Eliana Willis

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    For a Times Critic on Deadline, a Dramatic Reversal

    Stories evolve. But a recent review proved to a theater critic that people can change even more.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to do my job.That’s usually not a problem. As the chief theater critic for The Times, I enjoy the ritual of seeing plays during previews, thinking about them for a day or two and writing opening-night reviews.But after Second Stage Theater announced in June that it would produce a revival of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Appropriate,” I dithered for months about covering it. True, it would be the play’s Broadway debut — and the playwright’s. Both are important milestones for the paper to acknowledge with a thoughtful response.On the other hand, I’d seen “Appropriate” before, when it premiered Off Broadway in 2014. Other critics welcomed it as a serious play by a serious playwright.I hated it.That surprised me. The play’s subject — the legacy of racism in America — is something I care about deeply. And the plot is clever: Three white siblings bicker over the horrible souvenirs of slavery they find in their father’s plantation home. But the tone seemed too hectic and self-consciously outrageous to suit the subject.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?  More

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    ‘Fargo’ Season 5, Episode 7: Not Your Puppet

    Gator takes matters into his own hands. Dot takes a drive. Wayne takes a trade-in.Season 5, Episode 7: ‘Linda’After eight episodes of frolicking in a Coen-ized version of gangland Kansas City in the early 1950s, the last season of “Fargo” shifted audaciously to a black-and-white homage to “The Wizard of Oz,” complete with a tornado as deus ex machina. Having already moved the show out of the Coens’ Minnesota and North Dakota, its creator, Noah Hawley, gave himself the license to claim another patch of Heartland terrain, as if advancing across a Risk board. The Coens had ended “A Serious Man” with a tornado, too, so it wasn’t even that off brand.Now in the homestretch of the new season, Hawley returns to Oz again with an extended fantasy sequence that addresses Dot’s back story more deftly than a standard monologue or flashback ever could. It’s also a subtler homage than running a tornado through Kansas in black-and-white: Not until Wayne improvises a story for Scotty around “Dorothy” and rainbows does the connection become blazingly apparent. And even then, the episode is graced with a sense of the uncanny, as Dot’s past is illustrated with the punch of a particularly vivid dream. Such is the power of the “Fargo” pancake.A fuller reckoning with Dot’s history with Roy and Gator is forthcoming, but on the way out of town in her Kia with DLR plates, Dot pauses at a truck stop for coffee and pancakes and drifts off into a reverie. (She first stares at a recipe for chicken piccata that is posted to a billboard, which perhaps nods to the recipe-trading that Deputy Olmstead’s husband wanted her to do in order to be a “real wife.”) After stopping to unearth a cryptic postcard from “Camp Utopia” from a woman named Linda, Dot continues on her way until she passes a sign for the place and her car stalls out on the side of the road.The path to Camp Utopia is covered in untrodden snow leading into the forest, so it comes as a surprise for Dot to discover a large cabin filled with women, seated raptly before a puppet show. Yet it’s not the sort of whimsical performance associated with a sleep-away camp; it is a dramatization of domestic abuse, so triggering to Dot that she passes out. (This is the rare example of someone continuing to stay in a dream after passing out in it.) When she comes to, Dot announces that she is looking for a woman named Linda, only to learn that everyone is named Linda. This is women’s shelter, one Linda (Sorika Wolf) explains to her, and the generic name is a starting place from which to rebuild the identity of its residents. All these Lindas make Camp Utopia sound like a bizarro-world Barbieland.But there’s only one Linda who matters to Dot: Linda Hillman (Kari Matchett), Roy’s ex-wife, whom Dot needs to help clear some things up so she can resume her current marriage. Linda refuses to go until Dot’s story is adjudicated by the rest of the women through another puppet show, and she has to make a puppet first, which she is told will “expel the trauma” by attaching it to this representation. What it does, in practice, is lend a strange vibrancy to Dot’s back story that recalls the stop-motion existentialism of Charlie Kaufman’s “Anomalisa” in how it uses a familiar technique to unfamiliar ends.Despite the unreality of Camp Utopia, it seems safe to believe that the tragic story Dot tells about herself is real: Linda discovered her as a wayward 15-year-old named Nadine and brought her into the Tillman home with Roy and Gator, but Linda subtly nudged the abusive Roy in Nadine’s direction. As Roy directed sexual attention toward the teenager, Linda used the opportunity to flee, leaving Nadine trapped in her place. Dot has reason to blame Linda for condemning her to this terrible fate, but the episode is really about her recognizing that Roy deserves the fullness of her wrath.When “Fargo” clicks its heels together and snaps back to reality, it pulls a nasty twist on “there’s no place like home.” A freak (or not-so-freak) accident lands Dot in the hospital and back in the care of the wrong husband, Roy, who appears to have needed fate to do the job Munch and Gator couldn’t pull off. The episode ends on this cliffhanger, but knowing Dot’s back story throws Gator in a different light, casting him less as an inept baby-faced henchman than as an impressionable child who was the collateral damage in his father’s relationships. Gator is now stuck trying to impress daddy by wiping out Munch, which is almost poignant in its impossibility.There may be some scenario in which Gator understands his father’s culpability in his traumatic upbringing and aligns himself with the abused women who have passed through their house. But Roy has a talent for pitting his victims against one another. And with Munch now waiting in the weeds, Gator may not have a shot at redemption.3 Cent StampsWe finally get some clarity on the old woman who has been boarding Munch. It doesn’t seem as if any formal agreement was reached between them; Munch appears to have viewed himself as a guard dog, offering protection in lieu of rent. This means hacking her terrible son with an ax exactly the way his “Fargo” movie analog, Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare), takes out his partner, Carl (Steve Buscemi).Wayne’s neurologically challenged state has made him more of a softy than usual, which pleases his daughter, Scotty, who needs the companionship, and leads to incredible trade-in deals on his Kia lot. Having Wayne agree to a one-to-one trade-in for new car is a clever reversal of the scene in the movie where Jerry pretends to ask his boss for a discount he knows he will not get for a disgruntled customer.In another Coen callback, the specific tracking device Gator uses on Munch’s car is the same one Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) uses to locate Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) at a motel in “No Country for Old Men.” The show can’t come close to matching the film’s suspense, but it raises the temperature a bit. More

