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    ‘Queenie’ Is a Fun Coming-of-Age Show

    This smart and poppy British series melds the good parts of the semi-autobiographical sadcom with more predictable rom-com traditions.“Queenie,” based on the novel by Candice Carty-Williams (who also created and executive produced the show), follows a rough season for a bright, self-destructive 25-year-old Londoner. When we meet Queenie (Dionne Brown), she is at a crummy appointment with a rude gynecologist, the first of many characters we see treat Queenie with casual — and physically painful — disrespect.After a disastrous family dinner, Queenie’s boyfriend dumps her, which sends her into a spiral of booze, sex and lousy decisions. “Abandonment issues,” she cites, and the show slowly explains the exact nature of her estrangement from her mother and her tight but stressful relationship with her Jamaican immigrant grandparents and aunt. Yes, of course there is an episode told in gentle flashback that traces the torch relay of generational trauma. (All eight episodes arrive Friday, on Hulu.)Queenie has grim sex, too-rough sex, anonymous sex, sex with men who are not as single as they claim, and all her encounters leave her feeling worthless. Her girlfriends, in a group chat called “the Corgis,” offer support and sometimes tough love as the screen fills with sleazy messages from white dudes on dating apps. Despite the emphasis on Queenie’s sexual exploits and exploitation, the show is often prim: A car horn bleeps out a naughty word, and even the sex scenes are clothed and rather chaste.A friend — or maybe more than a friend? — tells Queenie that he admires how well she knew herself when they were kids. “I didn’t know who I was then, and I still don’t know now,” she says in voice-over. It’s one of many times the show uses voice-over to state what’s clear from Brown’s luminous performance and from the story in general. Beyond the vestigial interior monologue, other characters on “Queenie” also make the subtext the text. “You are going to have to face up to those demons at some point,” Queenie’s boss warns. Yeah, lady, that’s … that’s the show.The last decade of TV has brought us many messy 20-somethings bottoming out before finding self-actualization through embracing and metabolizing their greatest shame or insecurity. Often those shows are semi-autobiographical sadcoms, and “Queenie” captures the good parts of those shows in its humor and specifics. The show also pulls from rom-com traditions and from sweeter, tidy story styles; while its friction feels raw and authentic, its resolutions feel awfully pat in their sunniness.“Queenie” can feel “young adult” instead of young and adult, but the flip is that the show is never a miserable slog through trauma and degradation. It’s smart, poppy and fun — critical, but not cynical. More

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    ‘Becoming Karl Lagerfeld’ Seeks to Capture the Man Behind the Glasses

    Set in the 1970s, the series depicts the designer’s personal and professional evolution and revolves around an intense love story.Daniel Brühl had just started shooting the series “Becoming Karl Lagerfeld” in Paris last year, and he could feel the French crew’s eyes on him. The German actor, who was playing the title role, was all nerves. After his first few days on set, he returned to his dressing room to find an enormous bouquet of, as he put it, “the biggest and reddest roses I’ve seen in my life.” There wasn’t any note.When Brühl put the flowers in a vase at home later, however, he spotted a small card tucked among them. “It said ‘For Karlito, from Jacquot,’” he recalled in a video interview. “Nothing else.”He realized the gift was from his co-star Théodore Pellerin, a Canadian actor who portrays Lagerfeld’s great love, Jacques de Bascher; Pellerin had signed the card with their characters’ nicknames. Brühl knew then that he and the series, which revolves around the intense love story between the two men, would be fine.“Becoming Karl Lagerfeld,” which premieres on Friday on Hulu, is set mostly in the 1970s, a decade that was key to Lagerfeld’s development as a fashion designer as well as his personal evolution. It was before he formed his distinctive look of a sharp-angled figure decked out in monochromatic costumes, high collars, black gloves — though the tinted glasses and signature ponytail make their appearance. Like Andy Warhol, another secretive pop-culture icon, Lagerfeld meticulously manufactured his public identity, Brühl said: “So who was the person before he was famous?”Brühl briefly met Lagerfeld, who died in 2019, about 20 years ago on a photo shoot and remembers him as “very charming.” When Brühl had to become the designer, he did a deep dive, reading up, for example, on the many artistic fields Lagerfeld had been interested in: “literature, arts, architecture, design, and fashion, of course,” Brühl said. “I wasn’t bored a single second spending time with Karl Lagerfeld.”Still, there needed to be a way in, and for the creator and showrunner Isaure Pisani-Ferry, it was de Bascher, who was 21 to the designer’s 38 when they met. “It was this moment in the ’70s when he falls in love, which means loss of control — and this is a man who needs to be in control,” Pisani-Ferry said of Lagerfeld in a video conversation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    30 Shows to Watch This Summer

