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    in Television

    Kristen Doute’s Path From Villain to the Voice of Reason on ‘The Valley’

    In 2013, Kristen Doute was working as a server at the West Hollywood lounge SUR and struggling to make it as an actor when one of the restaurant’s owners — Lisa Vanderpump of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” fame — approached her with the opportunity to be cast in a new Bravo reality show.Called “Vanderpump Rules,” the show would follow the personal and professional lives of the young staff members at SUR. The two decided to give it a shot, unaware that one day, Ms. Doute’s boyfriend at the time, Tom Sandoval, would become the most hated man in the United States, and Ms. Doute would be publicly fired for racist behavior.“The worst-case scenario is that it doesn’t do well and no one ever hears about it again,” Ms. Doute, now 42, said of her decision to join the show during a recent interview. “Our IMDB pages are not through the roof right now. I think we’ll be OK.”After agreeing to join the cast, the two immediately went home and binge-watched MTV’s “The Hills,” one of the most popular reality TV shows of the time. “We wanted to learn how to, quote, unquote, do reality TV,” Ms. Doute said.Turns out, she did not need the help. With “Vanderpump,” Ms. Doute quickly became one of the network’s biggest reality stars — for better or worse. Since debuting on Bravo screens more than a decade ago, she has been an insatiable vortex for drama, earning the nickname “Crazy Kristen” for her drunken antics (i.e. throwing a drink on James Kennedy, a castmate), battling with gravity (i.e. tripping over a coffee table on a girls’ trip to Solvang, Calif.), and embarking on tireless quests for the truth — or at least her truth. (Her other cast-given nickname is “Detective Doute.”)In her time on “Vanderpump Rules,” Ms. Doute was known for creating drama wherever she went.Bravo/NBCUniversal, via Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Best Mafia Show, According to Morgan Spector of ‘The Gilded Age’

    The actor, who plays a railroad magnate on HBO’s period drama, is into Russian war novels, “lefty” podcasts and his home gym.Morgan Spector’s character on “The Gilded Age” always seems to have it together, even if, behind the scenes, his business empire is teetering on the brink of collapse.In real life, well — he’s trying.Speaking from his home in Hillsdale, N.Y., where he lives with his wife, the actress Rebecca Hall, he was sleep-deprived because his 7-year-old daughter had been up in the middle of the night. His 1-year-old Rhodesian Ridgeback, Stella, had vomited all over the house. His phone was acting up.“It’s been one of those days,” he said.Spector, 44, has become a fan favorite for his scene-stealing turn as the railroad magnate George Russell on HBO’s period drama about what happens when old money meets new money. His character has a crisis of confidence this season, as he allows himself to be swept along by a marriage plot hatched by his wife, Bertha (Carrie Coon), involving their daughter, Gladys (Taissa Farmiga), and the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Lamb) — a man George knows she doesn’t love.“It causes him to have a kind of existential reckoning,” Spector said. “Because despite all the sort of horrible robber baron-y things he does, he thinks of himself as someone with a moral code, particularly with regard to his family.”He shared his 10 cultural essentials, including the book that “made his entire personality” and the magazine he reads cover to cover. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.MomMy wife and I are both relatively busy working actors, which means our lives are logistically chaotic. That would make it extremely challenging to provide a grounded, consistent experience of childhood for my daughter, were it not for my mom. She jumped on board our crazy train early on and, as a result, it all functions pretty seamlessly.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Mark Snow, Who Conjured the ‘X-Files’ Theme, Is Dead at 78

    It took a misplaced elbow, a quirk of Los Angeles geography and some whistling from his wife to produce one of television’s most memorable melodies.Mark Snow, a Juilliard-trained soundtrack composer who earned 15 Emmy Award nominations, including one for his eerily astral opening theme to “The X-Files,” a 1990s answer to the timeless “Twilight Zone” theme and the basis of a surprising dance hit in Europe, died on July 4 at his home in Washington, Conn. He was 78.The cause was myelodysplastic syndrome, a rare form of blood cancer, his son-in-law Peter Ferland said.Over an extraordinarily prolific five-decade career, during which he tallied more than 250 film and television credits, Mr. Snow excelled in a field that comes with built-in creative challenges.“Some producers describe their musical idea as ‘fast but slow,’” he said in a 2000 interview with Film & Video magazine. “The director might say he wants to hear music that’s ‘blue with a hint of green.’ Now, no one really knows what those terms mean. That’s a big part of my job, interpreting the search for a project’s musical voice.”Mr. Snow provided music for 90 episodes of “Hart to Hart,” which starred Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers as a jet-setting couple who double as amateur sleuths, and 40 episodes of “Falcon Crest,” the 1980s prime-time soap opera.Mr. Snow provided music for 90 episodes of the Robert Wagner series “Hart to Hart.”Columbia Pictures , via Everett CollectionHis many other credits included “Starsky & Hutch,” with David Soul (left) and Paul Michael Glaser.via Everett CollectionWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    What’s Next for ‘Love Island’ Contestant Jeremiah Brown? A Book Club.

