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    Seth Meyers: ‘Ted Cruz Has a Thing for Self-Humiliation’

    “That clip was like watching one of those dumb cable news segments where a reporter willingly gets Tasered just to show everyone how bad it is,” Meyers joked of Cruz’s recent appearance on ‘Tucker Carlson.’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.Grovel GrovelTed Cruz appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show last week, apologizing for referring to the events of Jan. 6 as terrorism. Seth Meyers, who hosted “Late Night” from home on Monday after a Covid diagnosis, took Cruz to task for his backpedaling.“Wow, I knew Ted had a thing for self-humiliation, but that is next-level,” Meyers said. “Imagine begging for forgiveness from a cable news host while he sits there with that look he always has on his face like he’s trying to remember the name of the other guy from Wham.”“That clip was like watching one of those dumb cable news segments where a reporter willingly gets Tasered just to show everyone how bad it is.” — SETH MEYERS“I also like how Cruz finds a way to mention in that clip that he texted Tucker like they’re good pals. Unfortunately for Ted, any time he tries to text or call someone, it comes up as ‘Spam likely’ — or, in his case, ‘Likely made of Spam.’” — SETH MEYERS“And yet, this debacle keeps getting worse for Cruz because he proudly tweeted out the clip of himself groveling, which is a little like posting a video of yourself landing nards-first on a handrail during a skateboard fail with the caption, ‘Check out how epic this is.’” — SETH MEYERS“And look, we all know Ted Cruz has a thing for self-humiliation. He slinked back from Cancún after escaping a blackout in his state. He endorsed Donald Trump after Trump insulted his wife and his father, and took that infamous photo where he made campaign calls for Trump, looking like Jack Lemmon in ‘Glengarry Glenn Ross.’ And he keeps showing up in public with that facial hair looking like a Chewbacca who shaved everything but the beard.” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (Deltacron Edition)“Speaking of breaking records, thanks to Omicron, the seven-day average for newly reported cases in the U.S. topped 700,000. Seven hundred thousand! That’s the population of Denver, and you know you’re in trouble when you’re higher than the people of Denver.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Well, guys, today, the C.E.O. of Pfizer said that its vaccine for the Omicron variant will be ready in March. So get ready for the craziest St. Patrick’s Day in the history of the world.” — JIMMY FALLON“It feels like this March Madness, we’ll be filling out brackets to predict which of the 68 variants will become the dominant strain.” — JIMMY FALLON“But Omicron could be over by Groundhog Day, which would be just in time because scientists in Cyprus have found 25 cases of a strain of the coronavirus that they say combines elements of the Delta and Omicron variants, that they’re calling ‘Deltacron.’ Deltacron, also the name of the disappointing Transformer who turns into a delayed flight for Atlanta.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Scientists are currently disputing a new study that claims to have discovered a so-called Deltacron strain of the coronavirus. It combines the Delta and Omicron variants, and the only thing that can stop it is the Pfizerna vaccine.” — SETH MEYERS“Pretty soon the C.E.O. of Pfizer is going to be on Instagram Live like, ‘New vaccine just dropped, sound off in the comments!’” — JIMMY FALLON“I honestly have no idea how I haven’t been infected with this. I’m starting to feel like before I lost my virginity: Everyone else had, I know I probably will eventually, and when I finally do, I hope it goes as fast as losing my virginity did.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingJimmy Kimmel paid a teary tribute to his friend Bob Saget, who died Sunday.What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightMaggie Gyllenhaal, writer and director of “The Lost Daughter,” will return to “The Tonight Show” on Tuesday.Also, Check This OutBritney Spears onstage in 2011.Max Morse/Getty ImagesBritney Spears has always used the power of dance to assert her power and connect with her audience. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Ailey’ and ‘Somebody Somewhere’

