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    ‘The Buccaneers’ Arrives With More Arrivistes

    This Apple TV+ drama joins HBO’s “The Gilded Age,” back for its second season, in portraying the late 19th-century collision of old money and new.A newly moneyed woman in Gilded Age New York is desperate to gain the acceptance of the aristocracy. So she schemes to get the ultimate symbol of old money approval: a box at the exclusive Academy of Music. When she is denied, she helps spearhead the construction of a new see-and-be-seen cultural playground, the Metropolitan Opera House. Take that, aristocracy.Welcome to the second season of HBO’s opulent drama “The Gilded Age,” a series laden with emblematic showdowns between the gaudy arrivistes and the idle drawing-room class. By chance, “The Gilded Age,” which returned last week, is back just ahead of “The Buccaneers,” a new series on Apple TV+ that is set amid the same late 19th-century collision of old money and new, robber barons and debutante balls, gold diggers and status obsession.“The Buccaneers,” which premieres Wednesday, sends its wealthy but not sufficiently connected young ladies, their frocks and their deeply insecure parents all the way to London, skipping the middleman of old American money and going right to the source in search of marriageable dukes and lords. As you might imagine, culture clashes and broken hearts ensue.Donna Murphy as Mrs. Astor, left, and Carrie Coon as Bertha Russell, based on real women like Alva Vanderbilt, in “The Gilded Age.”Barbara Nitke/HBOTV’s Gilded Age dramas are somehow both alluring and repellent. It’s fun to watch ugly Americans make like combative peacocks. And the social dynamics seem to resonate in the 21st century, even if the details feel exotic and unattainable.“Hierarchy of classes is something that people seem to be more preoccupied with right now than at other times in the past,” said Esther Crain, the author of the lavishly illustrated “The Gilded Age in New York” and creator of the historical website Ephemeral New York, in a phone interview. “There’s this vast gulf between the very rich and everyone else, with a vanishing middle class. This really echoes the Gilded Age.”The “Gilded Age” opera house showdown echoes a pitched battle from the end of Season 1, in which Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon), the Academy of Music snub victim, hosts a buzzy ball at her palatial home for her teen daughter. She invites her daughter’s friend, whose mother, Mrs. Astor (Donna Murphy), is the unofficial gatekeeper of the old-money elite. But then the gatekeeper snubs the social climber, who subsequently disinvites the gatekeeper’s daughter. The chess game is on, and the children are the pawns.In her book, Crain details the historical events behind both the music hall duel and the dance dust-up. In real life, it was Alva Vanderbilt who hosted a “fancy dress” masquerade ball in 1883, and who snubbed Mrs. Astor’s daughter, Caroline, prompting Mrs. Astor to show contrition to her nouveau riche rival. The showdown was seen as a major victory for new money over old.In actual late 19th-century New York, Alva Vanderbilt was a new-money upstart.Library of CongressCaroline Schermerhorn Astor represented the old guard of New York society.Wikimedia CommonsThe new rich, based in the Fifth Avenue mansions of Manhattan, were largely a product of the Civil War and new fortunes made in the railroad, copper, steel and other industries. (Bertha’s husband, George Russell, played by Morgan Spector, is a railroad tycoon who finds himself dealing with labor issues in Season 2.)Unlike the old-money aristocracy who traced their wealth to their European ancestors, the new rich thrived in industry and flaunted their wealth, much to the old rich’s disgust and chagrin.“They thought, ‘We’re Americans, we’re the new guys, we’ve got something new to sell in this world, and we have a place here,’” said the “Gilded Age” creator Julian Fellowes in a video interview from his home in London. “For me, the 1870s and 1880s was when modern America found itself. The new people building their palaces up and down Fifth Avenue were doing it the American way. This was an American culture — a new way of being rich, a new way of being successful.”Of course, the new rich could also be reckless and dangerous. In Season 1 of “The Gilded Age,” George, who Fellowes modeled on the railroad magnate Jay Gould, drives a corrupt alderman to suicide. He lives not just to defeat his opponents, but