Eliana Willis

More stories

  • 113 Shares199 Views

    in Theater

    ‘Come for Me’ Review: Catherine Cohen’s T.M.I. Comedy Set

    In her autobiographical new show with songs, Catherine Cohen delivers a heightened version of millennial oversharing and confidence run amok.Attending Catherine Cohen’s new show “Come for Me” is like being swept up by a tornado, or maybe watching “Fast & Furious: The Vaudeville Years.” The pace of her new comedy show is so unrelenting that by the time you catch your breath after a joke, three more have zipped by. Filming sex with her boyfriend? Listening to true-crime podcasts? Freezing her eggs? Entire acts have been built on less. But in “Come for Me,” the follow-up to last year’s “The Twist…? She’s Gorgeous,” Cohen spends just a few minutes on each, if that, and moves on.As for the musical numbers — for she is that modern rarity, a singing comedian — they pack more delicious hooks than most pop albums do.It’s a great tease: Cohen suggests that she has enough material to go on for days, but chooses to give us only an hour’s worth.Even Cohen’s trademark meta annotations, like announcing “bridge!” in the middle of a number, are delivered breathlessly. She holds dramatic poses — leaning seductively against a wall, for example — but only briefly. In the middle of songs at last Friday’s show at Joe’s Pub, she commanded members of the crowd to “uncross your arms!” but did not pause for a reaction, smoothly segueing from singing to demanding and back to singing. (In contrast, the loopy absurdism of Ikechukwu Ufomadu’s 30-minute opening set benefited from his slow, deliberate formality.)This is par for the course for Cohen, who taunts us only as a way to spice up her real subject: herself, or rather the act of revealing herself. She mocks the postures of our confessional era while reveling in them.The Catherine Cohen we meet onstage is a fabulous, relentlessly bouncy narcissist for whom too much information is never enough. The set includes gleeful accounts of her sex life with her boyfriend (and the people they have been inviting to partake) in which self-deprecation and gloating fuse into a heightened version — or is it? — of millennial oversharing and confidence run amok. “Dating me,” she crows, “is what critics and fans alike have described as an immersive experience.”“Come for Me” is simultaneously more graphic and sweeter than her previous show, but it also gives off floral notes of doubt and vulnerability. The first song, “The Void,” suggests, without being remotely maudlin, a fumbling need to fill an emptiness, while the closing number, “Good Not Bad,” playfully subverts its cheery melody. Happily, this slight expansion of Cohen’s emotional palette — echoed by her musical one, since she’s now backed by a three-piece band rather than just a pianist — has not hindered her sunny, gonzo vitality. More, here, is more.Come for MeThrough June 30 at Joe’s Pub, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

  • 100 Shares109 Views

    in Theater

    William Jackson Harper Needed to Do ‘Primary Trust’

    The longtime New York actor explains why his character in Eboni Booth’s play about a lonely bookstore worker is closer to him than any other he’s taken on.When Eboni Booth’s “Primary Trust” begins, William Jackson Harper stands alone onstage. His weight shifts from foot to foot; his fingers knead the air. He is smiling, but that smile looks as though it comes from a place of pain.Harper (“The Good Place,” “Love Life”) plays Kenneth, a 38-year-old bookstore employee unmoored when the store closes. A play about loss, loneliness and the hope of connection, “Primary Trust,” which runs through July 2 at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theater, is also a shrewd and gentle vehicle for Harper’s particular gifts — vulnerability, thoughtfulness, emotional lability. There are few actors who can better convey the awkwardness, the messiness and the unanticipated joy of being alive.On a recent Monday morning, at a colorful cafe near his home in Brooklyn, Harper, 43, provided an offstage illustration. His matcha had slopped onto one of his tan suede loafers. “I’ve ruined these shoes,” he said as he studied the green stain. And then, after a pause, “Or maybe I’ll just look like a painter.”Harper and April Matthis in the play “Primary Trust” at the Laura Pels Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHarper, who spent a dozen years Off and Off Off Broadway before making the move to television, tends to get nervous in interviews. And he was nervous here, too — the veins in his forehead were pulsing. But he persevered. He is an artist who wears his heart on his sleeve. And under it, too: On his left arm was a tattoo of the cottonwood tree that stood in his grandmother’s yard. (“It reminds me of a time when everybody was alive,” he said.) Over tea he discussed the appeal of returning to theater and the lessons that the play can offer. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.When did you know that you wanted to be an actor?My mom made me take these theater classes in middle school. Because I was pretty shy. My mom was like, “We’ve got to work on that.” So I started taking these theater classes. Acting was the only thing that I was actually pretty good at.Did it make you less shy?Maybe it made me better at pretending. And I felt there was finally some place to put my feelings. I didn’t really have an outlet. Being loud and being onstage expelled some of the stuff that was bugging me.You spent a decade working in New York theater. But I understand that before you booked “The Good Place,” you almost quit acting?I was doing OK. I had some really good roles in some really good projects. Stuff that I was proud of. Like getting to do “All the Way” on Broadway. Doing “Placebo” at Playwrights Horizons, the “Total Bent” at the Public. But God forbid my mom gets sick. God forbid I get really sick. Just the uncertainty of the day-to-day, month-to-month, paycheck to paycheck nature of it was a little too much. Like, I’m in my mid 30s. I’d like to be just a little more stable. So I was like, I don’t think I want to do this anymore.Harper and Kristen Bell in NBC’s “The Good Place.”Colleen Hayes/NBCHow did TV feel different?There’s no rehearsal, which is wild, you just memorize your lines and then you go. And it’s a hell of a lot harder to keep your concentration because people are in the room with you — people looking at the monitors five feet away. You can’t suspend your disbelief at all. And since there is no audience reaction, you’re just like, Am I doing OK? But they pay you way better. They also feed you, which is amazing. And the fact that you get to do stuff over and over and over again is kind of nice. Because eventually through that repetition, something unlocks.Why do you keep coming back to theater?I just love it. I also feel like it expands my tool kit when it comes to just being an actor, because when you want something to change and you want something to go differently, it means that you have to shift your thinking and open yourself up. And I like being in charge of the whole ride. Once I’m doing a run of a play and just getting to stay in it, rather than only doing a minute at a time and then resetting, it’s easier to feel like I’m fully inhabiting a character. Because there’s no start and stop, you just go.How did “Primary Trust” come to you?Eboni and I had done some shows together, hung out socially. She was doing a workshop at the Roundabout and was like, “Hey, would you want to do this?” She sent me the script, and I had an emotional reaction to it immediately. The character of Kenneth is closer to me as a person than anyone I’ve played. And there’s things that character says that I’ve said in my life. That’s never happened to me before. I needed to do this play. I just needed to, I was going to be upset if I didn’t. Because I really felt like I just understood this character really, really deeply.“The character of Kenneth is closer to me as a person than anyone I’ve played,” Harper said. “There’s things that character says that I’ve said in my life.”Olivia Galli for The New York TimesWho is Kenneth?Kenneth is a 38-year-old who’s led a very small, isolated life out of self-preservation. He loses his job and has to be open to people in a way that he isn’t ready for. It’s all brand-new to him. This is a guy who found a way to make things work and to not get hurt. Now he has to risk really getting hurt and really making a mess.How did you find your way into Kenneth?Him being a foster child feels like a significant piece of things. I didn’t want to go asking people, Hey, do you know anyone who was raised in foster care? That would have felt really terrible and callous. But I watched a lot of documentaries about people that had been in the foster system. Then there’s a big traumatic loss early on in his life that shapes how he moves through the world. I lost my dad when I was really young. And there’s a thing Kenneth says about this one babysitter who tries to tell him that everything is going to be OK. He hates that. And I hate it, too. I’m like, “No! You don’t know that, the worst can happen.” Leaning into those feelings that I’ve had for a long time, that helped. Then there is the discomfort that I have just moving through the world, just going ahead and letting it be out there.Well, I’m skeptical of artists who are comfortable.I was just thinking about that on my run: People who feel certain and comfortable all the time, I’m like, Oh, man, what knowledge are you unencumbered by? Like, wow, it must be so nice to just not know and not care.Is there a lesson in this play?One is that you don’t know what people are carrying around. So be nice, be kind. And it shows that even if everything’s not OK, it might be OK. I know that sounds goofy. But as much as there’s a chance that things could all go to [expletive], there’s just as much of a chance it could work out. More

