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    I’ve Never Bought Anything From QVC. I Can’t Stop Watching It.

    The playful pleasures of David Venable keep pulling me back in.Last fall, I lived in a hotel in the small college town where I teach, an admittedly strange arrangement that came with a serendipitous perk: cable TV. At the end of most days, after stocking up on ice from the machine down the hall, I would get beneath the sheets and click on QVC. If I was lucky, I got to watch the incomparable David Venable, whose most distinct trait — aside from his striking height (6 feet 6 inches) and the dulcet tones of his North Carolina drawl — is his “happy dance”: a hands-over-head, 360-degree twirl that he executes when a product especially delights him. In seemingly every moment of his cooking and housewares show, “In the Kitchen With David,” he radiates joie de vivre.I don’t think I’m part of Venable’s target demographic. I can’t cook. I don’t like accumulating things. I appreciate when a living space feels homey, but I’m just as content in a spare room as I am in a curated one. Still, I’ve become one the many David Venable faithful. Regardless of what he’s selling, I’m watching. Venable avoids falling into the wolfish smarm that typifies the shopping-show genre. There’s a forthrightness of approach that tells us he’s interested in more than just selling things to us. When he’s talking up a portable power station, warning us that we won’t know we’ll need it until it’s too late, he’s not being a doomer; he’s being honest. He comes off like a mindful parent cautioning a naïve child, much like my folks, who, when I was in high school, always made sure I had an extra coat and blanket in the car during Minnesota’s brutal winters, just in case my car broke down. Like any salesperson, Venable uses scarcity as a tactic. But he doesn’t promise that any particular item will solve all your problems. Rather, he imagines a life for the viewer already brimming with warmth. Whatever he’s selling could make that full life a bit less unwieldy. You might feel compelled to buy those airtight, spillproof LocknLock storage containers, not just because they’re selling out fast, and this deal will only last tonight, but also because with Venable’s encouragement you can imagine walking to your parents’ home, holding your child’s hand, juggling a stack of gifts and laughing so hard you might drop your homemade hot-dish on your way to the front door. With LocknLock’s proprietary technology, however, you can be confident that your casserole won’t spill! For me, “In the Kitchen With David” functions as therapeutic entertainment. Venable’s screen presence never activates anything in the realm of stress or embarrassment. Just like us, we learn, he drops dishes at home, and his kitchen goes through various states of disarray. “There’s no shame in your game if you go to the store bakery and you buy something store-bought and put it in there,” Venable will say while holding a pie-carrier with handle-lid. His nonjudgmental energy transforms solo TV-watching into a communal experience, inviting us to marvel alongside him at the quotidian: a nonstick pan or a vegetable wedger or sugar-free caramels. And he is never desperate to make a sale. Look closely as a jittery brand ambassador fumbles over his or her pitch, and you’ll see Venable’s eyes soften and a smile spread across his face. He seems to enjoy it when things don’t go as planned. For him, spills and mispronunciations are not reasons to panic but opportunities for play.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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    Jimmy Fallon Reports ‘Today’s Taylor Swift News’

