Eliana Willis

NBCUniversal, the media giant owned by the cable operator Comcast, has pushed out the leader of its network entertainment group amid a pending investigation into claims of workplace harassment.The company said Thursday that Paul Telegdy, the chairman of NBC Entertainment, would be leaving the company. Mr. Telegdy, a longtime television executive, was about to be investigated by outside counsel hired by NBCUniversal after accusations from several Hollywood stars, including the actress Gabrielle Union, that he fostered a toxic work environment.Ms. Union was a judge on the NBC prime-time hit “America’s Got Talent.” She was ousted from the show in 2019 after she alleged instances of racist and otherwise offensive behavior on the set. In June Ms. Union filed a harassment complaint with California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing against NBCUniversal and the show’s producers.Mr. Telegdy, a former BBC executive, was made sole chairman of NBC Entertainment in October after a series of executive departures, putting him in charge of NBC’s prime-time lineup. Earlier, he was responsible for the network’s reality programming and oversaw franchises like “The Voice” and “American Ninja Warrior,” in addition to “America’s Got Talent.”Mr. Telegdy’s departure comes as Hollywood and the broader media industry has started to face a reckoning over entrenched racism and gender discrimination on studio lots and in network boardrooms. The leadership of NBCUniversal and Comcast is composed mostly of white men, as at many other media conglomerates.After Ms. Union lodged complaints against the network, Mr. Telegdy warned her agent that she “should be careful of who she called racist,” according to her filing with the state agency. The Hollywood Reporter chronicled several instances of Mr. Telegdy’s alleged behavior in a July 31 article that prompted NBCUniversal to conduct its investigation. A spokesman for NBCUniversal said that “more information about the investigation will be forthcoming.”Separately, the company announced on Thursday a sweeping change to its leadership ranks across its NBC properties and cable networks.The company consolidated its various networks by breaking down each unit. Each channel will no longer be led individual executives and will now be overseen by Frances Berwick, who will be responsible for the business of NBC Entertainment and the cable entertainment networks, including NBC broadcast, Oxygen, USA and Syfy. Ms. Berwick had previously led the company’s lifestyle division, a group that included E! and Bravo.The company said it would hire a new head of programming for the entertainment group to work alongside Ms. Berwick. Both executives will report to Mark Lazarus, the head of NBCUniversal’s entertainment and streaming divisions.The reshuffling comes under the leadership of Jeff Shell, who took over as the chief executive of NBCUniversal at the start of this year. In May, the company announced the departure of Andrew Lack, the longtime head of the company’s news division. He was effectively replaced by Cesar Conde, the chairman of Telemundo, in a newly created role with broader oversight.NBCUniversal has come under pressure as the pandemic continues to wipe out advertising revenue and theatrical sales. The company this week started layoffs as part of a program to cut about 10 percent of its 35,000-employee work force.Total sales for the second quarter fell 25 percent, to $6.1 billion. The company’s theme parks group took a $399 million loss, and sales at Universal Studios declined nearly a fifth in the period. More

What comes after “The Good Fight”? — DouglasWhat indeed! One of the things that makes “The Good Fight” so singular is its sense of imagination and ambition, a willingness to take big swings; there just aren’t that many shows that are going for it in the same way.I’m going to assume you started with “The Good Wife,” from which “The Good Fight” was spun off, but I encourage you to watch it again. Bingeing “Good Wife,” which I had previously watched week-to-week, highlighted how subtle and specific the show is — all these small changes and tiny shifts that I only noticed up close, like how Will and Diane prioritize or don’t prioritize the other’s approval via quick glances in a meeting.For another lawyer show that strikes that classy-but-horny balance, try “The Split,” a British drama about a family of divorce lawyers who go through breakups and shake-ups themselves. The show is serious and meaty, with maybe less flair than “The Good Fight” but a little more intimacy. (Season 1 is streaming on Hulu.)If you want something equally polished and simmering with rage, but less about the law and more about business, watch “Succession.” (It’s streaming on HBO.) Brian Cox stars as the patriarch of a media empire, and his adult children are smart and vicious and hungrily