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On ‘The Bear,’ Staging at a Fine-Dining Restaurant Is Rosier Than Reality
by Eliana Willis 1 July 2023, 02:02
Real-life chefs said the portrayal of haute cuisine work was a bit soft-focus.In its second season, the hit FX show “The Bear” ventures into the world of fine dining. As the scrappy Chicago restaurant crashes toward a reopening, two of the employees leave to apprentice at top restaurants in Chicago and Copenhagen.They wake up early and stay late. One polishes forks for hours, the other practices the same pastry techniques over and over and over. They see excellence, and they learn. In fine dining, this sort of apprenticeship is called a “stage,” which rhymes with “mirage.”But for a show often praised for its realistic portrayal of restaurant life, “The Bear” depicts haute cuisine staging as much more personal and touchy-feely than some chefs remembered.After a yearslong industrywide upheaval over work culture and questions about the long-term sustainability of the fine-dining model, some chefs said the show could give diners a frustratingly sunny impression of the realities of working in fine-dining restaurants.“It’s kind of a soap opera,” said Kwang Uh, the chef of Baroo, which is preparing to reopen in Los Angeles. “It’s not a documentary.”Mr. Uh, who runs Baroo with his wife, Mina Park, staged for three months at Noma, in Copenhagen, which recently said it would close its doors to diners.In “The Bear,” Marcus, the pastry chef played by Lionel Boyce, also travels to Copenhagen to stage at a restaurant that closely resembles Noma, though it’s never named in the show.In his very first task, Marcus positions ingredients with long tweezers, focusing in the quiet kitchen on preparing a full dish.Mr. Uh said that rarely happens, even with seasoned chefs. When he arrived at Noma, he had eight years of experience and had even managed restaurants, including Nobu Bahamas. But in the beginning, he picked herbs at Noma and sawed bones for marrow by hand.“Maybe he’s more of a V.I.P.?” Mr. Uh said of Marcus.Eric Rivera, a chef based in Raleigh, N.C., who also staged at Noma said: “Ninety-five percent of your day is cleaning stuff, picking stuff. You’re not plating dishes.”Two of the chefs on “The Bear” also go to culinary school, where they learn knife skills.HuluRichie, played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach, stages at a top restaurant in Chicago. (It is also not named, but the scenes were filmed at Ever, which has two Michelin stars.)In one scene, he peels mushrooms with the executive chef, Chef Terry, played by Olivia Colman. As they work side by side, she quickly reveals an extraordinarily personal detail: memories from her dead father’s notebooks.“That would probably never, ever happen,” said Stephen Chavez, who teaches at the Institute of Culinary Education’s Los Angeles campus.Mr. Rivera also found such a scenario far-fetched. “It’s obscenely rare that stages will even be able to meet the chef,” he said.He also doubted that an employee at a scrappy restaurant in Chicago could afford to go live in Copenhagen and work at the restaurant, which did not pay its interns until recently.“That’s what that show does — they paint this rosy picture of even how it is,” Mr. Rivera said. He added, “This is like, puppies and rainbows.”And “The Bear” addresses the changing culture of kitchens, though neither portrayal is necessarily accurate.In Copenhagen, the chef training Marcus, played by Will Poulter, does not raise his voice as he corrects Marcus’s technique. “No, again, Chef,” he says. “No, worse. Again, Chef.” Firm, but even.Marcus has a wonderful time, but unpaid restaurant interns at some of Copenhagen’s top restaurants reportedly faced abuse and dangerous working conditions for years.Still, many chefs said, the show gets a lot right.Both chefs start early — Marcus arrives at 4:50 a.m. — and both head home after dark.At Noma, stages often work 15 hours, said David Zilber, who is the former director of the Fermentation Lab. Mr. Rivera said he regularly started at 8:30 a.m. and left at 2 a.m.Richie, right, played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach, gets into the excellence of Ever.Chuck Hoades/FXAnd at both stages, they see the cultish commitment to excellence at top restaurants.In Chicago, for instance, Richie shines forks for a full shift. He’s furious, swearing and throwing the cutlery until his mentor sets him straight.“Do you think this is below you, or something?” he asks Richie, before launching into a monologue. Shining forks is about respect, about standards. “Every day here is the freaking Super Bowl.”That part is accurate, too, said Amy Cordell, the director of hospitality for the Ever Restaurant Group. Cleaning silverware is not grunt work, she said. It’s an important detail, just like all the other important details.“There’s no one job that is more or less important than another,” she said. “Finding the perfect cook doesn’t come from them showcasing their knife skills. It comes from how they sweep the floor.”Even with the long hours, the precarity and the low pay, many cooks still agree that stages are essential learning experiences.Hannah Barton, a manager at Herons in North Carolina, staged at Ever for just two days.It has changed the way she does seating, and even the way she hires new staff members, she said.“It seemed like everyone in that building had also drunk the Kool-Aid,” she said. “I wish that all of my servers could have that exact same mentality.” More
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John Early and His Dizzying New Special, ‘Now More Than Ever’
by Eliana Willis 30 June 2023, 19:14
In his new Max special, “Now More Than Ever,” the comedian mixes cringe comedy and cabaret to dizzying effect.John Early’s boundary-blurring new Max special, “Now More Than Ever,” has the perfect title. The hyperbole, salesmanship and euphony of the expression match his literate satirical persona. And it also hints at the main asset and flaw of his hour: the too-muchness of it all.Early is a triple threat in the old-school sense (singing, dancing, acting) as well as in the comedy one (stand-up, sketch, improv). And by improv, I don’t mean the Second City variety so much as the art of vamping, which he jokes is the one thing members of his generation, millennials, were taught to do. Perhaps. But anyone who has seen Early glamorously filibuster (a paradoxical phrase that also suits him) while hosting a live show knows this can be as entertaining as anything.While he might be best known for his scene-stealing flourishes on the series “Search Party” or his long-running double act with Kate Berlant, Early, whose influence can be seen on a whole generation of comedians, shows off a little bit of everything he does here. Using the frame of a behind-the-scenes pop music