Eliana Willis

What’s on TVMIRACLE WORKERS: DARK AGES 10:30 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. on TBS. Since this anthology installation of “Miracle Workers” began, Prince Chauncley (Daniel Radcliffe) has come to understand that he is not meant to carry on his family’s tyrannical traditions. He wonders if he’d prefer being kind to commoners instead, and he explores an internship shoveling feces with Edward (Steve Buscemi). Along the way, Chauncley develops feelings for Alexandra (Geraldine Viswanathan), Edward’s daughter, who has graduated from school and been employed at the medical center. Toward the end of the season, however, Chauncley has caused a war by backing out of a political marriage, and Alexandra, who was on her way to Paris with her new boyfriend, returns home.[embedded content]THE SCHEME (2020) 9 p.m. on HBO. In 2017, the N.B.A. scout Christian Dawkins — along with several assistant coaches and Adidas executives — was arrested by the F.B.I., after a two-year investigation into a collegiate basketball scandal. In 2019, Dawkins was found by a New York jury to be guilty of bribery and conspiracy to commit bribery. This feature details the scandal and the investigation, including interviews with Dawkins, his parents, his lawyer and two journalists.THE POLIO CRUSADE: AMERICAN EXPERIENCE 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings.) Partly based on the book “Polio: An American Story” by David Oshinsky, this feature documents the state of the nation during the polio outbreak of the 1940s-50s. Easily transmissible and potentially resulting in paralysis or death, polio and the threat of its contagion gripped the country until the Salk vaccines were tested in 1954. This program includes interviews with people who had polio and the only scientist still alive who worked on the vaccine.What’s StreamingA WRINKLE IN TIME (2018) Stream on Disney Plus; rent on Amazon, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube. This film adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s coming-of-age story “is demonstratively generous, encouraging and large-spirited,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times. It is directed by Ava DuVernay, who was behind “Selma” (2014) and “When They See Us” (2019). Storm Reid is Meg Murry, a middle-schooler with a little brother named Charles Wallace Murry (Deric McCabe) and two brilliant scientists for parents (Chris Pine and Gugu Mbatha-Raw). When the story begins, Meg’s father is missing — a result of his attempt to prove a theory about time and space — and is trapped in a fifth dimension by an evil force called the IT. It becomes up to Meg, along with Charles Wallace and a friend, Calvin (Levi Miller), to rescue her father and save the universe. The group encounter three celestial beings, personified by Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling and Oprah Winfrey, who share their wisdom with the children. Of the film’s impact, Scott adds that “it trusts words more than images, spelling out messages about love, courage and self-acceptance with the conscientious care of a teacher reading aloud to a class.” More

Season 5, Episode 7: ‘JMM’Dearly beloved. We are gathered here today to contemplate the nuptials of Jimmy and Kim, and to ask this question as they commence their life of matrimonial bliss:What just happened?The pair seem to have talked themselves into this union purely with professional upsides in mind. Under the law, a wife can’t be compelled to testify against a husband, and vice versa. Fine. Thing is, nobody is compelling Kim to testify against Jimmy.Maybe one day she will, and then she’ll save Jimmy from a long stint in the pokey. But this marriage seems conceived by two people who want to get married and have collaborated on a cold, unromantic rationale for doing so. They even hash out the full-disclosure rules of their wedded life outside a courthouse, like two lawyers negotiating a plea deal.For workaholic lawyers, this might be what passes for a bended knee and a diamond ring. Jimmy can’t even get a post-nuptials lunch.“Sorry, I just can’t get away,” Kim says, off to a meeting.Jimmy is soon face-to-face with Lalo Salamanca, newly arraigned and facing murder, arson and other charges. After he’s denied bail, Lalo asks about the monogram on Jimmy’s briefcase, unaware that they are his lawyer’s initials from his native incarnation. Now it’s his motto, “Justice matters most.”