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      Damon Lindelhof and Soo Hugh on Encouraging ‘Creative Short Circuits’

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      For the Taking the Lead series, we asked leaders in various fields to share insights on what they’ve learned and what lies ahead.Years ago, the television writer Soo Hugh had a meeting with Damon Lindelof, one of the creators of the groundbreaking ABC drama “Lost.” Lindelof was looking for writers to work on his next series, “The Leftovers,” for HBO, and Hugh was an admirer. She didn’t get the job.The next time the two met, in March 2022, it was at the premiere party for “Pachinko,” Hugh’s own critically acclaimed series, on Apple TV+, based on the National Book Award finalist of the same name. Lindelof took his place among a long line of well-wishers.“Clearly I made a mistake,” he said, in a recent conversation with Hugh via video.It’s easy to imagine a parallel universe in which Lindelof, 50, and Hugh, 45, were collaborators. Both writers are known for sweeping, large-cast, character-driven narratives that center on questions of fate and the search for meaning. On “Lost,” the castaways of the island are haunted by the unfinished business of their previous lives. On “Pachinko,” multiple generations of a Korean family are buffeted by the forces of war and globalization.As a showrunner in the mid 2000s, Lindelof ran a writers’ room that looked and functioned much differently than is common today. On “Lost,” he said, he mostly hired other “white Jewish guys who wore glasses and loved ‘Star Wars’” to generate the 24-episodes in a season of network television. His latest show, “Mrs. Davis,” an eight-episode limited series for the streaming service Peacock, was made in partnership with its co-creator Tara Hernandez, a former writer and producer on “The Big Bang Theory,” and a team of writers from a variety of religious and ethnic backgrounds.Hugh who previously wrote for network and cable television, now sits at the helm of a show that would have been nearly impossible to imagine 15 years ago: a fully international production — with an all-Asian lead cast and dialogue in subtitled Korean and Japanese — financed and distributed by an American tech company that now also functions as a studio.But some things in Hollywood never change. At the time of this conversation, members of the Writers’ Guild of America — Hugh and Lindelof among them — were one week into a labor strike, in which they are demanding changes to pay and employment practices that they say are exploitative, including issues involving compensation for streaming shows. Lindelof was preparing to join other members in a picket line — just as he had when the last writers strike, in 2007, disrupted production of the fourth season of “Lost.”Lindelof, in Los Angeles, and Hugh, in New York, discussed the challenges of working as a television writer today, learning from their staffs and remaining true to their creative vision in a collaborative medium. This conversation has been condensed and edited.Adriana BelletDAMON LINDELOF Soo, I’m just curious — you guys are in production right now, right? You’re shooting?SOO HUGH We are. We have a month left. We just finished in Toronto as the strike was being called. The Korea portion starts next week and will go for five weeks.LINDELOF Are you going?HUGH I am going, but I felt conflicted. [Many studios have warned writers who are also producers to continue producing or risk losing their contracts.] I have done all of my writing services. I would say “Pachinko” is a producer’s show in some ways just because of the gargantuan production. It’s a headache. I don’t know how long I will stay. It makes me very uncomfortable figuring out those boundaries — they’re so gray. It’s very strange times.LINDELOF Yeah, it’s supposed to be uncomfortable, I guess. I think that everybody is looking for the right thing to do. I don’t have a show that’s in production right now. With “Mrs. Davis,” we finished everything — post, final sound mix, final visual effects — before the strike. So it’s a much cleaner line. I wake up, I picket and then I go to bed. So I’ll just say, I’m with you in spirit.What do you think your career would be like if you were starting today?HUGH I don’t know if you feel this way, Damon, but I feel like there’s so little room for failure now. My first show was a failure [Hugh’s “The Whispers” ran for a single season on ABC in 2015] and it was by learning what I never wanted to do again that I was able to go on to something I’m more proud of. Nowadays, the system feels so do or die.LINDELOF I agree a thousand percent. In the mid-90s, when I first came out to Los Angeles and was trying to figure out how to become a professional writer, broadcast television was still where most of the work was. There was this institution where it was like, this is what you do, this is how you get a job, this is how you work your way up. Now, all of those things have changed. The goal used to be, Can I be on this show for three, four, five seasons? Now you have to put it all on the field on your very first opportunity because that show will probably only exist for a season, if at all. The pressures are just immense. I don’t think that I could have been successful in this environment.HUGH It’s interesting that you came from broadcast. I think we all pooh-pooh broadcast these days, but I am the showrunner I am because of broadcast, without a doubt. And I think the fact that broadcast has died is really killing showrunners. You don’t learn how to produce anymore. When we were coming up, you only had $4 million an episode and seven-day shoots [The most expensive episodes of television today can cost more than $20 million and shoot for more than 20 days]; it taught you a level of discipline that I think really carries you later on.How did you learn to communicate your vision effectively?LINDELOF Clumsily. I think that you watch how it’s done. I had the institutional experience of working primarily in broadcast procedurals. When you’re making as many episodes as we were, it’s a bit of speed chess. To Soo’s point, you have X number of dollars and X number of days to produce these episodes and everything kind of backfills into that. So it requires a lot of delegation and trust inside of the writers’ room. Ultimately the room becomes a machine that is trying to channel the vision of the showrunner. That’s how I learned how to do the job.On my last few shows, the goal has been different. It’s giving strong guidance and a decisive sense of, Yes, that feels good or That feels bad, but ultimately wanting every writer in the room to feel some fundamental sense of authorship. It became, Let’s build some kind of collective vision that we call “The Leftovers” or “Watchmen” [Lindelof’s limited series adaptation of the graphic novel, which aired on HBO in 2019, was nominated for 26 Emmys and won 11] that you all see yourselves in, and I’ll do my best to steer that thing. By the time I got to “Mrs. Davis,” I wasn’t showrunning at all anymore; Tara was. And that feels even better. She could either call upon my experience or completely and totally ignore it. It created both a tremendous amount of relief for me and also, I feel, a much better product.HUGH I really do believe in frequencies aligning. I feel like my job in putting a room together is creating a creative short circuit by finding the right personalities. I’m more interested in the way people think than how they write, because at the end of the day, I usually rewrite everything anyway. I just need that right brain power because that’s what we’re fueling the room with.LINDELOF I love that idea of frequencies aligning. I’m curious — do you start out like, The frequency is 89.9, and I am teaching it to all of you so you can get on it? Or are you like, I have some sense of what the range of frequency is, but I’m looking for these people in the room to help me find it?HUGH Both. We always start the day with an hour of non sequiturs. You’re not allowed to talk about the show. You’re not allowed to talk about your characters. You can only talk about what you saw on your walk over, or what did you watch on TV last night? Then, after an hour, we all turn together to a different tune.Adriana BelletWhat makes you excited when you’re reading a spec script?HUGH When it doesn’t start with a flash-forward.LINDELOF [Laughs] Anything that’s not like, Three days ago … It’s intangible, but it’s the same thing that you feel when you meet someone and you recognize, Oh, OK, I want to spend more time with this person. Within five or six pages you’re like, Who wrote this? Why did they write this? It feels so fresh and interesting. Then you meet them and, as in life, sometimes they’re even more interesting than you thought, and sometimes it doesn’t feel like a connection. You also want to have a well-balanced team. I’m not interested in having seven shortstops. You want some talkers, some listeners, some who are stronger on the page, some who are stronger in the room, some utility players.HUGH I’m so desperate for someone to say no to me. When you hire writers, you’re surrounded by people pleasers, and I get it. But what we’re looking for are people to help us build the best show. And sometimes that means telling us, You know what? I personally don’t think that’s going to work, and this is why.LINDELOF The worst thing that you can say to me in an interview is, I’m a huge fan of your work. Because either it triggers some degree of discomfort or self-loathing, or it’s very flattering and it’s really nice, but it kind of runs afoul of what you’re talking about. Is this person going to be unable to tell me that I’m an idiot? The fact of the matter is that most of the time, I am an idiot.Are there times when your writers have opened your eyes to a way of thinking that you hadn’t thought of before?HUGH All the time.LINDELOF All the time.HUGH I think the higher up you go, you lose all sense of proportion. You don’t worry about money anymore. You’re less hungry. You get exposed to fewer different people. Age just bubbles you in a way that for better or worse is limiting in terms of the human experience. So what I love about the writers’ room, and I think why it’s probably my favorite part of the process, is all of a sudden my sense of the world expands. Now I’m seeing it through seven or eight people’s eyes.LINDELOF Look, in the rooms that I started in, the reality was it was basically white guys. And so I was like, Oh, what you do is you just copy yourself. That way, there’s all these different versions of you, and you don’t have to waste time explaining things. That led to a culture of tokenism, which I take full responsibility for. On “Lost,” we had characters who spoke Korean, and Harold Perrineau as a Black father, so it was like, We should probably have a Black writer and a Korean writer for their episodes. But, of course, those writers are whole people who have perspectives on all the other characters, as well.The idea that came later — of curating a room that looks nothing like you and has wildly different life experience than you and that you may occasionally come into more conflict with — I think that resulted in better and more interesting work.As writers who became producers, how did you learn to get a big crew rowing in the same direction?HUGH I’ve found that my job as a showrunner is mostly to say, It’s not good enough but to say it with a smile. What can we do? How do we push it forward?LINDELOF I think when you are producing something, as opposed to writing, it is the act of making. If you’re a novelist, for example, sure you’re making a novel. But then you say, Now, Jonathan Franzen, manifest “The Corrections” into a television series, and it becomes an entirely different skill set. It requires daily and constant sacrifice and compromise from people who are not necessarily used to that. Every single day, every email that we get is some version of, I know you wanted to do this, but how about this instead? If you always say yes, then what are you even there for? Where’s the place where you dig in your heels? It will seem arbitrary to someone outside of our bodies, but we have to take the arbitrary thing and make it seem essential. More

