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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘La Frontera’ and ‘The English Patient’

    This week we’re watching a docuseries about the U.S.-Mexico border, the Oscar-winning 1996 film starring Ralph Fiennes and lots more.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, April 3-9. Details and times are subject to change.MondayBill T. Jones, right, in “Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters.”Rosalynde LeBlancCAN YOU BRING IT: BILL T. JONES AND D-MAN IN THE WATERS 8 p.m. on WORLD. “AfroPop: The Ultimate Cultural Exchange,” a documentary series about life across the African diaspora, is kicking off a new season with an exploration of the legacy of the choreographer-director Bill T. Jones’s seminal ballet, “D-Man in the Waters.” At the height of the AIDS epidemic, the disease ravaged the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, taking the lives of its co-founder, Zane, and the dancer Demian “D-Man” Acquavella; this dance was inspired by a series of group improvisations as a reflection of the troupe’s struggles and losses. Through the intercutting of vintage recordings of the Jones/Zane company and present-day footage of students learning the ballet — Jones drops into rehearsals to offer feedback — the film is a “passionate and moving” exploration of the dance piece’s endurance, writes Glenn Kenny in his Critic’s Pick review for The New York Times.LA FRONTERA WITH PATI JINICH 9 p.m. on PBS. This award-winning docuseries featuring stories from the U.S.-Mexico border is back for a second season, with the show’s Emmy-nominated host and executive producer, the chef Pati Jinich, expanding her travels to the Mexican states of Baja California, Sonora and Chihuahua. In addition to showcasing the culture and cuisines of these areas, the series will also cover how timely issues like L.G.B.T.Q. rights, climate change and immigration play out in the regions.TuesdayMartin Smith, right, with Taliban officials in “America and the Taliban.”FRONTLINE (PBS)AMERICA AND THE TALIBAN 10 p.m. on PBS. This three-part documentary series from the award-winning producers and directors Marcela Gaviria and Martin Smith (“In Search of Al Qaeda”) draws upon 20 years of reporting and new interviews with American and Taliban officials to tell the story of modern U.S.-Afghanistan relations. The series begins with the Sept. 11 attacks on New York City and follows the U.S.’s attempt to destroy Al Qaeda, ending with the Taliban’s 2021 takeover of Kabul.WednesdayGROWING BELUSHI 9 p.m. on DISCOVERY. The actor and comedian Jim Belushi (younger brother to the late actor comic John Belushi), his family and his team of farmers at Belushi’s Farm are back after building a cannabis business in southern Oregon from scratch in the first two seasons of the show. The third season follows Belushi and his crew as they work to turn their business into a national brand, documenting the high jinks and hiccups along the way — like a fire that destroys the farm’s barn, drying facility and half a million dollars’ worth of cannabis.ThursdayRalph Fiennes in “The English Patient.”Phil Bray/Miramax FilmsTHE ENGLISH PATIENT (1996) 5:15 p.m. on FLIXe. Based on the 1992 Booker Prize-winning novel of the same name by Michael Ondaatje, this Oscar-winning film is set in WWII-ravaged Italy in a bombed-out monastery, where a combat nurse, Hana (Juliette Binoche), is caring for an amnesiac, English-accented burn patient (Ralph Fiennes), scarred beyond recognition. The film intersperses scenes of Hana’s budding love for Lt. Kip (Naveen Andrews), a Sikh sapper in the British Indian Army, with the English patient’s flashbacks of his own tragic love affair. In her review for The Times, Janet Maslin described the movie as a “dreamlike, nonlinear tale” that “swoops gracefully from past to present, from one set of lovers to another, from the contours of the body to the topography of the desert sands.”FridayTHE LEGACY OF J DILLA 10 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. on FX. This feature from The New York Times Presents series is a portrait of the revered rap producer, J Dilla, who died in 2006 at the age of 32. Born in Detroit as James Dewitt Yancey, J Dilla was a prolific music producer who left an indelible mark on the hip-hop landscape through his original work and collaborations with artists like Erykah Badu, Busta Rhymes, A Tribe Called Quest and D’Angelo. Through exclusive interviews with his family and those close to him, the documentary explores J Dilla’s life and why he has been celebrated far more since his death than during his life.SaturdayHumphrey Bogart, left, and Ingrid Bergman in “Casablanca.”AP FILE, via Associated PressCASABLANCA (1942) 8 p.m. on TCM. Set during World War II, this Academy Award-winning film focuses on Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), an American expatriate and the owner of Rick’s Café Américain, a shady but popular nightclub in Casablanca, Morocco. The film follows the dilemma that arises when the thief Guillermo Ugarte (Peter Lorre) gives Rick travel papers he plans to sell later, only to die in police custody before doing so. Now Rick must decide whether to give them to the woman who broke his heart, Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), and her husband, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), a Resistance leader escaping German officials. Bosley Crowther described the film as “a rich, suave, exciting and moving tale,” in his review for The Times.SundayFrom left, Weezer band members Brian Bell, Patrick Wilson, Rivers Cuomo and Scott Shriner at the “Grammy Salute to The Beach Boys” in Los Angeles.Sonja Flemming/CBSGOSPEL SUPERFEST EASTER JAM 5 p.m. on BET. Some of the biggest names in gospel music are coming together in Ohio to celebrate Easter Sunday. This worship and music event will feature performers such as Pastor Donnie McClurkin, Deitrick Haddon and Le’Andria Johnson.A GRAMMY SALUTE TO THE BEACH BOYS 8 p.m. on CBS. Members of the Beach Boys — Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, David Marks and Bruce Johnston — are featured guests at this event celebrating the group’s win of the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. The tribute event at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles will feature live performances by Andy Grammer, Beck, Fall Out Boy, Weezer and John Legend, in addition to appearances by Tom Hanks, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen and John Stamos. More

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    ‘Prima Facie’ and ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ Win Big at the Olivier Awards

    The Jodie Comer-starring legal drama won best new play at Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys and an adaptation of ‘Totoro’ won six gongs — the most of any production.“Prima Facie,” a Broadway-bound play about a lawyer who represents men accused of assault, then is herself sexually assaulted, was the big winner on Sunday at the Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.The one-woman show, starring Jodie Comer and written by Suzie Miller, was named best new play during a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Comer was also named best actress for her performance at the West End’s Harold Pinter Theater.The awards come just days before “Prima Facie,” and Comer, transfer to New York. The show is scheduled to begin previews at the Golden Theater on Apr. 11.Its success at the Olivier Awards was perhaps unsurprising given that “Prima Facie” was a critical and commercial hit in London during its run last year. Matt Wolf, reviewing the play for The New York Times, said that Comer took a big risk making her West End debut in an “emotionally fraught solo play.” But, he added, “there’s no denying the visceral power of an evening that owes its sellout status to a theatrical neophyte who possesses the know-how of a seasoned pro.”“Prima Facie” beat stiff competition to the best new play title, including Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of “To Kill A Mockingbird” at the Gielgud Theater; “Patriots” at the Almeida — a timely look at President Vladimir V. Putin’s rise in Russia; and “For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy” at the Royal Court, a tale of six young Black men in group therapy.Comer accepted her award, thanking “the sisterhood” who worked on the show, then giving a message to viewers online. “To any kids who haven’t been to drama school, who can’t afford to go to drama school, who’ve been rejected from drama school — don’t let anybody tell you that it is impossible,” she said.Although it won one of the night’s most coveted awards, “Prima Facie” was not the only big winner. “My Neighbour Totoro,” an adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 animated film, at the Barbican Theater in London, won six gongs — the most of any production — including best entertainment or comedy play, and the best director award for Phelim McDermott.The show, produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, was a crowd-pleaser in London partly thanks to featuring several giant, fantastical puppets — including a furry Catbus that is part motor vehicle, part feline. Dominic Cavendish, reviewing the play in The Daily Telegraph, said those puppets were “worth the price of admission alone.”Other major winners included Paul Mescal, the Irish star, who was named best actor for his portrayal of Stanley Kowalski in a revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Almeida Theater.Matt Wolf, in a review for The New York Times, wrote that “Mescal brings both swagger and sensitivity to the role, in the process stepping out of the long shadow cast over this part by its stage and screen originator, Marlon Brando.”The best new musical award went to “Standing at the Sky’s Edge,” a show at the National Theater in London about the intertwined lives of the residents of a housing complex. It triumphed over several higher-profile titles including “Tammy Faye,” about the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, featuring music by Elton John. More

