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    Review: Without Bloodshed, the Ingénue Takes the Lead

    Sophie McIntosh’s new play gathers five women in a college production for an exercise in youthful ambition and the corrupting clashing of egos.Hailey loves acting. Sweet and guileless, she doesn’t know Broadway is home to plays, as well as musicals. She is also as earnest in her love for her craft as she is genuinely talented — a combination that earns the freshman the coveted role of Lady Macbeth in her Minnesota college’s production. So, of course, all of the older girls resent her.Sophie McIntosh’s “Macbitches,” having its premiere at the Chain Theater, throws Hailey (Marie Dinolan) and four upperclasswomen together for a tight 85-minute exercise in youthful ambition and the corrupting clashing of egos. It’s (thankfully) not a direct takeoff on Shakespeare’s tale of royal bloodlust, but rather a very funny, well-observed and finely acted dramedy about what it means to be a young woman in a B.F.A. program in a post-#MeToo world.And it counts a revelatory star turn from Dinolan as its brightest point. As Hailey, she exhibits impeccable comedic timing that demands attention even when she’s in the background, staring at the bottom of her Cosmo with inebriated innocence. Not only can Dinolan play drunk well (tougher than you’d think), but she superbly inhabits her character’s inchoate ability to command a stage.Or, in this case, a fraught celebration. The gathering, organized after casting notices have gone up, is held at Rachel’s (Caroline Orlando), the program’s now-former de facto lead. Hailey is invited over by Piper (Laura Clare Brown), an introverted sophomore who’s coming up against the limitation of her talent and is perhaps unaware of what the ingénue’s presence at this intimate get-together might do to her friends. The agitated Lexi (Natasja Naarendorp) and the dispirited Cam (Morgan Lui) certainly do not need her there.McIntosh, the director Ella Jane New and their cast ably navigate these social hierarchies. Rachel is not a tyrannical, or even obvious, queen bee, but her lead turn in “Hedda Gabler” the year before ensures an unspoken air of achievement her friends can only admire. The way these students interact and move through Brandon Scott Hughes’s set — complete with “Hamilton” merch and posters from past college productions — feels real, seemingly informed by the cast’s own experiences among other actors rather than writerly necessity.Yet it’s the interactions happening outside the room that provide the play with a relevant, weighty backbone it would be well without, but is leagues better for including. These young women, though confident and well-prepared, are still working in a world ruled by men.Are their professors, who appraise their looks to determine their fitness for a role, supposed to mold them for the “real world,” or help them overcome its obstacles? How can you imbue a romantic scene with the power of instinct when the new norm of intimacy training necessitates planning? And is there any room for agency and ambition if your plan is sleeping up in an industry newly focused on power imbalances?McIntosh evokes these questions astutely, never putting too fine a point on any of them, or turning her characters into mouthpieces. With a fantastic understanding of tone and genre, “Macbitches” juggles headier themes while remaining a lively college drama, a riff on both Shakespeare and “All About Eve,” and a showcase for Dinolan’s blazing charisma.MacbitchesThrough Sept. 10 at the Chain Theater, Manhattan; chaintheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

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    ‘House of the Dragon’ Premiere: Episode 1 Recap

    Sunday’s long-awaited premiere aimed to create investment in a new royal power struggle while assuring viewers that this was still “Game of Thrones.”Season 1, Episode 1: ‘The Heirs of the Dragon’So where were we?Oh, right: Sitting on our sofas trying to make the phrase “King Bran” make sense in our heads. It still doesn’t, but that’s ancient history now. Or to be more precise, in a narrative sense: ancient future.That’s because it was a much earlier clash for the Iron Throne that we saw being set up in Sunday’s long-awaited premiere of “House of the Dragon” — an Iron Throne that, based on its sprawling, jagged footprint, will apparently lose quite a few swords before King Robert Baratheon lands on it in a couple of centuries.But it is fundamentally still the same ugly chair inspiring the same ugly feelings — anxiety, envy, power-lust, a willingness to betray friends and relatives. That last part is important because unlike in the original contest, it seems that most of the betraying will be happening not between the various houses of Westeros, but within the same messed-up family.That would be the Targaryens, the ancestors of Daenerys, who embody the key pillars of the “Thrones” universe: vengeful resentment, dragons and incest. (The lore says King Viserys’s late wife was his cousin, and on Sunday the dynamic between Daemon and Rhaenyra was, uh, complex.)Their apparent proclivities were part of a series premiere that had to thread the needle of creating investment in a new story while reminding viewers that it was still “Game of Thrones.” This last part was pursued dutifully as the episode — written by Ryan Condal and directed by Miguel Sapochnik, the two showrunners — played all the hits. Hacking, shocking gore? Check. Brothel scenes? Check. Tense bickering at a big table? Check.Almost anyone who’s been on the internet in the past few years will have at least passing familiarity with HBO’s efforts, after the polarizing end of its biggest-ever hit, to keep the “Thrones” loot train going. There were the multiple spinoff concepts, a failed pilot. All of it led eventually to the story George R.R. Martin, the “Thrones” godhead, wanted to go with all along, which is what we got on Sunday, complete with the more hulking Iron Throne. (Martin often complained that the one in the original series was too modest.)So it was hard to ignore the brand management of it all. Even Ramin Djawadi’s score seemed designed to reassure with its minor-key riff on the thundering “Thrones” theme. (Though I admit that even in a more pensive register, the “duh-nuh-NUH-nuh” motif is very satisfying.)All the sameness is