  • 138 Shares189 Views

    in Television

    ‘The Fully Monty’ Returns After 25 Years, as a TV Show

    A new series on Hulu and FX reunites the feel-good British film’s characters and its writer, 25 years later and in another age of austerity.“‘The Full Monty’ is Sheffield, and Sheffield is ‘The Full Monty,’” said the actor Robert Carlyle in a recent video interview.When the feel-good feature was released in 1997, the film put the former mining town in the north of England and Carlyle, its lead, in the spotlight. Made on a budget of about $3 million, “The Full Monty” garnered more than $250 million at the global box office; at the time, The New York Times declared the film “by far the biggest success at Fox Searchlight Pictures.”Written by Simon Beaufoy, the film followed a group of unemployed steelworkers in Sheffield, including Carlyle’s Gaz and his best friend Dave (Mark Addy), as they attempted to raise money and wrest back control of their lives by performing a strip show for the town’s women.Now, a new eight-part TV series, premiering Wednesday on FX and Hulu, returns to Sheffield 25 years later, in another period of austerity and economic downturn. Co-written by Beaufoy — with Alice Nutter, a screenwriter and former member of the music group Chumbawamba — the show reunites the film’s original cast, including Carlyle, Addy, Tom Wilkinson, Paul Barber and Lesley Sharp.“If they left it any longer, I think we may have all been dead,” deadpanned Carlyle, 62.“The Full Monty” was Addy’s debut film performance, and led to roles in “A Knight’s Tale” and Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood,” and, later, in HBO’s “Game of Thrones.” Carlyle had been best known for playing Begbie in Danny Boyle’s 1996 film “Trainspotting.” He also collaborated with the director on “The Beach,” “28 Weeks Later” and “T2 Trainspotting.”In a recent video interview, with Carlyle calling from New York and Addy joining from his home in Yorkshire, north England, the pair discussed the parallels between “The Full Monty” film and the TV reboot, and why it felt like the right time to revisit their characters. Below are edited excerpts from that conversation.From left, Addy and Carlyle in the show, which picks up the characters’ lives in Sheffield, 25 years after the events in the film. Ben Blackall/FXWhat was Beaufoy’s pitch for getting the gang back together?MARK ADDY I remember getting an email from Simon checking whether I’d have any interest in being part of a state-of-the-nation drama seen through the prism of characters that we’ve met 25 years ago. How have they fared in the intervening years? He was interested in looking at the N.H.S., Britain’s public health care service, the care system, education — all aspects of our society — in the same way he did with “The Full Monty.”ROBERT CARLYLE There are a lot of things that are precarious at the moment in the country. Conservative rule, austerity — people have been chipped away at, and so has the infrastructure of the country. That’s as good a reason as any to do something which reflects people’s current experiences.What’s changed for Gaz and Dave in the intervening years?CARLYLE From Gaz’s perspective, I don’t think a lot’s changed. It’s still pretty much a hand-to-mouth existence for him. He does a variety of jobs to survive.ADDY Dave and Jean, who’s played by Sharp, have moved to a slightly nicer area of Sheffield, but they’re struggling in their own way.“The Full Monty” film explored how several issues affected the characters’ masculinity. In the first episode of the series, Gerald (Wilkinson) questions what he’s “allowed” to say these days. What identity issues are the characters grappling with in the show?ADDY Our generation is struggling to know how to address a person. You’re worried you’re going to offend somebody by misgendering them completely innocently. But that has come from a place of more acceptance and tolerance. It’s a problem that’s been thrown up by an improvement.CARLYLE Everyone has to be respectful of gender pronouns and stuff like that. It’s easy to be dismissive, but it’s important. The way that I look at it, it’s not much to be asked to call someone “they” or whatever they want to be called.One of the last great “isms” that seems to be up for grabs is ageism. Hopefully the show addresses that a little. Just because you get to your 60s, you’re not worthless.With Barber’s character, Horse, who is now in his 70s, you see how the welfare system that failed younger men is now failing an older generation.From left, Horse (Barber), Gaz (Carlyle) and Dave (Addy). In the show, the characters navigate another period of austerity and economic downturn in Britain. Ben Blackall/FXCARLYLE The whole Horse arc is tragic. There’s a moment I loved, you know when he goes to the supermarket? He’s got the packet of sausages and he’s slapping it against the self-checkout scanner. He says, “Where are all the checkout girls? They’ve all gone.” He’s trying to put money into that machine and the guy says, “Use a card.” But he hasn’t got a card. That’s something you don’t see on TV.At times, the show is also unapologetically silly. Why did a sense of lightness feel like the right approach?CARLYLE It’s what Simon Beaufoy does brilliantly. You can’t escape the politics in “The Full Monty,” but he’s able to balance that with humor. There’s no way any of these characters are self-pitying. It’s vital for it to have upbeat moments.ADDY It’s about how life goes on, the human spirit will hopefully see people through. The silliness tempers the tragedy.CARLYLE If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. And who wants to sit about crying all the time?Why do you think the show found a home on FX and Hulu in the United States, and on Disney+ in Britain, rather than on a British TV network like the BBC or Channel 4?CARLYLE I know it was offered to them. They weren’t interested. When I was told it was going to be Disney+ and FX, I was really surprised. This film had gone down in history as one of the biggest-grossing British independent films of all time. No one in Britain wants to stick some money into this?The film was released in a specific cultural moment in Britain in 1997. How important was that to its success?ADDY Massively.CARLYLE Tony Blair, his Labour government, Britpop. The whole explosion of popular culture. We were lucky, Mark and I, to be in the center of that.ADDY It was like, the worst of times are behind us, and things are going to get better.‌CARLYLE It rode along on the wave of optimism that prevailed at the tail end of the ’90s. But of course, that lasted about three days. Now, we’re back to where we’d been.The original film, released in 1997, was made on a budget of about $3 million, and garnered more than $250 million at the global box office.How did “The Full Monty” shape both your careers?ADDY I hadn’t done a film before. I’d done a lot of theater and was starting to make my way in the TV world. It changed everything for me. I remember Bobby saying at the time, this could do for you what “Trainspotting” did for me.CARLYLE “The Full Monty,” my God, who could have predicted that? It opened up a lot of opportunities across the pond. “The Full Monty” has been like a vast, warm shadow that’s followed me through my whole career.How do you feel about the fact that Gaz and Dave keep their clothes on this time?ADDY Relieved.CARLYLE Absolutely delighted, as I’m sure the audience will be. When Simon got in touch, the second line of the email said, “By the way, there won’t be any stripping.” More

