Eliana Willis

Lucy Jarvis, a groundbreaking producer in television and theater who was especially known for gaining access to hard-to-crack locations, including the Soviet Union and China at the height of the Cold War, died on Jan. 26 in Manhattan. She was 102.Scott McArthur, her longtime producing partner, announced the death.In the late 1950s and early ’60s, when television’s top producing ranks included few if any other women, Ms. Jarvis helped bring about some remarkable programming, including gaining access to the Kremlin for a 1963 television special about that Moscow complex. In 1964 she took television viewers on an extensive tour of the Louvre in France, a documentary that won multiple Emmy Awards. In the early 1970s she got permission to film in China, giving American viewers an inside look at ancient sites there at a time when that country was still largely sealed off.Her work in theater was just as internationally adventurous. In 1988 she collaborated with Soviet producers to take a production of “Sophisticated Ladies,” the Duke Ellington musical revue, to Moscow. In 1990 she brought the first Soviet rock opera ever seen in the United States, “Junon and Avos: The Hope,” to City Center in New York.In a 1999 interview with The Daily News, she explained her longstanding interest in introducing one culture to another.“If I can bring about an understanding of people whom we consider our enemy and know very little about,” she said, “I can justify the space I occupy on this very crowded planet.”Lucile Howard was born on June 23, 1917, in Manhattan. Her father, Herman, was an engineer and a hotelier, and her mother, Sophie (Kirsch) Howard, designed clothing patterns for the Singer sewing machine company.Ms. Jarvis credited her mother with instilling in her the confidence that would later allow her to go head-to-head with world leaders. Her mother, she said, made her study elocution, piano and dance and schooled her in how to enter a room with poise.“She said, ‘I am giving you the tools so that you can walk into a room anywhere in the world and feel perfectly at ease,’” Ms. Jarvis said in an oral history recorded for the Television Foundation and New York Women in Film and Television in 2006. “She made me believe that there was nothing I couldn’t do if I wanted to. That was Self-Esteem 101.”At Cornell University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in 1938, she was involved in the drama club, but her major was nutrition. Her first job was as a dietitian at the Cornell Medical School.A doctor there recommended her for the food editor’s job at McCall’s magazine, where she went to work in 1940. In that capacity she was encouraged to give talks around the country, and that led to invitations to appear on television in its very early days.Even those primitive TV shows were reaching more people than the magazine did, or soon would be. “I thought, ‘I’m in the wrong place,’” she said in the oral history.Ms. Jarvis married Serge Jarvis, a lawyer, in 1940 and earned a master’s degree at Columbia Teachers College in 1941 while working at McCall’s. Later in the decade she left the magazine to raise the couple’s two children.She re-entered the work force in 1950s, taking jobs at radio and television stations and then, in 1955, with the talk-show host David Susskind’s company, Talent Associates.In 1957 Ms. Jarvis met Martha Rountree, the wife of one of her husband’s clients and a creator of the long-running radio and television series “Meet the Press.” They started a program for the WOR-Mutual Broadcasting System that year called “Capitol Close-Up,” which profiled powerful figures.Their first interviews were with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Vice President Richard M. Nixon and the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover, “who had never before, or since, done a program,” she said in the oral history.In 1959 Ms. Jarvis joined NBC as an associate producer (she later became producer) of a Saturday night debate program, “The Nation’s Future.” It featured two people on opposite sides of an issue, with the newsman Edwin Newman as moderator. One of her jobs was making sure the studio audience was evenly balanced between supporters of each position.One contentious episode was on American policy toward Cuba, where Fidel Castro had taken power in 1959, leading to increasingly hostile relations and an embargo.“We had fistfights in the hallway,” Ms. Jarvis was quoted as saying in the 1997 book “Women Pioneers in Television,” by Cary O’Dell, “but the most difficult chore was finding enough pro-Castro people.”Perhaps even more volatile was an episode on whether fluoride should be added to the water supply.“That one almost got us all killed,” she said.One of Ms. Jarvis’s greatest coups came in 1962, when she used persistence and connections to get permission to film inside the Kremlin for an NBC special broadcast.