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    ‘Dying for Sex,’ Plus 7 Things to Watch on TV this Week

    The Hulu show starring Michelle Williams premieres, and the third season of “White Lotus” wraps up.Between streaming and cable, there is a seemingly endless variety of things to watch. Here is a selection of TV shows and specials that air or stream this week, March 31-April 6. Details and times are subject to change.Certain circumstances of being a woman.In 2020 Nikki Boyer hosted a podcast in which she chatted with her best friend Molly Kochan, who, after being diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer, decided to leave her husband to explore her sexual desires for the first time in her life. A new series, inspired by the podcast, “Dying for Sex” stars Michelle Williams as Molly and Jenny Slate as Nikki. Rob Delaney, Kelvin Yu, David Rasche also make appearances. Streaming on Hulu on Friday.Though menopause will effect every woman who lives into her 40s and up, there is only starting to be a public conversation about its symptoms or possible treatments. And who better to tackle the issue than Oprah Winfrey? She has recently hosted shows discussing weight loss drugs and A.I., and now comes “An Oprah Winfrey Special: The Menopause Revolution,” which will feature a panel with Naomi Watts, Halle Berry, Dr. Mary Claire Haver and others as they discuss their personal experiences and share research. Monday at 10 p.m. on ABC.A bounty hunter, a doctor and a dysfunctional family walk into a bar …The new series, “The Bondsman” answers the question I can only assume has been top of mind for most of us: What if Kevin Bacon were a bounty hunter resurrected from the dead by the devil to help bring escaped demons back to hell? Bacon stars as Hub Halloran, the aforementioned resurrected bounty hunter, who also spends time, when he’s not busy chasing demons, reflecting on what landed him in hell in the first place, getting a second chance at love and jump-starting his country music career. Jennifer Nettles, Damon Herriman and Beth Grant also star. Streaming on Thursday on Prime Video.Willa Fitzgerald and Colin Woodell in “Pulse.”Jeff Neumann/NetflixThough we have seen countless encounters on TV of hot doctors canoodling in the on-call rooms, it somehow never gets old. On “Pulse,” a new medical drama, the stakes get upped when a Category 1 hurricane rips through a busy Miami medical center. The third-year resident Dr. Danny Simms (Willa Fitzgerald) and the chief resident Dr. Xander Phillips (Colin Woodell) are locked down in the hospital and forced to work together as details of their affair starts to spread. No medical show romance can probably ever top Meredith Grey and McDreamy, but one can only hope. Streaming Thursday on Netflix.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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    ‘The White Lotus’ Season 3, Episode 7: Lovers and Fighters

    “The White Lotus” tells us only enough about the characters’ pasts to explain some of the choices they make. Sometimes this works; sometimes it doesn’t.Season 3, Episode 7: ‘Killer Instincts’One unusual quality of “The White Lotus” is that the show’s creator, Mike White, keeps his characters’ back stories to a minimum. He mainly traffics in types: the swaggering North Carolina money-manager, the vain celebrity, and so on.White tells us only enough about their pasts to explain some of the choices they make. We know a lot about Rick’s past, because his tragic childhood led directly to every move he has made this season. But we know very little about the Ratliff kids beyond the personas they project: the cocky older brother, the rebellious lefty sister and whatever the heck Lochlan is supposed to be. As for what made them this way? We can use our imaginations to shade in the finer details.Most of the time, this approach works well enough. There is a wonderfully wry comic moment in this week’s episode, when Piper gets embarrassed while watching Lochlan struggle awkwardly with his monastery dinner. We know just enough about her to guess what she is thinking. She suddenly seems a lot like her mother, concerned less with her brother’s feelings than with how his clumsiness reflects on her. (See also: Piper’s mildly dismayed expression when Lochlan says he wants to spend the year in Thailand with her.)On the other hand, Saxon’s overall blankness becomes a problem in this episode, leading to one of the season’s clumsiest scenes. The moment occurs at Gary’s party, when Saxon watches his father swill down yet another large glass of whiskey. He asks Tim again if something is wrong back at the office, reminding him that, “My career is totally tied to yours.” Saxon has no interests, no hobbies. “I put my whole life into this basket,” he says. “Into your basket.”Given what we have seen of Saxon this season, I am not sure he is the kind of guy who would give such a self-aware speech, saying things like, “If I’m not a success, I’m nothing, and I can’t handle being nothing.” (I can, however, believe that Tim would answer his son’s very real concerns with a mumbled, “Nothing’s up, kid. We’re all good. It’s a party, get out there.”)It’s a tricky balancing act for White, trying to show more than he tells and letting the audience make assumptions. I thought about this also this week during the Bangkok scenes with Rick and Frank. I figured these two were seasoned old pros, skilled at running cons, and that they would know what they were doing when they met up with Sritala and her ailing husband, Jim (Scott Glenn), at the Hollingers’ house. Instead, Rick and Frank are surprisingly — and ridiculously — unprepared. They try to get by on improvisation; Frank in particular is really bad at it.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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    Richard Chamberlain, Actor in ‘Shogun’ and ‘Dr. Kildare,’ Dies at 90

