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    Brooklyn Man Finds New Life in Crime (Writing)

    It was over lunch in 2013 that the literary agent Eric Simonoff asked Jonathan Ames, “So what do you want to do with your writing career?”Ames replied, “Have you read Richard Stark?”Simonoff confessed that he had not. Moreover, he had no idea who Richard Stark was.“Well,” Ames explained to his old friend and new agent, “I’d like to be like Richard Stark.”Richard Stark is one of the pseudonyms for the prolific writer Donald Westlake who, under that name, published over 20 novels centered on a character named Parker. The Parker series, with titles like “The Hunter,” “Butcher’s Moon” and “Nobody Runs Forever,” features a classic antihero: a no-nonsense criminal who speaks tersely and acts decisively, most often with his fists.Ames, in his 20-year writing career, had written perhaps most frequently about a character named “Jonathan Ames.” Before he departed New York for a television job in Los Angeles in 2014, he was well known in his hometown as an essayist, novelist, performer and bon vivant. “Jonathan Ames” turned up as the lead in his comedic confessional essays, collected in books like “What’s Not to Love?: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer,” and in the short story “Bored to Death,” which in 2009 became an HBO comedy series starring Jason Schwartzman. On that show, Schwartzman is a neurotic Brooklyn writer who dreams of writing pulp novels and who, inspired by his love of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, decides to advertise his services as an amateur private detective.“We were shooting the first season and we were coming up with the graphics for the opening, which showed a pulp novel called ‘Bored to Death’ opening up and showing the actual words of my story,” Ames, 57, said this month over Zoom from his home in Los Angeles. “I said, ‘Oh my God, this is so cool. I wish I was writing books with covers like that.’ And one of the writers said to me, ‘Jonathan, you have a TV show now.’”The implication, of course, being that whatever rung on the literary ladder that involves writing pulp fiction, Ames, a newly minted HBO showrunner, had long since climbed past it. “But he picked up on something,” said Ames. “The fact that, even then, my Holy Grail was to be writing crime novels.”This month, Ames has captured his personal Holy Grail, in the form of a detective novel titled “A Man Named Doll.” Published by Mulholland Books, it is the first in a proposed series (there’s already a Netflix film in the works) about a Los Angeles-based ex-cop and private detective named Happy Doll. (No spoilers, but suffice to say that the circumstances leading to his unusual first name are not, themselves, happy.)“A Man Named Doll” comes out on April 20.Crime readers may notice some superficial similarities between Doll and the kind of fabled gumshoes that Ames has long been enamored with — figures like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, or quick-fisted pulp avatars like Parker or Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. But it quickly becomes clear that Happy owes more to the rumpled Marlowe played by Elliott Gould in Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye” than to any hard-boiled toughs inhabited by Humphrey Bogart.Doll, for example, may be the first private detective in Los Angeles who’s in Freudian analysis five days a week. He is certainly the first one to describe his relationship with his beloved dog as “disturbed,” saying, “We’re like two old-fashioned closeted bachelors who cohabitate and don’t think the rest of the world knows we’re lovers.” Doll is less Jack Reacher than, well, Jonathan Ames.“He’s a neurotic Reacher with the soul of a poet,” said Joshua Kendall, the editorial director of Mulholland. When he received “A Man Named Doll,” he said, he recognized it as perfect for Mulholland, an imprint that specializes in both contemporary and classic genre fiction. But he also realized that “one of the great pleasures of the book is seeing the Ames pop out.”Of Ames’s detour toward crime writing, Simonoff, his literary agent, said, “He was clearly called in this direction. But the novel also exhibits the charm and quirkiness of classic Jonathan Ames. There’s a sweetness to it that isn’t there in the typical Parker novel.” (Since their lunch, Simonoff has happily brushed up on his Westlake.)Ames has spent most of his decades-long literary career bed-hopping promiscuously between forms and mediums: He’s been genre-fluid but pulp-curious.“Bored to Death” was a warmly satirical take on hard-boiled themes, set against a hipster Brooklyn backdrop. And on assignment from the online publication Byliner, Ames wrote a novella-length story, “You Were Never Really Here,” which was adapted into a dark and violent film directed by Lynne Ramsay and starring Joaquin Phoenix that premiered at Cannes in 2017. With that story, Ames said, “I did have this goal of not being funny at all. I just wanted to write something really lean and dark.” He loved the challenge of creating “an express train of a plot, where you can’t put it down.”There is a well-worn piece of writing advice, often traced to Aristotle, that contends that the perfect ending of any story should be surprising yet inevitable, and the fact that Ames has written a detective novel seems exactly that: surprising yet inevitable.“At a certain point in my life, starting back in the ’80s, I began to read almost entirely crime fiction,” Ames said. “You’re studying the form — you’re kind of doing an apprenticeship.”Adam Amengual for The New York TimesOther authors have veered unexpectedly into crime writing, either as a commercial diversion or out of love for the form. Graham Greene famously classified certain of his novels as “entertainments.” (Ames said, “I often liked the entertainments best of all.”) Denis Johnson wrote the pulp homage “Nobody Move,” and the Booker Prize winner John Banville wrote crime fiction as Benjamin Black.Yet for Ames, “A Man Named Doll” is not a dalliance with detective fiction so much as the consummation of a decades-long courtship. “At a certain point in my life, starting back in the ’80s, I began to read almost entirely crime fiction,” he said. “You’re studying the form — you’re kind of doing an apprenticeship.”“A Man Named Doll” feels both like the culmination of that apprenticeship and the logical successor to his comedic autobiographical writing, in which, after all, he cast himself as a lone figure roaming in the naked city, a broken romantic embroiled in adventures that often veered toward the illicit.Ames’s former teacher, Joyce Carol Oates, once gave a quote to The Paris Review that has stuck with him. Oates, he recalled, had said that, in “Ulysses,” James Joyce had used the structure of the “Odyssey” as “his bridge to get his soldiers across.”For him, pulp has become that bridge, he said.“The soldiers being my wish as a writer to observe, to describe, to form sentences, to entertain and to share my fears, my hopes, my, you know, despair — and maybe some of my courage. It’s important,” Ames added, “to try and pass on courage to the reader.”Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: The Oscars and a Greta Thunberg Documentary

