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    Book Review: ‘Tinderbox,’ by James Andrew Miller

    There’s enough animosity, jealousy, score-settling and killing gossip in “Tinderbox,” James Andrew Miller’s mountainous new oral history of HBO, to fill an Elizabethan drama. Yet the book’s tone is largely fond.The people who created HBO made something they’re proud of. They’re glad to have been there, to have had a piece of it, in the early, freewheeling decades. Most know they’ll never have it so good again.HBO went live on Nov. 8, 1972, broadcasting to a few hundred houses in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. The first thing you saw on the screen (cue screaming from future Time Warner shareholders) was Jerry Levin, sitting on a sofa. He welcomed viewers, then kicked it over to a hockey game from Madison Square Garden, which was followed by Paul Newman in “Sometimes a Great Notion.”Levin was an ambitious young lawyer who had been brought in by a cable company, Sterling Communications, to run HBO’s start-up programming. “Tinderbox” explains how Sterling eventually ran wires to all those buildings in Manhattan and elsewhere, sometimes via sublegal methods.Levin, of course, would become the architect of the most ill-judged merger in media history. At the height of the dot-com bubble in 2000, he tried to combine Time Warner, of which HBO was a subsidiary, with Steve Case’s already sinking AOL. In the ruinous wake, Levin resembled the proverbial hedgehog, the one who climbs off the hairbrush while sheepishly muttering, “We all make mistakes.”If you’re going to read “Tinderbox,” prepare for a landslide of corporate history. Students of power will find much to interest them. HBO had many stepparents over the years. Following these deals is complicated, like following the lyrics to “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.”In reverse order, Miller describes how HBO — the fly, more or less, in this scenario — has been sequentially consumed from 1972 through today: “Warner Bros. Discovery rescued it from AT&T, which had gobbled it up from Time Warner, which had saved it from Time Warner AOL, which had somehow abducted it from Time Warner, which had shrewdly outplayed Time Inc. for it, after Time had outflanked Sterling Communications long ago.”.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;}Miller, who has previously compiled oral histories of “Saturday Night Live,” ESPN and Creative Artists Agency, digs into the machinations and bruised egos behind these deals.These guys (they were mostly guys) all seemed to want to flex-cuff one another and throw enemies into the back of a van. Miller gets good quotes: “The only way I was going to sit across a table from Jerry was if I could jump across it and grab him by the throat”; “He’s a dog, he’ll follow whoever feeds him.”HBO’s famous bumper — the static, the celestial choir — didn’t debut until 1993. But the channel had an aura long before that. It began to make its mark on popular culture in the late 1970s and early ’80s, around the time I was in my teens.My family didn’t have HBO, but a friend’s did. It was where you clicked to see George Carlin say the seven words you couldn’t say on television, to watch movies with naked people in them and to laugh your ribs loose seeing comedians (Robert Klein, Bette Midler, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams) do material they’d never get away with on Carson.HBO was so sexy people went to hotels to watch it. The channel had no advertisers, and thus no one to complain about brash or steamy content.Before HBO, television in the hands of the big three networks was a wasteland — “a vast exercise in condescension,” as Robert Hughes put it, “by quite smart people to millions of others whom they assume to be much dumber than they actually are.”James Andrew Miller, whose latest oral history is “Tinderbox: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers.”Robert BomgardnerAn important early hire was Sheila Nevins, stolen from CBS to run HBO’s now-storied documentary unit. A Barbra Streisand concert was an early hit. Boxing was vital to the early growth of HBO, as were midweek broadcasts of Wimbledon. The channel launched a million comedy clubs. If you were a comic without an HBO special, you weren’t on the map.HBO branched out into original movies, some of which I was happy to see recalled: “Gia,” with Angelina Jolie; “Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story,” with Ben Kingsley and “Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned,” based on the Walter Mosley novel, with Laurence Fishburne, among others.“Tinderbox” slows down and lingers purposefully on the turn of the century, when the so-called golden age of television began to come into view. With shows like “Sex and the City,” “Six Feet Under,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and especially “The Sopranos,” HBO changed notions of what television could be, and pickpocketed the cultural conversation from film.“The Sopranos” was not an immediate hit, but it was beloved internally. “We were putting a husky guy with a hairy back wearing a wife-beater in the lead role,” says Jeff Bewkes, a former Time Warner C.E.O. “Nobody else would do that.”HBO had good luck with its early executives. These were the kind of guys who knew what a debenture was yet had a feel for programming and knew enough to hire good people and leave them alone. HBO gave people room to run.Often the only direction given to directors and producers was: Don’t make anything you’d see anywhere else. Winning awards was more important than ratings. Before HBO, elite actors wouldn’t go near a television show.Staffers at HBO sometimes found it hard to define what HBO was, but they knew what it wasn’t. A planned Howie Mandel special was killed.HBO’s luck held for a while after “The Sopranos” signed off. Lena Dunham’s “Girls” and “Game of Thrones” were in the wings. But the souk that is the modern television world was growing