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    Late Night Speculates About Mitch McConnell’s Next Career Move

    The senator is giving up his G.O.P. leadership post. “McConnell just turned 82, so that can only mean one thing: He’s running for president,” Jimmy Fallon said.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.Leaving So Soon?On Wednesday, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said he would step down this year from his long-held position as leader of the Senate Republicans.“McConnell just turned 82, so that can only mean one thing: He’s running for president,” said Jimmy Fallon.“McConnell said that it’s time for the next generation of leadership. Then he looked around the Senate and realized the next generation is 75.” — JIMMY FALLON“Well, thanks to the woke left, another Confederate statue has been taken down.” — SETH MEYERS“He’s not stepping down till November because, at 82, that’s how long it takes him to step.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“He will be retiring to the Galápagos Islands to spend more time with the other 500-year-old turtles.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Low-Rent Wonka Edition)“Last weekend in Glasgow, a Willy Wonka-inspired experience was brought to a halt following complaints it was ‘an absolute shambles of an event’ after families traveled from all over, paying $40 a ticket for an ‘exhilarating and immersive adventure’ called Willy’s Chocolate Experience. Still better than the English attraction: Spotted Dick’s Custard Explosion.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“But when people showed up, they found something very different from what they found on the website. What they found was basically a big empty warehouse with vinyl backdrops tacked to the wall. They got to see Willy Wonka’s famous portable power generator, and they got to meet what appears to be a meth lab Oompa Loompa.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Parents were very upset. They called the police on the place. I have to say, though, honestly, I feel like the kids learned an important lesson about how disappointing the rest of their lives are going to be.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Look, I don’t know why everyone is so upset that the kids were traumatized. Have you seen the movie? Traumatizing kids is the authentic Wonka experience!” — MICHAEL KOSTA, guest host of “The Daily Show”The Bits Worth WatchingOn “Late Night,” Seth Meyers recapped his highly publicized ice cream shop visit with President Biden, in a segment Meyers referred to this time as “A Closer Lick.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightEugene Levy, who gets a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame next week, will appear on Thursday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”Also, Check This OutRichard Lewis on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” this season.HBOIn one of his last interviews, the late Richard Lewis reminisced about the early days of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” and about meeting Larry David when they were children at summer camp. More

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    Richard Lewis, Comedian and ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Actor, Dies at 76

    After rising to prominence for his stand-up act, he became a regular in movies and TV, most recently on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”Richard Lewis, the stand-up comedian who first achieved fame in the 1970s and ’80s with his trademark acerbic, dark sense of humor, and who later parlayed that quality into an acting career that included movies like “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” and a recurring role as himself on HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” died on Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 76.His publicist, Jeff Abraham, said the cause was a heart attack. Mr. Lewis announced last year that he had Parkinson’s disease.Mr. Lewis was among the best-known names in a generation of comedians who came of age during the 1970s and ’80s, marked by a world-weary, sarcastic wit that mapped well onto the urban malaise in which many of them plied their trade.After finding success as a comedian in New York nightclubs, he became a regular on late-night talk shows, favored as much for his tight routine as for his casual, open affability as an interviewee. He appeared on “Late Night With David Letterman” 48 times.And he was at the forefront of the boom in stand-up comedy that came with the expansion of cable television in the late 1980s.Mr. Lewis performing as a standup in Las Vegas in 2005. He called himself “the Prince of Pain.” Ethan Miller/Getty ImagesWe 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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    In ‘Elsbeth,’ a Quirky Side Character Becomes a Quirky Lead

    This CBS procedural is new, but its star, Carrie Preston, has been playing the central character for almost 14 years.While filming the new crime show “Elsbeth” in an Upper West Side apartment in January, Carrie Preston, playing the title character, tentatively patted the guest star Peter Grosz on the arm. The combination of the gesture and Elsbeth’s hesitant expression made the attempt at comfort come across as simultaneously awkward and funny — and unmistakably true to the consistently awkward, funny Elsbeth.Robert King, who created the series with his wife, Michelle, and was directing that particular episode, chuckled in delight as he watched on a monitor. Nearby the showrunner, Jonathan Tolins, said, “She always finds things like that,” referring to Preston’s flourish. “That was probably not in the script.”Premiering Thursday on CBS, “Elsbeth” is a new project but Elsbeth herself is not. One reason Preston inhabits her fully enough to improvise such small, telling gestures is because she has been playing her for almost 14 years.Fans of legal dramas have long been acquainted with Elsbeth Tascioni, a seemingly scatterbrained but diabolically effective redheaded lawyer who popped up toward the end of the first season of “The Good Wife” in May 2010. From the start, the Kings, who also created that hit show, thought of Elsbeth as an answer to Columbo, the Los Angeles homicide detective that Peter Falk played in a series, then specials, between 1968 and 2003.“I didn’t really watch ‘Columbo’ — it was a little before my time,” said Preston, 56. But “I knew he was a little unorthodox in the way he did things. I was like, ‘OK, I get it: They want people to not see her coming.’”The Kings kept bringing Elsbeth back for guest stints on both “The Good Wife” and its first spinoff, “The Good Fight.” Despite her relatively limited screen time, she became a fan favorite, and Preston landed two Emmy nominations and one win, in 2013, for playing her.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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    Late Night Chides Biden for Talking About Gaza While Eating Ice Cream

