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    Late Night Weighs in on President Biden’s Annual Physical

    Jimmy Fallon joked that Vice President Kamala Harris “seemed a little too eager to hear the results.”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.So Far, So GoodPresident Joe Biden received a clean bill of health after his annual physical at Walter Reed on Thursday.Late night hosts used the opportunity to poke fun at Biden’s age. Jimmy Fallon joked that Vice President Kamala Harris “seemed a little too eager to hear the results.”“Yeah, it’s never good when the doctor examining you is like, ‘I don’t know if they even make these parts anymore.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Yep, the exam was going great until Biden confused the eye chart for a teleprompter.” — JIMMY FALLON“The White House said Biden’s exam took three hours. It’s never good when your physical has an intermission, you know what I’m saying? Nothing says ‘peak physical condition’ like a doctor’s visit with the same running time as ‘Avatar 2.’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Fit as a Fiddle Edition)“So today, Joe Biden had his annual physical. It was a clean bill of health, although his X-ray did reveal several classified documents. Gotta look everywhere.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“The presidential physical is pretty thorough. They do a colonoscopy, blood tests, and, as part of the dental exam, Biden pulls Air Force One with his teeth.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“The physician reported that the president remains healthy and vigorous. That’s right, you tuned in to this show to be entertained, and you are hearing about an 80-year-old man’s doctor visit.” — JAMES CORDEN“Between the F.B.I. search and undergoing a physical, this is a huge week for Biden getting probed.” — JAMES CORDEN“This seems like one of the worst parts of being the president of the United States, just having the entire country know your height, weight and that you’ve got some kind of weird rash.” — JAMES CORDENThe Bits Worth WatchingThe “Daily Show” correspondent Jordan Klepper found out where Republican voters stood on Donald Trump at a recent rally for Nikki Haley, Trump’s first declared rival for the presidential nomination.Also, Check This OutIn the revival, all of the original main characters (except for Casey, played by Lizzy Caplan, not pictured) are either pulled back into cater waiting or never stopped.StarzThe all-star sleeper hit comedy series “Party Down” returns for a new season 14 years after the comedy first premiered on Starz. More

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    Review: In ‘The Wanderers,’ Two Marriages and a Movie Star

    Anna Ziegler’s play about an Orthodox couple in the 1970s and an unorthodox one in the 2010s explores the limits of longing.There’s no shortage of stories that explore the merits and pitfalls of arranged marriages. In the Jewish subcategory alone, we have “Shtisel,” “Unorthodox” and the perennial “Fiddler on the Roof.” But Anna Ziegler’s awkwardly hitched play “The Wanderers,” which opened Thursday at the Laura Pels Theater, may be the first to consider the problem of forced matches while also exemplifying it.A shotgun seems to have been involved in forcing its two incompatible tales under one roof. The first begins in 1973 with the wedding of Esther and Schmuli, members of the Satmar Hasidic community who barely know each other. Even if Schmuli (Dave Klasko) is a bit meek, and Esther (Lucy Freyer) alarmingly headstrong, they seem at first like a traditional Orthodox couple, looking forward to making a family.Nevertheless, within five years, their marriage is in ruins. Schmuli has spirited away their daughters; Esther has fled Brooklyn with their infant son, Abraham.That’s not a spoiler but the foundation for the second story, which takes place decades later and proceeds in alternating “chapters” with the first. Abe (Eddie Kaye Thomas) is now an acclaimed 40-something novelist, having won, we are told, “a Pulitzer and two National Book Awards before turning 30.” The purple samples of his work provided suggest that the prizes were massively misjudged.Somewhat too conveniently for himself and the play, Abe is married to the daughter of another Satmar refugee. His mother and hers, best friends since childhood, raised Abe and Sophie (Sarah Cooper) to be each other’s “bashert”: their fate, their soul mates.Eddie Kaye Thomas and Sarah Cooper, on the table, portray a married couple with connections to an Orthodox couple played by Lucy Freyer, far left, and Dave Klasko, sitting at the two ends of the table.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhether they also chose that fate is an open question; for all their similarities, there are also crucial differences. For one thing, Sophie, who is biracial, grew up with a father — a Black professor of environmental science — but Abe rarely saw his after the separation. Precious about his loss, yet glib about other people’s, he has the charismatic narcissist’s ability to finagle subservience.That’s already a lot of plot for a 105-minute play, even before the lopsided interaction between the two stories, and the potential to explore generational harm through them, is overshadowed by an out-of-the-blue development. At a reading in a Brooklyn bookstore, Abe spots in the front row a well-known actress, a longtime crush who is apparently on his freebie list. Immediately afterward he receives an email that leads to a correspondence featuring thousands of others, many flirtatious to the point of virtual adultery.Unaccountably, the actress is given the name Julia Cheever, a herring so far past red it’s bleeding. As played by Katie Holmes, with whom the character shares certain biographical features, Julia is glamorous and wry but strangely underpowered. That’s in part a lack of stage authority; in this Off Broadway Roundabout Theater Company production, Holmes, though she appeared in the 2008 Broadway revival of “All My Sons” and in Theresa Rebeck’s “Dead Accounts” in 2012, is still feeling her