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      ‘Lessons in Chemistry’ and TV History

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      Brie Larson plays the fictional host of a 1950s cooking show in this period drama. But the story is inspired by the real TV homemakers who flourished back then.In a scene in the Apple TV+ period drama “Lessons in Chemistry,” Elizabeth Zott (Brie Larson) prepares for her new job as host of a local cooking show with scientific rigor. Poised with pad in hand, Elizabeth, a chemist, concentrates keenly on her home television set, as if she were observing a chemical reaction.“How does one study TV?” her neighbor asks playfully.“Turn on Channel 4,” Elizabeth retorts.Based on Bonnie Garmus’s 2022 novel, “Lessons in Chemistry” follows the brilliant but frequently undervalued Elizabeth as she jumps from one chauvinistic 1950s milieu — an elite research institute — to another: local television.While the character, her show (“Supper at Six”) and the Los Angeles TV station that carries it are all fictional, they are inspired by the robust culture of local broadcasting, rooted in radio, that flourished in the 1950s and early ’60s in cities across the nation. These early days before television went Hollywood, when local stations produced much of their own original programming, allowed for plenty of experimentation and gave women ample opportunity to work both behind and in front of the camera.In its depiction of a fictional cooking show, “Lessons in Chemistry” is a kind of companion piece to the series “Julia,” which tracks Julia Child’s rise to fame and returns next month for its second season on Max. Both follow protagonists who reinvent local television in their own iconoclastic images — Child, played by Sarah Lancashire, as a down-to-earth contrast to a pompous WGBH host (Jefferson Mays), and Elizabeth as a foil to an elderly predecessor who likes to drone on about stockings.Jefferson Mays and Sarah Lancashire in “Julia,” which depicts Julia Child’s rise to TV fame.Seacia Pavao/HBO MaxOne of the writers on “Lessons,” Elissa Karasik, used television chefs like Child, Alma Kitchell and Dione Lucas (who toured Australia), as models for how an “independent thinker” like Elizabeth might use the format of the cooking show to subvert gender expectations. While men like the BBC’s Philip Harben, generally considered to be the first TV celebrity chef, were staged in restaurant-quality kitchens and touted as professionals, female chefs were often filmed on sets meant to recall home kitchens and shoehorned into nurturing, domestic personas.In “Lessons in Chemistry,” this attitude is exemplified by an executive producer, played by Rainn Wilson, who pressures Elizabeth to endorse undesirable sponsors and rails against her penchant for wearing pants. “Big hair, tight dress, homey set!” he rants in one scene. “We need a sexy wife, loving mother that every man loves to see when he comes home from work.”Most daytime television, however, was not actually oriented around male viewers, according to researchers who have written about this period. Marsha Cassidy, a media scholar and the author of “What Women Watched: Daytime Television in the 1950s,” said that these shows were geared toward women’s tastes — even the non-homemaking segments like interviews, musical performances and games. And they were abundant at a time when many middle-class wives still stayed home during the day: Cassidy cited a 1952 Iowa State College survey that found that 72 of the country’s 108 local TV stations were producing homemaking programs.Such shows were mostly locally produced, and nearly every major market cultivated its own personalities in the genre, said Donna Halper, a media historian and professor at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass.Standouts included Monty Margetts, an actress — she would go on to appear in “Dragnet,” “Bewitched” and other network series — who was hired to host “Cook’s Corner” out of an NBC affiliate in Los Angeles. Unmarried, child-free and with little actual cooking knowledge, she was hardly a natural pick for the job, said Mark Williams, an associate professor of film and media studies at Dartmouth. But “she was quick on her feet,” he said, and she and her viewers created a kind of community around the effort to become more skillful housewives.“It was everything local television made affordances for,” said Williams, who writes about Margetts and that era in his forthcoming book, “Remote Possibilities: A History of Early Television in Los Angeles.”Ruth Lyons hosted “The 50/50 Club” and other shows in Cincinnati in the 1950s and ’60s.Cincinnati Museum Center, via Getty ImagesRuth Lyons hosted “The 50/50 Club” in Cincinnati. Though elegantly dressed in white gloves, she was “anything but a model for demure postwar femininity,” Cassidy said. “She was brash, outspoken, had a ‘sandpaper voice.’” She even teased her male co-stars on the air about who was really running the show, and audiences adored her for it.Lyons began on radio, like many early television performers, but not every radio personality made the jump. Some failed to look the part or find their audiences, said Halper, the media historian, and others simply chose not to go on camera. And still others, like Willa Monroe, didn’t have the institutional support in place.Monroe was one of the most popular personalities at Memphis’s WDIA, a white-owned radio station that catered to a Black market. “She took the genre of women’s show and made it appeal to the Black woman at home,” Halper said. “She had interesting guests, she did the recipes and homemaking tips and so on, but she also did a lot of appearances all over the city.”But because neither national television networks nor local stations (or their sponsors) were particularly interested in reaching Black women, Monroe never crossed over to this new medium. “Lessons in Chemistry” alludes to such racial disparities through the character of Elizabeth’s friend Harriet (Aja Naomi King), a Black attorney and mother. “You’re always talking about the things that keep women down, but who does that include?” Harriet asks her at one point. “Have you looked at your audience lately?”Left, Larson and Aja Naomi King in “Lessons in Chemistry.” The show touches on the racial disparities of the era.Apple TV+By drawing attention to race and class alongside gender, “Lessons in Chemistry” spotlights the shortcomings of midcentury feminist politics. In that vein, while wooing Elizabeth to take the job, her producer Walter (Kevin Sussman) vows, “This would be your show. You would be in charge of virtually every aspect of it.” But the dream of total creative autonomy ultimately did not bear out for most women in this era of broadcasting — nor does it materialize for Elizabeth.In 1952, the Federal Communications Commission lifted its freeze on new station licenses. The growth of the medium that followed, together with the establishment of a coast-to-coast coaxial cable, led to the ascent of national network programming at the expense of local stations. Live and prerecorded shows, mostly out of Los Angeles and New York, would come to take the place of locally produced homemaking series.Child would debut “The French Chef” as a weekly public television series in 1963 and go on to become a national treasure. While her local contemporaries are comparatively more obscure now, in “Lessons in Chemistry” Elizabeth Zott stands on their shoulders and channels their style and purposeful spirit. More

