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    ‘Billions’ Recap, Season 5, Episode 8: Back in Business

    Chuck returns minus a beard and a lover. Axe returns minus the good sense to leave well enough alone.Season 5, Episode 8: ‘Copenhagen’Chuck Rhodes has shaved off his beard. But he wants to be clear: It’s not that big a deal.“You look ready to toss your cap in the air at West Point!” exclaims his underling Karl Allard (Allan Havey).Rhodes’s weary reply? “Don’t make a whole thing of it.”My guess, and it’s just a guess, is that this new clean-shaven Chuck Rhodes has more to do with the vagaries of scheduling talent for the back half of this Covid-scrambled season than a decision made in the writers’ room. If your show stars Paul Giamatti, and if he has gone beardless sometime during the many months since you were last able to film, then by God, your main character will go beardless as well.But “Don’t make a whole thing of it” doubles as a mantra for the entire … what should we call it? A half-season premiere? Season Five version 2.0? However you slice it, the writers have taken a steady-as-she-goes approach to the show’s return. No hard reset, no launching point for a slew of brand-new story lines — this is a standard “Billions” episode, which is to say it simply advances its pre-existing plotlines in dense and dizzying style, through crackling dialogue and confident performances.For Chuck, this means losing more than just his beard. His relationship with the Yale sex researcher Catherine Brant, played by Julianna Margulies, appears to have been another casualty of the forced break in production. The show writes her off with Chuck’s revelation that his threesome with her and a sex worker, hired by Cat for the occasion, proved disastrous when its lack of sadomasochism, the thing that really gets Rhodes’s engine revving, exposed fissures in their romantic connection.Chuck’s relationship with his alma mater produces more trouble than a regrettable sexual liaison, however. One of his former students, Merle Howard (Noah Robbins), led a revolt against Chuck’s assignment to take down the secretary of the Treasury, Todd Krakow (Danny Strong), during the season’s opening half. With the help of some photographic evidence provided by the Axe Cap sleazeball Bill Stearn, a.k.a., Dollar Bill (Kelly AuCoin), he has now resorted to blackmail, ordering Chuck to resign his post as the Attorney General of New York lest his long-ago role in rigging a Yale student election be exposed.Chuck has a moral leg to stand on here: His opponent in the election in question opposed divestment from apartheid South Africa, and the young Chuck joined friends in burning ballots in a bathtub to prevent this ultraconservative candidate from achieving power. Unfortunately for Chuck, that candidate grew up to be the university’s beloved chaplain, and a head-to-head morality-based showdown in the present day would not necessarily deliver Chuck a slam-dunk victory — not when election-rigging has been such a going concern in America in general, and on “Billions” in particular.“It was a student election — persuading Oingo Boingo to play Spring Fling, and not Sun City,” Chuck protests to Merle. “It’s not Il Duce in ’34!”“One leads to the other,” Merle responds without missing a beat.Chuck’s lawyer and best friend, Ira (Ben Shenkman), digs up an unseen file of dirt on Chuck’s old election opponent, over Chuck’s protestations. If Merle had a pistol,” Ira asks, “would you let him shoot you? No: You’d defend yourself and then go about making amends once you knew you were still breathing.”In the end, Merle blinks, withdrawing his threat and reporting himself to the university’s dean (Tawny Cypress). When she confronts Chuck about his youthful indiscretion, however, Chuck refrains from using Ira’s file, tendering his resignation from Yale’s faculty instead. Sic semper tyrannis, I guess.On the opposite side of the great “Billions” divide, Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) takes on an altogether more dangerous adversary than a law student: his fellow billionaire Mike Prince (Corey Stoll). When Bobby learns from his thoroughly hung-over right-hand man Wags (David Costabile) that Prince is on deck for an ambassadorship to Denmark, the two men dig for whatever dirt can cancel the appointment and ruin Prince’s reputation.They settle on Scooter Dunbar (Daniel Breaker), Prince’s equivalent to Wags. Using a small army of runners to cover up his own involvement, Scooter appears to have developed a serious sports-betting habit, precisely the kind of security vulnerability that gets people axed from government positions. (Or at least used to.)But Wags’s attempt to bigfoot Scooter on the issue backfires when Prince shows up to Axe Cap headquarters, revealing that the bets were his own. The reason he placed the bets through Scooter and the runners wasn’t to hide a dangerous vice, he says. It’s because, given his well-earned reputation as a power player, his position could tilt the betting odds were it widely known.Not that this stops Axe’s attack. Keying in on a stray mention by Prince of his past, Axe tasks his lieutenants to dig deeper. Once again, it’s Dollar Bill who gets the goods: According to the mother (Becky Ann Baker) of Prince’s late partner, Prince swindled his former partner and best friend out of a billion-dollar deal — contributing, she believes, to his death in a drunk-driving accident. The ensuing TV news exposé lets Prince know he has a real fight on his hands.Indeed, if there’s a through line for this episode, it’s about characters trying, and often failing, to stay true to the people and things that mean the most to them. The artist Nico Tanner (Frank Grillo), the current love interest of Wendy Rhoades (Maggie Siff), recoils from the culture of limitless cash and entitlement embraced by the Axe Cap/Taylor Mason Carbon power structure — although that doesn’t stop him from fleecing one of them for thousands of dollars for a mere scribble. (His vigorous, shirtless creation of a new painting before an enraptured Wendy, to the tune of the Velvet Underground’s euphoric song “Rock and Roll,” is the episode’s valedictory moment.)As for Taylor (Asia Kate Dillon), the wunderkind trader is aghast to discover that the Mase Carb up-and-comer Rian (Eva Victor) still works as a cater waiter in her off hours. The side gig is an attempt to keep alive her relationships to her old friends, she insists. But if other major investors see her at work, Taylor argues, they will question how Taylor runs the shop. At Taylor’s behest, Rian quits her side hustle and settles in for a cozy night in front of the telly with her boss. Is it just me, or is there reason to worry that Taylor’s right-hand woman, Lauren (Jade Eshete), won’t be the only woman in the young genius’s life before too long?And while Chuck scrambles to find a kidney donor for his father (Jeffrey DeMunn) — a course of action that leads to Chuck’s humiliation by Dr. Gilbert (Seth Barrish), whom he put away for ethical violations — his ex-wife, Wendy, is tapped by Charles Sr. to be his health care proxy.“I need you to be cleareyed and punch my ticket” should the need arise, Charles tells her.In the end, the episode’s most potentially momentous moment almost feels like an afterthought. Acting on a tip by his sinister go-to guy Victor Mateo (Louis Cancelmi), Axe buys up an obviously crooked payday lender that Chuck and his own lieutenant, Kate Sacker (Condola Rashad), have been looking into. Why? Because said lender has a bank charter, the golden goose for which Axe Cap has been searching all season.Game on, folks!Loose change:As, quite potentially, the most Tom Petty-friendly show on TV, “Billions” here deploys “It’s Good to Be King.” Ironically, of course.This week’s major cameos come in the form of The Bail Project’s governing board chair, Michael E. Novogratz, and the singer-songwriter Jason Isbell, whose obvious integrity challenges Tanner to stand by his own artistic instincts.I appreciated Chuck and Ira’s shout out to Mamoun’s, the New York/New Haven falafel mainstay. Boy, I could tell you some stories.This week in “concepts I didn’t know about until ‘Billions’ told me about them,” it’s hygge, the Danish ideal of being warm and contented. Has anyone on this show truly felt hygge at any time? More