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    Review: This ‘Night of the Iguana’ Is Williams Without the Excess

    A new revival directed by Emily Mann and starring Tim Daly leans into its flailing characters’ confusions.While not his most elegant work, Tennessee Williams’s “The Night of the Iguana,” about a group of lost souls at a coastal hotel in 1940s Mexico, is not without its misty pleasures. Even as his characters stumble tragically in search of meaning, their convictions carry the sharp-tongued certainty of soap opera idols. But a new revival from La Femme Theater at the Signature Center mires itself too deeply in its characters’ confusions to let the edges of his language shine.It’s an issue of confidence, with Emily Mann directing her cast away from Williams’s assured dialogue and toward their characters’ flailing. And this play, with a defrocked minister who now leads Baptist church ladies on unreliable bus tours at its center, already has plenty of flailing.Plagued by nervous breakdowns, the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon (Tim Daly) is grasping at straws when he brings his ersatz flock to the cheap hotel run by his friend, the sultry Maxine (Daphne Rubin-Vega). Calling God a “senile delinquent” during a mid-sermon lapse in belief got him fired; his statutory rape of a 16-year-old on the trip could mean worse, and the girl’s chaperone (Lea DeLaria) is already rushing to phone the authorities.Like many of the playwright’s antiheroes, Shannon is disheartened by the world’s hypocrisy while also contributing to it. These contradictions are typically enlivened by the kind of fiery speechifying an actor can chew heartily, but “Iguana” is Williams in bold, underlined red ink: Shannon goes on about feeling hopeless and at the end of his rope, then later says as much about the panicking iguana caught and tied to a post by two hotel workers. No need for SparkNotes.His pleas need spirit, if only of desperation, and Daly, in a verbally stumbling performance, does not convey someone with the power to seduce with ease. This hesitation extends to most of the ensemble, who struggle with the cadence of Williams’s writing, except for the unflinching DeLaria and, as a hippie-ish painter named Hannah, Jean Lichty.Like Shannon, Hannah is a hustler with lofty spiritual ambitions, traversing the world trading watercolors and recitations for hotel rooms with her aging poet father (Austin Pendleton, whose adequacy with the play’s rhythms is undermined by the brevity of his time onstage). Shannon and Hannah’s near act-length conversation in the show’s second half, as she attempts to calm him down from the ledge, comes closest to achieving its intended discourse on freedom and redemption thanks to the surety with which Lichty imbues her character.It might be that, in trying to demystify Williams’s extravagance to get at its emotional core, Mann has thrown the priest out with the holy water. It’s possible to strip away the surfaces of the playwright’s worlds — a revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” last year did away with its Old South glamour and still got its point across — but not the excesses they need to reach their delicious boiling points.Traces of those remain, like Jeff Croiter’s tropical lighting, Beowulf Boritt’s stilted, shabby-chic set, and Rubin-Vega’s unshakable earthiness. But they don’t compensate for the play’s weaker elements, like two giddy German tourists (Alena Acker and Michael Leigh Cook) whose sporadic, Nazi-praising appearances are a thudding example of the duplicity Shannon rails against, in this case aimed at Maxine for renting them rooms.Williams wants it both ways in those moments, validating his protagonist’s gripes even as he condemns him. The gambit is not impossible, but is one that needs a production more convincing, more drunk on its own pretensions, to really win over a congregation.The Night of the IguanaThrough Feb. 25 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; iguanaplaynyc.com. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes. More