    PBS’s “American Masters” airs a documentary on the choreographer Alvin Ailey. And a bittersweet comedy series debuts on HBO.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, Jan. 10-16. Details and times are subject to change.MondayRICHARD JEWELL (2019) 9 p.m. on TNT. In this biographical drama, Clint Eastwood revisited the case of Richard Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser), a security guard who alerted authorities to the presence of homemade explosives at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, then was wrongly implicated in the bomb attack by the F.B.I. and media outlets. In Eastwood’s telling, Jewell’s story becomes a case study in prejudice and the potential ill effects of media attention. The result is a “flawed, fascinating movie,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times — “a rebuke to institutional arrogance and a defense of individual dignity, sometimes clumsy in its finger-pointing but mostly shrewd and sensitive in its effort to understand its protagonist and what happened to him.”TuesdayAMERICAN MASTERS: AILEY 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Like many influential artists, the choreographer Alvin Ailey has had two lives. One began when he was born, in segregated small-town Texas in the 1930s, continued as he worked to become a fundamental part of the evolution of modern dance and ended in 1989, when he died of AIDS-related illness. The other began in 1958, when Ailey established the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and continues today. This new documentary superimposes these two lives by mixing an exploration of Ailey’s rags-to-stages journey — told in part through his own words captured in archival audio recordings — with a behind-the-scenes look at a 2018 project by the choreographer Rennie Harris to stage a dance evocation of Ailey’s life with present-day members of Ailey’s company. The early chapters suggest that Ailey had a performer’s awareness of his own body even in his youth: “I remember being glued to my mother’s hip, sloshing through the terrain, branches slashing against a child’s body,” he says, “going from one place to another — looking for a place to be.”Daniel Puig and Kaci Walfall in “Naomi.”Boris Martin/The CWNAOMI 9 p.m. on the CW. The filmmaker Ava DuVernay (“A Wrinkle in Time” and “When They See Us”) and the writer-producer Jill Blankenship (“Arrow”) are behind this new superhero series. Based on a DC Comics character, the show follows Naomi (Kaci Walfall), a teenager with a passion for comic books who, after a supernatural occurrence, starts down a path to becoming a hero herself.WednesdayTHE GREAT ESCAPE (1963) 8 p.m. on TCM. A pair of World War II prisoners-of-war classics will be aired on Wednesday night. First, “The Great Escape” with Steve McQueen and company, which focuses on the slow but steady digging of an escape tunnel beneath a German prison camp. Then, at 11 p.m., THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (1957) with Alec Guinness. That movie’s action takes place above ground, as a group of British prisoners are forced to construct a bridge to aid the Japanese.ThursdayTRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG (2020) 6 p.m. on Showtime 2. Jane Campion’s quasi-Western “The Power of the Dog” is one of the most critically acclaimed movies of this season, and a lot of praise has gone to Ari Wegner’s cinematography. Wegner previously shot “True History of the Kelly Gang,” a visually striking period piece about the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, adapted from a Booker Prize-winning novel by Peter Carey. Directed by Justin Kurzel, the film casts George MacKay as Kelly, whose story culminates with a famous shootout. In his review for The Times, Glenn Kenny wrote that the film’s depiction of that event is “undeniably impressive.” But, he added, “the jumpy, springy qualities of the movie’s visual style are unfortunately undercut by its verbal content.”FridayLiev Schreiber in “Ray Donovan: The Movie.”Cara Howe/ShowtimeRAY DONOVAN: THE MOVIE (2022) 9 p.m. on Showtime. The crime drama “Ray Donovan” was canceled in early 2020 before its plot — about a professional fixer played by Liev Schreiber — had reached a clear conclusion. Two years later, its audience will get some level of closure with this feature-length continuation of the show’s story line. The original cast, which also includes Eddie Marsan and Jon Voight, returns.SaturdayHOTEL TRANSYLVANIA (2012) 6 p.m. on Syfy. “Hotel Transylvania: Transformania,” the fourth installment in the animated “Hotel Transylvania” family-movie franchise, will debut Jan. 14 on Amazon Prime Video. Kids might appreciate this opportunity to revisit the original movie on Syfy, which introduced the series’ exaggerated take on Dracula (Adam Sandler) and his daughter, Mavis (Selena Gomez). The first sequel, HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2, follows at 8 p.m.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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    Dwayne Hickman, TV’s Lovelorn Dobie Gillis, Is Dead at 87