“Time to get yourself a new motto,” Lalo says cheerfully, after explaining that Jimmy is about going to become a friend of the cartel. “‘Just make money.’”This seems like a good time to ask what exactly Jimmy wants from his new name and career. Riches would delight him but more than anything, he seems dead set on winning esteem. Even before he has earned a penny from the cartel, he appears to be drunk on the stakes of coming legal battles he might have to fight on its behalf.How else to explain his explosive, unhinged reaction to Howard at the end of the episode? With remarkable restraint, Howard asks Jimmy to explain why he’s recently vandalized his car (with bowling balls) and his reputation (with confrontational prostitutes, who implied he’s a chiseling john). Jimmy doesn’t confess to these pranks, but he does admit that he blames Howard for his brother Chuck’s death.Let’s leave aside that Jimmy has accused a man of homicide in a case that was clearly a suicide. What’s noteworthy is Jimmy’s explosion, which goes supernova when he senses that Howard is patronizing and pitying him. Jimmy would rather face another near-death ordeal in the desert than be pitied.“I travel in worlds you can’t even imagine!” he shouts at Howard. “I’m like a God in human clothing!”This might be Jimmy’s version of “I am the one who knocks,” Walter White’s memorable affirmation of lethal power in “Breaking Bad.” Walter was overstating matters a bit — there were other players who knocked just as hard, and harder — but Jimmy’s monologue seems lunatic. He hasn’t even spent a full day as the lawyer for a cartel honcho, and he is already likening himself to Zeus. Only someone steeped in resentment could come up with an analogy like that.This tirade aside, “JMM,” as this episode is titled, is essentially a series of sales pitches. The finest of them occurs after a meeting of fast food chief executives, who have assembled at the Houston office of Madrigal Electromotive, the German conglomerate and equipment manufacturer.Welcome back, Peter Schuler, the Madrigal executive who was last seen trying out “Franch” dressing in a test kitchen in Season 5 of “Breaking Bad,” then killing himself as the feds moved in to arrest him. Herr Schuler — played by Norbert Weisser, a name I have been hoping to see in the opening credits since the debut of “Better Call Saul” — is an anxious mess, and this is long before the authorities have started circling. We see him fretting that his multimillion dollar, off-the-books construction aid to the meth superlab is going to end his career.“It’s a miracle I haven’t been caught,” he moans to Gus and Lydia during a hotel room meeting. “Last year, the auditors came this close!”Cue the talented Mr. Fring, whose gifts include sweet talking terrified upper managers. The heart of his soliloquy is an appeal to some unknown history. “Do you remember Santiago?” Gus asks. “The two of us, our backs to the wall. You are still the same man.”This is the second reference to a momentous event in Santiago, presumably the city in Chile. (In Episode 1 of this season, Lalo referred briefly to an incident in Santiago, though with glee in his voice.) Max Arciniega, Gus’s deceased partner, hails from that city, and perhaps it’s there that they started both their meth making and chicken cooking. Apparently, Schuler was present, too, and it was obviously the Salamancas who had his and Gus’s backs to the wall.Maybe there’s an epic flashback in our future. It won’t be dull.Kim gets to make the most nuanced sales pitch of this episode. She persuades Kevin Wachtell that she and her firm didn’t fail Mesa Verde — he failed the firm by not heeding the firm’s advice. Kevin buys this spiel, which is rooted in truth. Kim simultaneously demonstrates that she is roughly three times nimbler on her feet than her boss, Richard Schweikart.Meanwhile, Mike shows up at Jimmy’s with a win-bail-for-Lalo kit, complete with people who will appear at a hearing and pretend to be family. This is quite a tactical 180 on Gus’s part, given that he had just instructed Mike to use the police to put Lalo behind bars. Apparently, Gus didn’t grasp that even there, Lalo could make trouble — like ordering the torching of a Los Pollos Hermanos.But why spring Lalo now? Is he less of a threat to Fring’s operation outside of the justice system? Is there something that Gus could do to Lalo as a free man that he could not do while the guy is in prison?The logic of this move seems elusive. Lalo could order even more of Gus’s restaurants burned to the ground once he makes bail, couldn’t he?Odds and EndsTo the extent we’re going to get an explanation of Mike’s decision to rejoin Team Gus, it comes during his meeting with his daughter-in-law.