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      ‘We Are a Romantic Country’: On the Set of a Steamy Hit in Italy

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      Italy falls for “Mare Fuori,” a television melodrama about the inmates of a juvenile detention center who pass the time making out — when not scowling at or occasionally stabbing one another.Before dawn, the teenage girls convened outside the Naples Navy base where the wildly popular Italian television show “Mare Fuori” is filmed.“We want to show them all of our love,” said Federica Montuori, 16, who with her fellow fans unfurled white sheets with spray-painted messages expressing how the lead actors, who play star-crossed — and mobbed-up — lovers in a juvenile prison, “belong in our hearts.”On the wall beside her, the scrawls on the bricks are love letters to “the most beautiful series in the world” and its main characters. “Ti Amo Carmine,” read one rectangle. “Ti Amo Rosa,” read another.Other fans have dived from nearby piers and swum to the back of the set, vexing gate guards charged with keeping them at bay. During the day, their screams have ruined takes.“We had to stop shooting,” said Ivan Silvestrini, the show’s director. “They won’t listen. It’s pretty unbearable, but what can you do?”Maria Esposito, who plays Rosa Ricci in the series, and Mr. Caiazzo, who plays Carmine, filming a scene for the fourth season.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesItaly has fallen for “Mare Fuori,” or “The Sea Beyond,” an often gritty but always soapy melodrama about the inmates of a coed juvenile detention center who pass the time stealing kisses — when not scowling at or occasionally stabbing one another.Entering its fourth season, the show, set and steeped in Naples street life, is “Saved by the Bell” meets “Scared Straight” meets “Gomorrah” meets Skinemax. It has been a smash hit on Italian television and is a fixture on Netflix Italy’s most-watched list. During Carnevale, children dressed up as the precocious gangsters, with leather hot pants and jackets, tank tops, lots of chains and toy guns.Its hypnotic theme song, recorded by an actor who plays an inmate on the show and who is also an increasingly popular singer in Italy, has been streamed 35 million times and gone platinum. Some fans have kept vigil singing the chorus outside the set.The series tells the intertwining stories of a hodgepodge of attractive delinquents, in a fictitious juvenile hall inspired by a real one — where the sexes are separated — on an island off Naples. Most of the characters are hardened thugs from competing Naples mob families, but there is also a rich Milanese piano prodigy jailed after a night out in Naples goes terribly awry, and a manipulative goth goddess who licks faces, cuts herself and kills for fun.The cast of mostly unknowns keeps the budget low, but the ensemble approach is also creating stars to supply Italy’s insatiable and often schlocky television-cinema complex.The show has turned Ms. Esposito and Mr. Caiazzo into celebrities. Fans can often be found surrounding the Navy base where the show is filmed, and even diving off nearby piers to swim to the back of the set.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesThe producers market the show as a dialect-heavy portrayal of Naples reality with a redemption message. But following on other Italian hits, like “Baby,” about underage prostitutes, the show has also underscored Italy’s infatuation with steamy young adult programming.“We have realized that these stories of young lovers, people like a lot,” said Roberto Sessa, one of the show’s producers. “In the end, we are a romantic country.”The plot revolves around Carmine Di Salvo, the reluctant and seemingly meek scion of a crime family who really just wants to be a barber, but who lands behind bars after stabbing a would-be rapist of his girlfriend in the neck with scissors. Incarcerated, he finds a nemesis in Ciro, the prince of the competing crime family, who eventually tries to kill Carmine and his piano-playing cellmate but who ends up getting stabbed with a screwdriver.Things really took off in the third season, this year, when Rosa Ricci, the late Ciro’s sister, shoots a guy to get into jail so she can settle scores with Carmine. In classic Montague and Capulet style, she falls for Carmine instead.A scene from the third season of “Mare Fuori,” whose costume director said “skin, skin, skin” is an important part of the show’s look.Fosforo PressOn a street in Naples, a fan of the show, Domenico Marino, 18, and his girlfriend considered taking home a souvenir pillow — displayed next to similar shirts, mugs and key chains — of the scantily clad Rosa featuring her catchphrase (“I am Rosa Ricci, and who the [expletive] are you to tell me what I need to do”). He decided on a cushion of her late brother Ciro instead.On Naples’s Via San Gregorio Armeno, famous for its Christmas nativity scenes, a crowd gathered to admire terra cotta figurines of the cast standing in front of the juvenile prison, displayed next to a manger.“We keep making them as long as there is demand, even for the ones who get killed,” said Elio Cassano, 60. “They don’t look at the soccer players or the Holy Family in the crèche, they form crowds around ‘Mare Fuori.’”One of the admirers, Chiara D’Amico, 18, a Sicilian with a crush on Carmine, said the juvenile prison reminded her of high school. Her mother, Santina Santonocito, 40, said she liked the show because it taught children “not to make errors — life inside is not so easy.”Pillows with photographs of the show’s characters on sale in Naples.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesElio Cassano arranging figurines of the show’s characters outside a shop in Naples.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesThey were visiting Naples, with plans to see its castles and eat pizza. “But the first thing on the list,” Ms. D’Amico said, was a pilgrimage to the set.Shortly before noon, a black van carrying Maria Esposito, 19, who plays Rosa, rolled up to the gate. She blew kisses from the passenger seat, sending the fans into a tizzy.On the set — which looked like a seaside high school with a soccer court, a foosball table and a black piano that had hearts traced in its dust — she stopped in hair and makeup with Massimiliano Caiazzo, who plays Carmine.“The theme of a forbidden love touches adults just as it touches adolescents,” said Mr. Caiazzo, 26, as Ms. Esposito, puffing on an e-cigarette, had her lashes doused in mascara.She had worked as an aesthetician before she joined at the end of the second season, which had made her “weep perennially, every day, with joy.”But for a young woman who loves going out (“I love living”), it was not easy being the face of Naples, she said. “I’m walking around the streets with my face on the pillows,” she said. “It’s a little creepy.”Rossella Aprea, the show’s costume designer, holding one of Rosa’s outfits.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesThe costume designer, Rossella Aprea, said that since there was no uniform in a real Italian juvenile prison, she could use her imagination. At a rack dedicated to Rosa, she held up a skimpy leotard decorated with dragons.“A lot of black, super tight, crop tops,” she said. “Skin, skin, skin.”Outside, the director struggled with a scene about the arrival of a new inmate, who held a leather satchel and looked as if he had either returned from safari or robbed a Banana Republic.“Tell him to come out of the car and look towards the girls,” Mr. Silvestrini instructed with frustration. He said he understood sex appeal was vital to the show’s success and required the suspension of disbelief about love in the detention center through the creation of imaginary circumstances for hooking up, what he called “room for romance.”“We created a pizza lab, a place where the boys and girls can be together,” he said. “And they can be promiscuous.”Ms. Esposito on the way to her dressing room. In the show’s third season, her character shoots someone to get into jail so she could settle scores with another character.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesAfter lunch, the director ordered the activation of a smoke machine for atmosphere, then walked a 40-something actor who played a crooked guard and a 20-something actress who played an inmate through their scene.“Then, at a certain point,” he instructed. “The kiss moment.”Their moment extended to a full-on make out session, lasting so long that the crew gave each other awkward looks.Soon after, Ms. Esposito walked on set for the day’s final scene.“She’s my star,” Mr. Silvestrini said.Ivan Silvestrini, the show’s director, seated in front of a screen, along with other members of the cast and crew, reviewing a scene.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesMs. Esposito, rail thin and with long straight black hair, wore bell-bottomed tight leather pants and a leather halter top. “These pants have gotten loose on me,” she said, laughing. “I’ve lost weight from the stress!”She said everywhere she went, she was mobbed by teenagers, “but also the adults.”“It’s in the hearts of all, this series,” Ms. Esposito said.She and Mr. Caiazzo acted an intense face-to-face scene on a staircase, the director called it a wrap and the crew blasted the “Mare Fuori” song. Soon after, the stars departed in separate vans, and the fans screamed and ran after them.Ms. Esposito made a heart sign with her hands.“Rosa Ricci,” they bellowed. “Bellissima.”Mr. Caiazzo greeting fans as he left the Naples set.Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times More