“We went into areas denied Russian TV cameramen,” Ms. Jarvis, who was credited as associate producer, told The Boston Globe. “About the time we were concluding our filming, the Cuban situation” — the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 — “broke out. We finished rapidly and got out fast.”The special, “The Kremlin,” was broadcast in May 1963.For “A Golden Prison: The Louvre,” the French, protective of the museum’s artworks, put almost as many obstacles in Ms. Jarvis’s path as the Soviets did for “The Kremlin.”“They were afraid of lights,” she said in the oral history. “They were afraid of the reaction. And they were just very stuffy about it.”It was a time when the producing ranks, at NBC and the other networks, were virtually all male.“Most of the women who worked at NBC in those days,” Ms. Jarvis said, “when I came on as producer, were stenographers, gofers; on rare occasion they worked their way up to researcher.” She would hire women as associate producers when she could, she said.Not all of her work was focused overseas. One powerful NBC News special she produced, broadcast in 1965, was “Who Shall Live?,” which reported on the vast number of patients who needed kidney dialysis, the limited number of machines available to provide it and the punishing cost of the treatments.The program, The Globe wrote, was “a penetrating look at the frightening impasse reached when scientific advances have outdistanced the conventional laws of economics.”Ms. Jarvis began filming in China in August 1972, becoming “the first American since 1948 to be admitted to China to film news documentaries,” one news report said. The documentary, “The Forbidden City,” was seen on NBC in January 1973.Ms. Jarvis left NBC in 1976 and founded her own production company, Creative Projects. (She later started a second, Jarvis Theater and Film.) Among Creative Projects’ first productions was Barbara Walters’s first special for ABC; broadcast in December 1976, it featured interviews with the president-elect, Jimmy Carter, and his wife, Rosalynn, as well as with Barbra Streisand.In addition to “Junon and Avos,” which Ms. Jarvis produced with the fashion designer Pierre Cardin, her later projects included a 1981 made-for-TV movie, “Family Reunion,” which starred Bette Davis.Ms. Jarvis’s husband died in 1999. A daughter, Barbara Ann, died in 2001. She is survived by a son, Peter, and a granddaughter. More

1. First Time I Saw MeLast August, at a premiere party at the NeueHouse on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, the actor Brian Michael Smith was biting into a slider when he turned around and there was Oprah Winfrey. Several years before, as a black transgender man struggling to break into Hollywood, Smith saw no obvious trajectory to a meaningful career. Even a college acting teacher said no one would cast him. “I saw zero representation of transmasculinity,” he says, using an umbrella term that means different things to different people but often describes trans men and nonbinary people who identify more with masculinity. “It was very isolating to grow up and have these dreams. I didn’t see how I was going to be able to do it.”This is how dreams are murdered, but instead of succumbing, Smith told himself “to Oprah this situation” — meaning create his own path. And so he did. He now plays a trio of distinct trans characters on TV: Toine, the gentle cop on OWN’s “Queen Sugar,” whose 2017 coming-out episode coincided with Smith’s public coming out; Pierce, a political strategist on Showtime’s sequel to “The L Word,” which debuted in December; and a firefighter on Fox’s new “9-1-1: Lone Star.” At the premiere, Smith saw his opportunity to thank the woman whose name had become his own inspirational verb. He swallowed the slider, extended his hand — and you know what Oprah said? “I know who you are.”Smith, 37, tells me this story in a Los Angeles hotel lobby on a rare day off. He keeps his head shaved, his beard trimmed and a polished stone from a yoga retreat in his pocket. Something he talks about — something all the trans male and nonbinary actors I interviewed for this story talk about — is why visibility matters. “It’s necessary for people to see themselves onscreen,” says Shaan Dasani, who appeared in two 2019 web comedies, “These Thems” and “Razor Tongue.” “It’s necessary for people to see multiple versions of masculinity.”In 2014, Laverne Cox appeared on Time magazine’s cover with the headline “The Transgender Tipping Point.” Since then, trans women have been working in Hollywood in increasing numbers, but that tipping point is only coming now for trans male and transmasculine actors and story lines. “We’ve been invisible,” says Nick Adams, the director of transgender representation at Glaad. He keeps an unofficial tally of trans men in film and television, dating back to a 1987 episode of “The Golden Girls.” The next entries come in 1999: an episode of the CBS series “L.A. Doctors,” about a teenager who abuses masculinizing hormones, and “Boys Don’t Cry,” about the life and murder of Brandon Teena, played by Hilary Swank. “Five years ago, the kind of roles I’m doing would have gone to cisgender actors,” says Theo Germaine, 27, of their recent parts as young trans men on Netflix’s “The Politician” and Showtime’s “Work in Progress” (Germaine identifies as nonbinary and uses both male and gender-neutral pronouns). Germaine is correct, but