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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Love Trip: Paris’ and American Idol

    A new reality dating show set in Paris premieres on Valentine’s Day, and American Idol returns for its sixth season on ABC.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Feb. 13-19. Details and times are subject to change.MondayBOYHOOD (2014) 5:40 p.m. on SHO2e. This award-winning coming-of-age drama depicts the life of Mason (Ellar Coltrane) as he moves through childhood and adolescence. Filmed over the course of 12 years in Texas, the director Richard Linklater’s home state, “Boyhood” began with only a few basic plot points grounding the story. In her review for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote that “the realism is jolting, and so brilliantly realized and understated that it would be easy to overlook.” The director’s “inspired idea of showing the very thing that most movies either ignore or awkwardly elide — the passage of time — is its impressive, headline-making conceit,” she added.TuesdayLOVE TRIP: PARIS 9 p.m. on Freeform. In what could be described as “The Bachelor” meets “Emily in Paris,” this new, unscripted reality dating show follows four American women as they move into a penthouse in the middle of Paris to find a selection of Frenchmen and women waiting to date them. The series follows them in their search for love abroad.WednesdayPOST-ROE AMERICA 11 p.m. on VICE. This documentary is the result of a seven-month investigation into the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn of Roe v. Wade, which had granted women the constitutional right to an abortion in 1973. The reporter Gianna Toboni meets with an array of women, politicians, doctors and abortion providers, in addition to the Christian legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, to understand what the future of reproductive rights might look like in this country.ThursdayRichard Beymer and Natalie Wood in “West Side Story.”Everett CollectionWEST SIDE STORY (1961) 8 p.m. on TCM. Inspired by the Shakespeare play “Romeo and Juliet,” this Oscar-winning musical follows the tragic love story of Tony (Richard Beymer) and Maria (Natalie Wood), two teenagers associated with rival New York City gangs. “The strong blend of drama, dance and music folds into a rich artistic whole,” wrote Bosley Crowther in his 1961 review for The Times. “What they have done with ‘West Side Story’ in knocking it down and moving it from stage to screen is to reconstruct its fine material into nothing short of a cinema masterpiece.”FridayGLADIATOR (2000) 3:15 p.m. on Showtime. Set in the 2nd-century Roman Empire, this Academy Award-winning epic film follows the Roman general Maximus (Russell Crowe) on his journey to freedom after he is stripped of his rank, enslaved and sold to a gladiator trainer following a change of ruler. “‘Gladiator’ is an allegory of its own time,” wrote Herbert Muschamp in a 2000 column for The Times. “The first Roman cinema spectacular to be made by Hollywood since the end of the Cold War, it is a meditation on the perplexity of the world’s sole surviving superpower.”SaturdayRod Steiger, left, and Sidney Poitier in “In the Heat of the Night.”Everett CollectionIN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (1967) and TO SLEEP WITH ANGER (1990) 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. on TCM. This week’s selection for Turner Classic Movies’ Black History Month Saturdays features a detective story set in the South and a comedic drama centered around familial tensions. The Oscar-winning film “In the Heat of the Night,” based on the 1965 novel of the same name, follows Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), a Black detective from Philadelphia, as he becomes entangled in a murder investigation while traveling through a small town in Mississippi.Written and directed by Charles Burnett, a director known for his films about the Black experience in the United States, “To Sleep with Anger,” was inspired by Burnett’s own family. Through the fictional story of Gideon (Paul Butler) and Suzie (Mary Alice), a married couple living with their two sons and their wives and children in Los Angeles, Burnett explores themes of tradition, modernity, morality and superstition as the couple takes in an old friend from the South, Harry (Danny Glover), when he pays a surprise visit to their home.SundayFrom left: Lionel Richie, Katy Perry, Luke Bryan, and Ryan Seacrest in the new season of “American Idol.”Eric McCandless/ABCAMERICAN IDOL 8 p.m. on ABC. This singing competition show is back for its 6th season on ABC (and 21st season overall), featuring the music industry legends Luke Bryan, Katy Perry and Lionel Richie as judges.NAKED AND AFRAID 8 p.m. on Discovery. Each episode of this unscripted survival series, returning for its 15th season, follows two strangers who are left without food, water or clothes in places like the American West, Gabon and Mexico. More

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    Jürgen Flimm, Director of Festivals and Opera Houses, Dies at 81