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      Why ‘Ted Lasso’ Has the Freshest Footwear on Television

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      Credit the show’s star and creator, Jason Sudeikis, a real-life sneakerhead who owns about 250 pairs.There’s a reason that Ted Lasso, the fictional, sunny, mustachioed American hired to manage an English football club in the Apple TV+ series of the same name, is a sneakerhead.“It was rooted in my own enthusiasm for sneakers and sneaker culture,” said Jason Sudeikis, who has sported more than a dozen pairs of blue, orange and even red paisley Air Jordans as the show’s titular coach.In a recent call from London, Mr. Sudeikis said that Ted’s affinity for footwear was also inspired, in part, by his longtime friend Brendan Curran, a fellow sneaker enthusiast and high school basketball coach in Lenexa, Kan., who connected with his students over this shared interest.“It was this bit of unspoken respect and camaraderie among him and his players and his students,” Mr. Sudeikis, 47, said of Mr. Curran and his team.While other shows like the ’90s sitcom “Seinfeld” have dabbled in delighting sneaker stans, “Ted Lasso” takes it to a whole new level. Characters have sported popular sneakers such as 2021 Air Jordan 1 Low “UNC”s, 515 Sport V2 New Balances and Onitsuka Tiger Mexico 66 “Kill Bill” shoes.There’s an Instagram account, @nikesoflasso, where an artist shares illustrations of some of the Nike shoes featured in the show and in Mr. Sudeikis’s personal collection, and a website, Shoes of Lasso, that tracks the various sneakers worn by the show’s cast.“We’re all so flattered by it,” said Mr. Sudeikis, who owns about 250 pairs. “It’s something that we were intentional about from the get-go, before we thought anyone would notice.”The appeal for many sneaker collectors begins at a young age, said Elizabeth Semmelhack, the senior curator at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto. “A common thread seems to be a desire for a very specific pair of sneakers,” she said.Mr. Sudeikis not only masterminds his own character’s footwear in “Ted Lasso,” but also consults about the sneaker choices of other characters.Colin Hutton/Apple TV+The Air Jordan 1 Low “UNC” sneaker is one of Mr. Sudeikis’s favorite shoes.NikeMr. Sudeikis said his love of sneakers began when he received his first pair of Air Jordans in middle school, in 1986. The shoes Ted wears are a combination of pairs from Mr. Sudeikis’s own collection (about 25 percent, he estimated) and that of Nike, which came on board as the official kit supplier for the show’s fictional team in its third season.Mr. Sudeikis said that when he wears his own sneakers, it “drives our costumer, Jacky Levy, a little crazy, just for continuity purposes.”Mr. Sudeikis, who originally played Ted in sketch-length NBC Sports commercials that aired in 2013 and 2014, not only masterminds his own character’s footwear, but also consults about the sneaker choices of other characters.“People would come into my trailer, and they’d say, ‘Oh my gosh’ — it would look like the back room of a Foot Locker,” he said.The characters’ sneaker choices have been intentional since the beginning, Mr. Sudeikis said, but eagle-eyed fans have increasingly begun psychoanalyzing them for plot clues. (In fairness, it’s not just the shoes; in Episode 2 of Season 3, a theory about Rebecca’s earrings being lassos — though in reality they were snakes — gained traction online.)Mr. Sudeikis said the sneaker sleuthing was definitely merited.“Jacky is incredibly intentional about that, certainly with Rebecca’s wardrobe, Keeley’s wardrobe, everybody’s,” he said. “It’s not always the sneakers, either — Ted wearing an orange sweatshirt in the Amsterdam episode was intentional because the national color for the Netherlands is orange.”Mr. Sudeikis said he liked the sense of community that springs up among sneakerheads.When he worked at “Saturday Night Live,” he would often walk to work wearing a pair of Jordans. “You’d meet someone who’d notice your shoes first and give you a nod,” he said. “It’s a little bit like ‘Fight Club’ — game recognizes game.”Eliza Wilson, an illustrator in Melbourne, Australia, who runs the Nikes of Lasso account and has drawn more than 70 shoes, echoed that idea. The feedback she received from other fans, she said, provided a sense of community during lockdown periods of the pandemic.With the series wrapping up on May 31, Ms. Wilson said she would miss the weekly routine of sketching the sneakers featured in every new episode, which take her about four to five hours each. But, she said, she may continue drawing shoes she sees Mr. Sudeikis wearing in social media posts and other photos.Despite owning enough sneakers to wear a different pair every other day for a year, there’s one pair, Mr. Sudeikis said, that remains close to his heart.“They’re pretty beat up at this point, but my Jordan 1s, low, they’re Carolina Blue,” he said, referring to the athletic color of the University of North Carolina. “I wear them a couple times throughout the show. I genuinely love those shoes.” More

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      Stand-Up Comics Are Asking, What’s So Funny About Grief?

