Eliana Willis

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.As a theater-obsessed middle school kid in Santa Monica, Calif., Alexis Soloski watched a 1991 recording of PBS’s “American Playhouse” broadcast of “Into the Woods” so many times that her VHS tape became nearly unplayable. So when Lorne Manly, a senior editor on The New York Times’s Culture desk, asked her to interview a fellow theater lover, Holland Taylor, as part of an article listing 50 reasons that fans cherish PBS for the network’s 50th anniversary this month, she hesitated exactly zero seconds.“I was definitely a PBS kid,” Ms. Soloski, a freelance culture writer, said. She loved “Great Performances” and was a devoted viewer of “Mystery!” though only its animated opening sequence. “I’d stay up and watch the Edward Gorey cartoon before anyone got murdered or anything scary happened — it was the most fascinating, elegant thing I’d ever seen.”The list of 50 reasons, a who’s who of beloved PBS shows, was compiled with emotional connections like that in mind. The article is part of a package on PBS that touches on its programming past, where it could go in the future, and even the evolution of its famous pledge drives. Jeremy Egner, the television editor for The Times, said the Culture desk began discussing how to commemorate the half-century mark in April. “It seemed like a good opportunity to take a step back and look at the impact PBS has had on TV, and certainly on American cultural life,” he said.Mr. Manly, who edited the list and oversaw the package, said the idea grew out of a brainstorming meeting among several of the Culture editors in July. “We were interested in this idea of a family tree,” he said. “That became the concept of 50 programs over 50 years.”Mr. Manly asked nearly two dozen writers from inside and outside The Times to identify and reflect on their memories of some of the system’s most iconic programs. He also recruited notable names, like the celebrity cook Rachael Ray and the Grammy-winning singer and songwriter Gary Clark Jr., to share first-person reminiscences about programs that changed their lives.“The Times audience is, I think, very knowledgeable about public television and has lots of memories,” Mr. Manly said. “We tried to include shows from every era to capture the impact on different generations.”Mr. Manly and other editors emailed a Google Doc to writers to collect ideas, which generated around 80 potential programs. Mr. Egner and Meeta Agrawal, The Times’s Arts & Leisure editor, helped to narrow them down, and then Mr. Manly chose the final 50 based on writer interest and the desire to represent different eras and genres. (“There were no fisticuffs,” Mr. Egner said.)Mr. Manly said many of the writers had personal connections to the programs they wrote about. “When someone has had a formative experience with a show, that makes for really engaging writing,” he said.But Mr. Manly would like to be clear: This is not a case of one man determining the 50 best shows on PBS. “It’s definitely not supposed to be a ranking,” he said. He added that he sought out programs that were well known, of course, such as “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” Ken Burns’s documentaries and “Sesame Street.” But, he said, “we also wanted to introduce some surprises in there.”For instance, Damon Lindelof, a creator of series including “Watchmen” and “The Leftovers,” suggested “Miss Marple,” whose heroine he became infatuated with as an 11-year-old navigating his parents’ divorce. “I don’t know if that was on the original list, but he found it a powerful part of growing up,” Mr. Manly said. “So we wanted to weave that in.”Other well-known programs lurk near the top of the list: The 1973 documentary series “An American Family,” “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” Julia Child’s cooking show “The French Chef,” “Downton Abbey” and Mr. Burns’s 11-hour documentary series, “The Civil War,”This is hardly the first list Mr. Manly has edited at The Times, and he said he had learned that it is better to try to represent a wide range of programs than to try to be definitive. “I haven’t seen anyone yet who’s outraged that we left something out,” he said, though he acknowledged he had heard some good-natured grumbling from an editor’s husband about the omission of Thomas the Tank Engine.Much has changed since PBS broadcast its first program, an episode of “The French Chef,” a cooking show created and hosted by Ms. Child, on Oct. 4, 1970. But the original mission of the system remains the same: education.“PBS created TV as we know it,” Mr. Egner said. “They dealt with issues like censorship, funding and political priorities while airing some really formative programming. Now the challenge is to figure out how to survive and thrive over the next 50 years.” More

More Republican households watched this year’s presidential debates than Democratic ones, but the Republican watchers were slightly likelier to turn them off earlier in the night. And during the so-called dueling town halls by President Trump and Joe Biden, Democratic and Republican households mostly watched the town hall of their own party, according to 605, […] More

The National Comedy Center will oversee the conservation of materials and artifacts that Carson amassed in his decades-long TV career. More

“Counting the 2016 Republican primary, we’ve watched him do that 16 times,” Colbert said. “It’s excruciating. It’s like dental surgery and tonight was like getting our last wisdom tooth taken out.” More