“Decided to play the cards I was dealt,” he says. This would seem downright Buddhist if it didn’t mean working for a murderous drug kingpin.I would like to dine at a restaurant called the Luftwaffle, a chain represented at the Madrigal meeting. I imagine the writers’ room laughed themselves silly when they came up with that one.Details like that put this show on another level. Another worth pointing out: the otherworldly music that plays while Gus and Nacho burn down a Los Pollos Hermanos. It’s “Chuncho (The Forest Creatures),” Shazam says, by the Peruvian singer Yma Sumac.In closing, a mystery. During Nacho’s one-on-one meeting with Mike, he asks for help. He wants Mike to save the life of his father, who lives under a death threat by Gus, if Nacho has to flee.“You got a way,” he says to Mike.He does? What way? Killing Gus? Calling the Disappearer?Nacho has something in mind. Please tell us what you think it is in the comments section.And finally, please celebrate avocadomania. It’s been a smashing success in participating restaurants. More

David Schramm, an acclaimed stage and television actor best known for his role as the irascible owner of a small airline on the long-running sitcom “Wings” in the 1990s, has died. He was 73.Margot Harley, a founder of the Acting Company, where Mr. Schramm was an original member, announced his death on Sunday. She did not give a cause or say where and when he died.Though well known from his signature television role, Mr. Schramm was first and foremost a stage actor. He was drawing attention in New York while still a student at the Juilliard School, where he was a member of the first graduating class of the drama division.That division was created in 1968 under John Houseman, and its first class of students, graduating in 1972, also included Kevin Kline, Patti LuPone and David Ogden Stiers.The students’ work was so well received that Mr. Houseman and Ms. Harley, the drama division’s administrative director, formed the Acting Company, a professional troupe, in 1972, with the new graduates at its core. By 1973 the company was on Broadway with five plays in repertory, Mr. Schramm appearing in all of them.He was often, as Mel Gussow put it in The New York Times in 1978, “the company’s resident old character man.” That year, at age 30, he was playing King Lear. Previously for the company, he had played an aging wanderer in Maxim Gorky’s “The Lower Depths,” the philosophical old doctor Chebutykin in Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” and the father of one of the young lovers in Molière’s “Scapin.” After five years with the Acting Company, Mr. Schramm became a regular on regional stages as well as in New York theaters. A turning point in his career came in 1988, when he played the male lead in the Garson Kanin comedy “Born Yesterday” opposite Rebecca de Mornay at the Pasadena Playhouse in California. The production drew rave reviews.“His portrayal is a true heir to Jackie Gleason: loud, blustery, swift, an ungrammatical ball of suet, as unaware of his arrogance as of his limitations,” Sylvie Drake wrote in a review in The Los Angeles Times. “In spite of it all, Schramm succeeds in making Brock remarkably appealing — a sort of disconnected large pussycat, with the roar and the timing of the lion that he’s not.”The television industry took note.“Because of those reviews, I landed in every casting office in town,” Mr. Schramm told that newspaper in 1989. “I was the flavor of the month.”He had done little television before that — his main credit had been playing Robert S. McNamara in the 1983 mini-series “Kennedy” — but suddenly he was turning up in episodes of “Miami Vice,” “Wiseguy” and other shows.And then, in 1990, came “Wings.” Mr. Schramm was cast as Roy Biggins, whose tiny airline shared a terminal on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts with one owned by two brothers, played by Tim Daly and Steven Weber. The cast also included Thomas Haden Church, Rebecca Schull and Crystal Bernard; Tony Shalhoub and Amy Yasbeck joined the ensemble later. The show ran for 172 episodes across seven seasons, a mainstay of the NBC schedule.Biggins was a blustery, obnoxious fellow, who often played against Mr. Weber’s laid-back character. On Twitter, Mr. Weber remembered the skill that Mr. Schramm had brought to the role.“His timing was never less than perfect,” Mr. Weber said, “his professionalism was always on display.”David Schramm was born on Aug. 14, 1946, in Louisville, Ky. In school he won trophies for public speaking, and at 17 he was an apprentice at the Actors Theater of Louisville.