crowded.HBO was no longer the brash insurgent. It passed on shows — “Mad Men,” “House of Cards,” “Orange Is the New Black,” “Breaking Bad,” “The Crown” — that went on to become crucial hits for Netflix and other cable and streaming services.Oral history is a strange form. It gives you a staccato series of micro-impressions, as if you were looking through a fly’s compound eyes. George Plimpton, who helped edit the best-selling oral biography “Edie,” was a fan. He liked it that “the reader, rather than editor, is jury.”Elizabeth Hardwick loathed the form. She thought oral histories were full of irresponsible drive-by shootings. The result, she wrote, was that “you are what people have to say about you.”Increasingly I’m a fan of the genre. I have a special fondness for Lizzy Goodman’s “Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011,” and I await the oral histories of Chez Panisse, Balthazar, Death and Company (the bar), n+1, Anna Wintour’s tenure at Vogue, Monster Energy drinks, the making of “Dusty in Memphis” and this newspaper’s Styles section.Miller is a good interviewer, but a corny writer. His interstitial material is mugged by phrases like “oodles of ambition” and words like “ginormous.” These really bugged me at the start. But this book is so vast that, by the weary end, these pats of cold margarine slapping me in the face were the only things keeping me awake.There are a lot of winning moments in “Tinderbox.” But wading through its nearly thousand pages I often felt spacey and exhausted, as if it were 4 a.m. on the third night of one of those endurance contests and I had to keep my hand on the pickup truck.HBO has retained much of its magic. “Succession”: what a treat. The sound of that bumper — the static, the choir — remains Pavlovian in its promise. But our over-entertained eyeballs have more options, and the channel’s competitors, Miller makes clear, have the long knives sharpened. More

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    Kevin Spacey Ordered to Pay $31 Million to ‘House of Cards’ Studio

    An arbitrator ruled last year that Kevin Spacey and his production companies owe MRC, the studio behind the Netflix series “House of Cards,” nearly $31 million for breach of contract following numerous sexual harassment allegations against the actor.The secret arbitrator’s ruling, which was issued 13 months ago, was made public on Monday when lawyers for MRC petitioned a California court to confirm the award.Mr. Spacey was once the centerpiece of the hit Netflix series, which ran for six seasons between 2013 and 2018. Mr. Spacey played the main character, the conniving politician Frank Underwood, and served as an executive producer of the series.While the sixth and final season was being filmed in 2017, the actor Anthony Rapp accused Mr. Spacey of making a sexual advance toward him in 1986, when Mr. Rapp was 14. MRC and Netflix suspended production on the series while they investigated.Mr. Rapp’s public accusation came just weeks after The New York Times and The New Yorker published articles about the producer Harvey Weinstein and as the #MeToo movement was gaining steam.By December 2017, after further allegations were made against Mr. Spacey, including by crew members of “House of Cards,” MRC and Netflix fired the actor from the show.In the arbitration, MRC argued that Mr. Spacey’s behavior caused the studio to lose millions of dollars because it had already spent time and money in developing, writing and shooting the final season. It also said it brought in less revenue because the season had to be shortened to eight episodes from the 13 because Mr. Spacey’s character was written out.The arbitrator apparently agreed, issuing a reward of nearly $31 million, including compensatory damages and lawyers’ fees.A lawyer for Mr. Spacey declined to comment.In a statement, MRC said, “The safety of our employees, sets and work environments is of paramount importance to MRC and why we set out to push for accountability.” More

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    Review: Channeling Anger in ‘A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing’

    Annie Ryan’s stage adaptation of the Eimear McBride novel is given a lucid and intimate revival at the Irish Repertory Theater.The girl is 5, doing somersaults in a skirt, her little-kid underwear showing as she tumbles.“It’s disgusting,” her scandalized grandfather huffs. “How is she supposed to be a child of Mary?”The Virgin Mary, that is. If you grew up Roman Catholic, the phrase “child of Mary” might already be familiar. Likewise the notion of moral purity it connotes, ingrained early in the narrator of Eimear McBride’s formidable rush of a novel “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing,” whose solo-show stage adaptation by Annie Ryan is getting a gorgeously lucid, intimate production at the Irish Repertory Theater.Both the novel, published in the United States in 2014, and the stage version, first seen in New York in 2016, predate the rise of the #MeToo movement. But they reflect an anger that was building and that McBride was able to articulate in the speed-of-thought story of a girl, whose name we never learn: a child who draws strength from what she has been taught to believe is her badness, but is left unguarded against others’ actual evil.Directed by Nicola Murphy on Irish Rep’s tiny second stage, Jenn Murray rides the current of the monologue like a river, navigating its rapids and eddies, and stretches of calm, with a deftness that easily brings the audience along. On a spare set by Chen-Wei Liao, abetted by Michael O’Connor’s lighting and underscored by Nathanael Brown’s subtle music and sound design, Murray slips in and out of a crowd of characters with near-total legibility.The girl is in utero when the play begins, but sentient all the same, and already fond of her toddler big brother. The whole play is spoken to him, her most precious person, who, by the time she is born, is surgery- scarred, with