particularly glaring within a franchise that frequently dazzled viewers by showing them things they’d never seen before on TV. There is also a weird thematic discordance when you consider that “Thrones” spent eight seasons showing us the destructive folly of cyclical power struggles, ultimately building to a resolution designed to leave all that behind.If you can forgive the obnoxiousness of a self-quote, I wrote about the “Thrones” finale: “In the end, ‘Game of Thrones’ was about blowing up the game of thrones.” Three years later, HBO is essentially saying, commercially and narratively: “Can we interest you in another game of thrones?”So there’s all that. But to be fair: It was one episode, and a pilot episode at that. Getting sagas going is almost always an expository slog, especially in a world as dense as Martin’s, which makes the awkward bits more apparent. And there were reasons to be excited about what is to come over the next nine weeks.More on ‘House of the Dragon’HBO’s long-awaited first “Game of Thrones” spinoff debuted on Aug. 21.A Rogue Prince: Daemon Targaryen, portrayed by Matt Smith, is an agent of chaos. But “he’s got a strange moral compass of his own,” the actor said.The New King: A string of critically acclaimed roles has lifted Paddy Considine, who stars as King Viserys Targaryen, from hardscrabble roots to a seat on the Iron Throne.The King’s Hand: Otto Hightower is a major player in the prequel. Here is what to know about the character and the history of House Hightower.The Showrunners: In a conversation with The Times, Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik discussed the new series, brothel scenes and domesticated dragons.The cast seems great. Matt Smith makes a meal of Prince Daemon, a one-man sex-and-violence machine spiked with self-doubt that he shows only to his courtesan girlfriend. Rhys Ifans is all slippery soullessness as Otto Hightower, the King’s Hand, who marginalizes his rival Daemon while using his own young daughter, Alicent, as bait for the grieving ruler. Steve Toussaint has presence and authority as Lord Corlys Velaryon, a wealthy former mariner known as the Sea Snake. (One of the other spinoffs in development would chronicle the character’s exploits as a young man.) As Alicent and Rhaenyra, Emily Carey and Milly Alcock bring charm and complexity as two halves of a friendship that seems destined to splinter.Paddy Considine is terrific as Viserys, his hangdog face exuding the king’s frailty and grit simultaneously. But based on his unhealing lesions and their evidence that the throne doesn’t like him — as well as the fact that this is a succession story, and that monarchs need to die for games of thrones to go on — he seems unlikely to occupy it for long.Matt Smith as Prince Daemon, the now thwarted heir.Ollie Upton/HBOThe episode began with a prologue scene that set two key precedents, as Viserys was named his grandfather’s heir over his older cousin, Rhaenys (Eve Best). First: The convoluted Targaryen family — again, incest — has a tradition of squaring off over succession claims. Second: The patriarchal leaders of the realm will resist attempts to put a woman on the Iron Throne.A woman’s place in this world was summed up in some later advice by Queen Aemma (Sian Brooke) to Rhaenyra. “The childbed is our battlefield,” she said, and we saw how that turned out. Her birth scene was grueling and ghastly, as any hope of continued peace died with her and her short-lived son.I praised several of the actors earlier, but probably the most sympathetic character in the episode was that vomiting squire at the tournament — I watched the birth scene and chunks of the City Watch dismemberment plan through my fingers. Sapochnik, the director of “Thrones” spectacles like “Battle of the Bastards” and “Hardhome,” has a gift for visceral filmmaking, and that talent can be used to disgust as well as dazzle.We got both in the jousting tourney, a breathtaking sequence in which, as my colleague Mike Hale wrote in his review of the series, “the collisions have an authentic force that will throw you back in your seat.” Also authentically forceful: the bloody bashing of sundry knight faces.“And the day grows ugly …” Rhaenys deadpanned as the crowd delighted in the brutality, which was one way to put it. The point was to establish the naïve bloodthirstiness of a people who, we were repeatedly reminded, had never known real war. When Viserys named his daughter as his heir a few minutes later, he guaranteed that they would eventually get one.“House of the Dragon” is based on Martin’s “Fire & Blood,” a novel written in the form of a faux history tome. The book reflects Martin’s longtime interest in the gap between what actually happens and how it is recorded for posterity.This gap apparently also applies to prophesy, as we see at the episode’s end: one last explicit tie to “Game of Thrones,” which was a broad-stroke retelling of “Game of Thrones.”Down in the dragon skull cellar where Cersei and Jaime will eventually meet their end, Viserys tells Rhaenyra that Aegon, the original Targaryen conqueror, was driven partly by a vision of “the end of the world of men.” But in his version, it’s a Targaryen who will “unite the realm against the cold and the dark,” either because the oracle was off that day or because Aegon tweaked it out of self-interest.To be fair, I guess Daenerys helped to save the realm from the White Walker menace. Maybe Aegon just left out the part where she incinerates the capital city afterward. [Update: Several readers pointed out that the prophesy most likely refers to Jon Snow, the formerly secret Targaryen who did unite much of the realm against the White Walkers, albeit not from the throne. Sorry Jon, you never get the credit you deserve.]At any rate, it was actually a different dragon queen reference that brought back a bit of the old thrill. It came during the funeral for the queen and her son — the baby bundle particularly devastating in its tininess, with enormous repercussions for the kingdom. The scene was a somber counterpoint to the chaos and violent agony that had come before it, and Sapochnik wisely let the quietness build.And when Alcock aced her first “Dracarys!” well … I mean, I’m not made of stone.