way around a world that lacks a camera.But her indistinctness is also the result of the problem of representing virtual communication onstage. Sometimes the director Barry Edelstein has Julia sit face-to-face with Abe, or even touching, as if in the same room. Other times, she wanders about Marion Williams’s set, which consists almost entirely of books, while reciting her emails as if they were soliloquies.At least hers are down-to-earth. Abe’s are high-flown, pretentious — which is but one way this plot thread recalls the infamous electronic flirtation between the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer and the actress Natalie Portman. Ziegler has said she found that correspondence, part of which was published in The New York Times, “pretty juicy,” but in repurposing it for the play, she seems to have spilled the juice everywhere. As written, and in Thomas’s crafty performance, Abe bears enough of a resemblance to Foer (who also has a mother named Esther) to make you wonder what the point is.In any case, the real governing spirit here isn’t Foer but the frequently name-dropped Philip Roth; Abe seems to aspire not just to his stature but also to his characters’ unapologetic selfishness. That Sophie tolerates this while also taking nearly sole responsibility for their two children, who could not possibly be as whiny as her husband, is something of a mystery, at least for a half-hour. But pretty soon, and with growing irritation thereafter, the explanatory twist becomes obvious, leaving the big revelation at the end of the play a letdown.Is it too much of a hint to mention that catfish is not kosher?Helpfully, Cooper, known for her comic lip-syncing of Donald Trump, has a fresh and natural energy onstage. Even so, the plot mechanics ensure that Sophie isn’t given enough playable material to make us want to stay in her story. And Abe, who thinks he is deep, is unbearable.The social strictures facing Freyer’s Esther and Klasko’s Schmuli seem impossible to alter and are thus political, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIf only by contrast, Schmuli and Esther are more engaging. The forces aligned against their happiness are not merely theoretical as with Abe and Sophie; they emerge from social strictures that seem impossible to alter and are thus political. This gives the emotions of their scenes more complexity, and though Freyer can’t do much else with her troubled character, Klasko is at times heartbreaking in his portrait of conflicted and hopelessly unenlightened love.The comparison between the two marriages, each undone by the search for something outside the characters’ ken, nevertheless feels specious. The dialogue in both sections, sprinkled like parsley with pidgin Yiddish and Hebrew prayer, has a secondhand aura that is also unconvincing. More authentic are the wigs by Tommy Kurzman and costumes by David Israel Reynoso; you certainly never question which world you’re in as the fur hats and wigs — the shtreimels and sheitels — give way to sweatpants.Still, “The Wanderers” feels, like its vague title, unmoored. That has not been a problem with Ziegler’s previous plays, which include “Photograph 51” (about the molecular biologist Rosalind Franklin) and “Actually” (about a campus sexual assault trial). Both feature stories in which a strong argument is developed single-mindedly through specific conflicts that point toward a crisis.It’s an irony that in trying to weld two such stories together, “The Wanderers” doesn’t enhance those elements but compromises them. Arranged or chosen, not all marriages are bashert.The WanderersThrough April 2 at Laura Pels Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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    Ryan Seacrest Is Leaving ‘Live with Kelly and Ryan’

    The Hollywood multitasker provided a steady hand at a somewhat tumultuous time for the talk show. He will be replaced by Mark Consuelos, the husband of “Live” co-host Kelly Ripa.Ryan Seacrest announced on Thursday that he was leaving “Live With Kelly and Ryan,” the syndicated morning talk show mainstay that he has hosted with Kelly Ripa since 2017.Ms. Ripa said Thursday on the show that a familiar face, and frequent guest host — her husband, Mark Consuelos — would assume co-hosting duties. The show will now be known as “Live With Kelly and Mark.”“I’m so grateful to have spent the last six years beside my dear friend of too many decades to count and will miss starting my days with Ryan,” Ms. Ripa said in a statement. “Ryan’s energy, passion and love for entertainment is one of a kind.”Mr. Seacrest, a Hollywood multitasker, arrived at “Live” after a one-year search, and provided a steady hand at a somewhat tumultuous time for the show. In 2016, when Mr. Seacrest’s predecessor, Michael Strahan, announced that he was leaving the show for “Good Morning America,” Ms. Ripa felt blindsided and that the Walt Disney Company — which syndicates the show — was favoring its morning show franchise over her longtime talk show, which she has co-hosted since 2001. She walked off the show, setting off a tabloid feeding frenzy.Mr. Seacrest’s arrival nearly coincided with what seemed at the time to be a formidable rival: NBC was giving Megyn Kelly a 9 a.m. talk show, and investing tens of millions of dollars in it.Although Ms. Kelly’s morning show could veer dark — “Megyn Kelly Today” often ran segments on topics like revenge porn and sexual harassment — Ms. Ripa and Mr. Seacrest kept it light, providing a soothing antidote to the divisive Trump years. Ms. Kelly’s show was trounced by “Live” in the ratings and was canceled roughly a year after it started.“Live,” which started in the 1980s as a New York talk show co-hosted by Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford, has long centered on a simple concept: two hosts chatting about their lives, and bringing in celebrities for breezy interviews.“The hosts have changed, but the overall concept continues on: two people, a man and a woman, and enjoying the chemistry between them,” said Michael Gelman, the longtime executive producer, in a 2017 interview.“Live” has been the top-rated daytime talk show among women ages 25 to 54, a demographic important to advertisers, for more than a year.Mr. Seacrest will continue hosting the show until the spring, and will also continue hosting “American Idol,” ABC said. He said in a statement that working with Ms. Ripa for the last six years had been a “dream job.”“It’s been a memorable ride, and now I’m excited to pass the baton to Kelly’s ‘real’ husband, Mark,” he said. More

