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      Kristen Kish Chosen as Next ‘Top Chef’ Host

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      Kish, who will bring considerable TV experience to the role, succeeds Padma Lakshmi, who hosted the show for 19 of its 20 seasons.Kristen Kish, an acclaimed chef who won the 10th season of “Top Chef” more than a decade ago, will return as the next host of the long-running culinary competition, Bravo announced on Tuesday. She will succeed Padma Lakshmi, who said last month she would be departing the show, which she had hosted for 19 of its 20 seasons.Kish, who has hosted several other food-related series, will take the reins for Season 21, which the network has said will take place in Wisconsin. She will join the food writer Gail Simmons and the chef Tom Colicchio at the judges table.“‘Top Chef’ is where I started my journey — first as a competing chef, then a guest judge and now as host, I have the honor of helping to continue to build this brand,” Kish said in a statement. “It feels like coming home.”Kish, who was adopted from South Korea and grew up in Kentwood, Mich., attended Le Cordon Bleu in Chicago. She then spent a decade working at restaurants in Boston, rising through the ranks to become the chef de cuisine at Barbara Lynch’s crown jewel restaurant, Menton.As The New York Times reported in 2014, Lynch had encouraged Kish and another young chef from her restaurant group to compete on “Top Chef.”Kish won Season 10, and has become a familiar face on the show in recent years as a guest judge. She has also opened her first restaurant, released a cookbook and has hosted or starred in several shows including “36 Hours,” a Travel Channel show that is a collaboration with The Times; “Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend,” and “Restaurants at the End of the World.”Ryan Flynn, an NBCUniversal senior vice president, said in a statement that Kish was “the perfect host for the next chapter of ‘Top Chef’ as we take on a new region of the country we haven’t explored.”Both Colicchio and Simmons published posts on Instagram Tuesday afternoon applauding the choice of Kish.“She is an excellent chef, brings a world class perspective and most importantly, having been a past contestant and judge, she knows what it takes to win @bravotopchef,” Colicchio wrote.“Psyched beyond words to have her pull up that seat at Judges’ Table,” Simmons said.In a statement to The Times on Tuesday, Kish added that she was already “overwhelmed by the amazing outpouring of support by the fans of ‘Top Chef’ embracing this new chapter.”“I am eager to get started!” she said.Maya Salam contributed reporting. More

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      Timothy Olyphant Is Back for a New Chapter of ‘Justified’

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      “I like to think there’s been some growth.”This was the actor Timothy Olyphant in New York last month, musing on the trajectory of his career from a TriBeCa sidewalk. He was referring specifically to the task of resurrecting past roles, which he first did a few years ago in the 2019 movie revival of “Deadwood.”Now comes “Justified: City Primeval,” an eight-episode limited series premiering on July 18, on FX. It features Olyphant returning to what is arguably his signature character, Raylan Givens, the Stetson-sporting deputy U.S. Marshal who anchored the Kentucky crime drama “Justified” for six seasons.The new show follows Raylan to Detroit for a fish-out-of-water adventure with a murderous baddie (Boyd Holbrook) and a sharp-elbowed but alluring lawyer, played by Aunjanue Ellis. The creators describe it as the existential evolution of a character, invented by the crime fiction grandmaster Elmore Leonard, who is starting to realize that he can’t chase killers forever and that he is running out of chances to connect with his teenage daughter.“It’s a mature, grown-up version of the show that we did,” said Michael Dinner, who created the limited series with Dave Andron. Both are former writers and executive producers on “Justified,” which ended its run on FX in 2015.The creators and Olyphant, who is also an executive producer on “City Primeval,” hope to bring back Raylan for at least one more series after this one. But first, they are going to find out if people are still interested in the character or “Justified” without the original show’s evocative backwoods setting and colorful criminals, played by the likes of Walton Goggins and Margo Martindale.“Justified: City Primeval” moves the action from Kentucky to Detroit, where Olyphant’s character, Raylan, joins a sharp-elbowed lawyer played by Aunjanue Ellis.Chuck Hodes/FXOlyphant (left, with Claire Danes and Dennis Quaid) plays a man who marries into the family of a celebrity chef in the Max series “Full Circle,” directed by Steven Soderbergh.Sarah Shatz/Max“With all due respect to our original cast, who I loved, adored and miss, it was really a fun experience being with all these new cast members but still feeling like we were doing our show,” Olyphant said. “This feels right in the sweet spot, but I don’t know, it could be a total failure.”If he didn’t seem particularly bothered by the possibility of tainting the legacy of his most famous creation, this is partly an effect of his affect. In conversation Olyphant is easygoing and quick-witted, qualities he brings to his work that also belie another of his defining traits: a simmering intensity.That combination proved perfect for the darkly comic, morally murky world of “Justified.” Olyphant’s performance in the series shifted his previously hit-and-miss career into a higher gear, which in turn has made his future prospects less dependent on the success of the “Justified” revival.As it happened, Olyphant was in New York for a screening of a different twisty crime thriller: “Full Circle,” in which he plays a Manhattanite with secrets who has married into the wealthy family of a celebrity chef, played by Dennis Quaid. (Other stars include Claire Danes, Jharrel Jerome and CCH Pounder.) Premiering Thursday on Max, the gripping six-episode serial revolves around a botched kidnapping with international repercussions.“Full Circle” was directed by Steven Soderbergh, the latest on a list of talented people with whom Olyphant long wanted to work and now has. Others include Quentin Tarantino, who cast Olyphant as the 1960s TV cowboy James Stacy in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” (2019), and David O. Russell, who hired him to play a disfigured thug in “Amsterdam” (2022). Kenneth Lonergan made him the center of his acclaimed play “Hold On to Me Darling” (2016).“You can throw Larry David on the list,” Olyphant said, referring to his appearance as a smarmy groom in “Curb Your Enthusiasm” in 2020. “I don’t know how long I’ll keep doing this, but I’ll show up every day for that guy.”There was also a brief run as a “Star Wars” lawman in “The Mandalorian” and “The Book of Boba Fett,” and a longer one as a Mormon U.S. Marshal in “Fargo.” He played a zombie’s husband in the horror comedy “Santa Clarita Diet” and himself in two different sitcoms: “The Good Place” and “The Grinder.” Earlier this year he had a memorable turn as a grizzled tour manager with terrible hair in “Daisy Jones & the Six.”Soderbergh, who said he had wanted for years to cast Olyphant, called him “the best example of an experienced professional, in that he can give you anything that you want.”“That is the best thing I can say about somebody,” he added.The afternoon after the “Full Circle” screening, Olyphant reclined in a metal chair outside a TriBeCa cafe and marveled at the company he is keeping these days.“I had a blast working with the writers,” Olyphant said of the “Justified” revival. “They picked up where we left off except for this time, there wasn’t anyone throwing things.”Philip Cheung for The New York Times“Being with Steven Soderbergh last night watching something that he’s made that I’m a part of, it just means the world,” he said. “I don’t know why it took me so long to get there, but it’s really nice to be there now.”Now 55, Olyphant retains an athlete’s physique — he had just come from swimming at Asphalt Green in Battery Park — but his hair has gone mostly gray. As he has revived old roles, he has entered a new phase of his life: His three children with Alexis Knief, his wife of over 30 years, are now grown, and one has followed her father not just into show business but also into the world of “Justified.” Vivian Olyphant plays Raylan’s daughter, Willa, in the revival. “Nepotism, you can’t beat it,” he cracked.Olyphant wasn’t sure he wanted to reprise his “Deadwood” role as Sheriff Seth Bullock. (Bullock got a promotion for the movie, adding yet another marshal to Olyphant’s résumé.) Once on set, however, he realized how much the show meant to him. It also gave him a final opportunity to work with David Milch, one of television’s greatest writers, whom Olyphant deeply admires. (Milch has since entered an assisted-living facility for Alzheimer’s care.)