“Oh, cool, they can do dragons.” (See below.)HBOA few thoughts while we check the side effectsFor the record, I do intend to give “House of the Dragon” a fair chance. My weariness with parts of it is tied to a more general weariness with media conglomerates endlessly flogging their profitable intellectual property. (Marvel’s “She-Hulk” premiered Thursday; “Lord of the Rings” and “Andor,” the latest “Star Wars” series, arrive next month.) It can all feel like a streaming content pharma ad: “Do you recognize the elements of thrilling drama but still feel malaise while watching it? You may be suffering from franchise fatigue …”In an interview before the season, Sapochnik discussed the importance of making the dragons feel like real, organic parts of the world. “What you want people to do is say, ‘Oh, cool, they can do dragons,’ and then move on,” he said. I was mostly there until Daemon nuzzled his on his way out of town, which evoked the sick triceratops in “Jurassic Park,” from 29 years ago.“The gods have yet to make a man who lacks the patience for absolute power,” Otto said, referring to Daemon but also to himself.Daemon’s brothel speech about the “heir for a day” was earth-shattering in the context of the story, leading Viserys to anoint his daughter heir instead and setting up all the fun to come. Know who was really staggered by it? That poor mid-coital couple frozen on the floor of the brothel.It took me years to be able to spell “Daenerys” correctly on the first try, so thanks in advance for your thoughts and prayers as I try to keep all these Targaryens straight.What did you think? Are you back in? Did you buy the dragons? Dracarys away in the comments. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Katrina Babies’ and the MTV Video Music Awards

    HBO airs its documentary on the youth affected by the 2005 hurricane and MTV hosts its annual award show.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, Aug. 22-28. Details and times are subject to change.MondayKEVIN CAN F**K HIMSELF 9 p.m. on AMC. This show, returning for its second season this week, is two shows in one — it follows Allison McRoberts (Annie Murphy) who puts up with her husband, Kevin (Eric Petersen), who is an immature, unhelpful archetype of a man like those in many other sitcoms. The scenes of them together are set to the classic sitcom laugh track and upbeat music. But when Allison is away from her husband, she enters a whole different show, in which she plots to murder Kevin. The series “will make us see the horror in what we’ve been trained to see as harmless, even if it has to smack us upside the head,” James Poniewozik wrote about the show’s first season. “It may be as subtle as a blow to the skull, but it’s an inventive meta-critique of TV.”TuesdayCINDERELLA: THE REUNION, A SPECIAL EDITION OF 20/20 8 p.m. on ABC. Twenty-five years ago, ABC aired a remake of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella” — and this week ABC is hosting a reunion. The movie starred Brandy as Cinderella. Other cast members included Whitney Houston as the Fairy Godmother, Jason Alexander as Lionel and Whoopi Goldberg as Queen Constantina. “The matter-of-fact racial casting works so smoothly that it becomes one of the show’s happiest effects,” Caryn James wrote in her 1997 review. “The entire kingdom is blissfully multiethnic, with a Black queen in Ms. Goldberg, a white king in Victor Garber and the Philippine-born Paolo Montalban as their son.” The reunion special will feature cast interviews and behind-the-scenes footage of Houston, who died in 2012.From left: Kandyse McClure, Jessica Sutton, Ashley Nicole Williams and Praneet Akilla in “Motherland: Fort Salem.”Freeform/Justine YeungMOTHERLAND: FORT SALEM 10 p.m. on Freeform. This series is finishing up its third and final season this week. The show is initially set 300 years after the Salem Witch Trials, as women are on the front lines protecting the country. Raelle Collar (Taylor Hickson), Tally Craven (Jessica Sutton), and Abigail Bellweather (Ashley Nicole Williams) are all witches who enroll in the army and use their supernatural gifts against threats to national security. The series finale promises a culminating battle between the Unit (this group of witches) and the Camarilla (an ancient organizations of witch hunters).WednesdayMYSTERIES DECODED 8 p.m. The CW. For the last two seasons, Jennifer Marshall, a U.S. Navy veteran turned private investigator, has explored the unexplained. Episodes this season have included her looking into accounts of the Lake Champlain monster, the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles, the so-called “Conjuring” house in Rhode Island, and more. Finishing up its second season, this week’s episode is focusing on Phoenix Lights, a 1997 U.F.O. event that remains a mystery.KATRINA BABIES 9 p.m. on HBO. Edward Buckles Jr. has an intimate perspective on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — he was 13 when it happened. He spent the next seven years talking to his peers and documenting the lives of children whose lives and communities were uprooted amid the devastation for this documentary, which features archival footage, first-person accounts, home videos and animation.ThursdayTHE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL (1952) 6 p.m. on TCM. This film, directed by Vincente Minnelli, follows the movie producer Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) as he uses those around him to become more successful. Those in his path include an actress (Lana Turner), a director (Barry Sullivan) and a screenwriter (Dick Powell). The film won five of the six Academy Awards it was nominated for. “Through all of this gory demonstration of the miserable innards of a man, the doctors are also displaying the innards of Hollywood,” the critic Bosley Crowther wrote in his review for the Times.FridayChanning Tatum, left, and Jonah Hill, in “22 Jump Street.”Glen Wilson/Columbia Pictures22 JUMP STREET 8 p.m. on FX. In “21 Jump Street,” Jenko (Channing Tatum) and Schmidt (Jonah Hill) went undercover at a high school — and in this sequel, the stakes are much higher: They are undercover at college, and they are trying to find the supplier of a new synthetic drug. This leads the duo to fraternity parties, slam poetry nights and to events at spring break. “As in the first movie, the guiding comic principle here remains the appearance of ironic detachment followed by an assertion of sincerity that’s as appealing as it is