    This year’s Academy Awards ceremony airs on ABC. And PBS airs a three-part documentary pegged to Earth Day.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, April 19-25. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE OLD MAN AND THE SEA (1958) 6:30 p.m. on TCM. A new documentary about Ernest Hemingway from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick has Hemingway back in the spotlight (in certain circles, at least). A few years before his death in 1961, the directors John Sturges and Fred Zinnemann came out with this Hollywood adaptation of Hemingway’s famous novella “The Old Man and the Sea.” Spencer Tracy plays the old man of the title, an aging fisher who scuffles with an enormous marlin in Cuban waters. Tracy gives “an affecting demonstration of primal fortitude,” Bosley Crowther wrote in his 1958 review for The New York Times. But the film at large is flawed, Crowther said, in part because “an essential feeling of the sweep and surge of the open sea is not achieved in precise and placid pictures that obviously were shot in a studio tank.” Call it imitation crab.SELMA (2014) 5:20 p.m. on FXM. David Oyelowo — whose directorial debut, “The Water Man,” is expected to be released early next month — plays the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in this historical drama about civil rights activists’ famous march from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery in 1965. Oyelowo is accompanied by a formidable ensemble cast, which includes Oprah Winfrey, André Holland, Wendell Pierce, Tessa Thompson and Lorraine Toussaint. Ava DuVernay, who directed, “writes history with passionate clarity and blazing conviction,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The Times. “Even if you think you know what’s coming,” Scott added, “‘Selma’ hums with suspense and surprise.”TuesdayINDEPENDENT LENS: PHILLY D.A. 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Philadelphia’s district attorney, Larry Krasner, is part of a wave of progressive prosecutors who have been elected across the country in recent years. This multipart documentary from the filmmakers Ted Passon and Yoni Brook, airing as part of PBS’s “Independent Lens” series, looks at the inner workings of Krasner’s office and the ways he and his team pursue criminal-justice reform.WednesdaySKYFALL (2012) 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. on BBC America. A year has gone by since life changed, and expectations shifted, for us all. This refers, of course, to the delay of “No Time To Die,” the newest James Bond movie, which was supposed to come out in April 2020 before being postponed by the pandemic. It’s now planned for release this fall. In the meantime, fans can revisit this highly regarded entry in the decades-old franchise, which pits Daniel Craig’s Bond against a tech-fluent villain played by Javier Bardem.ThursdayGreta Thunberg in “Greta Thunberg: A Year to Change the World.”Jon Sayers/BBC StudiosGRETA THUNBERG: A YEAR TO CHANGE THE WORLD 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Thursday is Earth Day. After audiences potentially do something proactive on behalf of the environment, they can settle down, relax and watch this three-part documentary about the climate activist Greta Thunberg. While the program, produced by the BBC, bears Thunberg’s name, it’s not a biography; it focuses on her conversations with an array of climate experts, with whom she shares the screen. “You are listening to me right now, but I don’t want that,” Thunberg says at the start. “I don’t want you to listen to me — I want you to listen to the science.”FridayA BLACK LADY SKETCH SHOW 11 p.m. on HBO. The first season of this show, created by Robin Thede and co-executive produced by Issa Rae, found comedy in a fake courtroom and an imagined, comically specific support group, in an airplane and at a wedding altar. The second season, which debuts Friday night, brings a fresh set of sketches and a slate of celebrity guests that includes the actress Gabrielle Union and the singer Miguel.SaturdayA scene from “Moana.”DisneyMOANA (2016) 6:50 p.m. on Freeform. One of the beauties of animation is the way that it allows voice actors to step into characters completely different from themselves: Eddie Murphy can play a donkey; Owen Wilson can play a talking car. There’s less of a gap between voice and onscreen presence with Dwayne Johnson’s character in “Moana,” though: He plays an impossibly muscular version of the Polynesian demigod Maui whose biceps are about the size of his head. Maui accompanies Moana (Auliʻi Cravalho), the daughter of a village chief, on a quest to save her island, and the environment. In his review for The Times, A.O. Scott called the film’s plot “a mélange of updated folklore, contemporary eco-spiritualism and tried-and-true Disney-Pixar formula.” There are, he added, “some touching and amusing zigzags on the way to the film’s sweet and affirmative conclusion.”SundayTHE OSCARS 8 p.m. on ABC. There are several ways that this year’s Academy Awards ceremony could make history. There’s a possibility that all four acting categories could be awarded to people of color. Chloé Zhao, the filmmaker behind “Nomadland,” could become only the second woman to win an Academy Award for best director (and the first Chinese woman, and the first woman of color, to win that award). Regardless of the winners, this ceremony is recognizing films released during a year in which movie theaters were largely closed, and many big-budget films were pulled from release and pushed to future dates. The best picture nominees are “Minari,” “Nomadland,” “Promising Young Woman,” “The Father,” “Judas and the Black Messiah,” “Mank,” “Sound of Metal” and “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” For results and commentary throughout the evening, follow live coverage on The Times’s app or website.Carey Mulligan in “My Grandparents’ War.” Wild PicturesMY GRANDPARENTS’ WAR 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Carey Mulligan is up for the best actress award at Sunday night’s Oscars ceremony, for her role in “Promising Young Woman.” Over on PBS, she’ll be featured in very different surroundings, as the guest on the Season 2 finale episode of “My Grandparents’ War.” The program follows famous people as they learn about their grandparents’ experiences during World War II. This episode finds Mulligan in Japan, where she explores her grandfather’s time as a British naval officer. More

