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      ‘Succession’ Season 4, Episode 9 Recap: Dearly Departed

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      This week, Logan Roy’s family and associates gather for his funeral, pausing all grudges so they can pay conflicted respects to the man.‘Succession’ Season 4, Episode 9: ‘Church and State’When people talk about TV or movies as visual medium, they’re usually referring to pretty pictures or striking compositions. But you know what’s also an important part of visual storytelling? The simple reaction shot.It wouldn’t take much retooling to turn any given “Succession” episode into a radio play, since most of the show’s “action,” so to speak, is in the dialogue. But boy would we ever miss those reaction shots. What these actors can do just with their faces — and what the directors and the editors can do with how and where they use them — is sublime.This week, Logan Roy’s family and associates gather for his funeral, temporarily putting aside all grudges so they can pay their respects to a giant of a man. Kendall insists, “Today is just about today” (a phrase that should be etched into the family crest for the eternally capricious and opportunistic Roys). Throughout the day, these folks talk a lot — especially during the service, as one Roy after another rises to say a few words. And again, a lot of what’s really happening in the story is in the reactions.Before the funeral even begins, the whole vibe surrounding the event is unsettled because of the postelection unrest in the New York streets (described by Tom as “a bit Tiananmen-y”). Kendall is furious when his ex-wife Rava (Natalie Gold) takes their kids out of the city for their safety. He is nearly as irritated when he learns his assistant Jess (Juliana Canfield) intends to resign, because of the potential violence that Jeryd Mencken and ATN have unleashed. “You have no idea how things will turn out and it’s very juvenile,” Kendall grumbles.But once everyone’s inside the church, the mood softens. The tone is set by the Roy siblings’ mother, Lady Caroline Collingwood (Harriet Walter), who takes it upon herself to ask Kerry — who brought an attorney, just in case anyone tried to bar her from the funeral — to sit with her, Marcia, and the fabled Sally Ann. (Caroline introduces Sally Ann as “my Kerry.”) These ladies share the bond of having loved a very difficult man; and when Marcia reaches out for Kerry’s hand, Kerry sobs.Then the service begins, with a surprise. Logan’s fiery liberal brother, Ewan (James Cromwell), ignores his grandson Greg’s attempt to stop him from taking the pulpit. Ewan first shares some touching stories about Logan: about how they comforted each other as boys when they crossed the Atlantic during World War II; and about how Logan blamed himself for their sister dying of polio, which he was convinced he brought home from the boarding school he hated. With that out of the way, Ewan finishes by torching Logan’s legacy, saying his brother fed “a certain kind of meagerness in men.” (The ever-sycophantic Greg, after his grandfather sits back down: “That was a good hard take that you gave.”)Here is where the reaction shots really start to become a factor. During Ewan’s takedown, we see Roman looking stricken. He came into this day feeling creepily upbeat, planning to follow his election night coup with a real grown-up eulogy for his father, in front of some of America’s most important people. But Ewan’s commanding, authoritative words shake him. Roman has never had this kind of spotlight; and now his siblings expect him to “say the other side” of the Logan Roy story.He can’t. Roman starts to give his generic “great, great man” speech, but then freezes and asks his family to bail him out. He breaks down in front of everyone, gesturing at the coffin containing his father and whimpering, “Get him out.” It’s another shattering performance from Kieran Culkin. (The face to watch during Roman’s meltdown is Gerri’s. She looks genuinely pained for her former protégé.)So Kendall fills in; and because he has lots of experience with throwing together sentences that his social peers can understand, he does a fine job. He acknowledges the pain his father could cause but he also celebrates how Logan made “bloody, complicated life” happen. “If we can’t match his vim, then God knows the future will be sluggish and gray,” he says, as both Mencken and Lukas Matsson look on with what appears to be grudging admiration. For all the gossip about how Jeremy Strong’s intensity on-set can frustrate his castmates, the results are on the screen in scenes like this one, so riveting and real.Shiv follows with her own impromptu eulogy, mostly focused on how terrifying Logan could be when she and her siblings were little kids. Like Culkin and Armstrong, Sarah Snook nails her big moment, playing this speech so that it sits right between “here’s a funny story about a grumpy old man” and an accusation of abuse. Shiv calls her father “hard on women” — and the shot of Kendall that follows is a reminder of his own issues with Rava and Jess.It is interesting to hear Shiv give such a harsh assessment of Logan’s parenting after what she had said to Matsson before the funeral. Readjusting their strategy for a looming Mencken presidency, they have decided to show they can play ball with a neo-fascist. Step 1: Promise that GoJo-Waystar will have an American CEO … like maybe Shiv. But when Matsson mentions that he heard a rumor about her being pregnant, she concocts a version of motherhood where she is “emailing through her vanity cesarean” and her kid “will never see her.” It’s positively Logan-esque.Post-funeral negotiations: Strong and Justin Kirk in “Succession.”Macall Polay/HBOAfter the funeral, the scramble for Waystar begins. Kendall capitalizes on his eulogy momentum by authorizing Hugo to start leaking to the media about Matsson’s shaky standing with the Waystar board. (“You’ll be my dog, but the scraps from the table will be millions,” he tells Hugo about the state of their business relationship. “Woof woof,” Hugo replies.) He also coaxes his father’s former bodyguard/confessor Colin to come work for him. He too is becoming more Logan-y by the minute.But as it turns out, Shiv’s play has juice. Kendall realizes he may have miscalculated when he corners Mencken at the post-funeral reception and the presumptive President-elect intimates that ATN may need him more than vice versa. “I thought you were the sound system,” Mencken says to Kendall. “Now you want to choose the track?” It doesn’t help that Kendall is interrupted by a succession of embarrassing family members: first Greg, then Roman (Mencken: “It’s the Grim Weeper!”), then Connor.It’s no wonder that Mencken seems relieved to talk with Shiv and Matsson, who seem … well, cooler. They both encourage him to broaden his thinking, with Shiv reminding him that Logan was more about “money, winning and gossip” than ideological purity and Matsson talking up the potential advantages (including “fun”) of allying with a “thought leader” tech bro. So as we head into the “Succession” finale next week, Kendall and Shiv both, seen in the right light, seem to have an edge in the fight to become the new Waystar CEO.So where does that leave Roman? Still reeling from his funeral disaster. As Kendall asks for his brother’s help in the coming board battle against Shiv, he chastises Roman bluntly for screwing everything up. Roman then leaves the reception to crash one of the protest marches happening outside, where he yells at and gets smacked around by the angry leftists.This suits him just fine. When it comes to reactions, Roman would always rather people look at him with anger than with pity — or, worse, with indifference.Due diligenceHere’s another one for the “Kendall can’t stand to see his family get bullied” file: When Mencken makes fun of Roman’s crying jag, Kendall immediately shuts that joke down.And here’s another brilliant reaction shot: When Kendall speaks at the funeral about how Logan “made” him and his siblings, the editors cut to Lady Caroline, looking a bit peeved.There is not a lot of gut-busting comedy this week, though the Roy kids do get in some good riffs while gawking at Logan’s tomb, an ornate shrine he bought from a dot-com pet supply guy. Shiv calls the seller “cat food Ozymandias,” asks whether her dad was “in a bidding war with Stalin and Liberace,” then suggests the grave could be a tax write-off because, “It’s technically a residence.”The tomb has plenty of room for more family members, should any of Logan’s children want to spend eternity with their problematic patriarch. Connor pipes up and says he wouldn’t mind a top bunk. Kendall hesitates, saying, “I had trouble finishing a scotch with him.” And Roman? “He made me breathe funny,” he says.Shiv, bothered by how little she really knew — or perhaps wanted to know — about her father’s character, asks Frank and Karl, “How bad was Dad?” They reassure her that he was “a salty dog but a good egg,” adding, “What you saw was what you got.” Then after she leaves, Karl half-shrugs, looks at Frank and asks, “Right?” Frank, halfheartedly: “Right.”Shiv, as the funeral ends and the cemetery prepares to inter her father: “I’m intrigued to see how he gets out of this one.” More