disingenuous,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for the Times. “It’s a destabilizing strategy that allows the filmmakers to have their cake and scarf it too.”SaturdayNASCAR CUP SERIES: DAYTONA 7 p.m. on NBC. On Saturday, the NASCAR Cup Series continues its 2022 season at the Daytona International Speedway. The race, which is 160 laps — or 400 miles — will feature drivers who qualified at a race the night before. The Cup Series kicked off in late June and will continue until mid-September.SundayFrom left: Elizabeth McCafferty and Rafaëlle Cohen in “The Boleyns.”BBCTHE BOLEYNS: A SCANDALOUS FAMILY 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). This three-part series, which originally aired in 2021 on BBC in Britain, is coming to the United States via PBS. This fictionalized version of the Boleyn family, which included Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII and the mother of Queen Elizabeth I, focuses on a young Anne, played by Rafaëlle Cohen, and her siblings Mary Boleyn (Elizabeth McCafferty) and George Boleyn (Sam Retford), as well as her father, Thomas Boleyn (Max Dowler). The show uses narration from academics along with the actors recreating certain scenes.MTV VIDEO MUSIC AWARDS 8 p.m. on MTV. The awards are back this year and broadcasting live from the Prudential Center in Newark on Sunday night. LL Cool J, Nicki Minaj and Jack Harlow are set to M.C. the show — and Minaj will receive the Video Vanguard Award as well as perform live. Other performers include Blackpink, Lizzo, Jack Harlow, Maneskin, J Balvin, Marshmello and Khalid, Panic! at the Disco and Kane Brown. Kendrick Lamar, Lil Nas X and Jack Harlow, who are up for seven awards, are tied for the highest number of nominations. More

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    Live Performance Is Back. But Audiences Have Been Slow to Return.

    Attendance lagged in the comeback season, as the challenges posed by the coronavirus persisted. Presenters hope it was just a blip.Patti LuPone, Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig came back to Broadway. The Norwegian diva-in-the-making Lise Davidsen brought her penetrating voice to the Metropolitan Opera. Dancers filled stages, symphonies reverberated in concert halls and international theater companies returned to American stages.The resumption of live performance after the long pandemic shutdown brought plenty to cheer about over the past year. But far fewer people are showing up to join those cheers than presenters had hoped.Around New York, and across the country, audiences remain well below prepandemic levels. From regional theaters to Broadway, and from local orchestras to grand opera houses, performing arts organizations are reporting persistent — and worrisome — drops in attendance.Fewer than half as many people saw a Broadway show during the season that recently ended than did so during the last full season before the coronavirus pandemic. The Met Opera saw its paid attendance fall to 61 percent of capacity, down from 75 percent before the pandemic. Many regional theaters say ticket sales are down significantly.“There was a greater magnetic force of people’s couches than I, as a producer, anticipated,” said Jeremy Blocker, the managing director at New York Theater Workshop, the Off Broadway theater that developed “Rent” and “Hadestown.” “People got used to not going places during the pandemic, and we’re going to struggle with that for a few years.”Many presenters anticipate that the softer box office will extend into the upcoming season and perhaps beyond. And some fear that the virus is accelerating long-term trends that have troubled arts organizations for years, including softer ticket sales for many classical music events, the decline of the subscription model for selling tickets at many performing arts organizations, and the increasing tendency among consumers to purchase tickets at the last minute.A few institutions are already making adjustments for the new season: The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra has cut 10 concerts, after seeing its average attendance fall to 40 percent of capacity last season, down from 62 percent in 2018-19.Many Broadway shows have struggled to match prepandemic salesPercent change in weekly gross sales in 2021 and 2022, compared with the same week in 2019 More

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    George R.R. Martin Is Finally Getting the Show He Wanted

    “House of the Dragon,” the “Game of Thrones” author’s preferred spinoff, premieres on Sunday night. “It had everything that I thought we needed for a successful successor show,” he said.In the five years that HBO programming executives have been carefully considering a worthy successor to “Game of Thrones,” there was one idea that George R.R. Martin kept pushing: his rise-and-fall tale of the dragon-riding Targaryen family, set nearly 200 years before the events of “Game of Thrones.”There was some reluctance within HBO’s ranks about creating a series that, like the original, was about a battle for the Iron Throne. A pair of writers assigned to work on the Targaryen concept came and went, but Martin would not give it up. Then, after HBO shot — and canceled — a separate “Thrones” prequel pilot, Martin’s persistence prevailed. “House of the Dragon” was ordered straight to series in late 2019. Martin is the creator of the show along with Ryan Condal.“House of the Dragon,” the first “Thrones” spinoff series, premieres on Sunday night, and the stakes are high for HBO. A hit could prove the viability of the Thrones Cinematic Universe. A middling performance (or worse) will prompt broader questions about whether millions of viewers are craving more “Thrones” series.In a conversation late last month, Martin, the man who over the past three decades meticulously constructed the “Thrones” universe in his various books, discussed why he felt strongly about this idea; his ambitions for future spinoffs; and how his work-in-progress books will diverge from the controversial ending of “Game of Thrones,” the TV series.These are edited excerpts from our conversation.Two writers worked on the development of your Targaryen story and it didn’t go anywhere. What made you keep pushing for it?I did not want to drop it. There was a lot of material already written on it, and it had everything that I thought we needed for a successful successor show. It had all of the intrigue around the Iron Throne. It had the great houses contending. It had dragons — a lot of dragons — and battles and betrayals.