Show.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightElisabeth Moss, star of “The Veil,” will appear on Tuesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutJoni Mitchell onstage at the Gorge Amphitheater in George, Wash., in June 2023. On Sunday, she will perform at the Grammys.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesJoni Mitchell will make her Grammys debut during this Sunday’s broadcast. More

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    ‘Suits’ and ‘Friends’: Here’s What Americans Streamed in 2023

    Hollywood was on strike for much of the year. And yet the time viewers spent streaming shows and movies went up. A lot.Last year, studios continued to pull back how much they spend on new TV shows. A pair of strikes effectively shut down Hollywood for several months, disrupting new releases of television shows and movies.And yet Americans kept on streaming.The time that people watched streaming services from their TV sets last year jumped 21 percent from 2022, according to a year-end review on streaming trends by Nielsen, the media research firm. There were nearly a million television shows and movies for Americans to choose from on over 90 streaming services.What did they watch? A lot of reruns, it turns out.Here’s a look at some of the trends.‘Suits’ Bests ‘Stranger Things’From left, Gaten Matarazzo, Finn Wolfhard and Sadie Sink in a scene from “Stranger Things.”NetflixIt’s well established that “Suits,” the USA Network’s legal procedural that aired from 2011 to 2019, was an unexpected streaming hit last year. Netflix subscribers began devouring it over the summer. They shattered records in the process.“Suits,” with 57.7 billion minutes of viewing time in 2023, eclipsed both “The Office” in 2020 and “Stranger Things” in 2022 (when its fourth season was released) as the most-streamed show on television sets in a single year, according to Nielsen. (The research firm began releasing yearly figures in 2020.)“Suits” was probably new to most viewers who watched it on Netflix, said Brian Fuhrer, a senior vice president of product at Nielsen.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?  More

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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Vanderpump Rules’ and the Grammys

    The Bravo hit returns for an 11th season, and the Recording Academy hands out awards.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Jan. 29-Feb. 4. Details and times are subject to change.MondayBAD ROMANCE 10 p.m. on ABC. In February 2023, Becky Bliefnick was murdered in her home, and her estranged husband, Tim Bliefnick, was immediately the primary person of interest. Evidence was found in the home and online, but one of the creepiest parts of the case is an appearance Tim made on “Family Feud” years earlier. The question he was asked didn’t seem out of the ordinary: “What’s the biggest mistake you made at your wedding?” His answer: “Honey, I love you, but said, ‘I do.’” This special edition of “20/20” takes a deeper look at the case.TuesdayVANDERPUMP RULES 8 p.m. on Bravo. I will always choose “Below Deck” over anything else in the Bravo universe, but I can humbly admit that this season premiere is going to be one of the network’s biggest must-watch moments all year. After “Scandoval” set the reality-television world aflame, this is the first chance to check back in with Tom Sandoval and Ariana Madix (minus Rachel Leviss, who has left the show). With Madix headed to Broadway to play Roxie in “Chicago” and Tom Schwartz coming off a slight character-redeeming run on “Winter House,” I personally can’t wait to see more drama unfold.WednesdayNaomi Watts and Tom Hollander in “Feud.”FXFEUD 10 p.m. on FX. Ryan Murphy is back at it with another season of his anthology series. When the show debuted in 2017, it focused on a feud between the actresses Joan Crawford and Bette Davis that exploded when they filmed “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” This season, subtitled “Capote vs. the Swans,” focuses on the fallings-out that the writer Truman Capote had with New York City socialites, including Ann Woodward, Babe Paley and C.Z. Guest.ThursdayFARMER WANTS A WIFE 9 p.m. on Fox. The second season, hosted by the singer and actress Jennifer Nettles, is bringing 32 “city girls” to the countryside to meet four single farmers to hopefully create a match. Look, it’s definitely not conventional (and might not be particularly successful), but I’ve read enough novels with the “big city girl moves to a small town and falls in love” trope that I’m willing to suspend my disbelief — for now.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?  More

