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    Lauren Boebert Apologizes for Vaping in a Denver Theater

    The Colorado congresswoman previously denied vaping during the performance, but could be seen doing so on surveillance video.Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado was kicked out of a performance of the musical “Beetlejuice” in Denver after causing a disturbance.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesRepresentative Lauren Boebert, a hard-right Republican rabble-rouser from Colorado, apologized on Friday night for her behavior at a recent performance of the family-friendly musical “Beetlejuice” in Denver, after surveillance video revealed her vaping and behaving disruptively in the theater.Ms. Boebert, 36, previously denied reports that she had been vaping. A pregnant woman seated behind her asked her to stop before she was ejected for “causing a disturbance” at the show, according to The Denver Post.“The past few days have been difficult and humbling, and I’m truly sorry for the unwanted attention my Sunday evening in Denver has brought to the community,” Ms. Boebert said in a statement Friday night. “While none of my actions or words as a private citizen that night were intended to be malicious or meant to cause harm, the reality is they did and I regret that.”Ms. Boebert, who can be seen on the video touching and carrying on with her date while sitting in the middle of a crowded theater, blamed what she called her “public and difficult divorce” for her behavior and said, “I simply fell short of my values on Sunday.”Ms. Boebert, a mother of four boys who likes to show off pictures of her new grandchild to colleagues in Congress, said she “genuinely did not recall vaping that evening” when she told her campaign to issue a statement denying she had done so. She said she would have to work hard to earn back trust from voters in her district.It may be a heavy lift for Ms. Boebert, who won re-election in 2022 by just 546 votes.If her too-close-for-comfort re-election campaign was a message that Colorado voters didn’t like her brand of disruptive politics, she hasn’t appeared to have received it. Since January, she has often acted in ways many Republicans view as detrimental to keeping control of the House in 2024 and to her keeping her seat.In June, Ms. Boebert tried to force a vote on articles of impeachment against President Biden, claiming his immigration policies constituted high crimes and misdemeanors. Some of her colleagues called the move “crazy,” and it was eventually shunted off to committees for further study.Ms. Boebert distinguished herself during the fraught speaker’s race in January as one of the most committed holdouts against Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, milking the moment for maximum Fox News exposure. In the House, she has cultivated an abrasive public persona, sometimes heckling her Democratic colleagues in the halls of the Capitol and largely ignoring reporters’ questions, except to loudly proclaim at times, “I love President Trump!”The behavior has also earned a cult following on the right. Ms. Boebert, who often wears five-inch Lucite heels and skintight dresses, has a national base of fans who enjoy her disruptive antics and extreme rhetoric.On the House floor, Ms. Boebert has railed against drag performances for children and claimed the left was “grooming” children by exposing them to “obscene content.” More

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    How Shane Gillis Both Plays to and Mocks Red Staters