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      Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Stand-up comedy.Are these the new five stages of grief? It can seem that way to those following the comedy scene. The past year has brought us specials and solo theatrical shows with jokes sandwiched between deeply felt thoughts on the death of a father, mother, girlfriend, boyfriend and sister.Dead baby jokes were once a juvenile niche. Now comedy about the death of a child has become its own heartbreaking genre. Just this month, the comic Liz Glazer released her debut stand-up album, “A Very Particular Experience,” about the stillbirth of her daughter (“a comedy show meets shiva”) and Michael Cruz Kayne premiered his wrenching solo about the death of his son, “Sorry for Your Loss.” Early on, he warns us that we might cry. “If you don’t,” he adds, pausing, “that’s rude.”There are so many grief-stricken comedians these days that it invites the question: For an art form traditionally associated with punchlines about dating and airplane food, why is it mourning again (and again) in America?The pandemic certainly put grief on the minds of artists and audiences, and that also explains a boom in books, theater, podcasts and television on the subject. One way to look at the final season of “Succession” is as a cringe comedy about people who are terrible at grieving.But the growth of stand-up on this theme is rooted just as much in aesthetic changes in the form. One of the most exciting developments in popular culture over the past decade is the growing ambition of comedy. Not only has it produced some of the finest, most urgent art on the pandemic, #MeToo and other newsworthy topics, but comics have also displayed a broader emotional palette than they did a generation ago. They are after more than just laughs. These new shows illustrate how grief, precisely because it’s usually handled with solemnity, jargon and unsaid thoughts, is ripe territory for stand-up.Michael Cruz Kayne warns audiences at his show about the death of his son that they might cry, adding, “If you don’t, that’s rude.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt the same time, there’s so much grief comedy right now that it’s already developed its own clichés: Joan Didion references, bits about the phrase “He’s in a better place.” Striking the right balance between light and dark is also tricky. Several comics sink into an indulgence they can’t afford. Comedy doesn’t have to be only about jokes, but when it stops being funny, there had better be a good reason.A SIGNAL TURNING POINT in modern stand-up was the moment when Tig Notaro walked onstage at a club in 2012, grabbed the microphone and said, “Thank you. I have cancer. Thank you.” She revealed that she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer and that her mother had died. She wondered aloud, “What if I transitioned into silly jokes?”Then a funny thing happened: The crowd protested, loudly. Notaro sounded surprised, even mocking the interest in bad news, before adding: “Now I feel bad I don’t have more tragedy to share.”That storied set was eventually released as a special, called “Live,” to considerable acclaim. Many comics followed with raw tragedies to share. Laurie Kilmartin live-tweeted as her father died before turning that into a special. Doug Stanhope used his mother’s last days for a baroque routine.Comedy has always gravitated toward darkness. Richard Pryor and George Carlin broached the saddest subjects. But there is a difference in comedy today, in aim and overtness. An extreme example is “Red Blue Green,” a 2022 special from Drew Michael, who has produced some of the most formally experimental and artistically polarizing hours in recent years. Toward the end, he describes comedy as “mining sadness” and transforming it into a balloon animal to make it palatable for an audience. That was the setup to the twist, a long rant about his own failings and insecurities and miseries that ends without a punchline. The result was something more like therapy than art — a deflated balloon.This is the risk of comedy that lingers in tragedy. It can get stuck there. Hannah Gadsby had also toyed with the surprise of setting up tension without relieving it in the surprise hit “Nanette,” to make a point about how always going for the joke can stunt your growth. That success touched a nerve, and the backlash included loud complaints that it wasn’t comedy at all. Besides giving short shrift to Gadsby’s deft balancing act, this policing of genre boundaries does comedy no favors. A flexible, broad art form is a healthy one.Hannah Gadsby in their special “Nanette,” which set up tension without relieving it. NetflixThe push into melancholy territory can be found in more ingratiating work, including specials by the most commercial stars. In his 2018 special, Adam Sandler downshifted into melancholy and sang about the death of his friend Chris Farley. But the tone has changed most dramatically among a younger generation of comics who seem interested in more than mere escapist entertainment. It’s also probably no coincidence that little-known comics are more likely these days to get attention from producers and industry people if they build shows around a narrative or theme.“At this point in comedy, it’s not enough to be funny,” Ben Wasserman said in the Brooklyn funeral parlor where he staged his vaudevillian “Live After Death,” which explores the death of his father and grandfather (not to mention his tragic lack of an agent). “You have to make people feel.”MAYBE THAT WAS SAID with tongue in cheek, maybe not. Either way, there’s no question that in certain quarters of comedy, jokes are not enough.For instance, at shows around New York, the quirky, swaggering Gastor Almonte has been performing a hilarious 10 to 15 minutes about his hatred of oatmeal. In a previous era that might have added up to a debut special that resembled the work of Jim Gaffigan. But when Almonte turned it into an hourlong solo show, “The Sugar,” that material was beefed up with a soul-searching story about his diabetes diagnosis and how the prospect of mortality changed his family. Watching it, I confess I wondered what the Gaffigan version of this show would look like.