Eliana Willis

If you’re particularly hungry to escape current realities, and have a susceptibility to industrial-strength sentimentality wrapped in tastefully autumnal lighting, then “Little Voice” on Apple TV+ might appeal to you. A half-hour dramedy premiering Friday about an aspiring singer-songwriter who tends bar, teaches music and walks dogs on the suspiciously clean streets of New York, it’s coronavirus-free.Created by the musician Sara Bareilles and the filmmaker Jessie Nelson, the team behind the Broadway musical “Waitress,” the series espouses a democratic ideal: Anyone can find and cultivate her own little voice, conquer her stage fright, get up before an audience and (in a future season, anyway) become a star.It takes place, however, in the Kingdom of Twee. Bess (Brittany O’Grady), the confidence-impaired heroine, navigates the gig economy in a cloud of adorable pooches and adorable students (They come in two varieties, very young and very old). She works on her songs in a storage unit that looks like an Anthropologie-appointed seraglio, next door to the unit where handsome but obnoxious Ethan (Sean Teale) is editing his film about dancing grandparents. It’s as if WeWork has spun off WeMeetCute.And there’s more. The South Asian roommate (Shalini Bathina) who plays guitar in an all-female mariachi band. The brother (Kevin Valdez) who lives in a group home for young men on the spectrum and whose adorable obsession is Broadway musicals. (Apparently it’s OK, in the name of representation, to use a bunch of guys with autism as a comic chorus. That said, they’re reasonably funny.) The first word Ethan makes when he and Bess play Scrabble: songbird. Bingo.“Little Voice” is not, on the surface, anything like “Friends,” but it weds the mechanics of that kind of glib New York sitcom with the grittier, but still fanciful, aesthetic of John Carney’s musical films like “Once” — dressing up the former, but not capturing much of the energy or the spirit of the latter. In the show’s vision of the city, musical talent is everywhere, and wherever Bess goes, people are busking. Sidewalk? Guy playing a grand piano. Central Park? Guy drumming on plastic pails. Subway platform? Old guys singing R&B.In fairness, this fairy-tale ambience is intrinsic to the show, and you may find it charming in its own right. But the story elements Bareilles and Nelson provide over the nine-episode season (three will be available Friday) don’t have enough originality or energy to get you sufficiently invested in the fantasy. (Another of the show’s executive producers is J.J. Abrams, whose “Felicity” looks dark by comparison.)There’s a tepid rom-com triangle among Bess, the caustic Ethan and an earnest, supportive musician, Samuel (played with abashed charm by Colton Ryan). There are the complications supplied by Bess’s semi-guardianship of her sibling (an increasingly common trope, also seen this season in “Stumptown” and “Everything’s Gonna Be Okay”). Most familiar is the meddling-Indian-parents routine involving the roommate, an already timeworn device that’s enlivened by the casting of Sakina Jaffrey as the mother.And Bess herself, despite an appealing, self-effacing performance by O’Grady, is more of a commercial jingle than a soulful ballad. As with the characters in Carney’s films, we’re meant to see that she’s the real thing and to take a rooting interest in her overcoming her self-imposed barriers to success. But the insecurities and familial dynamics she deals with aren’t compelling enough to attach us to her. (And Bareilles’s anodyne, mushy tunes don’t do the trick on their own.)One thing that distinguishes “Little Voice” from other musical theater-meets-karaoke shows of its type is that it acknowledges its own crowd-pleasing tendencies. Samuel gently suggests adding a backbeat to Bess’s music to cut against its treacly qualities, and an overt nostalgia for vinyl records and classic rock and soul permeates the series; Bess’s YouTube viewing runs toward old interviews with Aretha Franklin and Joni Mitchell.The effect isn’t to undercut the ambient sentimentality, though, but to highlight it. Bess may sound embarrassed when she says, “My stuff seems earnest,” but “Little Voice” isn’t making any apologies. More