  • 63 Shares189 Views

    in Television

    Danny McBride Keeps It Righteous

    The party started early. Like, 10:30 a.m., still-drinking-lousy-hotel-coffee early. It was late March, a warm and overcast coastal morning, and all I knew of the day’s schedule was that Danny McBride, the creator and star of the HBO comedy “The Righteous Gemstones,” planned to swing by with a driver who would take us to an oyster farm, located somewhere among the islands and salt marshes of South Carolina Lowcountry.I did not expect him to arrive in a fully stocked party bus with several of his closest associates, including his longtime collaborator David Gordon Green, though in retrospect perhaps I should have. While reporting a different story two months earlier, I had met Walton Goggins, who plays the oily televangelist Uncle Baby Billy in “Gemstones.” When I told him that I was going down to Charleston to see McBride, who lives and produces the series in the area, Goggins responded, “I hope you like tequila.”As an icebreaker, I shared this anecdote with McBride. On cue, his wife, Gia, an art director, furnished a bottle of Código 1530. “This is George Strait’s tequila!” McBride beamed, and a look ping-ponged around the bus that asked, “Too early?”It was not too early. As we raised candy-colored plastic shot glasses in the glow of two TV screens made to look like aquariums, I decided to stash my notebook for a while: Day 1 of my visit would be less about taking notes than about taking in the life McBride has made for himself since moving here from Los Angeles.McBride does little press, so getting to know him was, of course, the goal. When “Gemstones” returns on Sunday for Season 3, it brings back what has been the most Danny McBride of his creative efforts. It is his third HBO series — following the cult-favorite baseball comedy “Eastbound and Down” (2009-13) and the deranged public school comedy “Vice Principals” (2016-17) — and he created it alone. It sets a new personal benchmark for creative cursing and comic male nudity, which was already high.McBride created “The Righteous Gemstones” and stars as Jesse, the eldest son in a family of televangelists. (With Walton Goggins.)Jake Giles Netter/HBOMcBride’s characters offer “a funny and deeply complex view of men in general, especially men in America,” said his “Gemstones” co-star Edi Patterson. (With Adam Devine.)Jake Giles Netter/HBOIt is also his most Southern show. Both previous HBO series were set down South, but “Gemstones” is the first since he and his production company, Rough House Pictures, which he shares with Green and another longtime collaborator, Jody Hill, moved from Los Angeles to Charleston in 2017. It’s a true hometown production.Of McBride’s various creations, his most beloved have been Southerners who embody a flamboyantly American brand of male chauvinism, and Jesse Gemstone is no exception. The eldest son in a dysfunctional family of rich televangelists, Jesse vies perhaps only with the hard-partying narcissist Kenny Powers of “Eastbound” for McBride’s biggest blowhard, a high bar.It is the kind of satire that comes from a deep place of knowing. The kind whose execution appears so effortless that its target might not realize it is satire.“I know probably not his whole audience sees it the way I do — they’ll think, like, ‘Oh, I’m exactly like Kenny Powers,’ or whatever — but I think that’s part of the fun and part of the appeal,” said Edi Patterson, who plays Jesse’s unhinged sister, Judy, and is a “Gemstones” writer. “It’s such a funny and deeply complex view of men in general, especially men in America.”But “Gemstones” has also seen McBride, 46, broadening his creative range. He oversees every script, directs episodes. Its cast is a true ensemble, and its many characters and subplots have enabled him to explore new kinds of stories and relationships, some with tear-jerking sensitivity.Friends and colleagues reliably describe him as genuine, inclusive, a deep thinker. But more than many screen stars he is both blessed and dogged by fans who sometimes have trouble remembering he is not his boorish characters.I wondered whether the lines ever blurred for him, and whether the fan confusion chafed. The answer to both, he insisted, was no. He had left Hollywood and built a tight creative community 2,500 miles away for many reasons, and one of them seemed to be to preserve his integrity of self.“You can think I’m whatever, and if it makes you like the show more because you think that’s me, go for it,” he said the next day as we toured the “Gemstones” studios, located at a mall, inside a former Sears. “I would rather people not know what my deal is than clearly have an understanding of where the line is drawn.”“I don’t see myself as some alpha, and so I feel like there’s something inherently that makes me laugh about trying to present myself like an alpha,” McBride said.Elizabeth Bick for The New York TimesFunny enough, comedy is not McBride’s favorite genre — he prefers horror and reality TV — nor is it something he always pursued.Early on, he also didn’t imagine himself on camera. He wanted to write and direct. Raised Baptist, mostly in Fredericksburg, Va., he went to film school at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, in Winston-Salem, where he met Green; Hill; John Carcieri, another writer for “Gemstones”; and Ben Best, who created “Eastbound” with Hill and McBride and died in 2021. The film school was tiny, and then only two years old.