to crush them and their families. For him and his ilk, capitalism is a blood sport.Alisha Boe and Josh Dylan in “The Buccaneers,” inspired by real-life “dollar princesses” who married into titled European families.Apple TV+The games are a little different (if only slightly less brutal) in “The Buccaneers,” which is based on an unfinished novel by Edith Wharton. Looked down upon by the New York aristocracy and seeking suitable husbands, five young nouveau riche women high-tail it to London, where they and their financial resources are coveted by title-rich but cash-poor families. Nan (Kristine Froseth) is courted by a sensitive duke. Conchita (Alisha Boe) has a frisky marriage with a lord, whose parents are monstrous, anti-American snobs. All have romantic escapades that are, in many ways, brazenly transactional.“The girls’ mothers are coming over to London in order to effectively sell their girls into the aristocracy,” Katherine Jakeways, the series’s creator, said in a video interview from her London home. “And the aristocracy are welcoming them with open arms because they’ve got roofs to mend.”Added Beth Willis, an executive producer, from her home in Scotland: “How lonely that would be for so many of them. In America they might speak up a bit more at the dining table. They sometimes had their own money. And to come over to England and find these freezing cold houses with roofs literally falling in and being treated like a cash point must have just been awful.”Here, too, there is historical precedent. In one example, the socialite Consuelo Vanderbilt, of the shipping-and-railroad Vanderbilt family, married the ninth Duke of Marlborough, becoming perhaps the best known of what were called the “dollar princesses.”“Some of these marriages were arranged and didn’t end happily, but others did end happily,” said Hannah Greig, a historical consultant for “The Buccaneers.” “Sometimes the origins of the marriage were forgotten, and it became a love story. History offers lots of examples that you can draw on, for all of the different experiences that we see in ‘The Buccaneers.’”Both series include characters representative of people who existed in Gilded Age society, even if they were under-acknowledged at the time. In “The Buccaneers,” Mabel (Josie Totah) is torn between a marriage of convenience, to a man, and a romance of passion, with her friend Conchita’s new sister-in-law (Mia Threapleton). In “The Gilded Age,” the old-money Oscar Van Rhijn (Blake Ritson) carries on a passionate affair with John Adams, a scion of the presidential dynasty, all the while plotting his own marriage of convenience (and wealth) with the Russells’ debutante daughter, Gladys (Taissa Farmiga). (In a refreshing twist, the most avid gold diggers in both series are men.)Denée Benton stars in “The Gilded Age” as a member of New York’s Black elite, working with the journalist T. Thomas Fortune, played by Sullivan Jones.Barbara Nitke/HBOOne of the central characters in “The Gilded Age” is Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), a representative of 19th-century New York’s Black elite. At odds with her tradition-minded druggist father, Peggy goes to work for the real-life pioneering Black journalist T. Thomas Fortune (Sullivan Jones) and blazes her own trail, even as she faces down racism in her everyday life.Peggy’s story line gives the series a chance to look at issues of inequality that festered beneath the surface of the Gilded Age.“This season especially we see questions about the direction of Black America,” said Erica Dunbar, a Rutgers University history professor and “Gilded Age” historical consultant, in a video interview. “It’s a theme that still exists. What is the best way to move forward for a group of people who have already been marginalized or oppressed for hundreds of years at this point?”It all unfolds against a bloodless but volatile civil war between those who have been rich a long time and their freshly minted competition. The aristocracy’s view of the barbarians at the gate can be summed up by Agnes Van Rhijn (Christine Baranski), who has no interest in letting the newbies crash the party: “You shut the door, they come in the window.”But this is a fight Agnes won’t win. She can lock her windows, but the Metropolitan Opera House is coming soon. Despite the pitched battles of yore, if there’s one thing we’ve learned since it’s that money is money. And those who have the most generally have the upper hand, no matter the source of their riches. More