“I don’t know what I was so afraid of,” he said. “It was quite moving for everybody involved.”But Olyphant always figured he would play Raylan again. “It seemed like the kind of character that could age well,” he said.The new series updates Leonard’s 1980 novel “City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit,” one of his most beloved books. As Raylan joins the Detroit police in a case that encompasses a string of murders, a psychopathic aspiring singer, Albanian gangsters, corrupt cops and a crooked judge, he is frequently the odd man out in his own show.“I think they wanted that collision, which is why they sent him to one of the Blackest cities in the country,” said Ellis, who plays a defense attorney at the heart of the story. Other stars include Victor Williams, Vondie Curtis-Hall and Marin Ireland.During the original run of “Justified,” Olyphant was known as an occasionally demanding Leonard purist, insisting that the show stay true to the author’s dry wit and sneaky emotional complexity. That hasn’t changed — Ellis said Olyphant carried around a tattered copy of “City Primeval” on set “like it was the Bible” — though Olyphant suggested that the terms of engagement had evolved.“I had a blast working with the writers,” he said. “They picked up where we left off except for this time, there wasn’t anyone throwing things. They were all used to my [expletive].” (Dinner, who also directed multiple episodes, said that “he was a great collaborator.”)“The game has gotten simpler,” Olyphant said of his acting career. “I realize it’s all kind of a joke, just getting away with it.”Philip Cheung for The New York TimesAll productions have highs and lows, but this show’s were more extreme than most. In the plus column, Olyphant called working with his daughter, who studies acting at the New School in New York, “one of the greatest experiences of my adult life.”“So special and challenging, walking that line between trying to get a scene and trying to be a parent,” he said. (“He definitely did give a lot of notes,” Vivian, 20, said. “But in between takes, we would have a lot of fun.”)Less great: the night when the show, shot mostly in Chicago, was filming in a park and the cast and crew found themselves in the middle of an actual shootout. They all dove for cover as two cars tore down the street toward and past them, trading sprays of automatic gunfire.“You could hear the bullets kicking off the back bumper of the front car: tink, tink, tink,” Olyphant recalled. No one in the production was injured, but everyone was left shaken.“My heart goes out to the people that live in those neighborhoods because that is just not any way to live,” he said.So does Raylan age well? Is there growth? Viewers will have to draw their own conclusions.“The road in front of him is a lot shorter than the road behind,” Dinner said. “We get him into a place by the end of the story where he makes some decisions about his life.”Olyphant’s road is getting shorter, too, but the trade-off is that “the game has gotten simpler,” he said. “I realize it’s all kind of a joke, just getting away with it.” His co-stars say that whatever his penchant for downplaying the job, his enthusiasm for it is apparent.“He’s obviously very experienced now,” Danes said. “But there’s still that sense of giddiness and searching, which is wonderful.”Olyphant in turn takes inspiration from those with even more experience, from their example that growth can be its own reward. Co-stars like Quaid, he said, “seem to be having even more fun than I’m having.”“So if they’ll have me and keep inviting me to the dance,” he said, “I think I’ll keep showing up.” More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘What We Do in the Shadows’ and ‘Barbie Dreamhouse Challenge’

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      The series about Staten Island vampires is back for a fifth season on FX and HGTV premieres a “Barbie” themed show.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, July 10-16. Details and times are subject to change.MondayUNBREAKABLE (2000) 8:10 P.M. on HBO. Starring Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson, this M. Night Shyamalan film follows a security guard, David Dunn (Willis), who is the sole survivor of a train wreck and doesn’t seem to have sustained any injuries. On his journey to figure out what happened he runs into Elijah Price (Jackson), who tells him about how some people are “unbreakable.” “Mr. Shyamalan shows that ‘The Sixth Sense’ was no accident,” the critic Elvis Mitchell wrote in his review for The New York Times. “Deadpan melancholy has quickly become his signature.”TuesdayA still from “Iconic America.”Courtesy of Show of ForceICONIC AMERICA 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). This episode, part of an eight-part documentary series hosted by David Rubenstein, explores the symbolism behind the Statue of Liberty and how it relates to the current values of the United States, with the help of historians and experts. Other episodes in the series include Fenway Park, the Golden Gate Bridge and American cowboys.Wednesday2023 ESPYS 8 p.m. on ABC. This annual ceremony, which celebrates individual and team achievements in sports, is being co-hosted by LeBron James and Jimmy Kimmel and broadcast live from the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles this year. Awards include best athlete for both men’s and women’s sports, best team and best play. The United States women’s national soccer team are set to receive the Arthur Ashe Award for their fight for equal pay.ThursdayTHE BLACKLIST 9 p.m. on NBC. This series, following ex-government agent Raymond “Red” Reddington (James Spader), is wrapping up its 10-season run this week. As Red’s journey comes to an end, there are two big loose ends to tie up. The first is to figure out what is going to happen to the ongoing task force. The second is, What is going to happen to Raymond Reddington? With the end of the series, the show will have to answer the question: Will he live or will he die?WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS 10 p.m. on FX. This mockumentary, about four vampires who live together on Staten Island, is back for a fifth season. In the first episode of the season Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) and Laszlo (Matt Berry) discover the joys of a mall. Also this season, they help throw a pride parade and Colin (the energy vampire, played by Mark Proksch) runs for office.FridayFrom left: Linda Cardellini and Reese Witherspoon in “Legally Blonde.”MGMLEGALLY BLONDE (2001) 7:30 p.m. on Bravo. This movie taught us that having knowledge of how hair treatments work could win you a legal battle — and more important, that “girlie” doesn’t mean incapable. Reese Witherspoon plays Elle Woods, a sorority girl who makes it her mission to get into Harvard Law School to prove to her ex-boyfriend that she is marriage material. Along the way she finds a real passion and ability for practicing law. Jennifer Coolidge, as Elle’s manicurist-bff Paulette Bonafonté, and Luke Wilson, as her love interest and colleague Emmett, round out the cast of this fun movie that still packs an emotional punch.FINAL DESTINATION MARATHON various times on POP. Beginning at 8 p.m. you can cozy up, pop some popcorn, and brew some coffee since you could be up until 6 a.m. watching all five “Final Destination” movies. The general plot of every movie in the franchise is that some people narrowly escape death, except they didn’t escape death, it was a premonition for a future death. To jog your memory of some of the horrific deaths in store: There was the swimming pool incident in the first movie, the tanning bed incident in the third movie, and the botched eye surgery in the fifth movie.SaturdayALMOST FAMOUS (1990) 8 p.m. on TCM. This coming-of-age film is a semi-biographical story inspired by the director Cameron Crowe’s own story. Set in 1973, a 15-year-old William (Patrick Fugit) gets an assignment to write a profile on an up-and-coming