Eliana Willis

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    Animals Are Rewilding Our Cities. On YouTube, at Least.

    At the end of March I was, like many people, spending hours each day on the internet, my attention glued to graphs of projected deaths, maps of infection hot spots, photos of masked travelers huddled in subway cars. But then new images appeared, and they were quite unlike the others. Here were maps showing improvements in air quality, photographs of deserted streets and squares bathed in sunlight and, most surprising, videos of wild animals thriving in newly deserted towns and cities.These animal videos are astonishingly popular — one video, “Coronavirus lock down effects on animals” on Nature Connection’s YouTube channel, which includes clips of wild boar roaming Italian towns, Japanese sika deer walking the streets of Nara and a family of Egyptian geese crossing the empty tarmac of Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, has had over five million views — and their content has often been recirculated in mainstream news media. The videos are earnest and encouraging. “What a difference without humans,” says one YouTuber on the Planet Now channel, her voice full of wonderment as she shows us before-and-after shots of Venice, moving from muddy water and bustling crowds to empty streets and clean canals. She talks us through footage of fish and dolphins, screenshots of tweets about Venetian swans, news that ducks have returned to the fountains of Rome. “Look how blue it is,” she says, dreamily, of the canal water.Such testaments to nature’s sudden resurgence are, according to one Nature Connection video, a “silver lining” to the pandemic’s manifold horrors. In them, human progress, traditionally seen as a movement outward from cities to conquer the wild, seems to have not only halted but also turned back on itself. We cannot go anywhere; we’re stuck in our own homes, and it is the animals, suddenly, that are coming to us. “Nature is taking back Venice,” reads one headline in The Guardian, as if this were a war and humans under siege. It’s the return of the repressed, taking the form of goats browsing clipped garden hedges and cantering along the streets of Welsh seaside towns, flocks of wild turkeys strutting about Harvard Yard as if they remember the forests that once grew there. More

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    What’s on TV Wednesday: ‘Mrs. America’ and ‘The Main Event’

    What’s StreamingMRS. AMERICA Stream on FX on Hulu. Cate Blanchett plays the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly in this new mini-series, which revisits the fights for and against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. On the “against” side is Schlafly, a self-described housewife who spent the decade campaigning against the E.R.A., which would have amended the Constitution to legally codify equality between women and men. Fighting her on the “for” side are a cadre of figures from the left, including Gloria Steinem (Rose Byrne), Shirley Chisholm (Uzo Aduba), Betty Friedan (Tracey Ullman) and Bella Abzug (Margo Martindale). The show tells stories from both sides, as it chronicles events leading up to the defeat of the E.R.A. — a defeat, led by Schlafly, that had lasting effects. “Love her or hate her, you cannot not take away that she was extraordinary,” the series’s creator, Dahvi Waller, a former “Mad Men” writer, said in a recent interview with The New York Times. “And if you find yourself rooting for her and hate yourself for it, that’s also fun.”THE MAIN EVENT (2020) Stream on Netflix. In “The Main Event,” an 11-year-old boy uses superhuman abilities to defeat school bullies — and then professional wrestlers. A surreal comedy geared toward families, the film centers on Leo (Seth Carr), a young wrestling fan who discovers a mask that gives him supernatural strength. With his newfound power, he enters a pro wrestling competition, where his adult opponents underestimate both his physical abilities (his body weight appears roughly equal to that of his adult opponents’ left legs) and his determination.THE FITS (2016) Stream on Criterion Channel; rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. An 11-year-old girl flits between boxing and dancing in this indie drama, the first feature from the filmmaker Anna Rose Holmer. The girl, Toni (Royalty Hightower), spends most of her time at a recreational center in Cincinnati, where she boxes and trains with her older brother (Da’Sean Minor). But after she gets a glimpse of a local dance team, her interests begin to expand — setting into motion what Manohla Dargis referred to in her review for The Times as a “dreamy, beautifully syncopated coming-of-age tale.” Holmer, Dargis wrote, “leads with atmosphere and space (including that landscape called the human face), and tends to let the sumptuously textured visuals and intermittent blasts of percussive music express what the characters don’t.”What’s on TVWHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS 10 p.m. on FX. Bloodsucking and bathroom humor return in the second season of “What We Do in the Shadows.” Born of Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s mockumentary film of the same name, the TV series concerns a group of vampire roommates navigating undead life on Staten Island. Wednesday night’s Season 2 premiere begins with a series of deaths — including an unfortunate impalement. “The show is funny and silly,” Paul Simms, one of the show’s executive producers, said in an interview with The Times last year. “But it is about the sadness of eternal life.” More

