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      ‘Perry Mason’ Season 2 Premiere Recap: Keeping It Civil

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      New season, new showrunners, same Perry. Who knew that a show with such a grisly beginning could wind up becoming such great comfort viewing?Season 2, Episode 1: ‘Chapter Nine’It’s been nearly two and a half years since we last saw Perry Mason. In that time we’ve weathered (sort of) a global pandemic, a presidential election and an attempt to overturn that election. We’ve also seen the purchase of HBO’s parent company, WarnerMedia, by Discovery, along with all the changes that the newly minted chief executive David Zaslav has wrought for prestige TV’s most storied brand.Even the “Perry Mason” showrunners have been swapped out. Goodbye, Rolin Jones and Ron Fitzgerald, who have moved on to other creative endeavors; hello, Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, creators of the Steven Soderbergh-directed period piece “The Knick.”The times, in short, have changed.Judging by its Season 2 premiere this week, though, “Perry Mason” hasn’t noticed. The cast, led by Matthew Rhys in the role made famous by Raymond Burr decades earlier, is largely intact. So is the jazzy score by the trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard, a million miles removed from the sound of pretty much any other show on television. Ditto the overall vibe of rumpled, boozy Los Angeles noir, pitting the wealthy and sinister against the beaten-down but mostly noble working stiffs who make up Perry and his peers.Funny, isn’t it? A series that began with the mutilated corpse of a murdered infant has become a kind of comfort food.Still, it’s fair to say the time away has not been kind to Mr. Mason. For one thing, he has already retreated from the field of criminal law, despite having successfully navigated his very first, and very complicated, case as a defense attorney during the previous season: the defense of a bereaved mother, Emily Dodson (Gayle Rankin), from the charge of murdering her own baby.The Return of ‘Perry Mason’The second season of the HBO show, which is based on an Erle Stanley Gardner book series that inspired a classic TV courtroom drama, began on March 6.Season 2 Premiere: “Perry Mason” returned with a new season and new showrunners but the same Perry. Who knew that a show with such a grisly beginning could wind up becoming such great comfort viewing?Chris Chalk: The actor has pushed himself hard lately, playing deeply conflicted roles like the ex-cop turned private investigator Paul Drake in “Perry Mason.”Being Perry Mason: The showrunners reimagined a capable, no-nonsense attorney as a schlemiel with unresolved trauma. Casting the actor Matthew Rhys meant that Perry could go even more tragic.Through a harrowing dream sequence, we learn that Dodson has since drowned herself after months of sending unanswered postcards to Perry demanding to know what the point of it all was. Perry has no more of an answer to that than Emily did; perhaps that’s why he races a motorcycle he was given by a client until he crashes. It’s not as if he has his family farm to give him solace: That was sold long ago to Lupe (Veronica Falcón), Perry’s enterprising bootlegger ex-girlfriend.Perry’s current and decidedly lower-stakes focus now is civil law, and his most recent gig is representing the grocery store impresario Sunny Gryce (Sean Astin) against a former employee (Matt Bush) who invented many of Sunny’s successful sales techniques and then used them to start his own store. Perry has no taste for hanging this poor guy out to dry, but he is a very good attorney, as it turns out, and he does what he has to until a favorable verdict is won.The job seems good enough for Della Street (Juliet Rylance), Perry’s assistant and de facto co-counsel, who takes advantage of their steady stream of paying clients to hire an actual secretary (Jee Young Han) to do the work she herself was once tasked with. The civil case work is much less beneficial, however, to the Black ex-cop turned private investigator Paul Drake (Chris Chalk), whose new baby demands a regular source of income that Perry is no longer able to provide. Perry’s former partner, Pete Strickland (Shea Whigham), is able to help by providing Paul with some surveillance work for the ambitious (and, like his friend Della, secretly gay) district attorney Hamilton Burger (Justin Kirk) … but Paul’s family still makes a point of inviting Perry to the cookout when his birthday rolls around. Paul’s wife, Grace (Diarra Kilpatrick), at least, is aware of where his bread can truly be buttered.While Perry quietly rages against his new role as the defender of the petit bourgeois and Della entertains the offer of a date from a woman she encounters at a restaurant — whose gaydar, it seems, is next-gen — the case that will seemingly dominate the season unfolds. A scion of privilege named Brooks McCutcheon (Tommy Dewey), son of a ruthless magnate named Lydell (Paul Raci), spends his days choking his sex partners behind his wife’s back, his nights torching the speakeasy boats of the competition, and is obsessed with trying to convince somebody, anybody, that there is an audience for baseball in Los Angeles. (He is at least two decades ahead of his time in this respect, at least.)Both his sinister father and the crooked Detective Holcomb (Eric Lange) warn him to tread softly, but that doesn’t save Brooks’s life, as we learn when a child in a creepy mask discovers his corpse just before the credits roll.In short, you’ve got everything you would want a Prohibition Era murder mystery to include. Bootleggers, real-estate swindlers, hard-luck investigators, life in the closet, people bearing coins with strange insignia (a star-and-crescent, to be specific), the sense that Los Angeles is an ephemeral fantasyland that nothing so respectable as Major League Baseball would want anything to do with — it’s all there.So are the charming characters — often charming despite themselves — that made the show’s first season a success. Rhys’s resting sour face makes him perfect for Perry, the disgraced veteran of the Great War whose skill at ferreting out other people’s deceptions‌ has made him, in turns, a great detective and a rock-solid lawyer. Della’s competence and ebullience make her equally indispensable to both Perry and Los Angeles County’s most eligible bachelorettes. Drake is a good guy and