I’ve watched “Peaky Blinders” more times than I can count and have tried watching numerous other shows but nothing is as good.  It has everything: the best writing, acting, cinematography, music — and Cillian Murphy. Can anything match it? — ArleneIt sounds like you have a severe, wonderful case of having a favorite show. Our tastes are not one lifelong upward trajectory, where we constantly find “better” things. It’s completely possible that you will never love another show as much as you love “Peaky Blinders.” Based on my inbox, you would not be alone! But also, having a favorite show is not a bad thing. It’s energizing. It’s pleasurable. Your quest is complete.Steer into the skid. Watch shows that have a similar vibe and use those similarities to reflect on the specifics of how much better your favorite show is than its closest brethren. One reason I like, for example, “Better Call Saul” so much is I know who else is in its weight class, and I know how many shows have had “I do things my way” kinds of protagonists and how often shows seem to forget little, but important, details. And every time another show does something stupid that “Saul” doesn’t, I feel a juicy thrill of superiority, like my horse won.So, for period dramas with lots of male pouting and no sideburns, “Boardwalk Empire” (which is available to stream with an HBO or HBO Max subscription) covers some similar territory and has those luxe production values that can hide some, but not all, sins. If you don’t mind a much slower pace and love all the biological decrepitude of period shows, try “Taboo” (Hulu), which stars Tom Hardy, who created the show with his father, Chips, and Steven Knight, the creator of “Peaky.” I wonder if grand-scale historical dramas like “Vikings” (Hulu) or the flashier “Spartacus” (Starz, or see three of four seasons free on IMDb TV) might sharpen what feels special about “Peaky Blinders,” too.Once you’re stocked up on genre context, go further afield. If you like the score to “Peaky,” I wonder if you’ll like the score from “Gentleman Jack,” which is based on a true story and is about a jazzy lesbian in Britain in the 1830s (on HBO). My favorite cinematography on TV right now is “Queen Sugar,” a present-day family drama set in rural Louisiana (Hulu). I think about the writing from “Lodge 49,” a gentle, dreamy drama about a fraternal order, and “David Makes Man,” an artful coming-of-age story, all the time because they have such distinctive voices. (“Lodge” is available on Hulu; Season 1 of “David” will be streaming on HBO Max starting July 16.)Oh, and duh, try “Deadwood” (on HBO).Can you recommend a show (maybe like “Friday Night Lights”?) for a teenage boy and his mom? As he has grown, we loved watching “Robin Hood” (surprisingly good), “Malcolm in the Middle” (also excellent) and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” and now we’re casting about. — LindsayIt’s more like “The O.C.” than “Friday Night Lights,” but try “All American,” a high school football drama on the CW starring Taye Diggs. If you’ve watched a lot of teen shows, some of its ideas will be familiar to you, but presumably your son is just arriving at the genre. I dug “Cleverman,” an Australian superhero show based on Aboriginal mythology; it can be on the bleak side, but that doesn’t strike me as a vice (on Netflix). “Malcolm In the Middle” (on Hulu) makes me think you might like other quirky single-camera family comedies like “Everybody Hates Chris,” “Fresh Off the Boat” or “The Middle.”I know we’re all tired of making our own fun during the quarantine, but this might be the time to make the selection process part of the shared activity itself and agree to try five minutes of 10 different shows (each pick five? each pick four and two chosen at random?) just to see what happens. You can even teach him what channel surfing used to mean.My spouse and I have been watching “Killing Eve” and just finished the first season of “Queen Sono.” What other female assassin shows can we watch? — Kathleen, a Times Culture editor (and devoted reader)If you wish “Killing Eve” (on BBC America) would cross pollinate with a really good episode of “The X-Files,” you will love “Orphan Black” (Amazon Prime Video), which is not strictly an assassin show but does include a central female assassin, and lots of chasing and violence and phone calls that end abruptly. I love the incongruous buoyancy of “Killing Eve,” and “Orphan” has some of that, too, like the crunch and intrigue of a pickle spear on a diner plate.If you’re getting maxed out on genuine violence and want something lighter but still in a similar space, watch the cartoon series “Harley Quinn” (DC Universe), which is a clever satire of supervillainy but keeps that “do ‘bad guys’ overcome their guilt over doing evil things, or do they never experience the guilt at all, which is actually what makes them bad?” thread that many cat-and-mouse stories rely on. It’s bold and racy in all the fun ways.