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    How Helen McCrory Shone, Even in a Haze of Mystery

    She was unforgettable onstage playing seemingly serene women who rippled with restlessness.Selfishly, my first feelings on hearing that the uncanny British actress Helen McCrory had died at 52 were of personal betrayal. We were supposed to have shared a long and fruitful future together, she and I. There’d be me on one side of the footlights and her on the other, as she unpacked the secrets of the human heart with a grace and ruthlessness shared by only a few theater performers in each generation.I never met her, but I knew her — or rather I knew the women she embodied with an intimacy that sometimes seemed like a cruel violation of privacy. When London’s theaters reawakened from their pandemic lockdown, she was supposed to be waiting for me with yet another complete embodiment of a self-surprising life.Ms. McCrory had become world famous for dark and exotic roles onscreen, as the fiercely patrician witch Narcissa Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies and the terrifying criminal matriarch Polly Gray in the BBC series “Peaky Blinders.” But for me, she was, above all, a bright creature of the stage and in herself a reason to make a theater trip to London.More often than not, she’d be there, portraying women of wit and passion, whose commanding serenity rippled with hints of upheavals to come, masterly performances in masterworks by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Pinter, Ibsen, Rattigan and Euripides. Sometimes, she’d take you to places you thought you never wanted to go, to depths where poise was shattered and pride scraped raw.How grateful, though, I felt at the end of these performances, even after a pitch-bleak “Medea,” at the National Theater in 2014, which she turned into an uncompromising study in the festering nightmare of clinical depression. Granted, I often felt sucker-punched, too, maybe because I hadn’t expected such an ostensibly self-contained person to unravel so completely and convincingly. Then again, that was part of the thrill of watching her.Her “Medea,” also for the National Theater, dared to hit rock bottom before the play had even started.Richard Hubert SmithMost of Ms. McCrory’s fans felt sucker-punched by her death, I imagine. Aside from her family — who include her husband, the actor Damian Lewis, and their two children — few people even knew she had cancer. The announcement of her death was a stealth attack, like that of Nora Ephron (in 2012), who had also managed to keep her final illness a secret.I have great admiration for public figures who are able to take private control of their last days. Still, when I saw on Twitter that Ms. McCrory had died, I yelled “No!,” with a reiterated obscenity, and began angrily pacing the room.Damn it, Ms. McCrory had within her so many more complex, realer-than-life portraits to give us. Imagine what we would have lost if Judi Dench, Maggie Smith or Helen Mirren had died in her early 50s.McCrory, center, with Emily Watson, left, and Simon Russell Beale in “Uncle Vanya.”Stephanie Berger for The New York TimesLike Ms. Mirren, Ms. McCrory, at first glance, exuded a seductive air of mystery. Even in her youth, she had a sphinx’s smile, a husky alto and an often amused, slightly weary gaze, as if she had already seen more than you ever would.In the early 21st century, I saw her as the languorous, restless Yelena in Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” a role she was born for (in repertory with a lust-delighted Olivia in “Twelfth Night,” directed by Sam Mendes); as a defiantly sensual Rosalind in “As You Like It” on the West End; and (again perfectly cast) as the enigmatic friend who comes to visit in Harold Pinter’s “Old Times” at the Donmar Warehouse.In those productions, she brought to mind the erotic worldliness of Jeanne Moreau. It was her default persona in those days, and one she could have coasted on for the rest of her career. She brimmed with humor and intelligence, and I could imagine her, in another era, as a muse for the likes of Noël Coward.But Ms. McCrory wanted to dig deeper. And within less than a decade, between 2008 and 2016, she delivered greatness in three full-impact performances that cut to the marrow of ruined and ruinous lives. First came her electrically divided Rebecca West in Ibsen’s “Rosmersholm,” a freethinking “new woman” torn apart by the shackling conventions of a society she could never comfortably inhabit. Then there was her heart-stopping Hester Collyer, an upper-middle-class woman destroyed by sexual reawakening, in Terence Rattigan’s “The Deep Blue Sea.”In between, she dared to be a Medea who had hit bottom before the play even started. In Carrie Cracknell’s unblinkingly harsh production, Ms. McCrory played Euripides’s wronged sorceress as a despair-sodden woman who believed she would never, ever feel better. It was the horrible, dead-end logic of depression that drove this Medea.“Nothing can come between this woman and her misery,” observed the household nanny (played by a young Michaela Coel). But it was Ms. McCrory’s gift to lead us into that illuminating space between a character and her most extreme emotions, and to make us grasp where those feelings come from and how they have taken possession of her.I never failed to experience that flash of revelation watching Ms. McCrory. London is going to seem so much lonelier whenever I return to it. More

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    Scott Rudin to Step Back From Broadway Amid Bullying Reports