a good cop in a system with no practical use for either.On the shadier side of the street, the McCutcheons are a solid substitute for the pack of rich evangelical elders who drove the first season’s story along. And it’s fun to trace the parallels between Sunny Gryce and Lupe, both of them thriving in the quasi-legal shadow that capitalism inevitably casts.Working off a script by Amiel and Berger, the director Fernando Coimbra — with Blanchard’s invaluable help — crafts a convincing and familiar 1930s Los Angeles atmosphere for this motley crew of strivers and sad sacks to inhabit; it truly is hard to notice the creative handoff that has occurred between seasons. We’re back in business with Perry, and so far, business is good.From the case files:No graphic violence. No nudity. No explicit sex. Certainly no murdered babies. There’s a distinct ratcheting-down of the taboo from the first season premiere to the second.Isn’t it funny how Della’s dynamism leaves you rooting for her to betray her current partner and cheat with the glamorous woman she meets in the ladies’ room at lunch?“We’re where everyone wants to be!” Brooks hollers when his ballplayer partner communicates the league’s reticence to relocate any teams to Los Angeles. “You think anyone dreams of moving to [expletive] Cincinnati?” Well, that depends, Brooks. Has Skyline Chili opened yet?The closing credits, which on “Perry Mason” take on the role of opening title sequences on other shows, feature sand castles being washed away. If that isn’t the core anxiety at the heart of the California dream, I don’t know what is. More

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      Tyler James Williams Lifts His Spirits With bell hooks and Tom Ford

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      The “Abbott Elementary” star keeps nourished, body and soul, with D’Angelo’s music, Earl Grey lattes and early 2000s rom-coms.Tyler James Williams has had a winning season.A Screen Actors Guild award that he and his “Abbott Elementary” castmates won for their work on the ABC mockumentary about an underfunded public school in Philadelphia.A Golden Globe for best supporting actor for his own performance in the series, as Gregory Eddie, a substitute teacher who finds a sense of purpose and permanence in the job.And, as he took the Globes stage, a standing ovation from Eddie Murphy.“The award is great — I appreciate it. But that did more for me than anything ever could,” Williams admitted in a video call from Los Angeles.The actor, 30, has also morphed into something of a heartthrob in the role, which the “Abbott Elementary” creator Quinta Brunson, whom he’d met on “A Black Lady Sketch Show,” wrote for him after they became lockdown pals.All of the accolades don’t overshadow what he considers his most significant achievement.“We haven’t seen characters like Gregory and Janine” — a teacher played by Brunson with whom Gregory has a slow-burn kind of thing — “exist on television,” Williams said.“There’s not a heavy trauma story line. It’s just Black people living everyday lives and seeing the beauty in that,” he added. “Very rarely do we see that recognized in the awards platforms, so that for me is what I hope that win does.”Still, Williams, who has Crohn’s disease, may have never arrived at this moment had he not had a near-fatal flare-up when he was 23.“When I came out of the other side of it, I realized I had a choice,” he said. “I could be really busy and try to make a bunch of money. Or I could do things that felt like my heart was just bathed.”A few days after wrapping the second season of “Abbott” last month, Williams talked about his deep dive into bell hooks’s work, how D’Angelo captured the feelings of his youth and the Burberry trench he can’t leave behind. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1bell hooksIn 2020, when it became apparent that we were going to be locked down for some time, I was getting book recommendations from people. I had just finished “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” and Miss Lawrence, who was a castmate, had recommended “We Real Cool” by bell hooks. I read it and fell in love with her voice, and felt seen in a way I had never felt seen before, and understood things about myself I didn’t know. Then everything she had ever written, I was just diving through. To me they really question masculinity standards, particularly Black masculinity standards, which, with Gregory, I try to dismantle as many of those as I can.2‘Voodoo’ by D’AngeloI had to be 8 or 9 the first time I heard that album played in my house. And I was like, “Who did this? Who took my insides and made it sonic?” I listen to that album once every day, usually at the top of the day. D’Angelo, he’s kind of everything to me.3CinemaSinsIt’s a YouTube channel that points out all the tropes and archaic things that happen in our industry, where everything is so austere and we make art. It’s usually how I end my night when I’m in bed and winding down. Just to have some guy somewhere break it all down and dismantle it is really funny to me.4Earl Grey LatteDue to Crohn’s, I had to stop drinking coffee when I was younger, and I was a big latte person. So I got this great combination of Earl Grey teas that you mix together. Froth up the milk. It feels like a coffee, but you have the flowery notes that are in the tea. In the wintertime, you could do a dash of nutmeg, even some cinnamon, and a single sugar. And if it’s one of those days where it’s like, “This is going to be a heavy lift,” you do two tea bags.5Skywalker MarijuanaThat’s my favorite strain. Also Crohn’s-related, my doctors wanted me to eat more. My appetite response isn’t the same as everybody else’s — I need something to tell me that I’m hungry. And they were like, “Hey, there’s marijuana.” It seems to do all the things we need it to do.6Tom Ford CandlesI was shooting a show called “Whiskey Cavalier” in Prague, right before “Abbott,” and I stumbled on this candle at one of the stores on Parizska Street. There’s notes that are very masculine, but then there’s this soft powder behind it that’s feminine and light. I was like, “This is what I want my house to smell like at all times.”7‘Brown Sugar’This movie felt like a story that could happen to me: Two New York kids who love hip-hop could essentially just fall in love over that. It was simple. I’m a huge fan of the ’90s/early 2000s rom-com. I feel like we peaked as a society right