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    ‘The OA’ Creators Are Back With a Murder Mystery

    “A Murder at the End of the World” resembles other luxe murder shows. But the mark of the creators, Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, is clear in its idiosyncratic tone and themes.The filmmakers Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij have what they call a “garden.” It’s not an actual garden, however. It is what Batmanglij described in a recent interview as a “garden of ideas that exists between us.”“Some of those seedlings we’ve been cultivating for years, since our early days of sitting on skateboards in one of our bedrooms in Silver Lake and talking to each other,” he said last month, sharing a booth with Marling in the lobby of the Bowery Hotel. “We were ready to cut one of those blooms and plant it.”The latest product of that garden is their new series, “A Murder at the End of the World,” premiering with two installments Nov. 14 on FX on Hulu. The seven-episode show has a conventional, almost trendy hook: It is a murder mystery set at a remote Icelandic luxury retreat for some of the world’s most influential people, details reminiscent of buzzy recent films and shows like “Glass Onion” and “The White Lotus.” But with its time-jumping structure, uniquely eerie tone and warnings about artificial intelligence and climate change, it is also unmistakably the work of the idiosyncratic creators behind “The OA,” “Sound of My Voice” and “The East.”However even they were surprised by the protagonist they ended up with, a Gen-Z amateur detective named Darby Hart, played by Emma Corrin (“The Crown”). A true-crime author who grew up trying to crack cold cases on internet forums, Darby and her sleuth skills are tested when a guest ends up dead at a gathering hosted by a tech billionaire (Clive Owen) and his former coder wife (Marling), where a remarkably advanced A.I. named Ray (Edoardo Ballerini) serves as an assistant to the guests.“All of a sudden this outlier poppy in the corner, Darby, showed up, and said, ‘I represent the times,’” Batmanglij said.In “A Murder at the End of the World,” Emma Corrin plays a young true-crime author trying to solve a murder. (With Harris Dickinson.)Chris Saunders/FXMarling, 41, and Batmanglij, 42, talk in metaphors and big ideas. This makes sense if you’ve seen their body of work, which includes surreal sagas about grand topics, among them the afterlife and the end of the world, often featuring characters who consider themselves soothsayers.They have been planting their seeds for decades. They met as students at Georgetown in 2001 and started collaborating a couple of years later when Batmanglij invited Marling, then a summer analyst at Goldman Sachs, to participate in a 48-hour film festival, making a short film over the course of one weekend.The experience convinced Marling, the class valedictorian who was a double major in economics and art (with a focus on photography), to leave her business ambitions behind. “We had found this profound space together,” she said. “We basically have been telling stories in one way or another much in that fashion ever since.”Their first co-written feature, “Sound of My Voice,” was directed by Batmanglij and featured Marling, her long blond hair giving her an ethereal look, as a mysterious cult leader who claims to be from the future. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011 alongside “Another Earth,” which Marling also starred in and co-wrote with another Georgetown friend of theirs, Mike Cahill. Both films sold and Marling was the de facto star of that year’s festival. But after their Sundance success and despite bigger offers from Hollywood, she and her cohorts opted to recommit to their indie mission.“We had this instinct of not doing those things, like not playing the girlfriend of the movie star in this sort of empty action film,” Marling said. “And to instead be like, ‘No, let’s keep telling our stories. Let’s keep getting better at telling them.’”Marling and Batmanglij followed up “Sound of My Voice” with “The East,” starring Marling and Alexander Skarsgard, about a woman who goes undercover with an anarchist group committing acts of eco-terrorism.“The OA” only lasted two seasons on Netflix but it built a devoted following.JoJo Whilden/NetflixTheir biggest platform yet came in 2016 when their series “The OA” debuted on Netflix. Marling played a formerly blind woman who arrives home, after a mysterious disappearance, having regained her sight and calling herself “original angel.” She tells the story of her life — which involves Russian aristocracy and a mad scientist experimenting on people with near death experiences — to a group of high schoolers and a teacher, showing them “movements” that can supposedly help them jump dimensions. In the even more ambitious second season, which debuted in 2019, there were plot lines about tree internet and a mind-reading octopus.Critics found the series fascinating and flawed, but it had a passionate following. When Netflix canceled the show after the second season, fans started a hashtag campaign and one even staged a hunger strike outside Netflix headquarters in Los Angeles.“It had scope and ambition and was, by design, not the lowest-budget project around,” said Cindy Holland, who was the streamer’s vice president of original content at the time. “It became clear that it was going to be unsustainable as an ongoing project in that form at Netflix at the time, and it was a fairly sad experience for all of us, including the audience.”Marling said she sees the unexpected end of the series now as almost prophetic. “‘The OA’’s cancellation was a harbinger for a transformation for something that was afoot in the industry,” she said.“The space had been disrupted, a bunch of creativity and market energy had rushed into that space,” she continued. “But now it was going to calcify or solidify into something that in many ways was a broken business model and much worse than what had been before.”“We make the world so real between ourselves at first, that it’s literally like a third place that exists,” Marling said of how she and Batmanglij develop their ideas.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesShe and Batmanglij are still convinced they will finish the story of “The OA” at some point, in some form, but they decided to move on to what would become “A Murder at the End of the World.” The pair wrote the episodes — some together, some separately, some with other writers — and took turns directing. The show’s themes seemed to get only more relevant as they were making it.“It was really eerie, actually, to see with this one the number of things that when we had set out to write it four years ago it was science fiction,” Marling said. “When we talked about any of this stuff with people, we had to explain what is a deep fake, what is an A.I. assistant, what’s a large language model — how does that work? And then by the time we were editing it, to see everything come to pass.”In an interview, John Landgraf, the chairman of FX networks, called the show a “Russian nesting doll of an idea” — a comparison Netflix also used regarding “The OA.”“There was a very rigorous depiction of technology and the physical world,” he said, explaining that the concept appealed to him because it promised a “very grounded, well-researched depiction that nevertheless had a very big set of abstract and imagistic and emotional ideas attached to it.”While fear of the apocalypse hangs over much of the Marling and Batmanglij canon, including “A Murder at the End of the World,” their work rarely feels dystopian.There is also a twinkly-eyed belief in the good of humanity lurking underneath the techno-terrors, and the need to pay attention to feeling over just data.“A Murder at the End of the World” takes place largely at a tech mogul’s remote Iceland gathering for influential people.Chris Saunders/FX“They want to be putting positive ideas out into the world,” said Alex DiGerlando, the series’s production designer and longtime collaborator. He said this optimism manifests in various ways on set — any time they are met with a potentially disheartening scenario, he said, they find a way to see the bright side.Among the roadblocks they hit while filming “A Murder at the End of the World” were supply shortages, Covid outbreaks and disruptive storms. Marling got hypothermia during their monthlong shoot in Iceland. (The hotel’s interiors were built on a soundstage in New Jersey.)“I was kind of blown away, to be honest, by how indefatigable they were,” Landgraf said. “They just literally did not, would not quit on anything until it was the very, very best they could possibly make it.”Marling said that the intensity of her and Batmanglij’s commitment takes root even before they share their ideas with anyone else.“We make the world so real between ourselves at first, that it’s literally like a third place that exists,” she said. “It has a floor and a door, and we can open the door and invite people in.”Floors, doors, gardens — Marling and Batmanglij might mix metaphors, but what’s clear is that they see their stories as tangible objects that they nurture together with a willingness to embrace the unexpected.“We don’t have a favorite plant or tree or seed or sapling in the garden,” Batmanglij said. “We treat them all with so much love because sometimes it’s the one that you don’t water at all that starts blooming.” More

