Eliana Willis

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    in Television

    Can Peloton Sue Over Its ‘And Just Like That’ Appearance?

    A Peloton stationary bike played a pivotal role on the new HBO Max “Sex and the City” revival, whose premiere preceded a drop in the company’s stock price on Friday.This article contains spoilers for the premiere of “And Just Like That” on HBO Max.Peloton, a maker of high-end exercise equipment, was just as surprised as you were by its appearance on “And Just Like That,” the new HBO Max limited series that picks up the story of “Sex and the City.”At the end of the first episode, Mr. Big (Chris Noth), the on-again-off-again love interest of Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), clips into his Peloton stationary bike for his 1,000th ride. Shortly after he hops off the bike, he has a heart attack and dies.After the shocking ending, we couldn’t help but wonder: Are companies usually in the dark about how their products will be used in a movie or TV show, as Peloton reportedly was? What does the typical product-placement agreement look like? And if a company is particularly upset with how its product is portrayed, does it have any legal recourse?So, can Peloton sue?According to Nancy C. Prager, an intellectual property and entertainment lawyer, there are two types of product-placement agreements: one in which a company pays to be featured in show or movie, and another in which a production company procures a trademarked product to be used onscreen.Peloton declined to state on the record whether it was involved in any formal product-placement agreement, but if a production company wants to use a trademarked product, Ms. Prager said, it must get a special license to show the product and brand logos. (In the episode, the Peloton logo is clearly visible on Mr. Big’s bike, and the instructor video closely resembled a real Peloton course.)Ms. Prager explained that under trademark law, a principle known as nominative fair use allows production companies to use a trademark as long as the product is shown being used in a way consistent with the original trademark.“Nominative fair use does not to apply, though, when you use the protected mark in a way that disparages the mark or the brand,” Ms. Prager said. HBO “tarnished Peloton’s good will to consumers,” she added, noting that Peloton products purport to make their customers stronger and healthier.The ‘Sex and the City’ UniverseThe sprawling franchise revolutionized how women were portrayed on the screen. And the show isn’t over yet. A New Series: Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte return for another strut down the premium cable runway in “And Just Like That,” streaming on HBO. Off Broadway: Candace Bushnell, whose writing gave birth to the “Sex and the City” universe, stars in her one-woman show based on her life. In Carrie’s Footsteps: “Sex and the City” painted a seductive vision of Manhattan, inspiring many young women to move to the city. The Origins: For the show’s 20th anniversary in 2018, Bushnell shared how a collection of essays turned into a pathbreaking series.“The tarnish can be evidenced by the stock price plummeting,” she added, referring to the 11 percent drop in Peloton stock overnight after the episode aired. The stock’s value continued to fall on Friday.In Ms. Prager’s view, that means Peloton could reasonably consider litigation, especially if HBO did not disclose the story line involving the product.“It was a misstep that Peloton wasn’t fully aware of the script,” said Stacy Jones, the chief executive and founder of Hollywood Branded, a marketing and branding agency in Los Angeles.Peloton did not know how the bike or its instructor Jess King would be featured in the show, according to a report in BuzzFeed News. Ms. Prager and Ms. Jones agree that withholding those details leaves HBO in murky legal territory.“The production forgot that product placement is supposed to be mutually beneficial, and they did not put their thinking cap on about the damage that this would cause the brand,” Ms. Jones said.This seems like a lot of trouble. Why bother with product placement?“Think of product placement as an alternative form of advertising,” David Schweidel, a professor of marketing at Emory University Goizueta Business School, said on Friday.In recent years, companies have been seeking out product-placement agreements more than ever, he said. The increased use of streaming platforms means viewers are seeing fewer commercials, driving companies to make greater use of product-placement deals to promote themselves.“If I can’t reach my customer base with a traditional television commercial anymore, I take the product in the program itself,” Professor Schweidel said. “Then, they can’t avoid it.”He estimated that product-placement advertising was worth well over $20 billion in 2021.For production companies, the arrangements can be mutually beneficial, since featuring recognizable brands can make a show more realistic, Ms. Jones said.In this particular case, the inclusion of Peloton was integral to advancing a story line. “Peloton provided a solution to their problem,” she said.Can HBO protect itself?Usually when a company is so unhappy with how its product has been portrayed that the idea of litigation is floated, “TV shows claim that it’s a parody, that viewers obviously knew that this was fictional,” Beth L. Fossen, an assistant professor of marketing at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, said on Friday.That approach usually works for shows like “Saturday Night Live,” she said.But given that Peloton was the subject of unfavorable headlines this year about a child dying in an accident involving one of its treadmills, the story line may have “hit a little too close to home” for that argument to work, Professor Schweidel said.At least for the time being, it seems that Peloton is uninterested in pursuing litigation. In a statement on Saturday, Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum, a cardiologist on Peloton’s health and wellness advisory council, noted that “Mr. Big lived what many would call an extravagant lifestyle — including cocktails, cigars and big steaks — and was at serious risk as he had a previous cardiac event in Season 6.”Dr. Steinbaum said that Mr. Big’s lifestyle choices, perhaps in conjunction with a family history of heart disease, were most likely the cause of his death.In fact, she speculated, “riding his Peloton bike may have even helped delay his cardiac event.” More