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    Wynn Handman, Influential Director and Teacher, Dies at 97

    This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic.Wynn Handman, a director and acting teacher who shaped the careers of Dustin Hoffman, Joel Grey, Faye Dunaway, Richard Gere and other stars in his acting classes and at the influential American Place Theater in Manhattan, which he co-founded, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 97.His daughter Laura Handman said the cause was pneumonia related to the coronavirus.In addition to mentoring actors, Mr. Handman was an advocate of new American plays and those who wrote them.He founded the American Place Theater in 1963 with Michael Tolan, an actor, and Sidney Lanier, vicar of St. Clement’s Episcopal Church on West 46th Street in Manhattan, where the theater was located in its early years. Their mission was to promote new voices, approaches and subjects, an alternative to the often constricted commercial offerings nearby in the Broadway houses.“As a producer, Wynn brought the Greenwich Village theater revolution to spitting distance from Broadway, which, as far as he was concerned, was the enemy,” the theater journalist Jeremy Gerard, author of “Wynn Place Show: A Biased History of the Rollicking Life & Extreme Times of Wynn Handman and The American Place Theatre” (2013), said by email. The theater, he said, “shocked audiences — and many critics — with early plays by downtown anarchists (Sam Shepard), Black Power militants (Ed Bullins) and emerging feminists (María Irene Fornés).”Mr. Handman, who served as artistic director of the theater — which was still producing plays into this century — admitted that he wasn’t chasing the kind of success most producers and directors craved.“I was drawn to challenging plays, plays that would not succeed commercially and therefore needed a home,” he told The New York Times in 2013. “It was never in my mind to do a play that would become a hit. But that’s what most New York theaters are all about today.”His greatest hits, it might be said, were the actors who came through his classes, which he began teaching in the 1950s. Other acting teachers, like Lee Strasberg, may have been better known, but Mr. Handman’s workshop, for years held in a cramped space near Carnegie Hall, was just as intense.“It was a lot of technique, truth, moment-to-moment, how to listen, improv,” Burt Reynolds, a student early in his career, told The New York Times in 1981.In the 2019 documentary “It Takes a Lunatic,” directed by Billy Lyons, the actress Marianne Leone Cooper recalled, “He worked with me for six months on nothing but stillness.”James Caan, another of the many actors who paid tribute in the documentary, remembered serious work seriously tackled. “We didn’t spend a lot of time being trees, you know what I mean?” he said in the film.Mr. Handman was still teaching decades later when John Leguizamo tested out “Mambo Mouth,” his breakthrough solo show, which became an Off Broadway hit in 1990, in one of his classes.“Wynn sat there laughing and carrying on like any other audience member,” Mr. Leguizamo wrote in the foreword to Mr. Gerard’s biography, “but when I was done he cut into it like a surgeon trying to save an organ without killing the patient.”Irwin Leo Handman (Wynn had long been his legal name, his daughter said) was born on May 19, 1922, in Manhattan. His father, Nathan, ran a printing business, and his mother, Anna (Kemler) Handman, was a saleswoman at Saks Fifth Avenue.He grew up in the Inwood section of Manhattan, although that may conjure a different image to the reader of 2020 than it did almost a century ago.