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      With a Chuckle and a Cool-Girl Smirk, Beth Stelling Moves Up a Comic Class

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      The stand-up, who has a new Netflix special, delights in inappropriate laughs — none more so than in her bits about aging and childhood.The stand-up Beth Stelling reminds me so much of my best friend from high school.I relate this as full disclosure (comedy is subjective, especially when it intersects with your life) but also because it illustrates one of her considerable strengths. Some comics build a persona that is the best vehicle for their jokes. Stelling belongs to a different tradition: Her comedy emerges from an onstage character as rich and resonant as a great movie protagonist. Even if you don’t know someone like Stelling, her fully realized performance makes you feel as if you do.In “If You Didn’t Want Me Then,” a superb hour on Netflix that reveals a nimble storyteller who has leaped to a new artistic level, she carries herself with the steely cynicism of someone who has seen some things. Dressed all in black, she describes herself as grizzled by the time she was in high school and displays a delight in inappropriate laughs. She tells two stories about relationships with large age gaps and says, “I feel like the only time men believe women is when we’re lying about being 18.”After such lines, she tends to unleash a grunting chuckle that evokes Butt-Head more than Beavis along with a cool girl smirk. A laid-back dirtbag comic energy infuses her act. She never looks as if she were trying too hard. The feat of her standup is how it gradually makes her hard shell transparent, revealing vulnerability, compassion and feminist fire, through her revisiting of a childhood marked by divorce.Her last special, “Girl Daddy” (on Max), introduced audiences to her father, a conservative with a showman streak. “He moved to Orlando, Florida, to become an actor, which is not where you go,” she says, in a sentence that moves quickly before stopping on a dime. While he didn’t get many roles in movies or television, he did create a business dressing up in costumes as advertisements, like playing a leprechaun in front of an Irish bar. She once again uses him as a comic target, telling scathingly deadpan stories about his eccentricities, centering one bit on his raccoon collection. But watching her roast him you can’t help but think that some of his performance chops rubbed off on her.What stands out more in the new show is her sneakily loving portrait of her mother, who raised her in Dayton, Ohio, where the special was shot. The hour opens with a view of the city’s modest skyline alongside chunky red letters announcing the title with a heavy-metal guitar riff. When she says of Dayton that “not everyone showed us the respect we deserve,” Stelling could be talking about her mother, a teacher of more than three decades whom she has presented as a Marge Simpson type.Stelling opens with a story about a boy in her second-grade class who cracked an obscene joke at her mom’s expense that she had found hilarious. What follows is something of a fakeout. While she pauses to celebrate this boy’s joke, she’s setting up a belated if cheerful revenge, delivering the brutal comeback that she didn’t serve up when she was young and that her mom, a proper professional, never would.Her mother is unfailingly supportive of her career, always hyping her up, albeit clumsily, saying if she was in the Olympics, she would win the gold medal. Then Stelling, pausing and imitating her mother, finishes the compliment: “in women’s standup comedy.”One of Stelling’s sneakiest assets is her voice, a Bamfordian instrument that moves effortlessly from grunts to accents to girlish squeaks to bourgeois entitlement. She has a joke about how you’re a gymnast when you’re young because “you’re unaware of the many ways your neck can break” that gets most of its laughs from the change in speeds and intonations of its delivery.And yet, early in her set, she does a bit about how she plans to age and not get plastic surgery. “If I do get surgery,” she says, “it’s going to be a lobotomy.” Then comes her trademark chuckle before imagining telling her friend as if a whacked-out character: “Let’s get our heads done.” She then repeats the line but in a lower register closer to her own.She says she ran this joke by her mother and, imitating a cheerful Midwestern woman, the response was, “Wouldn’t that be nice.” Stelling looked stunned. “Curveball, Diane!” she marvels about her mom. Stelling clearly always saw herself as the dark one, but this special is a portrait of her getting older, wiser, seeing things anew. With a mix of melancholy and admiration, she adds, “I used to be able to shock her.”Shock is part of Stelling’s tool kit. She has two punchlines in this special that pull it off extremely well, both of which require too much context to ruin here. They produce the kind of belly laughs that can only come from surprising jokes not safe for work. But my favorite moments are the quieter ones, like the line about not being able to shock her mother, a soft laugh at best. It lingers because there’s subtext. She’s performing getting older and realizing her mother might be different than she thought.It suggests that the easy categories one might assume from her stand-ups — fun, reckless dad and square mom — don’t capture them in full. And through that realization, Stelling reveals a deeper version of herself. You might even recognize yourself in this moment. We all get older and see our childhood from new perspectives. And in your darker moments, getting your head done might even seem, for a moment, like sweet relief. More