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    in Theater

    Patti LuPone on 'Company,' Stephen Sondheim and More

    Her friends say there is nothing more fun than hanging with Patti LuPone while she’s having a glass of wine.That’s not true. There is something more fun: sharing a whole emerald bottle of Perrier-Jouet and dishing with Patti LuPone.Feuds! Lovers! Temper tantrums! Dictatorial directors! Wrongs avenged! Madonna’s “dead” eyes! Andrew Lloyd Webber’s perfidy! And, of course, teary memories of Stephen Sondheim.Last month, Mr. Sondheim, 91, died suddenly at home in Roxbury, Conn., just as he was about to come to New York to be celebrated at the openings of highly anticipated makeovers of two of his milestone collaborations: “West Side Story,” a movie directed by Steven Spielberg, and “Company,” the acidic musical about a terminally ambivalent Manhattan singleton. On Wednesday night, the Broadway lights were dimmed for the composer.Two years ago, when the pandemic shut down Broadway during previews for “Company,” Ms. LuPone retreated to her basement in Connecticut, where she posted videos that went viral showing off her pinball machine, her jukebox, her Ethel Merman cassettes, her husband’s bong and her dance moves to “Hava Nagila.”Now she’s back, picking up where she left off playing Joanne, the jaded, older friend of the singleton. When Ms. LuPone played the role in London before the pandemic, critics gushed and she won an Olivier. In this production, Bobby morphs into Bobbie, a woman whose friends want her to settle down, even though they concede marriage is a mixed bag.As one of Bobbie’s pals sings in the high-velocity “Getting Married Today”: “What’s a wedding? It’s a prehistoric ritual/ Where everybody promises fidelity forever/ Which is maybe the most horrifying word I ever heard of.”Bobbie is played by the lissome Katrina Lenk, who won a Tony in 2018 for her mesmerizing performance as Dina in “The Band’s Visit.”“I think it’s more poignant to have a woman,” Ms. LuPone said, “because we get asked that question, ‘When are you going to get married? The clock is ticking. Eggs are getting old.’ Boys don’t get asked that question, especially when they’re 35, boinking beautiful women.”Who better to mark this Broadway phoenix moment with than Ms. LuPone, the Long Island native who has been called “the goddess of the modern musical” by The Guardian? She is that very particular kind of animal, perhaps the last of the breed, a genuine Golden Age Broadway star, the kind that can turn a theater into a living room, throwing out an electric current that makes 1,000 people feel as if they are being spoken to, and sung to, individually.As Joanne, Ms. LuPone raises a martini glass in her socko “Ladies Who Lunch” number, with its famed primal scream — “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh, I’ll drink to that!”(Mr. Sondheim instructed the singer, who gets passionate about Republican political moves, to unleash her scream by thinking of how she feels when she reads a newspaper.)Patti LuPone as Joanne in the musical “Company.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe role of the salty, hard-drinking Joanne was originated in 1970 by the salty, hard-drinking Elaine Stritch, a Sondheim pal. As Alexandra Jacobs, a book critic for The New York Times, wrote in her biography of the actress, “Still Here,” Ms. Stritch always had her flask of Hennessy backstage when she was playing Joanne, the sort of wealthy Upper East Side woman who might drink vodka stingers and carry a bichon in her Birkin.Ms. Jacobs wrote in The Times that while “Company” is not as well known as other Sondheim shows, it has acquired a cult status among Gen Xers and millennials, who appreciate the fact that it is “drier than a sauvignon blanc, more New York than the Yankees.”Onstage, Ms. LuPone drinks water in her martini glass. But real bubbly is required to toast the lights returning to Broadway.Remembering SondheimAfter a preview performance the other night, we met up and looked for a Times Square bar, but it’s hard now to find one that stays open after shows, or one at all, really. (“Company” opened Dec. 9 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, and Jesse Green, a Times theater critic, called Ms. LuPone’s performance “perfectly etched,” in an otherwise mixed review.)“McHale’s, Charlie’s, Sam’s, Barrymore’s,” Ms. LuPone said, reeling off the names of bars that have closed.So we ended up setting up our own bar — complete with votive candles and vintage coupes — in a room at the Civilian on 48th Street. The small hotel is decorated as a homage to Broadway, with costumes and pictures from shows, so naturally we found a photo of Ms. LuPone that happened to be on the wall of our ersatz bar, a shot of her as Mrs. Lovett in “Sweeney Todd,” co-written by Mr. Sondheim..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;}I asked her if there was anyone she’d like to make into a meat pie, and she shot back, “Do you have to eat it?”In her dressing room, Ms. LuPone keeps a typewritten note sent to her before the pandemic hit by Mr. Sondheim, who was clearly growing more sentimental: “Every now and then I’m brought up short by realizing what a wonderful singer you are. That’s apart from the acting and performing and the attention to detail. In any event, I just felt I had to put it in print. Thank you for enhanceing [sic] my shows — and everyone else’s for that matter, Love, Steve.”Ms. LuPone choked up talking about it. “I just was so flummoxed by it,” she said, still referring to the composer in the present tense. “Steve doesn’t give compliments. I beg your pardon. Steve does give compliments, but they’re hard-earned. His notes can be devastating, which I’ve had several of.”She got a bad note when she was playing Fosca in “Passion” at Lincoln Center; Mr. Sondheim berated her about her enunciation, saying all he heard was “monotonous mush.”“I said in my head, ‘If it was anyone with less experience than me, they would have turned in their equity card,’” she said. “It was a dress down that — I was lost. That’s been my big downfall. I’m a flannel mouth. John Houseman called me a flannel mouth when I was in school.”A Sondheim score “is not easy to sing accurately. It’s a challenge to interpret the lyrics as he intended them with depth,” she said with understatement. “That is a big accomplishment. Steve makes me better. I keep saying, ‘Who will make me better now that Steve is gone?’”Some who worked with Mr. Sondheim thought that he was harder on Ms. Stritch and other women than on men, perhaps because of his dreadful relationship with his mother. He told Meryle Secrest, who wrote his biography, that after his father left for a younger woman, his mother was sexually inappropriate with him: “What she did for five years was treat me like dirt, but come on to me at the same time.” After that, Ms. Secrest said, Mr. Sondheim strived to maintain “a safe psychic distance” from women making overtures, “imagined or real.” (His domineering mother surely shaped his portrait of Rose in “Gypsy.”)“He’s not hard on people that don’t threaten him,” Ms. LuPone said. “I think he was hard on me because — I don’t know. I can’t answer for him but he was hard on me. I’ve got stuff in my scrapbook, the mean stuff and good stuff.” She saves everything, even the hate mail she got after she said she would refuse to perform if Donald Trump came to a show.The petite Ms. LuPone is routinely referred to as a towering legend, but in person she’s earthy, calling everyone from stagehands to fellow cast members to me “doll.”“She’s really warm hearted and bawdy and thinks of herself as a broad,” Ryan Murphy said. “She says what’s on her mind. And she knows where all the bodies are buried.”Josefina Santos for The New York TimesOne of the numbers in “Company” is “Being Alive,” and no one is more alive than Ms. LuPone, 72, who cherishes her fiery Sicilian temperament and her ability, as the writer Karen Heller put it, to “nurse a grudge like cognac.” But it’s easy to see the vulnerability threaded through the bravado.She has her own vocabulary on Broadway: Her rhapsodic fans are called “LuPonettes” and when she publicly burns someone — from an arrogant composer, to a Hollywood star who descends on Broadway for a guest turn, to a littering or photo-snapping or texting audience member — it’s called being “LuPoned.”When she does online forums with fans, she elicits comments like this one: “I wish Patti LuPone was my terrifying but beloved aunt.”Ryan Murphy cast her in roles in “Glee” (causing his young cast members to go “gaga,” he said), “American Horror Story” and his “Hollywood” limited series.“Patti has this insane, volcanic power within her body to sing like that,” Mr. Murphy said. “She is, to the American musical theater scene, what Meryl Streep became to the film world. There will never, ever, ever be another person like Patti LuPone who has that power.“Some might think of her as a diva, but she’s really warm hearted and bawdy and thinks of herself as a broad. She says what’s on her mind. And she knows where all the bodies are buried.”Her friend Joe Mantello, the acclaimed Broadway director and actor who worked with her in “Hollywood,” talked about her duality: “She understands that she’s a great star, she’s a legend. But there’s a part of her that also sees herself as part of Juilliard Group One, a working actress,” he said, referring to the first drama class at the school.After “War Paint,” the 2017 musical in which she played Helena Rubinstein, Ms. LuPone swore she would never do another musical.“I have two new hips and one new shoulder,” she told me. “Musicals are killers. They were breaking my body.”But when she was offered the chance to do “Company” with the British director Marianne Elliott, who directed the Tony Award-winning 2018 Broadway revival of “Angels in America,” Ms. LuPone could not resist.The singer is still afraid of Covid, and she had crying jags about returning to Broadway because “I just don’t want to do musicals anymore.” But she’s back belting, her mezzo-soprano voice still thrilling 41 years after she won her first Tony as Eva Perón in “Evita.” (She won a second Tony playing Rose in Mr. Sondheim’s “Gypsy” in 2008.)And, despite the hip surgeries, she’s back dancing — in heels, no less.“Did you see I tripped tonight?” she asked, adding merrily: “The next musical is in a wheelchair.”I told her that her voice — what she calls “two tiny muscles” and what Mandy Patinkin calls “the two tiny rubber bands in your throat” — sounded amazing.