band for Rolling Stone magazine. Crowe himself wrote for Rolling Stone in the 1970s. In the film version, William ends up following the band, Stillwater, on tour. Kate Hudson and Billy Crudup round out the cast, as a groupie and the lead singer of the band, respectively. Crowe “has made a movie about sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll that you would be happy to take your mother to see,” the film critic A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The Times.SundayBarbie in a 2012 version of her dreamhouse.Bethany Clarke/Getty ImagesBARBIE DREAMHOUSE CHALLENGE 8 p.m. on HGTV. If you haven’t noticed, pretty much everything is “Barbie” themed these days (she’s been collaborating with Coldstone Creamery, Xbox, Gap and many, many more), and houses are apparently no exception. Hosted by the model Ashley Graham, this four-part series will have eight teams of HGTV personalities, and one Food Network chef, work to turn a house in Southern California into their best recreation of the Barbie Dreamhouse.MS. MATCH (2023) 9 p.m. on E! Since the 2010s ended, the airwaves have been seriously lacking new romantic comedies. This week, E! is doing us a favor by releasing their new original movie. It follows Athena, who works as a dating coach at a company that teaches people how to better date — but with all that fake dating, what she really misses is a genuine connection. When her college ex-boyfriend comes back into the picture, Athena has to try to address what she actually wants and how to prioritize herself.REAL HOUSEWIVES OF NEW YORK CITY 9 p.m. on Bravo. Even though we love our OG RHONY stars, there’s a new cast in town. The revamp of this classic Bravo show features housewives Sai De Silva, Ubah Hassan, Erin Dana Lichy, Jenna Lyons, Jessel Taank, and Brynn Whitfield. Andy Cohen, the producer of the Real Housewives franchise, teased on his show “Watch What Happens Live” that “it’s going to be a different show” than the first iteration. “It’s so hard because everyone is going to compare it to RHONY, which was so perfect. And I hope this is perfect in a totally different way,” Cohen added. More

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      In ‘The Horror of Dolores Roach,’ the Empanadas Are to Die For

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      Justina Machado and Aaron Mark went uptown to sample the savory pastries that play a central role in their new horror-comedy — minus the mystery meat.You know those days when you would kill for an empanada? Well.It was a cool and sunny morning last month in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, and the actress Justina Machado and the writer Aaron Mark had agreed to meet there to talk about their new Amazon series, “The Horror of Dolores Roach.” An eight-part horror-comedy, starting Friday on Prime Video, the show makes the neighborhood a central focus, which was why I took the train uptown. It does the same for cannibalism, though there was nothing like that on the schedule as far as I knew.But we had all day to talk about eating people. First, empanadas. Grabbing a park bench, Mark and Machado fueled up on the hot, crisp hand-held pastries — guava and cheese, carne de res — from Empanadas Monumental, near 157th Street and Broadway, around the corner from where Mark lived for a decade as what he called a “broke, broke, broke” playwright.I drooled a little watching Machado and Mark take bites of the face-sized empanadas, which were perfectly golden brown, bubbly in the right spots and oozy, not greasy. They were tasty, Machado said, but she was partial to the chicken-and-cheese pastelillos, fried turnovers similar to empanadas, that her Puerto Rican mother used to make.“She would make them with a cafe con leche,” said Machado, known best for her roles in the “One Day at a Time” reboot and “Jane the Virgin.” “I could kill, like, four of them.”Empanadas devoured, we moved to a nearby cafe — this time, to talk over cinnamon buns — and got right to the macabre meat of “Dolores Roach.” Mark, who created the show, serves as showrunner with Dara Resnik. Based on his fictional Gimlet Media podcast of the same name (2018-19), the series itself is an adaptation of the one-woman play he wrote, “Empanada Loca.” A New York Times review of its 2015 Off Broadway production by the Labyrinth Theater Company called it an “exuberantly macabre” show.Mark was inspired to pursue a “contemporary gender-flipped ‘Sweeney Todd’” while living in Washington Heights. Machado made her Broadway debut in “In the Heights,” which is set there.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesMachado stars as Dolores, who returns to a gentrified Washington Heights after 16 years in prison for taking the rap for her drug-dealer boyfriend. Rattled by her new surroundings, she tries to start life over as a masseuse in the basement of an empanada shop run by her old friend Luis (Alejandro Hernández). But after her jerk of a first client gropes her, and she snaps, killing him in a sudden rage, she can’t seem to stop murdering.To the delight of his unsuspecting customers, the deranged Luis decides to make empanadas stuffed with the kibbled dead body parts of her victims, leaving Dolores to wonder how her life has taken such a monstrous path.Mark, a self-described “Jew from Texas” and a longtime horror fan, said the idea for a “contemporary gender-flipped ‘Sweeney Todd’” started percolating in 2013, when he and the actress Daphne Rubin-Vega developed the idea in New York. (She played Dolores in the play and podcast and is an executive producer of the series.) Mark moved four years ago to Los Angeles, where he had no luck pitching it as a TV series.But the theater world is small: Mimi O’Donnell, a former artistic director of Labyrinth, was tapped to head scripted podcasts at Gimlet, and she brought the project over as her first fiction podcast. (She is now the head of scripted fiction at Spotify Studios.) In 2019, the horror producer Blumhouse Television came aboard to help develop it for TV.Alejandro Hernández plays Dolores’s old friend Luis, who turns her murder victims into the filling for empanadas at his shop.Amazon Prime VideoThe show features some high-profile names in supporting roles, including Cyndi Lauper as a Broadway usher who moonlights as a private investigator and Marc Maron as the empanada shop’s landlord.But the series also has two uncredited stars: empanadas and Washington Heights. Mark said the show’s food stylist, Rossy Earle, tapped into her Panamanian roots to choreograph how Hernández rolled out, stuffed and fried the empanadas. She crafted distinct recipes for Dolores’s victims so that each corpse-meat filling had its own flavor.For Dolores’s first victim, Earle braised pork shoulder and butt in Achiote oil to give the filling an unctuous mouth feel — “Greasy and obnoxious,” like the character, Earle wrote in an email.Much of the series was shot in Ontario, but parts were filmed in Washington Heights, including on Mark’s old stoop on West 156th Street, where he recalled days spent “listening to what gentrification was doing to the humans who had been here for decades.”“That’s really what got me to ‘Sweeney Todd,’” he said. “I thought, this neighborhood is cannibalizing itself.”(Mark acknowledged in an email that he himself had been “very much an interloper uptown”; that awareness, and a growing “sense of culpability,” he said, had fueled his urgency to write about what he had seen and been a part of.)Machado, who grew up in Chicago, had a personal connection to Washington Heights, as well. In 2009, she made her Broadway debut in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s breakout musical, “In the Heights,” which is set there.Mark and Machado outside the building where Mark lived for a decade in Washington Heights.Victor Llorente for The New York Times“I guess there’s something about the Heights that’s calling me,” she said.As our conversation wrapped up and Machado and Mark eyed their doggy bags of empanadas, they were mum on whether a second season was in the works. But Roach isn’t Dolores’s last name for nothing. “She’s unkillable,” Mark said.Is she a coldblooded monster? Or a victim of circumstances? Machado and Mark didn’t entirely agree.“She’s not a maniac,” Mark said. “She wants to be a good person.”“She’s a survivor,” Machado offered. “But she’s a sociopath.”Either way, Machado called it “liberating” to be in a show about Latinos that wasn’t afraid to be comically sinister and eye-poppingly gory.“When we try to tell our stories, we feel a responsibility to make it a happy ending because we want to change the narrative, we want people to know that we have human experiences, that we are human beings,” she said. “But we love horror, too.”On playing Dolores, she added, with a laugh: “I’m a Latina serial killer, and I’m proud of it. I really am.” More