    He left his mark in Hamburg, Berlin, Salzburg and elsewhere. He also directed a memorable “Ring” cycle in Bayreuth.Jürgen Flimm, who led some of Europe’s most important theaters, opera houses and performing arts festivals over the last 40 years, died on Feb. 4 at his home in Wischhafen, Germany, northeast of Hamburg. He was 81.His death was announced by the Berlin State Opera, where he had been general manager from 2010 to 2018. His wife, the film producer Susanne Ottersbach Flimm, said the cause was heart failure following pneumonia.Mr. Flimm’s Berlin appointment was his last in a long career that also included directorships at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, the Ruhrtriennale festival in northwestern Germany and the Salzburg Festival in Austria. He also staged Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany in 2000.He directed acclaimed productions outside the German-speaking world as well, including at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House in London and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.A dress rehearsal for Mr. Flimm’s 2000 production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany. “It is impossible to guess how Wagner might have reacted,” one critic wrote of the production, “but the shock was considerable.”Jürgen Flimm was born in Giessen, Germany, on July 17, 1941, to Werner and Ellen Flimm, who were both doctors. His family had fled there after bombs began falling on Cologne, where they had been living, and where they resettled after the war.In a 2011 interview with the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, Mr. Flimm recalled his childhood. His father was a surgeon who, Mr. Flimm said, used the family’s apartment to see patients: “Every morning I put up my bed and our living room became a waiting room: patients everywhere.” His mother was a general practitioner, but like so many German women in the immediate postwar period, a time of general deprivation, she scrounged to bring home butter and meat. As a child, Jürgen sold old newspapers to fishmongers. While his older brother, Dieter, played drums in jazz bands around the city, Jürgen invented dialogue for his puppets in the attic. Dieter Flimm eventually founded an architecture studio and worked as a set designer and a musician. He died in 2002.Their father, who loved theater, would attend performances as a doctor on duty, and Jürgen often accompanied him. “I secretly hoped that an actor would get sick, so I’d be able to go backstage and see what went on there,” he said, although his father disapproved of his sons’ artistic proclivities and would have preferred for them to study medicine.Jürgen enrolled at the University of Cologne, where he studied theater, German literature and sociology. He abandoned his studies to become an assistant director at the Münchner Kammerspiele theater in Munich, where he worked from 1968 to 1972. He received an acting degree from the Theater der Keller in Cologne.In 1969 Mr. Flimm married the actress Inge Jansen, a colleague at the Kammerspiele. The marriage ended in divorce, but Mr. Flimm remained close to Ms. Jansen’s five children from her previous marriage, four of whom are still living. Ms. Jansen died in 2017.Mr. Flimm married Susanne Ottersbach. The couple lived in a two-story thatched house built in 1648. She is his only immediate survivor.He directed his first production at a theater in Wuppertal in 1971 and held positions at theaters in Mannheim and Hamburg in the 1970s, while also building up his résumé as director in Zurich, Munich and Berlin.He directed his first opera in 1978, the German premiere of Luigi Nono’s 1975 “Al Gran Sole Carico d’Amore” in Frankfurt. The work remained dear to Mr. Flimm’s heart: Decades later, he programmed it, in an acclaimed production by the British director Katie Mitchell, in both Salzburg and Berlin.In 1979, Mr. Flimm returned to Cologne to lead the city’s main theater, the Schauspiel Köln. During his six years as artistic director there, he programmed works by the influential choreographer Pina Bausch and the fanciful French-Argentine director Jérôme Savary.He moved to Hamburg in 1985 to lead the Thalia Theater, which he is widely credited with putting in the international spotlight by inviting avant-garde artists like the American director Robert Wilson.From left, the director Robert Wilson, the author William S. Burroughs and the singer and songwriter Tom Waits at the premiere of their work “The Black Rider” at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. It was the most lauded production during Mr. Flimm’s tenure there.Frederika Hoffmann/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesIn 1990, Mr. Wilson’s “The Black Rider,” a collaboration with the singer and songwriter Tom Waits and the author William Burroughs, became the most lauded production of Mr. Flimm’s tenure in Hamburg. Despite some famously sour reviews (the German magazine Der Spiegel likened it to “a version of ‘Cats’ for intellectuals and snobs”), it was a hit and toured worldwide.Mr. Flimm left the Thalia in 2000. That summer, his “Ring” cycle had its premiere at Bayreuth.“It is impossible to guess how Wagner might have reacted,” the critic Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker, “but the shock was considerable.” While praising some aspects of the cycle, Mr. Ross concluded that it ultimately left a very mixed impression.“The production felt unfinished,” he wrote, “and the flurry of painted curtains during the ‘Götterdämmerung’ apocalypse suggested that in the end it had simply run out of money.”Mr. Flimm made his Metropolitan Opera debut with Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio,” that October. This time Mr. Ross raved, concluding his review by saying that “Flimm is a smart director, and the Met should give him anything he wants.” The production was revived three times between 2002 and 2017.Mr. Flimm’s follow-up at the Met, a 2004 production of “Salome” that was a vehicle for the Finnish soprano Karita Mattila, was more polarizing. In his review for The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini noted that Mr. Flimm received some loud boos on opening night. But, he noted, “the bravos won out, and rightly so.”In 2005, Mr. Flimm became artistic director of the Ruhrtriennale, a multidisciplinary arts festival in the rust belt of Germany. He stayed an extra summer past his three-year contract after his designated successor, the German theater director Marie Zimmermann, took her life in April 2007.His time there dovetailed with the start of his artistic directorship at the Salzburg Festival, where he had previously served as head of drama from 2002 to 2004. During his first summer, he commissioned a new staging of “Jedermann,” the morality play that is the festival’s oldest tradition, from the young Bavarian director Christian Stückl. The production was a hit and remained a festival mainstay for a dozen years.Mr. Flimm ascended to the festival’s leadership in 2007. It was a tumultuous time: Gerard Mortier had taken the festival in a radically new direction throughout the 1990s, and after his departure in 2001, it had struggled to hold on to an artistic director.The four seasons Mr. Flimm spent as Salzburg’s leader were regarded as successful artistically, but he made clear that he was not interested in staying for the long run. In 2008, he announced that he would step down at the end of his term to head the Berlin State Opera.In September 2010, shortly after Mr. Flimm arrived in Berlin, four steamers sailed down the river Spree, conveying 500 members of the opera company westward to the Schiller Theater, where it planned to spend three seasons during renovations to its historic home. Instead, the construction dragged on for seven years.Mr. Flimm imported a number of acclaimed productions to Berlin that had first been seen at Salzburg. One of his original productions in Berlin was a 2016 staging of Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice,” which featured an abstract set designed by Frank Gehry that reportedly cost 100,000 euros.In addition to his work in theater, Mr. Flimm taught at the University of Hamburg and was a guest lecturer at Harvard and New York University. Among his many honors was the Bundesverdienstkreuz, the German government’s highest, which he received in 2002. In a 2011 interview with the Bavarian radio station BR, Mr. Flimm was asked what accomplishments he was particularly proud of. Among those he mentioned was his 2000 “Fidelio.”“After the premiere,” he said, “I stood on the balcony of the Met, looked out into Manhattan and thought to myself, ‘Not bad, Jürgen!’” More

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    Cody Longo, ‘Days of Our Lives’ Actor, Dies at 34

