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    ‘Malcolm in the Middle’ Is Getting a Four-Episode Revival on Disney+

    The return of “Malcolm in the Middle,” which aired from 2000 to 2006, will follow Malcolm as he helps his parents celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary, Disney+ announced.One of America’s wackiest families is making a comeback.“Malcolm in the Middle,” the hit television show from the early 2000s, will get a revival on Disney+ with four new episodes, the company announced on Friday. Frankie Muniz, who played Malcolm Wilkerson, helped tease the comeback in videos posted on Disney+ social media accounts.“I have been waiting for this moment for 18 years,” Muniz said in one video, referring to the show’s finale in 2006. “Let’s find out where Malcolm and his family are now.”The post also featured videos of Bryan Cranston, who went on to star in “Breaking Bad,” and Jane Kaczmarek, who will be reprising their roles as Malcolm’s parents, Hal and Lois.“What a delight that I get to yell at that kid again,” Kaczmarek said. “We are very, very excited about coming back together.”According to Deadline, Linwood Boomer, the show’s creator, will be a writer on the four episodes. Ken Kwapis, one of the directors of the original show, will direct all four episodes.The new episodes follow Malcolm’s return home with his daughter to help his parents celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary.It’s unclear whether Christopher Kennedy Masterson, Justin Berfield and Erik Per Sullivan, who played Muniz’s brothers on the show, will reprise their roles. Sullivan, who played the youngest brother, Dewey, left Hollywood after the show ended.“Malcolm in the Middle,” which aired on Fox from 2000 to 2006, tracked Malcolm, a young genius, navigating life with his dysfunctional family of scheming, bickering brothers and unconventional parents.In just its second week, the show became the most-watched comedy on television at the time, drawing 23.2 million viewers, The New York Times reported in 2000.Unlike other sitcoms at the time that were filmed with multiple cameras in front of a studio audience, “Malcolm in the Middle” was produced like a movie and used a single camera for a more realistic look. It also lacked a laugh track.But beyond aesthetics, “Malcolm in the Middle” was built on a cast of characters that were unpredictable and funny, with Malcolm often serving as the narrator and speaking directly to the camera.The show was nominated for 33 Emmys and won seven times in categories including outstanding directing for a comedy series and outstanding writing for a comedy series.Muniz largely stepped away from acting after the show ended and went on to become a professional racecar driver. But in interviews over the years, Muniz teased about the possibility of a “Malcolm in the Middle” reunion, saying his co-star Cranston was working on reviving the show.Variety reported that a premiere date has not been set. More

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    On ‘S.N.L.,’ Luigi Mangione Is Busting Out All Over

    As Chris Rock hosts, the man charged in the UnitedHealthcare shooting dominates this week’s riffs on the news.The 50th season of “Saturday Night Live” continues to provide the show with opportunities to revive many of its long-running characters. Last week, it was the Church Lady; this week, it was Nancy Grace, the TV personality and frequently outraged true-crime commentator, who has been frequently impersonated on “S.N.L.” over the years by cast members including Ana Gasteyer and Amy Poehler.On this outing, Grace was played by Sarah Sherman as she commented on the outpouring of online support for Luigi Mangione, who was charged in the fatal shooting of the UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson.“What is going on in this country?” Sherman declared. “Y’all, this man is not a sex icon, OK?”She added, “And yet, folks online are posting things like — am I reading this right? — ‘Luigi got that BDE.’ Really? I hope ‘BDE’ stands for Behavior Dat’s Evil.”Sherman went on to interview guests including Kenan Thompson, playing a regular customer at the Pennsylvania McDonald’s where Mangione was arrested.“Well, Nancy, I’ve been eating McDonald’s every day for three years,” Thompson said. “I got Type 10 diabetes. Blue Cross? Bitch, I got blue foot. You know what my health insurance plan is called? Hoping it goes away.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Book Review: ‘Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words,’ by Michael Owen

