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    in Television

    Serena Williams Reflects on Her Life and Legacy in a New Docuseries

    “In the Arena: Serena Williams,” an eight-part documentary on ESPN+, revisits the highs and lows of the star’s career and considers her impact on tennis and beyond.In March 2001, Serena Williams, then just 19, was booed mercilessly by the crowd during the tournament final of the Indian Wells Open in California. The jeering included racist slurs, and it was arguably the most terrifying and scarring thing that ever happened to Williams during her spectacular career.In “In the Arena: Serena Williams,” an eight-part documentary streaming on ESPN+ — the final episode premieres on Wednesday — the retired star looks back on how she was shaped by the experience.“Having to go through those scathing, nasty, awful things just because of the color of my skin opened a lot of doors for other people,” she said. “I have been able to provide a platform for Black girls and Black women to be proud of who they are.”I welcomed Williams’s newfound ease in talking so explicitly about race and her continued impact on women’s sports. One of the most visible athletes of all time, she has been the subject of countless interviews and biographies during her career, but she did not often seem eager to reveal much about her private life. This has changed in the past few years with projects like the HBO documentary “Being Serena” (2018), about her pregnancy and struggle to return to tennis, and her active posting on Instagram. She was also an executive producer of “King Richard,” the 2021, Oscar-winning biopic of her father, Richard Williams.But “In the Arena” reveals still more layers of its subject. Directed by Gotham Chopra, it features candid interviews with Williams and her relatives, friends and tennis contemporaries, including her sisters, Venus Williams and Isha Price; her fellow legend Roger Federer; and the former tennis star and current television commentator Mary Joe Fernández. Serena is also an executive producer.The series is a follow-up to “Man in the Arena: Tom Brady” (2021), which was also directed by Chopra and was produced by Brady’s 199 Productions. But tennis is far more solitary than a team sport like football. Spectators’ eyes are laser-focused on the players and their bodies, a reality that was originally made more fraught because of Williams’s race and class status in the predominately white world of tennis.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please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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    in Television

    Feel Good T.V. Is Great. But Lonely T.V. Gives Us What We Need.

    Dark comedies like “The Bear” and “Sunny,” provide a contrast to contemporary comedy’s relentlessly upbeat streak.Masa is a hikikomori — a shut-in or hermit of sorts — who has been holed up in his room for years. His dirty dishes are piled into towers. His mother is so worried about him that she calls his estranged father, Hiromasa, who offers for Masa to stay in his empty cabin on Lake Biwa, northeast of Kyoto. Masa will still be alone, but at least he will get a change of scenery.In the cabin, Masa retreats even further into his sullen isolation — until he meets Sho the trashbot. Sho is short and squat and looks like a glorified garbage can on wheels, complete with a claw arm to grab trash. He has been programmed to pick it up, but he is not very good at picking it out: Sho can’t quite tell why a KitKat wrapper goes in the garbage but Masa’s electronics don’t.Trained as an engineer, Masa suddenly has a passion project on his hands: He is determined to teach Sho the difference between trash and not-trash. When Hiromasa stops by to drop off groceries, he pauses at the doorstep, pleased by the scene unfolding behind the window: A gleeful Masa fist bumps Sho’s claw arm, pouring out a shot of whiskey to celebrate Sho’s finally figuring it out. The cabin floor is strewn with litter — remnants of countless trial runs — but Masa is grinning for the first time in years.This scene, from a recent episode of Apple TV+’s “Sunny,” is a rather pointed instance of something TV has been telling us for a while now: Mess brings meaning; people forge genuine connections in the midst of disorder. A spate of recent shows — “The Bear,” “Big Mood,” “Beef” and “This Is Going to Hurt” — pairs that somewhat saccharine sentiment with black comedy. Along with slightly older series like “Fleabag” and “I May Destroy You,” these shows stand in stark contrast to their relentlessly upbeat counterparts: “Ted Lasso,” “Abbott Elementary,” “The Good Place,” “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and “Parks and Recreation,” to name a few. In a world that’s bleak enough already, feel-good, heartfelt comedy feels like more of a salve; earnest sitcoms seem to counteract the vitriol of the real world. But the dark comedies, by their very nature, feel truer to life than their more wholesome peers. Rather than building worlds from novel, even quirky premises — an American football coach dispatched to lead an English soccer team, philosophy lessons set in an off-kilter heaven, musical theater in an exuberant precinct — these new shows settle into grittier worlds. Dark comedies accomplish what classic sitcoms like “All in the Family,” “Good Times,” “Maude” and “Roc” did: They plumb humor from everyday tragicomedy.Sometimes the subject of a dramedy leads to category confusion. “The Bear” has spawned a debate over whether it is, in fact, a comedy at all, because it deals so often with such heavy themes: the punishing atmosphere of restaurant kitchens, family dysfunction, alcoholism, addiction, trauma. The dramedy follows Carmen Berzatto, known as Carmy, in the aftermath of his older brother Michael’s suicide. Carmy interrupts his prestigious culinary career to come home to Chicago and run the family’s Italian-beef sandwich shop, inherited from Michael. Under Carmy and his sous chef, Sydney, the original no-frills sandwich shop evolves into a high-end restaurant, hungry for a Michelin star. “The Bear” is at its best in episodes like the critically acclaimed “Fishes,” bursting with the sheer chaos of the Berzatto family. In the show’s third, most recent season, the episode “Ice Chips” opens on Carmy’s sister, Natalie Berzatto, who goes by Sugar, sweating on a Chicago highway, en route to the hospital. She is in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and she is going into labor. Sugar has called every person she can think of, and no one is picking up. She grits her teeth and, as a last resort, calls her mother.Donna Berzatto is an alcoholic with mood swings and a fiery temper — she drove a car through the wall of the Berzatto family home at Christmas in “Fishes.” And right now, she is getting on Sugar’s last nerve. Donna insists that Sugar use a specific breathing technique (“hee, hee!”) and scares her off of delivering without drugs. But as the episode progresses, the “hee, hee!” starts to help, and when Donna suggests that ice chips might be soothing, something between mother and daughter starts to soften.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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    Remember ‘Severance’ and ‘Stranger Things’? TV Is Making Us Wait.

