Eliana Willis

There’s a statistical likelihood that your image of Steve Carell is based primarily on “The Office,” and on the films “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Anchorman” before that. In the streaming age it wouldn’t even be surprising if one of those venerable comedies was the last thing you watched him in. What are the odds that when you think of Carell you think of “Welcome to Marwen” or “Battle of the Sexes” or “Last Flag Flying,” recent movies whose box office ranged from poor to dismal?It’s too bad, because he was great in all of them, in ways that went beyond his considerable skills as a comedian. Carell’s reinvention of himself as a dramatic actor, beginning roughly with “Foxcatcher” in 2014, has been remarkable. That’s why “Space Force,” his new 10-episode series on Netflix (beginning Friday), is particularly disappointing. If we’re going to get five hours of Carell onscreen, did it have to be such a step backward?“Space Force,” which Carell created with the writer and producer Greg Daniels, his collaborator on “The Office,” tries to do a couple of things and doesn’t succeed in any very interesting or funny way at either.It is, most obviously, a satire of some of the habits and attitudes of Donald J. Trump. Carell’s character, Gen. Mark R. Naird, is put in charge of the newly formed Space Force, a branch of the military established by a Twitter-loving president to protect the satellites off which his inflammatory tweets bounce.The president of the show is unnamed and unseen but familiar. In addition to his Twitter habit, he presides over a chaotic administration and “has a name” for developing countries that can’t be repeated. The show’s humor largely flows from the scrambling, slapstick attempts of Naird and his team to satisfy the commander in chief’s “boots on the moon by 2024” pledge, and to thwart his warlike impulses as other countries, most gallingly China, steal his thunder.Fused with the relatively up-to-date political burlesque, though, is another element that harks back to Daniels’s heyday on “The Office” and “Parks and Recreation.” It’s a more sentimental workplace and family sitcom, focused on Naird’s relationships with his wife, Maggie (Lisa Kudrow), and his teenage daughter, Erin (Diana Silvers), who resents the move from Washington to the space base in rural Colorado; and with his cynical science adviser, Adrian Mallory (John Malkovich).There’s a workable comic framework in this bipartite structure. Naird seems designed to bridge a certain contemporary cultural gap. He exhibits traits that could be identified as Trumpian — a tendency to browbeat and second-guess the scientists who work for him, a readiness to question the loyalty of those with roots in exotic places like China or Belgium — though the show correlates them with his gung-ho military background rather than any political beliefs or ugly prejudices.At the same time he’s pointedly portrayed as a caring father and husband, and someone who will, at the last extreme of presidential impetuosity, take a stand against needlessly provoking other nuclear powers. Like a lot of sitcom dads, he’s a little deplorable, but he puts a human face on it. (In terms of “The Office,” he has some Michael Scott in him but he’s a lot more capable.)Carell has no problem making both sides of that equation believable and engaging — he’s a master of the quick shifts and reversals the part requires. But he’s too good for the material, which never takes off. The loony parts aren’t sharp enough, despite the efforts of Carell and crack performers like Noah Emmerich, Jane Lynch and Diedrich Bader, playing awfully broad stuffed-uniform stereotypes as Naird’s fellow joint chiefs.Malkovich is pleasingly louche as Mallory, and Silvers is funny as the angry daughter, but their scenes with Carell are bland and overly sincere and run on too long. (The episodes, at a full 30 minutes, generally feel padded.)The saving grace of the show could have been Kudrow, who, as always, can make you laugh anytime she wants, with a roll of her shoulders or a disgusted expression. But she’s not onscreen much, and her character is barely sketched — she’s part of a running joke that may pay off if the show gets another season. Still, the funniest thing in 10 episodes of “Space Force” is a five-second shot of her hair. More

Donald Trump has some ideas about fighting the coronavirus. “We hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light,” the president says, to the bafflement of nearby aides. “Supposing, I said, you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or … in some other way,” continues the president, gesturing toward her —Her? I should explain. The words are 100 percent Donald J. Trump’s. The actions belong to the comedian Sarah Cooper, whose homemade lip-syncs of the president’s rambling pandemic-related statements have become the most effective impression of Mr. Trump yet.How to medical pic.twitter.com/0EDqJcy38p— Sarah Cooper (@sarahcpr) April 24, 2020
Ms. Cooper posted that first video, titled “How to Medical,” to TikTok and Twitter in April. In a 49-second tour de force, Ms. Cooper illustrates his musings on light and disinfectant using a lamp and household cleaning products, playing the president’s puzzled aide in cutaways.She captures her Trump entirely through pantomime. She crosses her arms and bounces on her heels, like a C.E.O. filibustering through a meeting while the staff suffers. Plenty of wags seized on Mr. Trump’s bleach prescription for easy jokes, but her performance gets at something deeper: the peacocky entitlement of the longtime boss who is used to having his every whim indulged, his every thought-doodle praised as a Michelangelo.Ms. Cooper has been on a tear since, her karaoke Trump holding forth on the math of disease testing and wrestling with what it means to test “positively” for a virus. Channeling the president’s