    He went on to appear in movies and other TV shows and to work as a television executive, but the role of Dobie would dog him for decades.Dwayne Hickman, the affable, apple-cheeked actor whose starring role in the revered sitcom “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” would dog him for more than half a century, died on Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 87. The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, a spokesman for his family said. Broadcast on CBS from 1959 to 1963, “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” was an essential ingredient of adolescence for the postwar generation and remained popular in syndication for years. Mr. Hickman became one of TV’s first teenage idols for his portrayal of its lovelorn hero, and he remained indelibly identified with the character ever after, a fate he bore with genial resignation.“Dobie Gillis” followed the fortunes of its hero, his friends and family in Central City, a community whose precise location was never specified but that in all its wholesomeness seemed eminently Midwestern.Dobie, 17 when the show begins, is Everyteen. (Early in the series, Mr. Hickman’s brown hair was bleached blond to make him look as cornfed as possible, until the peroxide treatments began to make his hair fall out.) He pines ardently, in the words of the show’s jazzy theme song, for “a girl to call his own,” and just as ardently for the financial wherewithal to squire that girl around.For all its well-scrubbed chastity, the series marked a quietly subversive departure from the standard television fare of the day. It was among the first to place the topical subject of teenagerhood front and center by recounting the story from a teenager’s point of view. It broke the fourth wall weekly, opening with a monologue in which Mr. Hickman, seated in front of a replica of Rodin’s “Thinker,” gave viewers a guided tour of his gently angst-ridden soul.Many well-known actors received early exposure on the series, notably Bob Denver as Dobie’s best friend, Maynard G. Krebs, a scruffy junior beatnik who yelps “Work!” at the merest suggestion that he seek gainful employment. Mr. Denver would go on to star in “Gilligan’s Island.”Tuesday Weld was seen regularly as the beautiful, avaricious Thalia Menninger, the financially unattainable object of Dobie’s affections; Warren Beatty had a recurring role early in the run as a blue-blood classmate. Dobie’s cantankerous, tightfisted father and sweet, harebrained mother were played by the characters actors Frank Faylen and Florida Friebus. His deeply intellectual classmate Zelda, aflame with unrequited love for Dobie, was portrayed by Sheila James. (Under her full name, Sheila James Kuehl, she became, in 1994, the first openly gay person to be elected to the California state legislature.)Mr. Hickman had begun his screen career — reluctantly — some two decades earlier, trailing in the footsteps of his brother, Darryl, three years older and initially far better known. Darryl Hickman, whose fame was eventually eclipsed by Dwayne’s, would play Dobie’s big brother, Davey, in a few episodes of the show’s first season.Mr. Hickman, center, with Mr. Denver and Sheila James in a “Dobie Gillis” reunion special in the 1980s.CBSBy the time “Dobie Gillis” ran its course, Dwayne Hickman had become so closely identified with the title character that he had difficulty landing other roles. He was too old by then to play a teenager in any case: He had been 25 when “Dobie” began and was 29 when it ended.As a result, his career over the following decades wove in and out of Hollywood, embracing stints as the entertainment director for Howard Hughes’s Landmark Hotel in Las Vegas, an advertising man, a network programming executive and, in later years, a successful painter of realist landscapes.But for decades after his series ended, Mr. Hickman could scarcely walk down an American street without a stranger stopping, staring and joyfully calling out, “Hi, Dobie!” as if greeting a long-lost friend.Dwayne Bernard Hickman was born in Los Angeles on May 18, 1934. His father, Milton, was an insurance man; his mother, the former Louise Ostertag, had had designs on stardom herself, but, as Louise Lang, made it only as far as extra work in a few Hollywood pictures.As an adult, Mr. Hickman said that he had never planned on an acting career and had never particularly wanted one. He landed his first screen role by accident, when his mother brought him along to Darryl’s audition for “The Grapes of Wrath,” the 1940 Henry Fonda vehicle. Darryl won a part as one of the Joad children; Dwayne was cast as an extra, earning $21. Dwayne’s other childhood screen appearances included roles on the TV series “Public Defender,” “The Loretta Young Show” and “The Lone Ranger” and in the films “The Boy With Green Hair” (1948) and “Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys!” (1958), based on a novel by Max Shulman, the creator of “Dobie Gillis.” He received his broadest exposure yet when he was cast in “The Bob Cummings Show” (also called “Love That Bob”) as Chuck, the nephew of Mr. Cummings’s character; the series was broadcast variously on NBC and CBS from 1955 to 1959. While working on that show, he was also a full-time student at what is now Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Though the demands of his screen career caused him to leave before graduating, he later returned and completed a bachelor’s degree in economics there.Once Mr. Hickman became a nationwide heartthrob as Dobie — other actors considered for the role had included Tab Hunter and Michael Landon — his handlers attempted to cash in by turning him into a singing star. By his own ready admission Mr. Hickman could not sing. The two resulting albums, “School Dance” and “Dobie,” he later wrote, “didn’t exactly top the Billboard charts. ”Mr. Hickman in 1965.  Starting in 1977, he spent a decade as a program executive at CBS, and he later directed episodes of several TV shows, including “Charles in Charge” and “Designing Women.” Graphic House/Archive Photos, via Getty ImagesHis post-“Dobie” credits include the film “Cat Ballou,” with Jane Fonda and Lee Marvin, but consist mostly of trifles like “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini” (1965); two TV reunions, “Whatever Happened to Dobie Gillis?” (1977) and “Bring Me the Head of Dobie Gillis” (1988); and, in the 1990s, a recurring role on the series “Clueless.”Starting in 1977, Mr. Hickman spent a decade as a program executive at CBS, where he supervised the content and development of series including “Maude,” “Good Times,” “M*A*S*H” and “Alice.” He directed episodes of several TV shows, including “Charles in Charge” and “Designing Women.”Mr. Hickman’s first marriage, to Carol Christensen, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Joanne Papile. His survivors include his third wife, Joan Roberts Hickman; their son, Albert; and a son, John, from his first marriage.In his 1994 memoir, “Forever Dobie: The Many Lives of Dwayne Hickman,” written with Ms. Roberts Hickman, Mr. Hickman recounts what happened when he took her to the hospital to await the birth of their son. “When I walked into the labor room, a nurse was asking her questions as she filled out her chart,” he wrote. “When she finished, she looked up and said, ‘Thank you, Mrs. Gillis, I’ll be back in a few minutes.’’Mr. Hickman continued: “Joan grabbed my hand and said, ‘Promise that if anything happens to me you won’t name this boy Dobie!’ ” More

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    ‘Jeopardy!’ Keeps Seeing Winning Streaks. Champions Ponder Why.

