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    Sex, Thugs and Kidneys: ‘Bargain’ Bids to Be the Next ‘Squid Game’

    A new Paramount+ thriller depicts a fight for survival amid sex scams, organ auctions and earthquakes. Like other Korean dramas, it is really about class.In “Bargain,” a new dystopian South Korean series on Paramount+, a man shows up at a hotel far from the city to consummate a deal. He is to pay a young woman for sex; the price is steep because she claims to be a virgin. But wait: It turns out she actually works for a criminal organ-auctioning operation, and the guy is about to unwillingly give up a kidney.Then an earthquake levels the hotel, initiating a desperate scramble for survival. And that’s just the first 30 minutes or so.There’s an almost comical amount of calamity in “Bargain,” the latest offering in the push from Paramount+ into a robust South Korean streaming market that exploded with the popularity of Netflix’s “Squid Game” in 2021. Like that show, which depicted debt-ridden citizens competing in a series of deadly, Darwinian children’s games for the amusement of wealthy overlords, “Bargain” deals in dystopian extremes. (All six episodes begin streaming on Thursday.)But these shows aren’t serving up shock for its own sake. They use dark fantasy to confront issues that plague contemporary South Korean society, particularly the economic inequality fostered by capitalism run amok; social isolation in a frenzied tech boom; and a widespread distrust of government authority.In a paradox of the South Korean streaming boom, shows that often dramatize desperate efforts to get a piece of the economic pie are proving to be big business. (Netflix, the world’s biggest streaming service, reported that 60 percent of its subscribers worldwide had watched a Korean-language show or movie in 2022; the company plans to invest $2.5 billion in South Korean content over the next four years.)Jin Sun Kyu plays a man lured into a trap set by a woman posing as a prostitute. Next thing he knows, a roomful of people are bidding on his organs. Then comes the earthquake.TVING Co/Paramount+“We’ve seen a lot of demand for international content across the globe, and Korean content particularly is a phenomenon in itself,” Marco Nobili, the executive vice president and international general manager of Paramount+, said in a video interview. “Globalization has really brought that to light. So certainly Korea was a top market for us.”Paramount+ entered the arena through a film and television partnership between its parent company, Paramount Global, and the South Korean media conglomerate CJ ENM. As part of that deal, Paramount+ and the Korean streaming giant TVing, which CJ ENM controls, committed to co-producing seven original Korean series, of which “Bargain” is the second. The first, “Yonder,” about a man who reconnects with his dead wife, debuted on Paramount+ in April. (Both premiered in South Korea, on TVing, in October 2022.)At the same time, Paramount+ has begun building its K-drama library with hit shows from the CJ ENM vaults, including the 2016 procedural “Signal” and a 2017 thriller about a religious cult, “Save Me,” both of which also arrived in April.A dark, competitive thread runs through much of it; and just as the characters in Korea’s many dystopian offerings must fight for survival, there seems to be a kind of “can you top this?” contest happening among the shows themselves. The premise of “Bargain” is a little more extreme than that of “Squid Game.” Paramount+’s coming series “Pyramid Game,” in which a bullied high school girl must become a sniper in order to survive a brutal game, looks to be yet another nightmare blood sport.For Byun Seungmin, the creator of “Bargain,” the idea of toxic competition is crucial.“In South Korea, the issue of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer is severe,” Byun said in a video interview last month through an interpreter. “There’s a prevailing sense of defeat that if one isn’t born into a good background, it’s difficult to have a fair opportunity to achieve something.”In “Bargain,” you can either afford to buy a kidney for your dying father (freshly carved from a captive), or you can’t. You either run a criminal empire, or what’s left of your body is fed to the fish. Near the end of the series, as the female and male lead characters (played by Jun Jong Seo and Jin Sun Kyu) try to escape the collapsing structure, one says to the other: “If we die here, we die for nothing.” The response: “People like us always die for nothing.”The hit Netflix series “Squid Game,” whose premise put contestants in a series of deadly children’s games, initiated the boom in the South Korean streaming market. Noh Juhan/Netflix“Bargain,” like “Squid Game,” offers the spectacle of millions in cash literally dangling above those who can grab it. Such images are laden with meaning, said the journalist Elise Hu, whose book “Flawless” is a deep examination of South Korea’s booming beauty industry.“You have this story in which body parts are actually getting fragmented, and organs sold and then harvested, so that you can put a price on a body,” she said last month in a phone interview. “It all flows from this moment that South Korea is in with consumption, where you can buy all the things that you want and it’s all money, money, money.”As Byun put it, “The younger generation in Korea now believes unless the system collapses, or a disaster occurs where everyone becomes truly equal, there is no opportunity for the future.”