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    Kenneth H. Brown, Playwright Best Known for ‘The Brig,’ Dies at 85

    He drew on his own experiences in the Marines to depict brutality within the corps, drawing acclaim Off Off Broadway.Kenneth H. Brown, a New York playwright whose acclaimed 1963 Off Off Broadway play “The Brig,” based on his experiences as a Marine, portrayed dehumanization inside a military prison during the Korean War, died on Feb. 5 at a hospice in Queens. He was 85. A friend, the performance artist and writer Penny Arcade, said the cause was cancer.After growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s as something of a street tough, Mr. Brown, eager to serve his country, enlisted in the Marines at 18. But stationed in Japan, he found himself rattled by military life and was thrown into the brig for insubordination.There, by his account, he was humiliated and abused. Guards called him “maggot”; he was punched in the gut for even minor infractions. Mornings started with garbage-can lids being banged on bunk beds, and he and his fellow inmates were ordered to jog around their claustrophobic quarters for hours until they were breathless.“I was always in trouble in the Marines,” he said in an interview with the Lower East Side Biography Project. “I went to the brig twice. The first time I did 25 days.” Of his military service, he said, “By the time I got out, I was a complete pacifist.”Back in New York, Mr. Brown worked as a bartender and studied at Columbia University on the G.I. Bill. In his spare time he wrote “The Brig,” a hyper-realistic play depicting a grueling day in the life of 10 imprisoned Marines and the guards who brutalize them.Mr. Brown, left, with Judith Malina and Julian Beck, founders of the Manhattan avant-garde troupe the Living Theater, in 1964. The company had given “The Brig” its premiere.Mr. Brown didn’t have any theater connections. But through a friend his manuscript made its way to the Living Theater, the revered avant-garde repertory company founded in the 1940s by Julian Beck and Judith Malina. They were captivated by “The Brig” and decided to produce it.“I was a guy from the neighborhood,” Mr. Brown said. “I never met people like Julian and Judith.”“The Brig” made waves when it opened in 1963 at the Living Theater in Greenwich Village.“If what happens on the stage of the Living Theater is a true representation of conditions in the brig, the president or his secretary of defense ought to order an investigation,” Howard Taubman wrote in his review for The New York Times. “Mr. Brown’s obsessive script does not spare a detail of the devastating indictment.”The play won three Obie Awards and toured Europe. Jonas Mekas directed a film version.“The Brig” became one of the Living Theater’s great successes, but it also became inextricably linked to the company because of its anarchic last performance there. During the play’s run, the authorities shut down the playhouse for delinquent taxes, but the cast and an audience broke into the padlocked theater for one final show.“The play accomplished what I wanted it to accomplish,” Mr. Brown said. “It revealed the horror of this condition, and it revealed it very clearly not through commenting on it, but doing it. Actually performing the ritual of sadism that was the Marine Corps.”A scene from the film version of “The Brig,” directed by Jonas Mekas, in 1964Harvard Film ArchiveKenneth Howard Brown was born in Brooklyn on March, 9, 1936, to Kenneth and Helen (Bella) Brown. His mother was a bank officer, his father a police officer.Growing up in the Bay Ridge section, Ken was known to brawl with youths in the neighborhood. But he also wrote poems and short stories in his teens while attending the Jesuit-run Brooklyn Prep.After the success of “The Brig,” Mr. Brown enjoyed the life of a celebrated young playwright. “I was off and running, with grants and fellowships, teaching jobs and jaunts to faraway places,” he wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1986. “Maybe I could make a go of it in the rarefied atmosphere of literature.”But “by the time the smoke cleared,” he continued, “I was broke.”He went back to tending bar. He worked at Bradley’s, a jazz club on University Place, and helped run Phebe’s, a Bowery haunt for the downtown theater crowd. In an essay published in the Times in 1972, he wryly addressed the realities of a writer’s life in the city:“That’s right, I’m the guy who wrote ‘The Brig.’ What am I doing here running this restaurant? Well, I’ve got to pay the rent, you know. No, I can’t get any fellowships and grants. I’ve had them all, and nobody will renew them until I make theater history again. Oh, yes, you have to do it again and again.”But Mr. Brown kept writing. In 1970, he published “The Narrows,” an autobiographical novel about high schoolers growing up in Bay Ridge in the 1950s. “Nightlight,” a drama set in a bleak city apartment, was staged in 1973. “Hitler’s Analyst,” a novel about a Park Avenue psychiatrist who treats a couple who believe they are Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, was published in 2000.Mr. Brown grew old in Bay Ridge, living in a rent-controlled apartment passed down to him by his parents, and for years he headed into Manhattan to tend bar. He kept busy writing a sequel to “The Great Gatsby” titled “Carraway,” based on the character who narrates the Fitzgerald novel. (Information on survivors was not immediately available.)In 2007, long after the Living Theater’s playhouse was closed and years after the company began moving from place to place, it settled into a new home on the Lower East Side. To Mr. Brown’s surprise, he received a call from Ms. Judith Malina, then 80, who told him that “The Brig” would be the inaugural production.The play’s revival was widely publicized, and Mr. Brown savored the triumph. But as Americans were still reckoning with reports of torture at the U.S. military prison at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the revival was starkly timely. The coincidence wasn’t lost on Mr. Brown.“‘The Brig’ has always been relevant,” he said in an interview in 2010. “I guess as long as there’s war and as long as there’s a military and especially as long as one questions the ethical right to wage war.”“It’s going to stay relevant,” he added, “until there’s peace throughout the world.” More

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    David Olusoga Wants Britain to Face Its Past. All of It.