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      They Put the Heart in ‘Heartstopper’

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      Kit Connor and Joe Locke discuss the pressure of expectations and how the global success of their Netflix hit, returning Aug. 3, has changed their lives.Kit Connor and Joe Locke sat on a plump bordello-red couch at the Manhattan headquarters of Netflix. It was June, and they were in town to talk about their roles as the leading sweeties on “Heartstopper,” Alice Oseman’s romantic dramedy series about queer British high schoolers that begins its sophomore season on Netflix on Aug. 3.When “Heartstopper” debuted in April 2022, its fate was anybody’s guess. “Euphoria,” “Elite” and other shows with teen queer characters lured eyeballs with sex and bad behavior. “Heartstopper” offered its audience mellow dramatics and an understanding that puppy love is universal. “Just queer people being,” as Connor put it.It paid off. “Heartstopper” made the Netflix Top 10 — a list of the service’s most-watched shows in a given week — in 54 countries, and its first-season numbers were good enough to get the show renewed for two more. To date on TikTok, #heartstopper has 10.7 billion views and counting. Readers also gobbled up the source material: Oseman’s best-selling graphic novels and original webcomic, which now has over 124 million views. In April, Oseman announced that a fifth graphic novel was set to publish in November, with a sixth in the works.So my first question was: How has the “Heartstopper” phenomenon changed the lives of the two actors at its center?“The easier question is how hasn’t this changed our life?” Locke said.He wore a cream-colored cardigan with elegant vertical caviar beading plus skinny jeans and black sneakers, looking a lot like how his character, the misfit naïf Charlie, might dress if he were on a class trip to New York. Connor wore a blousy turquoise top and wide-legged black pants over what looked like flamenco heels — an elegant ensemble that his character, Nick, who is Charlie’s anxious jock boyfriend, would be aghast to find in his closet.Now 19, as is Connor, Locke said he’s had to grow up fast but in exchange got a platform to “normalize queerness.” Example: Days after our interview, Locke posted on Instagram a photo of himself wearing a “Trans Rights Are Human Rights” T-shirt on a float in D.C.’s Pride parade, an image that his 3.5 million followers have showered with over a million likes.In the new season, Charlie and Nick go to Paris together on a class trip.Teddy Cavendish/Netflix“There’s a big push in our world at the moment to take away young queer people’s autonomy,” Locke said. “It’s beautiful to be part of a show that really pushes and loves that young queer people can be in charge of their own fates.”And Connor?“I’m a bit more confident in myself in a very open sense, about who I am, what I can do, the way that I hold myself and the people I spend my time with,” he said. “I have a lot more pride.”But then we started talking about coming out, and the mood in the room shifted, fast. Last year, Connor came out on Twitter as bisexual, saying he felt forced to do so after some fans accused him of queer-baiting.“Telling someone you’re gay or bi or part of the queer community, there’s a thing where you feel like they might see you differently or think that it would change who you are,” he said. “For me, it’s just who I am. Coming out didn’t change me.”He’s cool with being called queer, he said, explaining that it is “more freeing in a way, less about labels.”Locke, who also identifies as queer, jumped in: “I think coming out is stupid, that it’s still a thing that people have to do.” He said he briefly came out at 12 on Instagram before reconsidering.“I had just told my mum, and I was on top of the world,” he said. “I quickly realized I was ready to tell my mum but I was not ready to tell the world. So I quickly deleted it and said my Instagram had been hacked. I went back in the closet for three years. I retold all my friends and they’re like, ‘Yeah, you told us two years ago.’”And now that he’s out-out and playing gay on “Heartstopper”? Locke glanced down and fingered his rings.“Twelve-year-old me would be very proud, and terrified,” he said.He paused to let tears collect in his eyes. “I’m getting emotional,” he whispered. Connor watched him. The room was still. “I’ve never thought about it in that sense before,” Locke continued, “which is weird because I’ve thought about the show a lot.”After a few seconds, he said softly: “It’s great.” He wore a teeny grin.“They’re meant for each other,” Connor said of his and Locke’s characters.Victoria Will for The New York TimesQueer pride, quick-fire emotions, happy tears, supportive mums: It’s like these guys are on “Heartstopper” or something. Thea Glassman, the author of “Freaks, Gleeks and Dawson’s Creek: How 7 Teen Shows Transformed Television,” said the series is rich in a rare commodity for contemporary teen television: “unapologetic sweetness.”