    Mr. Longo died in his sleep, likely from accidental alcohol poisoning, at his Austin, Texas, home on Wednesday, his representative said.Cody Longo, an actor known for his roles in the television series “Hollywood Heights” and “Days of Our Lives,” was found dead on Wednesday at his home in Austin, Texas. He was 34.He died in his sleep, likely from accidental alcohol poisoning, his representative, Alex Gittelson, said. Mr. Gittelson said that Mr. Longo had struggled with alcohol addiction for several years, but he believed that Mr. Longo had recently been sober.Mr. Longo was a singer, songwriter, musician and music producer and served as a music supervisor and executive producer on film and television projects. He released his first EP, “Atmosphere,” in 2012 and the single “She Said” in 2013.Mr. Longo starred in episodes of “Days of Our Lives” as Nicholas Alamain in 2011 and in the Nick at Nite drama “Hollywood Heights” as Eddie Duran, a music superstar, in 2012.In 2016, he had roles on the ABC series “Nashville,” “Secrets and Lies” and “The Catch.” Mr. Longo starred in the pilot for “Santa Cruz” on Fox and in the ABC Family teen drama “Make It or Break It.” He also appeared in the movies “High School” and “Piranha 3D” in 2010.Mr. Longo was born in Colorado on March 4, 1988, and studied psychology and film at the University of California, Los Angeles. He began acting professionally in 2009, according to his website.“He had taken some time away from acting to pursue his music career and spend more time with his family in Nashville,” Mr. Gittelson said, “but we had kept in touch regularly and he was excited to get back into acting this year.”Mr. Longo is survived by his wife, Stephanie, and three children, Lyla, Elijah and Noah. More

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    ‘The Last of Us’ Season 1, Episode 5 Recap: Darkness on the Edge of Town

    Joel and Ellie have been dealing more with humanity recently, but this week the undead reclaimed center stage.Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Endure and Survive’Oh yeah, that’s right … “The Last of Us” is a zombie show.For the past two episodes Joel and Ellie have been dealing with mere humanity, seeing the best and worst possible paths for their kind from Bill and Frank’s romantic optimism to Kathleen’s “kill ‘em all” bitterness.But in this week’s episode, which premiered Friday night on HBO Max — it will also air on HBO on Sunday night, opposite the Super Bowl — the undead reclaimed center stage. After Kathleen’s army rolls up on Joel, Ellie and their new allies Henry (Lamar Johnson) and Sam (Keivonn Woodard), the ground suddenly opens up and a rampaging horde of the infected swarms out, slaughtering scores of rifle-toting goons. It’s an abrupt reminder of a world-ending threat that has never stopped lurking for the past 20 years. Lately, the survivors of the cordyceps plague have been pointing their guns in the wrong direction.George Romero’s told this same kind of cautionary tale in 1968’s “Night of the Living Dead,” and then again in the sequels. Romero’s human characters set up barricades against the teeming masses of mindless monsters; but then over and over they would get distracted by their own bickering, let their guards down and then either get shot by outsiders or eaten by ghouls. The TV series “The Walking Dead” ran for 11 seasons with a similar idea. Though the fortresses on that show kept getting bigger — and the people inside them better organized — year after year, some catastrophic disaster would befall the living and the undead would capitalize.What distinguishes “The Last of Us” from its predecessors is that the series isn’t about the downfall of human society per se. That’s just an imposing, ominous backdrop to what so far has been a more intimate story. The action this week in Kansas City could have filled an entire Romero film or two or three “Walking Dead” seasons. But here these troubles are just something else our heroes have to move past, while hoping to suffer as few lingering injuries as possible.All of this though does not keep the episode’s director, Jeremy Webb, and the screenwriter Craig Mazin, one of the series’s creators, from leaning into the mayhem in Kansas City. The result was some of the most straight-up thrilling sequences in this show since Episode 2.Inside the Dystopian World of ‘The Last of Us’The post-apocalyptic video game that inspired the TV series “The Last of Us” won over players with its photorealistic animation and a morally complex story.Game Review: “I found it hard to get past what it embraces with a depressing sameness, particularly its handling of its female characters,” our critic wrote of “The Last of Us” in 2013.‘Left Behind’: “The Last of Us: Left Behind,” a prologue designed to be played in a single sitting, was an unexpected hit in 2014.2020 Sequel: “The Last of Us Part II,” a tale of entrenched tribalism in a world undone by a pandemic, took a darker and unpredictable tone that left critics in awe.Playing the Game: Two Times reporters spent weeks playing the sequel in the run-up to its release. These were their first impressions.The episode begins with a flashback to about 10 days ago, when Kathleen’s resistance movement finally overcame the FEDRA troops and dragged their corpses through the street in riotous celebration. On that night, she begins her tireless search for Henry, a former FEDRA informant who she blames for the death of her sainted brother, Michael. She starts by rounding up all the collaborators she can find and saying — or more accurately lying — that if they cooperate they will get the chance to be tried in her court. (“You’re all guilty, so that’s how that’ll go.”) That is how she learns that Henry and his 8-year-old brother Sam are under the protection of Dr. Edelstein — the man Kathleen will later interrogate and then shoot, as we saw in last week’s episode.But don’t feel too bad for FEDRA, or for their network of Quarantine Zone snitches. As Henry later explains to Joel, the authorities were so abusive to the city’s residents — “Raped and tortured and murdered people for 20 years,” he says — that the town became known far and wide as “Killer City.”Henry and Sam are, as suspected, the people who sneaked up on Joel and Ellie in their high-rise office building hideaway at the end of last week’s episode. While leaving Edelstein’s secret bunker, Henry saw Joel and Ellie escape an ambush. Sensing these newcomers could aid their own escape, Henry and Sam followed them in order to propose a plan. The four of them are to travel together through the city’s maintenance tunnels — which Henry insists are free of the infected, thanks to a secret FEDRA project that even Kathleen does not know about — and then sneak out through a residential neighborhood near an embankment, next to the bridge out of town.Keivonn Woodard in “The Last of Us.”Liane Hentscher/HBOOn the way though, Henry chooses to come clean to Joel, to let him know that Kathleen has reason to be furious. Henry did point FEDRA to Michael, because he needed medication for Sam, who in addition to being deaf, once had leukemia. (“I don’t work with rats,” Joel reflexively says at one point. “Today you do,” Henry replies.)So that’s what leads to our escapees facing dozens of militia rifles. They get through the tunnels OK, but then a sniper pins them down after they surface and by the time Joel disarms the gunman, Kathleen’s soldiers have bulldozed their way in. Henry offers to sacrifice himself to allow Sam and Ellie to escape, but Kathleen isn’t moved by any sob story about a sick brother. “Kids die, Henry,” she says. As she pulls out her gun, she adds, “It ends the way it ends.”Cue the monsters. Before Kathleen can shoot, one of her huge armored vehicles falls through a weak spot in the earth, loosing masses of the extra-ferocious underground creatures that Henry calls “clickers” — including one Big Boss mega-zombie who looks absolutely horrifying and also kind of awesome. (The video game includes a whole hierarchy of the infected.) Thanks to Joel covering his allies from the sniper’s nest as they scramble toward the embankment, all four of them are able to get away in the melee. But they are not unscathed: Sam gets infected. Though Ellie tries to save him by smearing some of her blood into his wound, he goes feral anyway, and Henry has to shoot him. With no one to stay alive for, he then shoots himself.That’s a truly heartbreaking ending, because these brothers would have made great traveling companions. Ellie and Sam had become fast friends, bonding over her collection of puns and a comic book series they both love. (Quoting the comic, Ellie says, “To the edge of the universe, endure and survive!”) Right before the end, they share what frightens them both, with Ellie admitting, “I’m scared of ending up alone.” Then Sam — poor, doomed Sam — asks the question that everyone should have probably been asking while they were trying to kill each other.“If you turn into a monster, is it still you inside?”Side QuestsKathleen doesn’t stick around long enough to become the formidable tragic villain she seemed meant to be; but Mazin does give Melanie Lynskey two terrific scenes that add dimension to the character. The first is the collaborator roundup on the night FEDRA fell, where she berates the assembly for selling out their neighbors for “apples” and then demands they tell her what they know. (“You’re informers! Inform!”) In the second, she walks around an old bedroom and talks about growing up with her beloved brother, a good man who wanted her to forgive Henry. The point of these two scenes is to show that Kathleen had defensible reasons to destroy FEDRA and everyone who helped them — but she knows she took things further than Michael would have.Sam and Henry hide out for 10 days in Edelstein’s hidden loft, with a small supply of canned food and a big bag of crayons. Later, they take Joel and Ellie to the remnants of an underground settlement, which has books and games. As always, the great dream in nearly all post-apocalyptic stories — and heck, maybe in life itself — is to find a secure space with some food and something to do, and then to stay put for as long as possible. More