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      ‘Billions’ Season 7, Episode 11: Courting a Centrist Candidate

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      Prince and Axe jostle for the attentions of Gov. Nancy Dunlop.Season 7, Episode 11: ‘Axe Global’“So, well, there’s that.” You said it, Axe. The penultimate episode of “Billions” has now come and gone, and with it one of the show’s final opportunities to really blow us away with a patented five-steps-ahead scheme that ends in a sudden twist turning everything on its ear. That is … not what we got.Don’t get me wrong — the five-steps-ahead thing is still alive and well in “Billions”-land. Mike’s story line hinges on how, or whether, to respond to the latest attack from Chuck and company: an all-out legal assault on his private holdings by the Southern District of New York. These are the only companies in which Prince Cap remains invested after Mike orders everything else dissolved to reduce vulnerability to Axe’s financial machinations. He has already voluntarily taken a huge loss as a defensive maneuver; to lose further, from that position, would make him look fatally weak.The information finds its way to the Prince brain trust via the young Southern District prosecutor Amanda Torre, who seems to act on her own out of disgust with Chuck’s vendetta. Given what we come to learn of his plan, though, it seems more likely she’s only playing the informant while still working for the team. (Honestly, the only thing that stops me from saying “She’s in on it” is the trust placed in her intel by Kate, who is no dummy. On the other hand … well, more on that later.)Using a football metaphor as elaborate as it is unnecessary — seriously, guys, the iocane powder scene from “The Princess Bride” would have served perfectly well — Mike games out the various scenarios. Maybe this is the attack, and they should meet it full on. Or maybe Chuck is counting on a big response, so they should hold their fire. Or maybe he expects them to hold their fire, so they should attack. And so on, and so on, and so on.Then Mike realizes that Chuck’s plan is to immerse him in the dilemma of which proverbial cup to drink from. While he and his brightest minds are trying to untangle the legal and financial implications of Chuck’s maneuver, Chuck and Axe are out there advancing the real plan, which involves an assault on the political front.Chuck and Axe are out to woo the popular centrist Democratic politician Nancy Dunlop away from endorsing Mike after he torpedoed her candidacy at that gathering of the rich and powerful in Episode 8. While wounded, she’s not politically dead, and her support — perhaps even as a running mate — would make Mike the heir apparent to the White House, security briefings and all. But, again, she’s not politically dead, and could conceivably win the presidency herself, provided she has the backing of a big-money player like Axe.The results are as disappointing to Chuck, Axe, Wags, Wendy and Taylor as they are scathing about the political establishment. Here’s a woman with strong centrist-Democrat bona fides, described by Chuck as “my beau ideal” of a candidate, openly offering her services to the highest bidder. That turns out to be Mike, who offers her the vice presidency. Their big debate about the first-strike use of nuclear weapons is apparently water under the bridge when political power is on the table.Cynicism really is the order of the day in this episode. In addition to courting Dunlop, Axe takes a run at rehiring his old crew. Wendy and Taylor are on board, obviously, as is the much-missed Mafee. Victor, Dollar Bill and Rian all show up to hear out the offer but decline, dutifully reporting it to Mike after the fact. Tuk and Ben Kim also turn it down, though they know their affection for Axe is too strong to do so in person; as such, they feel no need to flag the communication.That’s their mistake. Dollar Bill and Victor are rewarded for their candor and loyalty, while Ben Kim and Tuk are given the ax for failing to tattle and for lacking the fortitude to decline the offer in person. Such men can’t be trusted. As for Rian, she walks away from both outfits, choosing to quit Prince Cap and travel the world.That leaves the anomaly of Winston (Will Roland). Anchored to Prince Cap by its legal takeover of the algorithm he developed on company time, he extorts a huge payout to adjust it to Mike’s new low-risk parameters. We are left to wonder about the inclusion of this scene, which seems to do little beyond giving the actor Stephen Kunken more time to shine as the truly awful compliance officer Ari Spyros, and allowing Roland to recite some lyrics from Jethro Tull’s “Thick as a Brick.” (“Aqualung” gets all the attention, but real Tull-heads know.) Perhaps this dog will bark in the finale.Whatever may eventually happen with this almost vestigial story line, it doesn’t here. There’s no big prestige to whatever trick the writers Brian Koppelman, David Levien and Beth Schacter are pulling, not in this episode anyway. This one really is as simple as two groups vying for an alliance with a minor character we’ve seen only once, ahead of revealing her pick. Forgive me, but I still have visions of that fabulous shock ending from Season 2’s penultimate episode dancing in my head, a level of scheming, skulduggery and surprise that I want to see again before the curtain closes.We may yet get it. I simply refuse to believe that a show this beautifully bombastic won’t go out with a bang, in a finale with more twists and turns than a Mario Kart racetrack. Keep in mind that while the opposing armies seem pretty firmly established, they have every possibility of fracturing, reconfiguring or turning on themselves. Which leads to the biggest question of all, and no, it’s not whether Chuck and Axe can stop Mike Prince — it’s whether they will be back at each other’s throats if and when they do.Loose changeI don’t know about you, but opening an episode with a David Bowie cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City” and closing it with Procul Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” is a guaranteed way to get on my good side.The laugh line of the night goes to this exchange between Mafee and Chuck, an odd couple if ever there was one, after Mafee repeatedly asks permission to smoke up during one of their meetings, claiming it sharpens his mind. “My doctor says I have a paradoxical reaction to weed,” he explains. “Your doctor says that,” Chuck replies, deadpan. “I mean, she’s not technically a doctor,” Mafee admits. “More of a spirit walker.”I’m broadly sympathetic with Mafee’s claim regarding the mind-expanding power of the devil’s lettuce, but “spirit walker”? He’d have been better off just saying, “The guy behind the counter at the gray-market shop where I bought it said it’s good for creativity.”I won’t soon forget Ari reciting “Jerusalem” to a deeply confused Winston and Kate during their meeting. I had no idea how badly I needed to hear Kunken proclaim “Bring me my chariot of fire” until I was actually hearing it.There’s a weird optics thing going on with Prince’s brain trust, right? Other than Prince himself, every member — Scooter, Philip, Kate, Bradford, even their informant Amanda — is a person of color. The Chuck/Axe/Wendy/Wags/Taylor alliance is as white as the surface of a mirror on Wags’s coffee table.That said, there are no doubt many cards yet to be played, and it would not surprise me at all if one or more of Mike’s minions is secretly plotting his downfall. As I alluded to earlier, my money is on Kate. Even aside from her co-signing of the possible double agent Amanda, her becoming this evil this quickly feels like a smoke screen for something else.On the other hand, Scooter betraying his liege lord at last would have an even more poetic ring to it. Philip seems like a true believer in the mission of making loads of money at this point, but in the past he’s been wise to what a weasel Mike really is, and in this episode he rather pointedly asks Scooter if he ever questions Mike’s will. As for Bradford, I don’t see him shivving his boss, but I also can’t imagine him sticking around if it seems he’s backing the losing horse.The point is that Mike’s support network does not seem as firm to me as it does to him. Doesn’t he learn this to his detriment in this very episode? His wife, Andy, leaves him for the mountain-climbing boyfriend he deliberately sacrificed on the altar of his own ambitions before Axe secured the guy’s liberation.Come to think of it, Mike’s near-total lack of emotional response to the apparent end of his marriage (campaign appearances aside) strikes me as a weakness in and of itself. Any man so fixated on a political prize that he breezes past rejection by the love of his life is vulnerable to attack from beyond his range of focus. Axe sneaking behind his back to free the mountain climber — and thus put the kibosh on the Princes’ marriage while the man was picking out tuxedos for his launch party — is in fact, a case in point.Tough to believe it took the show this long to set a scene in Rao’s, as it does for Axe and Dunlop’s big sales-pitch meeting. Perhaps they were saving the big guns for the final act.When Mike hears he has been invited to Camp David, he replies, “Boom,” with a subtle accompanying explosive sound effect. I’d say the show has made its stakes pretty clear. More