“The Sugar” was staged downtown at Soho Playhouse, which has developed into a hub of weighty theatrical stand-up shows, many of which are transfers from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. One of that theater’s biggest hits of the year was Sam Morrison’s breakthrough, “Sugar Daddy.”Quick-witted and charismatic, Morrison delivered a tightly honed work about the pain of losing his boyfriend that is both a love letter to his partner and a self-deprecating satire of a culture of mourning, one that spoofs well-intentioned condolences and support groups. He argued that the difference between comedy and tragedy was thin, saying that in the plays of Shakespeare, “comedy is only tragedy with a marriage at the end.” He explained that grief was lonely and impossible and “nothing helps as much as this show,” before a pinpoint pause, “because you guys can’t talk.” And he flat out played the vain millennial fool. “What is trauma but unmonetized content?” he asks, echoing a line from “WandaVision,” a series that itself is a grief narrative.In contrast to Drew Michael, Morrison is uncomfortable going long without a laugh. I saw the show twice, and the second time the punchlines had become faster, more insistent, almost as if the best argument he came up with was to keep you laughing.Most of these comics share a belief that discussing the subject has become taboo, even stigmatized. “We don’t talk about grief: We keep our grief to ourselves,” Kayne says in “Sorry for Your Loss.” Glazer hit this same theme. “For that reason alone,” she says, “I want to talk about it.”There is an irony in so many comedians talking about grief by saying no one talks about grief. It evokes the parade of cancel culture-obsessed comics complaining about how you can’t joke about anything without getting canceled while doing that very thing. But the grieving comics are quicker to mock and undercut their own motivations.The fundamental hallmark of these shows is a meticulous self-awareness. The comics are constantly justifying their own work. There’s a defensiveness here, an anxiety that is understandable. Grief doesn’t sound like a fun night out. And there has been a backlash that you can detect from other comics, even ones practicing dark comedy. In his amusingly navel-gazing special “Blocks,” Neal Brennan poked fun at himself and others by terming this genre “stand-up traumedy.”In “Baby J,” John Mulaney mocked the idea of exploiting death. Marcus Russell Price/NetflixJohn Mulaney ridiculed the tendency to exploit death in his special, “Baby J,” by recalling how in elementary school he was jealous of a classmate whose grandfather had died because he became the center of attention. The recent movie “Sick of Myself” takes an even darker view in its scathing satire of the culture of victimhood. In one scene, the wildly self-involved protagonist fantasizes about her own funeral. It’s funny, if glib and uncharitable, in the way that biting satire often is.The truth is that death is too good of a straight man to ignore.So many of the opening jokes get their laughs by treating mortality with just the right amount of irreverence. (Glazer begins with “I hope you like stillbirth.”) The lightest touch is just enough. Witness the dry understatement of this line from the comic Rob Delaney’s wrenching memoir “A Heart That Works,” about the death of his young son: “In between Henry’s birth and his death was his life. That was my favorite part.”Another reason grief is an unexpectedly great subject for comedy is that in a fragmented, polarized culture, with a shrinking common collection of references, it’s universal and relatable in a way few other topics are. Even if we don’t know someone who has died, we will. Or as Kayne explained to his audience: “We’re all pre-dead.”When someone dies, the conversations follow a tight script. Sorry for your loss. There are no words. We are all afraid of saying the wrong thing, and those suffering don’t entirely know how to respond. It’s a relief to hear comics not just poking fun at the stale jargon of condolences, but also demystifying the hidden world of the grieving, which can be messy and petty. The competitiveness of grief is a frequent subject. Who suffers most? The consensus is it’s parents of children who die, but only in these shows might you hear someone weigh the levels of pain of a parent of a 2-year-old versus that of a 10-year-old (as Colin Campbell does in “Grief: A One Man Shitshow,” about the gutting experience of losing two teenage children in a car crash).While it might seem counterintuitive, the popularity of joking about death represents a welcome shift from pessimism about comedy that was popular among performers like Gadsby and Michelle Wolf during the Trump era. These more recent comics generally share a faith that comedy helps — even if only a little. There’s a joy in the performances of Morrison, Kayne and Alyssa Limperis (whose “No Bad Days” focuses on her late father) that takes you by surprise.It makes you question the seeming obviousness of the incongruity of this kind of comedy. Death is an integral part of life, one every great art form explores. It’s the existential elephant in every room. Why do comics joke about it? A better question: How can they avoid it?Ali Siddiq in “The Domino Effect 2: Loss.” He avoids self-aware jokes and instead leans into stories you can get lost in.via YouTubeThis may be part of the reason the most riveting special on grief spends no time analyzing the subject. In his eye-opening “The Domino Effect 2: Loss,” Ali Siddiq, a revelation of a performer, adopts a different approach. Instead of self-aware jokes, he leans into stories that are easy to get lost in, especially with his jaunty, magnetic delivery. Looking back on his childhood, he describes how he became a drug dealer and lost a girlfriend, a sister and eventually his freedom. He tells the story of his arrest with vivid, suspenseful detail, but also sadness at the cascading devastation of loss. It’s the rare comedy about grief that takes the advice, “Show, don’t tell.”THE BEST ART DOESN’T hit you over the head. It taps your temple with metaphor, allusion and maybe an oblique tease. Stand-up is so immediate, so direct in its relationship between the comic and the audience, that there’s a temptation to just be blunt, to tie up and underline your points with a punchline that calls back to an earlier one. But while there are only a limited number of subjects to joke about, there are infinite ways to do it. That variety is where art flourishes.One theme repeatedly voiced in these shows is the impossibility of overcoming sadness. We are told that time will not heal all wounds; that grief makes you want to get others to understand, even if they never will. The final stage of grief, the real one, is acceptance, and in one of his early jokes, Michael Cruz Kayne tells you that is the one you will never get to.You don’t need to have endured the death of a loved one to confront this problem, the one of failure. But you can try approaching it in different ways. This is what Kayne’s show is all about, how you can see the same thing from a radically different perspective. He cleverly illustrates this point by looking at examples in math, language and, most of all, comedy. The death of a child is the worst thing that has ever happened to him. It’s obscene to use it for comedy, to laugh at it.But by turning this experience into a show, he keeps the memory of his son alive. It’s a subtle, moving performance that finds beauty in the trying. You get the sense that it’s what allows him to laugh at things he shouldn’t. When he takes the body of his child to a funeral home for cremation, he pays the bill and receives a receipt, which is projected on the wall behind him. It reads: “Thank you please come again.” More