documentary (Think “Madonna: Truth or Dare”), he mixes goofy comic scenes in which he plays the vain, jerky star with observational stand-up and sultry cover songs.Unlike comics whose music punches up a joke, Early commits to his songs, using a lovely falsetto and pumping bass line in strutting performances of work by everyone from Britney Spears to Neil Young. It’s unusual for a special to toggle between cringe-comedy punchlines and triumphant cabaret exhilaration. And it’s a tricky mix, because the music slows the comedy, and the jokes don’t necessarily complement the music. Early likes being elusive, conflating sincerity and parody, while Ping-Ponging between broad subjects (Donald J. Trump, Silicon Valley) and rarefied references. (He’s the first comic to ever make me cackle at the word “plosive.”)He has more than enough charisma to fit together this jigsaw puzzle of a show. It’s coherent if not easy to access. The key to his persona, I think, can be found in the joke he tells about the always-be-selling vanity of his generation, presenting himself as its avatar. “Here’s what it boils down to,” he says. “I don’t know how to do my taxes, but I do know how to be a badass.” Then he clarifies, “A shell of a badass.”That’s the role Early plays here. In black leather pants, he dances across the stage, flirting with the crowd with as much ingratiation as the camera fawningly displays toward him. This shell is fun to look at, in part because it’s full of cracks. And you don’t just see it when he introduces his parents in the crowd and reverts to a bratty, insecure kid, or when he does a very funny take on the “Access Hollywood” tape that compares Trump to Early as a closeted 12-year-old in the locker room trying to convince his friends he likes a girl. “If we’re honest,” he says, “Donald Trump is not a sensual person.” It’s the way he says “If we’re honest” that cracks me up.One of the many reasons Early is so hard to pin down is that while he leans on swagger and gusto, his most distinguishing moments mix in another register, his bookish alertness to language. My favorite bit is an inspired mountain-out-of-a-molehill joke about how Apple manipulates you into giving up personal data by offering these choices when you try to download an app: “Allow,” a word he describes as “pillowy,” or “Ask App Not to Track,” which he terms “the single most suicidal sequence of monosyllabic sounds.” There’s no way I can do this justice in text, but it’s essentially five minutes of close-read literary criticism that ends in tears and hysteria. If, like me, that’s your kind of thing, you’re in luck.There’s also a strain of comedy here that lampoons the virtue-signaling language of the overly online. Early taps the microphone: “Check, check. You guys can hear me, right?” he asks before adding: “I just want to make sure this is amplifying queer voices.”While Early defines himself as the quintessential millennial, he has the Generation X obsession with a romanticized version of the culture of the 1970s. The grainy film stock and chunky red font of this special remind me of a Tarantino movie. In one revealing nostalgic riff, Early yearns for the days of Bob Fosse, when louche choreographers were on talk shows and dance could be “kinky and mysterious.”Fosse could also be both sexy and ridiculous. While I wish “Now More Than Ever” had a bit more precision and ruthlessness in its direction (by Emily Allan and Leah Hennessey), and there’s a visceral energy lost in the translation from live performance to film, at his best, Early evokes a gyrating, deliriously decadent razzle-dazzle.Toward the end, Early invites his band members to teach him how to play instruments so he can flirt and sexually harass the band, which leads to a visit from the channel’s woman from Human Resources.You get the sense that Early is annoyed by such bureaucratic scolds, but you would never find him responding to it with something as boring as complaining about cancel culture. Instead of defending himself, he flashes a guilty look and rushes into a final song. It’s a hypnotic, joyful performance of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.”As the camera swirls and splotches of yellow light flare, Early, sweat glistening under a disco ball, loses himself in reverie. At the start of the special, titles on the screen instruct you to turn the volume up, and it’s good advice. You can’t recreate the feel of a New York dance party by watching a special at home, but why not try? This is comedy that wants you to get up and dance. More
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Marvin Kitman, Satirist Whose Main Target Was TV, Dies at 93
by Eliana Willis 29 June 2023, 18:53
He twitted the networks for 35 years as a critic at Newsday. He also audited George Washington’s wartime expense account and wrote a biography of Bill O’Reilly.Marvin Kitman, who survived longer as a television reviewer than most of the programs he mirthfully critiqued, and who as a satirist and amateur historian audaciously, if belatedly, audited George Washington’s Revolutionary War expense account, died on Thursday at the Actors Fund Home in Englewood, N.J. He was 93.His son, Jamie Kitman, said the cause was cancer.Mr. Kitman joined the leftist but anti-Soviet magazine The New Leader as a TV critic in 1967, only after the magazine’s editor agreed that he could reveal in his first column that he had never regularly watched television.He began writing a syndicated column for the Long Island daily newspaper Newsday on Dec. 7, 1969 — “a day that will live in infamy,” he said, “as far as the TV industry is concerned.”Over 35 years he churned out 5,786 columns, championing groundbreaking shows like “All in the Family,” “Seinfeld” and “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” while mercilessly panning others. He branded the 1980 debut of the sixth season of “Saturday Night Live” “offensive and raunchy” and wrote of “Kentucky Woman,” a 1983 TV movie starring Cheryl Ladd, the former “Charlie’s Angels” star: “Cheryl Ladd as a coal miner was a very moving television experience. It made me want to convert to nuclear power.”In 1982, Mr. Kitman was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. His last column was published on April 1, 2005. (“Newsday gave me a tryout,” he wrote, “and after 35 years we decided it wasn’t working out.”)He also wrote a number of books. The most notable was probably “George Washington’s Expense Account” (1970), for which he was listed as Washington’s co-author under the name Marvin Kitman, Pfc. (Ret.)A work of nonfiction and not satire, it included a facsimile of Washington’s ledger itemizing cases of Madeira for personal use and military outlays for his army’s frequent, if occasionally strategic, advances to the rear.One commentator wrote that in “George Washington’s Expense Account” — a work of nonfiction, not satire — Mr. Kitman straddled “the line that divides verity from travesty.”An article about the book in The New York Times said that Mr. Kitman’s interpretation straddled “the line that divides verity from travesty” — not unlike Washington himself, who “at times struggled mightily over whether a certain expense was public or private” and “usually resolved the issue in favor of himself.”The historian Robin W. Winks, writing in The Times Book Review, declared that the book was a vehicle for Washington’s famous cherry tree to inflict its revenge. As evidence of Mr. Kitman’s prodigious research into Washington’s intemperance, he cited a mention that the general had gained 28 pounds during the war, which lasted more than seven years.Washington magnanimously rejected the $6,000 annual salary offered by Congress (the equivalent of about $1.7 million in today’s dollars over eight years). Instead, Mr. Kitman wrote, the commander in chief sought reimbursement for $480,000 in expenses (about $17 million today).Mr. Kitman also wrote about Washington in “The Making of the Prefident 1789” (1989), which exposed the political machinations behind Washington’s nonpartisan election — and incidentally, with the unorthodox spelling of its title, satirized the writing style of the era.His first book was the audaciously titled “The Number One Best Seller: The True Adventures of Marvin Kitman,” published in 1966. His last was “Gullible’s Travels: A Comical History of the Trump Era,” published in 2020.One of the liberal Mr. Kitman’s more surprising works was “The Man Who Would Not Shut Up: The Rise of Bill O’Reilly” (2007), which Jacob Heilbrunn, reviewing it for The Times, pronounced “a mash note” to Mr. O’Reilly, noting that Mr. Kitman saw the pugnacious conservative culture warrior as “a potent (and welcome) antidote to the pap served up for decades by the television industry.”Still, Mr. Heilbrunn wrote, the book ultimately revealed that Mr. O’Reilly’s work was less about conservative ideas than about “parading his seething personal resentments in order to become the very thing he purports to despise: a celebrity.”Mr. Kitman in 1964, when he ran for president in the New Hampshire Republican primary under the banner “I would rather be president than write.” He did not win.courtesy of Marvin KitmanPublishers Weekly wrote that it was “difficult to imagine a better researched or less biased work about such a divisive figure as O’Reilly.”Mr. Kitman was no stranger to the political arena himself. He briefly ran for president in the New Hampshire Republican primary in 1964 under the banner “I would rather be president than write.”When his delegate was reported to have received 638 votes in the primary, more than half as many as went to the perennial candidate Harold Stassen, Mr. Kitman demanded a recount. “There was some kind of fraud in my getting so many,” he complained.Had his mock campaign in 1964 actually succeeded, he could have faced the Democratic incumbent, President Lyndon B. Johnson, whose press secretary was Bill Moyers — who, as Newsday’s publisher in 1969, recruited Mr. Kitman.“I hired Marvin,” Mr. Moyers said in an email, “because we needed his wit, without which a media critic is a warrior without a sword.”“In the early days of television — the ’50s and ’60s — he thought the sure way to coax television to fulfill its cultural and creative possibilities was through satire,” Mr. Moyers added. “How could the big moguls in their plush counting houses high above Manhattan not read a guy who wrote that ‘on the TV screen pure drivel tends to drive out ordinary drivel’?”Marvin Kitman was born on Nov, 24, 1929, in Pittsburgh to Jewish immigrants from Russia. His family moved to New York in the 1930s. His father, Myer, was an inspector and clerk for Western Union. His mother, Rose (Kaufman) Kitman, worked at a glider factory in Brooklyn during World War II.“Some parents send their kids to Switzerland ‘for finishing,’” Mr. Kitman often said. “Mine brought me to Brooklyn.”After graduating from Brooklyn Technical High School, he attended the City College of New York. He parents hoped he would become a draftsman but he discovered a facility for writing when he worked on the student newspaper. He graduated in 1953 with a bachelor’s degree in English.Mr. Kitman began writing a syndicated TV column for the Long Island daily newspaper Newsday on Dec. 7, 1969 — “a day that will live in infamy,” he said, “as far as the TV industry is concerned.”In 1951, Mr. Kitman married Carolyne Sibushnick, who later became a photographer. In addition to his son, she survives him, along with their daughters, Suzy Kitman and A.J. Knight, and three grandchildren.After being drafted into the Army, Mr. Kitman served as a sportswriter on the base newspaper at Fort Dix in New Jersey from 1953 to 1955. He then moved to Leonia, N.J., where he worked as a freelance writer, writing a column for a horse racing tout sheet and consumer advocacy articles for the underground humor magazine The Realist.He was a founding editor, with Victor Navasky, of the satirical magazine Monocle, and a staff writer for The Saturday Evening Post.He later appeared on TV as a critic for WPIX and WNEW (now WNYW) in New York. He found himself no less disillusioned with broadcast television after working in the medium himself than he had been when writing about it. Particularly dispiriting was his experience helping to create and write a short-lived CBS sitcom titled “Ball Four” with the former major league pitcher Jim Bouton (who also starred, as a fictionalized version of himself) and the sportswriter Vic Ziegel, based on Mr. Bouton’s book of the same name.“It was the constant rewriting at night, how everyone was always so exhausted,” he recalled to The Record of Bergen County, N.J., in 2013, “and the input from the executives — all they knew about writing was the alphabet.”He went on to write for The Huffington Post and in 2013 began his own blog at marvinkitman.com, in which he expounded Marshall McLuhan-like on the anthropological impact of television. “Our kidneys had changed,” he wrote. “We had to go to the bathroom more often, like during the commercial breaks.”Resorting to his accustomed modesty, Mr. Kitman, tongue planted firmly in cheek, also soliloquized on his bona fides as a constructive critic rather than a chronic kvetch.“Thirty-five years of telling the commercial networks they were steering into an iceberg is the reason they are not being threatened today by cable, Netflix and everybody else streaming on hand-held devices, including the electric toothbrush. (Have you ever tried watching TV on it?),” he wrote in 2013.“The dinosaurs,” he added, “are dancing as fast as they can into the La Brea Tar Pits in L.A. and no longer need my help.” More
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Does ‘And Just Like That …’ Signal the End of Stealth Wealth?
