Eliana Willis

BERLIN — It has spread to every continent except Antarctica, brought the global economy to its knees and turned life upside down for millions of people. But, until Tuesday night, there was one lucky group of attractive, young people who knew nothing about the coronavirus pandemic.After weeks of being cut off from the world, the contestants of Germany’s version of “Big Brother” were told about the unfolding crisis in a midseason live show on Tuesday night.The TV show centers on 14 contestants confined to two adjacent houses for 100 days. They are filmed around the clock and gradually eliminated by viewer voting, with the winner taking home 100,000 euros (around $110,000). The current season began on Feb. 10, when most cases of the coronavirus were still in China.Speaking from behind a sheet of protective glass, “Big Brother’s” host, Jochen Schropp, explained that “a disease called COVID-19 had spread across the world” and “reached Europe.” Contestants were then shown news clips of recent events, including footage of deserted streets in Italy and Germany. Most of the contestants watched in shocked silence. Several erupted into sobs.Wiping away tears, one contestant, identified as Michelle, 26, explained that because she works as a geriatric nurse, she was particularly worried about her patients. Another, who works as a bartender, expressed concern about what the virus might mean for the country’s economy.The show had gone on as usual in recent weeks, even as the pandemic upended life in Germany. On Monday night, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced sweeping measures to combat the spread of the virus, including shutting the country’s borders with France, Austria and Switzerland to noncommercial traffic, and forcing the closure of most shops.As of Tuesday afternoon, 8,009 cases have been reported in Germany, a majority in North Rhine-Westphalia, the region where “Big Brother” is filmed.Now that we live in the era of “social distancing,” the contestants’ closeness has seemed like a relic from a more innocent time. In an episode that aired Monday, two contestants were made to spend a full day chained to each other, as part of a challenge set for them by the show’s producers.In another recent episode, male contestants took turns performing half-nude lap dances on a female participant. At a house party, one contestant drank sparkling wine out of another’s bellybutton.While conversation throughout Germany, as elsewhere, has been dominated by discussions of the virus, the contestants’ discussions have focused on more banal topics, like dating, household chores and their sexual interests.In an article on Thursday in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, a spokeswoman for Sat. 1, the channel that broadcasts the show, was quoted defending the ethics of withholding information from the contestants. But the show quickly reversed course. In an email on Tuesday, Sandra Scholz, a spokeswoman in the channel’s press office, said the program’s policy had always been to inform contestants “anytime something this exceptional happens in the world.”Contestants on “Big Brother” in Italy and Australia were recently told about the epidemic, and participants in Canada were informed after they noted the conspicuous absence of a studio audience during the segment of the show when contestants are eliminated.“Big Brother” has had to grapple with similar dilemmas about news events in the past. In 2001, the American version of the program broke the set’s news blackout to inform its cast members about the September 11 attacks. One of the contestants, Monica Bailey, had a cousin died who during the attack.Although four new contestants entered the German show on March 9 in a surprise twist, they were barred by producers from speaking about current events. The channel’s press office said in an email that all new arrivals had been screened for the virus, and that production staff had taken enhanced protective measures in recent weeks.Scholz also explained that contestants would have access to a psychologist to help them cope with the news. Schropp, the host, was joined by a doctor to deliver the announcement on Tuesday night.After an emotional question-and-answer session, the contestants were shown video messages from their loved ones, all of whom insisted they were healthy and urged the housemates not to leave the show. Gina, a bubbly contestant with bleached hair, was told by a friend that she was “not missing anything, because all the clubs and bars are closed.”The partner of another contestant, Pat, urged him to stay in the house. It was, he added, “the best quarantine that exists.” More