    In “Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words,” Michael Owen offers a sympathetic portrait of the lyricist, overshadowed in a life that had him tending the legacy of his younger sibling George.IRA GERSHWIN: A Life in Words, by Michael OwenThe lyricist Ira Gershwin once suggested his epitaph should be “Words Failed Me”: a joke tinged with ineffable sadness.Bespectacled and diminutive of stature, he was and will be forever overshadowed by his younger brother and collaborator George, the glamorous genius composer who died at 38 of a brain tumor many in his circle had dismissed as a nervous ailment.As has been told many times before, but not from the close P.O.V. that Michael Owen assumes in his new biography, “Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words,” this seismic event in musical history left his subject both bereft and, for the rest of his own much longer life, sweeping up after a fallen star while trying, faintly, to keep emitting his own light.Ira spent plenty of time vetting George biographers, whose number could populate a healthy chorus line. But his own “potpourri of musical memories,” titled “Lyrics on Several Occasions,” sold so poorly he bought up the remaining copies. A decade after his own death at 86 in 1983 came Philip Furla’s “Ira Gershwin,” which also focused to its detriment on the lyrics, not the man.Now Owen, an archivist who has previously published a biography of the torch singer Julie London, has stepped up to give this perpetual supporting player an infusion of main-character energy. He succeeds. “Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words” is dignified but not starchy, efficient but not shallow, and honest about grief’s unrelenting toll. It concerns family ups and downs as much as show business, and everyone — happy holidays! — has some of those.Ira was born Israel in 1896 to Russian Jewish immigrants to New York City, a name quickly switched to Isidore (Izzy or Iz) before he settled on one that, appropriately, can mean “watchful” in Hebrew. There would be four children, and their parents’ many business struggles and frequent moves left the oldest son cautious and introverted.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Trump Show Is Returning. Will It Be Triumph, Tragedy or Farce?

    On his last show before Election Day, John Oliver allowed himself to dream a little dream. Mr. Oliver, whose “Last Week Tonight” speaks to a mostly left-of-center crowd, spent most of the episode making the case for Kamala Harris. But also, he asked his audience, wouldn’t it be nice, for the first time since 2015, to have the option of simply ignoring Donald J. Trump’s existence? “I want so badly to live in that world!” he said.A week later, Mr. Oliver was back, reporting from a world he found rather less preferable. He devoted the episode to what the Trump victory meant. But first, he gave his audience permission to change the channel.“It is understandable,” he said, “not to want yet another guy in a suit doom-squawking at you.”Mr. Oliver, of course, spoke from a particular political position. But he was also voicing a kind of weariness that goes beyond reproductive issues or deportation policies or the health of democracy. The Trump Era has been a lot, and for a long time. One person has been Topic A, B and C for nearly a decade, throughout popular culture, but most of all on his native medium, TV.On Nov. 5, that might all have ended. It didn’t. How will we — collectively, as a culture — do four more years of this? And what might that even look like?WHEN I SAY THAT Donald Trump, in his first term, was a “TV president,” I mean something different than when we used the phrase for, say, Richard M. Nixon or Bill Clinton.It isn’t just about his having been a politician who “used the medium” to send a message, though he was that. It isn’t just about his having been a reality-TV star and decades-long media gadfly who instinctively thought like television, who craved the same types of conflict and provocation that the cameras do, who was always on, who for all practical purposes was as much TV character as man — though he was that too.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Conan O’Brien’s Parents Die 3 Days Apart

    Thomas O’Brien, an epidemiologist, and Ruth O’Brien, a lawyer, juggled successful careers with raising six children, including the comedy star.The parents of Conan O’Brien, the longtime late-night television host and a star in the comedy world, died this week within days of one another.Thomas Francis O’Brien, 95, an epidemiologist, and Ruth Reardon O’Brien, 92, a lawyer who made strides for women in the legal field, both died at their home in Brookline, Mass., according to the Bell O’Dea Funeral Home. Dr. O’Brien died on Monday, and Ms. O’Brien, died on Thursday.Happy families are not exactly a common topic in comedy. The parents of Conan O’Brien, 61, were not only celebrated in their respective fields but by the most well-known of their six children.Conan O’Brien credited his father with introducing him to comedy and described him in an interview this week in The Boston Globe as “the funniest guy in the room.” He added that his father had a “voracious appetite for ideas and people and the crazy variety and irony of life.”Ruth R. O’BrienThomas F. O’Brien, M.D.Bell O’Dea Funeral HomeThomas O’Brien spent most of his career at what is now Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where he was the first director of the infectious diseases division, and was on faculty at Harvard Medical School. He also was a co-founder of the Collaborating Centre for Surveillance of Antimicrobial Resistance for the World Health Organization. He became known for his work around antibiotic-resistant bacteria.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How Christian Slater Went From Bad Boy to Good Dad