“Everybody in that school was a misfit or a reject,” Green said. Their group bonded over one another’s VHS collections and found creative kinship and freedom. “It was all just a bunch of kids that kind of were trying to figure it out,” he said.Green was the first to make a splash after college with the critically lauded indie film “George Washington” (2000). After a main cast member of his next feature, “All the Real Girls” (2003), bailed a week into shooting, Green called “the funniest guy I know,” McBride, who was doing below-the-line postproduction work in Los Angeles.McBride asked his boss for time off, was denied, then quit and drove to North Carolina, where Green was shooting. The film debuted to rapturous reviews.Still, McBride’s break came a few years later with “The Foot Fist Way” (2008). Directed by Hill and written by Hill, Best and McBride, the film starred McBride as a Southern strip-mall taekwondo instructor whose ego grossly outstrips his skills. Copies circulated after its 2006 Sundance debut, landing eventually with Adam McKay and Will Ferrell, then producing partners, who got it into theaters. “Eastbound,” which McKay and Ferrell executive produced, soon followed.“With comedy, one of the tricks is knowing how you come off just physically,” McKay said. “And Danny knows he comes off like a guy who, if you cut him off in the parking lot of a Sam’s Club, would key your car while you’re in there shopping.”McBride said he was always satirizing a certain kind of guy he grew up with, a kind of guy he was not. He seemed amused by the outward contradiction.“I don’t see myself as some alpha, and so I feel like there’s something inherently that makes me laugh about trying to present myself like an alpha,” McBride said over lunch on Day 2 at a restaurant near his home. (McBride lives on an island near Charleston, and he had driven us there in his golf cart.)“They’re all just sort of dudes that I think have subscribed to this antiquated way of what the rules are, like what a dude’s supposed to be,” he added. “They’ve committed to it, and then the reality of it isn’t adding up to the illusion.”“Danny knows he comes off like a guy who, if you cut him off in the parking lot of a Sam’s Club, would key your car while you’re in there shopping,” Adam McKay, a past collaborator, said.Elizabeth Bick for The New York TimesMcBride and I talked a lot about masculinity, about fathers and sons. It is a central theme of “Gemstones” — and the Bible, he noted — with its “Succession”-like story about a powerful megachurch pastor (John Goodman) and his three feckless children. (Adam Devine plays the younger brother, Kelvin.) McBride’s own father left when he was young, and he hasn’t seen him since high school. But he insisted he isn’t resentful.“I like how my life turned out,” said McBride, himself a father of two. “Him exiting from our life is probably part of what enabled me to be able to go on and do the things that I did.” The biggest effect it had on his life, he said, was to make him more determined to be a supportive parent.McBride loves his characters and the South in the complex, sometimes ruthless way of familial love. On the surface, “Gemstones” picks some easy marks — megachurches, new money, homoerotic jocks; Season 3 promises monster trucks and militias — but soft targets can be tougher to nail. What allows for authenticity is affection, however complicated.“That’s the tightrope,” he said. “A lot of times I see, when things in the South are presented, it’s always such a boring take.”Back on Day 1, after we all spilled out of the party bus, we wound up on a muddy oyster skiff off Wadmalaw Island, several shots down, pulling salty Sea Cloud oysters straight from their floating cages. Still, having only just met McBride, it was hard not to wonder how much of the day’s events were a show put on for the benefit of a reporter — a good-time performance by a performer who plays characters who are constantly performing.I asked everyone I talked to about him afterward; they all insisted I shouldn’t flatter myself.“I want you to feel really special right now, but that’s kind of Danny,” said Cassidy Freeman, who plays Jesse’s beleaguered wife, Amber. When McBride is the ringmaster, “everyone’s invited,” she added. Hill called him “the fun coordinator of our group.”Cassidy Freeman, who plays the wife of McBride’s character in “Gemstones,” described him as an inveterate host.Jake Giles Netter/HBOWhen I reported back to Goggins, he put it this way: “He’s certainly not doing that as a way to impress you.” Whoever shows up, McBride “just rolls out the red carpet.”McBride seems to find community wherever he goes. Otherwise, he imports it. Green moved from Austin to Charleston. Rough House’s president, Brandon James, who was on the boat, moved with McBride from Los Angeles. As of last month, Hill was preparing to move there with his pregnant wife. For a time, the country singer Sturgill Simpson was in the Charleston crew. He’s in Season 3.It seems like creative utopia. The region’s lower production costs have made it easier for Rough House to develop an array of dream projects, relying on local crews fed and ferried by local businesses. Green’s 2018 “Halloween” sequel, which McBride helped write, was an early example. Green’s first film in their “Exorcist” sequel trilogy, for which McBride has a story credit, is scheduled for October.“I think what they’re doing is going to now become the norm with what’s changing here in Hollywood and the way commercial entertainment is made,” McKay said. “I think stuff is going to go hyperlocal, and I think it’s going to be really cool.”Dare to dream. For now, McBride seems genuinely grateful to have found a way to keep poking fun at things with his closest friends — to keep the party going.“Ultimately it’s really just trying to entertain people and give them something funny to laugh at,” he said. “It makes us laugh. And so we assume hopefully it will make other people laugh, too.” More