“Bargain” unfolds in a series of carefully choreographed long takes, the camera darting and gliding among the wreckage and creating a sense that, even in this dog-eat-dog world, everyone’s fate is connected. The dearth of editing made it essential that everyone hit their marks and stay on the same page.“It felt like a theater piece, or like I was playing a game of chess or Go,” Jun, the female lead, said through an interpreter. “The series is quite experimental in terms of the scenario and also the structure.”From left, Chang Ryul, Park Hyung-Soo and Jun in “Bargain.” Their characters must battle in an postapocalyptic-like environment after an earthquake collapses much of the building they are in.TVING Co/Paramount+The past few years have seen seismic change and even scandal in South Korean television and film. In 2017 the conservative president Park Geun-hye was removed from office and later convicted on charges of bribery, extortion and abusing her power, including the maintenance of a government blacklist that denied state funding to thousands of artists deemed unfriendly to her administration or insufficiently patriotic. During the Park administration, more filmmakers subsequently sought funding and distribution from streamers — especially Netflix, Hu said.Now the streaming frontier is wide open, and Paramount+ is staking its claim. Nobili, the Paramount+ executive, is particularly excited about the coming series “A Bloody Lucky Day,” about a taxi driver and a serial killer — shades of Michael Mann’s hit man/cabby movie “Collateral.”Business, in other words, is promising. But if “Bargain” stands to provide some wild entertainment for American audiences — and the promise of big revenue for its American streamer — Byun, its creator, seemed more focused on the culturally specific ways he hopes the series will speak about South Korea today. He described a country in which birthrates are plummeting and “people tend to avoid communication with others.”“They express anger about many things, claiming the value of fairness,” he continued. The characters in “Bargain,” he added, “reflect the masses in modern South Korea who seem to have lost hope, and even among them there is a rift.”And yet where there is collapse — of a building, an entertainment industry, a society — there is also the hope for renewal.“Collapse is not the end but a new beginning,” Byun said. “After going through the collapse, the characters inadvertently gain an opportunity to start over in a more primitive era where equality prevails.“I believe this also reflects the psyche of the public, desiring the end of the period they’re living in so that a new one can arise.” More

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    Late Night Hosts Roast Kevin McCarthy on His Way Out

    “Nine months? I’ve been to Phish concerts longer than that,” Jimmy Fallon joked of McCarthy’s tenure as speaker of the House.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 McCarthy Hearings’Kevin McCarthy was ousted as speaker of the House on Tuesday after only nine months in the job. The vote happened just in time for late night hosts to discuss it during their afternoon tapings.“Nine months? I’ve been to Phish concerts longer than that,” Jimmy Fallon joked.“Even Aaron Rodgers is, like, ‘Damn, that was fast.’” — JIMMY FALLON“After Matt Gaetz announced the motion to remove Kevin McCarthy, McCarthy said Gaetz has ‘personal things in his life that he has challenges with,’ like figuring out how to set his Venmo to private.” — SETH MEYERS“This was an unlikely and historic team-up between far-right Republicans and Democrats. Do you know how much you have to suck to get A.O.C. and Matt Gaetz on the same side of something?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“And I’m sure this won’t be taken out of context when I say: I love the McCarthy Hearings.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Low-Rated Creeps of Late Night Edition)“In fairness, you can’t really argue with him — the man does know talentless, loser creeps. In fact, he fathered two of them.” — JIMMY KIMMEL, on Donald Trump’s Truth Social posts referring to late night hosts as “low-rated CREEPS of Late Night Television” and “true losers.”“This from a man who is such a loser, he buried his ex-wife on a golf course just so he could continue to cheat on her.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Thank you for watching, sir. But I’m not surprised. He’s a 77-year-old white guy — of course he’s watching CBS.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“But I do have a question: ‘Low-rated creeps of late night’? How did he find out our original podcast title?” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingAmber Ruffin and Jenny Hagel returned on Tuesday’s “Late Night” for another “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell” segment, this time about Black Barbies and lesbian wine bars.What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightThe stand-up comedian and actor Wanda Sykes will appear on Wednesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This Out“Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJocelyn Bioh’s Broadway debut, “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” is a riotously funny workplace comedy set in prepandemic, mid-Trump Harlem. More

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    ‘Jaja’s African Hair Braiding’ Review: A Shop Where Everybody Knows Your Mane