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      ‘Ted Lasso,’ Season 3, Episode 10 Recap: The Rich Are Different

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      How quickly can a story line end? Very quickly.Season 3, Episode 10: ‘International Break’Do you remember when you were young and — at least if you were like me — you frequently misjudged how much space you had on a line to write what you intended, resulting in smaller and smaller, tightly squeezed letters as you approached the edge of the page? I feel as though that is where we find ourselves now in “Ted Lasso,” with just two episodes left in what is still theoretically the show’s last season.This week’s episode answered two of the show’s principal remaining questions — regarding Nate’s fate with West Ham and the future of Roy and Keeley — but so abruptly you could almost imagine you’d missed a scene or two along the way. This level of concision may have been necessary in part because the episode spent much of its hour-plus running time on two new and completely unnecessary story lines, two redemption arcs for tertiary characters, a fair amount of moping and a genuinely bizarre conception of how rich business owners make decisions. Even as we near the page’s edge, to put it another way, we’re still adding more words. The remaining ones will almost certainly have to be scrawled very small.First off, the story lines that did not move forward meaningfully: After focusing on Ted’s relationship with his son, Henry, and ex-wife, Michelle, two episodes ago, we have a second consecutive episode that has no interest in that subplot. Likewise, no news on Rebecca’s presumably upcoming familial developments — at least, unless a plastic Army man is saying more than I hope he is. But more on that later. Let’s start with the least important developments and work our way up.International break and Edwin Akufo’s proposalBoth of this week’s new subplots felt less like continuations of the season’s arc than like clogs that we needed to work through before getting to the real story.International breaks, as the name suggests, are weekends when national soccer leagues skip their matches in order for their top players to participate in FIFA-sponsored, nation versus nation competition. There have presumably been several of these in the three seasons of AFC Richmond play we have watched, although I can’t remember any mention of them before this episode.But now it is, for an episode at least, a Big Deal. Who will be selected to represent their native countries? Jamie for England, Van Damme (formerly Zoreaux) for Canada, Dani for Mexico, Bumbercatch for Switzerland and Colin for Wales. But no Sam for Nigeria? Not even after an episode-opening commentary singling him out as crucial to the team’s current 10-game winning streak?There appear to be two purposes to this subplot. The first is to set up the idea that joyous, loving Dani Rojas becomes a cruel competitor the moment he is on an opposing team. This entails some of the broad humor that has never been the show’s forte. (Remember Led Tasso? This is basically the same gag, with Dani substituted for Ted.) And it’s another idea that comes out of nowhere: I can’t recall Dani rejoicing in his efforts to injure the goalies for, say, West Ham, Manchester United, or any of his other Premier League opponents.The second purpose of the international break subplot is to help set up the Edwin Akufo subplot: The reason Sam wasn’t chosen to play is that Akufo, the unpleasant billionaire introduced back in Episode 11 of Season 2, bribed the Nigerian government $20 million not to select him. But that’s not all! He also plans to open another Nigerian-cuisine restaurant 20 meters away from Sam’s! And to deny Sam customers by personally calling and making reservations he doesn’t intend to keep using a variety of silly accents! I feel confident in saying this is not how billionaires — not even thin-skinned ones — spend their time.Toheeb Jimoh, left, and Phil Dunster in “Ted Lasso.”Apple TV+I’d like to stop there, but alas there’s more. Akufo is also planning to create a “super league” of exceptional teams that will compete only against each other and thus can charge more for tickets than typical matches. The details are unimportant, apart from the fact that this would theoretically make the team owners vastly more money while pricing average fans out of attendance. Color me cynical, but I’m confident that if it were this easy for rich team owners to make themselves richer it would already have happened.It’s a complicated setup to enable Rebecca, at a meeting of team owners, to stand up for everyday fans. Which is a setup for her to remind Rupert why he loved her and cause him to try to kiss her. Which is a setup for her to get over her longstanding obsession with beating Rupert on the pitch. Have I wasted your time with this lengthy explanation? Apologies, but that’s pretty much how I felt by the time this subplot was over.NateDepending on whom you ask, Nate has either been fired from managing Rupert’s West Ham squad or has quit. Either way, you’ll notice the past tense. We don’t actually see Nate quitting or getting fired, which would have been, I suspect, a very interesting scene had they bothered to film it. Instead, we go from the beginning (Nate belatedly realizing that Rupert is a bad man at the club last week) to the end (Nate being mopily unemployed) without any of the actual drama of a confrontation. It won’t be the only time this episode that “Ted Lasso” skips from start to finish without bothering with the messy “how did this happen?” part.Instead, we get Nate moping in his own bed, and then moping in his childhood bed at his parent’s place and then playing a violin (has this been mentioned before?) so that his dad can hear him and have a scene in which he shows that he’s not quite as crummy a father as he had appeared to be. We don’t even have any nice scenes with Jade this week, because she’s headed off to Poland to help her family screw in light bulbs, a joke that sadly may be the high point of this dreary story line. I’d like to say more, but I’m not sure what else there is to say.KJPRMy prediction last episode that Keeley’s breakup with her girlfriend/financier Jack would be forgotten without consequences proved incorrect. In fact, Jack has abruptly pulled all of the funding for Keeley’s firm, KJPR, and Keeley needs to be out of the office within 48 hours.For those keeping track, this is the third apparent instance in this episode in which a fabulously rich person has made a business decision based entirely on personal pique: Akufo spending a fortune to keep Sam off the Nigerian team (and opening a competing restaurant!); Rupert firing (or at least quickly accepting his resignation of) Nate, his by all accounts exceptionally talented and successful manager; and now Jack pulling the plug on KJPR. It’s a peculiar imagining of the way rich people typically make business decisions.But at least the show takes pains to show that rich people also make dubious business decisions based on sheer generosity. Following the owners’ meeting in which Rebecca decides against profit based on an appreciation of the fans — and persuades the other owners to do the same! — she decides to save Keeley’s firm by financing it herself.A couple of quick thoughts: First, if Keeley is in fact the P.R. whiz we keep hearing her to be — without ever seeing any evidence of this — couldn’t she, you know, find financing from someone who wasn’t a friend taking pity on her? Or has the fact that she takes many vacations, hires completely unqualified friends and never seems to do any work finally caught up with her? And second, has Keeley learned anything about mixing business and intimacy from her experience with Jack? If there is a Season 4 of the show, I half-expect Rebecca to pull her funding the next time Keeley fails to answer her texts.But at least we get to see Barbara redeemed after Keeley buys her a snow globe.Keeley and RoyWell, that was easy. Roy runs into Phoebe’s teacher — yay, Phoebe, genuinely and always — and she says he seemed “stuck” the last time they spoke, which evidently serves to immediately unstick him. Really? This wisp of a scene rather than, say, the powerful and spot-on lecture that Rebecca offered last week?But evidently that five-letter word is all it takes to make Roy want to get back together with Keeley, and his subsequent letter is all it takes to make Keeley want to get back together with Roy. There’s no conversation or negotiation, no working through what went wrong last time.Actually, I’m being unfair. There may have been such interactions. “Ted Lasso” just made the borderline unconscionable decision not to show them. We go from the two of them awkwardly standing in the doorway to a semi-clad Roy comfortably re-ensconced at Keeley’s.It’s precisely the same jump from the beginning to the end that we saw with Nate and Rupert, without any of that tricky middle part where people actually speak to one another. For that matter it’s the same nonchalance with which we moved from early signs of trouble between Roy and Keeley at the end of last season to the two of them already split up this season. If the show didn’t bother to show us the actual breakup, why should it show us the actual reconciliation? As someone who was rooting as hard for Keeley and Roy as anyone, I was astonished at how little emotional weight their reunion had.I know I’m quite down on this episode, and I know that many readers will like it more than I did — as was the case the last time I was substantially disappointed. Which is fine! The world don’t move to the beat of just one drum. But to be clear, especially for new readers: My disappointment is not because I dislike the show or any such nonsense. It’s because I like it enough to hold it to a high standard.Juno Temple in “Ted Lasso.”Apple TV+Here’s hoping that there are better things to come in the final two episodes, no matter how small the handwriting needs to be.Odd and endsI have always been in the camp that presumes Rebecca and her Dutch fella will get together by season’s end. (Why else show us the little girl’s room on the houseboat?) I now fear that, given the whole rush-to-the-end quality of this episode, their next meeting will also be abrupt — him showing up in London or her showing up at the houseboat with “happy ending” all but written on the screen. I for one was hoping to see them spend some time together again. But we’ll always have Amsterdam.Unless, of course, those predicting a Rebecca-Ted romance are right, which I dearly hope they are not. But Rebecca playing with the green matchbook and the green Army man together has me appropriately worried.Don’t even get me started on the odd and awkward hallway meeting between Rebecca and Sam.Wait, Rupert has already split up with Ms. Kakes before Rebecca got a chance to expose his affair? Boo! And did I hear correctly that her replacement is a Ms. Bread? I guess this makes Rupert a reverse Marie Antoinette.It’s a bizarre idea that Akufo, no matter how rich, could throw food on a variety of other very-rich folks without facing their rage, lawsuits and possible assault charges.I love Higgins’s delightfully dark take on Willy Wonka.Jamie’s evolution into the best guy ever continues. He’s the first to commiserate with Sam when the latter isn’t chosen for Nigeria and then he wears Sam’s number on the pitch. And his Uncle’s Day gift to newly minted best friend Roy — thank you, Phoebe! — is perfect.Speaking of: Roy wearing Phoebe’s tie-dye shirt to work was fine. But it would have been funnier if he’d worn the shirt Jamie gave him, even if it entailed a meeting with H.R.Sixty quid for a snow globe? That’s $75! Keeley may be the worst bargain-shopper ever. More