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    Willard Scott, Longtime 'Today' Weatherman, Dies at 87

    Mr. Scott, who played both Bozo the Clown and the original Ronald McDonald on television, was a longtime weather forecaster on the “Today” show who emphasized showmanship over science.Willard Scott, the antic longtime weather forecaster on the “Today” show, whose work, by his own cheerful acknowledgment, made it clear that you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, died on Saturday at his farm in Delaplane, Va. He was 87.His death was confirmed by his wife, Paris Keena Scott. She did not specify a cause, saying only that he had died after a brief illness.Mr. Scott, who had earlier played both Bozo the Clown and the original Ronald McDonald on television, was among the first of a generation of television weathermen who stressed showmanship over science. Throughout the late 20th century, he was also a ubiquitous television pitchman.A garrulous, gaptoothed, boutonnière-wearing, funny-hatted, sometimes toupee-clad, larger-than-life American Everyman (in his prime, he stood 6-foot-3 and weighed nearly 300 pounds), Mr. Scott was hired in 1980 to help NBC’s “Today” compete with its chief rival, ABC’s “Good Morning America.”Joining “Today” that March, Mr. Scott went on to sport a string of outré outfits, spout a cornucopia of cornpone humor and wish happy birthday to a spate of American centenarians, all while talking about the forecast every so often, until his retirement in 2015.Though he was meant to represent the new, late-model television weatherman, Mr. Scott brought to the job a brand of shtick that harked back to earlier times. He seemed simultaneously to embody the jovial, backslapping Rotarian of the mid-20th century, the midway barker of the 19th and, in the opinion of at least some critics, the court jester of the Middle Ages.There was the time, for instance, that he delivered the forecast dressed as Boy George. There was the time he did so dressed as Carmen Miranda, the “Brazilian bombshell” of an earlier era, dancing before the weather map in high heels, ruffled pink gown, copious jewelry and vast fruited hat. There was the time, reporting from an outdoor event, that he kissed a pig on camera.The pig did not take kindly to being kissed and squealed mightily.Mr. Scott, who began his career in radio before becoming a weatherman at WRC-TV, an NBC affiliate in Washington, had no background in meteorology or any allied science. But as he readily acknowledged, the weatherman’s job as reconstructed for the postmodern age did not require any.“A trained gorilla could do it,” Mr. Scott said in 1975, while he was at WRC.The only scientific asset one actually needed, he pointed out, was the telephone number of the National Weather Service.In more than three decades with “Today,” Mr. Scott traversed the country, delivering the weather on location at county fairs, town parades and quaint byways across America, as well as from NBC’s studios in New York.A frequent guest on late-night TV, he was a spokesman for a range of charitable causes and a commercial pitchman with wide television exposure — too wide, some critics maintained.The concerns he endorsed included Howard Johnson Motor Lodges, True Value Hardware, Burger King, Lipton tea, Maxwell House coffee, the American Dairy Association, the Florida Citrus Commission, Diet Coke, USA Today and many others.“A huckster for all seasons,” The New York Times called him in 1987.Mr. Scott’s onscreen persona — by his own account little different from his offscreen persona — divided viewers. Some adored him, inundating him with gifts, which he might display on the air. (Among them, the 1987 article in The Times reported, was “an airplane built out of Diet Coke cans.”)In January 1989, the country’s new first lady, Barbara Bush, broke ranks from the inaugural parade for her husband, George H.W. Bush, to dart over to Mr. Scott, broadcasting from the sidelines, and plant an impromptu kiss on his cheek.“I don’t know Willard Scott,” Mrs. Bush explained afterward. “I just love that face.”Then again, as The Boston Globe reported in 1975, there was this incident, from Mr. Scott’s days at WRC: “He was pushing a shopping cart in a Virginia supermarket recently when a little old lady charged by and smacked him with her umbrella. ‘I can’t stand you,’ she said.”The son of Willard Herman Scott, an insurance salesman, and Thelma (Phillips) Scott, a telephone operator, Willard Herman Scott Jr. was born on March 7, 1934, in Alexandria, Va.He was smitten with broadcasting from the time he was a boy, and at 16 he became a $12-a-week page at WRC-TV. After he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and religion from American University, Mr. Scott and a classmate, Ed Walker, took to the Washington airwaves with a comic radio show, “The Joy Boys.”With time out from 1956 to 1958 for Mr. Scott’s Navy service, “The Joy Boys” was broadcast on WRC-AM from 1955 to 1972 and on WWDC-AM in Washington from 1972 to 1974. Featuring humorous improvisation and topical satire, it won a large following.From 1952 to 1962, Mr. Scott also played the title character on “Bozo the Clown,” the WRC-TV version of a syndicated children’s show. In the early ’60s, on the strength of his Bozo, McDonald’s asked him to develop a clown character to be used in its advertising.As Ronald McDonald, Mr. Scott did several local TV commercials for the franchise but was passed over — in consequence of his corpulence, he later said — as its national representative.In 1967, he started doing the weather on WRC-TV. There, his exploits included emerging from a manhole one Groundhog Day dressed as an astoundingly large groundhog.When Mr. Scott was hired by “Today,” he supplanted the meteorologist Bob Ryan, who was fired to make way for him. Mr. Ryan, who held a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s in atmospheric science, had previously worked as a cloud physicist.Mr. Scott’s early weeks at “Today,” he later recalled, were “touch and go.”But by 1987, The Times reported, “his tenure there” was “credited with helping to catapult the show past ‘Good Morning America’ into first place in the breakfast-time sweepstakes.”Not all of Mr. Scott’s colleagues approved of his modus operandi. In 1988, Bryant Gumbel, a co-host of “Today,” wrote a confidential memorandum to an NBC executive in which he castigated the work of several colleagues, notably Mr. Scott.The memo, leaked to New York Newsday the next year, charged that Mr. Scott “holds the show hostage to his assortment of whims, wishes, birthdays and bad taste.”Though Mr. Scott publicly forgave Mr. Gumbel, giving him a conciliatory kiss on the cheek on a “Today” segment soon afterward, he said elsewhere that the memo had “cut like a knife.”With NBC colleagues, Mr. Scott shared three Daytime Emmys in the 1990s for coverage of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. He went into semiretirement in 1996, ceding regular forecasting to Al Roker while continuing to deliver birthday tributes.Mr. Scott’s first wife, Mary (Dwyer) Scott, whom he married in 1959, died in 2002. He married Paris Keena Scott, his second wife, in 2014. In addition to her, he is survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Sally Scott Swiatek and Mare Scott, and two grandchildren, Sally Marie Swiatek and John Willard Swiatek.Mr. Scott was the author of several books, including “Willard Scott’s Down Home Stories” (1984) and “Willard Scott’s All-American Cookbook” (1986).For all its burlesque jocularity, Mr. Scott asserted, his job was no less taxing as a result.“Everything I do looks like it just falls into place,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1988. “Part of what I do is make it fall into place. You have to work at being a buffoon.”Michael Levenson More