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    ‘Hello Tomorrow!’ Review: It’s Only a Paper Moon

    This comedy about hustlers selling lunar condos launches with visual pizazz. The emotions take longer to land.“The moon belongs to everyone,” declared “The Best Things in Life Are Free.” This was an easy enough sentiment to sing in 1927, before anybody planted a flag up there.In “Hello Tomorrow!,” a 10-episode comedy starting Friday on Apple TV+, Jack Billings (Billy Crudup), a traveling real-estate salesman, would like to offer you different terms. The moon, or at least a piece of it, can be yours for zero down and $150 a month, courtesy of Brightside Lunar Residences. Just don’t look too closely at the fine print.Is he selling a chance at a better life, or just a load of green cheese? What’s striking is not only how well Jack, with his spit-shined zeal, sells his earthbound customers on his blue-sky pitch; it’s how deeply he believes himself. “Hello Tomorrow!” spins out a galaxy of deceptions both personal and professional, devised by Jack and those around him, to show how the most powerful and important lies are the ones you tell yourself.The first thing that catches your eye about “Hello Tomorrow!” is, well, everything. While its conflicts are familiar — too much so, at times — it is visually unlike anything you’ve seen on TV outside “The Jetsons.” The creators, Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen, have conceived an alternative, future-past Earth that looks like an illustrator was hired to design a space-themed malt-shop menu in 1955 and got hopped up on bennies.Tin-can robots in avocado green and goldenrod yellow float about serving drinks and spraying shrubbery. Deliveries arrive to ticky-tacky suburban houses in a hover-van “driven” by a cartoon-video bird. A paperboy pulls a wagon that shoots today’s news out of pneumatic cannons.Some things haven’t changed, however: Money is still green and foldable and the source of heartache. The rich still get richer, and now they also have the moon as a luxury playground. To everyone else it’s a taunt, one more shiny thing that someone else gets to touch.The opening scene plays like a Buck Rogers burlesque of the “Mad Men” pilot. Jack sidles up to a miserable barfly (Michael Harney) and fires up his pitch, producing a rock from his pocket that he says came all the way from the lunar Sea of Serenity. “Wow,” his mark says. “That,” answers Jack, “is the one word none of us can live without.”From left, Dewshane Williams, Nicholas Podany and Hank Azaria play Jack’s sales team.Apple TV+Jack himself leads a distinctly wow-less life, as do his sales associates. Eddie (Hank Azaria) is an unlucky gambler who believes that “desperation is a salesman’s greatest asset.” Herb (Dewshane Williams) is an anxious expectant father of twins. Shirley (Haneefah Wood), Jack’s right-hand woman, sees through his upbeat blarney but is herself cheating on her husband with Eddie.Jack’s own personal secret is Don Draper-sized: He abandoned his wife and baby years ago. When a tragedy brings Jack to his old hometown, he longs to reconnect with his now-grown son, Joey (Nicholas Podany), the only way he knows how: deceitfully, by offering Joey a sales job without identifying himself as Joey’s father. That lie, and the questionable machinations of the moon-condo business, are the twin nuclear reactors that power the first season.“Hello Tomorrow!” is a hell of a looker. Its midcentury-modern version of steampunk — chromepunk? — is packed with analog-tech wonders like self-popping popcorn buckets at a ballgame. But the early episodes left me wondering if there was anything behind its polished facade.“Pleasantville”-style spoofs of 1950s suburbia have been done to death. The society of “Hello Tomorrow!” is not exactly Eisenhower-era America; on the one hand, it’s casually racially integrated, but on the other, women still hold pre-Betty Friedan housewife roles. There are vague references to a past “war” and hints that automation has cost some people their jobs and purpose, but no explanation of how technology has made the world so small while leaving America so homogeneous.In general, “Hello Tomorrow!” breezes past the world-building, hoping, not unlike Jack, that you’ll get too caught up in the pretty pictures to worry about the details. And damned if it doesn’t work, some of the time.Crudup is marvelously cast, letting Jack’s inner aches occasionally slip past his practiced smile. (Among a slew of quirky supporting performances, Susan Heyward is an absolute pip as Herb’s shrewd wife, Betty.) The season builds screwball momentum as Jack and company try to outrun the consequences of their choices.But the series is so stylized, not just in the design but also in the performances and the “Guys and Dolls” dialogue, that the characters often feel cartoony and unconvincing. Alison Pill, as a customer determined to expose Jack as a fraud, is like a black-and-white floor-wax commercial come to life. The sales staff’s various personal conflicts are weightless and one-note.Alison Pill stars as a customer convinced that Jack is a fraud.Apple TV+What is thoroughly, achingly real is the pervasive theme of lies and why people tell them. Falsehoods are an effective plot engine, of course, but here they are also about character; they’re the sad, sleazy cousins of wishes.The deeper you get into Jack’s business and personal deceptions, the more you realize that every character here — even the most upright — is lying to someone, or to themselves, in the sad belief that voicing the lie can somehow make it true. Underneath the show’s sleek shine is a story of beat-up dreamers trying to convince themselves that, with one lucky break, they might lasso the moon.You could ask whether they might be better off being honest with themselves, just as you could ask whether Jack couldn’t make a simpler living by selling some nice encyclopedias. But “Hello Tomorrow!” suggests that deceptions, self- and otherwise, are the rocket fuel that keeps us moving through an otherwise indifferent universe. “What’s life without a dream to make it go down easy?” Jack asks. It’s the oldest story under the sun. More