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    Eugene Lee, Set Designer for Broadway and ‘S.N.L.,’ Dies at 83

    He won Tony Awards for “Wicked” and other shows while also overseeing the sets for the late-night franchise’s fast-paced sketch comedy.For decades it was possible for Saturday night theatergoers in New York to get a double dose of Eugene Lee’s work, though it’s likely that few would have realized they were doing so. They might have taken in “Sweeney Todd,” “Ragtime,” “Wicked” or other Broadway shows whose striking sets were designed by Mr. Lee, then could arrive home in time to tune into “Saturday Night Live” — a show for which he served as production designer when it began in 1975, and on which he was still working this season.Mr. Lee, an inventive and remarkably prolific set designer who was also known for his decades with Trinity Repertory Company, a respected regional theater in Providence, R.I., died on Monday in Providence. He was 83.His family announced the death, after a short illness that was not specified.Mr. Lee won or shared three Tony Awards for his Broadway sets — for “Candide” in 1974, “Sweeney Todd” in 1979 and “Wicked” in 2003 — and six Emmy Awards for “Saturday Night Live,” most recently in 2021.In theater, he was known for imaginative designs imbued with authenticity.“Eugene loved real objects, objects with history,” Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Public Theater, who worked with Mr. Lee at Trinity Rep and elsewhere, said by email, “but he’d use them in utterly nonrealistic ways onstage.”He was known for reconfiguring entire theaters, as he did for “Candide,” the musical based on Voltaire, which was staged at the 180-seat Chelsea Theater Center in Brooklyn in 1973 before moving to the much larger Broadway Theater in Midtown Manhattan the next year. Mr. Lee, working with his partner at the time, Franne Lee, and the director Harold Prince, turned the Chelsea into “a ramped and runwayed circus midway,” The New York Times wrote, “surrounded by booths and mini-stages that could be changed, in a twinkling, from a corpse-littered battlefield to a vizier’s seraglio.”The “Saturday Night Live” stage crew at work in 2012. Mr. Lee created the basic stage look that has remained largely unchanged since the show began in 1975.Karsten Moran for The New York Times“The audience sat up, down and all around,” The Times said, “on stools, benches and ballpark-style ‘bleachers,’ between the ramps or along the runways or anywhere they wouldn’t be in the actors’ way.”Preserving that staging when the show transferred to Broadway took some effort, which included removing numerous seats, and for the first few performances some theatergoers asked for refunds because of problems with sight lines and other issues. But eventually the bugs were worked out.The show ran for almost two years and won five Tonys, including one for Mr. Lee and Franne Lee for scenic design. (Their relationship lasted for most of the 1970s but they were nevermarried, Patrick Lynch, Mr. Lee’s assistant and fellow designer, said by phone.)Five years later, for the Stephen Sondheim musical “Sweeney Todd” (which, like “Candide,” had a book by Hugh Wheeler and was directed by Mr. Prince), Mr. Lee brought pieces of an old iron foundry from Rhode Island and turned the Uris Theater into a stylized Industrial Age scene out of Victorian London.“The stagehands at the theater still remember how heavy the set was,” Mr. Lee told The Boston Globe in 2007. “You had to knock away bricks to support it. You can still see the scars all these years later.”Kristin Chenoweth left, and Idina Menzel in “Wicked,” for which Mr. Lee won a Tony.Sara KrulwichThe designs won him a second Tony Award, and a third came with “Wicked.” For that show, whose set featured an imposing dragon and a time motif, Mr. Lee drew inspiration in part from smashing apart old clocks in his Providence workshop and fiddling with the innards.Mr. Lee had more than two dozen Broadway credits, including “Agnes of God” (1982), “Show Boat” (1994), “Ragtime” (1998), “Glengarry Glen Ross” (2012) and, most recently, “Bright Star” (2016). While working on those projects and others, he oversaw the sets for “Saturday Night Live,” including creating the basic stage look that has remained largely unchanged since the show began in 1975.Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator and executive producer, said in a phone interview that when he began formulating “S.N.L.,” he had recently seen “Candide” and was impressed with the look the Lees had created.“In those days, television was always on the floor,” he said — filmed on one level, with a polished sort of look — but Mr. Lee, still working with Franne Lee, had a different idea.“He said, ‘Well, I think we should probably build stages,” Mr. Michaels said. “And that meant we’d build a balcony, basically turn the studio into a theater.”“It looked like the city,” Mr. Michaels added of the look Mr. Lee created. “Something about it rang true.”Over the decades — taking a break only when Mr. Michaels did for five years in the 1980s — Mr. Lee would travel from his home in Providence to oversee the show’s design each week, whether it included a living room, a fake Oval Office or a special setting for the musical guest.In his work on “S.N.L.” Mr. Lee encountered many up-and-coming comedians, and he helped some of them branch out, working on the Broadway shows of Gilda Radner (“Live From New York,” 1979), Colin Quinn (“An Irish Wake,” 1998) and Will Ferrell (“You’re Welcome, America,” 2009). He also became production designer for “The Tonight Show” when Jimmy Fallon took it over in 2014.“When we were discussing the ‘Tonight Show’ set, he just had such a clear vision on the look and the stage and the curtain and the color of the wood,” Mr. Fallon said by email. “Every inch of it had meaning.”Whoever was in the “S.N.L.” cast in a given year, Mr. Michaels said, owed a debt to Mr. Lee.“He built this place for us to play in and do the show,” he said, “and it feels whole when we’re in it.”For “Sweeney Todd,” Mr. Lee turned the Uris Theater into a stylized Industrial Age scene out of Victorian London.Martha Swope/The New York Public LibraryEugene Edward Lee was born on March 9, 1939, in Beloit, Wis. His father, also named Eugene, was an engineer, and his mother, Elizabeth (Gates) Lee, was a pediatric nurse.His academic history was a patchwork.“I don’t think I have a degree from any place,” he told American Theater magazine in 1984. “Maybe I have a degree from Yale; I can’t remember.”He started out studying at the University of Wisconsin.“Then I saw Helen Hayes talking on television about Carnegie Tech and the stage,” he told The Times in 2000, referring to what is now Carnegie Mellon University. “So I got in my Volkswagen, which my grandmother had given me, and I arrived at the front door and said, ‘I’m here.’”He had a similarly casual approach to the Yale School of Drama, where he arrived in 1966 and studied for a time, although he did not finish his degree. (Some two decades later, the school granted him a master’s degree — “a real degree, not even an honorary one,” he told Yale Alumni Magazine in 2017.)With or without degrees, by the second half of the 1960s he was getting plenty of design work, including at Trinity Rep, where Adrian Hall, the founding artistic director, brought him in as resident designer. (Mr. Hall died on Feb. 4 in Van, Texas.) When Mr. Hall added the job of artistic director of the Dallas Theater Center in 1983, Mr. Lee worked with him there as well.Wherever he was working, Mr. Lee favored the genuine over the artificial.“Once you start painting, it has a painted look,” he told American Theater. “What please me are real textures used in the way nature left them. There’s nothing like a real piece of rusted tin — really rusted — put up on the stage. I don’t care how heavy it is, how dirty it is.”Mr. Eustis recalled one production — “Hope of the Heart” in 1990 — on which Mr. Lee’s enthusiasm for the realistic had to be reigned in.“Eugene could be risky, even reckless,” he said. “When I first worked with him at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, he insisted that the actors should use live ammunition (mercifully, only BBs) in the course of the show. We had to do a full-scale test, with a dozen of us wearing goggles, to prove to him that BBs would fly all over the auditorium and blind the audience if we used them. Reluctantly, he agreed to abandon the idea.”A model by Mr. Lee, later revised, of a proposed set for “The Tonight Show.” Mr. Lee became the show’s production designer when Jimmy Fallon took over as host in 2014. Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesMr. Lee married Brooke Lutz in 1981. She survives him, along with his twin brother, Thomas; a son from his relationship with Franne Lee, Willie; a son from his marriage, Ted; and two grandchildren.Mr. Lee was known as a man of few words, and a man who loved the water. Mr. Eustis recalled that Mr. Lee took him out on Narragansett Bay on his sailboat when they were working on Trinity’s production of “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night” in 1995.“We spent a couple hours on the water, talking but not referring to the play, and then he said, ‘It would be too bad if they actually left the stage when they say they are leaving,’” Mr. Eustis recalled. “That was our whole conversation. He delivered one of the most brilliant and beautiful designs I’d ever seen.”Iris Fanger, reviewing the production in The Boston Herald, described that set as a series of rooms “that seem to stretch back into eternity.” More

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    Maya Rudolph’s Super Bowl Challenge: Make M&M’s Sweet Again