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    ‘The Doors Didn’t Open Easily’ on Her Path to ‘Cinderella’

    The choreographer JoAnn M. Hunter has quietly become an important figure in the world of musical theater, especially with her work for Andrew Lloyd Webber.LONDON — Midway through Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new “Cinderella,” the male ensemble throws itself into a thrusting, muscle-popping number that perfectly illustrates the musical’s fictional setting of Belleville, a town devoted to beauty in all its superficial forms. It’s also laugh-out-loud hilarious, a sly take on an objectification more usually embodied by a female chorus, and a witty amplification of the musical’s reimagining of the Cinderella myth.That dance (which incorporates kettle bells), and all the others in this West End production, is the work of JoAnn M. Hunter, a longtime Broadway performer and choreographer who has quietly become an important figure in a field that boasts very few women, and even fewer women of color.“A great number of choreographers go their own way,” Lloyd Webber said in a telephone interview, “but JoAnn is completely different, a wonderful collaborator who you can really talk to about what the show needs. She is hugely important to the look of the show.”“Cinderella,” which finally opened on Aug. 18 at the Gillian Lynne Theater here after multiple pandemic-related delays, has a book by Emerald Fennell (“Promising Young Woman”) and lyrics by David Zippel (“City of Angels”). It’s Hunter’s third collaboration with Lloyd Webber and the director Laurence Connor, after the 2015 Broadway production of “School of Rock” and the much-lauded 2019 West End revival of “Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”Carrie Hope Fletcher as Cinderella in the new West End production. Tristram Kenton A few critics jibed at Fennell’s rewriting of the Cinderella story: The heroine, played by Carrie Hope Fletcher, is a spirited, grumpy Goth; Prince Charming is M.I.A.; and his younger brother, Prince Sebastian (Ivano Turco), is the shy and awkward hero. But most reviewers concurred that the new musical is a great deal of fun, helped along by the wittily inventive, hugely varied dances that characterize Hunter’s style.“JoAnn M. Hunter’s choreography keeps it all swishing along, from blowzily romantic waltzes to homoerotically charged rapier skirmishes,” Sam Marlowe wrote in The I.Hunter, who is in her 50s, was born just outside of Tokyo, but grew up in Rhode Island with her Japanese mother and American father. She and her older brother were the only mixed-race children in their community. “I got taunted quite a lot, and I didn’t understand what was different about me,” she said.Ballet, which she started studying at 10, proved a savior. “In dance class I didn’t feel different at all,” she said. “I was just a dancer, with dancer friends. I always wonder if that’s why I fell in love with the art form.”At 16, she went to New York City on a summer dance scholarship. One night she bought a standing-room ticket for Bob Fosse’s Broadway musical “Dancin’.” As she watched, she made a silent vow: “I’m not going back home. This is where I belong.” What she saw, she said, was the possibility of “expressing all those things inside you.” Her family, she added, “never hugged, never said ‘I love you.’ But onstage I saw you had permission and freedom to show your feelings.”She went back to Rhode Island just long enough to tell her mother she wasn’t returning to high school, then moved to New York, taking dance classes, working at Barney’s and attending audition after audition, but staying under the radar in spite of her efforts. “I couldn’t get arrested at the time,” she said wryly.After working at the Opryland USA theme park in Nashville in the early 1980s (“we sang, we danced, we did four shows a day; I loved it”), she was hired for tours of “West Side Story” and “Cats.” But she experienced long periods of joblessness and insecurity.There was hardly any diversity on Broadway in the late 1980s, she said, and she felt acutely aware of looking different than the “beautiful tall blond girls” at auditions. “People would look at me, and say, ‘What are you?’” she recounted. “I would answer, ‘whatever you need me to be.’”She played the white cat in “Cats” for 15 months, and began to gain confidence. Then, in 1989, she had an experience that was pivotal for her subsequent choreographic career. She joined the cast of “Jerome Robbins’s Broadway,” an evening-length show of selections from Robbins’s choreography for musicals like “Fiddler on the Roof” and “On the Town.”The ball scene in “Cinderella.” A theater critic credited Hunter with choreography that keeps the story “swishing along, from blowzily romantic waltzes to homoerotically charged rapier skirmishes.”Tristram Kenton“Jerry was a tyrant,” she said, “but I adored working with him, and I think I was absorbing so many lessons without thinking about it. He was unsurpassed at telling a story through movement.”Ensemble roles in Broadway shows (“Miss Saigon,” “Guys and Dolls,” “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”) followed, and soon Hunter began to work as a dance captain, the ensemble member who can teach the choreography for every character. While she was performing in “Thoroughly Modern Millie” in 2002, the director, Rob Ashford, asked her to be his choreographic associate.“JoAnn was always the smartest person in the room as well as the best dancer, and I knew she would be invaluable,” Ashford said in a telephone interview. Hunter, who had just gone through a divorce, wasn’t so sure. (She said her initial response was “aaarghhhh.”) But she had to take the chance.“She is a real problem solver and a great collaborator,” Ashford said. “In a musical, a choreographer has to get inside a director’s head and translate that vision into their own creation. She was always about the goals of the show.”The director Michael Mayer, who hired Hunter to oversee Bill T. Jones’s choreography for “Spring Awakening” in 2006, said in a telephone interview that one of her great gifts is to “understand why the steps are there, what the characters are trying to accomplish through the movement, and how the movement is in conversation with the rest of the elements of the show, even though at that point she hadn’t made up the moves.”Hunter’s first independent choreography for a musical was for a 2008 U.S. touring production of “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.” “I remember thinking, I’m never going to know unless I try this,” Hunter said. “And if I’m bad, not too many people will have seen it!”Asked whether she thought this kind of insecurity was particularly rife among women, Hunter looked thoughtful. Perhaps, she said. “Men tend to try things without worrying if they have the experience.” She added that the paucity of female choreographers on Broadway didn’t help her confidence.Although there are still relatively few female choreographers working on Broadway, this has begun to change: Camille A. Brown, Michelle Dorrance, Ellenore Scott and Ayodele Casel are all choreographing upcoming Broadway shows. Hunter agreed that women are now somewhat more visible in musical theater. “It’s amazing to think as a dancer I only ever worked with two female directors, Susan Stroman and Tina Landau,” she said. “At the moment these issues are at the front of our brains, as is racial diversity. I hope it’s something enduring, not a fad.”When she choreographed “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” she added, she was still too fearful about a choreographic career to give up the insurance having an Equity card provides. “I am afraid of failure; we all go through life thinking, ‘I’m going to be found out,’” she said. She laughed. “I’m still petrified.”Hunter’s choreography, the director Rob Ashford said, “has the great gift, which she learned from [Jerome] Robbins of ‘just enough,’ of never taking longer than she needs.”Charlotte Hadden for The New York TimesHer first Broadway commission came from Mayer, with the short-lived revival of “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.” Then came “School of Rock.”Hunter said she had worked closely with Lloyd Webber on “Cinderella,” both on Zoom during lockdown, and in person from August last year. “People don’t really understand that a choreographer on a musical does much more than the dance sequences,” she said. “You move people around, deal with the transitions, where the audience’s focus should go. You have to be totally connected to the vision of the composer, writer and director.”The choreographer also often works with a dance arranger, she added, who adapts the score for dance sections. “A script direction might say, ‘goes into a dance moment,’” she explained. “But I think, ‘What do we want to say here?’ You might want a Latin feel, a tango rhythm, a French chanson, as a way of making mood and story more understandable.”For the “Muscle Man” dance in “Cinderella,” for instance, she thought about what the musical was trying to say and suggested a sound equivalent. “They are such macho, testosterone guys, and I had the idea of using kettle bells, which sounds like something dropping and is funny.”For “Cinderella,” Lloyd Webber did the dance arrangements himself. “I sketched out what I thought the dance music should be,” he said. “Then JoAnn took that, and actually stayed very faithful to it, but we added accents and she would ask for elements that the dance might need. It’s a really important collaboration, because you can’t look at the dance if you can’t listen to the music; it has to be good.”Hunter said that while she doesn’t read music, she has an acute sense of instrumentation and rhythm. “I just say things like ‘I don’t want it so pingy-pingy!’” she said. “That way I can make funny funnier and sexy sexier.” She added, “I always want every movement to tell a story. When Prince Sebastian dances at the end, I told Ivano, it’s not about the dance, it’s about you speaking up for yourself.”Her choreography, Ashford said, “has the great gift, which she learned from Robbins, of ‘just enough,’ of never taking longer than she needs.”Hunter, who last year directed and choreographed “Unmasked,” a concert retrospective of Lloyd Webber’s career, is working as both director and choreographer on “SuperYou,” a new musical written by Lourds Lane. Hunter described it as “a superhero, self-empowering piece about women finding their own voice” and said she hopes it will go to Broadway.Hunter added that she was still frequently the only woman on a creative team. “I’ve worked with great people, but the doors didn’t open easily,” she said. “I still feel I am constantly proving myself.” More

