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    In ‘The Last Dance,’ Michael Jordan and the Bulls Still Dominate

    Right now, 10 hours of old playoff basketball should probably be broadcast with a trigger warning. Ten hours of Michael Jordan-era Chicago Bulls playoff basketball should probably come with a chaplain. For “The Last Dance” is 10 hours of all-time postseason sports. The documentary is ostensibly about the season that culminated in the team’s historic sixth and final N.B.A. championship title, in 1998, led by Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Phil Jackson, the coach. That’s a story that may not require a show that runs about as long as Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Ten Commandments parable, “The Decalogue.” But what else are you doing?Moreover, this is a team whose personalities, personal dramas and feats warrant just this sort of excess. It’s a team that inspired its own commandments: Thou shall not doubt. Jordan’s 15 seasons of brilliance, cunning, ruthlessness, volition, perfectionism and artistry render him impervious to overstatement. He essentialized the sneaker as casual wear and luxury item. He made cause-free celebrity — cause-free black celebrity, no less — seem viable, preferable to having to mean all things to all people. One size had to fit all. Few team players had ever became as rock-star, movie-star famous and with nary a scandal the way Jordan had — almost exclusively through athletic supremacy. There was basketball Jordan and Air Jordan. No athlete anywhere will ever have a mid-motion logo as triumphantly hieroglyphic as his, the silhouette as sentence.In Pippen, Jordan had the greatest wingman ever; in Rodman, the most mercurial, most formidable Dennis. In Jackson, among the least likely of masterminds. How did the team’s core last so long? How’d it keep winning so big, bigger, biggest? Over and over, the series reminds you how many times things came yea close to falling apart. And, remarkably, even then, the pieces were reassembled and reconfigured for further dominance.You could call these 10 hours a walk down memory lane. But that’d be like calling Mardi Gras a parade.The series is this ocean of archival game clips, dunk montages, smack talk, mea culpas, cigar smoking, backstabbing, frontstabbing, manfully restrained tears, endorsements of the triangle offense, interviews with anybody who even blinked at the N.B.A. from 1984 to 1998, including with Jordan’s mother, Deloris, whose serenity creates the flabbergasting illusion that she’s younger than her 57-year-old son. I can think of maybe four living athletes important enough to lure the participation of two living ex-presidents (Bill Clinton, Barack Obama), but only one whose team could necessitate appearances by both of those guys plus Carmen Electra. This thing is absurdly, almost comically, exhaustive.ESPN Films, which produced the series with Netflix, had planned to air it during the finals. But we’re all a little desperate. Traffic to the network’s site is down. Its handful of cable channels are either going archival and morphing into the Sportsonian or impersonating Twitch, the all-day live-stream gaming site. Quarantined current stars are playing HORSE against their quarantined retired elders — people are placing bets! The thirsty need a slaking. So “The Last Dance,” which debuts Sunday, is a company opening up that case of good, special-occasion Château Margaux for crisis drinking.The show’s sprawl — two episodes per night for five Sundays — is more about vastness than depth. The filmmakers have access to unseen off-court footage from 1997 and ’98. When a title card announced that, I got chills: We’re going all the way back there?But the old footage doesn’t feel entirely tamed. It turns up a few locker-room eyepoppers, like a clip from one evening before the ’98 All-Star Game. A retired Magic Johnson drops by to say hi to Jordan, and Jordan’s All-Star coach, Larry Bird, asks Jordan about Magic, “Wouldn’t you like to have some of his ass today?” You really have to hear it with Bird’s Indiana twang. It’s the “picture your parents having sex” of sports-legend vulgarity. Johnson’s response is even less printable. (Picture your parents making porn.)The first four episodes loosely concern the personal stories of the team’s four main stars: Jordan, Pippen, Dennis Rodman, and Coach Jackson. The structure is irritating. A visual timeline slides us back and forth between the 1997-1998 season and just about every pertinent year before it. That strategy leaves us in no single place for terribly long. Just as you’re about to settle into, say, Jackson’s Montana upbringing, his career as a gangly Knick or his spirituality and adventures with psychedelics, it’s onward to add those biographical chips to the team mosaic.Once in a while, the to-and-fro produces a comedic masterstroke. Episode 3 ends with Jordan recalling the time Rodman requested a Las Vegas vacation, and Episode 4 opens with a title screen that says, “Dennis Rodman has been absent with permission from the Chicago Bulls for 24 hours.” The sentence then updates itself — “with” expands to “without” and “24 hours” reddens and ticks up to 88. And just like that, we’re looking at Electra, in the present, who goes on to conclude that “it was definitely an occupational hazard to be Dennis’s girlfriend.” Watching her interlude, it hit me: Electra, a pop singer, model and muse, was a Kardashian trial balloon.There’s no overarching big idea in this series, which Jason Hehir directed. It doesn’t have a big question to ask. No grand thought emerges about the league after Jordan, or about how he changed the sport. Nobody, for instance, scores the way Jordan did, from midcourt. It’s raining threes now. His 10 scoring titles aren’t likely to get a toppling anytime soon — seven of those were in a row. (And: Is