    Unpopular companies and brands in trouble go with a strategy of hiring a likable celebrity and hoping for the best. But they might be better off with a puppy.There are 179 actresses who are better known than Maya Rudolph, including Whoopi Goldberg (third most famous), Lindsay Lohan (15th) and Gwyneth Paltrow (32nd). But Ms. Rudolph is more likable than those three and many others who are household names, according to the market research firm YouGov.So it made sense that M&M’s, the candy that has found itself in the cultural cross hairs, would enlist Ms. Rudolph as its corporate pitchwoman and make her the star of a commercial scheduled to air during Super Bowl LVII on Sunday.Nearly 75 percent of the people who have heard of Ms. Rudolph said they liked her, and her popularity was on an upswing in the fourth quarter of 2022, YouGov reported in its most recent ranking. Ms. Goldberg and Ms. Paltrow each came in around 55 percent, and Ms. Lohan at 39 percent.Ms. Rudolph, a “Saturday Night Live” cast member from 2000 to 2007, is likable enough to make the multibillionaire she plays seem down to earth on the AppleTV+ series “Loot.” She managed something similar more than a decade ago in “Bridesmaids,” winning over audiences as a bride-to-be who develops bride-zilla tendencies. Now she will attempt to do the same for a candy brand in trouble.M&M’s got some blowback from cable pundits and social media warriors after it made cosmetic changes to its long-running cartoon characters. The Fox News host Tucker Carlson and others accused the brand of “woke” advertising, arguing that the “spokescandies” had lost their sex appeal. A point of contention was that one of the cartoon candies had replaced her high-heeled go-go boots with sneakers — and at times it was hard to tell if M&M’s was trolling right-wing commentators with its promotional stunts or if it was the other way around.“M&M’s will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous,” Mr. Carlson said on his show more than a year ago. He was at it again last month, saying, “The green M&M got her boots back but apparently is now a lesbian, maybe, and there is also a plus-sized obese purple M&M.”In the commercial to be shown during the second quarter of Sunday’s game, Ms. Rudolph will try to calm the brouhaha. (A spokeswoman for M&M’s “Chief of Fun” declined to comment for this article.)Marketers, especially those trying to create an appealing image for unlikable industries like pharmaceuticals and airlines, know that a bit of charm can do a lot to disarm doubters and critics. In addition to Ms. Rudolph, other “Saturday Night Live” alumni have brought some warmth to companies that could certainly use it. Amy Poehler, whose affability set the tone for the sweetly humorous sitcom “Parks and Recreation,” has taken on the challenge of making a cable, internet and phone company seem sympathetic in a series of commercials for Xfinity. Cecily Strong, who left “Saturday Night Live” in December after a 10-year run, has lent her services to Verizon.Rashida Jones, a onetime regular on “Parks and Recreation” and “The Office,” manages to make banking seem almost fun in commercials for Citi. Jennifer Coolidge, an endearingly kooky addition to the America’s Sweetheart club thanks to her performance on “The White Lotus,” was featured in two Super Bowl commercials last year: one for Uber Eats, which had faced criticism for its treatment of pandemic-shocked restaurants and gig workers, and another for FanDuel, part of a growing sports betting industry that has drawn worries about gambling addiction.Put on a happy face: Cecily Strong, Amy Poehler, Rashida Jones and Jennifer Coolidge have all appeared in commercials for brands that needed help with their public images.But companies can sometimes make a misstep in their attempts to capitalize on the amiability of certain celebrities. In 1984, Burger King introduced “Mr. Rodney,” a character based on Fred Rogers, the esteemed host of the PBS children’s show “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” Wearing a cardigan, Mr. Rodney addressed the camera in a gentle voice: “Hi, neighbors. Today’s new word is something McDonald’s does to every burger: Let’s call it ‘McFrying.’ Can you say that?”One call from the real Mr. Rogers got the commercial bounced from the airwaves. “Mr. Rogers is one guy you don’t want to mess with, as beloved as he is,” an apologetic Burger King spokesman said at the time.Beer companies may not need the assistance of likable celebrities as much as banks and phone companies, but Anheuser-Busch InBev is taking no chances on Sunday, with several Super Bowl commercials, including one starring Serena Williams.Likability “is paramount” in the choices of corporate spokespeople, said Shana Barry, the head of celebrity, entertainment and influencers at Anheuser-Busch. “You want to associate with a talent that is having a good time,” she said. “We want to make sure that you’re paying attention to the ads and that you can connect with them onscreen.”Social scientists who have delved into the mysteries of likability point to the mere exposure effect (sometimes known as the familiarity principle), which posits that people tend to like something the more they are exposed to it. They also cite emotional contagion, a phenomenon in which people often sync up with the emotional state of others in their orbit, meaning that viewers may get a lift when they see someone having a good time in a TV commercial. And a 2021 academic study found that experts who testify in civil and criminal trials have an easier time persuading jurors if they are perceived as likable.