    Remember “Severance”? Remember “Stranger Things”? Today’s leisurely TV schedules are taxing memories and changing the experience.Time moves slowly in Middle-earth. Ages last for millenniums. Elves are immortal. Villains menace the land, are defeated, then are nearly forgotten before they re-emerge eons later.By this measure, it has been a blink of an eye since we last saw “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” on Amazon Prime Video. But in terms of our brief mortal lives and the traditional calendar of TV, it has been a while. Galadriel and company will return for Season 2 on Thursday, nearly two years to the day since Season 1 began in 2022.This is the Ent-like pace at which TV moves these days. The “Game of Thrones” prequel “House of the Dragon” took nearly as long to come back for its second outing. “Severance,” likewise a member of the debut class of ’22, will return in January, almost three years since we last saw it. The teen drama “Euphoria,” whose second season began in January 2022, will start shooting a third season … sometime in 2025. By the time it airs, one assumes its characters will be eligible for Social Security.More and more, rejoining a favorite series is like trying to remember the details of high school trigonometry. Which hobbit did what to whom? What did they do all day in that “Severance” office again? Was “Stranger Things” set in the 1980s, or was it actually made then?From left, the director Shawn Levy with the actors Noah Schnapp and Finn Wolfhard during production of “Stranger Things,” whose episodes are sometimes movie length now.Tina Rowden/Netflix, via Associated PressThere are, of course, different reasons for shows to take their time returning. We had a pandemic. There were labor strikes in Hollywood. Streaming platforms have been retrenching. Individual shows can have creative or staffing issues. Ambitious productions take longer.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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    Michael Crichton’s Estate Calls New Show an Unauthorized ‘ER’ Remake in Lawsuit

    The best-selling author’s estate has filed suit over “The Pitt,” an upcoming series, claiming that it is an unauthorized reboot of the hit hospital drama.The estate of Michael Crichton filed suit against Warner Bros. Television on Tuesday, claiming that its upcoming Max series, “The Pitt,” is an unauthorized “ER” reboot that fails to credit him and compensate his heirs.The suit accused Warner Bros. and R. Scott Gemmill, the showrunner of “The Pitt,” of breaching a contract that requires Crichton’s consent for any remakes of the hit hospital drama. The estate also sued John Wells, an executive producer, and Noah Wyle, set to star and serve as an executive producer.“The lawsuit filed by the Crichton Estate is baseless,” Warner Bros. Television said in an emailed statement, calling “The Pitt” a “new and original show.” The company said it would “vigorously defend against these meritless claims.”The complaint, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, claims that in 2020, Warner Bros., Gemmill, Wells and Wyle began developing a reboot of the show without informing Sherri Crichton, the author’s widow and the guardian of his estate. Gemmill and Wells were executive producers on “ER,” and Wyle was a star of that show.When they told her about the project, nearly two years into development, Crichton’s estate was prepared to approve a reboot based on the condition that he would be credited as a creator, in addition to a set of financial terms. But Warner Bros. later walked back on many of its promises, the lawsuit said.After negotiating for nearly a year, the parties did not reach an agreement, according to the suit. But Warner Bros. “simply moved the show from Chicago to Pittsburgh, rebranded it ‘The Pitt’ and has plowed ahead without any attribution or compensation for Crichton and his heirs,” the complaint said.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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    in Theater

    Is This the Edinburgh Fringe, or a Wellness Convention?