  • 125 Shares119 Views

    in Television

    ‘Based on a True Story’: The Vogue of Killer Content

    A new Peacock satire puts the ethics of America’s true-crime obsession on trial by making a serial killer more than just a subject. He’s also the star.In a September 2022 episode of “You’re Wrong About,” a history podcast, the writer Michael Hobbes noted that the number of serial killers might be diminishing, which could be a problem, he said — for true-crime fanatics, anyway.“Step it up out there, serial killers,” he said. “You got to produce good content.”Hobbes was joking, but serial killers and the podcasts devoted to them feed an ever growing true-crime industry worth millions of dollars. Now the eight-episode Peacock satire “Based on a True Story,” which arrived in full last week, poses a troubling question: What if serial killers weren’t only the subjects but also the hosts, or even the producers, of a true-crime podcast?The idea isn’t entirely far-fetched. The true-crime world is saturated with podcasts that have been criticized as being ethically compromised and flawed, accused of offenses including plagiarism, racial insensitivity and pro-police bias. True-crime TV series have likewise been criticized: the docu-series “The Jinx,” for edits of a killer’s confession; “Making a Murderer,” for its presentation and omission of details; and the scripted drama “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” for humanizing its subject at the expense of Dahmer’s victims.“Based on a True Story,” created by Craig Rosenberg (“The Boys”), is a dark, comic sendup of true crime and its conventions, clichés and moral compromises. Matt (played by Tom Bateman) is a friendly plumber by day and the feared West Side Ripper by night. When a married couple in desperate need of excitement and cash (the pregnant Ava, played by an also-pregnant Kaley Cuoco, and Nathan, played by Chris Messina) discover his identity, they blackmail him into embarking on a scheme to create a podcast from the killer’s point-of-view.“Finally, some good luck!” Ava says. “A serial killer has fallen into our laps.”One central challenge, however, was how — and whether — the creators and cast of “Based on a True Story” could avoid committing the same crimes as the genre it claims to critique. It is, after all, still a comedy about some particularly gruesome murders.For Cuoco and Messina, it was important to keep the actions of their own characters in proper perspective.“Every day, I would turn to Kaley and say, ‘Is this supposed to be funny or serious here?’” Chris Messina (with Kaley Cuoco) said about trying to nail the tone of the satire.Peacock“In my opinion, Ava and Nathan are just as bad as the killer,” Cuoco, who is also an executive producer, said in a recent phone interview. “I know Ava is trying to believe, Well, this is us stopping him. It’s wrong and it’s funny at the same time.”Messina said, in a separate interview, that figuring out the tone had been a persistent struggle.“Every day, I would turn to Kaley and say, ‘Is this supposed to be funny or serious here?’” he said. “Obviously, with people being murdered, it’s no laughing matter. But there is a screwball comedy and terror along with a big heart.“Like, in the Coen Brothers’ ‘Fargo,’ when they are putting someone in a woodchipper. Why am I laughing one minute and horrified the next?”As the story gets underway, the absurdities quickly mount. In the beginning, Matt is supposed to be merely the interview subject, his voice disguised. But as the plot progresses, he emerges as a de facto showrunner.He upgrades the locations and equipment. He provides a new edit, changing the beginning, the ending and the music. He rejects every note about the narrative and the brand.“These seem like completely ridiculous conversations given that you are talking about people who have been murdered,” Bateman said. “And the funny thing is, he’s getting more and more artistically involved because it’s the first time in his life he’s ever felt seen.”Michael Costigan, an executive producer, said he thought the podcasters’ artistic squabbles also spoke to a common error in the true-crime world: losing track of the reality of the crimes.“Kaley’s character is pitching her ideas and forgetting something: ‘I’m sitting across from the perpetrator,’” he said. “We thought, This is absolutely talking about a metaphor for how millions of people get lost in stories as escapism. But what are they escaping into? What are they forgetting about?”Jason Bateman, another executive producer (no relation to Tom), said he had thought a lot about the show’s tone, and wanted to make sure it wasn’t too “silly” or “camp,” grounding character actions in reality. It was, he acknowledged, a difficult line to walk.Partly as a mirror of their own internal debates, the writers and producers created a character, played by Ever Carradine, who is the mother of a West Side Ripper victim. Her participation in a true-crime panel raises questions of whether she is honoring or exploiting her daughter.The show takes Nathan and Ava (Messina and Cuoco) to a true-crime convention, where all sorts of horrific crimes and killers are monetized. Elizabeth Morris/Peacock“We wondered in those scenes, what is the line?” Costigan said. “This is her wanting to talk about her daughter but then also participating in this world, too. We’re really hoping that the audience can have their cake and eat it, too — that you see the duality, see the world from both lenses.”Critics have pointed to recent studies in suggesting that fans of the genre, a large percentage of whom are women, can suffer from a kind of true-crime brain, a sense of heightened fear that is out-of-sync with the overall decline in violent crime of recent decades. It has also, as the advent of the web sleuth attests, created a lot of self-appointed experts. Ava’s wine-and-crime club of true-crime obsessives are fans of a podcast called “Sisters in Crime,” which leads her to believe she has mastered the genre.“Ava says things like ‘DB’ for dead body,” said Cuoco, who admitted that she is a huge “Dateline” fan. “She talks like she’s actually on one of those shows.”The same delusion that allows Cuoco’s Ava to figure out that Matt is the West Side Ripper also, unfortunately, leads her to believe she can control a serial killer — and to lose sight of the victims. In the original script, Ava and Nathan were to be the parents of teenagers, but when Cuoco became pregnant, she suggested that Ava be pregnant as well. It helped raise the stakes and address why Ava would be so blinded by her need to make money.“Her life is chaotic,” Cuoco said. “This is a distraction.”To find a potential fan base, the characters take an exploratory trip to CrimeCon, a series of real-life conventions for true crime aficionados, held in cities like Las Vegas, New Orleans and Orlando. As the actors and other producers explained, Rosenberg, himself a true-crime fan, had started thinking more about how criminals become celebrities after attending one such event. (A Peacock spokesman said Rosenberg was unavailable to comment because of the continuing writers’ strike.)“Craig said he heard people there discussing who their favorite serial killers were, as if they were football players,” Tom Bateman said. His character, walking around the convention floor, observes merchandise being sold in his name, as it is for other serial killers. But he isn’t ranking as highly as he thinks he should be.Cuoco said she had enjoyed making a humorous examination of the genre. But there were some sobering issues about true-crime, she acknowledged, that even this satire couldn’t fully address — including the future of the genre, which she said was “already at an extreme.”“There is a fine line,” she added. “I do not condone a serial killer doing a podcast in real life. But I feel like I would be one of those people who say, ‘This should be illegal,’ and then probably go in my car and listen to it. We can’t help ourselves.” More