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    Book Review: ‘Blanche: The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams’s Greatest Creation,’ by Nancy Schoenberger

    Playing Blanche DuBois is shattering, say the actresses featured in Nancy Schoenberger’s “Blanche.” But Tennessee Williams’s most indelible character is now a figure of sympathy.BLANCHE: The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams’s Greatest Creation, by Nancy SchoenbergerLast we saw of Blanche DuBois, the brittle antiheroine of Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “A Streetcar Named Desire,” she was being carted off to a state loony bin, uttering her famous line about relying on “the kindness of strangers” that can hardly be improved upon.So when Nancy Schoenberger, a biographer and poet, announced early in her new book, “Blanche,” that she planned to include a few sonnets written from the perspective of DuBois’s ill-fated, unseen young husband, as well as a hypothetical obituary in The Times-Picayune describing how her subject turned her life around after psychiatric treatment, I … yes, blanched.With rare exceptions, such as Jean Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea” (a prequel to “Jane Eyre” that imagines the first Mrs. Rochester), messing with another writer’s characters tends to be tricky business. You have to love, for example, the sardonic headline The New York Times ran when it reviewed Susan Hill’s 1993 novel “Mrs. DeWinter,” a follow-up to Daphne du Maurier’s unimprovable “Rebecca”: “Still Dead After All These Years.”Was “Blanche” going to be a “Still Crazy After All These Years” situation? Or like the goofy-sounding off-off-Broadway attempt at a “Streetcar” sequel in 2006, wherein Blanche and Stella, her sister, were at least in passing represented by throw pillows?Fortunately not. Schoenberger, the author of books on the novelist-socialite Lady Caroline Blackwood and the Johns Wayne and Ford, has now written a lean but graceful character study of DuBois, giving Williams’s most indelible but also frequently misunderstood character her due.It seems incredible now that when “Streetcar” was first staged in 1947, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Jessica Tandy, audiences sympathized with her antagonist and brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski: the brutish factory-parts salesman most remembered for the muscles rippling over his “wife beater” T-shirt and his primordial bellow of “Hey, Stellllla!” (The sympathy was probably in part because young Marlon Brando’s performance was so dazzling.)Even before the #MeToo era, however, Kowalski was being re-evaluated as a domestic abuser, slut shamer and rapist. And as important a proponent of the play as Kazan, who also directed Vivien Leigh in the 1951 film, grew convinced, after his prolonged time with the material, of Blanche’s basic sanity.Schoenberger briefly explains her own fascination with “Streetcar”: Her parents were born in New Orleans, where the play is set, on either side of the Audubon Park Zoo, hearing the roar of the lions there. Her father was an itinerant naval officer — “so handsome in his white uniform!” writes the author, whose enthusiasm sometimes spills over endearingly into exclamation points — but she visited Louisiana often as a child, marveling at the Spanish moss and “dark scurrying cockroaches that seemed to lurk everywhere.” Her mother, a campus beauty queen in Baton Rouge, was an early fan of Williams’s work.If New Orleans and its “miasmal vapors” are pure nostalgia for Schoenberger, for Williams, a gay man who had been mocked as “Miss Nancy” by his cruel father, Cornelius, the sensual city was “liberation,” she notes. He was inspired more tragically by his sister Rose, whose erratic behavior, possibly exacerbated by Cornelius’s violations, led to her institutionalization and then lobotomization at age 26.The dysfunctional Williams family, chronicled extensively in more substantive books like John Lahr’s “Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh,” moves to the background quite quickly in “Blanche,” though, as readers get acquainted with a series of prominent actresses who have played her, a couple of whom Schoenberger has interviewed, all of whom were haunted by their experience. She also relies heavily, though with a light touch, on previously published material, of which there is no shortage. Talking to a journalist about playing DuBois can resemble a particularly wrenching therapy session.For women and not a few drag queens, Blanche is considered one of the plummest roles in all of show business, though its psychological complexities can prove debilitating. “Like climbing Mount Everest,” NPR called it. (Cate Blanchett, naturally, has scaled Everest twice, playing Blanche both onstage and, in Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine,” onscreen, in a modernized version for which she won an Oscar.) Jessica Lange and her partner, Sam Shepard — romantic couples often get oddly enmeshed in the production of “Streetcar” — believed it the equivalent of “Hamlet.” Rosemary Harris: “The loneliest part to live through that I’ve ever played on the stage.” Patricia Clarkson: “It destroys your life when you play that part, you never really recover from it, and everybody who’s ever done it knows.” Jemier Jenkins, one of a few Black women to play her, on the aftermath: “I was very actively trying to release, release, release.”Even the sturdy Ann-Margret found herself “twisted and shaking, confused, agitated, and staring ahead in a daze. I’d lost my grip on reality.” Most starkly Leigh, who turned out to have bipolar disorder, claimed that playing DuBois “tipped me into madness.” “Why has she entered our bloodstream?” wonders Schoenberger, a persuasive proponent of the play’s enduring importance despite its dated elements, most risibly that women hovering around 30 are past their prime. We have lived to see the antiquation of the word “nymphomaniac,” with which the critic Kenneth Tynan dismissed the character, and the reframing of prostitution as “sex work.” (DuBois’s seduction of a 17-year-old male student, regardless, keeps the mantle of moral ambiguity as settled around her shoulders as the “burden” of Belle Reve, the lost family estate, or one of her gossamer scarves.)Talking to Claire Bloom, who played the part on a London stage in 1974, Tennessee Williams once said he imagined Blanche persevering through her time in the asylum and ending up with a flower shop back in New Orleans; in her feminist faux-obit, Schoenberger gives her a co-ownership with Stella, who’s divorced Stanley. It’s a fanciful but satisfying little coda to this project, thankfully confined. (The sonnets, supposedly by Blanche’s doomed young groom, Allan Gray, are gilding the lily.)I’m not sure “Blanche,” which can waft and flit like the butterfly-like creature it chronicles, will satisfy true Williams junkies. But if you’re unfamiliar with this great American classic, or have perhaps let high-school memories of it lapse, this book is a hell of a gateway drug.BLANCHE: The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams’s Greatest Creation | By Nancy Schoenberger | Illustrated | 240 pp. | Harper/HarperCollins Publishers | $30 More

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    Heidi Gardner Celebrates Easter … Candy