branches of a tumor left in his brain.Their mother, abandoned by her husband and frightened for her son, clings to religion. She might love her daughter. Mainly, she seems repelled by her.As a small child reveling in naughtiness, the girl races into the rain to swear lavishly — “My bad words best collection,” she calls it — where no one else can hear. Part of the pain of the play is watching that exuberant defiance ground down by shaming rules that dictate permissible female behavior and blame those who, by their own choice or someone else’s, don’t comply.She is 13 when her aunt and uncle come to visit. The others leave the house, and the uncle, stomach-lurchingly, seizes his chance. He goes to the girl’s room, charms her, kisses her. She thinks he wants more, but he protests: “I’m not that man.” He is, though, and he does. She is a child and he ought to be her protector. When sex hurts her, he says, “You’ll be fine.”This isn’t true then or in the years that follow, as his predation works its warping damage and what feels to the girl like her own sexual empowerment morphs into egregious, long-term self-harm.In college, she won’t speak the secret of her uncle’s abuse even to her best friend.“What is there to say?” she asks. She’s learned her lessons well.A Girl Is a Half-Formed ThingThrough Dec. 12 at the Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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    The Emails Behind the Opera ‘Eurydice’

    For several years, the composer Matthew Aucoin corresponded with Sarah Ruhl about how to adapt her play into the Met Opera’s latest premiere.In 2015, the composer Matthew Aucoin emailed the playwright Sarah Ruhl to ask whether she would be interested in working with him on a new opera inspired by the Orpheus myth.Instead they ended up adapting her 2003 play “Eurydice” — a yearning, fanciful treatment of the Orpheus story in which Eurydice is reunited with her dead father in the underworld. The result premiered at Los Angeles Opera in February 2020, and arrives at the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday, directed by Mary Zimmerman and conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin.Aucoin and Ruhl wrote to each other for several years about turning the poetry of her play into a libretto, building character through music, and understanding the strengths and limitations of opera. They recently looked back at those messages and discussed them in a joint interview. These are edited excerpts from their correspondence and their present-day reflections.SEPT. 29, 2015, 10:45 A.M.Dear Sarah,Hi — my name’s Matt Aucoin. Your plays “Eurydice” and “The Clean House” recently reduced me to a blubbering awe-struck wreck. And then I happened to read an interview with you in which you said, “Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him.” I thought, “I really want to make a great, horrible opera with this person.”Pardon my forwardness — and my ignorance, for not knowing your work until now! — but I’m overwhelmed by your lucid musicality. I sensed instantly that you’re a poet — not in any highfalutin’ sense, but in a more practical one: It’s clear that you wrote (and write) poetry, and that poetry is a native tongue for you.Oh, about “longing looks back”: I have the same gene as every composer EVER, and I need to write an Orpheus opera.Might you be interested in creating one together?SEPT. 29, 2015, 11:59 A.M.Dear Matt,Thank you so much for the kind words about my plays. I also read an article about you and was struck by a phrase someone wrote about you — language becoming music, and music becoming language. I’m interested in that nexus, too. It’s true I used to write and still dabble in poetry, and it’s true I’d love to collaborate on an opera sometime. I listened to a very small clip of your music on your website and found it quite beautiful; I’d love to listen to more.I feel it might be awkward for me to retread the Orpheus territory from his point of view having already written “Eurydice.” My gut is that I’m more interested in adapting “Eurydice” into a musical piece. But it’s silly for me to make any pronouncements in an email without first talking. So let’s meet and talk.MATTHEW AUCOIN I had a separate Orpheus opera in mind that was entirely different, that was in a way an expansion of my piece “The Orphic Moment” — much darker, much more twisted. It took a meeting or two for me to be like, you know what, adapting “Eurydice” makes more sense. I tried to inject a bunch of my ideas into “Eurydice”; then I felt that the skeleton of the play was so strong that it resisted the foreign energy. So I very quickly decided that we could create a more unified world if we stuck to the play.SARAH RUHL I don’t remember it taking you very long to say, “Yes, let’s do that.” Always you were trying to make Orpheus more complex, since that was your way in. But Eurydice was so present for me as a character, and it wouldn’t make sense to retread the material from his perspective.AUCOIN I think the core of this piece, for me, is: What would you say to someone you lost if you could meet them again in this other space?RUHL It’s myth as container, as vehicle — rather than myth for myth’s sake.OCT. 15, 2015Some thoughts …Opera as magical realism: I think we should indulge our every magical-realist impulse in this piece. I tend to think opera works better when its creators embrace this quality, since it’s probably inescapable: If opera is real, its realism is magical. (It just doesn’t work when people try to house train it or to convince the audience that opera is no weirder or scarier or more surreal than, like, a sitcom.)