  • 100 Shares149 Views

    in Theater

    At the Holland Festival, Many Shades of Strange

    Some of the action onstage at the Amsterdam event is so bizarre that following the action can be tough.When it was established in 1947, the Holland Festival signaled the Dutch desire to build bridges after World War II. Its mandate was simple: to bring international artists from a range of disciplines to the Netherlands, every summer.“You had three cultural exports at the time: tulips, cheese and the Holland Festival,” Emily Ansenk, who has been the event’s artistic director since 2019, said in an interview.Its core mission hasn’t changed much — and the breadth of work on offer in Amsterdam, spanning performance and visual arts, can feel somewhat disorienting. While the 2022 edition tackled climate change and issues of representation, there is no overt theme this year.Still, as the theater portion of the Holland Festival kicked into high gear over this past weekend, common threads started to emerge. Not all of them were inviting: Elli Papakonstantinou and Susanne Kennedy, two experimental European directors, created stage worlds so bizarre that following the action proved a tall order.“ANGELA (a strange loop),” a production created by Kennedy and her creative partner, the visual artist Markus Selg, is a hot ticket on the festival circuit this year. Its run at the Holland Festival came after stops at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels and at the Wiener Festwochen in Vienna, with the Avignon Festival, in southeastern France, to come next month.It’s easy to see why programmers love it. Its premise is zeitgeisty — the central character, Angela, is an influencer with an autoimmune disorder whose real life is crumbling — and Kennedy and Selg bring it to life with genuine technical wizardry. In Angela’s house, designed by Selg, every wall is also a screen. One minute, you see a plain white kitchen behind her; the next, a giant talking cat or a feverish explosion of colors.“ANGELA (a strange loop)” is a collaboration between the theater director Susanne Kennedy and her creative partner, the visual artist Marcus Selg.Julian RöderThe play’s script is entirely prerecorded: The cast lip-sync to it throughout, looking detached and slightly robotic. Reality is unstable and not to be trusted, the show keeps telegraphing. The most natural dialogue actually comes when Angela films herself addressing her followers, her chirpy “Hey guys!” in stark contrast with her otherwise aloof demeanor.The early scenes promise much. When Angela’s boyfriend, Brad, stops by, their affected, slow-motion interactions — and recorded munching sounds when they eat takeout — are oddly captivating, as is Angela’s relationship with her overbearing mother.Yet “ANGELA (a strange loop)” ultimately veers off the rails in the second half, which crams in so many shades of strange that it becomes difficult to keep track. The appearance of a bald angel figure who plays the violin? Quaintly strange. An abduction subplot that involves Angela wandering through a forest, before being “reborn from water and spirit”? Confoundingly strange. A ritual in which Angela “coughs up” a baby trapped in a tiny balloon and holds it up in front of a totem, with distorted images of fetuses flashing behind? Pointlessly, tediously strange.In terms of opaque plots, Kennedy and Selg had competition from Papakonstantinou, a Greek director who presented “The Bacchae” at the Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam’s largest concert hall. “The Bacchae” is very loosely based on Euripides’s ancient play, whose characters seem to have been transplanted into a postapocalyptic world. The stiff family of King Pentheus of Thebes gathers around a dinner table, in outrageously camp makeup and costumes, and await the arrival of a meteor that might destroy the earth.Georgios Iatrou in Elli Papakonstantinou’s “The Bacchae.”Alex KatThat meteor turns out to be Dionysus, the god who appears in Euripides’s play to punish Pentheus and his relatives for claiming that Dionysus is not the son of Zeus. Here, Dionysus — played by Ariah Lester, also the composer of the few songs peppered throughout — acts instead as a catalyst for an actual bacchanal. The cast strip to their underwear, before writhing and bouncing on the floor, at length.By the standards of contemporary dance, however, this particular gender-bending orgy was pretty tame and lacking in choreographic structure. Disturbingly, a family servant is also sexually assaulted by Pentheus in close-up onscreen, before happily joining in the romp, as if nothing had happened. A commanding performance by Georgios Iatrou as a singing Tiresias in drag wasn’t quite enough to redeem this “Greek tragedy in the metaverse,” as Papakonstantinou describes it.Queer characters were dealt a better hand in “Brideshead Revisited,” the only Dutch theater production in this year’s Holland Festival lineup. In this lo-fi, conversational show, the actor and performer Florian Myjer delves into his teenage passion for the 1945 Evelyn Waugh novel.Myjer is a member of De Warme Winkel, an acclaimed Dutch theater collective, which opened its own rehearsal and performance venue, De Sloot, last year in Amsterdam. Onstage there, Myjer first spoke to the audience as his sweet, awkward 16-year-old self, who fantasizes about the novel’s central male friendship between two Oxford students, Charles and Sebastian — which has been widely interpreted as having gay overtones. “But it’s not what I’m looking for because I’m not gay,” the young Myjer protests.Yet Myjer did ultimately come out as gay, and in the rest of the show, he grapples with his long-held desire to adapt “Brideshead Revisited” for the stage. Three times over, we witness him start rehearsals with another actor, Abke Haring, who co-directed the production with Myjer. Their attempts to start the creative process are hilariously awkward at first, before turning serious.Florian Myjer, left, and Abke Haring in “Brideshead Revisited,” a production by the Dutch theater collective De Warme Winkel.Sofie KnijffBoth performers reveal deeply held fears. Haring explains that she has always felt like she is both a girl and a boy, and details the impact this has had on her life. As the relationship between the two characters turns confrontational, Haring then wonders why Myjer chose her for this project instead of a man, and Myjer admits that he still feels shame over his sexuality.While “Brideshead Revisited” is certainly no Waugh adaptation, Myjer and Haring have taken a literary classic and riffed on it freely, in a warm, vulnerable way. The Holland Festival may have been intended to bring the world to Dutch stages, but it’s good to see some Dutch artists join the party and claim the spotlight, too. More