    The comic’s savvy approach fits into the evolving meaning of conservatism and has resulted in hugely popular stand-up specials, like “Beautiful Dogs” on Netflix.At the start of his new special “Beautiful Dogs,” Shane Gillis, a bulky comic with the mustache of a Staten Island cop, announces that America is the best country in the world and that all the others suck. His crowd roars. Then he says he’s only been to three other countries and when he boasts about his home abroad, they ask about mass shootings.“There’s really not a good comeback,” he says, shifting from swaggering to struggling, then exclaims, using a profanity: “What, are we going to give up our guns like a bunch of gay guys?” His tone flattens into resignation: “No, we’re just going to have shootings all the time.”This opening bit, which celebrates and satirizes rah-rah American jingoism in the style of “South Park,” encapsulates the Shane Gillis experience. It’s got the amiable idiot swagger, plus the trolling offensive spin. Then there’s the satirical overlay that subverts the perspective. It’s dumb and smart, cocky and self-mocking, homophobic but relentlessly self-aware.Since getting fired from “Saturday Night Live” in 2019 after videos surfaced of him using Asian and gay slurs on a podcast, Gillis has built perhaps one of the fastest growing comedy careers in America. His debut special, released on YouTube in 2021, racked up a staggering 14 million views, and he’s the most popular podcaster on Patreon with more than 71,000 paying listeners. “Beautiful Dogs,” his second special, has been lodged in Netflix’s Top 10 most popular shows since the streamer released it on Sept. 5. He regularly sells out theaters. Don’t be surprised if he becomes an arena act.Getting fired paid off. It made Gillis a martyr to some, and he was savvy enough to embrace those fans without tediously obsessing over cancel culture. He has said he understood the criticism of his comments, offered a halfhearted apology, then doubled down on lumbering through the china shop of cultural sensitivities. A comic who tells the crowd he has no female friends isn’t looking to appeal to everyone.There’s an element of shock jock to his persona. Onstage, his bits are more controlled and agile than they seem, and he’s skilled at winning fans in unexpected places. Speaking in an admiring 2022 New Yorker profile of Gillis, the comic Jerrod Carmichael, who came out as gay in his last special, called him one of the few truly funny comics working today. “His material still feels dangerous,” he said.Gillis, a 35-year-old former football player from central Pennsylvania, often holds the microphone with two hands, more like a singer than a stand-up. His attitude is less telling you the truth about the world than stumbling through the mess of his thought process. His appearance telegraphs rumpled ordinary guy, not polished entertainer. And he speaks to crowds as if he were messing around with friends. Few comics do more with the word “dude.”To fully understand his success, you must use a word taboo in certain comedy circles: conservative. Many comics who rail against cancel culture tend to flinch at that one. Call Joe Rogan one and you will hear umbrage and a list of his liberal policy positions. And look, no one likes to be pigeonholed. But there is a political valence to Gillis’s comedy and the way it fits into the evolving meaning of what it is to be right wing.Being conservative in the age of Trump is not as much about opinions on free markets or foreign policy anymore; now it can mean projecting a certain attitude, alternatively nostalgic and contemptuous, fixated on the supposed oppressiveness of liberal norms and bluntly giddy about transgressing them.That posture sits comfortably in the comedy scene. It’s no accident that two prime-time hosts on Fox (Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld) cut their teeth doing comedy, of sorts. Part of the reason Gillis is such a phenomenon is clearly political. (The title of the special is a Trump quote.)Right-wing media adores him. The Spectator called his success a major turning point in the resurgence of comedy. But unlike comics who are primarily animated by caricaturing and picking apart the left, Gillis lands a broader crowd by focusing on an affectionately mocking insider perspective of the half of the country that voted for Trump (which isn’t to say he did, though there’s no question he finds the politician hilarious).There are MAGA-like identity politics at the center of some of his bits, as when he describes the story of the first baseball game played by Jackie Robinson not as a civil rights landmark but as the moment when white people stopped being cool. “I know what I look like,” he says. “I got the body type of the guy who says, Let’s look at the rest of the body cam footage before jumping to any conclusions.”His last special lovingly poked fun at his “Fox News dad,” who goes to bed angry every night. In “Beautiful Dogs,” he describes himself as a bit of a history buff, which he calls a sign of “early onset Republican.” He levels with his audience: “If you’re a white dude in your 20s and 30s and can’t stop reading about World War II, it’s coming, brother.”The assumptions here are that being a Republican makes you a beleaguered outsider. He compares the pull of it to that of a person turning into a werewolf. “I’m not a Republican, but I can feel it,” he says. “It grows.”Gillis, who lives in New York, regularly works clubs here, and there’s a way that his comedy is pitched as an explanation of a red state sensibility for a blue state audience. Some of this can feel forced and far below his intelligence, tipping over into Larry the Cable Guy territory.He uses a hack sexist line, only to draw attention to how bad it is. His punchlines about porn cover well-trod ground, and his contrarian joke about terrorists is similar to the one that got Bill Maher fired from his ABC show after Sept. 11. Gillis can get stuck in his own bubble, drawing some familiar or easy laughs. His new special has more sex jokes than his last, some about his own grossness (“coughing during sex is funny”) and others about the hopelessness of being competitive with the Navy SEAL who previously dated his girlfriend.His most ambitious bit in the new hour involves a trip to George Washington’s Mount Vernon during the racial upheaval of 2020. He describes the absurdity of the historical re-enactors, but also the gruesome detail of the slave quarters, mapping how he vacillated between hero worship of our first president and denunciation of our country’s original sin.Not unlike his opening bit, Gillis moves back and forth on his feelings about our country through the narrative of Washington, his military exploits, his lore. “I was trying to be cool and liberal and hate him,” he says. “Couldn’t do it.”Interestingly, he includes a joke that is identical to one John Oliver recently told mocking the idea that we are more divided than ever by bringing up the Civil War. Of course, in the 19th century, we couldn’t express our dislike for one another as easily. But what hasn’t changed is that people remain curious about those different from them, even those they dislike or hate. It may be human nature or strategy. (Know thine enemy.)Partly people watch Shane Gillis for the same reason some liberals binge Fox News — to see how the other half thinks. More