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      In ‘Platonic,’ the Sex Part Doesn’t Get in the Way. No, Really.

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      About 20 years ago, the husband-and-wife writing and directing team of Nicholas Stoller and Francesca Delbanco went to a joint bachelor-bachelorette party in Las Vegas. Delbanco knew the bride-to-be a little, but the bachelor had been a close friend since college.The parties peeled off — the men to a steakhouse, the women to get sushi. Delbanco found herself rolling almost involuntarily with the bachelorette group.“I went with her, but I was there not because I had known her — I was there because I was a friend of his,” Delbanco recalled in a recent video interview. “I remember thinking, ‘Why does it have to be that way?’”The incident gnawed at her over the years, until she finally decided to address it in her work. “Platonic,” the new Apple TV+ limited series created by Delbanco and Stoller and starring Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen (who are also executive producers), playfully asks a timeless question: Why is it so difficult for people — especially married people — to maintain friendships with members of the opposite sex?“Platonic,” which premieres on May 24, isn’t a “will they or won’t they” romantic comedy like “When Harry Met Sally,” which is less about staying friends than about falling in love. It’s the story of Sylvia (Byrne), a happily married but slightly bored woman, who tries to rekindle a friendship with Will (Rogen), a middle-aged man-child going through a painful divorce. Sylvia and Will used to hang out, partying and laughing but never sleeping together. They eventually went their separate ways, largely because Sylvia didn’t care for Will’s wife. Now Will is back, lonely and a bit needy.He is ready to resume the party. He is also passively dismissive of Sylvia’s family life, with her extremely nice, extremely handsome husband (Luke Macfarlane) and their three kids.Sylvia, meanwhile, has a hard time taking Will seriously. He is a hipster brewery owner with a young girlfriend and an aversion to selling out and settling down. But Will’s footloose ways also make Sylvia look back and wonder where the years have gone. “Platonic” isn’t just a tale of friendship; it’s also a front-row seat to dueling, colliding midlife crises.The series reunites Byrne and Rogen, stars of the 2014 comedy “Neighbors,” directed by Stoller, about a young married couple living next door to a bunch of raucous frat boys. This time, however, their characters are in conflicting places in their lives.“I think my character is self-destructive in a lot of ways and immature in a lot of ways, and really trying to live a life that is just not the life someone his age should be living anymore,” Rogen said in a joint video interview with Byrne. “In his perspective, he’s just not shackled by this thing that she’s shackled by. So her judgment of him is confusing because he’s like: ‘Well, who cares? I don’t have a kid and a spouse.’”The series follows Sylvia (Byrne), a happily married but slightly bored woman, who tries to rekindle a friendship with Will (Rogen), a man-child going through a painful divorce.Apple TV+For her part, Sylvia is “a responsible and extremely high-functioning achiever,” as Byrne described it, “one of those sorts of characters who can do it all.”“Those people are intimidating,” she continued. “And then on the flip side of it, she can really party.”In one episode, Sylvia throws Will a divorce party, inviting all of his friends to a swanky dinner at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. The guys want to go to a strip club after dinner; Sylvia is resistant, which annoys Will.“Fun has changed for me,” she tells Will. “It has evolved into something else.” Will’s rebuttal: “Your fun has evolved into something called ‘not fun.’” Then they end up doing CK, a mix of cocaine and ketamine, giving Byrne a chance to show off her physical comedy chops as she stumbles through the rest of the evening.The episode illustrates a big part of Sylvia’s dilemma. Part of her wants to be irresponsible, to shuck off her outwardly ideal life, her mom and wife duties, if only for a moment.“It’s a constant push and pull,” said Byrne, who has two children with the actor Bobby Cannavale. Sylvia was once a promising lawyer, but she gave up her career to have a family. “You do feel a sense of loss and grief and weird disorientation if you have been the primary caregiver for so long, and that is where she’s at,” Byrne added. “Then she’s at this crossroad when she reunites with Will, and it sends her off on a little spiral.”Both parties have confidants and protectors. Sylvia’s best friend is Katie (Carla Gallo, who also worked with Byrne in “Neighbors”). Katie is a bit more forgiving than Will’s younger friend and business partner, Andy (Tre Hale), who is both frustrated with Will’s pious attitude and suspicious of Sylvia’s sudden re-emergence in Will’s life.“There’s a beef there, with Andy wanting to make sure Sylvia is not coming in and messing with my dude’s head because he already has a bunch of stuff on his plate,” said Hale, a formidable former U.C.L.A. football player. “He is annoyed that he has to be the big brother in the situation, especially as it pertains to the bar and the business.”The first time audiences saw Rogen and Byrne together onscreen, in “Neighbors,” their characters were having furious, comical sex as their infant child sneaked a peek. In “Platonic,” however, the sexual chemistry is nil by design; you never really ask yourself if Will and Sylvia will fall into bed together. She has issues with Charlie, her lawyer husband, who is the opposite of a wild and crazy guy, but she isn’t about to cheat on him.Byrne and Rogen played a married couple in the 2014 big-screen comedy “Neighbors.”Glen Wilson/Universal PicturesAs Stoller put it, “Everything’s either sex or murder in TV and movies, and we don’t have either.”There is, however, jealousy. Sylvia is a little jealous of Will’s freedom. Will is a little jealous of Sylvia’s loving, supportive home life. And Charlie is a little jealous of this wisecracking arrested-development case partying with his wife — Charlie’s work friends start referring to Will as “your wife’s boyfriend” — which sets up some rich comic possibilities.“The central joke there is that Luke is so good-looking,” Stoller said of Macfarlane. “He looks like a god, you know?”Delbanco added: “And Will is a wreck. His life is in shambles, and he’s got this crazy midlife crisis, and he’s bleaching his hair. There’s something so great about the most solid, handsome, upstanding man in the world being somehow undone by what he perceives as this threat to his marriage.”It all circles back to the main question: Can a woman and a man — a straight woman and man, anyway — maintain a close friendship?Delbanco recalled another Las Vegas story, this one more recent. Shortly before the pandemic, she spent a weekend there with two straight, married guy friends. “It was really fun, and I don’t think Nick was thinking, ‘Why are you in Las Vegas with those friends?’” she said. “We just had a great time, but a lot of people were like, ‘Wait, where is your husband?’”Stoller recalled the weekend from his end. “My friends kept asking, ‘Where’s your wife?’” he said. “And I was like, ‘Oh, she’s in Vegas with two of her guy friends.’” The near-universal response: “‘What? Really?’”“It is a constant source of amusement and fascination for me,” Byrne said of her friends’ incredulity at her ability to have friendships (that don’t involve sex) with straight men.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesThe common expectation for such friendships is that the parties have either had sex or will have sex (or that one of them was relegated to the Friend Zone). Byrne has a close male friend, an old roommate with whom she still likes to socialize, and many of her friends can’t believe they never slept together. “It is a constant source of amusement and fascination for me,” Byrne said of her friends’ incredulity. “That was one of the reasons I was drawn to the series.”In the end, perhaps the friendship issue boils down to the question of what it means to be a grown-up. The roads can narrow when you start a family, or immerse yourself in a career, or both. What once seemed like a routine social relationship starts to draw raised eyebrows. There were fewer rules when Will and Sylvia were tearing it up as 20-somethings.Years later, they have embraced different versions of adulthood. There’s a wistful quality to their rekindled friendship, something that represents times both wilder and more innocent.“They used to go out really late and get into all kinds of adventures and crazy shenanigans that are less and less available to you when you’re in your 40s and parents and that kind of stuff,” Delbanco said. “That’s some of the pleasure that they take in each other.“The question becomes, is there a way to incorporate that into your adult life without messing up the rest of it?” More