    On a July morning, the actor Christian Slater sat on a bench at the Long Beach marina, grimacing in the California sunshine. Slater sighed, he scowled, he groaned. He looked like a man facing some terrible moral quandary. Or like a man with severe indigestion.Slater, 55, was filming a scene for “Dexter: Original Sin,” the latest brand extension of the florid Showtime serial killer series, which premiered in 2006. (“Dexter: New Blood” debuted in 2021; “Dexter: Resurrection” will air next year.) Premiering Friday on Paramount+, “Original Sin,” set mostly in the early 1990s, describes the early career of Dexter Morgan, a forensic analyst in Miami who offs serial killers that the police can’t corral.It features the same central characters as the original show, though they are now played by different, younger actors, Slater among them.That Slater should join the “Dexter” universe is no surprise. His résumé includes several killers, some accidental and some absolutely psycho. In the late 1980s and 1990s, he specialized in dark matter, playing anarchic, irresistible characters in movies like “Heathers” (directed by Michael Lehmann, a producing director of “Original Sin”), “True Romance” and “Pump of the Volume.”Slater with Patrick Gibson in “Dexter: Original Sin.” “He was definitely more gregarious and friendly and kind than I was expecting,” Gibson, who plays young Dexter, said of Slater. Patrick Wymore/Paramount+ with ShowtimeBack then, Slater didn’t know how to separate himself from his characters. “I didn’t have an identity enough of my own to really be able to separate or differentiate between the two,” he said. “I was latching onto any sort of personality that I could find.” So that darkness impinged on his personal life, too. There were arrests on charges of assault, drunken driving, attempting to board a flight with a gun in his luggage. Interview magazine once called him “the last analog bad boy.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    36 Things That Stuck With Us in 2024

    The movie scenes, TV episodes, song lyrics and other moments that reporters, critics, editors and visual journalists in Culture couldn’t stop thinking about this year.The Last Scene in a Film‘Challengers’Mike Faist in “Challengers.”MGMReal tennis, like real dancing, happens when the body is rapt and alive, where visceral sensation takes over and the only thing left is the crystallization of every nerve and muscle, both aligned and on edge. That last match was a dance.— More

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    Time Magazine’s Person of the Year Doesn’t Surprise Late Night

    “Trump is the first man in history to be Time’s person of the year and McDonald’s employee of the month,” Jimmy Fallon said on Thursday.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.‘America’s Main Character’Time magazine has named President-elect Donald Trump as its person of the year for 2024.“Trump is the first man in history to be Time’s person of the year and McDonald’s employee of the month,” Jimmy Fallon said. “History is being made!”“Trump said the honor feels just as exciting as the birth of his child, except he was present for the award.” — JIMMY FALLON“So it’s the second time he’s had the honor, with the first coming after his presidential win in 2016. That was also the same week Hillary Clinton canceled her subscription and smashed her server with a hammer.” — DANA PERINO, guest host of “Gutfeld!”“The editorial board mentioned Trump’s historic comeback, his impact on global politics and how we increased his votes from Blacks, Latinos and people named Biden.” — DANA PERINO“The difference: In 2016, the cover called him ‘President of the divided states of America.’ This year, it’s simply his name, even though there was plenty of room for ‘Cry harder, losers.’” — DANA PERINO“Now, obviously, Donald Trump is the person of the year. At this point, he’s basically America’s main character.” — MICHAEL KOSTA“Sadly, there’s no one left to roll it up and spank him with it. Maybe Elon will do it for him, I don’t know.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“According to the Time website, the person of the year is bestowed upon ‘a person, group, or concept that had the biggest impact for good or for ill.’ Which, that’s him, all right. It was a no-brainer in every sense of the word.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“By the way, just to put Trump’s Time cover in context, it’s not exactly a mark of greatness. The president who currently holds the record for the most Time magazine covers, it isn’t a universally beloved one, like F.D.R., J.F.K. or George Washington. Not because Time wasn’t around in the 1700s, but because Washington was more of a People magazine time of guy.” — SETH MEYERS“But I guess once again, Time has not been kind to Joe Biden.” — MICHAEL KOSTAThe Punchiest Punchlines (Clemency For Christmas Edition)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More