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    in Television

    Nikolaj Coster-Waldau Wonders About the Past 2 Million Years

    The “Game of Thrones” actor, now hosting a documentary series on climate change, is captivated by genetics research, algorithms and tiny art.Nikolaj Coster-Waldau wants people to step away from the abyss when it comes to climate action.“It’s a very difficult balance,” said the Danish actor, who portrayed Jaime Lannister in “Game of Thrones.” “You want to get people aware, you want to inspire change. But I think we’ve gone overboard by making it into this doomsday.”“It’s exhausting for everyone,” he added. “And it’s not quite true, actually.”In “An Optimist’s Guide to the Planet,” a documentary series from Bloomberg Originals, Coster-Waldau meets with scientists, activists and ordinary folks who have developed ingenious solutions to global issues — things like sargassum that captures carbon on St. Vincent, worms that eat plastic in Spain and a zero-waste village in Japan.It’s an insane endeavor, Coster-Waldau said, but he predicts bluer skies ahead.“The biggest resource, and we keep forgetting that, is that we need each other,” he said. “What humans can do when we pull together, it’s incredible.”In a video call from his home north of Copenhagen, Coster-Waldau — who will play William of Normandy in the upcoming “King and Conqueror” series — discussed why George the Poet’s podcast, miniature art and “3 Body Problem” have captured his attention.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Eske Willerslev and His Genetics ResearchWhat he’s doing is understanding who we are by looking back in time. Now they can actually extract DNA from soil samples, so they picked down in northeast Greenland and were able to go back 2 million years. And that means now you can see how this world of ours has changed dramatically many, many times.2‘We, the Drowned’ by Carsten JensenIt’s an amazing novel that I just revisited about Marstal, a small town in Denmark — a seafaring town, a fisherman’s town — and the riders of freight ships from this town. It’s a historical novel, but it’s incredibly well told.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Climate Protesters Disrupt Broadway Play Starring Jeremy Strong

    A performance of a new production of Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” was interrupted by protesters who shouted “no theater on a dead planet.”A trio of climate change protesters disrupted a performance of “An Enemy of the People,” starring Jeremy Strong, on Broadway Thursday night, shouting “no theater on a dead planet” as they were escorted out.The show they disrupted is selling quite well, thanks to audience interest in Strong, who is riding a wave of fame stemming from his portrayal of Kendall Roy in the HBO drama “Succession.” Strong stars in the play as a physician who becomes a pariah after discovering that his town’s spa baths are contaminated with bacteria; revealing that information could protect public health, but endanger the local economy.The protest, before a sold-out crowd at the 828-seat Circle in the Square theater, confused some attendees, who initially thought it was part of the play. It was staged during the second half, during a town hall scene in which some audience members were seated onstage and some actors were seated among the audience members. Although the play was written by Henrik Ibsen in the 19th century, this new version, by Amy Herzog, has occasionally been described as having thematic echoes of the climate change crisis.Strong remained in character through the protest, even at one point saying that a protester should be allowed to continue to speak, said Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, who was among many journalists and critics who were in the audience for a press preview night. “I thought it was all scripted,” Green said. “The timing was perfect to fit into the town meeting onstage, and the subject was related.”The protest was staged by a group called Extinction Rebellion NYC, which last year disrupted a performance at the Met Opera and a match at the U.S. Open semifinals. Other climate protesters around the world have taken to defacing works of art hanging in museums, but a spokesman for the New York group said that it had not engaged in that particular protest tactic.A spokesman for Extinction Rebellion NYC, Miles Grant, explained the targeting of popular events by saying, “We want to disrupt the things that we love, because we’re at risk of genuinely losing everything the way things are going.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Masters of the Air’ Review: Hanks and Spielberg, Back at War

    The team behind “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific” returns to World War II and the Greatest Generation, this time piloting B-17 bombers.This review contains spoilers for the entire season of “Masters of the Air.”When Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg created “Band of Brothers” in 2001, in the wake of their partnership on the 1998 film “Saving Private Ryan,” they were the most prominent celebrators of what had become known as the Greatest Generation. Twenty-three years later, with the release of “Masters of the Air,” they’ve become their own greatest generation: upholders of an old-fashioned style of television making, fighting their chosen war over and over again.Created by John Shiban and John Orloff based on Donald L. Miller’s book of the same title, “Masters of the Air” — which wrapped up its nine-episode run on Apple TV+ this week — was Hanks and Spielberg’s third mini-series saluting American troops in World War II. (Gary Goetzman joined them as executive producer for “The Pacific” in 2010 and for “Masters.”) The latest band of brothers chosen for dramatization and valorization was the 100th Bomb Group, the “bloody Hundredth,” based in England and decimated during its daytime runs over Europe from 1943 to 1945.The first — and for many viewers, perhaps, sufficient — observation to be made about “Masters” is that the money, more than ever, was right up there on the screen. These producers are Eisenhower-class when it comes to marshaling staff and materiel, as evidenced by the solid five minutes of closing credits, and both the quotidian recreation of an air base in the green English countryside and the special-effects extravaganzas of airborne battle were visually captivating.Some of the images of mayhem in the skies as the American B-17s and their crews are torn apart by German flak and fighters were the kind that will stick with you even if you would rather they didn’t, like the rain of wings and engines slowly falling after two bombers collide or like the airman sliding through the sky and being halved by a plane’s wing.But being absorbingly pictorial (the distinguished roster of directors included Cary Joji Fukunaga, Dee Rees, Tim Van Patten and the team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck) only contributed to the sense that the show existed in amber — more of a well-preserved fossil than a compelling drama. You could argue that this was the inevitable result of trying to celebrate 1940s-style patriotism one time too many. But the issues with “Masters” are artistic rather than cultural or political or factual.In condensing Miller’s broad-ranging history, while also converting it into a drama extending over nearly eight hours, Orloff and Shiban ended up with an ungainly, disjointed story that never gave itself the time or the space to grow. “Masters” felt like a catalog of war movie genres — the home-front melodrama, the aerial-combat blockbuster, the P.O.W. escape adventure, the behind-enemy-lines spy thriller, the racial-harmony drama — strung together in fealty to actual events but with disregard for dramatic development.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Television