“I made a pact with the devil because, believe me, I’ve abused it,” she said. “In my entire life, I smoked, I took drugs, I blew out vocal cords. I had the vocal cord operation. It’s shocking to me that I still have a voice. I feel like Ethel Merman.”At the preview, the audience was primed to see their Patti again. They got excited before the show started, merely listening to a recording of her voice ominously warning everyone to turn off their phones. (Ms. LuPone famously snatched a phone from an audience member during a 2015 performance at Lincoln Center, after the woman would not stop texting.)“Musicals are treacherous animals,” Ms. LuPone said, talking about all the backstage drama and sniping. “Hits can go south faster than flops. In hits, people become entitled. In flops, you’re holding on for dear life.”Ms. LuPone and Stephen Sondheim at a rehearsal for “Sweeney Todd.” Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘A Burden and a Blessing’She said that this final act of her career is a lot easier than clambering up to Broadway.“I went through emotional abuse because it was the thing to do to get a performance out of somebody,” she recalled. “I never had the casting couch. They said, ‘Get out!’ They never said ‘Come in.’ I never went through any kind of sexual harassment. No, it was mental and emotional harassment.”She has said that she could be her own worst enemy, letting her temper fly.It would happen in taxicabs, she said. If she thought drivers were cheating on the meter, she would do battle, jump out without paying and yell a raunchier version of “Don’t ever mess with a New Yorker!”Mr. Patinkin, who played Che to her Evita, backed up her tales of pugilistic prowess.When they were on the road doing a concert tour, she once came in with a black eye. She explained that a guy in the parking lot had stolen her space; she had “mouthed off,” and he smacked her.“But you should have seen what I did to him!” she kvelled to Mr. Patinkin.“She doesn’t pull any punches,” he said. “She gives it to you right on the chin.” It doesn’t sound like a metaphor.“I’ve gotten in trouble since I was a toddler for questioning,” Ms. LuPone said. “I got in a lot of trouble in school. When I got out of Juilliard and got into the professional world, there was some weird behavior. Mean stage managers, lousy agents that didn’t protect me. I was completely alone in ‘Evita,’ I had to fight the battles myself.”She has talked about Hal Prince, the director, bullying her, as other British members of the cast tried to prod her to do the part as it had been done in London by Elaine Paige, to which she replied: “Shut up.”“It was like a battlefield from my dressing room past the stage management to the stage,” she said. “It was Beirut. I was safe onstage and I wasn’t even safe on the stage because I couldn’t sing it, so I was in fear every minute.”Ms. LuPone may have felt as if she was in a war zone, but her co-star felt as if he was in heaven.“You’ll never find a better partner to be with onstage, she’s just absolute magic,” Mr. Patinkin said. “I’ve never felt safer with anyone. She could throw a dagger right between my eyes and I know it would stop one millisecond right before it hit my forehead.”“If you feel a little tired or worn out, if something has happened to you,” he added, “she’ll pick you up and make sure you’re alive.“Patti is so sensitive, she sings like a child, very truthfully. She can’t let certain feelings go, which is a burden and a blessing. She fights through it all and gives everything, until there’s nothing left in her.”As she sipped champagne and nibbled on prosciutto, Ms. LuPone looked like she had plenty more in her.“I have scars,” she mused. “And why are we called ‘bitches’ or ‘difficult to work with’ when we’re simply asking for what we need?” It infuriates her, she said, because it is men who are using those labels.“Apparently, I was persona non grata in California after ‘Evita,’ because everybody heard I was difficult in New York. It’s like, ‘Wait a minute, you want to know why I was difficult?’ No, it’s just, ‘You were difficult so you’re on the Life’s Too Short list.’ I’m saying this for every woman and guy that goes through that. Your talent will out. Your talent will carry you, if you stick to it and honor your talent.”In the wake of #MeToo, she noted, abusive bosses get the hook.“There’s no more bad guys left in the world,” she said with a sly smile. But her black humor is still intact, so she added that, for her show, “We had to go through two days of sensitivity training. I wanted to kill myself.”She played Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard” in London, before it came to Broadway. In 1994, when Andrew Lloyd Webber fired her and replaced her with Glenn Close, she wrote in her memoir, “I took batting practice in my dressing room with a floor lamp. I swung at everything in sight — mirrors, wig stands, makeup, wardrobe, furniture, everything. Then I heaved the lamp out the second-floor window.”She sued him and used the $1 million she won to build a pool at her Connecticut house, now christened the Andrew Lloyd Webber Memorial Pool.“The only thing we didn’t do is the police drawing on the bottom of the pool,” she said, laughing.After decades of trading insults, she says simply that Mr. Lloyd Webber is “a sad sack.” Her irritation at Ms. Close still simmers. And then there’s Madonna: In 2017, she told Andy Cohen: “Madonna is a movie killer. She’s dead behind the eyes. She can’t act her way out of a paper bag.” She added, for good measure: “She should not be on film or stage.”When we left the theater, Ms. LuPone said we were exiting through “the Madonna door,” called that because when Madonna acted there in David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow” in 1988, she made a quick getaway by this door to try to avoid the throngs outside.“That’s when she had that body, in that period when she was staggeringly beautiful,” Ms. LuPone said. “I couldn’t look at anything else but her body. I couldn’t hear what she was saying. It was just like, ‘Wow.’ She did have presence onstage in that respect, when she came onstage with that body.”I asked Ms. LuPone if it smarts to leave every night by the Madonna door, given that Madonna got the Eva role in the movie.“I always thought that Judy Davis would have been stunning in the movie, and get somebody else to sing it — get Marni Nixon,” she said, referring to the ghost singer for Natalie Wood in “West Side Story” and Audrey Hepburn in “My Fair Lady.”“I want to see somebody that’s going to be electrifying and Madonna is not an electrifying presence on camera,” Ms. LuPone continued. “She’s just not — not for that score, which is insane.“When Mandy and I did it onstage, thank God we had training from Juilliard, so we were able to connect the dots dramatically, because there really wasn’t anything there.”Ouch.I asked about her husband, Matt Johnston, whom she met when he was a cameraman on a 1987 TV movie in which she portrayed the young Lady Bird Johnson. (Mrs. Johnson told her, “Evita was a bird of paradise, and I’m just a little mouse.”) How has the star stayed married for so long in showbiz?“Because Matt gave up show business,” she said. “He became Mr. Mom and a farmer, and he is egoless. He understands what this is that I have to do, and he supports it.” They have a son named Josh, 31, a filmmaker.I was curious about her seven-year romance with Kevin Kline, which got off to a fractious start at Juilliard.“We were at each other in the very beginning,” she said, “and then one day in art history class, we were just all over each other.”And did it really end, as she wrote in her memoir, when Mr. Kline collided with “a chorus girl in Boston while he was doing ‘On the Twentieth Century.’”“Well, it depends on who you ask,” Ms. LuPone said mischievously. “I wanted to move to an apartment that had doors because I was in a tiny little apartment on 21st Street. Kevin thought that was a commitment.”But she still treasures the telegram Mr. Kline sent her on opening night of “Evita”: “InEVITAble!”When I left her outside her New York apartment at 2 a.m., I felt very awake and caught up in the Patti of it all.“Bye, doll,” I called out.“Bye, doll,” she sang back.“Your talent will out,” Ms. LuPone said. “Your talent will carry you, if you stick to it and honor your talent.”Josefina Santos for The New York TimesConfirm or DenyMaureen Dowd: You chided Neil Patrick Harris for not knowing what he was doing in rehearsals for your limited “Company” run at Lincoln Center in 2011.Patti LuPone: True. We had 10 days. He came in and he didn’t know anything.You once played a vengeful ghost who haunted a laundromat and lived in a dryer.Confirm.Your ideal “Ladies Who Lunch” outing would include Eleonora Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, Edith Piaf, Patti Smith and Bette Davis.Yes.You started your career as a toddler with a Marilyn Monroe imitation.Yes. My mother used to make me come out when I was 3 or 4 and go like this (pursing her lips).You have a long rider attached to every contract that you think of as a scrapbook for every mistake you’ve ever made.Exactly. What’s in the dressing room. What my transportation is. Just to make sure I’m not stressed out when I get there. I learned from Ryan Murphy to ask for “portal to portal.”As Helena Rubinstein said, “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones.”I do think that’s true.It was intimidating to sing “Ladies Who Lunch” at Stephen Sondheim’s 80th birthday party 10 feet away from Elaine Stritch.No, I felt honored. I started singing the line “Does anyone still wear a hat?” and I looked straight at Elaine, who had a hat on, to pay homage. Elaine always said very wise things to me. She was a lovely mentor and a lovely friend.At Juilliard, John Houseman was just as frightening as he was in “The Paper Chase.”He was tough and scary. I got in an elevator with him once in 1969, 1970. I said, “Hi, Mr. Houseman.” He turned to me and said, “Louise Bernikow says you’re the most illiterate person she’s ever met.”You sang “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” better than the senior George Bush.Can I tell you something about Barbara and George? I did a performance at the East Wing when they were in the White House. And the next time Matt and I went back, we were in the line and I said, “We got pregnant the last time we were here!” At the Willard.By happenstance, you sang at Ryan Murphy’s wedding, which was so private, he didn’t invite any of his friends.I was singing in Provincetown, and I ran into Ryan. So I came to see him come out of his room and sang “Here Comes the Bride” and threw rose petals in his path.You were jealous when Madonna performed in leather and a mesh teddy at the Boom Boom Room during Pride Week.I can’t think of anything funny about Madonna. More