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    Melissa Etheridge Is Ready to Rewatch ‘Barbie’

    The singer, who brings her autobiographical show to Broadway this month, on her longtime love for the Kansas City Chiefs and what she’s looking forward to in New York.Melissa Etheridge has lived a lot of life. So much so that the early version of her autobiographical show was four or five hours long.“I had to snip out a lot of the story lines,” Etheridge, 62, said in a phone interview from her home in Los Angeles. “And then even more so for Broadway. It was taking out some of my really early childhood stuff, tightening up some of the stories.”But there was one moment in the show, “Melissa Etheridge: My Window” — which will have its Broadway opening on Sept. 28 after a well-reviewed run at New World Stages last year — that she knew she couldn’t cut, even though it’s the toughest part to get through: Her son’s death at 21 from a drug overdose.“I’m still working through it,” the Grammy-winning singer and songwriter said of losing her son, Beckett Cypher. “But that’s how I knew I had to wrap it up — show people what I’ve learned about myself, and being a mother, and about addiction and not taking guilt on.”Before relocating to New York to begin “My Window” rehearsals, Etheridge shared her cultural essentials, including the album that made her a fan of Taylor Swift and her love for the Kansas City Chiefs. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Lululemon PantsI was a jeans girl, and then the pandemic hit, and I became a sweatpants girl. Now my daughter and my wife have got me hooked on Lululemon. I found this pair of pants — they’re sweatpants, but they’re really thin, but not like yoga pants that are like “Oh, here’s my ass” — and I was like, “These are fantastic.” Once you get into your 50s, it’s all about comfort.2Kansas City ChiefsI was born and raised in Leavenworth, Kan. I was 8 when we won the Super Bowl in 1970 and have been a fan ever since. I’m beyond crazy about the Chiefs. My house is kind of a Chiefs shrine — I have a pool table with the team logo on it and a Chiefs guitar strap.3XeriscapingWhen we had our huge drought in Southern California, I looked at my big, beautiful yard with all this grass and I’m like, “Why do I have big, thick grass in a desert? And why am I watering it constantly?” So I turned to xeriscape, which is going back to native, drought-tolerant plants.4Quinton HypertonicI’m always looking for ways to get enough electrolytes and magnesium. My tour manager, who’s even more of a health nut than I am, said “These are great, try this.” Plus, it makes my water taste really soft.5Esther HicksWhen I went through cancer 19 years ago, it was a big wake-up call about health and life. I came across her early law of attraction stuff — the idea that we’re creating our reality and that our joy and our happiness creates more joy and happiness — and it really spoke to me. It makes more sense than any religion.6My Gibson Chuck Berry 1970s ES-355 Replica Murphy Lab GuitarI recently went down to Nashville with my band and my crew, and we all went to the Gibson Garage. They took me back into the vault, which dazzled me. They said, “Here, you can borrow this guitar for your tour,” and I started playing it and was like, “OMG, this is the greatest thing! I have to have it.” I think I’ll use it in the last few numbers of the show.7Smoking With Strangers OutdoorsI love that cannabis is finally legal in New York City. The last time I was there over the summer, looking for a place to smoke, I saw some women sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park smoking, and I asked, “Do we just sit and smoke now?” And she was like, “Yeah, it’s great.”8Taylor SwiftIt was my daughter who got me hooked — I used to drive her up to boarding school, and we’d listen to the whole “1989” album. Then I went to a show in Chicago with her in June, and I looked around at the audience and said, “This is amazing.”9Springbok PuzzlesI’m a huge puzzler. It started 20 years ago when I was undergoing chemotherapy and didn’t have the energy to do anything else. It helps keep my mind sharp and relaxed. I love Springbok puzzles not only because they’re from my home in Kansas City, but because the pieces are unique — I don’t like the puzzles where all the pieces look the same — and the quality is fantastic.10Dine-In Movie TheatersI love this new trend of really fancy theaters. Here in Westlake we have one called Cinépolis where they bring you dinner in the theater — and this is actual real food; you can get a hummus platter or a nice salad. I saw “Barbie” on the road recently at a dine-in theater in Lexington, Ky. I loved it! It made me laugh so hard. I’m ready to see it again. More