    “If you thought she was on your TV a lot last night, well, wait till next Sunday,” Fallon said after the pop star’s big night at the Grammys.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.‘Today’s Taylor Swift News’Taylor Swift made Grammy history on Sunday night, winning Album of the Year for a fourth time.“Let’s get to today’s Taylor Swift news,” Jimmy Fallon said at the top of Monday’s monologue, before quipping that everyone else at the Grammys “got an Emmy nomination for acting surprised when she won.”“Yep, Taylor dominated the Grammys. If you thought she was on your TV a lot last night, well, wait till next Sunday.” — JIMMY FALLON, referring to the upcoming Super Bowl“Last night at the Grammys, the big winner was Taylor Swift, who became the first artist to win Album of the Year four times — all for the same album.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Not only did Taylor make Grammys history, she also announced that on April 19, she’s releasing a new album called ‘The Tortured Poets Department.’ Then every other artist releasing an album on April 19 was like, ‘Well, looking more like a June release now.’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Rainy Day Edition)“We are getting hit by a biblical amount of rain here in Los Angeles. All around town, they’ve been gathering Kardashians two by two.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“You know, they closed our kids’ school today because of rain. And this is, I just want to mention, not an outdoor school. There is a roof on the school, but they said it’s too dangerous to come to school, somebody could get wet.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“When I was a kid in Brooklyn, for them to cancel school, there had to be, like, at least six inches of snow, there had to be black ice on the road, and, like, Son of Sam had to be on the loose.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Now, meteorologists say the drastic weather is being caused by something called an atmospheric river, which is also the name of my easy-listening dad band.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Here’s how you know we have a lot of rain: when the L.A. River is actually a river. Usually it’s just a big, empty skateboard park.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“These bizarre weather emergencies are just going to keep happening. We all know the cause. Al Gore warned us about this, and it’s getting worse every year, so I’ll just say it: The witch’s curse!” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingJimmy Kimmel had some thoughts after Donald Trump asked Truth Social users if they thought he looked like Elvis.What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightThe “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans” star Molly Ringwald will talk to Seth Meyers on Tuesday’s “Late Night.”Also, Check This OutThe “Curb Your Enthusiasm” star Larry David.HBOFaithful viewers can test their fandom in this pretty, pretty good “Curb Your Enthusiasm” quiz. More

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    Quiz: Do You Respect ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’?

    Photo credits: HBO (“Curb Your Enthusiasm”); NBC (“Seinfeld”); Craig Barritt/Getty Images (Elmo); Albert Ceolan /De Agostini Picture Library, via Getty Images (St Benedict amongst Angels, detail from The Glory in Heaven, 1746, by Johann Jakob Zeiller); Peter Dazeley/Getty Images (snakes); James Warwick/Getty Images (zebra); Simon Maina/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images (Moamer Kadhafi); Paramount (“Star Trek: The Next Generation”); Shawn Thew/EPA, via Shutterstock (Bernie Sanders); Universal Pictures (“Back to the Future”); Kenny Holston/The New York Times (Sanders); Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images (Sanders)Produced by Sean Catangui, Alicia DeSantis, Gabriel Gianordoli and Josephine Sedgwick More

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    Inger McCabe Elliott, Who Famously Became Con Man’s Victim, Dies at 90

    She was a successful designer. But she was probably best known for being duped in a scheme that inspired the play “Six Degrees of Separation.”Inger McCabe Elliott, a photographer and designer who, with her husband, was conned at her home in Manhattan by a slick-talking 19-year-old purporting to be Sidney Poitier’s son — an incident that helped inspire John Guare to write his celebrated play “Six Degrees of Separation” — died on Jan. 29 at her home in Manhattan. She was 90.Her son, Alec McCabe, confirmed the death.It was a bizarre New York tale.In early October 1983, Mrs. Elliott and her husband, Osborn Elliott, a former top editor of Newsweek who at the time was the dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, got a call from a young man who introduced himself as David Poitier.He said that he was a friend of Mrs. Elliott’s daughter Kari McCabe, and that muggers had stolen his money and a term paper he had written about the criminal justice system. He needed a place to stay, he said, until his father arrived in Manhattan the next day to direct scenes for the film version of the Broadway musical “Dreamgirls.” (Mr. Poitier had six daughters but no sons, and he had no involvement in “Dreamgirls.”)Charmed, the Elliotts invited the young man — his real name was David Hampton, they later learned — to spend the night at their East Side apartment and gave him $50 and some clothes. He asked Mrs. Elliott to wake him early the next morning so that he could go jogging.David Hampton, the man who had masqueraded as Sidney Poitier’s son, in 1990 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center after the opening of the John Guare play based on his impersonation. William E. Sauro/The New York TimesThe Elliotts were unable to reach Kari McCabe that night to confirm Mr. Hampton’s claim that they were friends. (She had no idea who he was, they later found out.)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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    Hinton Battle, Three-Time Tony Winner in Musicals, Dies at 67