    Returning favorites include “The Bear,” “House of the Dragon” and “Only Murders in the Building.” Among the new arrivals? Jake Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman.It’s dangerous to draw conclusions before all the evidence is in, but a long look at the roster of new and returning series this summer might convince you of the primacy of what my colleague James Poniewozik has identified as “mid TV.” A lot of pleasure, in the form of audience-tested favorites and star-studded new shows. Not a lot of adventure or experimentation or risk.Of course, TV has never had much of those qualities — we’re talking marginal differences here — so don’t feel guilty strapping in for something that sounds comfortable. Here are 30 possibilities over the next three months, in chronological order; all dates are subject to change.‘Presumed Innocent’David E. Kelley’s new adaptation of the Scott Turow legal thriller — following the 1990 film — has an enticing cast: Jake Gyllenhaal as the prosecutor suspected of murder, played originally by Harrison Ford; Ruth Negga and Bill Camp as his wife and his boss; as well as Elizabeth Marvel, Lily Rabe and Peter Sarsgaard. The victim, originally Greta Scacchi, is played by the Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve, star of Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World.” (Apple TV+, Wednesday)‘The Boys’The popular anti-superhero action-fantasy returns; Season 4 reunites the showrunner, Eric Kripke, with one of his “Supernatural” stars, Jeffrey Dean Morgan. (Amazon Prime Video, Thursday)A scene from Season 2 of the “Game of Thrones” prequel, “House of the Dragon.” Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney) is king, but for how long? Ollie Upton/HBO‘House of the Dragon’HBO executives heaved a dragon-sized sigh of relief in 2022 when the network’s “Game of Thrones” prequel was a big success (averaging 29 million viewers across all platforms in its first season). Now they just have to do it again. (HBO, June 16)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Dolly Parton Says a Musical About Her Life Is Broadway Bound

    The show, expected to arrive on Broadway in 2026, will be called “Hello, I’m Dolly.”Dolly Parton’s long-gestating biographical musical is aiming to arrive on Broadway in 2026, the singer-songwriter said Thursday.The musical will be called “Hello, I’m Dolly,” which is both the title of Parton’s first studio album and an allusion to the classic Broadway show “Hello, Dolly!”Parton announced plans for the show in remarks to CMA Fest, a gathering of country music fans in Nashville.“I just wanted to say that I wouldn’t be here, if you hadn’t been there, and I mean that — and that happens to be the name of one of the songs that’s going to be in my new Broadway musical,” she told the crowd. “I’ve written a whole lot of original songs for it, as well as all the hit songs that you know.”She added that, “You’ll get to know all of my life, up to now” and that “It really does have a lot of story, a lot of family.”Parton has been working on the musical for about a decade. In 2016, she told Variety she thought it would hit the stage two years later; at the time, she said the first act would be about her pre-Nashville life, and the second act would be about her Nashville-based career.Parton and Maria S. Schlatter will write the musical’s book; in 2020, the two collaborated on the film “Christmas on the Square.”Parton, who has numerous business ventures in addition to her songwriting and performing career, is planning to produce the musical with Danny Nozell, who is Parton’s longtime manager, and ATG Productions, the British theater company producing this season’s Broadway revival of “Cabaret.”This will not be Parton’s first Broadway venture: She wrote the music and lyrics for the 2009 musical “9 to 5,” which was adapted from a film in which she starred, and in 1993 one of her songs was featured in a Broadway holiday show called “Candles, Snow & Mistletoe.”It’s also not the first Parton-themed musical out there: A show called “Here You Come Again,” about a devoted Parton fan, has had several productions in American regional theaters over the last few years and is now touring Britain. More

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    Review: ‘Fantasmas’ Journeys to the Center of Julio Torres’s Mind