    An overnight star as Dr. Kildare in the 1960s, he achieved new acclaim two decades later as the omnipresent leading man of mini-series.Richard Chamberlain, who rose to fame as the heartthrob star of the television series “Dr. Kildare” in the early 1960s, proved his mettle by becoming a serious stage actor and went on to a new wave of acclaim as the omnipresent leading man of 1980s mini-series, died on Saturday night at his home in Waimanalo, Hawaii, on the island of Oahu. He was 90.A spokesman, Harlan Boll, said the cause was complications of a stroke.Mr. Chamberlain was just 27 when he made his debut in the title role of the idealistic young intern on NBC’s “Dr. Kildare,” based on the 1930s and ’40s movie series. With his California-blond boyish good looks and low-key charm, he became an overnight star, said to be receiving 12,000 fan letters a week during the show’s five-year run (1961-66).Not long after the series ended, he moved to England, determined to shake his pretty-boy image by training as a serious actor. By 1969 he was playing Hamlet at the Birmingham Repertory Theater and surprising the British critics, who called him assured, graceful and plucky. “Anyone who comes to this production to scoff at the sight of a popular American television actor, Richard Chamberlain, playing Hamlet will be in for a deep disappointment,” a review in The Times of London declared.After five years he returned to the United States and to notable stage and screen roles, but it was television, and in particular the mini-series format, that restored his major star status. It began with a role as a Scottish trapper in the ensemble cast of the 12-part “Centennial” in 1978, as viewers began a brief but intense romance with this new programming form, which combined feature-film ambition with the many hours required to tell big stories in great detail.For Mr. Chamberlain, the phenomenon hit full force only when he played the dashing 17th-century romantic lead in “Shogun” in 1980, seducing a new generation of fans. He followed that in 1983 with his portrayal of Ralph de Bricassart, the tortured young priest in the saga “The Thorn Birds,” making him a 49-year-old sex symbol and the undeniable holder of the unofficial title “king of the mini-series.”Mr. Chamberlain received Emmy Award nominations for “The Thorn Birds” and “Shogun,” as well as for “Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story” (1985) — in which he played Raoul Wallenberg, the World War II resistance hero — and for “The Count of Monte Cristo” (1975). He won three Golden Globes during his career, for “The Thorn Birds” and “Shogun,” and as best television actor for “Dr. Kildare” in 1963.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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    Richard Chamberlain Was a Mega Star in TV Mini-Series ‘The Thorn Birds’ and ‘Shogun’