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    ‘Standing at the Sky’s Edge’ and ‘Sylvia’ Energize British Musicals

    The art form needs to make room for lesser-known names, to refresh and enlarge the talent pool, our critic writes.Where are the new British musicals? The question bears asking as Britain’s defining musical theater composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber, starts previews on Broadway of his latest show, “Bad Cinderella.” In April, Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera” will close on Broadway after a record-‌breaking 35-year run in a city where he has often seemed to be the only English practitioner of musicals around.Who else might carry forward an art form in which Lloyd Webber, 75 next month, surely can’t be expected to go it alone? There have, of course, been the occasional offerings from George Stiles and Anthony Drewe (“Betty Blue Eyes,” “Honk”), or from Elton John, whose “Billy Elliot” ran for years on both sides of the Atlantic. John’s recent “Tammy Faye” premiered Off West End last year at the buzzy Almeida Theater‌, and has life in it still.But musicals need to make room for lesser-known names as well, to refresh and enlarge the talent pool. How gratifying, then, to encounter two recent London openings from comparative newcomers, both in large playhouses, both enthusiastically received. And each show knows how to energize an audience — no small achievement in itself.That’s not to say that either “Standing at the Sky’s Edge,” at the National Theater, through March 25‌, or “Sylvia,” at the Old Vic, through April 8‌‌, is ready for the Broadway spotlight‌, ‌if that is even ‌their goal: Both are determinedly British in their subject matter, and “Sylvia,” in particular, has further work to do.It was nonetheless cheering to note the visceral response of playgoers swept up in the sheer passion of stories vigorously told; on this evidence, there seems to be an appetite for shows that expand the scope of what an English musical can be.‌“Standing at the Sky’s Edge” arrives in London after two‌ runs in Sheffield, the northern English city where it is set, and where both its composer-lyricist, Richard Hawley, and book writer, Chris Bush, are from.Cast members of “Standing at the Sky’s Edge,” which is set in the Park Hill housing complex, a Brutalist architectural landmark in Sheffield, England.Johan PerssonAnd yet you don’t need to be familiar with the city’s Park Hill housing complex, a Brutalist architectural landmark, to be drawn into the musical’s skillful weave of three story lines set in the same apartment there. Ben Stones’s imposing concrete set includes the signature graffito, “I love you, will u marry me,” that was painted on a concrete bridge of the housing project in 2001 and became an unlikely Sheffield icon.Love in its various forms turns out to be the topic connecting the show’s three plot strands, each set in different eras. We see Rose (Rachael Wooding) and Harry (Robert Lonsdale) starting a family in the early 1960s: Harry, a steelworker, takes pride in being the youngest foreman in his company’s history, but slides into depression as the once-mighty steel industry in the region goes into decline.That same flat some 30 years later becomes home to a teenager fleeing war-torn Liberia. Played by a radiant Faith Omole, that character, Joy, isn’t sure whether Park Hill, her supposed place of refuge, is a castle or a prison. And when she embarks on a mixed-race relationship with a sweet local boy, Jimmy (Samuel Jordan, in a knockout performance), Joy confronts the realities of racism head on: You wince when someone asks her family if they know how to use a refrigerator.Bringing the story line forward to 2016 is the transplanted Londoner Poppy (a clarion-voiced Alex Young), whose anxious parents need reassurance that their daughter has moved to “South Yorkshire, not Siberia.” Attempting a fresh start in a property that has been newly refurbished and a neighborhood that has gentrified since Joy’s time there, Poppy can’t escape her former lover, Nikki (Maimuna Memon), who shows up hoping to rekindle their romance.A roving narrator (Bobbie Little) appears now and then to connect the thematic dots. Home, she tells us, may “simply be a series of boxes that stops the rain,” but, in the director Robert Hastie’s production, there is also a profound sense of connection to the city. (Hastie runs the Crucible, the Sheffield theater where the show began.)Hawley’s full-bodied score, meanwhile, folds this singer-songwriter’s back catalog together with new songs, yearning and hopeful, that catch at the heart. The title song, taken from a 2012 album, is a rousing company number that gets the second act off to a propulsive start, and whose elation is characteristic of the show as a whole.The cast of “Sylvia,” which tells the story of the English suffragist Sylvia Pankhurst, at the Old Vic.Manuel Harlan“Sylvia” also looks toward England’s past, this time to tell the real-life story of the celebrated suffragist Sylvia Pankhurst, an activist who fought over many years to secure the right of British women to vote. She is at the impassioned center of this well-meaning, if dramatically sketchy, musical from the director-choreographer Kate Prince. The impressive designer here, as with the Sheffield-set musical, is Ben Stones.An earlier version of the show had a brief run at the Old Vic in 2018 as a dance-led work-in-progress. It has since been reworked as a largely sung-through musical that casts a strong glance ‌toward‌‌ “Hamilton.” Like Lin-Manuel Miranda’s