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    Is It the Weekend? Not Until He Says So.

    The 18-year-old behind the viral Twitter account @CraigWeekend has offered people a routine reminder to take a load off.In a scene from “Saturday Night Live,” the English actor Daniel Craig stares into the camera and flops his arms halfheartedly, as if he meant to raise them above his head but got tired halfway.“Ladies and gentlemen, the Weeknd,” he says, announcing the episode’s musical guest: the Canadian pop star Abel Tesfaye. The studio audience begins to cheer.These four seconds of footage, notable if only for Mr. Craig’s ambiguous tone (was he exasperated? dubious? expectant? neutral?), were surely forgotten by most viewers after the episode was broadcast on March 7, 2020. But not by Miles Riehle.Watching Mr. Craig on “S.N.L.,” he was amused by what he saw as a double entendre. “It sounds like he’s welcoming in the weekend, as in Saturday or Sunday,” said Mr. Riehle, 18. “I was like, ‘Man, that’s really funny.’”Following in the footsteps of Twitter accounts that tweet only on specific dates — think “Mean Girls” and Oct. 3 — Mr. Riehle claimed the handle @CraigWeekend and started tweeting the clip every Friday afternoon.When the account took off months later, in November, “I was excited to have so many people following something that I was doing,” Mr. Riehle said. Soon, interview requests started rolling in.The extra attention, while thrilling, was also daunting, he said, “because now I have to make sure I keep all these people entertained.”That said, he seems to be sustaining the interest of his more than 450,000 followers, who Friday after Friday await his announcement that the workweek has come to an end. Some people message him when they feel he has not delivered his proclamation early enough.Mr. Riehle thinks the account’s appeal can be chalked up to its positive and predictable messages during a period marked by fear and uncertainty.“Given how much stress there was going on in the world, for a lot of people it was extra potent, being able to embrace the weekend and get excited for it,” he said. Fans of the account, he said, have developed “a community of good vibes.”“It always seems like people are nice to each other in the replies and the comments and the quote-tweets,” Mr. Riehle said. “I think that’s sort of rare on the internet.”He usually posts between 3:45 p.m. and 4:20 p.m. Pacific time, but never on the hour. “I kind of want to keep people on their toes,” he said.Indeed, that his followers know something is coming — but not exactly when — could be key to keeping them engaged, said John Suler, a psychology professor at Rider University.The predictability “is very reassuring to people, especially during a pandemic when people have little else to do on a Friday and everything else in life seems so unpredictable,” Dr. Suler said. “But then, he does mix in a bit of unpredictable reinforcement by posting at different times of the night.”Josh Varela, a fellow at Lead for America, a local government leadership program for recent college graduates, from Ventura, Calif., has notifications turned on for the account so he and his roommate know it’s time to put aside their responsibilities for the week.“Whenever @CraigWeekend tweets, we see it as the time we’ll crack open a beer and hang out,” Mr. Varela, 23, said.Derek Milton, a 34-year-old film director from Los Angeles, said that “any anxieties, any worries, any hardships that have accumulated over the past five days are relieved by a four-second clip.” He and his friends love the video so much that they recorded a parody version of their own while on the set of a photo shoot with none other than the Weeknd.Mr. Craig was not available to comment on the “S.N.L.” clip, but the Weeknd appears to be in on the joke. In May, he tweeted, “ladies and gentlemen, the …”It wasn’t hard for Mr. Riehle to fill in the blank.“I consider that to be a call-out tweet to me personally,” he said. “I think he likes it.”Mr. Riehle starts college this fall at the University of California, Davis, where he plans to study environmental policy and planning. He intends to keep running the account while in school.“I don’t know when it will end or if it will end,” he said. “Obviously if it gets to a point to where it’s harming my relationship with the internet, then I might get rid of it, but I have no plans right now to ever stop doing it.”For all the relief his account give the weekday 9-to-5 crowd, Mr. Riehle knows that, for some workers, the tweet could also be a dispiriting reminder of impending duties. He himself works as an ambassador for Orange County’s public transit service — on the weekend.“It is kind of ironic,” he said. More

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    Why It's Not The Weekend Until @CraigWeekend Says So