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      Late Night Sums Up Sidney Powell’s Plea Deal

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      The former Trump lawyer could testify against the ex-president in one of his cases — “and you don’t even know which one I’m talking about,” Seth Meyers marveled.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Get Out of Jail Free PleaSidney Powell, a former lawyer for Donald Trump, pleaded guilty in the Georgia election interference case, agreeing to testify against other defendants, possibly including the former president. Powell, who will avoid prison time, will also have to pay a $9,000 fine and write a letter of apology to the people of Georgia.On Thursday, Seth Meyers said it was still shocking to him that “when discussing a former president, I have to say ‘one of the four criminal cases’ — and you don’t even know which one I’m talking about.”“It could be the election interference case, the stolen documents case, the hush money case, the Georgia case, or, because the news is so insane, there could be some other criminal case you totally forgot about, like the investigation into what the hell he’s hiding under that bulky jacket. Looks like a grandpa trying to sneak a bunch of kids into an R-rated movie.” — SETH MEYERS“Being Trump’s craziest lawyer is like being the most divorced dad at an Embassy Suites.” — MICHAEL KOSTA, guest co-host of “The Daily Show”“As part of the deal, Powell gets six years’ probation and appears to be cooperating with prosecutors in their case against the others, which includes Trump. Oh, man, the Chicken McNuggets are coming home to roost, aren’t they?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Just a letter? This woman actively tried to steal an election. The least she could do is apologize door to door like a sex offender.” — RONNY CHIENG, guest co-host of “The Daily Show”“She got treason down to an apology letter. Like, that’s an amazing negotiation. Is she still practicing? Because I might want to hire her.” — RONNY CHIENGThe Punchiest Punchlines (Just Don’t Edition)“After failing to get elected speaker of the House twice this week, congressman Jim Jordan said that he’s not dropping out and will keep running. When Jordan said that he was running a third time, even Nike was like, ‘Just don’t.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Yep, Jordan wants to be speaker of the house so that he doesn’t have to go back to his old job of being the villain in ‘Scooby-Doo.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Republican congressman Carlos Giménez said yesterday that his office has received robocalls encouraging him to vote for Ohio congressman Jim Jordan. But then he remembered he actually saved Jordan’s number as ‘Scam Likely.’” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingJimmy Kimmel got an interview with the “Bachelor in Paradise” star Sam Jeffries, who left the show after an extended bout of constipation.Also, Check This OutLayla Mohammadi in “The Persian Version.”Yiget Eken/Sony Pictures ClassicsMaryam Keshavarz’s semi-autobiographical film “The Persian Version” is about a rising Iranian American director and her tumultuous family life. More

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      Jimmy Kimmel Recaps Biden’s Big Day in Israel