    Amy Schneider isn’t the only one on a roll. Just a dozen players have won 10 or more games, half of those in the past five years, and a quarter in this season alone.When Amy Schneider became the fourth contestant in the history of “Jeopardy!” to surpass $1 million in winnings in regular-season play on Friday, she extended her winning streak to 28 games.It was a remarkable milestone for Schneider, who last month became the woman with the most consecutive wins on the program.Her victory came as long winning streaks have grown more common on “Jeopardy!” — there even seem to be streaks of streaks. Earlier this season Matt Amodio won 38 consecutive games, the second-longest run in the show’s history. The player who beat him, Jonathan Fisher, ended up winning 11 games in a row, a rare feat in itself.Since “Jeopardy!” got rid of a rule in 2003 that had limited contestants to no more than five wins in a row, only a dozen contestants have managed to win 10 or more games in a row. Half of the dozen, or six streaks, have occurred in the past five years, while half of those six have been this season.The winning streaks have provided some welcome excitement, and ratings boosts, for a show that has struggled to choose a permanent replacement for Alex Trebek, its beloved longtime host, who died in November 2020. But they have also raised new questions.Is this trend simply a result of chance? Are contestants getting better at prepping — have they learned to game the game? Is this a case of improvement over time, much in the same way that top runners and swimmers are able to best the records set by their predecessors? Could the clues possibly be getting easier?Earlier this season Jonathan Fisher won 11 games in a row.Jeopardy ProductionsHe beat Matt Amodio, who won 38 consecutive games.Jeopardy Productions“Behind the scenes we’ve spent a lot of time discussing whether this is some kind of ‘new normal’ or whether we’ve just had an unusual windfall of brilliant ‘Jeopardy!’ players,” Michael Davies, the show’s executive producer, wrote in an email.He discounted the notion that the clues could be getting easier.“I actually think the show may be getting harder,” Davies wrote, noting that the subject matter covers an ever-wider range of material. “Let’s face it, so few people read the same books anymore or watch the same TV shows. And we have massively diversified the history, cultural and pop cultural material we expect our players to compete over.”Theories abound about the show’s recent run of big winners. In interviews and emails, several recent champions and people who write about “Jeopardy!” and study it obsessively offered their thoughts.The show’s longtime host, Alex Trebek, left, posed with Ken Jennings after his earnings from his record breaking-streak surpassed $1 million in 2004.Jeopardy Productions, via Getty ImagesThe writers and producers behind the show have talked about several possible explanations, Davies wrote, including that contestants now have access to a wealth of online resources (including a fan-generated website called J! Archive, which Schneider relied on to prepare, that includes clues dating back to the 1980s).Andy Saunders, who runs the website ​​ The Jeopardy! Fan, has started to run the numbers and believes the trend may be significant beyond this particular moment. In a blog post on Friday, Saunders wrote that the average streak length started increasing in the season spanning 2010 and 2011, which he suggested could be the result of more intensive preparation on the part of contestants.Some point to the influence of one star player: James Holzhauer, a professional sports bettor who won 32 games in 2019 and continues to hold the record for the most money won in a single game.Holzhauer’s strategy — to start with the high-value clues, hunt for the Daily Doubles and make risky wagers — proved to be a winning one for him, and some contestants took note. Amodio, for example, said he copied Holzhauer’s approach of starting with the large money clues at the bottom of the board. But Schneider has done the opposite, taking a more traditional approach that she called a “reaction against James Holzhauer.”James Holzhauer, a sports bettor who won 32 games in 2019, influenced the strategy of some contestants who followed. John Locher/Associated PressHolzhauer’s take on the current trend? A product of chance.“People always assume everything is a paradigm shift,” Holzhauer wrote in an email, “when it’s actually fairly normal for results to occasionally cluster.”One theory holds that the pandemic may have played a role, causing delays that increased the lead time — and potentially the study time — contestants had after they had been invited to compete on the show.“You had a whole bunch of people who knew they were going to be on the show and could spend a whole bunch of extra time preparing,” Saunders noted.Amodio and Schneider were two of those people. Amodio, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Yale, was initially scheduled to compete in April 2020 but because of pandemic cancellations, started taping a year later than originally planned.In that time, Amodio said in an interview, he focused on boning up on pop culture, a weak area of knowledge for him. He listened to pop music he had not heard before (discovering Dua Lipa in the process) and watched samples of a broad swath of current television (including “The Good Place,” which earned him the correct response to a $1000 clue in his 13th game).Schneider was invited onto the show in fall 2020, but the taping was delayed and she didn’t compete until about a year later, giving her more time to practice with the clues from previous games and correct gaps in her knowledge (“like forgetting which Brontë sister was which,” she said).But she said in an interview that she was skeptical that the extra study time was a significant factor. She views a well-prepared contestant as someone who has long been an intellectually curious person — not someone who crams before the test. “You just have to live a life where you’re learning stuff all the time,” she said.Fisher, who beat Amodio, had little time to prepare: There was only about a week between his getting the call inviting him to appear on the show and his arrival at the studio.Still another explanation being considered is the recent increase in applicants. Shortly before the pandemic hit, the show introduced a new entrance test that would-be contestants can take at any time, rather than limiting it to particular times. In a recent article for The Ringer exploring the trend in streaks, Claire McNear reported that before the new exam was introduced, “Jeopardy!” had about 70,000 applicants each year; with the new exam, it gets an average of about 125,000 a year.The show has also replaced regional in-person follow-up rounds with virtual rounds, a change that Cory Anotado, a game-show journalist who will appear on the show as a contestant this week, views as an important factor.“When you lower the barrier of entry, a lot of times you get better results,” he said.The string of successes comes at a time of upheaval for “Jeopardy!” The search for someone to succeed Trebek devolved into controversy after McNear reported that the chosen successor, Mike Richards, had made offensive comments about women on his podcast several years earlier (Richards stepped down from the hosting role then left the show entirely). Ken Jennings — who holds the record for the longest streak since winning 74 games in 2004 — and the sitcom actress Mayim Bialik have shared hosting duties since, but the show has put off officially naming a permanent host for the regular season.McNear, the author of a 2020 history of the show called “Answers in the Form of Questions,” wrote in the article that the elimination of the five-day cap in 2003 had been “an explicit ploy by then-executive producer Harry Friedman to drum up interest in the show,” and noted that the show’s ratings have been up this season compared to last season.Asked if it was possible for the show to try to engineer streaks by, say, pitting champions against weaker opponents, Davies said, “I can assure you that that isn’t the case.”He said that a diverse pool of contestants is selected for every taping and that an outside compliance agency randomly selects which games they will play in and in which order.It is also hard to predict how well a contestant might do based on what’s on paper. One element that is critical to a “Jeopardy!” streak is not related to knowledge or information recall but skill at using the buzzer in the specific environment of the studio.As a defending champion, Schneider said she quickly learned that she had a significant advantage over newcomers because she was already comfortable and quick with the device.“Now that I’ve been on a streak of my own,” she said, “I’m almost surprised that it hasn’t happened more often.” More