    For more than a decade, the historian and broadcaster’s work has focused on bringing his country’s uglier histories to light. Recently, more people are paying attention.LONDON — In December, when a British court cleared four Black Lives Matter protesters of criminal damages for toppling the statue of Edward Colston, a 17th-century slave trader, in June 2020, it was thanks in part to David Olusoga’s expert testimony.Olusoga, a historian whose work focuses on race, slavery and empire, felt a duty to agree to address the court on behalf of the defense, he said in a recent interview, since “I’ve been vocal about this history.”At the trial in Bristol, the city in southwest England where the Colston statue was toppled, Olusoga, 52, told the jury about Colston’s prominent role in the slave trade and the brutalities suffered by the African people Colston sold into slavery.The closely watched court decision was greeted with concern by some in Britain and relief by others, and Olusoga’s role in the defense offers just one recent example of his work’s impact on British society.Olusoga’s comments in court are consistent with a frequent focus of his wider work as one of the country’s most prominent public historians: that long-forgotten or buried past injustices can be addressed in the present day in public-facing, accessible media.Olusoga in a scene from the docu-series “One Thousand Years of Slavery” on the Smithsonian Channel, for which he served as an executive producer.Smithsonian ChannelOlusoga’s latest TV work is “One Thousand Years of Slavery,” which premieres on the Smithsonian Channel on Monday. The show, which he executive produced alongside Bassett Vance Productions, a production company helmed by Courtney B. Vance and Angela Bassett, takes a wide-ranging, global look at slavery through the familial stories of public figures like Senator Cory Booker and the actor David Harewood.One of Olusoga’s best-known projects is “Black and British: A Forgotten History,” which explored — through a BBC television series accompanied by a best-selling book — the long and fraught relationship between Black people and Britain, introducing many people to Black communities here that date back to the Roman times.“I’m interested in the histories we don’t tell. I’m not interested in retelling stories that we’ve told a thousand times,” Olusoga said. “I’m interested in telling stories that are unfamiliar.”Olusoga, who is half-Nigerian, traces this focus to his mother telling him when he was a child that Nigerian soldiers served in World War II. In that moment, his interest in history overlapped with his attempts to understand his Black and British identity, he said. “It made me realize not just that there was more to this for me, but also that I wasn’t being told the whole truth,” he said. “And a lot of what I do is from that moment of realization.”The historian was born in Lagos to a Nigerian father and a white British mother. He moved to Britain as a child and grew up in northeast England with his mother and siblings. In the book “Black and British,” he spoke of the racial tensions of the 1970s and 1980s and a campaign of racist abuse his family experienced, which forced them to leave their home.Olugosa’s “Black and British: A Forgotten History” explores the long and fraught relationship between Black people and Britain.Despite having a difficult time in school — Olusoga was diagnosed with dyslexia at age 14 — there he developed a love of history from a favorite teacher and the television he watched. He studied history at university but opted for a career in TV over academia. For Olusoga, “history was naturally public,” he said. “I chose very deliberately to leave universities and go into television in order to make history.”After 15 years in TV production, he started appearing in front of the camera. He’s now a fixture on British screens presenting shows like “A House Through Time,” which each season tells the story of a British house and its inhabitants over the centuries. In 2019, Olusoga was awarded an Order of the British Empire for services to history and community integration (which he struggled to accept because of its association with the violent acts of the empire).In an email, Mary Beard, the author of “Women and Power” and a professor of classics at Cambridge University, praised Olusoga’s skills of persuasion. She remembered that, when filming “Black and British” with Olusoga in a rural English village, an older white woman said she was “proud” to know that one of the earliest inhabitants of her village had been Black after being presented with a reconstruction of that ancient woman’s face.“That is the Olusoga effect,” said Beard, who is another one of Britain’s best-known historians. “He has a real gift for telling stories straight and winning people to seeing things in a different way. It is a very rare gift.”This is also evident in the impact of “Unremembered,” a 2019 documentary that was made by his production company, Uplands Television. The show, presented by David Lammy, a Black Member of Parliament, brought to public consciousness that African and Asian soldiers who died in World War I were not commemorated in the same way as their white comrades, and many lie in unmarked graves. The program ultimately led to a public apology from Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government.In recent years, Olivette Otele, Britain’s first Black female history professor and the author of “African Europeans: An Untold History,” has seen a shift in how the Black experience is included in British and European history, which she credits in part to Olusoga.“In academia, we do all we can, but to be able to democratize, to reach wider audiences has made such a huge difference, so much so that it’s becoming normal to engage with these topics,” Otele said in a recent interview.Olusoga studied history but opted for a career in television over academia, as he believes history is “naturally public.”Alexander Turner for The New York TimesFor Olusoga, this shift was surprising. “I’ve been telling these stories on radio and television, and fighting for them to be told, for my entire career, and I’ve done nothing different,” he said. “I think what’s happened is the world has changed around me and I think people are more interested in listening.”At the same time, since the 2020 murder of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter protests, there have been contentious debates about what gets included in Britain’s public history. In late 2020, following the toppling of the Colston statue, the British conservation charity the National Trust released a report exploring links between some of its sites and colonialism and slavery. The report was dismissed as “woke” by some conservative politicians and many in Britain’s right-wing press.Yet Olusoga said debates like this show that certain segments of the population reject the uglier elements of British history. The past is sometimes used to make British people feel “that we were magical people from a magical island that’s always been on the right side of history,” he said.But, “if you only want to tell yourself the positive stories from your past,” he said, “then that necessarily means you cannot have an honest reckoning with your past.”He added: “And that’s Britain’s issue.” More

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    ‘We Need to Talk About Cosby.’ (Among Others.)