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      Kimmel joked that President Biden and Israel “go way back”: “You know how Moses parted the Red Sea? Joe was the guy who dared him to do it.”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Biden in WartimePresident Joe Biden flew to Israel on Wednesday, meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.Jimmy Kimmel noted that White House officials say Biden prefers to meet other world leaders face to face, particularly in times of crisis — “which is a nice way of saying he still doesn’t know how to Zoom.”“It’s very rare for an American president to fly into a combat zone. They say the last time Biden was in this much danger, he was rolling with Corn Pop.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“President Biden arrived this morning in Israel, making him the first president to visit Israel during a time of war — which is pretty dangerous, but he should be OK once he makes it down the stairs.” — SETH MEYERS“The president gave a surprisingly strong speech. He told the Israeli people the United States stands with them. He condemned the disgusting attacks by Hamas and cautioned Israel to learn from the mistakes we made after 9/11. This kind of thing is where Biden really shines. He and Israel go way back. You know how Moses parted the Red Sea? Joe was the guy who dared him to do it.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Wow, wise words from President Biden. Anytime an American president admits a mistake, it’s a big deal. So, Israel, please learn from us — don’t stay in Afghanistan for more than 20 years, tops.” — MICHAEL KOSTAThe Punchiest Punchlines (Worse Than the First Edition)“Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan failed to secure enough votes today in the second round of voting to become House speaker and received only 199 votes. That’s worse than he did yesterday! If they keep doing votes, he’s eventually going to get to zero, and then he’ll fade away like Marty McFly in a family photo.” — SETH MEYERS“That’s like retaking the S.A.T. and finding out you got dumber somehow.” — JIMMY FALLON“But he’s not giving up. He’s going to keep on going until he loses unanimously.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingTwo “Tonight Show” audience members competed in a challenge on Wednesday to paint a portrait of Jimmy Fallon on a giant pumpkin as quickly as possible.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightBilly Porter will promote his upcoming album, “Black Mona Lisa,” on Thursday’s “Late Night.”Also, Check This OutAdèle Haenel on the grounds of PS21 in Chatham, N.Y., where she was appearing in “L’Étang.”Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesThe French actress Adèle Haenel is in New York this week, performing with the choreographer-director Gisèle Vienne “L’Étang.” More

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      Review: ‘Scavengers Reign’ Is a Gorgeous, Hypnotic Space Trip

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      Max’s animated sci-fi saga imagines a bizarre ecosystem in which humans are the invasive species.“Weird” hardly begins to describe the extraterrestrial life-forms the viewer encounters on the planet Vesta in “Scavengers Reign.” These include: lamprey-like blobs you can slap on your face to use as breathing masks; herds of equine beasts with throat pouches that inflate when they bellow; spiky fruit (I think?) whose ropy innards double as electrical cables; and a rhino-esque critter whose digestive tract harbors bioluminescent sacs that are useful as torches. (You retrieve them, er, the hard way.)But these creatures are not the aliens. We are. The animated series, whose first three episodes of 12 arrive Thursday on Max, is a lush, magnificent, hypnotic story of human survival in a place that feels, in a way that sci-fi planets only occasionally manage, truly otherworldly.The series builds on “Scavengers,” a short film by Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner. In the original (which aired on Adult Swim in 2016 and is available online), a pair of shipwrecked space-farers wordlessly use the local life-forms in a Rube Goldberg bioengineering scheme to survive their isolation.The long-form version, created by Bennett and Huettner, adds dialogue, characters and back story, following several crash survivors scattered across the surface of this strange world. Azi (Wunmi Mosaku) cultivates a farm assisted by Levi (Alia Shawkat), a quirkily malfunctioning robot. The irritable Sam (Bob Stephenson) works on a rescue plan with Ursula (Sunita Mani), a more curious-minded colleague who sees a “profound” beauty in their hostile surroundings. Elsewhere, Kamen (Ted Travelstead), stranded alone, wrestles with guilt over his role in the calamity that landed the crew here.If the survivors are living a nightmare — there is no lack of toxic, parasitic and stabby wildlife all around them — it is a gorgeous one. The luxurious backgrounds are reminiscent of Studio Ghibli films; the polymorphous biological forms make this feel like “Lost in Space” if it were rebooted by David Cronenberg.But while “Scavengers Reign” looks epic, there is no sprawling lore or mythology as in recent sci-fi serials like “Foundation” and “Raised by Wolves.” It’s a man-and-woman-and-robot-vs.-nature struggle, full of ingenuity, ooze and blood. (Parents note: This is definitely an adult animated series, both in language and in the level of occasional gore.)The series is more entrancing than horror-show scary, though. It is attuned to its characters’ loneliness, fear and remorse, and there is a strain of psychedelic spirituality in its rendering of the surreal ecosystem.There is not a clear line, on this planet, between plant and animal life, if the categories apply at all. The world is frightening and violent but in its own way harmonious. Bennett and Huettner have dreamed up a baroquely balanced ecosystem. Some creatures poison you, others eat the poison. What may seem to the harried survivors like constant danger is, on Vesta, just the cycle of life.After all, we may root for the humans, but they are the invasive species here. “Scavengers Reign” imagines a future in which humanity treats the universe, like it did Earth, as a grab bag of extractable resources. The castaways, we learn, were workers in a corporate flotilla who crashed on the planet as a result of a dangerous shortcut meant to make their trip more profitable. The characters who fare best in this strange new world are those who adapt to it, sync with it, or even — like Levi, whose circuitry has become entwined with native vegetation — become part of it.There is such a thing as too much symbiosis, of course. A silent, poker-faced, frog- or newt-like creature that thrives by mesmerizing other animals into bringing it food (think the Hypnotoad from “Futurama,” but creepier) ends up enthralling Kamen into its service, gorging itself on the offerings he brings it until it becomes massive and insatiable. But even this fearsome beast is just doing what comes naturally; the injection of a human into its ecosystem is what turns it into a monster.Expanded from short film to series, “Scavengers Reign” becomes less meditative and more of a gripping survival adventure; it also drags a bit in its last half. But the real attraction is less the plot than the immersive imagery and biological inventions, like the reed-like stalks that make musical noises when bobbled, then shoot spikes. “Scavengers Reign” is much like those plants. It plays a haunting tune, but it can also draw blood. More