    He won awards for his roles in “Sophisticated Ladies,” “The Tap Dance Kid” and “Miss Saigon” — the most ever in the category of best featured actor in a musical.Hinton Battle, a dazzling dancer who won the first of his three Tony Awards in 1981 for his performance in the Duke Ellington musical revue “Sophisticated Ladies” after learning how to tap dance in the weeks leading up to opening night, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 67.His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by Leah Bass-Baylis, a family spokeswoman, who danced with him on Broadway. She did not provide a cause.“Some people are born with the spirit of the dance,” said Debbie Allen, the dancer, choreographer and actress, who had known Mr. Battle since he was 16. “Hinton Battle was that kind of person.” She added: “He was just technically superior to anyone who came close to him. He had rhythm and style. You were looking at a supernova.”Mr. Battle auditioned for “Sophisticated Ladies” several years after he originated the role of the Scarecrow in “The Wiz,” the all-Black adaptation of “The Wizard of Oz,” when he was 18. Trained as a ballet dancer, he didn’t know how to tap and felt the pressure of being in a show with virtuoso tappers like Gregory Hines and Gregg Burge.Mr. Battle playing the Scarecrow with Stephanie Mills as Dorothy in the Broadway musical “The Wiz” around 1975. Hulton archive/Getty ImagesAt his audition, Mr. Battle said that he fudged a soft-shoe routine.“I panicked,” he told The New York Times in 1984. “It used to be you didn’t need to know how to tap. Tap was out for so long, and there wasn’t much of it to see.”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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    You’ve Just Watched the Super Bowl. What Will You See Next?

    The TV network that airs the N.F.L. title game wants to retain as many viewers as possible. There are various strategies, with CBS choosing to debut the crime drama “Tracker.”Some of the most precious television real estate comes immediately after the National Football League’s season finale, one of the few programs to still corral a giant audience.The network that airs the Super Bowl wants to retain as many of those viewers — 115 million people last year — as possible with the postgame slot. It has been a powerful tool to debut new shows, as CBS will do on Sunday with “Tracker,” a crime drama about the hunt for missing people that stars Justin Hartley, and it has also showcased already popular ones, such as NBC did in 1996 with “Friends.”Either strategy can prove effective.“It’s really a year-by-year basis when you have the Super Bowl and to think, ‘What are the different weapons you have to deploy?’” said Amy Reisenbach, the president of CBS Entertainment.New ShowsFor nearly two decades, the Super Bowl has cycled among Fox, NBC and CBS. (In 2027, ABC will air its first Super Bowl since 2006.) “There isn’t really any other platform like it on TV,” Reisenbach said, adding, “It’s a huge opportunity to get eyeballs.”Networks plan out the postgame slot about a year ahead of time, said Dan Harrison, the executive vice president of program planning and content strategy at Fox Entertainment.CBS chose “Tracker” in May, Reisenbach said, after executives viewed the pilot episode and felt it could appeal across demographics because of Hartley’s popularity with both men and women. The decision to debut a new show follows the strategy CBS used for “Undercover Boss” (2010) and for its two most recent Super Bowl lead-outs, “The World’s Best” (2019) and “The Equalizer” (2021).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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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Abbott Elementary’ and Super Bowl LVIII