    Anthony Boyle on His Breakout Roles in ‘Manhunt’ and ‘Masters of the Air’

    The actor has broken out on TV this year in the historical series “Masters of the Air” and “Manhunt.”Anthony Boyle was out of luck. He had been expelled from his Catholic boys school for “behavioral problems.” He had also been fired from his job at a nightclub after getting caught drinking while working.And so Boyle, then 16, figured it was as good a time as any to chase the dream that had begun to take shape in his head. He typed a string of words into Google search: “Belfast male acting auditions.”He eventually landed some unorthodox roles, including a part in a production of “Romeo and Juliet” that was staged on a massive chessboard and a stint in a ghost tour, in which he wore a black bag over his head and scared people by pretending to be the wrathful spirit of an 18th-century Irish revolutionary.Though Boyle would later return to school, he didn’t stop acting.“I never felt like there was another option,” he said in a recent video interview. “I never felt like there was like a backup plan that I could go and study medicine or go and do something else. It was always just acting.”More than a decade later, Boyle has arrived at another turning point in his performing career. Despite finding success on the stage in London and New York, he had landed only minor roles onscreen before this year.Now, the man who hated school suddenly seems to be the go-to actor for televised historical dramas. Boyle plays Major Harry Crosby, an airborne navigator battling seasickness and self-doubt, in the Apple TV+ series “Masters of the Air,” about the travails faced by America’s 100th Bomb Group in World War II and executive produced by Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘The Regime’ and the Dictators I Have Known

    The HBO show is set in a fictional European country, but The Times’s chief diplomatic correspondent recognizes references to many real despots and failed states.“The Regime,” the oddball limited series from HBO, is like a teenager’s dream of dictatorship. In the lengthy and sometimes ponderous tale of an unnamed country in “Middle Europe,” there are various references, more literary than lived, to the top authoritarian hits of the last 50 years.Chancellor Elena Vernham, played excellently by Kate Winslet, is no Hitler. She may have a narcissistic ruthlessness, but she’s also indecisive and weak, desperate for love, easily manipulated by manifold toadies.Will Tracy, the show’s creator and co-writer, said he read 20 books about autocracies, authoritarian leaders and totalitarian states to develop the six episodes. But in its mix of satire, slapstick, comedy and commentary, “The Regime” is more akin to the Marx Brothers’ Freedonia in “Duck Soup” (1933) or the European Duchy of Grand Fenwick in “The Mouse that Roared” (1959) than to any past dictatorship.The series plays in broad strokes with the mechanics of populism and the global competition for rare materials, but what distinguishes “The Regime” is actually a break from history: its undisputed leader is a woman.The character of Elena gives some subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle, nods to politicians from history.Miya Mizuno/HBOWinslet’s chancellor is a nervy, vulgar, insecure hypochondriac obsessed with her demanding father, a sly reference, perhaps, to France’s Marine Le Pen. The show is preoccupied with very 21st-century anxieties about powerful women and the mood swings of the menopause, as she falls in thrall to a tough peasant corporal, a “real man of the people,” played by Matthias Schoenaerts. Corporal Zubak, known as “The Butcher,” full of his own neuroses, becomes a kind of Rasputin, a confidante, dietitian, aide and lover.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Barbara Walters’s Wardrobe Was For Sale This Week in NYC