    The powerful producer of “Hello, Dolly!” and “The Book of Mormon” regrets “the pain my behavior caused” and says others will directly run his shows.Scott Rudin, a powerful Broadway producer facing renewed accusations of bullying, apologized Saturday for “troubling interactions with colleagues” and said he would step aside from “active participation” in his current shows.Rudin, who has won a raft of awards for prestige productions not only onstage but also in Hollywood, was facing renewed scrutiny over a long history of tyrannical behavior toward workers in his office following a recent article in The Hollywood Reporter. He made his apology in a written statement first given to The Washington Post.“After a period of reflection, I’ve made the decision to step back from active participation on our Broadway productions, effective immediately,” he said in the statement. “My roles will be filled by others from the Broadway community and in a number of cases, from the roster of participants already in place on those shows.”Rudin, a prolific producer of starry plays whose biggest Broadway success is the long-running musical “The Book of Mormon,” acknowledged the concerns about his behavior, without detail. Through a spokesman, he declined a request for an interview.“Much has been written about my history of troubling interactions with colleagues, and I am profoundly sorry for the pain my behavior caused to individuals, directly and indirectly,” he said in the statement. “I am now taking steps that I should have taken years ago to address this behavior.”Rudin has been dogged for decades by reports that he threatened, verbally abused, and threw objects at people who work in his office, but had continued to thrive in an entertainment industry with a long history of tolerating poor behavior by people who produce acclaimed art.The Hollywood Reporter article, coming at a time of intensified concern about abusive behavior in many sectors of society, described an assistant who said Rudin had thrown a baked potato at his head and an earlier incident in which Rudin allegedly smashed a computer monitor on a different assistant’s hand.Over the last week, some performers had begun to publicly express concerns about his dominant role in the industry. When Karen Olivo, a Tony-nominated star of “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” which was not produced by Rudin, announced a plan last week not to return to that show when performances resume, Olivo called on others to speak up, saying, “The silence about Scott Rudin: unacceptable.”Rudin is known as a detail-oriented producer involved with every aspect of the shows he produces, from casting to marketing, and his statement Saturday did not explain what stepping back from active participation means, prompting immediate skepticism from some corners of the entertainment industry.The Actors’ Equity Association, a labor union representing more than 51,000 stage actors and stage managers, called on Rudin to release his former employees from nondisclosure agreements that in some instances bar them from describing their experiences in his employ.“We have heard from hundreds of members that these allegations are inexcusable, and everyone deserves a safe workplace whether they are a union member or not,” said a statement from the union’s president, Kate Shindle, and executive director, Mary McColl.Actors Equity, joined by SAG-AFTRA and the American Federation of Musicians Local 802, had issued a statement on Monday saying that “No worker should be subjected to bullying or harassment” but not mentioning Rudin by name.Rudin, 62, has for years been a dominant figure in the American entertainment industry. He is among the handful of people known as EGOTs by virtue of winning Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony Awards, and he was able to combine a keen eye for casting with relationships in the film and theater industries to put together many starry projects in both industries.Although for a time he worked as a studio executive in Hollywood, in recent years many of his highest profile projects have been onstage. Recently, he has been active as a producer of NY PopsUp, a series of performances funded by the state in an effort to remind people of the value of performing arts and to employ some artists during the pandemic.Rudin had a sizable slate of projects in the works, and his move appears intended to allow those projects to proceed without the distraction of protests about his behavior.The most anticipated of those projects was a revival of “The Music Man,” starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, that was scheduled to begin previews Dec. 20 and open Feb. 10.Rudin, with Bette Midler behind him, accepting a 2017 Tony for the revival of “Hello, Dolly!”Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Tony Awards ProductionsBut he also had three shows running before the coronavirus pandemic shut down Broadway that were candidates to reopen once full-capacity commercial theater rebounds in New York: “The Book of Mormon”; “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a hit stage adaptation of the Harper Lee novel; and “West Side Story,” an adventurous revival of the beloved classic.“My passionate hope and expectation is that Broadway will reopen successfully very soon, and that the many talented artists associated with it will once again begin to thrive and share their artistry with the world,” Rudin said in the statement. “I do not want any controversy associated with me to interrupt Broadway’s well deserved return, or specifically, the return of the 1,500 people working on these shows.”Cara Buckley contributed reporting. 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    Americans Have Discovered the Garden, and Celebrities Want In

    Many of us turned to gardening for solace during the pandemic. Now Martha Stewart and Drew Barrymore want to guide us to green thumbs.Last spring, as the world descended into a collective panic, Drew Barrymore planted her first lawn. “I did not think I could do this,” said Ms. Barrymore, 46, who until last year did not include gardening in her exhaustive list of achievements.And yet, the actress, writer, producer, businesswoman, mother and recent television host managed to make grass grow. “It was all barren. I got the water and the rake and the bag of seed and I waited weeks and watched it grow,” she said, speaking by phone as one of her two daughters vied for her attention in the background.In early-stage pandemic fashion, she — like many other locked-down homeowners — also got chickens and planted a victory garden, growing tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants, strawberries and squash. “It was a miracle. I never knew I could do these things, I didn’t