there.8GoldThere’s something about it aesthetically that has always brightened my day. I’ve tried to get into silver, but it doesn’t really do it for me. There’s something about the way sun hits gold that the world gets brighter. It’s kind of like when you take sunglasses off. Everything becomes more vibrant.9Black Burberry Trench CoatI don’t buy a lot of things, and my closet’s very small. I just have stuff that I’m absolutely in love with. And Burberry has always done the trench better than everybody else. It’s something that I pull out literally all the time. It goes so perfectly with everything, always. I left it in New York when I came back from Christmas to finish shooting, and I was like, “What am I doing? I have to go back and get this.” I need this everywhere I go.10DuragsDuring the pandemic, my hair was really long. I couldn’t see a barber, so I ordered a durag and would put it on. I would compress over and over and over again and just kind of brush it out because I didn’t have any other choice. By the time we had shot the pilot of “Abbott,” I had been wave brushing for almost a year, and that became Gregory’s look. More

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      Review: ‘History of the World’ Repeats, as Farce

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      Mel Brooks’s human comedy gets a ‘Part II’ for streaming TV, with a sketch-star cast and a sharp makeover.Before his many lives as America’s tummler-in-chief — movie star, director, Broadway producer — Mel Brooks was a TV guy. He wrote for Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows,” the Big Bang from which much of the TV comedic tradition exploded forth. His 1981 film, “History of the World, Part I” (in which Caesar appeared as a cave dweller), applied an episodic approach, as if it were meant to be a sketch-comedy series.Now, with a little help and a few changes, it is. The eight-part “History of the World, Part II,” which debuts two episodes a day from Monday through Thursday on Hulu, is a screwball tour of civilization that gives the Brooks formula enough contemporary updates that you could think of it as “Evolution of TV Comedy, Part I.”And in an era of dutiful brand extensions and pointless revivals, it turns out to be history that’s surprisingly worth repeating.The 96-year-old Brooks is a writer and producer of the new series and assumes the narrator role performed by Orson Welles in the film. He has limited screen time now — the heaviest lifting is done by the writer-producer-performers Ike Barinholtz, Nick Kroll and Wanda Sykes — but he is responsible for the show’s first sight gag, in which he’s digitally altered into a young, musclebound hunk.Like that image, “Part II” aims not simply to reproduce the Mel Brooks of the last century but also to bring his comedy into 2023. It’s a collaborative production (the cast is so vast it might be easier to list TV-comedy fixtures who don’t appear) that is more diverse in both faces and comedy styles. Beyond the callbacks to the movie and affectionate recreations of Brooks’s slapstick and Jewish humor, the series combines elements of “Kroll Show,” “Drunk History,” “Documentary Now!,” “Sherman’s Showcase” and more.“Part I” was less a parody of actual history than of movie history. Its ancient Rome was lifted from swords-and-sandals epics; its French Revolution was, as the New York Times critic Vincent Canby wrote, very much the one imagined in M.G.M.’s “A Tale of Two Cities.”“Part II” is thoroughly made of TV and pop-media references. The story of Jesus Christ begins with a dead-on parody of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” with Kroll as a Larry Davidian Judas riffing with J.B. Smoove as the apostle Luke; later it becomes a drawn-out sendup of the Beatles documentary “Get Back.”“Part II” is hit-and-miss, much like “Part I” and nearly every sketch comedy ever made. When it hits, it’s an almost perfect marriage of style and subject. The strongest extended sketch stars Sykes as Shirley Chisholm — the Black female congresswoman and 1972 presidential candidate — in a note-perfect sendup of a ’70s sitcom. It’s not just impeccably executed and detailed, it’s sharp, smart history, accented with the laughter of a “live Black audience.”When the show misses — well, another advantage streaming has over the movie theater is the fast-forward button. A running bit about Gen. Ulysses S. Grant (Barinholtz) trying to kick his booze habit starts off strong with Timothy Simons as a cranky Abraham Lincoln but becomes a grinding war of attrition. The limp gag of imagining historical figures on social media (Galileo, Typhoid Mary, Princess Anastasia) doesn’t improve with repetition.The many guest stars include, from left, Rob Riggle, Richard Kind and Zazie Beetz.Aaron Epstein/HuluThere’s also the occasional reminder of the changed cultural sensibilities that “Part II” was made for. Brooks was a yukmeister provocateur, who made fun of the horrors of the 20th century (and beyond) while trusting his audience to get the absurdity. His “The Producers” — about the making of a deliberately offensive musical about Hitler — was about that kind of trust backfiring, and it generated backlash in real life.But as Brooks said on “Fresh Air” last year, “If we’re going to get even with Hitler, we can’t get on a soapbox because he’s too damn good at that.” (I guess I should note that Brooks is Jewish, even if that’s news only to Homer Simpson.) In that spirit, the closing credits of “Part I” tease a sequel including the segment “Hitler on Ice.” It’s assumed that the audience, without nudging, sees the ridiculousness of showing a genocidal monster pirouetting on skates.The first episode of “Part II” turns that brief joke into a full sketch with Barinholtz, Kroll and Sykes as sports announcers. Through the routine, their insults of the Nazi skater — “He’s a thug and bad for the sport” — grow sharper and more vulgar, as if to make clear that the depiction does not equal endorsement. It’s a funny bit, too, but funny for a more cautious, earnest time that prefers its problematic comedy more clearly underlined and bracketed.One advantage “Part II” has over its movie predecessor is the freedom of small scale. It can execute a one-joke premise and get out fast, as when it has Johnny Knoxville play the famously hard-to-kill czarist adviser Rasputin as the star of a Russian “Jackass.” (This also distinguishes it from Netflix’s “Cunk on Earth,” which can be screamingly funny but is condemned to repeat its Ali G-esque joke a little too long.)Still, “Part II” doesn’t entirely forget where it came from. A series of musical sketches featuring Kroll as a Jewish peasant selling mud pies during the Russian Revolution is the most Brooksian in style and setting. In a showstopping number, Kroll and Pamela Adlon fend off a murderous Cossack neighbor and duet about the trade-offs of city vs. shtetl life. (“Why seek out death and fear? / We’ve got plenty of it here!”)It’s just the dish to celebrate Mel Brooks’s legacy: Mud pie, à la mode. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Perry Mason’ and The Oscars