    The 18-year-old behind the viral Twitter account @CraigWeekend has offered people a routine reminder to take a load off.In a scene from “Saturday Night Live,” the English actor Daniel Craig stares into the camera and flops his arms halfheartedly, as if he meant to raise them above his head but got tired halfway.“Ladies and gentlemen, the Weeknd,” he says, announcing the episode’s musical guest: the Canadian pop star Abel Tesfaye. The studio audience begins to cheer.These four seconds of footage, notable if only for Mr. Craig’s ambiguous tone (was he exasperated? dubious? expectant? neutral?), were surely forgotten by most viewers after the episode was broadcast on March 7, 2020. But not by Miles Riehle.Watching Mr. Craig on “S.N.L.,” he was amused by what he saw as a double entendre. “It sounds like he’s welcoming in the weekend, as in Saturday or Sunday,” said Mr. Riehle, 18. “I was like, ‘Man, that’s really funny.’”Following in the footsteps of Twitter accounts that tweet only on specific dates — think “Mean Girls” and Oct. 3 — Mr. Riehle claimed the handle @CraigWeekend and started tweeting the clip every Friday afternoon.When the account took off months later, in November, “I was excited to have so many people following something that I was doing,” Mr. Riehle said. Soon, interview requests started rolling in.The extra attention, while thrilling, was also daunting, he said, “because now I have to make sure I keep all these people entertained.”That said, he seems to be sustaining the interest of his more than 450,000 followers, who Friday after Friday await his announcement that the workweek has come to an end. Some people message him when they feel he has not delivered his proclamation early enough.Mr. Riehle thinks the account’s appeal can be chalked up to its positive and predictable messages during a period marked by fear and uncertainty.“Given how much stress there was going on in the world, for a lot of people it was extra potent, being able to embrace the weekend and get excited for it,” he said. Fans of the account, he said, have developed “a community of good vibes.”“It always seems like people are nice to each other in the replies and the comments and the quote-tweets,” Mr. Riehle said. “I think that’s sort of rare on the internet.”He usually posts between 3:45 p.m. and 4:20 p.m. Pacific time, but never on the hour. “I kind of want to keep people on their toes,” he said.Indeed, that his followers know something is coming — but not exactly when — could be key to keeping them engaged, said John Suler, a psychology professor at Rider University.The predictability “is very reassuring to people, especially during a pandemic when people have little else to do on a Friday and everything else in life seems so unpredictable,” Dr. Suler said. “But then, he does mix in a bit of unpredictable reinforcement by posting at different times of the night.”Josh Varela, a fellow at Lead for America, a local government leadership program for recent college graduates, from Ventura, Calif., has notifications turned on for the account so he and his roommate know it’s time to put aside their responsibilities for the week.“Whenever @CraigWeekend tweets, we see it as the time we’ll crack open a beer and hang out,” Mr. Varela, 23, said.Derek Milton, a 34-year-old film director from Los Angeles, said that “any anxieties, any worries, any hardships that have accumulated over the past five days are relieved by a four-second clip.” He and his friends love the video so much that they recorded a parody version of their own while on the set of a photo shoot with none other than the Weeknd.Mr. Craig was not available to comment on the “S.N.L.” clip, but the Weeknd appears to be in on the joke. In May, he tweeted, “ladies and gentlemen, the …”It wasn’t hard for Mr. Riehle to fill in the blank.“I consider that to be a call-out tweet to me personally,” he said. “I think he likes it.”Mr. Riehle starts college this fall at the University of California, Davis, where he plans to study environmental policy and planning. He intends to keep running the account while in school.“I don’t know when it will end or if it will end,” he said. “Obviously if it gets to a point to where it’s harming my relationship with the internet, then I might get rid of it, but I have no plans right now to ever stop doing it.”For all the relief his account give the weekday 9-to-5 crowd, Mr. Riehle knows that, for some workers, the tweet could also be a dispiriting reminder of impending duties. He himself works as an ambassador for Orange County’s public transit service — on the weekend.“It is kind of ironic,” he said. More

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    ‘Ted Lasso’ Season 2, Episode 7 Recap: What’s the Matter with Ted?