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    Jimmy Fallon Pokes Fun at the Republican Debate’s Lackluster Lineup

    Fallon joked that “tomorrow at 9 p.m., CBS has ‘The Amazing Race,’ and NBC has the opposite.”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 Not-So-Amazing RaceThe third Republican presidential debate will air on NBC on Wednesday night, live from Miami.Jimmy Fallon joked that tomorrow at 9 p.m., “The Amazing Race” will play on CBS while “NBC has the opposite.”“Five nonviable candidates will assemble onstage for no good reason at all — none of them will be president.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Tim Scott and Ron DeSantis. What a lineup. It’s like if all the Avengers were Hawkeye.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Most of the pressure is on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who will be in front of a home crowd and is reportedly determined to finally break away from the pack. In fact, sources inside his camp say he’s planning to wear his extra-tall Gene Simmons KISS boots.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“The debate is at Miami-Dade County Center for the Performing Arts. Yep, for performing arts, because pretending you have a shot when you’re polling at 1 percent, well, that’s acting.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Bye-Bye, WeWork Edition)“The co-working space company WeWork filed yesterday for bankruptcy. Wait a minute — again? You already went out of business. I watched a whole mini-series about how you went out of business. And you were still in business? Oh, my God, Trump’s going to win again, isn’t he?” — SETH MEYERS“WeWork went from a $47 billion company to bankruptcy. Somewhere out there, Elon Musk is going, ‘Ooh, challenge accepted!’” — SARAH SILVERMAN“You know what? Maybe this is an opportunity. America has a homelessness crisis, and WeWork has all of the empty building space. You see where I’m going with this, right? We need to give the WeWork guy another $100 billion to solve homelessness.” — SARAH SILVERMANThe Bits Worth WatchingJimmy Kimmel took audience questions for People’s Sexiest Man Alive for 2023 then unveiled him on Tuesday’s show.What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightThe comedian Leslie Jones will sit down with her friend Seth Meyers on Wednesday’s “Late Night.”Also, Check This OutSyreeta Singleton, the showrunner for “Rap Sh!t.” “The music industry is at a really interesting place right now because it really does feel like it’s social-media driven,” Singleton said, “and you got to fake it ’til you make it.”Phylicia J.L. Munn for The New York TimesThe showrunner Syreeta Singleton took her “Rap Sh!t” stars on the road for the Max comedy’s second season, premiering Thursday. More

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    ‘Snatch Adams’ Review: Gross-Out Humor for Not-So-Easily-Shocked Liberals