  • 138 Shares199 Views

    in Theater

    Juliet Stevenson Returns to ‘The Doctor,’ and the New York Stage

    The British actress is reprising her role as the Jewish physician at the center of an ethical drama. “It’s like a tailored suit,” the director Robert Icke said.At the start of Robert Icke’s “The Doctor,” the actress Juliet Stevenson stands alone in a spotlight onstage. “Am I sure? Yes. Yes!” she says crisply as if to an invisible interlocutor. “I’m crystal clear. I’m a doctor.”As the play’s title character, a grammatically exacting neurosurgeon named Ruth Wolff, Stevenson will repeat those last two phrases many times as events unfold and Ruth’s clarity and intellectual certainties erode. Eventually they will transmute into something far more inchoate as her life unravels, and self-doubt begins to permeate her conviction that being a doctor is all that matters.“The Doctor,” which opens Wednesday at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, is a reworking of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1912 drama, “Professor Bernhardi,” about a Jewish physician who refuses entry to a Roman Catholic priest trying to administer last rites to a patient dying from sepsis after an abortion. In Icke’s version, the issues go beyond questions of medical ethics and religious affiliations to include identity politics and cancel culture.The play, and Stevenson, received rave reviews when “The Doctor” was first presented in 2019 at London’s Almeida Theater, where Icke was then the artistic director, and later after it transferred to the West End. “One of the peaks of the theatrical year,” Michael Billington wrote in The Guardian, adding that “while Stevenson shows how integrity can turn into obduracy, she also beautifully portrays the human cost of making medicine one’s god.”During an interview, Stevenson, 66, said the piece “takes a lot of the preoccupations of our time and plays them out on a very large, Shakespearean scale. Nobody’s right. Nobody’s wrong. We can explore all the angles because it’s safe. We’re on a stage, it’s a play!”After a long rehearsal, she was enthusiastic and voluble during our conversation at the Bishopsgate Institute, a cultural center in East London. “I have always wanted to put myself at the service of great writing, share it with people in the dark,” she said. “Every culture has that ancient ritual.”In Britain, Stevenson is a familiar face who has taken on a variety of roles onstage and on-screen since graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1978. But to U.S. audiences, she is probably best known for the 1990 Anthony Minghella film, “Truly, Madly, Deeply,” a romantic comedy about a woman mourning her dead lover, who returns as a ghost.“I don’t want to play King Lear any more. I want to tell women’s stories,” Juliet Stevenson said about the lack of roles for women over 40. An image of a wolf, her inspiration animal, is affixed to her dressing room mirror.Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesShe never aspired, she said, to a Hollywood career. “I am not at ease in the industry and no good at all that glamour stuff,” she added. “I am not an actress because I felt this face has to be on a screen.”And despite playing lead roles in major West End productions that have moved to Broadway, including “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” her only previous appearance in New York was a 2003 City Opera production of Stephen Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music.”“I never wanted to leave my children for long stretches while filming or acting outside the U.K.,” Stevenson said. “But now my youngest is 22, and I am free!”She comes “with this relish,” she said for a first-time move from the West End to New York: “It’s amazing to have a first time at my age!”“The Doctor” is Stevenson’s third collaboration with Icke, after playing Gertrude in his 2017 production of “Hamlet,” starring Andrew Scott, then alternating with Lia Williams in the roles of Mary, Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth I in his update of Friedrich Schiller’s “Mary Stuart.”Stevenson first met Icke in 2010 at the Almeida Theater, where he was then an associate director. “We did a gala with a whole lot of famous actors doing Shakespeare, and I offered to run lines,” Icke recounted in a telephone interview from New York. “Juliet was the only person who wanted to rehearse and wanted notes. She was performing a very difficult bit of ‘As You Like It,’ and there was something about the rhythm and music of what she was doing that was amazing, and I stored it up.”They kept in touch, and, in 2015, when Stevenson congratulated Williams backstage, after watching her performance in Icke’s “Oresteia,” the director had a flash of inspiration. “I had been thinking about “Mary Stuart” for a long time, and looking at Lia and Juliet, I realized if I solved the problem of how to cast it by not solving it and doubling the roles, I had the key.”These parts in Icke’s productions have been important moments in her career, Stevenson said, adding that she would never have taken on Gertrude in “Hamlet” without his insistence. “I thought, ugh, these voiceless women in Shakespeare,” she said, “but he took that problem, that silence, and put it in the center.”But there have been many important moments, starting when she was around 10 and performed a W.H. Auden poem, “If I Could Tell You,” at school, she said. “It was the first time I felt a light bulb go on, felt I had to be a vessel for the poem to pass through me to an audience.”Jeremy Irons and Stevenson in New York City Opera’s 2003 production of the musical “A Little Night Music” at the New York State Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStevenson, the youngest of three children, lived abroad with her family as her father’s job with the British Army’s Royal Engineers took them to Germany, Australia and Malta. At 9, she encountered “an amazing drama teacher, Bess Jones,” at a boarding school just outside London, and started to go to the theater in her teens. When she saw “King Lear,” she immediately wanted to play the title role. “I was just possessed by it, the size of his anger, passions, love, regret, grief,” she said. “I stomped around being Lear for months; of course he is just like a badly behaved adolescent!”She successfully auditioned for the Royal Academy — “a culture shock” — where she felt lost and insecure until a teacher harshly criticized her performance of a speech from “Antony and Cleopatra.” “My anger found its way into the words, and I could feel the temperature of the room change,” she said. “I thought, OK, this is what acting is.”After graduating, she found ensemble work (“Shape No. 2, Sea Nymph No. 2 and Hellhound No. 3”) in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of “The Tempest,” and stayed for eight years playing lead roles in Shakespeare productions and new plays, and working with directors like Peter Brook, Trevor Nunn and Howard Davies.She had also started working in film, appearing in Peter Greenaway’s “Drowning by Numbers” and “a couple of forgettable movies” before working on “Truly, Madly.” Also in 1990, she performed in “Death and the Maiden,” winning the best actress Olivier Award in 1992, and met her future husband, Hugh Brody, an anthropologist. Over the next two decades she had two children and played a dizzying number of roles onscreen (“Emma,” “Bend It Like Beckham,” “Departure”) and onstage (“The Duchess of Malfi,” “Private Lives,” “The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” “Duet for One”).“Juliet pours her life and love and soul into everything,” said the theater director Natalie Abrahami, who worked with Stevenson in Beckett’s “Happy Days” and “Wings,” by Arthur Kopit. “She is always pushing, really good at asking instinctive, actor-led questions: ‘Why would the character act this way? What memory is triggered here?’ She is always making the map of a character’s life as three-dimensional as possible.”In “The Doctor,” Stevenson “climbs an extraordinarily difficult mountain with Ruth,” said Naomi Wirthner, who plays Ruth’s antagonist, the surgeon Roger Hardiman. “It’s a rock face that she climbs every night, every rehearsal, and just when you think she is at peak Ruth, she will find a deeper, stronger layer.”While writing “The Doctor,” Icke said, he was thinking about “the genius archetype, cancel culture and how society deals with the exceptionally abled. The examples are usually men, like Picasso, but I was interested in the interaction of genius and femaleness.”He knew, he added, that he wanted to write “a virtuosic, lead-actor play, like ‘Jerusalem’ with Mark Rylance. There is something about watching a great actor shoulder a big boulder and drag it up the hill. This was very specifically written for Juliet. It’s like a tailored suit; there isn’t a line of Ruth Wolff that is innocent of the knowledge that it will be spoken by her.”When he sent Stevenson the script, it spoke to a long-harbored frustration. “I had got really fed up with the lack of roles for women over 40,” she said. “And I don’t want to play King Lear any more. These are men’s stories, and I want to tell women’s stories.”She added that coming back to “The Doctor” after a break “was like holding up a mirror to so many cultural tensions: the demonizing of otherness, George Floyd, antisemitism, the agonizing history of abortion in the U.S.” The play also responds through its eclectic casting, she said, to the policing of which actors can play which characters. “When you see a white actor and discover the character is Black, it forces you to think, would I have reacted differently to that situation had I known that?”Warming to the theme, she continued.“My job description as an actor is to tell other’s stories, to imagine myself into other people’s lives,” she said. “Let’s not lose our richness. Let’s throw all these subjects up in the air and let them catch the light as they fall.” More

  • 100 Shares149 Views

    in Television

    Has America Ignored the Workplace for Too Long?