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      The HBO legal drama, starring Matthew Rhys, returns, and ABC airs the 95th Academy Awards.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Mar. 6-12. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE VOICE 8 p.m. on NBC. The singing-competition show that discovered Cassadee Pope and Morgan Wallen is back, and one of the judges, Blake Shelton, is gearing up for his 23rd and last season. Niall Horan, Kelly Clarkson and Chance the Rapper are joining him in the memorable red-spinning chairs as judges. The series starts with a “blind audition” round, as always.10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU (1999) 8 p.m. on Freeform. This teen romantic comedy is Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” if it took place in the late 1990s. Julia Stiles plays Kat Stratford, a girl who tends to scare off any male suitors with her bad attitude. Because her younger sister cannot date until Kat does, a mission is set forth — get Kat a date. Enter the very handsome Patrick Verona, played by Heath Ledger, who might be the solution to Kat’s dating problem.PERRY MASON 9 p.m. on HBO. Set in 1932 Los Angeles, this legal drama is based on stories by Erle Stanley Gardner, and follows the titular defense lawyer during the Great Depression. This second season will likely be a little different from the first because Jack Amiel and Michael Begler replaced the Season 1 showrunners Rolin Jones and Ron Fitzgerald. The series stars Matthew Rhys as Perry Mason alongside Shea Whigham and Eric Lange.TuesdayFrom left: Julia Michaels, Kelsea Ballerini, Jimmy Fallon, Nicole Scherzinger and Jason Derulo on “That’s My Jam.”Evan Vestal Ward/NBCTHAT’S MY JAM 10 p.m. on NBC. If you were not able to score Kelsea Ballerini tour tickets, you can see the singer team up with Julia Michaels against Nicole Scherzinger and Jason Derulo in musical games like Air Guitar and Launch the Mic in this competition show, hosted by Jimmy Fallon for a second season.WednesdayTHE CHALLENGE 8 p.m. on MTV. In the “World Champions” edition of this long-running reality competition show, winners and MVPs from Argentina, Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. are paired together for the opportunity to win $500,000.ThursdayLES MISERABLES: THE STAGED CONCERT 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Before Anne Hathaway sang “I Dreamed A Dream” or Hugh Jackman stole bread in the film version of “Les Miserables,” the popular musical, set in 19th-century France, had been staged in London’s West End since the mid-1980s. To celebrate, a filmed 2019 performance from the Gielgud Theater is airing on Thursday.TOP CHEF 9 p.m. on Bravo. The chopping, sautéing and seasoning we see on this cooking-competition show might be more impressive than usual this year. For its 20th season, the host Padma Lakshmi is bringing back “Top Chef” all-stars from all over the world. The head judges Tom Colicchio and Gail Simmons will be joined each week with guest chefs.FridayTHE 12TH VICTIM 8 p.m. on Showtime. In late January of 1958, the 19-year-old Charles Starkweather and his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, went on a killing spree that left 10 people dead. This four-part documentary series with archival footage looks at the events that transpired and how the justice system has changed since then, through the lens of Fugate’s guilty verdict: She is the youngest female in U.S. history to have been tried and convicted of first degree murder.SaturdayRichard Beymer and Natalie Wood in “West Side Story.”Everett CollectionWEST SIDE STORY (1961) 10 p.m. on TCM. It’s a two-for-one modern adaptation of Shakespeare week: a 1960s version of “Romeo and Juliet” set in New York City. Tony (Richard Beymer), a member of the Jets gang, falls for Maria (Natalie Wood), the younger sister of the leader of the opposing Sharks. Chaos, romance and musical numbers ensue.SundayTHE OSCARS 8 p.m. on ABC. The 95th Academy Awards are back this Sunday at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles and will be broadcast live. The sci-fi movie directed by Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” is up for the most awards with 11 nominations. “The Banshees of Inisherin” and “All Quiet on the Western Front” are tied for second with nine nominations each. See a full list of nominees here and follow along live with our culture reporters on Oscars Sunday.Scott Shepherd and Bella Ramsey in “The Last of Us.”Liane Hentscher/HBOTHE LAST OF US 9 p.m. on HBO. This post-apocalyptic show, based on the video game of the same name, might hit a little close to home as we enter yet another year of the pandemic — but that hasn’t stopped it from being a hit. In the show, a fungal infection turns people into quasi-zombies. This Sunday’s episode will wrap up the first season (HBO just greenlit Season 2), so it is likely that some of the loose ends won’t tie up until next season. More

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      ‘The Last of Us’ Season 1, Episode 8 Recap: There But for the Grace