    “Not the most dignified way to deliver world-changing news,” Michael Kosta said on Tuesday’s “Daily Show.’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.Biden’s Big ScoopOn Monday, President Biden was asked about a timeline for a potential cease-fire in Gaza while visiting an ice cream shop for a “Late Night with Seth Meyers” segment.On Tuesday, the “Daily Show” host Michael Kosta said Biden had delivered his response “in the most Joe Biden way possible” — that is, while eating an ice cream cone.“Not the most dignified way to deliver world-changing news. It does remind me of the photo of Obama’s team watching the bin Laden raid while making balloon animals.” — MICHAEL KOSTA“This was like when Obama announced ‘We got bin Laden’ just as someone put out the pie.” — SETH MEYERS“That’s a very statesmanlike response, and a reason to kindle hope, if he hadn’t said it directly into a scoop of mint chip.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“I’ll tell you what, if I was a politician, I would always have an ice cream with me, just to cram in my mouth in case I got asked about Israel-Palestine.” — MICHAEL KOSTA“Now, despite Biden’s prediction, both Hamas and Israel say they’re not actually close to a cease-fire. But I’m not surprised that Biden was so optimistic: When you’re holding a freshly scooped ice cream cone, everything feels like it’s going to be OK. That’s why it’s the official food of telling your kid you’re getting a divorce.” — MICHAEL KOSTAThe Punchiest Punchlines (Biden and Trump Take Mexico Edition)“Biden and Trump are scheduled to visit the border in Texas on Thursday. Both of them. They will both be at the border. And if they can get two more senior citizens to go with them, they’ve got themselves a pickleball match.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Former President Trump is set on Thursday to visit the U.S.-Mexico border. I’m guessing to make a break for it?” — SETH MEYERS“If you think these two guys are confused now, wait till they spend a few hours in 100-degree heat.” — JIMMY FALLON“The president is going to see what can be done to solve the border crisis. Trump is going to make sure he doesn’t solve what’s happening at the border. Biden is planning to meet with U.S. border agents, while Trump is planning to sell golden high-tops on the streets of Juárez.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingJosh Brolin took over Stephen Colbert’s desk on Tuesday’s “Late Show.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightSheryl Crow will perform on Wednesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutOlivia Rodrigo onstage in California on Friday night.OK McCausland for The New York TimesFor her Guts World Tour, Olivia Rodrigo’s opening acts will range from the rising star Chappell Roan to the Gen-X rockers the Breeders. More

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    Ole Anderson, Original Member of Four Horsemen Wrestling Team, Dies at 81

    The professional wrestler fought alongside Arn Anderson, Ric Flair and Tully Blanchard. He later spoke out against the commercialization of the sport.Ole Anderson, a professional wrestler who starred as an original member of the Four Horsemen team in the 1980s and was later critical of the sport’s corporate greed, died on Monday. He was 81.The Carter Funeral Home in Winder, Ga., said that Mr. Anderson had died at his home in Monroe, Ga., and that he had “passed away peacefully.” The funeral home did not share a cause of death.World Wrestling Entertainment, known as the World Wrestling Federation when Mr. Anderson wrestled, said in a statement on Monday that he was known for his “hard-nosed style and gruff demeanor.”Mr. Anderson wrestled professionally from the late 1960s through the 1980s, after training under Verne Gagne, a member of the W.W.E. Hall of Fame.Through the 1970s and early 1980s, he was a member of the tag team known as the Minnesota Wrecking Crew, which over the years included Gene, Lars and Arn Anderson, who called themselves brothers and were popular around the Midwest. They were part of regional circuits like Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling and Georgia Championship Wrestling that were united under the National Wrestling Alliance, which regularly crowned them tag-team champions.In the 1980s, Mr. Anderson teamed up with Arn Anderson, Ric Flair and Tully Blanchard to become the Four Horsemen, who went on to dominate the N.W.A. and later World Championship Wrestling, which competed with the W.W.F.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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    Death of David Gail, ‘Port Charles’ Star, Was Drug Related, Publicist Says