the pregame headphones craze his doing? What was he listening to?)You’d welcome any thoughts on his Bulls being the last dynasty before the N.B.A.’s hip-hop and Instagram eras. The shorts were short back then and the suits hideous (baggy, endless, with too many buttons and too many breaks; its wearers looked like deacons at a car-salesman church). But they were standard before Allen Iverson, the Sixers phenomenon, who in the late 1990s and 2000s, brought swagger, bravado and cornrows to the league and with those a different kind of racism that pried “thug” from traditionalists’ lips and crested with a brawl between players and fans one night outside Detroit in 2004.The roundabout consequence was the institution of an official dress code that, on the one hand, inspired pre- and postgame sartorial inspiration and, on the other, served to remind the players of their places as employees. ESPN shared only the first eight episodes with critics. Maybe some of this is up for consideration during the dismount.As a whole, though, “The Last Dance” doesn’t hunger to be a work about the cultural psyche or the country’s racial history. It’s not Ken Burns or “O.J.: Made in America,” the current yardstick for redwood-size nonfiction storytelling. And that’s all right. Jordan has never felt quite comparable to Muhammad Ali, O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson or Barack Obama, these towering figures who double naturally as Rorschachs of a roiling national consciousness. Jordan is as important but less transcendent, less polarizing, less political, therefore less politicized.It’s quite something witnessing Obama practice cultural criticism in an expression of empathy for and disappointment in Jordan’s refusal, in 1990, to endorse the futile Senate candidacy of Harvey Gantt (the first of two tries); Gantt was a black architect and former Mayor of Charlotte, N.C., running to unseat the super-racist Jesse Helms in Jordan’s home state. Obama wasn’t the only person who wished Jordan had spoken out. When the series digs up Helms’s victory speech (“There’s no joy in Mudville tonight!”), it’s tempting to be mad at Jordan all over again. But his remaining apolitical was by design. The ambition was to achieve unimpeachable, unparalleled excellence in his chosen career. Everything else was a potential distraction.A more-than-casual basketball person, such as myself, might know all of this about Jordan and think, as I actually, did: This seems like a lot of stone for such a little bit of blood. But here’s the achievement of this series: Jordan isn’t boring. At all. He’s thicker now, handsome in a seasoned way, that dark-brown dome of his having eased more into “rotunda”; his buttonhole eyes retain a mild haze of puddled rheum; that tiny hoop remains affixed to his left ear, birthmark-stubborn. To his right, there often sits a whiskey glass; my gaze would occasionally drift its way for status checks — full, half full, more empty. Regardless, he’s wonderful throughout this thing, more than he needed to be, more than I would have guessed: present, open, ruminative, so funny.Hehir has this trick where any time someone says something debatable or controversial or simply worthy of running by Jordan, he hands him an iPad and makes him watch what was said. And every time Hehir does it, Jordan turns the reaction into gold. He’s an incredulous Zeus in these moments, lightning bolts falling from his toga as he laughs, zapping lesser gods. To Gary Payton, his momentarily wily foe in the 1996 finals, I say: Ouch. (It could have been worse. Jordan drops a house on Isiah Thomas.)Payton pops up in Part 8 and is also fantastic. All the talking heads here bring good stuff. The coach Pat Riley, remembering Jordan’s arrival in the league: “As a rookie, he wasn’t a rookie.” Magic Johnson, shaking his head at Jordan’s dethroning him: “That dude was just … Mmm mmm mmm.” Some of the joy in spending all this time with “The Last Dance” comes from who the series has gathered to sing Jordan’s praises and tell the truth on him — broadcast journalists like Hannah Storm, Willow Bay, Bob Costas, Andrea Kremer, Ahmad Rashad and Michael Wilbon; former teammates like Steve Kerr, Toni Kukoc, Horace Grant and B.J. Armstrong.Jordan’s evasion of zeitgeist sizzle simply takes some of the pressure off Hehir. He could’ve leaned on all those clips of Jordan’s electric breakaways and all-court modern dance. He is determined, instead, to leaven deification with intimacy and humor. The series feels unafraid to broach the tricky stuff about Jordan’s life, personality and career, like his gambling, his father James’s murder, the sour aspects of his ambition and those fascinating 18 months, in 1994 and 1995, when he quit the N.B.A. to play baseball for a White Sox farm club. (Imagine Superman auditioning to play Wolverine.) Jordan seems ready to go there for all of it, into the valleys and darkness. This show is among the most fascinating examinations of greatness of I’ve seen.People who missed the Jordan era might receive his totalizing prowess as myth. They know him as a brand, as the baldheaded middle-aged meme who leaks courtside tears for their tweets, as one of the worst-dressed men in sports retirement. “The Last Dance” is an invitation to meet the legend who sparked the memes, to witness a newly human — or perhaps simply also human — figure who, in his prime, loved his sport above all else. We learn nothing about Jordan’s marriages or children.But more than once, the series shows us the child in him. It tends to surface after he has won, as in the heartbreaking sight of him minutes after taking title No. 4 in 1996, still mourning his father. A camera catches him sprawled on the locker room floor, still in his uniform and crying convulsively, onto no one’s shoulder — a sudden metaphor of himself. Alone, weeping into a basketball. More