    When she isn’t making audiences laugh on “Saturday Night Live,” she’s hanging out with girlfriends, admiring the flowers at 30 Rock and cheering for the Kansas City Chiefs.Heidi Gardner has developed a knack for portraying women in troubled relationships, dialing up the melodrama until she gets a laugh. On “Saturday Night Live,” where she has been a cast member since 2017, she sometimes plays Angel, “every boxer’s girlfriend from every movie about boxing ever,” according to the show’s Weekend Update anchors, who is perpetually threatening to take the kids to her sister’s.“I was around a lot of interesting characters growing up that were going through pretty intense things in life,” Gardner, 39, said in a phone interview last month. “But when that’s your life, there’s some comedy in that, too.”The same can be said of the Apple TV+ series “Shrinking,” which stars Jason Segel as a grieving therapist. One of his patients is Gardner’s Grace, who is in an abusive relationship. Both of them get plenty of chuckles.“I happen to find a lot of comedy in tragedy,” she said.Gardner, who grew up in Kansas City, Mo., talked about her go-to comedian, the decades-old TV show she discovered during the pandemic and why Easter candy is the best candy. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Brownies From a BoxFoods are constantly being elevated, but I never want a brownie that’s not from a box. When I have a brownie that’s from outside of the box, I’m like, yeah, this just isn’t it. And I have a feeling that most people agree with me. A brownie is to be made at home from a box with burnt crispy edges. Yeah, try and elevate it, but the box is still going to be better.2‘The Virgin Suicides’I first read the Jeffrey Eugenides novel when I was a teenager, almost like proving myself: I read the book, and I’ve seen the movie, and it’s this cool thing. But I loved it. Reading it as an adult, the language he uses stuck out to me from a more mature place. The way he describes things are feminine, they’re nostalgic, they’re girlie, they’re womanly, and they bring me so much joy.3Jack BlackHe’s my guiding light of comedy. When I was in college, he started blowing up in “Orange County” and “Saving Silverman,” and I was a massive fan of his band, Tenacious D. To this day, if I really need to laugh, I’ll go on YouTube and look up, like, his first Conan appearance. I can’t not laugh at him and find him completely enjoyable. He’s the most reliable source of comedy I think I’ve ever had in my life.4Girls Night Out, Let’s Have Fun ClubWhen I was a kid, my mom had a group of five friends who called themselves the Girls Night Out, Let’s Have Fun Club. They’d go to a bar on a Friday night, they’d take trips to San Francisco, and sometimes they’d have lingerie parties where a saleswoman would come to one of their houses with a rack of lingerie, negligees and teddies. They would try things on, have drinks and have so much fun. I’ve had a couple hangs like that recently with some friends, and I’ve thought: Oh, this is Girls Night Out, Let’s Have Fun Club. This is what my mom was doing. Part of my essential life is having good girlfriends.5‘Dallas’ RerunsWhen I was stuck at home during the pandemic, I started watching “Dallas” for the first time. I loved it. So many of the plot twists shocked me. I’m so jealous of people that were watching it as it was happening, back at a time where there were so few channels. It’s amazing that now we can watch whatever we want any time, but back then there was some limit to conversations. A lot of people were doing the same things, and I like that.6CowgirlOutside Times Square, there’s not a lot of accessible chain restaurants here in New York like I grew up with in the Midwest. But Cowgirl in the West Village has a lot of the comfort food we would get when we went out to dinner when I was a kid. They have a chicken fried steak, they have onion rings, and I love the tartness of their frozen margaritas. They taste like you’re drinking straight concentrate.7Stargazer LiliesGrowing up, my parents were divorced, and my dad used to take me to the flower shop in Kansas City to pick out flowers for his dates and get me flowers as well. We would step into the walk-in cooler full of flowers, and it was the best smell ever. I loved how chilly it was. His go-to flower was the Stargazer lily, a big, blooming, excessive pink and white flower. Every few weeks at 30 Rock, they change out the flower display at one of the main entrances with Stargazer lilies. If I see them when I walk in on a Saturday, I think, ‘Ooh, this is going to be a good show.’ I get why my dad would buy them for a woman he was trying to impress.8Easter CandyI think Easter candy is just the best and most joyful candy: It’s bright, it’s colorful, and the things that you get for Easter are more rare and better than the candy you get for Christmas, Halloween and Valentine’s Day. I think a Cadbury Creme Egg is an incredible, rare gem, and the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in egg form are better than any other formation of Reese’s.9Le Grand StripC.C. McGurr, the owner of this vintage store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, pulls things for me that I wouldn’t immediately think will look good on me, but I always try them on because it’s neat when someone sees something in you that you don’t see. She hits estate sales and gets the back story on some of the clothes. So, when I’m trying on a feather robe that I don’t have any use for except that I like how I feel in it, she’s telling me about the previous woman who owned it — about the woman’s closet and how she arranged her scarves.10Kansas City ChiefsI have a few tattoos that I got when I was, like, 21, but I really have no reason for them now. Lately, I’ve been thinking maybe I’ll get the number 15 — Patrick Mahomes’s number — just somewhere really small, because the Chiefs are something I’ve never grown tired of. I love them. More

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    In ‘Beef,’ Road Rage Is Only the Beginning

    LOS ANGELES — In the upcoming Netflix series “Beef,” Steven Yeun plays Danny Cho, a struggling handyman in Los Angeles who becomes embroiled in a road rage incident with Amy Lau, a wealthy entrepreneur played by Ali Wong. Over 10 episodes, their simmering hatred fuels an escalating series of poor decisions, setting off a bizarre chain of retribution including but not limited to robbery, vandalism, catfishing and bad Yelp reviews.The show was created by the writer Lee Sung Jin (“Dave,” “Two Broke Girls”), who first worked with Yeun and Wong on the animated series “Tuca & Bertie.” (Yeun and Wong played a robin and a song thrush who are lovers.) Around the same time, Lee was involved in a road rage confrontation in Los Angeles that would inspire his new series.“Beef” is Lee’s first outing as a series creator and showrunner. It also features Yeun’s first regular role on live-action TV since his character, Glenn, was killed off “The Walking Dead” in 2016. Glenn’s gruesome murder sparked viewer outrage but things worked out great for Yeun, who has since appeared in acclaimed films like “Minari,” which brought him an Academy Award nomination for best actor, and “Burning.”Lee and Yeun are set to work together again on Marvel’s forthcoming “Thunderbolts” movie, their first forays into the MCU: Lee as a writer, Yeun in a yet-to-be-revealed role.On an afternoon in March, Yeun and Lee got together at the Apple Pan, a beloved hole-in-the-wall burger joint on L.A.’s west side. Over hickory burgers, fries and slices of pie, they talked about how they met, the inspiration for “Beef” and their Korean church connections. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.In “Beef,” Yeun and Ali Wong play strangers who become embroiled in a bitter feud.NetflixTell me about the “incident.”LEE SUNG JIN I was getting on the 10. The light turned green and I didn’t go right away, and a white BMW X3 starts honking like crazy, pulls up next to me and [the driver] says a bunch of [expletive] at me. I was like, That’s not OK — I’m going to follow him home. In reality, I wasn’t actually going to follow him; I’m not that courageous. But back then I lived in Santa Monica — when we both got off at Fourth Street, I’m just commuting home, but I’m sure he was like, Oh my God, this guy is following me.I thought there was something interesting there, how we’re all locked in our subjective world views, and we go around projecting a lot on the other person and not really seeing things for what they are.How did you two first meet?LEE We actually met through Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. I was doing their pilot “Singularity” for FX, and I had really wanted to work with Steven. Seth and Evan are huge fans of his. [To Yeun] I don’t know how they knew you.STEVEN YEUN I don’t either. I guess maybe comic book worlds? Just me being in “Walking Dead” and them being fans of that world. And being gracious people, too, they invited me over to their house one time and properly smoked me out.LEE So Seth and Evan [introduced Lee and Yeun]. And after that first meeting, we had you and your wife over at our place. I was with my now-wife, and I remember feeling like we were going to know each other for a while. There was just something very comforting and familiar. We have very similar backgrounds.YEUN We’re not from the coasts. And we’re Korean. And we’re working in this business.Playing his character in “Beef” was “almost therapeutic,” Yeun said. “How do we see the world when you’re living in this space of, like, This place is designed to crush me?”Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesLEE And we both came up in the Korean church.How did you come up with the character of Danny?LEE I’m sure there’s a lot of me in Danny, but I think there’s a lot of all of us in Danny. I knew I wanted this guy to have a chip on his shoulder. I knew he lived in Reseda. I had just bought a home, and I was hearing a lot of funny stories about handymen and contractors shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to their work.YEUN Danny was an interesting thought experiment — it was almost therapeutic. How do we see the world when you’re living in this space of, like, This place is designed to crush me? I’m pretty sure all of us feel that way to some degree.What was that like to play for 10 episodes?YEUN I was pretty exhausted most days; you’re kind of living in a hypervigilant state. But I also relate to that life. I never dreamed I would be in this position in this business, and I think that makes you learn how to avoid things that could potentially harm you. For me, that seems like a very immigrant lens.Have you had road rage?YEUN Oh for sure. I think anybody who tells you that they haven’t is a liar. But my road rage is usually contained in my car.Yeun plays a handyman with a chip on his shoulder.Andrew Cooper/NetflixWong plays a wealthy entrepreneur.Andrew Cooper/NetflixThe series revolves around this relationship between Danny and Amy, but you aren’t together physically for much of it. What was that like?YEUN It was exciting, because you would hear the rumblings of how shooting was going on the other side. And I’m sure she was also hearing the other side. But then every time we would get together, it was very electric.I could see you and Ali getting into it, just as people.YEUN There’s good electricity between Ali and I.LEE They’re very similar, but opposite in a lot of ways — I mean that in the best way. We’re all close friends but I think when you have that, it does cause electricity.Much of the series takes place in parts of Los Angeles you rarely see on TV, including a Korean church in the Valley, complete with a praise team.LEE I’ve actually known Justin Min [who plays the praise team leader] since he was a kid, because his older brother, Jason, was my best friend in college. When Jason moved out to L.A., Steven, before “The Walking Dead,” went to the same church as him and was in the praise team.Jason actually arranged all the praise team songs in the show, and we prerecorded the music with this amazing producer, Ariel Rechtshaid, who does, like, Beyoncé and Adele. Jason is a pastor now, and he pulled his actual praise team from his church, and there were extras from that church who knew you, remember? There were these little kids going, “Uncle Steven!”YEUN That week was really fun, because we shot at an actual Korean church in Chatsworth. There was something very nostalgic about that week.“I thought there was something interesting there, how we’re all locked in our subjective world views,” Lee said about the incident that inspired the show.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesL.A. has always had plenty of road rage, but the problem got even worse during the pandemic. To what extent is this a Covid series?LEE We wrote it during Covid, and we were seeing headlines like: “Because of Covid, road rage up.” So yeah, it was in the air.But even aside from the rage, the thing that gets exacerbated with Covid is this sense of isolation and loneliness. When Amy talks to George in the intimacy exercise scene about this feeling she’s had forever, that came from me telling the writers’ room about my own low points. I was talking about my goddaughter, Lily — she was 4 at the time — and how I just hope she never has this feeling, and I started crying because it was very sad to think that she’s going to have to deal with it. I think that the show is really getting at the core of this feeling that a lot of us can’t escape.Do you ever wonder why you got so mad during the encounter that inspired this show? Or is it a common thing for you?LEE Um, yeah, I think I should probably reflect on it more.YEUN I think you’ve done quite a lot of reflecting!LEE Well, I’ve definitely thought a lot about not just that incident but why I am the way I am. And why any of us are.It’s easy, in writing, to point to one thing and be like, Oh, it was this trauma in my past, like, A leads to B leads to C. But that’s just not how we work. The lines aren’t straight — it’s very wiggly, and there’s a lot of stuff. I think that’s what the show wants to explore: That it’s not one thing. It really is about how hard it is to be alive.Is that BMW driver going to see a picture of you and go, Hey, that guy made this into a TV show?LEE No, I was wearing sunglasses.YEUN Also, that guy probably gets into five of those a day. He’s telling somebody off because they didn’t go fast enough? That guy lives in that space. More

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    Netflix’s ‘Transatlantic’ Tells of World War II Rescues

    A Netflix series dramatizes the efforts of Varian Fry, an American who helped save some 2,000 people from the Nazis without his government’s support.When Anna Winger, the co-creator of the new Netflix series “Transatlantic,” relocated to the vibrant French port city of Marseille last year, she found a dilapidated villa awaiting her. The “relic,” as she called it, was ideal for her purpose: the recreation of the Villa Air-Bel where, early in World War II, a dapper American named Varian Fry oversaw an extraordinary rescue operation for artists and writers, most of them Jews, hounded by the Nazis and the Vichy government of occupied France.Arriving in Marseille in mid-August, 1940, determined to help those in danger after witnessing the abuse of Jews in Berlin in 1935, Fry had to battle not only the French authorities and Nazi ideology, but also his own risk-averse United States Consulate in Marseille.Improvising at a time when the United States had not yet entered the war, Fry, a rebel in a suit, navigated a narrow path until his forced departure in late August 1941. He was determined to secure safe passage and overseas visas for the thousands of “foreign undesirables” who soon came knocking on his door.Among the some 2,000 people he rescued were the artist Max Ernst, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt and the German novelist Heinrich Mann.In his book “Assignment: Rescue,” written after the war, Fry wrote of Nazism that “I could not remain idle as long as I had any chance at all of saving even a few of its intended victims.”For many years, Winger had been obsessed with the story of “this man alone doing something very brave,” she said in an interview. In 2018, she started working on the project, and in 2020, she optioned Julie Orringer’s novel “The Flight Portfolio,” which became the basis for the fictionalized events in the series.Winger, who created the shows “Unorthodox” and “Deutschland 83,” lives in Berlin, where “as a Jew you think of these stories all the time,” she said. Her parents, both anthropologists, were Harvard professors and “a lot of people in the generation above them were refugees from Europe.” For her, “the impact of the emigration made possible by Fry is immeasurable in its influence on midcentury American thought.”Filming on “Transatlantic” began in Marseille in early 2022; war broke out in Europe just a few days later. With millions of refugees eventually pouring out of Ukraine, the moral dilemmas of conflict that the series explores felt particularly pertinent. “For all of us, it was top of mind and seeped into our daily lives in Marseille,” Winger said. She would go home to a Berlin dealing with a vast influx of refugees.The show captures not only the life-or-death seriousness of Fry’s mission to save refugees of another war, but also something of the louche, living-on-the-edge drama of a city that has always been a crossroads, and in 1940, unlike the northern half of France, was not directly occupied by German troops.Filming on “Transatlantic” began in Marseille in early 2022, and war broke out in Europe not long after.Anika Molbar/NetflixThe Marseille that Fry and his motley team of driven young anti-Fascists encountered had something of the freewheeling intrigue captured in “Casablanca,” another story of people suspended by war in a foreign place, aching in limbo for love and visas. Inevitably, money and sex — the currency of clandestine escape — have their place in “Transatlantic.”“We try to be true to the history but also make fun by working with it in a heightened way,” Winger said. The degree of fictionalization in the series has already caused controversy; Sheila Isenberg, the author of a book on Fry, called the show a “travesty.”Much of this pushback has been focused on the decision to depict Fry having a gay relationship. In 2019, James D. Fry, his son, wrote a letter to The New York Times stating that “My father was indeed a closeted homosexual.” He was responding to a New York Times review by Cynthia Ozick of the Orringer novel that said of Fry, “there is no evidence of homosexuality,” contrary to the novel’s portrayal of him.