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    Elmo’s Unhinged Rant About a Pet Rock Resonates With the Exasperated

    A 2004 clip from “Sesame Street” surfaced on social media this week, drawing thousands of responses from viewers expressing that they could relate to Elmo’s sense of frustration.Elmo wants the oatmeal raisin cookie, which is on a counter. Next to the cookie is a rock.But as Elmo reaches for it, his furry red hand is stopped by an orange one that belongs to Zoe, another “Sesame Street” character, who is concerned for the rock, a pet named Rocco.“No, no, no — wait, Elmo,” Zoe says. “Rocco says that he wants the oatmeal raisin cookie.”And it is at this point that Elmo — a children’s character usually associated with innocence, lighthearted fun and playfulness — reaches his breaking point.“Rocco?” Elmo says, sounding astonished. “Rocco’s a rock, Zoe! Rocco won’t know the difference!”And when Zoe insists that Rocco will, indeed, know the difference, Elmo goes from incredulous to angry.“How?” Elmo retorts. “How is Rocco going to eat that cookie, Zoe? Tell Elmo. Rocco doesn’t even have a mouth. Rocco’s just a rock! Rocco’s not alive!”The video clip from a 2004 episode of “Sesame Street” circulated widely across social media this week, garnering more than eight million views and thousands of responses from people who resoundingly expressed that they could relate with an unhinged Elmo’s sense of exasperation.As the video got more and more attention, other clips of Elmo losing his patience with the rock began to appear, adding fuel to a raging internet fire as others posted about the fictional relationship — aghast, they said, at how Elmo had been gaslit all these years.There is the clip in which Zoe says she was late because Rocco had “to go to the potty,” and Elmo, pausing for a beat, responds with a flat, “What?”Another clip shows Elmo saying hello to a real hamster, only to be interrupted by Zoe, who directs him to also say hi to Rocco.Of course, Elmo was already a star on the internet before this week.The Elmo fire meme is often dispatched during chaotic moments. Other scenes of him in an adversarial mood have also circulated, such as one in which he throws a fit and starts to walk off the set of “The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon” or one in which he bites and throws a talking block of cheese on a cooking show.Drake Amendola, 29, of Queens said that what he loved about the cookie clip was that he could tell Elmo was trying to be inclusive of Zoe and “her eccentricities.”“But you can just tell that like, every little inch he gives, she takes a mile,” Mr. Amendola said on Saturday.There is also a pandemic interpretation, Mr. Amendola said.The rock is a metaphor for pandemic denialism, and Elmo represents the vaccinated — those who, now in year three of pandemic life, are fed up with the false beliefs surrounding Covid-19.“Just the amount of times people try to convince you something you know isn’t true, no matter how many times you point out the obvious,” he said.For his part, Elmo said on Twitter that he and Zoe were still “best buds” but that he didn’t “want to talk about Rocco.”Dr. Leela Magavi, a psychiatrist in Newport Beach, Calif., said the clip helped divert the attention of children and adults from “their own pain and helplessness during this difficult time.”Many people “perceive Elmo as an amicable, loved character, so when they view his frustration and anger, it helps normalize their own feelings of anger and makes them realize that this is a normal human sentiment,” she added.To others, the clip is an example of selfishness.“We’ve all had an Elmo experience, either in college, in a class, or at work somewhere, from people who want to make everything about them,” said Alexiss Tyler, 27, of Kansas City, Mo.Jennifer Cretu of Snohomish, Wash., said her three boys — ages 8, 11 and 14 — believed that Elmo had been wronged, though her oldest, Liam, was able to sympathize with Zoe because he, too, once had an imaginary friend: Barack Obama.Her middle child, Silas, believed that the unhinged Elmo phenomenon could have been headed off by having the human character in the scene eat the cookies. “I mean, one is a rock,” he said. “And the other two are just puppets.”Liv Pearsall, who has 2.8 million followers on TikTok and makes videos highlighting Elmo’s bratty side, said that the “Sesame Street” characters have personalities and that Elmo sometimes displays his in “snarky, savage moments.”“It’s kind of like a combination of the nostalgia that we all have from ‘Sesame Street’ coupled with just kind of being shocked that he was so sassy,” said Ms. Pearsall, 22, of Los Angeles. “I think we all relate to that at times.” More

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    Amy Schneider Becomes First Woman to Surpass $1 Million on ‘Jeopardy!’

