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    The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Netflix in September

    Every month, Netflix adds movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of September’s most promising new titles.(Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)‘Wrestlers’ Season 1Starts streaming: Sept. 13Greg Whiteley, the co-creator and director of the popular Netflix docu-series “Last Chance U” and “Cheer,” tells another story of small-time athletes fighting to keep their dreams alive in “Wrestlers.” Set in and around a Louisville, Ky., gym, the series follows the veteran star Al Snow and the die-hard performers of Ohio Valley Wrestling, who are working to boost business after their new bosses have given them just a few months to increase revenue. As with Whiteley’s other shows, “Wrestlers” features up-close and exciting sports footage alongside intimate slice-of-life scenes and confessional interviews, as these people who love the history and traditions of regional professional wrestling share their hopes and dreams.‘El Conde’Starts streaming: Sept. 15The daring Chilean writer-director Pablo Larrain — best-known for his offbeat 2016 biopics “Neruda” and “Jackie” — puts his own peculiar spin on the life of Augusto Pinochet in “El Conde,” a black-and-white gothic horror film that reimagines the dictator as a depressed vampire, enduring an audit of his crumbling estate. Jaime Vadell plays Pinochet, who in this movie has been alive since the time of the French Revolution and has kept hanging around long after everyone has assumed he died. Larrain fits some actual history into this picture, but for the most part he uses satire to critique the lingering vitality-sapping effects of Pinochet’s tyrannical reign.‘Love at First Sight’Starts streaming: Sept. 15Based on the Jennifer E. Smith novel “The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight,” this romantic dramedy stars the vibrant young actress Haley Lu Richardson as Hadley Sullivan, who is reluctantly on her way to London to attend her father’s wedding when she gets seated on the plane next to Oliver (Ben Hardy), a charming math whiz heading home for his mother’s memorial service. When the two are separated after landing, they have an eventful and emotional day of meeting family obligations while also trying to find each other again. Jameela Jamil plays multiple characters and also narrates the film, using Oliver’s nerdy number-crunching as a prompt to keep the audience updated on the ever-shifting odds that these two likable kids will be happy together.‘The Saint of Second Chances’Starts streaming: Sept. 19Bill Veeck was one of Major League Baseball’s maverick innovators, spending much of his life coming up with creative and sometimes controversial ballpark promotions to draw fans and make money. The documentary “The Saint of Second Chances” — co-directed by Jeff Malmberg and the Oscar-winning Morgan Neville — is about Bill’s son Mike, whose initial attempts to follow in his father’s footsteps were derailed by his part in the Chicago White Sox’s notorious 1979 “Disco Demolition Night,” which ended in a riot. Narrated by Jeff Daniels — with re-enactments that have the actor-comedian Charlie Day playing Mike — the film covers the younger Veeck’s big comeback in the ’90s, when he found ways to bring fun back to baseball and to his own life by running the independent minor league team the St. Paul Saints.‘The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar’Starts streaming: Sept. 27Fresh off the critical and commercial success of his film “Asteroid City,” the writer-director Wes Anderson makes his Netflix debut with “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” an adaptation of a Roald Dahl story. Clocking in at around 40 minutes — a bit too long to be a short film and not long enough to be a feature — the movie stars Benedict Cumberbatch as a smug gambler who become fascinated with the rumors he has heard about a man who can see without using his eyes. As always, Anderson has enlisted an impressive supporting cast, including Ben Kingsley, Dev Patel, Richard Ayoade and — as Dahl himself — Ralph Fiennes. This project also reportedly relies even more than usual on Anderson’s penchant for overtly theatrical effects, as the characters tell stories within stories while often remaining on a single stage.Also arriving:Sept. 7“Dear Child”“Kung Fu Panda: The Dragon Knight” Season 3“Top Boy” Season 3“Virgin River” Season 5, Part 1Sept. 8“Burning Body” Season 1“Rosa Peral’s Tapes”“Selling the OC” Season 2“Spy Ops” Season 1“A Time Called You” Season 1Sept. 12“Michelle Wolf: It’s Great To Be Here”Sept. 13“Class Act” Season 1Sept. 15“Surviving Summer” Season 2Sept. 21“Sex Education” Season 4Sept. 22“Song of the Bandits”“Spy Kids: Armageddon”Sept. 26“The Devil’s Plan” Season 1“Who Killed Jill Dando?”Sept. 27“Encounters” Season 1“Forgotten Love”“Street Flow 2”Sept. 28“Castlevania: Nocturne” Season 1“The Darkness within La Luz del Mundo”Sept. 29“Nowhere” More

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    ‘Swing State’ Playwright Wants to Sound an Alarm for a World in Trouble

    In her Off Broadway drama, which had an acclaimed run in Chicago, the playwright looks for hope to outweigh despair in a fractious, anxious time.The playwright Rebecca Gilman moved away from small-town Alabama long ago, but a soft Southern lilt still shapes her words. In all the years she lived and worked here in her adopted city of Chicago, she remained immune to its Bill Murray accent. The broad tones of nearby Wisconsin have likewise left no mark.Rural Wisconsin itself, though, has burrowed deep in her soul. After more than a decade of traveling back and forth from Chicago, Gilman relocated full-time to Green County, Wis., about four years ago. If you want to send her into a soliloquy, just ask what she loves about the prairie. She will talk about its colors and how they change throughout the year — from white to pink to purple to a wind-stirred sea of yellow — and then she will venture into its metaphors.“When you go to a prairie, it’s just teeming with life — butterflies, bugs, birds, everything,” she said on a stiflingly hot August afternoon in an upstairs lounge at the Goodman Theater, where her new play, “Swing State,” was in rehearsals for its New York run. “It’s an ecosystem. Everything depends on everything else. Some of the plants have to be pollinated by particular butterflies. Particular butterflies have to have lupine to lay their eggs. Monarchs have to have milkweed. And it is not a monoculture. It cannot thrive unless it’s as diverse as diverse can be.”Gilman, 58, worries about the prairie’s destruction, but she acts on that fear, volunteering with an endearingly named group, the Prairie Enthusiasts, to protect the land. She worries, too, about threats to wildlife — like white-nose syndrome, which has killed millions of bats — so she recently trained as a “bat ambassador,” to raise awareness of their plight.And like so many inhabitants of this bellicose, burning planet, Gilman worries about its survival if people cannot find a way to coexist and cooperate, at the most intimate local level and beyond. In “Swing State,” which is scheduled to begin previews on Friday, at the Minetta Lane Theater in Manhattan, she wrestles with that anxiety, and with the hopelessness that it can bring.The actors Bubba Weiler and Mary Beth Fisher rehearsing the play at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, where “Swing State” had an acclaimed run last year.Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesDirected by Gilman’s longtime collaborator Robert Falls, the play is set in what is known as the Driftless Area of Wisconsin, where the rolling landscape is untouched by glacial sediment, or drift. The principal characters are driftless, too — lacking the purpose that human beings require to thrive.Peg, a recent widow in her 60s, cherishes the acres of ancient prairie on her land, and takes crotchety good care of her 20-something neighbor Ryan, a recovering alcoholic who looks out for her, too, as he scrambles to get his life together. But with the natural world in escalating peril, and her husband now just ashes in a box, Peg cannot summon the will to go on.Set in 2021, “Swing State” is only subtly a play about the coronavirus pandemic, depicting the isolation that people felt in its early stages, and the knee-jerk, politicized hostility that arose around masks and vaccines. It is more interested in the ways that antagonism has replaced goodwill, and how lethal to community such hardheartedness can be.When the play had its premiere at the Goodman last October, the critic Chris Jones wrote, in a rave review in The Chicago Tribune, that Gilman had captured “the feeling that America has atrophied, the sense that once-shared values have swung so far to the extremes that the bones of a nation have crumbled.”Yet she frames it all in up-close, personal terms, using just four characters — all residents of the same tiny township. The story isn’t overtly about civic life; at the same time, it is hugely about civic life.“The play, for me,” Falls said, perched in a cushy chair a few feet from Gilman, “is sort of about loss and everything we’re losing. One could say civility in politics. One could say very much the environment. One could say a democracy.”For all the rough-and-tumble raucousness of the national shouting match, though, “Swing State” takes a gentle tone.“In a way,” Falls said, “it becomes the quietest play, sitting in the middle of the biggest epic social circumstances.”The longtime collaborators at a rehearsal last month. Falls said the play “is sort of about loss and everything we’re losing.”Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesA TONY AWARD WINNER for his 1999 production of “Death of a Salesman,” Falls, 69, was nearing the end of his long tenure as the Goodman’s artistic director when he decided he wanted to stage one more Gilman play. It would be the sixth in a collaboration that began with her 2001 play “Blue Surge.”In late 2020, when the pandemic was keeping him at home in Evanston, Ill., wondering darkly if actors would ever act without masks on, Gilman was at home in southern Wisconsin, not knowing if she would ever write another play — because, she said, “everything just seemed sort of pointless.”But then he called her up and asked her to. Always, he said, he has felt a connection to her voice, and to the “moral sensibility” at the heart of her plays — a quality he ascribed to her deeply understanding “how the world truly works” yet rejecting “the cynicism of just throwing up your [expletive] hands.”“I really wanted to do a new play by Rebecca,” he said, “to the point where it didn’t really matter what Rebecca wanted to write about.”Gilman had two conditions, swiftly granted: that Falls would direct and that Mary Beth Fisher — who originated lead roles in two of Gilman’s best known plays, “Spinning Into Butter” (1999) and “Boy Gets Girl” (2000), both at the Goodman — would star.As Gilman wrote the role of Peg for Fisher, she poured into the play what was on her mind. Even in those dire days when theaters were shut down and the industry’s future was grim, Gilman’s eyes were on a more collective danger.“The world is in trouble,” she said. “It’s not just the theater that’s in trouble. The world is in trouble. And if the planet dies, all of our precious art is going to die with it. That was the urgency I was feeling. Like, can we create something that also communicates this?”In her swing-state township that Joe Biden won by two votes, where she and her husband joke that maybe they tilted the balance, Gilman doesn’t really talk politics with people anymore: too hazardous.“There’s so much potential for conflict and animosity,” she said, “that you kind of just don’t go down that road because you also have to live next to each other, where there aren’t very many people. You don’t want to make enemies of your neighbors. I don’t know my neighbors’ politics, and I don’t need to know, and I don’t want to know, because I need them if we get stuck in the snow, or they need me to come to their daughter’s high school graduation party.”Fisher, right, with Anne E. Thompson, left, and Kirsten Fitzgerald in the play.Liz LaurenThat polarity and interdependence are woven into “Swing State”; likewise what Gilman said was her fear of losing the people most precious to her, and her alarm at what was vanishing from her beloved outdoors.“Despair is a really strong word,” she said. “But when you do go out into the natural world regularly, it’s impossible not to see what’s dying. It’s impossible not to see what we’re losing.”When bird-watching became a popular pandemic activity, friends would ask her to take them. It gave them solace and gave her solace, too, but hers came with an asterisk.“I was so happy that they were discovering it,” she said. “But at the same time, I was thinking, there used to be so many more birds here. Every time we’d go out, I’d think, oh, gosh, I wish you had come out with me 10 years ago. I wish you’d come out with me five years ago. The birds that we used to see here are not here anymore.”Falls spent his first 13 years of life surrounded by cornfields in rural Illinois, where his mother’s side of the family were farmers. He has always preferred city to country, books to bird-watching. Yet when Gilman took him onto the prairie and handed him a pair of binoculars, he immediately made a rare sighting: a Henslow’s sparrow, a type of bird that figures poignantly in “Swing State.”Theater people in general being fond of superstition, he took that as a “great omen” for the play. Maybe it was, given the show’s success so far — the accolades in Chicago, then the transfer of the Goodman production to New York by Audible Theater, which will record an audio version for wide release.The play’s title, by the way, isn’t just about Wisconsin as a purple state. It’s about the characters’ emotional landscapes, Gilman said, “swinging between despair and hope.”She has no interest in providing false hope, preferring to acknowledge reality. But she doesn’t want to knuckle under to despair, not least because it’s unfair to abandon the world’s troubles to generations that didn’t cause them.So, she said, it’s a balancing act, one in which “meaningful work that makes the world better” — the kind her characters are in search of, and that she has discovered on the prairie — is part of finding a way to heal.“Put despair and hope on the scale,” she said. “You’re going to have to work to make hope outweigh despair, but I do think it’s possible. And I do think that the work is necessary in a way it never has been before.” More