“We consider the letter from his son, James Fry, to The New York Times to be the last word on the subject,” Winger said via email.In the show, Fry, played by Cory Michael Smith, works closely with Mary Jayne Gold (Gillian Jacobs), an American heiress who brings her money, energy and connections to the mission, as well as with Albert O. Hirschman (Lucas Englander), a German Jewish intellectual who would become a distinguished American economist.Their activities meet the stern disapproval of the American consul general in Marseille, Hugh S. Fullerton (renamed Graham Patterson in the show), who is played by Corey Stoll. Fullerton, hewing to the then-neutral State Department line, wants to keep the United States out of the war. His vice consul, Hiram Bingham IV (Luke Thompson), thinks otherwise, however, and he quietly helps Fry with travel documents, some of them fraudulent.The interactions between these characters, their relationships and ruses, their hopes and hypocrisies, form the narrative backbone to “Transatlantic.”Mary Jayne Gold (Gillian Jacobs) and Graham Patterson (Corey Stoll) have a dalliance on the show, even as he is resistant to the team’s rescue efforts.Anika Molbar/NetflixOne night last spring, Winger shot scenes featuring Jacobs and Stoll in the recreated Villa Air-Bel, on the outskirts of the city. The consul, a loyal diplomat incapable of an act of rebellion against State Department policy, has a dalliance with the heiress, “that has a transactional nature to it, a question of getting people out,” Stoll said.They embrace. They argue. He wants to spend the night with her. She asks him to leave. Over and over the actors played the scene until Winger was satisfied that the exchange between the pair achieved the right degree of sparring and sexual tension.Fry and Gold may be on the same side, but they bicker a lot. To play the central character, “I spent a lot of time reading about Fry, going to Columbia University, where all his papers are,” Smith said in an interview in Marseille. “He was unassuming and demure, which I appreciate, yet he burned with a contrarian courage that led him to row against the tide.”A literary journalist, enamored of European writers and artists, Fry was 32 when he arrived in Marseille. He had been sent to France from New York by the newly formed Emergency Rescue Committee (the forerunner of the International Rescue Committee), established by American and German intellectuals. With him he brought a list of people to rescue, including Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton and Alma Mahler, who would eventually escape across the Pyrenees carrying Symphony No. 10, the last work of her former husband, Gustav Mahler.Fry thought he could get the job done quickly. But as Alan Riding wrote in his book “And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris,” Fry found himself in a “no man’s land of Gestapo spies, corrupt French police and refugees galore.”Initially installed at the Hôtel Splendide, Fry quickly gathered a talented team of volunteers. Continuously hounded, detained for several days in late 1940, Fry faced off with Fullerton, the American consul, who repeatedly advised him to leave or face arrest, and in January 1941 refused to renew Fry’s passport unless he returned to the United States.To the U.S. authorities at the time, Fry was a troublemaker, his effort to protect Jews and anti-Nazis a renegade operation undermining a craven official policy.The events portrayed in the show are many-faceted, Smith said, but a core truth is inescapable: “There were civilian heroes before our government was ready to step in.”Initially installing himself at a hotel, Fry far right, quickly gathered a talented team of volunteers.Anika Molbar/NetflixJacobs, who plays Gold, a sometime pilot of impetuous courage, said she found the part fascinating for its multiple dimensions. Gold makes mistakes, and her relationship with Fry is sometimes tense. He “views her as too impulsive, while she sometimes thinks he is too cautious,” Jacobs said, and yet, Gold’s moral core is clear: “She knows what she does is the right thing to do.”Englander, the Austrian actor who plays Hirschman, another of Fry’s volunteers, said in an interview on set that filming the show made him reflect on his family’s own history.“We never spoke of our Jewish past,” he said. “Grandpa had to run away — that was all we said in my family.” When Englander came to lines in which Hirschman speaks about his past before fleeing Germany, he said: “I felt my grandfather so strongly. I needed minutes of crying and coffee and cigarettes to recover. Now, I feel a compulsion to give something to life and help today’s refugees.”Fry never ceased in his search to find ways out, until he was hounded out of the country after 389 days. He was told by the Vichy police, with the apparent backing of the American consul general, that he had “gone too far in protecting Jews and anti-Nazis,” Riding wrote in “And the Show Went On.”Back in the United States, Fry wrote a groundbreaking article for The New Republic in 1942 titled “The Massacre of the Jews.” It had little effect. The slaughter continued, with Western powers doing their best to look away.Anna Winger, a creator of the show, left, was obsessed with Fry and his story for many years before she started working on the project.Anika Molbar/NetflixWriting and teaching, Fry lived out the rest of his life in relative anonymity, and died at the age of 59. It was only in 1967 that France honored him with a Légion d’Honneur, the country’s highest order of merit.During production, Smith found himself thinking about Fry as an American hero defying his own government.“There’s a real fight in America about exceptionalism, about what it means to be an exceptional nation,” he said. “Is it loving your country unyieldingly? Or is it taking a scalpel to it and looking at it honestly. This show is asking people to look realistically at our history.” More

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    The Last Days of Beckett’s, a Smoky New York Literary Salon

    About a year ago, a literary salon sprang to life in a run-down townhouse in the West Village of Manhattan. Dozens of young writers, critics, artists, theater actors and filmmakers started going there almost nightly to drink, smoke, talk, dance and argue, much like their bohemian predecessors in the days before sky-high rents priced poets out of the neighborhood.The venue had the clandestine air of a speakeasy. Notice of its existence was passed along by word of mouth. Guests stuffed cash into a cardboard box marked “donations” to receive canned Modelo from a fridge. There were readings, screenings and music shows in the grand, loft-like ground-floor space. Neighbors complained constantly about the noise. The police barged in once during a play.“This place has given us a taste of an older New York we never saw,” said Christian Cail, a jazz guitarist who visited the space. “This isn’t meant to exist.”The host was Beckett Rosset, a 53-year-old writer with a rocky past who lives in a book-cluttered apartment upstairs with his 18-year-old tabby cat, Micio. Mr. Rosset was named after Samuel Beckett, the 20th-century literary giant who worked closely with his father, the publishing maverick Barney Rosset. Gradually, his salon became known as Beckett’s, and its happenings included a debate about Shakespeare’s identity, a showing of the 1972 pornography classic “Deep Throat” and issue release parties for Dirty Magazine and the Mars Review of Books.The writers Rachel Rabbit White, left, and Nico Walker, in the townhouse stairwell with Mr. Rosset.OK McCausland for The New York TimesLate in the fall, as rumors swirled that the building was about to be sold, word went out that there would be one last gathering. On a November night, some 100 devotees shoved past the townhouse door to attend a rowdy wake inside. Poets in scarves sipped Fernet and writers in denim jackets drank cheap red wine. Others hung out on tattered sofas, flipping through the works of Henry James.In the rear, a hushed crowd sat on the floor of a dark theater space equipped with a piano and a disco ball, waiting for the evening’s entertainment to begin. Acts included the blind soprano Nafset Chenib, who sang Verdi, and the literary critic Christian Lorentzen, who read his old humor columns from The New York Observer. A woman in the audience wearing Converse sneakers kept coughing as she smoked a cigarette.Mr. Rosset, nervy and thin, wearing a dark suit, stood up and faced the crowd. “It wasn’t so long ago I was sitting here by myself and I didn’t even know any of you yet,” he said. “Now the building is getting sold, but I’m just thankful to so many of you for what this place became.” Some of the regulars started sobbing and hugging each other.To its adherents, Beckett’s had become a downtown sanctuary for the city’s creative underclass. It started last spring, when the playwright Matthew Gasda, who is known for staging his works in lofts and apartments, was looking for a place to mount his satire “Dimes Square.” So an actor in his play, Fernanda Amis (the daughter of the novelist Martin Amis), approached her cousin, Pablo Marvel, who lives in the townhouse and is related to the family that bought the building decades ago, to ask about renting the ground floor. Mr. Rosset soon started managing things. During the run of “Dimes Square” performances, a scene was born.Partygoers at the last Beckett’s gathering.OK McCausland for The New York TimesA poster for Evergreen Review, the literary publication run by Barney Rosset.OK McCausland for The New York TimesAfter Mr. Rosset thanked the crowd on that November night, the gathering turned into a drunken send-off to Beckett’s. Guests danced to Oasis beneath the disco ball while others chain-smoked beside space heaters in the host’s bedroom.Among the mourners was a writer named Jonah Howell. “I’m from a swamp town near New Orleans and haven’t been in New York long,” he said, “but I’ve already learned the bar to entry to literary scenes is high here. You got to know the right people to get anywhere. But here, you just come and you’re in.”