announcement that he was taking the drug hydroxychloroquine (against prevailing medical advice) as a Covid preventive, she’s a manic Willy Wonka, handing out a blister pack of pills to herself as a girl in pigtails.Long before he was elected, Donald Trump posed the challenge of being easy to imitate, and thus nearly impossible to satirize. Everyone has a Trump, and when everyone has a Trump, no one does.A big problem comes when a writer tries to take the president’s belligerent spoken jazz (“I know words. I have the best words”) and force it into comedic 4/4 time. Even the most lacerating satire has to impose coherence on Mr. Trump, which — like news reports that try to find a narrative in his ramblings — ends up polishing the reality, losing the chaos essential to the genuine article.Which maybe destined Donald Trump to be the TikTok president. The service was built around the concept of lip-sync videos, and to spoof this president, the perfect script is no script.Before Ms. Cooper’s “How to Medical,” other TikTok users riffed on a Trump ramble about the power of “germs.” Kylie Scott posted “Drunk in the Club After Covid,” lip-syncing Mr. Trump’s words as a rambling inebriate, finding 80-proof logic in the teetotaler president’s musings.“The germ has gotten so brilliant,” she mouths — cradling a drink, squinting her eyes and spiraling a finger toward her temple — “that the antibiotic can’t keep up with it.” (A TikTok search on “#drunktrump” yields a growing crop of examples.)In 2008 Tina Fey hit on a version of this with her “Saturday Night Live” impression of Sarah Palin, some of whose best lines were verbatim or near-verbatim quotes. But even Ms. Fey put some English on Ms. Palin’s English, as with the line “I can see Russia from my house,” which some people later mistook for a real quote.With Ms. Cooper, there’s the added frisson of having Mr. Trump — who boasted of sexual assault, ran on xenophobia and referred crudely to African and Caribbean countries — played by a black woman born in Jamaica. (Compare the “S.N.L.” sketch that used as a punchline the idea that Leslie Jones wanted to take over the role of the president.)It’s more than just irony. There’s something liberating about Ms. Cooper taking on a subject she couldn’t be expected to mirror, much as Melissa McCarthy was freed to imagine a hyper-aggro version of the former press secretary Sean Spicer.Instead, Ms. Cooper’s Trumpian drag is partly a caricature of performative masculinity. (Mr. Trump’s lifelong public persona has also been a caricature of performative masculinity.) There’s something provocative in a woman trying on a male politician’s unexamined confidence, his viewing of the other people in the room as temporarily useful props.It’s part an impression of Mr. Trump, part an attempt to ask whether a woman could get away with what Mr. Trump does and what that might look like. (Ms. Cooper wrote a 2018 humor-advice book titled, “How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings.”)Other Cooper videos are more minimal, like a 12-second clip of the president touting his economic record: “We are bringing our country back and a big focus is exactly that, with the, uh, minorities, specifically, if you look at, uh, the Asians.”There’s no outfit or staging. Ms. Cooper does all the work with her eyes, which dart around frantically on each “uh,” before landing somewhere offscreen and pointing on “Asians.”This is another theme of her Trump, the insistent confidence betrayed by microexpressions of terror. From Ms. Cooper’s lips, the president’s sentences become plywood bridges he’s trying to nail together, one shaky plank at a time, over a vertiginous Looney Tunes canyon.Beyond capturing the moment, Ms. Cooper’s Trump says something about what makes a good political impression. Too often, people judge it by the Rich Little standard — how much you manage to look and sound like the subject.Mimicry is a neat trick, but it’s not satire unless there’s an idea of the person, which can hit closer to the core than a pitch-perfect imitation. What Ms. Cooper and company are developing is comedy not as writing, but as a kind of live-action political cartooning.And it has applications beyond Mr. Trump. The comedian Maria DeCotis performs Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s briefing digressions about family life in quarantine as a kind of stir-crazy sitcom, in which she plays the New York governor, each of his grown daughters and one daughter’s boyfriend.All these pieces prove that creativity eventually finds ways to work its way out of apparent dead-ends: not just how to make comedy under quarantine but how to ridicule a self-satirizing political moment. Comedians are not the only people to look at our current reality and say, “I have no words.” As it turns out, you don’t need any. More

The gambling thriller starring Adam Sandler arrives on Netflix. And a mini-series about Ulysses S. Grant debuts on History. More

Season 5, Episode 4: ‘Opportunity Zone’Wendy Rhoades stares at the man opposite her. And stares. And stares. And stares some more.The man opposite her is the artist Nic Tanner, the recent recipient of a gigantic commission from Bobby Axelrod. This Renaissance Italy-style largess has him dealing with perhaps his first bout of artist’s block. Wendy has some wise words for him, but the staring comes first. Why? Because he needs fight his own way out of his artist’s block; stonewalling his demurrals and excuses is how she’s teaching him this.According to Wendy, any obstacles between him and success as Bobby’s artist-in-residence are self-imposed. She tasks him with envisioning a better future, then getting off his duffer and doing whatever it takes to get himself there.That Wendy’s act of artist-whispering is successful nearly goes without saying. She’s a performance coach, a great one in fact, and figuring out how to unlock people’s