trailblazer, “Sylvia” refracts history through an ethnically and musically diverse lens: The music by Josh Cohen and D.J. Walde draws from funk, soul, R&B and hip-hop. Sharon Rose, in the title role, recently appeared as Eliza in “Hamilton” in London.But “Sylvia” has a superficial feel that “Hamilton” never had: It makes caricatures of the historical figures it presents, including Winston Churchill, and skimps on the family drama at its fractured heart, though the soul singer Beverley Knight is in tremendous voice as Sylvia’s mother, Emmeline.It’s left to the giddy, near-perpetual motion of the staging to carry us through, even when the writing doesn’t. And Prince, a notable figure on the British dance scene, is canny enough to know how to end proceedings on a high. The show ends with a pair of anthems, “Stand Up” and “Rise Up,” celebrating women’s progress and exhorting the audience to get to their feet. And, swept along, they do. More

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    Jason Alexander Will Direct a Comedy on Broadway This Summer

    “The Cottage,” written by Sandy Rustin, will star Eric McCormack, Laura Bell Bundy and Lilli Cooper.“The Cottage,” a farce inspired by and also sending up the work of Noël Coward, will come to Broadway this summer in a new production directed by the “Seinfeld” alum Jason Alexander.The play, which has had several productions in small theaters over the last decade, will star Eric McCormack (“Will & Grace”), Laura Bell Bundy (“Legally Blonde”) and Lilli Cooper (“Tootsie”).“The Cottage” is a British farce by an American writer, Sandy Rustin, whose murder mystery drama, “Clue” (adapted from the board-game-based film), is now among the most-produced plays in the United States.Set in England in 1923, the comedy is set off by the revelation of an extramarital affair that brings a group of interconnected people together at a country house.It was first staged in 2013 at the Astoria Performing Arts Center in Queens, and has since had productions in Massachusetts, Arizona, Colorado, Virginia, and Florida, as well as on Long Island, and it has been optioned for television.Alexander directed a reading of the play in 2016 and led a developmental workshop in 2017. This production will be his Broadway directing debut, but he has appeared on Broadway in six shows and won a Tony Award for starring in “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway.”“The Cottage” is scheduled to begin performances July 7 at the Hayes Theater, with the opening scheduled for July 24. It is a commercial production, renting space from a nonprofit; the lead producers are Victoria Lang and Ryan Bogner, who last collaborated on the stage adaptation of “The Kite Runner” that ran on Broadway last year.This summer is shaping up to be an unusually busy one for Broadway: “The Cottage” is the fifth show to announce a summer opening thus far, joining the musicals “Back to the Future,” “Here Lies Love” and “Once Upon a One More Time” and the play “Purlie Victorious.” More

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    ‘Party Down’ Is Back. Did You R.S.V.P.?

    The invitations have been sent, the appetizers plated, the bottles opened. Rows of glasses gleam like baby stars. And somewhere, on the fringes of the celebration, a cater waiter is about to do something very wrong.This was the template of “Party Down,” a Starz comedy that ran for two 10-episode seasons, debuting in the spring of 2009. Canceled just as critics and niche audiences were beginning to catch on, the show followed the disaffected employees of a mid-tier catering company as they moved from party to party, one per episode, filching booze, seducing guests, snorting coke,  flirting with Nazism and accidentally poisoning George Takei.The original 20 episodes never included a surprise party. But get your streamers and party blowers ready. Because in a surprise to just about everyone — most likely including the folks at Nielsen, who once awarded the show’s finale a 0.0 rating among 18- to 49-year-olds — “Party Down” is back. A six-episode revival will premiere on Starz on Feb. 24, with new episodes arriving weekly.Martin Starr, a returning cast member, seemed to genuinely marvel at the development.“This was the only show I’ve worked on where people came to work when they weren’t working,” he said in a group video call. “It’s crazy that we get to come back and do it again.”“Truth be told,” his co-star Ken Marino said, “the reason I came back to set when I wasn’t working is I was between homes.”Starr: “I do remember you were finding places to go to the bathroom that maybe didn’t have your name.”Marino: “I still do. I’m going to the bathroom right now.”Is this the same “Party Down” that failed to dominate cable television over a dozen years ago? Mostly. The show’s original creators, John Enbom, Dan Etheridge, Rob Thomas and Paul Rudd, remain, as executive producers, and Enbom oversees a small staff of writers. The party-a-week structure also endures, as does the original cast — with the exception, based on the five episodes provided in advance, of Lizzy Caplan.In the revival, all of the original main characters (except for Casey, played by Lizzy Caplan, not pictured) are either pulled back into cater waiting or never stopped. Starz“All of us, for the entire 13 years since we stopped shooting the show, all we wanted to do is make more ‘Party Down,’” the show’s lead, Adam Scott (“Parks and Recreation,” “Severance”), said in a separate interview last month. “We all would have been there for free.”But the world has changed in the dozen or so years since the original run was canceled. So have the actors. Unknowns or barely knowns when the show debuted, most have since become household names. (The others? Depends on the household.) And they’ve all seen the current crop of disappointing reboots and reprises. “Party Down” could just be the rare show to get it right, mixing the perfect cocktail of star power, nostalgia, growth and gags.Then again, the characters never put a lot of muscle into bartending. So here’s a Zen koan for a deeply un-Zen show: Can you throw the same party twice?Are we having fun yet?The first run of “Party Down” was both structural marvel and joke spectacular. Each episode was simultaneously a workplace comedy, a hangout comedy and a procedural — a sitcom that never sat down. The celebrations it featured — birthdays, after parties — typically bordered the entertainment industry and nearly all of the cater waiters harbored industry dreams of their own.Those dreams eluded them, which fueled the philosophical inquiry at the show’s center.