    Jocelyn Bioh’s Broadway playwriting debut, set in a Harlem hair braiding shop, is a hot and hilarious workplace sitcom.Nothing says comedy to me like hot pink, and pink doesn’t get much hotter than the pink of the house curtain that greets you at the beginning of “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding” by Jocelyn Bioh. In the pale and staid Samuel J. Friedman Theater, a fuchsia drop depicting dozens of elaborately woven hairstyles — micro braids, cornrows, “kinky twists” and more — tells you, along with the bouncy Afro-pop music, to prepare for laughter.That will come in abundance, but don’t in the meantime ignore Jaja’s storefront: gray and grimy and contradicting the pink. With its roll-up grille fully locked down, it’s telling you something too.What that is, Bioh does not reveal until quite late — almost too late for the good of this otherwise riotously funny workplace comedy set in prepandemic, mid-Trump Harlem. A kind of “Cheers” or “Steel Magnolias” for today, “Jaja’s” is so successful at selling the upbeat pluck and sharp-tongued sisterhood of its West African immigrants that the hasty dramatization of their collateral sacrifice feels a bit like a spinach dessert.No matter: The first 80 minutes of the 90-minute play, which opened on Tuesday in a Manhattan Theater Club production, are a buffet of delights. Even David Zinn’s set for the beauty shop’s interior, once the grate is unlocked and lifted, receives entrance applause. From that moment on, the director, Whitney White, keeps the stage activated and the stories simmering at a happy bubble.David Zinn’s beauty shop set receives applause as do the wigs designed by Nikiya Mathis.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesUnlike the Ghanaian private school students in Bioh’s “School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play” and the star-struck Nigerians in her “Nollywood Dreams,” the stylists at Jaja’s are independent contractors. I don’t just mean financially, though they negotiate their prices privately and pay Jaja a cut. They also operate independently as dramatic figures, their plots popping up for a while, momentarily intersecting with the others’, then piping down to make room for the next.That’s fine when the plots and intersections are so enjoyable. Five women work at the salon in the hot summer of 2019, not counting Jaja’s 18-year-old daughter, Marie (Dominique Thorne), who runs the shop’s day-to-day operations. It’s she who lifts the grate and seems to shoulder the heaviest burdens. Her hopes for college, and a career as a writer, hang by a thread of false papers.Romance and dominance are the main concerns of the others. As her name suggests, Bea (Zenzi Williams) is the queen, at least when Jaja is not around, and stirs up drama from an overdeveloped sense of personal entitlement. “When I get my shop, there won’t be any eating of smelly foods like this,” she snarks at her friend Aminata, innocently enjoying fish stew.Today Bea is especially infuriated because she believes that Ndidi (Maechi Aharanwa), a younger, faster braider, is stealing her clients. Meanwhile — and the adverb is apt because the subplots often echo the West African soap operas the women watch on the salon’s television — Aminata (Nana Mensah) is fuming over her scoundrelly husband, who wheedles her out of her hard-earned money and spends it on other women. Sweeter and quieter and more self-contained, Miriam (Brittany Adebumola) gradually reveals another side as she tells a client what she gladly escaped, and yet regrets leaving, in Sierra Leone.The problem of men is a common theme: Even Jaja (Somi Kakoma), who eventually makes a spectacular appearance, is caught up in what may or may not be a green-card marriage scam with a local white landlord. But except for Aminata’s husband, the men we actually meet — all played by Michael Oloyede in nicely distinguished cameos — are kind and cheerful, hawking socks, jewelry, DVDs and affection.Kind and cheerful is not the case with all the clients. (There are seven, played by three actors.) One is so rude just entering the shop that the braiders, usually hungry for business, pretend to be booked. Another client demands to look exactly like Beyoncé for her birthday; another is a loud talker. One mostly eats while Bea refreshes her elaborate do, a Strawberry Knotless Afro-Pop Bob. And Jennifer (Rachel Christopher) sits patiently in Miriam’s chair throughout, receiving long micro braids that take 12 hours and fingers of steel.It’s her birthday: Kalyne Coleman as a customer who asks for Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” braids at the salon.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNever really forging these bits into a single narrative, Bioh makes comic music of them, sometimes with the set-it-up-now, pay-it-off-later approach and sometimes with a scrapper’s punch-feint-return. Without White’s orchestration of the rhythm — and the perfect timing of the cast, most of them making Broadway debuts — I can’t imagine this working. Nor would it be as enjoyable without Dede Ayite’s sociologically meticulous costumes or the brilliance of the title characters. And by “title characters” I of course mean the hairstyles, rendered in before, during and after incarnations by Nikiya Mathis’s wigs, which seem to be holding a conversation of their own.If the entire play had been nothing but byplay — the women in one another’s hair both figuratively and literally — I would not complain. Translating a popular genre to a new milieu and stocking it with characters unfamiliar to most American theatergoers, as Bioh did in “School Girls” as well, is refreshing enough when crafted so smartly.But instead she has seen fit, again as in “School Girls,” to deepen and darken the story while providing a bang of activity at the end. Though abrupt and insufficiently resolved, it doesn’t come from nowhere. By the last of the play’s six scenes, all the women, but especially Jaja and her daughter, have something to fear from a president who has recently referred to some African countries with a disparaging vulgarism and complained that Nigerians allowed to enter the United States would never go back.