the reality is starker: Five years ago, these roles mostly didn’t exist. When a transmasculine character did pop up, he was often a victim, his story limited to and by trans trauma; Smith describes seeing “Boys Don’t Cry” while in high school as both affirming and terrifying.But in the last year, we’ve witnessed more trans male and nonbinary actors onscreen than ever before. Even more important is what the actors and their roles represent. They are reflecting back the reality of trans male and nonbinary lives while mainstreaming long-marginalized characters and narratives. They are introducing multidimensional characters whose gender intersects with other facets of identity — race, class, sexual orientation, disability. Through their performances and social media, the actors are updating and expanding the very idea of the leading man.Why is this vital? Let me start with the most basic reason: survival. The actors are creating characters that audiences have never seen before at a time when right-wing politicians are trying to strip trans people of not only their rights (the military’s recent restrictions surrounding transgender troops and recruits, for example) but their humanity (think of all the so-called bathroom bills). A paradox of America 2020: There’s been a swift advancement of trans visibility and equality, even as anti-trans violence has become what both the Human Rights Campaign and the American Medical Association call an epidemic, and an unprecedented acceptance of trans folks, even as the Supreme Court considers whether someone’s gender identity is grounds for termination from employment. More than half of trans male adolescents have attempted suicide, according to a 2018 study published in the journal Pediatrics. “There’s a reason for that,” says Scott Turner Schofield, who stars in Amazon’s new “Studio City.” “We’re raised to believe there’s something wrong with us. We’re raised to believe we’re the only one.” So when Smith’s character came out on “Queen Sugar,” Twitter lit up with the hashtag #FirstTimeISawMe. Progress — social, cultural, political — always begins with the self.2. SuperheroesTwo and a half years ago, Leo Sheng was in Ann Arbor, Mich., about to start a master’s in social work when a casting agent messaged him on Instagram. “Acting was not on my radar,” he says. Sheng flew to New York for an audition. As he boarded the plane back to Michigan, his phone rang: He got the part. In “Adam,” which premiered last August, Sheng plays Ethan, a young trans man so emotionally grounded that he becomes the ballast for the cis characters flailing all around him, thus flipping a trans narrative trope. Soon after, he was cast in “The L Word: Generation Q” as Micah, an adjunct professor of social work.Sheng, now 23, recognizes the potential for social and political change in acting: Through characters like Ethan and Micah, he’s helping Hollywood revise its depictions of trans men, catching up to trans lives as they’re actually lived. Story lines are moving past transition into love, friendship, work, family — the everything-ness of a man’s life. Sheng and the other actors are portraying men not defined by crisis or fear, or hormones and chest-binding, but in the midst of full and (mostly) happy lives — “a type of happiness a lot of people want to know is possible,” Sheng says.Sheng uses social media to further complicate the narrative, engaging in an ongoing deconstruction of who and what defines the male self. He posts about going to the gym and his evolving relationship to muscles. He wants people to see trans male bodies as they are, whether ripped or soft, hairy or smooth, boyish or dad-ish, scarred or not. Sheng recently posted about his period, a frankness that drew praise but also online attacks about his identity.Something we can’t forget: Even as the actors appear in more and more celebrated projects, some people continue to deny their existence. The English actor, writer and director Jake Graf, 42, says in the past trans men were invisible, both onscreen and in broader society, in part because many could choose whether to disclose their identity: “Largely due to our physicality, we’ve been afforded the luxury of living that unseen, under-the-radar, stealth life.” Their reasons were complex and understandable (personal safety, social and financial stability, for example), but one consequence has been that there is now far less awareness of trans men than of trans women. Society has a long and unfortunate history of gazing at and fetishizing trans women, but that has been less the case with trans men. That’s a generalization, of course, but only in service of sharing a point many of the actors made to me: They now want to be seen; they now want people to know they exist. “Trans women have historically been more visible,” Graf says. “Trans men have been out there doing things much more quietly, which is great for them, but not great for visibility.”Graf used to audition without disclosing his identity, and casting directors saw him as another guy in the gaggle. Only after coming out could he stand out, booking roles in 2018’s “Colette” and 2015’s “The Danish Girl” (based on a novel I wrote). With his square jaw and British charm, Graf embodies the classic leading man while also subverting the very notion. He started making short films, highlighting the fine-grain details of ordinary trans lives: a young man visiting his gynecologist; an older man recalling life before the queer and trans rights movements — a multiplicity of stories Hollywood is only now incorporating.