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    What’s on TV Saturday: John Prine and ‘One World’

    What’s on TVAUSTIN CITY LIMITS 11 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). This live music show is resurfacing an episode from 2018 to honor the Grammy-winning folk singer-songwriter John Prine, who died of complications from the coronavirus on April 7 at the age of 73. Prine was revered by Bob Dylan, and in 2019, was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. This performance, his eighth and final for “Austin City Limits,” came 40 years after he made his debut on the show in 1978. It features a few classics, such as “Illegal Smile,” off Prine’s debut record; “Lake Marie,” from 1995’s “Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings,” and seven tracks from his final album, “The Tree of Forgiveness,” including “When I Get to Heaven.” It’s a joyful farewell, in which Prine makes peace with mortality and sings: “When I get to heaven, I’m gonna shake God’s hand/Thank him for more blessings than one man can stand/Then I’m gonna get a guitar and start a rock-n-roll band.”ONE WORLD: TOGETHER AT HOME 8 p.m. on various networks. Alanis Morissette, Billie Eilish, Chris Martin and more than a dozen other stars will celebrate and support front-line medical workers in the battle against the pandemic in this two-hour special. Presented by the advocacy group Global Citizen, the telecast will feature musical and comedic performances, as well as stories from doctors, nurses and grocery workers, and will benefit charities working to help those most affected by the outbreak. Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert will host. “One World” also includes an event with athletes, artists and social media influencers that will stream online from 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. A full list of networks and digital platforms is available at globalcitizen.org.What’s StreamingTOO HOT TO HANDLE Stream on Netflix. We’ve all heard of this format: A group of attractive, fit single people are isolated together in a luxurious location, and it’s only a matter of time before drama — and lots of bad behavior — erupts. This new dating series wants to turn that model on its head. After 10 single contestants from around the globe arrive on an island expecting a wild summer, a digital personal assistant lays down the rules: “No kissing or sex of any kind.” Each time that rule is broken, money will be deducted from the $100,000 grand prize. Some contestants try to commit to the challenge and forge emotional rather than physical connections, while others just can’t help themselves.HOME Stream on AppleTV Plus. While we’re all isolated in our own homes, it doesn’t hurt to imagine what it would be like to live in someone else’s — especially if that someone is a visionary architect. This new show, the first documentary series on AppleTV Plus, explores innovative homes from around the world and the minds of the people who built them. More

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    Alas, Poor New York: Shakespeare in the Park Is Canceled

