Eliana Willis

Leslie Odom Jr. met Josh Gad when they were drama students at Carnegie Mellon. And when Gad calls, usually about some weirdly wonderful little project, Odom tends to pick up the phone. “I always know that it’s going to be a delightful experience,” Odom said, “because it’s no secret: Josh is a delightful dude.”The admiration is apparently mutual. In “Central Park,” a new animated musical series on Apple TV Plus, Odom is the voice of Owen Tillerman, the park’s devoted manager, battling forces intent on destroying his beloved oasis. It’s a role that Gad, one of the show’s creators and stars, wrote with Odom in mind.“Central Park” also shows a softer side of Odom, most famous for his Tony-winning portrayal of Aaron Burr in the Broadway juggernaut “Hamilton.” (Disney Plus will stream a movie version beginning July 3.)Late last year, Odom released “Mr,” his first album of original material, and in early March set out on his Stronger Magic Tour. But the pandemic soon forced him back to Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, the actress Nicolette Robinson (“Waitress”), and their 3-year-old daughter, Lucille. On a phone call, Odom elaborated on the 10 quarantine essentials that have kept him going. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.1. Billie Holiday at Carnegie HallI haven’t been home for this long a stretch since my kid has been born. I’ve never had the pleasure of putting my daughter to bed every single night. Bath time is part of the wind down for bedtime for her, and I’ve taken that as a time to help lay a really good musical foundation. One of my dad’s favorite games was that he would have his music on, and he would quiz me: Who’s this? Who’s that? And it gave me great pleasure to get the answer right. Lucille can recognize Billie’s voice now. When I ask her, “Who’s that?,” she says, “Billie Holiday.”2. “The Sopranos”I’m in the prequel David Chase wrote that deals with a pivotal summer in young Tony’s life. That audition came up fast, so I watched a couple of episodes just to learn what I could. Then I thought I would watch all six seasons. Chase writes about family and brutality and violence and criminality, but I’ve never seen it handled with quite the same economy or eloquence. There’s so much poetry in the series, all the dream stuff, plus the whole notion that a guy like Tony is putting himself on the proverbial couch. Watching someone do the hard work on themselves leads to powerful change, because it inspires someone else to do the same thing.3. Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”After I saw “The Pieces I Am,” the Toni Morrison documentary, I was like, it would be worth my time to complete my education. I’d read “The Bluest Eye,” “Song of Solomon” and maybe one other book. So at the top of quarantine, I picked “Beloved.” Sometimes it’s hard to carve out the time to sit and peacefully read with a toddler, so books on tape have been great — that one in particular, because Ms. Morrison reads it herself. I’ve had a very fun time toggling back and forth between the book and the audiobook, to have her tell the story to me. I think I know something; I know what it meant to me. And then I’ll hear her read the same phrase and it opens it up in a whole different way.4. HypeMiCWe are recording “Central Park” in quarantine. They sent us any equipment that we didn’t have so that we could keep the work going. So I’ve been recording from home. Between that and the concerts, the benefits and the fund-raisers that we’re doing online, the HypeMiC has become my favorite little mic. It sounds great.5. Words With FriendsWith all the free time, it’s been a great source of time suckage, but also of strategy and staying nimble and keeping the brain moving a little bit. I’m very, very focused right now on the six-letter word. That’s all I care about.6. Orange ChickenI like to eat good food, which means in quarantine you have got to cook good food. My in-laws, who live about five blocks away, have an orange tree, and I found a great recipe where you essentially just make a reduction from the oranges. Orange, ginger, soy sauce are the main ingredients, chicken and rice or noodles. I’ve been able to do a vegetable lo mein, a fried rice with it, and I get my Asian food fix. So orange chicken is my go-to meal, and it’s a big hit over here with the ladies.7. “Middleditch & Schwartz”I have heard about the legendary live improv show that Tom and Ben perform for years. It has always sold out too fast for me to witness in person. Enter Netflix, doing essential work in these dark times, by giving us all the literal best seat in the house — it’s the sofa for us in L.A. — for three of these longform improvised shows. Biggest laughs we’ve had in quarantine.8. Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” and Trey Edward Shults’s “Waves”They’re obviously both tremendous achievements in filmmaking. They both deal with class. They’re both about the messiness and the strength of family. And both of the movies packed a genuine surprise for me. I’m not unlike my kid in that way. She loves an adventure, or even a story about an adventure. And she wants to be dropped off in an entirely different place than we picked her up. Both those movies managed to be that.9. ManhattansNic has gotten so great at making this one very specific cocktail, so we treat ourselves a couple of times a week. The other thing is, we only ever lived in Manhattan when we were on the East Coast, within walking distance to the theaters. The city is on our mind all the time. So it’s also been a part of a rumination or a little prayer in some way, raising a glass to one of our favorite places on the planet, pouring one out for our city.10. Cori Doerrfeld’s “The Rabbit Listened”Putting Lucille down each night before we say our prayers — that’s a holy time. We take it very seriously as a spiritual practice for our family. And “The Rabbit Listened” is a book that she requests quite often, or that Nicolette requests because she likes it so much. It’s a sweet little book about when something sad happens, how Taylor, the little boy at the center, doesn’t really know where to turn. These animals show up and they each have a different suggestion about what he should do — whether it’s scream, cry, get even. And the rabbit is the only one of his friends that shows up to listen, so Taylor is able to tell him how he feels. I love the lesson of it. More

AT&T’s new streaming platform HBO Max went live on Wednesday, but for many HBO subscribers, it was not entirely clear whether they had access to the service.Millions currently do not. That’s because AT&T could not strike deals in time for the launch with some key distributors and a few device makers. Only those who purchased HBO through the right distributor and have the approved device could watch HBO Max.HBO Max costs the same as HBO ($15 a month) and is intended to convert HBO users to the new service, which offers twice as much content.Confused? Here’s a handy guide:For those who already pay for HBO through a traditional TV provider, you’re in luck. HBO Max hashed out agreements with most of the major players, including Comcast, the nation’s largest cable operator, thanks to a last-minute deal signed Wednesday. Those customers can download the app and sign in with their HBO Go or pay-TV account. (Here’s the full list of providers.)But if you’re planning to watch on an Amazon Fire or Roku device, you’re out of luck. AT&T could not reach agreements with either. Both Amazon and Roku get a cut of revenue from streaming providers, and the structure of those deals can get complicated. Still, there are still plenty of places to download the app. Approved devices include Apple, Samsung TVs from 2016 and later, Xbox and Chromecast. Here’s the full list.For those who bought their HBO service through a digital provider like Apple, Google Play, Hulu Live or YouTubeTV, you’re good to go. Log in to the HBO Max website or app with your HBO credentials. But the same device caveat as above applies.For those who have HBO Now, you likely bought it directly from the HBO website. You should be all set. Just log in to the HBO Max website or app with the same account.Anyone who bought HBO through Amazon Channels or a Roku device are shut out of HBO Max. Amazon and Roku provide both media access and sell devices, so they have two key areas over which to negotiate.For consumers stuck in the middle, you can cancel your HBO account to sign up on the HBO Max website and watch through an approved device. More

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