“It’s about kindness and positivity and acceptance, and as teens, that’s all you’re looking for,” she told me. “As adults, that’s all you’re looking for.”The new season focuses on Nick and Charlie’s couple stuff: sharing a bed during a class trip to Paris, navigating hickey shame, coming out about their relationship. There is still no sex or even under the shirt stuff, though — there is no second base in “Heartstopper.”There is also a character who is asexual (as is Oseman) and new transgender characters that Locke said he hopes will help transgender kids understand “that there are still people in the world who have their backs.”Locke and Connor were very aware that expectations from fans, Netflix and industry watchers are considerable now that the show is a global hit. The pressure, Locke said, is “terrifying.”But if they were antsy about it, it didn’t show in their relaxed rapport and modest demeanors. Connor, who grew up in Croydon in South London, comes across as grounded and affable, and he speaks with considered thoughtfulness, like he actually took notes during media training.Locke has Charlie’s gentle deportment but with the soft edge of a cool-kid wise guy. As our conversation turned to their own education, Connor mentioned that he “wasn’t one of those people who thrived at school,” and sheepishly said he got a B in drama. When he finished, Locke leaned over, cracked himself up and said into my recorder: “You don’t need school, kids. He got a B in drama.”Locke said a sharp tongue is one way he protected himself while growing up on the Isle of Man. “People knew not to give me [expletive],” he said.”I think coming out is stupid, that it’s still a thing that people have to do,” Locke said.Victoria Will for The New York TimesAs for what’s next, Connor is set to star in a new horror-thriller, “One of Us,” and Locke recently shot “Agatha: Coven of Chaos,” Marvel’s “WandaVision” spinoff. The stage beckons: Locke wants to be in a Broadway musical, Connor would do Shakespeare in London. If they had free time, Connor would hang with friends in a park. Locke wants someone to make him brunch.As our conversation ended, I asked both men where they’d like their characters to be in 20 years.“The hope would certainly be that they’re still together,” Connor said softly, looking at Locke as if to get approval.“I think they would be,” Locke replied, glancing back.“They’re meant for each other,” Connor said.“They’d have some children, a family,” Locke said.“Happy would be nice,” Connor said.“Yeah,” Locke said, again with that grin. “Just happy.” More

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      2023 Emmy Awards Will Be Postponed Because of Actors’ and Writers’ Strikes

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      The ceremony, originally planned for Sept. 18, may be pushed into January in hopes that the labor disputes will be settled.The fallout from the Hollywood actors’ and writers’ strikes continues.The 75th Emmy Awards will be postponed because of the strikes, according to a person briefed on the plans. The ceremony, originally planned for Sept. 18, does not yet have a new date but will most likely be moved to January, the person said.Emmy organizers are hopeful that would give the Hollywood studios enough time to settle the labor disputes. A new date will be finalized in the next few weeks.Fox, which is broadcasting this year’s event, and the Television Academy, which administers the Emmys, had concluded last month that it would have to postpone the event if the writers’ strike continued to linger until the end of July, The New York Times reported last month. The writers have now been on strike for 88 days and have not returned to the bargaining table with the major Hollywood studios since negotiations broke down in early May.By the time tens of thousands of actors joined the writers on picket lines and went on strike on July 14, it all but put a nail in the coffin for an Emmys ceremony in September.The postponement marks one of the biggest events that will get rescheduled because of the labor conflicts. The Emmys, which traditionally take place in August or September, were last postponed after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. That year, the event ultimately took place in November.Organizing the Emmys is a significant undertaking, one of the reasons that the Television Academy and Fox set a late July deadline to make a decision on a postponement. Variety reported earlier that the Emmys would be rescheduled.Nominations for the Emmy Awards were announced this month. HBO, which led all networks in total nominations, became the first network in 31 years to earn four nominations in the best drama category — “Succession,” “The White Lotus,” “The Last of Us” and “House of the Dragon.” In the comedy categories, two-time winner “Ted Lasso” will compete against shows including “Abbott Elementary” and “The Bear.” More

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      ‘Oppenheimer’ Fans Are Rediscovering a 40-Year-Old Documentary