by Eliana Willis 28 June 2023, 15:05
So does the pop culture and fashion wheel turn.And just like that, stealth wealth, the aesthetic made viral by “Succession,” with its toxic billionaires in their Loro Piana baseball caps and Tom Ford hoodies locked in a C-suite cage match to the death, has been swept off screen.In its place: logomania, branding that can be seen from whole city blocks away and accessories that jangle and gleam with the blinding light of bragging rights.The outfits, that is to say, of Carrie and Co. in Season 2 of “And Just Like That …,” the “Sex and the City” reboot come recently to Max — the streamer that, as it happens, also gave us the Roys in their greige cashmere. Both shows are set in New York City, the home of strivers and entrepreneurs, of “Washington Square” and Wharton, of constantly evolving social castes highly, and literally, invested in their own identifiable camouflage.If watching “Succession” was in part like engaging in a detective game to suss out what character was wearing what brand, so insider were the fashion politics, watching “And Just Like That …” is like attending brandapalooza: the double Cs and Fs and Gs practically whacking you on the head with their presence. (Warning: Spoilers are coming.) All the over-the-top fashionista-ing is back. The room-size closets!It’s the yin to the “Succession” yang: a veritable celebration of the comforting aspirational dreams of self-realization (or self-escapism) embedded in stuff that may actually be the most striking part of an increasingly stale series. Certainly, the clothes, which often serve as their own plot points, are more memorable than any dialogue.Well … except maybe for that instantly classic line in Episode 1, uttered by Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker) on her way to the Met Gala in reference to her gown and feather hat: “It’s not crazy — it’s Valentino.” But that’s the exception that proves the rule.Lisa Todd Wexley stopping traffic on her way to the Met Gala in Valentino.Craig Blakenhorn/MaxThere is Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), with her multiple Manolos and Fendis, self-medicating with shopping, returning home one day with six Bergdorf Goodman bags. Charlotte (Kristin Davis) toting her Burberry doggy poop bag (also possessed of a Burberry apron and Burberry ear muffs) and bemoaning the fact that her teenage daughter hocked her Chanel dress to fund her musical aspirations.Lisa Todd Wexley dropping her kids off for camp in a bright green Louis Vuitton jacket and scarf. And Seema (Sarita Choudhury), the character that passes for a restrained dresser thanks to her penchant for neutrals (and the occasional animal print), loudly lamenting the theft of her caramel-colored Hermès Birkin — one of her totems of self, ripped directly from her hands.Lisa Todd Wexley dropping her children off for camp in Louis Vuitton.Jason Howard/Bauer-Griffin/GC ImagesSeema with her caramel-colored Hermès Birkin.Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin, via GC ImagesThere is Loewe and Pierre Cardin; Altuzarra and Dries Van Noten. There is also an effort to repurpose clothes, like Carrie’s wedding dress, in order to promote the virtues of rewearing, but it’s pretty much lost in all the rest of the muchness. There is a dedicated Instagram account on which the costume designers Molly Rogers and Danny Santiago share their finds, with 277,000 followers. @Successionfashion, by contrast, has 184,000.All of which means what, exactly? Is the era of quiet luxury, so recently embraced by TikTok, already at an end? Have our attention spans, so famously abbreviated, moved on? Has the physics of fashion exerted its force and produced an equal and opposite reaction to an earlier action?As if. In many ways, the fashion in “And Just Like That …” seems to protest too much. In part that’s because it seems like a regurgitation of the fun that came before, which was itself a reaction to the minimalism of the early 1990s, which itself was born in that decade’s recession.The fact is, no matter how much lip service has been paid to quiet luxury or stealth wealth or whatever you want to call it, and how it is 2023’s “hottest new fashion trend,” it was never a recent invention. It has been around since way back when it was referred to as “shabby chic” or “connoisseurship” or “old money,” all synonyms for the kind of product that didn’t look overtly expensive but was a sign of aesthetic genealogy — the difference between new money and inherited money that fashion co-opted and regurgitated to its own ends. Just as more obviously coded consumption has been around since Louis Vuitton plunked his initials on some leather back in 1896 or since Jay Gatsby started tossing his shirts.Note the Fendi bag on the back of Carrie’s chair.HBO MaxFind the Burberry-branded doggy poop bag tucked on Charlotte’s arm.HBO MaxWe’ve been declaring the “end of logos” and, alternately, the “rise of stealth wealth” for decades now. There are cycles when one is more ubiquitous than the other (usually having to do with economic downturns when flaunting disposable income is not a great look), but they exist in tandem. They help define each other.Consider that during the current economic uncertainty, exactly the kind of environment that tends to fast-forward the appeal of low-key high-cost items, the most successful global brands have remained the most highly identifiable: Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Hermès. Or that in his recent debut for Louis Vuitton, Pharrell Williams introduced a bag called Millionaire that costs — yup — $1 million. (It’s a yellow croc Speedy with gold and diamond hardware.)What is more interesting is, as Carrie and the gang continue on their merry wardrobed way, how clichéd both styles now seem, how performative. Once they have trickled up to television, it’s impossible not to recognize the costume. Or the fact that whichever look you buy into, they are simply different ways of expressing wealth, in all its decorative strata. And wealth itself never goes out of fashion. More
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In ‘The Bear,’ Molly Gordon Is More Than the Girl Next Door
by Eliana Willis 28 June 2023, 09:18
