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    in Television

    ‘SNL’ Riffs on the State of the Union and Republican Response

    The Republican rebuttal delivered by Senator Katie Britt already struck many viewers as parody, making Scarlett Johansson’s job look easy.It was inevitable that “Saturday Night Live” would sample heavily from the buffet of satirical potential offered by Thursday’s State of the Union. Perhaps the only question going into this weekend’s broadcast, hosted by Josh Brolin and featuring the musical guest Ariana Grande, was who would play Senator Katie Britt of Alabama, who delivered the much-discussed Republican response to President Biden’s speech.As it turned out, “S.N.L.” did not draw from its own cast for this role, but it didn’t look far to find someone: Britt was played by Scarlett Johansson, the two-time Academy Award-nominated actress, six-time “S.N.L.” host and — yes — wife of Colin Jost, the Weekend Update co-anchor.Following a brief introduction from Ego Nwodim as CNN’s Abby Phillip, the show began with Mikey Day, now the resident Biden impersonator at “S.N.L.,” taking his place in front of Punkie Johnson (as Vice President Harris) and Michael Longfellow (as Speaker Mike Johnson).“Folks,” Day said, “tonight I’m going to cover a lot. There’s going to be a lot of applause. So, Kamala, I hope you didn’t skip leg day, girl. You’re going to be up and down all night.” (Naturally, Johnson stood up and applauded; Longfellow did not.)Day continued: “Tonight, I’m also going to be talking about my predecessor,” he said. “Mainly because every time I say predecessor, Mike Johnson shakes his head, like he just accidentally caught 30 seconds of the show ‘Euphoria.’ Look at that weirdo.”After being booed by Heidi Gardner (who was playing Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene), Day threw to the Republican response: “I think she’s going to help me more than anything else I could say here,” he said. “Enjoy.”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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    Jeremy Strong Isn’t Sure He Knows Who He Is

    For years, Jeremy Strong was a relatively anonymous, steadily gigging actor. He did theater and some recurring TV work (“The Good Wife,” “Masters of Sex”), and was able to land decent supporting roles in big movies (“The Big Short,” “Selma”). Then “Succession” changed everything. The hit HBO show, a biting satire about the emotionally dysfunctional, […] More

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    Former Trump Aide Alyssa Farah Griffin Becomes a Liberal Favorite

    Now and then during an election cycle, a Republican pundit becomes something of a hero to Democrats.Peggy Noonan, a conservative Wall Street Journal columnist and former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, filled that role in the months leading up the 2008 election, after she had pilloried the second Bush administration over its invasion of Iraq and criticized Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee.Nicolle Wallace and Steve Schmidt, veterans of John McCain’s failed 2008 presidential campaign, reached pundit primacy on MSNBC excoriating the tea party activists then in ascendance.A rising star of the current season is Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former communications director for President Trump who is now a co-host of ABC’s “The View” and a regular commentator on CNN.Ms. Farah Griffin, who resigned from the Trump administration in December 2020, garnered wide attention with a tweet she posted on Jan. 6, 2021: “Dear MAGA — I am one of you. Before I worked for @realDonaldTrump, I worked for @MarkMeadows & @Jim_Jordan & the @freedomcaucus. I marched in the 2010 Tea Party rallies. I campaigned w/ Trump & voted for him. But I need you to hear me: the Election was NOT stolen. We lost.”Three years later, Ms. Farah Griffin, 34, spends many of her nights at the CNN headquarters in the Hudson Yards district of Manhattan, bantering with Van Jones, David Axelrod and other liberal commentators.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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    ‘Free to Be … You and Me’ Took the Revolution to the Playground