“OK, so you want me to go? Fine, I will go,” Jaja exclaims witheringly, in what seems like a direct response. “But when do you want me to leave? Before or after I raise your children? Or clean your house? Or cook your food? Or braid your hair so you look nice-nice before you go on your beach vacation? ‘Oh please miss. Can you give me the Bo Derek hair please?’”“Jaja’s” is full of such treasurable moments, when the drama feels tightly woven with the comedy. And if the weave frays a bit at the end, what doesn’t? Like the Strawberry Knotless Afro-Pop Bob, it’s still a great look.Jaja’s African Hair BraidingThrough Nov. 5 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    ‘Only Murders In the Building’ Season 3 Finale: The Show, and Deaths, Go On

    Tuesday’s finale of “Only Murders in the Building” wrapped a season that was a love letter to Broadway musicals, not least because it was a little silly.This notebook contains spoilers for the Season 3 finale of “Only Murders in the Building.”Everyone loves a Broadway hit. It’s possible that we enjoy a Broadway catastrophe — “Carrie,” “Diana, the Musical,” “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” — a little more. Few productions have been as cataclysmic as Oliver Putnam’s “Death Rattle Dazzle,” a misbegotten gothic about murderous infants, re-conceived as a glittery musical. Think “Ruthless” but skewed younger and set at a Nova Scotian lighthouse.This musical was the centerpiece of Season 3 of the Hulu comedy “Only Murders in the Building,” which brought the amateur detectives played by Selena Gomez, Steve Martin and Martin Short out of their luxury apartment complex and into a sumptuous Broadway theater. (The theater is actually the opulent United Palace in Washington Heights, subbing for a space more than 100 blocks south.) “Death Rattle Dazzle” bore only the vaguest sequined resemblance to a real Broadway show, while demonstrating deep love of the form. Think of the season as a love letter to Broadway, written in lipstick and blood.On the original opening night, the leading man, Paul Rudd’s Ben Glenroy, was killed. Twice. Once with rat poison and again down an elevator shaft. Theater has its own violence. A good show “kills,” it “slays,” it “knocks them dead.” But this was s a bit much.Amid rehearsals for the original play’s transformation into a musical, several members of the cast and crew were accused of his murder. In the meantime, there were in-jokes about superstitions, spike tape, stage fright, Schmackary’s Cookies and the cavalier use of accents. The accent jokes were made at the expense of Meryl Streep. Matthew Broderick also showed up for some method skewering.During the season finale, which arrived on Tuesday (spoilers follow, so many), the murderers were finally revealed. The uberproducer Donna DeMeo (Linda Emond) had poisoned Ben to protect her son Cliff’s investment in the show. Then her son (Wesley Taylor), defending his mother and his ego, pushed a revived Ben down an elevator shaft.Was the motive love? Or money? Or artistic integrity? Yes? I think? Motive is never big with the “Only Murders Gang.” (Personally, I plumped for the documentarian Tobert (Jesse Williams), mainly because it’s hard to trust a man named Tobert.)This season didn’t often mirror what actually happens on Broadway, even as it assembled a crack team of Broadway composers — Justin Paul, Benj Pasek, Marc Shaiman, Michael R. Jackson and Sara Bareilles — to supply the songs. “Death Rattle Dazzle” was, even by Broadway’s variable standards, too inane, too sparkly. Perhaps the most delirious fiction, beyond the dancing crab people, was the notion that a single negative review, delivered here by the critic Maxine (Noma Dumezweni, deadpan and delectable), could be the precipitating event for a murder.The series’s madcap commitment was one of the most realistic aspects of “Death Rattle Dazzle,” which included singing shellfish and three babies suspected of murder.Patrick Harbron/HuluThankfully (and I write this as someone who covered Broadway for decades), critics don’t have quite that much power, but then again Martin’s Charles-Haden Savage described Maxine’s assessment as “a pan, a massacre.” And also: “The harshest review in the history of theater. A complete bloodletting.” After attending the musical’s opening night, Maxine has warmer feelings: “This dusty old chestnut has been Botoxed, bedazzled and brought back to life.” A complete about-face? Yes, that’s fiction, too.But what did feel real, just a smidgen, was the madcap commitment to the bit that putting on a musical requires. Most musicals, even those that eschew babies and shellfish, are at least a little silly. Unless you’re attending a theater camp, humans don’t spontaneously break into song, and there isn’t often a full orchestra backing them or a chorus that just happens to sing along in harmony while executing the occasional pas de bourrée. It’s