unloved. Characters on “The Good Fight” and “Succession” are obsessed with reputation, though that obsession leads them down different paths, and they understand their legacies in different ways — is work your family, or is your family work?In a different vein, there’s “Goliath,” starring Billy Bob Thornton as a craggy genius lawyer. The show loves seediness and revels in the dirtbag aspects of California, but it has robust legal maneuvers and terrifically vivid characters, though I’ll warn you that it loses some potency as the seasons go on. “The Good Fight” and “Goliath” have a similar stylish confidence, the swagger of grown-up shows for grown-up people.A friend and I (she’s in Seattle; I’m in Los Angeles) have had a weekly Netflix viewing party going for about two months now where we chat online while watching something. We tend to gravitate toward darker true crime/cult documentary material (“Wild Wild Country,” “The Staircase,” “Filthy Rich,” “Holy Hell,” “Fyre”) as the commentary flows pretty naturally with those. In a deviation from our usual genre, we just started “The Last Dance.” Any suggestions on series or documentaries that would make for a good viewing party? — AmaniIf you’re part of an ESPN+ household, watch “O.J.: Made in America,” which is among the best TV documentaries of all time — fascinating and deep, true crime but not lurid. You can also find tremendous joy and options from the “30 for 30” library, which are all sports documentaries and are all at least decent; some are truly excellent. In terms of chitchat potential, start with “9.79*,” which is about the men’s 100-meter finals at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Prepare to use the OMG eyes emoji a lot as you learn about steroid use and the various open secrets of the era.For something with more of the cult-y “wow, everyone sure is tolerating a lot of bad behavior from the leader of this organization, who is also exerting tremendous control over everyone’s lives, and at some point will everyone realize the purported benefits of participating in this group are small compared to the day-in-day-out emotional and physical distress of enduring it?” vibe, watch the first two seasons of the junior college football documentary series “Last Chance U.” (The other three seasons are great, too, but have a different energy. They’re all on Netflix.)If you want more stories of people buying into a collective delusion, watch “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” (streaming on HBO and HBO Max), about the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes and her company, Theranos. Come for the juicy, terrible behavior, stay for the animation that reminds you, “Oh yeah, that invention would also leave you with a big old box of blood in your house.”After depleting most of what appeals to me from American-produced content … I fled to Australia (virtually, of course). I absolutely loved “Offspring.” I also devoured “Rosehaven,” basically a slow show about a small hamlet populated by quirky characters. Getting to know them through the seasons was as satisfying as picking leaves off an artichoke to get to the heart. Alas, now I am adrift in an empty sea. Anything to match these? — MichelleI also adore “Rosehaven” (on Sundance), and it reminds me a lot of “Please Like Me,” a similarly darling, small-scale series, this one about a young gay man trying to start his adult life. (It’s streaming on Hulu.)If you like plucky Australian heroines, watch “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries” (on Acorn), a detective show set in Melbourne in the 1920s. The costumes alone are reason to watch, and for light procedurals and endearing romance, this is tough to beat. But if you prefer your procedurals set in the present day, watch “My Life Is Murder,” starring Lucy Lawless. (That’s on Acorn.) It reminds me of “Psych” sort of, and has that kind of affection for its characters.For something more grounded, try “Tangle,” a domestic suburban drama from 2009. (Season 1 is streaming on Amazon Prime Video). If you like shows where backyard barbecues go awry, and couples gripe to each other for a good long time before bed, watch this.Series’ availability on streaming platforms is subject to change, and varies by country. Send in your questions to watching@nytimes.com. Questions are edited for length and clarity. More