    Free Shakespeare in the Park, a treasured rite of summer in New York, will not take place this year because of the coronavirus pandemic.The annual festival, staged as the sun sets in an open-air amphitheater surrounded by trees, is just too big and too soon to pull together at a time when no one knows when large gatherings will be permitted again.“This is something I mightily resisted,” Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, which founded and runs the festival, said in an interview. “But it’s just clear to us at this point that there’s no way we can responsibly prepare, build and rehearse to get shows open in a timing that might match the quarantine’s timing.”The pandemic has forced the cancellation of programming and taken a huge financial toll at arts institutions around the world. Even as elected officials begin to discuss whether and how it might become safe to restart the economy, major summer events — including, in the theater world, the Edinburgh festivals, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Williamstown Theater Festival — have already been called off.Shakespeare in the Park, which has been performed for free at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater since 1962, was to include two shows this season: a new production of “Richard II,” directed by Saheem Ali, which was to have begun May 19; followed by a musical adaptation of “As You Like It,” directed by Laurie Woolery, that had a brief run in 2017 as part of the theater’s Public Works program. More

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    Late Night Says State Protesters Are Barking Up the Wrong Flagpole

    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. If you’re interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox.Gridlocked and GoadedLate night celebrated one month of Covid-19 quarantining by riffing on demonstrations this week in Ohio, Michigan and other states where locals protested state-based shutdowns.One protester in Michigan misspelled “governor” on her sign, which Jimmy Kimmel said “showed us how important it is that we do get schools open ASAP.”“If you’re curious what all that schmutz on the window there is,” Kimmel said, pointing to a photo of Ohioans screaming into the closed State Capitol, “that is the coronavirus. Yes, so well done.”“The real problem is you can’t make Americans do anything. We just won’t. If you tell us to do something, we won’t do it. We only exist because someone tried to make us pay extra for tea once.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I’m sure that convinced the legislators. [imitating legislator] You know, the medical data doesn’t back up an early reopen, but I heard some sound policy ideas from Lady Flag Screamer and Guy in a ‘Purge’ Mask.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Angry Trump supporters were also at Michigan’s State Capitol, where they blocked traffic and honked their horns in a protest called ‘Operation Gridlock.’ Who are you gridlocking? There’s nobody else out there. Blocking empty streets is like streaking in your shower — it doesn’t count!” — STEPHEN COLBERT“The event had the feel of a free-floating Trump rally. Protesters carried Trump flags, MAGA signs, even Confederate flags — because nothing says ‘Never surrender’ like a Confederate flag.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (New York Masks Edition)“Big news in New York, where yesterday the governor announced an executive order that requires everyone in the state to wear a mask in public when not social distancing. It’s a big change for all New Yorkers, except Jets fans.” — STEPHEN COLBERT, alongside a photo of Jets fans covering their faces“Yeah, everyone has to wear a mask. The players on the New York Jets said, ‘That’s OK, we’re used to hiding our identity.’” — CONAN O’BRIEN“[imitating New Yorker] Hey, I’m breathing here. And don’t forget to wash your finger! Your mother — is high risk. Seriously, you’ve got to be good to your mom — like I was, last night.” — STEPHEN COLBERT, on Governor Andrew Cuomo’s suggestion that New Yorkers will politely police one anotherThe Bits Worth WatchingJoe Biden popped up on “Desus & Mero” on Thursday night to talk about plans to beat Donald Trump and how Barack Obama came to endorse him earlier this week.Also, Check This OutAnyone can enjoy John Cassavetes’s oeuvre if you start with “A Woman Under the Influence,” his 1974 portrait of a marriage starring his real-life wife, Gena Rowlands. More

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    What’s on TV Friday: ‘#blackAF’ and ‘Selah and the Spades’