— MattAUCOIN In opera, all speech is dream speech. That’s a law of nature on Planet Opera. Simply because everything is sung, what’s communicated will tend to have a dreamlike or surreal quality, no matter how much you might want it to sound like “Seinfeld.”RUHL I love what you say about dream speech. I’ve been wanting to write a piece about the idea that art is a dream we have together. When we’re sleeping, we dream alone at night. Art becomes an incredible vehicle in which we can have the same dream at the same time, while awake.APRIL 29, 2016It occurs to me that Orpheus has no parents; his lineage is disputed and totally confusing. I’m sensing that one difference between O + E is that even though Eurydice’s father is dead, she was deeply close to him, whereas Orpheus was always an orphan.We might see him first happily singing to himself, and then expressing his pre-wedding anxieties: He’s torn between his love for Eurydice and his overwhelming need to make music; he’s not sure where he came from; he’s never felt 100 percent human; and he’s unsure if he can give and accept the love he feels so powerfully for Eurydice.— MattAUCOIN I think there are two implied love triangles in the “Eurydice” dramaturgy. Eurydice is torn between her connection to her father and her relationship to Orpheus. And Orpheus is also kind of torn between Eurydice and music itself. I think that’s where the idea of the double [adding a countertenor’s halo of sound to the baritone role] came from.JULY 19, 2016, 7:43 P.M.I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Hades. The main thing, from my perspective, is that he’s a sociopath. He has a total lack of interiority and yet he is alone. Sounds like hell to me. So he feeds off Orpheus and Eurydice, both of whom have (if anything) too much interior life; they’re too likely to withdraw into their own worlds, and he knows that. He’s a parasite who sinks his teeth into Eurydice’s intellect and Orpheus’s music.I think it’s important that Hades’s lines are simple and direct — and emotionally wrong, awkward and unnatural, but in a way that’s unsettling rather than comical. I think the repetitions of “interesting” risk being a little too funny, especially when they’re sung.— MattJULY 19, 2016, 8:51 P.M.Do we care that we somewhat lose his absurdity (“It was delivered to my elegant high-rise apartment by mistake”)? The question about humor is maybe a larger question tonally about the piece. I use humor in the play to deflect and deepen the tragedy — it could be that doesn’t play the same in an operatic piece. I don’t want to totally excise the humor, but in the nasty man it just might not be singable.— SarahJULY 20, 2016, 4:20 P.M.I definitely want to keep the humor!!! I just think Hades needs to be dangerous — dangerously deadpan, at first. Which could be funny in its own right. For me the absurdity emerges when we see his gigantic empty loft. But at first, I’d love him to be eerily nondescript.— MattRUHL I’m so happy that Matt has been able to rhythmicize lines and retain their humor.AUCOIN The challenge with Hades is that it lies at an extreme of the male voice, but he should also sound quite deadpan. The music is absurdly high, but I wanted to create the sense that for him it’s completely normal.RUHL I love this idea that Hades is impersonating a person. And I think it’s wonderful how you figured that out in the singing of it.AUCOIN It’s a matter of rhythm and range. Hades’s music is the exact opposite of proper, correct text setting. When he says “How interesting,” he sings the word “how” on a high D flat for an entire bar. And in certain sections, every syllable is accented in this horrible way. It’s not human.JAN. 31, 2017I think what we are going for is condensing stage time, while distending mythic time … if that makes ANY sense!— SarahRUHL It takes longer to sing than to speak, so everything has to be shorter. But you want the mythic scope of it to still feel big. It’s a bit of a puzzle. How much can you feel like time is moving slowly in the underworld without actually subjecting the audience to a kind of slowness that they don’t want to be subjected to?AUG. 8, 2019FATHEREurydice is gone.This is a second death for me.I wonder about cutting “This is a second death for me.” It’s a little self-pitying. Might be more moving just: “Eurydice is gone. How do you remember to forget?”— SarahAUCOIN This is part of a longer scene where Eurydice’s father remembers the directions to his childhood home. In an early version of the score, he sang those directions very slowly, and it felt totally wrong — like moving through molasses. Sarah, Mary and I all independently came to the conclusion that he had to speak these lines, not sing them. The words carry so much emotion that, unusually for opera, song proved superfluous.RUHL I had the experience in writing the play as well. I had written a soliloquy that I would describe as an operatic soliloquy; it was poeticized and emotional. And it felt all wrong for who he was as a person.AUCOIN I think the shape of the drama is so devastating.RUHL The ending is very sad. I hope it gives people catharsis after this two years of not being able to grieve with others. I’ve watched two funerals on Zoom. It’s hard for me to have a good cry on Zoom; I’m not with other people, and I feel self-conscious with people watching me cry on video. It’s not that I’m inviting people to come and cry at “Eurydice” — but in a way, I am. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Dancing With the Stars’ and the Soul Train Awards