    W. Kamau Bell’s documentary series is a model of how to engage honestly with disgraced artists and their art.There is a simple, amazing thing that W. Kamau Bell does in his Showtime documentary series, “We Need to Talk About Cosby.” While interviewing subjects about the comedian and actor accused of multiple rapes, Bell has them watch scenes of Cosby’s performances on a tablet.Not a monitor on the set. Not a flatscreen on the wall. The interviewees — entertainers, experts, women who have accused Cosby of sexual abuse — hold a small screen in their laps. The device makes them turn their faces downward, lighting up at warm childhood memories or registering disgust at punch lines that now ring horrific.It’s a small gesture, but it’s important. You have to hold in your head what you know about Bill Cosby the man. And you have to hold literally in your hand what you know about Bill Cosby’s work.It is intimate, as art inherently is. Something came out of the artist’s mind and went into yours. At best, this is a transcendent experience. At worst — at the moment with Cosby — it can be unsettling, dissonant, sickening.Bell’s series, airing in four parts on Sundays on Showtime and streaming in full online, uses a straight chronological structure to consider, side by side, the arc of Cosby’s career, his particular importance to Black Americans and the stories of the many women who have reported being drugged and sexually assaulted by Cosby over decades.(In 2018, Cosby was convicted of sexual assault. His conviction was overturned in 2021 by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which ruled that prosecutors had reneged on an agreement not to charge him after a deposition in a civil suit, in which he had admitted giving women quaaludes in an effort to have sex with them.)The series is outstanding enough for how it contextualizes Cosby’s legacy, especially for Black America, and the charges against him, which Cosby denies. Bell grew up with Cosby — “I was raised by Fat Albert” — but he also has a sharp critic’s eye as a performer himself. Analyzing the famous lip sync of Ray Charles’s “Night Time Is the Right Time” from “The Cosby Show,” for instance, Bell notes how it specifically spoke to Black Americans by having the Huxtable family perform to the grandparents on the set, rather than toward the home audience through the camera..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}And in interviews with numerous Cosby accusers, the series offers harrowing accounts of how Cosby leveraged his trust and moral authority — as a groundbreaking comic, pop-cultural educator and TV father figure — both to bully people professionally and to cover for, as they describe it, the acts of a predator.But it’s in bringing the two sides together that “We Need to Talk About Cosby” does something too rare in cases like this. It holds Cosby’s achievements and his wrongs close, and it recognizes that there may be unresolvable dissonance between the two.Too often, the public conversation around Cosby — and around other artists who have fallen into various forms of disgrace — labors to fix these contradictions. We turn them into morality-play debates, like “Should you still watch ‘The Cosby Show’ (or read ‘Harry Potter,’ or see Woody Allen’s movies, or laugh at Dave Chappelle’s or Louis C.K.’s standup, or … )?” The question shunts the ethical burden of an artist’s words or deeds onto the audience.Cosby (with Malcolm-Jamal Warner, far left; Keshia Knight Pulliam, middle right; and Tempestt Bledsoe) made little distinction between himself and his character on “The Cosby Show.”NBC Universal, via Getty ImagesOne ham-handed way of resolving the tension is by insisting that people “Separate the art from the artist,” an especially bizarre request given how many such artists rely on associating their creations with their personas. (Cosby made little distinction between himself and Cliff Huxtable.) The biographical Michael Jackson musical “MJ” takes this to an extreme, ignoring the charges that Jackson molested children, separating the artist from the allegations.Another way is to retrofit your view of the work to match what you now know about the artist. Maybe the work becomes a kind of crime scene, full of clues and confessions we might have seen earlier, if only we had known to look. (There is some of this in Bell’s documentary, which brings up Cosby’s much-noted fixation on aphrodisiac drugs in his standup and TV comedy.)Or maybe the art must be retroactively downgraded. A work that we once erroneously believed to be good, because we were misguided, or taken in by a bad actor, is revealed to have been tainted all along with hackery and hidden self-justifications. The dissonance is resolved. The bad person simply made a bad thing.Appreciating art, especially narrative art, requires a moral sensibility. It’s what allows you to distinguish good behavior from bad, to orient yourself in a fictional world’s moral universe. And we live in a moralistic time, when many audiences don’t want to see daylight between the text of a work and the beliefs of its creator.So it’s tempting to believe that only good people create good art — and to be disturbed that you, a good person, have connected in some way with the creation of someone who turns out to be a monster. Who wants to be a sucker, a victim, an accomplice?It may be even more disturbing to acknowledge not only that a bad person created a great work but also that the work can’t be neatly isolated from the creator’s worst aspects. We each harbor within us good and bad impulses, which hopefully most of us master in favor of good, but which every artist, however moral or immoral, draws on to create.This messy, unsatisfying reality plays out in a damning recent New York magazine story on the TV creator and film director Joss Whedon. Like Cosby, Whedon benefited from a righteous public image — in his case, as a feminist and thoughtful nerd whose enlightenment elevated his pulp-literate creations, especially “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” That image collapsed in recent years amid accusations that he treated actors cruelly on set, had affairs with employees and used his persona as a shield. (Whedon has disputed some of the charges.)Though Whedon seems to participate in the article as damage control, he does himself few favors. The interviewer, Lila Shapiro, hands him the stake and he does the rest. Asked about his affairs on the “Buffy” set, “he quickly added that he had felt he ‘had’ to sleep with them, that he was ‘powerless’ to resist.”But Whedon’s bad allyhood and rationalizations are only part of the story. Shapiro also writes insightfully about the “Buffy” fans who, whatever their idol’s hypocrisy, were genuinely thrilled, inspired and given a witty voice by the show’s outcast heroes. Some of them have tried to adjust to what they now know about Whedon by adjusting their view of his work:Over the last year, some of his fans have tried to scrub him out too, erasing him from their narratives about what made “Buffy” great. In posts and essays, they have downplayed his role in the show’s development, pointing out that many people, including many women, were critically important to its success. It may be hard to accept that Whedon could have understood the pain of a character like Buffy, a woman who endures infidelity, attempted rape and endless violence. But the belief that her story was something other than a projection of his psyche is ultimately just another fantasy. Whedon did understand pain — his own. Some of that pain, as he once put it to me, “spilled over” into the people around him. And some of it was channeled into his art.