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 3: ‘Chapter Three’Sister Alice is out to sea. Literally. In the shot that ends this week’s episode of “Perry Mason,” the charismatic preacher is shown blissfully adrift in her tiny ship, figuratively kept afloat by her conviction that God has spoken to her.The leaders of her congregation, however, are facing stormier seas. Sister Alice remains involved in the life of Emily Dodson even as District Attorney Maynard Barnes mounts what appears to be an airtight case against her — helped by the distraught woman’s murmur of “guilty” when asked for her plea at an arraignment hearing. To make matters worse, we can add seizures to auditory hallucinations in the tally of neurological conditions that seem to plague the preacher; when she collapses and convulses in the middle of a theatrical church service, the rich and powerful elders ensure that the show goes on around her.Then, to the horror of her mother and handler, Birdy, Sister Alice whispers — loudly enough for a nearby reporter to hear — what God has commanded her to do: raise the slain infant Charlie Dodson from the dead. That final, surrealistic shot of Sister Alice floating alone is belied by the tension and turmoil her faith has wrought in those around her.It’s a bold choice to end the episode this way. But on this show, bold choices abound. There always seems to be some new weirdness around the corner, something stranger or sharper or gorier or more romantic or more unpleasant than what is strictly called for by the standards of a whodunit.Take the plight of E.B. Jonathan, who is Perry’s de facto boss and Emily’s lawyer. Over the course of this episode, we see him suddenly struggling with what ought to come naturally to him. He repeatedly loses his train of thought. He bobbles a statement to the press. He seems perpetually one step behind in court. He notices blood in the sink after he brushes his teeth. He stares at a hummingbird outside his window so fixedly that he doesn’t hear his assistant, Della Street, calling his name.In the end, E.B. gets dumped by his client Herman Baggerly — who is busy planning the construction of a religious community with his son Matthew Dodson, recently cleared in the case — and is reduced to begging an old associate for a loan, unsuccessfully. Thanks to a precise performance by John Lithgow, Jonathan’s dissolution over the course of an hour feels both sudden and inexorable, as if it were bound to happen sooner or later. It adds a tragic dimension to a character who could have remained a stock figure in lesser hands.The same can be said of the Los Angeles police officer Paul Drake, a reluctant participant in the cover-up of key facts in the Dodson case. Followed around by the crooked and murderous Sgt. Ennis — who puts the “offensive” in “charm offensive” when he puts his hand on the belly of Drake’s pregnant wife, Clara (Diarra Kilpatrick), and pays for the couple’s groceries — he beats Perry when the private eye approaches him about his bare-bones crime scene report. When Perry ironically employs a racial slur to describe Drake’s acquiescence, Drake threatens him with the violence that, as a police officer, is his to mete out with impunity, throwing the epithet back in Mason’s face.But when his wife instructs him to go along to get along, despite knowing full well what kind of person Ennis is, it’s too much for Drake to take. (There’s a separate conversation we can have about Clara and other wife characters who, like, just don’t get it, but I’m willing to give the show the benefit of the doubt at this point.) Drake approaches Perry under cover of darkness and admits that he doctored the report, changing the facts to fit the bogus theory that Emily’s lover George Gannon killed his co-conspirators and fled the scene instead of getting killed there as well. As evidence, he proffers a broken set of dentures he recovered in the alley where Gannon fell to his death.So, like grim Prince Charmings searching for their Cinderella, Mason and his wisecracking sidekick, Pete Strickland, race to the morgue to locate Gannon’s body before it gets cremated. After fighting their way through the tangle of corpses, they locate their man and discover that the broken dentures match the fractured partial set still in his mouth. It is perhaps the most disgusting investigative breakthrough TV has seen since Will Graham was out there profiling serial-killing installation artists in “Hannibal.”But for all its darkness, “Perry Mason” still has a lighter side. Sometimes it comes out in the form of humor, like the off-color anecdote that the mortician, Virgil (Jefferson Mays), shares with Perry and Pete while they’re searching for the personal effects of the two other dead kidnappers. (“Never would’ve caught him if it weren’t for the mayonnaise,” goes the punchline. The rest is probably better left unwritten.) Pete’s grousing and grumbling and his own penchant for foul-mouthed tale-telling