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    Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad Tackle Another Book (Not Mormon)

    Twelve years after opening “The Book of Mormon,” the two actors — and good friends — return with “Gutenberg! The Musical!”Josh Gad still remembers the first time he and Andrew Rannells met, in June 2010 in a Los Angeles audition suite. No matter what Gad did during their scenes together, Rannells didn’t laugh. Not once.Rannells was auditioning for “The Book of Mormon,” the new musical from the creators of “South Park.” Gad, then a correspondent on “The Daily Show,” had long been attached. The producers wanted a celebrity opposite him, and they’d invited several to these tryouts. Rannells, a replacement actor in “Hairspray” and “Jersey Boys,” was not remotely famous. Confronted with Gad’s cyclone energy, he chose stillness.“I was so intimidated. And it really upset me,” Gad said, over dinner at Chez Josephine, a theater district mainstay where Rannells, in younger days, used to work the coat check. Gad turned to Rannells. “I had that Tony locked until you walked in the door. And I still had a grudge because you beat me out for ‘Jersey Boys.’” (It was unclear if Gad was joking. Then again, Gad is almost always joking.)“The Book of Mormon” opened in 2011, to rapturous reviews, with Rannells as the strait-laced Mormon missionary Elder Price and Gad as his co-evangelist Elder Cunningham, whose laces are a lot looser. Both men were nominated for a Tony Award and both men lost out to Norbert Leo Butz for “Catch Me If You Can.” Somewhere along the way, they became close friends, which was apparent over dinner, a symphony of bits, riffs and callbacks between bites of tuna tartare and duck breast. They had ordered identical meals and identical Diet Cokes.Rannells, 45, has spent his post “Mormon” years in other Broadway shows and on television (“Girls,” “Black Monday,” “Girls5Eva”). Gad, 42, has since become a voice-over luminary (“Frozen,” Frozen 2,” “Central Park”). Now they are reuniting, one block south and one block east of their “Mormon” haunts, in “Gutenberg! The Musical!” which begins previews at the James Earl Jones Theater on Sept. 15.“Gutenberg!” directed by Alex Timbers and written by Scott Brown and Anthony King, is a farcical, largehearted duet about a pair of nursing home workers, Bud and Doug, bitten grievously by the Broadway bug. Using an inheritance and the proceeds from the sale of a home, they rent a Broadway theater for one night, hoping to find a producer for their deeply misguided and tragically under-researched original musical about Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of movable type and the publisher of the Gutenberg Bible.“The Book of Mormon” opened in 2011, to rapturous reviews, with Rannells as the strait-laced Mormon missionary Elder Price and Gad as his co-evangelist Elder Cunningham, whose laces are a lot looser.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTwo old friends finding a vehicle for a Broadway return has the whiff of a vanity project. But this deliriously silly show, in which the two actors play dozens of characters and wear a combined 107 baseball caps, demands that vanity be left at the stage door.Over dinner, Gad joked (probably!) that when Timbers had sent him a photo of those 107 hats, each inscribed with the name of one of the show’s characters, he’d tried to back out.“It was too late,” Rannells said.“I know,” Gad said. “I read my contract last night.”The day after dinner, at a rehearsal space at the Alvin Ailey Extension, Gad and Rannells were stumbling through (with an emphasis, perhaps, on stumbling) the second act of “Gutenberg!” In a scene at the top of the act, as Bud and Doug introduced themselves to the audience, Rannells hit Gad in the face, perhaps accidentally.“That’s assault,” Gad said.“You walked into it,” Rannells replied. Moments later they were standing cheek to cheek, singing spooky oo-oo-oos.Rannells was wearing a shirt and shorts in complementary greens, his wavy hair reliably perfect. Gad was all in black. He was also drinking an iced coffee. Given his typical energy levels, this seemed like a bad idea. He had burst into the rehearsal room after the lunch break singing “Unchained Melody” with heavy vibrato. He also riffed on a line from “Sunset Boulevard”: “We taught the world new ways to dream.”“No,” Rannells said. He hugged Gad. Or maybe he gave him a mild version of the Heimlich maneuver. This is more or less their way, with Gad as an avatar of chaos and Rannells in smirking control.Casey Nicholaw, the director of “The Book of Mormon,” had noted this contrast. “Josh’s comedy basically just says, ‘Watch me. Love me.’ Josh is just out there,” he said. “And Andrew’s is sneaky. Andrew knows how to just hold himself with grace and dignity and then just go for it.”Each has a different process, a different style, a different affect. Collaborators I spoke with compared them to famous comic duos — Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello. Gad cited “The Odd Couple.”“I definitely am more anxious than he is,” Gad said over dinner. “I’m a bundle of anxiety when it comes to learning dances. I’m a bundle of anxiety when it comes to getting lines right.” Gad said that he is also a hypochondriac and that sometimes, offstage during “The Book of Mormon,” Rannells would suggest possible diseases for him.“He’s got a mean streak,” Gad said. “I can say that now.” Rannells, sipping his Diet Coke, didn’t deny it.Despite that mean streak, a friendship endures. Nikki M. James, their “Mormon” co-star, recalled watching it begin. “Onstage, they played very different people who end up becoming each other’s best friends,” she said in a recent interview. “That camaraderie and friendship and love and sense of family, it was very clear offstage as well.”That show left them inextricably linked. “When I die, if I get an obituary in The New York Times, Josh’s name will also be in it,” Rannells said, somewhat darkly.And after they departed “The Book of Mormon,” each for a quickly canceled sitcom (“1600 Penn” for Gad, “The New Normal” for Rannells), they would often talk about how they might work together again. A revival of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” was mooted. So was a revival of “The Producers.” About four years ago Timbers (“Moulin Rouge,” “Beetlejuice”) had another idea.Brown and King (“Beetlejuice”) had first conceived “Gutenberg!” more than 20 years ago. Back then, King was a musical theater intern at Manhattan Theater Club. Tasked with sifting through the slush pile, he found himself listening to home-recorded tapes and CDs of new musicals, most of them sung through by the author or authors, most of them hopeless. King thought that he and Brown could write something just as bad. Worse even.