“There was a farm across the street,” Mr. Handman said in the documentary. “A real farm. That’s true. I had such a happy childhood that I never wanted to leave Inwood.”Mr. Handman graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx in 1938 and the City College of New York in 1943, later earning a master’s degree in speech pathology from Teachers College at Columbia University. After graduating from City College he enlisted in the Coast Guard, serving on an icebreaker that was assigned to knock out a German weather station in the Arctic. The mission was a success, and a number of Germans were taken prisoner.“When the Germans came aboard the ship, I didn’t feel like saluting them,” Mr. Handman, who was Jewish, said in the documentary, but his commander ordered him to follow protocol and do so.While at sea he would sometimes entertain his shipmates with skits, and the experience led him to think about acting once the war ended. He applied to the Neighborhood Playhouse, Sanford Meisner’s theater school, and studied there from 1946 to 1948.He wanted to act, but Mr. Meisner saw him as a director and in 1949 suggested he lead a summer theater in the Adirondacks where some Neighborhood Playhouse students were in repertory. Mr. Handman was reluctant, but Barbara Ann Schlein, whom he would marry the next year, urged him to try it.“I found myself, my calling, that summer,” Mr. Handman told Mr. Gerard in an interview for the biography.Mr. Handman taught at the Neighborhood Playhouse from 1948 to 1955, but in 1952 he also began teaching his own acting classes, and in 1955 he broke away from Mr. Meisner. His studio across from Carnegie Hall was furnished with salvaged wooden auditorium seats.“Its warmth and funkiness were chemical to him,” said Jonathan Slaff, a theater publicist who studied with Mr. Handman and represented the theater in the mid-1990s, “and he transported its seating and décor into a studio he established on the eighth floor of Carnegie Hall and, later, on the 10th floor of 244 West 54th Street.”Separate from his teaching was the American Place Theater. For the first year or so it devoted itself to readings. Its first full production, in November 1964, was “The Old Glory” by Robert Lowell, the poet, his first stage production. It won an Obie Award for best American play.The next year the theater staged “Harry, Noon and Night” by Ronald Ribman, with Mr. Grey and Mr. Hoffman in the cast. “Hogan’s Goat” by William Alfred was also done that year, with Ms. Dunaway in the cast.In 1970 the theater moved to a custom-built space on West 46th Street.Over the decades, the theater’s offerings were nothing if not eclectic. In 1968 there was “The Cannibals,” George Tabori’s gruesome tale of cannibalism in a Nazi death camp. In 1986 there was Eric Bogosian’s “Drinking in America.” In 1998 came Aasif Mandvi’s solo show, “Sakina’s Restaurant.”“He helped foster idiosyncratic work,” Mr. Bogosian told The Times in 2007. “He has a great eye for what’s good, what’s honest.”Mr. Handman’s wife, known as Bobbie, died in 2013. In addition to his daughter Laura, he is survived by another daughter, Liza Eleanor Handman; two grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.Mr. Handman was still teaching when he contracted the virus.“As soon as the lockdown was over,” Mr. Slaff said, “he would have been back in class.” More