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    ‘Diana, the Musical’ to End Broadway Run on Dec. 19

    The royal musical had a bumpy road to Broadway, from a delay caused by the pandemic to a filmed version of the show on Netflix that was widely panned.After surviving the pandemic, which forced its closure after nine preview performances, and a widely panned filmed version for Netflix, “Diana, the Musical” announced on Friday that it would end its Broadway run on Dec. 19. It originally had an open run.“We are extraordinarily proud of the ‘Diana’ company and of the show onstage at the Longacre,” the producers, Beth Williams of Grove Entertainment, Frank Marshall and the Araca Group, said on Friday in a joint statement. “Our heartfelt thanks go out to the cast, crew and everyone involved in creating the show. And to the audiences who have shown their love and support at every performance.”The show, which is about the ill-fated marriage of the Princess of Wales to Prince Charles, began previews on Nov. 2 at the Longacre Theater, and opened on Nov. 17. At the time of its closing, it will have played 33 performances and 16 previews.The reviews for the musical were mostly negative. In his review for The New York Times, Jesse Green wrote, “If you care about Diana as a human being, or dignity as a concept, you will find this treatment of her life both aesthetically and morally mortifying.”The show, which had a pre-Broadway production at La Jolla Playhouse, featured Jeanna de Waal in the title role and Roe Hartrampf as Prince Charles. It was directed by Christopher Ashley, choreographed by Kelly Devine, and written by Joe DiPietro and David Bryan (the Bon Jovi keyboardist), who created the Tony Award-winning musical “Memphis.” More

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    Jussie Smollett Found Guilty: What Comes Next?

    The actor who was found guilty of falsely telling the police he was the victim of a hate crime faces a possible sentence of up to three years, but experts disagree on whether the judge is likely to incarcerate him.The discussion in the case of Jussie Smollett, the actor convicted on Thursday of falsely reporting he was the victim of a racist and homophobic attack, has turned to whether the actor will receive prison time when he is sentenced in several weeks.Daniel K. Webb, the special prosecutor who handled the case, said on Friday that he had not yet decided on what recommendation he would make to the judge but again emphasized how serious he thought the case was. Mr. Webb has pointed in several settings to the social damage caused by faking a hate crime, about the waste of police resources spent on the case and about the consequences of lying to a jury, which found Mr. Smollett guilty after he spent seven hours on the witness stand standing by his account.“It’s fair to say Mr. Smollett is not repentant at all,” Mr. Webb said. “And he doubled down during our trial. I will emphasize those matters as I should.”But some experts said they would find it surprising if Mr. Smollett were to be imprisoned because he was convicted of the lowest level felony offense and has no prior felony convictions.Mr. Smollett’s lead lawyer, Nenye Uche, a former prosecutor who said his client planned to appeal the verdict, echoed that sentiment on Thursday.“I’ve never seen a case like this where the person got jail time,” he said. “And he shouldn’t because he’s innocent.”Mr. Smollett’s lead lawyer, Nenye Uche, speaking to reporters after the verdict on Thursday, surrounded by other members of his defense team.Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated PressMr. Smollett was convicted of five counts of disorderly conduct, which carry a maximum sentence of three years in prison. Even Mr. Webb has acknowledged that those charges don’t typically lead judges to incarcerate people.But he said: “There’s never been a case like this. I don’t know any case in Illinois that involves this criminal misconduct and deceiving police for weeks on end about a hate crime and then compounding it by lying to a jury.”Judge James B. Linn, who is presiding on the case, has the option of sentencing the defendant to just probation or a shorter period of prison time. He agreed on Thursday to release Mr. Smollett while he awaits sentencing.“What I could see happening is probation with a ton of community service hours,” said Michael O’Meara, a criminal defense lawyer who has also worked as a prosecutor, “and just to sting him a bit, maybe some jail time.”The judge will certainly consider Mr. Smollett’s prior criminal infraction, though it was 14 years ago and relatively minor. He was convicted in California of misdemeanor driving under the influence, making false statements to the police and driving without a license. (Mr. Smollett pleaded no contest.)In this instance, it was Mr. Smollett who reported a crime, an attack by two assailants who he said beat him up, yelled racist and homophobic slurs at him, placed a rope around his neck and poured bleach on his clothing in an early morning assault on a frigid day in 2019. But two brothers told the police that Mr. Smollett had directed them to carry out the attack, and he was ultimately charged by a grand jury with lying to the police, a hoax that prosecutors argued had been orchestrated for publicity.Understand the Jussie Smollett TrialCard 1 of 5A staged hate crime? More

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    Michael Nesmith, the ‘Quiet Monkee,’ Is Dead at 78