    Becca Blackwell and Amanda Duarte’s amorphous variety show aims to be a queer spectacle but is mostly improv strung together with non sequiturs.The usually unassuming Soho Rep entrance is now flanked by giant labia glinting with gold-and-fuchsia sequins. Beyond them, a flamingo-pink-hued tunnel leads to the intimate stage, where a colossal pair of brassy legs are splayed as if for a gynecological exam in an amusement park fun house.Much of what occurs between them during “Snatch Adams & Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month,” an amorphous, slap-and-tickle variety show, seems designed to shock audiences while gingerly reinforcing their presumed liberal politics. Once it quickly achieves both, “Snatch Adams” continues to push its crotch-in-your-face humor further over the top, but to diminishing returns.The action onstage tests the limits of what can be described in print. So here is my attempt at a tame sampling.The creator and performer Becca Blackwell (“Is This a Room?”), dressed for the role of Snatch in a towering vagina costume with patches of flesh-colored felt and feathers, asks an audience volunteer to locate the clitoris, represented on Blackwell’s face by a squeaky red clown nose (the crafty and audacious production design is by Greg Corbino). Amanda Duarte, who co-stars as Tainty, wears a puckered-anus headpiece and balloon-size testicles that swing from her shoulders. The getup’s missing member, she explains, was a casualty of #MeToo.Looking like doctor’s office diagrams come to life to a patient on LSD, the performers retreat behind a pair of pink desks, mics in hand, and proceed to banter. Duarte, who also controls the sound effects (think air horns and crickets), appears to follow a run of show on a laptop. But after the initial sight gags and a steady flow of low-hanging puns, “Snatch Adams,” presented in association with the Bushwick Starr, consists mostly of improv strung together with non sequiturs.Duarte, the creator of a recurring comedy night for discarded jokes, plays a gruff and gleefully vulgar captain to Blackwell’s gentle and almost childlike jester, who at times seems adrift. (“What do we do now?” Blackwell repeats sincerely between several bits. In an underdeveloped narrative frame, Snatch is newly unemployed from Planned Parenthood.) They are joined at intervals by Amando Houser and Becky Hermenze, who gamely act out parody commercials, or “capitalism breaks,” for products like poppers and period cups.At intervals in the production, parody commercials for products like poppers and period cups are gamely acted out.Julieta CervantesDirected by Jess Barbagallo, who also developed the show with Corbino, “Snatch Adams” has the freewheeling style of late-night sketch comedy and the queer, campy aesthetic of downtown avant-garde theater, where Blackwell has for years worked to expand understanding of gender diversity. But this is not a show that bristles with punk resistance, alongside its well-justified warning about the use of bodily secretions. For much of their 90 minutes onstage, Blackwell and Duarte simply seem to be riffing off each other while daring the audience to be grossed out. But destigmatizing genitals and menstruation is a low bar, especially for this crowd.Attempts to address fraught issues head-on are uneasy and fall flat. In one early segment, Blackwell reads sobering headlines about the daily challenges facing women and L.G.B.T.Q. people on a local level. Duarte punctuates each one with a fart sound. (Cue the crickets.)At each performance, interviews with a surprise guest promise to be a wild card. Bridget Everett’s entrance on the night I attended was like a blast of pure oxygen: finally a comedian who wasn’t overcommitted to a bit. Everett talked frankly about grief and her body in a way that cut deeper than anything that had come before.It’s when Blackwell steps out of the act at the end, and tries to point out the arbitrary boundaries that society erects between us, that “Snatch Adams” finally seems to have something to say. If only it had been more explicit earlier.Snatch Adams & Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the MonthThrough Dec. 3 at Soho Rep, Manhattan; sohorep.org. Running time: about 1 hour 30 minutes, depending on the special guest. More

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    Is Homer Simpson a Good Dad Now?

    In a recent episode of “The Simpsons,” Homer suggested he would abandon one of his best-known bits: throttling his son. It is the latest example of the show tailoring itself to evolving tastes.Homer Simpson may be maturing, or so he says.The character, voiced by Dan Castellaneta, hinted that he would no longer choke his son, Bart, appearing to acknowledge that one of the oldest recurring bits on “The Simpsons” was a clear form of animated child abuse that was played for laughs.In the third episode of the current season, the show’s 35th, titled “McMansion & Wife,” Homer meets a neighbor who compliments the grip on his handshake.“See Marge? Strangling the boy has paid off,” Homer says to his wife in the episode, which aired on Oct. 22. “Just kidding. I don’t do that anymore. Times have changed.”It was not clear whether this signaled a lasting shift in the show, which was renewed for a 36th season this year. A spokesman for Fox, the network that has long aired “The Simpsons,” declined to comment.“The Simpsons,” created by Matt Groening, has made moves in recent years to update its humor to fit with evolving standards. In 2020, Hank Azaria said he would no longer voice the character of Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, an Indian convenience store owner who became known for his catchphrase, “Thank you! Come again.”Apu had long been a sore point among viewers of Indian descent, many of whom viewed the character, which Azaria had voiced since 1990, as nothing more than a racist caricature. Azaria has said the voice was inspired by South Asian clerks he heard growing up in New York, as well as Peter Sellers in the 1968 film “The Party.”The discussion took off in the public sphere after the release of the 2017 documentary “The Problem With Apu,” in which the comedian Hari Kondabolu spoke to other Indian American actors and performers who said the character had become emblematic of the marginalization they faced in the entertainment industry.But there isn’t a consensus among people of South Asian descent, as evidenced by the Indian American comedian Akaash Singh, who argued in a 2022 YouTube special titled “Bring Back Apu” that the character was a positive portrayal of an immigrant story. Apu has not been seen since Season 33.The “Simpsons” creative team responded to Kondabolu’s documentary through the show, then in its 29th season, in a 2018 episode titled “No Good Read Goes Unpunished.” In the episode, Lisa Simpson breaks the fourth wall and says: “Something that started decades ago and was applauded and inoffensive is now politically incorrect. What can you do?”The shot immediately pans to a framed picture of Apu. Marge chimes in and says, “Some things will be dealt with at a later date,” to which Lisa replies, “If at all.”The show has long been self-referential, and has been so with the choking bit on several occasions. One episode — “Love Is a Many Strangled Thing,” from Season 22 — examines the roots of Homer’s choking impulses, with the help of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (as himself) and Paul Rudd (as a therapist). A newly empathetic Homer swears to never choke Bart again, which then sends Bart on a spree of bad behavior, as he is no longer afraid of his father’s rage.The Season 11 finale, titled “Behind the Laughter,” was a parody of the VH1 documentary series “Behind the Music.” After Homer is shown choking Bart, he says, “And that horrible act of child abuse became one of our beloved running gags!” More