“There’s no one version of a trans guy in Hollywood anymore,” says Elliot Fletcher, 23. From 2016 to 2018, Fletcher took on three consecutive trans roles that, viewed together, proved groundbreaking. On MTV’s “Faking It,” he played a high schooler navigating his gender identity and sexuality. On Freeform’s “The Fosters,” he was the sweetly rebellious boyfriend. On Showtime’s “Shameless,” Fletcher plays an L.G.B.T.Q. activist who is simultaneously insulting, raunchy and endearing. The role he’d really love, though, is the next Spider-Man. With the right glasses, he could pass for Peter Parker. When I asked the actors about their dream roles, most said they want to play a superhero. A superhero implies someone elite, a status long denied to trans and gender-nonconforming people.3. I Am My Own MasculinityIn “The Politician,” Germaine’s character, James, toggles between running the student-body campaign of his best friend, Payton, and sleeping with Payton’s girlfriend. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, people are going to hate me because I’m not playing a nice person,’” Germaine says. In fact, James represents an evolution of the trans male character beyond hero, saint or martyr to someone allowed to be ruthless and deceitful. The character breakdown describes James as trans, but his gender identity is never explicitly defined — it’s so unremarkable, it’s never remarked upon. It’s what makes the character so transformational; James refuses to take on the burdens of definition or explanation. If you look at him only through the lens of gender identity, he won’t engage. He transfers questions of identity from him to you. As a nonbinary actor, Germaine says they still feel some pressure to justify and self-explain but hope audiences are ready to move past fixed ideas of how a trans or nonbinary person should look.Viewers seem to be. Germaine’s James takes us to a place beyond “passing” — a word the actors don’t like but also acknowledge as a real factor in how trans men are depicted. Hollywood still mostly employs actors who can be perceived as cis. On the one hand, this represents progress: The actors want casting directors to see them for any relevant part, whether cis or trans. But it’s also a privilege that excludes many. “There are so many different ways to express gender,” Sheng says. “I would love to see more nonbinary, genderqueer and trans folks who can’t ‘pass’ be given opportunities.”Recently Chella Man, 21, joined the cast of DC Universe’s series “Titans,” playing Jericho, who is mute, biracial and bisexual. Soon after, Man, who identifies as genderqueer, modeled for Calvin Klein flexing his biceps in black boxer briefs. It’s a radical act, he says, “to showcase my flat-chested, penis- less body.” He says he received a lot of love and a lot of transphobia, neither of which surprised him. He posted on Instagram from the shoot with the caption: “No visible underwear bulge. Jewish and Asian history and representation in my DNA and on my skin. Top surgery scars out and proud. Visible cochlear implants paired with my DEAF AF tattoo.” Man followed this with an older image of himself — in track pants and shirtless, pre-top surgery. A bicep tattoo gives the photo its caption and meaning: “I Am My Own Masculinity.” Man is saying through image and ink that he can define his own masculinity, rather than let it define him.This, then, is what comes next: shifting from a past where gender was handed to us by society’s cues and prompts to a future of expressing who we are in terms we control. “Masculinity stems from gender, which is socially constructed,” says Man. “Anyone has the potential to unlearn social constructs and/or redefine what they may mean to them.” Collectively, the actors are engaged in this conversation about gender and identity, leading us to a day when those conversations are no longer necessary.4. The Gates of ParamountAt the beginning of 2019, Jill Soloway, the creator of Amazon’s “Transparent,” invited Schofield, who declined to give his age, for a hike in Griffith Park. In the chaparral above Los Angeles, they discussed organizing a new group under the umbrella of 5050 by 2020, a strategic initiative working toward gender parity across all Hollywood professions that Soloway helps lead. Soloway, 54, who identifies as nonbinary, says that many trans men and nonbinary people have a unique perspective on the issues of equality, opportunity and the post-#MeToo discussion of masculinity and its privileges. Smith agrees: As he transitioned, he had to ask himself what kind of man he wanted to be, “examining that earlier on and more intensely than cis men.” He believes the importance society places on masculinity might be more problematic than masculinity in and of