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    ‘The Sopranos’ and Nina Simone Sustain ‘Unorthodox’ Star

    Last spring, the Israeli actress Shira Haas was undergoing a transformation in Berlin. Call it a crash course — with lessons in Yiddish, English, piano and voice — in playing Esther “Esty” Shapiro, a fiercely independent 19-year-old woman who escapes her cloistered Hasidic community in Brooklyn, in Netflix’s “Unorthodox.”The hard work won Haas praise. James Poniewozik, the chief television critic for The New York Times, called her “a phenomenon, expressive and captivating.”In another world, she would have ridden that high to the premiere of her latest movie, “Asia,” at the Tribeca Film Festival and the shooting of Season 3 of “Shtisel,” also on Netflix.Instead, Haas, 24, was sheltering at home in Tel Aviv and pondering the 10 things she doesn’t want to live without. Here are edited excerpts from a conversation about them.1. Nina Simone’s ‘I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free’A friend without any connections to [“Unorthodox”] sent this to me a week or two before I flew to Berlin. I was so into the script already and was like, I can totally relate to it as Esty. I can hear it all the time, it’s such a moving song. And to listen to her doing this live is so powerful. And that song is just, yeah, my song of the year for sure.2. Female directorsTali Shalom-Ezer directed “Princess,” which was not only the first female director that I worked with, it’s also the first project I ever did. I was not yet 17, and it was completely new to me, this cinema world. I was so lucky to work with Tali because she was so sensitive, and she taught me so much, and she gave me so many new ways to see. She was a true inspiration obviously as an actress, but also as a role model. That’s why I mentioned the other directors I’ve worked with — Maria Schrader, Natalie Portman, Niki Caro and Ruthy Pribar. You know that they were running all these projects on their backs. I’ve worked with the most amazing men directors. I cannot complain for a second. But working with strong and talented women is, for me, something that leads to more awareness. The fact that we’re talking about this says that there’s not enough of that, right?3. MandalasA really good friend of mine is a big mandala maker, and a few years ago I was stressed and she was like: “You should make mandalas. I’ll teach you how.” Since then it’s like my meditation. It’s really only for my soul and for myself. I have a lot of them from the last years, and it’s interesting to see which mandala I made in what period, because there’s a lot of meaning in what you create.You take calipers, and the basic one is really just circles. Then you can do whatever you want. Sometimes I put pictures that I love, sometimes I paint, sometimes with pencils or pens or markers. I know lots of people think it needs to be symmetrical, but for me it’s always a big mess. You have the basic shape of it, so you do have rules — but you can break them.4. ‘The Sopranos’It came out when I was 4, so I did not watch it when it was aired. But it was one of the first series that really influenced me. I felt like I’m seeing cinema in my TV. The writing and the acting — I mean, brilliant. I think it affected me as an actress and the stories that I want to tell.I’m a Carmela person. I’m always attracted to the female strong part, so she’s my favorite for sure. But all of the characters, even though they’re talking about murders and criminals, you can really understand them and see their private life. And I think that’s the reason that I love it so much, because that’s how life is complex. In “Unorthodox,” you see a society that you don’t know, but you can understand the people. I’m not trying to say that we’re “The Sopranos.” But you see characters where, if you were to read about them in the news, you would be like, “Oh, this is awful.” But they really touch your heart.5. Chava AlbersteinShe is a singer and composer and a huge, huge symbol here in Israel. She’s been working for over 50 years. She has beautiful songs, and some of them are very old — what my parents and grandparents listened to. But every time I hear them, whether it’s her old songs or current songs, I always get emotional. And like with Nina, it’s not only that her songs are beautiful, but also how she presents the songs is so amazing. I feel like singing in a lot of ways is also acting. You cannot separate it.6. ‘Beware of Pity’ by Stefan ZweigIt’s a very hard core book about relationships, about connections, and the pity and mercy that the man has toward the woman because she’s disabled. It’s kind of a mirror to society’s face, and how our actions and words have consequences. It really touched me. I’m not an easy crier, not at all. But this book was one of the few moments that I found myself sobbing. It was a knife to my heart.7. PhotoshopI do it for fun, for friends, but sometimes it’s more like inspiration for my work and my roles. If I’m writing, for example, and I have this idea, I’m sometimes going to design it, to have pictures and references together and to make colors. It’s like a mood board, but it’s much crazier.8. Pawel Pawlikowski’s ‘Cold War’I told you before, I don’t usually cry. But I went to the cinema with a friend when it was just released, and I had tears in my eyes. It’s a story about history and about passion. I’d never felt such things. And the music and the soundtrack combined together with this cinematography — and even the makeup and the hairstyles — you can really see the emotional journey of the characters and the historical phases they’re going through. I felt like I’m seeing a masterpiece.9. Brené Brown on EmpathyA friend of mine sent this to me when we were 19. It’s less than three minutes, and I remember smiling the whole way through. It was so simple, but not a cliché. And it was so beautifully said and so accurate. I think it’s really helped me in my relations with others, and the difference between showing that you know something versus to just be. You should just listen. It’s a helpful thing for actors because when you’re working on a character, it is so important not to judge her but to really understand and have empathy for her. That’s the key, I think.10. Jérémy Comte’s ‘Fauve’It’s about a friendship between two kids that are playing together, and they have this perfect chemistry. I don’t want to spoil it too much, but it’s about one of them losing the other, and moving on. It’s so, so beautiful for the cinematography and the location and for the art. And I recommend people to see it right now in this time that we’re living. More