think I was capable of it,” said Ms. Barrymore, who lives on the East Coast. “I felt really empowered.”Now, she is sharing her enthusiasm for grass as the face of Instead, a new lawn-care subscription service that fertilizes grass using ingredients like molasses, wheat flour, feather meal, blood meal and alfalfa. Over the course of the growing season, subscribers who pay $132 for a small lawn or $264 for a large one will receive three packages that promise to deliver a “happy lawn” that will be “overjoyed with this special recipe.”Ms. Barrymore is the latest celebrity to seize on a moment when millions of Americans have turned to their gardens as a source of solace, and to spin it into a business opportunity. Martha Stewart was the first to read the room. She weathered the pandemic last summer by filming “Martha Knows Best” for HGTV, a reality series about life on her sprawling Bedford, N.Y., estate, followed quickly with a second series in the fall. The show is now filming its third season, to air this summer.Last October, Aly Raisman, the Olympic gymnast who frequently posts Instagram selfies with her overgrown zucchini and miniature lime trees, partnered with the indoor gardening-kit company AeroGarden to share growing tips. And in January, UrbanStems, a flower and plant delivery service, released the love fern, a potted Blue Bell fern designed with Kate Hudson’s King St. Vodka brand.Even noncommercial ventures seem to play better in the garden these days. During their March interview with Oprah Winfrey, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle took their guest on a tour not of their Montecito living room, but of their chicken coop, projecting a message that in this time of social distancing, the most intimate setting is the backyard.Americans don’t have a national gardener in the way that the British have Monty Don, who hosts “Gardeners’ World,” which is a national institution in Britain. But with this newfound appetite for homegrown tomatoes and luscious lawns, the time might be ripe for one. As the country emerges from a long winter and (hopefully) the pandemic, all those raised beds and carefully tended lawns planted last spring and summer are still out there, waiting to be tilled and seeded for another season. Someone needs to explain the difference between a shovel and a spade.One candidate for the role would be, of course, Ms. Stewart, 79, who has been schooling Americans on their pruning methods for decades. She published her first book about gardening in 1990 and sells a line of garden tools and décor. In “Martha Knows Best,” she offers housebound viewers advice on how to achieve the perfect gardening soil, plant trees and build stone pathways, among other things.“People have started this hobby of gardening that’s addictive,” said Jane Latman, the president of HGTV. “We get letters and comments on our social feed constantly. Where is the gardening? You’re HGTV. Put the ‘G’ back in HGTV.”The first two seasons of “Martha Knows Best” were filmed with a skeleton crew on Ms. Stewart’s 153-acre estate, where she was locked down with a few members of her household staff. The mogul of domesticity spent much of each episode haranguing her cheery gardener, Ryan McCallister, as he dutifully planted 18,000 daffodil bulbs and wrapped her enormous boxwoods in burlap for the winter. (A crew of silent workers stitched the burlap shut with sewing needles.) In typical Martha Stewart fashion, she also demonstrated how to carve pumpkins and make wreaths, and bantered with celebrities, including Ms. Barrymore, over video.Filming began on April 9 for the third season, which will offer viewers more of Ms. Stewart’s property and take them indoors, as pandemic restrictions loosen. “We’re going to see more chickens,” Ms. Latman said. “The audience was very interested in the chickens.”As HGTV begins to look beyond the pandemic, it still has an eye toward the outside. “The idea of home has changed over the last year and a half, and there is a nesting that people have done and will continue to do,” Ms. Latman said.“Inside Out,” a show about an interior designer and landscape designer squaring off to win the larger share of a homeowner’s budget, premieres April 26 on Discovery+, the streaming service for Discovery, HGTV’s parent company. And “Clipped,” a topiary competition series premiering May 12, has cast Ms. Stewart as the lead judge deciding who has created the best sculpted shrubbery.If Ms. Stewart is a natural fit to channel our newfound enthusiasm for the garden, Ms. Barrymore is a less likely one. “Had they asked me two years ago, I think I probably would have been like, ‘You don’t want me, I’m not the real deal,’” she said of her partnership with Instead.But by the time the company did come around, Ms. Barrymore, who also has beauty and home-furnishings lines, was hosting a new talk show and had acquired an appreciation for dirt. Now, her Instagram feed is an eclectic mix of trying on lipstick for her beauty brand, selfies in the television studio, and videos of her hugging her chickens.In Instead’s version of landscaping, grass has an opinion and “lawning” is a verb like nesting, Zooming, adulting or Instagramming. Ms. Barrymore is the co-chief creative officer of the company, which is funded by the venture capital arm of Scotts, the lawn-care behemoth. She defines “lawning” as the act of “setting up a space for you and your family, and it’s a place that doesn’t want to be a museum that you stare at but a place that you interact with and live.”In a 30-second commercial for the lawn-care product, Ms. Barrymore, wearing a denim shirt and patchwork skirt, spreads out on an impeccable lawn and pets the grass, professing her love for it. “Happy lawn, meet happy lawn,” she says with a giggle.For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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    Helen McCrory, British Star of Stage, Film and TV, Dies at 52