“I got $25 a week to clean the toilets and be in a play,” he told The Times of Trenton, N.J., in 2008, when he was in a production of Conor McPherson’s “The Seafarer” at the George Street Playhouse in nearby New Brunswick. “My big line in my very first one was, ‘I’m the station master, madam,’ and on opening night I said, ‘I’m the station madam, master.’ People must have been thinking, ‘Get this kid off the stage.’”He kept at it, though, taking acting classes at Western Kentucky University, where a speech and theater professor, Mildred Howard, read about the new drama division starting at Juilliard and urged him to try out.“She worked on two audition pieces with me,” he said, “arranged for the flight, packed a lunch, and said, ‘Go!’ I did and got accepted on the spot.”Mr. Schramm made occasional appearances on Broadway after his initial turns in the 1970s, most recently in 2009 as the bigoted Senator Rawkins in a revival of the musical comedy “Finian’s Rainbow.” (Charles Isherwood of The New York Times called his performance “boisterously oily.”)But the bulk of his stage work was in regional theaters. Critics praised his work in John Olive’s “The Voice of the Prairie” at Hartford Stage in 1987, Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” at the Berkshire Theater Festival in 2008, John Patrick Shanley’s “Outside Mullingar” at George Street in 2014, and many more.“My specialty seems to be playing the loud, pompous, bombastic, verging-on-hysteria guy,” Mr. Schramm told The Los Angeles Times in 1989. “But I’d rather establish a totally different persona each time. It’s why I act.”Information on his survivors was not immediately available.As for “Wings,” Mr. Schramm told The Times of Trenton that he knew the show would be a success right from the start.“When we sat around the table reading the first script,” he recalled, “and I saw this buffoon they created for me, this pompous guy who said garish things to women, and all the other rich characters, I turned to Rebecca” — Ms. Schull — “and said, ‘I think we’ve landed in a tub of butter.’ And we did.” More

“I’ve gotten to like this room,” President Trump said March 23 in the White House briefing room.If the walls had ears, they’d have been surprised to hear it. Until recently, the Trump administration had all but done away with formal press briefings, and the president preferred to talk to reporters amid the helpful din of a helicopter or in a Fox News studio.But the briefing room has one amenity that Donald Trump, suddenly without rallies and travel appearances amid a pandemic, cannot resist: a camera.Mr. Trump became a prime-time star through TV, a political figure through TV and a president through TV. But he has not, as president, had what he had with NBC’s “The Apprentice”: a regular TV show in which he plays an executive in control.Now, the coronavirus briefings have given him a new, live and unfiltered daily platform before a captive national audience. True to his résumé, he has conducted them as a kind of reality TV, or rather, create-your-own-reality TV.In this reality — often subject to later fact-checking by the press or to backpedaling by staff — help and needed equipment are always just around the corner. Accurate reports of his conflicts with governors over federal support are “fake news.” And no one could have anticipated a pandemic like this, despite warnings, playbooks and public-health infrastructure intended to do exactly that.The daily coronavirus briefings, increasingly timed to run live on cable and broadcast right around the evening news, are a journey. The president begins them by soberly reading statements. (On Thursday, he gave the roll call of the G20 leadership.) He can be expansive — even, astonishingly, praising the media — and he can be peevish. (“I want them to be appreciative,” he said Friday of American governors.)In its short life, for all its dead-serious subject matter, the program has developed the structure, rhythm and characters of a weekly reality show.There’s drama and intrigue, such as the reports that the president might be at odds with staffers like Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. There’s the appearance of the protagonist, Mr. Trump, flanked by lieutenants, to announce the day’s topics and story lines.And there’s the concluding “Apprentice” boardroom-style conflict in the Q. and A. session, in which friendly journalists are praised, and those who ask questions he doesn’t want to answer are “terrible.” After which Mr. Trump leaves the set and his public-health officials climb into the producer’s chair to edit his comments and their own often diverging guidance into a cohesive narrative. More