    The season finale of “Dancing With the Stars” airs on ABC. And Tisha Campbell and Tichina Arnold return to host the 2021 Soul Train Awards on BET.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, Nov. 22-28. Details and times are subject to change.MondayDANCING WITH THE STARS 8 p.m. on ABC. The contestants on the 30th season of “Dancing With the Stars” have danced their way through nine emotional weeks. Expect a captivating conclusion with its final four pairings of celebrities and professional dancers: The “Dance Moms” alum and TikTok star JoJo Siwa with the dancer Jenna Johnson; the N.B.A. player Iman Shumpert with Daniella Karagach; the Peloton star Cody Rigsby with Cheryl Burke; and the TV host Amanda Kloots of CBS’s “The Talk” with Alan Bersten. The youngest competitor of the season, Siwa, 18, has already made “Dancing With the Stars” history: she is the first contestant on the show to be in a same-sex pairing. “I want to be a role model for people who love love,” Siwa said in an interview with The New York Times in September.THE RED SHOES (1948) 8 p.m. on TCM. “There has never been a picture in which the ballet and its special, magic world have been so beautifully and dreamily presented,” Bosley Crowther wrote in his Times review of the film in 1948. “Here is the color and the excitement, the strange intoxication of the dancer’s life.” Based on an 1845 Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of the same name, “The Red Shoes” follows the journey of Vicky (Moira Shearer), a young ballet dancer toeing the line between two passions: true love and becoming a prima ballerina. The film, which won several Oscars, including honors for its art direction and music, glows in Technicolor, an appropriate fit for this whimsical tale of temptation, passion, obsession and sacrifice.TuesdayAn archival image as seen in “Home From School: The Children of Carlisle.”National Archives and Records AdministrationINDEPENDENT LENS: HOME FROM SCHOOL: THE CHILDREN OF CARLISLE 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The filmmakers Geoffrey O’Gara and Sophie Barksdale bring to light the stories of Arapaho children who, in the 1800s, were taken from their homes and brought to a federal boarding school in Carlisle, Pa. There, they were stripped of their culture. The filmmakers follow a group of Northern Arapaho tribal members who traveled to the school grounds in 2017 to seek answers for their people, who have spent generations fighting to bring the remains of their lost children home. In July, the children who died at Carlisle Indian Boarding School were laid to rest in their ancestral home land. While many tribes, including the Ute and Navajo, are still uncovering their own truths about similar violent histories, this documentary follows this Arapaho journey in 2017, sharing true accounts of loss, love and healing.LEADBELLY (1976) 9:45 p.m. on TCM. In this biopic, Gordon Parks, the director of “Shaft” (1971), explores a true story of Black history and exploitation, one that occurred many years before the fictional private eye John Shaft ran through the streets of Harlem. “Leadbelly” follows the life of the titular folk singer (played by Roger E. Mosley), who was known for his mastery of the 12-string guitar — and for singing a song for a Texas governor that led to his pardon from prison, or so the story goes. “He was always refining his music, which provided the order in a life that was in every other respect chaotic,” Vincent Canby wrote in his 1976 Times review of the film. (Parks’s own life was recently examined in the director John Maggio’s “A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks,” a film that, in its own way, also captures a Black artist’s journey through America.)WednesdaySPACE JAM (1996) 5 p.m. on VH1. Michael Jordan stars alongside Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and the rest of the Looney Tunes entourage in this comedic amalgamation of mid-’90s live action and animation. Classic cartoon shenanigans ensue as Jordan is (literally) sucked into the world of Looney Tunes through a sand trap and called upon by the Tune Squad to help save the day (by playing a basketball game, naturally). The battle royale pins the Nerdlucks, an alien team led by the Tunes’s arch nemesis, Swackhammer (voiced by Danny DeVito), against Jordan and the Tune Squad. The good guys are assisted by Bill Murray, who looks slightly out of place but very ready to rumble in a Tune Squad jersey. Can the Tune Squad defend their home? Is that all, folks? (The gang reappeared in “Space Jam: A New Legacy,” starring LeBron James, this year.)ThursdayBACK TO THE FUTURE (1985) 7:30 p.m. on Syfy. This blast from the past — to the future — takes us for a ride with the high schooler Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) in his DeLorean turned time machine, built by the witty and unconventional scientist Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd). After a shocking encounter in an abandoned mall parking lot, McFly puts the pedal to the time-flying metal. He lands in a 1955 brimming with wiseguys and high school ne’er-do-wells.FridayGal Gadot in “Wonder Woman.”Clay Enos/DC Comics and Warner Bros.WONDER WOMAN (2017) 7 p.m. on TNT. Patty Jenkins’s interpretation of “Wonder Woman” gives the beloved DC Comics warrior an origin story with weight. The soon-to-be superhero, Diana Prince (Gal Gadot), is raised by an all-female warrior clan that is hidden away from humans on a mystical island. Diana, though, has felt a deep connection to the outside world since her youth. The veil between her world and the world of the humans is torn open when a World War I-era plane crashes into the water near the island and Diana saves its pilot, Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), from drowning. Afterward, Diana finds herself facing “the war to end all wars” head on.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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    Review: ‘The Alchemist,’ a Play in Search of Comedy Gold