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      ‘Silo’ Creator on the Show’s ‘Cautionary Tale’ About Tech

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      In an interview, Graham Yost discusses the Apple TV+ sci-fi series and the mysteries and revelations of its twisty season finale.This interview includes spoilers for the first season of “Silo.”In the cliffhanger season finale of the dystopian saga “Silo,” streaming on Apple TV+, Bernard (Tim Robbins), the true power of the closed Silo community, gives the condemned protagonist, Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson), a secret peek at some hidden truths.First he reveals the surveillance machinery used to keep tabs on an unassuming populace. Then, sitting in her cell, before her banishment into the mysterious outside world — a supposed death sentence — Bernard tries to convince Juliette (and himself) that his authoritarian actions were for the good of all.“To me, that was a really important scene,” said the series creator and showrunner, Graham Yost (“Justified”). “It’s not easy being Bernard. You get the sense that this guy who we’ve come to believe is stone evil is someone who has his own burden. You realize he has the worst job in the Silo.”That word, “Silo,” refers both to the enormous subterranean city that shelters 10,000 people and to the practice of information siloing: filtering data through narrow, manipulative networks. Those living in the Silo — this one, at least — believe themselves to be the last people on Earth, having been convinced that life is impossible in the wasteland outside.The echo chamber is carefully monitored by Bernard’s I.T. team, themselves unaware of the extent of the lies told on the screens inside the Silo. While the image everyone sees is of a gray and toxic world inhospitable to life, a contraband version shows blue skies and green trees — supposedly evidence of the Silo leadership’s manipulation. Which is the true depiction of the world?When Juliette is cast out by Bernard in the finale, she sees the ugly truth: The outside is, in fact, desolate and poisonous. She also discovers that there are many more Silos beyond her own. But unlike her doomed predecessors — Sheriff Holston Becker (David Oyelowo) and his wife, Allison (Rashida Jones) — Juliette survives because of the spacesuit-sealing power of the superior heat tape supplied by her pals in the lower reaches of the Silo, the subject of a running subplot.“At its heart, this is a mystery show,” Yost said. “You’re trying to find out what the hell happened to force people to live underground, when it will be safe to go out, what’s going on and why.”In an interview last month, Yost was careful not to spoil the many mysteries, though curious viewers can find answers in the Hugh Howey novels that form the basis of the series. (Howey himself makes a brief crowd-scene cameo in the finale.)“At its heart, this is a mystery show,” said Graham Yost, left, with the author Hugh Howey.Apple TV+As for what the future holds for “Silo,” Yost said he has a four-season plan to cover the three books in the series so far: “Wool,” “Shift” and “Dust.” (Howey has said he is writing more “Silo” novels.) The second season is currently in production in England, but Apple TV+ has yet to announce further seasons.Speaking by phone while on vacation in Newfoundland, Yost discussed his “Silo” game plan, a useful note from Apple and the continuing Writers Guild of America strike. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Many television writers aren’t talking about their series right now, why are you doing so? And how does the strike affect your plans for Season 2?I’m on strike. But I ran this interview by the W.G.A., and I think it’s OK. We’ll see if I get yelled at. It’s a weird time. I did stop all producing activities as requested by the Guild, and I declined promotional stuff leading up to the launch of the show. Now it’s a month-and-a-half later, and if I get a chance to talk about the strike, I’m happy to do it.The reality is, we had to get started on Season 2 a long time before we would announce it. I imagine that if the show had done terribly, they might have pulled the plug. But scenes are being filmed in England as we speak because all the scripts were written for Season 2 long ago, and we did a mad dash before the strike to make sure we’d answered the actors’ and directors’ notes as best we could.In Howey’s first book, we learn early on that the greenery screen is a virtual reality simulation, but we don’t find that out in the show until the finale.At the end of the written story, when Holston takes off his helmet, he sees that the world is dead and that the display in the helmet is a lie, while the display on the screen in the Silo is actually telling the truth. That’s a really nice flip; that’s one of the things that hooked me on this. But we decided let’s hold off.Why?Frankly, that was a note from Apple. They said: “What if we don’t find that out until the end of the season? Let’s see how that feels.” The great thing is, when you write the scripts, you can read them all and go: “Yeah. Let’s hold off on that.” We could have gotten to the finale and said, “No, let’s not reveal it this season.” But we wanted to.Even before we brought the writers’ room together, we knew that Juliette going outside was a great end of the season. Then we went back and forth on how much to reveal. Do we reveal the other Silo berms, or do we hold off? In this instance, we wanted to reveal that the world really is dead out there. The stuff that Holston saw, the stuff that Juliette sees — it’s not true. It’s an augmented reality.We also wanted to add another big question with the additional Silos, which was something like the hatch in “Lost”: What does all this mean? That feels like a great thing to kick off another season.Juliette (Ferguson) spends much of the first season antagonizing powerful figures in the Silo and is eventually forced to leave.Apple TV+Now that you’ve established the world of the show, will there be more room for the story to breathe in Season 2? Perhaps more flashbacks, as in the second book?When I pitched Season 2, we thought we were going to be telling more of the deep back story than we are actually going to. It does appear, but I don’t want to say anything more about it. You have to put on the brakes and go, No, the audience isn’t going to enjoy that. They want to be able to focus on solving one big chunk of mystery at a time.The show is loosely blocked out for four seasons. I suppose there’s a world where we get into the fourth season and go, “Man, we’re going to need two more seasons,” but I honestly can’t see that happening now. We’re so far into it. We looked for things in the books like, “Wow, this would be a great end of Season 2”; “This would be a great end of Season 3”; “This is how the series should end”; and then worked backward from that.The story seems to be nervous about technology in general: I.T. is used for surveillance and manipulation, and even some of the “relics,” which seem initially like important clues, end up being misleading.Ultimately, be very afraid of technology. This is a cautionary tale: What happened to the world? Was it nuclear? Was it a disease? Was it A.I.?And that brings us back to the writers’ strike. A.I. was not a high priority on our agenda last year but then ChatGPT came out, and it was like, Oh my lord. It’s not great, but it can learn. We’ve got to figure this out, because A.I. is not the demon. It’s how you use it.If a studio or network wants to have A.I. write scripts and then just have one writer clean them up, I don’t think that would be good. And it’s not just because we’re afraid of being out of work: It’s also that we love the medium we work in. We want it to stay vital, humane, human, clever and groundbreaking. It would be a terrible shame if stuff was just churned out because A.I. is a cheaper way to do it: “We don’t need the writers. We don’t need the directors. And we can use digi-models of the actors, too.” That might cost $1.98, but what would it do for the human spirit? More

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      ‘The Idol’ Is Ending Sunday. Here’s Why That’s a Good Thing.