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    Michael McGrath, Tony Winner and ‘Spamalot’ Veteran, Dies at 65

    He clanged coconuts in the Monty Python stage musical in 2005; seven years later, he won a Tony for “Nice Work if You Can Get It.”Michael McGrath, who won a Tony Award in 2012 for his work in the musical “Nice Work if You Can Get It” and was a regular on Broadway, Off Broadway and regional stages, known especially for comedic roles and for his ability to conjure the likes of Groucho Marx, George M. Cohan and Jackie Gleason, died on Thursday at his home in Bloomfield, N.J. He was 65.His family announced the death through the publicist Lisa Goldberg. No cause was provided.Mr. McGrath was one of those stage actors who might rarely be recognized on the street yet worked steadily for decades, drawing good notices throughout. He did much of his early work at Theater by the Sea in Matunuck, R.I., where he appeared regularly from 1977 to 1991, including in the title role of a 1989 production of “George M!,” the musical about Cohan, the famed song-and-dance man.“Exuding confidence and manic energy,” Michael Burlingame wrote in a review in The Day of New London, Conn., “McGrath struts and crows like a bantam rooster.”By the late 1980s he was appearing in New York shows, including “Forbidden Christmas,” a 1991 holiday edition of the long-running parody revue “Forbidden Broadway”; in one sketch he was Luciano Pavarotti, “wearing,” as Mel Gussow wrote in a review in The New York Times, “a white shirt as big as a bedsheet.”A year later he made his Broadway debut in the ensemble of “My Favorite Year,” a backstage musical based on the 1982 movie about the golden age of television. That show closed after a month, but it was the start of regular Broadway work for Mr. McGrath — sometimes as an understudy or standby player, sometimes in featured roles.Mr. McGrath, left, as Patsy and Tim Curry as King Arthur in the 2005 Broadway musical “Spamalot.” Mr. McGrath played three roles and earned a Tony nomination.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHe played three different parts in “Monty Python’s Spamalot,” the hit 2005 musical based on “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” including Patsy, the servant who banged coconuts together to imitate the sound of a galloping horse. His performance earned him a Tony nomination for best featured actor in a musical.His Broadway run continued with “Is He Dead?” (2007), “Memphis” (2009) and “Born Yesterday” (2011). Then, in 2012, came his Tony-winning turn in “Nice Work if You Can Get It,” a musical that showcased the songs of George and Ira Gershwin. Matthew Broderick and Kelli O’Hara got most of the attention in the lead roles, but it was Mr. McGrath (as a bootlegger) and Judy Kaye (as a temperance leader) who earned the show’s two Tonys, for best actor and actress in a featured role in a musical.Mr. McGrath with Judy Kaye in “Nice Work if You Can Get It,” for which they both won Tonys.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMore recently on Broadway, Mr. McGrath was in “She Loves Me” (2016) and “Tootsie” (2019), among other shows. In between Broadway roles, he worked Off Broadway and in regional houses. He also continued to perform in productions of “Forbidden Broadway” and, in 1996, a movie-themed offshoot, “Forbidden Hollywood,” in which he imitated both John Travolta’s character in “Pulp Fiction” and Tom Hanks’s Forrest Gump.That same year, he tapped his inner Groucho in “The Cocoanuts,” a revival of an ancient Marx Brothers show mounted at the American Jewish Theater in Manhattan. Mr. McGrath had always been known for doing a bit of ad-libbing from time to time. (“It’s gotten me in trouble with authors,” he acknowledged in a 1996 interview with The Times. “A lot of them don’t like you going off the script.”) But in “The Cocoanuts,” ad-libs, Groucho style, were expected.“There are a lot of guys who do better Grouchos,” Mr. McGrath told The Times, “but Groucho and I share the same sense of humor, so I find it very easy to ad-lib as him. I wouldn’t say my timing is as great, but we’re in the same ballpark.”He brought another famed figure back to life in 2017, when he played Ralph Kramden, Jackie Gleason’s role, in a musical version of “The Honeymooners” at Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey.If Mr. McGrath wasn’t an A-list star, he sometimes went on in place of one. On Broadway he understudied Martin Short twice, in “The Goodbye Girl” in 1993 and “Little Me” in 1998. A Times reporter was in the audience of “Little Me” in December 1998 when Mr. McGrath stepped in for Mr. Short, who had a cold. Many might have been disappointed at first not to be seeing Mr. Short, but by the show’s end, The Times reported, the theatergoers “gave Mr. McGrath the special ovation for people who leap into impossible situations full throttle and soar.”Mr. McGrath understudied Martin Short in the 1998 musical “Little Me.” One night when he stepped in for Mr. Short, The New York Times reported, the audience gave him “the special ovation for people who leap into impossible situations full throttle and soar.” Ruby Washington/The New York Times“They rose to their feet, screaming, ‘Bravo! Bravo!’”Michael McGrath was born on Sept. 25, 1957, in Worcester, Mass. After graduating from high school there, he studied briefly at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, but he left after three months to start his acting career.Among his fellow players in the “Forbidden Broadway” series was Toni Di Buono. In a 1988 version of the show, he parodied Joel Grey’s “Cabaret” character; she did the same for Patti LuPone, belting out “I Get a Kick Out of Me.” Ms. Di Buono and Mr. McGrath later married.She survives him, as does their daughter, Katie Claire McGrath.In a 2012 interview with The Cape Codder of Massachusetts, Mr. McGrath talked about Cookie, the character he played in his Tony-winning turn in “Nice Work if You Can Get It.”“There is a little bit of Gleason in everything I do,” he said. “For Cookie, I’ve also incorporated elements of Groucho Marx, Moe Howard of the Three Stooges, Skip Mahoney from the Bowery Boys, and even a little Bugs Bunny.” More