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      “The Day After Trinity,” made available without a subscription until August, shot to the top of the Criterion Channel’s most-watched films.One morning in the 1950s, Jon H. Else’s father pointed toward Nevada from their home in Sacramento. “There was this orange glow that suddenly rose up in the sky, and then shrank back down,” Else recalled.It was, hundreds of miles away, an atomic weapon test: a symbol of the world that was created when a team of Americans led by the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer exploded the first nuclear bomb a decade earlier on July 16, 1945.Growing up in the nuclear age left an impression on Else, now 78.He was later a series producer of the award-winning “Eyes on the Prize,” a program on the civil rights movement, and directed documentaries about the Great Depression and Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. But before all that, in 1981, he made a documentary about Oppenheimer, the scientist whose bony visage graced the covers of midcentury magazines, and the bomb. It was called “The Day After Trinity,” a reference to that inaugural detonation.Decades later, viewers are flocking to Else’s film, a nominee for the Academy Award for best documentary feature, as a companion to Christopher Nolan’s biopic “Oppenheimer,” which grossed more than $100 million domestically in its opening week this month.After the Criterion Channel made “The Day After Trinity” available without a subscription until August, it shot to the top of the streaming service’s most-watched films this month, alongside movies directed by Martin Scorsese, Paul Verhoeven, Michael Mann and other typically Letterboxdcore filmmakers.“We have seen a huge increase in views,” Criterion said in a statement, “and we’re very happy with the success of the strategy as a way to make sure this film found its rightful place in the conversation around ‘Oppenheimer.’”In a phone interview from California last week, Else, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, praised Nolan’s film, which he saw last weekend in San Francisco. (A spokeswoman for Nolan said he was not available to comment.)“These stories have to be retold every generation,” Else said, “and they have to be told by new storytellers.”Nolan’s three-hour opus, a Universal release shot on IMAX film with a lavish cast of brand-name Hollywood actors, shares much with “The Day After Trinity,” an 88-minute documentary financed by the public television station in San Jose, Calif., and various grants.The Oppenheimer of “Oppenheimer” (based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “American Prometheus”), and the Oppenheimer of “The Day After Trinity” are the same brilliant, sensitive, haunted soul. “This man who was apparently a completely nonviolent fellow was the architect of the most savage weapon in history,” Else said.The movies feature some of the same characters from the life of Oppenheimer, who died in 1967, including his brother, Frank (played in “Oppenheimer” by Dylan Arnold), his friend Haakon Chevalier (Jefferson Hall) and the physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi (David Krumholtz). Both films build to Trinity and then document the conflict between some of its inventors’ hope that the bomb would never be used in war and its deployment in Japan, the invention of the more devastating hydrogen bomb and the nuclear arms race of the Cold War.A central plot point in each movie is a closed hearing in 1954 at which Oppenheimer was stripped of his government security clearance, partly because of past left-wing associations. David Webb Peoples, a co-editor and co-writer of “The Day After Trinity” — whose later screenwriting credits include “Blade Runner,” “Unforgiven” and “12 Monkeys” — even proposed structuring the film around the hearing, as Nolan did with “Oppenheimer.”“The closest he ever came to an autobiography is his personal statement at the beginning of the hearing,” said Else, who focused on interviews with firsthand witnesses, old footage and still photographs rather than trying to recreate the hearing.“It’s also a courtroom drama,” Else added, “and who is not going to pay attention to a courtroom drama?”One place “The Day After Trinity” goes that “Oppenheimer” does not is Hiroshima. In the documentary, Manhattan Project physicists recount wandering the wrecked Japanese city. The narrator explains that the Allies had not bombed it beforehand to preserve a place to demonstrate the new weapon.Else returned to the topic in his 2007 documentary, “Wonders Are Many: The Making of ‘Doctor Atomic,’” which chronicles the composer John Adams’s opera about Oppenheimer. Else is currently working on a book about nuclear testing. And in 1982, he made a one-hour episode of the public-television series “Nova” about the Exploratorium, the San Francisco science museum that was founded in 1969 by none other than Frank Oppenheimer.“Making ‘The Day After Trinity’ was a pretty rugged ride — it’s pretty rugged subject matter,” Else said. “After I finished it, it was such a joy to spend a year with Robert Oppenheimer’s younger brother, Frank, and celebrate the joy of science.” More

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      ‘And Just Like That …’ Season 2, Episode 7 Recap: Reunited

