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      Emmys: It’s Jeremy Allen White vs. Jason Sudeikis in the Comedy Actors Race

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      On the one hand, Jason Sudeikis is on a roll. He’s won the best actor in a comedy award two consecutive years for playing the title role in “Ted Lasso.” But can one ambitious and anxious chef topple him?Jeremy Allen White, the star of “The Bear,” will seek to snap Sudeikis’s winning streak at the Emmys along with a group of others. He was nominated on Wednesday along with Bill Hader, Sudeikis’s former castmate at “Saturday Night Live” and a previous winner in the category, for the final season of “Barry.” Martin Short also received a nomination for the second consecutive year for “Only Murders in the Building.”With “Hacks” and Jean Smart out of the competition this year for best actress in a comedy, award prognosticators believe that Quinta Brunson could be on a glide path to winning for “Abbott Elementary.” Brunson took writing honors at the Emmys last year for her good-natured ABC workplace comedy, and would be the first Black woman to win best actress in a comedy since Isabel Sanford won in 1981 for “The Jeffersons.”In the comedy races, it’ll be a showdown between the two-time winner “Ted Lasso” and “The Bear” and “Abbott Elementary.” It has been nine years since a network show won best comedy at the Emmys. The old network tradition of having a chokehold on the category has since given way to cable (“Veep,” “Schitt’s Creek”) and to streaming series (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “Fleabag” and “Ted Lasso”). More

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      Natasha Lyonne on Her Emmy Nomination for ‘Poker Face’

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      In the Peacock murder-of-the-week procedural “Poker Face,” Natasha Lyonne plays Charlie Cale, a former cocktail waitress and poker hustler with a difference: Charlie is a human lie detector in a trucker hat, able to spot a falsehood from across the casino floor.Also among Charlie’s powers? She helped earn Lyonne an Emmy nomination on Wednesday, Lyonne’s third as a performer, for best lead actress in a comedy series.Charlie’s unusual ability in the series — a reverse whodunit, or “howcatchem,” created by Rian Johnson — is a wonky blessing that sends her out on the lam after she upsets a Nevada casino boss. As she shambles across the country, Charlie, the sole constant in every episode, stumbles on diverse crimes and then intuits how they were committed.But Lyonne’s job requires more than intuition. For each episode, she memorizes a 60-page script and helps guide the guest actors through the particular rhythm of Johnson’s style.“It’s really moving when the work is actually acknowledged,” she said by phone just after the Emmy nominations were announced. “Because I do put in quite a good deal of work to make it seem so loose.”Lyonne — who has a mess of red-gold hair and a voice that sounds like she’s perpetually just waking up, and isn’t especially happy about it — hadn’t watched the nominations. But she had already reached out to Johnson to ask if she could bring his wife, the podcaster and critic Karina Longworth, as her date for the ceremony.In a brief interview, Lyonne discussed Charlie’s multilayered spirit as desert rat, idealist and puzzle maven. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Congratulations. I like to see this nomination as a win for raspy-voiced women everywhere. What’s the fun of playing Charlie? And how does the nomination feel?Rian really built this bespoke character on our shared love of Peter Falk and of Elliott Gould in “The Long Goodbye.” But with this added twist of the Dude from “Big Lebowski” or like a lazy, late-in-life Gene Hackman. Well, not really late in life, but more “Night Moves” than “French Connection.” Just a back-foot character who’s sort of a desert rat who’s got the sun on their face. And with the hairdo, I sometimes feel like I’ve archetyped a Mae West character for myself.But I’m building the character from the inside out. A thread in my work is this John Lennon quote: “Just give me some truth.” There’s a lineage of people who’ve had that desire to communicate truth through their work. The deep need to communicate the human experience is what I’m after. Sometimes I worry that because of my surrealist bent, that kind of gets lost in the shuffle.How hard-boiled is Charlie? What motivates her?I don’t know. How hard-boiled a musician is Bob Dylan? Charlie’s somebody who just really has a need to right a wrong, or when she sees an injustice, to name it and call it out. She’s not like, “I can’t wait to put cuffs on you.” Because she’s not a cop. It’s a need instead to look out for the little guy and make sure that nobody’s being taken advantage of, which is obviously something I resonate with.Rian and I have this shared love of crossword puzzles. So in many ways, we built Charlie as less hard-boiled and more as someone who wants to crack the case, to get to the end of the puzzle. If she sniffs out something rotten in the state of Denmark, she has to get to the bottom of it, without realizing that as she gets there, she’s looking into the barrel of a gun. More

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      ‘Succession’ propels HBO to huge haul of nominations.