    Jeremiah Brown asked his 2 million TikTok followers what to do after being voted off the hit series. The answer has him, and his fans, reading “The Song of Achilles.”After he was voted off the dating show “Love Island USA” last month, Jeremiah Brown wasn’t sure what to do with his newfound fame.During his 16 days as a contestant, he’d gained more than two million followers on TikTok, up from just 44 before he went on the show. Shortly after his exit, a suggestion from a follower on social media immediately grabbed him.“Somebody said, you should start a book club, and I was like, oh my gosh, lightbulb,” Brown said in an interview. “The second I read this idea, I was like yeah, we got to do this.”When Brown posted about his book club in early July, the announcement generated wild enthusiasm. Soon, the club had around 120,000 members.“Y’all some nerds,” Brown told his followers.After polling club members on what genre they wanted to read (romance, naturally), Brown gave them a list of books to vote on, which included BookTok favorites like “It Ends With Us,” “Beach Read,” “Twisted Love” and “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.” The winner, by several thousand votes, was “The Song of Achilles,” by Madeline Miller.The novel, which is more of an epic tragedy than a romance, has already attracted a wide audience, selling more than 4 million copies since its release in 2012. Set during the Trojan War, it imagines a doomed love affair between the warrior Achilles and his devoted companion Patroclus.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Was Murderbot Smiling in the Finale? Only the Creators Know for Sure.

    This interview includes spoilers for the Season 1 finale of “Murderbot.”On the surface, Chris and Paul Weitz were in unfamiliar territory when they set about creating “Murderbot,” the darkly comic Apple TV+ series, which just wrapped its first season on Friday. After all, they hadn’t adapted a science-fiction story together before.But as the Weitz brothers noted in a joint video call last month, the cynical, soap-opera-obsessed cyborg at that show’s center (Alexander Skarsgard) isn’t entirely dissimilar from the carefree, selfish cad played by Hugh Grant in their 2002 film “About a Boy,” which they directed and co-wrote (with Peter Hedges).Like that man, the cyborg of “Murderbot” is inconvenienced by some of the messier aspects of human existence — particularly emotions. And like him, it must learn to resemble a responsible, loving human being.“Hugh Grant’s character was essentially self-medicating with television and didn’t really want to deal with people, and was kind of forced to by a hippie mom and her son,” Chris said. The title character — Murderbot is a name the cyborg privately gives itself — finds itself in a similar dynamic after it is hired to protect a motley group of scientists on an expedition to survey a distant planet.In “Murderbot,” Noma Dumezweni plays the leader of a freethinking group of scientists and Alexander Skarsgard plays the freethinking deadly cyborg charged with protecting them.Apple TV+“I think there’s a theme in both our work of people who aren’t actually equipped to provide emotional support for other people but who nonetheless figure out a way to do so,” Paul said — even if, strictly speaking, the cyborg’s pronouns are it/its.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Rage’ Is a Wild Spanish Dramedy About Women Who Are Pushed Too Far