    She was acclaimed for her work on the TV series “Peaky Blinders” and in three Harry Potter movies, but she first gained notice in the London theater.Helen McCrory, the accomplished and versatile British stage and screen actress who played Narcissa Malfoy in three Harry Potter films and the matriarch Polly Gray on the BBC series “Peaky Blinders,” in addition to earning critical plaudits for her stage work, has died at her home in north London. She was 52.Her death, from, cancer, was announced on social media on Friday by her husband, the actor Damian Lewis.Ms. McCrory was a familiar face to London theater audiences and to British television and film viewers well before she won wider recognition in the Harry Potter movies. She began her career in the theater in 1990, straight out of drama school, playing Gwendolen in a production of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” in Harrogate, Yorkshire. In 1993, the director Richard Eyre, who was the head of the National Theater, cast her in the leading role in his production of Arthur Wing Pinero’s comic play “Trelawny of the ‘Wells,’” for which she earned glowing reviews.“Helen McCrory, in the title role, perfectly captures Rose’s crossover from a lovelorn ingénue to wounded woman,” Sheridan Morley wrote in The International Herald Tribune.The next year she played Nina in Chekhov’s “The Seagull” at the National Theater, alongside Judi Dench and Bill Nighy, and in 1995 she was named “most promising newcomer” in the Shakespeare Globe Awards for her portrayal of Lady Macbeth in the West End.Ms. McCrory worked steadily in the theater over the next two decades, with notable appearances as Yelena in Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” in 2002; as Rosalind in “As You Like It” in 2005 (which earned her an Olivier Award nomination for best actress); as Rebecca West in Ibsen’s “Rosmersholm” in 2008; and as Medea in 2016.“Portrayed with unsettling accessibility and nerves of piano wire by Helen McCrory,” Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times, “the Medea of ancient myth has become the sad but scary crazy lady next door, the kind who inspires you to lock up your children.”But as early as 1994, Ms. McCrory was also venturing into film and television work. In 2003 she appeared as Barbara Villiers, the mistress of Charles II, in Joe Wright’s four-part series “Charles II: The Power and the Passion,” and in 2006 she made a cameo appearance as Cherie Blair, the wife of Prime Minister Tony Blair, in Stephen Frears’s “The Queen” — a role she reprised in the 2010 film “The Special Relationship,” written, as was “The Queen,” by Peter Morgan.Ms. McCrory became known to worldwide audiences through her 2009 role as Narcissa Malfoy, the mother of Harry’s nemesis, Draco Malfoy, in “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” She played the role again in Parts 1 and 2 of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the final films in the series. (She had in fact been slated for a larger role, as Bellatrix Lestrange, in the earlier “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” but had been forced to withdraw after discovering she was pregnant; Helena Bonham Carter took over.)She was good at playing villains — the evil alien Rosanna Calvierri in an episode of “Doctor Who,” the spiritualist Evelyn Poole in the series “Penny Dreadful,” and, perhaps most notably, Polly Gray, the aunt of the gang boss Tommy Shelby, on the period crime drama “Peaky Blinders,” a role she played for its entire five-season run, from 2013 to 2019.Ms. McCrory with Jason Isaacs, left, and Tom Felton in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2” (2011).Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Brothers PicturesHelen Elizabeth McCrory was born on Aug. 17, 1968, in the Paddington neighborhood of London, the eldest of three children. Her father, Iain McCrory, was a diplomat; her mother, Ann (Morgans) McCrory, worked for the National Health Service.During her childhood, her father’s work for the Foreign Service took the family to Tanzania, Norway, Madagascar and Paris.“Dad tells me my first appearance onstage was dancing during an official visit by the French president,” Ms. McCrory said in a 2014 interview with The Times of London. “I’m pretty sure the idea of being an actress came to me around that time. Every evening at the house was like a little concert.”In her teens she was sent back to England, to the Queenswood School for Girls in Hertfordshire. She began to act while there and, after graduating, spent a year traveling around Italy before being accepted at the Drama Center London.Being an actress “was the only thing I wanted to be,” she told The Times of London in 2017, adding that she had been “incredibly lucky” to be quickly given major roles.Ms. McCrory met Mr. Lewis in 2003, when they were both appearing in Joanna Laurens’s “Five Gold Rings” at the Almeida Theater in London. “Damian’s naughty, and I’ve always loved my naughty boys,” she said last year on the BBC 4 radio program “Desert Island Discs.” They had two children, Manon in 2006 and Gulliver in 2007, and married in 2007. Although Mr. Lewis also found fame, on the television series “Homeland” and “Billions,” they maintained a low-key life in London.Ms. McCrory with her husband, the actor Damian Lewis, in London in 2017 after she was named an officer of the Order of the British Empire.Pool photo by Wpa“I’m much happier as I’ve got older,” Ms. McCrory told The Times of London in 2016. “Age has given me nothing but confidence, security and joy.” She added, “To me, ‘Helen McCrory, 47’ means nothing. ‘Helen McCrory, bad housewife and argumentative after a bottle of gin’ would be much more relevant.”In recent years she appeared on TV in leading roles in David Hare’s political drama “Roadkill” and James Graham’s “Quiz” and as the voice of a daemon in “His Dark Materials.”Last year, Ms. McCrory and Mr. Lewis spearheaded a fund-raising effort to provide meals for members of the National Health staff amid the coronavirus pandemic. Their work led to donations of close to £1 million ($1.4 million) to the Feed NHS Scheme. Just a month ago, on March 12, she appeared with Mr. Lewis on ITV’s “Good Morning Britain” to discuss the project.Her illness was not widely known, and her death came as a surprise to most. Complete information on survivors, in addition to her husband and children, was not immediately available. More

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    Head of New York Theater Workshop to Depart in 2022