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      This week’s episode offered a different perspective on who the good guys and bad guys of the story are. But only briefly.Season 1, Episode 8: ‘When We Are in Need’You know that old saying about how history is written by the victors? Something similar could be said about fiction. The heroes of any story are the people the author wants us to follow; and the villains are anyone standing in their way. But another storyteller with another focus might have flipped that perspective on the same story.Two episodes ago in “The Last of Us,” Joel and Ellie were startled by what they assumed was a roving band of raiders on the fictional University of Eastern Colorado campus. One of these men ran at them while they were trying to mount their house and gallop away. Joel wrestled with him and broke the man’s neck, after taking a puncture wound in the gut.This is a clear-cut case of right and wrong, right? Some rogue tried to kill the good guys and suffered the proper consequences.This week though, we get a different angle on what happened. In a small, struggling community of survivors in Colorado’s former Silver Lake resort, the residents are mourning the loss of Alec, the man Joel killed. They considered him to be a hunter, who was out looking for food for his starving people when he was viciously murdered. When they find out Joel and Ellie are hiding out in a house just a few miles away, the group turns to their leader, David (Scott Shepherd), for justice — which, from their perspective, is wholly justified.This episode — this season’s next to last — is at once the show’s simplest to date and also the one that digs deepest into the larger themes. On one level, the story this week is one of pure suspense, set in just a few locations, and with not a lot of action in comparison to what we have seen before. It’s about a recuperating Joel and a terrified Ellie trying to fend off the Silver Lakers, whose intentions remain suspicious no matter how gracious David appears to be. (Give a lot of credit to Shepherd’s perfectly pitched performance, which makes David seem at once kindly and creepy.)Inside the Dystopian World of ‘The Last of Us’The post-apocalyptic video game that inspired the TV series “The Last of Us” won over players with its photorealistic animation and a morally complex story.Game Review: “I found it hard to get past what it embraces with a depressing sameness, particularly its handling of its female characters,” our critic wrote of “The Last of Us” in 2013.‘Left Behind’: “The Last of Us: Left Behind,” a prologue designed to be played in a single sitting, was an unexpected hit in 2014.2020 Sequel: “The Last of Us Part II,” a tale of entrenched tribalism in a world undone by a pandemic, took a darker and unpredictable tone that left critics in awe.Playing the Game: Two Times reporters spent weeks playing the sequel in the run-up to its release. These were their first impressions.Ellie first meets David out in the woods with his right-hand man, James (Troy Baker), where they are all chasing the same deer — which Ellie ends up killing. She gets the drop on the men and makes a deal at gunpoint. They can share the meat if James brings her some penicillin to treat Joel’s gut wound, which is red and swollen with infection. And while Ellie waits, David talks.The story he tells about where he came from seems credible. David is a religious man now, but he used to be a nonbeliever, before the plague. He and his flock left the Pittsburgh Quarantine Zone when the Fireflies toppled FEDRA in 2017; and they gradually made their way west, losing some people to raiders but gaining others.David firmly believes everything happens for a reason, as he has expressed on a banner hung in the Silver Lake steakhouse where his group gathers: “When we are in need, He shall provide.” He thinks God delivered Ellie to their settlement to be a potential leader and provider. (Ellie: “You inviting me to your hunger club? Thanks.”)But while David insists that what Ellie calls “some weird cult thing” is actually “pretty standard Bible stuff,” there are indications that something is amiss. For starters, David seems strangely hesitant when Alec’s daughter asks when they are going to bury her father. Even stranger: Though their pantry had only about a week’s supply of meat before the excursion to the Eastern Colorado campus, everyone at dinner gets a bowl of “venison” in tomato sauce. (Some of the savvier Silver Lakers seem hesitant to eat it, though they eventually do tuck in.)Then there is the question of whether David honestly wants Ellie to be part of his team. (“I’m a shepherd surrounded by sheep and all I want is an equal,” he says to her at one point.) James certainly seems eager to kill Ellie outright whenever David is not around. “If we bring her back she’s just another mouth to feed,” he grumbles. When David warns that if they leave her on her own she will likely die, James suggests, “Maybe that’s God’s will.”This debate over who gets saved and who gets culled — or eaten — raises some uncomfortable questions, making this episode especially provocative.Consider Joel again. All season long, we have heard about the terrible things he has done to survive, though we have seen only brief flashes of what he is willing to do when necessary. This week, though, we see him at his most merciless. When the Silver Lakers are closing in on the house where Joel is convalescing, Ellie leaves him with a knife and jumps on the horse to try and misdirect the hunters. She ultimately is captured; but it does not matter. Even a weakened Joel is strong enough to choke one man, tie up two others, torture his prisoners to get information on Ellie’s whereabouts and then viciously kill them. He behaves like the enemy they believe him to be.In the end, this episode comes down on Joel and Ellie’s side — and not just because they are the show’s main characters. David’s turn to cannibalism crosses too many lines. Once you start seeing everyone as either friend or food, you have lost the moral high ground.Even worse, it is strongly implied that David is just a sicko, through and through — and that he has been since before the end times. After his people cage Ellie, David’s low-key, rational-sounding conversations turn into fervid rants. He talks about how human beings are animals. He says Ellie has “a violent heart,” adding, “and I should know.” He praises cordyceps because “it secures its future with violence, if it must.” When Ellie escapes by breaking his finger, burns down the steakhouse (banner and all), and stabs him in the gut, David appears to be excited by her aggression. Later, as David pins her to the ground, his voice turns dark. “I thought you already knew,” he says. “The fighting is the part I like the most.” (Yikes!)The episode concludes with one horror after another. Joel arrives in Silver Lake, where he is appalled to find his horse dead in a cold storage facility where three headless human corpses have been cleaned, dressed, and hung on hooks. Back in the burning steakhouse, David seems to be on the verge of sexually assaulting her before she gets her hands on a