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      “Succession,” HBO’s operatic saga about a media dynasty and a two-time best drama winner, scored 27 Emmy nominations for its farewell season on Wednesday morning, the biggest haul of any series. Here’s what to know:That tally helped propel HBO, a perennial Emmys heavyweight, to one of its strongest years. In addition to “Succession,” HBO landed best drama nominations for the second season of “The White Lotus,” as well for its popular video game adaptation, “The Last of Us,” and “House of the Dragon,” its “Game of Thrones” prequel. It was the first time since 1992 that a single network landed four nominations in the best drama category.The timing of this year’s announcement was awkward: More than 11,000 television and feature film writers have been on strike for 72 days. The union representing 160,000 actors could declare a strike as soon as its contract expires later on Wednesday. The strike — or strikes — could postpone the September ceremony.This year’s best actor in a comedy category will be closely watched. Jason Sudeikis, who has won two years in a row for playing the title role in “Ted Lasso,” faces competition from Jeremy Allen White of “The Bear.”Here are the nominees in some of the most closely-watched categories.HBO’s moment of triumph is coming at a time of transition for the network, which since last year has been run by a debt-ridden parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery. The network is now part of a streaming service that removed its call letters in May (bye HBO Max, hello Max). And, for the first time, HBO is in the process of licensing revered older series — “Insecure,” and soon, “Six Feet Under,” “Band of Brothers,” “True Blood” — to its archrival, Netflix, in an attempt by Warner Bros. Discovery to drum up cash.Frank Scherma, the chair of the Television Academy, which organizes the Emmys, alluded to the labor disputes right before presenting the nominations on Wednesday morning.“We hope the guild negotiations can come to an equitable and swift resolution,” he said. More

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      How Steven Soderbergh and Ed Solomon Straightened Out ‘Full Circle’