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      Bill Saluga, a Memorable Comedic Wiseguy, Is Dead at 85

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      He played many characters in his career, but he was best known by far for the one who said, “You doesn’t have to call me Johnson.”Raymond J. Johnson Jr. was a wiseguy, dressed in a zoot suit and a wide-brimmed fedora and waving a cigar in his right hand.When someone mentioned his name, the shtick took off.“Ohhhh, you doesn’t have to call me Johnson,” he would say. “My name is Raymond J. Johnson Jr. Now, you can call me Ray, or you can call me Jay, or you can call me Johnny, or you can call me Sonny, or you can call me Junie, or you can call me Ray Jay, or you can call me R.J. Or you can call me R.J.J. Or you can call me R.J.J. Jr.“But you doesn’t have to call me Johnson.”And you can call his creator Bill Saluga, a diminutive comedian with a thick mustache who came up with Johnson while a member of the Ace Trucking Company, an improvisational sketch troupe whose most famous alumnus is Fred Willard. Mr. Saluga also played Johnson on various television series; on a disco record (“Dancin’ Johnson”); and, most memorably, in commercials for Anheuser-Busch’s Natural Light beer.In 1979, at the peak of Mr. Saluga’s fame as a comedic one-hit wonder, Tom Shales of The Washington Post wrote that “now everybody and his brother are doing Saluga impressions throughout this very impressionable land of ours. He’s right up there with Steve Martin’s wild and crazy guy and Robin Williams’s madcap Mork.”Bob Dylan played off Mr. Saluga’s Johnsonian wordplay, and his own name change, in his 1979 song “Gotta Serve Somebody.” He sang, in part:You may call me Terry, you may call me TimmyYou may call me Bobby, you may call me ZimmyYou may call me R.J., you may call me RayYou may call me anything but no matter what you sayYou’re gonna have to serve somebodyMr. Saluga died of cardiopulmonary arrest on March 28 in a hospice in Los Angeles, his nephew, Scott Saluga, said. He was 85 and had been living in Burbank.The Tribune Chronicle, a newspaper in Warren, Ohio, near Youngstown, where Mr. Saluga was born, first reported his death on April 8. But it did not become widely known until Hollywood trade publications published obituaries this month.William Saluga was born on Sept. 16, 1937. When Billy, as his friends called him, was 10, his father, Joseph, was killed in an accident while working at the Republic Steel mill, and his mother, Helen (Yavorsky) Saluga, started working as a bookkeeper.Billy was a class clown and a cheerleader in high school. After two years in the Navy, he became a performer. In the early and mid-1960s he was seen on a local TV station, with a sketch comedy group called the Thimble Theater and at the Youngstown Playhouse, where, for seven years, he played roles in numerous productions, including “Inherit the Wind” and “Guys and Dolls.”In 1968, he became the talent coordinator for the comedian Steve Allen’s interview and entertainment show. “If you have a special or unusual talent,” a newspaper ad for the show read, “television needs you. Call Bill Saluga. 469-9011.”In 1969, after replacing a member of the Ace Trucking Company, he created the Johnson character during a man-on-the-street sketch with Mr. Willard at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village, It became part of the troupe’s repertoire until he left in 1976. By then, the group had made numerous appearances on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.”Mr. Saluga appeared from 1976 to 1977 on the comedian Redd Foxx’s variety show and a comedy and variety series hosted by the comedian David Steinberg, on both of which he played Raymond J. Johnson. For the Steinberg show, he also portrayed a New York street guy named Vinnie de Milo.“Billy was always doing Ray J.,” Mr. Steinberg, said by email. “He was relentless with it. I would say, ‘Mr. Johnson,’ and Billy would be off.” He added: “He did it everywhere. At parties. His timing and delivery were so funny every time.”The character, with a delivery based in part on the con man Kingfish from the sitcom “Amos ‘n Andy,” appealed to Anheuser-Busch, which hoped to use him to distinguish Natural Light from a rival beer, Miller Lite. In 1978, the company teamed Mr. Saluga with Norm Crosby, the malaprop comedian, for a commercial set in a bar.When a customer asks for an Anheuser-Busch Natural Light, Mr. Crosby counsels him to say, “Just say ‘Natural,’” which propels Mr. Saluga to say: “See, you doesn’t have to call it Anheuser-Busch Natural Light. And you doesn’t have to call it Anheuser Natural. And you doesn’t have to call it Busch Natural. Just say ‘Natural.’” And when Mr. Crosby says, “Johnson’s right,” Mr. Saluga says, “Ohhhh, you can call me Ray or you can call me Jay. … ”The pair would go on to do a second spot. Eric Brenner, a friend of Mr. Saluga’s, said in a phone interview that Mr. Saluga had earned significant money in residuals from the two commercials, probably the most he made in his career.For the next 40 years, he took regular acting jobs — including a hostile ticket taker at an opera house in a 1992 episode of “Seinfeld” and Louis Lewis, the comedian Richard Lewis’s fictional cousin, in three episodes of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” in 2005 — as well as reprising Raymond J. Johnson on the animated TV series “The Simpsons” (2002) and “King of the Hill” (2010). “He played outrageous characters onstage, but offstage he was very reserved,” said Bill Minkin, a friend and fellow comedian. “It was that Midwest down-home thing.”No immediate family members survive.Mr. Saluga did not mind being known primarily as Raymond J. Johnson. In fact, he said, it gave him an agreeable anonymity when he stepped out of character.“I would sit in restaurants and hear the people behind me in the booth talking about me, and I was right there,” he said on “Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast” in 2017. “They didn’t know who I was, which was great.” More

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      ‘Succession’ Season 4, Episode 8 Recap: The Will of Some People