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    ‘Better Call Saul’ Season 5, Episode 9 Recap: Bullet Holes

    At last, proof positive: Kim is a much better liar than Jimmy.We know because as the pair try to win over a skeptical looking, handgun-packing, fish-tank tapping Lalo, it is Kim who proves a far more convincing, far nimbler fabricator. Lalo mentions the bullet holes he found in Jimmy’s car — which turn out to be the biggest holes in Jimmy’s story — and Kim instantly has a simple and plausible explanation.“Bullet holes?” she says, feigning astonishment. “That’s it?”They are no doubt the work of New Mexico’s legion of yahoos, she says, who will shoot at anything made of metal. Kim also serves as a character witness, telling Lalo that Jimmy is a man of integrity. The kind who doesn’t lie, she lies.Our favorite con man, it seems, has married a far more talented con woman. She doesn’t merely persuade Lalo. She admonishes him. For not having a better criminal enterprise, for not hiring more trustworthy minions.“No offense,” she says, “but you need to get your house in order.”It’s a nonviolent, psychologically fraught ending to an episode that is low on action and very interior. If the tale told here has a chewy center, it is the speech Mike gives to Jimmy about the ways that people choose a road, often based on a small decision, and then find it impossible to exit that road. This is a pretty fatalistic vision of life, and one to which Mike sincerely subscribes. With good reason. When he tried leaving his own road a few episodes ago, he wound up a depressed drunk with a death wish.Is Jimmy every bit as chained to his fate? Probably. By accepting a bag of cash in exchange for serving as Lalo’s mule, and by mentioning this mission to Kim, he has cast his lot with the Mexican cartel in a way that can’t be uncast.Nacho, certainly, is stuck on his road. Mike’s efforts to convince Fring to remove the gun he is pointing — at times literally — at the head of Nacho’s father comes to naught. Mike argues that Nacho delivered Lalo, as promised, and is due a chit. Fring is unmoved. He likens Nacho to a dog that bites all of his owners.For viewers, who know Nacho as both a criminal and a human with a soft spot for his father and for compulsive women, this seems unduly harsh. But all that Fring knows about the man is that he tried to kill his previous drug-lord boss, Hector Salamanca.Lalo, on the other hand, doesn’t worry much about his own fate. He makes bail, gets released and nears the Mexican border when it occurs to him that he should double check Jimmy’s desert escape story. Why he didn’t think of this before he arrived at the water well/meeting spot is unclear, and this actually gets to one of the more interesting conundrums for the writers of “Better Call Saul.”How smart, capable and menacing should Lalo be? It’s no fun if he’s dim or merely intelligent, right? What made the contest between Gus and Walter White so compelling in “Breaking Bad” is that each was trying to outsmart the other, and both were surpassingly devious. Their schemes and counter-schemes made them ideal enemies.So far, I’m not sure that the writers have invested Lalo with enough malignant gifts to serve as a Gus-worthy foil. He is charming, he is murderous, and he certainly can jump from high places and land on his feet (Into a ravine in this episode; out of the ceiling of a