    The actor, who died at 90, was the most compelling face of a maximalist, soapy television era.When mini-series ruled prime time, their maxi-est star was Richard Chamberlain.Today we call them “limited series.” But in their 20th-century heyday, under another inapt diminutive, mini-series were the megafauna of TV, lavish events that achieved the kind of cinematic spectacle that was otherwise rare in living-room entertainment of the time. They were TV specials that made TV special.In the 1970s and 1980s, a number of mini-series — “Roots,” “The Winds of War,” “Lonesome Dove” — dominated the conversation and minted stars. But perhaps no other actor is more closely associated with the genre than Chamberlain, who died on Saturday at 90, because of his star-making, swoon-worthy, emotive roles in “Shogun” and “The Thorn Birds.”I was young when Chamberlain’s mini-series aired, and “Dr. Kildare,” the 1960s medical series that established him as a heartthrob, was before my time. But his landmark roles helped form my ideas of what TV could do, and what a TV star was.His mini-series were luxury liners and time machines, whisking audiences to other lands and ages in a way that workaday series couldn’t. In “Shogun,” Chamberlain played John Blackthorne, an English navigator taken prisoner in feudal Japan; in the melodrama “The Thorn Birds,” his priest, Father Ralph de Bricassart, wrestled with his forbidden love for a young woman from an Australian sheep ranching family.Locations and budgets helped shape the experience, of course, but so did Chamberlain’s screen presence. A Shakespearean actor in between TV roles, he was able to make the manners of decades or centuries before feel warm-blooded and lived-in. He was dignified enough to carry the stories’ grandeur, expressive enough to put them over as the finest grade of pulp.Though he was a signature star of the 1980s, Chamberlain’s appeal was in a way a holdover of the 1960s and 1970s. He was emotive, with fine features that made a beautiful canvas for fervor and anguish and longing. He could rage and burst with passion, but his appeal was a different mold from the kind of beefy masculinity that would define the 1980s screen celebrity of Stallone and Schwarzenegger.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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    ‘S.N.L’: Live From New York, It’s More Military Secrets.

    Mikey Madison hosts and Luigi Mangione, Squidward and Ashton Hall make appearances.There was no uncertainty as to whether “Saturday Night Live” would offer its own satirical take on the news that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had disclosed attack plans for a U.S. strike on Houthi militia fighters in Yemen during a text chat that mistakenly included the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg. It was only a question of how “S.N.L.” would do it.This weekend’s opening sketch featured the cast members Ego Nwodim and Sarah Sherman, as well as the guest host, Mikey Madison, as teenage girls whose group chat was interrupted by an unexpected message, read aloud by Andrew Dismukes: “FYI: Green light on Yemen raid!” he exclaimed.Dismukes, as Hegseth, continued to recite the texts he was sending (“Tomahawks airborne 15 minutes ago”) along with the emojis he was using for punctuation (“Flag emoji, fire emoji, eggplant”).“Do we know you, bro?” Madison asked. “This is Jennabelle.”“Oh, nice,” Dismukes replied. “Jennabelle from Defense, right?”Warned by Nwodim that he was in the wrong group text, Dismukes answered, “LOLOLOL could you imagine if that actually happened? Homer disappear into bush GIF.” He added that he was “sending a PDF with updated locations of all our nuclear submarines.”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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    Maryland’s Kermit the Frog Commencement Choice Gets Mixed Reaction From Students

    The University of Maryland says it is honoring Jim Henson, an alumnus, with its choice of commencement speaker. Some students think it is avoiding “real issues.”Andrew Thompson, a senior at the University of Maryland, woke up on Wednesday to the news that his commencement speaker would not be a politician, tech executive or astronaut.Rather, he would be sent off into the work force by a cheery, fleece puppet the color of pea shoots: the “Muppet Show” star Kermit the Frog.That was great news for some students, who have already started calling the May graduation ceremony their “Ker-mencement.” Still, Mr. Thompson said that he and his roommates felt deflated. He didn’t want to sound ungrateful, but he couldn’t see why he was supposed to listen to life advice from a fictional character.“It’s a little silly, having a puppet as a commencement speaker,” said Mr. Thompson, 22, a mechanical engineering major.Perhaps silly was the point. Last spring, school after school struggled to keep their commencements from careening into controversial territory. The University of Southern California and Columbia University canceled their main-stage graduation ceremonies amid campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza. An N.F.L. kicker dived into gender politics in a speech at Benedictine College in Kansas. And a university in Buffalo, N.Y., outsourced its commencement speech to an A.I. robot named Sophia.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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    ‘Yellowjackets’ Season 3, Episode 8 Recap: ‘Eat It’

