Eliana Willis

Jim Carrey, the elastic actor and star of films like “The Mask,” “Dumb and Dumber” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” will be the latest performer to take on the role of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee, at “Saturday Night Live.”NBC said on Wednesday that Carrey will play Biden on the coming 46th season of “S.N.L.,” which begins on Oct. 3.Carrey, who has hosted “S.N.L.” several times over the years and rose to stardom on the Fox sketch show “In Living Color,” will be the latest performer to impersonate Biden on “S.N.L.”; the role has previously been played there by Jason Sudeikis, Woody Harrelson and John Mulaney.Alec Baldwin, who has been playing President Trump for “S.N.L.” since 2016, will be returning to that role.Presumably there will be plenty of work for both of him and Carrey as “S.N.L.” ramps up to cover the Presidential election season: NBC said that the show will broadcast five new episodes to start its season, from Oct. 3 through Oct. 31. No hosts or musical guests were immediately announced for these shows.These will be the first live episodes that “S.N.L.” will broadcast since the coronavirus shutdown in March. The show was forced to conclude last season with several remotely produced episodes.NBC said in a news release that it expects to allow “a limited in-studio audience at Rockefeller Center” for these new broadcasts and said that “S.N.L.” will “work closely” with the team of the governor of New York, Andrew M. Cuomo, in proceeding with this plan.“S.N.L.” said that it has added three new featured performers to its cast: Lauren Holt, a house performer from the Upright Citizens Brigade theater in Los Angeles; Punkie Johnson, who has appeared on shows like “Space Force” and “Corporate”; and Andrew Dismukes, who has worked as a staff writer on “S.N.L.”NBC also said that “S.N.L.” would be working with comedy training programs at the PIT, Second City, the Groundlings and Upright Citizens Brigade to provide funding for “a scholarship program for students of diverse backgrounds to advance their comedy careers.” More

Jerry Harris, a student featured in the Emmy-nominated Netflix series “Cheer,” was sued on Monday by 14-year-old twin brothers in Texas who say that he solicited sex, sent them sexually explicit messages via text and social media, and asked them to send nude photos of themselves.The lawsuit, filed in the District Court of Tarrant County in Texas, accuses Mr. Harris, who is now 21, of asking one of the boys for oral sex at a cheerleading competition and threatening “imminent physical bodily injury.”The boys are not named in the suit because they are minors.The suit accuses Mr. Harris of “sexual harassment, exploitation abuse and molestation” of the boys. It states they are now “limited in their ability to meaningfully interact with others due to the trauma of childhood sexual abuse.”A representative for Mr. Harris did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday. But a spokesperson for him has told People: “We categorically dispute the claims made against Jerry Harris, which are alleged to have occurred when he was a teenager. We are confident that when the investigation is completed, the true facts will be revealed.”Mr. Harris, who was a member of the cheerleading team at Navarro College in Corsicana, Texas, and at one time coached athletes at National Cheerleaders Association camps, gained acclaim on the Netflix series for his upbeat attitude and spirited pep talks and he had endorsement deals with Cheerios and Walmart. He made a guest appearance with other cast members on the Dallas stop of Oprah Winfrey’s nationwide wellness tour in February and held an Instagram chat with Joe Biden in June.He “violated his role as a mentor, trainer, coach, sexually violated the Plaintiffs,” the lawsuit said, “and used his position of authority and power over the Plaintiffs.” It also states that three organizations — the U.S. All Star Federation, Cheer Athletics and Varsity Spirit — that employed Mr. Harris or that organized or oversaw competitions he participated in as an athlete or as a coach when the behavior is alleged to have occurred did not do enough or act quickly enough to protect the boys.Mr. Harris befriended the boys when they were 13 and Mr. Harris was 19, USA Today first reported on Monday. They met him while competing in national cheerleading competitions organized and overseen by Varsity Spirit and the All Star Federation and communicated with him in person, by phone and on social media.According to the suit, they were “star struck” by Mr. Harris, who was nationally known as a cheer personality and coach. He asked for their phone numbers and Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat handles, and, the boys say in the lawsuit, the interactions became sexual in nature “almost immediately.” They also said that Mr. Harris asked that they send him “booty pics.”The complaint