meat cleaver. She practically turns feral as she hacks him to death.Yet even during such a grim and bloody day, there are glimmers of hope. The original sin of “The Last of Us” — in Joel’s eyes, anyway — is that he failed to save his daughter when the plague started raging. On this day, Ellie has already saved herself by the time he arrives; but at least he gets to give her the reassuring hug he never gave Sarah. This, in itself, is a kind of heroism. As a traumatized Ellie sobs, Joel holds onto her, tightly. “It’s OK, baby girl,” he says. “I got you.”Side QuestsThe actor who plays James in this episode played Joel in the video game. Although Baker did not act opposite Bella Ramsey in the original “The Last of Us,” it still must have been strange for him to play a character so hostile to Ellie’s existence.I appreciated the realism of seeing Ellie bring the penicillin back to the unconscious Joel and having no idea how to give it to him. (Just injecting it straight into the wound seemed to work OK.)On the one hand, a world overrun by mushroom monsters seems pretty bad. On the other hand, the survivors get to live out their lives in swanky resorts. Maybe worth it? More

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      ‘S.N.L.’ Imagines How ‘Fox & Friends’ Might Cover the Dominion Suit

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      The cast and writers stepped in to fill the gap in Fox News’s coverage of its own election lies scandal, in an episode hosted by Travis Kelce.Fox News has so far been wary in reporting on a defamation lawsuit brought against it by Dominion Voter Systems, and on the many private messages the suit has surfaced from high-ranking Fox News personnel, expressing their disbelief at falsehoods and conspiracy theories the network promoted after the 2020 presidential election.So “Saturday Night Live” strode right into that gap, kicking off this weekend’s show with a sketch that imagined how the “Fox & Friends” morning show might cover this news. (Short answer: awkwardly.)“S.N.L.”, which was hosted by the Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and featured the musical guest Kelsea Ballerini, opened on a sendup of “Fox & Friends” with Mikey Day, Heidi Gardner and Bowen Yang playing the hosts Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt and Brian Kilmeade.Day, as Doocy, set up the segment by saying, “You may have heard that Fox News is currently facing a $1.6 billion lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems.”Yang, as Kilmeade, said he was surprised by the suit “because I’m such a fan of Dominions — the little yellow guys with the overalls.”“Not the Minions,” Day explained. “We’re talking about the Dominion voting machines lawsuit. And our boss, Rupert Murdoch, gave some pretty shocking testimony in the case.”“This whole trial has been so unfair,” said Gardner. “They are raking him over the coals. Rupert Murdoch would never murder anyone. They sent him away for life.”Day corrected her, too. “That’s not Rupert Murdoch, that’s Alex Murdaugh,” he said.“Well, we just blew the case wide open,” Gardner replied. “They got the wrong guy.”The hosts shared text messages from Fox News hosts that they said the news media had presented out of context. For example, Yang showed a text message from Sean Hannity that read: “Rudy Giuliani is insane.”However, Yang said, the full message actually read that Giuliani is “insanely hot. I just want to lick that head dye right off.”Day added that text messages reading “Mind blowingly nuts” and “off the rails” had been sent to their fellow Fox host Laura Ingraham in response to her question, “What should I put in my Tinder bio?”The hosts then introduced an interview with the MyPillow founder, Mike Lindell (James Austin Johnson), warning him not to say anything outrageous about Dominion.Saying that he understood, Johnson immediately disobeyed the instruction. “Every Dominion machine has a Venezuelan Oompa Loompa inside that eats the votes with its little mouth,” he said.Following a further admonishment, Johnson broke the rule again: “Dominion voting machines give triple votes to Democrats, illegals and that lady M&M that stopped shaving her pits,” he said.Toy story of the weekWhen you’ve got an “S.N.L.” episode hosted by a star athlete like Kelce, a two-time Super Bowl-champion, of course you’re going to put him in sketches that puncture traditional notions of masculinity. Like this one, which found Kelce’s neatly attired character dining at an American Girl Café, with no other companions at his table besides his two dolls, Claire and Isabelle.Kelce proved pretty deft with wry descriptions of his dolls (“Isabelle just had her period and she thinks she’s a woman now”) and in parrying the suspicions of a waiter, played by Day, who asked if his name might turn up on any court documents or government lists. “The only list you’ll find me on is the hungriest customer list,” Kelce responded.Fake ad of the weekYang got the spotlight in this filmed segment, explaining to the camera that, as a gay man, he loves his female friends but sometimes finds them overwhelming. When he needs relief, he turns to Straight Male Friend, a product he describes with the same calm detachment you would use to summarize a prescription drug: “A low-effort, low-stakes relationship that requires no emotional commitment, no financial investment and, other than the occasional video-game related outburst, no drama.”Kelce played that product, an easygoing bro who barely reacted when Yang told him he was thinking of moving to Europe for seven years. “Just hit me when you’re back,” Kelce responded.But be careful: As an onscreen graphic warned, “Three or more straight male friends may result in a trip to Atlantic City.”Weekend Update jokes of the weekOver at the Weekend Update desk, the anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che riffed on a drag performance ban in Tennessee; a conclusion from the Department of Energy on the cause of the coronavirus pandemic; and the fallout from a racist rant by Scott Adams, the creator of the comic strip “Dilbert.”Jost began:Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has signed a new law banning public drag performances with a six-year prison sentence for repeat offenders, as first predicted in the now documentary “Madea Goes to Jail.” A Tennessee state senator said the bill will prevent kids from being “blindsided by a sexualized performance in public.” What are you talking about? Drag shows don’t just pop up like flash mobs and sprinkle gay dust on your kids. I never accidentally happened upon a drag show, and I grew up in New York City. Now, I have been blindsided by a sexualized performance a few times, but that’s just what you get when you take the bus.Che turned to Covid news …The U.S. Energy department concluded that Covid likely originated from a Wuhan laboratory leak and not a wet market. So I gave up eating bats for nothing?