    A familiar face comes back into the picture, but it’s a face with a different name. And questionable motives.Season 3, Episode 8: ‘A Normal, Boring Life’This week, we tackle what the question of a “normal” life looks like for a Yellowjacket. Meet Adult Melissa, otherwise known as Kelly, played by Hilary Swank.Adult Melissa thinks she has it pretty good. How did she achieve this? First, she faked her own death and changed her name. Then she married Hannah’s daughter, whom she ended up falling in love with despite initially semi-stalking her to make sure she was safe. Now, they have a kid, go to church and live in a house with a cheesy sign that says, “The Kitchen Is the Heart of the Family.” She still likes to wear backward baseball caps.Melissa-slash-Kelly believes that she is pretty well-adjusted despite it all, and compared to Shauna, who broke into her home to kill her wife, she certainly seems to be. In order to move forward, Melissa erased the past, started completely fresh. And when the past came back to haunt her, she decided to exorcise it again. That’s why she sent the tape to Shauna after she learned about Adult Natalie’s death. It wasn’t, she says, a threat. It was a way to absolve herself, to keep the guilt at bay.Shauna doesn’t necessarily believe that, and I’m not sure I do either. Melissa is almost a little too at ease with her transformation. But sitting across the table from each other, these former lovers seem like polar opposites. Shauna is jittery and paranoid, constantly thinking someone is out to get her; Melissa is calm, just wanting to maintain the peaceful existence she fought hard to create for herself.Their dynamic in the present day is mirrored by the fracture we see in the ’90s story line this episode. With the arrival of Hannah and Kodiak, some of the Yellowjackets are thrilled to be heading home, dreaming of the “normal” lives they’ll have when they get back to civilization. Meanwhile, another camp is, perhaps rightly, unsure that normalcy will ever be an option.All of this is brought into stark relief during a sequence set to Supergrass’s “Alright,” which has the jaunty lyrics “We are young, we run green, keep our teeth nice and clean.” (You might know it best from the “Clueless” soundtrack.) As the song plays, we see how some of the girls fantasize about the creature comforts they’ve been missing. Mari’s water bottle turns into a Slurpee. Misty imagines sitting on a toilet and using real toilet paper. Van falls into a fluffy bed.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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    Through Tears, ‘Mid-Century Modern’ Makes Them Laugh

    On an evening in mid-January, there were bouquets piled outside of Linda Lavin’s trailer on the Disney lot in Burbank, Calif. Nearby, on a soundstage, a black ribbon was wrapped around her caricature.Lavin had died on Dec. 29, at age 87. Now the creators and cast of “Mid-Century Modern,” a Hulu sitcom that shoots in front of a live studio audience, had returned to work to honor her. That night, they would film a half-hour episode designed to pay tribute to her character, Sibyl Schneiderman, while also eulogizing an actress with an outstanding seven-decade career.That was hard enough. Even harder: They had to make it funny.“The job is to make sure it doesn’t get too sad and too sentimental,” said James Burrows, the multicamera-sitcom legend who directed the episode. “You have to remember it’s a comedy, and you’ve got to make the audience laugh.”I had reached out to the sitcom’s creators back in the fall. A new sitcom set among gay men in later life — think “Golden Girls” for the marriage equality set — it sounded like a hoot. It also offered a chance to explore how depictions of queer relationships have changed since the 1990s.But when Lavin died unexpectedly after most of the season had been shot, an irreverent sitcom with an impressive zingers-per-minute rate suddenly had to pivot. So the reporting assignment pivoted, too. (All 10 episodes arrived on Friday.)The ensemble of “Mid-Century Modern” played a group of gay men living in Palm Springs, Calif., with the mother of Lane’s character, played by Lavin.Chris Haston/DisneyWe 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