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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Below Deck Sailing Yacht’ and ‘Abbott Elementary’

    Bravo airs its reality show about “yachties,” and ABC is back with its Emmy-winning sitcom.For those who still enjoy a cable subscription, here is a selection of cable and network TV shows, movies and specials that broadcast this week, Oct. 7-13. Details and times are subject to change.Monday60 MINUTES: ELECTION SPECIAL 8 p.m. on CBS. This program, in which CBS sits down with the Republican and Democratic presidential nominees, has been a bit of an election-season tradition for over 50 years. And with no more debates on the docket, this would have been another opportunity for voters to hear from the candidates before Election Day. But on Tuesday, according to CBS, former President Donald J. Trump backed out, declining to be interviewed by the correspondent Scott Pelley. Vice President Kamala Harris is still scheduled to be interviewed by Bill Whitaker.BELOW DECK SAILING YACHT 9 p.m. on Bravo. For a while, the fate of this “Below Deck” spinoff seemed precarious. The last season aired through July 2023, before the boatswain, Gary King, was accused of sexual misconduct by a member of the production team, Samantha Suarez, in an exposé for Rolling Stone. The next month, King didn’t appear at BravoCon, a convention where fans can meet Bravolebrities, so viewers wondered if he was off the show. But just like that, King is going to be back on our screens with very little explanation. At the time of the accusation, Bravo said: “The concerns Ms. Suarez raised in July 2022 were investigated at that time and action was taken based on the findings.” King will be joined again by the chief stew Daisy Kelliher and, of course, Captain Glenn Shephard, a fan favorite.TuesdayGraceland, the mansion once owned by Elvis Presley, in Memphis, Tennessee.Jeff Mitchell/ReutersAN OPRAH SPECIAL: THE PRESLEYS — ELVIS, LISA MARIE AND RILEY 8 p.m. on CBS. For this special, Oprah Winfrey traveled to Tennessee to sit down with Riley Keough, the granddaughter of Elvis Presley and an actress in her own right. This is the first time that Keough has been interviewed since her mother, Lisa Marie Presley, died unexpectedly in January 2023. Lisa Marie had been writing a memoir, “From Here to the Great Unknown,” which Keough finished on her behalf after her death.WednesdayThe cast of “Abbott Elementary.”Gilles Mingasson/DisneyWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Saturday Night Live’ Revisits the Vice-Presidential Debate

    The comic Nate Bargatze hosted an episode that opened with another political sketch featuring the guest stars Dana Carvey, Jim Gaffigan, Maya Rudolph and Andy Samberg.Last week, America got the answer to the question: Who would play the presidential and vice-presidential nominees this season on “Saturday Night Live”?This week, another pressing question arose: How quickly would “S.N.L.” reference Senator JD Vance’s quote, “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check” from Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate?The answer came late in an opening sketch that parodied the debate, and which featured most of the same players from last weekend’s opening, including Bowen Yang as Vance and Jim Gaffigan as Gov. Tim Walz.Welcomed to their podiums by Heidi Gardner (as Norah O’Donnell) and Chloe Fineman (as Margaret Brennan), the candidates each made a brief opening statement.Yang, observing that he wanted to make an appeal to women voters, said, “I understand that both moderators tonight are mothers, and I like that.”Gaffigan was observed scribbling furiously on a notepad and explained that he was not taking notes for the debate. “I got to grade these papers,” he said. “Got a stack of midterms.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Ella Purnell Is a TV Star Who Hasn’t Lost Touch With Her Barista Roots

    “Sometimes, before I go to bed,” the “Sweetpea” actress and executive producer said, “I think about how good my coffee’s going to be in the morning.”You might think twice about overlooking the office wallflower after watching Ella Purnell play a sad sack gone sadist on the new Starz dramedy “Sweetpea.”The British actress, who is also an executive producer on the series, plays Rhiannon, a shrinking violet who develops a thirst for vengeance after her childhood bully resurfaces.Purnell, 28, is best known for playing a high-school princess on Showtime’s teen survival drama “Yellowjackets” and a sheltered innocent on the postapocalyptic Prime Video series “Fallout.” Now she’s traded their perkiness for pent-up rage. She called Rhiannon “a case of arrested development” during a phone interview in September from Los Angeles, where she’d attended the Emmy Awards ceremony the day before.“She’s stuck in the past and unable to move on,” Purnell said, adding that she’s the opposite in real life. “I really love processing things. You can’t just stuff things away in a little box in your brain and not think about it. It will find other ways to come out if you don’t feel your feelings.”Still, there are some things Purnell — a self-described creature of comfort — won’t let go of.“I like to do the same things every day. I like to eat the same things every day. I get hyper-fixations,” she said before discussing worn-in footwear, a miraculous beauty product and the American meal she craves. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Breville Espresso MachineI spent a lot of money on that machine; it’s not going to waste. I used to work in a coffee shop, so I have experience tamping down and getting the right grind size and pressure. Sometimes, before I go to bed, I think about how good my coffee’s going to be in the morning.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘The Franchise’ Review: Cutting Marvel Down to Size