“We tried to come up with, like, what’s a terrible idea for a musical?” King said.But what began as a way to prank King’s boss evolved into something just a little more sincere. As King put it, “We fell in love with our own dumb stuff.”In 2003, Brown and King performed a 45-minute version of the show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in New York. It ran for about two years. With encouragement from a producer, they wrote a second act and took it to London. The show that emerged was never about the real Gutenberg — Bud and Doug have only the vaguest ideas of how movable type and medieval history work. Instead it was a loving lampoon of Broadway wishes and tropes.Gad and Rannells’s characters in “Gutenberg! The Musical!” hope to find a producer for their musical about the inventor of movable type.Adam Powell for The New York TimesBut for the Off Broadway premiere in 2006, directed by Timbers, the creators stepped out in favor of actual actors, Christopher Fitzgerald and Jeremy Shamos, which made it feel more like a real show and less like a goofball routine written by two starving artist roommates.There had been conversations about moving the show to Broadway. Those conversations had never been especially earnest. Then Timbers slipped Gad the script, hoping that he would share it in turn with Rannells. Which is exactly what happened.With Brown and King and Timbers, the actors met for a reading in workshop in Los Angeles in March 2020, an inauspicious moment for Broadway-bound musicals. The reading went well. To succeed, the friendship between Bud and Doug has to feel ardent, unbreakable. Gad and Rannells had that.So after a delay of about three years, conversations began again. A two-person show felt overwhelming, especially one in which the actors also had to serve as their own crew, moving each prop and set piece. Gad described it as “more intimate, and yet much more insane than even ‘Mormon.’” Still, he and Rannells agreed.In rehearsal, that insanity was in evidence. The two men were playing not only Bud (Gad), the composer, and Doug (Rannells), the book writer, but also every other baseball-capped character. And they had to play them with all the naïveté and enthusiasm that newbie writers would bring, but also with the necessary skills of a practiced musical theater performer, because bad acting and bad singing aren’t funny for long.“You have to commit to doing fully lived-in characters by performers who otherwise would not be on Broadway,” Gad said.“It’s literally a hat on a hat on a hat on a hat,” Rannells sighed.Hats aside, they seemed to be having a pretty good time, particularly during one sequence where Rannells reenacted an eagle attacking a sea gull, while Gad, playing a pubescent girl, did a sexy, scary skeleton dance.It wasn’t all skeletons and sea gulls. Opening a Broadway show is stressful. “I think our actual human sweat will give us away,” Rannells said. “I’m going to be a real mess 10 minutes into the show.” Opening a Broadway show with a best friend in accidental smacking distance is stressful in a different way. But it’s also pretty nice. “Gutenberg!” is about two characters supporting each other, through thick and thin and third reprise. And as Gad and Rannells tell it, that tracks for the actors, too.“There are times where I want to fall down and just cry at how tiring the show is,” Gad said. “Then I look at Rannells and I’m like, ‘OK, he’s going to keep me upright.’”He turned to Rannells, adding, “I’m so happy you got ‘Jersey Boys’ now. Now I actually think they made the right choice.” More

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    Fall TV Reflects the Hollywood Strikes, but Not How You Think

    The tired familiarity of the reality-heavy network schedules is a reminder of the issues that led to the work stoppages.Fall TV this year rolls in amid the fog of the writers’ and actors’ strikes. The networks have been slow to commit to their schedules, still rejiggering their lineups for September and beyond. Cable outlets have been bumping the release dates of in-the-can shows, lest they wither without promotion by their stars, an activity prohibited by the actors’ guild during the strike. The streaming archives beckon.At first glance the fall network schedules suggest the work stoppages have had an impact: They are overstuffed with reality competitions and game shows, whose employees generally work under different contracts from those of the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA.ABC’s Wednesday prime-time lineup consists of “Celebrity Jeopardy!” followed by “Celebrity Wheel of Fortune” followed by “The $100,000 Pyramid.” On Thursdays CBS added a new competition called “Buddy Games” to go along with the long-running “Big Brother” and another installment of “The Challenge: USA.” On Fox, celebrities endure military training on Mondays (“Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test”), guess songs on Tuesdays (“Celebrity Name That Tune”) and croon in ridiculous outfits on Wednesdays (“The Masked Singer”).However, aside from “Buddy Games,” essentially summer camp competitions for groups of adult friends, none of the shows in the previous paragraph are new — the networks have been churning out unscripted prime-time shows by the bushel for years. Overall, their lineups are eerily steady, more like an extended summer season of familiar titles and reruns than an uncharacteristically barren fall slate.So the schedules end up reflecting the strikes not because they look radically different, but because their numbing sameness is a reminder of the issues that led to the work stoppages — that everything is simply “content,” and the only kind of value is monetary value.Jesse L. Martin and Maahra Hill in NBC’s “The Irrational,” one of the few new scripted series arriving this fall.NBCWhat are we to assume about the studios’ feelings toward the people who make television when their offerings suggest apathy regarding the people who watch it? Or perhaps these lackluster lineups are the product of corporate strategy, now that seemingly all of TV has been consolidated within a few media megaliths that are transforming how shows get made and creators get paid.It is little wonder ABC is happy to offer up singing contests and celebs spinning the Wheel when Disney, its owner, would like you to subscribe to Hulu and Disney+ for scripted family and prestige shows along with franchise fare like the Marvel and “Star Wars” series. CBS? Oh, you mean the broadcast home of the Viacom empire, where you can also watch repeats of Paramount+ shows like “FBI True” and “Yellowstone?”