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    ‘True Detective’ Season 4, Episode 3 Recap: Toxicity

    Danvers and Navarro both must face some cold realities about who and what they represent in a community being poisoned by its biggest employer.Season 4, Episode 3: ‘Part 3’By Scott TobiasIn the first two episodes of “Night Country,” we knew Annie Kowtok as a dead person, a young Inupiaq activist who was stabbed 32 times and whose memory haunts the living every bit as much as the hallucinations that seem to slip in their minds during permanent darkness do.And so it’s especially powerful to meet Annie when she is associated with life, thanks to a stealthily placed flashback in the cold open in which she is helping an expectant mother through a water birth. Navarro has turned up to arrest her in connection with trespassing and destruction of private property at the mine, but the officer is literally disarmed by the scene she witnesses and is enlisted to help with: Annie is defiant about bringing an Inupiaq baby, the next generation, into the world.In perhaps the season’s strongest hour to date, the episode moves the procedural elements forward as expected, but the one common thread is the tug Annie and the town’s Indigenous population has on the consciences of our two lead characters. It starts with that flashback, in which Navarro has been put in the awkward spot of enforcing the law on the mine’s behalf, only to be put in a situation where she is disrupting an Inupiaq birth. For as much tension as we’ve witnessed in Danvers’s relationship with Ennis’s Native population, the show reminds us that Navarro, too, has complicated feelings about her place in the community. An Inupiaq herself, she has been hiding away from her own identity. Her sister has the kakiniit tattoo on her chin. Navarro, conspicuously, does not.To be a police officer in Ennis is often to represent the interests of the town’s biggest employer. Navarro and Danvers are not in the business of administering environmental justice or blowing the whistle on polluted groundwater. If there is tension around the mine, they’re the ones squelching protests or arresting activists like Annie for breaking the law. That, inevitably, puts them on one side of a stark racial line.The discomfort for Navarro is more acute, given her roots, but there is a lot of evidence in this episode that Danvers has been fighting her own conscience — and is perhaps starting to lose the battle. She rages at Leah to wipe the temporary tattoo marks off her face, perhaps as a protective instinct, but they’re on Annie’s face, too, and the weight of it seems to stir her sympathies.Meanwhile, the law is being administered much less delicately. It is a sharp narrative strategy to cut from the flashback with Navarro and Annie to a scene in which Hank is rounding up a civilian army to “search” for Raymond Clark, the missing scientist who had a secret affair with Annie. The term “search” is in scare quotes because Hank seems to have deliberately gathered a collection of armed-to-the-teeth yokels for a bounty hunt. He tells them that Clark is armed and dangerous and sends them on their way. When Navarro turns up to remind Hank that they want Clark alive, he replies, “Do we?”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?  More

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    ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ Review: Romance on the Rocks

    Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James are superb as a midcentury-modern couple free-falling into addiction in Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel’s musical.Seldom have a pair of alcoholics looked as glamorous as they do in Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel’s bruised romance of a Broadway musical, “Days of Wine and Roses,” starring Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James as midcentury-modern Manhattan lovers free-falling all the way to hell, drinks in hand.What’s astonishing about this show, though — aside from the central performances, which are superb, and Guettel’s anxious, spiky, sumptuous score, which grabs hold of us and doesn’t let go — is the way its devastating chic snuggles right up to catastrophic self-destruction.For all the glossy come-hither of Michael Greif’s tone-perfect production, which opened on Sunday night at Studio 54, not for an instant does it glamorize the boozing itself. And yet we can sense the allure: how alcohol might become the one true thing that matters, smoldering wreckage be damned.Adapted from JP Miller’s recovery-evangelizing 1958 teleplay and 1962 film of the same name, this “Days of Wine and Roses” is like a jazz opera melded seamlessly with a play. Deeper, wiser and warmer than it was in its premiere at Off Broadway’s Atlantic Theater Company last year, it is no longer so wary of melodrama that it’s afraid of feeling, too. Gone is the emotional aridity that kept the story at a strange remove.Granted, the opening scene is still perplexing, too sparely written and staged to situate the audience properly, or let us grasp the skin-crawling 1950s creepiness of what James’s Joe Clay is up to on a yacht in the East River. A public relations guy, Joe has arranged a corporate party onboard, and procured female guests for the pleasure of the male executives.So there is a certain rancidness to his mistaking O’Hara’s Kirsten Arnesen — the impeccable secretary to the boss at the firm where they both work — for one of the women in his Rolodex. Not exactly a meet-cute, even if she does set him straight, puncturing his condescension with a tight, nice-girl smile pasted to her face.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?  More