ridiculous to think that a few lights, some spangled costumes and a set that’s mostly plywood will transport an audience to some far-off world.And yet, that’s what happens. Which is why we have and have had long-running musicals about, say, cats or trainee witches or the wildlife of the African savannah. Those crab people should feel right at home.A couple of weeks ago, I took the train up to the United Palace for an “Only Murders” pop-up event. Guests wandered the lush surroundings, sifting evidence with specialized flashlights. “Only Murders” is a TV show about a podcast, which this season was about a Broadway show. This event was also a strange hybrid of forms — gallery exhibit, immersive happening, escape room, a live-action watch party, Botoxed and bedazzled. Also you could get your makeup done, which seemed fun. And they gave you a puzzle on the way out.The best part, for me anyway, was a quiet moment in which I was able to sit in the orchestra and look up at the stage. In that plush seat, I could imagine all of the wonderful, outrageous, demented shows that had played there before and dream about what might come next. More

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    Book Review: ‘In the Form of a Question,’ by Amy Schneider

    Amy Schneider’s new memoir, “In the Form of a Question,” captures a life of bold choices well beyond wagers on the Daily Double.IN THE FORM OF A QUESTION: The Joys and Rewards of a Curious Life, by Amy SchneiderAmy Schneider is one of the “Jeopardy!” greats, second only to Ken Jennings in games won (40 to Jennings’s 74). She’s fourth overall in regular-season winnings ($1,382,800) and fifth if you include tournaments ($1,632,800). In her new memoir, “In the Form of a Question,” she locks down a No. 1 spot, though, for best hang. Extolling the virtues of recreational drugs, the thrills of casual sex, the flirting potential in offering tarot readings? Ken Jennings could never.In “Question,” Schneider bounces between bloggier, jokier chapters (“Why in God’s Name Did They Make ‘Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue’?”) and more revealing, still jokey ones, about her gender transition and other formative experiences (“So if You’re Trans, Does That Mean You Like Guys?”). Her prose is warm and funny, though the omnipresent snarky footnotes sometimes deflate moments of earnest momentum.Other times, the little sidebars are home to some of the more endearing jokes, such as describing “The Music Man” as “probably the best work of literature ever written about the eternal conflict between unsophisticated farmers and the grifters who want to sell them musical instruments at above-market prices.” This is, deeply and completely, a theater-kid book.“When it comes to other people, I don’t have a setting between ‘at least slightly uncomfortable’ and ‘almost disturbingly comfortable,’ between ‘co-worker’ and ‘Elena Ferrante character,’” Schneider writes. That comes through here, and the more Ferrante-ish chapters are the book’s most interesting. Perhaps there is less of a need for listing the meanings of each tarot card, or an essay describing how good the TV show “Daria” is.Images from a handwritten diary entry from the day her first wife left; her candor about self-loathing (“I kept a mental list of all my shortcomings, all my failures, everything I had to feel ashamed of, and I tended to that list with great care, always on the lookout for opportunities to add to it”); the nervous ecstasy in her trans awakening — that’s where the book feels the most special and alive.The gossip in any of us will always yearn for more happy tales of sex and drugs, and Schneider has a bunch of fun ones. “There’s a fascinating nocturnal world out there, and the only people who can access it are those who have done some blow,” she notes. Sure, having a long-term partner who cares about you can be fulfilling. “But when you hook up with somebody who doesn’t know you well, then it must be because they’re horny for you, and that feels great!”Fleeting moments of righteous bitterness — “not that everything about my wife’s sexual relationship with a mysterious homeless felon that she met at a comedy open mic was perfect” — and tossed-off lines about acrimonious friend breakups and decades-long love triangles add edge and fizz.In the scheme of “Jeopardy!” memoirs, this one is not particularly “Jeopardy!”-centric. There is no training-montage section, no “Jeopardy!” war room, and Schneider describes herself as a lonely and ambivalent student. Her self-actualization comes about not through a career in software engineering or through making money from trivia, but through casting off the oppressive guilt and shame around sex and bodies that colored her entire young life.Fame is mostly but not exclusively great, she admits, and drifting too far into its bubble is dangerous. “I love how many more ways I can now imagine life turning out for me,” she writes, though “icon, but like in a cautionary tale sort of way,” could be one of them.Trans stories are often commodified for either misery or nobility in the face of misery, but “In the Form of a Question” is a much fuller, livelier, more textured and sardonic picture. When you win enough money to quit your job, you actually get a new job, Schneider says. She describes hers, wryly but rightly, as “Famous Celebrity Trans Person.” If this book is part of the gig, things seem like they’re going pretty well.IN THE FORM OF A QUESTION: The Joys and Rewards of a Curious Life | By Amy Schneider | 272 pp. | Avid Reader Press | $28 More