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    Best Arts Photos of 2023

    Peter Fisher for The New York Times2023 in Retrospect: 59 Photographs That Defined the Year in ArtsDeadheads, ballerinas and Mick Jagger: As 2023 winds down, revisit a memorable handful of the thousands of images commissioned by our photo editors that capture the year in culture.Marysa Greenawalt More

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    Sondheim Was a Critical Darling. Since His Death, He’s a Hitmaker, Too.

    The musicals of Stephen Sondheim often struggled at the box office during his lifetime, but since his death several have become huge hits on Broadway.Stephen Sondheim, the great musical theater composer and lyricist, was widely acclaimed as a genius, but during his lifetime he had a bumpy track record at the box office, with many of his shows losing money.In death, however, his shows have flourished.A revival of “Merrily We Roll Along” — which was so unpopular when it debuted in 1981 that it closed 12 days after opening — is now the hottest ticket on Broadway. A lavish revival of “Sweeney Todd” that opened in March is already profitable, and at a time when almost everything new on Broadway is failing.Meanwhile, Sondheim’s unfinished and existentialist final work, “Here We Are,” is now the longest-running show in the brief history of the Shed, a performing arts center in Hudson Yards on Manhattan’s West Side, where luminaries like Steven Spielberg and Lin-Manuel Miranda signed up as producers to make sure no expense was spared on the Sondheim send-off.“There just seems to be an unbounded appetite for him,” said Alex Poots, the artistic director of the Shed.The posthumous Sondheim bump appears to have resulted from a confluence of factors.The big Broadway revivals feature fan-favorite talent — the “Merrily” cast includes Daniel Radcliffe of “Harry Potter” fame, while “Sweeney” is led by the celebrated baritone Josh Groban — reflecting a desire by top-tier entertainers to champion, and tackle, Sondheim’s tricky but rewarding work.The revival of “Merrily We Roll Along,” with, from left, Lindsay Mendez, Daniel Radcliffe and Jonathan Groff, is one of the hottest tickets on Broadway.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAlso: The outpouring of praise for Sondheim upon his death, when he was hailed as a transformational creative force, seems to have spurred new interest in his work. And his shows, some of which felt challenging when they first appeared, are now more familiar, thanks to decades of stage productions and film adaptations. Plus, according to most critics, the current revivals are good.“Sondheim went from being too avant-garde to being a sure bet, like you’re doing ‘A Christmas Carol’,” said Danny Feldman, the producing artistic director of Pasadena Playhouse, a Southern California nonprofit that won this year’s Regional Theater Tony Award. The playhouse devoted the first half of 2023 to Sondheim: A production of “Sunday in the Park With George,” a show once seen as esoteric, became one its best-selling musicals ever, and a production of “A Little Night Music” was not far behind. “The interest was shocking,” Feldman said.One side effect of his popularity: Ticket prices are high. “Merrily” is facing strong demand from Sondheim lovers and Radcliffe fans, but its capacity is limited; it is playing in a theater with just 966 seats. That has made it the most expensive ticket on Broadway, with an average ticket price of $250 and a top ticket price of $649 during the week that ended Dec. 17. “Sweeney” is also pricey, with tickets that same week averaging $175 and topping out at $399. (Both shows offer lower-priced tickets, particularly after the holidays.)“We shouldn’t be criticized for being a hit and paying back investors who have taken a big punt in New York,” said the “Merrily” lead producer, Sonia Friedman. “Most shows right now are not working, and therefore when something comes along that does, let’s get the investors some money back.”In life, Sondheim was often seen as more of an artistic success than a commercial one — a critical darling with a passionate but finite fan base, leading to short runs for many of the shows whose scores he composed, especially during their first productions. A few shows, particularly “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” were hits from the start, but some musicals that are now viewed as masterpieces, including “Sweeney Todd” and “Sunday in the Park With George,” did not recoup their costs during their original productions.