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    In 2022, TV Woke Up From the American Dream

    How the TV of 2022 depicted the weird, warping pressures of work and ambition in a boom-and-bust economy.In the Peacock series “Killing It,” Brock (Scott MacArthur), an Everglades snake hunter and would-be YouTube influencer, gets shot in the face in an altercation over a sack of python eggs. It is the best thing that has ever happened to him.The shooting leaves Brock minus one eye. But it’s captured on video, and the upload gets millions of views, giving him the lucrative viral success he’s wanted for years.“American dream!” he says, beaming. “Getting shot in the face!”On TV, 2022 has been the year of the American dream — with a catch. For many of the hustlers, entrepreneurs and strugglers onscreen, that aspiration still exists. But as Brock experienced, it can cost you an important part of yourself.“Killing It,” created by Dan Goor and Luke Del Tredici of “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” slipped under many TV watchers’ radar last spring, including, mea culpa, mine. In its first episode, it seems like a simple, wacky buddy comedy: Craig Foster (Craig Robinson), a Florida security guard with dreams of starting a prostate-supplement business, teams up with the ride-share driver Jillian Glopp (Claudia O’Doherty) in a contest to exterminate invasive pythons.But as the season goes on, it becomes a broad, big-swinging satire of an adversarial economy that can seem to be booming and busting at the same time. (Tim Heidecker has a boisterous turn as a testosterone-pumped motivational speaker who preaches the philosophy of “Dominine,” which is one more than “dominate.”)As Craig, Jillian and their opponents claw toward their prize, one foot of dead python at a time, they give us a tour of the hustler’s mirage, in which the promise of riches shimmers on the horizon, all yours if you only go to one more paid conference, pitch two more investors, take three more jobs.The work experience of Jillian, an Australian immigrant, is especially bleak-comic. She drives an Uber that tows a mobile billboard (which doubles as her home), gets a TaskRabbit stint helping a rich woman (D’Arcy Carden) perpetrate a tax-fraud scheme and takes a job murdering birds at an airport, all with a heartbreakingly cheerful spirit of optimism.The comedy is grotesque and blunt — Craig spends one episode with a dead snake nailed to his palm — but sneakily smart. In this hunt for the American dream, it says, every life form must find a lower life form to kill. And while the series is set in 2016, three years before the first stirrings of Covid, it feels pandemic-adjacent in its focus on the stratum of the work force for whom work is risky, physical and in-person. You cannot drive an Uber, or shoot a nail gun into a python’s skull, over Zoom.Nicco Annan and Brandee Evans in “P-Valley,” in which every dancer dreams of being something else.StarzThe pandemic plays explicitly in Season 2 of Starz’s strip-club melodrama “P-Valley,” about a line of work that is defined by in-person interaction. The proprietor of the Pynk nightclub, Uncle Clifford (a resplendent Nicco Annan), who is nonbinary and uses she/her pronouns, spends much of the season sporting a bejeweled mask, enforcing 2020-era Covid protocols while trying to keep her business afloat at 50 percent capacity.The Pynk is a magnet for dreams, and not only naughty ones. The “P-Valley” creator, the playwright Katori Hall, respects her pole dancers as artists and athletes, and she recognizes their work for what it is: a job that manifests the economy tangibly, translating desire into dollar bills flying in the air.And because dancers age out so quickly, the job also renders the pressures of the economy in time-lapse: You have just a few years to rise up the pole before your tiring muscles pull you back down.Every dancer enters the Pynk with an eye on something else — a showbiz life, a business career, or simply escape — but one of the most affecting journeys of Season 2 belongs to Mercedes (Brandee Evans), who comes to realize that she has reached retirement age without having figured out her next step. “You’re just going to have to learn how to dream new dreams,” Uncle Clifford tells her. That’s the price of dreaming: You can’t afford to wake up.The summer’s surprise buzz phenomenon, FX on Hulu’s “The Bear,” focused on the pressures of a different sort of service industry. Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), a high-end restaurant chef, comes home to run his family’s struggling Chicago sandwich joint after his drug-addicted brother’s suicide. The pandemic isn’t a factor in the story. But the show’s depiction of work as a kind of barely restrained combat (which sometimes boils over into actual combat) feels like a bespoke fit for the post-reopening economy of labor shortages and supply chain issues.The memorable, high-decibel work sequences make “The Bear” look and sound like a war story that happens to take place in a kitchen. Work here is furious, violent and relentless. Flames roar up the sides of pans, pots clatter like artillery, slabs of beef are dragged and hoisted like casualties. Hands are burned, fingers slashed; the pace of the prep rush turns the kitchen staff into sweating, shouting bodies, meat cooking meat.All the while, Carmy flashes back to memories of being mocked and belittled by his Michelin-starred boss in the restaurant where he used to work. At times, you wonder why he chooses to stick with this job that often makes him so unhappy. In the season finale, reminiscing about his brother at an Al-Anon meeting, he seems to hit on an answer: Sometimes our dreams are not ours alone, nor are they even our choice. “Me trying to fix the restaurant was me trying to fix whatever was happening with my brother,” he says. “And, I don’t know, maybe fix the whole family.”Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy Allen White in “The Bear,” which depicts work as a kind of combat.FXIn politics, “the American dream” has long been used aspirationally, to evoke family and home. But as my colleague Jazmine Ulloa detailed earlier this year, the phrase has also lately been used ominously, especially by conservative politicians, to describe a certain way of life in danger of being stolen by outsiders.The typical counterargument, both in politics and pop culture, has been that immigrants pursuing their ambitions help to strengthen all of America. (The Dream Act has its name for a reason.) But some recent stories have complicated this idea by questioning whether the dream itself — or, at least, defining that dream in mostly material terms — can be toxic.The third season of Hulu’s “Ramy,” starring the comedian Ramy Youssef as a rudderless young Muslim from an immigrant family, takes on the theme directly. The title character’s parents, Maysa (Hiam Abbass) and Farouk (Amr Waked), have found prosperity tantalizingly