    He shot to fame as a member of a made-for-TV rock group, but he denied that he was the group’s only “real” musician. He went on to create some of the first music videos.Michael Nesmith, who rocketed to fame as the contemplative, wool-cap-wearing member of the Monkees in 1966, then went on to a diverse career that included making one of the rock era’s earliest music videos and winning the first Grammy Award for video, died on Friday at his home in Carmel Valley, Calif. He was 78.Jason Elzy, the head of public relations for Rhino Records, the label that represents the Monkees, said the cause was heart failure.Mr. Nesmith was a struggling 23-year-old singer and songwriter when he saw an advertisement in Variety seeking “4 insane boys” for “acting roles in new TV series.” Two aspiring television producers, Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, inspired by the Beatles’ movies, were hoping to make a TV series about the zany antics of a rock band — not a real rock band (although the Lovin’ Spoonful was briefly considered for the job), but actors with musical backgrounds who could create the illusion of a band.The four members were picked to fit types. Davy Jones, a British vocalist, was the cute scamp; Micky Dolenz, the drummer and primary lead singer, was the wild jokester; and Peter Tork, the bass player, was the lovable dim bulb. Mr. Nesmith, a guitarist and occasional singer, was variously described as the cerebral Monkee, the introspective Monkee, the sardonic Monkee, the quiet Monkee.“He has that dry Will Rogers sense of humor,” Mr. Dolenz told Rolling Stone in 2012, characterizing Mr. Nesmith’s real persona. “That’s probably one of the reasons they cast him.”The show made its debut in September 1966, and though it lasted only two seasons, the Monkees became a cultural reference point, thanks largely to their best-selling albums (which featured a lot of studio musicians and backup singers, especially early on). Mr. Nesmith, who wrote and produced some of the Monkees songs, had the reputation of being the only “real” musician in the group, but in his 2017 memoir, “Infinite Tuesday,” he disputed that.The four members of the Monkees were picked to fit types. Mr. Nesmith was variously described as the cerebral Monkee, the introspective Monkee, the sardonic Monkee, the quiet Monkee.  NBC/via Getty Images“It would always seem wildly ironic to me that I was the one given credit in the press for being the ‘only musician’ in the Monkees,” he wrote. “Nothing was further from the truth.”The Monkees in action (or at least acting), from left: Davy Jones, Peter Tork, Micky Dolenz and Mr. Nesmith.Getty ImagesBut he was musician enough to have a modest solo career after Monkee mania faded at the end of the 1960s, and that led him into a role in music-television history.In 1977 he recorded a song called “Rio” for the Island Records label, which asked him to make some kind of promotional film for it.“They wanted me to stand in front of a microphone and sing,” Mr. Nesmith was quoted as saying in the 2011 book “I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution,” by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum. But he did something different.“I wrote a series of cinematic shots: me on a horse in a suit of light, me in a tux in front of a 1920s microphone, me in a Palm Beach suit dancing with a woman in a red dress, women with fruit on their head flying through the air with me,” he said. “As we edited these images,” he added, “an unusual thing started to emerge: The grammar of film, where images drove the narrative, shifted over to where the song drove the narrative, and it didn’t make any difference that the images were discontinuous. It was hyper-real. Even people who didn’t understand film, including me, could see this was a profound conceptual shift.”Almost by accident, he had made one of the first music videos as that term came to be understood. It got some play in Europe, but Mr. Nesmith was struck by the fact that there was no outlet in the United States for showing such works, which a few other pop and rock stars were also beginning to make (and some, like the Beatles, had made earlier).The Monkees (from left, Mr. Tork, Mr. Nesmith, Mr. Jones and Mr. Dolenz) in 1967, at the height of their fame.Ray Howard/Associated PressIn 1979 he and the director William Dear developed a TV show, “Popclips,” for Nickelodeon, a recently inaugurated channel for children that was looking to add teenagers to its audience. “Popclips” showed nothing but music videos, introduced by a V.J. The show is often said to have helped inspire the creation of MTV in 1981, although accounts of the various people who claim to have had a role in MTV’s emergence differ widely. Mr. Nesmith, in his interview for “I Want My MTV,” took a nuanced view of his role.“It’s a gradual coalescence of different things,” he said of the concept of a full-time music video channel, “a confluence of energies. It’s one of those ideas that nobody really thinks up. It’s like justice. Or kindness. Nobody thinks that up.”Robert Michael Nesmith was born on Dec. 30, 1942, in Houston. His father, Warren, and his mother, Bette (McMurray) Nesmith, divorced in 1946, soon after Warren returned from fighting in World War II. His mother later remarried, took the last name Graham and became wealthy from inventing Liquid Paper and running the company that produced it. That money would give Michael the financial security to follow his varied interests.His mother moved to Dallas, where he grew up. In his book, he described himself as an indifferent student in high school.In 1960 he enlisted in the Air Force (earning a high school equivalency diploma while in the military). The Air Force, though, was not a good fit, and he requested and received an early discharge in 1962.He enrolled at San Antonio College, where he began performing on a guitar he had received as a Christmas gift from his mother and stepfather in 1961. He also met a fellow student, Phyllis Barbour. In 1964 the newly married couple resettled in Los Angeles, where Mr. Nesmith sought to further his fledgling performing and songwriting career.Mr. Nesmith in the recording studio in an undated photo. When his days as a Monkee were over, he formed a country-rock band and became a pioneer of music video.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesAmong the songs he wrote in 1965 was “Different Drum,” though its best-known incarnation, a hit version by Linda Ronstadt and her group the Stone Poneys, would not come out until 1967, after the Monkees were famous. Mr. Nesmith was playing in local clubs and sometimes serving as M.C. at one of them, the Troubadour, when someone showed him the Variety ad.The Monkees’ early songs — provided mostly by outside writers and recorded largely by studio musicians, with the Monkees (primarily Mr. Dolenz and Mr. Jones) providing the vocals — were such hits that fans began clamoring to see the fake group live in concert.“We started wailing away in rehearsal, trying to get a decent rendition of the songs on the records,” Mr. Nesmith wrote. “It never sounded great, but it didn’t sound all that bad.”The Monkees gave their first live performance in December 1966 in Hawaii, the start of a tour that took them all over the United States.“The Monkees have been practicing more, and are learning to pull off live concerts,” The Boston Globe wrote in March 1967. “On their first tour, the continuous screaming drowned all imperfections in the music.”The mania, though, soon played itself out. “The Monkees” ended after two seasons, in March 1968, and both Mr. Tork and Mr. Nesmith left the band shortly afterward. Mr. Nesmith formed his own group, the First National Band, and released an album in early 1970, “Magnetic South,” which included a minor hit, “Joanne.”Two more First National Band albums quickly followed, showcasing a country-rock sound that was just slightly ahead of its time — as the First National Band was petering out in 1972, groups like the Eagles were pushing a similar sound into the mainstream, leaving Mr. Nesmith feeling as if he had missed the boat.Mr. Nesmith in concert with the Monkees in 2013, during one of the band’s periodic reunions.Jeff Daly/Invision, via Associated Press“I was like, ‘Why is this happening?’” he recalled in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2018, when he organized a modest “First National Band Redux” tour. “The Eagles now have the biggest-selling album of all time and mine is sitting in the closet of a closed record company?”Several other musical ventures followed, but Mr. Nesmith was growing increasingly interested in video. He thought that videodiscs, which had come on the market in the late 1970s, were the future of music, and after “Rio” and “Popclips” he made “Elephant Parts,” an hourlong disc of music videos and comedy sketches (including a parody of his own song “Joanne” that featured the Japanese movie monster Rodan instead of a woman).In 1982, “Elephant Parts” received the first Grammy Award for video, a category called video of the year at the time (soon to be split into short- and long-form awards, the first of several title changes as the art form and technology evolved).“Elephant Parts” led in 1985 to “Michael Nesmith in Television Parts,” a short-lived TV sketch show. Mr. Nesmith had also begun producing movies, most notably “Repo Man” in 1984.And he continued to be a Monkee — when it suited him. In varying combinations, Mr. Tork, Mr. Dolenz and Mr. Jones (until his death in 2012) toured and recorded periodically as the Monkees. Mr. Nesmith only occasionally joined them onstage, but all four played and sang on, and wrote songs for, the group’s 1996 album, “Justus.” In 2016 the group released the album “Good Times,” which included some archival material recorded by Mr. Jones.Mr. Nesmith also wrote and directed “Hey, Hey, It’s the Monkees,” a television special made to promote “Justus,” which was broadcast in early 1997.Mr. Nesmith became more willing, or perhaps more available, to embrace his Monkee past in recent years. He joined Mr. Tork and Mr. Dolenz for a tour after Mr. Jones’s death.Peter Tork died in 2019. Mr. Dolenz is now the last surviving Monkee.In 2018 Mr. Nesmith teamed with Mr. Dolenz for a tour, but that June he had to cancel the final four shows when shortness of breath left him unable to perform. He told Rolling Stone that he had quadruple bypass surgery shortly after that.“I was using the words ‘heart attack’ for a while,” he said. “But I’m told now that I didn’t have one. It was congestive heart failure.”Yet by that September he was back touring with his own group, playing his First National Band material. And he and Mr. Dolenz went back on the road this year, for what was billed as the Monkees’ farewell tour. They gave their last performance on Nov. 14 in Los Angeles.Mr. Nesmith’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1975. His marriages to Kathryn Bild, in 1976, and Victoria Kennedy, in 2000, also ended in divorce. He is survived by three children from his first marriage, Christian, Jonathan and Jessica Nesmith, and a son from a relationship with Nurit Wilde, Jason Nesmith, as well as two grandchildren.Mr. Nesmith’s varied career included a legal battle with PBS. Early in the video era, his company, Pacific Arts, had bought the home video rights to some of PBS’s most popular programs, including “Nature.” PBS sued him over royalties, but in 1999 a federal jury in Los Angeles found in Mr. Nesmith’s favor and awarded him $47 million. His reaction to his legal victory was typically wry.“It’s like catching your grandmother stealing your stereo,” he said after the verdict was issued. “You’re glad to get your stereo back, but you’re sad to find out that Grandma’s a thief.”Maia Coleman contributed reporting. More