    Fifty years ago, the TV landmark showed Gen X kids that no one else has the right to tell you who you are.“Free to Be … You and Me,” the 1974 kids-TV special and feminist milestone, begins with footage of children riding a carousel. I was one of them. Not literally — I watched the show on TV like millions of other baby Gen X-ers. But these kids, laughing and spinning, were my cohort at a strange point in history.We were born at the tail end of one of the country’s great periods of social revolution. Our mothers were getting jobs outside the home, and so was Mary Richards on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Later in our childhoods would come the era of Phyllis Schlafly and He-Man, and things would jerk backward again for a while, maybe without our even being aware of it at the time.But on “Free to Be,” the future was baby steps away. The theme song, by the New Seekers, imagines a land “where the children are free” and says that “it ain’t far to this land from where we are.” The children transform into cartoons on lively horses. They leap out of the spinning wheel’s orbit, galloping through an animated desert, girls and boys side by side.In the show’s animated stories, chivalry doesn’t protect girls, self-reliance does: In “Ladies First,” a “tender, sweet young thing” who insists on special treatment ends up eaten by tigers.ABCMarlo Thomas, the former star of the sitcom “That Girl,” created “Free to Be” as an album in 1972, in collaboration with the Ms. Foundation for Women. She was inspired, she said in the introduction to a 2010 DVD of the TV special, by reading bedtime stories to her niece — books that “told girls and boys who they should be, who they ought to be, but seldom who they could be.”Through songs, skits and stories, “Free to Be” told them they could be, and do, anything. Girls could run races and grow up to be doctors; boys could play with dolls and grow up to push a stroller. A princess could decide not to marry a prince, or anybody. A man could cry.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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    Lisa Ann Walter of ‘Abbott Elementary’ on the Show She’ll Never Forget

    “I would challenge anybody to see Patti LuPone in her prime sing ‘Evita,’” the actress said, “and not say, ‘That was the best show I’ve ever seen in my life.’”It was a Monday morning in Los Angeles and Lisa Ann Walter had the day off from “Abbott Elementary,” the ABC sitcom about an underfunded public school in Philadelphia.But that didn’t mean she wasn’t working.The Season 3 premiere was a little more than a week away, and even though Walter knew where her character — the veteran second-grade teacher Melissa Schemmenti — was headed, she would divulge only that “there are changes. Big changes.”But there were plenty of other things to discuss: Her stand-up tour. A movie script she’d written during the pandemic. A project that’s an animated series about a single mom of teenage boys called “Bitter.” The $1 million she’d bagged for the Entertainment Community Fund on “Celebrity Jeopardy!” The playoff dinner the night before that began with a pot of chili and ended up a smorgasbord.“I go overboard,” she said in a video call.Then there’s the project she’s doing with her bestie Elaine Hendrix — she couldn’t talk about that either — who played Meredith to Walter’s Chessy on “The Parent Trap” some 25 years ago.“Elaine and I can’t go anywhere together without people losing their minds,” Walter said before talking about the origin story of “Outlander,” her fixation on muscle cars and kissing during bar trivia. “I always used to say I don’t really have to do anything else with my career.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1‘Sense and Sensibility’ OnscreenI think Emma Thompson is a genius with the screenplay. It’s Alan Rickman at his finest. It evokes enough of that period, the lushness and quietness, that it’s genuinely that article. But it’s modern enough where it resonates — that need to find your person.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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    Akira Toriyama’s “Dragon Ball” Hero Goku Is One for the Ages

    The creator of “Dragon Ball” helped bring anime to the world. Its main character became a cultural phenomenon.“It’s over 9,000” is perhaps the most popular line in the English dub of the “Dragon Ball Z” series. The line is beloved for its drama; it’s an exclamation referring to the unmatched power level of the main character, Son Goku. It was an ongoing joke in my middle school and became one of the internet’s most enduring memes.But Goku was always an exemplar of staying power, back from his beginnings in the “Dragon Ball” manga created by Akira Toriyama, whose death was confirmed on Friday.Toriyama is the creator of the manga “Dr. Slump” and “Sand Land” but is best known for “Dragon Ball,” which first published in 1984 and for years ran in the popular Japanese magazine Weekly Shonen Jump. It was successful from the start, but as more people around the world learned about it, “Dragon Ball” attained such levels of popularity that it became one of the standard-bearers of anime.Despite the prominence of greats like Hayao Miyazaki and the recent surge of live-action adaptations in the United States, it’s still fairly rare that a manga or anime — even given the massive scope, breadth and history of the art form — achieves crossover appeal to mainstream Western media. There have been a few big exceptions. “Pokémon.” “Naruto.” And “Dragon Ball.”“Dragon Ball” is the story of an alien boy named Son Goku who ends up on Earth. He teams up with a brilliant blue-haired teen named Bulma, and they search for seven dragon balls to summon the powerful wish-granting dragon Shenron.The worlds and images Toriyama created combined the kung fu-inspired fight sequences of old martial arts flicks with science-fiction and a fantasy-style reimagining of space and technology. The characters burst off the page and the screen: A wild-haired boy in an orange gi flying on a cloud; a whiskered green dragon whose serpentine body coils in Gordian knots in the sky; and seven orange orbs, speckled with small red stars, that when combined offer their collector infinite power.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Theater