out of reach, signing up with ride-share and grocery-delivery apps in their middle age.Maysa has grown resigned, but Farouk remains in a poignant unrequited love affair with the dream. He chases real-estate deals; he gins up a hapless business selling ad space on takeout containers; he fantasizes about appearing on “Shark Tank.” (Ramy, meanwhile, has hit it big in the jewelry business, having partnered with some contacts in Israel, but finds himself more spiritually adrift than ever.)In the season’s final episode, Maysa and Farouk, having come across a stash of hallucinogenic mushrooms, reminisce about their early days in the country when they would feed Ramy and his sister hot dogs, not knowing they contained pork. Stoned, they make a run to buy convenience-store franks, bite into the seductive, non-halal treats and realize that they taste disgusting. “Why did we sell our souls?” Farouk asks. “We gave it all up for hot dogs.”Most recently, Hulu’s “Welcome to Chippendales” — about another kind of commercialized American meat — reconsiders the immigrant dream from the vantage of success. The story of Somen Banerjee (Kumail Nanjiani), the founder of the male-stripper empire, it is in many ways of a piece with this year’s glut of scam-and-scandal docudramas; it’s a rise-and-fall series in which the fall is less interesting and takes twice as long. (The creator, Robert Siegel, gave us the prosthetic fantasia “Pam & Tommy” earlier this year.)The series stands apart, though, for showing how Banerjee, born in India, uses a learned idea of American appetites to pursue a received idea of the American dream. In some ways, being an outsider makes his success possible — much in America is novel to him, so he’s receptive to new ideas (like seminude dancers in bow ties).“Welcome to Chippendales” on Hulu is based on the real-life origins of the famous male-stripper empire.Erin Simkin/HuluBut his embrace of Americanness (for instance, he goes by “Steve” rather than “Somen”) cuts two ways. He experiences racism before and after he hits it big, but he also uses discrimination as a business tactic, ending up in court because of a scheme to bar Black patrons (whom, he concludes from experience, will make white customers see his club as less “classy”).Banerjee has perhaps internalized the American dream too thoroughly. He gets his first intimation of this when he returns to India for his father’s funeral, his suitcase stuffed with gifts of electronics and Velveeta, hoping to be welcomed as a conquering success. Instead, his mother scolds him for leaving the family printing business to run a fleshpot. “We are middle-class people, Somen,” she says. “We did not need saving by America.”He leaves, weighed down with rejection and processed cheese. Beyond his mother’s personal disappointment is the verdict that he has stopped being himself, but in the process he has not really become a new person either. He is simply a reflection of another culture’s artifice, an imitation of an imitation.This is the danger of the American dream when you scale it down from the national to the individual level. You risk devoting your life to wanting something because it’s what you’ve been told you should want. Everybody loves a Cinderella story, but sometimes your dream, in reality, is just a wish somebody else’s heart made. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: Kennedy Center Honors and New Year’s Eve

    This year’s Kennedy Center Honors ceremony airs on CBS. And various networks offer New Year’s Eve festivities.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, Dec. 26-Jan. 1. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE YEAR: 2022 9 p.m. on ABC. For over a decade, ABC and its anchors have offered an annual retrospective look at the year’s biggest news stories. (Of course, whether a look back at the past year sounds like a gift or a nightmare is something viewers will have to decide for themselves.) The 2022 program includes segments on pickleball, Taylor Swift’s Ticketmaster saga and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.TuesdayHalle Berry, left, and Patrick Wilson in “Moonfall.”Reiner Bajo/LionsgateMOONFALL (2022) 9 p.m. on HBO. You know you’re in for a particular kind of movie when its trailer shows characters yelling “Hang on!” in three different scenes. And you know you’re in for the “hang on” kind of movie when it’s directed by Roland Emmerich (“Independence Day,” “The Day After Tomorrow”). Both things are true of “Moonfall,” a sci-fi disaster flick about two former astronauts (Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson) who join forces to save the planet after a geeky amateur researcher (John Bradley) discovers that the moon is heading for a collision with Earth. In a New York Times review, Ben Kenigsberg wrote that the movie’s off-planet element “flirts with the transcendently goofy,” but that “Emmerich spoils it by crosscutting to a useless narrative thread on Earth.”AMERICAN MASTERS: GROUCHO & CAVETT 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). “If Groucho never existed, we would sense a lack in the world of comedy, like the planet in the solar system that astronomers say ought to be there.” Those words, attributed to the TV host Dick Cavett, kick off this feature-length documentary, which looks at the friendship — and mentorship — between Cavett and the pioneering comic Groucho Marx. Through new interviews with Cavett and archival footage of Marx (who died in 1977), the documentary follows Marx and Cavett’s relationship from their first meeting, at the funeral of the playwright George S. Kaufman in 1961, until Marx’s death, and looks at how their friendship was a bridge between two generations of comedy.WednesdayTHE 45TH ANNUAL KENNEDY CENTER HONORS 8 p.m. on CBS. This year’s Kennedy Center Honors recognized a multigenre, multigenerational group of artists: the singer Gladys Knight; the actor and filmmaker George Clooney; the rock band U2; the singer-songwriter Amy Grant; and the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Tania León. The ceremony earlier this month, footage of which will debut on CBS on Wednesday, featured tributes to the honorees from an array of familiar faces, including Garth Brooks, Mickey Guyton, Ariana DeBose, Matt Damon, Sheryl Crow, Jason Moran, Alicia Hall Moran and Eddie Vedder.REAR WINDOW (1954) and THE WINDOW (1949) 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. on TCM. Here’s a novel midcentury-mystery pairing: Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” and “The Window,” a 1949 film noir directed by Ted Tetzlaff, who a few years earlier was the cinematographer on Hitchcock’s “Notorious.” These two movies also have somewhat similar setups. The classic “Rear Window” casts James Stewart as housebound photographer who believes there has been a murder at a neighboring home; “The Window” centers on a nine-year-old boy (Bobby Driscoll) who suspects the same.ThursdayREADY PLAYER