“It’s not like he fell out of favor and has been rediscovered. He’s always been revered and valued and prized by everybody who loves theater, but we also have to recognize that several of his shows, when they first premiered, were not understood and were not embraced,” said Jordan Roth, the producer who brought “Into the Woods” back to Broadway in the summer of 2022, seven months after Sondheim’s death. Now, Roth said, “The grip on our hearts seems to have tightened.”“Into the Woods,” a modestly scaled production, featured the pop singer Sara Bareilles and a troupe of Broadway stars. It recouped its costs and then had a five-month national tour.The original production of “Sweeney Todd” did not recoup its investment, but the current revival starring Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford is making a profit.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn February, seven weeks after “Into the Woods” concluded on Broadway, “Sweeney Todd” began previews. It’s a much bigger production — big cast, big orchestra — that was capitalized for up to $14.5 million. It has sold strongly from the get-go (during the week that ended Dec. 10, it grossed $1.8 million) and has already recouped its capitalization costs.“I’m sorry that I can’t call him and say look at these grosses. He definitely would have had a sarcastic statement in response, but he would have liked it secretly,” said the show’s lead producer, Jeffrey Seller. “Who doesn’t want to be affirmed by the audience?”Groban and his co-star Annaleigh Ashford are ending their runs in the show on Jan. 14; the show’s success has prompted the producers to extend the run, with Aaron Tveit and Sutton Foster taking over the lead roles on Feb. 9.“It has morphed into being under the umbrella of an enormous and deserved celebration of Sondheim’s work and legacy and life,” Groban said. “All of a sudden there’s grief involved, and wanting to do him proud, and what-would-Steve-do feelings.”“Merrily,” which began previews in September, is the biggest turnabout, given that its original production is one of Broadway’s most storied flops. The current revival, capitalized for up to $13 million, has been selling out.“Of all the things he wanted, he wanted as many people as possible to be in the theater watching the shows, and he just missed it,” said Maria Friedman, the director of the “Merrily” revival and a longtime Sondheim collaborator.In November, 10 members of the company of the original ill-fated “Merrily” attended the revival and marveled at the reversal of fortunes.“It’s thrilling to see the show finally get its due,” said Gary Stevens, who was an 18-year-old in the original “Merrily” ensemble, and who is now 60 and works an executive at a chauffeuring company in Florida. “I’d be remiss if I didn’t say there was a sense of bittersweetness. We look at this revival’s success as, in some ways, our success, because the day after closing, even with how exhausted we were and how sad we were, we recorded a kick-ass album that kept that show alive, so that it became a legendary flop and cult classic that kept going and going, and now this.”Another member of the original “Merrily” cast, the actress and singer Liz Callaway, was nominated this year for a Grammy Award for a live album of Sondheim songs, one of two collections of Sondheim songs nominated in the 2024 Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album category. “I think a new generation is falling in love with Sondheim now,” she said.“Here We Are” is a little different. It is not expected to recoup its costs, or to transfer to Broadway, but both the leadership of the Shed and the commercial producer who raised money to finance the production proclaimed it a success.“It was always about honoring Steve’s legacy,” said the producer, Tom Kirdahy. “And we hope that it has another life, in London or on the road.”In London, there are also two Sondheim shows running. “Old Friends,” a revue of Sondheim songs with a cast led by Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga, is in the West End. And at the Menier Chocolate Factory, a revival of Sondheim’s rarely staged “Pacific Overtures” opened earlier this month to critical praise.“For those of us who wanted to do right by him, this is a year I’ll never forget,” Groban said. “I just hope he’s smiling down.” More