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      Valentine’s Day drama abounds in this week’s episode, but the most important involves a major figure from Carrie’s past.Season 2, Episode 7At least one aspect of “the old Miranda” is still very much intact. She told us back in Season 2 of “Sex and the City” that when a romance ends, she “would love to be one of those people who’s all: ‘We loved, thank you. You enriched my life. Now, go, prosper.’” But that’s just not her vibe. In her own words, she is much more: “We didn’t work out, you need to not exist.”And so things go with Che.In last week’s episode, Che somewhat abruptly (in my opinion, anyway) ended things with Miranda, and Miranda, self-sufficient and headstrong as ever, is done. She will not be taking Che’s calls, thank you very much, nor will she be having any further emotions about the breakup. She is on to whatever, and whoever, might be next.No one is more impatient for Miranda to move on than Charlotte, the ever-enthusiastic cheerleader for coupledom, who tells Miranda she had better hurry up and figure out if she is gay or straight so that she can find a new person to love, as if that were something anyone could just do on a tight deadline. After all, Miranda rebuts, she was drawn to Che as a person, and that doesn’t necessarily mean she is a full-on lesbian, especially considering Che is nonbinary. Sexuality is complex! Labels shouldn’t define us! Gender is a construct!Except that, in one impromptu shopping trip, Miranda figures out pretty darn fast that sexy sapphic ladies are her thing.At a cosplay-laden reading in the curtained-off back room of Books Are Magic, Miranda comes upon Amelia (Miriam Shor), a woman she has heard read Jane Austen audiobooks many times over. Miranda has always been entranced by that voice, and immediately, she is entranced by Amelia. That’s that. It’s figured out. Hot women get Miranda hot, and she is very down to heed that siren call.Unfortunately, Miranda’s fantasy of how much better dating women will be doesn’t quite live up to the reality. She shows up to Amelia’s apartment for their first date — which just so happens to be on Valentine’s Day — and finds it is grungier than a frat house bunk room. While Miranda is decked out in a tight dress cut just so to expose the tiniest amount of underboob, Amelia is in sweats and caked in cat litter.Miranda sits on the unmade bed waiting for Amelia to return from the bodega when an emergency phone call with Carrie helps her realize that 50-something lesbian Miranda doesn’t have to put up with the same baloney she tolerated in her 30s, so she ghosts. It stands to reason that Miranda will soon be ghosting all the Austen audiobooks in her queue as well.That’s not the only Valentine’s Day chaos ripping through this crew. The holiday is especially taxing for the moms and dads in the group, whose kids are kicking them out of their own homes on the big night. Lisa, who can’t stand her son’s handsy girlfriend, Baxter (Lucie McKenzie), puts the kibosh on his going to the suite Baxter’s parents booked for them, but agrees to let them stay in while she and Herbert go out.The worst fate Lisa can imagine is coming home to discover Herbert Jr. (Elijah Jacob) and his girlfriend have had sex in her bed. She doesn’t anticipate the far worse outcome of returning to discover the kids in her walk-in closet, taking photos with her prized fashions for Instagram. Turns out, that’s a far more egregious invasion of space.Charlotte and Harry are also asked by Lily to excuse themselves, as she is throwing a lonely hearts party of sorts for a crew of “cool girls” from school. Charlotte throws her full support behind her heartbroken daughter (last episode’s condom run was all for naught, apparently) and grabs a homemade brownie on the way to her Early Bird Special date with Harry.It turns out, though, that the little confection was a pot brownie, and Charlotte ends up in the back of an ambulance, full-on freaking out, convinced that she can “feel her blood.”Surprisingly, that little whoopsie with a space cake was the best thing that could have happened to Charlotte. As she comes to in the emergency room, she tells Harry that her life flashed before her eyes, and she wasn’t a fan. Charlotte realizes she has poured her entire self into serving her family and hasn’t left anything for herself. To my personal delight, she announces she is going to take a job in the art world. Boss Lady Charlotte is back.The most important Valentine’s Day date of the episode, of course, is the one Carrie almost doesn’t have with Aidan (John Corbett). The ellipses-laden email she sent last week worked, and Aidan asks to meet Carrie for dinner when he is in town for a meeting.Somehow they both end up at different restaurants right next door to each other, and both spend the better part of an hour thinking the other has stood them up.Honestly, I was sick during this entire scene. It had the feel of the whole Il Cantinori/El Cantinoro fiasco from Carrie’s 35th birthday from “Sex and the City” Season 4, in which everyone did, in fact, stand Carrie up, and I feared the teased appearance of Aidan was nothing more than a hoax yet again.Eventually, finally, Aidan texts Carrie. (What in the world was he waiting for? Much like Charlotte, I thought I was having a stroke.) Soon they find each other on the street. Dinner is lovely, and Carrie invites Aidan back to her place.Standing outside her door, beneath an apartment that was briefly theirs, Aidan momentarily becomes unglued, feeling that he can’t relive all that pain. It once again looks as if it might be over for them before it begins, and the Aidan stan in me once again died a tiny death. Thankfully he remembers there are plenty of hotels in New York, and he and Carrie can simply go knock boots there.Carrie and Aidan are back on, and at least for me, this has made both movies and every cringey scene of this latest series entirely worth it. Let’s go.Things still taking up space in my brain:As roomies, Miranda and Nya are the modern-day “Golden Girls” we need, especially considering Miranda is in her Blanche era. I hope Miranda never moves out.Of the oodles of wordplay this franchise has cranked out over the years, “Mevening” is by far the most usable example, and I’m stealing it. More

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      What ‘The Bear’ Gets Right About Chicago