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    Drew Barrymore Defends Show Return Decision in Emotional Video

    Barrymore responded to continuing criticism after her decision to bring back her talk show amid the Hollywood writers’ strike.Drew Barrymore is not the only talk show host returning to air amid ongoing strikes by Hollywood writers and actors, but in the span of a week she has become perhaps the most high-profile target for criticism over the decision.On Friday, she doubled down, posting an emotional video on Instagram in which she apologized to striking writers, some of whom have picketed outside the studio where “The Drew Barrymore Show” resumed filming in New York City this week, and signaled that she had no intention of a reversal, at least for now.“My decision to go back to the show — I didn’t want to hide behind people, so I won’t,” Barrymore said in the video. “And I won’t polish this with bells and whistles and publicists and corporate rhetoric. I’ll just stand out there and accept and be responsible.”To begin filming the fourth season of her show amid the strike by the Writers Guild of America, the program has returned to production without its three unionized writers, and with a promise that the new episodes — the first of which is set to air on Monday — will not include written material that violates the rules of the strike. Other daytime talk shows with unionized writers on staff, including the “The View,” which began airing new episodes earlier this month, have taken a similar approach. “The Jennifer Hudson Show” and “The Talk” are among the shows that are also planning returns.A statement on Friday from CBS Media Ventures, which produces “The Drew Barrymore Show,” noted that although Barrymore is a member of SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union that is also on strike, she works with the talk show under a separate agreement called the Network Code, which makes it permissible for her to host the show amid the labor unrest. The company said that the show considered its staff and crew of more than 150 people when making the decision to resume production, and that the show will be “completely unscripted” until the end of the strike.“I wanted to do this because, as I said, this is bigger than me,” Barrymore said in her video, “and there are other people’s jobs on the line. And since launching live in a pandemic, I just wanted to make a show that was there for people in sensitive times.”She went on: “I weighed the scales and I thought, if we could go on during a global pandemic, and everything that the world has experienced through 2020, why would this sideline us?”Some of the criticism of Barrymore referenced her earlier decision to drop out as host of the MTV Movie and TV Awards in May, expressing solidarity with the striking writers.The actress’s apologetic, almost anguished explanation stood in contrast to that of Bill Maher, who announced this week that his weekly HBO show would return to the air, stating plainly, “It has been five months, and it is time to bring people back to work.”As backlash to Barrymore’s decision grew in recent days, the National Book Foundation dropped the actress as the host of its National Book Awards ceremony in November, after several high-profile writers were among the critics of her decision to return to air.“I want to just put one foot in front of the other,” Barrymore said in the video on Friday, “and make a show that’s there for people regardless of anything else that’s happening in the world.” More

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    Fall TV Quiz: Do You Like Game Shows?