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      Danny DeVito, His Daughter and a Lot of Baggage (Onstage)

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      The pair, starring in Theresa Rebeck’s Broadway comedy “I Need That,” have a chemistry that “comes with playfulness, love and a history of irritations.”The first time Lucy DeVito acted onstage — an electrifying turn as an ant in a second-grade play about insects — her father, Danny DeVito, watched proudly from the back of the room. (DeVito, who had already starred in the television series “Taxi” and appeared in films like “Terms of Endearment” and “Throw Momma From the Train,” didn’t want to pose a distraction.)Now, as Lucy makes her Broadway debut, he has the best seat in the house: right onstage with her. Starring together in Theresa Rebeck’s new comedy, “I Need That,” they are playing the roles they know best: father and daughter.Directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, the play, in previews at the American Airlines Theater, centers on the widower Sam, a recluse and hoarder facing eviction. His daughter, Amelia, and his best friend, Foster (played by Ray Anthony Thomas), beg him to give up and give in — give up the stuff; give in to some help — much to his chagrin, over the show’s 90 minutes.In Midtown Manhattan recently, the DeVitos sat in a rehearsal space, the detritus from a deli breakfast spread out on a table in front of them. The improvised set was a disaster, a small kitchen surrounded by piles of junk: board games, record players, plastic bins, garbage bags, clothing, shoe boxes. At one point in the show, Danny’s character unearths a television set from several layers of trash.Ray Anthony Thomas, left, Lucy DeVito and Danny DeVito, whose character, a hoarder, is facing eviction if he doesn’t clean up his property, in “I Need That.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe script was still pliable, and both of them were grasping to achieve the fullness of their characters. Danny was memorizing his lines, looking up toward the heavens every time he drew a blank. (When he focused, he curled into himself, hunched into a hug, his bottom lip out in consternation.) His riffs bejeweled every line: When the script called on him to invite his daughter in for breakfast, he instead laid out a menu. “You want breakfast? Coffee? Cereal? Eggs? Fruit? I got a really ripe plum!”Lucy, on the other hand, was more studious and probing. During her character’s apex in the show, the plea for her father to change his life, her voice curdled from sadness into a resigned anger. While running those lines, Lucy pulled over to ask for directions from von Stuelpnagel: Where is her character, emotionally, right now? Should she remain hard or retreat back into softness? They talked it through, Lucy smacking a tiny Rubik’s Cube into her palm to punctuate her points. Her father looked on, silent and smiling.“She works a lot. She’s really, really in there — she’s in there, digging, and that’s part of the whole idea,” Danny said a few weeks later during a break from rehearsals. “She never lays down on it. She’s always on it.”Danny, 78, began his acting career on the stage. Eager for something to do after graduating from high school in Summit, N.J., he began working at his sister Angie’s beauty shop. She encouraged him to train as a cosmetologist at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and once he was immersed in the world of professional theater, he decided to try out acting for himself. After he graduated in 1966, DeVito acted in productions in New York, and in 1971 garnered attention for his role as Martini in the Off Broadway production of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” He also reprised the part in the 1975 film.He soon became a bona fide star playing Louie De Palma, the tiny-but-mighty dispatcher on the sitcom “Taxi,” which ran for five seasons from 1978 to 1983. By the time the show ended, he had met and married Rhea Perlman, known for her role as Carla Tortelli on “Cheers.” Lucy, their first child, was born in 1983. (The couple, now amicably separated, have two other children, Jake and Gracie.)