Travelwire last season.)But he’s always a step behind Gus. He was snowed about the meth superlab. He was manipulated into prison and later manipulated out of prison. This week, he jumped bail, just as Gus planned, and appears to be lamming it to Mexico, just as Gus planned. (Well, he was headed in that direction when last seen.) And as Kim snookered him in that living room showdown, Mike had the cross-hairs of a rifle pointed at Lalo’s chest.The point is that Lalo might need more game. As a fan of the show, and a fan of suspense, I kind of wish that Gus’s organization was now genuinely imperiled. It seems the worst Lalo can do, at present, is compel Gus to blow up his own restaurants. Which is bad.But there’s one episode left in this season. From which cliff are we currently hanging? Kim’s death appears off the table, at least for the time being. I sort of expected that by now Lalo would pose an existential threat to Gus Inc., and we would all be wondering if he was about to sic the Feds on the guy, or preparing to murder Gus, as counterproductive to the cartel’s interests as that might be.We still don’t know whether Lalo will be back for Season 6., though it seems likely given Jimmy’s brief reference to him in Season 2 of “Breaking Bad.” My wish: that he gets back to Mexico and then returns next year, with reinforcements and new ways to cause havoc. A lot more havoc.Odds and Ends:In addition to saving Jimmy’s life, Kim changes career paths in this episode. She’s had enough of the tedium of regulatory work on behalf of a growing regional bank, and she would like to become a public defender. This irks Jimmy, who is — as he has been at other moments — focused on the money. She’s undaunted.The woman has range. She even knows what kind of soaking bath cures a guy desiccated in the desert.So, Don Eladio was behind the attempted hijacking of Lalo’s $7 million in bail cash. At least, that is what Gus has concluded after talking to the elegant, even-tempered señor. The question is, why?Here’s why, according to Gus: “He was trying to protect his business by protecting our business.”All right, hive mind, let’s buy a vowel and solve this puzzle.My guess is that Eladio wants to scuttle the bail deal on the theory that keeping Lalo behind bars is good for Fring’s drug enterprise, and thus good for Eladio’s. It’s a fair assumption. As far as Eladio knows, Lalo has been nabbed by the police and is going to wind up, like his cousin Tuco, neutralized behind bars. Eladio doesn’t know that Lalo was causing huge problems for Fring while in jail. He certainly doesn’t know that Fring has a double agent in the cartel, and that Fring torched his own restaurant. Finally, Eladio doesn’t know that Fring orchestrated Lalo’s release.So Eladio hired some gangsters to steal the cartel’s own money, hoping to keep Lalo in the Big House.For Fring, what’s the end game here? Remember, he said that anything that happens to Lalo on this side of the border is his responsibility. So his plan is surely to let Lalo escape to Mexico and then kill him there, without raising any suspicions.Lalo is in a hurry to get home, unaware that home for him is now one of the most dangerous places on earth.What are you hoping to see in the finale? Share in the comments section.And remember, if anyone asks if you pushed your car into a ditch, the wrong answer — perhaps the worst answer — is “I don’t think so.” More