“Buffy” was always a collaborative work, of course; nearly all TV is. But it didn’t suddenly become more collaborative because we needed it to be. Which leaves a disappointed fan with a dilemma: How to sit with what you felt once and what you know now, with how an artwork moved you and how reality appalled you, without diminishing either to make room for the other.“We Need to Talk About Cosby” is as good a model as I’ve seen for doing this. It doesn’t tell anyone what they “should” do about Cosby or “The Cosby Show.” But it asks the viewer to do something hard: to accept that what you once thought about the work still holds true — it actually made you feel what it did — but that the things you know about the artist are also true, and the two may be inseparable, in ways that might make it painful ever to look at the work again.Throughout the series, Bell employs the idea of “the Cosby we knew” versus the Cosby we didn’t. In a closing monologue, he says: “There were times when I was making this show that I wanted to quit. I wanted to hold on to my memories of Bill Cosby before I knew about Bill Cosby. I guess I can — as long as I admit, as long as we all admit, that there’s a Bill Cosby we didn’t know.”This Jekyll-and-Hyde division makes sense as a rhetorical device, a way of talking about the good that can be acknowledged in people and the evil that must be deplored in them. But as Bell’s wise documentary also makes clear, there wasn’t really one Bill Cosby and another secret one. There isn’t a good Cosby and a bad Cosby, whom we can store in different mental compartments. There is just Bill Cosby, about whom we didn’t know enough and now know dreadfully more. In the end, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are always the same guy. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: The Super Bowl and an Oscar Micheaux Documentary

    The Super Bowl airs on NBC. And TCM airs a documentary about a pathbreaking filmmaker.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, Feb. 7-Feb. 13. Details and times are subject to change.MondayLOVE & BASKETBALL (2000) 6 p.m. on BET. Football is front of mind this week, but Gina Prince-Bythewood’s coming-of-age classic “Love & Basketball” is timeless. Set in Los Angeles, the movie stars Sanaa Lathan and Omar Epps as young people who are passionate for each other and for the game.TuesdayAMERICAN MASTERS: MARIAN ANDERSON — THE WHOLE WORLD IN HER HANDS (2022) 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The filmmaker Rita Coburn (“Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise”) looks at the barrier-breaking contralto Marian Anderson in this new documentary. Anderson is perhaps best known for her 1939 concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, which became a civil rights milestone; she also broke the color barrier for soloists at the Metropolitan Opera and toured for the State Department. Anderson’s life and legacy — she died in 1993 at 96 — are discussed here by interviewees including the tenor George Shirley and the mezzo-sopranos Denyce Graves and J’nai Bridges.WednesdayA scene from “Fairview.”Comedy CentralFAIRVIEW 8:30 p.m. on Comedy Central. A small American town deals with big changes in this new, “South Park”-esque half-hour animated series, which counts Stephen Colbert among its executive producers. The stand-up comic Blair Socci voices the mayor of Fairview, where people’s jobs are being replaced by artificial intelligence; Covid is a concern; and, in at least one case, a student gives a school presentation on his father’s career running an explicit OnlyFans account. While moderating an interview panel at New York Comic Con last year, the comedy writer-performer Jen Spyra said to the “Fairview” creator R.J. Fried, “I understand that you take the comedy to some abjectly disgusting places.” Fried responded calmly and succinctly: “That’s for sure.” The voice cast also includes the comics Aparna Nancherla and Atsuko Okatsuka.ThursdayDavid Oyelowo and Storm Reid in “Don’t Let Go.”Lacey Terrell/Universal PicturesDON’T LET GO (2019) 5:20 p.m. on FXM. Grief seems to bend time in “Don’t Let Go,” a sci-fi thriller led by David Oyelowo and directed by Jacob Aaron Estes. Oyelowo plays Jack Radcliff, a Los Angeles detective whose niece (played by Storm Reid) is murdered. But soon after the killing, Radcliff receives what is apparently a phone call from his dead niece, speaking from the past — or perhaps from another dimension. He sets off to untangle the mystery. The result is “a likable, derivative genre mash-up,” Manohla Dargis said in her review for The New York Times. “You get lost in its thickets because Estes hasn’t wholly figured out how to make toying with time work,” she wrote. “But he has a fine cast and a good sense of place, including a feel for the spookiness of emptied-out spaces.”FridayEVERYTHING’S GONNA BE ALL WHITE 8 p.m. on Showtime. The producer-director Sacha Jenkins (“Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James”) is behind this new three-part docuseries, which explores race and racism in America’s past and present. It does so with the help of interviewees from an array of fields — academic, political, artistic and more — including the historian Nell Irvin Painter, the human rights activist Linda Sarsour, the comedian Amanda Seales, the artist Favianna Rodriguez, the rapper Bun B and the sexuality educator Ericka Hart.SaturdayCRY MACHO (2021) 8 p.m. on HBO. Clint Eastwood plays a patinated Texas rodeo retiree tasked with transporting a boy (played by Eduardo Minett) from Mexico to the United States in this modern Western. (Or almost modern: It’s set in 1980.) Their journey is risky but roundabout, filled with 20-miles-an-hour detours that make the movie a slow burn. Its relative quiet is especially pronounced in comparison to the work that Eastwood is best known for — a trait that A.O. Scott welcomed, mostly, in his review for The Times. “This one,” Scott wrote, “is something different — a deep cut for the die-hards, a hangout movie with nothing much