accuses Mr. Harris of exploiting the fact that both boys were gay and says he began sending them sexually explicit messages, including photos of his genitals and videos of him masturbating, while continuing to demand that they send nude photos of themselves. At the American Cheerleaders Association Nationals competition in Fort Worth, in February 2019, the document says, Mr. Harris, who was 19, also told one of the boys, who was 13, to follow him into a bathroom. There, the suit says, he asked him to perform a sexual act.The boys’ mother discovered sexually explicit messages, photos and videos from Mr. Harris on their phones and social media accounts around February 2020, according to the complaint. She reported what she found to the three organizations named in the lawsuit, as well as the Fort Worth Police Department and the F.B.I., one of the boys’ lawyers, John C. Manly, said.A spokesman for General Mills, which owns Cheerios, said on Wednesday that the company had suspended its relationship with Mr. Harris as soon as it learned of the allegations. He also said the company had removed all content related to Mr. Harris from its advertising.USA Today also reported on Monday that the F.B.I. was investigating allegations that Mr. Harris asked for sex and nude photos from the boys. The F.B.I. executed “court-authorized law enforcement activity” in Naperville, Ill., on Monday, its Chicago Division said. Mr. Harris owns a home there. He has not been arrested or charged with any crime.The lawsuit seeks more than a million dollars in damages from the U.S. All Star Federation, Cheer Athletics and Varsity Spirit, citing “emotional distress” and “loss of enjoyment of life.” The lawsuit states that the boys will need medical and psychological treatment, therapy and counseling.Sarah Klein, another lawyer for the teenagers, said in a statement that she feared there might be other people in the same situation. “We have seen too many examples of national athletic organizations such as U.S.A. Gymnastics, U.S.A. Swimming and others ignore sexual abuse” by those people who have a high profile, like Mr. Harris, she said. “I fear that there may be other victims in this case, and I urge them to follow the lead of our clients and report their abuse to law enforcement.”Netflix declined a request for comment on Wednesday.Cheer Athletics said that Mr. Harris was strictly an athlete participant, and that his affiliation with it ended at the National Cheerleaders Association Nationals competition on March 1, 2020. More

Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. We’re all stuck at home at the moment, so here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.‘Fox & Friend-Zoned’President Trump called into “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday and said he planned to call into the program regularly in the final weeks of the campaign. Steve Doocy, a co-host, told the president that Fox News had not agreed to giving him a weekly platform on the morning show.“You may want to do it every week, but Fox is not committed to that,” Doocy said at the end of the 47-minute call. “We’ll take it on a case-by-case basis. And Joe Biden, as well, is always welcome to join us for 47 minutes, like we just did with the president.”[embedded content]“Wow, Steve Doocy just told the president of the United States, ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you.’ Imagine that — he’s the most powerful man in the world and they’re treating him like he’s a Jehovah’s Witness who’s also selling timeshares.” — TREVOR NOAH“President Trump called into ‘Fox & Friends’ this morning and announced he will now appear on the show once a week, though he didn’t say exactly why he’s cutting back.” — SETH MEYERS“I think Trump just got ‘Fox & Friend-zoned.’” — JAMES CORDEN“That’s right, it’ll only be one call a week and 168 hours per call.” — JIMMY FALLON“Wow! That is cold. That’s like ending a date with, ‘So I’ll see you next Saturday, and every Saturday after that,’ and she says, ‘Uh, you may want to see me next Saturday, but Katie is not committed to that. We’ll take it on a case-by-case basis.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“But still, man, I want to give props to Steve Doocy for inviting Joe Biden on the show to make it seem like ‘Fox & Friends’ is a balanced news show. That was pretty cool. Yeah, at the end he was just like: ‘Just to be clear, we will also talk with Joe Biden; it’s only fair. All right, coming up next, are Democrats going to burn your house down while you sleep? We’ll discuss, but the answer is yes.’”— TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (47 Minutes Edition)“The fact that Doocy knew it was 47 minutes shows you how annoyed he was. Not 45 minutes, not an hour — 47 minutes exactly. That’s someone who spent most of a conversation staring at their watch.” — TREVOR NOAH“You know it’s been a great chat when the person you’re talking to says exactly how many minutes it’s been: ‘Well, we’ve been talking about 47 minutes, Grandma.’”