itself. Dasani, who also declined to give his age, echoed that with a story from his time in film school, before transitioning: In a study group with three film bros, he found himself ignored. After transitioning, he noticed what he said wasn’t devalued in a way he felt it had been before. “I remember clocking this — be the guy who makes room for other voices at the table.”In April 2019, about 30 actors, writers, directors and editors met in a boardroom on the Paramount lot. They gathered around an imposing executive table, the kind that has long excluded them. The cohort’s goals are both practical (networking, professional development) and inspirational (support, friendship). For some, it’s the only time they’ve been in a space with so many like themselves. As far as anyone knows, it’s a first for Hollywood. “There’s so much tenderness in the room,” says Dasani of the now monthly meetings. The symbolism of the Paramount lot isn’t lost: For a long time, those gates have been closed to many communities. When I ask Dasani about this moment of increasing representation, he corrects me. “I hope it’s more than a moment. I hope it’s a cultural shift.” A shift to ensure the gates never close again.Grooming: Christina Guerra and Hailey Adickes at Celestine Agency. More

LOS ANGELES — Disney reported mixed quarterly results on Tuesday, with per-share profit declining by 17 percent and revenue climbing by 36 percent. Costs associated with building its Disney Plus streaming service occupied much of the gap.But investors and Disney’s Hollywood competitors were interested in only one number: Disney Plus subscribers. There were 28.6 million as of Monday, the company said, an astounding number for a service that is less than three months old. Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, told analysts on a conference call that the response to Disney Plus had “exceeded even our greatest expectations.”Disney unveiled its flagship streaming platform on Nov. 12 amid a thundering marketing campaign and found immediate success with “The Mandalorian,” a live-action “Star Wars” series that introduced a blockbuster character known as Baby Yoda. Within a day of its introduction, Disney Plus had 10 million subscribers, including an unspecified number of accounts for customers who signed up free under a promotion with Verizon, blowing past analysts’ estimates. Disney Plus costs $7 a month for those paying the sticker price.Average monthly revenue per paid subscriber in the quarter was $5.56. Mr. Iger said popular offerings included the 2016 musical “Moana” and old episodes of “Hannah Montana” and “The Simpsons.” And, of course, “The Mandalorian,” which Mr. Iger said would return for a second season in October.“It’s often challenging for a company to pivot in a new strategic direction, particularly when it involved navigating between established and emerging business models,” Mr. Iger said. “We have made an extraordinary amount of progress.”Another focus of the call was the coronavirus outbreak in China, which has sickened more than 20,000 people in the country and killed at least 425. As a result, the Shanghai Disney Resort and Hong Kong Disneyland have been closed for more than a week.Christine M. McCarthy, Disney’s chief financial officer, told analysts that “the precise magnitude of the financial impact is highly dependent on the duration of the closures and how quickly we can resume normal operations.” She estimated that the closing of the Shanghai Disney Resort could drag down second-quarter operating income by $135 million, “assuming the park is closed for two months.” Hong Kong losses could add up to $145 million over a similar period.For the most recent quarter, Disney’s theme park division had operating income of $2.3 billion, a 9 percent increase from the same period a year earlier. The results were dented by costs associated with the introduction of new “Star Wars” rides and higher wages for union employees.Attendance at Disney’s domestic parks increased by 2 percent in the quarter.Walt Disney Studios delivered $948 million in operating profit, an increase of more than 100 percent from a year earlier. Contributing were “Frozen II,” which has taken in $1.4 billion, and “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” which has taken in $1.1 billion. Those films, which are still playing, and “Toy Story 4” boosted Disney’s consumer products business by 25 percent, Ms. McCarthy said.Media Networks, a vast part of Disney that includes ESPN and ABC, reported operating income of about $1.6 billion, a 23 percent increase. Disney credited its recently purchased National Geographic and FX networks for that rise. Profit declined at ESPN because of an increase in programming costs and lower advertising revenue as a result of lower viewership.Disney’s streaming division, which includes Hulu and the sports-oriented ESPN Plus, posted an operating loss of roughly $693 million, which was not as bad as most analysts had anticipated. (Ms. McCarthy said losses could total $900 million in the current quarter.) Disney said that Hulu had 30.6 million paying subscribers as of Monday, a 33 percent increase from a