“To read at those places like KGB Bar or the Franklin Park series it’s like you need a National Book Award or something,” Mr. Howell added. “There’s no segregated class here.”The playwright Matthew Gasda at the piano, with the artist Alida Delaney.OK McCausland for The New York TimesMr. Cail, the jazz guitarist, was standing near the bathroom line.“Where are we supposed to go now?” he said.As things shook out, Beckett’s wasn’t over quite yet.‘It Ain’t Pretty’Because the sale of a debt-ridden building in New York can be sluggish, the salon survived a few more months, resulting in a series of farewell parties with names like “Afterlife” and “Resurrection.” Amid the cigarette smoke haze at these bashes, the conversation often turned to Mr. Rosset and what would become of him once the townhouse was sold.“I think this place will come to signify its era,” said Anika Jade Levy, a co-editor of the indie literary publication Forever Magazine. “Now that it’s ending, I hope Beckett knows he’s more to us than just a man with a cool loft.”Cassidy Grady, an actor and playwright, whose “Fire Wars” was staged in the townhouse, shared the sentiment. “Beckett has never lived an ordinary life,” Ms. Grady said. “He’s been trying to figure out who he is through all this, but I think he thought he’d have more time.”Mr. Rosset had become a subject of fascination to his acolytes, some of whom accosted him for selfies. They had heard whispers of a troubled life — that he was a scion of literary royalty who had been in and out of jail. And they wondered about the framed Richard Avedon photograph hanging in his bedroom, a 1979 portrait that shows him, at age 10, standing next to Samuel Beckett.Late on a recent night, as yet another party emptied out downstairs, Mr. Rosset stood in his room, looking at the boy in the picture. “I still remember that day,” he said. “I flew to Paris with my father, and we all met at a cafe. I remember Beckett didn’t seem to like Avedon much. He said he’d only do the portrait if I was in it.”“When I look at this picture,” he continued, “I feel sad for that kid. That’s not a happy child. He looks in pain. It’s like he’s looking at his future and it ain’t pretty.”The host holds his 18-year-old cat, Micio.OK McCausland for The New York TimesMr. Rosset had a privileged Manhattan childhood. His father, the founder of Grove Press, was a towering figure who published writers like Jean Genet and William S. Burroughs. He changed the course of American letters with his crusade against censorship by publishing works including D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer.” His legal slugfests resulted in landmark First Amendment cases.The younger Mr. Rosset grew up in a townhouse not far from the one where he lives now. As a boy, he sat on the staircase to get a view of the cocktail parties attended by the likes of Norman Mailer and John Lennon. He spent weekends at a house in East Hampton, where the novelist Kenzaburo Oe stopped by for visits, and he sometimes encountered his father’s first wife, the painter Joan Mitchell.“She overheard me learning how to say curse words,” he recalled. “She called me over and told me, ‘Your language, it’s beautiful.’”Mr. Rosset’s struggles began in his teens. He said that he was expelled from two private boarding schools, Rumsey Hall and Blair Academy, and started experimenting with hard drugs at night in Central Park. He described his father, who married five times, as an absent parent, but said that, as his drug use worsened, so did their rift, resulting in a strained relationship that lasted until his death in 2012.“It was easy to tell I was going down a bad road,” he said. “I always felt abandoned by my father, and that feeling came to define my life. But in fairness to him and my family, I was unmanageable.”By his 20s, Mr. Rosset was using heroin and living in Bowery flophouses like the Providence and the Whitehouse Hotel. In the mid-1990s, he was charged with selling narcotics and petit larceny, putting him in Rikers repeatedly. Inmates nicknamed him “the Brain,” he said, after he taught a cellmate how to read.“At the Rikers library, I found a rare first-edition Beckett book,” he said. “I shoved it down my pants and stole it. I sent it to my father to try and make amends. He mailed me some cigarettes after that.”The actor George Olesky stood up from his place on the floor to the delight of the Beckett’s crowd.OK McCausland for The New York TimesIn his 30s, Mr. Rosset worked as a bartender, a proofreader and an assistant at a small record label. He befriended a West Village eccentric, Mary Kaplan, who took an interest in him. “She told me: ‘I feel sorry for your cats. Why don’t you all come stay at my home for a week?’” he said. “Well, I’m still here today. Mary saved me.”He moved into her townhouse, the same building that would become the site of his underground salon. As his stay expanded from weeks to years, he realized he had been taken in by a den mother of sorts. Ms. Kaplan’s father ran the Welch Grape Juice Company, and she used her largess to provide shelter for artists. Mr. Rosset helped take care of her until her death at 85.One of her great-nephews, Mr. Marvel, lives on the fourth floor, helping manage the building for his family. “I think what’s happened here with Beckett was guided by Mary’s bohemian spirit,” he said.In March, the building was put up for auction, and Beckett’s shut down indefinitely. Whatever happens next, Mr. Rosset said he was grateful for the ride, although he won’t exactly miss cleaning up after a bunch of hormonally charged poets and artists.Two Beckett’s regulars, Heather Simington, left, and Kitty St. Remy.OK McCausland for The New York TimesCasualties of another evening at Mr. Rosset’s salon.OK McCausland for The New York Times“Lots of them are privileged, highly educated, bored kids, but I’m not knocking them,” he said. “They’ve desired to become part of something, and that touches me, because I’ve felt like an outsider my whole life. For the first time, I feel like I belong.”Mr. Rosset declined to discuss the specifics of the Beckett’s business model, but said the money that guests kicked in had allowed him to make “enough to feed me and my cat.” The downtown scene that sprouted up around him, he added, also helped him make sense of his life. He’s even starting a publication, Tense, citing as its inspiration his father’s literary journal, Evergreen Review.“There’s an irony that I’m now channeling my father with this space and this magazine,” he said. “I’ve tried to be a lot of things in my life, but doing this finally feels right, because it’s in my blood, and that’s because of him.”The Last Last PartyMr. Rosset threw one last bash, billed in his email blasts as “The Rear End.” On the night of the party, March 18, the townhouse was packed. A group of women in fur coats stepped out of a black S.U.V. and tried to talk their way inside, only to be told by the volunteers at the door that Beckett’s was over capacity.“But I know someone reading tonight,” one of the latecomers said.Some of the guests were wondering where the scene would go now.The ballet dancer Ellen Frances in Mr. Rosset’s apartment on the night of her solo performance.OK McCausland for The New York Times“People are already trying to make new places a thing,” said Meg Spectre, an artist who had a Tamagotchi tied to her purse. “I heard at Manero’s in Little Italy people tried staging a play, but the restaurant got too loud. A scene has to happen organically, like it did here. You can’t force it.”The variety show that evening featured a reading by the novelist Nico Walker, a solo ballet performance by Ellen Frances and a pole dancing routine by Ella Wasserman-Smith. Mr. Rosset took part in a staging of a short Samuel Beckett play, “Catastrophe.”Around midnight, Ray Laurél, a musician from London, left the party and approached Mr. Rosset on the sidewalk, saying, “I just want to thank you, Mr. Beckett. I’m a theater kid from London and I was trying to find the scene here. Someone told me to come here because it might be closing. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”Mr. Rosset, in his apartment at the townhouse. “For the first time, I feel like I belong,” he said of his time as the host of the literary salon that took his name.OK McCausland for The New York TimesMr. Rosset gave a smile. Then he went back to picking cigarette butts off the sidewalk.Two days later, Mr. Rosset was awakened by a call informing him that the movers had arrived. He rushed downstairs to watch them take away the piano, the chandeliers and the rows of antique chairs.Then the moving truck drove off, hauling a scene away with it.Sheelagh McNeill contributed research. 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    ‘Yellowjackets’ Shows Us the Teenage Girlhood We Were Hungry For