    A new HBO comedy takes a jaundiced look at the making of a second-rate superhero film.The new HBO series “The Franchise” satirizes the making of a superhero movie by a fictional movie studio that is Marvel in all but name. (The actual fictional name is Maximum Studios.) Warner Bros. Discovery, HBO’s parent, is Marvel’s bitter rival in the superhero field, so you might expect the show to offer an extra measure of savage mockery.But the eight half-hour episodes (premiering Sunday), while nominally dark and sardonic, do not have anything approaching the visceral pleasure that the genre they are spoofing can often provide. “When you make movies like this, but good, there’s nothing better,” the beleaguered first assistant director, Daniel (Himesh Patel), says in one of the show’s few moments of genuine feeling.The movie-within-the-show, a second-tier effort called “Tecto,” is clearly not one of the good ones. “The Franchise,” somewhat perversely, operates on the same tepid, clichéd level as the production it is supposed to be mocking.More could have been expected. The show’s creator, Jon Brown, wrote for “Succession” and, way back, for the barbed British comedy “Misfits.” And the list of executive producers includes the accomplished veterans Sam Mendes and Armando Iannucci. Mendes directed the first episode, and his touch can be seen in an early three-minute shot that follows Daniel as he walks through the cavernous set of “Tecto,” putting out fires (and encountering many of the other central characters). It is a virtuoso moment that nothing else in the show approaches.Iannucci, of course, is a specialist in the specific sort of satire “The Franchise” undertakes: the acidic depiction of institutional vanity, insecurity and ineptitude. But the vitality of Iannucci creations like “The Thick of It” and “Veep” is exactly what the new show is missing. It has more in common with Iannucci’s most recent show, the scattered outer-space cruise comedy “Avenue 5,” on which Brown worked as a writer and producer. (The sinking-ship metaphor that underlies “The Franchise” was explicit in “Avenue 5.”)“The Franchise” leapfrogs through the 117-day shoot of “Tecto,” named for its hero, an off-brand Thor (Billy Magnussen) who wields an invisible jackhammer. Each episode finds Daniel and the power-hungry third assistant director, Dag (Lolly Adefope), confronting crises drawn from the musty archives of the Hollywood backstage comedy and then tweaked to fit the world of contemporary big-money filmmaking. Bowing to commercial reality means product-placing Chinese tractors; last-minute rewrites are driven by protests over the studio’s “woman problem”; a temperamental director melts down because Martin Scorsese accuses the studio of killing cinema.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    In ‘La Máquina,’ Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna Get a Rematch

    Sitting cross-legged on the floor at the Château Marmont in Los Angeles, Gael García Bernal stared with admiration at his lifelong friend and fellow actor Diego Luna. Just the night before, they had walked onstage at the Peacock Theater and, as expected, presented the Emmy for best director of a limited or anthology series or TV movie.Less expected, in a move they said wasn’t preapproved, they had given the award in Spanish.“We were just told that the Emmys are losing a big chunk of its audience,” García Bernal told the crowd and the nearly 7 million live TV viewers. “So me and Diego decided to do something to push the limits, to erase the boundaries.”Luna saluted the United States’ more than 50 million Spanish speakers. Then the award went to Steven Zaillian of “Ripley” — for “mejor dirección” in a limited series.Whatever its provocative qualities — in our interview, García Bernal cited Donald Trump’s divisive immigration rhetoric as motivation — the speech was also a canny bit of promotion. As much of the ensuing coverage noted, the two actors have their own limited series coming on Oct. 9, “La Máquina,” Hulu’s first original Spanish-language production.In “La Máquina,” Luna, left, plays the spray-tanned, plastic-surgery obsessed manager of a boxer played by García Bernal (with Eiza González as the boxer’s ex-wife).Cristian Salvatierra/HuluFriends since they were children in Mexico City, García Bernal, 45, and Luna, 44, are indelibly linked, not least because of their breakout roles in Alfonso Cuarón’s breakout film, “Y Tu Mamá También” (2002), in which they played best pals from different social classes on a life-changing road trip.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Late Night Heaps Scorn on Trump’s Latest Defense