ONE (2018) 11 p.m. on TBS. To see two wildly different sides of Steven Spielberg, consider pairing his semi-autobiographical period drama, “The Fabelmans” (now in theaters), with his sci-fi bonanza “Ready Player One,” a movie that manages to be nostalgic despite being set in 2045. That’s because its dystopian world uses late 20th- and early 21st-century pop culture as its building blocks. The story, adapted from Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel of the same name, centers on a young man (Tye Sheridan) searching for treasure left behind by a dead virtual-reality world-builder (Mark Rylance).FridayRosamund Pike and Ben Affleck in “Gone Girl.”Merrick Morton/20th Century FoxGONE GIRL (2014) 7:25 p.m. on HBO. The musicians Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, of the band Nine Inch Nails, composed the scores of two movies playing in theaters right now: Luca Guadagnino’s “Bones and All” and Sam Mendes’s “Empire of Light.” For an earlier example of their movie music, see this thriller from David Fincher, about a husband and wife (played by Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike) whose lives derail when the wife, Amy, goes missing, and the husband, Nick, becomes a suspect in her disappearance.A SOLDIER’S STORY (1984) 8 p.m. on TCM. The playwright Charles Fuller won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1982 for “A Soldier’s Play,” about an investigation into the murder of a Black Army sergeant on a segregated Louisiana military base in the 1940s. And he wrote the screenplay of this film adaptation, which was directed by Norman Jewison and scored by Herbie Hancock. Fuller died in October, which makes the end of the year a poignant time to revisit the film.SaturdayNew Year’s Eve decorations in Times Square earlier this month.Justin Lane/EPA, via ShutterstockNEW YEAR’S EVE SHOWS on various networks. How do you take your New Year’s Eve programming? With sugar? See MILEY’S NEW YEAR’S EVE PARTY, hosted by Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton, at 10:30 p.m. on NBC. With extra twang? How about NEW YEAR’S EVE LIVE: NASHVILLE’S BIG BASH, hosted by the singers Jimmie Allen and Elle King and the anchor Rachel Smith, at 10:30 p.m. on CBS. With a Times Square neon glaze? Try DICK CLARK’S NEW YEAR’S ROCKIN’ EVE WITH RYAN SEACREST 2023 at 10:30 p.m. on ABC. For those without cable TV, or who just want to watch the New York ball drop with minimal fuss, there’s a free livestream of the Times Square scene at timessquarenyc.org.SundayDIONNE WARWICK: DON’T MAKE ME OVER (2023) 9 p.m. on CNN. This new documentary about the singer Dionne Warwick’s art and activism pairs archival materials with an impressive slate of interviewees that includes Quincy Jones, Gladys Knight, Olivia Newton-John, Smokey Robinson, Elton John, Snoop Dogg, Gloria Estefan and Alicia Keys. The doc picked up solid reviews when it opened at the Toronto International Film Festival last year; it makes its wider debut on Sunday. More

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    Is It Time for a ‘White Lotus’ Vacation?

    Things turn out badly for most of the show’s well-heeled characters. But that hasn’t stopped some fans from booking a trip.For some fans of “The White Lotus,” watching the show was not enough. They want the full experience.Last month, Will Potter, an executive at Sotheby’s who lives in Brooklyn, booked a stay at the San Domenico Palace, the Four Seasons resort hotel in Taormina, Sicily, where the show’s second season was filmed.“There’s very few shows where, as I’m watching it, I’m going, ‘This is so good,’” Mr. Potter, 38, said.During the first season of the HBO series, which was set in Hawaii, Mr. Potter was especially taken with Tanya McQuoid, the bumbling heiress played by Jennifer Coolidge, he said. As he watched the second season, with his wife, on Sunday nights after they had put their two children to bed, he found himself falling for the show’s idyllic Sicilian setting. Weeks before the murderous finale aired, he had booked a summer family vacation there.“We were like, ‘This looks amazing, to do a full adventure,” Mr. Potter said. “It looks like a beautiful hotel.”Hotel staff members greet the guests in a scene from season two of “The White Lotus.”Fabio Lovino/HBOHe added that the family plans to go on side trips inspired by the show’s characters’ forays away from the hotel property. “We were watching the Noto region episode,” he said, “and we were like, ‘What if we mix it up and explore that?’ And then we ended up putting the exact itinerary together.”The San Domenico Palace, a former Dominican monastery perched on the edge of a promontory overlooking the Ionian Sea, was converted into a hotel in 1896. Its guests have included Oscar Wilde, D.H. Lawrence, Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren.After the second season of “The White Lotus” began airing in October, the hotel experienced “a spike in web visits from the U.S. market, and the U.K. and Australia,” Ilaria Alber-Glanstaetten, the resort’s general manager, said. Some of the $4,200-a-night suites are still available in 2023, she added. “Bookings have been affected, but the biggest impact has been on awareness,” Ms. Alber-Glanstaetten said.Like the majority of “White Lotus” characters, some guests have had stays that were less than tranquil. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, arguably the most headline-generating celebrity couple of the mid-20th century, became part of San Domenico lore after a dramatic argument on the terrace in 1963. “Liz apparently broke a mandolin over Dick’s head,” Ms. Alber-Glanstaetten said. “The reason for the fight was allegedly jealousy.”The terrace of the San Domenico Palace.AlamyThe manager attributes the sometimes stormy mood of the place to Mount Etna, the active volcano that is visible from many of the suites. “It’s hard to describe, but when you are there you really feel it,” Ms. Alber-Glanstaetten said.Ida K. Mova, 37, a design consultant for Waterworks, a manufacturer of bath and kitchen fixtures, who lives in San Francisco, visited the San Domenico Palace in August. After watching “The White Lotus,” she is up for a second trip. “I can’t wait to go back,” she said.The online travel giant Expedia calls the trend of television- and film-related tourism “set-jetting.” Nearly two-thirds of travelers who took part in a recent survey reported having booked a trip inspired by a movie or TV show, the company said.The first season of “The White Lotus” was filmed at Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea in Hawaii. Like the San Domenico in recent months, that hotel had a spike in reservations last year, but it was hard to tell if it was because of the HBO series or because the pandemic lockdown had lifted soon after it aired.“We strategically wanted to try and reopen after the filming had been done,” Robert Delaney, the resort manager at the Four Seasons Maui, said. He added that many guests ask about the Pineapple Suite, a room that exists only in the “White Lotus” universe, and the most ardent fans “talk about little intricacies of the characters in the show.”A “White Lotus” scene at the San Domenico pool.HBOMike White, the creator of “The White Lotus,” has not always portrayed hotel staff members in the most flattering light. In the first season, the manager, Armond, went on a drug binge and had sex with another staff member in his office. In the second season, Valentina, the manager of the Taormina resort, makes use of an unoccupied suite to have a fling with a prostitute.Mr. Delaney said he found the depictions of hotel workers to be lacking in accuracy at times. “The portrayal of some of the activities that the characters or the managers took part in was not a fair portrayal of what the everyday role is for someone like me, for example,” he said. More