    In a cabin in the wilderness, a group of starving teenage girls, a teenage boy and one adult man wake to an unfamiliar smell. Their noses twitching in the air, they leave their thin blankets and head out into the snowy wild in socks and insufficient clothes. Outside, their friend, whose body they tried to cremate last night, has turned into smoked meat. They surround her corpse, girl-shaped but foodlike, like a pig from the barbecue pit. One of the girls stands near the charred flesh, knife in hand. “She wants us to,” she says. A few moments later, the feast begins.Thus “Yellowjackets,” Showtime’s hit drama, answered, in the second episode of its second season, the question teased throughout its first: What and whom are these girls going to eat? Named for a New Jersey high school girls’ soccer team whose plane crashes in the Canadian Rockies en route to the 1996 national championships, “Yellowjackets” toggles between the team’s 19-month sojourn in the wilderness and the present day, when the surviving members struggle with the aftereffects of what happened to them. The show has become a sensation, garnering five million viewers per week, making it Showtime’s second-most-streamed show ever. In addition to the standard BuzzFeed meme roundups, the show has spawned exuberant fan fiction and forums that include suggested paper topics (“ ‘Yellowjackets’: Yellow Wallpaper for the 21st Century”) and frenzied theories about what, exactly, the Yellowjackets did in the woods.Plot mysteries abound: What happened to the hunter who died in the cabin where they shelter? Is there a malevolent spirit in the woods, and will it follow the girls to safety? But the show also grapples with questions of a more existential tenor, making it catnip for a demographic aging out of youth and into middle age, performing the excavations and re-evaluations that accompany midlife. Do people ever really change? Does trauma echo forever?As Showtime teased the second season (which began streaming in late March) and the internet forums buzzed with anticipation for the revelations promised therein, I headed to the frigid north to see for myself. The sky over British Columbia was ashen and spitting indifferent snow as I navigated the slush to the Vancouver soundstage where much of the show was filmed. On the way to the set, I listened to the official “Yellowjackets” playlist, groaning with pleasure as one after another 1990s jam issued forth. I was vibrating with excitement.I first came to the show as an exhausted mother with a free Showtime trial, repulsed and compelled by the unforgettable first scene of the pilot, written by the creators (and spouses) Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson and directed by Karyn Kusama. In it, a girl runs barefoot through the snow in a filmy nightie, blood in her tracks, until she falls into a pit and is impaled by sharpened sticks. Later, figures shrouded in animal pelts string her up naked and bleed her dry. It’s one of the most gruesome opening sequences I’ve ever seen on television, but “Yellowjackets” doesn’t sustain the wild pitch. One of the show’s winning qualities is the way it juxtaposes brutal violence with familiar scenes of soccer practice, futile groping in frilly bedrooms and the malaise of middle age, all against the soundtrack of the ’90s.Two hours and a rapid PCR test later, I sat in the dark of a tent, watching as two young women formed a kind of Pietà in a pool of warm yellow lamplight. One, Courtney Eaton, playing the character Lottie with eerie poise, lay on her side in a nest of blankets. The other, Sammi Hanratty, portraying the marvelously weird Misty, knelt behind, her frizzy blond hair aglow, bringing unspeakable news from beyond the cabin’s walls. Karyn Kusama was behind the camera, making minute, courteous corrections to the angles and expressions of the actors’ pliant faces over the course of two scenes. The spoilers fell thick as the manufactured Canadian snow blanketing the adjacent stage. I was watching the season finale unfold in real time.‘We didn’t want it to be about being women in a man’s world.’It was the last few days of shooting, and many of the primary executives were also on hand: the showrunners, Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson and Jonathan Lisco, and the producer Drew Comins. Comins was immediately identifiable as the show’s hype man; “Buzz, buzz, buzz!” was his cheerful greeting when we were introduced. They gathered together in the tent to watch the shoot. “Karyn loves to live in the painting,” someone murmured, seeing the same Pietà in the light of the lamps.Kusama joined us for a moment between shots. Lately, she has enjoyed vindication following the commercial flop and subsequent cult ascension of her 2009 film, “Jennifer’s Body” (another representation of women doing upsetting things). I asked her about something she said in a previous interview, about the ongoingness of TV and the way it allowed celebrated characters like Tony Soprano and Don Draper to not change — to occupy the uneasy Dantean position of being midway through the journey of life, but without Dante’s final ascent up to virtue and improvement. “Yellowjackets” claims its own form of ongoingness, giving female characters the same opportunities to flail in midlife, while anchoring them to a traumatic formative experience that made them heroes, of a sort, in their own lives. Kusama took on an oracular aspect in the dark as she spoke. “Any marginalized psyche is often positioned as an object, not a subject,” she said. The Yellowjackets “are characters who got through most of high school, learning that hard terrible lesson in female adolescence, that you’re not the subject of your own story.”The first episodes of the first season established this truth with a light touch, showing the girls leaving something nasty behind them: the guys yelling “Show us your tits,” the mean girls who prank call, alcoholic mothers, violent fathers. After the crash, the problem is simply the Yellowjackets, trying to survive. It’s the perfect canvas for Kusama, who was drawn to the idea of “living completely in your appetites and starvation.” Kusama believes questions of appetite “are very rich ideas for women: being hungry, being fed, feeding each other.” For her the show conveys “a very pure relationship to the metaphor,” and indeed these were the subjects of the day’s scenes, about which I now possessed sinister knowledge.When Kusama, who is also an executive producer, first met with Lyle and Nickerson to discuss the pilot, she likened it to a war story. She told me that the real wilderness of the show is “female interiority, female experience, female transformation and the presence of a kind of unchangeable chaos in women,” a delicious phrase. “It is progress to see ourselves change,” she said, “but the reality of many people’s lives is that the patterns we learn early are the patterns we enact and re-enact for years to come.” Part of the show’s inquiry, she said in the darkness, is “to what degree is positive change possible,” given that there is “very real anguish in their past.”As the sounds of activity outside the tent picked up and it was clear our time would soon come to an end, I asked Kusama about the challenge of exploitation that invariably lives in a show about cannibal teenage girls. “Yellowjackets” is in some ways a quintessential Dead Girl show, an idea explored by the writer Alice Bolin in her book on the subject to account for shows like “True Detective” and “Twin Peaks.” These mysteries are structured around beautiful, dead white girls and “the investigator’s haunted, semi-sexual obsession” with them. In “Yellowjackets,” it is the audience who steps into the inspector’s role, only to find our voyeurism thwarted, at least most of the time, by a conscientious editorial sensibility. It’s a fundamental conundrum of storytelling, Kusama said, “the urge to entertain and engage versus the urge to confront and provoke.” She approached her episodes with a firm rule: “None of this is a joke,” she told herself and her colleagues. It was imperative for her to treat these characters “with some degree of gravity, because otherwise I really wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.”I walked through the extant sets — a remarkable recreation of the Canadian forest replete with the scent of real (salvaged) pine trees dangling from the rafters — past rooms of stacked up crates with labels like “antlers” and “fur.” I followed Lyle, Nickerson and Lisco to the warren of modular offices tucked above the soundstages. I admired Lyle’s outfit as we walked, an array of ’90s layers befitting the “Yellowjackets” universe: a leopard cardigan, a red animal-print skirt, black tights, boots. It was such a good outfit that I forgot to look at the men.We took off our masks and sat in a circle. Trucks bearing the material of filmmaking rumbled around the buildings on the roads below the window. I raised the topic of covertly dignified treatment of teenage girls. Lyle and Nickerson, who previously wrote for “Narcos,” Netflix’s drama about the life and death of Pablo Escobar, knew that they wanted to make a show about women. “But we didn’t want it to be about being women in a man’s world,” Lyle said. “So we were like, ‘Well, I guess we can drop them into the wilderness in a plane crash and see what happens.’” For Nickerson, the frame was less important than the development of the characters, to give them “the dignity of a point of view” and let them proceed from there.When I suggested that the first season was a bit of a bait and switch, because audiences drawn in by the cannibalistic first episode will find all kinds of other complex human dramas playing out, Lyle agreed. “That slightly salacious or plot-driven outset to the story with the plane crash and the cannibalism,” she said, is “a little bit of a Trojan horse to just make you care about these women.” She went on, “It’s interesting that you almost need something like that to tell a story about women that is hopefully nuanced and complicated.”Lisco, who previously worked on hits like “N.Y.P.D. Blue” and “Halt and Catch Fire” and came on as a showrunner after Lyle and Nickerson sold “Yellowjackets,” spoke to the show’s juxtapositions as its strengths, its blend of the gruesome “reality of what they’re going through with real comedy, because the bizarre incongruities of life are with us always.” He thought people longed, perhaps because of the pandemic, “to feel something and feel the totality and richness of their human experiences.”