Lyle Waggoner, the sable-haired heartthrob best remembered as the announcer and a comic performer in the early years of “The Carol Burnett Show” and for playing opposite Lynda Carter on the 1970s television versions of “Wonder Woman,” died on Tuesday at his home in Westlake Village, Calif. He was 84.The cause was complications of cancer, his agent, Robert Malcolm, said.Mr. Waggoner’s dulcet voice, square jaw and muscular physique made him seem cut out to be a leading man. But his most recognizable parts were in support of others — Ms. Burnett on her hit comedy-variety show, and Ms. Carter, who played Wonder Woman on ABC and then CBS in the 1970s.Mr. Waggoner started on “The Carol Burnett Show” when it began in 1967 and stayed with the program for seven seasons, going from eye-candy announcer to important player in an ensemble cast that also included Harvey Korman, Tim Conway and Vicki Lawrence, in addition to Ms. Burnett.“It was Carl Reiner’s suggestion that we get a hunk of an announcer,” Ms. Burnett told The Los Angeles Times in 2015, when a collection of the show’s early episodes was released on DVD. “Lyle walked in, and it was practically no contest. He was funny and didn’t take himself seriously. He was hired on the spot, and we started using him in sketches.”Mr. Waggoner’s good looks led to other employment as well. In 1973 he was the centerfold model for the first issue of Playgirl magazine.He parted ways with “The Carol Burnett Show” in 1974, and appeared the next year on “Wonder Woman,” which began as an ABC television movie before becoming a regular series.Mr. Waggoner originally played Steve Trevor, an Army officer who crashes his plane on the secret island of the Amazons in the 1940s. Princess Diana, as Wonder Woman is known at home, brings him back to Washington, and they work together to foil Nazi plots, with Diana doing most of the foiling.After the show’s first season ended in the winter of 1977, ABC decided not to renew it, in part because a series set in the 1940s was expensive to produce. But CBS liked the program enough to pick it up, and later that year an updated take on the show, set in the 1970s and called “The New Adventures of Wonder Woman,” made its debut.Ms. Carter once again played Diana, and Mr. Waggoner played his original character’s son, Steve Trevor Jr., an agent of an American intelligence organization that turns to Diana for help.“I couldn’t believe they wanted me to play my own son,” Mr. Waggoner said in an interview with the website SciFiAndTvTalk in 2011. “I figured: ‘Well, they’re professionals. They must know what it is they’re doing, but this doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense to me.’ I’m sure it didn’t make much sense to the viewers either, but they stuck with us for two years.”CBS canceled the show in 1979, but it lived on in reruns and continued to find new fans for many years. Mr. Waggoner went on to make guest appearances on many shows, including “The Love Boat,” “Mork and Mindy,” “Happy Days” and “Murder, She Wrote.”Mr. Waggoner said that people recognized him from “Wonder Woman” decades after it went off the air.“I can go anywhere in the U.S. and sometimes the world and people walking down the street will stop me and say, ‘Hey, Lyle, how are you?’” he said in 2011.Mr. Waggoner drew on that recognition in some of his last roles, parodying his 1970s image on the sitcoms “That ’70s Show” and “The Naked Truth.”Lyle Wesley Waggoner was born on April 13, 1935, in Kansas City, Kan., to Marie (Isern) and Myron Waggoner. His father worked for the Southwestern Bell telephone company.Lyle attended Washington University in St. Louis, served in the Army in Germany and appeared on “Gunsmoke” and “Lost in Space” before landing his breakout role with Ms. Burnett.He married Sharon Kennedy in 1960. His survivors include his wife; two sons, Jason and Beau; and four grandchildren.When his acting career quieted down in the 1980s, Mr. Waggoner founded Star Waggons, a company that supplies custom-made trailers for actors on film and television shoots. Star Waggons employs around 100 people and is now run by his sons.Years before Mr. Waggoner got an important part on a beloved if campy television show based on a comic book, he auditioned for the lead role on perhaps the most beloved and campiest one of them all. But the role of “Batman” was given to Adam West. More

It happened around the world, and now it’s happening in the United States: The more people stay home to avoid the coronavirus pandemic, the more they find themselves glued to their screens.In South Korea, as cases spiked, television viewership shot up 17 percent, according to Nielsen. Last month in Italy, the size of the TV audience increased 6.5 percent, with a 12 percent rise in hard-hit Lombardy.The same trend has arrived in the United States. In the Seattle area, total television use increased 22 percent on March 11 from the week before, according to Nielsen. In New York that day, as more people started working from home, use went up 8 percent. (Total use, as defined by Nielsen, includes live television, on-demand viewing, streaming and gaming.)But for media companies, the benefit of having a bigger-than-usual audience may be short-lived as the outbreak threatens to undercut the very structure of their business. With businesses scaling back workers and analysts warning of a recession as global economies slow, a significant number of viewers may decide in the coming months to break away from cable or cut back on streaming