“The essential elements are true no matter who you are,” said Natalie Anne Kerr, a psychology professor at James Madison University. “Companies can manipulate the situation to promote liking and connection to their ambassadors, especially if they’re actors who can intentionally choose to play the role of a likable person.”Keanu Reeves appeared in a 2018 Super Bowl commercial for Squarespace.But being seen as trying too hard to be liked can backfire, Dr. Kerr said. Truly likable people show vulnerability (this is known as the pratfall effect) and are relatable (the similarity attraction effect). See Keanu Reeves, who appeared in a 2018 Super Bowl commercial for Squarespace, doing a motorcycle stunt while reciting the words of the 1983 cult hit “Adventures in Success” as the track played in the background. Quirkiness may also be an asset, Dr. Kerr added, noting that one of her favorite actors is Nick Offerman, who is known for playing gruff but kind loners, as well as for his good-natured appreciation of carpentry and his wife.Tone deafness can destroy likability, said Mitch Prinstein, a psychology and neuroscience professor at the University of North Carolina and the chief science officer at the American Psychological Association.“We always tell elementary school kids that they can’t walk up to a bunch of kids playing Legos and say, ‘That’s stupid; let’s play with trucks,’” said Dr. Prinstein, the author of “Popular.” “You can include your truck with the Legos, but you can’t just disregard the group norm.“The same thing applies to adults,” he continued, “whether you’re leading a boardroom or you’re a celebrity. You have to read the room.”Public figures may have a tougher time connecting with audiences when they become so famous and wealthy that they lose touch with everyday experiences, he added. An out-of-touch star is rarely likable, especially at a time when fans have grown accustomed to joining their favorite entertainers on social media as they document a date night or grocery run.Rather than relying on big stars to pitch products, some companies are tapping TikTok tastemakers and Instagram nanoinfluencers to chase niche groups. “Brands are really looking for authenticity, for somebody that can talk about the brand in a way that others might not be able to,” said Adma Ortega, who handles celebrity and influencer relations for the Wieden & Kennedy ad agency in New York. “They want to talk to a specific audience, because you can’t talk to everyone anymore.”Some companies break through the noise by ignoring likability altogether, as Samsung did in building ads around the reality TV star Christine Quinn, who once said of her role on “Selling Sunset”: “I love being the villain, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”Deciding on a spokesperson is increasingly complicated, involving metrics like social media follower counts, audience demographics, algorithmic calculations including the Klear Score, the Aspire authenticity score and E-Score polls. After the Super Bowl, Anheuser-Busch and other companies will study rankings like Ad Meter and the Super Clios to see how viewers reacted to their commercials.Some firms still use the Q Score, a nearly 60-year-old measure of appeal that costs $1,750 per name. Clients get a detailed breakdown of sentiment among different demographics, and can also buy a full work-up of more than 1,200 personalities or a ranking of celebrities customized by their appeal to a particular audience. The score is used by ad agencies, movie studios, TV networks, lawyers and estates, said Steven Levitt, the president of the Q Scores Company.The “Q” stands for “quotient” — a reference to how the rating is calculated, by dividing the percentage of respondents who say a celebrity is one of their favorite personalities by the percentage of those who have heard of the person. Another part of the rating evaluates unpopularity. The highest score ever, a 71 in 1985, went to Bill Cosby; nowadays, celebrities rarely score above the low 40s, Mr. Levitt said. Ms. Rudolph’s score is 19, three points above the average for actresses, he said.Ad makers often ignore Q Scores in favor of gut instinct, Mr. Levitt added. “A lot of decisions are not based on data,” he said. “They’re based on creative appeal, or the strength of an executive to outshoot and overpower subordinates and say, ‘No, I think this is the way to go.’”But celebrity likability may not last. It takes only one slap at the Oscars, one rude complaint about an omelet, or one too many reports that a nice talk show host with a penchant for dancing was perhaps not so nice after all.Which may be why some of the most popular Super Bowl commercials of recent years have had no recognizable celebrities front and center, according to an analysis by the measurement firm iSpot.TV. Last year, the most likable ad featured a variety of wild animals grooving to the 1987 Salt-N-Pepa hit “Push It” after sampling some Flamin’ Hot Doritos.And the stars of the most likable spot on record, a Budweiser commercial from 2014? Clydesdale horses and a golden retriever puppy. More