is another example.At other times, the show’s warmth stems from romantic chemistry. Perry combines business with pleasure when he and his girlfriend, Lupe, travel to a desert casino to investigate one of George Gannon’s old jobs, from before Gannon found Jesus. Lupe smiles when she realizes she has been dragged along on an assignment in lieu of simply having a nice New Year’s Eve date — but that doesn’t stop her from making Perry take off her high-heeled shoes and hop in a fountain with her, finally getting the New Year’s kiss she’d been demanding. The easy, sexy rapport between the actors Matthew Rhys and Veronica Falcón is such that you half expect the fountain’s water to begin steaming.For all its darkness, “Perry Mason” illuminates its world with flashes of the unexpected and the light of human connection. It could skate by as a grim-and-gritty revisionist riff on the “Perry Mason” of yore — and to an extent, that’s exactly what it is — but only to an extent. It’s too smart, too strange and sometimes too sweet for that critique to stand up in court.From the case files:Fans of great character actors take note: That’s the former Max Headroom, Matt Frewer, as the judge at Emily’s arraignment. Personally, I have a soft spot for his portrayal of the pyromaniac Trashcan Man in the old ABC mini-series adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Stand.”As Emily Dodson, Gayle Rankin is really put through her paces in this episode, whether she is screaming “Shut up!” at the top of her lungs as her husband chews her out or reeling from the illegal interrogation to which detectives Holcomb and Ennis subject her.Something to keep an eye on: Perry pays special attention to a photo representing the “Child Adoption” aspect of Sister Alice’s ministry. Combine that with her ambiguous declaration to Emily that “You didn’t kill your baby any more than I did — bad men did that,” and I think it might be time to view the good Sister as a suspect. More

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s relationship with Disney started inauspiciously. He wrote a song on spec for a holiday show. The company rejected it.“It was a holiday song, called ‘Holidays at Our House,’ and I will never play it for you,” he recalled recently. “It was not very good.”But in the years since, the partnership has blossomed, so much that Miranda recently joked about the idea that Robert A. Iger, the company’s executive chairman, might burst into his house if he talked too much about an upcoming project.The company and the composer have a mutual fandom. Miranda named his firstborn son Sebastian, partly in honor of the crab in “The Little Mermaid.” And Iger said that among the reasons he was interested in acquiring the live-capture film of “Hamilton” was that “I wanted to strengthen the partnership we have with him.”That “Hamilton” film began streaming Friday, on Disney+. Here’s a timeline of collaborations between Disney and Miranda:2011: He Pitches Dog Treats on ‘Modern Family’“I basically told them that I would run craft services to be part of the show,” Miranda told TV Guide. Instead, he was cast, by his own description, as a “pathetic loser” in an episode of “Modern Family.” The show aired on ABC, a Disney subsidiary.2012: He Takes a Leaf From ‘Timothy Green’He played Reggie the botanist in Disney’s “The Odd Life of Timothy Green.” Among his castmates: the rapper Common, who later told The New Yorker, “I will always remember us freestyling during lunchtime on the set and thinking, ‘Wow, this guy is talented.’”2015: He Joins the ‘Star Wars’ UniverseOn the night that the filmmaker J.J. Abrams saw “Hamilton,” Miranda introduced himself. According to both men, Miranda just blurted out an offer to write music for “Star Wars,” which Disney had acquired in 2012 as part of its purchase of Lucasfilm. Miranda “comes up to me … and he says, ‘Hey if you need music for the cantina, I’ll write it,’ and he walks off,” Abrams said in an interview with Jimmy Fallon. Miranda wound up contributing to two “Star Wars” sequels, co-writing with Abrams the songs “Jabba Flow” for “The Force Awakens” (2015) and the song “Lido Hey” (above) for “The Rise of Skywalker (2019). He also made an uncredited cameo as a pilot in the latter film. “I was working in Wales, and visited J.J.,” Miranda recalled in a recent interview with The New York Times. “I was just there intending to visit, and he said, ‘Do you want to put on a suit?’”2016: He Writes Songs for ‘Moana’The week Miranda found out he was about to become a father, he was hired by Disney to write songs for “Moana.” He won a Grammy for one of them, “How Far I’ll Go.” “I feel very grateful that we managed to create a Disney heroine who isn’t looking for a