    The 58-year-old actor, who was also on “Beverly Hills, 90210,” died last month in a Tampa, Fla., hospital days after going into cardiac arrest.David Gail, the “Port Charles” and “Beverly Hills, 90210” actor who died in a Tampa, Fla. hospital on Jan. 16, had been intoxicated from a mix of drugs and alcohol that caused him to go into cardiac arrest, his publicist said on Tuesday.A number of drugs were found in Mr. Gail’s system, including amphetamines, cocaine, alcohol and fentanyl, according to a statement from the publicist, Linda Brown. The cardiac arrest led to a brain injury, which ultimately caused his death days later, she said.The Hillsborough County Medical Examiner did not immediately respond to a request for Mr. Gail’s autopsy report on Tuesday evening.The family previously said that Mr. Gail, 58, had died from complications from a sudden cardiac arrest.Paramedics who found Mr. Gail after he went into cardiac arrest performed CPR and used a defibrillator to try to revive him, but he ultimately wound up on life support at the hospital, according to Ms. Brown.Mr. Gail’s mother, Mary Painter, said in the statement that her son had for years been reliant on medication to manage pain from hand and wrist surgeries that kept him out of work for nearly a decade.“It breaks my heart to learn my son died this way,” Ms. Painter said, adding, “I can only assume that his former dependence played a part in self-medicating from uncontrolled sources.”Her son’s death, she said, highlighted victims of pharmaceutical addiction and the fentanyl epidemic.Mr. Gail had a bountiful television acting career in the mid- to late 1990s, including his most prominent role, as Dr. Joe Scanlon on the “General Hospital” spinoff show “Port Charles.” Mr. Gail played Dr. Scanlon in 216 episodes in one season, which ran in 1999 and 2000, according to IMDb.Years before that, Mr. Gail appeared on eight episodes of “Beverly Hills, 90210,” playing a minor part in an episode in the first season and returning to the show for the fourth season in a more established role.“When I came back it was such a shock, I was asking, ‘How could I possibly come back?’” Mr. Gail said about his return on the “Beverly Hills Show Podcast” in 2021.“But it worked,” he added.He also made dozens of appearances in a variety of television shows throughout the 1990s and several films in the 2000s. More

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    ‘Shogun’ Season 1, Episodes 1 & 2 Recap

    When an English ship pilot lands in feudal 1600s Japan, five lords must decide whether he’s an enemy or a useful pawn in their quest for power.Episode 1: ‘Anjin’Episode 2: ‘Servants of Two Masters’The ghostly Dutch trading vessel Erasmus materializes out of the fog, dwarfing the homes of a small coastal village like a Lovecraft-ian monster emerging from the sea. It may as well be one.There is no shogun, no unquestioned and absolute ruler, holding the country’s fractious lords together when “Shogun” begins. The Erasmus, with its cargo of guns and ammo and its irascible English pilot, is the harbinger of a world war into which Japan doesn’t even realize it’s been drafted. Its flag means death.Adapted by Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks from the 1975 novel by James Clavell, “Shogun” co-stars Cosmo Jarvis as John Blackthorne, the Erasmus’s pilot, or navigator. Blackthorne is part of a small fleet commissioned by England to find the mysterious and very wealthy island of Japan, and harry any Catholic forces along the way. This is a tall order: England’s Catholic rivals, Portugal and Spain, have kept their lucrative route to East Asia a secret from the rest of the world — even as they kept the existence of England, and Protestantism in general, a secret from their Japanese trading partners.By the time Blackthorne and what’s left of the fleet’s crew wash ashore, they’re down to a dozen or so bedraggled, starving and half-delirious men, looking and acting every bit like the barbarians they’re held to be by the heirs of Japanese civilization. This is no fit state under which to meet Lord Yabushige (Tadanobu Asano), an opportunistic sadist who aims to hang onto the ship and its weaponry for himself.Yabushige defies the wishes of his Portuguese Jesuit translator and spares Blackthorne, who seems a mere pirate until his Protestant desecration of the Catholic cross tips off the nobleman to his true motivations. Yabushige does, however, slowly boil a member of the crew to death to further his studies of dying men’s last moments. Samurai or serial killer: six of one, half dozen of the other.While Yabushige’s cruelty gets laid on pretty thick, “Shogun” does not render that cruelty as some innately Japanese feature. The show is set in 1600, as Europeans have been waging centuries of brutal religious warfare and burning heretics alive.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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    What if Mom’s Not to Blame?