    The ongoing strikes by actors and writers in Hollywood mean the broadcast networks have fewer new and returning scripted series than usual this fall. Good thing they have plenty of game shows and reality contests to plug the gaps and a seemingly bottomless appetite for more! Elsewhere there are delayed premieres and other adjustments but don’t worry, there will still be plenty of TV to watch.So what can you expect to see in prime time this fall? Take this quiz to find out. Even if you’ve never read a Hollywood trade publication, a little familiarity with TV’s recent past will serve you well. (Note: Given the ongoing negotiations and uncertainty, all schedule information here is even more subject to change than usual.) More

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    ‘Billions’ Season 7, Episode 6 Recap: From Russia With Love

    The insurrectionists at Prince Cap aren’t doing a great job of slowing Mike down. But Chuck might just have a new redheaded ace up his sleeve.Season 7, Episode 6: ‘The Man in the Olive Drab T-shirt’“The irresistible force meets the immovable object.” This quote should be familiar to Chuck Rhoades. As this week’s episode of “Billions” goes to great lengths to point out, Chuck is fan of professional wrestling. He would no doubt recall the wrestling commentator Gorilla Monsoon excitedly describing the clash between Hulk Hogan and his friend turned nemesis Andre the Giant at WrestleMania III with these exact words. Indeed, Chuck’s erstwhile ally, the Russian oligarch Grigor Andolov (John Malkovich), references the match by name during this very episode.But the sentiment should be a familiar one to Chuck as well. There he is at the beginning of this week’s episode, on a remote airstrip in Iceland, staring down his old nemesis, the fugitive billionaire Bobby Axelrod. Generally speaking, when the irresistible force meets the immovable object, a clash occurs. This time, however, the meeting is agreed upon in advance and pursued with a level of politeness, even honor, of which I doubted either man was capable.At any rate, by the time the closing credits roll, neither one has tried to body slam the other, figuratively or otherwise.That’s the best thing about Chuck and Bobby’s big reunion, actually: the lack of fireworks. Sure, their meeting is set against the spectacular, glowing green backdrop of the aurora borealis, but that’s as showy as the scene gets. This isn’t the Bride finally tracking down Bill, it’s two guys who dislike but respect each other, seeing if they can’t do a little “I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine” business. A fiery throw-down might have been satisfying on a lizard-brain level, but with few exceptions, these are not lizard-brained men.At any rate, Bobby has found himself with a Grigor Andolov problem. Despite Axe’s role in having Andolov expelled from the United States, the two have found themselves on the same end of an arms deal with Ukraine. That Andolov is acting against his own government, one not known to tolerate dissent, much less outright treason, weighs heavily on his mind. But so does the divorce proceeding brought against him in New York court.Unless Grigor can show up in person to contest the case, he tells Bobby, he’ll lose a fortune. And unless Bobby agrees to help him, Bobby will lose his life. So Axe swallows his pride and, using Wendy as a proxy, makes contact with Chuck, whom he knows has the legal know-how to allow a wanted man like Andolov back into the States. For his part, Chuck feels it’s a deal worth making if it puts Axe in his debt.Unfortunately, what’s good for Axe and Andolov is bad for, well, pretty much everyone else: Solicitor General Adam DiGiulio, Attorney General Dave Mahar of New York, Gov. Bob Sweeney of New York (Matt Servitto) and even the slimy ex-treasury secretary Todd Krakow (Danny Strong), who is using his hedge fund to bankroll Andolov’s ex. And it turns out that that’s not all he’s doing with Andolov’s ex.How best to placate all these political power players? How can Chuck make Andolov look like enough of a good guy to get through customs but enough of a bad guy to get a pop (that’s wrestling jargon for a positive reaction) from the Kremlin, which already suspects that he is playing for the other teamFor advice, Chuck turns to Paul Levesque, also known as Hunter Hearst Helmsley, best known as Triple H, the professional wrestler turned chief content officer and head of creative for the W.W.E. Hunter, as Chuck calls him, is known to fans for having a great mind for the business. Who better to coach the group on how they can all come out looking like winners — the kind of outcome the new, relatively enlightened Chuck Rhoades prefers at any rate?The answer turns out to be rather simple. Chuck gets Andolov into the country as an expert witness in a different case. He allows the menacing robber baron to threaten to throw Krakow off a rooftop unless he puts the kibosh on the