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    in Theater

    Billy Crudup Makes the Sale in ‘Hello Tomorrow!’

    Billy Crudup’s father, Thomas Henry Crudup III, was a gambler, a hustler, an occasional loan shark and a bookie of questionable gift. Sometimes on the way to his son’s weekend soccer practice, he would stop the car on an interstate shoulder and deal king crab out of the trunk. He sold red-and-white-striped umbrella hats, coffee additives, Farrah Fawcett posters, an inflatable ice chest.“Which is not a flotation device,” the younger Crudup clarified in a video call on a weekday afternoon in January.Despite two and a half decades in entertainment, this Crudup, 54, has lived a somewhat more conventional life governed by rigorous professional ethics. The risks he takes are mostly artistic. To watch his early films — “Stage Beauty,” “Without Limits,” “Almost Famous” among them — is to see a performer making audacious choices, executed with deep feeling and meticulous control.He’s an indifferent gambler. (The actor Hank Azaria, a poker buddy, confirmed this: Crudup, a performer who often trades in inscrutability, apparently has no poker face.) Then again, his whole career has been a kind of gamble, a long game. Though he has movie star looks, he bet that they wouldn’t last, and so the parts he took, often character parts, were designed to secure career longevity by demonstrating his aptitude and range.In one way, he lost that bet. As I broke it to him, his looks have held up very well. “I appreciate that,” he said, strong-jawed and elfin beneath a Yankees cap. “A lot of niacin and B-root.” (Niacin and B-root? “Those are the first two things that came into my head,” he said.)But in another way, it paid off: In his 50s, he is enjoying the best roles of his life. Since 2019, he has played Cory Ellison, a bright-eyed, coldblooded network news exec in the Apple TV+ series “The Morning Show.” Now he has added Jack Billings, a fast-talking slickster who heads a lunar time-share concern in “Hello Tomorrow!,” another Apple TV+ show, which debuts on Feb. 17.In “Hello Tomorrow!,” Crudup’s character leads a team selling lunar properties in a development called Brightside. (With Haneefah Wood and Hank Azaria.)Apple TV+An evangelist, a huckster, a consummate salesman, Jack reminds Crudup of his father, who died in 2005. Traveling salesmen are akin to gamblers, Crudup argued, always playing the odds, always counting on the big win.“I get to be in some proximity to my dad, by playing a version of him,” Crudup said.There are two narratives that people like me tend to spin around Crudup: that fame has always eluded him and that he never wanted it anyway. He acknowledges that both are somewhat true. He didn’t avoid mainstream projects (see: “Watchmen”), as long as he could play flawed and fractured characters within them.But while acting is a kind of selling, Crudup has always resisted selling himself. For years, he wore his own clothes to award shows. He mostly skipped the talk show circuit. He has tried to keep his personal life private. (“Billy Crudup has a personal life?” his friend and “Morning Show” co-star Jennifer Aniston joked.) A decade or two ago, he would have submitted to an interview like this, if he submitted at all, only out of contractual obligation and under sufferance. A New York Times writer, interviewing him in 2004, wrote, “He shields his life from would-be inspectors as if it were a nuclear facility in North Korea.” This avoidance was partly in service of that gamble. He wagered that a public persona would make receding into roles more difficult. “I figured the more people knew about me, the harder it would be for me to convince them that I was somebody else,” he said. Avoiding publicity was, he said, “a protective mechanism.”It was also a way to protect himself when the tabloids swarmed. In 2003, Crudup left his girlfriend, Mary-Louise Parker, to pursue a relationship with his “Stage Beauty” co-star, Claire Danes. He has not spoken publicly about this, just as he doesn’t speak about what seems to be his current relationship, with the actress Naomi Watts. He could set a few records and Wikipedia pages straight, he said. But he prefers not to.“Because that’s a lifelong pursuit, constantly trying to manage how people think about me as opposed to thinking about my work,” he said.The work has been consistent, but in the 2010s it became less visible. In films like “Jackie,” “20th Century Woman” and “Spotlight,” he inhabited characters so fully that he didn’t seem to be acting at all. It was easy to admire his performances without thinking much about them. That changed with “Harry Clarke,” a 2017 Off-Broadway play about a diffident, pansexual con artist. The play has a dozen roles. Crudup played all of them.Leigh Silverman, who directed the play, was surprised at how much Crudup struggled during rehearsals. In his films, he had made it look so easy. “I was so captivated, really, by his suffering, and his continuing to show up every day,” Silverman said in an interview. But during previews, Crudup began to suffer less, abandoning himself to the various roles, switching fluently between them. To anyone watching him alone onstage, his reach and capacity were irrefutable, as was his charisma.“He’s both holding you at a distance and beckoning you forward, which is so sexy,” Silverman said.In “The Morning Show,” Crudup (with Jennifer Aniston) plays a charismatic news executive. “Billy has an intensity to him, an energy to him, that felt really right for the character,” Kerry Ehrin, the original showrunner, said.Apple TV+One of those watchers was Aniston, who immediately turned to her producing partner, Kristin Hahn, and told her that Crudup had to be in “The Morning Show.” Cory had been originally envisioned as a 30-year-old villain. But when Crudup flew out to Los Angeles to meet with Kerry Ehrin, the original showrunner, she was quickly convinced.“Billy has an intensity to him, an energy to him, that felt really right for the character,” Ehrin said.Cory is staunch in his determination to win the ratings game. But there’s a volatility to the man, an unpredictability. “The Morning Show,” like “Harry Clarke” before it, allows Crudup to live in the contradictions that have made him a thrilling performer: his boldness and precision, his childlike enthusiasm married to a coolness that borders on opacity. Crudup enjoys these tensions. His co-stars do, too.“It’s electric,” Aniston said of acting opposite him. “Every time, I’m going, Oh, I wonder what’s going to happen next?”This electricity impressed Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen, the creators and showrunners of “Hello Tomorrow!” Set in a retrofuturist world in which hovercrafts are a given and travel to the moon commonplace, the show centers on a group of salesmen hawking lunar properties in a development called Brightside. They’re led by Crudup’s Jack, who attacks the project with missionary zeal. Other actors had shown interest in the role. They’d seen Jack as a smoothie, a charmer. Jansen recalled Crudup’s take: “He said, ‘Oh, this guy isn’t a salesman; he’s a priest.’”The truth about those lunar properties remains elusive though much of the season. What’s important is that Jack believes in them, and his belief is so unswerving and sincere that it has a way of inspiring those around him.“Jack’s a genuine believer that providing somebody with a little bit of hope during the day is a true commodity worth valuing,” Crudup said.Here are some of the things that make Jack a good salesman: his energy, his flexibility, his superlative people skills. These are qualities Crudup’s father shared. They are also among the abilities that make Crudup a great actor. Like an actor, Jack is selling people on a story. He believes in the dream so that others can believe it, too.Crudup has generally sought to avoid publicity. “I figured the more people knew about me, the harder it would be for me to convince them that I was somebody else,” he said.Philip Cheung for The New York Times“Good salesmanship is truly believing what you’re saying,” Crudup said. And Crudup has that belief. It’s why he can deliver a line like “Chaos, it’s the new cocaine” in “The Morning Show” with absolute conviction. It’s why his Jack can conjure intimacy even when surrounded by computer-generated automatons.“Sometimes giving folks a new dream to dream can make all the difference,” Jack says. And in Crudup’s mouth it sounds just about plausible.His co-stars Azaria and Haneefah Wood noticed this early in the shoot, during a scene in which Jack delivers a seminar-style version of his moonage daydream. Even having read the script, Azaria found himself weeping during the performance. His character, an insider on Jack’s team, would not have wept.“I had to hide from the camera that he had made me cry,” Azaria said.After the director called cut, Wood, who plays the team’s savvy accounts manager, approached Crudup. “And I was like, ‘[Expletive] you, Billy,’” she recalled. “‘Now my game has to step up so far, to be on just the same level.’”“But he gives you that energy,” she added. “He gives you the desire to just want to go all the way.”Whether or not Crudup has gone all the way, he has come pretty far. His career has been the opposite of a Ponzi scheme: He put the work in early on and he kept working. It’s only now, in these rich continuous roles, that he is seeing the return on his investment. And knowing he has made good has allowed him to hold himself a little more lightly. He’ll wear anyone’s shirt to an awards show now, he told me.“I feel less protective because I’ve been able to establish the career that I hoped to,” he said. Raking in the chips feels good. Maybe not as good as cornering the highway king crab market, but pretty good all the same.“It is miraculous to me,” he said. More