    What’s Streaming#BLACKAF Stream on Netflix. “We’re celebrating my dad’s new Netflix show,” Drea (Iman Benson) says at the self-referential beginning of this new sitcom. “I don’t know exactly what it’s about, but pretty sure it has something to do with black stuff.” Created by the screenwriter Kenya Barris (“black-ish,” “Girls Trip”), “#blackAF” stars Barris as a fictionalized, exaggerated version of himself. The show’s Kenya is a successful, cynical screenwriter living an extravagant Los Angeles life and raising children with his wife, played by Rashida Jones. The show explores issues of race, class and wealth — with family dynamics that should resonate well beyond the story’s rarefied setting. “Most families are functionally dysfunctional,” Barris said in a recent interview about the show with The New York Times. “You want the house to be a little bit messy,” he added. “You want the mom to be a little bit frayed. The dad to be a bit out of touch. Some of those things are just part of what family is. I want people to realize that that dysfunction is part of our functionality.”SELAH AND THE SPADES (2020) Stream on Amazon. This debut feature from the filmmaker Tayarisha Poe was praised by critics when it debuted at last year’s Sundance Film Festival. Set at a fictional, prestigious boarding school in Pennsylvania, the movie centers on Selah (Lovie Simone), the head of a powerful clique who takes under her wing a new student, Paloma (Celeste O’Connor), whom she mentors in navigating the school’s knotted social order. The dynamic between the two shifts when Paloma begins to threaten Selah’s grasp on social power. In her review for The Times, Teo Bugbee called the film “exceptionally composed.” Poe, she wrote, “designs her frames with care and sets a languid pace, a relief from the desperate freneticism of many teenage tales.”HERE WE ARE: NOTES FOR LIVING ON PLANET EARTH (2020) Stream on Apple TV Plus. The artist and illustrator Oliver Jeffers’s children’s book “Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth” gets an infusion of star power in this animated short film adaptation. Ruth Negga and Chris O’Dowd voice parents walking their young son through essential pieces of knowledge, like why humans keep track of time. Meryl Streep narrates.What’s on TVHAROLD AND LILLIAN: A HOLLYWOOD LOVE STORY (2017) 8 p.m. on TCM. Harold Michelson was a storyboard artist, art director and production designer who worked on classic movies including “The Graduate,” “West Side Story” and “Spaceballs.” Lillian Michelson was a film researcher who contributed to “Scarface,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and more. Together, they were a behind-the-scenes Hollywood power couple. Their lives and work are profiled in this documentary from Daniel Raim, which includes interviews with its two subjects and some of their friends and collaborators, including Francis Ford Coppola and Mel Brooks. In her review for The Times, Monica Castillo wrote that the film “maintains a free-flowing tone as it uncovers the work that went into creating some of the indelible scenes in Hollywood history.” More

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    Brian Dennehy Found the Tragic Grandeur in Ordinary Lives

    On a November night, 22 years ago, fresh off a plane from New York, I walked into the Goodman Theater in Chicago and straight into the depths of depression. I felt privileged to be there. Because my guide that evening into the state of paralyzing unhappiness was Brian Dennehy, who was making one man’s inner darkness uncannily visible as the title character of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.”I had admired Mr. Dennehy — who died on Wednesday, at 81 — as a smart, risk-taking and undersung actor onstage and onscreen. He was a heartbreakingly sensitive lout as the parvenu Lopakhin — a brute with a touch of the poet — in Peter Brook’s production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” (1988) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. His performance as the serial murderer John Wayne Gacy in the 1992 television film “To Catch a Killer” was a penetratingly human portrait of a monster, and it haunted my nightmares for a long time.But nothing I had seen Mr. Dennehy do before prepared me for his take on Willy Loman in Robert Falls’s shadow-shrouded “Salesman,” Miller’s benchmark drama from 1949. The scale of his performance was more genuinely tragic than any version of Willy I’ve seen before or since. Mr. Dennehy had a large and brawny frame that loomed intimidatingly from a stage. Yet the character he was portraying thought of himself as a little man — so insignificant that he was afraid he was on the verge of disappearing altogether.The disparity between Mr. Dennehy’s physical stature and his character’s sense of smallness generated extraordinary pathos. It was as if he had been made outsized by pain. And there was a visceral intensity to the way he moved, always grabbing at his body and face, as if he wanted to tear off his skin.Paradoxically, this intensely physical performance conveyed the interior of Willy’s mind with a sharpness that stung. One of Miller’s early titles for “Salesman” had been “Inside His Head,” and that was precisely the location of Mr. Falls’s production.The world this Willy inhabited was the life-sapping landscape of depression. Mr. Dennehy defined this realm as a place that was both claustrophobic and all too easy to be lost in forever. When the other characters — embodied by an excellent supporting cast that included Elizabeth Franz as Willy’s wife, Linda — reached out to him, you knew that he was beyond their touch.And you felt in your gut that the death of the title was a foregone conclusion, that Willy would never be able to find his way out of his unfathomable sadness. And yet I stayed with every second of that performance — first in Chicago, and then again when the production transferred to Broadway the next year, when Mr. Dennehy won a Tony Award for best actor.He received his second Tony four years later, as the miserly, combative father in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” also directed by Mr. Falls. Though his character, James Tyrone, was a retired matinee idol, Mr. Dennehy refrained from the easy temptation of playing the ham.This production gave center stage to Mary, James’s morphine-addled wife, who was played by Vanessa Redgrave, in a wrenching performance that had something of the externalized inner anguish that illuminated Mr. Dennehy’s Willy. There was an almost self-effacing gallantry about his James, as if his primary raison d’être had become shoring up a woman on the edge of dissolution. At the same time, he registered the enduring, impossibly tested love of a man for his wife, and the wounds with which she had left him. It was as if he were always trying to rein in his instinctive urge to lash out at her.I am deeply sorry not to have caught Mr. Dennehy in the two productions of O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” in which he appeared, first (in 1990) as the slick-talking, pipe-dream-selling salesman Hickey; and later as the sozzled, grizzled, self-destroying Larry, opposite Nathan Lane in 2015.I am therefore doubly grateful to have seen his Willy Loman, not once but four times. There was no masochism in my returning to that production. The agony that Mr. Dennehy exuded should have been unbearable. But when darkness is rendered with such glowing detail by an actor of such strength, it becomes a triumph over the night. More