to prove and just enough to say.”SundayPaul Robeson in Oscar Micheaux’s “Body and Soul.” A documentary about Micheaux will air on TCM on Sunday night.Kino LorberOSCAR MICHEAUX: THE SUPERHERO OF BLACK FILMMAKING (2021) 9:30 p.m. on TCM. From 1919 to 1948, the filmmaker Oscar Micheaux made some 40 movies filled with nuanced Black characters who broke screen stereotypes and often directly addressed issues of race. This documentary from the filmmaker Francesco Zippel (“Friedkin Uncut”) looks at Micheaux’s groundbreaking work and remarkable life: Micheaux’s parentshad once been enslaved, and he turned to professional storytelling only after a stint as a homesteader in South Dakota. His first film, “The Homesteader” (1919), was based on a fictionalized memoir he wrote. Produced about a century later, this documentary features perspectives from the late contemporary filmmakers John Singleton and Melvin Van Peebles, and a handful of performers and scholars.SUPER BOWL LVI 6 p.m. on NBC. Will the Los Angeles Rams or the Cincinnati Bengals prevail? What will it be like seeing two quarterbacks who were No. 1 draft picks — Joe Burrow of the Bengals and Matthew Stafford of the Rams — face off in a championship game, an extreme Super Bowl rarity? Most important, will Matthew McConaughey grace us with another weird, surrealist commercial, as he did for Doritos last year? Find out on Sunday during this live broadcast of the 56th Super Bowl. Viewers who are in it more for the culture (and, perhaps, the guacamole) will be glad to see a stacked halftime performance lineup: Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J. Blige and Kendrick Lamar. More

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    ‘Billions’ Season 6, Episode 3 Recap: Street Fighting Man

    Prince forms an unsavory alliance to help make a giant land grab. Chuck grabs a bullhorn.“I look at every competitor as a potential partner … right up until I can’t anymore.” As far as one-sentence encapsulations of the Mike Prince Method go, it’s hard to beat this statement by the billionaire coprotagonist of the sixth season of “Billions.” In this week’s episode, titled “S.T.D.” (it’s not what you think), Prince drives one such competitor — one of the more odious figures in the “Billions” legendarium — to the edge of defeat, then rides in to save his bacon and enrich them both.It’s a feat of bargaining so impressive that it literally drives Prince’s enemy Chuck Rhoades into the street, wielding a bullhorn instead of his authority as Attorney General. In the end, Chuck may find the former more effective than the latter.The episode begins with a late-night rallying call by Ben Kim, one of the more timid soldiers in Prince Cap’s newly acquired army. As a friend of Mafee, who quit the firm with Dollar Bill after Bobby Axelrod’s ouster, Ben hears that Mafee and Stern’s outfit is snapping up land in anticipation of New York City’s 2028 Olympic bid. Their bank roller: none other than the disgraced former treasury secretary Todd Krakow (the ever-delightful Danny Strong).Rather than allow Krakow to elbow him out of the position he himself planned to take, Prince offers an alliance and is rebuffed. So he takes his case to the city’s new mayor, Tess Johnson (Gameela Wright), advising her to speak out against plans to build a new stadium in Manhattan, seen as crucial to the Olympic bid.At the same time, Chuck’s ace, Kate Sacker, uncovers Krakow’s role in the Olympics ploy and kills his various land deals. This sends Krakow scampering into Chuck’s office, demanding to know why on earth he would help Mike Prince on a matter like this. Chuck, who wasn’t previously aware of Prince’s involvement, advises Krakow to resubmit his real-estate plans on the up-and-up instead of through shell companies, the better to stick it to Prince.But the mayor’s anti-stadium news conference kills Chuck and Krakow’s anti-Prince maneuver — which, in turn, drives Krakow and Prince into each other’s arms. Krakow has the deals. Prince has the bankroll. All they need is a developer to help them out, whom they find in Bud Lazzara, the mogul Chuck humiliated in the previous episode.Now all Prince needs to come out on top is a way to placate employees like Ben Kim, Taylor Mason and Wendy Rhoades, who have sentimental attachments to the rival firm established by Mafee and Dollar Bill. This he produces in the form of a bailout by the venerable I-bank Spartan-Ives; it’s enough for Mafee to reinstitute his weekly dinner meet-ups with Taylor, to say nothing of saving the bacon of his and Dollar Bill’s firm, High Plains Management. (Its logo is two crossed six-shooters. Yee-haw!)With all his ducks in a row, Prince plans to go forward with a Manhattan stadium after all. Despite having single-handedly convinced the mayor to oppose such a development, he now woos her back with the promise of converting the athletes’ quarters he plans to build into low-income housing. It’s enough to lure her into a joint news conference for the city’s Olympic ambitions.But drawing on the lessons of his successful showdown with the upstate billionaire Melville Revere, Chuck is not about to be outdone. He literally stops traffic outside the news conference, then starts walking on top of the stopped cars, megaphone in hand. The billionaire class, he says as the top of some poor commuter’s car buckles under his dress shoe, will not be allowed to quintuple traffic and displace the city’s citizens — not on his watch, anyway. “Take back our city!” he exclaims, leading the assembled onlookers in a chant to that effect. As the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” drops on the soundtrack, Prince, Lazzara and Krakow can only stand and watch as their moment of triumph is co-opted.Running parallel to all this is a drama taking place behind the scenes at Michael Prince Capital: the struggle of Prince’s right-hand man, Scooter Dunbar, and his predecessor in the second-banana role, Mike Wagner. Wags still has the office adjacent to the boss’s, but after watching Scooter traipse back and forth from his comparatively distant digs, he finally relents and offers up the space to his replacement. Of course, this gives him an excuse to relocate to the lower floor, where all the grunts work, making him a man of the people.Dunbar, no dummy, recognizes the ploy and winds up offering half of his office to Wags — a maneuver that dovetails nicely with Prince’s repeated insistence that the two men work together, which they do rather well in the task of wooing the suave Colin Drache (Campbell Scott), a sort of Olympics whisperer. By bringing him aboard, they grease the wheels for Prince’s New York Olympic bid, but it’s their shared, teary-eyed love of the Harry Chapin song “Cat’s in the Cradle” that truly cements their new partnership. Wags crying real tears over this sentimental ode to the tenuous relationship between father and son? Stranger things have happened, especially on this show … but not very many.Loose change:The classic-rock needle drops keep on coming: This episode also offers up a double shot of Allman in the form of Gregg’s solo version of “Midnight Rider” and the Allman Brothers Band’s “Ramblin’ Man,” not to mention Chuck’s quoting Bruce Springsteen’s “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” Do I miss the days when Bobby Axelrod introduced, like, Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades” into the equation? Yes I do. But speaking as a Long Island native, a little Harry Chapin is always welcome.