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      It’s election night in America. Stay away from the bodega sushi.Season 4, Episode 8: ‘America Decides’The day before Logan Roy died, he delivered a fiery call to arms to his ATN staff, letting them know what he expected from the network going forward. The speech was an angrier variation of the populist spiel he had given many times before, in which he insisted that the news should always be frank and unpretentious. He wanted his anchors to tell their viewers “truthful” things they had never heard anyone say before on television. He wanted ATN to be, in a word, “spicy.”Throughout this week’s action-packed, nerve-shredding episode of “Succession,” Logan’s kids argue a lot about what the old man would want them to do, as the presidential race between the Republican Jeryd Mencken (Justin Kirk) and the Democrat Daniel Jimenez (Elliot Villar) comes down to a couple of battleground states. The big sticking point is Milwaukee, where a fire at a vote-counting facility has destroyed enough ballots to tilt Wisconsin from blue to red.How would Logan have handled this? Would he have maintained the policy of “no brass on the battlefield” and left all of ATN’s messaging to the Decision Desk data-nerds? Or would he have seized the opportunity offered by Mencken to Roman, to shape the narrative such that the Mencken camp (and by extension the Roys) are the night’s big winners?To ask what Logan would do, though, is to miss the real crux of the issue. It was clear from Logan’s defenses of ATN that he didn’t care whether his network broadcast the facts. He preferred “the truth” — which has a more flexible definition, depending on who is doing the telling.On this election night, up in ATN’s executive offices, there are two competing truths, represented by the Jimenez supporter Shiv and the Mencken backer Roman. Every time Shiv tries to turn the conversation to things like Menckenite obstructionists in “victory vans,” Roman shouts, “False flag!” and rebrands the ominous vehicles as “fun buses.” The Roys are at an impasse.Roman has a decided advantage, given that ATN already has what Tom calls a “unique perspective” on the news. While the other networks are suggesting that Mencken goons may have burned the Milwaukee votes, ATN floats theories like “electrical failure.” (Roman would prefer to go with “Antifa fire bombing.”) At one point, ATN’s Tucker Carlson-like anchor Mark Ravenhead (Zack Robidas) delivers a rant during the network’s purportedly neutral coverage, attacking leftists for trying to turn the fire to their political advantage.Roman also has Kendall and Tom on his side, to a degree. Kendall is hesitant because he is no Mencken fan. When he mentions to Roman that he fears what a Mencken administration might mean for his adopted daughter, Sophie, his brother mocks him for caring about the ideals of American pluralism. Roman compares their whole argument to when they were kids, when Kendall would play the sober-minded big brother in order to get chicken for dinner, while the whinier Roman wanted steak.Kendall asks, “Because we had so much chicken when you were a kid, we have to elect a fascist?” And although he is being facetious, those kinds of lingering slights are what guides the decision-making this night.As for Tom, he is under pressure to quiet his critics by delivering big ratings for ATN’s election coverage. To get there, he endures glitchy touch-screens and a steady stream of Roys entering the newsroom’s forbidden areas. Tom remains inclined to side with Roman, perhaps because that puts him at odds with Shiv, whom he has not forgiven for their vicious argument at the tailgate party. Even when she tries to win him back by finally telling him that she is pregnant with his child, he stings her by asking if she is lying, as another “tactic.”Shiv has a rough time overall on election night. As the evening nightmarishly shifts Mencken’s way, she has a heart-to-heart with Kendall — in a reflection of the touching Season 2 scene in which he confided to her that he would never be Logan’s choice to run the company. Here, he listens to Shiv’s argument that ATN could slow the Mencken momentum. Their Decision Desk guru, Darwin (Adam Godley), knows from historical data and exit polling where the Milwaukee votes would have gone. They could put Darwin on camera and let him explain why ATN won’t project a winner in Wisconsin.But two things get in the way. The first is that Kendall really wants the next president to kill the GoJo deal, which Roman insists Mencken will do. So Kendall asks Shiv to take one more shot at persuading her ex-lover Nate to get Jimenez to make that same promise. Instead, she merely pretends to make the call and then lies to Kendall, saying that the Jimenez people are open to considering his proposal. This sets up the second impediment: when Kendall calls Nate to iterate more clearly what Shiv claims to have said.There is some phenomenal staging in this episode, a lot of which involves people passing phones back and forth — and at one point even holding one phone up to another so that the people on the lines can speak to each other. But the best phone sequence is Kendall’s call to Nate, which plays out mostly unheard on the other side of one of ATN’s enormous office windows, as Shiv looks on with dread. After Kendall gets the word from Nate that Shiv never called him, he walks over to talk to Greg, who Shiv knows is aware of her consultations with Matsson.Kendall, feeling betrayed by the sibling he trusts most, spits some icy words in Shiv’s direction and then tells Tom to make the call for Mencken. ATN really is about to help elevate an authoritarian to America’s most powerful public office because one spoiled brother is in a snit.Although this episode is incredibly entertaining, it does cut uncomfortably closer to real-world politics than is typical for “Succession.” This show always features characters and ideas inspired by real political figures, but the creator Jesse Armstrong uses these mainly as the backdrop to the Roys’ family drama — and as a way of satirizing generally the blinded arrogance of the powerful. Here though, the way the election plays out is so much like the specific circumstances of 2016 and 2020 that it might stir up bad memories for anyone who sweated and fretted through those nights.That’s ‌OK, though because while Roman may “ironically” make racist comments in the newsroom and may assure Shiv that “nothing happens” when terrible people take power, Armstrong is showing here that the pettiness of the Roys and their ilk does have repercussions. Everything for this family is about banking a win in the moment, regardless of whether it might later turn into a loss. That’s what their father taught them: Take what you can, when you can, and let someone else clean up after.So as the evening ends — with ATN having called Wisconsin and the presidency for Mencken, without having let Darwin explain that this is all just “pending” — Roman sums up what happened in terms Logan Roy would have understood.“We just made a night of good TV.”Due diligenceTom has a bad election night, too, ending with Greg handing him his phone and saying, “A lot of very important people want to scream at you.” This is a great episode though for fans of the sicko Tom-Greg dynamic. Not willing to entrust the “Gregging” he needs to anyone other than Greg, Tom keeps his lanky lackey close at hand, relying on him for everything from a quick bump of cocaine (Tom: “This is not a thing. It’s not going in a book.”) to double-shot coffees. Tom lays out a doomsday scenario in which Greg fails to keep him from getting drowsy, Tom miscalls the results in Colorado, China invades Taiwan, the world blows up and “We’re back to amoeba.”One of Tom’s non-Greg assistants makes the mistake of bringing bodega sushi into the office, which Tom nixes (“Tonight my digestive system is basically part of the Constitution!”) but Greg sloppily eats, ultimately leading to a stray smear of Wasabi ending up in Darwin’s eyes. Greg makes matters worse by pouring lemon La Croix onto the affected area. (“It’s not that lemony!” he insists.) True to Tom’s dire warnings, it is while Darwin is briefly incapacitated by foodstuffs that the Roys start making the decision to call the election for Mencken.Once Connor learns he lost Kentucky (“Alas Kentucky, Willa … alas vanity”), he scrambles to appease Mencken, offering to “concede in his direction.” So we get the wonderful spectacle of Connor delivering a peppery kiss-off speech in front of a sign bearing his campaign slogan: “Enough Already!”Just because ATN declared Mencken the winner doesn’t mean the election is over. The mess in Milwaukee needs to be resolved; and it could all end with Wisconsin flipping to Jimenez. In other words: Once again on “Succession,” a big deal remains unclosed. More

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      On HBO’s ‘Succession,’ if You’re Eating Food, You’re Losing