    Also: Nate seems headed to a dark place, and Keeley and Roy explore whether there can be too much of a good thing.Season 2, Episode 7, ‘Headspace’At last: A clear vision of the trajectory of this season — hinted at last week — has come into focus. It’s not about wins and losses. We still have no idea of AFC Richmond’s chances of rejoining the Premier League. We don’t even know their next opponent in the FA Cup, following last week’s shocking upset of Tottenham Hotspur.What we do know is a little bit more about Ted and the journey he appears to be on this season. But I’ll come back to that. Let’s instead start at the beginning of the episode.To Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” the show posits the downside of a perfect relationship: Your jobs, interests and romantic ideals overlap so utterly that you are around each other every single minute. At least, that’s how things feel for Keeley. As self-evidently wonderful as Roy is, living with Angry Yoda 24/7 does sound a bit exhausting.And then, another subplot, more concerning still: Nate is obsessed with social media declaring him a hero after the win over Tottenham. But his father is still utterly dismissive. While yelling at other parts of the newspaper — “Let me know if they ever talk back,” says Nate’s mother — he ignores the back-page story about his suddenly famous, soccer-coach son.“They say humility is not thinking less of yourself,” he lectures Nate. “It’s about thinking about yourself less.”Maybe throw in a “Well done, son” somewhere? Or an “I’m proud of you”? Between Jamie and Nate (with Sam presented as a counterexample), Season 2 of “Ted Lasso” is turning into an exploration of poor fathering.And that’s all before the title sequence. We’ve already had a mouthful of plot, and we haven’t even tasted Ted’s crucial, perhaps season-defining, story line. Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.After the titles, we find Ted back in Sharon’s office, where he’d collapsed on the sofa last week. He seems much better than the curled-up fetal mess he was then, but only on the surface.The manic activity Ted has displayed in the last couple of episodes is again on full display, as he fiddles around about where to sit and anxiously messes around with Sharon’s vintage water-drinking bird. (Who would have guessed that the “Doctor! Floor! Ceiling! Trash can!” scene of two episodes ago would have been one of the most revealing moments of the season?)After Ted springs a quick trio of references to “Mad Men,” the “New Yorker” and “The Sopranos,” Sharon offers her most significant line of the season to date:“Don’t worry, Ted.”Like many, I’d initially imagined that Sharon would be a new foil for Ted, the old ones — Rebecca, Jamie, et cetera — having been so completely won over. But no. She is not here, like the others, to be helped by Ted. She is here to help Ted. And he clearly needs help.This will be the first of three visits Ted takes to Sharon this episode, and two out of three will end with him storming out angrily in distinctly non-Ted Lasso (maybe more Led Tasso?) fashion. The irony, clearly deliberate, is that Ted’s profound suspicion of psychotherapy is driven in large part by the fact that it is the professionalized version of what he does himself as a nonprofessional: get inside someone’s head as a paid quasi-friend and try to “fix” them. (Sharon makes this point herself fairly elegantly.)By the end of the episode, we still have little idea of precisely what is eating at Ted beyond his recent divorce. But Sharon’s role in the season — she is played, again, by the wonderful Sarah Niles — is much clearer. Stay tuned.That said, this is still a nascent story line. Let’s go back, for now, to our two big, pre-title-sequence subplots.Nate’s state of mind, which has been headed down a dark path for most of the season, has taken a still darker turn. His abuse of Colin, both on the pitch and off — you may recall he called him a “dolt” last episode — is accelerating, with him ultimately comparing Colin to a painter whose work hangs in a Holiday Inn. (Genuine question: Are Holiday Inns a significant presence in the U.K.? Or is this one of those moments when the series’s American roots show?)One of the things I’ve appreciated about this arc so far is that it understands that a deterioration like Nate’s isn’t linear. It takes place in fits and starts, sparked — in both directions — by specific occurrences. This episode, Nate has two clear moments of contrition, of maybe resetting himself in a good way for him and others alike. The first is when Coach Beard calls him out and a visibly stricken Nate asks, “Did you tell Ted?” (Beard subsequently disapparating is a nice touch, but one I hope won’t become a shtick.)The second is when Nate apologizes to Colin in front of the whole team. I love that while the rest of the team is using unprintable nouns to describe Nate’s behavior, Dani Rojas interjects — quite accurately — that he is a “wounded butterfly.”But Nate’s moments of self-correction don’t quite take root in his fragile psyche. All it requires is one nasty social-media comment to set him off, as he threatens to make the young kit manager Will’s life a “[expletive] misery” for coming up with his gag “Wonder Kid” jersey.It’s not clear precisely where this is all going. But I think it’s fair to say that it will get worse before it gets better.The episode’s other major plotline — Keeley’s need for just an ounce of “Me Time” away from Roy — is a new one, and one that seems to have been quickly resolved. (I should note that, having worked at the same organization with my wife not once but three times, I am supremely familiar with this dilemma. It may in fact be the closest I ever come to being Roy Kent.)I’m not sure there’s much more that needs to be said about this one, except that Roy’s effort at self-correction is vastly more successful than Nate’s. If anyone associated with “Ted Lasso” wants to pay me to market the “‘Roy Is Sorry for Not Understanding Keeley’ playlist,” well, you know where to find me. I promise it will be a chart-topper.So, Keeley and Roy are probably fine. Nate is getting worse. The Rebecca-Sam flirtation remains, for now, unresolved. And Ted’s manic-depressive turn requires further exploration. But don’t worry, Coach Lasso: We got you, babe.(Lots of) Odds and EndsPerhaps the biggest surprise of the episode was what didn’t happen. Last week concluded with the Big Reveal that Rebecca and Sam are romantic Bantr buddies — but that fact remains unrevealed to either of them. The episode reminded us that it was aware of this conundrum with its awkwardly-bumping-into-one-another scene, but that was it.How great is it that Keeley and Roy each describe the other at one point as “the cat’s pajamas”?Jan Maas’s role on the show has come into clearer focus, too. As a Dutchman, he has become the show’s inveterate truth-teller. When he sides with Jamie against Roy on the question of whether Jamie should crowd a teammate on the pitch — “He’s right, actually” — even Roy has no recourse but a frustrated obscenity.Ted’s reference to the Jerky Boys and the post-caller-ID decline of crank calling hit me particularly hard, as I devoted considerable energy to that vocation as a young teen. If you lived in Connecticut in the 1980s and received a call from “Fran the Funky Man at WDOD Waterbury” asking you to sing three lines of a Rolling Stones song in exchange for concert tickets — well, I apologize.Sharon’s line about needing to be Ted’s “tormentor” in order to be his “mentor” was a good one, but the subsequent exchange — Ted: “I like that”; Sharon: “I knew you would” — was priceless.Are Higgins and his wife becoming one of the great televisual romances of the 21st century? I say yes. The “have you seen her dressed in blue” moment in the bravura, five-minute “She’s a Rainbow” sequence from Episode 5 may be the highest point of an overall series high point.It was great to see Trent Crimm, who after his breakthrough role in Episode 3 of the first season (a.k.a. “the “Trent Crimm episode”) has become a kind of mascot for the show. But do more with him than having him seek a dumb, random quote from Ted. His screen time is precious!I’m not certain how Roy feels, but if people tried to cover up talking about me by jazz scatting whenever I entered the room, I think I’d be OK with that.As a premier Roy Kent fan from the start — I actually own a Kent jersey; I don’t get Nate’s issue with novelty gear — the idea that he is a fan of “The Da Vinci Code” is almost too terrible to bear. That said, his commentary, “You can’t put it down because the chapters are so short” is pretty spot on.After a slow week last time, we’re back in the game on pop-culture references, including (in addition to those already mentioned): Vladimir Putin, “Sex and the City,” Glenn Close, “Citizen Kane,” “Ratatouille, and “Twelfth Night” (Mae’s “If music be the food of love….”). Please remind me of others I missed in comments.Last week, folks pointed out that I should have cited Esther Perel and Brené Brown, and also offered two deep, deep cuts: The David-and-Goliath reference to “Steve Wiebe vs. Billy Mitchell” cited two past world champions of “Donkey Kong” (that was evidently a thing), and Ted’s voice mail greeting, “You gotta leave your name, leave your number…,” was a riff on an old “comic” answering-machine tape called Crazy Calls. (Hard as it is to believe, that was a thing, too.) Another reader pointed out that the Rebecca-Sam relationship parallels — in names at least — the romantic will-they-or-won’t they of Kirstie-Alley-era “Cheers.” I would say that’s a coincidence, but Jason Sudeikis is George Wendt’s nephew … More

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    The Best Movies and TV Shows New to Netflix, Amazon and Stan in Australia in September