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      ‘Happy Valley’ Review: The End of the Hero’s Journey

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      Sarah Lancashire returns in the long-delayed final season of one of the best, and most human, crime dramas on TV.Each season of the great British series “Happy Valley” begins the same way, with the rock-solid cop Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) facing the everyday bizarrerie of policing in a tired, depressed, grimly beautiful pocket of West Yorkshire: teenage sheep rustlers, a jilted boyfriend threatening to set himself on fire, unseen agitators heaving kitchen appliances out of upper-story windows onto patrol cars. Compassionate but impatient and prone to anger, smarter than the detectives who condescend to her, Cawood wears her black uniform and neon vest like a bulky suit of armor. She’s a contemporary knight errant, upholding a code of decency against the terrors of modern life.“Happy Valley,” whose final season premieres on Monday (streaming on Acorn TV and AMC+, broadcast on BBC America), is a pocket-size, prosaic saga — a hero’s tale contained in three six-episode seasons and embedded in a family drama. The emotions that buffet the characters are epic in scale, but the action, though it has occasional flashes of brutal violence, tends to be of the everyday, walking-and-talking variety. Like all mythical heroes, Cawood has an antagonist, the psychopathic rapist and killer Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton), who is the father of her grandson. But for long stretches of the show, he is in prison, and he and Cawood spend much more time stewing about each other than actually facing off.The second season was shown in 2016, and that seven-year gap is reflected onscreen. Season 3 begins with Cawood counting the days to her retirement and enjoying atypically peaceful relations with her sister, the recovering alcoholic Clare (Siobhan Finneran), and with her now teenage grandson, Ryan (Rhys Connah). The center quickly fails to hold, however, as both the emergence of a body in a drained reservoir and Cawood’s discovery of a profound betrayal by someone close to her raise the specter of Royce, even though he is in prison for life.In its structure, “Happy Valley” is very much a traditional British crime series, with seemingly unconnected plot strands and investigations that wind themselves together against a backdrop of cop-shop politics. But in the hands of the accomplished writer and producer Sally Wainwright (“Gentleman Jack,” “Scott & Bailey), who has written every episode, it is also a powerful social drama that focuses unflinchingly on male violence against women without sliding into speechmaking or heavy-handed symbolism. In the new season’s major subplot, a less-than-sympathetic female character is caught between two seemingly more capable men whose weaknesses run deeper than hers.Overall, the final season is, as any faithful viewer could guess, the culmination of Cawood’s extended battle to the (at least figurative) death with Royce. In order to set up a satisfyingly visceral conclusion, Wainwright forces the action and pushes at plausibility a little harder than those viewers will be used to. The story’s focus also is diluted by her indulgence of characters from the first two seasons who are brought back but not given much to do.Those offenses are minor, though. And the mechanics of the plot fade in the face of the prodigious performances by Lancashire and Norton, both of whom calmly straddle the allegorical and the mundane: the stoic warrior who is a grouchy grandmother, the indestructible horror-movie monster who is a sad victim of his own sociopathy. Also wonderful to watch are Finneran — the relationship between Cawood, for whom weakness is anathema, and the softhearted Clare has been the show’s backbone — and Connah; a child of 10 when the previous season was filmed, he is excellent as the now nearly adult Ryan.Cawood’s mission in the final season has a new, even more personal dimension: She must protect Ryan from his father while also, grudgingly and tardily, acknowledging Ryan’s right to learn about the man for himself. In a time when television and film are playing catch-up with female superheros and action figures, “Happy Valley” has quietly provided a paradigm of local, human heroism. More

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      How Hillsong, a Hip Megachurch, Became Entangled in Scandal