    Grief narratives were in vogue, and psychological maladies, too, at the annual Scottish arts showcase.As I made my way to Scotland for this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the three-week arts showcase that finished on Monday, I felt a little apprehensive. A conspicuous number of shows were themed around psychological maladies. These included plays about grief, anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder and gambling addiction. I had thought I was going to a festival, but this sounded more like a wellness convention.Theater geared toward raising awareness can often be underwhelming, because the message gets in the way of a good time. But “300 Paintings,” by the Australian performer Sam Kissajukian, was a pleasing exception. Kissajukian, who has bipolar disorder, quit comedy a couple of years ago, when he was in his mid-30s, to become an artist — a frying-pan-to-fire trajectory if ever there was one. In this one-man show, he recounts, with the help of a slide show, a six-month manic streak during which he fast-tracked his way onto the art circuit through prolific productivity and business chutzpah: the delusional confidence of the unwell. Then he crashed, sought psychiatric help and got diagnosed. Kissajukian’s monologue is a whimsical delight, and the paintings aren’t bad either.Sam Kissajukian in “300 Paintings.”Tal GoldhamerGrief narratives have been much in vogue onstage since the success of “Fleabag,” which was performed at the Fringe in 2013. “So Young,” a sentimental comedy written by the Scottish playwright Douglas Maxwell, was one of several shows about bereavement at this year’s festival. Set in Glasgow, it centers on the conflict between two grieving people: a middle-aged widower who has just found a new, much younger girlfriend; and his dead wife’s best friend, who is affronted at how quickly he has moved on. The play foregrounds an often overlooked truth: that grief, though primarily personal, has an inherently social dimension.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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    In ‘Only Murders in the Building,’ Michael Cyril Creighton Is Above Suspicion

    For years, Michael Cyril Creighton hoped one of his small TV parts would evolve into something more. With “Only Murders,” it finally happened.On a rainy morning in early August, the actor Michael Cyril Creighton sat in a dog friendly cafe on the outskirts of Astoria, Queens. With him was Sharon, his seven-year-old rescue, who is part Chihuahua, part Jack Russell terrier, with a soupçon of haunted doll. Another dog scampered over to their table. Sharon growled low in her throat and bared her teeth.“She has a troubled past,” Creighton said, soothing her. “But she’s great.”Creighton — bespectacled, bearded, with a cuddlesome physique — is more reliably sociable. During a two-hour conversation that began with savory scones and included a damp walk at a nearby sculpture park, he growled not once, not even when interrupted, frequently, by fans of his work on “Only Murders in the Building.”In “Only Murders,” the Hulu series about occasional homicides in a luxury co-op on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Creighton, 45, plays Howard, a librarian and hobbyist yodeler with an impressive sweater game. A gossip and a noodge, keen to be accepted by the building’s amateur detectives, a trio played by Selena Gomez, Steve Martin and Martin Short, Howard is also capable of surprising vulnerability. So is Creighton, who combines a mordant wit and a clown’s broad instincts with deep feeling.A recurring actor in the show’s first two seasons, Creighton was made a series regular in its third. In Season 4, which premiered on Tuesday, his co-stars include a pig who urinated on his feet between takes.“Look, it’s ridiculous what we’ve got going on in his world,” John Hoffman, the “Only Murders” showrunner said in an interview. “I feel like I can throw him anything and he’ll sort it out. I can’t believe I got so lucky to find him.”In Season 4, Creighton’s character, Howard, owner of many (many) cats, adopts a retired working dog and starts his own podcast, called “Animals and Their Jobs.”Patrick Harbron/DisneyWe 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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    ‘Only Murders in the Building’ Goes to Hollywood