“What we were asking was: How long do you chase the dream?” Thomas, one of the creators, said. “When do you grow up? When do you quit banging your head against the wall?”The “Party Down” staff are all trying to make it, as actors, screenwriters and comedians. (Marino’s Ron, the manager, has a different dream: a Soup ’R Crackers franchise.) Only Henry (Scott), who has traded beer-commercial celebrity for free-floating despair, has opted out. The actors were trying back then to make it, too. None of the original cast — Caplan, Ryan Hansen, Jane Lynch, Marino, Scott, Starr — were anything like famous when the show began. Acting in a comedy about the entertainment industry’s has-beens, also-rans and never-wills resonated with the cast, sometimes uncomfortably.“It felt so close to home, this show, because I felt like I could be a caterer the next day easily,” Hansen said.Scott, who at the time had yet to play a lead, then shared that sense of career tenuousness. The cast felt deeply connected to the show in those first seasons, he said, and protective of it. “We just wanted to do it forever, because it made us feel better,” he said. “It really did.”“All of us, for the entire 13 years since we stopped shooting the show, all we wanted to do is make more ‘Party Down,’” Scott, fourth from left, said.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesThe salaries, though small, kept a few of the actors on the sunny side of financial precarity. The camaraderie helped, too. (That camaraderie remains; I had four of the actors together on a video call, and I have never heard grown men exchange so many “Love yous.”) Several actors separately compared the original shoot to summer camp.That genuine affection altered the show’s tone. Some first season episodes included “edgy” humor — gay jokes, post-racial jokes. (“It’s cringey, yeah,” Starr said.) But the creators quickly realized they didn’t need that edge. The show was sadder than that. Funnier, too. The characters are screw-ups, sure, but the show suggests that everyone is a screw-up, especially after an hour at an open bar. So maybe the best thing is to find common cause as you pass the hors d’oeuvres.“It’s about people who think that they’re going to find happiness in something out there,” Lynch said. “But what they have right in front of them is really quite sweet.”Lynch shot the first eight episodes. Then she had to leave for the Fox show “Glee.” Marino hired a stripper for her wrap party. The stripper, Lynch recalled, smelled of French fries. The show went on, with Jennifer Coolidge replacing Lynch for two episodes and Megan Mullally, the only actor who was already well-known, coming in for the final 10.The creators believed that it would keep going, even though, according to Nielsen, the Season 2 finale attracted only 74,000 viewers. Starz had other plans. Those plans didn’t involve letting the creators take the show elsewhere. “Party Down” languished.One decade, zero dinnersIf the original run argued that it’s healthier to let some dreams die, the creators and the cast could never quite manage that. There were talks, every year or so, of getting the crew back together — for a special, for a movie, for a move to another network. Friends and fans often asked Marino about it.“I was like, ‘They’re working on it,’” he said. “‘It’s going to happen! Right around the corner!’” It took him eight or nine years to accept that maybe that corner wasn’t coming.Then in 2019, Starz appointed Jeffrey Hirsch as its new president and chief executive. Thomas reached out to Hirsch and began pitching the show again. Hard. This time, Starz said yes.That was only the first hurdle. The actors had conflicts and prior commitments now. The revival was approved in the summer of 2021, with production scheduled for early 2022. Lynch was to begin rehearsing a Broadway musical. Scott was making the Apple TV+ show “Severance.” Mullally had booked a movie being shot in Idaho.Somehow a six-week window was found, even though that window involved flying Mullally to Los Angeles every weekend and back to Sun Valley by Monday.When “Party Down” debuted in 2009, none of the main cast were anything like famous.StarzIn the new season, the main cast has become more diverse, with the inclusion of two new regulars: Zoë Chao, second from left, and Tyrel Jackson Williams, far right.Starz“We could never get together for dinner for a decade,” Etheridge, a creator, said. “But when we came to shoot the show, everybody was there.”Everybody except for Caplan, who had signed onto the FX series “Fleishman Is in Trouble.” (Asked whether Caplan might make a surprise appearance in Episode 6, Starz declined to comment.) Enbom had originally structured this new season around the on-again-off-again relationship between Henry and Caplan’s Casey. He had to restructure it, adding a new character, a studio executive played by Jennifer Garner. The revival’s first episode takes time out to heckle Caplan: Casey, now a successful comedian, can’t make a crew reunion.“She’s shooting in New York,” Starr’s Roman, still an aspiring “hard sci-fi” writer, says. “Too big time for the likes of us.”There were fewer jokes in real life. Hansen tried to make light of the situation. “Listen, we get it,” he said. “She had a job, whatever. I mean, I personally turned down a Marvel movie to do ‘Party Down.’”