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    Late Night Riffs on Trump Beating Biden in Early Key Polls

    “Polling a year ahead of an election is always super-accurate — and if you don’t believe me, just ask President Hillary Clinton,” Jimmy Kimmel said.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 Emperor’s New (Old) ClothesWith the election a year away, a new poll found President Biden trailing Donald Trump in five of six swing states.Jimmy Kimmel reminded viewers that “polling a year ahead of an election is always super-accurate — and if you don’t believe me, just ask President Hillary Clinton.”“Don’t panic — it’s still too early to say Biden will definitely lose. He could absolutely die in his sleep instead.” — SARAH SILVERMAN, guest host of “The Daily Show”“This is really scary for liberals. And I mean actually scary, not like they-took-‘Hamilton’-off-Disney-Plus scary.” — SARAH SILVERMAN“Young voters are said to be disenchanted with Biden’s positions on climate change and Palestinian rights, and so they’re leaning towards a guy who believes in neither of those things at all.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It’s like after ‘The Return of the Jedi,’ the people in the galaxy were like, ‘You know, this Princess Leia is kind of a dud — why don’t we give the Emperor another shot?’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“You know what, I’m going to be honest: I like a scary poll number — puts a little fire under your tuchus. This is a wake-up call to Joe Biden. I mean, no, really: Joe, wake up!” — SARAH SILVERMAN“A lot of it is about age. Everyone says Biden’s old — he’s old. Which, yeah, he is old, but I want to remind you: Biden’s 80, Trump is 77. They’re basically — this isn’t a choice between some old codger and a young up-and-comer. This is a choice between Mr. Burns and Mr. Magoo.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“And what makes these poll numbers particularly shocking is that the man Biden is losing to is currently on trial in every jurisdiction in America.” — SARAH SILVERMANThe Punchiest Punchlines (Trump on Trial Edition)“Former President Trump took the witness stand today in his civil fraud trial. He swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and then everyone just laughed and laughed.” — SETH MEYERS“And, by the way, if I had Donald Trump under oath, I wouldn’t be wasting time asking about financial statements. This is my chance to find out the answers to every question I’ve had about him ever. Is there a Melania clone? Is there a pee tape? If you had to do a ‘Sophie’s Choice’ with one of your adult sons, would it be both?” — SARAH SILVERMAN“It was nuts. Trump was yelling, the judge was annoyed, and the lawyers were trying to keep peace. The courtroom basically turned into everyone’s Thanksgiving.” — JIMMY FALLON“Since whatever he’s doing is working, Trump plans to commit at least 90 more felonies.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingThe global pop star Jung Kook of BTS sat down with Jimmy Fallon on Monday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightThe musician Jeff Tweedy, Wilco’s frontman, will promote his new book, “World Within a Song,” on Tuesday’s “Late Night.”Also, Check This OutBoy George previously starred on Broadway in the 2003 show “Taboo,” for which he wrote the music and lyrics.Simon Dawson/ReutersThe British pop star Boy George will join the cast of “Moulin Rouge!” on Broadway in 2024. More

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    After Election, Poland’s Art World Calls for Change