— JIMMY FALLON“And by the way, if Melania ever wanted to have an affair, Trump’s Fox News interviews would be the perfect time for her to do it. [imitating Melania] ‘OK, Eduardo, my husband just called into Fox now, so we have anywhere between 45 minutes and three hours to make cold, indifferent love.’” — TREVOR NOAH“To put that in perspective, without commercials this show isn’t even 47 minutes long — and think about how long this feels some nights.” — JAMES CORDEN“After 47 minutes of talking on Fox News, Trump finally had to get off the phone and go back to his other major responsibility, watching Fox News.” — JAMES CORDEN“Forty-seven minutes. I don’t want to talk to anyone on the phone for that long.” — JAMES CORDENThe Bits Worth WatchingStephen Colbert introduced a new initiative to help Americans learn “how to vote early, easily and safely” in the states where they live.What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightThe actress Cynthia Nixon will talk with Seth Meyers on “Late Night” about starring opposite Sarah Paulson in Netflix’s new series “Ratched.”Also, Check This OutImageA new collection of works from Audre Lorde suggests the writing of the self-professed “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” is more timely than ever. More

The supermarket at the U.S. Army base in Chioggia, Italy, looks as if it could be anywhere in the world. That’s exactly the point. As Britney (Francesca Scorsese), a teen living on base, explains it to new kid Fraser (Jack Dylan Grazer), all the military stores like it are precisely alike, down to the same items in the same places in the same aisles. “So we don’t get lost,” she says.Good luck with that. Getting lost is the natural condition of humans, and teenagers in general: You wander, get waylaid, and in the process hopefully find out who you are. That process is the subject of “We Are Who We Are,” the languid, lusty, sun-baked teen drama from Luca Guadagnino (“Call Me by Your Name”) that begins Monday on HBO.We meet Fraser, in fact, staring at a “Lost and Found” sign at an Italian airport, where he has arrived with his mother Sarah (Chloë Sevigny), the new commander of the base, and his other mother, Maggie (Alice Braga). Sulky and withdrawn under a protective helmet of bleached hair — he would rather have stayed home in New York — he sets off to explore the base and Chioggia, running into a group of Army kids off for an afternoon at the beach.Introverted and flinchy, Fraser is an unsettling character to enter the story through, with an awkward, defensive personality and hints of a troubled past. At one point he slaps Sarah over a minor annoyance; at another, she accidentally cuts herself and he instinctively puts her finger in his own mouth.They fight and comfort each other intimately, and his problems seem to frustrate and terrify her. (Sevigny, who made her debut in Larry Clark’s 1995 teen-panic flick, “Kids,” is nuanced and convincing as the commanding officer uncertain on the home front.) But he is a lot of work, maybe more work than you’ll want to invest as a viewer.But “We Are” opens outward with the second episode, which shows us the same day through the eyes of Fraser’s neighbor Caitlin (Jordan Kristine Seamón, an astonishing newcomer). She’s more settled than Fraser — popular and close to her conservative father (Scott Mescudi, better known as the rapper Kid Cudi) — but is also searching for her place, experimenting with her gender expression and testing her friendships.As the two meet and form a close, platonic alliance, the focus broadens to Caitlin’s circle of friends — white and Black, Christian and Muslim, American and European, military and civilian, all thrown together in a limbo that’s both America and Italy and yet not wholly either, living a curious existence that’s both tightly regimented and exhilaratingly free.I’m not sure if this is a realistic portrait either of overseas base life or of military family dynamics, but the uncanniness of the setting feels key to the story. The series’s real setting is adolescence. The physical location is simply an otherworldly backdrop for its flirtations and fights to play out against, like an enchanted wood in a Shakespeare comedy.It’s funny that it took an Italian director to see the potential in the stories of American military kids. But then again, an American might have been more burdened by the urge to comment topically.There’s little military politics in the first four episodes (of eight), other than a slowly percolating subplot about deploying soldiers to Afghanistan. And American politics creep in only at the edges, with ads and TV footage from the Trump and Clinton campaigns (the series is set in 2016) and the MAGA hats that Caitlin’s father orders for the two of them, though campaign gear is forbidden on base.All these touches, so far, feel more