“Tell that to everybody,” he added.But just about everyone described themselves as heartbroken, including Caplan. “If I think about it for too long, I start to cry,” she wrote in an email. She sent cupcakes to the shoot.The bow tie abidesHollywood has transformed in the years since “Party Down” first concluded, and in some ways the show has, too. Gratuitous boobs are gone now. And the catering crew, once blindingly white, has become more diverse with the inclusion of two new regulars: Sackson, a YouTube-style content creator played by Tyrel Jackson Williams, and Lucy, a chef played by Zoë Chao who styles herself as a “food artist.”Yet, the sweet-sour, slightly funky flavor of “Party Down” — like a margarita made with off-brand liquor — is mostly unaltered. This seems to be the rare revival that understands what made the original work, yet can still move (or move just enough to include the occasional TikTok dance challenge) with the times.“We kept doing what we’d always been doing, just with new details,” Enbom said. “Because society certainly has not changed into a more wholesome place.”Have the returning characters changed? That depends on how much you and your therapist believe that change is possible. “They’re still the same lovable knuckleheads,” Mullally said. “Most of these people haven’t really moved on, or they haven’t really become any happier, or more fulfilled in their lives.”Friends and fans often asked Marino, top left, whether the series would be revived. “I was like, They’re working on it!,” he said. “Right around the corner!” It took nearly 13 years.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesSlinging hors d’oeuvres hits different and more darkly in midlife. Still, the creators and the cast didn’t want the revival to feel like a bummer.“It’s going to be fun watching the characters try to claw their way toward something other than their current circumstances,” Scott promised.And if not exactly “fun,” then certainly relatable. “Really who gets what they want in this life?” Lynch said.She probably meant that rhetorically. But the “Party Down” die-hards, Lynch included, did get what they wanted, a third season. And they seem to have delighted in making it, though Marino joked that he’d had to slim down before he could fit into his signature pink bow tie.“Had to work off that neck fat,” he said. “Got my neck nice and lean.”Slipping on that outfit was a little more stressful for Chao, a newcomer. She had watched the show, years after its debut, while working a food-service survival job herself. “Party Down” had made her feel less alone. She didn’t want to ruin it. “I whispered to myself every day, going onto set, ‘Be the least funny, but by as little as possible,’” she said.Williams expressed similar gratitude and anxiety. “Everyone was so sweet and welcoming from the very beginning,” he said. “It never felt like an intimidating environment.” And yet, he added, “there was still like this insane fear.”The returning cast faced related, if less acute, worries. They have been in the business long enough to understand how revivals can go wrong. (A few of them had even appeared in revivals that flopped.) But they were reassured by the scripts, written by Enbom and a small staff, which suggested a continuity of character and tone and food-poisoning-induced body horror. There was also the pleasure of being together again — a little older, a little grayer, but still able to drop a tray on cue.Will the ratings for this coming season be better? Comfortingly, they can’t get much worse. But the cast and creative team are counting on the show’s turning enough heads that Starz will greenlight a fourth season. (“You better believe I’m not missing that one,” Caplan wrote.)Though Starr is inclined to cynicism, he sounded only mildly sardonic in discussing this ambition. “I really do hope we’re allowed to come back and do it again and keep up this little charade we’ve got going,” he said.Hansen put it a bit more pragmatically. “In 12 years, people are going to love Season 3.” More

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    ‘Star Trek: Picard,’ Season 3, Episode 1: Reunion Engage

    The new season of “Picard” reunites the admiral with his old crewmates, something fans have been hoping for since the series began.Season 3, Episode 1: ‘The Next Generation’[Takes deep breaths]I’m being told it is against the Times stylebook for me to yell out a scream of anticipation for this season of “Picard,” which is essentially a catch up with the “Next Generation” cast.So I guess I’ll just write instead.This is easily the most anticipated offering of the new era of “Trek” since, well, the first season of “Picard,” which many fans were hoping would be exactly what the third season is billing itself to be — a reunion of the old show.But before we get to all that, some housekeeping.The last time we saw the crew of the Enterprise all together was in “Star Trek: Nemesis” in 2002, one of the more critically reviled offerings of the “Star Trek” franchise, in part because it needlessly killed off the beloved Data. (It wasn’t disliked only by audiences: Several of the main cast members weren’t fans either, as they told me in our group interview earlier this month.) When “Picard” arrived 18 years later, we learned that our favorite captain had become a retired admiral withering away at his vineyard. Riker and Troi were also mostly retired after serving on the U.S.S. Titan, and Data was killed off again, but this time next to a classy fireplace.The first two seasons of “Picard” have followed a similar trajectory. They’ve started off strong and tailed off as the season went on, leaning heavily into nostalgia as the basis for ambitious plot lines. That would be fine, except the writers have often opted for short-term payoffs rather than long-term storytelling.That nostalgia has sometimes led to some odd choices — such as Picard not being human anymore after becoming an android in Season 1. The show has also sometimes seemed to forget who the characters are, as with last season’s use of Young Guinan.So my excitement about another offering of the “Next Generation” cast is mixed with trepidation.As expected, the season premiere is promising. It’s the 25th century (the onscreen text here is an homage to “Wrath of Khan”). The opening scene includes a large dose of fan service, such as audio of a captain’s log from way back when Picard encountered