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    ‘The Crown’ and What the U.K. Royal Family Would Like Us to Forget

    Netflix’s sprawling drama has never been about revealing anything new, but instead speaks to several furtive truths about the British monarchy.Over the last seven years, “The Crown” has been criticized by numerous prominent Britons on behalf of their royal family.After former Prime Minister John Major described the show as a “barrel-load of nonsense,” and the actress Judi Dench — who is friends with Queen Camilla — accused it of “crude sensationalism” in 2022, Netflix labeled the show a “fictional dramatization.” But these complaints misunderstood the sprawling drama’s appeal for many British fans and, for the real royal family, its usefulness.The show has never been about revealing anything new. Instead, it has resurfaced what the royal family would most like us to forget. “The Crown” has, over six seasons, spoken to several furtive British truths: the public perception of the monarchy, the self-preservation strategies of a family preoccupied with becoming irrelevant and the family’s rigorous quashing of internal dissent.In Seasons 1 and 2, Matt Smith played Prince Philip and Claire Foy was Queen Elizabeth II. Des Willie/NetflixThe glossy dramatization of these truths is partly why the popularity of “The Crown” has endured, finding an audience in Britain even among people who want to end the monarchy or are indifferent to it. I am one of the former.On the show’s premiere in 2016, I was captivated by Claire Foy’s depiction of a young Elizabeth thrust onto the throne prematurely following tragedy, entertained by Olivia Colman’s more confident queen who had more challenging relationships with her prime ministers, and have stayed loyal to her story as Imelda Staunton closes off “The Crown” as a pious matriarch and meddling parent.Much of the show has been devoted to the royals’ romantic woes, but over the years I have been more interested in its depiction of the extent the crown will go to protect its power and traditions.In Season 4, Diana Spencer (Emma Corrin) begins her unhappy marriage to Prince Charles. Des Willie/NetflixThis was clear in episodes in which Elizabeth, as a princess, traveled to Kenya to try to counter the country’s independence movement (Season 1); the family hid the queen’s disabled cousins, Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon, in an institution (Season 4); and a 20-year-old Diana becomes trapped in a loveless marriage so that the future king can have a chaste-seeming bride (Season 4).Still, the show has often neglected to explore the monarchy’s true wealth and political influence. The crown’s real estate portfolio is valued at 16.5 billion pounds ($21 billion), and the monarch enjoys a broad exemption from most taxes, as well as many other laws. Under official rules, members of the royal family must not be criticized in Parliament, even as, according to a report from The Guardian, Charles has written directly to the country’s top politicians to ask for changes to national policy.In June 1981, members of Britain’s royal family gathered on the balcony of Buckingham Palace in London after attending an annual parade to celebrate the monarch’s birthday. Bob Dear/Associated PressIn Britain, what the public sees of the royal family is carefully stage-managed: We are presented with recorded Christmas broadcasts and gentle waves from chariots and balconies to fawn over as we wave our little Union Jacks. The “Palace,” as the royal institution is known, would like us to know the family through their carefully curated charity work, patronage, garden parties, weddings and jubilees.So there is something thrilling about the depiction of such a powerful family onscreen without their control. It’s the same pleasure that many of us will have gotten from watching Oprah’s interview by Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, or reading Harry’s memoir, “Spare.”Britons eager for an unvarnished view of the royal family have, in previous decades, pored over the intrusive paparazzi shots of Princess Diana on a yacht or Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, having her toes sucked on vacation. But because “The Crown” is a “fictional dramatization,” it can be enjoyed guilt-free, without having to engage with the sleaze of Britain’s tabloid newspapers.Prince Charles (Dominic West) and Camilla Parker Bowles (Olivia Williams) in Season 5.Keith Bernstein/NetflixPerhaps it is no surprise that anonymous sources have relayed accounts of the royal family being upset by a show that dramatizes moments they would rather forget. But this doesn’t take into account the degree to which “The Crown” has humanized the people sitting at the top of Britain’s rigid class system.Louis Staples, a Harper’s Bazaar columnist and frequent commenter on “The Crown,” points out that, these days, “intimacy is one of the most valuable currencies in our culture. When people share with us deeply enough — their flaws, their failures, their ups and downs — we form a connection with them.”Queen Elizabeth was famous for not sharing the messy, human and emotional parts of herself with her public, and for encouraging the rest of her family to do the same. The public relations strategy “never complain, never explain,” considered a core principle of her reign, holds that silence is dignified and public expression damaging.In the final season, the queen asks Prince William (Ed McVey), left, and Prince Harry (Luther Ford) for their thoughts on whether Prince Charles should be able to marry again. NetflixBut story lines on “The Crown” — like the suggestion of infidelity between Prince Philip and Penelope Knatchbull or young William and Harry’s heartache after losing their mother — may have served to humanize people generally kept at a distance from the public.Given that the real existential threat to the royal family is not public hatred, but total irrelevance — especially since the queen’s death — “The Crown” has given the Windsors an invaluable kind of outreach, even if they have had to swallow it like bitter medicine.Once the show has ended and viewers are no longer gripped by discovering the (yes, fictionalized) stories of the real people behind the onscreen characters, the royal family might find themselves wishing for one more season. More