    Our picks for September, including ‘Billions,’ ‘Goliath’ and ‘Worth’Every month, streaming services in Australia add a new batch of movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for September.New to NetflixSEPT. 2‘Q-Force’ Season 1The animated series “Q-Force” is both a campy social satire and a parody of over-the-top action-adventure movies. It follows the exploits of a team of secret agents who are frequently undervalued by their government handlers, because many of these superspies are openly gay. Sean Hayes cocreated the show and also voices the main character, Agent Steve Maryweather (dubbed “Agent Mary” by his dubious bosses). Wanda Sykes, Matt Rogers and Patti Harrison voice some of the hero’s colleagues, who have to fight both the nation’s enemies and their peer’s prejudices.SEPT. 3‘Worth’Kenneth Feinberg was the attorney assigned by the U.S. government to help manage its 9/11 compensation fund, intended to get the terrorist attacks’ survivors and the victims’ families paid quickly — while saving American businesses from potentially devastating lawsuits. In the provocative drama “Worth,” Michael Keaton plays Feinberg as a well-meaning pragmatist, who changes his way of thinking about the project after many of his potential payees take offense at the idea of putting dollar values on human lives. Sara Colangelo directed and Max Borenstein wrote this film, which has a unique take on the true cost of 9/11.‘Blood Brothers: Malcolm X & Muhammad Ali’NetflixSEPT. 9‘Blood Brothers: Malcolm X & Muhammad Ali’The boxer Muhammad Ali and the activist Malcolm X were close friends for a few years in the early 1960s, leaning on each other for advice and support at a time when they were each defying an establishment determined to silence them. The director Marcus A. Clarke’s documentary “Blood Brothers” — based on a book by Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith — uses new interviews and vintage footage to tell the story of how these two men urged each other on, while also examining the circumstances that eventually drove them apart.SEPT. 10‘Kate’In this gritty thriller, Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays the title character: a skilled assassin who gets dosed with a deadly poison, leaving her with 24 hours to find out who is trying to kill her. As she races through Tokyo, Kate seeks the guidance of her longtime handler, Varrick (Woody Harrelson), while also trying to protect a teenager, Ani (Miku Martineau), who is related to one of her former targets. This story of violence and redemption puts an all-too-rare spotlight on Winstead, a fine actress and a compelling action heroine.‘Chicago Party Aunt’NetflixSEPT. 17‘Chicago Party Aunt’ Season 1The actor and comedian Chris Witaske is probably best-known as part of the cast of the Netflix series “Love,” but for several years Witaske has also run a Twitter account called “Chicago Party Aunt,” writing in the voice of a fictional Windy City long-timer who has spent some wild nights with nearly every famous Chicagoan. That Twitter feed has now been adapted into an animated series, with Lauren Ash voicing the legendary libertine Diane Dunbrowski, who knows how to find a good time in every neighborhood dive from Wrigleyville to Armour Square.SEPT. 22‘Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan’In the late 1970s, an Ohio man named Billy Milligan was accused of being a serial rapist. He was ultimately committed to a mental hospital instead of a prison term, after a team of psychiatrists determined that Milligan suffered from multiple personality disorder, and thus had no conscious awareness of having committed his crimes. The four-part docu-series “Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan” looks back at a trial and verdict which still raise a lot of questions today about mental health and justice.SEPT. 24‘Midnight Mass’The writer-director Mike Flanagan — the creator of Netflix’s “The Haunting of Hill House” — combines supernatural horror with small-town melodrama in this mini-series about a floundering fishing community which sees its fortunes start to change with the arrival of a mysterious new Catholic priest, Father Paul (Hamish Linklater). The increasingly strange and possibly dangerous phenomena that sweep across this tiny island cause the locals to face their past mistakes and regrets. Particularly shaken up is Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford), an ex-con hoping to repair his broken life without the aid of any shady miracles.Also arriving: “Afterlife of the Party” (Sept. 2), “Money Heist” Season 5, Part 1 (Sept. 3), “Kid Cosmic” Season 2 (Sept. 7), “Into the Night” Season 2 (Sept. 8), “JJ+E” (Sept. 8), “Lucifer” Season 6 (Sept. 10), “Metal Shop Masters” (Sept. 10), “Pokémon Master Journey: The Series” Part 1 (Sept. 10), “Prey” (Sept. 10), “Nailed It!” Season 6 (Sept. 15), “Schumacher” (Sept. 15), “Too Hot to Handle: Latino” (Sept. 15), “Sex Education” Season 3 (Sept. 17), “Confessions of an Invisible Girl” (Sept. 22), “Dear White People” Season 4 (Sept. 22), “My Little Pony: A New Generation” (Sept. 24), “Ada Twist, Scientist” (Sept. 28), “Sounds Like Love” (Sept. 29), “Love 101” Season 2 (Sept. 30).New to Stan‘Minari’StanSEPT. 1‘Animaniacs’ Season 1Aimed primarily at the ’90s kids who grew up watching the original “Animaniacs,” this revival mostly sticks with what fans loved the first time: zany irreverence, a blizzard of pop-culture references, and an animation style that is broadly cartoony and un-slick. The new series features the same core characters: the kooky siblings Yakko, Wakko and Dot, and the would-be world-dominating mice Pinky and the Brain. The show features a lot of the same entertaining schtick, balancing third-wall-breaking, “Looney Tunes”-style slapstick adventures with some cleverly snarky songs.SEPT. 2‘The Dissident’Bryan Fogel’s documentary “The Dissident” is an illuminating piece of investigative journalism, digging into both the scandalous murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the rise of tech-savvy authoritarian regimes around the world. The film is about how Khashoggi and the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — who has been accused of ordering the reporter’s assassination — each used the media to shape the international community’s opinions about the future of the Arab world. Fogel asks his audience to consider what becomes of society if the powerful decide which voices are heard and which crimes go unpunished.‘Billions’StanSEPT. 6‘Billions’ Season 5, Part 2This popular drama about the rivalries of the mega-rich was in the middle of another great season last year when COVID-19 shut down production. The creative team was finally able to reassemble to shoot the last five episodes, continuing a story which has seen the venture capitalist Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) try to buy respectability by founding his own bank, while the ruthless U.S. attorney Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) is using every quasi-legal method at his disposal to bring Bobby down. “Billions” fans have been waiting for over a year to see how the season ends; they should savor every juicy plot twist still to come.SEPT. 16‘Minari’Youn Yuh-jung won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in the writer-director Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical dramedy “Minari,” about a Korean immigrant named Jacob (Steven Yeun) and his wife Monica (Yeri Han), who move to rural Arkansas to establish a produce farm. Youn plays Monica’s mother, who joins the family and urges them to preserve their cultural traditions as they pursue their American dream. Chung surrounds his leads with vivid detail, placing the humor, the anxiety and the hope of this family in the context of the sometimes welcoming and sometimes alienating Southern state where they try to make a home.SEPT. 26‘Black Mafia Family’The producing team of Randy Huggins and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson (best-known for the “Power” franchise) turn to the true crime genre for their latest series, which begins in Detroit in the late 1980s. Demetrius “Lil Meech” Flenory Jr. plays his own father, “Big Meech,” who alongside his brother Terry “Southwest T” Flenory (Da’Vinchi) rose from low-level drug trafficking to become nationwide gang bosses and players in the hip-hop industry. As with Huggins’ and Jackson’s other shows, expect “Black Mafia Family” to be frank about what it takes to get ahead in the criminal underworld — and about the toll it takes on those who succeed.Also arriving: “The Zhu Zhus” Season 1 (Sept. 1), “Code 404” Season 2 (Sept. 2), “Les Misérables” Season 1 (Sept. 2), “A.P. Bio” Season 4 (Sept. 3), “Jamie’s American Road Trip” Season 1 (Sept. 3), “Scaredy Squirrel” Season 1 (Sept. 3), “Dead Pixels” Season 2 (Sept. 7), “Where the Wild Men Are” Season 1 (Sept. 8), “Wu-Tang: An American Saga” Season 2 (Sept. 9), “Spliced” Season 1 (Sept. 10), “Love, Inevitably” (Sept. 10), “The Remarkable Mr. King” Season 1 (Sept. 10), “The Departed” (Sept. 12), “Liar” Season 2 (Sept. 15), “Storks” (Sept. 15), “The Fear” Season 1 (Sept. 16), “Streamline” (Sept. 16), “They Call Me Dr. Miami” (Sept. 19), “Pacific Rim” (Sept. 21), “New Amsterdam” Season 4 (Sept. 22), “Home Economics” Season 2 (Sept. 23), “Trigonometry” Season 1 (Sept. 23), “The Town” (Sept. 26), “Supernova” (Sept. 28), “Silk Road” (Sept. 30).New to Amazon‘Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’AmazonSEPT. 17‘Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’The title character in the hit British stage musical “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” is a teenage boy who challenges the bullies at his school and ultimately wins over his classmates when he opens up about his dream of becoming a drag performer. In the movie version, Max Harwood plays Jamie, while Richard E. Grant plays one of his drag mentors and Sharon Horgan plays a teacher who urges the youngster to get back into the closet. The show’s writer Tom MacRae also wrote the lyrics to its songs, set to upbeat and crowd-pleasing music by Dan Gillespie Sells.SEPT. 24‘Goliath’ Season 4In the fourth and final season of this moody, noir-influenced legal drama, the underdog attorney Billy McBride (played by Billy Bob Thornton, in peak form) tackles the big opioid companies, joining his ambitious colleague Patty (Nina Arianda) at a high-class San Francisco firm. “Goliath” has quietly been one of TV’s best crime shows since its 2016 debut; and while it’s too bad it’s coming to an end, at least it’s going out with another season of tense confrontations, big surprises, and stellar performances.Also arriving: “Cinderella” (Sept. 3), “LuLaRich” (Sept. 10), “Pretty Hard Cases” (Sept. 10), “The Voyeurs” (Sept. 10), “Do, Re & Mi” (Sept. 17), “The Mad Women’s Ball” (Sept. 17). More