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      Three Times critics agree: The HBO pop fable is bad television. Ahead of Sunday night’s season finale, they break down its baffling missteps and occasional bright spots.Created by Sam Levinson, Abel Tesfaye (a.k.a. the Weeknd) and Reza Fahim, “The Idol” arrived five weeks ago amid mostly negative buzz and ends Sunday on HBO. (A second season has not been announced.) Ahead of the season finale, three New York Times critics — James Poniewozik, chief TV critic; Wesley Morris, critic at large; and Lindsay Zoladz, pop music critic — compared notes on the story of the unstable pop star Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp), the grimy Svengali Tedros (Tesfaye) and their various handlers and hangers-on.JAMES PONIEWOZIK A confession: I was ready for “The Idol” to be good. Yeah, I saw the reports about the catastrophic production. But there’s a history of HBO series that followed big hits and were trashed because they were trying different, ambitious things. (I will defend “Tell Me You Love Me” and “John From Cincinnati” until death.)But indeed “The Idol” is bad. Impressively so! In this era of smoothed-out TV mediocrity, you need pull to make a show this bad. You need big names who have, to quote Tedros, “cart-ay blan-shay.” “The Idol” is gross and leering in the way the set reports suggested, but it’s also inept in a way that Sam Levinson’s “Euphoria” would not suggest. The tone lurches erratically. Motivations are inexplicable. It features the least mesmerizing cult leader in screen history. Characters and story lines seem to exist only to express the makers’ gripes about the music industry or intimacy coordinators, like a porny, torture-y “The Newsroom.”I am open to arguments to the contrary, though! Or, at least, is “The Idol” saying anything about celebrity or pop music that’s worth a closer listen?WESLEY MORRIS I’m with you, Jim. Through four episodes, it’s a baffler. I think it suffers from that pull you identified. This is a 90-minute movie that doesn’t have the bonkers ideas, imagery or attitude to justify the five-plus hours it asks us to pay.But you know, that first episode seemed like it was really up to and onto something. As TV, it ran tight and focused while being busy and, in its lewd way, suspenseful. It was funny, strange, knowingly acted and — as ensemble comedy and because of that erotic choreography — enticingly physical. We’re taken inside the hothouse of American celebrity to watch as it wilts beneath the California sun. We meet an army of competing personalities and competing interests, all trying to figure out what then seemed to be a question of murder-mystery proportions: How did that image of Jocelyn’s semen-stained face get all over the internet? And who is its owner? Turns out, the leak is a white herring.An important joke is that the horror filmmaker Eli Roth is here, jittering in a small, pretty decent part. That’s because everything after the first episode, which ends with Tedros Tedros (yes, “Lolita” lovers) turning Jocelyn into a Magritte painting (tying her head up in a scarlet scarf) and then telling her to sing, is indeed a soulless trip to Ye Olde Torture-Porn Dungeon, albeit a bank-bustingly chic one.LINDSAY ZOLADZ Hello, fellow world-class sinners. Jim, I agree that there is something rare about a show this chaotically messy in our age of middle-of-the-road prestige, but I’m not sure that it’s compellingly bad enough that I would recommend it to anyone for rubbernecking purposes. Life’s too short. As attempted commentary about pop stardom, I find the show to be repellently smug — it really thinks it has something profound to say about celebrity and even (help us) female empowerment, but its big ideas all ring disappointingly hollow.And dramaturgically speaking — to quote Jeremy Strong, an actor I’d rather be watching on Sunday nights — “The Idol” is curiously inert. The story is muddled, the pacing is all over the place, the writing and performances can’t get me to care about the fates of any of the major characters. The best thing about the show by far is its stellar supporting cast: Rachel Sennott is hilarious as Leia, a kind of skittishly basic, Gen-Z Marnie Michaels who finds herself plopped down uncomfortably in the middle of this den of sin. But my favorite member of the entourage is Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who brings a knowingness and a killer sense of comic timing to the role of Destiny, one of Jocelyn’s managers. Cast her in everything, please.The flip-side of the supporting actors’ strengths, though, is also one of the show’s main weaknesses: “The Idol” is at its worst when its main characters are onscreen. Which, of course, is most of the time.Da’Vine Joy Randolph has brought excellent comic timing to the part of Destiny, one of Jocelyn’s managers.Eddy Chen/HBOThe question I keep asking myself: Why is the Weeknd doing this? (Excuse me: Why is Abel Tesfaye doing this?) Over the past decade, the Toronto-born crooner has ascended to a level of pop stardom more stratospheric than even the fictional Jocelyn’s; “Blinding Lights,” his glisteningly paranoid 2019 single, is now the longest charting song by a solo artist ever on the Billboard Hot 100 as well as the most-streamed song in Spotify history. That makes him successful in a way that even a misguided passion project like “The Idol” is unlikely to put too large a dent in, though I can’t help but wonder if this tarnishes his reputation just a bit moving forward. Jim, as someone less familiar with the Weeknd’s music, what impression is Tesfaye’s performance here making on you?PONIEWOZIK To my eye (and ear), Tesfaye is reading the role rather than acting it. His performance is flat, except when he overcorrects into outbursts. It’s the actorly equivalent of wearing sunglasses indoors; it doesn’t look cool, it just keeps us from seeing your eyes. And his “I meant to do that” defenses in his interviews don’t help matters. Why is he doing this? Search me, but maybe the answer is in the credits: Maybe he feels that there is an “Abel Tesfaye” side to his talent that “the Weeknd” persona does not sufficiently express. But if he’s willing to stretch in a new direction, he’s not yet Abel.In general, to bring up another bad HBO memory, “The Idol” has what I think of as the “Entourage” problem. For most of that show’s run, I could never quite tell if I was meant to think Vinny Chase was talented or just a pretty face who believed his own P.R. That issue is everywhere here. Is Jocelyn’s single … good? Is the remix? Is Tedros smart? Musically savvy? Charismatic? Good at sex? I don’t know, and if “The Idol” does, it also seems willing to reverse things on a dime to make the story go where it needs to, as when Jocelyn swerves within the space of an episode from being totally in Tedros’s thrall to calling him out and calling the shots. I would love to know what either of you think we’re supposed to think about Jocelyn.MORRIS Let’s talk about it! First of all, that song … It’s what plays while you make returns at Uniqlo. There’s not much that Mike Dean, the producer who makes an embarrassingly gonzo appearance in Episode 4, could do to make it more interesting. It’s a banger that doesn’t bang.My favorite farcical detail in this show is that a major pop star exists whose stage name is Jocelyn. “Jocelyn” is how you can tell nobody knew how to stop this thing before it was too late. This isn’t something I’d be thinking much about with a show that worked (I love all the Jocelyns in my life!), if that show’s lead actor could do more than leak a river from one eye at a time. But Lily-Rose Depp is a single-tear sort of performer. And yet! She does appear to be acting something like pain and insecurity. Somehow, she’s convincing me that Jocelyn is more than Sam Levinson’s idea of pop star. Depp is better at line readings than the Weeknd. She knows how to hold a closeup.The