    The Law and Justice party tried to reshape the country via the arts. Now that it appears set to lose office, its critics are split over how to move on.Just weeks after becoming Poland’s culture minister, in 2015, Piotr Glinski began a yearslong effort to shift his country’s cultural life toward the political right.He ousted liberal museum directors, replacing them with conservatives. He created new institutions to celebrate traditional culture and nationalist heroes. And along with other lawmakers from his party, Law and Justice, he launched broadsides against movies, plays and pop stars that criticized the Roman Catholic Church or the government’s policies on issues including immigration.Many artists and cultural leaders opposed Glinski’s actions, and there were protests throughout his term, including outside Poland’s National Museum after a leader he had appointed removed sexually suggestive artworks from the walls.Pawel Sztarbowski, the deputy director at the Powszechny Theater, in Warsaw, said that Glinski had tried to “return Poland to an imaginary past.”Now, that project may be coming to an end. After opposition parties won a majority of parliamentary seats in the recent general election, Polish cultural figures are calling on what is expected to be a coalition government dominated by centrist parties to reverse Glinski’s agenda. But they are split over how to do that without entrenching political interference in the arts, which they have spent nearly a decade protesting.Jaroslaw Suchan, a former director of the Museum of Art in Lodz whose contract was not renewed by the Law and Justice government, said that the party had “treated culture as an ideological weapon.” But if a new government simply fired Glinski’s appointees, “they’d be repeating the last government’s behaviors.”“We have to think of the long term,” Suchan said, instead of seeking revenge.Protesters gathered outside Warsaw’s National Museum in 2019, after the gallery took down a sexually suggestive work.Krystian Dobuszynski/NurPhoto, via Getty ImagesMore than three weeks since the Oct. 15 election, it is still uncertain when Law and Justice will leave office. Under the country’s Constitution, President Andrzej Duda, a Law and Justice ally, has 30 days to ask a party to form a new government, though he has not done it yet. In the power vacuum, Law and Justice supporters have been trying to derail the decision by questioning the legitimacy of the vote.Observers of Polish politics expect that Donald Tusk, the leader of Civic Coalition, the largest opposition party, will eventually be asked to lead a new government in alliance with several other groups.Before the vote, Civic Coalition said in a manifesto that it would abolish the “censorship of Polish culture” and ensure that institutions that presented controversial work kept their grants. The party also promised that it would not appoint political figures to run cultural organizations, though the manifesto gave no further details. A spokesman for Civic Coalition did not respond to an interview request.Current and former museum and theater leaders said in interviews that they were hoping for more significant change.The most pressing issue, according to Piotr Rypson, the chairman of the Polish branch of the International Council of Museums, is the leadership of three important museums, which he said had been handed over to Law and Justice sympathizers: the Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art and the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, both in Warsaw, as well as the Museum of Art in Lodz.The Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, one of the museums whose directors were replaced with conservatives under Glinski.AlamyRypson said two of those leaders were “incompetent,” and that the third, the Ujazdowski Castle’s director, Piotr Bernatowicz, had displayed artworks out of step with his institution’s traditions. Bernatowicz, whose contract runs through 2027, has staged several exhibitions featuring artists whose work focuses on conservative political hobbyhorses. He did not respond to emailed interview requests.Malgorzata Omilanowska, who was culture minister in a center-right government before Law and Justice took office, said that the three appointees were a “real embarrassment” and had marginalized their museums within Poland.They had also had an impact on Poland’s reputation abroad, she added, not least because they had just helped choose the country’s representative for next year’s Venice Biennale. Their pick, announced on Oct. 31, was the painter Ignacy Czwartos, with a show focused on Polish victims of German and Russian aggression, events often highlighted by Law and Justice. One of the works he proposes showing in Venice, for example, will depict Angela Merkel and Vladimir V. Putin on either side of a burning swastika.A worker cleaning near paintings by Ignacy Czwartos at the Ujazdowski Castle in 2021. He has just been selected to represent Poland at the next Venice Biennale. Czarek Sokolowski/Associated PressIn an email exchange, Andrzej Biernacki, the current director of the Museum of Art in Lodz, said that Poland’s art world was intolerant of artists with conservative views and its institutions had favored Western artists to the detriment of the country’s own. That’s why, he said, he refocused the museum’s budget to acquire works by Polish, rather than international, artists, buying or securing as donations nearly 1,000 pieces.Janusz Janowski, the director of the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, said in an email that he has also shifted his museum’s focus toward contemporary Polish art, including through “collaborating with eminent artists, even those who might not necessarily align with the artistic ‘mainstream.’”Janowski and Biernacki both said that they would be staying in their posts, and that their contracts ran until the end of 2025. Biernacki added that if the new government tried to remove him early, it would be breaking the law.In an emailed statement, Glinski, the culture minister, said that he had simply replaced museum directors when their contracts expired. “Polish culture was dramatically underinvested” when he came to office, he said, and he had refocused the country’s institutions to foster a sense of national identity and patriotism — something “all wise and responsible states” do. Ukraine would have been quickly defeated by Russia without its “strong Ukrainian patriotism,” Glinski added.The bullish statement summed up the past eight years with pride: “The scale of our achievements — of this great institutional change in Polish culture — has no precedent either in contemporary Polish politics or in contemporary culture.”His critics see it differently, yet even among those who desire a cultural reset, there are some aspects of Glinski’s tenure that few want to lose. Suchan, the ousted Lodz museum director, said that under Glinski culture was “at the center of politics” — a position it never held under liberal governments, for whom it was often an afterthought. The culture ministry’s budget doubled during Law and Justice’s eight years in office, Suchan added, and Glinski secured funding to set up a host of new institutions — including museums, an opera company and various grant-making bodies.The new coalition government should maintain that funding, Suchan added. If nothing else, Law and Justice had showed that “culture isn’t a waste of money,” he said, adding that “it plays an important role in creating citizens, and shaping society.” That, he said, was “one lesson” everyone in Poland, liberal or conservative, could take from the past eight years. More