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      The show celebrates a kind of ambition — humane and independent — that’s often neglected by Hollywood. Maybe that’s why the setting is so important.FX’s “The Bear,” now in its second season, is about grief and family and food, but there’s something else there, too. Its protagonist, Carmen Berzatto, is an accomplished chef who has worked in the vaunted kitchens of restaurants like Noma, the French Laundry and Eleven Madison Park. When the show began, he had come home to Chicago after the death of his brother, who left him a struggling shop selling a local staple, Italian beef sandwiches. Carmy could have run the place like any of the hundreds of modest lunch counters in the city, or else he could have sold it and angled to return to the world of fine dining. Instead, we watched him attempt a third thing, turning the business into a new, forward-thinking restaurant. This is the other stuff the show is about: ambition, and Chicago, and the freedom the nation’s third-largest city can offer to follow your ambitions on your own terms.“The Bear” is among relatively few TV shows that truly lean into a Chicago setting: In addition to copious shots of elevated trains and city skylines, there are nods to local culture hallmarks ranging from the obvious (Scottie Pippen, Bill Murray, Vienna Beef hot dogs) to the deeper cuts (Harold Ramis, Pequod’s Pizza, Margie’s Candies). Some of network television’s most popular procedural shows are set here — “Chicago Med,” “Chicago Fire,” “Chicago P.D.” — but like so many Chicago stories on TV, they use the city for its unmarked, adaptable qualities: It is a metropolis big enough to accommodate any type of person or story, big enough that viewers do not expect to be offered quaint local color, and yet not culturally defined in the American mind in the ways New York City and Los Angeles are. Chicago is in the sweet spot, asking for no explanation, happy to serve as a kind of median city. Insofar as it does have a national reputation, it is as an unpretentious workhorse of a place: the “City of the Big Shoulders,” the city Nelson Algren compared to loving a woman with a broken nose. (“You may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”) The sort of place a restless, plucky Midwesterner like Carmy would leave in order to pursue his ambitions, hoping to prove something to everyone back home — and the sort of place he would return to, stoic and remote, to dole out unglamorous sandwiches from a broken-nosed kind of shop.Their ambitions revolve around the excellence of the work itself.Leave it to a Chicagoan like me to note that there are, in fact, more than 20 restaurants in the city with at least one Michelin star. But “The Bear” captures something real about the city’s dining culture — and, more broadly, what you might call the geography of ambition. In one scene in the second season, Sydney Adamu, the woman who is now chef de cuisine for the new restaurant Carmy hopes to start, is discussing the menu with him when she notices his old chef’s uniform from New York, embroidered with his initials. He sees her looking at it. “New York — lame, right?” he says. Sydney replies: “I want to hate it. Like, don’t get me wrong, I do. But it looks sick, and I bet it felt really good wearing it.” It did, Carmy acknowledges; nobody here is going to deny New York’s cultural domination. But he goes on to talk about having earned Michelin stars, saying that his brain raced right past the joy of it to dread — that it felt imperative to keep them at all costs. “New York,” here, signifies a heightened awareness of status and image, stress and precarity, ruthlessness dressed as sophistication.And Chicago, for “The Bear,” is depicted — accurately — as a place where the goal is not necessarily to win status or acclaim so much as to create something great and original, ambitious without pretense, committed to excellence for its own sake rather than prestige or fame. This is the kind of chef we see Carmy transforming into, and the kind of chef we’re shown surrounding him. When Sydney, planning for the new business, visits other restaurants seeking guidance, she finds people glad to assist; at the well-regarded eatery Avec, she gets crucial advice from the real-life restaurateur Donnie Madia, playing himself. The show casts the city’s restaurant culture as sophisticated but warm, human. It continually suggests that once you abandon the ladder-climbing it associates with the coasts, ambition can be more about playing the game on your own terms or not playing it at all — pursuing your ambition without the brutal expense or atomizing ultracompetitiveness of places closer to the cultural spotlight.Chicago is in the sweet spot, asking for no explanation.In another second-season scene, Sydney has a video chat with the pastry chef Marcus, who has gone to Copenhagen to hone his skills. She has been reading “Leading With the Heart,” a book by the former Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski — a gift from her father. Her offhand summary of its lessons is a little dismissive, but Marcus, a former athlete, gets it: The team “kept drilling,” he says, grinding slowly toward excellence. Marcus receives his own lesson about ambition when he asks Luca, the chef he’s studying under, how he got so good. Luca replies that after working with a superior cook, he realized he wasn’t the best and wasn’t ever going to be the best. He came to see this as a good thing: “I could take that pressure off myself. And the only logical thing to do was to try and keep up with him.” At some point, he says, doing great things is less about skill and more about being open “to the world, to yourself, to other people.”This kind of ambition — humane and independent — is often neglected in Hollywood portrayals of driven people, but “The Bear” nails it. It’s something you encounter in the real Chicago, too. This really is a city where people are able to do unique and forward-looking things with food; where comic actors are funny in person long before they are (or aren’t) pulled to the coasts to be funny on camera; where large and underrecognized shares of Black and Latino cultural and business leaders have done their work; where there are rich and idiosyncratic scenes in theater and music and art and literature that seem to thrive regardless of whether any national spotlight will ever tilt in their direction.In “The Bear,” even in the tense run-up to the restaurant’s opening, you don’t see Sydney or Marcus burnishing their egos or waiting for people to recognize how special they are. Their moments of triumph come not from critics or crowds but from the people around them: Marcus’s presenting a dish named in memory of Carmy’s brother, or Sydney’s lovingly preparing an omelet for Carmy’s beleaguered sister, Natalie, and then lingering, vulnerable, to see how it goes over. Their ambitions revolve around the work itself and the people with whom they do it. Carmy struggles his way toward the same sensibility, even when it scares him. Cooking, he admits by the season’s end, has, for him, been about routine and concentration, about single-mindedly pursuing a goal — an approach that helped him avoid the messiness of human connection, hiding his vulnerability behind the armor of his own accomplishments.Carmy went back to Chicago because he had to. He stays because he wants to. For him, and for Sydney, and for Marcus, the point is to do a great thing, for its own sake, alongside people you care about, without much concern for image or status. “The Bear” seems to see this as a very Chicago thing. Resilient but vulnerable, ambitious but sincere, sophisticated but real, somehow too subtly original to be easily defined in the American mind — that feels like my city to me, too.Opening illustration: Source photographs by Chuck Hodes/FXNicholas Cannariato is a writer living in Chicago. He last wrote about celebrity travel shows. More

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      ‘Minx’ and ‘Stiffed’: Dirty Pictures From a Revolution