(This shift isn’t limited to networks, of course. Think not of HBO as a refined tastemaker in a separate TV universe from home-makeover shows and insects pulled from people’s bodies — imagine instead an array of treasures and garbage and the “Friends” catalog all piled up under one meaningless heading: Max.)This is hardly the first fall to be full of reality shows. ABC was always going to air another season of “Dancing With the Stars” (this will be its 32nd); NBC was always going to air “The Voice” (Season 24); CBS was always going to air “Survivor” (45) and “The Amazing Race” (35); and Fox has slotted “Hell’s Kitchen” (22) in its fall line-up plenty of times. Even though the CW is largely ceding any claim to original programming, opting instead to fill out its fall schedule with an array of existing foreign shows, it is still airing new episodes of its version of “Whose Line Is It Anyway?,” which begins its 12th season in November.NBC is spreading out the reruns of the “Law & Order” and “Chicago” franchises, its reliance on the Dick Wolf universe a core programming strategy for much of the past three decades. ABC will keep “America’s Funniest Home Videos” alive until the sun eats the earth. Fox’s animated comedies are shelf stable for the time being.Even most of the new fare colors comfortably inside the lines. ABC’s “Golden Bachelor” is “The Bachelor” with a 71-year-old widower at its center. NBC has two scripted dramas: “The Irrational” and “Found,” each a spin on the crime procedural, lest any American go more than a few minutes without seeing someone ducking under yellow crime-scene tape. Fox has a new cartoon from Dan Harmon (“Krapopolis”), his third current animated series. CBS is airing the original British version of “Ghosts” as a companion to reruns of its American version — an inspired choice in its way, but also a simple one, given the adaptation’s success.Otherwise, our newcomers include the already mentioned “Buddy Games,” hosted and executive produced by Josh Duhamel, who previously made two movies based on the same concept, and two CBS game shows: “Lotería Loca,” hosted by Jaime Camil, a TV version of the bingo-style game lotería; and “Raid the Cage,” an adaptation of an Israeli show that involves people grabbing prizes out of a cage. Lastly, there is Fox’s “Snake Oil,” a hybrid of “Shark Tank” and “Bullsh*t,” hosted by David Spade.From left, Charlotte Ritchie, Katy Wix and Jim Howick in the original British “Ghosts,” which CBS will run alongside reruns of its own version.Monumental Television, via CBSTo be fair, the networks have been counted out many times before, and shows like ABC’s “Abbott Elementary,” which scored eight Emmy nominations in July, and “Ghosts” demonstrate that there is still plenty of fun and specialness to be had in a broadcast format. Those and other sitcoms and procedurals could be back with new episodes in the new year. (Or perhaps even earlier, if the strikes somehow get resolved soon.) But such sparks are rare.Way back in the early 2000s, premium cable shows began to mostly outshine network ones and plenty of streaming series have since done the same — winning awards, amassing cachet, draining our wallets. Fair enough! After a while, it seemed like the networks were barely putting up a fight; cop shows and singing competitions as far as the eye can see, plus “Grey’s Anatomy” and “The Simpsons.”But now the new flashy ride at the fair is not a pricier, fancier platform; it’s free, ad-supported streaming television. The increasing popularity of these platforms, like the Roku Channel, Tubi, Pluto and Amazon’s Freevee, suggests that viewers want to recreate the basic-cable experience of yesteryear with marathons of classics, but they also want fun and interesting original shows (Freevee’s “Jury Duty” got four Emmy nominations this year, including for best comedy) and are happy to tolerate ads. That’s a network television audience.That also means networks could occupy a different space in the public imagination — the main floor isn’t the penthouse, but hey, it’s not the garden unit or the storage basement either. Mass-appeal comedies and long-season dramas still have value in the streaming era, perhaps more now than ever before as a way to lure parents and children away from their individual screens.Maybe a fall of game shows will eventually alienate viewers and consequently, convince program executives of the worth of actual creativity. Maybe it will lead to more adventurous attitudes in Hollywood when the strikes eventually end. Maybe the next time the networks have to put things on hold, we will actually feel the loss. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Minx’ and ‘Office Race’

    The cheeky Starz show wraps up its second season, and Comedy Central premieres an original film.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, Sept. 4-10. Details and times are subject to change.MondayOFFICE RACE (2023) 8 p.m. on Comedy Central. This original movie from Comedy Central stars Beck Bennett as Pat, a lazy office worker, and Joel McHale as Spencer, his annoying boss. Wanting nothing more than to one-up his boss, who is also fitness obsessed, Pat commits to running a marathon with plans to defeat him. Alyson Hannigan, Kelsey Grammer and J.B. Smoove round out the cast.LITTLE RICHARD: I AM EVERYTHING 9 p.m. on CNN. After its world premiere in January at Sundance, this documentary about Little Richard is coming to small screens for the first time. Directed by Lisa Cortés, the film walks viewers through the rock ’n’ roll pioneer’s complicated personal and professional legacy. John Waters, Billy Porter, Mick Jagger and others help revisit and contextualize his life and his impact.TuesdayDetroit Lions running back Jermar Jefferson.Paul Sancya/Associated PressINSIDE THE NFL: 2023 SEASON PREVIEW 8 p.m. on The CW. The official N.F.L. season is starting on Sept. 7 (after three weeks of preseason games) with a game between the Detroit Lions and the Kansas City Chiefs. And as the season begins, so does this long-running companion show, now on the CW. Hosting this year is Ryan Clark, who’s joined by a panel of former players: Jay Cutler, Chad Johnson, Chris Long and Channing Crowder. The show also features previously unaired highlights and mic’d up commentary from N.F.L. players during games.WednesdayCRIME SCENE CONFIDENTIAL 9 p.m. on ID. Season 2 of the series returns for those fascinated by true crime: In the first episode, the crime scene investigation expert Alina Burroughs focuses on the 1988 murder of Margie Coffey, a young single mother in Ohio. A local police lieutenant was originally convicted in the case and served time in prison. But with advances in DNA and forensic technology, looking back at old cases can provide new information.EVOLUTION EARTH 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). As our planet rapidly changes, animals have had to keep pace and adjust their behavior to survive the ever changing environment. This series, over five episodes, explores areas all over the world (urban, rural, remote), checking in with the animals to see what adjustments they have had to make.ThursdayFrom left: Steven Kolb, Elaine Welteroth, Nina Garcia, Brandon Maxwell and Law Roach on “Project Runway.”Zach Dilgard/BravoPROJECT RUNWAY 9 p.m. on Bravo. The 20th season of this long-running show, and an All-Star season at that, is coming to a close. After many challenges, including creating looks out of toys from F.A.O. Schwarz, designing uniforms for fan-favorite cast members from “Below Deck” and the first ever “free” episode, where contestants could design whatever they wanted, only one person can be crowned