Eliana Willis

The actress known for stealing scenes in “The Wire” is teaming with series co-creator Ed Burns to turn her life story into a TV show.Felicia “Snoop” Pearson is running a few minutes late to a joint interview alongside her writing partner Ed Burns, so Burns fills the time with a helpful story about one of the few other instances of her truancy.More than two decades ago, the actor Michael K. Williams had asked Pearson to accompany him onto the set of “The Wire” after she brazenly introduced herself to him at a Baltimore nightclub.Burns, who with David Simon cocreated the landmark show that explored institutional failures, admired her distinct tattoos and gravelly Baltimore drawl. Williams and some of the actors vouched for Pearson as an authentic resource who would give the show additional credibility.Burns had a spot on the show for her, he promised, if she limited any illicit activity and showed up the next week.The day Pearson was to appear on camera, Burns said, he received a frantic phone call. “I didn’t know the car was stolen,” Pearson hurriedly began.Through some deciphering, Burns discovered that Pearson had visited New York with friends for Pride Week. During the journey, they noticed a cop car’s flashing lights and pulled over. The driver of the car had no idea the vehicle he had purchased was stolen. Police searched Pearson, discovered a pocketknife and took her into custody. She did not make call time.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

The comic was fired from the show in 2019 before ever appearing on it, history he barely mentioned when he hosted on Saturday. “Please, don’t Google that,” he said in his monologue.Finally given the opportunity to take the stage at NBC’s Studio 8H, the comedian Shane Gillis did not say much about how he’d been fired as a cast member from “Saturday Night Live” before appearing in a single episode.Instead, Gillis, who has since gone on to become a popular standup and podcaster, delivered an opening monologue that perhaps suggested both he and “S.N.L.” were both better off for having followed separate trajectories.Gillis, who has performed in standup specials like “Beautiful Dogs” on Netflix and is a co-host of “Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast,” was announced to be an “S.N.L.” cast member in September 2019. Just days later, “S.N.L.” reversed course and dropped him from its lineup, following criticism of resurfaced podcast segments in which Gillis used a slur to describe Chinese people and performed a caricature accent, and used a homophobic slur to refer to the filmmaker Judd Apatow and the comedian Chris Gethard, as well as the presidential candidates Andrew Yang and Senator Bernie Sanders.At the time, “S.N.L.” said in a statement that the language Gillis had used “is offensive, hurtful and unacceptable.” Gillis himself wrote in a social media post that he was “a comedian who pushes boundaries” adding that in comedy, “you’re going to find a lot of bad misses.”Returning to “S.N.L.” nearly five years later as a guest host, Gillis did not take a scorched-earth approach in his monologue, like when Norm Macdonald appeared as a host in 1999 after he’d been fired from the show. (“I haven’t gotten funnier,” Macdonald said at the time. “The show has gotten really bad.”)“Yeah, I’m here,” Gillis began. “Most of you probably have no idea who I am. I was actually — I was fired from this show a while ago. But if, you know, don’t look that up, please, if you don’t know who I am. Please, don’t Google that. It’s fine. Don’t even worry about it.”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