    Barack Obama’s Netflix series “Working” tries to catch you up on decades of change — more than it has time for.Sheila steps into a wood-paneled room and addresses a ring of home-care aides in navy blue scrubs. Soft light filters through the curtains as they begin with a prayer: “Father God, as we go through this meeting, open up our minds, open up our ears, so we can hear, so we can see. Amen.” The aides take turns introducing themselves and offering brief sketches of their jobs. Sheila is their manager. They are employed by At Home Care, LLC, a business in southeastern Mississippi, and they are speaking to a camera — to a documentary crew that is filming their meeting for a mini-series titled “Working: What We Do All Day.” Some describe the closeness they have with the people whose bedpans they change, whose medications they administer. One, Caroline, her pulled-back hair flecked with gray, says she probably knows the clients she takes care of better than their own children do. Then Sheila asks: “Y’all have any questions for me? Any comments for me?”This innocent query opens a floodgate of discontent that takes both Sheila and the viewer by surprise. There are questions about time-keeping and payment-tracking systems. An aide named Amanda says a client had her drive 10 miles to pick up a pizza: “Is the GPS picking up all that?” No, Sheila says sympathetically, aides don’t get paid for extra driving. “It don’t seem right,” she concedes, “because you’re burning your gas.” None of this releases the pressure in the room; if anything, it just keeps building. “How are we supposed to live and survive?” one woman asks. “We have kids to take care of, homes to take care of.” Caroline notes that she has been with the company for almost three years without seeing a raise. Sheila stares downward, as though battening her emotional hatches.The scene is documentary gold. It requires no commentary, no interviews. It is a simple, powerful illustration of an American workplace, boiling like a pot of tomato sauce, ready to spit hot rivulets of grievance at anyone who stirs it. We feel for the workers. We feel for Sheila, who seems caught in a crossfire, trying her best. We feel righteous anger at whoever might be to blame for all this dissatisfaction. But who, precisely, is that? This is one of many big questions that “Working” may not have anywhere near enough time to answer.“Working” is a limited Netflix series hosted by Barack Obama and produced in part by Higher Ground, the production company he and Michelle Obama founded. In a voice-over, the former president tells us the production was inspired by Studs Terkel’s pathbreaking 1974 oral history, “Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do,” a hefty book that relayed the thoughts and stories of a wide swath of Americans, placing their words democratically side by side. The show’s four episodes, made available last month, aim for something similar, spending time with workers at all levels of the three companies it focuses on — letting viewers viscerally compare, say, the lives of a Manhattan housekeeper and the C.E.O. of the conglomerate that owns the hotel where she works. Money was clearly spent on this program. The cameras are slick, the angles creative, the songs expensively licensed. This may well be the production’s chief value: It is shockingly rare to see the daily lives of working-class people represented on TV so plainly and honestly, let alone with such a budget.In that context, watching Sheila’s meeting spiral out of control feels almost as subversive and revelatory as Terkel’s book. The problem arises when the show attempts to explain what, specifically, has gone wrong to make that eruption possible. Try as it might to stay close to the workers, the series can’t resist its periodic voice-overs, in which Obama delivers industrial-grade doses of information over spiffy archival footage of domestic workers or the movie “Wall Street” or the economist Milton Friedman. The scripts touch on all sorts of systemic forces, from the workers left out of the New Deal to the macroeconomics of the decline of the middle class.The fact that the show needs to reach all the way back to the New Deal era underlines a key problem: America’s perception of its own workplaces may be astonishingly out of date, steeped in denial about just how profoundly things have changed. The series wants to hang around working people, as Terkel did, to understand their hopes and dreams and contradictions. But it also wants to put forward an argument about what’s happened to American workers that involves catching the viewer up on several decades of complex changes — all presented by a politician who, you can’t help noting, happened to be in charge of the country for a key stretch of the time being explored.Did politicians participate in all that denial? This issue goes unaddressed, but the series does touch on the idea that popular media has long neglected the workplace. Television, Obama argues at one point, used to be full of representations of working and middle-class people and their jobs — say, in Norman Lear shows like “Good Times” or “All in the Family.” After the Reagan era, though, popular shows tended to follow upscale professionals, or to look more like “Friends” or “Seinfeld,” portraying people who lived comfortably despite being vaguely or fancifully employed. The nation’s jobs have shifted from industrial to service work, but even that seismic change — a work force now epitomized by nurses, waiters, retail clerks, delivery drivers — is rarely reflected in the stories we consume. Neither are developments like the erosion of job security, the rise of erratic scheduling, the invasive workplace surveillance — changes that marked Obama’s very own era in the White House.“Obtuseness in ‘respectable’ quarters is not a new phenomenon,” Terkel writes in his book. He offers the example of Henry Mayhew, whose 19th-century reports on working people in London “astonished and horrified readers of The Morning Chronicle.” The writer Barbara Ehrenreich later cataloged the way journalists and scholars “discovered” poverty in the 1960s after the breathless enthusiasm of the postwar economy cooled. (“We seem to have suddenly awakened,” the critic Dwight Macdonald wrote in a New Yorker review of one book on the topic, “to the fact that mass poverty persists.”) It’s easy to sense something similar in the audience for a documentary like “Working” — a sudden, belated understanding of the indignities creeping up toward even the most insulated professionals, and a growing sense of the workplace as a site of urgent, high-stakes conflict.In the final episode, Obama suggests his biggest worry is polarization, a fear of the problems that will arise if we cannot pay people enough for them to find dignity in their work. Terkel’s own animating concerns were more jarringly radical and succinct: He began his book with the admonition that since it was about work, it was, “by its very nature, about violence — to the spirit as well as to the body.” Obama is not quite there. His “Working” wants to show us what America’s jobs look like today, and to wake us to the possibility that we have spent too long underestimating their profound, dignity-robbing, politically consequential transformation. The series would need hours of explanatory montage to make up for all that lost time; if there’s anything it makes clear, it’s that the problem is far larger and more urgent than a few hours of television can aim to capture.Opening illustration: Source photographs from Netflix More