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    The TV Show I Love: ‘Grey’s Anatomy’

    Stuck on a desert island or confined to a one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment, I will take the 15-year-old medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy” as distraction over any of its newer, shinier, more critically acclaimed, more endlessly dissected and meme-fueling competition.I’ve been onboard since 2007. The show’s creator, Shonda Rhimes, or its current showrunner, Krista Vernoff, could replace the lead character, Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo), with an android: I have no desire to ever stop watching. The longevity of my emotional investment is partly the point. Nothing replaces the feeling — unique to television — of watching a show age in real time. And this one has remarkably held up.Besides the occasional tremor when a cast member leaves or acts out — or a pandemic prompts a season to end prematurely, as happened last week — series like “Grey’s” are often taken for granted. Yet the pleasures they dispense are both rare and very real. Here’s why I’m a fan.How I Discovered ItI embarked on my “Grey’s” journey around the middle of Season 4. “ER,” to which I was devoted, was in its penultimate season and running on fumes, and I must have been looking, consciously or not, for another prime-time drama focusing on adults rather than children or families. (The medical genre wasn’t a draw in itself: I never got into, say, “House,” and I didn’t even bother with the “Grey’s” spinoff “Private Practice.”)One night, I stumbled onto Seattle Grace Hospital, and I never left. I can’t remember the episode or why I was hooked — maybe it was an intriguing case, maybe it was a snarky exchange between Meredith and her “person,” Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh). No matter: I was back the following week and have remained loyal.Why I WatchIt’s not just inertia that has kept me hanging on. I have ditched other favorites, like “The Walking Dead,” many seasons in. But “Grey’s” has never flagged in brilliantly stitching together the personal, the professional and the soap-operatically outrageous. Of course, the show handles the medical side of the stories well, deftly balancing one-in-a-million cases with less colorful but just as dangerous illnesses. (It’s amazing how many people have been impaled by implausible objects over the years.)Yet operating-room action alone would not have kept me interested: I have stayed for the ever-changing permutations of horny doctors and to watch characters either settle into relationships or flamboyantly sabotage them. This is a series in which adults have adult concerns, but the impulse control of hormonal teens.The show has also never shied from hot-button issues (Meredith has recently become obsessed with the inequity of the American health-insurance system) or from addressing the moral and ethical quandaries of fallible doctors blinded by hubris, pigheadedness or lust.And all of this has unfurled with a matter-of-factly progressive approach to race (inclusive casting has always been a huge part of the appeal), sexual orientation and physical and mental disabilities — a tolerance woven into the show’s fabric rather than funneled into Very Special Episodes.Why I Keep Coming BackRenewal is built into the show’s DNA: Grey Sloan Memorial, as the hospital is now known, is a teaching institution, which means that new interns and consulting doctors arrive at regular intervals. They are put under observation, and the show either absorbs or rejects them, like a body with a transplanted organ. Established stars can’t sleep soundly either, and anybody can get walking papers overnight. When the powers-that-be killed off the dreamboat Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey) in Season 11, ratings did not sink — and the show remains a hit for ABC.If you become overly attached to a character or a couple on “Grey’s,” chances are that at some point you will wind up either sobbing or furiously throwing objects at the wall. And you will keep watching because the show is uncommonly well-written and directed, even when the plot goes off the rails.What I Manage to OverlookLoving means tolerating flaws. “Grey’s” often deploys weapons of mass emotional manipulation that drive me crazy in other shows. I can’t stand sappy acoustic covers of pop songs, but when they play over patients being informed they are going to live or die, I start crying. Likewise, preternaturally perceptive children are my Kryptonite on all series except “Grey’s.” Perhaps this is because said kids are almost always patients, so they come and go fairly quickly. (Many of the doctors have offspring now, but they barely figure in the story lines.)Am I Prepared for When It’s Gone?As a rule, I accept that shows must end. In 2019, the ABC entertainment president Karey Burke said that she would keep the series going as long as Rhimes and Pompeo were game. Pompeo’s contract runs until Season 17, in 2021; she could well renew and renew and renew, until Grandma Meredith bosses around interns a third her age. I will tag along, even if it requires walkers for everybody involved. More

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    It’s a Streaming World After All: Scuttled Benefit Is Back.