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      A new documentary series explores the history of Hillsong, known for its celebrity congregants and fashionable trappings before being struck by a series of scandals.The global megachurch Hillsong was known for its hipster trappings, celebrity congregants and wildly popular worship music in the 2010s, but in recent years it has been more closely tied to a series of scandals, including the firing of its charismatic celebrity pastor, Carl Lentz, for “moral failures.”A four-part documentary series, “The Secrets of Hillsong,” premieres on FX on Friday and delves into the turmoil. The series, which is based on a 2021 article in Vanity Fair magazine, features the first interview with Mr. Lentz since he was fired in 2020.Here’s how the trouble unfolded.Why was Hillsong so popular?Brian Houston and his wife, Bobbie, founded Hillsong in Australia in 1983 and opened its first United States branch in New York in 2010. The church was a member of the Australian branch of the Pentecostal denomination, the Assemblies of God, before it formed its own denomination in 2018.Hillsong’s expansion into the United States built on its enormous success in presenting worship music. Its services drew in young people in big cities, where services were held in concert venues, such as Irving Plaza and the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York. The congregants were fashionable and included celebrities such as Justin Bieber, Kevin Durant and Vanessa Hudgens.Mr. Lentz, the lead pastor of Hillsong’s New York branch, also became a celebrity.This hip veneer suggested that Hillsong supported a more progressive form of Evangelicalism, but the church was criticized for its position on L.G.B.T.Q. rights. In an August 2015 blog post, the church’s founder, Mr. Houston, said that gay people were welcome at Hillsong, but that it did “not affirm a gay lifestyle.”Carl Lentz: “hypepriest”Mr. Lentz mingled with celebrities including Mr. Bieber, whom he baptized in the bathtub of an N.B.A. player’s home. In 2017, GQ magazine called Mr. Lentz a “hypepriest” to reflect his trendy wardrobe, which included aviator glasses, skinny jeans and designer sneakers. He spoke frequently about racial inequality and in 2016 declared his support for the Black Lives Matter movement.It all came to a halt when he was fired from Hillsong in November 2020. The church said that his termination had followed discussions about “leadership issues and breaches of trust, plus a recent revelation of moral failures.” Mr. Lentz said on Instagram shortly afterward that he had been “unfaithful in my marriage, the most important relationship in my life.” His wife, Laura Lentz, was also a Hillsong pastor.Since then, he has stayed out of the spotlight. Last week, he said in an Instagram post that his wife and children had been his “only priority” for the past three years.“Part of the healing from that heartache led us to the decision to be a part of a documentary that we do not control, that we don’t have any say in and that we haven’t even seen yet,” he said.He now works at Transformation Church in Tulsa, Okla.Carl Lentz was once the lead pastor of the Hillsong branch in New York but was fired in 2020 after what the church called “moral failures.”Andrew White for The New York TimesWhat happened after Carl Lentz left?More turmoil. Hillsong’s founder, Mr. Houston, resigned in March 2022 after the church said that an internal investigation had found that he behaved inappropriately toward two women, breaching the church’s code of conduct.He had already stepped away from his ministry duties in January 2022 to fight a criminal charge accusing him of concealing child sexual abuse by his late father, Frank Houston. Brian Houston has denied the allegations. The case is still in the courts, The Australian Associated Press reported.In March, Mr. Houston said he had been charged with drunken driving in the United States in February 2022. Mr. Houston said that at the time “it seemed like all hell had broken loose within Hillsong church.”Mr. Houston did not respond to a request for comment. In a video posted on his social media accounts in November, he criticized Hillsong’s leadership for how it had handled the allegations of misconduct made against him.“I didn’t resign because of my mistakes,” he said. “I resigned because of the announcements and statements that had been made.”What is Hillsong like today?In March 2022, nine of the 16 Hillsong churches in the United States cut ties with the organization, abruptly shrinking the church’s American presence. Hillsong’s website says it has seven churches in the United States, as well as locations in more than two dozen other countries.The website also says that about 150,000 people worldwide attend its services weekly, but that is an estimate the church has been using since before the pandemic. Hillsong did not respond to questions about current attendance figures.The documentary premiering on Friday includes interviews with congregants and looks at the history of the church’s relationship with money, sex and God. More

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      ‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2, Episode 8 Recap: The Wilderness Gets Choosy

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      The Yellowjackets are outsourcing a lot of their decisions to “the wilderness” lately. Too bad for its latest victim.Season 2, Episode 8: ‘It Chooses’Earlier this season on “Yellowjackets,” young Natalie recruited her teammates to help her try to fish a moose out of the frozen lake. The moose proved too heavy to dislodge, and it disappeared into the icy water, leaving the teens defeated and hungry.Now, in the second to last episode of the season, Natalie is in a similar situation watching a body sink beneath the ice. Except this time she lets it sink in order to save herself and provide food for her fellow survivors. And it’s not an already unconscious animal. It’s Javi, the little brother of her sometimes lover Travis.The moment also calls back to another situation Natalie encountered. In hopes of easing Travis’s suffering, she previously lied and told him that Javi, who ran away during the group’s drug-induced frenzy last season, had died. Here, she is partly responsible for Javi’s actual death, all while Javi was trying only to lead her to safety.When Javi is declared dead, Van solemnly says, “the wilderness chose.” But did the wilderness really choose? Or did the girls?As this season draws to its conclusion, the desperation of the Yellowjackets in the wilderness hits a new high — or rather low — point. Lottie is bruised, internally and externally, from Shauna’s beating. Akilah realizes that her little mouse friend has been dead all along, it’s cute, fuzzy body just a desiccated corpse. And everyone is starving. Really starving. And extreme hunger means rational thought has gone out the window.Lottie tells Misty that, if she dies, the others should not let her body go to waste. But Lottie holds such sway over the group that they cannot fathom losing her guidance. So instead of allowing Lottie to perish, they invent a new ritual. Standing in a circle around their makeshift altar, they all pick cards. Whoever gets the Queen of Hearts will be sacrificed. In this inaugural drawing, Natalie draws the losing card.Whatever discussions were had about how the ritual would unfold were left offscreen, so it all seems eerily practiced. We never hear any talk of the rules of this deadly game that might demystify it, so the ease with which it is played is uncomfortably natural. There’s no debate over how it is going to work. It just does, and everyone accepts that with the powerlessness of those who haven’t eaten in too long.Shauna puts Jackie’s necklace on Natalie before drawing a blade to her throat from behind. Natalie accepts her fate, but with a condition: Shauna must face her when she slices. Shauna hesitates, and Travis rushes to the rescue, tackling Shauna and urging Natalie to run. The girls, bloodthirsty, pursue Nat through the wintry landscape while Javi comes to her aid, offering to take her to his hiding spot.While Lottie’s followers claim to know something about what the “wilderness” wants, Javi has actually learned its secrets. The only other person who has a sense of what he discovered is Ben, who uses Javi’s drawings to discover a cavern filled with tiny animal bones under a tree, where the young boy resided in apparent solitude.And then Javi dies. The ice cracks open and he falls in as the weapon-wielding chasers catch up. “If you save him, the others will get you,” Misty tells Natalie as she draws her away from the hole. Natalie, realizing that Misty is right, stops fighting. Javi will become the next meal, we assume.The legacy of these cannibalistic traditions bleeds into the present day action.The contemporary scenes feature mostly a lot of exposition that we as an audience already know but the rest of the characters do not. After Shauna explains that Adam’s remains have been found, Van, not clued into the whole cover-up situation, throws away Shauna’s keys so she can’t drive home to Jeff. Lottie brings the group all into the “sharing shack,” which proves true to its name.Shauna shares that Adam wasn’t actually blackmailing her before she murdered him, it was Jeff and Randy — and that she may also have shared too much with the police. (Speaking of sharing …) Tai shares that she was the one who hired Jessica Roberts (Rekha Sharma) to do research on her teammates to protect her political campaign. Misty shares that she kidnapped Jessica and then “took care of it.” And, of course, they all share how they helped Shauna cover up Adam’s killing. (We see the gruesome fruits of their labors in the images the cops show to Jeff in hopes of getting him to talk.)After all these confessions, Lottie emerges with an idea and some beverages. One of the cups is spiked with phenobarbital. Lottie’s plan is another sacrifice. “We give it what it always wants,” she explains. “One of us.” Her rationale is that it — whatever it is — will help them survive the various travails they are enduring if they offer it another sacrifice.She leaves who should die up to chance. That’s what the wilderness would want, she says. “We don’t get to decide,” she explains. “It chooses.”But these women still seem to be doing a lot of projecting about what the “wilderness” is requesting — and, in turn, absolving themselves of any guilt related to their own actions. Natalie could have continued trying to save Javi, but she didn’t. That’s not the wilderness, that’s a choice. It’s Lottie who is presenting her friends with potential death. Not the wilderness.The series has yet to convince me that there’s anything truly supernatural going on. Instead, we’re seeing a lot of desperate and frightened humans doing cruel things to save themselves while letting others suffer. It reminds me of Jackie’s death at the end of Season 1, which was the result of plain teen meanness rather than any sort of ghoulish presence.The surviving Yellowjackets can blame the wilderness for only so much. At some point, they have to take responsibility for all the pain they’ve caused. Still, maybe the guilt would be worse than just drinking Lottie’s death potion.More to chew onI’m a general fan of the “Yellowjackets” music cues, but a couple in this episode felt a little too on the nose for me. Walter is listening to “Not While I’m Around” from “Sweeney Todd,” a musical about cannibalism. As Natalie tries to evade capture, we hear Smashing Pumpkins’ “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” in which Billy Corgan sings, “Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.” Also maybe a little too apt.That said: Nice house, Walter.It’s nice that we finally know what was likely going on in the pilot’s opening sequence, even if we don’t know who was being chased. (I’m not sure that last detail is going to end up mattering.)Callie’s Shawn Mendes poster in her bedroom is a very funny production design choice.Melissa is reading a copy of “Sassy.” Long live “Sassy.”I’m glad Misty finally called Mari out. Someone had to. More