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      Though “Minx” and “Stiffed” are set 50 years ago, the debates they present — about desire and gender and equality and autonomy — feel startlingly current.On a nightclub stage, a blond woman in a sensible skirt suit runs back and forth in T-strap heels, overwhelmed by her duties to her family, her boss, herself. She stumbles, then falls. “It’s so hard being a woman in 1973,” she pouts, still sprawled. “If only there was a way to make a change.” Then the shirtless men in breakaway pants appear behind her. Women can’t have it all, now or 50 years later. An eyeful of oiled torsos, however muscular, may not have been a perfect substitute for real social transformation.This playful scene, an imagined forerunner to a Chippendales-style revue, occurs in the second season of “Minx,” which began on Starz on Friday. A workplace comedy set at an erotic magazine for women, “Minx” revisits the 1970s collisions, confusions and correspondences between women’s liberation and the sexual revolution.“Minx” has plenty of company. The 2023 podcast “Stiffed,” created by Jennifer Romolini, is a history of the actual, short-lived erotic magazine Viva, an inspiration for “Minx.” Other recent work dealing with the debates of this era include the 2022 film “Call Jane” and the 2022 documentary “The Janes,” both about an underground network for women seeking safe abortions, and the 2020 FX series “Mrs. America,” about the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment.A workplace comedy set at an erotic magazine for women, “Minx” revisits the 1970s collisions, confusions and correspondences between women’s liberation and the sexual revolution.HBO MaxCultural evocations of the American past often invite a thank-God-we’re-beyond-all-that superiority. But these recent works, despite the paisley and the quaaludes, don’t encourage that same condescension. These pieces are set 50 years ago, but the debates they present — about desire and gender and equality and autonomy — feel startlingly current.“It all feels very fraught and it all feels interconnected,” said Ellen Rapoport, the creator of “Minx.” “And you can’t separate the issues.” When it comes to the sexual revolution, she said, “I’m not sure who won.”The 1970s saw significant advances in women’s rights. Abortion was legalized in all states; hormonal birth control became widely available. A woman could have a credit card in her own name, could apply for a mortgage. Title IX was passed. A concurrent sexual revolution encouraged a new openness around sex and sexuality, while also seeding a backlash still felt today.This was the environment that birthed Viva, an erotic magazine for women created by Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse and related magazines. Guccione’s goal was both cynical and utopian. Capitalizing on this new sexual candor, Viva was designed as a distaff alternative to Guccione’s other publications. Playgirl, another magazine that began in 1973, had similar aspirations. Viva may have been a cash grab, but as Romolini’s reporting for the eight-episode podcast shows, many of the women journalists who staffed it also believed that it could become a savvy, brainy, feisty publication for women interested in sex and gender. Yet it was, from the first, a study in cognitive dissonance. Articles about rape and female circumcision jostled alongside beauty tips, soft-focus photo spreads and ads for diet pills.“It never really gelled or meshed,” Romolini said. “Bob Guccione thought he knew what women wanted and, not being a woman, he did not. So it was two magazines. One was this progressive, feminist, smart, fun culture magazine. The other had these soft, flaccid penises in a variety of outrageous poses.”Viva published its last issue in 1979, having run through a masthead’s worth of editors, Anna Wintour among them, and a throng of contributors including Nikki Giovanni, Simone de Beauvoir and Joyce Carol Oates. Playgirl, which appealed mostly to gay men, hung on in increasingly attenuated form until 2016. Neither approached the popularity of similar men’s magazines. But “Minx,” particularly in its second season, has allowed Rapoport to imagine a different fate, a truly successful women’s erotic magazine, edited and eventually published by women (and gay men) who believe — sometimes haltingly, sometimes fervently — in sexual freedom and women’s liberation.She likes to think a magazine like this might have succeeded.Lovibond of “Minx” says a show set in the 1970s like hers shouldn’t still resonate, but it does.HBO Max“If you truly combined well-written thoughtful articles about women’s issues and actually erotic content, not just a guy on a horse, I think people, at least at that time, would have enjoyed that,” Rapoport said.In both “Minx” and “Stiffed,” the erotic content ultimately functions as racy camouflage. They may seem like stories about sex, but they are both mainly about work. When she began researching “Stiffed,” Romolini assumed that the governing question of the series would be, Who gets to dictate female desire and why is it not women? But in interviewing the surviving alumnae of Viva, she discovered that the women who worked there had mostly given up on that question.“Ultimately, ‘Stiffed’ is about professional desire more than it is about sexual desire,” Romolini said. “And I think that’s what it was for these women.”Rapoport had structured Season 2 of “Minx,” which moved to Starz after HBO Max scrapped the series, around a similar premise. “In the first season, we really just wanted to normalize sexuality, nudity, male nudity, and to have the idea that women were erotic creatures,” she said. “This season is really about this societal drive for success.”Desire, it turned out, could provide only piecemeal liberation, especially once people — men, mostly — discovered how to monetize it, a shift that fostered the “porno chic” of the late 1970s and the mainstream distribution of sexually explicit films. In the second episode of Season 2 of “Minx,” the magazine hosts the West Coast premiere of the real pornographic film “Deep Throat.” The movie is billed as a celebration of female sexual empowerment. But it also looks a lot like exploitation.One character, Doug Renetti (Jake Johnson), inspired by Viva’s publisher, Guccione, defends the film as feminist. “It’s about a woman searching for an orgasm,” he says.Joyce Prigger (Ophelia Lovibond), the editor in chief of Minx, disagrees. “Which she finds with a clitoris conveniently located inside of her mouth?” Joyce says.Related debates within the feminist community (often referred to as the porn wars or the sex wars) fragmented the movement, making it vulnerable to attacks — attacks that “Minx” has dramatized, from both the political left and the right. As the ’80s dawned, Ronald Reagan was soon to be elected president, evangelical Christians held new sway and the Equal Rights Amendment had been defeated, leaving many of the liberating promises of the 1970s unfulfilled.“I don’t think the sexual revolution ultimately happened. It started and then devolved,” Nona Willis Aronowitz, a cultural critic and the author of “Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution,” said. “Ever since, we’ve tried to claw our way back to some of the most utopian ideas and we haven’t gotten there.”Sexual liberation has real political dimensions, as the personal is only rarely apolitical. But faced with the work still incomplete — a wage gap, though narrowed, remains, and protections against domestic and sexual violence are still lacking — a focus on female pleasure can seem frivolous. So can a show and a podcast centered on a skin magazine for women.Yet in examining this narrow slice of the sexual culture of the 1970s, “Stiffed” and “Minx” suggest parallels between then and now.“‘Minx’ felt like a way to think about things that were currently happening, but through this lens of 50 years ago,” Rapoport said. “Conversations about birth control, abortion, gay rights, every social issue is now back on the table again, in a way that I don’t love.”Lovibond, the star of “Minx,” agreed. “Go to marches, as I do, and you’ll see signs today that we were holding in the ’70s,” she said. A show set then shouldn’t still resonate, she argued. But it does.Lorna Bracewell, the author of “Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the #MeToo Era,” sees these backward-facing shows as offering counsel for the present. “This intense period of reaction that we are living through, it motivates people to look back and say, well, what did feminists do the last time this happened?”Viva had only a brief run. Minx never existed. But “Stiffed” and “Minx” allow a return to a moment of, as Bracewell described it, “really radical aspirations and fantasies and dreams and desires,” a moment when great social change seemed possible. If we look and listen closely enough, maybe we can learn what went wrong in the past and dream better for the future, with equality and an occasional hunky dance revue.“I just wonder if there’s a way for all of us to come together, agree on things and try to make progress,” Rapoport said.Maybe then, she implied, the woman in heels won’t have to fall. More