subscriptions.The gain in audience size “will be replaced pretty quickly by the necessity of reducing monthly bills, when people will have to deal with the financial impacts of a recession,” said Craig Moffett, a co-founder of the research firm MoffettNathanson. “Cord cutting will accelerate with a vengeance.”The Walt Disney Company, ViacomCBS and other media giants face a pivotal moment as the delicate ecosystem that protects their business — live content tied to high-cost subscriptions — erodes even faster. It started last week with the sudden disappearance of a dependable asset: sports programming.Live sports coverage generates billions of advertising dollars and fuels television subscriptions — a combination that delivers fat profits. Now the industry is facing the postponement and cancellation of almost every major sporting event, including the Masters golf tournament, a CBS staple, as well as the remainder of the National Basketball Association season and postseason, which are consistent draws for the AT&T-owned Turner channels and Disney’s ESPN and ABC networks.The sports coverage has become critical at a time when the audience appetite for dramas and sitcoms has shrunk. Advertisers spend more than $2 billion on live games and tournaments during this part of the year, according to Kantar Media. And with LeBron James benched indefinitely, ESPN is expected to lose $481 million in N.B.A.-related advertising; for Turner, the loss will be about $210 million, according to MoffettNathanson.In statements, ESPN and AT&T’s WarnerMedia said they were confident that they would weather the challenge, but declined to make executives available for interviews. For now, ESPN has filled the gaps by running “SportsCenter” nearly nonstop.NBCUniversal executives have been eagle eyed on the Tokyo Olympics ever since President Trump called last week for a possible postponement. More than $1.25 billion in advertising commitments are on the line for the network and its parent company, Comcast. More

Season 5, Episode 5: ‘Dedicado a Max’There’s a pleasing symmetry to “Dedicado a Max,” an episode that could be more accurately titled “A Tale of Two Coots.” The bifurcated plot revolves around a pair of ornery old men. Both are natural-born fighters who don’t like to be told what to do. One is in a house that people want him evicted from, that he refuses to leave. The other is in a house that people want to stay in that he would like to flee.The latter is Mike, who doesn’t seem particularly grateful for the lifesaving measures taken by Gus Fring, who has created a makeshift hospital somewhere in Mexico, complete with high-tech medical equipment, a surgeon and a housekeeper. Mike’s first thought is to escape this idyll. His second is to call Gus and bark: “This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife. How did I get here?”OK, those are not direct quotes, but they capture the gist. Fring turns up at the end of the episode to explain that he has saved Mike’s life because he needs some muscle and smarts in the coming war with the Salamancas. The scene, the finest of the episode, plumbs a theme dear to the show’s creators, which also loomed large in “Breaking Bad.” Can acts of kindness make up for acts of evil? Is there a karmic ledger that allows this kind of moral accounting, where pluses and minuses are tallied and zeroed out?“The anonymous benefactor,” says Mike, all but sneering. “Well that must make you feel pretty good. And is that supposed to balance the scales, make up for everything else you do?”“It makes up for nothing,” Fring replies. “I am what I am.”This might be a variation of a line by Iago, the ur-villain of “Othello,” who promises to hide his true self when he says “I am not what I am.” Fring is not what he appears to be, either. Or at least there is much more to him than he lets on. This dialogue unfolds next to a memorial to Max Arciniega, the love of his life and the man to whom this health clinic is dedicated. (Hence the episode’s name.) So we get an added layer of pathos, not visible to Mike. We are watching a man remember and mourn as he tries to convey an aura of invulnerability.The other coot in this episode is Everett Acker, a.k.a. Mr. Hell No. As his lawyer, Jimmy has an approach to jurisprudence that could be defined as “strict obstructionist,” and he finds ever more inventive ways to prevent Mesa Verde’s bulldozers from bulldozing.This enrages Kevin Wachtell (Rex Linn), Mesa Verde’s chief executive, who is eager to start building his call center and fumes at every delay. Instead of bouncing Kim off the case because her boyfriend is suing the bank, Wachtell keeps Kim in situ, arguing that he wants the best to manage this brawl. This gets awkward fast and eventually Kim’s boss, Rich Schweikart, suggests it’s time for her to hand off Mesa Verde to colleagues.Schweikart has seen through Kim’s ruse — she’s helping Jimmy undermine Mesa Verde — which might explain her reaction. She expresses the kind of rage one feels after getting caught. This leads to the episode’s most implausible moment. She follows Schweikart out