A new addition to the cast for Season 2, the actress plays Chef Carmy’s love interest — “a human woman,” she said, “not just this sweet, sweet girl.”On a recent Monday afternoon, the actress Molly Gordon ambled through Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. Gordon, a wry and sprightly presence in movies like “Booksmart,” “Good Boys” and “Shiva Baby,” wore chunky sneakers, a schoolgirl skirt and sunglasses that made her look like a cat with an active Vogue subscription.Plenty of actresses on the come-up might have chosen a walk around these streets — and maybe a look-in at a few of the fashion flagships — as an afternoon activity. But Gordon, who stars in Season 2 of the FX series “The Bear,” which arrived last week on Hulu, had a less glamorous motivation. The stress of organizing a thriving acting career while also co-writing and co-directing her first feature, “Theater Camp,” which opens in theaters on July 14, had led her to grind her teeth. She was on her way to her dentist to be measured for a new night guard.“It’s amazing, it’s sexy, it’s all the things,” she said of the dental appliance. “This will not be my last mouth guard.”I had been told that Gordon, 27, was a woman of unusual personal charm. “Charming and disarming,” was how Jeremy Allen White, the star of “The Bear,” put it. And this was abundantly true. I had also heard her described as a girl-next-door type. This rang less true. Gordon has too much savvy for that, too much drive. She is more like the girl who knows exactly where you hide your spare key and can break into your house at will.In “The Bear,” she plays Claire, an emergency room resident and a love interest for White’s jittery chef, Carmy. When Season 1 landed last summer, Carmy became a social media pinup. (Italian beef, but pouty with it.) And yet early episodes of “The Bear” had deliberately avoided any suggestion of sex or romance. In this season, Claire offers both. Which means that Gordon has been set the not exactly enviable task of playing the new girlfriend of the internet’s boyfriend.“She sees right through, in a really beautiful way, to the core of Carmy,” Jeremy Allen White, left, said of Claire, the character played by Gordon.Chuck Hodes/FXA scene from the feature film “Theater Camp,” which Gordon (pictured with Ben Platt) co-wrote, co-directed and stars in.Searchlight PicturesGordon knows that the internet can be a scary place, but on that afternoon, about two weeks before Season 2 dropped, she appeared mostly undaunted. (Mostly, not entirely: “I hope people don’t not like me. That’s all I can say.”) Claire mattered more. In her ambition and her candor and her warmth, Claire has felt closer to Gordon than any part she has played. It has made Gordon hungry for more.“She’s not the girl next door, because I don’t know what that is,” Gordon said. “I feel so grateful that I’m able to have this role where I get to be a human woman and not just this sweet, sweet girl.”A career on camera — and more recently, behind it — is Gordon’s birthright, more or less. The only child of the director Bryan Gordon and the writer and director Jessie Nelson, she grew up in Los Angeles, a precocious presence on her parents’ sets and at their dinner parties. She began acting as a toddler, participating in a neighborhood children’s studio, the Adderley School, where she met the actor Ben Platt.Platt, speaking by telephone, recalled those early performances. Props would malfunction. Costumes would come loose. But Gordon always pushed right through it, if a step or two behind the beat. She struggled in school, but theater was a place where she could shine, where she could play.Gordon had a few small parts in her parents’ projects, but otherwise she stuck to school and camp and community shows, intuiting that she could not yet handle the rejection that auditioning would bring. At 18, she enrolled at New York University. She dropped out two weeks later. “It was really expensive,” she explained. “And I couldn’t sit with how unhappy I was.”“She’s not the girl next door, because I don’t know what that is,” Gordon said of her character in “The Bear,” who indeed did grow up with Carmy.Amy Harrity for The New York TimesHaving found a small apartment, she took acting classes, secured representation and began to land the occasional television role. Eventually, a Gordon type emerged: poised young women who could also express some kindness, some vulnerability. She seems to have come by that poise honestly, though as Platt said, the offscreen Gordon is more self-effacing and silly and neurotic.“She often plays very cool characters,” Platt said. “She is a lot more funny and Jewish than that.”Christopher Storer, the creator of “The Bear,” had worked with Gordon on the Hulu series “Ramy” and immediately thought of her for Claire. Though Season 1 had assiduously ignored the personal lives of the restaurant workers, Storer and his fellow showrunner, Joanna Calo, wanted to see what would happen if Carmy attempted a relationship outside work.“We really wanted to get to what would it be like for Carmy to actually try to experience some form of happiness in his life,” he said.He and Calo decided on a character who had known Carmy for most of his life, someone who saw him for who he was and loved him anyway. On “Ramy,” Storer had found Gordon inherently lovable. “She’s so sweet,” he said. “And she’s so smart. And she’s funny as hell.” He knew she could lend all of that to Claire.Claire and Carmy meet again in the second episode, in the freezer aisle of a grocery, over a carton of veal stock. Claire looks at Carmy, and as a ballad by R.E.M. plays, that look seems to hold history and love and hunger. Carmy has armored himself against feeling, but opposite Gordon’s Claire that armor is useless.“She sees right through, in a really beautiful way, to the core of Carmy,” White said by phone.Ayo Edebiri, a star of both “The Bear” and “Theater Camp” and a longtime friend of Gordon’s, said that Gordon, for all her coolness and penchant for comedy, has a “deep well of emotion” that she can access. “There’s this deep reservoir of desire and feeling,” Edebiri said.But desire and feeling can’t sustain a relationship, especially if the man involved has a walk-in fridge’s worth of unresolved trauma to work through. For Gordon, the scenes opposite Carmy — the sweet, morning-after ones, the anguished ones — felt uniquely personal, mirroring her experiences with past partners. “I’ve been with men and we were so happy together,” she said. “But the happiness made them so angry and sad.”“I would love to lead a project, I would love to stretch myself,” Gordon said. “I can be naïve, I can be twisted, I can be dark.”Amy Harrity for The New York TimesAnd as someone who struggles with work-life balance — in the past year or so, Gordon has shot “The Bear,” shot and sold “Theater Camp” and tried to get a series pitch and a feature script greenlighted, which is to say that her balance skews all work — she has often asked herself the same questions the show forces Carmy to interrogate.“I get to explore things that are really near and dear to my heart,” she said. “Can we accept love? Can we have a work life and a romantic life?”For now, she isn’t sure of the answers.Gordon has never minded playing friends and girlfriends. If a girl next door is what’s required, she knows the address. But in her mid-20s, she has become more comfortable with her own ambition, scope and range.“I would love to lead a project, I would love to stretch myself,” she said just before she departed for her dental appointment. “I can be naïve, I can be twisted, I can be dark. I just haven’t always been given those opportunities.“I’m very grateful for what I have. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t want more.” More