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      Damon Lindelhof and Soo Hugh on Encouraging ‘Creative Short Circuits’

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      For the Taking the Lead series, we asked leaders in various fields to share insights on what they’ve learned and what lies ahead.Years ago, the television writer Soo Hugh had a meeting with Damon Lindelof, one of the creators of the groundbreaking ABC drama “Lost.” Lindelof was looking for writers to work on his next series, “The Leftovers,” for HBO, and Hugh was an admirer. She didn’t get the job.The next time the two met, in March 2022, it was at the premiere party for “Pachinko,” Hugh’s own critically acclaimed series, on Apple TV+, based on the National Book Award finalist of the same name. Lindelof took his place among a long line of well-wishers.“Clearly I made a mistake,” he said, in a recent conversation with Hugh via video.It’s easy to imagine a parallel universe in which Lindelof, 50, and Hugh, 45, were collaborators. Both writers are known for sweeping, large-cast, character-driven narratives that center on questions of fate and the search for meaning. On “Lost,” the castaways of the island are haunted by the unfinished business of their previous lives. On “Pachinko,” multiple generations of a Korean family are buffeted by the forces of war and globalization.As a showrunner in the mid 2000s, Lindelof ran a writers’ room that looked and functioned much differently than is common today. On “Lost,” he said, he mostly hired other “white Jewish guys who wore glasses and loved ‘Star Wars’” to generate the 24-episodes in a season of network television. His latest show, “Mrs. Davis,” an eight-episode limited series for the streaming service Peacock, was made in partnership with its co-creator Tara Hernandez, a former writer and producer on “The Big Bang Theory,” and a team of writers from a variety of religious and ethnic backgrounds.Hugh who previously wrote for network and cable television, now sits at the helm of a show that would have been nearly impossible to imagine 15 years ago: a fully international production — with an all-Asian lead cast and dialogue in subtitled Korean and Japanese — financed and distributed by an American tech company that now also functions as a studio.But some things in Hollywood never change. At the time of this conversation, members of the Writers’ Guild of America — Hugh and Lindelof among them — were one week into a labor strike, in which they are demanding changes to pay and employment practices that they say are exploitative, including issues involving compensation for streaming shows. Lindelof was preparing to join other members in a picket line — just as he had when the last writers strike, in 2007, disrupted production of the fourth season of “Lost.”Lindelof, in Los Angeles, and Hugh, in New York, discussed the challenges of working as a television writer today, learning from their staffs and remaining true to their creative vision in a collaborative medium. This conversation has been condensed and edited.Adriana BelletDAMON LINDELOF Soo, I’m just curious — you guys are in production right now, right? You’re shooting?SOO HUGH We are. We have a month left. We just finished in Toronto as the strike was being called. The Korea portion starts next week and will go for five weeks.LINDELOF Are you going?HUGH I am going, but I felt conflicted. [Many studios have warned writers who are also producers to continue producing or risk losing their contracts.] I have done all of my writing services. I would say “Pachinko” is a producer’s show in some ways just because of the gargantuan production. It’s a headache. I don’t know how long I will stay. It makes me very uncomfortable figuring out those boundaries — they’re so gray. It’s very strange times.LINDELOF Yeah, it’s supposed to be uncomfortable, I guess. I think that everybody is looking for the right thing to do. I don’t have a show that’s in production right now. With “Mrs. Davis,” we finished everything — post, final sound mix, final visual effects — before the strike. So it’s a much cleaner line. I wake up, I picket and then I go to bed. So I’ll just say, I’m with you in spirit.What do you think your career would be like if you were starting today?HUGH I don’t know if you feel this way, Damon, but I feel like there’s so little room for failure now. My first show was a failure [Hugh’s “The Whispers” ran for a single season on ABC in 2015] and it was by learning what I never wanted to do again that I was able to go on to something I’m more proud of. Nowadays, the system feels so do or die.LINDELOF I agree a thousand percent. In the mid-90s, when I first came out to Los Angeles and was trying to figure out how to become a professional writer, broadcast television was still where most of the work was. There was this institution where it was like, this is what you do, this is how you get a job, this is how you work your way up. Now, all of those things have changed. The goal used to be, Can I be on this show for three, four, five seasons? Now you have to put it all on the field on your very first opportunity because that show will probably only exist for a season, if at all. The pressures are just immense. I don’t think that I could have been successful in this environment.HUGH It’s interesting that you came from broadcast. I think we all pooh-pooh broadcast these days, but I am the showrunner I am because of broadcast, without a doubt. And I think the fact that broadcast has died is really killing showrunners. You don’t learn how to produce anymore. When we were coming up, you only had $4 million an episode and seven-day shoots [The most expensive episodes of television today can cost more than $20 million and shoot for more than 20 days]; it taught you a level of discipline that I think really carries you later on.How did you learn to communicate your vision effectively?LINDELOF Clumsily. I think that you watch how it’s done. I had the institutional experience of working primarily in broadcast procedurals. When you’re making as many episodes as we were, it’s a bit of speed chess. To Soo’s point, you have X number of dollars and X number of days to produce these episodes and everything kind of backfills into that. So it requires a lot of delegation and trust inside of the writers’ room. Ultimately the room becomes a machine that is trying to channel the vision of the showrunner. That’s how I learned how to do the job.On my last few shows, the goal has been different. It’s giving strong guidance and a decisive sense of, Yes, that feels good or That feels bad, but ultimately wanting every writer in the room to feel some fundamental sense of authorship. It became, Let’s build some kind of collective vision that we call “The Leftovers” or “Watchmen” [Lindelof’s limited series adaptation of the graphic novel, which aired on HBO in 2019, was nominated for 26 Emmys and won 11] that you all see yourselves in, and I’ll do my best to steer that thing. By the time I got to “Mrs. Davis,” I wasn’t showrunning at all anymore; Tara was. And that feels even better. She could either call upon my experience or completely and totally ignore it. It created both a tremendous amount of relief for me and also, I feel, a much better product.HUGH I really do believe in frequencies aligning. I feel like my job in putting a room together is creating a creative short circuit by finding the right personalities. I’m more interested in the way people think than how they write, because at the end of the day, I usually rewrite everything anyway. I just need that right brain power because that’s what we’re fueling the room with.LINDELOF I love that idea of frequencies aligning. I’m curious — do you start out like, The frequency is 89.9, and I am teaching it to all of you so you can get on it? Or are you like, I have some sense of what the range of frequency is, but I’m looking for these people in the room to help me find it?HUGH Both. We always start the day with an hour of non sequiturs. You’re not allowed to talk about the show. You’re not allowed to talk about your characters. You can only talk about what you saw on your walk over, or what did you watch on TV last night? Then, after an hour, we all turn together to a different tune.Adriana BelletWhat makes you excited when you’re reading a spec script?HUGH When it doesn’t start with a flash-forward.LINDELOF [Laughs] Anything that’s not like, Three days ago … It’s intangible, but it’s the same thing that you feel when you meet someone and you recognize, Oh, OK, I want to spend more time with this person. Within five or six pages you’re like, Who wrote this? Why did they write this? It feels so fresh and interesting. Then you meet them and, as in life, sometimes they’re even more interesting than you thought, and sometimes it doesn’t feel like a connection. You also want to have a well-balanced team. I’m not interested in having seven shortstops. You want some talkers, some listeners, some who are stronger on the page, some who are stronger in the room, some utility players.HUGH I’m so desperate for someone to say no to me. When you hire writers, you’re surrounded by people pleasers, and I get it. But what we’re looking for are people to help us build the best show. And sometimes that means telling us, You know what? I personally don’t think that’s going to work, and this is why.LINDELOF The worst thing that you can say to me in an interview is, I’m a huge fan of your work. Because either it triggers some degree of discomfort or self-loathing, or it’s very flattering and it’s really nice, but it kind of runs afoul of what you’re talking about. Is this person going to be unable to tell me that I’m an idiot? The fact of the matter is that most of the time, I am an idiot.Are there times when your writers have opened your eyes to a way of thinking that you hadn’t thought of before?HUGH All the time.LINDELOF All the time.HUGH I think the higher up you go, you lose all sense of proportion. You don’t worry about money anymore. You’re less hungry. You get exposed to fewer different people. Age just bubbles you in a way that for better or worse is limiting in terms of the human experience. So what I love about the writers’ room, and I think why it’s probably my favorite part of the process, is all of a sudden my sense of the world expands. Now I’m seeing it through seven or eight people’s eyes.LINDELOF Look, in the rooms that I started in, the reality was it was basically white guys. And so I was like, Oh, what you do is you just copy yourself. That way, there’s all these different versions of you, and you don’t have to waste time explaining things. That led to a culture of tokenism, which I take full responsibility for. On “Lost,” we had characters who spoke Korean, and Harold Perrineau as a Black father, so it was like, We should probably have a Black writer and a Korean writer for their episodes. But, of course, those writers are whole people who have perspectives on all the other characters, as well.The idea that came later — of curating a room that looks nothing like you and has wildly different life experience than you and that you may occasionally come into more conflict with — I think that resulted in better and more interesting work.As writers who became producers, how did you learn to get a big crew rowing in the same direction?HUGH I’ve found that my job as a showrunner is mostly to say, It’s not good enough but to say it with a smile. What can we do? How do we push it forward?LINDELOF I think when you are producing something, as opposed to writing, it is the act of making. If you’re a novelist, for example, sure you’re making a novel. But then you say, Now, Jonathan Franzen, manifest “The Corrections” into a television series, and it becomes an entirely different skill set. It requires daily and constant sacrifice and compromise from people who are not necessarily used to that. Every single day, every email that we get is some version of, I know you wanted to do this, but how about this instead? If you always say yes, then what are you even there for? Where’s the place where you dig in your heels? It will seem arbitrary to someone outside of our bodies, but we have to take the arbitrary thing and make it seem essential. More