“They have exactly the sort of chemistry you’d expect a father and daughter to have, and that comes with playfulness, love and a history of irritations,” said the show’s director, Moritz von Stuelpnagel.OK McCausland for The New York TimesLucy, 40, performed in school productions throughout her childhood, acting in plays like “For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls,” by Christopher Durang. In college, she said she finally admitted to herself that she wanted to be an actor. She did not expect it to be easy; if anything, she prepared for the opposite. Growing up so close to the industry, she said earlier this month, she was “very much aware of the hardships and how much disappointment there can be, how rough the business is.”After graduating from Brown University in 2007, Lucy moved to New York City, where she played an autistic girl in an Ensemble Studio Theater production of “Lucy,” by Damien Atkins, and starred in “The Diary of Anne Frank” in Seattle, at the Intiman Theater. In 2009, she co-starred alongside her mother in a run of “Love, Loss, and What I Wore,” the play adapted by Nora and Delia Ephron from Ilene Beckerman’s memoir. (Lucy joined the show’s rotating cast first.)In Hollywood, nepo babies, or celebrity children who coast off their family connections to get work they may not deserve, rule the screen. In New York, they’re passé. When she first began acting, Lucy fantasized about changing her last name, not wanting her parents’ reputations to precede her. (It doesn’t help that she is a perfect, even split of her parents’ faces, walking proof of the Punnett square.)She never got far enough to decide on a name, though her father had some suggestions. Why not Nicholson? “De Niro, even,” Danny quipped.“Lucy has always done the work,” Danny said. “I don’t think there’s ever been a time when either of us ever picked up a phone.”The Roundabout Theater Company has now given both DeVitos their Broadway debuts. In 2017, Danny starred in a revival of Arthur Miller’s “The Price,” for which he received a Tony nomination. (Danny had to, among other things, wolf down a hard-boiled egg while speaking his lines during every performance.)Rebeck’s play is not their first time playing father and daughter. In the 2022 animated FX series “Little Demon,” Danny was the voice of Satan and Lucy played his daughter, the Antichrist.DeVito starred with Mark Ruffalo, left, and Tony Shalhoub, right, in a 2017 revival of Arthur Miller’s “The Price.” He provided comic relief, making a meal of his Tony-nominated performance, our critic wrote at the time.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I Need That,” scheduled to open on Nov. 2, will be the pair’s second production directed by von Stuelpnagel. In 2021, they collaborated on the audio play “I Think It’s Working Pointing Out That I’ve Been Very Serious Throughout This Entire Discussion or, Julia and Dave Are Stuck in a Tree,” written by Mallory Jane Weiss, for the theater podcast and public radio show “Playing on Air.”Lucy asked von Stuelpnagel to keep them in mind for future projects, and he connected the family to Rebeck. After a few long consulting meetings on Zoom, Rebeck wrote “I Need That” with the family in mind, even integrating small details from their lives.Von Stuelpnagel said their interplay in rehearsals, in the same mold as their characters’ relationship, sharpened the production. “Lucy knows her father’s inclinations for certain choices he might make and she nudges him to come at it in a different way, and he listens with great respect,” he said. “That kind of collaboration is a special thing to witness.”In one scene, Amelia shows up at her father’s house to discover that he has fallen and hit his head. She rushes to grab a bag of frozen peas for his head, checking his pupils, moving with the love of a mother and the brusqueness of a drill sergeant. It felt like both a role reversal of a familiar scene and a preview of the future: Who takes care of whom?Though their real-life relationship inspired the play, Danny and Lucy see the differences between them and their characters, agreeing that, as a real family, they are less eccentric and less prone to yelling.The DeVitos have played father and daughter once before. In the FX animated series “Little Demon,” Danny was the voice of Satan and Lucy played his daughter, the Antichrist.OK McCausland for The New York Times“You’re a very capable human being, and Sam doesn’t leave his house,” Lucy said to her father during the interview. “You’re one of the most social people I know. There’s a different kind of fear and exhaustion that comes from that.”Danny agreed that he had “different problems” than Sam. “I feel blessed that I have kids who care about me enough not to write me off,” he said.During the rehearsal process, the DeVitos sought to create a homey environment in a few ways, including, most importantly, by bringing in what Lucy called “amazing snacks.” Recent holidays on set have included cannoli Sunday, chocolate Monday and taco Tuesday.“I’ve been on a diet since I was 10 years old, and I’m trying to figure out how to make everybody a little fatter than I am,” Lucy said. “If you’re around me, usually I’m bringing a sandwich or a nice hunk of provolone with some anchovies and some bread.”In rehearsals, it’s hard to tell whether Lucy is talking to her father or reading lines. “They have exactly the sort of chemistry you’d expect a father and daughter to have, and that comes with playfulness, love and a history of irritations,” said von Stuelpnagel. “That familiarity breeds a really deep, dynamic relationship.” More