    The murder mystery comedy returns with more celebrities than ever but in a winking, self-aware way.In its first three seasons, the Hulu mystery comedy “Only Murders in the Building” recruited an impressively starry array of guest stars — including Nathan Lane, Paul Rudd and Meryl Streep — to join the already stellar main cast of Selena Gomez, Steve Martin and Martin Short. Season 4, which starts on Tuesday, has even more famous faces, which can be overwhelming at times. But there’s a knowing quality to the way these celebrities are deployed: “Only Murders” has gone Hollywood, but in a winking, self-aware way.Partly, that’s by … going to Hollywood. In the premiere, Mabel, Charles and Oliver (Gomez, Martin and Short) are summoned to Los Angeles by a Paramount Pictures executive (Molly Shannon, always hilarious) who is desperate to make a movie based on their hit podcast. The A-list cast has already been chosen: Eugene Levy will play Charles, Zach Galifianakis will play Oliver, and Eva Longoria will be Mabel. (For those keeping track of the meta-layers, that’s a group of real celebrities playing themselves as the cast of a fictional movie about a reality-inspired podcast inside a fictional show — starring real celebrities as fictional hosts.)But Mabel has reservations. And Charles is growing increasingly worried about the disappearance of his friend and former stunt double, Sazz Pataki (Jane Lynch), who as we know from the Season 3 finale was murdered in Charles’s apartment — dressed as (and presumably mistaken for) Charles himself. It can be a bit awkward when a show leaves its natural environment, and that’s true when the crime-solving trio heads to California. The characters feel out of place and so do we. Lucky for us, the action soon returns to New York and their Upper West Side apartment building, the Arconia, where they must try to track down Sazz’s killer.There’s cheeky fun in the big-time celebrities playing heightened versions of themselves, but the jokes about haughty famous people are also a little obvious. The most delightful guest turns come from the less-famous actors who play the zany suspects. Jin Ha, so great in “Pachinko,” is an adorably jittery screenwriter. Catherine Cohen and Siena Werber are gloriously eccentric film director sisters. There is also an eye-patch-wearing Richard Kind and other established character actors, like Daphne Rubin-Vega, who show up to cause chaos.“Only Murders” has become comforting in its rhythms. The writers have a working formula, and they use that formula well. But I’m really not watching for the mystery anymore — even though there are plenty of twists and turns this season. I’m watching to see who pops up next and how much they can make me giggle. More

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    ‘Chimp Crazy,’ ‘Childless Cat Ladies’ and the Fault Lines of Family Life

    The charged cultural conversation about pets and children — see “Chimp Crazy,” “childless cat ladies” and more — reveals the hidden contradictions of family life.“Monkey love is totally different than the way that you have love for your child,” Tonia Haddix, an exotic animal broker, says at the beginning of “Chimp Crazy,” the documentary HBO series investigating the world of chimpanzee ownership. “If it’s your natural born child, it’s just natural because you actually gave birth to that kid. But when you adopt a monkey, the bond is much, much deeper.”“Chimp Crazy” arrives in a summer of cultural and political obsession about the place of animals in our family lives. When JD Vance became the Republican vice-presidential nominee, his 2021 comment about “childless cat ladies” resurfaced, positioning them as adversaries of the traditional family. New York magazine published a special issue questioning the ethics of pet ownership, featuring a polarizing essay from an anonymous mother who neglected her cat once her human baby arrived. In the background of these stories, you can hear the echoes of an internet-wide argument that pits companion animals against human children, pet and tot forced into a psychic battle for adult recognition.These dynamics feel supercharged since 2020, the year when American family life — that insular institution that is expected to provide for all human care needs — became positively airtight. The coronavirus pandemic exaggerated a wider trend toward domestic isolation: pet owners spending more time with their animals, parents more time with their children, everyone less time with one another — except perhaps online, where our domestic scenes collide in a theater of grievance and stress.When a cat, a dog or certainly a chimp scampers through a family story, it knocks it off-kilter, revealing its hypocrisies and its harms. In “Chimp Crazy,” Haddix emerges as the avatar for all the contradictions of the domestic ideal of private home care: She loves her chimp “babies” with such obsession that she traps them (and herself) in a miserable diorama of family life.Haddix, a 50-something woman who describes herself as the “Dolly Parton of Chimps,” believes that God chose her to be a caretaker. She was a registered nurse before she became a live-in volunteer at a ramshackle chimp breeding facility in Missouri, where she speaks of a male chimp named Tonka as if she is his mother. Haddix also has two human children; she just loves them less, and says so on television.As she appoints herself the parent to an imprisoned wild animal, she asserts an idealized form of mothering — one she describes as selfless, unending and pure. “Chimp Crazy” is the story of just how ruinous this idea of love can be, for the woman and the ape.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