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    Mal Z. Lawrence, Noted Catskill Quipster, Dies at 88

    A popular comic in the Catskills’ heyday as a resort area, he brought borscht belt humor to audiences all over the country, including on Broadway.Mal Z. Lawrence, a mainstay of comedy in the Catskills during the latter years of that resort area’s heyday and one of the four performers who brought borscht belt humor to Midtown Manhattan in 1991 in the hit show “Catskills on Broadway,” died on Monday in Delray Beach, Fla. He was 88.His talent agent, Alison Chaplin, confirmed the death, in a hospice center.Mr. Lawrence came to prominence in the Catskills in the 1950s but soon was known all over the country, playing Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Florida and other stops on the comedy circuit where his brand of relatively mild Jewish-tinged humor was greeted enthusiastically. To a Florida audience he might joke about the Catskills; to a Northern audience, he’d poke fun at Florida.“I worked a place down there called Century Village of West Palm Beach,” one routine went. “Working there was like appearing in Madame Tussauds Wax Museum. If you didn’t have a handicapped parking sticker, there was nowhere to put your car.”The Catskills, which drew a heavily Jewish crowd, gradually declined during the 1960s as a summer vacation destination. Mr. Lawrence, though, kept the flame alive; he was still performing his borscht-belt-style routines as he neared 80, working material at venues in Florida, New Jersey, Illinois and elsewhere that would have fit comfortably into his act a half-century earlier.He recognized that his style of humor had acquired an added dimension of nostalgia, something he, Dick Capri, Marilyn Michaels and Freddie Roman turned into gold in December 1991 as the original cast of “Catskills on Broadway.” The show was little more than each of them in turn doing about 30 minutes of jokes, with Mr. Lawrence going last. Opening at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, it ran for more than a year and then enjoyed a healthy touring life.“‘Catskills on Broadway’ manages to reproduce the ambience of the Catskills,” Mel Gussow wrote in his review of the Broadway premiere for The New York Times. “The basic difference is that on Broadway there is not a nosh in sight. But there is a groaning board of jokes about eaters and stuffers. As Mr. Lawrence observes, everyone in the Catskills wears warm-up suits. Warming up for what, he asks, sumo wrestling?”Mr. Lawrence also acted, portraying secondary characters in films including “Rounders” (1998) and “Boynton Beach Club” (2005) and occasionally turning up in plays. In 1997 he was part of the Broadway cast of a revival of “Candide” directed by Harold Prince, playing (as Ben Brantley’s review in The Times described it) “a giddy assortment of supporting roles.”To play them, he shaved the mustache he had been sporting for some years.“I look 20 minutes younger now,” he told Jewish Exponent at the time.Mr. Lawrence at his home in Monticello, N.Y., in the Catskills, in about 2014. He later moved to Florida. Marisa ScheinfeldManny Miller was born on Sept. 2, 1932, in the Bronx and grew up there. “Mal Z. Lawrence,” as he variously told the story over the years, was the suggestion of an early agent, or perhaps several different agents. “Lawrence” was borrowed from a Long Island village where he was appearing. As for the Z, which stood for nothing, “My agent told me I’d get more marquee space,” he said.He was a decent baseball player as a youth and said he even tried out for the Yankees, but nothing came of it.He was drafted into the Army in 1953, and while serving over the next two years began finding his way toward a comedy career. He resembled Jerry Lewis, he said, and he teamed with another soldier to do a knockoff of Mr. Lewis’s routines with Dean Martin for the amusement of fellow servicemen.He went to work in the Catskills in 1955 at Sunrise Manor in Ellenville, N.Y. He started out as a tummler, or social director, whose job was to keep guests entertained throughout the day and encourage them to join in group activities.“I took women on walks, did Simon Says,” he recalled in an oral history for “It Happened in the Catskills,” a 1991 book edited by Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer. “The first time I did Simon Says, I gave away 30 T-shirts. I couldn’t get anyone out.”Soon he was performing, both at Catskills resorts and at small nightclubs in Eastern cities. If he never made the jump to television or film stardom like Danny Kaye, Buddy Hackett and other comics who started in the Catskills, he did work steadily.The Broadway show evolved from a one-night show at the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island that was enthusiastically received, although not everyone was convinced it would work on Broadway.“Many knowledgeable people said that it wouldn’t go,” Mr. Lawrence told The Washington Times in 1993, when the touring version of the show played the nation’s capital. “I think I was one of those people.”In 2000 he, Bruce Adler and Dudu Fisher brought a similarly styled show, “Borscht Belt Buffet on Broadway,” to Town Hall in Midtown. He was the closer in that show as well.“Pronouncing himself thrilled to be on West 43rd Street at the height of the off-season,” Lawrence Van Gelder wrote in a review in The Times, “Mr. Lawrence is soon running through topics like doddering security guards in Florida, gambling in Atlantic City, meals in Catskills resorts, old age and the effects of marriage on behavior. The audience exits smiling.”In 1980 Mr. Lawrence married Patty Heinz, who survives him. They lived in Delray Beach.Mr. Lawrence was not the type of comic to dwell on comedic principles or technique.“My philosophy is, ‘Do anything that you have to do to make them laugh,’” he told The Washington Times. “What else can we do?” More