    Red Bull Theater brings on the cons and their marks in this adaptation of the 17th-century Ben Jonson work.Let’s face it: Some people don’t just ask to be conned, they practically beg for it. Their greed, be it for money, sex or power, makes them vulnerable to the most extraordinary fabrications: the more outlandish the promises, the harder they fall for them. Conveniently, their hubris and self-confidence shelter them from the fact that they are gullible idiots.Such perfect marks are matched with perfect swindlers — shrewd, resourceful, prone to fart jokes — in the Ben Jonson comedy “The Alchemist,” now being revived by the Red Bull company. Naturally, shenanigans and slapstick ensue, spiced with an abundance of saucy double, and sometimes single entendres.For the occasion, Red Bull has reunited the team behind its 2017 hit adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Government Inspector”: the playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, who translated Jonson’s dense Jacobean text into a vernacular that is easier on 21st-century New York ears, and the director Jesse Berger, who seems to have never met a door that could not be slammed in a hurry. The pairing is felicitous, though the result is not as consistently funny as their earlier show, especially in the slack second act. Admittedly, very little is.After his master leaves plague-infested London for his home in the country, “for he could well afford to,” the butler, Face (Manoel Felciano), and his accomplices Subtle (Reg Rogers) and Dol Common (Jennifer Sánchez) use the now-empty city house to entertain a series of visitors ripe for the fleecing.There is, for example, Dapper, who wants a good-luck charm to improve his gambling odds and is made to believe a simple flea, conveniently near-invisible, will do the trick. The expert comic actor Carson Elrod fleshes out Dapper with a veritable arsenal of mimicry and affectations that make his every appearance a delight.Other targets are more satirically pointed, like the pious Ananias (Stephen DeRosa), who is from “a Protestant sect banished to Holland for the crime of being perfect,” or the excellently named Sir Epicure Mammon (Jacob Ming-Trent, in fine form), who covets the philosopher’s stone that could turn any metal into gold — Jonson’s approach is here very similar to that of Molière.From left, Jacob Ming-Trent and Manoel Felciano in “The Alchemist.”Carol RoseggSir Mammon’s appetites are boundless, and he is bewitched by the suggestion that a single mystery word can trigger the comely Dol into a carnal frenzy. “He that makes the stone must be virtuous, he that buys it, not really,” he says. “Tis the genius of Capitalism.”Hatcher dispenses such anachronisms judiciously — a joke referring to the James Bond universe is milked for all it’s worth, especially visually — but mostly he avoids the trap of over-relying on them for easy laughs. (The modern model of a classic play being jolted into the present remains David Ives’s “The School for Lies,” a dizzying rewriting of Molière’s “The Misanthrope.”)The dialogue often zings, and Berger orchestrates the farcical comings and goings on Alexis Distler’s bi-level set at the requisite madcap pace — at the performance I attended, the excellent Rogers (who played the director of the musical-within-the-musical in “Tootsie”) ad-libbed a line about all the stairs he had to climb.But the show is better at setting up the plot than at resolving it when we return from intermission — it is, after all, easier to throw a bunch of pins up in the air than it is to juggle them.Luckily, the cast members continue to exert themselves relentlessly in the service of laughter, from mere exaggerated inflections to all-out clowning. If acting is a form of conning, theatergoers, too, are willing victims.The AlchemistThrough Dec. 19 at the Red Bull Theater, Manhattan; redbulltheater.com. Running time: 2 hours. More

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    ‘Insecure’ Recap, Season 5, Episode 5: Out of Control

    As Molly deals with a family emergency, Issa finds a new relationship moving faster than she planned.Season 5, Episode 5: ‘Surviving, Okay?!’We all have a friend who is obsessed with control. They are the ones who ask who is invited to a party before agreeing to attend. They make all the reservations. In “Insecure,” that friend is Molly.Molly needs to know who, what, where and why before she even picks out an outfit. She has gotten better about this as the show has progressed, but this week the control freak returns. This episode, which was directed by Kerry Washington, starts out near the end of a tryst, when suddenly Molly’s phone gets a flurry of incoming messages. Her mother, Carol, has been hospitalized.Yes, Molly showed up to the hospital in her freakum dress, but in her defense, she left in a rush. After the doctor first confuses Carol with another, much older Black woman, the family finally finds her. It was only slightly comical — there are plenty of real-life reports that suggest that doctors give less consideration to Black patients.Molly’s mother has had a stroke and is unresponsive. It has caught Molly, Ms. In Control, off guard. Throughout the episode, the Carter family waits to see how much the stroke has affected Carol. Molly doesn’t leave the hospital, and soon Issa stops by to offer support and help.Issa had just woken up in Nathan’s bed, to a cup of coffee, when she got the news about Carol. She asks Nathan to take her to the hospital, where she offers to bring Molly a more appropriate outfit. In the meantime, she gives Molly the clothes off her back so that she can be more comfortable while tending to her family — that kind of sisterhood and care is beautiful to see onscreen. (Issa is also a vision in that dress.)After Molly and Issa exchange clothes, they look at themselves together in the mirror. It is briefly as if each has become the other — Issa in the party dress and Molly in the killer sweatshirt and jeans. It’s nice to see the relationship reach this level of quiet, shared love, where a nod and a hug communicates more than words can.At the hospital, Molly, her brothers, Curtis and Jerome, and her father, David, are all shocked to see their matriarch in such bad shape. David is incapable of even speaking to the nurse but Molly picks up the ball, asking the nurse to keep her updated.Before this emergency hospitalization, Molly’s parents had omitted key details about her mother’s health, including the fact that Carol had had a stroke before. Molly is shocked and her sense of control takes another hit — she didn’t even know what all was going on with her own parents.Meanwhile, Issa has her own, less profound problems: She loses Molly’s dog, Flavor Flav, during a walk. She had been distracted by Nathan, who had just met her mother over FaceTime, when the dog got loose. They set out to find him with a bizarre lack of urgency: They were basically just kicking it and hoping Flav would come back to them, which I found strange. But eventually he did.After Issa essentially hangs up on her mother, who was doing the most, she explains to Nathan that it is OK if he thinks it’s too soon for them to be meeting one another’s parents. But Nathan says no, with that darling smile. Their bond is deepening and soon Issa is learning more about Nathan’s family, though as is often the case with his past, it’s pretty dark. (His father sounds at least somewhat abusive.)Almost as soon as they stop looking for Flav and take a break on a bench, he finds them on his own. (In Los Angeles?!) Nathan sees an opportunity for a metaphor.