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    Day 25: That Time an Orthodox Jew Celebrated Christmas

    The first and only time that Alex Edelman’s family celebrated Christmas, their tree was topped not by a star, but a teddy bear wearing a yarmulke.Mr. Edelman, who was 7 or 8 at the time — he doesn’t remember the exact year — was also wearing a yarmulke. All of his male family members were. Mr. Edelman, 33, grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home in Brookline, Mass., and he says his family’s one-night fling with Christmas, which he chronicled with withering precision in his recent Off Broadway comedy show “Just For Us,” was a thoroughly Jewish endeavor.The story has become an integral part of Mr. Edelman’s comedy routine: A non-Jewish friend of Mr. Edelman’s mother had a tragic year, and no one to celebrate Christmas with. So Mr. Edelman’s mother decided that, religion notwithstanding, she would do a mitzvah — the Jewish concept of a good deed — and invite her to celebrate with them. In order to make that happen, of course, she’d need stockings, cookies for Santa, and that ever-important tree.“So we had Christmas,” Mr. Edelman says in his act. “We did a pretty good job, for Jews. We went whole-hog, except no hog. Kosher Christmas.”By decking their halls, Mr. Edelman said, they were performing an essential Jewish act: welcoming the stranger into their home, with love and open hearts.On Christmas morning, Mr. Edelman and his younger brother opened presents with their parents and Kate, their non-Jewish friend, who had spent the night and gone to bed delighted by the celebration. The brothers then headed off to school, as the Jewish day school that they attended was not closed on Christmas Day. Later that evening, their father would get a phone call from the school principal, who was deeply concerned. The Edelman brothers, it seemed, had been telling other students that Santa Claus had visited their home. Why would the Edelmans allow Christmas into their life? Mr. Edelman’s father was quick to answer: Clearly, he told the school principal, you don’t understand the true meaning of Christmas.“It was a moment of great parenting. Not to give too much credit to my parents, but all credit to my parents,” Mr. Edelman said in an interview. “The only thing that is universally Jewish is intentionality. You cannot have Judaism without intention. And what’s so Jewish about this event is there was so much empathy, but also much intentionality, when my parents decided to do this.”These days, the story remains Mr. Edelman’s favorite comedic bit in his show, “because afterward people tell me their own stories of human kindness,” he said. “It highlights what I love about my Jewish values, with empathy as the true north. It’s a good demonstration of how Jewish values can be applicable, even when you’re celebrating Christmas.” More

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    Emily Is Still in Paris. Why Are We Still Watching?

    The Netflix hit has been widely mocked from the beginning. But despite its flaws — or perhaps because of them — it’s a pop-culture phenomenon.Here is one inviolable rule that I have learned governs American screens: If ever I see a young woman standing before a mirror holding a pair of scissors, it is almost always a harbinger of some unspeakable doom. Whether in comedy or in horror, this image is cinematic shorthand for when the writers want us to know that whatever this woman’s inner torment may have been in that moment, it won, obliterating her sanity and driving her to this act of assured self-destruction.That is how we find the titular heroine of “Emily in Paris,” in the third season’s premiere: still in Paris, standing before a mirror in the middle of the night, muttering to herself before snipping off a jagged, uneven chunk of hair across her forehead. She has been jolted awake from a nightmare in which she saw herself forced to confront her deepest fear: having to make a decision on her own.This is an existential crisis for Emily Cooper, who, before her French sojourn, was happily shilling tag lines for I.B.S. drugs in Chicago. As laid out in the series’s first season, by way of a mystifying fluke, Emily finds herself at a luxury marketing firm in Paris, going in place of her pregnant boss. (In this universe, we are to assume that this enormous company has only two employees and that corporations simply love to give unasked-for promotions to junior underlings.) She is there in Paris to provide an “American point of view,” despite not possessing much of one, beyond lovingly declaring that “the entire city looks like ‘Ratatouille.’” By the end of the first two seasons, she has conducted sanitized love affairs with a rotating cast of forgettable men and embodied a portrait of American middle-managerial insufferability specifically calculated to drive her Parisian co-workers and watchers of the show equally apoplectic.The show’s second season ends on a low-stakes cliffhanger that kept unwilling “Emily in Paris” hostages like me (I cannot in all honesty call us “fans”) on begrudging tenterhooks for a year: Will Emily choose the safety of a big corporation and stick with Madeline, her mentor from Chicago, an ur-girlboss of corporate marketing who is obnoxiously secure in her American basicness and a cartoonish portrait of who Emily might become two decades from now? Or will she defect and join the marketing coup being staged by Sylvie, the abrasive yet terrifyingly magnetic Frenchwoman whose approval Emily has spent the past two seasons trying to win with an almost-feral desperation?Beneath the Bambi-like visage and the sweet ebullience lies a stark void of nothingness.For the pugnaciously good-humored Emily, whose sole defining characteristic so far has been her geniality (even being called an “illiterate sociopath” by her former friend barely made a dent in her sunniness), this outer turbulence has forced her to exhibit signs of an inner life for the first time in the show’s run. For once, Emily is visibly shaken. And in the