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    Obie Awards, Sans Ceremony, Honor ‘Dark Disabled Stories’

    There was no formal celebration for the newest honorees. Instead, the American Theater Wing presented cash grants to sustain their work.The Obie Awards, a scrappy but venerable annual competition honoring the best theater staged Off and Off Off Broadway, has chosen “Dark Disabled Stories,” Ryan J. Haddad’s autobiographical work inspired by his experiences navigating the city with cerebral palsy, as the best new American play.The prize was announced on Saturday night, both by news release and on Spectrum News NY1, as the American Theater Wing, which presents the Obies, decided to forgo a costly ceremony — in most nonpandemic years, the Obies have been handed out at a boozy and often boisterous party — and instead to give grants of $1,000 to $5,000 directly to the winning artists and arts institutions.“These are unprecedented times, and it’s extremely challenging for theater right now, so we absolutely want to celebrate the achievements of Off and Off Off Broadway, but in doing so we want to have the most impact by putting money directly in the pockets of the artists and the companies making the work,” said Heather A. Hitchens, the Wing’s president and chief executive. “Everybody likes a party, and maybe some day it will make sense to do that again, but we’re not made of money — we’re a nonprofit, so how can we use our resources to be the greatest force for good right now?”The Obies, created by The Village Voice in the mid 1950s, have been in flux for years as The Voice foundered and the pandemic battered the theater industry. The Wing, with a board led by artists, has kept the Obies afloat with a combination of in-person and streaming ceremonies.The Obies proudly have no defined categories or set number of winners — a panel of judges, this year led by the director David Mendizábal and the critic Melissa Rose Bernardo, determines how to structure the honors each season. The awards announced this weekend were for shows that opened Off or Off Off Broadway between Sept. 1, 2022, and Aug. 31, 2023.The judges gave two awards for playwriting. One went to Hansol Jung for “Wolf Play,” about a twice-abandoned adopted boy who reacts to his trauma by behaving like a wolf and is depicted by a puppet; the play was staged first at Soho Rep and then at MCC Theater, in collaboration with Ma-Yi Theater Company. The other playwriting award went to Bruce Norris for “Downstate,” about a group home for men who are registered sex offenders; that play was staged at Playwrights Horizons in a production developed by Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago and the National Theater in London.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?  More

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    5 Podcasts for Hollywood’s Awards Season