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    Best TV Episodes of 2023

    “Bob’s Burgers,” “Frontline,” “Killing It” and “A Spy Among Friends” were among the series that gave us some of the best episodes of television this year.Great TV series can run for dozens or hundreds of hours, but we still experience them a piece at a time. This list is dedicated to those pieces: a handful of the best episodes that Mike Hale, Margaret Lyons and I saw in a year of professional viewership.As usual, this list isn’t comprehensive — it wouldn’t be if it were 10 times as long. And as usual, I avoided repeating shows that were on my Best of 2023 list. So I could have, but didn’t, include standout installments from “The Last of Us” (“Long, Long Time”), “Succession” (“Connor’s Wedding”) and “The Bear” (for me, “Forks” not “Fishes,” nothing against the latter). Consider it a starting point, and feel free to add your own. JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘Australian Survivor’Season 8, Episode 7: ‘Return of the King’“Australian Survivor” has been outplaying the U.S. version for a while now, and nowhere was that more evident than in this jaw-dropping episode from the “Heroes vs. Villains” season. The episode’s final tribal council featured a masterstroke of psychological manipulation by George Mladenov, or “King George,” who emerged as one of the most telegenic antagonists of any version of the show. American “Survivor” is still a delight, but this iteration currently wears the crown. (Streaming on 10play.) PONIEWOZIK‘Bob’s Burgers’Season 14, Episode 2: ‘The Amazing Rudy’It’s a rare comedy that can maintain quality, and even improve, going into its 14th season. It’s an even rarer one that, this long into its run, can pull off a striking and effective departure from form like this side-character spotlight. Shunting the Belcher family to the wings for most of the episode, this half-hour dove into the family history of the anxious grade-schooler Regular-Sized Rudy (voiced by Brian Huskey) as he searched for a magic trick that could save an awkward dinner with his divorced parents. Funny, poignant and ultimately uplifting, “The Amazing Rudy” showed that this burger joint can pull off a distinctive special of the week. (Streaming on Hulu.) PONIEWOZIKA scene from the “Amelia” episode of “Bob’s Burgers,” where Louise takes a class assignment personally.Fox‘Bob’s Burgers’Season 13, Episode 22: ‘Amelia’You could fill this list with episodes of “Bob’s Burgers”; from the past 12 months, “The Plight Before Christmas” and “These Boots Are Made for Stalking” also come to mind. The Season 13 finale typified the Fox comedy’s embrace of eccentricity, individuality and generosity of spirit, as the compulsively competitive fourth-grader Louise (Kristen Schaal) agonized over a multimedia report on her hastily chosen hero, Amelia Earhart. Her eventual triumph was a satisfying and gently comic victory for all ambitious, difficult, undervalued girls and women. (Streaming on Hulu.) MIKE HALE’Carol & the End of the World’Season 1, Episode 4: ‘Sisters’To the burgeoning genre of big-hearted apocalypse stories (“Station Eleven,” “The Last of Us”) add this adult animated series, set in the months before a looming planetary collision, which arrived too late for my annual best-TV list. Through a series of home-video snippets, this episode follows the introverted Carol (Martha Kelly) on a hiking trip with her exuberant sister, Elena (Bridget Everett), as the mismatched siblings try to bond before doomsday. (Streaming on Netflix.) PONIEWOZIK‘Cunk on Earth’Season 1, Episode 3: ’The Renaissance Will not be Televised’I could probably have picked any of the five ridiculous episodes of this history mockumentary, but I’m partial to the Renaissance installment. In it, Philomena Cunk (Diane Morgan) walks us through some of the major events between 1440 and 1830 or so, with her dopey and bizarre questions. She and a da Vinci expert look at “The Vitruvian Man,” and she asks, “What’s it for?” In praising the artist’s Last Supper, she marvels, “You almost feel like you could crawl inside it and betray Jesus yourself.” As for the French Revolution, she explains that “The guillotine was specifically designed to be the most humane way to decapitate someone in front of a jeering crowd.” “Cunk” is dorky buffoonery at its best. (Streaming on Netflix.) MARGARET LYONSDave Burd, seated, as Dave, with child-actor versions of himself.Byron Cohen/FX‘Dave’Season 3, Episode 2: ‘Harrison Ave.’The fictional-autobiographical FXX comedy about the rapper Lil Dicky (Dave Burd) can be raunchy and scatological and outrageous. This third-season episode, however — well, it was still all that but also insightful and sweet. As the title character returns home to shoot a video about a childhood romance — cast with a slew of child-actor versions of himself as well as his actual young love, now grown up — the ensuing chaos becomes a reflection on celebrity, memory and the responsibilities of memoir. (Streaming on Hulu.) PONIEWOZIK‘Extraordinary’Season 1, Episode 8: ‘Surprise!’In “Extraordinary,” everyone on earth gets a superpower on their 18th birthday; Jen (Máiréad Tyers) is 25 and hasn’t gotten hers yet. While the humiliation and confusion she feels about this drives some of the show, it is secondary to the loving but bickering friendship with her roommate and bestie, her