    Women in media recently had a chance to browse and buy clothes owned by the trailblazing TV news anchor.If anyone could make a baby pink suit look intimidating, it was Barbara Walters. The TV news anchor coolly lobbed questions at the Libyan dictator Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in a 1989 interview while sheathed shoulder to knee in pastel Chanel and pearls.Back then Ms. Walters, who died in 2022 at the age of 93, reigned among the most celebrated, highly paid and formidable journalists in broadcast news. A trailblazer, she made history as the first female co-host of the “Today” show — and then made history again when she became the first female anchor of the ABC evening news. Later in her decades-long career she migrated to the newsmagazine show “20/20” and to “The View,” the daytime talk show she cocreated.Ms. Walters wore a pink Chanel skirt suit while interviewing the Libyan dictator Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in 1989. Kimberly Butler/Getty ImagesAlong the way Ms. Walters, who formally retired in 2014, became as famous as many of the high-profile subjects she interviewed, a group that included Katharine Hepburn, Anna Wintour, Michael Jackson and Monica Lewinsky, as well as several U.S. presidents and other world leaders, like Margaret Thatcher, Fidel Castro and Vladimir Putin.Her wardrobe for such encounters was both shrewdly considered and often audacious, filling with brash hits of color as her fame grew. This week bits of Ms. Walters’s sartorial legacy were on view — and on sale — at a showroom in Midtown Manhattan as part of a two-day event that drew a steady stream of women in media eager to comb through racks of clothing the journalist had owned.Gowns and cocktail dresses owned by Ms. Walters were among the items for sale.Mario Anzuoni/ReutersThe event also featured some of the more colorful attire owned by Ms. Walters.Lou Rocco/ABCWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Loony Musings of the ‘Valley Heat’ Podcast

    Christian Duguay’s podcast purports to be about the neighbors in the Rancho Equestrian District of Burbank. One thing is for sure: It’s masterfully absurd.In the Rancho Equestrian District of Burbank, Calif., they take foosball seriously — and those who don’t, well, they might get their thumbs broken. Or worse. Foosball is life or death there, but mostly death, or at least it can seem that way on “Valley Heat,” a deliriously deadpan fictional podcast about this real neighborhood that delights in ludicrous lore and nonsense.Its host, the spectacularly ineffectual freelance insurance adjuster Doug Duguay (played by Christian Duguay, a former star of “Mad TV”), tells his audience with the earnestness of an NPR host that when it comes to causes of death, a lot of people don’t know that foosball is “second only to jumping off cliffs in bat suits.”There’s no better indictment of the algorithms that power our digital landscape than the fact that my feeds have shown me thousands of videos of comedians doing crowd work over the past few years, but not a peep about this masterfully absurd podcast. While its 17 episodes evoke the dry humor of Mike Judge and the gleefully silly song parodies of “Flight of the Conchords,” “Valley Heat” remains under the radar, probably for the same reason it’s such an exciting find. It’s too weird to neatly categorize or quickly explain.I knew little about it before a recommendation from a friend, who said: “I’m not going to tell you anything, just listen.” I didn’t get it at first. It seemed banal, wandering. But its humor sneaks up on you. It’s somehow improvisational and literary at the same time, drunk on language, packed with twists, narrowly satirical while also creating a strange aesthetic world. The muted tone requires some focus from listeners. Once I tuned into its peculiar frequency, it had me laughing out loud as much as any TV show has in recent years.The first season was released in 2020 and developed a cult following, with some famous fans like Patton Oswalt. After a few episodes of a second season, the podcast vanished for more than a year and a half. It re-emerged in January on the platform Maximum Fun, which this year released two new episodes (that include Oswalt as a voice). The show centers on Doug, a beta male buffoon who tells us he was the kind of kid who could never have fun at a party. Doug grew into the kind of adult who becomes flustered when his wife’s yoga teacher, who answers the phone by saying “light and love,” texts mermaid emojis in Venmo transactions. “The mermaid is the only naked emoji,” he explains, before hedging. “Not fully naked.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Below Deck’ Sails on With a New Captain

    With a different captain at the helm and new production elements, the reality show about charter yachts is switching up its style.Starting a new season of “Below Deck” can be similar to returning to summer camp as a kid — you know it’s going to be fun and that you’ll be in the same environment, but some of the people will be different and you’re not quite sure what the vibes will be.This time around, in particular, feels that way because for the first time in the show’s 11-season run, Captain Lee Rosbach is no longer at the helm. It’s a pivotal moment for a franchise that has become one of the most popular entities in the sprawling universe of reality TV since premiering on Bravo in 2013. The show’s appeal was built on endless romances between various crew members (“boatmances,” as they came to be known), horrible charter guests and some sort of passive-aggressive fight about how many shackles of the anchor chain should be in the water. And there was always Rosbach presiding over the drama as he trudged around the boat, reeling off one liners like “I’m madder than a pissed-on chicken” and “we screwed the pooch so many times we should have a litter of puppies running around.”At the center of the show now is Kerry Titheradge (the stern yet goofy captain of “Below Deck Adventure” fame), who is managing the Motor Yacht Saint David with the cheeky chief stew Fraser Olender by his side.With that change in captain, the energy on the boat — both onscreen and off — is different, according to Olender.“I feel like Kerry this season, as opposed to Lee, has a no B.S. attitude, which I love with him,” Olender said in an interview. “With Kerry, he taught me a lot and sort of forced to me confront issues directly with my team, work them out, as opposed to making executive decisions too soon.”This shift in management style changes the central conflict — whereas the drama once focused on the captain swiftly kicking out any unpleasant crew member (as we might have seen with Rosbach), the drama now focuses on the whole crew trying to get along (since Titheradge gives people those second chances).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More