    As Oscars night approaches, these shows offer expert analysis and predictions, insight into behind-the-scenes machinations and reflections on front-runners of the past.The 2024 awards season has felt unusually hectic so far, thanks to the strike-delayed Emmy Awards shifting from their usual fall airdate to January. To help make sense of it all — and unpack the discombobulated state of Hollywood now — these five podcasts offer a mixture of expert analysis and predictions for the major ceremonies, original reporting on the industry trends and behind-the-scenes machinations that influence voting, and reflections on Oscar front-runners of the past that probably shouldn’t have been.‘Little Gold Men’This Vanity Fair series debuted in 2015, which means it’s been on hand to chronicle some of the weirdest moments in Academy history, like the 2017 Best Picture flub (when “La La Land” was mistakenly announced as the winner instead of “Moonlight”), 2021’s muted Covid-era ceremony held in a cavernous Los Angeles train station, and the slap heard around the world in 2022. But even when there’s nothing quite so unusual going on, the analysis here always makes awards season more interesting. Hosted by the Vanity Fair journalists Michael Hogan, Katey Rich, Richard Lawson and Joanna Robinson, the conversation is always exhaustive and packed with expertise, exploring not just the contenders for Hollywood’s top prizes, but also the campaigning and strategizing that shape the race. Since many Oscar journeys begin at film festivals such as Sundance, Cannes, Venice and Toronto, there’s no shortage of news and releases to cover year round, not to mention interviews; recent guests have included Andrew Scott (“All of Us Strangers”), Emma Stone (“Poor Things”) and Greta Lee (“Past Lives”).Starter episode: “Oscar Voters, Start Your Engines”‘This Had Oscar Buzz’There’s a peculiar category of film that debuts with great fanfare, attracts plenty of awards buzz, and then fades from the cultural consciousness without a trace (and no awards). Not all of the films discussed on “This Had Oscar Buzz” fall into that bracket, but, as the title suggests, the focus is on the movies that had that buzzy aura around them, at least for a while. An early episode about “Cake,” a 2014 movie starring Jennifer Aniston as a woman living with chronic pain, exemplifies what works so well about this format — Aniston was lauded for her playing-against-type performance and campaigned intensely during that awards season, but was famously snubbed on Oscar nomination morning. The hosts, Joe Reid and Chris Feil, don’t belittle either the performance or the hustle, but rather use the hype around “Cake” as a jumping-off point to discuss Aniston’s career and celebrity more broadly, alongside the ins and outs of how exactly buzz gets built in the first place.Starter episode: “Alexander (With David Sims)”‘The Town With Matthew Belloni’Though not a traditional awards season podcast with predictions or play-by-play recaps, “The Town” is an invaluable resource for anyone hoping to understand the upheaval in Hollywood. Delivered in snappy episodes that clock in around 30 minutes, Matthew Belloni, a former editor of The Hollywood Reporter and a founding partner of the digital media company Puck, shares insights and exclusive reporting on the industry, whether the issue is last year’s monthslong writers’ and actors’ strikes, Disney’s succession woes or the cost-of-streaming crisis. In a recent episode, Belloni and Brooks Barnes, a Hollywood correspondent for The New York Times, went deep on the current state of the “unkillable” Golden Globes, which returned last year after a hiatus sparked by controversy surrounding its now-defunct unorthodox voting body, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Traditionally the first awards show on the calendar — and the most chaotic — the Globes have proved to have more staying power than many predicted, and this analysis is a good resource for anybody wondering why.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?  More

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    ‘S.N.L.’ Wonders What Men Will Do After Football Season Ends

    Dakota Johnson hosted and Justin Timberlake was the musical guest in an episode that brought back some old favorites and also offered a few surprises.The Super Bowl may still be two weeks away, but as far as “Saturday Night Live” is concerned, this is your last weekend to experience authentic N.F.L. football.This latest “S.N.L.” broadcast, hosted by Dakota Johnson and featuring the musical guest Justin Timberlake, kicked off with a parody of CBS’s coverage of the A.F.C. championship game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Baltimore Ravens, with Andrew Dismukes and James Austin Johnson playing the anchors Tony Romo and Jim Nantz.Dismukes began with some enthusiasm for the game: “We’ve got two generational talents at quarterback,” he said. “Two elite defenses. I expect this to be an all-out battle for the next three hours.” Then a hint of emotion crept in as he added, “And after that, it’s all over.”“All over?” Johnson asked.“Football,” Dismukes said. “After today it’s just — it’s done.”Yes, there’s the Super Bowl, but, as Dismukes said: “That’s not real football. The Super Bowl is for commercials and Usher and people who never watch football asking how many points a touchdown is worth. Today is the last real football day for just us guys.”The rest of the CBS broadcast team tried to make their peace with this eventuality. “What are men supposed to do on Sundays now?” asked Mikey Day, who was playing the analyst Bill Cowher. “Just go to their friends’ houses for no reason?”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?  More