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    Why ‘Dr. Brain’ Is More Subdued Than Sensational

    In an interview, the South Korean filmmaker Kim Jee-woon discusses his quiet psychological thriller and the emerging global popularity of K-drama.The South Korean science-fiction thriller “Dr. Brain,” whose first season wraps up Friday on Apple TV+, must seem jarring to anyone expecting another high-concept Korean series (or K-drama) like the recent international hits “Kingdom” (zombie costume drama), “Squid Game” (dystopian science fiction) and “Hellbound” (supernatural religious-cult drama).By contrast, “Dr. Brain” often feels stylistically and emotionally subdued thanks to its withdrawn protagonist, a brain scientist named Sewon (Lee Sun-kyun) who has an overdeveloped amygdala and an underdeveloped hippopotamus. So while Sewon has an exceptional memory, he’s not very warm or ingratiating.Lee Sun-kyun stars as a scientist with a device that can access other people’s memories and perspectives.Apple TV+Based on a popular Korean web cartoon, “Dr. Brain” follows Sewon as he searches for his missing son, Doyoon (Jeong Si-on), using his own experimental “brain-synchronizing” device, which allows two human patients to share their memories. Viewers learn more about Sewon in each new episode as he brain-syncs with his friends and loved ones, and sees himself through their eyes.For his first K-drama, the veteran genre filmmaker Kim Jee-woon (“Illang: The Wolf Brigade,” “I Saw the Devil”) tamped down the cartoon’s more fantastical elements — his “Dr. Brain” plays more like a psychological drama with science-fiction trappings. In a recent video interview, Kim, who directed all six episodes and wrote them with Kim Jin A and Koh YoungJae, discussed the emerging global popularity of K-drama and how he relates with his main character. These are edited excerpts from that conversation, which was facilitated by the translator Rebecca Lee.It’s not terribly common to build a series around an emotionally distant character like Sewon, who is defined primarily by curt speech and inexpressive body language. Why did you make him that way?We added the part where he has an overdeveloped amygdala and underdeveloped hippocampus. If you look at the original web cartoon, you’ll see that Hong Jac-ga, the original cartoon’s writer and artist, primarily defined Sewon as a creative, outstandingly intelligent character.I wanted to add more layers to Sewon’s personality; I imagined that he needed to be more socially isolated so that he could establish more relationships as the story progressed. We also added more supporting characters to our series than were in the original cartoon.Did you work with Lee Sun-kyun to make his muted performance reflect Sewon’s more sympathetic qualities?Sun-kyun initially struggled to follow all of Sewon’s emotions, so before we started shooting, he and I talked about how we’d make Sewon relatable. We decided to make the character seem warmer to viewers as the story progresses, so as Sewon goes through a series of brain-syncs, he shows us emotions that are not evident when we first meet him.Aside from the brain-synchronization aspect, “I tried to keep the plot grounded in reality,” Kim said.Apple TV+You use subjective camerawork to simulate what Sewon sees when he brain-syncs with other patients. These point-of-view sequences can be disorienting, but they mostly look realistic. How did you determine what viewers should see in these scenes?I tried to keep the plot grounded in reality because we didn’t turn Sewon into a superhero. So I started with the assumption that this type of technology is possible, and started building from there. For example: When Sewon brain-syncs with someone, he unconsciously picks up their habits, emotions and thoughts, so I tried to visualize how he might feel in his everyday life. What do his nightmares feel like? What does it look like if he’s on strong medication or recreational drugs?My team and I looked up successful experiments on brain synchronization, brain connection and brain wave transmission from around the world, and consulted with prominent brain engineers in Korea. Among the various neuroscience experiments, I was impressed by a 2011 study conducted by the psychology and neuroscience professor Jack Gallant at UC Berkeley. Gallant showed a short video clip to human test subjects and then was able to successfully reconstruct images from that video by observing the brain activity in their visual cortexes. Those experiments suggest that in the coming decades, dreams could be scanned and visualized by interpreting neurological activity from the visual cortex while we sleep.Were any aspects of “Dr. Brain” inspired by other series or films?This wasn’t an inspiration for “Dr. Brain,” but I’m generally inspired by the tempo and the wealth of detail in “Zodiac.” As for “Dr. Brain” and the concept of showing what people’s memories and dreams look like, I’m a big fan of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and Satoshi Kon’s anime movie “Paprika.”What do you think about the recent global popularity of K-dramas? Are there certain genres or styles of them that you prefer or dislike?Korean music, movies and music started to reach a global audience after 1997, when Kim Dae-jung was elected president. His administration implemented policies that nurtured more competitive domestic arts programs and industries, which led to the development of a global fan base for Korean content. The generation that’s now creating Korean content grew up watching films and listening to music that were made during the middle to late 1990s, so they know how to appeal to global audiences.Seo Ji-hye, left, and Jo Bok-rae in “Dr. Brain.” Korean dramas have been more popular than ever on streaming services this year.Apple TV+Some cast members from “Dr. Brain” have said that you remind them of Sewon. Lee Sun-kyun said that you are both “a little blunt, but very deep.” Do you identify with the character?Yeah, there are several similarities. I’m not a person who’s quick to express emotions. I don’t really talk about myself a lot, and I’m not very active in pursuing personal or social relationships. These social inhibitions are partly an expression of my personality, but also how I see my role as a director. Korean filmmaking can be quite chaotic, and a director’s actions, behavior or mood can have a big influence on the crew and the production’s staff. A director cannot be shaken by every little thing that happens during the shoot, so he has to make sure that his entire team can rely on him.What makes Korean filmmaking uniquely chaotic? How is it different from something like “The Last Stand,” the American action movie you made with Arnold Schwarzenegger?In Korea, you and your team will often end the working day by going out for a couple of drinks. Maybe more than a couple of drinks — quite a few drinks. As you drink together, you try to find solutions to problems that happened during the workday that you weren’t able to confront at the time. That’s a very common occurrence in Korean filmmaking, and I think it’s unique to Korea as well. I’m not a big fan of doing that stuff. [Laughs.]Compared to Hollywood productions, Korean movies and dramas are built around a unique family-like hierarchy, though that’s now changing completely. Five years ago, the Korean entertainment industry passed new labor laws that shorten working hours and provide better welfare and health insurance. The pandemic’s need for social distancing has also brought immense changes to Korean film and TV, and while some old labor practices remain, a new culture is emerging. More