year ago. ESPN Plus had about 7.6 million, up from 1.4 million.The successful introduction of Disney Plus in North America has prompted Disney to accelerate the service’s rollout overseas. It will arrive in Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and a handful of other European countries starting on March 24. Disney Plus will become available in India on March 29.Mr. Iger told analysts that he was pleased with Disney’s ongoing efforts to digest the entertainment assets it bought from Rupert Murdoch last year for $71.3 billion. Those efforts have included dropping the word Fox from the 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight movie divisions. (Mr. Murdoch retained ownership of Fox News and the Fox broadcast network.) Emma Watts, the top executive at 20th Century, quit last week. She was primarily responsible for shepherding James Cameron’s four upcoming “Avatar” sequels. Hulu’s chief executive, Randy Freer, also resigned. More

What’s on TVCONTACT (1997) 7 p.m. on Ovation. Based on the 1985 science-fiction novel of the same title by Carl Sagan, “Contact” yearns to bridge the gap between humanity and technological advancement. Jodie Foster plays Ellie Arroway, a scientist devoted to finding extraterrestrial life, who picks up a radio signal from another planet. This garners national attention, and as Ellie decodes the aliens’ message, she must protect her work from those trying to steal or discount it. Ellie and a young minister named Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey) engage in a debate throughout over science and religion — and Palmer also becomes a love interest. “But try as it might to convey a humanist, mystical message and to equate the search for extraterrestrial life with religious faith,” Stephen Holden wrote in his review for The New York Times, “‘Contact’ is much more convincing when worshiping at the cold shrine of technology.”STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS 8 p.m. on CNN; 9 p.m. on CBS, ABC, NBC and FOX. President Trump will deliver his third State of the Union Address — the last of this presidential term. Mr. Trump’s first State of the Union Address focused on immigration policy, and his second — which was rescheduled because of a government shutdown over funding for a border wall — touched on looming Congressional investigations into his conduct. This year, the speech comes a day ahead of a final vote on his impeachment. What’s StreamingTOM PAPA: YOU’RE DOING GREAT! Stream on Netflix. The film, TV, radio and podcast comedian Tom Papa makes his Netflix debut with an hourlong routine filmed in his home state, New Jersey. In this special, Papa covers life’s simple pleasures: getting married, having two daughters, and living with the notion of being a parent. With asides about pets, climate change, social media and Staten Island, Papa assures viewers that we’re all just doing our best.BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY (2001) Stream on Hulu. Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. If Bridget Jones just loses 20 pounds and cuts down on alcohol, cigarettes and carbs, she’ll probably find (and land) the man of her dreams. At least, that’s her hope. Luckily, her current suitors — her charming boss, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), and her former childhood friend, the earnest Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) — assure our heroine that they like her for exactly who she is. Renée Zellweger, who adopts an unassuming British accent to play Bridget, was nominated for an Academy Award for her role. “Ms. Zellweger accomplishes the small miracle of making Bridget both entirely endearing and utterly real,” Stephen Holden wrote in his review for The Times. The movie’s sequels, BRIDGET JONES: THE EDGE OF REASON (2004) and BRIDGET JONES’S BABY (2016), will also be available for streaming. More

Jerry Jacobson swindled more than $24 million out of a major fast food promotion over 12 years. His trick: stealing and selling McDonald’s Monopoly game pieces.Jacobson’s fortune, and his downfall, came from gaming the twice-a-year promotion, which promised anything from a free sandwich to a million dollars to the customer who revealed the lucky game piece — a property, a railroad — when they peeled off the sticker attached to their hash brown wrapper or soda cup or the inside of a magazine.He was in charge of keeping the promotion secure, delivering the most lucrative game pieces to McDonald’s packaging plants. Instead, through most of the 1990s, he pocketed and sold them to a vast network of friends and distant relatives. In the end, more than 50 people were convicted in the scheme.