of her office, down the hall and confronts him in full view of other employees.I can understand why Kim would go all-in at this moment. I just don’t grasp why she did it in such a public space, instead of conferring in Schweikert’s office, per his urging. This is out of character, given Kim’s impeccable instincts about professional appearances. So the scene comes across as gratuitously dramatic, at least by the standards of realism set by this show.Let’s hope that Kim is a step ahead of all of us and that this was a ploy.While we’re on ploys, one of the episode’s highlights is the arrival of “Mr. X,” a.k.a. Sobchak (played by the “Walking Dead” veteran Steven Ogg), who was last seen in Season 1, getting disarmed and throat-punched by Mike as he auditioned for a bodyguard gig. He’s far better as a private detective, it turns out. He has been hired by Jimmy, through the “underground Craigslist,” to scrape up raw material that could be used to blackmail Wachtell. Sobchak has broken into Wachtell’s home and photographed the place.What did he find? Apparently nada. The blackmail approach seems doomed. Then, after Sobchak has been ushered out of the back of the nail salon where this debriefing occurs, Kim looks at some interior shots of Wachtell’s home and smiles. She’s spotted something incriminating.So here’s the question: What is it? The two images that improve her mood both include renderings of Mesa Verde’s corporate logo, a horse-rising cowboy. One is a vintage black and white, beside family photographs. Cut to Kim, at her office computer, comparing the outline of that photograph to the corporate logo. Then to a Mesa Verde ad, which apparently refers to the year of the bank’s founding, 1958.Those are our clues, people, and this is classic “Better Call Saul.” The show has a way of turning us all into Watsons to some character’s Sherlock. If you have a notion of what made Kim smile, please share.Odds and Ends:Broadly speaking, “Better Call Saul” is divided into two strands: a legal plot (about Kim’s and Jimmy’s travails as lawyers and people) and a narco plot (about Gus’s and Lalo’s efforts to dominate the local drug market). The last two episodes have leaned heavily into the legal plot, so much so that Lalo has been absent from both, and Hank and Gomez did not appear in this one.As a fan of the narco plot, I hope that Mike’s journey from depression and surgery to health and (eventual) vigor will mean it gets at least equal time on the show, perhaps more.Come back, Lalo. We miss you.We have finally learned what turns Jimmy on, sexually. Role play. He gets a bit hot and bothered when Kim does a fine impression of Wachtell beside his golf course, reacting angrily to news that ground can’t yet be broken on that call center. Most role play revolves around archetypes that include such classics as the naughty nurse. Not Jimmy’s taste. He’s partial to grumpy, middle-aged bank executives.“Kevin,” he says to Kim, when she’s finished with her Kevin impression. “Would you care to take a shower with me?”Different strokes.In the episode’s last line, Fring says he has chosen Mike as his “button man” because Mike understands a crucial concept: revenge. It’s a stellar ending, and it strongly suggests that Gus has studied Mike’s history enough to know his darkest secret: what Mike did in Philadelphia to avenge his son’s murder.Some parting questions. What is up with Howard and his efforts to recruit Jimmy to his firm? It has to be more than a way to keep Patrick Fabian busy, doesn’t it? But what exactly does Howard want?Please share your guesses, about this and other mysteries described above, in the comments section.Meantime, I have to make a call. More

“Saturday Night Live” became the latest topical comedy series to suspend its season amid concerns about the coronavirus pandemic. “S.N.L.,” the late-night NBC variety sketch program, had been on a scheduled hiatus after its March 7 broadcast and was expected to return on March 28. But the series “will now not resume production until further notice,” NBC said in a statement on Monday. The network added, “We will monitor the situation closely and make decisions about future shows on an ongoing basis as further information develops.”“S.N.L.,” which is currently in its 45th season and is broadcast from NBC’s New York headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, joins the ranks of other programs like “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” “Late Night With Seth Meyers” and “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” which have all halted their seasons during the spread of the coronavirus.During its many years on the air, “S.N.L.” has occasionally been suspended in midseason by writers’ strikes. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the show was back on the air in less than a month; its Sept. 29 season premiere that year opened memorably with an introduction by then-Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and the singer-songwriter Paul Simon, who performed “The Boxer,” a song about showing resilience in the face of hardship. More