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      in Television

      ‘All the Light We Cannot See’ Casts Blind Actresses

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      In a new Netflix mini-series, the two actresses playing the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel’s protagonist, are blind, just like the character.On a set on the outskirts of Budapest, as the crew reset cameras for the next take, Nell Sutton, 7, sat up in bed and asked her director, Shawn Levy, a question:“How will you make it look like night?”Levy explained that the blue lights, set up around the room, would convey nighttime onscreen. Sutton was satisfied, and settled back into position, headphones on, to start a scene in which her character, Marie-Laure, is listening to the radio way past her bedtime. Her father, played by Mark Ruffalo, comes in and catches her. She tells him that she is learning about the magic of radio waves. “The most important light is the light you cannot see,” she says.Sutton, cast as the young Marie-Laure in “All the Light We Cannot See,” Netflix’s four-episode adaptation of Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is blind. The actress playing the character 10 years later, Aria Mia Loberti, is also blind.In some ways the set, which took over a site next to an abandoned brewery last year for a few weeks over the summer, seemed like any other: People with walkie-talkies strode past equipment and craft services. But this production was the first time that blind lead characters in a major television show were being played by actors who were themselves blind, and the attention that went into accommodating those actors, and making the show as true as possible to the experiences of people who are blind, was significant.In the show, Daniel (Mark Ruffalo) catches his young daughter Marie-Laure (Nell Sutton) up past her bedtime listening to the radio.Atsushi Nishijima/Netflix“All the Light We Cannot See” is set in occupied France during World War II and follows Marie-Laure, an amateur radio enthusiast and the daughter of a master locksmith at Paris’s Museum of Natural History, and Werner (Louis Hofmann), a young German radio engineer who is drafted into a Nazi Wehrmacht squad to trace a radio signal that is broadcasting resistance messages. Marie-Laure is behind the signal, which she sends from Saint-Malo, a town on the northern coast of France, where she and her father moved while Paris was occupied.The book’s title refers to radio signals, and its protagonist’s sightlessness, but also to moral blindness, Doerr said in an interview on set. “In many ways, Marie-Laure is a much more capable-sighted character than Werner for much of the book,” he added.The adaptation was directed and produced by Levy (“Stranger Things”), and co-produced by Dan Levine (“Arrival.”) When the book came out in 2014, the producer Scott Rudin snapped up the adaptation rights to develop a feature film. Years later, when Levy learned that Rudin intended to let the rights lapse, he approached Doerr and proposed making a limited TV series instead. “That was much more exciting to me,” Doerr said. “The novel is like 500 pages; it would be hard to go for 120 minutes.”Levy said that he and Levine agreed early on that Marie-Laure, both as a child and as an adult, should be played by blind actors. It was a risk for several reasons, Levine said, not least because studios like to cast big names in lead roles. The show has big names — Ruffalo as Marie-Laure’s father, and Hugh Laurie as her uncle, Etienne — but the actors playing Marie-Laure would have to be unknowns.The director Shawn Levy, right, approached Anthony Doerr, left, to adapt Doerr’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel into a limited series.Chloe Ellingson for The New York TimesThe bigger issue was how to find them, since there are very few working blind actors. The producers and the casting directors did a global, open casting call, contacting schools and communities for the blind. “I thought, once we go down this road, we can’t go back,” Levine said. “We couldn’t say, ‘Well, we can’t find anyone.’”First, they cast Sutton, who was from a small town in Wales and who had starred in a campaign for a British charity, but had no other acting experience. Finding the older Marie-Laure took more time, and the production team saw hundreds of auditions before a tape from Loberti, a Ph.D. student at Penn State University who had no acting experience at all.The production’s secret weapon, Levy said, was their blindness consultant, Joe Strechay. Strechay has been legally blind since he was 19, and described himself in an interview in his trailer as now being “totally blind.” He previously worked with Netflix on the “Daredevil” series, and with Steven Knight, the writer of “All the Light,” on the Apple TV+ series “See.” “Having a lead character played by a person who’s legally blind, this is what we’ve been working for for a long time,” Strechay said.Strechay consulted on all of the adjustments the production made to the set, including adding tactile marks to the floor that Loberti and Sutton could feel to establish their positioning, giving the actors time on set ahead of shooting to acclimate, and writing the series title in Braille on the directors’ chairs and trailers.Joe Strechay worked as the blindness consultant on set, helping to make it accessible to the blind actors. Atsushi Nishijima/NetflixHe was also involved in a directorial capacity. Strechay watched all of the rushes with his seeing assistant, Cara Lee Hrdlitschka, who described the scenes to him in minute detail so that he could give feedback on how Marie-Laure’s blindness was being conveyed onscreen. “If someone who’s blind or low-vision does something over and over again, it becomes easy,” Strechay said. “So if it’s supposed to be them arriving in a place they’ve never been before, we look at all those little movements to make sure they’re accurate for that moment, for that character, in the story.”This led to frequent alterations, including to a scene in which Daniel teaches young Marie-Laure how to use a cane while walking down a busy street. Levine thought Daniel ought to be standing next to the curb, for Marie-Laure’s safety, but on set Strechay corrected him. Daniel would want it the other way around, he said, so Marie-Laure could orient herself by the sound of the traffic and feel the curb with her cane.These details mattered to Strechay, he said, because he has been generally unimpressed by media representations of blind people. Ruffalo played a blind person in the 2008 film “Blindness,” and remembered mentioning this to Strechay when they first met. “He said, ‘Oh yeah, I saw that. Nice try,’” Ruffalo said in an interview between takes.Sutton and Ruffalo in a scene from the show. Sutton, who is from a small town in Wales, had starred in a campaign for a British charity before the show, but had no other acting experience. Atsushi Nishijima/Netflix, via Associated PressStrechay has also helped the sighted actors understand how to interact with a blind person respectfully. In the scene in which Marie-Laure listens to late-night radio, Ruffalo, as Daniel, removed a pair of headphones from Sutton’s ears. Because of the headphones, she couldn’t hear Ruffalo when he entered the room.“I know not to startle her, to just give her a little touch to tell her I’m there,” he said, adding that onscreen, Daniel alerting Marie-Laure to his presence this way is also more authentic to the relationship between a blind child and her father. “It was important to me that we approach it this way,” Levy said, not only because it seemed right, but because it ultimately made for a better show.Working on this production has made the producers think differently about the primacy of sight in their work. One of the novel’s strengths is how it immerses the reader in Marie-Laure’s experience of the world: through smell, sound and touch. TV is a visual medium, but there are ways it can bring those other senses to the fore.“It’s so easy as a director to get image obsessed, shot by shot,” Levy said. “And there’s still that, because this is ultimately a television series that people will watch. Creating beautiful images is important to me, but my awareness of the tools that I have as a director is more 360.”He gave the example of the objects Marie-Laure has on her bedroom windowsill. “They wouldn’t be items chosen for prettiness, they’d be chosen for the sound they make in a breeze, or the texture against the fingertips,” Levy said. In several episodes, shots of Marie-Laure focus on her feet — walking over broken glass, navigating the streets of Saint-Malo with her cane — and so heightening the viewer’s sense of how she perceives the world through senses other than sight.Strechay said he hoped Sutton’s and Loberti’s performances would open the door for more blind actors. Sutton shared this hope, she said in an interview on set, adding that she was excited for other blind children to watch the series.“Sometimes I say your gift is your blindness,” she said. “And I say, even if you’re blind, you can still do anything.” More