producer Mike Dean, right, who has worked with the Weeknd in the past, appeared as himself in the penultimate episode.Eddy Chen/HBOBut the part itself is madness: a clash of motivations, lusts, self-doubt and ambitions. It’s cri-de-coeur Britney mixed with Elvis under Col. Tom Parker’s thumb. But the prevailing influence, to my eye anyway, is Depp’s own mother, the singer, actor and Frenchwoman Vanessa Paradis. Jocelyn’s skinny, mile-long cigarettes seem more like a tribute to that kind of European insouciance than to anything conventionally American.Anyway, Jocelyn has been written as a mess, this victim (her abusers include her recently deceased mom and the maw of showbiz) whose post-traumatic stress has led her, we’re asked to believe, to a Svengali’s cult whose M.O. is basically “let Tedros Tedros make you suffer for your art.” But is she any kind of artist? The most irritating part of the show is maybe its point: Much stronger, more original talent surrounds Jocelyn, but her white blondness overtakes any determination to coax it.The show is chronically offering much better stuff than Jocelyn’s potential hit “World Class Sinner.” In the first episode it is prolonged exposure to Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”; in Episode 4 it’s the singing and songwriting of another of Tedros’s captives, a strawberry shortcake named Chloe (Suzanna Son) — in the show’s only feat of poignant emotional connection, she learns from Destiny how to use her tongue to produce stronger (perhaps Blacker) singing. But Destiny is supposed to be Jocelyn’s manager! Has she ever advised her client to do that?Lindsay, I like Destiny, too. Sometimes. But she spends a week watching an adult man do terrible stuff to all kinds of people, including her client, and says nothing of consequence. This isn’t management. It’s babysitting.ZOLADZ Jim, I am constantly coming back to the questions you asked: Are we supposed to think Jocelyn’s music is any good? And, more vexingly, are we supposed to think the music she’s making with Tedros is better than the music the label wants her to record? (Remember a few years ago when we were all arguing over whether or not the pop songs in “A Star Is Born” were supposed to be bad? “The Idol” has me desperately missing Ally and her alternate-universe banger “Hair Body Face.” Jocelyn could never.)I do think we’re supposed to find “World Class Sinner” to be cloying and superficial, but the music she’s making with Tedros is bad, too. Some of this is Depp’s performance: She’s a watchable screen presence, but she’s a weak vocalist, and it’s often hard to tell if the vacancy she projects when she’s singing these songs is written into the character or merely a limitation of her performance. Whether intentional or not, she’s certainly playing Jocelyn like a cipher, which can make for confusing and frustrating viewing.Is Jocelyn supposed to be good? Depp in “The Idol.”Eddy Chen/HBOWhat most gets on my nerves about the show’s philosophy about pop music, though, is that on some level it does feel like a self-aggrandizing commercial for the Weeknd. When Tedros wants to impress Jocelyn with his industry connections, he books a session with — cue the impressed gasps from basically everyone in Joc’s entourage — Mike Dean, a producer with whom the Weeknd often works.I mean, the show takes place in Tesfaye’s own Beverly Hills mansion and features innumerable characters telling Joc how dope her house is. Tesfaye has taken great pains to point out that Tedros is not a self-portrait, and of course it’s not: For one thing, Tedros isn’t a musician. But no amount of gauche rattail wigs and zipped-up wind-breakers can make this show the artistic risk or the expression of vulnerability that Tesfaye seems to think it is. The Weeknd’s songs tint the show’s atmosphere — Episode 4 centered, right on the nose, on his too-languid cover of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” — ultimately perfuming the show with an ever-present whiff of self-satisfaction.PONIEWOZIK So what is this show trying to say, from behind its red-fabric gag? It seems to buy big into the idea that authenticity in art comes from suffering. And it’s full of provocations about how carnality is the soul of music. These two concepts come together in the show’s S&M fixation: Rough sex, in its vision (or at least Tedros’s), is the hairbrush for the frozen sea within us. On top of that, there’s a lot of something-something about how the corporate music money machine wants to repress the artist’s wildest urges.It’s hard to see these themes play out in “The Idol” without thinking of the criticisms of how Levinson sexualizes his young female characters in “Euphoria.” Most of the first episode is about Jocelyn’s handlers trying to rein in her sexuality and using the language of “wellness” and “slut-shaming” and “revenge porn” as P.R. tools. It all feels like a straw-diva rebuttal: “You call it exploitation, but look, this fictional woman I created wants to show her nipples on camera! Woke capitalism won’t let her express herself!”Suffering for their art: clockwise, from top left, Mitch Modes, Tesfaye, Suzanna Son, Rachel Sennott, Moses Sumney and Troye Sivan.Eddy Chen/HBOThe stressed-out suits, however, are easily the best part of the show. Half of it is a caustic, “Veep”-style industry satire about the star-maker machinery, with strong work from Randolph, Hank Azaria and Jane Adams (the best part of “Hung,” that raunchy HBO train wreck of yesteryear). Say you gave the show a Jocelyn-ectomy; say she and Tedros and the entire Spahn Mansion high jinks were this offscreen problem that they had to talk about and manage (but also try to profit from). That could be brutally effective. But then what would the Weeknd do?MORRIS I love the idea of a starless “Idol.” It’s funny: There is no shortage of recent television about either famous artists or our obsession with them — “Dave,” Paper Boi in “Atlanta,” “Daisy Jones & the Six,” “The Swarm” — and not many of them are terribly enlightening about how fame feels. Mass culture enhanced and exacerbated its modern incarnation yet continues to be lousy at illuminating critiques of it.Not even the Weeknd really seems to have an answer for what celebrity is, what makes someone a star. (So many times in this show we hear someone say that so-and-so is a star, but it’s definitely not Jocelyn.) The one character who approximates the requirements is Tedros — in the world of the show, the outsize magnetism belongs to him. Of course, that fame is artificial; his worshipers are more afraid than admiring. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover his heroes are Ike Turner and Ron O’Neal’s Youngblood Priest in “Super Fly.” At some point, Tedros looks at up, searchingly, at an almost life-size photo of Prince, a star who is known to have had his own moments of Tedrosity.The show is strange about Black men and sex. And no one in the show talks about it. A funny intergenerational fender-bender happens when Azaria’s Chaim implores Leia to describe Tedros and she keeps identifying him as a person of color, and Chaim keeps asking whether she’s trying to say he’s Black. The whole show is like that about Tedros and Moses Sumney’s Izaak, its two Black male characters: tentative. It doesn’t know what more to do with a scenario that’s freighted with this country’s long history of racialized sex than to be a troll about it.I’m with you two: For all the sex and vulgarity we see and hear about, the show has no idea how to convey what’s pleasurable about it, about what we come to certain pop music to experience.I know we don’t know where this going, how it’s going to end. I don’t know whether anyone should care, or even what would be a satisfying outcome for Tedros in Sunday’s finale. All I know is that when Destiny proposed murder, I clapped. More

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      ‘The Idol’ Season Finale Recap: What Was the Point?