… and then pivoted to “Dilbert”:Newspapers around the country dropped the cartoon strip “Dilbert” after creator Scott Adams said he chose to live in a community where no Black people live. So he lives in your building, huh, Colin?Jost (after denying it was true) picked up the thread:Newspapers dropped the cartoon strip effective immediately. And to rub it in, they’re replacing “Dilbert” with “Peanuts: Oops All Franklin.” “Dilbert” creator Scott Adams’s racist rant was in response to the results of a poll that asked respondents the question, “Is it OK to be white?” Oh, I’d say it’s more than just OK. [His screen showed a photo of Jost holding wads of cash in his hands.]Weekend Update desk segment of the weekExtending its mockery of the comic-strip controversy, Weekend Update featured a visit from Dilbert himself: He was played by Michael Longfellow, who wore some horrifying prosthetics that all-too-realistically depicted what the character might look like if he were human.Longfellow told Che that, although he was oblivious to Adams’s racism: “I knew he was bad. He made me go into the office every single day during Covid and he knows I’m autoimmune.” When Che responded with disbelief, Longfellow said, “Do I look like somebody who’s not autoimmune? Yeah, I’m a real athlete. My hair is skin, Michael.”He went on to describe Adams as “the funny guy” and “the Trump-supporting cartoonist who did magic in his spare time — had a great Kevin Hart impression.” Che said, “Well that sounds like a racist to me.”Longfellow replied: “Well, it turns out he was a racist. And I’m his prize creation. I mean, what does that make me?” More

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      In ‘A Spy Among Friends,’ B.F.F. Betrayal at an International Level

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      A twisty MGM+ series tells the story of Kim Philby, a British agent secretly working for the Soviet Union, and Nicholas Elliott, his closest friend.“Why wasn’t he in custody?” asks the MI5 officer Lily Thomas. It is January 1963, and Thomas is talking about Kim Philby, a British intelligence agent who, after being exposed as a Soviet spy, has escaped to Moscow. Nicholas Elliott, Philby’s closest friend and a fellow member of the foreign intelligence agency MI6, looks slightly nonplused. “Well, that’s not how we —” he begins, before coming to an abrupt halt.That “we” is at the heart of “A Spy Among Friends,” a six-part series based on the book of the same name by Ben Macintyre, and starring Guy Pearce as Philby, Damian Lewis as Elliott and Anna Maxwell Martin as Thomas. The series, produced by Sony Pictures Television, premieres March 12 on MGM+.It’s the “we” of the old boys’ club, of men bonded by private schools, an Oxbridge education, members-only clubs and the confident assumption of their right to power. The show explores the psychological shock of the realization that a figure considered “one of us” was something quite different all along.“MI6 tended to attract those public schoolboys, people who had no hesitation about bending the rules because they thought they were above the rules,” Macintyre said in a recent interview. “They believed they were born to lead, and they couldn’t imagine that one of their own could be a traitor.”The TV adaptation was written by Alex Cary (“Homeland”) and directed by Nick Murphy (“Blood”). Like the book, it is both a tale of espionage and the story of a friendship and a betrayal that is as personally devastating for Elliott as the political betrayal is for the Western powers.Philby’s story is true: He was one of the Cambridge Five, a group of upper-class Englishmen recruited by the Soviets while in college, and who were eventually, and gradually, unmasked following World War II, after they had been working for the Communist cause from inside British intelligence services for decades.Pearce said that even after playing the character, Philby’s motivations remained an enigma to him.Sam Taylor/Sony Pictures Television“It’s such a well-known story in the U.K., Philby as the most successful traitor of the 20th century,” Lewis said in a video interview from New York. “This is a sneak peek at a more psychological, emotional way of looking at it.”Philby was both Elliott’s best friend and his idol, Lewis said, and Elliott “fatally continued to facilitate his treachery.” Lewis added: “The great tragedy is that he realizes in retrospect that the man he loved and enabled and defended had gotten thousands of people killed.”Macintyre said that he learned about the Philby-Elliott friendship from the novelist John le Carré, who described it to him as “the best unwritten story of the Cold War.” When he began his research, he discovered “comrades in arms who loved each other as much as heterosexual men in Britain could.”“It’s a very intimate treachery,” Macintyre said.The book, full of biographical detail and historical context, wasn’t easy to adapt, Cary said in an interview, adding that Lewis, whom he had worked with on “Homeland,” helped him develop the script and the show’s approach.