“I like being rich — ain’t gonna end up like Trump,” says Todd Krakow; unless I’m mistaken, this is the show’s most direct reference yet to the former president.Perhaps the show’s most breathtaking moment is the sight of the business-casual enthusiasts Mafee and Dollar Bill fully suited up for their big news conference with Krakow. I never knew they had it in them.I’m always here for a good “Billions” wrestling reference. Between Tuk’s “Austin 3:16” T-shirt (a reference to the former champion “Stone Cold” Steve Austin) and Mafee’s labored analogy of Wendy and Taylor’s maneuvers to an unprotected pile driver (a move in which a wrestler drives his upside-down opponent headfirst into the mat), this episode scratched that squared-circle itch.No “Godfather” references that I could spot this week, but the cinematic callbacks flew fast and furious; Mafee’s early quote from “Tombstone” and the comparison of Wags and Scooter to Riggs and Murtaugh from “Lethal Weapon” were just the tip of the iceberg.A giant portrait of Stacey Abrams on the wall? Michael Prince Capital really is different from Axe Cap. More

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    Late Night Rips Rudy Giuliani’s ‘Masked Singer’ Appearance

    Jimmy Kimmel joked that only Giuliani would attempt to overthrow the government “and then try to rehabilitate his image by singing ‘Shake Your Groove Thing’ dressed as a pineapple.”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.Take It OffLate-night hosts couldn’t get over reports that Rudy Giuliani, personal lawyer to former President Donald Trump, recently taped an episode of the new season of Fox’s reality show “The Masked Singer.”“The guy who’s trying to destroy our country? He’s singing on a show!” Jimmy Kimmel said.“That’s right, the criminal goon that we know for a fact is being investigated for trying to overthrow our democracy for his idiot emperor was yukking it up on a reality show. There hasn’t been anything this shocking since Lee Harvey Oswald made a guest appearance on ‘Gilligan’s Island.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“How does this even happen? I mean, a lot of people at Fox had to sign off on this. Not one of them was like, ‘Hey, maybe we shouldn’t have the guy who is under investigation for helping to plot an insurrection singing on our show’?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Only Rudy Giuliani would try to overthrow the government, break wind loudly in court, sweat hair dye all over one press conference, have another one next to a dildo store and then try to rehabilitate his image by singing ‘Shake Your Groove Thing’ dressed as a pineapple.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“America is truly, truly, truly, truly, the greatest country on earth. Because this is the only place in the world where entertainment trumps everything. Because a year ago — I mean just a year ago — this guy tried to overthrow America’s democracy and now he’s a contestant on a reality show? Is there anyone they won’t have on? Like, one of these days, a masked singer is going to take off their head and it’s going to be literally the coronavirus.” — TREVOR NOAH“The Fox network should be ashamed of themselves. They should have another show after ‘The Masked Singer’ that night called ‘The Masked Executives.’ All the Fox executives come out in costumes; the one who greenlit this idea takes off the mask and gets voted out of television forever.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (More Rudy Unmasked Edition)“Now, if you’re not familiar with ‘The Masked Singer,’ congratulations.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Once again, Rudy Giuliani ruins the day by showing people his face.” — TREVOR NOAH“Rudy’s episode has not aired yet, so we don’t know much beyond that. Fox isn’t revealing what his swan song was, or which animal costume Rudy wore, though it was safe to assume he was a jackass.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Why would Rudy even agree to this? Did he think he was going to ‘The Masked Singer Landscaping Company’?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“One of the most chilling phrases in the English language is ‘Surprise! It’s Rudy Giuliani!’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“The only people who should be unmasking Rudy Giuliani is the gang from ‘Scooby Doo,’ you know?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I just think it’s impressive that they were able to get a member of the Trump administration to wear a mask in the first place.” — JAMES CORDENThe Bits Worth WatchingSamantha Bee, who was born in Canada, tackled the bizarre racist imagery some Ottawa truckers are using to protest coronavirus vaccine mandates on Thursday’s “Full Frontal.”Also, Check This OutFrom left, Cynthia Nixon, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kristin Davis in “And Just Like That …,” which wrapped up its first season on Thursday.Craig Blankenhorn/HBO MaxThe creators of the “Sex and the City” revival “And Just Like That …” discuss the show’s reception, middle-age miseries and why Chris Noth was edited out of the season finale. More

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    Review: ‘The Tap Dance Kid,’ Still Out of Step With the Times