time-honored tradition of one-dimensional screen heroines who came before her, Emily has commenced yet another season-long course of causing unintentional catastrophes with the only act of intention seen from her so far: the guillotining of her own bangs.When the first season of “Emily in Paris” debuted on Netflix in October 2020, it was widely mocked and near-universally reviled in both nations for an abundance of reasons. There was the literalism of its construct. (There is truly nothing more to it than here is Emily, who is in Paris.) There was the egregiously loud costuming. (What sort of corporate culture in France allows for bucket hats to be worn at an office, and why is Emily in possession of so many of them?) Then there were the characters, a buffoonish assemblage of dated stereotypes that managed to offend both the Americans and the French.But despite its utter frictionlessness or perhaps because of it, the compulsively hate-​watchable show became a phenomenon.I began watching this show out of the crudest form of identitarian loyalty, because I harbor an unshakable sympathy for any youngish woman (even fictional; even if she wears bucket hats) whose profession (like mine) requires using the word “social” as a noun with a straight face. Far be it from me to demand interiority from rom-com ingénues experiencing character development for the first time, but watching Emily utter marketing argot like “corporate commandments” and breezily brush off every cruel joke about her dimwittedness left me wondering: Does this show want me to laugh at Emily for the particular brand of sincere, millennial smarm she represents? Or am I meant to cheer at her (very American) refusal to change, no matter what her travails in Paris put her through?To say Emily is chasing anything would be ascribing too much agency, with which even her creators have not dignified her.In both literature and cinema, Paris has long been the milieu in which to place a certain class of mordantly restless, cosmopolitan and upwardly mobile white American woman, who finds herself in the city (often fruitlessly) chasing things her homeland has denied her: a renewed sense of self after heartbreak; liberation (both sexual and intellectual); sometimes adventure; occasionally adultery. Paris harbored Edith Wharton’s Countess Olenska when the insipid society gentleman she fell in love with hadn’t the spine or the stomach to claim their life together. In her memoir, “My Life in France,” Julia Child recalls arriving in Paris still a “rather loud and unserious Californian,” and how it was the city, along with her beloved husband, Paul, that molded her into the woman the world got to know. Paris was where Carrie Bradshaw, perpetually in love with the idea of love, finally realized that maybe all it did was make her more miserable. Emily Cooper, however, is not one of these women. To say she is chasing anything (except perhaps a steady stream of head pats of approval from her bosses) would be ascribing too much agency, with which even her creators have not dignified her.In 1919, when Wharton, herself an expatriate in Paris, wrote that “compared with the women of France, the average American woman is still in the kindergarten,” she might as well have been talking about Emily, whose stock-in-trade is a unique brand of empty infantilism. Nowhere is this more evident than in the way the millennial Emily Cooper seems engineered from a boomer’s nightmare of what young people today are like: indolent, addicted to their phones and obsessed with being rewarded for doing the bare minimum. The show’s architects have endowed her with what has come to be known as her generation’s worst trait: a compulsive devotion to online oversharing and the cult of manufactured relatability. But what sets Emily apart is that beneath the Bambi-like visage and the sweet ebullience lies a stark void of nothingness.The Chekhov’s Bangs incident turns out to have only the most minor payoff later on, when for once, Emily makes a life-altering choice that of course fosters zero introspection. For a show that managed to make even the complexity and angst of infidelity as saccharine as the pain au chocolat that Emily posts on Instagram with the caption “butter+chocolate = 💓,” watching her give herself what her friend calls “trauma bangs” was about as abrupt an upping of the stakes in the Emilyverse as can be. But for those of us who’ve continued to watch, we do it despite our bewilderment — like Emily butchering her hair — even though we know it’s a mess.Iva Dixit is a staff editor for the magazine. She last wrote a Letter of Recommendation about raw onions.Source photographs: Stéphanie Branchu/Netflix More

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    The Artists We Lost in 2022, in Their Words

    Music innovators who sang of coal country and “Great Balls of Fire.” An actress who made a signature role out of a devilish baker who meets a fiery end. The trailblazing heart of “In the Heat of the Night.”The creative people who died this year include many whose lives helped shape our own — through the art they made, and through the words they said. Here is a tribute to just some of them, in their own voices.Sidney Poitier.Sam Falk/The New York Times“Life offered no auditions for the many roles I had to play.”— Sidney Poitier, actor, born 1927 (Read the obituary.)“People in the past have done what we’re trying to do infinitely better. That’s why, for one’s own sanity, to keep one’s own sense of proportion, one must regularly go back to them.”— Peter Brook, director, born 1925 (Read the obituary.)Ronnie Spector.Art Zelin/Getty Images“Every song is a little piece of my life.”— Ronnie Spector, singer, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Yuriko.Jack Mitchell/Getty Images“Dance is living. Dance is, for me, it’s survival.”— Yuriko, dancer, born 1920 (Read the obituary.)Kirstie Alley.Vinnie Zuffante/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images“The question is, how do you create with what you have?”— Kirstie Alley, actress, born 1951 (Read the obituary.)Carmen Herrera.Todd Heisler/The New York Times“Every painting has been a fight between the painting and me. I tend to win. But you know how many paintings I threw in the garbage?”— Carmen Herrera, artist, born 1915 (Read the obituary.)“I decided that in every scene, you’re naked. If you’re dressed in a parka, what’s the difference if you’re dressed in nothing at all, if you’re exploring yourself?”— William Hurt, actor, born 1950 (Read the obituary.)Takeoff.Rich Fury/Getty Images For Global Citizen“You gotta have fun with a song, make somebody laugh. You gotta have character. A hard punchline can make you laugh, but you gotta know how to say it.”— Takeoff, rapper, born 1994 (Read the obituary.)“I love watching people get hit in the crotch. But only if they get back up.”— Bob Saget, comedian and actor, born 1956 (Read the obituary.)Olivia Newton-John.Las Vegas News Bureau/EPA, via Shutterstock“I do like to be alone at times, just to breathe.”