    Schneider, a software engineering manager, is the fourth contestant in the game show’s history to reach the milestone.Now that Amy Schneider has experienced what it’s like to dominate on the “Jeopardy!” stage, she wonders why streaks like hers don’t happen more often.Once you get used to the buzzer and the cadence of the clues, she explained in a recent interview, you have a significant advantage over a candidate who comes in cold.And Schneider has certainly settled into her groove.On Friday, she became the fourth contestant and the first woman in the history of “Jeopardy!” to surpass $1 million in winnings during regular-season play. She did so on her 28th game, a runaway in which she won over $42,000, continuing a streak that has captured the attention of game-show fans across the country.“It’s not a sum of money I ever anticipated would be associated with my name,” Schneider, a 42-year-old software engineering manager who lives in Oakland, Calif., said in a news release.Schneider, who grew up watching “Jeopardy!” at home with her parents and in eighth grade was voted most likely to appear on the show, has had a whirlwind of a week — for good reasons and bad. On Monday, she tweeted that she had been robbed, losing her credit cards, identification and phone. (As a result, she said she would need to pause her detailed recaps of each game on social media).The $1 million mark is a rare one to reach — Ken Jennings was the first player to do so, in 2004, 30 games into his record 74-game run. But fans have gotten increasingly used to seeing contestants achieve it. James Holzhauer became the second person to hit $1 million during his 32-game streak in 2019. Three months ago, Matt Amodio surpassed $1 million as well, amassing $1.5 million before he was beat after 38 wins.The recent pattern of streaks on the show has fueled theorizing among fans watching from their couches and among members of the show’s production team. Some have postulated that pandemic-related delays in production have benefited some contestants by giving them more time to study. Some point to the increasingly vast amount of resources online. Or, it could just be chance.“To some extent, I think it’s just got to be a statistical fluke,” Schneider said.Schneider is doubtful that the extra time she had to prepare during the pandemic helped her significantly. Ultimately, she said, it’s not something you can cram for.“To be good at ‘Jeopardy!’,” she said, “you just have to live a life where you’re learning stuff all the time.” More

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    in Theater

    A Season to Savor a Cherished Musical Again and Again (and Again)