“House of the Dragon” has thematic overlaps with “Game of Thrones” — family rivalry, the battle for the throne. In what ways is it different?“Game of Thrones” and my book version of it, “A Song of Ice and Fire,” is, in some ways, a classic high fantasy in the mode of Tolkien and many, many writers who followed. Now, yes, it is true that in a sense, I’m deconstructing those tropes, those myths, the things that were hallmarks. But I’m also following them to some extent. “House of the Dragon” is more like historical fiction with some dragons thrown in. It’s like a Shakespearean tragedy.The conclusion of “Game of Thrones” disappointed many fans, but “my ending will be very different,” Martin said.HBOIt’s been just over three years since “Game of Thrones” ended in a way that disappointed many fans. What did you make of the ending?One of the things in the later seasons of the show was, How many seasons was it going to be? And [the “Game of Thrones” creators David Benioff and Dan Weiss] for years were saying they wanted to wrap it up in seven seasons. Well, seven became eight because the eighth season is really the second half of the seventh season — it’s kind of one long season.But I never felt that seven or eight seasons was enough. I campaigned for 10 seasons, and we could have gone to 12. There’s enough material — and there certainly will be enough material once I finish these last two books — to sustain 12 seasons.But I lost that battle, and we went with eight. I think one of the big complaints about those last seasons is not only what happened — although there are complaints about that — but also that it happened too suddenly, and it was not set up. And if we had 10 seasons or 12 seasons, I think that would have worked better.Considering the backlash, what’s your level of concern, for the new show, that people are either going to be too fatigued to return to the “Thrones” universe, or will relish in bringing the knives out, no matter what?I do see comments online from people, and sometimes they email me directly. I’m also concerned about a similar thing with my book. As you know, “The Winds of Winter” is very, very late — the last book was 11 years ago, and people are very angry about that. But how many people?“House of the Dragon” and any other spinoffs that are coming, and “The Winds of Winter” when it comes, are going to face some immediate backlash, and some resistance from people who don’t even want to give it a chance.Let’s say “House of the Dragon” is a hit. What would be your ideal ambition here? An entire fleet of “Thrones” TV series?Well, we are developing a number of other spinoffs. There’s the Jon Snow sequel show, and the rest are all prequels. There’s “Ten Thousand Ships” about Nymeria — that’s like a thousand years before and about how the Rhoynar came to Dorne. That’s an “Odyssey”-like epic. There’s the nine voyages of Corlys Velaryon, the Sea Snake. That would take us to places in the world that we’ve never seen.We have some animated shows going, one of which was set in Yi Ti, which is basically the fantasy version of Imperial China or the Far East. We got a terrific script on that. Obviously, not all these shows we’re developing are going to make it to air, but I hope that several of them do.Rhys Ifans and Emily Carey in “House of the Dragon,” which involves an earlier battle for the Iron Throne.Ollie Upton/HBOIs there a model you admire? Something like Marvel?I do like what Marvel is doing because I like the variety of the shows. Another model that I think was interesting was the old “Mary Tyler Moore Show.” That show generated a number of spinoffs: There was “Rhoda,” about her friend. Phyllis got her own show. And the one that really excited me was “Lou Grant.” They took this character from a sitcom and they made him the hero of a serious journalism show. That’s pretty amazing to take a character who is a comic foil and make him the center of a serious show. I’d like to see a range in our shows.Before “House of the Dragon” was given a green light, HBO shot an entire pilot for a show that takes place 1,000 years before the events of “Game of Thrones.” It was eventually canceled. What went wrong with it?Well, I have not seen the pilot. For whatever reason they won’t show it to me, so I don’t know. It was, in some ways, more challenging because on that one, they’re really, really going back into the past. The Long Night is mentioned in my books here and there, but it’s an ancient event that people tell stories about — it’s like the Garden of Eden or a biblical flood. I remember when we were first developing it, I said, “You’re going back so far — if you decided to do a ‘Sopranos’ prequel, then you would be talking about the Etruscans, the ancestors of Tony Soprano. You might be talking about cave men.”Tell me about your level of involvement in “House of the Dragon” versus your level of involvement with “Game of Thrones,” the original series.I am a lot more involved in “House of the Dragon” than I was in the later seasons of “Game of Thrones.” Now, mind you, I was very involved in the early seasons of “Game of Thrones.” Seasons 1 through 4, I mean, not only did I write a script, but especially like Seasons 1 or 2, I was giving a verdict on all the castings. I was reading the scripts. I was talking to Dan and David. I visited the set. But as the years went by, that involvement became less and less.Will your upcoming books diverge from “Thrones,” the TV series?A lot of this story comes to me as I write it. I always knew once the show got beyond my books — which honestly I did not anticipate — they would start going in directions that the books are not going to go in. Now, as I’m writing the books and I’m making more and more progress and it’s getting longer, ideas are coming to me and characters are taking me in directions that are even further from where the show went.So I think what you’re going to find is, when “Winds of Winter” and then, hopefully, “Dream of Spring” come out, that my ending will be very different. And there will be some similarities, some big moments that I told David and Dan about many years ago, when they visited me in Santa Fe. But we only had like two, three days there, so I didn’t tell them everything. And even some of the things I told them are changing as I do the writing. So they will be different. And then it’ll be up to the readers and the viewers to decide which one they like better, and argue about it.When will the books be done?No comment. No comment. No comment. I get in trouble every time I do that. I mean, going back like 10 years, I said, “Oh, I should be done next year.” And then it’s not done next year. And then: “George lied to us.” I’m no good at predicting these things. And some of it depends on how many other interruptions there are and all that. I’m in a pretty good place now, so I’m optimistic. But I’m not going to make any predictions. More