divorce filing and stops shtupping Grigor’s ex-wife. Then Chuck makes a big show of arresting him, at which point Andolov makes an even bigger show of being the most comical pro-Russian “heel” (wrestling jargon for villain) since Nikolai Volkoff. The American politicians look good to their domestic audience, Andolov looks good to his, and the slimy Krakow survives to ooze another day. Everyone’s a winner!The same cannot be said for the participants in the Mike Prince story line. Like a trio of plotters straight out of Shakespeare, Wendy, Wags and Taylor are constantly kibitzing in hopes of taking their dreaded boss down before he can win the White House. In this episode, they adopt a two-pronged strategy. While Wags whispers in the ear of Kate Sacker, Mike’s formidable legal counsel, so that she’ll drop him for her own congressional run, Wendy orchestrates a disastrous quasi-focus group with Prince Cap employees, all of whom kiss Prince’s posterior when he’s in the room. (They describe him as an egomaniac who loves the smell of his own flatulence when he’s not.)The ploy is meant to shake the confidence of Prince, who loves himself and is convinced everyone else either feels the same way or simply needs to get to know him better. To learn that his biggest earners think he’s a narcissist with a God complex is a body blow to his self-esteem — potentially enough to persuade him to call off his presidential campaign.But Wendy and company didn’t count on Mike’s wife, Andy, nor on Kate’s master-of-the-universe father, Frank (Harry Lennix). Andy tells Mike that people love him not because he is inherently lovable but rather because everyone loves a winner. That’s the air he needs to project during his upcoming televised speech, which he paid to have air in prime-time on every network. Frank tells Kate it’s always best to stick with a winner, even when the going gets tough, because association with a winner is what gets people to pick up the phone when you call.So Kate rescinds her resignation. Prince gives his big speech and reaps a huge bounce in the polls. Both Prince and his campaign guru, Bradford, praise Wendy for pulling off the exact opposite of what she intended. And Chuck stares nervously at Prince on his computer screen, clearly wondering if the time has already come to call in that favor from Axe.At this point in its run, “Billions” feels a bit like a spinning top starting to wobble — but I mean this as a compliment. There are only so many times the schemes of one of the show’s preposterously competent main characters can go right before they start to go disastrously wrong. Each meticulously plotted episode moves us incrementally closer to that tipping point.Loose changeIn a tertiary plot, Charles Rhoades Sr. asks Chuck to intervene in an acquaintance’s case of posthumous paternity (don’t ask). It turns out to be a cover for Charles’s feeling that he has lost of control over his legacy when he discovers his wife and daughter praying together — despite his insistence that their daughter be raised an atheist. As he does elsewhere with Triple H, Chuck consults an expert on control: Mistress Troy (Clara Wong), his former dominatrix. It is she who gives Chuck the idea to tell his dad to, in effect, stoop to conquer: Act acquiescent now, and he’ll wind up with a kid and wife who love him more, allowing him to exert more control in the longer term. Everyone’s a winner, again. Sort of.In addition to seeing the returns of Malkovich, Strong, Lennix and Servitto, this episode also welcomed back Rick Hoffman as the repugnant Dr. Swerlow, Charles’s … medical adviser, I guess? Wearing an Adidas tracksuit with “The Doc” monogrammed on it, Swerlow provides obscene expertise to anyone within a 20-foot radius — including Ira, whom he’s been providing with sublingual sexual performance-enhancing medication sub rosa for some time. Hence the videos from last week, I suspect.“When did I become Lex Luthor?” Mike asks Wendy plaintively. I dunno, Mike, probably when you decided to run for president as a bald billionaire, something the comic-book villain did over two decades ago. He won, too, if you can somehow imagine a United States of America willing to elect a wealthy megalomaniac as president. Try not to strain yourself.This week’s opening- and closing-credits needle drop: PJ Harvey’s brutally bitter alt-rock classic “Rid of Me.” It’s great to hear the song play while Paul Giamatti quietly emotes, though I maintain that hearing an unassuming friend absolutely tear through it at karaoke is the ideal way to experience it.Yes, that was President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine talking to Axe, but if you thought he might have better things to do than make a cameo on “Billions,” you would be correct. A Showtime spokesperson confirmed that the show edited existing footage of him into the episode. More

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    ‘The Changeling’ Review: Bye Bye Baby