— Olivia Newton-John, singer, born 1948 (Read the obituary.)“Movies are like clouds that sit over reality: If I do cinema well, I can uncover what is beneath, my friends, my allies, what I am, where I come from.”— Jean-Luc Godard, director, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Sam Gilliam.Anthony Barboza/Getty Images“The expressive act of making a mark and hanging it in space is always political.”— Sam Gilliam, artist, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“Everyone says that I was a role model. But I never thought of it when I was doing the music and when I was performing. I just wanted to make good music.”— Betty Davis, singer-songwriter, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)Nichelle Nichols.Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images“The next Einstein might have a Black face — and she’s female.”— Nichelle Nichols, actress, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)“If I could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, it would be with Albert Einstein at Panzanella.”— Judy Tenuta, comedian, born 1949 (Read the obituary.)“In time, writers learn that good fiction editors care as much about the story as the writer does, or almost, anyway. And you really often end up, the three of you — the writer, and the editor, and the story — working on this obdurate, beautiful thing, this brand-new creation.”— Roger Angell, writer and editor, born 1920 (Read the obituary.)Jennifer Bartlett.Susan Wood/Getty Images“I spent 30 years trying to convince people and myself that I was smart, that I was a good painter, that I was this or that. It’s not going to happen. The only person that it should happen for is me. This is what I was meant to do.”— Jennifer Bartlett, artist, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)Christine McVie.P. Floyd/Daily Express, via Hulton Archive and Getty Images“I didn’t aspire to be on the stage playing piano, let alone singing, because I never thought I had much of a voice. But my option was window-dresser or jump off the cliff and try this. So I jumped off the cliff.”— Christine McVie, musician and songwriter, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“Sometimes you have to put yourself on the edge. You go to the precipice and lean over it.”— Maria Ewing, opera singer, born 1950 (Read the obituary.)Taylor Hawkins.John Atashian/Getty Images“There’s so much in what I do that is beyond hard work — there’s luck and timing and just being in the right place at the right time with the right hairdo.”— Taylor Hawkins, drummer, born 1972 (Read the obituary.)“I was primarily an actress and not a pretty face.”— Angela Lansbury, actress, born 1925 (Read the obituary.)“I always try to improve upon what I’ve done. If something’s not working, I’ll change it to make it better. I’m an artist and a performer above all, and I don’t limit myself.”— Elza Soares, singer, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Leslie Jordan.Fred Prouser/Reuters“I’m always working, always. I got to keep the ship afloat.”— Leslie Jordan, actor, born 1955 (Read the obituary.)“The reward of the work has always been the work itself.”— David McCullough, historian and author, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“To me, sitting at a desk all day was not only a privilege but a duty: something I owed to all those people in my life, living and dead, who’d had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear.”— Barbara Ehrenreich, author, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)James Caan.Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Passion is such an important thing to have in life because it ends so soon, and my passion was to grow up with my son.”— James Caan, actor, born 1940 (Read the obituary.)Tina Ramirez.Michael Falco for The New York Times“Words are unnecessary when movement and feeling and expression can say it all.”— Tina Ramirez, dancer and founder of Ballet Hispánico, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Claes Oldenburg.Tony Evans/Getty Images“I haven’t done anything on the subject of flies. It’s the sort of thing that could interest me. Anything could interest me, actually.”— Claes Oldenburg, artist, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)“A skull is a beautiful thing.”— Lee Bontecou, artist, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)“I like to write strong characters who are no better or worse than anybody else on earth.”— Charles Fuller, playwright, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Ray Liotta.Aaron Rapoport/Corbis, via Getty Images“One review said I played a sleazy, heartless, cold person who you don’t really care about. Great! I love it; that’s what I played.”— Ray Liotta, actor, born around 1954 (Read the obituary.)Jerry Lee Lewis.Thomas S. England/Getty Images“There’s a difference between a phenomenon and a stylist. I’m a stylist, Elvis was the phenomenon, and don’t you forget it.”— Jerry Lee Lewis, musician, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)“All of us have something built into our ears that comes from the place where we grow up and where we were as children.”— George Crumb, composer, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Anne Heche. SGranitz/WireImage, via Getty Images“People wonder why I am so forthcoming with the truths that have happened in my life, and it’s because the lies that I have been surrounded with and the denial that I was raised in, for better or worse, bore a child of truth and love.”— Anne Heche, actress, born 1969 (Read the obituary.)Louie Anderson.Gary Null/NBCUniversal, via Getty Images“That’s my goal every night: Hopefully at some point in my act, you have forgotten whatever trouble you had when you came in.”— Louie Anderson, comedian and actor, born 1953 (Read the obituary.)“Adult human beings live with the certainty of grief, which deepens us and opens us to other people, who have been there, too.”— Peter Straub, author, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Ned Rorem.Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times“I believe in the importance of the unimportant — in the quotidian pathos.”— Ned Rorem, composer, born 1923 (Read the obituary.)Gilbert Gottfried.Fred Hermansky/NBC, via Getty Images“I don’t always mean to offend. I only sometimes mean to offend.”— Gilbert Gottfried, comedian, born 1955 (Read the obituary.)“Merce Cunningham is quoted somewhere as saying he wanted a company that danced the way he danced. I kept doing the same thing. And I began to wonder why I was insisting that they be as limited as I am.”— David Gordon, choreographer, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)Hilary Mantel.Ellie Smith for The New York Times“The universe is not limited by what I can imagine.”— Hilary Mantel, author, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)“Getting the right people with a shared vision is three-quarters of the battle.”