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      The season finale, like the rest of the series, had little of substance to say about either pop music or power dynamics.“The Idol” has concluded its five-episode run, and there’s one question I can’t help but ask: What was the point of all of that?The season finale of the series from Sam Levinson, Reza Fahim and the star Abel Tesfaye (the Weeknd) had shockingly little to say about either pop music or power dynamics. Well, maybe not shockingly. Nothing in the first four episodes suggested that there was going to be some brilliant revelation in the eleventh hour, but a girl could hope that we might get a bit more than an underwhelming ending in which the baffling character known as Tedros Tedros is both exposed for the creep that he is and ultimately forgiven by Lily-Rose Depp’s heroine, Jocelyn.Sure, if you want to, you can argue that there is a transference of who has the upper hand in their relationship. In the finale, Tedros’s back story as a pimp has been publicly revealed in a Vanity Fair article planted by Jocelyn’s manager Chaim. Tedros loses his club and is apparently being investigated by the I.R.S. And yet Jocelyn gives him a pass to her tour date at SoFi Stadium. Backstage he receives a strongly worded warning from her other manager, Destiny, before being embraced by Jocelyn.“None of this means as much without you,” she says. And then she introduces him onstage to about 70,000 screaming fans as “the love of my life.”We are ostensibly supposed to read this as Jocelyn now being in control. In her dressing room he looks at the wooden hairbrush she claimed her mother used to beat her. “It’s brand-new,” he says, realizing that she had deceived him. She addresses her fans as “angels,” the very thing he called her. And, after they make out in front of that audience, she tells him, “You’re mine forever. Now go stand over there.”Are we supposed to believe it was all a ruse on Jocelyn’s part? That she used her own story of abuse to manipulate him? That’s what I think Levinson and Tesfaye are getting at, but it’s more confusing than anything. If Jocelyn were a real pop star, aligning herself with a man who went to prison for holding a woman hostage would tank her career. That’s not power — that’s a man’s idea of what power looks like for a woman.But let’s back up for a second. For most of this episode it looks like Jocelyn is going to fully kick Tedros to the curb, a conclusion which would have been predictable but at least more satisfying than this one.Angry that their meeting was not organic but instead a product of his scheming, she calls him a “con man and a fraud.” She has a plan to take over his empire of young talent by making them all her tour openers. When her team arrives for a meeting about whether this endeavor is going to happen, Jocelyn has all the scantily clad singers put on a performance for the label. Despite initial skepticism, everyone is impressed by the vocals and the grinding. They are less so by Tedros, who is wasted and belligerent.At this point, it is unclear what it would take for Jocelyn to kick the patently useless Tedros out of her house. But we get the answer when it comes out that her ex-boyfriend Rob has been accused of sexual assault. The charge comes thanks to the photo that Xander orchestrated in the previous episode, which placed Rob in a compromising position with one of Tedros’s followers.Upon hearing the news, Jocelyn immediately recognizes it as Tedros’s doing and finally orders Chaim to take care of him. Chaim obliges, with Hank Azaria chewing his way through a monologue about Little Red Riding Hood. Meanwhile, Jocelyn performs a sexualized interpretive dance to one of her new songs as proof of concept for the tour.But once Tedros is gone, Jocelyn is back to being bored. She swims. She trains. She smokes, morosely. Fast forward to six weeks later: The tour is already underway, and the disgraced Tedros is invited back into the fold, much to the dismay of the suits who thought they had rid themselves of him for good.And that brings me back to the question of what “The Idol” wanted to accomplish. Speaking with The New York Times before the series debuted on HBO, Tesfaye said his pitch was “about celebrity culture and how much power they have.” But we never really see Jocelyn wield her celebrity power. Tedros may be hers “forever,” but she is still clearly beholden to him as evidenced by the fact that she welcomes him back.So I’m left believing that what Levinson and Tesfaye thought they were creating was a messed up love story, in the style of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread.” In that 2017 film, Anderson pulls off a switcheroo in which a demanding mentor is dominated by his adoring pupil. But over the course of that 130-minute movie we come to understand much more about the central couple than we do over five hours of “The Idol.”That is the greatest failing of “The Idol”: After all of this, I still don’t know what drives Jocelyn and Tedros. Music, I guess? But I have trouble believing even they care all that much.Liner notesHow does an entire tour get put together in six weeks on the basis of three singles? Yes, presumably some of it was in the works before Tedros came along, but these things are monstrous undertakings and Jocelyn has been a little preoccupied.What other songs is she going to sing during her set? One of the show’s biggest oversights is that we have no sense of who Jocelyn was as an artist before her crisis.One moment Nikki is trying to recruit Tedros and then the next she’s laughing about his demise. It is totally baffling character behavior. (Similarly, I still don’t understand why Xander has any allegiance to Tedros, unless he is supposed to be literally brainwashed.)Justice for Leia, the one character with any sense. I wonder what was in her note to Jocelyn.Nikki briefly mentions that Andrew Finkelstein’s employees walked out to protest Jocelyn’s misogynistic music. That seems like a bit of an attempt to acknowledge the potential backlash to the series, which has already come and gone.Will there be a Season 2? I have a hard time imagining what that would even look like unless Jocelyn and Tedros turn into Bonnie and Clyde. But don’t get any ideas, please, HBO. More

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      Prue Leith’s 2,200-Mile Road Trip From California to Florida

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      The “Great British Baking Show” judge steps out of the tent to sample the flavors of America. Is her 2,200-mile drive a showstopper or a technical challenge?​​Last fall, my husband and I set our hearts on renting an R.V. for a road trip from Los Angeles to Florida. We imagined picnicking on mountaintops in New Mexico, sleeping under the stars in Texas and barbecuing prawns (the R.V. would come with a grill, of course) on a Mississippi levee. In the end, our 2,200-mile American journey ended up being memorable, but for none of those reasons.“We can’t accept anyone over 70 with a British driver’s license,” insisted the woman on the phone. I’m 83, but in my head I’m a sprightly 60, and my husband, John, is 76. Nobody had warned us about this potential obstacle. If they had the same age cutoff for Americans, I thought, the R.V. business would collapse.We called another company. Their rep said he’d never heard of any age restriction. “No problem,” he said. “We’ve got the perfect R.V. for you.” Except it was 45 feet long. The thought of parking something the size of a London bus was too much, even for my gung-ho husband.Common sense prevailed, and we rented a Ford Explorer.New MexicoSalsa and sticker shockWe were overdue for a break. Aside from my usual job eating cake as a judge on “The Great British Baking Show,” I’d been doing trial runs of my one-woman stage show in Britain and the United States, and it had been exhausting.So, before we set off on our great adventure, we rented a mobility scooter for two and hit the boardwalk at Venice Beach, in Los Angeles. But our crawl through the deafeningly loud music, junk food and stands selling shorts emblazoned with vulgar words and messages like “Beat Me” did little to re-energize our spirits.On the day we left California, torrents of rain were falling. By the time we crossed into Arizona, the sun had exploded over the hills