winner.FridayMINX 9 p.m. on Starz. Though this series was originally axed by HBO Max before being brought back to life by Starz, it will successfully complete its second season this week. Originally centered on the creation of the first erotic magazine for women in the 1970s, the show’s second installment digs deeper into the lives and experiences of its characters, including Tina (Idara Victor) and Richie (Oscar Montoya), who have gotten closer as Joyce (Ophelia Lovibond) and Doug (Jake Johnson) drift further apart.SaturdayIMITATION OF LIFE (1934) 10 p.m. on TCM. This original film version of Fannie Hurst’s 1933 novel follows the widow Bea Pullman (Claudette Colbert) and her housekeeper, Delilah Johnson (Louise Beavers), who decide to start a business together in Atlantic City after Delilah shares her pancake recipe with Bea. The critic Andre Sennwald wrote in his November 1934 review for The New York Times, “On the whole the audience seemed to find it a gripping and powerful if slightly diffuse drama which discussed the mother love question, the race question, the business woman question, the mother and daughter question and the love renunciation question.”SundayTHE MASKED SINGER 8 p.m. on Fox. The goofy competition show, where celebrities don a full-body costume to sing and have judges guess who they are, is back for its 10th season. Nick Cannon is back to host, and the judges Ken Jeong, Nicole Scherzinger, Jenny McCarthy-Wahlberg and Robin Thicke are also returning. This special premiere will include performances from some of the show’s alumni as we gear up to guess who Donut, Anteater, Hawk, Hibiscus and S’More are.Norman Reedus in “The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon.”Emmanuel Guimier/AmcTHE WALKING DEAD: DARYL DIXON 9 p.m. on AMC. The last time we saw Daryl Dixon, he was riding away on his bike at the end of “The Walking Dead.” This series starts as he washes up in France and involves himself in an autocratic movement in Paris.DREAMING WHILST BLACK 10 p.m. on Showtime. Originally a BBC and A24 production, this British comedy follows Kwabena (Adjani Salmon), who decides to leave his soul-crushing, dead-end office job to work toward his dream of being a filmmaker. Along the way he has to deal with the financial risk and must manage his love life, all while navigating the racism, microaggressions and elitism. More

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    Lea Michele Ends ‘Funny Girl’ Run on Broadway

    The Broadway revival saw an immediate change in its fortunes when the actress stepped into the production last September.“That was my dream come true,” Lea Michele gushed from the stage on Sunday after her final performance in “Funny Girl,” the Broadway revival that the actress breathed new life into when its future looked grim one year ago.Michele’s sudden addition to the production, which closed with its star’s exit, stretched its run to nearly 600 performances and allowed it to recoup its capitalization costs — far from a guarantee on Broadway. At Sunday’s matinee, the actress basked in the show’s success, and received seven standing ovations, including for the insistent barn burner “Don’t Rain on My Parade” and the reflective ballad “People.”“I was truly given the greatest gift that surpassed this dream and that was the unconditional true love and support from this cast, who has worked so, so, so hard,” Michele added. “I was embraced with open arms the minute I came in.”Just as Michele reversed the show’s fortunes, “Funny Girl” appeared to have reversed hers. Three years ago, Michele’s celebrity had been clouded by a wave of criticism over bullying behavior and a prima donna attitude. Since she stepped in as the show’s lead, Michele has reassumed the role of a celebrated Broadway star, announcing Tony nominees, performing on late-night shows and booking a solo concert this fall at Carnegie Hall.At her final show at the August Wilson Theater, Michele gave the audience an extra song: “My Man,” which includes lyrics from an original performed by Fanny Brice, the pioneering Jewish entertainer whose life is the basis for the musical.Although the song was not part of the score in either Broadway production, the show’s original star, Barbra Streisand, sang it at the end of her final performance in 1965 and then in the 1968 film adaptation.Michele has said that the song has been an important one to her since she sang it on the television series “Glee.” A belter about devotion to a man despite him being a constant disappointment, “My Man” was dedicated in the series to a character played by Cory Monteith, whom Michele dated both on TV and in real life. Monteith, who had struggled with substance abuse, died of a combination of heroin and alcohol in 2013.“The whole thing with life imitating art imitating life really gets me,” said Richard Gruber, who saw Michele in “Funny Girl” seven times and was seated in the theater’s second row at the performance on Sunday.Gruber, 69, who lives in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., flew in Sunday morning for the final performance and had a return flight Sunday night.“I just find her riveting,” Gruber said, clutching a white rose that the production gave audience members at the front of the house to toss at curtain call.The strength of a performance: Michele and “Funny Girl” cast members performed at the Tony Awards in June, though it wasn’t eligible for any awards.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOver the years, theater producers had trouble reviving “Funny Girl” because of its inextricable association with Streisand, who was 21 when the original production first opened on Broadway. (Streisand is not known to have attended any performances of the revival.)Streisand has long been an idol to Michele, who started as a child actress on Broadway, became a known entity as a lead in “Spring Awakening” and rose to become a household name in “Glee” as an uptight but talented high school glee club member. In a blending of TV and reality, Michele’s character, Rachel Berry, landed the role of Brice, and Michele performed several of the musical’s songs on the show.Michele had long been discussed as an option for a “Funny Girl” revival, but the show’s director, Michael Mayer, who has directed Michele in “Spring Awakening,” said last year that he had sensed that she was not ready to return to work after the birth of her child. The actress Beanie Feldstein was cast in the role, but she drew middling reviews when the show opened in spring 2022. It received one Tony nomination, for Jared Grimes, who portrays Brice’s dance coach and sidekick.When Feldstein bowed out of the show earlier than expected, Michele was tapped to replace her, fueling a flood of press attention, social media debate and, once she made her debut, rave reviews that bolstered ticket sales. A tour, featuring Katerina McCrimmon, starts on Saturday in Providence, R.I.With “Funny Girl,” Michele made her first appearance in a Broadway cast in 15 years. She has indicated that the next gap won’t be so significant. The actress told Variety that she has already booked her next job, hinting that it is a show she expects people will recognize, but that is very different from the one that drew her back to Broadway. More