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    ‘And Just Like That …’ Recap, Episodes 1 and 2: Big Love

    Samantha’s gone. The girls are back. And Carrie seems to have finally gotten it all. Can her happiness with Mr. Big last?Season 1, Episodes 1 and 2: ‘Hello It’s Me’ and ‘Little Black Dress’Ding dong, Big is dead. That is sad, but not for the obvious reason.Make no mistake, a wide swath of longtime “Sex and the City” fans have longed for the day that John James Preston, a.k.a. Mr. Big (Chris Noth) would be out of the picture. After many seasons of bad guy behavior, the fact that he and Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) ended up together at the end of the original series left a significant portion of fans dismayed. That Carrie took him back after he left her at the altar in the first movie sequel, and that she compromised herself to fit his marital ideal in the second, did little to assuage disappointment.Then “And Just Like That …,” the 10-part HBO Max follow-up series to “Sex and the City,” was announced, and rumors quickly swirled that Big was going to be killed off. By the end of the premiere episode, which dropped Thursday with Episode 2, the deed was already done.As much as I wanted him gone, I wasn’t rooting for that. I had hoped that after years of heartache and accommodation forced upon her by this man she simultaneously won over and settled for, Carrie would instead finally realize she had always deserved better, and she would walk her sky-high stilettos out the door. She didn’t, and that’s the sad part.Indeed, the premiere episode of “And Just Like That …” leads us to believe (at least for now) that Big had been tamed at long last — that he and Carrie were sincerely happy and had found their soft landing in love. And maybe they had. He and Carrie share a dreamy-eyed slow dance in the kitchen while searing salmon (Carrie cooks now?), and it looks like the picture-perfect marriage a 30-something Charlotte York (Kristin Davis) might have painted. They’re comfortable and committed, but they still have that spark. Who could hope for more?And so, the series chose to have it both ways. Allowing that development to stand, however briefly, allows us to witness Carrie’s apparent success — all hail the conquering hero! But allowing it to stand much longer might have served as a perpetual reminder of what made their relationship so controversial: Carrie’s constant self-debasement through the better part of six seasons and two movies, as she convinced herself that if she only worked hard enough, waited long enough and acquiesced enough, she could change Big. It was that persistent delusion that frustrated so many fans for so long. And centering that narrative today might have sent a toxic and somewhat unconvincing message.So in a tear-jerking scene in which Carrie inexplicably doesn’t call 911 upon finding her husband nearly dead on their bathroom floor, the two share frantic kisses and hugs before Big finally leaves her for good.The ‘Sex and the City’ UniverseThe sprawling franchise revolutionized how women were portrayed on the screen. And the show isn’t over yet. A New Series: Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte return for another strut down the premium cable runway in “And Just Like That,” streaming on HBO. Off Broadway: Candace Bushnell, whose writing gave birth to the “Sex and the City” universe, stars in her one-woman show based on her life. In Carrie’s Footsteps: “Sex and the City” painted a seductive vision of Manhattan, inspiring many young women to move to the city. The Origins: For the show’s 20th anniversary in 2018, Bushnell shared how a collection of essays turned into a pathbreaking series.But more on that later.When Episode 1 opens, we find a trio of familiar faces — Carrie, Charlotte York Goldenblatt and Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) — living in a vaguely idealized, maskless, carefree-ish post-pandemic New York.Of course there’s a glaring absence: Samantha Jones, played in previous installments by Kim Cattrall, who left the franchise amid a very public feud with Parker. The series gets right to addressing the missing “fourth musketeer,” in a way that may vaguely allude to the apparent real-life drama. A rift between Carrie and Samantha has emerged. In Carrie’s words, she fired Samantha as her publicist, and then Samantha fired Carrie, along with Charlotte and Miranda, as friends.At first pass, this seems like a grave overreaction on Samantha’s part. She crossed an ocean and won’t answer texts just because her pride was bruised? Maybe. Or maybe she was just sick of third-wheeling with her boring married friends and needed to move on, and the overseas job thing is just a pretext. We’ll never know.What we do know, however, is that in some respect, the story mirrors reality. Much of what has been reported about the relationships among the series’s core four actors is hearsay and speculation. But we know that there was friction between Cattrall and her castmates and that Cattrall, like Samantha, removed herself.Regardless of the reasons for Samantha’s departure, it is relatable. As decades pass, some friendships wither, and this plot point is a reminder that, like romantic relationships, sometimes friendships aren’t happily ever after.With that out of the way, the episode moves at a rapid pace, making little room for subtlety or nuance when it comes to situating the characters in this new stage of life. Everyone is older. (In case the passing of time wasn’t obvious, you’ll be made aware of it by the many self-deprecating “old” jokes woven into the dialogue.) The women have gray hair, in various degrees and shades of dye. They’re not entirely comfortable with podcasts. They struggle with pronouns. They weren’t who they once were, and they’re not trying to be. Sort of. (As Charlotte, still a full brunette, argues: “Ruth Bader Ginsburg died her hair.”)Carrie is still in the media game, but she has parlayed her success from print columns and books into a steady podcast gig and healthy Instagram following. It’s all a bit uncomfy to her, though, especially when her younger, “queer, nonbinary, Mexican-Irish diva” boss, Che Diaz (Sara Ramirez), tells her she needs to be more explicit on the show.Charlotte is mostly still Charlotte, living a lovely life in a Park Avenue palace with her adoring husband and girls. While her oldest, Lily (Cathy Ang), who stuns the crowd at her piano recital with a virtuosic performance, seems to take after her mother in the pursuit of perfection, her youngest daughter, Rose (Alexa Swinton), is a punky skateboarder who won’t wear the floral Oscar de la Renta number her mom bought for her without an ironic T-shirt over top.Finally, Miranda has ditched corporate law to pursue a master’s in human rights — an endeavor she proclaims she doesn’t need to be a “spicy redhead” for. If Miranda’s gray hair and fine lines aren’t enough to alienate her from her Gen Z classmates, the racially insensitive rambling she spills onto her Black professor, Nya Wallace (Karen Pittman), certainly solidifies it. Watching Miranda struggle to walk back comments about her professor’s braids is almost as uncomfortable as watching Big masturbate.It has been well publicized that the franchise has made an effort to reckon with its original blinding whiteness, namely with the addition of new cast members of color. Reasonable people will disagree on whether or not the series is doing that successfully and sensitively. Still, Miranda’s word vomit scene suggests they’re at least being thoughtful about that process. Considering the original series is riddled with dated, problematic references, and that the second movie was slammed as, at worst, offensive, and at best, insensitive, the still largely white cast couldn’t burst into this series completely enlightened. Their learning curve is on display, particularly in Miranda’s cringey white savior moments with her incredibly patient professor, and that at least feels honest.In all other regards, the first episode is largely lighthearted until the very end, when Big suddenly drops his phone, has a heart attack and dies. That flows into the mostly melancholy Episode 2.Much as they did when Big no-showed his wedding to Carrie in the first movie, Carrie’s fiercely loyal friends, Miranda and Charlotte, are right by her side in this time of need, literally, sleeping next to her in shifts as she navigates her new role as a widow. Even Samantha makes a spectral appearance, sending a billowing coffin spray to the funeral.The funeral itself is as austere as the man was, by Carrie’s design. Knowing Big would have hated a stodgy old funeral home, she throws a modern if somewhat unfeeling affair to commemorate Big’s passing — an event through which she does almost no crying. “But is that good?” Miranda wonders aloud.Speaking of wondering aloud, let us all raise a glass to the cameo friend Susan Sharon (Molly Price) for taking a pause mid-memorial to ask the essential question: “Am I the only one that remembers what a [expletive] he was to her?” Amen.The steeliness of it all is broken by Charlotte, who does the bulk of the crying, in part out of sadness for Carrie’s loss, and in part out of guilt. Charlotte reasons that had she not forced Carrie to go to Lily’s recital instead of heading out to the Hamptons with Big, Carrie would have been with Big when he had his heart attack, and he might have lived (assuming Carrie had remembered to call for an ambulance). Late in the episode, as Charlotte pushes this theory once again, Carrie relieves her of her pain, saying she isn’t mad at Charlotte but at herself for not switching off the people-pleaser inside her and leaving with Big, as she wanted to.It would have been a great time for Susan Sharon to show up again and point out that Big still refused to go to events with Carrie and her friends, and that maybe, if he would have been a little more considerate, he might have come to the recital and not died alone.In any case, that’s the worst of it for Charlotte, at least in these first two episodes. Her only other pressing concern is whether she can turn the cool documentarian and fellow P.T.O. mom Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker) — her allotted friend or colleague of color for the series — into her new BFF.Other characters are facing deeper issues. These early episodes hint at a possible drinking problem for Miranda, who sneaks wine into Lily’s recital, orders a midmorning Chablis at a dive bar and slams bourbon at the funeral before her speech.Meanwhile, marriage is not so blissful for Anthony Marentino (Mario Cantone) and Stanford Blatch (Willie Garson) who bicker at every turn, even on a “good night,” only to be reminded by Big’s passing that they’re lucky to have each other. Given that Garson died in September as the new series was still filming, it remains to be seen how long that will remain true.But of course it is Carrie whose world has been rocked the hardest. She is on her own again, asking herself, “What do I do now?”Will she gallivant through Manhattan sipping cosmos and serial dating? I hope not. Most of us aren’t here for Carrie ‘n’ friends to relive their glory days. They’re in a more mature, wisened up place, and that feels right.Still, despite her grief, it’s impossible not to feel a ripple of excitement that our single girl is back. More