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Murray Hill Is Ready to Share His Personal Life
by Eliana Willis 27 June 2023, 20:04
“I’m really inspired by the younger generation to be more open,” said the famous drag king, who shared photos of his very busy Pride month.Murray Hill’s signature catchphrase is a percussive “Showbiz!” When he began performing as a drag king in New York during the mid-90s on stages he recalls being “the size of a postage stamp,” shouting “Showbiz!” called out the irony of his Vegas showman persona against the gritty and grimy environs of underground drag clubs.Today, at age 51, with roles as Fred Rococo on HBO’s “Somebody Somewhere,” which was recently renewed for a third season, and as host of Hulu’s new game show “Drag Me to Dinner,” the distance between Mr. Hill and the mainstream is shrinking. Still, his life isn’t wall-to-wall glamour. “I’m in a two-bedroom apartment right now, the second bedroom being my bathroom where I’m talking to you,” he told me from his home in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, during our video call.For Pride season, which lasts the month of June, we unleashed Mr. Hill on the town with his iPhone to capture some of his most “Showbiz!” moments.These are edited excerpts from the interview.I love “Family Feud.” With everything that’s going on in the country, to have us on their daytime slot, I thought it was pretty subversive and radical. Steve Harvey did not know what to do with us. That’s me with Haneefah Wood (above, middle) and Bianca Del Rio (above, left). I knew Bianca when she was just starting. We’re cut from the same cloth, but she’s more Joan Rivers; I’m more Don Rickles. And you know what? She bought a house in Palm Springs with a pool. There’s a whole economy around drag that was never there before. Thinking back to the ’90s — those dirty, stinky clubs — that is mind-blowing to me.That was at Susanne Bartsch’s “New York, New York” Pride kickoff party at the Public Hotel. Susanne Bartsch (above) is like the mother of the queer community. She’ll book Joey Arias and Amanda Lepore, who were the generation before me, and then she’ll book Charlene and all these Brooklyn kids. I don’t know anyone else who does this. I was on “Today With Hoda & Jenna” with Neil Patrick Harris. We’re talking mainstream here, a dream come true. So Jenna and Hoda and Neil were all doing cakes and I’m so short I couldn’t see what he was actually doing. He made a cake of me.Neil Patrick Harris is the producer of “Drag Me to Dinner.” I’m pretty sure I’m the first drag king — transmasc, whatever I am — to host a TV show in history. Neil Patrick Harris and his husband, David Burtka, had me host one of their Restaurant Week gigs. I didn’t know at the time, but I think that was my audition. Robert Evans says, “There’s no such thing as luck, it’s opportunity that you’re prepared for.” They gave me an opportunity.I’m a sports guy. When I got to Mets stadium, I was so excited, I was like a child. I was in the owner’s suite behind home plate and they presented me with that jersey. The back says “Mr. Showbiz.” When I had gone to a Yankees game many, many years ago, I wore a whole Derek Jeter uniform and I actually got harassed a lot. So to go back for a dedicated Pride night, it was such a different experience.I saw a lot of posts from these young drag kings saying that they weren’t getting enough Pride bookings. I always say this: If you don’t see yourself represented, go out and represent yourself. So I said, “Let’s put on our own show.” We had 20 drag kings at 3 Dollar Bill and it was completely sold out. I still have goose bumps, because I’ve never seen a show like that. And there was so much sex appeal! It was like “Magic Dyke” instead of “Magic Mike.”On Sunday at the “Pride Across America” broadcast on ABC and Hulu, I was the guest broadcaster. Lea DeLaria jumped off the parade route to talk to us. She’s the O.G. butch comedian. I’ve known Lea since the ’90s and we often get confused for each other, people calling me “Lea” and her “Murray.” When we took this picture, she goes, “We’re both in the same place at the same time. Now people know we’re two different people.”I never would have imagined sharing a picture of a partner, and I’ve never done it before. When I was coming up, there was this drag etiquette where you never broke character. You never knew anybody’s dead name, you never discussed where you were from, what your family life was like, or what your hardships were. I’m really inspired by the younger generation to be more open and not have things be “on” and “off,” they can actually be everything at once.I am in a loving, amazing, queer relationship at a senior age. Her name is Michelle Casino. This is the first girlfriend that I’ve had in my life that I actually liked. They would all agree. I have this line in my act: I go, “I’ve made a lot of mistakes and many of them are in this room tonight.” More
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Ryan Seacrest to Succeed Pat Sajak as ‘Wheel of Fortune’ Host
by Eliana Willis 27 June 2023, 18:34
The game show has demonstrated remarkable durability even as traditional television has declined in the wake of streaming entertainment.Ryan Seacrest, the dexterous Hollywood master of ceremonies, was named the next host of “Wheel of Fortune” on Tuesday, succeeding the longtime host Pat Sajak in 2024.The selection of a star like Mr. Seacrest by Sony Pictures Television, the studio behind the show, is a big bet on “Wheel of Fortune.” The show has demonstrated remarkable durability even as traditional television has declined in the wake of streaming entertainment.The swift decision by Sony executives, made just two weeks after Mr. Sajak announced he would step down next year, also suggests that they are hoping to avoid the succession fiasco that nearly overwhelmed their other hit game show, “Jeopardy!”Vanna White, Mr. Sajak’s longtime “Wheel of Fortune” co-host, is under contract for another year, and is in negotiations to continue with the show, said a person with knowledge of the talks who spoke on the condition of anonymity.