    How Ingrid Michaelson Made ‘The Notebook’ Into a Musical

    Family history is “wrapped up in these songs,” said the singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson, who is making the leap to Broadway with an adaptation of the popular romance novel.The stage manager’s office on the second floor of the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater in Times Square is about the size of a half bathroom and has the charm of a utility closet. It’s crowded and overlit, thanks to a high-wattage vanity mirror situated near a 1970s-era mini sink.Ingrid Michaelson surveyed the room where we were to begin our interview, and sighed. “It’s not glamorous at all — but it is,” she said. “There’s just a small, lucky group that gets to see these little rooms.”With the opening of “The Notebook” on Thursday, Michaelson will make the turn from a successful mid-list singer-songwriter to Broadway composer. Though other pop writers have made the same foray into musical theater — including Dolly Parton, Cyndi Lauper, and Michaelson’s friend Sara Bareilles — Michaelson was an unlikely choice, because “The Notebook” is a huge franchise and she isn’t a hitmaker. “Quirky” is a word that turns up in articles about her, and quirky is rarely a mass-market trait.Nicholas Sparks’s 1996 romance novel was a publishing phenomenon that has sold 14 million copies worldwide. In 2004, it was adapted into a film starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, and its feverishly passionate dialogue (“It wasn’t over. It still isn’t over!” Gosling shouts, in the middle of a rainstorm.) made it as beloved by fans as it was scorned by critics. Wielding a double-barreled shotgun in his review for The New York Times, the critic Stephen Holden dismissed Sparks’s book as “treacly” and called the film “a high-toned cinematic greeting card.”“I remember watching the movie with my friend — we rented it from Blockbuster,” Michaelson, 44, recalled. “I cried and cried and cried at the end.” She was dressed casually, in a gray knit cap, baggy flannel shirt and torn jeans. In conversation, she gravitated toward self-deprecation and the spilling-over candor of a lifelong New Yorker. She was droll and funny, but cried several times during our interview. At one point, on the topic of losing our parents, we both cried at the same time.“The Notebook” begins in an old age home, where Allie, who has Alzheimer’s disease, doesn’t recognize her husband, Noah. He reads to her from a notebook, which tells the story of how they met and fell in love in their late teens, only to be separated by a conniving parent. They meet again 10 years later, when Allie is engaged to someone else. Will her marital pledge hold firm in the face of true love? We know the answer, but the reward of their reunion is offset by the pain of seeing them both in distress.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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    Melissa Benoist Hits the Campaign Trail in ‘The Girls on the Bus’

    After six years on “Supergirl,” the actor and producer took a crash course in political journalism to prep for a new Max series.Melissa Benoist has made a habit of playing journalists on television.She spent six years as the hero of “Supergirl,” Kara Danvers, who works in media when she’s not saving the world. Now Benoist is taking on the role of a campaign reporter named Sadie McCarthy in the Max series “The Girls on the Bus,” a very loose adaptation of the former New York Times reporter Amy Chozick’s nonfiction book “Chasing Hillary.”But Benoist does not think she’d be a good fit for the profession. Asked about the choice of some political reporters to refrain from voting in the elections they cover, she explained in a phone interview that she would be a “terrible journalist.”“I’m too emotional,” she said. “I’d for sure be biased.”“The Girls on the Bus,” created by Chozick and Julie Plec (“The Vampire Diaries”), is a fictional and frothy account of the lives of women chronicling a series of Democratic presidential contenders on their way to the national convention. Benoist’s Sadie works for a New York Times stand-in called The New York Sentinel, and is given an opportunity to return to the road after being publicly embarrassed during the previous election cycle when a video of her crying after her candidate lost, a journalistic no-no, went viral.The show has a fantastical bent, and not just because Sadie has conversations with the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson (P.J. Sosko). Despite arriving in an election year and taking inspiration from Chozick’s book about covering Hillary Clinton, the political landscape of the show looks very different from our current one. Sadie and her cohorts grapple with familiar topics, but they do so in a sort of parallel universe where the bonds they form while tracking down sources is at the center of the tale.In the series, Benoist’s character, left, competes and bonds with other reporters on the campaign trail played by, from left, Carla Gugino, Christina Elmore and Natasha Behnam.Nicole Rivelli/MaxFor Benoist, the show is her first series regular role since “Supergirl” and her first venture as a producer. In an interview, she discussed her crash course in political reporting and why that word “girl” keeps following her around. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.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