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      Review: The Cocktail Wit Is Watered Down in a Rickety New ‘Cottage’

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      Jason Alexander directs a Broadway farce that aims for the high style of Noël Coward but falls on its face instead.Farce is the emergency that keeps emerging. That’s why it depends so much on doors: to admit fresh trouble and lock it in.Alas, the door in “The Cottage,” a mild farce by Sandy Rustin, works only partway. It lets people enter, yet doesn’t trap them; they can leave at any time — and never do. Even when a killer is coming, the characters merely dawdle.Dawdling is the play’s difficulty as well; everyone talks in pseudofancy circles. The stunts and capers likewise have no danger in them. And Jason Alexander’s trick-filled production, which opened on Monday at the Helen Hayes Theater, cannot hide that the stakes are too low.For Beau (Eric McCormack) and his sister-in-law, Sylvia (Laura Bell Bundy), those stakes are close to nonexistent. Theirs is, after all, a once-a-year tryst. And since each is already cheating merrily on a spouse, the initial problem — Sylvia wants a bigger commitment, but Beau is overbooked — does not seem very problematic.The interruptions that then arrive with the dulling punctuality of a track coach grasping a stopwatch do not much complicate matters. The first is Beau’s pragmatic wife, Marjorie (Lilli Cooper); the second is her foppish lover, Clarke (Alex Moffat). Because Clarke is Beau’s brother and Sylvia’s husband, the impact of his affair is nullified within minutes as the adulteries cancel each other out.While you try to absorb the overneat crisscross symmetry of that setup, notice the cottage itself, a classic Cotswolds hideaway fully furnished with opportune dangers: a twisty staircase, a library ladder, a trapdoor window seat and alarming taxidermy. (The amusing set is by Paul Tate dePoo III.) With croony jazz (sound by Justin Ellington) and lovely Deco frocks (by Sydney Maresca) we are clearly in the 1920s. In a marcelled blond bob (by Tommy Kurzman), Sylvia looks simply smashing.The cast mostly delivers elegant work, our critic writes, with Eric McCormack as Beau and Laura Bell Bundy as Sylvia consistently hitting their marks. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd yes, that’s how they talk. If the play is not exactly new — it has been making the rounds since 2013 — it wishes it were even older. Specifically, it places itself in the “Private Lives” era of Noël Coward, when brittle Brits in smoking jackets dropped bon mots along with their ashes. (The dozen hidden-cigarette jokes provided by the prop supervisor, Matthew Frew, are the funniest part of the show.) Also suggested are the identity confusions of “The Importance of Being Earnest” and the country-home sexcapades of “Nothing On,” nested within Michael Frayn’s glorious backstage farce “Noises Off.”But to suggest something is not to achieve it, and though “The Cottage” operates like a farce it only rarely achieves a farce’s liftoff. That’s when the pressure on the characters becomes so intense that it initiates a kind of verbal and physical fission.A few moments here hint at that possibility, as when Sylvia says, “So, you stuck a mustache on a mustache and changed your name to Richard?” — a line that is both perfectly logical in context and logic’s perfect opposite outside it. And Moffat’s extreme character choices, including postures that find him tied up in pretzels with his feet en pointe, nearly turn this “Saturday Night Live” clown’s performance into modern dance.But these are squibs; they zoom up, pop briefly and fizzle. Despite the cast’s mostly elegant work — Bundy and the self-mocking McCormack consistently hit their marks — the script and what feels like Alexander’s desperation to keep things aloft inevitably let them down. I am not, for instance, aware of a scene in Coward involving 30 seconds of earsplitting flatulence. Nor do the stinger chords that announce each new character’s entrance inspire confidence in the production’s genre discipline.“The Cottage” is therefore more of a spoof than a farce, and less a spoof of Coward or Wilde than of Feydeau, soap operas and middlebrow adultery comedies of the 1970s like “6 Rms Riv Vu” and “Same Time, Next Year.” More or less successfully, they all used humor to assuage the sexual anxieties of their times by showing how characters twisted into agonies of jealousy and desire might nevertheless come to a good end.Rustin wants to do something similar by introducing three additional amatory complications, including Dierdre (Dana Steingold) and Richard (Nehal Joshi), about whom it would be unfair to say more. In different ways they lead Sylvia, who gradually becomes the center of the play, to reject the traditional assumptions that too often trap women in loveless marriages. Developing this feminist angle on Coward, Rustin name-checks the English suffragist leader Emmeline Pankhurst and draws on a surprise instance of intergenerational sisterhood to resolve the plot.Though the misogyny of man-made social institutions (and plays) is not exactly news, I was glad of this development in theory, and impressed with Bundy’s ability to carry it off at the just-right midpoint between silly and serious. But after all the temporizing and flatulating earlier, the last-minute arrival of a point seemed, well, beside the point. Had I laughed more than twice in the play’s previous 119 minutes, I might even have found it funny.The CottageThrough Oct. 29 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan; thecottageonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours. More