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    Late Night Shows Return After Writers’ Strike Ends

    “We’ve been gone so long, ‘The Bachelor’ is now a grandfather,” Jimmy Kimmel joked on Monday.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.They’re BaaackLate night shows returned on Monday night for their first broadcasts since May, after a five-month writers’ strike ended last week. In their monologues, hosts expressed gratitude to be working again and caught up on some of the news that happened while they were sidelined.“We’ve been gone so long, ‘The Bachelor’ is now a grandfather,” Jimmy Kimmel joked.“The stalemate finally ended when the studios realized, ‘We’ve got to end this now, or it’s another three months of watching ‘Suits.’” — JIMMY FALLON“It was kind of weird coming back after being gone for five months. The studio was empty for so long, NBC converted it to a Spirit Halloween.” — JIMMY FALLON“I missed my writers so much. I was so happy — so happy to see them this morning. I will admit, by lunch, I was a little over it.” — SETH MEYERSWhile off the air, Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers and John Oliver collaborated on a podcast called “Strike Force Five,” with proceeds donated to their out-of-work staff members.“We still, by the way, have two episodes and thousands of T-shirts left to sell,” Kimmel said on Monday. “The strike ended exactly on the day we ordered the shirts and hats, so if you want one, go to StrikeForceFive.com, or I’ll be giving them out until Christmas 2045, OK?”Neither on the podcast nor on “The Tonight Show” did Jimmy Fallon mention an apology he issued in September after current and former employees reported experiencing a “toxic workplace” under his leadership. Instead, he focused on gratitude for viewers who choose “to have me in your bedrooms at nighttime.”“I’m more excited than the guy seeing ‘Beetlejuice’ with Lauren Boebert.” — JIMMY FALLON“Yeah, everyone is excited. Today, my dad called me up and said, ‘Finally, I can watch Kimmel again.’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Bad Business as Usual Edition)“We looked at the calendar today and — check my math on this — I believe we have been off the air for 154 indictments.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Donald Trump got arrested four times while we were on strike — once for the classified documents, once for interfering with the election, once for Jan. 6, and once for shooting Tupac, allegedly.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Trump is now facing 91 felony counts. Ninety-one felony counts. It’s like all of Melania’s birthday wishes came true at once.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Donald Trump arrived in New York last night to stay at his possibly soon-to-be-renamed residence, Trump Tower, ahead of his appearance today in a Manhattan courthouse for a fraud trial, and I just want to say it’s really nice of him to come back to New York for our first show.” — SETH MEYERS“Trump might not even have the money to pay the penalty in his fraud trial, which means there’s a remote but realistic possibility that Trump Tower gets taken away, he has to sell Mar-a-Lago and he ends up crashing with Rudy Giuliani.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingThe actor Matthew McConaughey turned rhymes from his new children’s book “Just Because” into a spirited duet with Jimmy Fallon on Monday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightFresh off a sold-out date at Madison Square Garden, the musical supergroup boygenius will perform on Tuesday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutBeyoncé on tour last summer. Her “Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé” will be released on Dec. 1.The New York TimesThe highly anticipated film version of Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour will debut in movie theaters on Dec. 1. More

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    Echo Brown, Young Adult Author and Performer, Dies at 39

    A one-woman show that used her date with a white hipster to talk about life, race, love and sex, led an editor to sign her to write two novels.Echo Brown, a late blooming storyteller who mined her life to create a one-woman show about Black female identity and two autobiographical young adult novels in which she used magical realism to help convey her reality, died on Sept. 16 in Cleveland. She was 39.Her death, at a hospital, was confirmed by her friend Cathy Mao, who said the cause had not yet been determined. But Ms. Brown was diagnosed with lupus in about 2015, leading eventually to kidney failure, Ms. Mao said by phone. A live kidney donor had been cleared for a transplant, which was expected to take place early next year.Ms. Brown, who grew up in poverty in Cleveland and graduated from Dartmouth College, had no professional stage experience when her serio-comic show, “Black Virgins Are Not for Hipsters,” made its debut in 2015. It told her autobiographical story, through multiple voices, about dating a white hipster, including wondering what his reaction to her dark skin would be, and the sex, love, depression and childhood trauma she experienced.