tense relationship with her mother and her budding romance with a shape-shifter who entered her life as a stray cat. This all comes to a head in the season finale, when a big, messy party pulls together all the show’s quirky characters and plot lines — and then just when things are feeling happy and resolved, it ends with a perfect record-scratch twist. Ah, the best kind of hurts so good. (Streaming on Hulu.) LYONSIn a scene from “Frontline,” the photographer Evgeniy Maloletka picks his way through the aftermath of a Russian attack in Mariupol, Ukraine, in 2022.Mstyslav Chernov/Associated Press‘Frontline’Season 42, Episode 5: ‘20 Days in Mariupol’This unaffectedly brutal documentary, filmed by the Associated Press video journalist Mstyslav Chernov, belongs on every list of the year’s best movies; through the good offices of “Frontline,” which was involved in its production, it can be included here. In backyards, on debris-strewn streets and in the ruins of a bombed-out maternity hospital, Chernov records the anger, despair and utter bewilderment of Ukrainian civilians during the early days of the Russian invasion. And as he and his team sprint across open areas and hunker down in flimsy stairwells, he narrates their desperate efforts to get the news to the world. (Streaming on PBS.org.) HALE’Killing It’Season 2, Episode 2: ‘Mallory’Claudia O’Doherty gave one of 2023’s best comedic performances in Peacock’s capitalism satire, as Jillian Glopp, a gig worker turned partner in a struggling saw palmetto farm. In the second season’s second episode, the theft of her beloved car — a budget Kia she’s named “Mallory” — cracks her sweet disposition, turning her into a raging vengeance seeker and unleashing the frustration of years scraping by in a dog-eat-dog economy. O’Doherty filters her character’s crackup through a blazing beam of Aussie sunshine. (Streaming on Peacock.) PONIEWOZIK‘A Spy Among Friends’Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Snow’Alexander Cary’s miniseries dramatizing the last days of friendship between the traitorous British spy Kim Philby (Guy Pearce) and his fellow agent Nicholas Elliott (Damian Lewis) emphasized subtle, complex psychology over spy craft (though it had that too). This may be why it didn’t receive the notice it should have. The penultimate episode, in which the full dimensions of Philby’s downfall became apparent, was — like the entire series — a clinic in naturalistic acting by Lewis, Pearce and their co-star Anna Maxwell Martin. (Streaming on MGM+.) HALEIn its attempts to understand some of the victims, Zachary Heinzerling’s thorough, judicious documentary series made the events more opaque.Hulu‘Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence’Season 1, Episode 3: ‘Larryland’Everything about the case of the middle-aged dad Lawrence V. Ray and the group of bright young college students he drew into a cultlike miasma of mind control, sexual exploitation and indentured servitude is hard to fathom. Zachary Heinzerling’s thorough, judicious documentary series made the events both more comprehensible and, in its attempts to understand some of the victims, more opaque and mysterious. The final episode, which came out during Ray’s trial (he is serving a 60-year sentence for sex trafficking and other crimes), was a heartbreaking, mesmerizing summation of the case’s contradictions. (Streaming on Hulu.) HALE‘Telemarketers’Part 1From its opening moments, HBO’s “Telemarketers” is all about shaggy veracity: When we meet our protagonists, Sam Lipman-Stern (also one of the show’s directors) is shirtless in bed, and Patrick J. Pespas is high in the front seat of a car. The two worked together at a telemarketing company, small cogs in a despicable grift, but the office itself is home to real camaraderie — and real chaos, thanks in part to pervasive drug use. Lipman-Stern’s grainy footage from his teenage years captures the outrageousness of his workplace but also Pespas’s intense, charismatic vitality. While the subsequent episodes expose more of the telemarketing industry’s shadiest work, the first installment is an instant, startling immersion into its subjects’ perspectives. (Streaming on Max.) LYONSHaley J in “Wrestlers,” a documentary series with a mother and daughter match that includes folding chairs. Netflix‘Wrestlers’Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Mother’There are dozens of poignant, personal moments in “Wrestlers,” a documentary series about a low-level professional wrestling league. Humor, passion, ambition — plenty of all of those, too. But one episode is a genuine jaw-dropper, and its climax is a death match between a mother and daughter. Marie was a young mom and went to jail while her daughter, Haley, was a child. They never really reconciled, but now they’re in the same wrestling league, where Marie is a doting veteran and Haley, now also a young mother herself, a fast-rising star. Marie says Haley is a “carbon copy” of her; Haley does not see it that way. But they both like turning one kind of pain into another kind of pain, and they bring all their anger and grief into the ring. They also bring folding chairs, a trash-can lid and thousands of thumbtacks, and by the end of the match, they’re both battered, and Marie’s face is covered in blood. It is perhaps the most visceral catharsis I have ever seen. (Streaming on Netflix.) LYONS More