— Anne Parsons, arts administrator, born 1957 (Read the obituary.)Paula Rego.Rita Barros/Getty Images“My paintings are stories, but they are not narratives, in that they have no past and future.”— Paula Rego, artist, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Javier Marías.Quim Llenas/Getty Images“When you are addressing your fellow citizens, you have to give some hope sometimes, even if you want to say that everything is terrible, that we are governed by a bunch of gangsters. In a novel, you can be much more pessimistic. You are more savage, you are wilder, you are freer, you think truer, you think better.”— Javier Marías, author, born 1951 (Read the obituary.)“Art is not blameless. Art can inflict harm.”— Richard Taruskin, musicologist, born 1945 (Read the obituary.)“I am a worker who labors with songs, doing in my own way what I know best, like any other Cuban worker. I am faithful to my reality, to my revolution and the way in which I have been brought up.”— Pablo Milanés, musician, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Peter Bogdanovich.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Success is very hard. Nobody prepares you for it. You think you’re infallible. You pretend you know more than you do.”— Peter Bogdanovich, director, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Loretta Lynn.CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images“I think the highest point of my career was in the late ’70s. I had No. 1 songs, a best-selling book and a movie made about my life. But I think it was also the lowest point for me as well. Life gets away from you so fast when you move fast.”— Loretta Lynn, singer-songwriter, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)Thich Nhat Hanh.Golding/Fairfax Media, via Getty Images“Many of us have been running all our lives. Practice stopping.”— Thich Nhat Hanh, monk and author, born 1926 (Read the obituary.)Photographs at top via CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images; Anthony Barboza/Getty Images; Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images; Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images. More

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    Lauren Spencer Is a Sex-Positive Disability Influencer

    Name: Lauren SpencerAge: 35Hometown: Stockton, Calif.Now Lives: In a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment in Los Angeles.Claim to Fame: Ms. Spencer, who goes by Lolo, is an actress, model and disability influencer who is best known for portraying the quick-witted, sex-positive freshman Jocelyn on “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” currently in its second season on HBO Max.“Jocelyn was the college version of myself,” she said. “I was partying all the time, having sex — maybe not as often as Jocelyn is, though.” Ms. Spencer, who has muscular dystrophy and uses a wheelchair, also createsvideos debunking disability myths and shares fashion and dating tips on Instagram and YouTube. “I wanted to create content that would answer that question and eventually dispel stereotypes about how disabled people live their lives,” she said.Big Break: Ms. Spencer started her YouTube channel, Sitting Pretty Lolo, shortly after graduating from California State University, Northridge in 2012. The channel caught the attention of a Tommy Hilfiger executive who hired her for a fashion campaign. With the help of an agent, she landed the lead role in “Give Me Liberty,” a 2019 independent film about Tracy, a disability advocate, and her relationship with a medical transport driver.“I’m just going to share my truth,” Ms. Spencer said. Carlos JaramilloLatest Project: She recently voiced Jazzy on “Firebuds,” a Disney Junior animated series about a team of first responders. Jazzy, who has spina bifida, uses a combination wheelchair and car. “It’s very important for kids to start learning about disability at a young age,” Ms. Spencer said. In September, she started Live Solo, an online resource that helps young adults with disabilities live independently. “I wanted to challenge myself to figure out how I could make a greater impact on the disabled community beyond me just talking in front of a camera,” Ms. Spencer said.Next Thing: Ms. Spencer will release her first book, “Access Your Drive & Enjoy the Ride,” in February. “My goal is not to inspire anyone,” she said. “I’m just going to share my truth — a different perspective on something that’s been misrepresented for so long.” But, she added, “if people get inspiration, that’s dope.”Dating With a Disability: Ms. Spencer, who is single, said her wheelchair isn’t quite the “no big deal” apparatus it is for her character Jocelyn. “The men I have dated or interacted with haven’t necessarily freaked out or been weird about anything,” she said. “But certain things they’ve either said or done made it feel they didn’t fully accept the fact that I had a disability.” More

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    ‘The Witcher: Blood Origin’ Is TV’s Latest Big Fantasy Prequel

    The mini-series series takes place 1,200 years before the events of “The Witcher,” which has been one of Netflix’s most-watched shows since its debut in 2019.Producers of hit series have long used spinoffs to keep the stories going (and the ad and subscription dollars flowing). In our I.P.-obsessed era of pop culture universes, the desire to preserve — and ideally expand — popular TV franchises has only intensified. And more often than not these days, going forward means looking backward.This year, the biggest new series have been prequels, with “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” and “House of the Dragon” being set long before the events of “The Lord of the Rings” and “Game of Thrones.” “Andor” is a prequel for a movie, “Rogue One,” that was itself a prequel for other “Star Wars” films. This month “Yellowstone” added “1923,” another prequel to join last year’s “1883.”Now on Sunday comes “The Witcher: Blood Origin,” a Netflix mini-series that takes place 1,200 years before Geralt of Rivia started slaying ill-minded creatures and thoughtfully pushing back his signature white mane in “The Witcher,” which premiered in 2019 and returns next summer for its third season.Based on stories by the Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski, the franchise is named after monster hunters, of which Geralt is the most famous. It is set on a continent (conveniently named the Continent) where witchers rub elbows with elves and dwarves, powerful sorceresses and power-hungry nobility.A spinoff was probably inevitable for a title that has conquered every platform it has encountered: The streaming adaptation of “The Witcher” followed popular game and comic book versions, and it has become one of Netflix’s most-watched shows ever.For the creator and showrunner of “Blood Origin,” Declan de Barra, the initial motivation was the opportunity to expand on clues or allusions in Sapkowski’s books, including by introducing new characters. Foremost was a desire to focus on the Continent when it was dominated by elves.