    James C. Nicola, who balanced provocative programming with shows aimed at Broadway, will have served 34 years as artistic director.As the New York theater world points toward reopening, one major force within its nonprofit sector — and a central figure in its often lucrative collaborations with Broadway — is preparing to walk away.James C. Nicola, the artistic director of New York Theater Workshop, announced on Friday that he will step down in June 2022. At that point, he will have spent 34 years — nearly half his life — at the off-Broadway theater, which spawned the once-in-a-lifetime hit musical “Rent” and grew under his leadership into a steady home for provocative fare by the likes of Caryl Churchill, the Five Lesbian Brothers and the director Ivo van Hove.“I’ve been around long enough to see some of my colleagues carried out of their jobs in a pine box,” Nicola, 71, said on Thursday. “I didn’t want to go that route.”His announcement comes at a time when theaters in New York are grappling with numerous internal and external pressures. Besides the protracted closures related to Covid 19, which has wreaked havoc on theaters’ finances, several groups of theater artists who are Black, Indigenous or people of color have pointed out the overwhelmingly white and male demographics of their artistic leadership, most notably in the “We See You, White American Theater” manifesto that came out in July 2020.One of its demands was that theater leaders should view it as “an act of service to resign” if they have served in the role for more than 20 years — a benchmark that Nicola reached when George W. Bush was president. Nicola is the first prominent New York artistic director to announce his departure since then, and the process of replacing him will undoubtedly be closely watched.Asked about his replacement, Nicola said he would “love to see someone who has the trust and faith of all the constituencies of the community.”Unlike many artistic directors, Nicola was not primarily a stage director himself. He came to New York Theater Workshop in 1988 after stints in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s casting office and at Arena Stage in Washington.In recent years, the workshop has seen several works transfer to Broadway from its airy East Fourth Street theater, including the Tony Award-winning musicals “Once” and “Hadestown”; the acclaimed personal-meets-political memoir “What the Constitution Means to Me”; and “Slave Play,” which is currently nominated for 12 Tonys. (Another transfer, “Sing Street,” was two weeks away from its first preview on Broadway when the Covid-19 lockdown happened.)Nicola — who recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of “Rent,” the theater’s first Broadway transfer, with a starry online fund-raiser — says he is of two minds about the pipeline between commercial and nonprofit theater.“There are many wonderful people in the commercial Broadway world, but I think we’ve become too dependent on their enhancement money,” said Nicola, referring to the funds that commercial Broadway producers will invest in smaller productions with an eye toward larger subsequent productions.“If it’s a large project and it doesn’t have commercial enhancement, it’s probably not going to happen,” he said. “And I think that’s something we as an industry need to be really concerned about.”New York Theater Workshop still plans to present two works that were canceled last year, the Martyna Majok play “Sanctuary City” and a new adaptation of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” by Clare Barron.Until that is feasible, the theater has established an ambitious Artistic Instigators program, connecting traditional theater artists, filmmakers and digital artists on projects that subscribers can watch in their evolving states. As Nicola envisions a post-coronavirus theater landscape, he hopes theaters will learn from these innovations.“This year, we had 18,000 people view the ‘Rent 25’ gala from all over the globe,” he said. “Eighteen thousand. That kind of access — it’s hard to imagine not having the capacity to do that going forward. So maybe instead of doing eight shows a week, we do seven live shows and then stream a capture.”Members of the original “Rent” cast during the recent anniversary fundraiser.via New York Theater WorkshopBut those decisions will ultimately fall to his successor. Whoever it is, Nicola will be watching from the sidelines.“I want to absolutely stay out of it,” he said. “I think it’s completely inappropriate to be hovering or hanging out, both during the process and when that person comes in. They shouldn’t have to contend with the old guy.”He said he was at peace with what comes next.“As a child, my dad told me he thought he was going to die at 37,” Nicola said. “He didn’t, but I started thinking the same thing: Was I going to make it past 37? And oddly, I was 37 when I started at New York Theater Workshop. In a certain way, it was like the beginning of my life, not the end.” More

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    Netflix to Debut Italy’s First TV Show With a Majority Black Cast

    The creators of “Zero,” including the co-writer Antonio Dikele Distefano, say they hope viewers enjoy it so much that the characters’ racial identity becomes irrelevant.ROME — While much of the world spent 2020 in lockdowns of varying severity, the 28-year-old Italian author Antonio Dikele Distefano had the busiest year of his life.Along with working on his sixth novel and interviewing Italians of different ethno-cultural backgrounds for a television program, he spent months on the set of “Zero,” a show inspired by one of his novels that premieres on Netflix on April 21.This is Dikele Distefano’s first time co-writing a television show. Until now, he has been best known for his books, gritty coming-of-age fiction, with classic themes of heartbreak, friendship and uncertainty about the future, which have become a publishing sensation in Italy. But the work of Dikele Distefano, whose parents migrated from Angola, also integrates his experiences of being a Black Italian.And “Zero,” which refers to the nickname of the lead character, is the first Italian television series to feature a predominantly Black cast.Center from left, Giuseppe Dave Seke, Daniela Scattolin and Dylan Magon shooting an episode of “Zero.”Francesco Berardinelli/NetflixVirginia Diop and Dave Seke, who plays Omar, the lead character in the show.Francesco Berardinelli/NetflixDikele Distefano says he hopes that fact will only briefly be a talking point. He likes to cite “Coming to America,” the 1988 Eddie Murphy comedy that made more than $288 million at the box office worldwide, as an inspiration. “The film is so entertaining that you don’t even think about” the fact that the cast is all Black, he said of that movie in a Zoom interview this week. “For me, that is a victory.”In his novels, Dikele Distefano takes a similar tack, throwing light on the lives of young people, the children of immigrants, who are not considered citizens even when they are born in Italy, speak the language and share the same cultural references. They can apply for Italian citizenship only when they turn 18.The desire to change society motivates much of his work, he said, including “the idea of, in the future, having a country where my nieces and nephews can say, ‘I feel Italian.’” So far, growing calls to change the law and grant citizenship to anyone born in Italy have not gotten far in Parliament.Dikele Distefano’s raw and emotionally open approach to his writing has struck a chord with readers of his novels. While his books are shaped by his background, they home in on universal emotional truths.