“We had long, long conversations about the balance between spy-narrative red meat and a story about friendship,” Cary said.He came up with the fictional Thomas, he said, as “a device through which we could engage with Elliott emotionally,” and as an acknowledgment of the various women in Macintyre’s book who are “involved in an unsung way.” He added that he knew introducing a central female character to the story could “be called woke, which is fine with me!”Thomas, with her northern accent and blunt manners, embodies the class differences between MI5 (which investigates matters of national security, like the F.B.I.) and MI6 (the foreign intelligence service, like the C.I.A.). But her character also suggests a redemptive path for Elliott, who gradually becomes aware of her qualities and potential.Lily Thomas (Anna Maxwell Martin) is a fictional character, created for the show to help Lewis’s Elliott along a redemptive path. Sony Pictures Television“She represents what has to change in British society, but also has to play as a real person,” Maxwell Martin said in an interview. Thomas is there, she said, “to serve a narrative — someone who will cleave open Elliott’s mind and his subtleties, his emotional brain and his heartbreak, and someone who would challenge what happened in Beirut.”Beirut, where both men had been stationed, is where the final confrontation between Elliott and Philby takes place. Cary uses their long, elliptical conversation as a central structuring device for the show, which moves swiftly and without any identification between countries, eras and story lines. “That allowed me to tip my hat to the le Carré ‘Tinker, Tailor’ genre,” Cary said.Anchoring the rapidly shifting scenes are conversations: between Philby and Elliott, between Thomas and Elliot, and between Philby and his Russian debriefer. And between these, there are subplots: a fictional one involving a C.I.A. plot in Moscow after Philby’s defection, a true one about the identification of Anthony Blunt, the curator of Queen Elizabeth II’s art collection, as another member of the Cambridge group.“A key decision a director must make is the relationship between your camera and the story,” said Murphy, the show’s director, discussing the story’s shifts in time and location. In the show, “the camera reacts to everything, it doesn’t anticipate, which allows the audience to discover everything as the characters do.”Murphy’s London is a gray, monochrome place, full of brown-suited men and women who are constantly lighting cigarettes in dim rooms. “The era is often delivered cinematically as a tribute to the swinging ’60s,” Murphy said. “But the ’60s hadn’t swung yet; it was an England and a Europe trying to get off its knees after the war.”The Moscow that Philby escapes to is an even more drab city of slushy snow, long lines and drunks on the street. And although he is nominally welcomed as a hero, the K.G.B. is deeply suspicious that he has come to Moscow to spy for Britain.Pearce said that Philby mostly remained an enigma to him, too: “Did he really want to go to Moscow, or take the offer that Elliott makes of a peaceful life in the country in return for a full confession? Would his ego have allowed him to become an ordinary person in England?”While Philby’s flight to Moscow, and whether Elliott was complicit in it, remain an important ambiguity, the central question of the show, Cary said, is “whether there was sincerity in the depths of that friendship, even as there was duplicity in the great arc of the friendship.”That is also the essential question for Elliott, played by Lewis with a fine-tuned opacity that occasionally cracks to reveal the pain beneath.Lewis and the show’s writer Alex Cary also worked together on “Homeland,” and Lewis helped develop the script and approach for “A Spy Among Friends.”Sony Pictures Television“It is like a love story,” Lewis said. “He feels like the cuckold who gave everything blindly to the relationship without knowing he has been cheated on.”Midway through the first episode of the series, Murphy recreates the televised news conference that Philby gave after he was accused of being the “third man” in a Communist spy ring that included his fellow Cambridge student Guy Burgess. Asked whether he still regarded Burgess as a friend, Philby hesitates, then gives an answer that is perhaps the one sincere sentiment he expresses in the show:“On the subject of friendship,” he says slowly, “I’d prefer to say as little as possible, because it’s very complicated.” More

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      Seth Meyers Says It’s ‘Too Late’ for Fox News to Undo Trump Damage

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      Meyers wished the network luck in reining in the former president while he’s “interrupting weddings at Mar-a-Lago to give off-the-cuff toasts.”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.‘I’ve Created a Monster!’According to a recent deposition, the chairman of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, tried to make sure former President Donald Trump was given less coverage on the conservative news channel after the 2020 election.Seth Meyers chastised Murdoch for the late-in-the-game call. “Too late, you built this,” he said, spicing his remark with an expletive.“It’s easy to put a brain in Frankenstein when he’s a lifeless body strapped to a table, but good luck getting it out of his head while he’s lumbering around a golf course and interrupting weddings at Mar-a-Lago to give off-the-cuff toasts.” — SETH MEYERS“According to filings in the Dominion lawsuit, Murdoch has been trying to keep the ex-prez off Fox for a long time now. After Jan. 6, Murdoch instructed an aide to make the former president a nonperson. He wants to make the former president persona non grata, as opposed to now, when he’s persona au gratin.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“They’re banning the ex-president? That’s like Discovery Channel banning sharks. No one wants to watch ‘Salty Water Week.’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (The Fascist and the Furious Edition)“In Washington, ‘the fascist and the furious’ have gathered to praise their lord and savior, Donald Trump, at the annual CPAC convention. This is a convention for all your worst aunts and uncles.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Every, like, low-rent radio host and podcast racist with a dye job and a fleece vest shows up to try to out-crazy each other. Remember the first seasons of ‘American Idol’ when the losers would just line up and be mowed down by Simon Cowell? It’s like that but without Simon Cowell.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Actually, Trump’s excited to be there. He actually spent all day in the lobby signing copies of his classified documents.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingJimmy Fallon and Brendan Fraser turned into Goat Leg Greg and Gilvin of the Tree to deliver “Pearls of Wisdom” on Thursday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutDaniel Kwan, second from left, with his highly nominated “Everything Everywhere All at Once” collaborators Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan and Jonathan Wang.Some of this year’s Asian and Asian American Oscar nominees reflect on a record-setting awards season ahead of next week’s ceremony. More