    Our critic didn’t set out to see “Caroline, or Change” seven times, but amid so much uncertainty the show turned out to be just what she needed.Settling into my seat at Studio 54, I let the sound design begin to transport me like a musical overture — the chittering of creatures and the bubbling of water, echoing from tall grasses and low haze on the edge of a Southern swamp.At each performance of “Caroline, or Change,” I look forward to this calming bit of preshow acclimation, even as a Confederate statue stands imposingly at center stage. And I keep my eyes peeled for the theater’s Covid safety enforcer patrolling the orchestra, arms crossed, scanning the audience for any unmasked faces. Spotting him calms me, too.When the lights dim, the statue is wheeled off, and in its place when they come up again is Caroline Thibodeaux, in the person of the astonishing British actor Sharon D Clarke, doing laundry in a Louisiana basement in 1963.I didn’t set out to see this musical masterpiece by Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori seven times this season, but I have. For the record, I’d been scared to see it even once — scared the way you get when you cherish a work of art so fiercely that you don’t want to risk finding it diminished.It didn’t matter to my brain that theater’s habit of reinvention is one of the things I love about the form, or that this Broadway revival got rave reviews in London. “Caroline” is my favorite musical, and I was protective of my memory of it. I’d been mad since 2004 that George C. Wolfe’s original Broadway production ran only a few months. (Hold a grudge much? Yeah, I know.)Yet Michael Longhurst’s gorgeous iteration, for Roundabout Theater Company, turned out to be just what I’ve needed: a work of intricate beauty to savor again and again in this strange, uncertain season. After catching the first preview in October, I started telling people that I would see it three times a week if I could.Sounded like I was exaggerating. I was not.Inspired by Kushner’s own Louisiana childhood, “Caroline” is the fictional story of a divorced Black maid working for a Jewish family mired in grief and paying her what they know is too little to get by on. Comedy and fantasy leaven the ugliness and pain, but the music, the lyrics, the characters are complex. It’s not a show to be absorbed in one swoop.If this production had opened as planned in what was to have been the busy spring of 2020, there’s no way I would have seen it as many times as I have. Repeated viewing at any scale is a rare luxury for me, and the chance to do it to such an extent with “Caroline” is a direct effect of the pandemic. In an unsettled season with a cascade of postponements and cancellations, lower ticket demand and fewer productions mean bargain prices and, if you’re a theater journalist like I am, a lot more free evenings.So I have been taking advantage — which I feel guilty admitting, because of course I could have spent that same time seeing deserving new work that I missed completely. Instead I’ve been giving one show a closer, longer look than usual, watching extraordinary cast members deepen their performances so far beyond that thrilling first preview that I can’t honestly regret it.Domhnall Gleeson, with Aoife Duffin in the background, in Enda Walsh’s “Medicine” at St. Ann’s Warehouse.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesCritics tend to see multiple productions of the same play — especially in seasons when there seem to be 47 stagings of “King Lear” or 18 of “The Tempest” — but not multiple performances of a single production, unless it transfers somewhere, usually to Broadway from Off Broadway or an out-of-town tryout. Even then, we only see the beginning of each run, while the production keeps changing after that.In theater — unlike films and TV shows, which stay frozen no matter how many times you watch them — the ritual of repetition coexists with change. As in other kinds of live performance, exact duplication is impossible, and also not the point. Evolution is the hope, which I’ve seen realized in “Caroline.”It has been quite frankly exhilarating to watch the company get tighter and tighter, especially at a time when public perception is that Broadway in particular and theater in general are a pandemic shambles. At the matinee just this Wednesday — the matinee! — Clarke gave a shattering performance, as alive to the text and the moment as any other I’d seen, but with elements new to me: an inflection, a movement, a vocal fillip at the end of a song. Such are the many layers of her character.“I love dissecting it. I love it,” Clarke exulted to me in an interview in October, the day after the first preview.Three months on, with the musical’s limited run set to close this weekend, it feels like she is still investigating.The other show I revisited this fall was Enda Walsh’s “Medicine,” but that wasn’t because I’d been wild about it initially. Walsh’s plays sometimes land with me and sometimes don’t. This one — chaotic, often funny, with Domhnall Gleeson’s understated performance at its heart — did not.I first saw it in November at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Six days later, in an interview, Gleeson told me that he had only just figured out how the show, which the company had performed elsewhere, worked in the St. Ann’s space. I gave it another shot because of that — and because his passion for another Walsh play, “The Walworth Farce,” prompted me to read it, an experience that left me wide awake when I finished it after 1 a.m., my every nerve ending taut.The second time I saw “Medicine,” in December, I watched it more deliberately, and it absolutely landed. Outside afterward, I walked through a patch of park and stood staring out at the East River, shaken. If the play had stayed in town longer, I’d have gone again.But when I see a show repeatedly in the same run — as I did with two of the plays in Phyllida Lloyd’s Donmar Warehouse Shakespeare trilogy, also at St. Ann’s — I tend to top out at three viewings.Zawe Ashton, from left, Charlie Cox and Tom Hiddleston in the 2019 Broadway production of “Betrayal” at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat’s what happened with the Broadway productions of “The Cher Show” (where seeing Stephanie J. Block’s understudy at one performance made me realize Block’s particular power) and “Sea Wall/A Life” (where I listened ferociously to figure out what was sound design and what was sound bleed from outside). My curiosity about both was professional, though; going more than once was about reporting.Jamie Lloyd’s 2019 revival of “Betrayal,” starring Tom Hiddleston, was different. Its first preview blindsided me: a Pinter play that could make me cry? I became fascinated with the geometry of emotion in the production — with where Lloyd placed the characters on the set, and how their isolation signified. Determined to watch the staging from different angles in the house, I went five times in all.When I told Lloyd about that, during an interview toward the end of the show’s run, he inquired about the actors: “And have you noticed variations in their performances?” I still wonder which answer he might have been looking for: reassurance that the show had stayed lively or that it hadn’t flown off the rails.I would be a little heartbroken if “Caroline” had gone off the rails — always my worry when a production runs for a while. As it is, when it gives its final performance on Sunday, I plan to be there, seeing it for the eighth time.After that, I expect I’ll be in the market for a new obsession. I’m thinking maybe “Company.” More