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      Why ‘Ted Lasso’ Has the Freshest Footwear on Television

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      Credit the show’s star and creator, Jason Sudeikis, a real-life sneakerhead who owns about 250 pairs.There’s a reason that Ted Lasso, the fictional, sunny, mustachioed American hired to manage an English football club in the Apple TV+ series of the same name, is a sneakerhead.“It was rooted in my own enthusiasm for sneakers and sneaker culture,” said Jason Sudeikis, who has sported more than a dozen pairs of blue, orange and even red paisley Air Jordans as the show’s titular coach.In a recent call from London, Mr. Sudeikis said that Ted’s affinity for footwear was also inspired, in part, by his longtime friend Brendan Curran, a fellow sneaker enthusiast and high school basketball coach in Lenexa, Kan., who connected with his students over this shared interest.“It was this bit of unspoken respect and camaraderie among him and his players and his students,” Mr. Sudeikis, 47, said of Mr. Curran and his team.While other shows like the ’90s sitcom “Seinfeld” have dabbled in delighting sneaker stans, “Ted Lasso” takes it to a whole new level. Characters have sported popular sneakers such as 2021 Air Jordan 1 Low “UNC”s, 515 Sport V2 New Balances and Onitsuka Tiger Mexico 66 “Kill Bill” shoes.There’s an Instagram account, @nikesoflasso, where an artist shares illustrations of some of the Nike shoes featured in the show and in Mr. Sudeikis’s personal collection, and a website, Shoes of Lasso, that tracks the various sneakers worn by the show’s cast.“We’re all so flattered by it,” said Mr. Sudeikis, who owns about 250 pairs. “It’s something that we were intentional about from the get-go, before we thought anyone would notice.”The appeal for many sneaker collectors begins at a young age, said Elizabeth Semmelhack, the senior curator at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto. “A common thread seems to be a desire for a very specific pair of sneakers,” she said.Mr. Sudeikis not only masterminds his own character’s footwear in “Ted Lasso,” but also consults about the sneaker choices of other characters.Colin Hutton/Apple TV+The Air Jordan 1 Low “UNC” sneaker is one of Mr. Sudeikis’s favorite shoes.NikeMr. Sudeikis said his love of sneakers began when he received his first pair of Air Jordans in middle school, in 1986. The shoes Ted wears are a combination of pairs from Mr. Sudeikis’s own collection (about 25 percent, he estimated) and that of Nike, which came on board as the official kit supplier for the show’s fictional team in its third season.Mr. Sudeikis said that when he wears his own sneakers, it “drives our costumer, Jacky Levy, a little crazy, just for continuity purposes.”Mr. Sudeikis, who originally played Ted in sketch-length NBC Sports commercials that aired in 2013 and 2014, not only masterminds his own character’s footwear, but also consults about the sneaker choices of other characters.“People would come into my trailer, and they’d say, ‘Oh my gosh’ — it would look like the back room of a Foot Locker,” he said.The characters’ sneaker choices have been intentional since the beginning, Mr. Sudeikis said, but eagle-eyed fans have increasingly begun psychoanalyzing them for plot clues. (In fairness, it’s not just the shoes; in Episode 2 of Season 3, a theory about Rebecca’s earrings being lassos — though in reality they were snakes — gained traction online.)Mr. Sudeikis said the sneaker sleuthing was definitely merited.“Jacky is incredibly intentional about that, certainly with Rebecca’s wardrobe, Keeley’s wardrobe, everybody’s,” he said. “It’s not always the sneakers, either — Ted wearing an orange sweatshirt in the Amsterdam episode was intentional because the national color for the Netherlands is orange.”Mr. Sudeikis said he liked the sense of community that springs up among sneakerheads.When he worked at “Saturday Night Live,” he would often walk to work wearing a pair of Jordans. “You’d meet someone who’d notice your shoes first and give you a nod,” he said. “It’s a little bit like ‘Fight Club’ — game recognizes game.”Eliza Wilson, an illustrator in Melbourne, Australia, who runs the Nikes of Lasso account and has drawn more than 70 shoes, echoed that idea. The feedback she received from other fans, she said, provided a sense of community during lockdown periods of the pandemic.With the series wrapping up on May 31, Ms. Wilson said she would miss the weekly routine of sketching the sneakers featured in every new episode, which take her about four to five hours each. But, she said, she may continue drawing shoes she sees Mr. Sudeikis wearing in social media posts and other photos.Despite owning enough sneakers to wear a different pair every other day for a year, there’s one pair, Mr. Sudeikis said, that remains close to his heart.“They’re pretty beat up at this point, but my Jordan 1s, low, they’re Carolina Blue,” he said, referring to the athletic color of the University of North Carolina. “I wear them a couple times throughout the show. I genuinely love those shoes.” More

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      Stand-Up Comics Are Asking, What’s So Funny About Grief?