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    HBO Max Pulls Nearly 200 ‘Sesame Street’ Episodes

    HBO Max took down classic episodes of “Sesame Street” as it prepares to combine with Discovery+. The move came as a surprise to fans, who worried about what it signals.Nearly 200 episodes of “Sesame Street” have been pulled from HBO Max, the streaming platform that has been purging films and television shows in recent weeks as it prepares to combine with another streaming service, Discovery+.Fans of “Sesame Street” were surprised on Friday to see that hundreds of episodes, most from the first 40 years of the show, had been removed from HBO Max.It is the latest shift at HBO Max following the merger of its former parent company, WarnerMedia, with Discovery Inc. in April. Together, the companies formed Warner Bros. Discovery, which is aiming to find $3 billion in savings in an effort to reduce its $55 billion in debt.This week, about 70 HBO Max staff members were laid off as a part of the reorganization, and HBO Max announced that 36 titles were being pulled from the platform. The pulled programming included the animated series “Infinity Train” and “The Not-Too-Late Show With Elmo,” a “Sesame Street” spinoff.David Zaslav, the company’s chief executive, also told investors this month that the company plans to offer a single paid subscription streaming service, bringing together content from HBO Max and Discovery+.It was not clear what that means for the future of “Sesame Street” on HBO Max.As of Friday, HBO Max had cut the number of “Sesame Street” episodes it provides to 456 from 650, Variety reported. Some spinoff series survived the cull, including seven seasons of “My Sesame Street Friends,” and “The Magical Wand Chase” special, featuring Elmo and Abby Cadabby, a pink fairy-in-training who joined “Sesame Street” in 2006.Every episode of “Sesame Street” from Seasons 39, which aired in 2008, through 52, the latest season, is still available on HBO Max. The newest season, 53, will air on HBO Max in the fall.The only episodes available from before season 39 are from seasons one, five and seven, including a fan favorite in which all of the characters gather for a singalong in Bert and Ernie’s bathroom.Some of the most notable episodes HBO Max once streamed are no longer available, including an episode that aired in 1983 and featured Big Bird confronting death, following the death of the actor who played Mr. Hooper, Will Lee.HBO said in a statement that the streaming platform was “committed to continuing to bring ‘Sesame Street’ into families’ homes.”“‘Sesame Street’ is and has always been an important part of television culture and a crown jewel of our preschool offering,” the statement said.Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit group behind “Sesame Street,” struck a five-year deal with HBO in April 2015 to give the premium cable network the first run of new episodes. The episodes would then air free nine months later on PBS, where the show had aired for 45 years.In 2019, Sesame Workshop made a similar deal with HBO Max, which started in May 2020. Both deals also gave HBO Max access to the enormous back library of “Sesame Street,” though it has never made all of the episodes available at the same time.Some episodes of the show are available on PBS and the Sesame Street YouTube account.Sesame Workshop did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.Joe Hennes, editor in chief of ToughPigs, a website for fans of “Sesame Street,” the Muppets and other Jim Henson creations, said the “Sesame Street” episodes still available on HBO Max were a “random assortment.”“The culturally important episodes, or the episodes that maybe a more casual fan would say, ‘I’d like to see that again,’ that stuff is what’s missing,” Mr. Hennes said.Mr. Hennes, who worked in the creative department of Sesame Workshop from 2012 to 2021, said that he was concerned that the episode removal could signal a fading relationship between HBO Max and Sesame Workshop.Sesame Workshop expanded its offerings and increased its production values with the influx of funding from the premium cable network. If HBO Max reduced its financial support or ended the relationship, Mr. Hennes said it could limit the nonprofit’s production and outreach work.“In a perfect world, HBO Max would want to invest more in ‘Sesame Street’ and really make it the flagship that it could be for the streaming network,” Mr. Hennes said. “So it’s a little baffling that they would decide to go backward on that and say we’re going to do less of this and not really capitalize on their own investment in the franchise.”After HBO Max’s decision to remove episodes became public, the official Twitter account for “Sesame Street” seemed to address the change.“Your friends on Sesame Street will always be here when you need them,” it said. “Visit the neighborhood any day of the week with full episodes on our YouTube channel.” More

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    Natasha Rothwell Used to Be Paid in Beer