“It’s very revealing, and I felt very vulnerable doing it,” she told The Oakland Tribune in 2015, adding, “It’s as if you get onstage and share your deepest, darkest secrets. Putting my sexuality out there in front of people can make me feel very exposed.”The show was successfully staged in theaters in the Bay Area; she also performed it in Chicago, Cleveland, Dublin and Berlin.Robert Hurwitt, the theater critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, called Ms. Brown “an instantly attractive and engaging performer” who “has us eating out of her hand well before she gets everyone up and dancing to illustrate (with a little help from Beyoncé) why Black women shouldn’t dance with white men until at least after marriage.”And the writer Alice Walker said on her blog in 2016, “What I can say is that not since early Whoopi Goldberg and early and late Anna Deavere Smith have I been so moved by a performer’s narrative.”When “Black Virgins” was mentioned in a profile of Ms. Brown in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine in 2017, Jessica Anderson, an editor at Christy Ottaviano Books, an imprint of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, took notice.“I reached out blindly to see if she would turn her attention to writing for a young adult audience,” Ms. Anderson said in a phone interview. “She wasn’t familiar with young adult or children’s literature. I sent her some books, and she had an immediate sense of what her storytelling should be.”The result was “Black Girl Unlimited” (2020), a novel that Ms. Brown tells through the lens of her young self as a wizard who deals with a fire in her family’s cramped apartment, her first kiss, her brother’s incarceration, sexual assault and her mother’s overdose.Ms. Brown’s first novel presents her young self as a wizard and carries readers through events like a fire in her family’s apartment, her first kiss, her brother’s incarceration and her sexual assault. Macmillan“Brown’s greatest gift is evoking intimacy,” Karen Valby wrote in her review in The New York Times, “and as she delicately but firmly snatches the reader’s attention, we are allowed to see this girl of multitudes and her neighborhood of contradictions in full and specific detail.”Ms. Brown’s second book was “The Chosen One: A First-Generation Ivy League Odyssey” (2022), a coming-of-age story that uses supernatural elements like twisting portals on walls to depict her disorienting and stressful experiences at Dartmouth as a Black woman on a predominantly white campus.Ms. Brown’s second novel focuses on her stressful experiences at Dartmouth as a Black woman on a predominantly white campus.Christy Ottaviano BooksPublishers Weekly praised Ms. Brown for the way she ruminated on her “independence, fear of failure and mental health” with “vigor alongside themes of healing, forgiveness and the human need to be and feel loved.”Echo Unique Ladadrian Brown was born on April 10, 1984, in Cleveland. She was reared by her mother, April Brown, and her stepfather, Edward Trueitt, whom she regarded as her father. Her father, Edward Littlejohn, was not in her life. During high school she lived for a while with one of her teachers.Ms. Brown thought that Dartmouth, with its prestige and stately campus, would represent a “promised land” to her and be “the birth of my becoming,” she said in a TEDx talk in 2017.But early on she heard voices from a speeding truck shout the N-word at her.“They weren’t students, they probably weren’t affiliated with Dartmouth in any way, but it was enough to shatter me,” she said. The incident taught her a lesson: “There are no promised lands in this world for marginalized people, those of us who fall outside the category of normal.”She graduated in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in political science — she was the first college graduate in her family — and was hired as an investigator with the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the independent oversight agency of the New York City Police Department. She left after two years, believing that “we didn’t have the power to do the work that was necessary,” she told the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.She worked as a legal secretary and briefly attended the Columbia Journalism School. She became depressed, started to study yoga and meditation, and moved to Oakland in 2011. While there, she was hired as a program manager at Challenge Day, a group that holds workshops at schools aimed at building bonds among teenagers.Her job included telling students about her life, which helped her find her voice.“I found that I could drop people into emotion and pull them out with humor,” she said in the Dartmouth magazine article. “That’s where I learned I was a good storyteller and wondered, ‘Where can I go to tell more stories?’”She began taking classes in solo performing with David Ford at the Marsh Theater in San Francisco. At first, she wrote comic scenes, then created more serious ones.“It was clear that she was someone who was ready for this, and she had a very easy time getting the words off the pages as a performer,” Mr. Ford said. “There was something miraculous about her.”In addition to her mother and stepfather, Ms. Brown is survived by her brother Edward. Her brother Demetrius died in 2020.Ms. Brown’s latest project was a collaboration with the actor, producer and director Tyler Perry on a novel, “A Jazzman’s Blues.” It is based on a 2022 Netflix film of the same name that Mr. Perry directed from a script that he wrote in 1995, about an ill-fated romance between teenagers (the young man becomes a jazz musician) in rural Georgia that takes place largely in the late 1930s and ’40s. It is to be published early next year.Ms. Anderson said the project came about because, as Ms. Brown got sicker, “it was too energy-consuming for her to work on her own material. So she was looking for a more creative partnership. and this came about through her agent.” More