“Smarter than you gave him credit for,” he says to Issa, who doubted the dog would make it back. But really he is talking about himself.“I honestly could not have done today without you. You’re so patient with me, that’s why I love you,” Issa says to Nathan, almost accidentally. It’s another unplanned step forward in their relationship and again Nathan responds favorably, this time with a warm kiss.After returning Flavor Flav, Issa heads back to the hospital, where Molly had just been informed that her mother will likely be at least partially paralyzed by the stroke. Though the doctor offers to inform the family, Molly volunteers to do it herself. It seemed like an effort to recover some semblance of the control she is used to having.Talking to Issa, Molly beats herself up, as if allowing herself to have a good time was somehow linked to her mother’s affliction.“I was hooking up with some random guy when my mom was busy having a stroke,” she says.“All of this stuff is out of our control anyway,” Issa replies.The truth of Issa’s own words is almost immediately demonstrated to her, when she unexpectedly glimpses Lawrence with his new family. Heading out for coffee, Issa sees him with Condola and Elijah — they are at the hospital, presumably for a pediatric appointment. Issa looks at the baby’s face and then at Lawrence’s. It’s the image of a life she once was ready to have, but one that is distant from who she is today.Lawrence looks up and they lock eyes. (Condola does not notice.) Then Issa slips down the hall and Lawrence heads into his appointment. They both saw what could have been and had to walk past it, Lawrence with disappointment on his face.Issa stops when she gets out of view, frozen by what she has seen until the episode cuts to black. I hope that she is strong enough to look at what could have been and walk toward what is. More

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    ‘Succession’ Recap, Season 3, Episode 6: Pretenders to the Throne

    Kendall had hoped to be the kingmaker, but we all know whom that role belongs to.Season 3, Episode 6: ‘What It Takes’“Succession” is sometimes described as a political satire, but politics is more the show’s milieu than its subject. The Roys run a right-wing media empire, so they spend a lot of time around politicians; and the family members themselves, at least on a performative level, have fiercely held ideals. (Or fluidly held in the case of Kendall and Shiv, who have lately sort of switched sides.) Rarely has this series engaged in as much sustained commentary on the sorry state of modern politics as occurs in this week’s episode.The title, “What It Takes,” is likely a reference to Richard Ben-Cramer’s nonfiction account of the 1988 U.S. presidential race, in which he examined in-depth the biographies and the campaigns of two Republicans and four Democrats, considering what drove these men to run. The book explores the gulf that often opens up between the candidates’ impressive credentials and how they sell themselves to voters and the media.In the “Succession” version, the guys vying for the Republican nomination at a Virginia gathering of conservative thought leaders aren’t exactly the best and the brightest. Up for consideration at an emergency meeting of the Future Freedom Summit are: Vice President Dave Boyer (Reed Birney), the “steady old plow-horse,” who’s like a second-rate copy of his retiring boss; Rick Salgado (Yul Vazquez), a moderate Reaganite elitist trying to convince the base that he’s now a big tent, blue collar populist; and Jeryd Mencken (Justin Kirk), a slick-talking nativist who says of a diversifying America that he supports integrating “new elements” but, “C’mon man, slowly.”Bringing up the rear is Connor Roy, about whom his own brother Roman says: “Sure, I dunno, yeah. Wait, but like, really?”This meet-up in Virginia has been called “the ATN primary,” hastily arranged after the cable news network tossed out the Raisin. Next on the ATN agenda: telling their largely Republican viewers which puppet they should be devoted to now. (Cue Greg: “But is that, like, constitutional?”)Logan shrugs off the hype and drama, saying, “I need to keep my spoon in the soup.” But he clearly has more on his mind than just deciding, as an ordinary American citizen, who would make a great president. He wants someone who will throw some administrative roadblocks in front of the tech companies who are stealing ATN’s audience. More important, he wants someone who’ll squelch the Justice Department’s investigation into Brightstar.So the Roys gather in their suite, debating their options and seeing which candidate will be the most pliable. Maybe it’s Boyer, who hustles when Logan calls him up and asks him — not entirely jokingly — to “run me over a Coke” and also to “fire the deputy attorney general.” Maybe it’s Salgado, who can go deep into the weeds on policy. Maybe it’s the up-and-coming firebrand Mencken, who calls ATN “dead” and compares it to an afternoon pudding cup in a nursing home. Or maybe it’s Connor, who … OK, who are we kidding? It’s not Connor. (Although Greg does politely say, “I think I could see myself spoiling my