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      Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Stand-up comedy.Are these the new five stages of grief? It can seem that way to those following the comedy scene. The past year has brought us specials and solo theatrical shows with jokes sandwiched between deeply felt thoughts on the death of a father, mother, girlfriend, boyfriend and sister.Dead baby jokes were once a juvenile niche. Now comedy about the death of a child has become its own heartbreaking genre. Just this month, the comic Liz Glazer released her debut stand-up album, “A Very Particular Experience,” about the stillbirth of her daughter (“a comedy show meets shiva”) and Michael Cruz Kayne premiered his wrenching solo about the death of his son, “Sorry for Your Loss.” Early on, he warns us that we might cry. “If you don’t,” he adds, pausing, “that’s rude.”There are so many grief-stricken comedians these days that it invites the question: For an art form traditionally associated with punchlines about dating and airplane food, why is it mourning again (and again) in America?The pandemic certainly put grief on the minds of artists and audiences, and that also explains a boom in books, theater, podcasts and television on the subject. One way to look at the final season of “Succession” is as a cringe comedy about people who are terrible at grieving.But the growth of stand-up on this theme is rooted just as much in aesthetic changes in the form. One of the most exciting developments in popular culture over the past decade is the growing ambition of comedy. Not only has it produced some of the finest, most urgent art on the pandemic, #MeToo and other newsworthy topics, but comics have also displayed a broader emotional palette than they did a generation ago. They are after more than just laughs. These new shows illustrate how grief, precisely because it’s usually handled with solemnity, jargon and unsaid thoughts, is ripe territory for stand-up.Michael Cruz Kayne warns audiences at his show about the death of his son that they might cry, adding, “If you don’t, that’s rude.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt the same time, there’s so much grief comedy right now that it’s already developed its own clichés: Joan Didion references, bits about the phrase “He’s in a better place.” Striking the right balance between light and dark is also tricky. Several comics sink into an indulgence they can’t afford. Comedy doesn’t have to be only about jokes, but when it stops being funny, there had better be a good reason.A SIGNAL TURNING POINT in modern stand-up was the moment when Tig Notaro walked onstage at a club in 2012, grabbed the microphone and said, “Thank you. I have cancer. Thank you.” She revealed that she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer and that her mother had died. She wondered aloud, “What if I transitioned into silly jokes?”Then a funny thing happened: The crowd protested, loudly. Notaro sounded surprised, even mocking the interest in bad news, before adding: “Now I feel bad I don’t have more tragedy to share.”That storied set was eventually released as a special, called “Live,” to considerable acclaim. Many comics followed with raw tragedies to share. Laurie Kilmartin live-tweeted as her father died before turning that into a special. Doug Stanhope used his mother’s last days for a baroque routine.Comedy has always gravitated toward darkness. Richard Pryor and George Carlin broached the saddest subjects. But there is a difference in comedy today, in aim and overtness. An extreme example is “Red Blue Green,” a 2022 special from Drew Michael, who has produced some of the most formally experimental and artistically polarizing hours in recent years. Toward the end, he describes comedy as “mining sadness” and transforming it into a balloon animal to make it palatable for an audience. That was the setup to the twist, a long rant about his own failings and insecurities and miseries that ends without a punchline. The result was something more like therapy than art — a deflated balloon.This is the risk of comedy that lingers in tragedy. It can get stuck there. Hannah Gadsby had also toyed with the surprise of setting up tension without relieving it in the surprise hit “Nanette,” to make a point about how always going for the joke can stunt your growth. That success touched a nerve, and the backlash included loud complaints that it wasn’t comedy at all. Besides giving short shrift to Gadsby’s deft balancing act, this policing of genre boundaries does comedy no favors. A flexible, broad art form is a healthy one.Hannah Gadsby in their special “Nanette,” which set up tension without relieving it. NetflixThe push into melancholy territory can be found in more ingratiating work, including specials by the most commercial stars. In his 2018 special, Adam Sandler downshifted into melancholy and sang about the death of his friend Chris Farley. But the tone has changed most dramatically among a younger generation of comics who seem interested in more than mere escapist entertainment. It’s also probably no coincidence that little-known comics are more likely these days to get attention from producers and industry people if they build shows around a narrative or theme.“At this point in comedy, it’s not enough to be funny,” Ben Wasserman said in the Brooklyn funeral parlor where he staged his vaudevillian “Live After Death,” which explores the death of his father and grandfather (not to mention his tragic lack of an agent). “You have to make people feel.”MAYBE THAT WAS SAID with tongue in cheek, maybe not. Either way, there’s no question that in certain quarters of comedy, jokes are not enough.For instance, at shows around New York, the quirky, swaggering Gastor Almonte has been performing a hilarious 10 to 15 minutes about his hatred of oatmeal. In a previous era that might have added up to a debut special that resembled the work of Jim Gaffigan. But when Almonte turned it into an hourlong solo show, “The Sugar,” that material was beefed up with a soul-searching story about his diabetes diagnosis and how the prospect of mortality changed his family. Watching it, I confess I wondered what the Gaffigan version of this show would look like.