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    Nathan Louis Jackson, Writer for the Theater and TV, Dies at 44

    He wrote plays that tackled big issues like the death penalty and gun violence. He also wrote for series including the superhero saga “Luke Cage.”Nathan Louis Jackson, an acclaimed playwright who grappled with serious issues like the death penalty, homophobia and gun violence — and was also known for his work on television shows like “Luke Cage,” a Netflix series about a Black superhero — died on Aug. 22 at his home in Lenexa, Kan., a suburb of Kansas City. He was 44.His wife, Megan Mascorro-Jackson, confirmed the death. She said that she did not know the cause, but that Mr. Jackson had had cardiac problems over the past few years, including an aortic dissection and an aortic aneurysm.Mr. Jackson was still attending the Juilliard School when his play “Broke-ology,” premiered in 2008 at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts. The story of a Black family in a poor neighborhood of Kansas City, Kan., where Mr. Jackson grew up, it focuses on the confrontation between two brothers over the care of their father, William (played by Wendell Pierce), who has a debilitating case of multiple sclerosis — a disease that Mr. Jackson’s father, who died in 2001, also had.Reviewing the play in The Boston Globe, Louise Kennedy wrote that “what makes Jackson’s writing feel true and fresh — aside from its great humor”— was the way he portrayed the brothers. Malcolm, she noted, “isn’t just a selfish striver,” nor is Ennis “just a resigned martyr” — and William “isn’t just a passive victim.”Crystal A. Dickinson and Wendell Pierce in “Broke-ology,” which one critic called “a very promising debut in the big time for a playwright with a rare quality: heart.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA year later, after Mr. Jackson received his artist diploma in playwriting from Juilliard, “Broke-ology” opened at the Off Broadway Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center.“‘Broke-ology’ is a decidedly imperfect work,” Robert Feldberg wrote in The Record of Hackensack, N.J., “but it’s a very promising debut in the big time for a playwright with a rare quality: heart.”Mr. Jackson’s next play, “When I Come to Die,” explored the emotional turmoil of a death row inmate whose execution goes awry — the drug cocktail that was supposed to kill him managed only to stop his heart temporarily — forcing him to wonder what to do with an unexpected extension of his life, and if he will face another execution.“I started thinking about people in weird time positions, and these cats know exactly how much time they have left on this earth,” he said of death row inmates in an interview with The New York Times in 2011, when the play was running Off Broadway at the Duke Theater, a production of Lincoln Center Theater’s program for emerging playwrights. “But what happens if you get more of it?”Although Mr. Jackson established an early place for his work in New York City, he remained close to his Midwestern roots. In addition to living in Kansas, he was the playwright in residence at the Kansas City Repertory Theater, in Missouri, from 2013 to 2019.From left, Michael Balderrama, Chris Chalk and Neal Huff as Adrian Crouse in Mr. Jackson’s play ‘When I Come to Die.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat theater staged productions of “When I Come to Die” and “Broke-ology” and the world premieres of his “Sticky Traps,” about a woman’s response to protests by a homophobic preacher at the funeral of her gay son, who had killed himself, and “Brother Toad,” about the reactions in the Kansas City community to the shooting of two Black teenagers.“The beautiful thing about his writing is that he never told the audience what to think,” Angela Gieras, the executive director of the Kansas City Rep, said in a phone interview. “He’d share a story that was compelling and truthful and let the people have their own conversations.”Nathan Louis Jackson was born on Dec. 4, 1978, in Lawrence, Kan. His father, Cary, was a heating and cooling service technician. His mother, Bessie (Brownlee) Jackson, was a preschool teacher.Nathan said that he was not a good student in high school, and that he studied as little as he could.“Ironically, I failed English,” he told Informed Decisions, a Kansas State University blog, in 2017. “I didn’t want to read Shakespeare.”He graduated from Kansas City Kansas Community College with an associate degree in 1999. At Kansas State, where he majored in theater, he made his first attempt at playwriting by creating monologues for forensics competitions.“I’m there in the Midwest, and there ain’t no other Black folks doing this, so I’d just end up doing August Wilson every time,” he told The Times. “I wanted to do a piece that speaks for me, so I said, ‘I’ll just write my own stuff.’”Mr. Jackson wrote two plays in college that were recognized after his graduation by the Kennedy Center. He won the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award twice, for “The Last Black Play” and “The Mancherios,” which he adapted into “Broke-ology,” and the Mark Twain Comedy Playwriting Award, also for “The Last Black Play.”After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 2003, Mr. Jackson acted in a children’s theater, took graduate courses in environmental science and writing, and worked as the manager of a barbecue restaurant.He moved to New York City to attend Juilliard in 2007. He and his wife lived in a diverse neighborhood there, and he remembered seeing people from all over the world on the subway.But at the theater, “I did not see that,” he said in an interview with KCUR-FM, a public radio station in Kansas City, Mo., in 2016, “What I saw was predominantly white, older, and with a little money in their pockets.”He strove to write plays featuring “people marginalized by poverty, incarceration or gun violence,” Ms. Mascarro-Jackson said in a phone interview.“Lots of times they were Black characters,” she added, “because that’s what he knew.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Jackson is survived by his mother; a daughter, Amaya; a son, Savion; a sister, Ebony Maddox; and a brother, Wardell.Over the last decade, while continuing to work in the theater, Mr. Jackson also wrote episodes of several TV series, including “13 Reasons Why,” “Resurrection,” “S.W.A.T.,” “Southland,” Shameless” and “Luke Cage,” for which he was also an executive story editor. He spent a lot of time in Los Angeles, where he suffered the aortic dissection in 2019.“The series makes a bigger, grander statement about African American men and how we view them,” he told The Kansas City Star in 2016, referring to “Luke Cage,” a Marvel show whose title character is a former convict (played by Mike Colter) with superhuman strength and unbreakable skin who solves crimes in Harlem.He added: “It is undoubtedly a Black show. But at the same time, it’s just a superhero show. We deal with something all the other superheroes deal with. We just do it from a different standpoint.” More