potential is what she does. So is striking up a nearly instant interpersonal chemistry with her clients; if you look at it from the right angle, it’s almost as if she were coming on to Tanner rather than coaching him. Something similar happens later when she and Bobby have dinner in their shared apartment, as a comfortable silence between friends starts feeling like … something more.But you can also see her skill at work with Taylor Mason — the person who, I’ll remind you, nearly ended Wendy’s career for using her case notes to brutally sabotage Taylor’s personal and professional life. But you can’t argue with success, and that’s exactly what Wendy helps Taylor achieve when they sit down for a second meeting with an oil executive they’re attempting to persuade to “greenwash” their company.From mortal enemies to a potentially permanent partnership in a matter of minutes? That’s the power of Wendy Rhoades.What is Bobby’s power? I wonder if, more than anything else, it’s knowing when to get the hell out of Dodge. In a grim way, that’s how his rise to the top began: He narrowly escaped death on 9/11 and made a fortune that very day. And he’s been known to high-tail it from investments that have gone belly-up, as he did when the upstate New York town of Sandicot proved to be less than the lucrative business opportunity he had anticipated.So when he puts himself in contention for investing in an “opportunity zone” in an economically depressed area of Yonkers, his hometown, it’s easy for both the town worthies and his chief rival, Mike Prince, to paint him as a serial lam artist, one who will abandon Yonkers the moment it no longer proves useful to him. It takes all of his interpersonal skill — heavily influenced by his years under Wendy’s tutelage, might I add — to convince the decision makers otherwise, by drawing on his indisputable personal history in the area.But even though he beats both Prince and Charles Rhoades Sr. — who had been sicced on the project by his son, Chuck, as a way to rattle him — and wins the day, that habit of leaving dies hard. All it takes is some thinly veiled mockery by Prince, who tells Axe he “stinks” of Yonkers, to cause Bobby to skip out on the elaborate dinner he had planned with the family currently living in the house where he grew up. He slings mild expletives at Yonkers as he leaves, as if attempting to verbally scrub off that stink — of growing up poor, of having something to prove, of needing to feel valued. For Bobby, it’s better to just beat it.And what about Chuck, the third corner of this bizarre triangle? In this episode, at least, he appears only partially committed to his own power: legally boogie-woogieing until his enemy gets tripped up. His plan to use his father to scoop the Yonkers opportunity zone out from under Axe flops thanks to his father’s inveterate racism, while a potential partnership with Prince comes up short thanks to Prince’s sense of morality. (Yeah, sure, that’ll last.)Chuck seems much more alive in the hallowed halls of his alma mater, Yale. He’s not just teaching there — he’s being taught. His election-day speech, in which he went public about being a sexual masochist, is on the syllabus of Catherine Brant (Julianna Margulies), a best-selling writer and sociology professor who seemingly specializes in sexuality. (A quick comparison of Brant and Wendy reveals her as Chuck’s type almost immediately.) While he at first doesn’t want to speak to her class about this infamous speech, he eventually gives in.Was his public confession an act of submission, or an attempt to play the dominant by strategically surrendering? Chuck frames the speech as an emotional release rather than a “carnal” one, but this is the big question about his character, isn’t it? Are his personal and professional spheres distinct, or do they overlap like a Venn diagram — master sometimes, servant others, driven always by the imbalance of power and the question of who wields it?This is a jam-packed episode of “Billions,” for what it’s worth. (As if there were any other kind?) In addition to the adventures of Wendy and Taylor and Bobby and Chuck, we see Wags try and fail to reconnect with his baby-faced Christian son, George, and decide that fathering a whole new child is easier. We see Kate Sacker warn her father, Franklin (Harry Lennix), against partnering with Axe to bring diversity to his Yonkers scheme, then divulge to Chuck that the pair plan to go into the banking business together. We see Mafee settle back into the easy camaraderie of Axe Cap, to the point where Taylor allows him to change his seat in the office rather than keep him sequestered with the Mase Cap quants.But as is custom on “Billions,” the plot beats pertaining to our main characters do much more than advance story lines. They reveal who these people are just as surely as a stare-down from Wendy Rhoades does.Loose change:The episode ends with another great heavy metal music cue: “Home Sweet Home,” by Mötley Crüe. To be honest, I would have thought Bobby’s taste in metal was a bit more refined than these hair-metal exemplars, but maybe that’s just me.Speaking of “maybe that’s just me,” I’m not sure how I feel about the show’s portrayal of Chuck and Catherine’s students. They’re a touchy-feely bunch whose aversion to discipline and espousal of concepts like “privilege” seem torn from your average right-wing “what’s wrong on campus these days” essay. Personally, I expect heavy discipline from the masochist professor. The joke practically writes itself.On the other hand, the show subtly but unmistakably highlights its gender-nonbinary character Taylor’s discomfort at being misgendered as a woman by that oil exec. “Billions” may score a few points at the expense of privilege discourse and safe spaces, but it also recognizes how much all of that simply comes down to the respect we’re willing to afford people who aren’t like us. More