boyfriend,” he told The Los Angeles Times. “She’s saving her family, she’s saving her island, she’s saving the world.”2018-20: He Becomes a ‘Duck Tales’ RegularHe voiced Gizmoduck and his alter ego, Fenton Crackshell-Cabrera, in Disney’s “DuckTales” reboot. “We looked at the original character, as we do with all of our updates, and thought, ‘Well OK, he talks a mile a minute, he’s got 100 plans at once, he’s impossibly earnest, and he wants to do what’s right’,” Francisco Angones, one of the show’s writers, told Entertainment Weekly. “So we said, ‘Oh, that’s Lin-Manuel Miranda.’”2018: He Kicks Up His Heels in ‘Mary Poppins Returns’Miranda starred in “Mary Poppins Returns” as a Cockney lamplighter, an old friend of the title nanny, dancing and singing in several numbers, most memorably “Trip a Little Light Fantastic.” “As a child, of course, you’re just dazzled by the fantasy of this umbrella-wielding nanny and the world that she conjures,” he told Vogue, “but as an adult, you realize that the narrative is a modern-day fable about the importance of family above all else, particularly in times of hardship.”2020: He Looks Back on His Rap Improv Years“We Are Freestyle Love Supreme,” an 82-minute documentary about the improvisational rap troupe Miranda co-founded, is to be streamed by the Disney-owned Hulu starting July 17. (The premiere was delayed in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.) The filmmaker, Andrew Fried, began following the group in 2005; the troupe had a run on Broadway last fall and winter. “Freestyle Love Supreme probably has shaped my writing more than any other creative endeavor I’ve been a part of,” Miranda told The Times in 2018, “because it’s writing in real time in front of an audience with nothing but your brain and your friends.”Still to come: Songs set in Atlantica, and South AmericaMiranda has two major Disney films in his future.He is collaborating with the composer Alan Menken on new songs for a live-action remake of “The Little Mermaid.” The film, which Miranda is co-producing, is to star Halle Bailey as Ariel, and the cast includes Melissa McCarthy, Javier Bardem, Awkwafina and Daveed Diggs.And, working with some of the alumni of “Zootopia,” Miranda is co-writing a new animated musical film, still untitled but set in Colombia, for Walt Disney Animation Studios. More

The opening scenes of the filmed version of the Broadway musical “Hamilton,” which starts streaming on Disney Plus on Independence Day weekend, pull you back in time to two distinct periods. The people onstage, in their breeches and brass-buttoned coats, belong to the New York of 1776. That’s when a 19-year-old freshly arrived from the Caribbean — the “bastard, immigrant, son of a whore” who shares his name with the show — makes his move and takes his shot, joining up with a squad of anti-British revolutionaries and eventually finding his way to George Washington’s right hand and the front of the $10 bill.But this Hamilton, played with relentless energy and sly charm by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the music, book and lyrics, also belongs to the New York of 2016. Filmed (by the show’s director, Thomas Kail, and the cinematographer Declan Quinn) in front of a live audience at the Richard Rodgers Theater in June of that year, the movie, while not strictly speaking a documentary, is nonetheless a document of its moment. It evokes a swirl of ideas, debates, dreams and assumptions that can feel, in the present moment, as elusive as the intrigue and ideological sparring of the late 1700s.“Hamilton,” which premiered at the Public Theater in early 2015 before moving to Broadway and then into every precinct of American popular culture, may be the supreme artistic expression of an Obama-era ideal of progressive, multicultural patriotism.[embedded content]Casting Black and Latino actors as the founding fathers and their allies — Daveed Diggs as Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette, Christopher Jackson as George Washington, and Leslie Odom Jr. as Hamilton’s mortal frenemy Aaron Burr — was much more than a gesture of inclusiveness. (Jonathan Groff channels the essential, irreducible whiteness of King George III.) The show’s argument, woven through songs that brilliantly synthesized hip-hop, show tunes and every flavor of pop, was that American history is an open book. Any of us should be able to write ourselves into it.Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury and an architect of the American banking system, was Miranda’s chosen embodiment of this belief: an outsider with no money and scant connections who propelled himself into the center of the national narrative through sheer brains, talent and drive. Miranda shares some of his hero’s ambition and intelligence, and turns Hamilton into an avatar of modern American aspiration. Just like his country, he sings, he’s “young, scrappy and hungry.”The tale of his rise fuses individual striving and collective struggle. For all his sometimes comical self-regard (he has a pickup line about “my top-notch brain”), Hamilton doesn’t measure success just in personal terms. That’s Burr’s great shortcoming: He scrambles after power and prestige without taking a risk or committing himself to a principle. But Hamilton wants to make his mark by making a difference. Self-making and nation-building are aspects of a single project.“Hamilton” is a brilliant feat of historical imagination, which isn’t the same as a history lesson. Miranda used Ron Chernow’s dad-lit doorstop the way Shakespeare drew on Holinshed’s Chronicles — as a treasure trove of character, anecdote and dramatic raw material. One of the marvels of the show is the way it brings long-dead, legend-shrouded people to vivid and sympathetic life. The close-ups and camera movements in this version enhance the charisma of the performers, adding a dimension of intimacy that compensates for the lost electricity of the live theatrical experience.The glib, dandyish Jefferson is a perfect foil for Hamilton: his rival, his intellectual equal and his sometimes reluctant partner in the construction of a new political order. Though Hamilton hates it when Washington calls him son, the father of the country is also a warm, sometimes stern paternal presence in his protégé’s life. The duplicitous Burr may be the most Shakespearean figure in the pageant, a gifted man tormented and ultimately undone by his failure to make himself matter.Not that public affairs are the only forces that move “Hamilton.” I haven’t forgotten the Schuyler sisters, who have some of the best numbers and who somewhat undermine the patriarchal, great-man tendencies inherent in this kind of undertaking. Miranda weaves the story of revolutionary ferment and the subsequent partisan battles of the early national era into a chronicle of courtship, marriage, friendship and adultery that has its own political implications. Angelica Schuyler (the magnificent Renée Elise Goldsberry), the oldest of the three sisters, is a freethinker and a feminist constrained by the narrowness of the options available to women of her time and class. Her sister Eliza (Phillipa Soo), who marries Alexander, is saved from being reduced to a passive, suffering figure by the emotional richness of her songs.Still, the personal and the political don’t entirely balance. “Can we get back to politics?” Jefferson demands after an especially somber episode in Hamilton’s family life, and it’s hard to keep from sharing his impatience. The biographical details are necessary to the structure and texture of the show, but it is fueled by cabinet debates and pamphlet wars, by high rhetoric and back-room dealing, by the glory and complexity of self-government.Again: This isn’t a textbook. Liberties have been taken. Faults can be found. The problem of slavery isn’t ignored, but it has a way of slipping to the margins. Jefferson’s ownership of slaves is cited by Hamilton as a sign of bad faith (“your debts are paid because you don’t pay for labor”), but Washington’s doesn’t come up.“Hamilton” is motivated, above all, by a faith in the self-correcting potential of the American experiment, by the old and noble idea that a usable past — and therefore a more perfect future — can be fashioned from a record that bristles with violence, injustice and contradiction. The optimism of this vision, filtered through a sensibility as generous as Miranda’s, is inspiring.It’s also heartbreaking. One lesson that the past few years should have taught — or reconfirmed — is that there aren’t any good old days. We can’t go back to 1789 or 2016 or any other year to escape from the failures that plague us now. This four-year-old performance of “Hamilton,” viewed without nostalgia, feels more vital, more challenging then ever.Its central questions — “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” — are staring us in the face. Its lyrics are an archive of encouragement and rebuke. Over the years, various verses have stuck in my head, but at the moment I can’t get past the parts of “One Last Time” that are taken, word for word, from Washington’s farewell address, ghostwritten by Hamilton. And I can’t escape tears when the outgoing president hymns “the sweet enjoyment of partaking, in the midst of my fellow-citizens, the benign influence of good laws under a free government.”HamiltonRated PG-13. Bare-knuckle politics. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. Watch on DisneyPlus. More