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    Late Night Is Tired of Tucker Carlson’s ‘Foaming’ at the News

    The Fox News host joined his network in insisting the company’s burned-down Christmas tree is proof of the war on Christmas.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.Fired UpOn Thursday, Fox News hosts continued their insistence that the Christmas tree outside its headquarters had been burned down as part of the war on Christmas.Jimmy Kimmel said the network must not have had anything else to talk about this week, “because they really went to town on this ‘We have been victimized’ jag, and no one did more phony foaming at the mouth than the little dumber boy,” referring to Tucker Carlson.“According to Tucker Carlson, this is not an isolated incident of some disturbed rando lighting their tree on fire,” Stephen Colbert said, even though the police have said the suspect was a homeless man, and that drugs or mental illness could have been a factor in the torching.Seth Meyers imitated Carlson during one of his monologues.“[imitating Carlson] When will it end? Will every new variant mean new powers for our political class? Will they be able to test you, trace you, come to your house and inject you with a microchip hidden in a vaccine that tracks your movements? And will that tracking microchip allow them to see that you went to the anime convention, in secret, of course, because you didn’t want your friends at Fox News to know you’re into that kind of thing. And will they find out about the time you asked Sean Hannity what he thought of ‘Dragon Ball Z,’ and he looked at you like you were crazy, and that hurt your feelings so much that you ran into the bathroom to cry, only to realize you had run into the women’s bathroom and you were so worried that someone would see you run out that you instead removed a ceiling panel and climbed into a heating duct for the purposes of shimmying back to your office, not knowing that the duct wouldn’t be strong enough to support your weight, causing you to, mid-shimmy, collapse through the ceiling, where you landed on top of Rupert Murdoch’s desk while he was sitting at it, causing him to look up from his soup and yell ‘Crikey!’ Will that happen to you? Well, I can tell you it will because it happened to me.” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (Hillary’s MasterClass Edition)“Oof, that is brutal! And the way she’s sitting like that, and she’s reading it to us, it’s like the world’s most depressing fairy tale: ‘Once upon a time, an ogre crushed the dreams of a princess, and nobody lived happily ever after. The end.’” — TREVOR NOAH“But, yes, Hillary Clinton is giving a master class on resiliency that’s now available everywhere —except in Wisconsin, for some reason.” — TREVOR NOAH“And in it, she reads the victory speech she never got to deliver. And I really love how she’s like, ‘I’ve never shared this speech with anybody before. it was too painful. You’re paying me how much? Oh, well, I guess I could read a few pages.’” — TREVOR NOAH“Wait, why? We don’t want to hear that. You know when we wanted to hear that? After the election in 2016.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“What is this? What is she doing? Is this a Christmas present for Donald Trump?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It’s like she made him a cameo video for his birthday.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingOn their Thursday night episode, Desus and Mero tried to convince the actress Sandra Bullock to reboot “Miss Congeniality.”Also, Check This OutClockwise from top left: Norah Jones, Bryson Tiller, Kelly Clarkson and She & Him are entering (and in some cases, returning to) the holiday music scene this year.Kelly Clarkson and Bryson Tiller are just two artists with holiday albums redefining the genre. More