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    in Television

    Late Night Is Still Concerned About That Balloon

    “AT&T told their customers, ‘Relax, they can’t spy on you if you can’t get a signal,” Jimmy Fallon said.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.Going Over Like a Lead BalloonOn Thursday, the State Department revealed that the Chinese spy balloon the U.S. downed last weekend was capable of monitoring Americans’ electronic communications.“When they heard that, Siri and Alexa were like, ‘Oh, hell no, that’s our job!” said Jimmy Fallon.“Yeah, they were tracking all of our communications, including phone calls and text messages. The balloon was like, ‘Based on what we’ve gathered, we should invest in eggplants.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Meanwhile, AT&T told their customers, ‘Relax, they can’t spy on you if you can’t get a signal, you know what I’m saying?’” — JIMMY FALLONOn “The Daily Show,” Chelsea Handler reported that China was demanding that the balloon be returned.“[Expletive] you, China! You sent the balloon over here to spy on us — we found it, and now it’s ours! You don’t get to demand that we return it, just like the guy who attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband doesn’t get his hammer back.” — CHELSEA HANDLER“And I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not scared about the supposed explosive self-destructing capability on a balloon. All balloons have a self-destructing capability — it’s called deflating.” — CHELSEA HANDLER“Sorry, China, but that’s confusing. Usually, when you release things, it’s for the entire world to enjoy, like Covid.” — CHELSEA HANDLERThe Punchiest Punchlines (Nepo Baby Edition)“North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was joined onstage yesterday by his 9-year-old daughter at a military parade unveiling the country’s new missiles. So I guess Bring Your Daughter to Work Day has officially jumped the shark.” — SETH MEYERS“Yes, this girl is speculated to become Kim’s successor. Who would’ve ever thought that North Korea would have a female leader before America? And she’s a minority!” — CHELSEA HANDLER“I have to say, I am so sick of these nepo babies. First we have Lily-Rose Depp and then Willow Smith, and now this girl? Whatever happened to becoming a nuke-wielding tyrant on merit? You know how many girls are out there working hard, learning how to fire missiles and starve an entire population who will never have an opportunity to lead a regime?” — CHELSEA HANDLERThe Bits Worth WatchingGordon Ramsay taste-tested Super Bowl snacks on Thursday’s “Late Late Show.”Also, Check This Out“Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” features Craig David Dowsett as a demented version of the children’s character.Jagged Edge ProductionsIn the horror film “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey,” friendly animal icons from childhood turn sadistic when Christopher Robin leaves for college. More