“The Sugar” was staged downtown at Soho Playhouse, which has developed into a hub of weighty theatrical stand-up shows, many of which are transfers from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. One of that theater’s biggest hits of the year was Sam Morrison’s breakthrough, “Sugar Daddy.”Quick-witted and charismatic, Morrison delivered a tightly honed work about the pain of losing his boyfriend that is both a love letter to his partner and a self-deprecating satire of a culture of mourning, one that spoofs well-intentioned condolences and support groups. He argued that the difference between comedy and tragedy was thin, saying that in the plays of Shakespeare, “comedy is only tragedy with a marriage at the end.” He explained that grief was lonely and impossible and “nothing helps as much as this show,” before a pinpoint pause, “because you guys can’t talk.” And he flat out played the vain millennial fool. “What is trauma but unmonetized content?” he asks, echoing a line from “WandaVision,” a series that itself is a grief narrative.In contrast to Drew Michael, Morrison is uncomfortable going long without a laugh. I saw the show twice, and the second time the punchlines had become faster, more insistent, almost as if the best argument he came up with was to keep you laughing.Most of these comics share a belief that discussing the subject has become taboo, even stigmatized. “We don’t talk about grief: We keep our grief to ourselves,” Kayne says in “Sorry for Your Loss.” Glazer hit this same theme. “For that reason alone,” she says, “I want to talk about it.”There is an irony in so many comedians talking about grief by saying no one talks about grief. It evokes the parade of cancel culture-obsessed comics complaining about how you can’t joke about anything without getting canceled while doing that very thing. But the grieving comics are quicker to mock and undercut their own motivations.The fundamental hallmark of these shows is a meticulous self-awareness. The comics are constantly justifying their own work. There’s a defensiveness here, an anxiety that is understandable. Grief doesn’t sound like a fun night out. And there has been a backlash that you can detect from other comics, even ones practicing dark comedy. In his amusingly navel-gazing special “Blocks,” Neal Brennan poked fun at himself and others by terming this genre “stand-up traumedy.”In “Baby J,” John Mulaney mocked the idea of exploiting death. Marcus Russell Price/NetflixJohn Mulaney ridiculed the tendency to exploit death in his special, “Baby J,” by recalling how in elementary school he was jealous of a classmate whose grandfather had died because he became the center of attention. The recent movie “Sick of Myself” takes an even darker view in its scathing satire of the culture of victimhood. In one scene, the wildly self-involved protagonist fantasizes about her own funeral. It’s funny, if glib and uncharitable, in the way that biting satire often is.The truth is that death is too good of a straight man to ignore.So many of the opening jokes get their laughs by treating mortality with just the right amount of irreverence. (Glazer begins with “I hope you like stillbirth.”) The lightest touch is just enough. Witness the dry understatement of this line from the comic Rob Delaney’s wrenching memoir “A Heart That Works,” about the death of his young son: “In between Henry’s birth and his death was his life. That was my favorite part.”Another reason grief is an unexpectedly great subject for comedy is that in a fragmented, polarized culture, with a shrinking common collection of references, it’s universal and relatable in a way few other topics are. Even if we don’t know someone who has died, we will. Or as Kayne explained to his audience: “We’re all pre-dead.”When someone dies, the conversations follow a tight script. Sorry for your loss. There are no words. We are all afraid of saying the wrong thing, and those suffering don’t entirely know how to respond. It’s a relief to hear comics not just poking fun at the stale jargon of condolences, but also demystifying the hidden world of the grieving, which can be messy and petty. The competitiveness of grief is a frequent subject. Who suffers most? The consensus is it’s parents of children who die, but only in these shows might you hear someone weigh the levels of pain of a parent of a 2-year-old versus that of a 10-year-old (as Colin Campbell does in “Grief: A One Man Shitshow,” about the gutting experience of losing two teenage children in a car crash).While it might seem counterintuitive, the popularity of joking about death represents a welcome shift from pessimism about comedy that was popular among performers like Gadsby and Michelle Wolf during the Trump era. These more recent comics generally share a faith that comedy helps — even if only a little. There’s a joy in the performances of Morrison, Kayne and Alyssa Limperis (whose “No Bad Days” focuses on her late father) that takes you by surprise.It makes you question the seeming obviousness of the incongruity of this kind of comedy. Death is an integral part of life, one every great art form explores. It’s the existential elephant in every room. Why do comics joke about it? A better question: How can they avoid it?Ali Siddiq in “The Domino Effect 2: Loss.” He avoids self-aware jokes and instead leans into stories you can get lost in.via YouTubeThis may be part of the reason the most riveting special on grief spends no time analyzing the subject. In his eye-opening “The Domino Effect 2: Loss,” Ali Siddiq, a revelation of a performer, adopts a different approach. Instead of self-aware jokes, he leans into stories that are easy to get lost in, especially with his jaunty, magnetic delivery. Looking back on his childhood, he describes how he became a drug dealer and lost a girlfriend, a sister and eventually his freedom. He tells the story of his arrest with vivid, suspenseful detail, but also sadness at the cascading devastation of loss. It’s the rare comedy about grief that takes the advice, “Show, don’t tell.”THE BEST ART DOESN’T hit you over the head. It taps your temple with metaphor, allusion and maybe an oblique tease. Stand-up is so immediate, so direct in its relationship between the comic and the audience, that there’s a temptation to just be blunt, to tie up and underline your points with a punchline that calls back to an earlier one. But while there are only a limited number of subjects to joke about, there are infinite ways to do it. That variety is where art flourishes.One theme repeatedly voiced in these shows is the impossibility of overcoming sadness. We are told that time will not heal all wounds; that grief makes you want to get others to understand, even if they never will. The final stage of grief, the real one, is acceptance, and in one of his early jokes, Michael Cruz Kayne tells you that is the one you will never get to.You don’t need to have endured the death of a loved one to confront this problem, the one of failure. But you can try approaching it in different ways. This is what Kayne’s show is all about, how you can see the same thing from a radically different perspective. He cleverly illustrates this point by looking at examples in math, language and, most of all, comedy. The death of a child is the worst thing that has ever happened to him. It’s obscene to use it for comedy, to laugh at it.But by turning this experience into a show, he keeps the memory of his son alive. It’s a subtle, moving performance that finds beauty in the trying. You get the sense that it’s what allows him to laugh at things he shouldn’t. When he takes the body of his child to a funeral home for cremation, he pays the bill and receives a receipt, which is projected on the wall behind him. It reads: “Thank you please come again.” More