What’s on TVTHE GOOD DOCTOR 10 p.m. on ABC. In the second part of the season finale, the doctors at San Jose St. Bonaventure Hospital continue to respond to the major earthquake that rocked their city. The crisis is testing their ingenuity and pushing their personal issues to the surface. Dr. Shaun Murphy (Freddie Highmore), the protagonist of the series, is still reeling from his latest rejection by Lea (Paige Spara), who cited Shaun’s autism as a reason not to pursue a romantic relationship with him. Undeterred, he revealed in the last episode that he hadn’t lost hope. Lea, who was trapped after the earthquake hit and eventually rescued, overheard Shaun’s comments and responded emotionally. But before they could address them, an aftershock left Shaun stranded with a patient in the flooding basement of a collapsed building.What’s StreamingTHE SCHOUWENDAM 12 Stream on Acorn TV. The second installment of Lex Passchier and Martin van Steijn’s “The 12” anthology series focuses on a Dutch village haunted by the unsolved disappearance of two teenagers in 1995. This mystery is reignited when a man in his 40s who bears a striking resemblance to Olaf, one of the missing teens, shows up in Schouwendam. The new arrival claims to not know his own identity. Prodded by the suspicions of the villagers, he starts to look into his connection to the lost Olaf in a bid to recover his memory. This follow-up to “The Oldenheim 12” is linked to its predecessor by its shared focus on dark underbelly of small-town life.TIP TOP (2014) Stream on Mubi. Rent on Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. This film by Serge Bozon is two parts deadpan farce, one part conceptual mystery. Adapted from a novel of the same name by Bill James, it blends features of screwball comedy and film noir to reflect on the legacy of French colonialism and contemporary sexual mores. Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Kiberlain star as Internal Affairs investigators charged with determining whether or not the police were involved in the murder of an Algerian informant. Both sleuths have secrets of their own. Sally (Kiberlain) is a compulsive voyeur who was demoted because of her proclivities, and Esther (Huppert) has a penchant for sadomasochism. THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (1964) Stream on the Criterion Channel. Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes and YouTube. In this movie, Jacques Demy manages to synthesize the emotional earnestness of the American musical with the adventurous cinematic spirit that was circulating among younger French filmmakers during the 1950s and ’60s. Bursting with color, sung throughout and driven by Michel Legrand’s music, it tells the tragic love story of a young couple torn apart by the Algerian War. Before he’s drafted to fight, Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) and Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve) make plans to marry. When their wartime correspondence lags, a pregnant Geneviève accepts a marriage proposal from a kind and wealthy suitor at the urging of her mother. After returning to civilian life and learning of Geneviève’s decision, Guy also tries to move on. More

Season 3, Episode 3: ‘The Absence of Field’Much of the first two seasons of “Westworld” was about the hosts wresting control of their destinies and exercising the same freedoms enjoyed by their human tormentors, who had cast them as attractions in a sadistic Disneyland for the global elite. But now that the action has shifted to the human world, the premise has been turned on its head: How much control do humans have over their destinies? It turns out to be far less than they might imagine.The theme has been a long time coming, planted most prominently in the revelation that Delos was most interested in Westworld as an opportunity to harvest data from its guests, which was then kept in a massive server called the Forge. And it manifested last week, too, in Maeve’s peculiar adventures in Warworld and beyond, which she eventually discovered was a large-scale simulation devised by Engerraund Serac to gain intel on the robot uprising. When Maeve demonstrated flaws in the program by freezing a moment of action, it recalled the “bullet-time” effects of “The Matrix,” a film about a future where humans experience their lives as a simulation while machines tap them as an energy source.Tonight’s