the Borg for the first time and a plaque referencing Cor Caroli V, a planet where a third season “Next Generation” episode takes place.But the scene doesn’t feature our old friend Jean-Luc but rather our other old friend, Dr. Beverly Crusher. She appears to be on the run from some shady looking aliens. Beverly has developed skills with a phaser, which is contrary to what we saw in her younger days, as Riker points out later. She’s vaporizing enemies now! (Who says you can’t pick up new hobbies as you get older?) And she sends a message to her old captain and sort of crush, Jean-Luc, to say that she needs him — but she does so through his old comm badge using a secret code.Gates McFadden in “Star Trek: Picard.”Trae Patton/Paramount+The fact that “Picard” gives Beverly something to do other than stand around and scan things was a big reason Gates McFadden came back to reprise the role, and it’s a welcome sight.Meanwhile, Jean-Luc finally, after all these decades, seems content in retirement. He is in love with Laris. He might write a book. He’s ready to move to Chaltok IV, a Romulan planet, where he’ll sip Saurian brandy and wind down his life. He’s earned it. But again, he’s an android now, so he can’t die. Not really. Can he even taste brandy? See where the long-term plot issues are? (Fun reference here: Picard holding the flute from the classic “Next Generation” episode “Inner Light.”)But Beverly needs saving. She sends Jean-Luc a coded message telling him to trust nobody. For some reason, Jean-Luc tells Laris, Beverly hasn’t spoken to member of the Enterprise crew for 20 years. (This would mean that shortly after the events of “Nemesis,” Crusher cut off her closest friends. Excited to find out why!) Props to Laris — a Romulan intelligence operative — for being totally chill with one of Jean-Luc’s exes reaching out for a secret rendezvous. True love.Riker and Picard meet up at Guinan’s bar during Frontier Day celebrations, where Picard tells Riker about the secret message.“I wouldn’t have asked to meet you like this if it hadn’t been very important,” Jean-Luc tells his old first officer. (At a crowded bar? Where people could easily eavesdrop? Of course, moments later, we see someone doing exactly that.)Jonathan Frakes and Patrick Stewart have instant chemistry, borne of decades of working together. But Riker suggests to Picard that he is on the outs with his wife, Troi — another member of the old crew. (This raises a question: Troi and Crusher were close friends on the Enterprise, why wouldn’t Jean-Luc want to tell her too? Why just Riker?)Riker instantly agrees on a scheme to hit the road to the Ryton system, like Jake and Elroy. That’s what bros do, after all. They hatch a scheme to commander the sleek looking U.S.S. Titan, Riker’s old command. Another nice traditional “Trek” moment: glamour shots of the exterior. (I hate to be that guy, but Beverly’s message specifically said not to involve Starfleet. So why would Riker and Picard center their plan on using a Starfleet ship? Surely, they can find another deep space charter. OK, I admit it: I don’t hate being that guy.)The Titan is commanded by Captain Shaw, played by the charming Todd Stashwick. He is a magnetic presence, but Shaw’s previous post appears have been on the U.S.S. Jerkface, because he is, without explanation, rude and dismissive of two legendary Starfleet officers. He doesn’t even greet them when they arrive, instead sending Seven of Nine — er, Commander Annika Hansen. Shaw also isn’t on the bridge to greet visitors for what is apparently an inspection or giving orders when the ship leaves spacedock. (Picard gives the order to Seven to take out the ship. Why isn’t Shaw doing that?) Almost every single sentence uttered by Shaw is dripping with condescending rudeness.“Captain Shaw prefers I use Hansen,” Seven tells Jean-Luc. Since when does a Starfleet captain in the 25th century get to decide what your name is? (We’re going to use Seven for now, since that’s what she’s known as mostly throughout the “Trek” universe.)It’s a strange dynamic and here’s the problem: Shaw is painted as the unlikable villain of the episode. Seven even says that Shaw’s behavior is making her reconsider joining Starfleet. But Shaw’s stance is absolutely correct. When Riker says he wants to unexpectedly divert the ship to the Ryton system, Shaw says, “That’s at the edge of Federation space at the opposite direction of our intended course — twice the time.”He’s been given no heads up on this mission. Jean-Luc may be an admiral, but he is retired. Riker doesn’t even outrank Shaw. Why would he follow this clearly suspicious order that comes out of nowhere with no real explanation other than “bragging rights?” Picard makes it all the more weird when he says they’ll end up at Deep Space 4, which, as Shaw notes, has been shut down. (Picard should know better. In the “Next Generation” episode “The Pegasus,” Picard defies an admiral who tries to take command of the Enterprise.) As far as Seven goes, seen through another lens, Shaw trusting her to take the ship out of spacedock without him needing to be there is an example of him having faith in her.Seven quickly breaks Shaw’s faith by sending the ship to the Ryton section anyway. This area of space is outside the Federation’s jurisdiction and far away from Earth, so it must have taken a long time to get there, even at maximum warp. Is Shaw such a detached captain that he doesn’t notice when his ship goes in the opposite direction? Especially given his fondness for rules and regulations? Despite Shaw’s personality flaws, all his actions showed me in this episode is that he’s a competent Starfleet captain who can see through blatant lies.The episode ends with intrigue on Beverly’s ship when Riker and Picard meet — dun, dun, dun — her son. (There is an explicit reference that Picard and Crusher actually were lovers, when Picard says that he made her a mixtape.)All in all, a fun episode. Seeing Riker and Jean-Luc interact like the old friends that they are went down easy like a glass of Chateau Picard. My excitement — and my trepidation — remains high. More