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    Brian Dennehy, Tony Award-Winning Actor, Dies at 81

    Brian Dennehy, a versatile stage and screen actor known for action movies, comedies and classics, but especially for his Tony Award-winning performances in “Death of a Salesman” in 1999 and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” in 2003, died on Wednesday in New Haven, Conn. He was 81.His agency, ICM Partners, announced his death. His agent, Brian Mann, told The Chicago Tribune that the cause was cardiac arrest resulting from sepsis. Mr. Dennehy lived in Connecticut, where he was born.Brawny and gregarious, Mr. Dennehy was often called on to play an Everyman or an authority figure: athletes, sheriffs, bartenders, salesmen and fathers. He was in scores of movies — “First Blood” (1982), “Gorky Park” (1983), “F/X” (1986) and “Presumed Innocent” (1990) were among them — as well as an assortment of television series. But his first love was always the stage.“He was a towering, fearless actor taking on the greatest dramatic roles of the 20th century,” Robert Falls, artistic director of the Goodman Theater in Chicago, where Mr. Dennehy did some of his finest work, said in a phone interview. “They were mountains that had to be climbed, and he had no problem throwing himself into climbing them.”Mr. Dennehy, who once played college football, thrived on roles that let him contrast his physical presence with an emotional vulnerability.“Mr. Dennehy is a big bear of a man, but sometimes more of a teddy bear than a grizzly,” Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times in 1990 after seeing Mr. Dennehy’s performance as the protagonist Hickey in Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” at the Goodman, which Mr. Falls directed. “There’s a buried, dainty tenderness in his burly frame as well as a hint of festering violence.”Mr. Falls also directed Mr. Dennehy’s two Tony-winning turns, which started at the Goodman. Ben Brantley of The Times, in his review of the Goodman’s production of “Salesman,” the Arthur Miller play, called it the performance of Mr. Dennehy’s career.Mr. Falls said in the interview that Mr. Dennehy’s background — he had come to acting somewhat late, after knocking around in various blue-collar jobs — had helped make his portrayal of Willy Loman, one of the great roles of the American theater, so memorable.“When he did ‘Salesman,’ he just brought everything to that role,” Mr. Falls said. “It was tailored for him. He knew those people. He knew that world.”Brian Manion Dennehy was born on July 9, 1938, in Bridgeport, Conn., to Edward and Hannah (Manion) Dennehy. He grew up on Long Island.He enrolled at Columbia University on a football scholarship, though, he said later, what he really wanted to do was perform with the Columbia Players.“In those days, the Players had an artistic definition of themselves which didn’t allow a football player to be active,” he told the alumni magazine Columbia College Today in 1999. “I remember going up there a few times and distinctly feeling unwelcome.”His first newspaper notices were not as an actor but as a tackle on the Columbia football team. He was picked to be one of the senior captains, but in July 1959 The Times ran an article headlined, “Football Captain-Elect Drops Out of Columbia.”Mr. Dennehy, who said he had struggled academically, left school to join the Marines, serving in the United States, South Korea and Japan while he and his first wife, Judith Scheff, had two children. After leaving the service he completed his bachelor’s degree at Columbia in 1965 while working variously as a cabdriver, trucker, butcher, bartender and motel clerk to support his family.He also spent time as a stockbroker — Martha Stewart was a co-worker — though he admitted that he hadn’t been a very good one and hadn’t enjoyed the work.