    Voting is underway for the 74th Primetime Emmys, and this week we’re talking to several acting nominees. The awards will be presented on Sept. 12 on NBC.Natasha Rothwell used to be paid in beer at the Upright Citizens Brigade.During three-minute skits, she would impersonate an agitated therapist or a heckling dog watcher in the brigade’s blacked-out, basement theater in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. It was a raucous, feet-first entry to performing — and provided plenty to drink — for early career comedians looking for a glimmer of recognition or even Hollywood stardom.Now a decade later, instead of booze, she has received an Emmy nomination for her supporting role as an overworked and underappreciated spa manager in the HBO series “The White Lotus.”Rothwell’s first Emmy nod for acting is a pivotal moment for someone who had her beginnings on the New York improv stage and has since transitioned into directorial and acting roles with Netflix and HBO. To her, the nomination validates the hard work she has done to help give a voice to people of color who are often expected to keep hidden in the background.In “The White Lotus,” Rothwell, 41, plays Belinda, who works in the titular resort’s wellness center tending an endless parade of entitled guests, among them Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge), who has traveled to Hawaii to scatter her mother’s ashes. To Tanya, Belinda is a miracle-worker, and she offers to fund a wellness business of Belinda’s own. But by the time Belinda creates a business plan, Tanya’s interest has wilted, and in the final episode she hushes Belinda with a wad of cash.“These characters aren’t glaringly problematic,” she said. “I mean for people of color our lenses are tuned and we know that it’s clearly problematic. But it’s not your MAGA-hat wearing Karen walking through, throwing privilege around.”“It’s the nuance of the privilege” as it was portrayed, she added, “that really provoked people.”The quiet storm churning in Belinda, Rothwell said, reflects the experience of service industry professionals who feel powerless in their position. (Rothwell herself took family photos at JCPenney and worked the drive-through window at McDonald’s before landing the big gigs.) She credits the writer and director Mike White for imbuing her character with tenderness and depth without making Belinda’s struggle the focal point.“She just wasn’t a prop in other people’s story; she had a drive and a desire,” Rothwell said. “He really highlighted the real experience of Black people in customer service where we can’t say what we think when we think it. We don’t have that luxury.”At U.C.B., Rothwell poured her heart into every character she played, something her manager, Edna Cowan, recognized immediately. In their first meeting, at Cowan’s apartment, Rothwell expressed her desire to break into the entertainment industry, which began their partnership of more than a decade.“I feel like I have matches in one hand and dry sticks in the other,” Rothwell recalled having said to Cowan. “And I just need someone to help me make fire.”More on the 74th Emmy AwardsThe 2022 edition of the Emmys, which celebrate excellence in television, will take place on Sept. 12 in Los Angeles.‘The White Lotus’: Natasha Rothwell’s nomination for her portrayal of an underappreciated spa manager is a pivotal moment for the actress, whose career began on the improv stage.‘Pam & Tommy’: After her Emmy-nominated role in the Hulu mini-series, Lily James has a new appreciation for the many complications of being Pamela Anderson.‘Severance’: Christopher Walken and John Turturro, both nominated for best supporting actor in a drama, drew upon their years of friendship in the techno-thriller.‘Dopesick’: Kaitlyn Dever is up for her first Emmy for her role as a young woman with an opioid addiction in the mini-series. She sought to approach the role with the utmost sensitivity.Cowan was among the first people Rothwell called after the Emmy nomination. Rothwell peeled from her bedsheets around 9:30 a.m., lurched for her phone — as she normally does — and watched as celebratory alerts overwhelmed her screen. She had made a calendar reminder on her phone to congratulate Coolidge, who was heavily favored for a nomination, but she had not anticipated receiving one of her own.She thought she was still dreaming.“I had to catch my breath,” Rothwell said. “It was pretty special.”As Rothwell wiped tears from her eyes, the two shrieked from excitement, scaring Rothwell’s salt-and-pepper goldendoodle, Lloyd Dobler, a reference to John Cusack’s character in “Say Anything.” Rothwell reminded Cowan of the analogy she had made in their first conversation.“We made fire, we made fire,” Rothwell recalled saying.Cowan, in a recent video interview, put it this way: “I think it’s the culmination of many years of consistently good work.”Natasha Rothwell, left, with Jennifer Coolidge; both received Emmy nominations for their roles in “The White Lotus.”Mario Perez/HBOBorn in Wichita, Kan., Rothwell grew up as an Air Force brat, living in bases around the world, from Florida to Turkey. (She attended two elementary schools, two middle schools and two high schools.) She was thankful for being exposed to a variety of cultures, she said, but not all of her memories were good — such as being called the N-word for the first time, at her high school in Fort Walton Beach, Fla.“We’re not in Kansas anymore,” she remembered thinking. “Literally.”Such experiences motivated her to better understand human behavior. She joined an improv troupe at her second high school, in Maryland, which helped liberate her from obsessive, intrusive thoughts, and went on to study theater at University of Maryland. Her dream was to become a Broadway actor, and she felt discouraged after graduation when she kept landing mostly comedy roles.On the advice of one of her former professors, she decided to embrace her talent for comedy.“I’m so grateful that I stopped trying to resist my natural sort of inclination and was able to apply my dramatic skill set to comedy, which I think makes it hit harder,” she said.After “Saturday Night Live” was criticized in 2013 for not having a Black female cast member, the artistic director at U.C.B. informed Rothwell of special auditions; “S.N.L.” hired her as a writer in 2014 but she left after a single season, feeling undervalued.But things picked up quickly after that. In 2016, she was featured in the short-lived but critically admired Netflix comedy series “The Characters,” and later that year she began a full-series run as the protective and fiercely loyal friend Kelli Prenny in HBO’s “Insecure.” (She was also a supervising producer and writer of “Insecure,” sharing its Emmy nomination for best comedy in 2020, and directed an episode of the final season, her directorial debut.)As she helped develop her “Insecure” character, Rothwell asked herself: What would it be like to be in the world and not once doubt your worth or your value? She hoped Kelli’s unapologetic truth would allow Black, plus-sized viewers to feel seen, she said. Kelli was a character she had needed to see herself.