    The behaviors are extreme and exciting, but the show itself isn’t bleak. It is bright and funny, colorful and surprising.The Spanish dramedy “Rage” (in Spanish, with subtitles), debuting on Friday night at 8 on HBO Latino, is a distinctive anthology of female anger. Each episode includes a true plate-smashing meltdown, the culmination of decades of frustration and neglect. People rip cabinets off the wall, light fires, destroy entire kitchens. And while the show has an amped-up soapy lilt, all the indignation is grounded in real despair and grief.The stories connect and coincide; some of the women are neighbors, or catch glimpses of each other on television. Some of the women are rich and impulsive while others scrounge for each rent check, but disappointment knows no tax bracket. A prized pig wanders through the chapters connecting the arcs, too.Marga (Carmen Machi) is a visual artist and hobbyist markswoman whose slick husband is sleeping with their housekeeper, Tina (Claudia Salas). Tina’s mom, Adela (Nathalie Poza), struggles to make ends meet while taking care of her own ailing mother. Nat (Candela Peña), prim and stylish, loves her job at a high-end department store … until she is forced out by a blasé boss who prefers to hire less-qualified Instagram influencers.Vera (Pilar Castro), a celebrity chef, vents to her pal Marga about how hopeless she feels, how sinister the world seems to her. But it isn’t just perception, it is also projection: She winds up torturing a journalist who antagonizes her. “We’re all just selfishness, meanness and madness,” she tells him while he’s tied to a table.When Victoria (Cecilia Roth) realizes the award she is getting is sponsorship nonsense and not a belated recognition of her work, the humiliation overwhelms her, and we watch this tidal wave of self-recrimination crash on shore. Have I been a fool this whole time? How much of my life have I wasted operating under these misapprehensions about myself, about the world?Everything on “Rage” escalates, quickly, and the behaviors are extreme — and exciting. While the characters are motivated by pain, the show itself is bright and funny, colorful and surprising. Two episodes air on Friday and the remaining six air weekly after that. More

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    in Theater

    As Climate Change Heats Up Europe’s Summers, Avignon Festival Tries to Adapt

    Rising temperatures pose an existential threat to the theater extravaganza, where extreme heat is making it tough for the audience.As a punishing heat wave swept through Europe last week, some cultural events had to carry on with the show. The Avignon Festival, one of Europe’s largest theater extravaganzas, was just days from opening. And even as temperatures hit 40 degrees Celsius, or 104 degrees Fahrenheit, the festival’s venues — many of them outdoors — still needed to be prepped.“Within 12 hours, we had adapted,” said Eve Lombart, who has been the festival’s general administrator since 2019. Working hours for technicians building stages and sets were adjusted, with longer breaks in the afternoon; to compensate, technical teams started as early as 6 a.m. at some of the event’s 40 venues.The swift adjustments were the result, Lombart said, of years of behind-the-scenes effort to adapt the festival to climate change.For Avignon and other events in the south of France, rising summer temperatures have become an existential threat. Days over 100 degrees Fahrenheit are no longer a rarity, with serious effects on audiences and workers. While air conditioning — less common in Europe than in other parts of the world — has been installed at most indoor venues, crowds typically walk from show to show throughout the day to catch as many productions as possible.Visitors in Avignon find ways to protect themselves from the sun during the day.Pierre Gondard for The New York TimesFlorent Masse, a Princeton University professor who is the director of the Princeton French Theater Festival, said that conditions had worsened significantly since he first traveled to Avignon, in 2002. Masse noted that on the opening day of this year’s event, the 30-minute walk back to the city center after a performance at La Fabrica, a venue in Avignon’s suburbs, was arduous.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Meet the French Game Show Contestant Who Won 646 Times in a Row (and 23 Cars)

    He also won TVs, musical instruments, a parachuting session, makeup, household appliances and much, much more. “It’s a lot,” he acknowledged.Much feels in flux in France these days. Will yo-yoing tariffs hit businesses? Is Perrier really that natural? And don’t even get started on the volatile summer heat.But for the past 21 months, fans of a popular French game show have lived by a simple, ironclad certainty. Tune in at noon on any given day, and without fail, there he was: a soft-spoken young man named Émilien, with wiry round glasses and an astonishing depth of trivia knowledge.Just as reliably, Émilien beat the other contestants. Again, and again, and again.Although he has declined to reveal his last name for privacy reasons, Émilien is now a celebrity of sorts in France for his record-breaking winning streak on a show called “Les Douze Coups de Midi,” or “The Twelve Strokes of Noon.” Starting on Sept. 25, 2023, he competed 647 times and netted 2.56 million euros, about $3 million, in cash and prizes.But it came to an end on Sunday, when a single defeat ended his reign.Émilien, now 22, is as incredulous as the rest of us that he got that far.“It’s a crazy story,” he said by phone this week. “I never expected it to last that long.”Broadcast on the TF1 television network, each day’s show has four contestants compete in a series of trivia quizzes. The winner — le Maître de Midi, or Master of Noon — defends that title the next day.“My goal was always the same,” Émilien said. “Every day, from the first to the 647th, to still be there at the end of the show, to do my best and come back the next day.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More