“I was sitting in the bullpen at Merrill Lynch down at Liberty Plaza and 30 guys got off the elevator with their attaché cases and headed for their desks,” he told the Columbia publication. “I thought to myself, ‘I’ve got to get out of here.’ And I did. Eventually, I was an overnight success — after 15 years.”He had been acting in community theater productions, mostly on Long Island, for years, but in the mid-1970s he branched out.“The thing was,” he told the Long Island newspaper Newsday in 1991, “you could work in community theater for 30 years and no one would spot you, no matter how good you were. Eventually, I had to take a chance in New York.”His first mention as an actor in The Times was in 1976, when he was in a showcase production of Chekhov’s “Ivanov” by the Impossible Ragtime Theater. An agent named Judy Schoen saw the show and happened to be looking for “a pro football type,” as Mr. Dennehy put it, for a role in the movie “Semi-Tough.” He was cast, and small roles in other movies and television series came quickly after that.By 1982, when he landed a regular role in the TV series “Star of the Family,” The Associated Press was calling him “one of Hollywood’s busiest character actors.” That same year his role as an overzealous sheriff in “First Blood,” the Sylvester Stallone hit (the first of Mr. Stallone’s “Rambo” movies), was something of a breakout.For the next four decades Mr. Dennehy seemed to have as much television and film work as he wanted, racking up more than 45 credits in the 1980s alone. In 1990 he received the first of six Emmy nominations, as outstanding supporting actor in a mini-series or special for the TV movie “A Killing in a Small Town.”In 1992 he played the serial killer John Wayne Gacy in “To Catch a Killer,” another mini-series. On the other side of the law, he played a Chicago police investigator, Jack Reed, in six TV movies in the 1990s, directing and earning writing credits on four of them himself.Another well-known role in the 1990s was Big Tom, the father of Chris Farley’s character in the 1995 comedy “Tommy Boy.”In recent years he had recurring roles in the TV series “Public Morals,” “Hap and Leonard” and “The Blacklist.” His last Broadway appearance was in 2014 in A.R. Gurney’s “Love Letters.” In an interview with The Times in conjunction with that show, he was asked about favorite fan letters he had received.“The most interesting was from John Wayne Gacy, who was in prison at the time, awaiting execution,” he said. “I played him in ‘To Catch a Killer.’ It was a letter of disappointment in the fact that one of his favorite actors had participated in this calumny. The movie revealed that 33 bodies of young boys were buried in the crawl space of his little house. His explanation: ‘Lots of people had access to that crawl space.’”Mr. Dennehy’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1974. In 1989 he married Jennifer Arnott. She survives him, as do three children from his first marriage, Elizabeth, Kathleen and Deirdre; two children from his second marriage, Cormac and Sarah; and several grandchildren.One of Mr. Dennehy’s best-known film roles was as an extraterrestrial in “Cocoon,” Ron Howard’s 1985 film about residents of a retirement home who are rejuvenated by swimming in the aliens’ pool. The movie was shot in Florida. For an article marking its 25th anniversary, Mr. Dennehy told The St. Petersburg Times that cicadas had been in season and chirping loudly during the filming — so loudly that before Mr. Howard called “action,” a crew member would fire a gun to quiet the insects.“You could get two or three minutes when they would shut up, and you could actually shoot and record,” Mr. Dennehy said. “That would be the last thing done before we’d roll the cameras.”Derrick Bryson Taylor contributed reporting. More

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    Thomas Miller, Hit-Making TV Producer, Is Dead at 79