in a glorious display of opera lighting.We made it as far as Sante Fe, N.M., where our hotel, the Vanessie, a charming collection of wooden buildings around a courtyard was, like everywhere, suffering from a lack of staff. The single employee handed us a laminated notice: “Our restaurant, room service and bar are currently closed. A $30 service charge will be added to your bill.”Happily, Vara Vinoteca, across the street, was open. We ate tiny padrón peppers stuffed with cream cheese and cumin, tuna ceviche and pineapple salsa, and a small bowl of warm, slightly curried mussels in the shell, all served with a flight of four glasses of different California cabernet sauvignons.I’d have been happy to have all our meals in that simple little room. But Santa Fe brims with good restaurants, quirky architecture, art museums and shops stuffed with desirable things, so we set off to explore. John fell in love with a hatter’s shop, where he bought two authentic Stetsons. He also spent eye-watering amounts of money on two baseball caps for his grandsons. Is there a difference between a $41 and a $5 baseball cap? Apparently.John was equally dumbfounded at my lusting after an irresistible $150 necklace made from cut-up plastic water bottles and sprayed with red, black and gold paint. Vibrant, bouncy, light as a feather — it was a work of art. But apparently it was a piece that, at least for us, money couldn’t buy: The shop’s credit card system required a U.S. ZIP code, and cash was not accepted. We gave up.Prices constantly amazed us. The exchange rate has made the U.S. shockingly expensive for Brits, and taxes and tip on top of that? I’m already vaguely offended to be expected to tip when buying a coffee at a counter. And now with the touch screens suggesting tips of 15 percent and up, a latte feels like a major purchase. Only petrol seemed cheap, at half the U.K. price.Luis MazónTexasWhere astronauts dare to dine“Boring, flat, brown, goes on forever”: Everyone said we’d hate Texas. But we loved it. Maybe because I grew up in the wide-open spaces of South Africa, the little towns with not much more than a windmill and a church touched my heart.We stopped for lunch at Dirk’s, a Lubbock diner packed with locals eating chicken tenders, sticky ribs and burgers, all flooded with gloopy barbecue sauce and followed by doughnuts or pancakes in a lake of syrup.The waiter seemed puzzled when I asked, “Do you have any green vegetables?” Then he smiled and said, “Oh, yes, we have green beans.” They turned out to be canned beans in a cloying juice.We were also puzzled by the way American waiters routinely congratulate you on your menu choice, rewarding you with “Good choice,” “Excellent” or even “Awesome.” You want fries with that? “Awesome!”By the time we got to San Antonio, we were ready for a drink. A waterside cafe among the raised flower beds, paved walks and roving mariachi bands of the River Walk delivered first-class margaritas (freezing, salt on only one edge of the glass, not too sweet) and still-warm tortilla chips. Watching the young waiter make guacamole at a riverside table was a joy: knife razor-sharp, chile fresh, avocado and tomato perfectly ripe. And his judgment was fine — a smidge of chopped raw red onion, a decent squeeze of lime, and a generous grind of pepper and salt, all turned together gently rather than crudely mashed. I found myself eating very slowly, just to hold on to that flavor as long as possible.We had the worst meal of our whole trip not far away in the Texas Hill Country tourist town of Fredericksburg, which prides itself on its German heritage. We’d spent a happy morning touring the shops, museums and galleries of the town’s north end, and enjoyed a lunch of fried chicken sandwiches and banana walnut pancakes.So we had high hopes for the south side. But sadly its historic houses were full of tourist junk like plastic stein mugs and Barbie dolls squeezed into lederhosen. We retreated to a restaurant whose menu boasted of authentic German dishes. We were served pork chops ruined by oversweet gravy, tasteless sauerkraut, sweet and vinegary red cabbage, and potato mash obviously made with powdered mix that had not been brought to a boil. We abandoned our plates and went back to our motel to microwave emergency rations of Campbell’s tomato soup.The next day, on our way to Houston, we passed a roadside church whose huge hoarding exhorted us to “Give Up Lust — Take Up Jesus.” I thought that sign might be my most abiding memory, until I’d spent a few hours at the Space Center Houston. I never guessed I’d be so riveted by topics like the geology of the moon and how NASA astronauts train underwater.But the cafeteria! It is astonishing, the best I’ve ever seen anywhere in a public building: brioche or sourdough sandwiches, homemade soups, hot roasts and grills, fresh tortillas, a salad bar to tempt the most die-hard carnivore, and no junk food in sight. It was a long way from the usual NASA fare of freeze-dried food in pouches and tubes.Luis MazónLouisianaHow to nurse a hangoverLouisiana is famous for gumbos and étouffées, so I was expecting gastronomy as we crossed the state line and drove toward Louisiana State University’s Rural Life Museum, a Cajun heritage village in Baton Rouge. I guess I was overly optimistic. The jambalaya and blackened fish in the cafe were tasteless and dried out. I’ve had better Cajun food in London.Plantation Alley, along the Great Mississippi Road, with its half a dozen “Gone With the Wind”-style estates, now open to the public, swept me away. The most beautiful of them was Oak Alley, with its avenue of 250-year-old Southern live oaks, their branches creating a vast green tunnel. But I couldn’t understand how the magnificent trees were obviously much older than the house. It turns out that these oaks are native to the area, and had once grown all over the estate. When the house was built in 1836, enslaved workers were made to dig up 28 of the huge 60- to 70-year-old trees, with root systems equal to the size of their canopies, and replant them in an avenue down to the Mississippi levee.The Great Mississippi Road eventually leads to New Orleans and the famous French Quarter, with its balconies of elaborate wrought iron — a daytime picture of Victorian good taste. We, ignorant Brits, had no idea that at night on Bourbon Street, that “good taste” became the flavor of daiquiris, pizza and hot dogs against a backdrop of bands belting out rock ’n’ roll, small children beating dustbins, grown-ups playing jazz, and the raucous din of drunken tourists until 3 a.m.But I liked the party atmosphere, and I’m mighty partial to a daiquiri, so we set off on a pub crawl. I now know that the secret to a good mango daiquiri is fresh mango, and not bottled mango syrup. And the next morning, after one too many mango delights and little sleep, I learned that shrimp and grits, with a good grating of cheese, is the perfect hangover cure.FloridaTurkey, sweet potatoes and slice of modern EdenOur road trip ended, as it had started, at a beach. Only this one was a mercifully far cry from the Venice boardwalk.We had rented a house for the week in the small Florida Panhandle community of Seacrest Beach, on the Emerald Coast along Highway 30A. This eight-mile strip — a kind of manufactured, perfectly designed modern Eden — consists of 16 neighborhoods on white-sand beaches between Pensacola and Panama City. Developments with names like Rosemary Beach, Seagrove Beach, Alys Beach, Grayton Beach and WaterColor share the perfect sands and the desired 30A address.Everyone rides around on bikes, and perfectly tanned mothers gossip over kombucha and wheatgrass at sidewalk cafes. Even the children look straight out of an upmarket catalog.Friends of friends, on holiday, invited us to their Thanksgiving dinner — turkey with all the trimmings, sweet potatoes, pecan pie and ice cream. In thanking them, I said something about the pleasure of such generosity, family closeness and their children’s politeness. Our host laughed. It’s because we’re from the South, she said.I’m glad we failed to rent my dream Winnebago back in Los Angeles. If we’d succeeded, we’d never have experienced a traditional American family Thanksgiving. We’d have been in a trailer park, eating takeout. Thank you, Lady Luck.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2023. More