“I’m truly humbled to be stepping into the footsteps of the legendary Pat Sajak,” Mr. Seacrest said in a statement. “I can’t wait to continue the tradition of spinning the wheel and working alongside the great Vanna White.”In replacing Mr. Sajak, Mr. Seacrest will face a test: He’ll be replacing a host who is virtually synonymous with the show, like Bob Barker was with “The Price Is Right” or Alex Trebek with “Jeopardy!”Mr. Sajak, a former Los Angeles weatherman, as well as Ms. White, came to “Wheel of Fortune” in the early 1980s and turned the show into a major hit. Within a few years, “Wheel of Fortune” spawned board games, video games, casino slot machines and, eventually, a prime-time spinoff, “Celebrity Wheel of Fortune.”Though “Wheel of Fortune” hardly holds the same spot it once did in American culture — at its height in the 1980s, the game show had a nightly audience of more than 40 million viewers — it remains one of the most popular entertainment programs on television.At its height of popularity in the 1980s, “Wheel of Fortune” had a nightly audience of more than 40 million viewers.ABC, via Everett CollectionIn the most recent television season, “Wheel of Fortune” averaged 8.6 million viewers a night, just a shade behind the 9.1 million who watched “Jeopardy!,” according to Nielsen. Those audiences are nearly as big as anything on prime-time TV, aside from football games.Hosting a popular game show, which requires little more than a few days of work a month, is one of the most coveted jobs in all of entertainment. Landing the job adds another notch to Mr. Seacrest’s résumé, which has included stints as a daytime talk show host, competition series host, red carpet interviewer, radio host and New Year’s Eve master of ceremonies.Mr. Seacrest left “Live,” the morning show mainstay that he hosted with Kelly Ripa, this year after a successful six-year run. He continues to host ABC’s “American Idol,” which garnered an audience of more than six million this past television season, according to Nielsen.When Mr. Sajak announced on June 12 that he would be leaving the show, many in the entertainment industry thought the search for his replacement could take months. Still, succession speculation began immediately, and on social media many “Wheel of Fortune” fans called for Ms. White to take over as host. Puck reported last week that she was in negotiations for a new “Wheel of Fortune” contract.Underscoring just how much celebrity entertainers covet the position, Joy Behar remarked on “The View” two weeks ago that her co-host Whoopi Goldberg had interest in hosting “Wheel of Fortune.”“I want that job,” Ms. Goldberg replied definitively, to the cheers of the studio audience. “I think it would be lots of fun.”After Mr. Trebek died in 2020, Sony trotted out a rotating cast of potential “Jeopardy!” successors, who filled in as guest host for a week or two at a time. In 2021, Sony announced that Mike Richards, the show’s executive producer, would take over hosting duties at “Jeopardy!”But within a matter of days, reports surfaced that Mr. Richards had made a series of sexist and offensive remarks years earlier, and, amid a public uproar, he was pushed out of the job — first as host and then as executive producer of the show. It took nearly another year for Sony to announce that Ken Jennings and Mayim Bialik would be the permanent hosts of “Jeopardy!”Over the last year, the drama surrounding “Jeopardy!” has settled down considerably, and the show has sustained its strong ratings.Two weeks ago, Mr. Jennings was asked on “The View” who should take replace Mr. Sajak.“That’s an interesting question,” Mr. Jennings said, adding: “Hopefully, ‘Wheel’ has got an envelope somewhere that says, ‘What to do when Pat packs it in.’” More
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Where Does ‘Unicorn: Warriors Eternal’ Rank in the Tartakovsky Canon?
by Eliana Willis 27 June 2023, 17:32
The Adult Swim series, from the acclaimed animator Genndy Tartakovsky, wraps up its first season this week. Our critic breaks down his other shows.On Friday, “Unicorn: Warriors Eternal,” the latest series from the famed animator Genndy Tartakovsky, will wrap up its first season on Adult Swim. Decades in the making, this show about a group of immortal fighters was a passion project for Tartakovsky, who is best known for award-winning series like “Primal” and “Samurai Jack.” While “Unicorn,” which is streaming on the Adult Swim website and on Max, has many of the animator’s signatures, it does not always deliver to the standard of some of his earlier series.What does “Unicorn” do well and less well? And what should you watch next if the series served as your introduction to Tartakovsky? I have broken down the good, the bad and the middling of his oeuvre — specifically TV series that he created and had the most creative control over (so no “Powerpuff Girls” or “Hotel Transylvania”) — and how “Unicorn” fits in with the rest.‘Dexter’s Laboratory’ (1996-2003)“Dexter’s Laboratory” is about a boy genius and his inventions.Hanna-Barbera/Cartoon NetworkA zany and fast-paced series about a boy genius named Dexter and his inventions, which are often destroyed by his ballet-dancing older sister, Dee Dee, “Dexter’s Laboratory” is one of the original series that defined Cartoon Network in the 1990s. Though it lacks the loftier intentions of “Samurai Jack,” “Primal” and, now, “Unicorn,” it delivers in fun, original narratives and stellar sound design.The show premiered as part of Cartoon Network’s animated anthology series “What a Cartoon!” in 1995 with a few short pilots. It graduated to a full series the following year, with a variety of short segments in each episode, including fun superhero parodies like “Dial M for Monkey” and “Justice Friends,” featuring goofs on Captain America, Thor and the Hulk.The series’s main appeal, however, is its fantastical plot twists and developments within the span of stories that are just a few minutes long. “Dexter’s Laboratory” has a total of four seasons but Tartakovsky left after the second, and the series lost much of its comedic charms. Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.‘Samurai Jack’ (2001-04, 2017)The animation in “Samurai Jack” features sharp silhouettes and bold colors.Adult SwimAn impressive marriage of classic kung fu movie conventions and futuristic sci-fi dystopia, “Samurai Jack” is not just an example of Tartakovsky’s animation at its best, but a masterful work in its own right. As in “Dexter Laboratory,” the animation in “Samurai Jack” is full of sharp, geometric silhouettes and bold colors. But “Jack,” like “Unicorn,” uses a wider swath of artistic reference points, including paintings of the Edo and Meiji eras and Impressionist-style watercolor paintings.