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      Their gripping new crime thriller for Max is loaded with twists and layers. But it is actually much simpler than what they originally conceived.The first time the director Steven Soderbergh and the screenwriter Ed Solomon worked together was on the murder mystery “Mosaic” (2017), which could be watched as a choose-your-own-adventure-style story using a smartphone app or as a six-episode HBO mini-series.“Mosaic” drew mixed reviews, but the two men learned a lot doing it. For their next collaboration — what eventually became the six-part series “Full Circle,” debuting Thursday on Max — they envisioned another show that would have two distinct, separately shot versions: one told in classic, linear fashion and another that would present the same events told from different perspectives and whose meaning changes depending on which path the viewer chooses.The idea was greenlighted in 2021, and Solomon started writing two versions that would tell the same story differently. Then last spring, reality hit.“When I got the schedule and I saw the number of days and the page count of just the linear, I was like, ‘This is physically impossible,’” Soderbergh said in a recent joint interview with Solomon. He added: “I had visions of ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ — that this was going to become a legendary folly.”Soderbergh decided to jettison the branching version. But then he had to tell Solomon, who had already written 175 pages of it in addition to the six linear episodes.“That was not a lunch that I was looking forward to,” Soderbergh said. It turned out, though, that Solomon already agreed with him. “It was just too much,” he said.There are few better ways to spend an afternoon than talking about film and television with these two men, who love making and watching stories. Soderberg’s résumé careens among blockbusters (“Ocean’s Eleven,” “Magic Mike”), daring oddities (“The Girlfriend Experience”) and the odd Liberace biopic (“Behind the Candelabra”). Solomon’s often has comic undertones, with films including “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” and “Men in Black.”Together, their efforts have had a decidedly noirish bent — sandwiched between their two series is the 1950s crime feature “No Sudden Move” (2021), for HBO Max. The premise of “Full Circle” follows suit, inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s suspenseful 1963 film “High and Low”: What if there were a kidnapping but the wrong child was taken?Even without branching, the story delivers plenty of twists and layers, toggling between two families in an unlikely entanglement: One is the Manhattan family of a celebrity chef played by Dennis Quaid (with Claire Danes as his shot-calling daughter and Timothy Olyphant as his son-in-law with a mysterious past); the other, led by a criminal matriarch (CCH Pounder), is rooted in a Guyanese community in Queens. In the middle stands a rogue Postal Service inspector played by Zazie Beetz (“Atlanta”).Timothy Olyphant and Claire Danes, right (with Lisa Janae), play a wealthy Manhattan couple who become entangled in a botched kidnapping of their son.Sarah Shatz/MaxCCH Pounder (with Phaldut Sharma) plays a crime boss based in Queens; she has mysterious historical links to the wealthy Manhattan family. Sarah Shatz/MaxSoderbergh and Solomon’s methods and history of close collaboration helped them turn on a dime and adapt the show as they went along.“Scenes were being rewritten, lines were being thrown in while we were doing it,” Phaldut Sharma, a Britain-based actor who plays Pounder’s right-hand man, said in a recent video call. “It was my first my first experience of doing a job in America and I thought this must be the norm, but members of the crew told me this is not really the way it normally goes.”Soderbergh, 60, and Solomon, 62, sat down for a lengthy chat at Soderbergh’s office, in the TriBeCa neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Steven works famously fast, editing himself at the end of every day on a shoot. How does the writer factor in?ED SOLOMON Most weekends we would meet, usually on a Sunday. I would get a text: “Are you around?” Which meant “I’m going to be in the office for the afternoon.” [Laughs.] And we would just talk through: “Where’s this going? And what does that mean for what we’ve got?” We were constantly reassessing — the writing continues as the shooting starts, and it continues as the editing is happening. I really appreciate how fluid you are with that.STEVEN SODERBERGH It has to swing both ways. I can’t say to Ed, “Rethink this,” or, “Rejigger that,” without looking at my own work and going, “I’m throwing out stuff that I worked hard on trying to figure out and shooting.”SOLOMON Sometimes the show outgrows your original idea, which is part of what’s exciting.