“Yellowjackets” does have a little something for everyone. There’s a fundamental humor in the show’s timing: one moment of grotesque violence in the past, one moment of mundanity in the present, contrasts à la “The Sopranos” or “Breaking Bad,” but with teenage girls doing the things, broadening the innate disconnect. Gliding brashly and mostly successfully among horror, buddy detective, melodrama and light camp, the show also achieves something that I can only describe as the sometime triumph of Prime Time over Prestige, the marriage of surreality and strong character development within the confines of fast-paced entertainment doled out a week a time. It harks back to the golden age of weird prime-time shows like “Twin Peaks” or “Lost,” which delighted, shocked, titillated and annoyed, but never in quite the way audiences expected.Like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” another fan favorite that trucked in teenage-girl archetypes, “Yellowjackets” is occasionally quippy and self-referential. “Wow. I’ve never been in a French farce before,” says one doomed character when he hides from a husband in a bedroom closet. As adult Misty (Christina Ricci) prepares to kill a nosy reporter (long story), she ponders who might play her in a movie adaptation. “Who’s the one in that thing about those rich ladies that kill that guy?” she asks guilelessly, a nod to “Big Little Lies,” one reference to which Comins compared the show during pitch meetings. “Big Little Lies” disguised a searing portrait of abuse as a piece of gossamer lifestyle porn. “Yellowjackets” performs a similar trick: It sneaks a thoughtful excavation of teenage girlhood and middle-aged floundering into its genre pleasures.Toward the end of the day, I visited costumes, where Amy Parris, who like me is nearing 40, kept a stack of ancient magazines as reference material: Seventeen and Sassy and YM, which could have been mine. One magazine contains a photo of a teenage Christina Ricci and Elijah Wood — who joins the show this season as Walter, one of Misty’s fellow citizen detectives from the true-crime forums — together at the height of their early fame. It’s a potent reminder of the psychic resonance the show holds for someone who grew up with these referents. I read some headlines aloud: “A ballerina and her eating disorder.” “So you think you want a nose job? Read this first.” We briefly observed how nasty it was to be alive and teenage in the 1990s. And yet these nostalgic artifacts opened a yawning chasm of feeling. Perhaps the real resonance of the show is the age of its present-day characters — early 40s, just tipped into the zone of midlife where women have historically become invisible, a tendency that popular culture dances with and occasionally fights against.Retrospection is in the air. Younger millennials, apparently, are rewatching “Girls” in record numbers to parse the just-vanished particulars of their early 20s. Before “Yellowjackets,” I binged “Fleishman Is in Trouble” and was totally caught up in the backward excavation of its hapless middle-aged characters. I exchanged texts with my peers about the promised reappearance of Aidan on “And Just Like That,” an unheimlich but irresistible return to “Sex and the City,” a show that gave my generation a formative if deeply inaccurate picture of what our adulthood might hold. Cultural offerings like “Impeachment” or “I, Tonya” take up the specifics of the 1990s’ sensational moments and examine them in a new light. What a time, then, for both of the “Yellowjackets” story lines: its murderers’ row of former icons — Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci, Melanie Lynskey, now Elijah Wood — playing middle-aged roles, as well as the opportunity to see those characters as their past selves, a vicarious simultaneity.The show takes the common awfulnesses of teenage girlhood in that era (which of course persist today, with their own temporal inflection) — the unsettling sexual experiences or outright assaults; the casual racism; homophobia and misogyny; Kate Moss languishing in her underwear — and discreetly moves them out of the way. A primary love story in the woods is a queer one; the romance between Van (Liv Hewson) and Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) is a loving and fully realized relationship from the jump. The only adult man present, the team’s coach, Ben Scott (Steven Krueger), is gay, and his period-appropriate terror of being outed is understood and neutralized by the empathetic perspicacity of Natalie (Sophie Thatcher), who navigates her own halting romance with Travis (Kevin Alves), the only teenage boy in the cabin. Unlike the characters of “Euphoria,” whose goal seems to be to show as much pretend-under-age boob as possible, those in “Yellowjackets” have access to a form of fundamental self-respect and agency that many middle-aged women took years to attain. Maybe that’s part of the fantasy, too.There’s something fundamentally melancholy, though, about all this looking back. Toward the end of the first season, in a wilderness interlude, Van is attacked by wolves, her face torn open. Back at the cabin, the girls work together to hold her down while one draws a curved needle through her cheek to stitch the wound. In the next moment, we see 40-something Taissa (Tawny Cypress), now at Shauna’s modest New Jersey ranch house, where Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) makes up her teenage daughter’s bed, beneath a poster that reads “Keep Calm You Can Still Marry Harry.” The two old friends lie in bed, and Shauna muses about what would have happened had they not crashed, had she gone to Brown the way she planned, where she would “write amazing papers on Dorothy Parker and Virginia Woolf” and fall in love with a “floppy-haired, sad-eyed poet boy.” Taissa, meanwhile, describes a litany of successes that actually came to pass: Howard University, “a bunch of beautiful women,” “first string on the soccer team,” Columbia Law. But achieving a dream can also become ash in the mouth. “Not a single one of those things felt real,” Taissa says. It was their time in the woods, when everything was terrible and vivid and somehow fundamental — and cheeks were stitched with twine — when feeling and reality were truly one.Or at least that’s what the show wants us to think at first. That’s certainly how the characters feel in the early episodes, quietly assenting to the fate suggested in their bad marriages, puzzling children and unfulfilling jobs. But then the gang gets back together, and their efforts to keep their shared trauma among them amount to a kind of quest. Their days become unpredictable and enlivened again. At some point, viewers sense that the women approach their present-day escapades with the same ferocity they brought to their exploits in the wilderness.From some angles, this vicarious pleasure might confirm our worst suspicions that for women, middle age signals the decline after the peak. But the notion of a miserable midlife turns out to be another bait and switch. “Yellowjackets,” then, becomes a deliciously macabre play on the midlife crisis. Certainly, healing and redemption appear to fall outside the boundaries of a “Yellowjackets” universe. So, like other women before them, these restless heroines begin to make the most of the diversions life finds for them, grim as their circumstances might be: sex, camaraderie, adventure and wild fun.Source images for opening artwork: Showtime, the New York Public Library, Russell Lee via the New York Public Library.Lydia Kiesling is the author of “The Golden State,” which was a 2018 National Book Foundation “Five Under 35” honoree. Her novel “Mobility” is set to be published in August. Sarah Palmer is an artist, photographer, and educator based in Brooklyn. Her solo exhibition, “The Delirious Sun,” at Mrs. gallery in Maspeth, is on display until May 6. More