    The Encores! series returns with a 1983 musical that, despite its pleasures, wasn’t quite right then and isn’t quite right now.When 8:30 p.m. was a typical curtain time for Broadway musicals, the main character’s biggest number, crystallizing the crisis and ensuring an ovation — think “Rose’s Turn” in “Gypsy” — often came at 11.The curtain for Wednesday night’s opening of the Encores! revival of “The Tap Dance Kid” went up at 7:30, so the so-called 11 o’clock number came closer to 10, but it was still recognizably the main event. That’s when Joshua Henry, playing William Sheridan, the conservative father of a Black family thrown into chaos by a son who wants to be a dancer, let loose with a tirade that ripped the fabric of the rest of the show to pieces, expressing with fury and unbridled terror the character’s disdain for what he sees as the performative Blackness of tap.“I keep on smilin’ through the worst of times,” he snarls while shucking and jiving monstrously. “Lettin’ the white man toss me his nickels and dimes.”It’s an astonishing performance, in the best way hard to watch. If only William were the main character it might even make sense at the end of a mostly lighter-hearted story. But he’s not, and it doesn’t, and the biggest number, whenever it comes, should not be his.That “The Tap Dance Kid” is never sure which of the members of the Sheridan family it’s about — the focus seems to change every 10 minutes — is just one of the oddities afflicting this tonally bewildering but intermittently appealing 1983 musical, which Encores!, in its return to live production after a two-year pandemic hiatus, is offering through Sunday at New York City Center.Is the main character, as the title leads you to expect, William’s 10-year-old son, Willie (Alexander Bello), the one who wants to dance despite his father’s prohibitions? Or is it Emma (Shahadi Wright Joseph), William’s 14-year-old daughter, who wants to be a lawyer like him but can barely get his attention because she’s a girl?Bello, left, with Adrienne Walker, who plays his mother, Ginnie.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhat about William’s wife, Ginnie (Adrienne Walker), who must “tap dance” around her husband’s temper while trying to make things right for her children? Or Ginnie’s brother, Uncle Dipsey (Trevor Jackson), a dancer and choreographer? Dipsey, depending on your point of view, is either leading Willie astray by teaching him the “shim-sham-shimmy” or upholding the joyful traditions of an art form mastered by men like his late father, Daddy Bates (DeWitt Fleming Jr.).Yes, even a ghost gets two big numbers.The musical was always something of a hodgepodge. The original book, by Charles Blackwell, based on the bracingly dour young adult novel “Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change” by Louise Fitzhugh of “Harriet the Spy” fame, never resolved the problem of making peppy entertainment out of such downbeat material.The score — by Henry Krieger and Robert Lorick — fully absorbed that confusion of tone, offering songs that are either purely high-spirited (“Fabulous Feet”) or baldly prosaic (“Four Strikes Against Me”) with little in between. There are times when you don’t know why someone is singing or dancing and other times when you do but wish you didn’t.The Encores! production, directed by Kenny Leon, does not solve those problems. Lydia Diamond’s “concert adaptation” (though the production is amply staged) does make some improvements, moving the story, which in the 1983 production was said to take place in “the present,” to 1956, where it in some ways makes more sense. The family’s interpersonal and often gender-based conflicts — Emma wants to wear pants, Ginnie chafes under her husband’s authority — feel more apt in the earlier period, as does Krieger’s swingy music, which is oddly retro for the composer of “Dreamgirls.” Still, it’s beautifully performed by the 24-piece Encores! orchestra under the direction of Joseph Joubert.But in further revising the jumbled tunestack used for the original production’s national tour, Diamond’s adaptation exacerbates the show’s scattershot approach. (At the start, we get three establishing numbers in a row, for Willie, Dipsey and Emma, thus establishing little.) And the heavy cutting of spoken scenes that is part of the Encores! brief is especially detrimental to such a busy yet unfocused story. In one scene, I realized that Willie was on a bus only after checking the program to find that the number was called “Crosstown.” I’d thought he was in a dream sequence.Foreground from left: Kurt Csolak, Jodeci Milhouse and Justin Prescott. The show’s ensemble numbers, choreographed by Jared Grimes, are suitably spectacular, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe choreography by Jared Grimes is suitably spectacular in the ensemble numbers, and the demonstration of the changing styles of tap as they pass from Daddy Bates to his children and then, via Dipsey, to more familiar Broadway versions, is fascinating to watch. Jackson (along with Tracee Beazer as his girlfriend, Carole) is an especially exciting dancer, and an appealing crooner as well. And Bello, in a tradition of Willies that includes Alfonso Ribeiro, Dulé Hill and Savion Glover, makes a charming show of learning and then quickly personalizing the steps that are part of his heritage.I wish that were the focus of the story — or that there were a focus at all. If the musical numbers are sometimes hard to grasp visually, the staging of the book scenes is too often undifferentiated. And at least on opening night, after just 11 days of rehearsal, the technical elements were not yet cohering. For a show about the excitement of dance, the pace is strangely languid.That’s partly built into the haziness of the original material. And though one of the things Encores! is designed to show us is what musicals, for better or worse, felt like when they first opened, I’m not sure this production, the first under Lear deBessonet, the new artistic director, succeeds.Perhaps it shouldn’t. That “The Tap Dance Kid” tells the story of an upper-middle-class Black family (“Don’t you buy all of your clothes on the Upper East Side?” William asks his wife rhetorically) made it somewhat ahead of its time in 1983. That it was mostly the work of a white creative team makes it somewhat behind the time now. Letting Black artists take a new look is the only sensible thing to do — except for leaving it be. Not every historical relic needs to be on display.The Tap Dance KidThrough Feb. 6 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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    Broken Lights, No Glue: ‘Abbott Elementary’ Has Teachers Talking

    A new sitcom by Quinta Brunson about a Philadelphia public school is a relatable balm during a period of intense stress for educators.In the second episode of “Abbott Elementary,” a new ABC mockumentary about a group of (mostly) dedicated educators in an underfunded public school in Philadelphia, a second-grade teacher named Janine resolves to fix a flickering hallway ceiling light that the school had ignored.“The more senior teachers are just used to giving in,” says Janine, the bright-eyed protagonist (played by the show’s creator, Quinta Brunson), “but I, however, am young, sprightly and know where they keep the ladder.”For Maurice Watkins, a 28-year-old music teacher in Maryland, Janine’s take-charge approach was laughably familiar. Just recently, he had taken a trip to a discount store to buy mops and brooms to clean the classroom floors of the three public schools where he teaches. While the traditional classrooms undergo a regular cleaning, the spaces where he teaches band and orchestra do not.