“Full Circle” relies more on detail than on back stories — Quaid’s character, Chef Jeff, has a ponytail that speaks volumes about his personality. Was there a deliberate effort to be lean?SODERBERGH There can be a tendency to spoon-feed the viewer about the back story of the characters before you’ve even really gotten into the story. That’s something that I resist as a viewer, and it’s something that I’ve tried to resist as a filmmaker. Most things that I see, both movies and television, are too long. My motto is, if it can be pulled out and it still works, it should be pulled out. I want this thing to be all marrow as much as possible.Dennis Quaid plays a celebrity chef whose empire has some unsavory ties.Sarah Shatz/MaxThe loose, sometimes shaggy atmosphere recalls the noir movies of the 1970s. Were they part of your influences?SODERBERGH I’m after a sort of discovered precision. I want the construction of something that’s been considered, but I want it to feel like it’s happening right in front of me for the first time. I was looking at “The French Connection,” the Sidney Lumet cop films from the ’70s, because I did want that kind of feeling.What draws you to noir?SODERBERGH It’s just a very cinematic form of storytelling. The conflicts are clear, they’re interesting. They inevitably lead to some burst of violence, either physical or emotional, because the pressure builds up in the clash between people’s dreams and desires, and reality, and shifting loyalties, mistrust, all of these things. It’s a very sexy genre to work in as a director.SOLOMON When people are hiding their truth from others, and then the circumstances pressurize them and they’re trying harder and harder to keep that from coming out — to me that’s an exciting place to write from.SODERBERGH Genre is just a great and efficient delivery system for ideas. It’s built to have a sort of superficial narrative layer and then this subterranean thematic space that you can put anything you’re interested in, and that’s what makes it fun.Zack Ryan’s score is interestingly jarring. Why did you set a gritty thriller to such lush music?SOLOMON We talked about Douglas Sirk at the very beginning.SODERBERGH I like the juxtaposition of that visual aesthetic and the sonic aesthetic of a ’50s melodrama. I didn’t want a hip, trendy score — I wanted something very classical and emotional. Which is not typical for me, to be this in your face or in your ears with the music, trying to enhance the emotional state of the character you’re watching.SOLOMON I never told you this: I had a theory that the score was doing the work that the original branching narrative was going to do, which was all about inner life and people’s emotional experience, while this other crime story was going on.It’s always a risk when form and content don’t gel.SODERBERGH I’ve seen extremely skilled filmmakers whose style is so developed and so detailed, you can feel the intelligence and the work. It exposes the fact that the script they’ve shot isn’t as good at its job as they are at their job. Your talent has to match your ambition — you need both, but if they’re out of whack, it’s not going to happen for you. I’ve seen talented people who are not ambitious enough. We see many more people who are more ambitious than they are talented. The universe eventually tends to catch up with them.Too much back story is “something that I resist as a viewer,” said Soderbergh (right, with Solomon, middle, and Olyphant). “And it’s something that I’ve tried to resist as a filmmaker.” Sarah ShatzDo you feel the writers’ strike is making people think harder about how movies and TV are made? Are you reflecting on the way you create?SODERBERGH It’s something I think about a lot. My entire career has been a test of my ability to improve and optimize my work process, which is about getting to the best version of something as quickly as possible with the least amount of drama and ego. I don’t feel that the work we’re doing is necessarily important with a capital I, but it’s also not meaningless. I want to be in that space of taking it as seriously as it needs to be taken to be good. Because if you take it too seriously, it tips over into indulgence, and that’s not what I want.SOLOMON I think art made by human beings has a feel that cannot be replicated. The problem is, the people making decisions on the highest level that are all about bottom line and “How can I get rid of as many human beings as possible?” don’t have the ability to judge what is good art and not good art. My fear is, if we don’t draw a line in the sand now, we’re going to continue to a place where a lot of people are out of work.What keeps you on your toes?SODERBERGH I need a pocket of fear to keep me alert.Where was that pocket on “Full Circle”?SODERBERGH The complexity of the story, of the schedule. You need that sense that this could go sideways if I don’t execute at the best of my ability. You’ve got to find this balance of being self-critical without being paralyzed. You have to make decisions but you’ve also got to be willing to say to yourself: “That can be better. It has to be better.”SOLOMON I want to be a better writer on the other end of it. I want to know that I will have learned a lot about myself, about this project. I will push myself to a degree that when I come out the other end of it, I’m moving forward, I’ve learned stuff. More