The new “Walking Dead” spinoff, premiering Sunday on AMC and AMC+, builds on more than a decade of back story. We’re here to help.The new six-part mini-series “The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live,” the latest installment in the sprawling “Walking Dead” universe, premieres Sunday on AMC and AMC+. It finds Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira reprising their longtime roles as Rick Grimes and Michonne, the weathered survivors of a postapocalyptic wasteland populated by flesh-devouring zombies.Rick, the former sheriff turned heroic leader, and Michonne, the katana-wielding warrior with a heart of gold, were two of the show’s longest-tenured and most beloved characters. When they paired off late in the show’s run, it added a warm central love story to somewhat offset the show’s litany of bloodshed and gore — until Rick left the series in Season 9 and Michonne in Season 10.“The Ones Who Live” picks their story up where it left off in the original series, revealing what happened to the couple after they exited the show. But it also involves other characters, settings and organizations that have either appeared or been mentioned in “The Walking Dead” and its spinoffs, including the dystopian city the Civic Republic, its high-tech military the C.R.M., and the slippery villain Jadis, played by Pollyanna McIntosh. There’s also 12 years and 11 seasons of back story to keep in mind — and a ton of lore, including flash-forward child births and complex double-crosses.If any of that sounds only vaguely familiar — or if you, like millions of viewers, stopped watching “The Walking Dead” some time before it wrapped its 11th and final season in November 2022 — you might need a bit of a refresher to keep up with “The Ones Who Live,” which dives into its propulsive story without many flashbacks or expository monologues to bring viewers up to speed. (For their part, Lincoln and Gurira have said that they didn’t keep up with the whole series either, so you’re in good company.) Here’s everything you’ll need to know before the series kicks off on Sunday.What happened to Rick?After it was announced that Lincoln would be leaving “The Walking Dead” sometime during its ninth season, many fans assumed Rick would be killed off as many other characters had been before. Lincoln’s final episode, “What Comes After,” certainly set up that expectation, placing Rick in seemingly insurmountable jeopardy, gravely wounded and surrounded by a horde of walkers. As they close in on him, he has visions of friends and family he’s lost over the years, including Shane (Jon Bernthal), Sasha (Sonequa Martin-Green) and his first wife, Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies), driving home the impression that these are Rick’s final moments on earth.Instead, Rick is saved at the last moment by Jadis, his antagonist and sometime-ally, who whisks him to safety in a mysterious helicopter with cryptic promises that things will be OK. (Using a radio to communicate with the pilot, she refers to “As” and “Bs,” insisting that Rick is an A, which is sure to figure into “The Ones Who Live.”) Badly banged up, he is placed on a stretcher and given an intravenous drip, and he drifts off to sleep as Jadis consoles him. It’s the last time we see Rick until the final minutes of the series finale, when we catch a glimpse of his life six years later under the iron rule of the heavily militarized city the Civic Republic, still dreaming of reuniting with his family.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

Revelations that Alexander Smirnov, an F.B.I. informant, was a serial fabulist were downplayed on air and online by those who continued to insist the president should be impeached.On Tuesday, a few hours after the credibility of a key source boosting Republican efforts to impeach President Biden collapsed in spectacular fashion, the Fox News host Jesse Watters offered his viewers a reassuring message.“It’s a smear job,” Mr. Watters said.He was referring to the Justice Department’s revelation that Alexander Smirnov, an F.B.I. informant who had accused Mr. Biden and his son Hunter of an elaborate bribery scheme involving Ukraine, was in fact a serial liar who could not be trusted. In a court filing, federal prosecutors said Mr. Smirnov had spread misinformation and was “actively peddling new lies that could impact U.S. elections after meeting with Russian intelligence officials.”Because Mr. Smirnov’s claims were frequently cited by congressional Republicans in their now-stalled attempt to unseat Mr. Biden from office, Democrats argued that the impeachment effort had reached a logical conclusion. “He is lying, and it should be dropped and it’s just been an outrageous effort from the beginning,” the president said last week.But the conservative media world reacted with a different, and sharply defiant, narrative. In this worldview, news of Mr. Smirnov’s deceptions was merely part of a conspiracy to protect Mr. Biden at all costs.“They say he has ties to Russian intelligence; where did they get that from?” Mr. Watters told his prime-time audience, noting that Mr. Smirnov had previously been considered credible by the F.B.I. “They just gave the media and the Democrats permission to call the Ukraine bribes and the Biden impeachment ‘Russian disinformation’ for the rest of the year.”Miranda Devine, a columnist for The New York Post, dismissed Mr. Smirnov as a “straw man” and said the evidence against Mr. Biden remained “overwhelming.” Maria Bartiromo, on Fox Business, described the Justice Department’s filing as “an intimidation tactic” and accused the government of “taking this guy down.”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