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    On QVC, Shawn Killinger Can Help You Sell Yourself

    On a Saturday night earlier this month, the QVC host Shawn Killinger kicked off another episode of “Shawn Saves Christmas,” the seasonal series she hosts live at QVC’s gargantuan 24/7 broadcast center in West Chester, Pa., about an hour’s drive from Philadelphia. But by the end of the first segment, it seemed like Shawn was going to sink Christmas instead.As I watched from behind the cameras, she accidentally tipped over a rolling tote bag, shattering a wine bottle loudly enough to be heard on air. “We are going to need a mop,” she said with a cringe and levity, owning the oopsie, as did the camera, which lingered on the aftermath for several seconds. As the screen cut to a photo of the product, Killinger hustled to another part of the set to talk about mascara as the crew, panicked-looking but resolute, made the mess disappear in minutes.Having talked to Killinger quite a bit by that point, I suspected she was mortified by the disaster. When she is presenting on QVC, she had told me earlier, she feels like she is “pedalling a unicycle uphill through a rancid windstorm while juggling flaming swords while chewing gum and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.”But if she was, she didn’t show it. And the secret to that friendly composure is what brought me to QVC HQ.“I’m not a salesperson,” Killinger said. “I’m a storyteller.”Christopher Leaman for The New York TimesMost TV shows are trying to sell you something, whether it’s the Lexus in a conventional ad, a product-placed luxury watch or just a Netflix subscription. But on QVC — it originally stood for “Quality Value Convenience,“ in case you’ve ever wondered — the selling is the entire point, and many of the products verge on the nutty.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?  More