like quirkily deployed set dressing than statements. Many of the supporting characters are thinly drawn, and the plot is slight and shaggy. Friends ally and drift apart, arguments whip up and dissipate like summer cloudbursts.Guadagnino’s gift here is more for atmosphere and emotion, and the episodes burst with them. They’re rich with sun and salt and a touch of melancholy. The camera revels in the Labrador-like energy with which these kids — except Fraser — leap into any available body of water.There’s a lot of leaping in “We Are Who We Are,” figurative and literal. The young characters make impulsive life decisions with the same energy they use for dangerous, illicit rides on the Army-base zip line. (Guadagnino, who shares the writing with Paolo Giordano and Francesca Manieri, also has an eye for a great visual metaphor.)All this comes together in the fourth episode, centered on an impulsive, all-night house party. It’s a finely detailed, living fresco of libido and intoxication, all these teenagers inhabiting their bodies as if they were just-unwrapped birthday presents.Last year, HBO’s teen drama “Euphoria” tried to capture this same sense of chaos but with a glum, dire, shock-the-parents sensibility, treating adolescence like a minefield. “We Are Who We Are” is content, instead, to observe and soak in the vibe, to push in its earbuds, turn up the volume and dance. More

Kevin Dobson, the actor best known for playing a pair of detectives on television — Telly Savalas’s protégé on “Kojak” and Michelle Lee’s love interest on the prime-time soap opera “Knots Landing” — died on Sept. 6 at a hospital in French Camp, Calif. He was 77.His brother Brian said the cause was complications of an autoimmune deficiency that led to heart failure.A New York City native, Mr. Dobson began acting in the late 1960s, working odd jobs at odd hours so that he could attend auditions during the day. He landed his first TV role in 1968, playing a governor on the ABC daytime soap opera “One Life to Live.”He went on to play numerous characters with a New York flair, and often a convincing New York accent, on crime and medical series like “The Mod Squad,” “Emergency!” and “Cannon.”Mr. Dobson became a more familiar face to viewers in 1973 as Detective Bobby Crocker, a sidekick of Mr. Savalas’s Lt. Theo Kojak, on “Kojak,” the wildly popular crime drama about Manhattan detectives.Four years after that show’s run came to an end in 1978, Mr. Dobson found success again when he was cast as Detective Mack MacKenzie for the fourth season of “Knots Landing,” a CBS soap opera revolving around married couples in suburban Los Angeles. His character was Ms. Lee’s paramour and, ultimately, her husband.He remained with the show until it was canceled in 1993. He reprised the role in a 1997 mini-series, “Knots Landing: Back to the Cul-de-Sac,” and joined fellow cast members to look back in a 2005 special, “Knots Landing Reunion: Together Again.”In recent years he returned to his daytime TV roots with recurring roles on “The Bold and the Beautiful” and “Days of Our Lives.”Mr. Dobson was less active on the big screen than the small one, but he did appear in some notable films, including “Midway” (1976), as part of an all-star cast that also included Henry Fonda and Charlton Heston, and the 1981 romantic comedy “All Night Long,” in which his character was married to Barbra Streisand’s.In 1981 he played Mike Hammer, the hard-boiled detective created by Mickey Spillane, in the CBS television movie “Margin for Murder.” “Mr. Dobson is given a valuable opportunity to step outside of his usual ‘nice guy’ image,” John J. O’Connor of The New York Times wrote in a review. “He makes the most of it, reinforcing Mike’s toughness with an impeccably accurate New York accent.”Kevin Patrick Dobson was born on March 18, 1943, in Queens, one of seven children of James and Rita (Walsh) Dobson. His father was the custodian for a local Roman Catholic school, and his mother was a homemaker.Growing up in an Irish-American pocket of the Jackson Heights section, he attended Monsignor McClancy Memorial High School before transferring to Newtown High School, from which he graduated in 1961. He then served for two years in the Army as a military policeman in Maryland and, after returning to New York, worked as conductor on the Long Island Rail Road and studied with the noted acting teacher Sanford Meisner.Mr. Dobson quit the railroad when he got a role in a traveling play and later began working nights as a taxi driver and in other jobs while going to auditions by day.In 1968 he married Susan Greene, a manager with Trans World Airlines. She later produced “Money, Power, Murder,” a 1989 television movie that starred Mr. Dobson.In addition to his brother Brian, Mr. Dobson is survived by his wife; another brother, Dennis; his sisters, Mary Alice Giles and Jane Booton; his daughter, Mariah; his sons, Patrick and Sean; and five grandchildren. More