The comedian was abruptly fired in 2019, just after being named to the cast, when offensive comments he’d made surfaced. Now a rising stand-up star, he is set to appear on the show this weekend.When the comedian Shane Gillis was dropped from “Saturday Night Live” in 2019 just days after the announcement that he’d been added to the Season 45 cast, he lost one of the most sought-after jobs in comedy. Immediately after his addition to the cast, multiple instances surfaced of him using language that the show called “offensive, hurtful and unacceptable” in a statement addressing his ouster.Among the inflammatory language he’d used, on his podcast and on others, was a slur to refer to Chinese people, along with a caricature accent, and a homophobic slur, which he used to describe the filmmaker Judd Apatow and the comedian Chris Gethard as well as the Democratic presidential candidates Andrew Yang and Senator Bernie Sanders (the latter two prefaced with the word “Jew”). “Fat, ugly idiots promoting hate, that’s what this is,” he said, ribbing himself and those with whom he was talking.Gillis could have become a pariah. Instead, on Saturday, he’ll make his debut on NBC’s storied Studio 8H stage, as a host.Since his firing, Gillis’s star has quickly ascended: His debut special, released on YouTube in 2021, has amassed about 24 million views; and his podcast with Matt McCusker, “Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast,” on which some of the problematic statements were made, has the most subscribers of any podcast on Patreon with more than 80,000 paying listeners, tens of thousands more than the next highest. He has also been touring rigorously, performing on comedy stages across the United States and the world.He reached new heights in September with the release of Netflix’s “Beautiful Dogs,” which had a lengthy run on the streamer’s Top 10 most popular shows list. In that special, he walked the line between satirizing conservatives and playing to them, according to The New York Times’s comedy critic, Jason Zinoman, who described its opening bit as “dumb and smart, cocky and self-mocking, homophobic but relentlessly self-aware.”“Don’t be surprised if he becomes an arena act,” Zinoman added.A few weeks ago, Bud Light announced that it was partnering with Gillis. “Welcome to the team,” the brand posted on Instagram along with a photo of the comedian. Bud Light has been scrambling to contain the fallout, which included plummeting sales, from last year’s right-wing backlash to Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender influencer, promoting the beer on Instagram.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

A 1980 adaptation of the best-selling novel cast it as the tale of a white hero in an exotic Japan. A new version tells a more kaleidoscopic story.Gina Balian, a television executive who had worked on the hit series “Game of Thrones” for HBO, had just left to help FX start a new limited series division when an agent sent her a nearly 1,200-page novel.It was “Shogun,” James Clavell’s 1975 best-selling chronicle of a hardened English sailor who lands in Japan at the dawn of the 17th century looking for riches and ends up adopting the ways of the samurai. Balian’s first reaction was that she had already seen this book on television — back in 1980, when NBC had turned the novel into a mini-series that earned the network its highest Nielsen ratings to date.Most of what she remembered about the first adaptation was Richard Chamberlain — its white, male star. But as she started reading, she discovered the novel had a much more kaleidoscopic point of view, devoting considerable pages to getting inside the heads of the Japanese characters.“I thought that there was a story to be told that was much wider and deeper,” said Balian, who is co-president of FX Entertainment. It didn’t hurt that something about it also reminded her of “Game of Thrones,” in terms of the “richness of so many characters’ lives.”It took 11 years, two different teams of showrunners and a major relocation to bring “Shogun” back to the screen. The 10-part series debuts on Hulu on Feb. 27 with the first two episodes, followed by new ones weekly, and will premiere on Disney+ outside of the United States and Latin America.Both Hollywood and Western audiences largely have moved beyond viewing the world as a playground where (mostly) white protagonists prove their mettle in exotic lands. Shows and films like “Squid Game” and “Parasite” have shown that audiences can handle Asian characters speaking their own languages.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