Season 1, Episode 7: ‘Chapter Seven’“I am fighting — for a woman’s life!” Perry Mason yells at his friend and partner Pete Strickland. “I can’t lose, Pete! I can’t [expletive] this up like … ”He hardly needs to finish the sentence. Perry’s life up to this point has been one long series of screw-ups: a failed marriage, a dishonorable discharge, a family farm bought right out from under him by the woman he’s been dating — and now, a rupture in his relationship with his closest associate. Let Paul Drake, the well-meaning beat cop, do the investigating from now on, Pete tells Perry; Pete is getting out of the Perry Mason business.The decision comes at a key moment for Mason. Sure, he has every right to be mad at Pete for failing to successfully tail the crooked Radiant Assembly of God elder Eric Seidel — and if he had known of Seidel’s subsequent fate, he would have been even angrier. Thanks to the investigative efforts of Pete, Perry and Paul, Mason is on the verge of a breakthrough that could clear his client, Emily Dodson, of the murder of her infant son Charlie. But with Easter Sunday looming, and Sister Alice’s promise to raise Charlie from the dead with it, the clock is ticking — and, by episode’s end, it runs out.At least the contours of the scheme that got poor Charlie killed are now in clearer focus. Elder Seidel, desperate to keep the church afloat after disastrous financial mismanagement and real-estate boondoggles, uses George Gannon, the church’s accountant and cooker of books, and Sgt. Ennis, Seidel’s old acquaintance from his union-busting days, to pull off Charlie’s kidnapping and hold him for ransom. He knows that the baby’s paternal grandfather, the fellow church elder Herman Baggerly, is good for it.But when the baby won’t stop crying while in his kidnappers’ clutches, Ennis enlists a lactating Chinese-American sex worker to breastfeed the boy. Tragically, the heroin in her bloodstream winds up killing the poor child. Stitching open the baby’s eyes was a trick to make him look alive for the ransom handoff.Pretty much everything Ennis has done since has been to cover his tracks, notably murdering all of his co-conspirators. The wet nurse, having outlived her usefulness to Ennis, appears to have been given a hot shot and overdosed. Seidel is brutally stabbed to death this week in one of the show’s most vicious scenes to date. And it would have worked, too, if it weren’t for that pesky Perry Mason, who announces his intention to break Ennis on the stand. Raymond Burr would be proud of that promised maneuver; heck, he would probably be plenty chuffed to see Mason using Hicks’s testimony to reveal the church’s money woes in the first place.One hundred thousand dollars in debt? The very same amount demanded by the kidnappers? That should be some food for the jury’s thought.But even as the truth of the Charlie Dodson case becomes plain for perhaps the first time, “Perry Mason” finds time for other plotlines, other emotional tones. Personally, I can’t stop thinking of Sister Alice in this episode, as this week’s episode both begins and ends with scenes that center on her.In the first, we see her as a teenager, walking through a field of flowers as her mother attends to their car, which is out of gas. When an ostensible good Samaritan reveals his true colors by wordlessly demanding sexual access to Alice in exchange for his help with getting them to the next town, Mother Birdy acquiesces. If this was the first time that Alice the human being was exploited so that Sister Alice the prophet could live on, it was certainly not the last.Case in point: the Easter Sunday debacle at Charlie Dodson’s grave. Still hearing the voices in her head that have been with her at least as early as that opening flashback, Sister Alice does her thing over the tiny exhumed coffin; the struggle to open it that ensues is our first indication that all will not go according to plan. Sure enough, a near riot breaks out when the coffin is opened … and revealed to be empty. Perry and Della race a devastated Emily Dodson, who now wants only to join her baby in death, to safety. But Birdy and Alice take off in another direction, which Birdy quickly re-routs on an obviously preplanned detour.There, in the middle of the street, onlookers have found a living baby, one Birdy claims is Charlie Dodson returned to life.What follows is admirably ambiguous. Bloodied from the chaos at the grave site, Sister Alice watches her mother proclaim Alice’s success in resurrecting the baby — and runs away, by herself, blood streaming from her broken nose, silk garments catching the wind behind her. Is she smiling in the episode’s final shot? Is it a smile of triumph or, more likely, one of bitter recognition of her mother’s skulduggery in producing a fake miracle in lieu of a real one?From the case files:When Perry infiltrates the Chinese brothel where Ennis did his recruiting, he’s on the verge of getting beaten down by the place’s muscle when Paul intervenes to save him with a gun. I’m a big Pete Strickland fan, but it’s hard to imagine him pulling off a similar rescue.Here’s one to file away for later: Like his friend Della Street, the deputy district attorney Hamilton Burger is secretly gay. Given that he played the role of Perry’s primary antagonist in the old “Perry Mason” series, you have to wonder how this will play out in the 2020s reboot. More