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      Maggie Siff Stars in a Rare Revival of Williams’s ‘Orpheus Descending’

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      “Orpheus Descending,” a rarely revived play about the treatment of outsiders, has only become more meaningful for its star and its director.After Maggie Siff’s husband died of brain cancer in 2021, the last thing she wanted to do was a play about a woman with a husband dying of cancer.But then, after initially pondering whether to commit to the show in 2019, she reread the script — and reconsidered her hesitation.“I was like, ‘Oh, no, I have to do it,’” Siff, 49, said of starring in the Theater for a New Audience’s revival of Tennessee Williams’s “Orpheus Descending.” Now in previews, the play is scheduled to open July 18 at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn.Williams’s play — a modern retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, in which a man has the opportunity to get the woman he loves back if he can just follow one simple rule — is set at a small-town dry goods store in the Deep South. The writing was revelatory to Siff, especially after she had attended to her own sick spouse, Paul Ratliff, for a year.“It has that quality of living at the edge of what’s real and realistic, and what’s mysterious and beyond our comprehension,” she said.Siff, who is best known for her starring turn as the strong-willed psychiatrist Wendy Rhoades in the Showtime series “Billions,” plays Lady Torrance, a middle-aged storekeeper’s wife who becomes infatuated with a wandering young guitar player, Val, as her elderly, bigoted husband lays dying in a room upstairs. As the two lovers navigate their doomed tryst, they confront the ecstasies of reawakened passion, the racism of an insular community and the gradual erosion of sensuality into newfound resilience.“It’s like sitting at the deathbed of a loved one,” said the play’s director, Erica Schmidt, who directed a New Group production of “Cyrano” for the stage in 2019, and then for the screen in 2021, both of which starred her husband, the actor Peter Dinklage.Members of the cast rehearse “Orpheus Descending.” Pico Alexander, center, plays the roaming musician who attracts the attention of Lady Torrance.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesThe show, which is a rewrite of Williams’s 1940 play “Battle of Angels,” was first staged on Broadway in 1957. It was a flop, running for only 68 performances. (The New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson called it a “second-rate play” by Williams, though he praised the “lyric intensity” of its dialogue and “tender writing that recalls the delicacy of ‘The Glass Menagerie.’”)“Orpheus Descending” has rarely been revived, but Schmidt, who saw the 1989 Broadway revival and a 2019 production at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London as well as the 1959 film adaptation, “The Fugitive Kind,” said she was drawn to its exploration of how outsiders are treated in the United States. She felt the theme would resonate in 2020, when the play was originally set to be staged before the pandemic forced a postponement — even more so now, amid a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment nationwide.“That’s possibly why it hasn’t been so successful in the past,” Schmidt, 48, said at a rehearsal on a sweltering Wednesday last month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “It’s grappling with these issues that maybe we don’t want from our Williams.”In a conversation during their lunch break, Siff and Schmidt — unintentionally twinning in all black — discussed the play’s appeal, how it speaks to the modern moment and what has surprised them in their now years of wrestling with the work. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Why did you want to do this play?ERICA SCHMIDT The play is shot through with desire; this need to really live life and to cling to what matters to you with both your hands until your fingers break, as Carol [an eccentric aristocrat character] says. It reminds me of when Thornton Wilder says in “Our Town,” “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?”MAGGIE SIFF I was drawn to it because of the size of life and the dark, liminal space of the world. I was also incredibly scared of it. It felt like an undeniable piece of work that one would need to throw oneself into. And then a lot of life happened — my husband passed away, and I didn’t think I would be able to do this play, but I picked it up again, and these are people who are living right on that line. It’s heaven and hell, living and dying. Being alive but dead inside. And then being alive, but coming into life.What has surprised you about the text?SCHMIDT Williams is very prescriptive in his stage directions and his punctuation, but there is an emotional size or participation that is necessitated by this play in certain moments. The question is how you get there without just being dramatic for the sake of being dramatic.SIFF The thing about the play that always made me the most anxious was the hysteria. For the longest time, whenever I’d read it, the third act, I was just like, “I don’t know how this happens.” And the surprise to me in working on it is how organically it happens. While it’s very difficult to earn those states of being that are so heightened and so large, it’s really masterfully built into the play.The other surprise is that while the play is very grim, dark and tragic, there’s so much in it that is really life-affirming and joyful to perform.SCHMIDT The subtext of the play is live, live, live.After rehearsals at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the play has now begun previews at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesThe original was a flop. What are you doing differently in this production?SCHMIDT Williams talks a lot about the vast expanse of darkness outside the door. When you look at “Battle of Angels,” the hanging tree and cotton fields are described as being right outside the door. So this is the hell that Orpheus — Val — is descending into, Two Rivers County, Mississippi, this vast, racist, sexist 1950s hell. And so, working with the set designer, Amy Rubin, we decided to put the store in the middle of the stage so we can create the vast expanse. And that’s not something I’ve seen in other stagings. Why is now the right moment to revive this?SCHMIDT The play demands that you pay attention to how complicit and complacent you are. Lady is essentially sleeping next to the man who wears a white hood in the night. And the legacy within the play of the Choctaw Indians who were driven from Mississippi in the Trail of Tears and the crimes of the slave trade and the legacy of all that blood on the ground. In our current cultural moment, it feels like only by looking at the past — by really looking at it — are we able to understand it and move forward, hopefully. We can’t pretend there isn’t blood on the ground.SIFF The play takes a mythic frame that it puts on top of a very political setup.SCHMIDT How we get out of hell?SIFF What is hell? What is the nature of heaven?SCHMIDT Can one person save another?SIFF Can people change? What does it mean to be corrupt in your soul? Is love redemptive?SCHMIDT Is love real?SIFF These are the questions that galvanize the play, and they’re questions we’ve been asking for centuries. And he’s not afraid to be like ‘Yes, I’m going to take these,’ and he throws all of those things at the wall. Maybe too many!“She’s lived through a lot to be in a place where she can come alive, which is, I think a feat,” Siff said of her character, Lady Torrance.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesMaggie, what do you admire about Lady Torrance? And what frustrates you about her?SIFF She reminds me of some of the women in my family. She’s such a survivor — I want to say tensile, is that the right word? It’s also the thing that’s her undoing — her pride.SCHMIDT [Reading from a dictionary app on her phone] Tensile, relating to tension, capable of being drawn out. A tensile rod.SIFF I think of it as like the thing that supports bridges, right? She’s lived through a lot to be in a place where she can come alive, which is, I think a feat.SCHMIDT Oh, it is a feat.She’s reminiscent of Williams’s other strong female characters who try to bring about change in a male-dominated society but fail. Or even your “Billions” character, Maggie, who’s similarly sharklike.SIFF She would be a mean — I don’t know, what would she be in this day and age?SCHMIDT The owner and proprietor of a really fancy club, like some kind of massively successful Italian wine garden.SIFF She might also be a singer.SCHMIDT Yeah, and a mandolin player.SIFF She’d be some kind of fabulous diva.What do you hope people walk out of the theater thinking?SIFF Like all great pieces of theater that have tragic endings, I hope an audience will be able to walk out and still feel somehow more expanded, rather than “Oh, why did I put myself through that for three and a half hours?”SCHMIDT Oh, no! It’s not three and a half. It’s going to be two and a half, with intermission. And it’s funny.SIFF There’s a lot in it that’s very life-affirming. More

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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