    A Broadway fund-raiser to benefit entertainment workers whose livelihoods have been imperiled by the coronavirus will be rescheduled after a labor union retreated from a demand that musicians be paid for the streaming of the previously recorded event.“We believe all musicians should be fairly compensated for their work all of the time, but we also believe that we must do everything possible to support entertainment workers hurt by the coronavirus pandemic,” Ray Hair, international president of the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada, said in a statement Monday. “We fully support the union musicians who have graciously offered to forgo all required payments to allow this charity event to move forward.”The fund-raiser, which had been scheduled for Monday, will instead be held on Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern time. (It will be streamed at broadwaycares.org, youtube.com/BCEFA and facebook.com/BCEFA, as well as on websites of Playbill, iHeartRadio and ABC-owned television stations.)The event is to raise money for the theater nonprofit Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. It will feature a streamed benefit concert, recorded in November, in which 79 singers and dancers, and 15 musicians, performed songs from Disney musicals, . The actor Ryan McCartan will host from home, weaving in live interviews.The fund-raiser had run aground over whether the musicians — who were paid last fall for performing — should also receive compensation for the streaming.Their union, which has made a priority of winning compensation for streaming media, insisted that the musicians should be paid. But the charity said it could not afford to do so, and pointed out that other unions, including Actors’ Equity and SAG-AFTRA, had agreed to waive any fees given that the event was to benefit suffering performers. The charity also agreed to make a donation to an emergency assistance fund for musicians.After an unpleasant email exchange last week, the charity canceled the event on Saturday.On Sunday, the 15 musicians issued a public statement expressing their desire for the event to proceed without any additional payment to them. Also on Sunday, the president of the union’s Local 802, which represents musicians in Greater New York, issued a statement criticizing Hair’s action.On Monday, after Hair issued the statement changing his position, Tom Viola, the Broadway Cares executive director, issued his own statement thanking the union and praising those musicians “who were willing to speak up during this unprecedented time.”And the musicians who had performed in the original concert welcomed the news. “We are delighted to see that President Ray Hair has endorsed our wish to donate our rights to the streaming of this performance,” they said in a statement. “Thanks to all the AFM leadership for hearing our voice in this matter.” More

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    What’s on TV Monday: 'Listen to Your Heart’ and ‘The Baker and the Beauty’

    What’s on TVTHE BACHELOR PRESENTS: LISTEN TO YOUR HEART 8 p.m. on ABC. It’s only been about a month since Peter Weber wrapped up his divisive stint as television’s most visible romantic free agent on “The Bachelor.” Many fans are still parsing his decision to break off his engagement with Hannah Ann to pursue a relationship with Madison, especially since the couple called things off soon after the finale aired. The franchise’s new offering starts off with a two-hour episode, and follows musicians looking for love. It should be diverting enough to help viewers forget that the most recent bachelor didn’t end his season betrothed. At the very least, it will tide us over until Clare Crawley assumes “The Bachelorette” throne. The spinoff’s contestants will perform separately and together as they try to develop ongoing relationships.THE BAKER AND THE BEAUTY 10 p.m. on ABC. If you’re still in the mood for romance after watching aspiring musicians flirt and flaunt their skills for two hours, this new series about an average Joe and a famous fashion mogul may hit the spot. The two meet when Daniel (Victor Rasuk), who works at the family bakery, publicly rejects his girlfriend’s marriage proposal. He’s splattered with soup, a parting gift from his spurned partner. Noa (Nathalie Kelley), the titular beauty and celebrity, offers him a ride away from his troubles. But instead of returning to his close-knit clan of parents and siblings, Daniel joins Noa for a night out in Miami.What’s StreamingANATOMY OF A MURDER (1959) Stream on the Criterion Channel. Jimmy Stewart stars in this acclaimed courtroom drama by Otto Preminger as Paul Biegler, a folksy small-town lawyer who is called upon to defend an Army lieutenant charged with murder (Ben Gazzara). The officer says it was a revenge killing for the rape of his wife, Laura (Lee Remick). Biegler is hopeful that he will be able to successfully argue that the lieutenant is innocent because his actions were the result of an “irresistible impulse.” But the case proves difficult to make. The prosecution is tough and Laura appears unsympathetic and unreliable.THE MOUTH OF THE WOLF (2009) Stream on Mubi. The director Pietro Marcello’s film “Martin Eden” was supposed to open in theaters in the United States this month, but its release was postponed because of the coronavirus. While we wait for “Martin Eden,” the Italian director’s adaptation of Jack London’s 1909 novel, his first two full-length films are available to stream. One, “The Mouth of the Wolf,” is a hybrid documentary and drama that follows Vincenzo Motta after his release from prison, as he readjusts to life in Genoa and reunites with his companion, Mary. The other, “Crossing the Line,” is a documentary: a journey through Italy on the country’s long-distance express trains. More