gripping episode firms up the connection by having Dolores “red pill” Caleb, the war veteran turned cyber mercenary who came to her aid after the shootout that ended the Season 3 premiere. Before it was co-opted as a political meme, the red pill referred to a scene in “The Matrix” in which Keanu Reeves’s hero learned the ugly truth about the world as it really was, rather than the pacifying illusion used to oppress humanity. Here, Dolores tells Caleb about a nefarious company called Incite that has been collecting data for years on individuals and storing it on “Rehoboam,” a massive system designed to predict and control human behavior in much the same way the hosts were managed in the park.For Caleb, this cursed revelation is a reward of sorts for breaking out of his own loop and surprising Dolores in the process. Dolores had good reason to believe humans would not be inclined to act nobly on her behalf, but his choice to stay with her in an ambulance and fight off crime-app mercenaries has genuinely touched her. She hasn’t encountered anyone like him before: All the guests in the park have both the privilege to pay admission and the impulse to include rape and murder on their vacation itinerary, so underclass nobility is foreign to her.Science-fiction robots tend to stick to a simple “kill all humans” plan, but Dolores can’t miss the parallels between Caleb’s predicament and her own. They’ve both been shackled to a predetermined life — her by programming, him by algorithm.There’s no missing the message here about how Silicon Valley companies mine user information — some that we give away voluntarily — and how vulnerable the right to privacy has become in the digital age. When Dolores sits Caleb down at the diner booth where his schizophrenic mother abandoned him as a child, she is armed not only with knowledge of that painfully intimate memory but also with a full shooting script. Later, she takes him to the pier that the algorithm predicts will be a likely spot for his future suicide, which it predicts with enough confidence to ensure that the powers that be will prevent him from advancing beyond his current status as a part-time construction worker and petty criminal.It’s an extremely “Westworld” twist for Dolores to start liberating humans like Caleb after vowing to take revenge on them, but she’s learning that we have our redeeming moments. Even Charlotte Hale, the most hiss-able villain in the Delos empire, shows a little vulnerability and heart when the chips are down. The pre-credits scene of Charlotte taping a message to her son in the middle of the park rebellion is an early sign of where the episode — and the season — appears to be headed. If there’s a shred of decency in her, then perhaps a more nuanced approach to torching the human world may be required.One of the big questions heading into the season was addressed tonight: Whose “pearl” is controlling Charlotte-bot? The show strongly hints that it is Teddy, despite the fact that we saw her beam Teddy into the Valley Beyond at the end of Season 2. Dolores says she can trust this person. They share a tender moment in a hotel room. She seems to make reference to his suicide.And yet she never actually says his name, which means that “Westworld” is shelving the big revelation for another time. Keeping the audience in the dark over Charlotte’s identity is an immensely frustrating narrative strategy, the sort of misdirection-for-its-own-sake that invites speculation without substance.Whoever the host actually is, he or she has become profoundly uncomfortable in Charlotte’s skin. For one, Charlotte cares about her son, revealing a softer side than Dolores might have assumed or that we’ve actually seen on the show. But it also appears that the essence of Charlotte is asserting herself, despite the fact that Charlotte-bot is a replicant body with a host brain.To quote Jeff Goldblum in “Jurassic Park,” “Life finds a way.”Paranoid Androids:The Delos riot control robots look exactly like the ED-209 in “RoboCop,” so they’re certain to work perfectly.Why would Charlotte need to go through all that security rigmarole if Serac was only a hologram? The heavily fortified location offers privacy, perhaps, but the tech seemed a bit superfluous.Secac is a trillionaire? We don’t yet know how he got all the money. But we can safely guess he isn’t asked to pay income tax on it.“I remember what it’s like to be me. You’re not the only predator here.” In rescuing Charlotte’s son from a pedophile in the park, the line between the host and the actual Charlotte gets hazy. More