“Unicorn” comes the closest of Tartakovsky’s series to matching the stunning imagination behind the worlds and characters in “Samurai Jack,” which incorporates lengthy, intricately directed action sequences, split screens, modular frames and various aspect ratios. The sound design is so tactile that you can practically feel each stab, crunch or slice.Through Jack’s classic hero’s journey, his noble questing and his encounters with new places and people who need his help, the series gives its story an epic scope. However, that narrative, with its repetitive “Kung Fu” western formula, can start to feel dull after a few episodes, but the revamped final season in 2017 was an improvement.Though the story doesn’t always take off, “Samurai Jack” follows a fascinating line of questioning about what it means to control a historical narrative and how fascism is born and perpetuated through physical and mental slavery and oppression. Plus, it had an awesome theme song. Stream it on Max.‘Star Wars: Clone Wars’ (2003-05)“Star Wars: Clone Wars” includes well-known characters like Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker while pushing the story in new directions.LucasfilmSeparate from the C.G.I. show “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” from 2008, this series explored the years between “Star Wars” films — specifically “Attack of the Clones” and “Revenge of the Sith” — long before Disney+ arrived with its ever-expanding cache of spinoffs. But the show succeeds where so many of the franchise’s extensions fail by including enough familiar characters to satisfy fans while pushing the story into invigorating new directions.In terms of the action sequences, “Clone Wars” and “Samurai Jack” are both first-rate, but the former’s combination of light-saber fighting and Jedi parkour, gymnastics and force-pushes makes for a more dynamic watch.Tartakovsky proves to be the perfect match for George Lucas, who is notorious for writing dialogue as stiff as the hinges of an unoiled C-3PO. Tartakovsky’s minimalist approach to dialogue allows the visuals and unfolding action to speak for themselves; the additions he does make, like fresh exchanges between Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi and the introduction of a new sith-in-training named Asajj Ventress, further illuminate the workings of the “Star Wars” universe. Stream it on Disney+.‘Sym-Bionic Titan’ (2010-11)“Sym-Bionic Titan” has the clean lines and balanced palettes of Tartakovsky’s other work but it lacks charm overall.Cartoon NetworkIn this throwback to ’80s and ’90s fantasy mecha (read: giant robot) shows, a princess, a moody warrior sent to protect her and a robot escape a war on their home planet to settle on Earth as normal human high schoolers. But when their enemies pursue them to Earth, the three discover that they can “Voltron” themselves together into a giant robot fighter via a psychic link, à la “Neon Genesis Evangelion.”This show somehow manages to be too much and not enough: too much camp without the bite, too much earnest replication of the flashy ’80s and ’90s animation style, too mecha and yet too little humor, too little grounding, too little nuance. The humor is D.O.A., the jokes and cookie-cutter dramatic scenarios (fish out of water, a wacky intrusive neighbor) are set up neatly but executed without finesse or charm.The backdrops still have the clean, simple lines and balanced palettes of Tartakovsky’s other work. But they get quickly swallowed by the unctuous gleam and artificial gloss of the central action sequences and by character art that feels dated and muddled, a mix between decades old anime and saturated graphic novels of the previous 10-15 years.“Sym-Bionic Titan” stands out as one of the more loquacious series in Tartakovsky’s career. It shares this quality with “Dexter’s Laboratory,” but “Sym-Bionic Titan” is more awkward and cringe-worthy. Rent it on iTunes.‘Primal’ (2019-present)“Primal,” about a primitive man and his dinosaur, is violent but artful.Adult SwimAt a glance, you might expect “Primal” to be defined by viciousness and machismo — “Metalocalypse” but with dinosaurs. The series, about a primitive man and a dinosaur traveling together, bonded by grief, is violent and masculine. But it is never gratuitous, even when a dying woolly mammoth’s eye looks out pleadingly before being blinded by a sharp stone.That wounded eye says it all. The show, which was renewed for a third season earlier this month, is grounded in a brutal, unflinching philosophy of empathy and survival, exploring how empathy can be both a necessity and hindrance in a fight for survival.From its visual artistry to its unblinking, unsentimental depiction of connection and loss to its well-placed moments of levity, “Primal” feels like a natural evolution for Tartakovsky’s style and writing following “Samurai Jack.” The animator has tended toward spare dialogue, but “Primal” is practically nonverbal. The result is a captivating series that pulls you in to its world and doesn’t let go. Stream it on Max.‘Unicorn: Warriors Eternal’ (2023)“Unicorn: Warriors Eternal” is about magical immortals who are repeatedly reborn as ordinary people.Adult SwimTartakovsky started this series about 20 years ago, around the time he concluded work on “Samurai Jack” and “Clone Wars.” But “Unicorn,” which has been popular but has not yet been renewed for another season, has neither the sophistication of the former nor the fine-tuned action of the latter.The warriors of the title are magical immortals who are repeatedly reborn as different, seemingly ordinary individuals in order to fight an ancient evil — a robot named Copernicus locates each reborn warrior and awakens their dormant powers. “Unicorn” centers on the journey of Emma, who is struggling to adapt to her recently activated warrior alter ego, Melinda, a sorceress with devastating destructive power. She’s joined by Edred, a Legolas-type elven swordsman who was Melinda’s lover in a previous life, and Seng, a floating bald kid who recalls Avatar Aang, drifting in and out of the astral plane.Tartakovsky drew from Hayao Miyazaki (“Howl’s Moving Castle,” “Castle in the Sky”) for the wonderfully fantastical 19th-century steampunk setting — Copernicus’s speechless reactions, spare but full of meaning, are classic Tartakovsky. But the rest of the storytelling is more traditional, and it is flattened by a humdrum plot and a poorly written female protagonist.Tartakovsky’s projects tend to be predominantly male, so perhaps it is unsurprising that Emma/Melinda is saddled with a pat dilemma meant to give her character emotional complexity. She’s caught between a meek, accommodating persona and that of a powerful entity, a well-worn trope from animated series, especially anime. (See “Yu-Gi-Oh!” and “Jujutsu Kaisen,” among others.) It doesn’t help that her identity crisis is conflated with a romantic crisis, as lovers from the two halves of her life vie for her affection.Ultimately “Unicorn” builds worlds and mythologies but not the urgent stakes or interesting characters to drive them. For all of the magic in the series, it is missing the magic of Tartakovsky at his best. Stream it on AdultSwim.com and Max. More

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