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    Review: In Milo Rau’s ‘120 Days of Sodom,’ Sadism Gets in the Way

    The provocations in Milo Rau’s stage adaptation, featuring actors with Down syndrome, confuse the production as it grapples with weighty issues.Is anything even shocking on a stage anymore? Simulated rape, coprophilia and torture all feature heavily in Milo Rau’s “The Last Generation, or the 120 Days of Sodom,” a theater production starring actors with Down syndrome that opened Saturday at the Théâtre de Liège, in Belgium.The show was inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s brutal 1975 film “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom,” in which a group of libertines inflicts sadistic acts on imprisoned young people, and the point, presumably, is to get a reaction from the audience. But the torments inflicted on the characters feel like an annoyance rather than a meaningful transgression in this day and age, and stand in the way of a work that actually has much more to say.Rau, a high-profile Swiss director who is now at the helm of Vienna’s prestigious Wiener Festwochen festival, is certainly adept at showing and contextualizing extreme violence. Just in recent years, he has recreated the violent murder of a gay man in Belgium (in “La Reprise — Histoire(s) du Théâtre (I)”); the collective suicide of a family of four (in “Familie”); and the massacre of farmers in Brazil (in “Antigone in the Amazon”).Yet while these stage works were based on real events, “The Last Generation” delves into fictional barbarity. Pasolini’s film was an adaptation of the Marquis de Sade’s 18th-century novel, transposed to Italy at the end of the second world war. The torture party became a metaphor for the twilight of Mussolini’s Fascist regime.In Rau’s reinterpretation, he has opted to work with Theater Stap, a Belgium-based professional company of actors with learning disabilities. (A previous iteration of “The Last Generation,” in 2017, featured Theater Hora, a similar Swiss ensemble.)Alongside 10 Stap performers, four actors without Down syndrome play their persecutors. As often with Rau, commentary is woven into recreations of scenes from “Salò.” The cast members discuss their feelings about Down syndrome, violence and Pasolini’s film. (One admits sheepishly that the movie made her laugh.)Jacqueline Bollen, Robert Hunger-Bühler and Koen de Sutter play three of the four persecutors in the production.Dominique HoucmantIn many ways, this setup lessens the effect of the violence. The Pasolini scenes only form a portion of “The Last Generation” and are often set on a small stage within the stage. At other moments, the perpetrators become outwardly protective of their castmates with Down syndrome, taking them by the arm to move around the stage, or interview them about their personal lives.Their answers, in some cases, are then stitched together with moments from Pasolini. After Gitte Wens and Gert Wellens, two Stap members, discuss their real-life relationship, an actor asks them to be intimate. Then, as they lie on a bed, they are pulled apart and shot, as happens in “Salò.”The idea of casting performers with learning disabilities as torture victims has caused debate in the Belgian media. In interviews, Stap’s members have insisted on their agency in the process of making the show and their desire to do more than feel-good productions. They are obviously gifted performers, and deserve to tell the stories they want to tell.What is less clear is whether the story of “120 Days of Sodom” really serves Rau’s purpose, and theirs. A key theme throughout is how genetic testing is leading to the slow disappearance of people with Down syndrome. According to the play, nine out of 10 couples who receive a prenatal Down diagnosis in Belgium opt for an abortion. Rau posits that as a result, the actors onstage may be part of a “last generation.”One of the non-Down actors, Koen De Sutter, is tasked with delivering a monologue inspired by the story of a man who chose, with his partner, not to have a child with the condition, and harbors some regrets.The torture portion of the evening doesn’t shed much light on this delicate issue, and it is a tricky proposition within the constraints of theater. Are scenes in which actors pretend to rape each other and eat excrement any worse than what can be found in a handful of clicks on pornography websites? What reaction are stage depictions of scalping and eye-gouging, performed using prosthetics, supposed to elicit at a time when social media is full of actual filmed violence?In an interview for the Théâtre de Liège, Rau said that his goal was to comment on societal decline today, especially the quest for physical perfection and what he called “Belgian fascism.” In “The Last Generation,” there are pointed digs at the political history of Belgium, where Rau was based from 2018 until this summer as director of the playhouse NTGent. “We were all collaborators — maybe the best in Europe,” an actor says early on about Belgians in World War II, triggering slightly shocked whispers from the audience.Yet “The Last Generation” is vague about what fascism means today, and doesn’t connect the dots between Belgian politics, “The 120 Days of Sodom” and decisions to abort fetuses with Down syndrome. Many scenes are powerful and intriguing on their own: “I hate Down’s,” one Stap actor screams repeatedly at one point, while throwing food to the floor. I would have liked to know more — ideally without having to watch a performer fake-pee on a colleague’s face.The Last Generation, or the 120 Days of SodomTouring theaters in Belgium through Dec. 21; ntgent.de. More