    In a recent crop of films and television shows, grown men are obsessed with their mothers — even if they’re not the monsters audiences expect them to be.IN ANY DISCUSSION of the enduring cultural madness surrounding the subject of mothers and sons, it would probably be natural to start with Sigmund Freud. But let’s treat as a given all the ways in which he blazed a trail for decades of mother bashing and jump one century forward, so that we can examine the philosophy of a different scholar of male frailty and its relationship to unresolved maternal trauma. “Boy, I love meeting people’s moms,” Ted Lasso says in a 2021 episode of the character’s namesake Apple TV+ series. “It’s like reading an instruction manual as to why they’re nuts.”Listen to this article, read by Ron ButlerOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.It’s a funny line, it’s a brutal line, it’s an unfair line — and it’s also an exquisite setup for a big reveal that wouldn’t air until two years later, during the show’s third season, when, for the first time, we meet Ted’s mother and finally learn (or think we do) just where his own blind spots, irrationalities and insufficiencies come from. It’s an “aha!” moment of a kind in which television and movies have long specialized: If you’re seeking the deepest understanding of why any man is the way he is and can’t be anything more, different or better, there’s someone you have to meet. And it’s all her fault.The tortured dynamic of mothers and sons in popular culture has always been its own peculiar thing. Mother-daughter narratives have as profuse a tradition, but with a key difference: In those stories, no matter how complex the interplay of competition and control and selfishness and sacrifice and ego, there’s the base line belief that a relationship is supposed to exist into adulthood. Mothers and sons, though? Not so much. As movies and television have often had it, theirs is a bond that, if both parties are healthy, is meant to reach some kind of tacit endpoint that results in male independence and maternal letting go. If a grown man and his mother are still somehow at each other’s throats or in each other’s business, that’s pathology. Whether played for laughs, tears or shrieks, it’s almost always treated as a sign of dysfunction. Over decades, the pop-psychology conversation about mothers and sons has evolved from a fixation on all the ways in which the former can ruin the latter to more nuanced fretfulness about toxic masculinity and the difficulty of raising proud boys who don’t become Proud Boys or turn horrible in any of the other ways the world encourages them to be. But when that talk turns toward mothers, the verdict, as reflected in movies and television, has never moved all that far beyond “You’re doing it wrong.”Armen Nahapetian (left) and Zoe Lister-Jones in 2023’s “Beau Is Afraid.”Courtesy of A24That may, at long last, be changing. The past year has brought an exceptionally varied and thematically rich crop of movies exploring men and their — to use the proper scientific term — mommy issues. They range from the extremely dark comedies “Beau Is Afraid” and “Saltburn” to the more heartfelt and sincere “All of Us Strangers” to the coming-of-age period piece “The Holdovers” to the singular mash-up of character study and tabloid scandal excavation that is “May December.” The movies all showcase mothers and sons; many of them seek to untangle relationships knotted and gnarled by neediness, selfishness or cruelty. By the end of most of them, blood is on the floor, and the collateral damage is steep. But as different as their approaches are, what these films have in common is a questing, thoughtful desire not simply to return to an old trope but to complicate, undermine or even explode it. That said, old tropes die hard, and this one — the hapless son who’s been emotionally mangled by a monster mother — has been entrenched in movies and television for close to 75 years. Freud himself may not have been around to watch them emerge but, by the 1950s, references to psychiatry and analysis were ubiquitous in movies and on TV comedies and talk shows, and mothers, in the cultural parlance of that era, were a necessary evil — something for healthy and well-adjusted men to get past and get over. Men who couldn’t, or worse, didn’t want to, were portrayed as marionettes tied to and practically strangled by their mothers’ apron strings. They were labeled neurotic, and often implicitly labeled homosexual — an accusation that couldn’t then be made overtly in entertainment but could definitely be winked at. Doting mothers, not to mention distant or domineering or strong or fragile ones (for mothers, there was no winning path except quiet self-sacrifice), could make their sons timid, unstable, sexually dysfunctional, effeminate, perverse or outright mad. It became a kind of cruel, knowing joke: Think of Robert Walker’s simpering, coy, mommy-obsessed murderer in Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train” (1951) or Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, whose macabre credo “A boy’s best friend is his mother,” earnestly stated to Mommy stand-in Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), is the closest thing “Psycho” (1960) has to a punchline. Or in a more benign mode, consider the hanging-on-to-heterosexuality-by-a-thread beta male that Tony Randall used to play in all those Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies. “I’ve been talking to this psychiatrist about my mother for two years now,” his character says in “Pillow Talk” (1959), adding, “It’s perfectly healthy. He dislikes her as much as I do!”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