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    Leaping ‘Into the Next Unknown’: Robert Lyons on the End of New Ohio Theater

    The handwriting on the company’s wall, in chalk, was traced by a closing night crowd sharing memories of more than 30 years of landmarks and larks.The last performance of the last show at the 74-seat New Ohio Theater, on Christopher Street in Manhattan’s West Village, was “Ultra Left Violence,” a poetical, political, work-in-progress play by the company’s artistic director, Robert Lyons. Wrapping up the New Ohio’s final Ice Factory festival on Aug. 12, it was thrillingly, even touchingly, weird.Mid-show, members of the convivial audience were given chalk — a motif in the production design — to cover the black-painted walls with their memories of the New Ohio and its predecessor, the Ohio Theater, on Wooster Street in SoHo. After the spectators returned to their seats, the performance continued with the frenzied, prolonged smashing of a watermelon, which sent chunks and juice flying. (Tarps and rain ponchos were provided.)Experimental work was the soul of the New Ohio, a producer and presenter that closed for good on Aug. 31. The publicity line has been that the shutdown is the end of 30 years, but that’s a give-or-take number. It rounds up the life span of Ice Factory, the festival of new works that Lyons founded in 1994, and rounds down his tenure, which started at the Ohio Theater in 1988, when the owner of that space, Bill Hahn, hired Lyons, then 28, to run it. He served as the building’s super, too, and got a rent-free loft in exchange.“My wife says it wasn’t a job, it was a lifestyle choice,” Lyons said. “We lived upstairs. My daughter was raised there.”In 2011, after the Wooster Street building was sold, the Ohio was reincarnated as the New Ohio. Cumulatively, the two stages saw a jaw-dropping profusion of downtown artists (Taylor Mac, Mimi Lien, Knud Adams, Sam Gold, Lee Sunday Evans, James Ortiz) and companies (the Mad Ones, Half Straddle, Target Margin, New Georges, Ma-Yi Theater Company, Rude Mechanicals, Clubbed Thumb, Ping Chong and Company, Elevator Repair Service, Vampire Cowboys, the Talking Band).The shows Lyons remembers most fondly include “Surrender,” by International WOW; “Boozy,” from Alex Timbers; and “Particularly in the Heartland,” by Rachel Chavkin and the TEAM. Back in 1988, Lyons recalled, Anne Bogart’s “No Plays No Poetry” put the Ohio Theater on the map.As for the rented space that was home to the New Ohio, it will remain a theater, renamed 154 and run by the nonprofit ChaShaMa. In the coming season, 154 will host the company Out of the Box Theatrics, which focuses on marginalized communities.Three days after the final performance of “Ultra Left Violence,” Lyons arranged two chairs on the New Ohio’s immaculate empty stage and sat down for an interview. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.What’s your own favorite memory of those 30 years?Definitely one of them was when we did the Vaclav Havel festival, and he came to the [Ohio Theater] two or three nights in a row. Edward Einhorn did the festival. I directed one of the shows, and Havel came and saw it. Then he just hung out, and I bought him a beer at the concessions, and he was telling me about this play he was working on.That seems to epitomize what theater is to you: art and politics and hanging out.Exactly right, yeah. The thing I love the most about these 30 years is the community of people that I’ve got to know and bond with.What grabbed you about the old Wooster Street space?It was spectacular. It was 5,000 square feet of raw space with the old creaky floors, the columns, the barn doors that opened out onto the street. It was falling down around us. It had no air conditioning. It was famously hot during the summer, and it didn’t matter. People were willing to suffer for their art — to consume it and to perform it. It was a different time. I don’t think you could get away with that now.The other night here, what were you thinking as you watched the final show?It was very emotional, of course. I was trying to hold it together. [laughs] But I was just surrounded by so many of my friends. So it was a very warm, safe room to be in. It was a crazy show, and I was very happy to finish on that note. Like, let’s just do a bonkers intellectual circus, and see if it works.Why go out with a work in progress?I was consciously trying to make a statement to myself and maybe to everybody that I’m going to continue to do theater past this date. I’m going to stop running a theater, but I’m not done making theater. Now we’re spring-boarding into the next unknown.I’ve been getting a very steady flow of people telling me how sorry they are that we’re closing. But it was the right time. I’m 64, you know. For me, it’s not so much of a sad thing, but —Is it really not a sad thing?Talk to me in a month. [laughs] I’m still sitting here. I’ve had a key to a theater for 35 years in New York. I could always open up the door to a theater and go in. And Sept. 1, I won’t. The reality of that is going to hit.But it’s the right time?I was kind of done with the day to day of keeping a machine going. There was a point where I said, OK, we have the funding to get through this year. Then next year is a complete catastrophe. Because that’s where the field is, and all that PPP money and Covid money is ending. I would rather go out and [be able to] meet all my obligations and enjoy it instead of do one more year and be chasing money the whole time and worrying about “Can I keep it open?” and then maybe closing in the middle of the season.Your audience stuck around, but the funding got scarcer and —And the cost of making the work and the cost of staffing. That’s the combination.Is there still room for the truly experimental?Here [a downtown producer and presenter] is very good at it. Their work is very strange. They’re also paying people living wages. But I do think it’s harder. We’re always on the margin of a marginal form. I don’t know if we’ve ever been more than that, really.But you seed the wider theater.I agree. This is where everyone gets their chops. This is where everybody learns what they have to say and how to say it and what their aesthetic is. That translates throughout the regional theater system and uptown in the larger spaces. All of those have gotten more adventurous over the 30 years, because people are bringing their aesthetic — maybe not as wild, but still carrying it with them.In your final show, so much was drawn and written in chalk, meant to be wiped away — ephemeral, like theater.It’s very fleeting. Part of the magic of it is you do all the labor that goes into making a piece — the design team, the cast, the stage management team, the writers. Putting all that effort and creativity and thought and commitment into this, and we did it for four performances. You just think, who does that? And it’s theater people. That’s who.What makes it worth it?What do I want the fabric of my life to be? If it’s playing with other people as though it’s the most serious, important thing in the world, that’s a pretty good way to spend your time. More