“As a teacher, you’re left to fix it yourself,” said Watkins, who works with fourth through sixth graders. “Almost every day I go through one of those situations.”(Luckily, Watkins’s attempts at janitorial duties did not go sideways like Janine’s did: After she adjusted a loose wire, much of the school’s power went out.)Six episodes in, Brunson’s “Abbott Elementary” has quickly become a talker among teachers who see themselves and their colleagues reflected in the show’s main characters, who are repeatedly pushed to their wits’ end by administrative chaos, paltry resources and the antics of their students. On social media, some viewers gushed about how relatable the show is to them.The ratings have been strong thus far, with more than 7 million total viewers across all platforms over roughly the first month after the premiere, according to ABC. (There’s Hollywood buzz, too: On Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show, the host brought on Joyce Abbott, Brunson’s sixth-grade teacher whom she named the show after, bringing the actress to tears.)Teachers say they recognize the fictional school’s staff in their own halls: the young teacher who is too new to be cynical, the self-serving principal, the ace veteran teacher who is stubbornly set in her ways and the white teacher who falls all over himself trying to seem progressive around his Black students and colleagues.Watkins said that the day after the first episode of “Abbott Elementary” aired in December, “every teacher at school was talking about it.” For some, though, it hit too close to home.“Some teachers I know can’t even watch it,” Watkins said.Teachers say they identify strongly with the challenges Janine and her colleagues face on a daily basis: a persistent lack of funding, behavioral problems of students and struggles with introducing new educational technologies.“D — all of the above,” said Alisha Gripp, a principal at a charter middle school in Kansas City, Mo. One aspect of the show that she adamantly does not identify with, however, is the school’s incompetent principal, Ava Coleman (played by Janelle James), who spends her time trimming her Chia Pet and organizing student files by who has the hottest dad.“I think she’s hilarious — but I am nothing like her,” Gripp said with a laugh.In one episode, teachers take to TikTok to drum up school supplies for their students; Janelle James, right, plays the principal. Gilles Mingasson/ABCGripp, who has been an educator for 17 years, said she thought “Abbott Elementary” was a more true-to-life depiction of teaching than those in much other Hollywood fare, including “Boston Public,” a Fox drama from David E. Kelley. That show tended to lean into melodrama in the fictional high school where it was set, making Gripp think to herself, “They’d be fired; they’d be fired; that kid would be suspended.”“It really is cool to have a more realistic, but still entertaining, take on education,” she added.Much of the show’s background comes from Brunson’s mother, who was a public-school teacher in Philadelphia for 40 years, according to two of the show’s executive producers, Justin Halpern and Patrick Schumacker. The producers and writers also interviewed teachers, school staff members and board members about their jobs.Many of the plot points come from real-life educators, including the main arc of an episode in which Janine becomes wildly successful at using TikTok to ask people to donate school supplies. It comes off as both funny and grim because she has to resort to social media for basic materials like scissors and glue.The TikTok episode reminded Kristina A. Holzweiss, a 52-year-old former teacher and librarian who is now an education-technology specialist at a Long Island high school, of a time several years ago when she independently raised more than $100,000 to buy enrichment materials like Chromebooks and a 3-D printer for her library. This was before TikTok took off, but teachers could use a website called DonorsChoose, which helped them with crowdfunding for their classrooms.“Teachers should not have to do this; this is not in our job description,” Holzweiss said, “but teachers always put their students first.”For some, a show that highlights hard-working, committed educators is particularly welcome right now. As schools across the country reopened after extended pandemic closures, teachers were put in the center of battles over mask mandates and in-person versus remote learning.The struggles of teaching during a pandemic — as well as long-term issues around low pay, benefits and erratic hours — contributed to a nationwide labor shortage at schools, which have struggled to find substitutes for sick teachers and teachers who quit.Melissa (Lisa Ann Walter, left) and Janine in an episode about a new gifted program that goes awry.Liliane Lathan/ABC“When the pandemic happened and everything closed, teachers were heroes,” said Jennifer Dinh, a 31-year-old second-grade teacher in Chino Hills, Calif. “But as soon as the next school year rolled around, it all went out the door.”“Abbott Elementary” tackles the issue of teacher burnout from the outset, showing a young teacher walking out of the building carrying a box of her belongings and raising a choice finger on her way out. (“More turnovers than a bakery,” quips Barbara Howard, played by Sheryl Lee Ralph, who has been teaching in the school district for 20 years.)A theme of the show is the clash between young, newer teachers like Janine, who are learning the physical and emotional toll of trying to fix a dysfunctional school, and the more experienced teachers, who have learned to accept certain things — a flickering light, for example — so that they avoid burnout.“If we burn out, who’s here for these kids?” asks Melissa Schemmenti (played by Lisa Ann Walter), a straight-talking, Sicilian American second-grade teacher.After more than three decades of teaching, Jocelyn Hitchcock, a 57-year-old fan of the show, is determined not to burn out. After 20 years as a music teacher, she grew frustrated by dwindling funding for the arts and shifted to the core subjects. This past fall, Hitchcock started teaching at a small elementary school on the Walker River Paiute reservation in Nevada.Her school has recently dealt with a serious shortage of teachers (the principal has had to teach in the classroom), and she now spends time before and after school tutoring children to help them catch up from the learning deficits created by the pandemic.In “Abbott Elementary,” she said, she finds validation in seeing people on TV going through what she experiences day to day.But because the show is set in a nonpandemic world (at least thus far), Holzweiss said she thought the show was missing an exploration of the greatest challenges that teachers face right now: hybrid teaching, staffing shortages and students lagging behind academically and socially.“It’s an entirely different world now,” she said. More