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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Catfish’ and ‘Sullivan’s Crossing’

    The MTV show is back for a ninth season. The CW premieres a new show based on a novel of the same name.With 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, Oct. 2-8. Details and times are subject to change.MondayJaime Camil on “Lotería Loca.”Fernando Marrero/CBSLOTERÍA LOCA 9 p.m. on CBS. Rogelio, what are you doing here? Jaime Camil, of “Jane the Virgin” fame is stepping out of his telenovela role and into a hosting role on this new game show. Based on a Mexican game, similar to bingo, each episode will feature two players — the first place player will get to move up for a chance to win the cash prize at the end.TuesdayCATFISH 8 p.m. on MTV. Nev Shulman and Kamie Crawford are back to bust people on their lies and (very occasionally) make a great love story happen. This long running show centers on online dating and figuring out if people really are who they say they are. Even though the episodes are almost formulaic at this point (someone reaches out to say that the person they are talking to online won’t meet them, Nev and Kamie investigate, they all fly to find the person, and finally they have a sit down emotional conversation about why the “catfish” lied) it somehow never gets old to see Nev put people in their place.From left: Kelli Williams, Shanola Hampton, Gabrielle Walsh and Karan Oberoi in “Found.”Matt Miller/NBCFOUND 10 p.m. on NBC. Like I said last week, crime procedural shows are making their big comeback in 2023, and this new show further proves that. The show follows Gabi Mosely (Shanola Hampton) and her team as they try to solve cases of missing people. The twist? Gabi is keeping her childhood kidnapper in her basement and getting their help to figure out each clue and resolve the cases.WednesdaySULLIVAN’S CROSSING 8 p.m. on The CW. With “Riverdale” and “Nancy Drew” off the air, The CW is lining up a whole new roster of shows, starting with a story based on a novel by Robyn Carr of the same name. Maggie Sullivan (Morgan Kohan) moves back to her hometown, a campground in Nova Scotia, that is run by her estranged father after she finds herself in legal trouble. The part I’m most excited about? Maggie’s father is played by Scott Patterson who is making his CW re-debut after playing the grumpy but lovable Luke Danes on seven seasons of “Gilmore Girls.” The show also stars another “Gilmore Girls” alum: Chad Michael Murray.THE SPENCER SISTERS 9 p.m. on The CW. If you are a daughter with a mother of any age, you have certainly eye-rolled before at “you look like you could be sisters” from random men on the street. But this show has taken that concept and run with it. The mother/daughter duo, who are often mistaken for sisters, investigate crimes together in their hometown, Alder Bluffs. Like lots of CW shows, this first premiered in Canada earlier this year.ThursdayTHIS IS ELVIS (1981) 6 p.m. on TCM. Long before Baz Luhrmann used archival footage of Elvis Presley mixed with shots of Austin Butler in the role for the final scene of “Elvis,” this documentary did the same thing. It combines footage of Presley along with reconstruction of some moments of his life with actors and voice-overs for Vernon Presley, Gladys Presley and Priscilla Presley.FridayAlicia Silverstone and Stacey Dash in “Clueless.”Paramount PicturesCLUELESS (1995) 8 p.m. on CMT. To me, Cher Horowitz (played by Alicia Silverstone) will always be the No. 1 It Girl. From the incredible outfits (the yellow two-piece set lives in my mind rent free), to her rousing speech on immigration (“may I please remind you that it does not say R.S.V.P. on the Statue of Liberty”) you can’t help be fascinated by her. Come for the notorious one liners (“you’re a virgin who can’t drive”) and stay for the jarring reminder that though this movie came out nearly 30 years ago, Paul Rudd still looks almost exactly the same.SaturdayGREAT CHOCOLATE SHOWDOWN 8 p.m. on The CW. This show is what “The Great British Bake Off” would be like if it focused on only one ingredient: chocolate. The finale will feature the three remaining bakers as they create a four-part chocolate dessert meant to embody their baking history. The winner will walk away with $50,000 and a potential stomach ache.SundayTHE CIRCUS 7 p.m. on Showtime. Whether we are ready or not, we are officially entering into campaign season for the 2024 presidential election. As you watch the debates and read up on the candidates, this show can act as a companion guide. Hosted by John Heilemann, Mark McKinnon and Jenn Palmieri (who have all acted as political strategists and communication directors on the national level in some capacity), this show is returning for its eighth season to home in on President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign and former President Donald Trump’s campaign amid criminal proceedings.LAST STOP LARRIMAH (2023) 9 p.m. on HBO. Deep in the Australian outback there is a town with 11 residents. In December of 2017, Paddy Moriarty and his dog disappeared. What was once a tight knit community turned into a crime scene and an investigation began into whether someone in town was to blame. This documentary explores the town’s history and how everyone in the small community became a suspect. More