    In the comic fabulist’s dazzling new HBO series, sketch comedy meets sketch fantasy.The title of Julio Torres’s new HBO series, “Fantasmas,” is a way of giving a name to a thing you can’t see. In an early scene Torres, playing a version of himself, pitches Crayola executives on a crayon for “the color clear,” which he suggests naming after the Spanish word for “ghosts.” The executives hesitate; clear, they say, isn’t a color. “Then what do you call this?” he asks, gesturing at the air. “The space between us. The emotional space, I mean.”The scene is typical Torres, absurd, fantastical, a touch wistful. It also suggests a good way to describe his hard-to-pin down comic sensibility. As the delightful “Fantasmas” reiterates, he’s drawing with crayons that are in nobody else’s box.Over the past several years, Torres has established himself as a premier comic fabulist. In “Los Espookys,” the unjustly short-lived supernatural comedy Torres cocreated for HBO, he imagined a fictional Latin American country where magic-realist mysteries unfolded. In the 2019 special “My Favorite Shapes by Julio Torres,” he imagined stories about a series of objects — cubes, toys, figurines — that rolled past him on a conveyor belt like whimsical sushi.The six-episode “Fantasmas,” which begins on Friday, lies somewhere between those two works structurally while borrowing elements of his earlier work as a writer for “Saturday Night Live.” It’s more digressive than a sitcom, more serial than a sketch comedy. Think of it as a sketch fantasy.“Fantasmas” places his character, Julio, in a stage-set version of New York City located a few parallel universes left of the one we know. In this one, the nightlife includes a club for gay hamsters; an “incorporeal services” company entices customers to “free yourself from the burden of having a body”; and the subway public address system announces that “the next F train will arrive in 178 minutes.” (OK, that one may roughly approximate actual New Yorkers’ experience.)Torres completists will note strong echoes of his recent film, “Problemista,” in which he played an El Salvadoran immigrant in New York scrambling to secure his work visa. The movie even began similarly, with his character pitching eccentric toy ideas to Hasbro, including a Barbie-like doll with her fingers crossed behind her back to create “tension.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Stephen Colbert Calls the Focus on Biden’s Age Old News

    “You heard that right, ladies and gentlemen: Joe Biden is old,” Colbert said of a Wall Street Journal article on the president’s aptitude.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. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Old NewsThe Wall Street Journal published an article about the president this week with the headline: “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.”“You heard that right, ladies and gentlemen: Joe Biden is old,” Stephen Colbert said. “Which, of course, could disqualify him from being president. After all, being old is a felony.”“Pretty sure one of these guys had a bunch of felonies. Oh, it’s the other guy? Thirty-four? And he’s old, too?” — STEPHEN COLBERT“The Wall Street Journal published an article yesterday titled ‘Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.’ Yeah, we know. Sometimes he doesn’t even make it to the door.” — SETH MEYERS“The Wall Street Journal published an article yesterday that claims President Biden appears to be slipping in private meetings. He keeps saying crazy stuff that makes no sense like, ‘a convicted felon is beating me in the polls.’” — SETH MEYERS“This blockbuster lid-blower-offer also included this little nugget explaining that Biden is someone who has both good moments and bad ones, in a clear contrast with his opponent, who only has bad ones.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Still, I am confident that The Wall Street Journal knows ‘Old Man is Old’ is breaking news, but I’m sure they will balance that perspective in their article about their 93-year-old boss Rupert Murdoch’s wedding: ‘Young Buck Ready to [Expletive].’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Boeing in Space Edition)“The first-ever manned flight of the Boeing Starliner spacecraft launched today after multiple delays, with a pair of NASA astronauts onboard. Boeing seems to have trouble getting to Cincinnati. I don’t know, should they be going — should they be heading into space? I don’t know. They put extra duct tape on the doors just to be safe.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“They were aiming for Cleveland, but, still, good for them.” — JIMMY FALLON“Imagine being surrounded by bags of urine and then hearing ‘Don’t worry, there’s a Boeing on the way to help.’” — JIMMY FALLON, on the Starliner delivering a new urine processing pump to the space station to replace a broken one“Seriously, you thought it was rough when you forgot to change the filter on your Brita.” — JIMMY FALLON“I’ll tell you, that definitely isn’t on the list of activities at space camp.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I had no idea being an astronaut was so glamorous.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingThe comedian Joel Kim Booster remembered the first time he met Ronny Chieng on Wednesday’s “Daily Show.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightThe comedian and “Stress Positions” star John Early will appear on Thursday’s “Late Night.”Also, Check This OutJulia Fox.Miguel Medina/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.The actress, writer and New York icon Julia Fox dished on being an “It Girl” for the latest episode of Popcast. More

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    Review: In a Nostalgic Revival, ‘Home’ Is Where the Heart Was