    LaKeith Stanfield stars in a dark modern fairy tale about a father who doesn’t listen when his wife has doubts about who (or what) is in the crib.A changeling is what a fairy or demon or troll leaves behind when it kidnaps a human baby. Take your eye off your newborn for just a second and you might find yourself raising a ravenous little monster that is not the one you gave birth to.“The Changeling” on Apple TV+ is about what happens when a mother comes to believe, perhaps correctly, that the tiny thing she is caring for is no longer her baby. Fittingly, the series is a kind of changeling itself: a pale echo of the 2017 novel by Victor LaValle on which it is based.The spotty track record for adaptations of books in the peak-TV era is a dead horse that I’ve beaten before. But it’s an inescapable subject. The advent of short, bingeable seasons and, until the money really runs out, the increased demand for shows has brought whole libraries to the screen.“The Changeling,” which is halfway through its eight-episode season, is a stark example of how out of sync the rhythms of good fiction can be with the demands of television. At the same time, it demonstrates the ways in which appealing performers and some visual style can keep you at least partly interested even when the story wanders.LaValle’s novel is a contemporary fairy tale, and it can feel deceptively light and simple on the page, but the history it relates is dark and soaked in despair. Like the Brothers Grimm, he uses his storytelling gifts to acclimate us to the horror, moving the narrative along so smoothly and propulsively that our nerves hover in a state of suspended agitation.The parents whose baby may or may not be human are Emma Valentine, a librarian, and Apollo Kagwa, a freelance book dealer who at first gives no credence to Emma’s suspicions. LaValle uses this framework to dig deeply into the insecurities of parents in the social-media age; at the same time he constructs a casual, street-level epic of New York City struggle and adventure that ranges from Apollo and Emma’s Washington Heights neighborhood to magically enhanced locations in the East River and the forests of Queens.Kelly Marcel, best known as the screenwriter of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” created and wrote the adaptation of “The Changeling,” and she seems to have been tugged in various directions: by a desire to pull viewers in quickly, by a need to stretch out the story (the season covers about two-thirds of the novel) and perhaps by a simple impulse to do something different.So LaValle’s eminently coherent, resolutely chronological story is artily fractured, and the current TV penchant for unexplained, repetitive flashbacks is indulged to a numbing degree. Unwilling to let the story build, Marcel pulls out elements of mystery and revelations about Apollo’s and Emma’s pasts that LaValle saved for key moments and moves them forward in ways that take away the story’s shape. (To help us navigate, she uses passages from the book as narration, which are read by LaValle.)Clark Backo plays a mother who suspects something is amiss with her child.Apple TV+More defensible, but not always successful, are the ways in which she expands the roles of Emma and of Lillian, Apollo’s mother. (LaValle’s novel is centered on Apollo and on the quest he has to undertake after horrific events beset his family.) More screen time for Clark Backo, as Emma, and for Alexis Louder and Adina Porter, as Lillian at different ages, is a good thing; and some new scenes that expand on Emma’s warrior mentality are well done.It all goes wrong for Marcel, though, in a wholly invented late-season episode designed as a showcase for Porter. A prime example of the inadvisability of the trend toward stand-alone “bottle episodes,” it is a magical-realist dream sequence set inside a fleabag hotel that, for the viewer, meticulously recreates the feeling of being trapped in your seat at an excruciating downtown play.LaKeith Stanfield, who is an executive producer of the series, soldiers bravely as Apollo. But Marcel has changed the valence of the character, making him more of a victimized Freudian basket case and less of the barbed egoist he was in the book; this flattens out Apollo’s emotional arc and makes him less interesting, and Stanfield’s performance is uncharacteristically bland. Marcel does a better job with one of LaValle’s best inventions, Apollo’s acerbic fellow book dealer Patrice, and Malcolm Barrett plays him with a sly energy that draws you to him whenever he’s onscreen.You can also perk up during the moments when “The Changeling” remembers that it’s a fairy tale, and the directors — including Dana Gonzales, Melina Matsoukas, Solvan Naim and Jonathan van Tulleken — give a little sparkle to a nighttime boat ride on the East River or a journey through abandoned subway tunnels.And for some of us, there’s a pleasure threaded through the series that isn’t often found on TV, even in literary adaptations: frequent depictions of the handling, reading, hoarding, buying and selling of books, serving as both a reinforcement of the story’s fairy tale underpinnings and as guiltless gratification for the bibliophile. That’s one aspect of the novel that didn’t get thrown out with the bath water. More