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    in Television

    How TV Shows Are Moving Past the Coronavirus Pandemic

    Remember the coronavirus pandemic? Some shows, faced with an unpredictable reality, prefer to put it safely in the past.“Sex and the City” always existed in a fantasy version of New York City, but in its HBO Max sequel, “And Just Like That,” there’s a different sort of illusion at work. In the opening scene, Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) are waiting for a table at a very crowded, very indoor restaurant.“Remember when we legally had to stand six feet apart from one another?” Carrie quips.And just like that … Covid is over. At least it is in this show’s Manhattan, as well as in a cohort of other series that try, wishfully, to press the epidemiological fast-forward button.In the real world, the Omicron variant may be driving case counts into the stratosphere, but on TV, the pandemic is playing dead. In the Season 11 premiere of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David’s HBO comedy of ill manners, chaos breaks out during a party (specifically, a premature funeral) at Albert Brooks’s house when Larry finds a closet stuffed with Purell, toilet paper and KN95 masks, exposing the “Lost in America” director as having been a “Covid hoarder.”You know — during the pandemic. The one that is definitely over.For nearly two years now, representing (or avoiding) Covid on TV has been a choice among bad options. Most shows ignored it altogether. A few, like “Social Distance” on Netflix, made the pandemic a direct subject, earnestly if clunkily.But maybe most awkward have been the series that acknowledged Covid existed but declared or implied it was over long before Covid decided it was over. NBC’s time-skipping “This Is Us” played the pandemic’s greatest hits throughout Season 5 — quarantine, video calls, pandemic unemployment — but this week’s Season 6 premiere suggests that the show has moved on. Season 2 of HBO Max’s “Love Life,” a story that spans several years, includes one pandemic episode, then begins the next in a version of 2021 where an audience is sitting unmasked in New York’s La MaMa theater.Some prime-time series about doctors, police and other emergency workers made fitful efforts to depict Covid, but their mask discipline sagged over time. “Grey’s Anatomy,” for instance, brought the pandemic full-on to Seattle Grace hospital in fall 2020. By fall 2021, it opened with the disclaimer that it now “portrays a fictional, post-pandemic world which represents our hopes for the future.”In the most recent season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David, right, outed Albert Brooks as a “Covid hoarder.”John P. Johnson/HBOThese are all understandable choices, and maybe the only creatively practical ones. But they make for some potent cognitive dissonance. When I watched a “post-pandemic” “Grey’s” episode recently on Hulu, it opened with a pre-roll ad urging me to get a booster shot.For programs that simply try to show how people live daily life, the pandemic’s challenges are both subtler and more pervasive than those presented by past catastrophes. After 9/11, there was no need for homeland-security alerts to impinge on “Friends,” and the subsequent fixation on terrorism was even a natural driver of plot for action thrillers.The pandemic, on the other hand, quelled action. Covid touched every aspect of mundane life. Masks limited facial expression. Real-life distancing practices meant that the basic engine of sitcoms — people in a room or a bar or an office, talking — was now fraught with angst.Very occasionally, series have managed to capture this reality, as in the second and final season of HBO’s naturalistic comedy “Betty,” whose young characters skateboarded through pandemic-era New York in various states of matter-of-fact maskedness.The remake of “Scenes From a Marriage” split the difference oddly, opening with the fourth-wall-breaking image of the cast and crew working under Covid protocols, then letting its domestic dissolution play out sans masks. More often, TV has breezed past the situation, or wished it away. As long as a year ago, series were declaring early victory over Covid. NBC’s “Mr. Mayor,” which premiered last January, starred Ted Danson as the mayor of Los Angeles, a job in which managing public health is not a small detail. The pilot yada-yadas the pandemic away by having him mention that “Dolly Parton bought everyone the vaccine.” (A later episode does involve a lice outbreak.)To its credit, a series like “And Just Like That” is at least trying to acknowledge the pandemic, rather than shunt it offscreen. It just does so in the past tense.The Peloton on which Mr. Big (Chris Noth) takes his fateful last ride was a habit many other shut-ins of a certain income acquired during lockdown, which was also when he and Carrie began their evening ritual of listening to vinyl LPs. Anthony (Mario Cantone) runs a bakery, the offshoot of one more Covid-acquired sourdough hobby. And when Carrie calls Miranda out for her drinking in a recent episode, Miranda shoots back: “I am drinking too much. Yes. We all were in the pandemic, and I guess I just kept going.” Make mine a double.There’s a note of wistful, wishful thinking in all this retconning of reality — would that we could write a time jump into our own scripts! But there’s also the simple matter of timing. TV generally works on a faster schedule than movies or books, but it’s not instantaneous (and shooting during Covid tends to take longer).So TV creators — suddenly conscripted, like educators and restaurant managers, into making public-health decisions they never expected to be part of the job description — have been left to guess at Covid’s future like a hapless pop culture C.D.C.In some cases, what’s onscreen now is a time capsule from the heady early days of vaccine optimism. The post-Covid “Curb” season wrapped production a few mutations ago, in May, when the virus seemed to be fizzling into oblivion. (The executive producer Jeff Schaffer told The Hollywood Reporter that the season takes place “Right now, if everyone had the brains to get vaccinated.”) A “comfy chic” challenge in the newest “Project Runway” season, produced in spring, had contestants adapt “those awful couch clothes that we’ve all been living in for over a year,” presumably for a post-Covid future.This week’s season premiere of “This Is Us” suggests that the show has moved past the pandemic.Ron Batzdorff/NBC“South Park,” which released a two-movie “Post Covid” special on Paramount+ in November and December, has one of the quickest turnaround times in TV — the first installment was released just as Omicron was discovered and the second worked in a reference to the variant. But it put the “post” in its “Post Covid” premise by using time travel and alternate reality to depict a future in which humanity had — well, almost — beaten the virus. (Maybe the most far-fetched twist is its resolution, in which, with the series’s frustrating both-sidesing, vaxxers and antivaxxers shower each other with apologies for getting so worked up during the plague years.)Still, it’s striking that TV, whose strength is the ability to stay on top of the moment, has generally worked so hard to avoid the biggest thing to happen to its collective audience in the past two years. You could easily imagine face masks becoming a staple, even a cliché, of period dramas some day — a visual shorthand for “the turbulent days of 2020” the way a shot of the corner of Haight and Ashbury says “the ’60s” — even as future rerun-watchers puzzle at why they’re nowhere to be found in the TV of our own time.Maybe it’s only fitting that TV producers should muddle through this garbage storm like everyone else, unsure what the rules will be by airtime, wishing they knew where the pandemic fell on the spectrum between temporary emergency and permanent way of life. And I’m sure plenty of viewers would rather be reminded of anything else.But you’re reminded anyway, if only by the twinge of uncanniness from seeing TV characters act as if the pandemic were history, even as you’re still trying to get your hands on rapid antigen tests. I bet Albert Brooks has a ton of them. More