“When I would walk through the airport of Philly, when I would be visiting my family, they’d be like, ‘Yes, Kelli, I see you!’ and it was just this love for her that made me protective of her,” she said.Although the role wasn’t official, she kept on her writer’s cap during the production of “White Lotus,” too. She remembered pulling White aside at one point and saying, “You know, we don’t talk the way we talk around y’all,” referring to the different ways people speak at work compared with in their personal lives.White was receptive to working the idea into the show, she said. In Episode 3, viewers see Belinda relax as she talks to her son about Tanya’s wellness center proposal, capturing one of the character’s few relieving moments.Given Rothwell’s reputation in comedy, people are often surprised, she said, when she takes on more serious roles. But she has tried not to let herself become limited to one genre, inspired, she said, by the versatility of performers like Robin Williams and Lily Tomlin. And she is still motivated by her early love for drama.“The comedy I write and am drawn to produce, direct and consume has both levity and gravity,” she said. “They necessitate each other.” More

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    ‘Bad Sisters’ Review: The Family That Kills Together (Maybe)

    Sharon Horgan headlines a twisty, comic take on the avenging-women thriller for Apple TV+.A despicable male is found dead, and the prime suspects are a group of women who wanted to protect one of their number from his constant oppression. The killer or killers are eventually revealed; a lot of driving is done up and down a picturesque coastline. It’s the “Big Little Lies” scenario, but “Bad Sisters,” premiering Friday on Apple TV+, adds something new and refreshing to the formula: a sense of humor.The Irish writer and performer Sharon Horgan, who created “Bad Sisters” with Dave Finkel and Brett Baer, has been behind some of the most caustically funny shows on British television this century, like “Pulling” (raucous female friendship) and “Catastrophe” (the chaos of marriage). Earlier this year, she branched out, recasting “The Shining” as a family sitcom in “Shining Vale” on Starz.“Shining Vale” and “Bad Sisters” don’t send up the horror and avenging-women-thriller genres; they employ humor, strategically and affectionately, to give the genres new life. The 10 hourlong episodes of “Bad Sisters” (based on a Belgian series, “Clan”) tell a serious story about the damage that ripples outward from one angry and devious man, but Horgan and her collaborators use the structures of comedy to maintain energy and keep up our interest, and they mostly avoid the tendencies toward moralism and melodrama that this sort of narrative often lapses into.The villain of “Bad Sisters” is John Paul Williams (Claes Bang), who works in the finance department of a Dublin architecture firm. We first see him in his coffin at his wake, which is where we’re introduced to the five sisters of the title: Grace, his long-suffering wife (Anne-Marie Duff), and his in-laws Eva (Horgan), Ursula (Eva Birthistle), Bibi (Sarah Greene) and Becka (Eve Hewson).The circumstances of John Paul’s death are kept from us until late in the series, but we know that it has been ruled an accident because Tom (Brian Gleeson) and Matt (Daryl McCormack), a pair of slightly feckless half brothers who own a small and failing insurance agency, have set out to prove otherwise. If they can show that it was murder, they won’t have to pay off on the life-insurance policy that Grace holds.Their stumbling but bullheaded progress — they’re like low-rent cousins of Edward G. Robinson in “Double Indemnity” — is one of the show’s clever comic storytelling devices. The investigation they carry out is remarkably effective, largely because no one gives much thought to talking with them, and the audience is always a step or two ahead in putting together the facts they’re uncovering.Tom and Matt unwittingly guide us through the larger story, in which continual flashbacks illustrate John Paul’s awfulness and the increasingly dire steps the sisters take in response. Each sister proves to have her own reason to want him dead, which complicates the narrative and fills out the 10 episodes. The most baroque of these subplots involves the loss of one of Bibi’s eyes, which requires Greene to wear a pirate-like eye patch that’s a neat visual joke in its own right.The trickiness and delayed revelations mean that “Bad Sisters” is a forest of spoilers, about which it can perhaps safely be said that the sisters-in-law find themselves willing to contemplate murder and that John Paul proves, through a series of misadventures that are grisly in nature and slapstick in form, to be comically indestructible, right up until he isn’t.Beyond the smart construction and tart dialogue, especially in the episodes (four of 10) written or co-written by Horgan, “Bad Sisters” succeeds because the five lead actresses convince us that they’re a family unit, sometimes for worse but mostly for better. The characters are types — strong and overprotective Eva, angry Bibi, flighty but sensible Becka — but the performers make them distinctive and make us feel their fierce devotion to one another.Particularly good is Duff in the difficult, thankless role of Grace, who sticks with John Paul despite being gaslighted, debased and controlled; it would be easy to write her off and disengage from the show, but Duff keeps us with her, showing the layers of insecurity, fear and honest devotion that make sense of the character.The real key to the show, though, is the performance by Bang, who pulls off an even more impressive feat with John Paul, expertly portraying his ghastliness while also rendering him as absolutely human and never for a moment descending into caricature. John Paul’s sociopathy is, with a few exceptions, a matter of conversational malevolence and tactical maneuvering rather than physical violence, and Bang executes his attacks with the self-satisfied joy of a childish virtuoso; instead of playing up monstrousness or soullessness, he puts a twinkle in John Paul’s eye and a hint of uncertainty beneath his bravado, and you can’t take your own eyes off him. More