    Garry Marshall, the noted producer and director, was talking about the best-known character in one of his best-known television shows.“I always wanted a tall Italian boy,” he said in an oral history recorded in 2000 for the Television Academy. Instead it was a 5-foot-6-inch Jew named Henry Winkler who ended up playing the Fonz on “Happy Days,” a portrayal so distinctive that what had been envisioned as a supporting role became one of the most recognizable characters in television history.The man responsible for that casting leap of faith was one of Mr. Marshall’s fellow executive producers on the series, Thomas L. Miller.“Tom Miller was the whole key to casting Henry Winkler,” Mr. Marshall said in the oral history. Mr. Winkler, who was an unknown when he auditioned for the role in 1973, concurred.“Tom took me to makeup, plucked my unibrow, told me what to do,” he said in a telephone interview. And it was Mr. Miller who called him that October — on his birthday, no less — and told him he had won the role. He had only just arrived in Los Angeles from the East Coast.“Two weeks into my stay I hit the jackpot,” Mr. Winkler said. “And a lot of it was thanks to Tom, who made sure that I came across with the right image, and Garry, who changed his mind about the character.”Mr. Miller, who produced dozens of other TV shows, including “Perfect Strangers” and “Full House,” died on April 5 in Salisbury, Conn. He was 79.The cause was heart disease, Warner Bros. Television, which had worked with the production company run by Mr. Miller and Robert L. Boyett, said in a statement.Mr. Miller was not generally known for the kinds of groundbreaking shows that draw critical acclaim and awards. What he and his production partners did draw were viewers.“Our award is that 30 million people are watching,” Mr. Miller told The Los Angeles Times in 1990. “To me, the goal is to entertain.”“Happy Days,” which premiered in 1974, ran for a decade with 255 episodes. “Perfect Strangers” racked up 151 episodes from 1986 to 1993, overlapping for much of that time with “Full House” (192 episodes, 1987-95). Other long-running shows that had Mr. Miller as an executive producer included the “Happy Days” spinoff “Laverne & Shirley” (1976-83), “Valerie” (later renamed “The Hogan Family,” 1986-91), “Step by Step” (1991-98) and “Family Matters” (1989-98).Some producers are less hands-on once a TV series is launched, but Mr. Winkler said Mr. Miller was an active presence on “Happy Days.”“He was there at every shoot,” Mr. Winkler said. “He was part of the family, and a creative part. He was there in the editing room. He knew where to put the violins for the emotional moments.”“He understood the audience,” Mr. Winkler added, “and then, if you had a problem, he understood you.”Thomas Lee Miller was born on Aug. 31, 1940, in Milwaukee to Edward and Shirley Miller. He earned a bachelor’s degree in drama and speech in 1962 at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, then set out for Los Angeles, where he worked for the director Billy Wilder on “Irma la Douce” (1963), “The Fortune Cookie” (1966) and other films.After four years with Mr. Wilder he developed TV shows at 20th Century Fox, then became a vice president of development at Paramount Studios before embarking on his producing career, founding a production company with Edward K. Milkis. Miller-Milkis Productions joined with Mr. Marshall, who died in 2016, to produce “Happy Days” (which was set in Mr. Miller’s hometown) and “Laverne & Shirley.”Mr. Boyett eventually joined the group, and in the mid-1980s, after Mr. Milkis’s departure, the company became Miller-Boyett Productions. Miller-Boyett shows, including “Full House” and “Family Matters,” were a key part of ABC’s Friday night sitcom lineup, known as TGIF. Mr. Miller and Mr. Boyett’s most recent TV producing credits were on “Fuller House,” a Netflix sequel to “Full House.”In 2000 Mr. Miller and Mr. Boyett, his life partner as well as his business partner, relocated to New York, where they were among the producers of a number of Broadway shows, including “Tootsie” last year.Mr. Miller, who lived in Salisbury, moved to Connecticut with Mr. Boyett in 2007. Mr. Boyett survives him along with a brother, Robert, and a sister, Kitty Glass.Mr. Miller aimed for shows that didn’t try to deliver a Message with a capital M but did have heart.“It’s never about lecturing, it’s about entertaining,” he told The New York Times in 1990, “but we always like to have somebody in our shows make some human connections, so the people who watch it say, ‘Yes, I understand that and I like it.’” More