    Samm-Art Williams’s 1979 play about the uprooting of a Black farmer returns to Broadway for the first time.To say that Samm-Art Williams’s 1979 play “Home” is old-fashioned is to say that “The Odyssey” and “The Wizard of Oz” are too: They are all tear-jerking stories about lost souls working their way back to the proverbial place where the heart is. But another way to see them is as keen records of how we thought, at particular points in time, about our place in the universe. Is that ever old-fashioned?For “Home,” which opened on Wednesday at the Todd Haimes Theater, the particular point in time is the tail end of the Great Migration, bringing millions of Black Americans to the North from the South in an attempt to escape racism and poverty. Among them is the play’s protagonist, Cephus Miles, a North Carolina farmer who winds up in a big city a lot like New York after spending five years in prison. His crime: taking too seriously the biblical commandment to love thy neighbor and the injunction not to kill. He refused to serve in Vietnam.Though the outline of the story might seem to warrant a furious response, like that of many antiwar and antiracist works of the ’70s, “Home” follows a different line, its honeyed cadences glazing its anger with affection. That’s apt because Williams is ultimately less interested in the embitterments of the world than in the ability, indeed the necessity, of masking the bad taste of unfairness with love.And Cephus (Tory Kittles) is certainly not angry at the South. His memories of hard work, tall tales and odd characters in segregated, fictional Cross Roads — likely based on Williams’s Burgaw, N.C. — are surprisingly upbeat. The poverty, being general, is bearable. (And funny: If a possum falls into the moonshine still, so be it.) The racism shows up mostly as marginalia, implied rather than prosecuted. Black boys shoot dice in the white section of the cemetery, Cephus tells us, because “that’s where the nice cement vaults were.” The Black section’s graves provide no level surface.The nostalgic style, unfashionable for decades, may be why “Home” has not until now been revived on Broadway, despite its successful and much-praised premiere. Kenny Leon’s production for the Roundabout Theater Company — a result of the company’s Refocus Project, designed “to elevate and restore marginalized plays to the American canon” — is thus especially welcome, if perhaps overly faithful to the original vision. With golden light (by Allen Lee Hughes) and a set consisting mostly of a rocking chair and a tobacco field that make the sharecropping life look strangely inviting (scenic design by Arnulfo Maldonado), it steers right into instead of away from sentimentality, giving us the full flavor of the writing at the cost of courting hokum.The play is mostly a monologue for Kittles’s character, while Ayers and Inge provide quick-take sketches of preachers, loose women, drunks and aunties.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Clipped’ Is a Juicy Sports Docudrama

    The latest gossipy sports show, it recreates the scandal surrounding Donald Sterling, the former owner of the Los Angeles Clippers who was banned from the N.B.A. for life in 2014.“Clipped,” which begins Tuesday, on Hulu, is the latest gossipy sports docudrama, this time about the scandal surrounding Donald Sterling, the former owner of the Los Angeles Clippers who was banned from the N.B.A. for life in 2014 after recordings of him making racist comments became public. Remember? The lady who wore the face visor?I’m not sure if “Clipped” hopes you know the details of this story or hopes you don’t, but vague familiarity is baked into its very being: The show itself seems familiar because of the glut of sports shows that followed in the documentary and scripted footsteps of “O.J.: Made in America” and “The People v. O.J. Simpson,” and basketball stories in particular had a surge after “The Last Dance,” including the recent, similar “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty.” Sports-related series aside, “Clipped” also resembles fellow mildly prestigious podcast-to-TV shows like “Gaslit” or “The Dropout,” and it has a similar behind-the-headlines premise to “Pam & Tommy.” (“Clipped” is based on the ESPN 30 for 30 podcast “The Sterling Affairs.”)“This story has a girl, a tape, sports, racism, money,” says a crisis public relations manager in Episode 5. “There is something in it for everyone.” Fair enough! “Clipped” does indeed have those things going for it, as well as strong, anchoring performances from Laurence Fishburne as Coach Doc Rivers, Cleopatra Coleman as V. Stiviano, Ed O’Neill as Sterling and Jacki Weaver as Shelly Sterling.At the show’s highs, you can practically hear a coach reminding his players to focus on the fundamentals: voice, stakes, heightening, details. It nails those aspects (and in some cases fingernails them — manicures get a lot of screen time), giving everything an admirable, almost hygienic momentum. The characters here are either smart, savvy, gifted or cruel, and they say what they mean. That’s a rarity in current dramas, lending “Clipped” a refreshing clarity. But it can also ring a little immature, and what the show gains in aerodynamics it loses in nuance and texture.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More