    The third season of the award winning sitcom airs on ABC. The Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers go head-to-head.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Feb. 5-11. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE EXORCIST 5:55 p.m. on Flix. There are two things I’m always in the mood to watch: reality television and horror movies (both involve a bit of schadenfreude). “The Exorcist,” of course, is genre royalty, and since it turned 50 last year, it’s a good time to watch Regan’s head go around and lament the ever-worsening quality in practical effects. You can also play my favorite TV game: trying to catch which parts have been edited out for broadcast.BELOW DECK 9 p.m. on Bravo. Our beloved “stud of the sea” Captain Lee Rosbach has finally sailed off into the sunset after 10 seasons of managing unruly young yachties (don’t worry, he’s fine: he’s gabbing about all things “Below Deck” on his podcast, “Salty”). Captain Kerry Titheradge, of “Below Deck Adventure” fame, is now manning the helm. Fraser Olender returns as the chief stew, and with the rumors that he’s now dating a charter guest confirmed, there’s sure to be plenty to rock the boat this season.TuesdayMatthew Broderick in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”Paramount PicturesFERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF 5:30 p.m. on Freeform. References to “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” abound in the latest season of “True Detective.” The “Twist and Shout” parade sequence plays in the Tsalal station leading up to the mysterious death of the researchers — and it’s on a loop when Chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) inspects the scene. Later, a murderer eerily whistles the Beatles tune as both taunt and callback. Perhaps a rewatch of the John Hughes classic, with Matthew Broderick starring as the charming truant, will unlock the deepening mystery?WednesdayABBOTT ELEMENTARY 9 p.m. on ABC. Coming off another semi-successful awards season (Quinta Brunson won an acting Emmy for her role in the show), “Abbott Elementary” returns for its third season. Once again, optimism and hilarity will be set against the backdrop of the grimly underfunded Philadelphia public school system. Last season ended with an unexpected turn for Brunson and Tyler James Williams’s will-they-won’t-they couple (and a cameo from my favorite local celebrity, the massive anatomical heart at the Franklin Institute), so I’ll be eager to check back in.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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    ‘True Detective’ Season 4, Episode 4 Recap: The Monster Under the Bed

    Danvers wrestles with her demons. Navarro does, too, but hers appear to be of a different sort.Season 4, Episode 4: ‘Part 4’There’s a classic bit on “The Simpsons” where a panel of children are seated as a focus group for “The Itchy & Scratchy Show” and asked what they want to see from the long-running cartoon, which has started to flag in the ratings. After an exasperating series of responses, the moderator sums up his findings: “So you want a realistic, down-to-earth show that’s completely off the wall and swarming with magic robots?”That’s what “Night Country” is starting to feel like as it heads down the backstretch. It is a realistic, down-to-earth police procedural that’s swarming with supernatural beings and lots of storytelling bric-a-brac. To an extent, that’s part of the “True Detective” brand, to flood the zone with enough symbols, Easter eggs and plot tributaries to keep the Subreddits humming all season with theories about which ones will pay off and which ones will wriggle off with the other red herrings. As the season’s showrunner, Issa López, and her writers start to bring the season to a close, there’s already some evidence that the show has spread itself too thin, despite an abundance of laudable elements.Take the fate of Navarro’s sister, Julia (Aka Niviana). The image of this lonely, troubled young woman spending her last moments among the icebound wreckage before walking naked into the dark is a haunting one. One of the great strengths of “Night Country” — and the three Nic Pizzolatto seasons of “True Detective” before it — is how beautifully it can conjure these modern noir images from distinct locales.And yet, so little narrative real estate was given over to Julia until this final episode that her death feels more like a device than an emotional payoff. In a pre-credits scene, we witness Danvers’s compassion in scooping her off the streets and bringing into the station, which brings her closer to Navarro. As for Navarro herself, the heaviness of this loss is a family curse that now threatens to swallow her, too.The most touching moment in the episode is a much smaller one. When Navarro gets the call from the Coast Guard about Julia, she and Peter have just finished a harrowing mission back to the nomad encampment on Christmas Eve. She suppresses her devastation when Peter asks if everything’s OK and sends him off to be with a family that is still intact. Her emotional generosity is a subtle payoff to a relationship that has been building around these two interconnected cases; the further “Night Country” strays from the grit-and-grind of police work, the less resonant it becomes. The mysteries around Annie’s murder and the frozen scientists link up so beautifully to the tensions within Ennis that the continued sprinkling of specters, flashbacks and various uncanny events has gotten distracting. There are many questions still to answer and only two episodes left.To that end, this week’s episode does address some of the business at hand. The “Blair Witch”-style video on Annie’s phone, presumably documenting the last moments of her life, includes whale bones frozen in the ice behind her, indicating an ice cave system the detectives are keen to locate. A team from Anchorage finally arrives to take the bodies away, despite Danvers’s desire to poke around them a little more for clues. (In sharing the news that the men were dead before they froze to Captain Ted, Danvers admits to doing “an independent pre-forensic evaluation,” which sounds better than saying that Peter’s veterinarian cousin looked at them.)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