“Sometimes I think we should move out of the city.”Grace Fraser, the extremely put-together Upper East Side therapist at the center of the HBO mini-series “The Undoing” (premiering Sunday), says that to Jonathan, her extremely roguishly charming husband, but she’s not referring to Covid-19. She’s feeling suffocated by her own wealthy white privilege, embodied in the swirling nastiness that comes with being a Manhattan private-school parent. In terms of most-talked-about pathologies of 2020, “The Undoing” bats .500.Created and written by David E. Kelley and starring Nicole Kidman as Grace, the six-episode series is, like their previous HBO collaboration, “Big Little Lies,” a murder mystery wrapped in a marital melodrama. It was based on Jean Hanff Korelitz’s 2014 novel “You Should Have Known,” whose title referred to a self-help book Grace had written and, more obliquely, to her failure to see the truth about that charming husband.The show’s new, more dire title, with its horror-movie ring, directly reflects the point of the story, as Kelley has shaped it: the undoing of Grace’s comfortable life and seemingly happy marriage amid the unraveling of her illusions about Jonathan, who fairly early on becomes the prime suspect in a sensational murder. Since the demands of the glossy melo-mystery must also be met, the show dangles (through the five episodes available for review) the possibility that Jonathan is innocent — of murder, at least — and that the enraged Grace will find a way to forgive him for his abundant other sins.This should all be sexily entertaining, and even fun, with Kidman and Hugh Grant playing Grace and Jonathan, and Kelley supplying the banter they exchange around the townhouse kitchen island. And for one episode it is. Grace is on the school auction committee, and Kelley and the director Susanne Bier make that the vehicle for an authentic and discreetly devastating portrait of the systemic smugness of her and her fellow moms.They also introduce Elena Alves (Matilda De Angelis), the sloe-eyed, full-figured mother of a scholarship student from Spanish Harlem. She lands on the auction committee like a bombshell, silently nursing her baby amid the discussion of Hockneys and free preschool admissions counseling. She also lands on the story like an archetype out of the slightly distant and distasteful past, a disruptive sexual force from the potent lower classes. But at least she’s employed sparingly, and eerily, as a device to get us into the thriller plot, with her own spooky-funny music cues when she drifts onscreen.The fun lasts a little way into the second episode, with Jonathan’s whereabouts uncertain, Grace’s nerves fraying and the shape of the mystery still unclear. It dissipates pretty quickly after that, though. The whodunit is slight and dreary, with Edgar Ramirez largely wasted as the lead detective. And the courtroom scenes, formerly a Kelley specialty, are tinny and theatrical. (Noma Dumezweni, as Jonathan’s high-priced lawyer, gives her speeches some gravitas; Sofie Grabol, of the original “The Killing,” is given nothing to do as the prosecutor.) Scene after scene, we’re put through the wringer of watching manifestly intelligent people doing stupid and highly improbable things on the witness stand, on TV or in response to late-night booty calls.The primary victim of this is Grant, for whom the part of Jonathan clearly was designed, like a pair of bespoke gloves. “How much charm do you think you have?” his lawyer asks him, and the answer is, quite a bit. In the early scenes, as he cocks his head, thickens his voice and asks Grace, in that mock-abashed way, “Would you like to be washed?,” it’s all still there.But the result of this tailoring of part to actor is that once Jonathan is the murder suspect and his secrets start to come out, the story turns on the question of whether he’s a sociopath or whether he’s, well, Hugh Grant. And that turns out to be an unwinnable proposition for the actor Hugh Grant, who, as the story progresses, resorts to self-parody in Jonathan’s moments of crisis — exaggerating the tics and hesitations we’re so fond of to try to sell the melodramatic claptrap with which he’s been saddled.Kidman fares much better — she can do tormented golden child in her sleep, and she doesn’t hit any false notes as Grace. Donald Sutherland and Lily Rabe also spruce things up in roles that are right in their wheelhouses, as Grace’s master-of-the-universe father and her high-strung best friend. Douglas Hodge makes an impression in a few completely extraneous scenes as Jonathan’s public defender; the character’s one contribution to the texture of the show is that he holds his meetings in one of New York’s great neighborhood institutions, the Lexington Avenue steakhouse Donohue’s.It’s possible, if you tune out the more risible aspects of the story, to enjoy (or bemoan) “The Undoing” for its visual evocation of a crowded, vital, pre-pandemic New York City. In that case the most important person in the production is the brilliant cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (“Slumdog Millionaire,” “T2 Trainspotting”), doing an entire TV series for the first time. He captures New York as both dream and nightmare — in not quite hallucinatory streetscapes, or in the way a walk through the city takes you constantly in and out of sun and shadow. After a while, everything else about the show is just noise. More