“McMillions,” a six-part HBO documentary series premiering Monday, chronicles the scam and its unraveling. Here’s what to know before you watch.Who was involved?It was Jacobson who watched the winning pieces being printed, who locked them away in a vault, who sealed them up and tucked them in his vest and flew from factory to factory to hide them in McDonald’s packaging, according to The Daily Beast, which looked back on the case years later.Jacobson went into private security work after having served briefly as a police officer in Hollywood, Fla. His connection to the Monopoly game began when he and his wife at the time, Marsha, moved to Atlanta, where she began work as a security auditor. She helped her husband get a job with one of her clients, Dittler Brothers, which printed the McDonald’s game pieces. He later moved to Simon Marketing, a company in the same area, that produced the pieces.Soon, he started slipping the prize-winning pieces to people he knew, sometimes for profit. His stepbrother. His local butcher, who paid $2,000 for a stolen $10,000 piece. His nephew, who received a $200,000 piece in exchange for $45,000.Over the years, the fraud grew beyond his circle as he found other conspirators, usually by chance — which made them more difficult to pin down during the F.B.I.’s investigation years later. Jacobson, according to The Daily Beast story, said he met Gennaro Colombo, who claimed to be a member of New York’s Colombo crime family, at the Atlanta airport in 1995. Jacobson was waiting to board a cruise ship several years later when he met Don Hart, who in turn introduced him to Andrew Glomb at a dinner party. They became Jacobson’s accomplices, the middlemen who would sell the pieces Jacobson had swiped to various “winners.”How did it work?Jacobson came across the materials he needed by accident, according to The Daily Beast article. A supplier sent him a package by mistake, filled with the metallic tamper-proof seals — the ones used to secure the envelopes filled with game pieces that Jacobson was charged with delivering.In airport bathrooms — en route to packaging plants — Jacobson would remove the envelope’s original seal, swap out winning pieces for regular ones and resecure the envelope with one of the new seals he was sent.He would then pass the winning pieces on to Colombo and his other “recruiters,” who tracked down willing buyers and coached them through claiming their winnings. Colombo sold a $1 million piece to Gloria Brown, a friend of his wife, on the side of the highway for $40,000 in cash, Brown said in an interview with The Daily Beast. He then drove her to a McDonald’s, walked her through what to say and helped her lie about where she lived to avoid drawing suspicion — a surplus of winners was popping up in Jacksonville, Fla., where she and others connected to Colombo resided.How were they caught?In March 2000, according to The Daily Beast, the F.B.I. received an anonymous phone tip: Someone named “Uncle Jerry” was rigging the McDonald’s Monopoly promotion, stealing game pieces from the inside and selling them.Special Agent Richard Dent, based in the F.B.I.’s Jacksonville office, contacted a McDonald’s spokeswoman, Amy Murray, who began trying to verify the winners. One winner — Colombo’s father-in-law, who claimed $1 million from the contest — told Murray that he lived in New Hampshire, but property records in Jacksonville proved otherwise. Gloria Brown, Murray found, was also having her annual checks delivered to a Jacksonville address.Dent launched an investigation that would rope in 25 agents nationwide. He found his big lead in 2001, when he mapped out the addresses of three winners — all of whom lived within miles of Jacobson’s South Carolina lake house.Dent convinced McDonald’s to run one more Monopoly promotion, so the F.B.I. could track down the final evidence it needed. The move was fraught with legal risks — the corporation, in its collaboration with federal investigators, already knew at this point that its game was compromised.The decision paid off, allowing Dent to pin down Andrew Glomb for the first time. Colombo, though, died after a car accident in 1998. The F.B.I. arrested eight major suspects on Aug. 22, 2001, and charged Jacobson with conspiracy to commit mail fraud.What’s happened since?There’s a reason the scheme didn’t last long in the public’s memory: The trial, in Jacksonville, started on Sept. 10, 2001, and was quickly overshadowed by the events of Sept. 11.Jacobson, who declined to speak to The Daily Beast and did not respond to a request from The Times, said at his trial that he had stolen as many as 60 game pieces. He served 37 months behind bars and agreed to pay $12.5 million in restitution. Now in his late 70s, he still lives in Georgia.McDonald’s, through an instant million-dollar giveaway, tried to quietly make amends with customers.It was not the first time, or the last, that someone had gamed a competition supposedly decided by luck. In 1998, several years before Jacobson’s trial, an agent with Nevada’s Gaming Control Board was sentenced on a racketeering charge after designing a computer program that rigged slot machines in Las Vegas, Reno and Lake Tahoe.And in 2010, the director of information security at the Multi-State Lottery Association, which runs the game in 33 states, wrote a computer code to manipulate the association’s random-number generators — producing winning lottery numbers that he could predict in advance.McDonald’s still runs similar promotions to the Monopoly sweepstakes, but the corporation has since created an “independent promotions task force” to prevent future copycats. More