    Jimmy Kimmel said Donald Trump was “partially right” in denying interference in the 2020 election: “He tried to rig the election and failed to rig the election.’Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.‘Rignoramus’A newly unsealed court filing in the special counsel’s case against former President Donald Trump detailed attempts at election interference in 2020. Trump refuted those claims, saying that it wasn’t he who rigged the election, “they did.”“He’s actually right about some of that; he didn’t rig the election. He tried to rig the election and failed to rig the election. He’s a rignoramus, is what he is.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“What a baby. That’s just as bad as Jeffrey Dahmer’s famous defense, ‘No, you ate my neighbor!’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“I know this is going to sound controversial, but I’m just going to come out and say it: I think Trump might have done something wrong.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (October Surprise Edition)“A federal judge yesterday unsealed a 165-page motion detailing evidence against former President Trump in his election interference case. OK, well, there’s only one way he’s reading 165 pages, and it’s at the Cheesecake Factory.” — SETH MEYERS“According to the filing, Trump told the staff that he was going to declare victory regardless of the results. Vladimir Putin heard and was like, ‘[imitating Putin] My little man is growing up.’” — JIMMY FALLON“The news of Trump’s alleged crimes are being called an ‘October surprise,’ while most Americans were like, ‘Um, we’re not that surprised.’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingDemi Lovato and Jimmy Fallon shrieked their way through a new haunted house experience, “Tonightmares.”Also, Check This OutSaoirse Ronan in “The Outrun.”Martin Scott Powell/Sony Pictures ClassicsSaoirse Ronan delivers another stunning performance as an alcoholic desperately clinging to sobriety. More

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    When John Amos Had Enough of the ‘Good Times’

    The actor, whose death was announced this week, made it known he didn’t like the direction the hit show was going. His character was then killed off.It was the role John Amos had worked toward his entire acting career. For three seasons, to many accolades and impressive ratings, Amos played the patriarch, James Evans Sr., on “Good Times.” The character was hardworking, earnest and serious-minded — traits largely unseen in Black television characters up to that point in the mid-1970s. And “Good Times” was a hit, part of a string of sitcom successes from the executive producer Norman Lear.But suddenly, Amos was no longer a part of the cast. The groundbreaking show explained the absence to viewers by having Evans die in an offscreen car accident while preparing the family for a move to Mississippi.“Damn! Damn! Damn!” the actress Esther Rolle, who played Evans’s wife, Florida, famously lamented while mourning his death.“Good Times” rumbled on for another three seasons without its fatherly anchor, and with diminishing viewership each season until it concluded in 1979.The actor’s actual death, at the age of 84, was made public on Tuesday although he died in August. The lag between his death and the announcement has widened a longstanding rift between his two children, Shannon Amos and K.C. Amos His daughter, Shannon, said that she had only learned of her father’s death through media reports.“This tragic news has left us in shock and heartache,” Shannon Amos said in a statement attributed to her, close friends and family members. “We are deeply concerned that our father may have been neglected and isolated during his final days.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Jay J. Armes, Private Eye With a Superhero Story, Dies at 92

    With steel hooks for hands and a flamboyant personality, Mr. Armes captured the attention — and scrutiny — of reporters across the nation.Jay J. Armes, a flamboyant private investigator who lived on an estate with miniature Tibetan horses, traveled in a bulletproof Cadillac limousine with rotating license plates and had steel hooks for hands — including one fitted to fire a .22 caliber revolver — died on Sept. 18 in El Paso. He was 92.His death, at a hospital, was caused by respiratory failure, his son Jay J. Armes III said.Described as “armless but deadly” by People magazine, Mr. Armes appeared to live the life of a superhero. In the 1970s, the Ideal Toy Corporation even reproduced him as a plastic action figure, with hooks like those he began wearing in adolescence after an accident in which railroad dynamite exploded in his hands.In the 1970s, the Ideal Toy Corporation reproduced Mr. Armes as a plastic action figure, complete with hooks for hands.Associated PressMr. Armes (pronounced arms) catapulted to investigatory stardom in 1972 after Marlon Brando hired him to find his 13-year-old son, Christian, who had been abducted in Mexico. Working with Mexican federal agents, Mr. Armes said he found the boy in a cave with a gang of hippies.He told other daring tales of triumph: flying on a glider into Cuba to recover $2 million for a client; helping another client escape from a Mexican prison by sending him a helicopter, which he said inspired the 1975 Charles Bronson movie “Breakout.”The national media was enthralled by his detective skills.“He is an expert on bugging, a skilled pilot, a deadly marksman and karate fighter and, perhaps, the best private eye in the country,” Newsweek wrote in 1975. “All he lacks is a pair of hands.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More