“My favorite part of the books was identifying with the elvish story,” de Barra, 51, said in a video conversation. “You could see that they were a post-colonized sort of species, they could barely reproduce and they’re pre-agrarian, but yet they have this mythology that’s sort of hinted out in the background. What happened before? What was their Rome before the fall?”As a writer and co-executive producer for “The Witcher,” de Barra had begun mapping out what he thought happened before the Conjunction of the Spheres — the cataclysm that allowed both humans and monsters to travel from their own worlds to the Continent. So when the original series’ creator, Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, asked him to draw up a spinoff concept, de Barra was ready. For his story engine, he picked one of the oldest and most tested: A group of mismatched individuals must team up to save their world, in this case from rampaging overlords and one demented wizard.“I just imagined a group of people who would hate each other if they turn up at a party, and put them in the crucible together,” he said. “People who are all different and have reason to have beef with each other but have to work together.”Henry Cavill, the monster-slaying star of “The Witcher,” has said he is leaving the show after next season.Jay Maidment/NetflixThis being the “Witcher” franchise, some of them also find reasons to have sex with one another. And yes, there is just as much jarringly modern profanity in “Blood Origin” as in the main show, along with the goofy irreverence that sets the franchise apart. (Last year’s special, “The Witcher: Fireplace,” is an hourlong shot of a crackling fire.)“What’s great about Declan is that he’s very energetic and he has a very raucous, naughty sense of humor — and he brings that to ‘Blood Origin,’” Lenny Henry, who plays the plotting Chief Sage Balor, said in a video chat. “So you get all the heightened Shakespearean arias from some of the characters and then you get that low side.”Balor plays a crucial role in the “Blood Origin” universe, setting in motion a series of events that will ripple through time and space. Among the characters most affected are Éile (Sophia Brown) and Fjall (Laurence O’Fuarain), two warriors from rival clans who end up fighting on the same side as part of the main superteam. (How super? The mighty Michelle Yeoh is a key part of it.)In a way, Éile is “The Witcher” in a nutshell: a fierce fighter who both comments on and drives the action with song — this is, after all, the rare fantasy series that has spawned a cult hit, with “Toss a Coin to Your Witcher” from Season 1. This is an essential element for the Ireland-born de Barra, who used to front a hard-rocking band and who is the co-writer of several numbers for both streaming “Witcher” properties.“My favorite songs are ones that end really short,” he said by way of explaining the decision to cut the prequel down from its planned six episodes to four. He also draws connections between epic Celtic ballads and Éile’s tunes, including “The Black Rose” — a direct reference to the 16th-century Irish song“Róisín Dubh.”“I wanted her to be writing rebel songs for the people,” de Barra said. “I knew there would be nods to Irish mythology as well as Eastern European mythology, because Sapkowski does that himself with some of his places and people, like Skellige Islands and stuff like that.“He has a potpourri of all sort of European mythology and he pulls the stories and puts them together and bakes his own cake,” de Barra added. “So I felt very comfortable doing that.”Offscreen, Brown, who is Black, has been at the center of the kinds of caustic discussions, regarding race and how it relates to source material, that have occurred within other fantasy fandoms. (You might recall how the sight of Black elves in “The Rings of Power” threw some viewers into a tizzy.)“If something new is coming into a space, people are always going to think ‘Oh, that’s not right,’” Brown said. “I got some difficulty when the casting came out, but I’m not new to the industry, and I’ve worked very hard to be here, so it didn’t waver my knowing I was meant to be there.”Henry — who is also Black and who played the harfoot Sadoc Burrows in “The Rings of Power” — chose to laugh at it all. “What you have to say to those guys is, ‘You will believe an Upside Down where there’s a big weird creature made out of corned beef threatening children, but you won’t believe a Black elf?’” he said. “It’s all pretend — anybody can be what they want to be.”Angst about Éile’s function in the “Witcher” mythos is also related to what some fans have decried as drastic departures from the books and video games in the original series. These complaints have grown louder online since Henry Cavill, who plays Geralt and who has been an outspoken fan of the Sapkowski stories, announced, with little explanation, that he is leaving the show after the upcoming season.The series follows a makeshift team trying to save the world, including Éile, a warrior elf played by Sophia Brown.Lilja JonsdottirDe Barra said any adapter of the “Witcher” stories is “never going to be able to satisfy everybody,” explaining that dedicated fans of the books and the games will all have their own differing views of what the characters and the world should look like.“No two people are ever going to agree on it,” he said. “The core that was important for me was just telling a story that I believed in and that could work on its own whilst honoring the books.”The TV shows integrate Sapkowski’s vision and broaden it, and this dual approach is particularly apparent in “Blood Origin.” As the title suggests, we meet some familiar characters and there are plot developments that will bear fruit generations later, in the timeline of the main series. But de Barra cautions viewers against drawing too many conclusions.For example, in one scene a seer — who is well known among “Witcher” fans — says one of Éile’s descendants will be very important in the future, but the show doesn’t indicate whom it will be.“We can’t spell it out, not now, but it will be spelled out later,” de Barra said. “Most people are saying. …” He trailed off. “Anyway, I’ll leave it for now.”Such comments will be cryptic for those new to the “Witcher” universe, but they should not worry: While some plot points will be endlessly dissected on “Witcher” subreddits, “Blood Origin” stands on its own. “I hope we can introduce many new fans to the show and then they can pour into the marquee series and fall in love with fantasy,” Brown said.“I’ve watched things when I was younger that made me want to be an actor and made me want to escape and see the world in different ways,” she continued. “So I hope people can see the world differently through seeing our worlds.” More