“People often say that we need beautiful stories,” he said. “I’ve always been drawn to real stories. Truth appeals to me.”He added, “I wouldn’t be able to tell a story far from me, something that I haven’t lived or that doesn’t belong to me.”Dikele Distefano in the Barona district on the outskirts of Milan, where “Zero” was largely filmed. His raw and emotionally open approach to writing has struck a chord with readers of his novels.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesIt was Dikele Distefano’s “authentic voice” and “clear language” that caught the attention of Netflix, said Ilaria Castiglioni, the streaming service’s manager for Italian original series. She said that he was the first to bring to Netflix Italy the experiences of second-generation immigrants in Italy and that “we were drawn to how he narrated his experience so naturally.”“Zero” is the sixth made-in-Italy series for Netflix, after the crime drama “Suburra: Blood on Rome,” now in its third season; the teenage drama “Baby,” also in its third season; the historical fantasy “Luna Nera”; the supernatural drama “Curon,” and “Summertime,” whose protagonist is a woman of Italian and Nigerian descent.Castiglioni said Netflix had seen a need to better represent Italy’s changing society. “A very important theme for us is representation, to create empathy, so that as many people as possible find themselves reflected in what they see onscreen,” she said.But “Zero” is not overtly about the struggles and discriminations faced by Black Italians, she added.“We tried to tell a story that was universal,” while recognizing the greater difficulties that Black Italians have to deal with, she said. “Our objective is to create entertainment,” she added, “and if that entertainment creates a debate, it’s a plus, but we leave that aspect to our public.”“Zero” explores the metaphorical invisibility felt by many young people facing an uncertain future. In the figure of the main character, Omar (Giuseppe Dave Seke) an often-ignored pizza delivery guy, the metaphor is made literal: He can actually will himself to become invisible. Attempting to save his neighborhood from greedy property investors, the mild-mannered Omar becomes a community superhero, joining a group of other young people who have their own useful skill sets.Characters in the show, such as Sara (played by Scattolin) and Momo (Magon), have their own useful skill sets.Francesco Berardinelli/NetflixOmar (Dave Seke) can will himself to become invisible and becomes a community superhero.Francesco Berardinelli/NetflixAngelica Pesarini, a professor at NYU Florence who focuses on issues of race, gender, identity and citizenship in Italy, said, “The fact that the main character is a dark-skinned Black man — already I think it’s revolutionary in the Italian landscape.”Though racism is rife in their country, Italians are loath to admit it to themselves, Pesarini said.“Netflix is doing a series with an almost entirely Black cast and then on the national channels you have horrific instances of racism that wouldn’t be imaginable in the United States,” she noted.Among recent examples, an Italian actress used a racist slur during an interview on the national broadcaster in March. A few days later, a satirical program on the private broadcaster Mediaset aired an old parody of a lawmaker that also used the slur. In another skit, which aired this month, the same program was again accused of racism after the hosts made fun of Chinese people. On Wednesday, one of the hosts posted a video to apologize for that episode.Pesarini, the NYU Florence professor, said, “I was thinking of all the Black Italian kids watching these programs,” and “hearing the N-word referred to them.”“It was so violent for me as an adult, I can’t imagine the damage this does for someone growing up in this country as a nonwhite Italian,” added Pesarini, who is of Italian and East African heritage.Pesarini and other activists have started a campaign, #cambieRAI (a play on the national broadcaster’s name that translates as “you will change”). She said that they had sent a letter to RAI “explaining why we were shocked and fed up and frustrated” with how Black people were represented on television in Italy. So far, there has been no response, she added.The coronavirus set the production of “Zero” back an entire year. When Italy went into national lockdown in March 2020, the cast and Dikele Distefano decided to remain ensconced in a hotel in Rome, giving them an unexpected opportunity to bond, a chemistry that is manifest in the actors’ onscreen interactions.Dikele Distefano said he was motivated in part by “the idea of, in the future, having a country where my nieces and nephews can say, ‘I feel Italian.’”Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times“We became best friends, we still speak every day,” Dikele Distefano said. That said, the tension of working within the restraints imposed by the pandemic is something he hopes never to repeat. “I would like to work in a more relaxed way,” he said, laughing.“Zero” has a carefully selected soundtrack. Dikele Distefano’s first forays into writing came via his passion for music, he said, and in his teens, he rapped under the name “Nashy.” In 2016, he founded Esse Magazine, a digital publication about Italian music and urban culture. “Rap was a school for me, the possibility to express what I was feeling in four-four time,” he said. When he discovered books, he gave up rap, he added, but without the music, “I wouldn’t be writing.”Dikele Distefano worked on the script for “Zero” alongside the writers Carolina Cavalli, Lisandro Monaco, Massimo Vavassori and Stefano Voltaggio. The eight initial episodes end in a cliffhanger that seems to beg for a second season.But Castiglioni said that Netflix had made no decision about any continuation. “For now, we’re concentrated on this series,” she said. “Let’s see how it goes and then look to the future.” More