ballot in his favor.”)Logan will make the final call, as Roman (a Mencken man) and Shiv (a Salgado supporter) play the devil and angel on his shoulder, whispering suggestions. Connor is in the room, unwaveringly backing himself. And Tom and Greg are there ostensibly as “family,” though both know that no one will pay attention to what a couple of potential jailbirds say. (Greg stays mostly quiet, “minimizing the Greg window.” But he does stick around because while he’s a registered voter, “I just feel like you maybe get a bigger vote in here.”)Tom and Greg — especially Tom — are responsible for some much-needed comic relief in what is otherwise a fairly dark and occasionally disturbing episode. Tom at first default to poking fun at Greg, saying the young man will like this summit because, “It’s a nice safe space where you don’t have to pretend to like ‘Hamilton.’” But the truth is that Tom genuinely appreciates being able to talk with someone who understands his prison anxieties — unlike Shiv, who is sick of hearing him obsess about it.Tom and Greg grab a meal at a local diner because Tom has been trying to get used to the bland, starchy food he has been told he will be served behind bars. Greg spills his fears that, “Because of my physical length, I could be a target for all kinds of misadventure.” He also mentions the rumor he has heard that sometimes prisoners humiliate their cellmates by using their pillowcases as toilet paper. (“I know,” Tom interjects. “I’ve read the prison blogs.”)Later, Tom returns to what appears to be the same diner with Kendall, who has stealthily rolled into Virginia in hopes of sowing dissension in the Roy ranks. Kendall thinks he can flip Tom, who is in dire need of an ally. He warns his brother-in-law that while Logan may seem all-powerful and that Shiv may seem loyal, Tom can’t really count on either of them to save him from incarceration. Tom appears too resigned to his fate to fight. (“I have of late decided not to tarry too much with hope.”) But he does listen to Kendall … and maybe he actually hears him.What Tom doesn’t know, though, is that Kendall right now is flailing. He bombed at the shareholders’ meeting. He is not welcome at the Future Freedom Summit, given that he accuses the attendees of “burning books and measuring skulls down in Nuremberg, Virginia.” And he has just fired Lisa Arthur, “the best lawyer in town” (a designation he puts in quotation marks himself), because she seems more interested in cooperating with the feds than with aggressively countering Waystar. “Turns out she’s a toxic person,” he says to his assistants in explaining his decision to cut Lisa loose.Kendall had hoped to be the kingmaker whom future presidential candidates would have to court. Instead, it’s Roman who gets to corner Mencken in the bathroom of the Roys’ suite, in an absolutely riveting and more than a little terrifying scene. In a few intense minutes, Roman takes the measure of this man, to see just how committed he is to the whole neo-fascist agenda. Is he really willing to borrow ideas from Franco or Travis Bickle or “a very naughty boy named H?”Roman would like Mencken to be just obnoxious enough to fire up the base, but with a little bit of a wink so as not to scare off the center. His ideal is “Deep State Conspiracy Hour” but, “y’know, funny.” He also reminds Mencken that while ATN may seem like yesterdays news, they did just topple a President — and then immediately rattled the Justice Department with a rumor that the deputy A.G. is pursuing a personal grudge.Shiv is appalled that Roman and Logan would even consider Mencken, especially when Salgado is more palatable and less potentially dangerous to the whole American experiment. Roman of course belittles her choice. (“I think you’re so brave for picking the brown man.”) And when she tells her dad that Mencken is widely hated and begs him to “look at the climate,” Logan wryly replies: “The climate said I should step aside. I guess I’m a climate denier.”The episode ends with an echo of the “Succession” opening credits as the Roys gather for a group photo with their new Chosen One. Shiv tries to refuse, but Logan presses her until she relents and says, “I’ll be in the photo but not right next to him.” He sighs, “You win, Pinky.” But this is not even remotely true. Not wanting to be exiled like Kendall, Shiv has edged closer toward supporting a political philosophy she genuinely thinks is dangerous.What it takes, indeed.Due DiligenceIs it possible that Roman orchestrates the whole Mencken-anointing maneuver because his mother hurt his feelings? At the convention, a guest congratulates him on some news that catches him by surprise: His mom just got engaged to some British rando. (“A crooked-tooth turnip-man,” Roman speculates.) Shut out by one parent, perhaps he felt all the more compelled to impress the other. In the meantime, he takes comfort in learning that at least neither Shiv nor Kendall knew that “new dad just dropped.”Roman and Shiv spend some time on the plane down to Virginia engaging in their favorite pastime: Is Dad sleeping with the help? The latest possibility is Logan’s assistant Kerry (Zoë Winters), who is unusually comfortable with sharing her opinions about which candidate ATN should back. She also laughs with Logan about memes he shows her on his phone. (Trying to join in, Roman says: “Oh yeah, yeah. Well-played, the internet.”)Apparently a convict’s toilet is a stair-machine, a bench, a fridge, a lover, a brother and a priest. It’s also a toilet. (“So that’s a big part of prison?” Greg asks.)In addition to choking down bad food, Tom endures a shipment of funky-tasting wine in screw-top bottles. (“You kind of have to meet it halfway,” he says, hopefully. “There’s lots to unpack.”)Ever wondered what kind of movies Waystar’s entertainment division produces? Apparently it’s schlock like “Dr. Honk,” a comedy Roman once greenlighted about a man who can talk to cars. These are the people who are picking the next president. More