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      When it comes to the high-powered Roy dynasty, food is for the weak and striving.Autumn light filters through the treetops of Central Park West, streaming into Jean-Georges, giving the gray banquettes a matte, silver gleam. The space is plain, severe in its neutrality, undeniably grand and hushed. Each table, though in clear view of the others, is luxuriously cocooned by space, almost private.It’s the ideal place, really, for the Roy children — the scions of the Waystar Royco media empire on HBO’s “Succession” — to discuss their father’s funeral arrangements.The conversation is brisk, and though they chose Jean-Georges as their meeting spot, they don’t eat the food. They leave the pastries — the dark, oversize canelés and fruit-studded buns — along with the platter of fanned, cut fruit, completely untouched. They get up from their seats without so much as unraveling a napkin or dirtying a plate. The slight, feathered mark of Shiv’s nude lipstick on a coffee cup is the only trace of their presence.It’s not unusual for the Roys to avoid eating. From Logan’s humiliating game of “Boar on the Floor” to the menacing box of doughnuts he sends his children when they try to meet in secret, the food on “Succession” has always been deliciously toxic, dissonant and loaded — a clear line into the family’s trauma and power dynamics.But in the final season, things are especially warped and grim. It’s as if the show has stepped into its Ozempic era and real power can only be found in the total absence of appetite. For those with meaningful status in “Succession,” food doesn’t exist for pleasure or nourishment — it barely exists at all. If a character does have a nibble, no matter how small, it tends to be a red flag.At a business retreat in Norway, Tom Wambsgans, right, passes on the buffet.Graeme Hunter/HBOTom Wambsgans, Siobhan Roy’s husband, didn’t come from money, but married into this super-rich family, and has carefully studied their patterns and prerogatives. He is hyper-aware of the contradictions and intricacies of America’s unspoken upper-class etiquette — and often the first to criticize a faux pas.“She’s wolfing all the canapés like a famished warthog,” Tom tells cousin Greg, clocking the inappropriate date Greg brought along to Logan’s birthday lunch. Because what could be more plebeian, what could signify her being any more out of place, than actually eating the food?Not long after, at Logan’s wake, Tom misjudges his position and nominates himself to take over as interim chief executive for the company. If it wasn’t already clear he’d made a terrible mistake, it is when Tom pops a fish taco into his mouth. As he’s powerless, chewing, Karl imagines how the board might see him: “You’re a clumsy interloper and no one trusts you. The only guy pulling for you is dead, and now you’re just married to the ex-boss’s daughter, who doesn’t even like you.”By the time the Waystar team flies to Norway to finalize the sale of the company to Lukas Mattson, the billionaire chief executive of GoJo, Tom sees hospitality as pure gastro-hostility. As Waystar’s senior executives pile their plates with food at a buffet, he’s careful not to be seen eating breakfast at all. “Ambush!” he calls out cheerfully to his colleagues. “You took the bait, fattened for the kill.”And Tom’s not wrong. A GoJo executive comments on the portion size, too: “Hey, easy buddy, leave some for us.” The Waystar team’s desire for breakfast pastries isn’t the only thing that now feels embarrassing — the Americans are overdressed for the countryside, anxious for the deal to go through, fearful of losing their jobs. Their hunger, their appetite, their keenness, it’s a squishy surplus of vulnerability.As Season 4 opens, Logan is competing with his children to buy Pierce Global Media, and escapes his own birthday party in a huff to visit Nectar, a Greek-owned coffee shop on Madison Avenue. (For Town & Country, Charlotte Druckman wrote about this excursion as its own kind of power move.)In a rare moment of vulnerability, we see Logan eating. But first, he insists to his bodyguard, Colin, who is on the clock, that Colin is his best friend, that human beings are merely economic units in the market, that he isn’t sure what happens when we die. Emotionally, he’s a mess.“Nothing tastes like it used to, does it?” Logan says wistfully. “Nothing’s the same as it was.”Connor Roy and Willa Ferreyra hosted their rehearsal dinner at the Grill, a classic Midtown power-lunching spot. It ends up predictably miserable.Macall B. Polay/HBOIn the episode that aired on Sunday, the family reaches the heights of both their incompetence and their power. Election Day in the newsroom was already tense for Tom without the Roy siblings stomping around, sliding notes directly to TV anchors, pushing their agendas on his top voting analyst, scrolling through Twitter, reframing the headlines because, well, the right-wing candidate asked them to. Tom loses his temper when Greg approves cheap sushi as his lunch.It’s not much of a power move — it is not, for example, Logan telling the staff to scrape an entire over-the-top steak and lobster dinner for the family into the trash, then order pizza instead — but it’s the only move that Tom, who has lost control of the newsroom, who never had any control over in the first place, has left. He will allow the election results to be nudged and massaged, the newsroom to be compromised and swayed. He will allow the world to burn, but look, he is above the sushi. He will not touch the sushi.Greg, on the other hand, is happy to dig into his “bodega sushi” as the siblings pressure Darwin, ATN’s election analyst, to call the election before he’s ready. It’s a devastating and hilarious sequence. “This isn’t actually a numbers thing,” says Roman. “I’m just going to say we’re good and that’s on me.” “You can’t make the call ’til I make the call,” says Darwin, angrily.But a moment later, Darwin has given up all sense of editorial integrity and is punished for it, as he accidentally smears wasabi from Greg’s sushi into his own eyes. Greg, in a bumbling, misguided effort to help, pours stinging, lemon-flavored LaCroix right into the wound.It’s as if he didn’t know there’s no making things better with food — there is only making things worse.Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. More

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      I’m a Couples Therapist. Something New Is Happening in Relationships.

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmOne afternoon in 2020, early in the pandemic, I met Syl’violet and Matthew for a virtual session. Young, idealistic, deeply in love, they were also prone to dramatic fights. In this session Syl’violet, a vivacious essayist and spoken-word poet, was trying to describe the ways she felt Matthew, a measured medical student, was trying to control her, in this case by trying to dissuade her from buying a slushy. He thought they should keep to a tight budget until after he became a doctor and achieved financial stability. Then she could have “all the slushies you want later.” Syl’violet found his reasoning maddening, especially since he seemed to imply she was reckless.On the face of it, the fight seemed insignificant, but then an exchange took place that changed the tenor of the argument, connecting us to the underlying roots of the issue. “I have trouble envisioning that finish line,” Syl’violet exclaimed, tearing up, “because the plan that he’s talking about? My life has always been: The plan never works. You can do all the right things, you can obey all the right rules and get [expletive].” For a moment, Matthew continued to try to reason with her and convince her of his sound financial strategy. “I know that sounds very conceited, cocky,” he said, to which Syl’violet whipped back: “No! It sounds privileged!” She described her family’s relationship to money; they’d had nothing but trauma for generations. Syl’violet resented Matthew’s pride in his plan. “A privileged setting gave you access to all these things,” she said. “You’re taking ownership over it like, ‘I did it according to plan,’ as if, like, if other people did it according to plan, it would work out.”With the mention of the word “privilege,” Matthew came around to realizing they were talking about forces larger than themselves. Each of them was African American, but he came from a financially stable family; his parents, a firefighter and a bank manager, followed a middle-class trajectory and did well. “Let me rephrase,” Matthew said carefully, signaling to Syl’violet that he could see how his certainty about his future reflected his class background: “I recognize that if it wasn’t for my parents’ credit score, my loans to get — OK — so, I get that.” As the relevance of class and race came into focus, Syl’violet’s rage transformed into deep sorrow, generations of poverty weighing heavily on her. “I cannot stop thinking that we’re going to go bankrupt.” She worried that they might even be evicted. “I wish I could believe what you believe,” she told Matthew. He replied, his voice growing tender: “We have the same life now.” He looked at her, exuding care. “We have to live with the idea, the thinking, the viewpoint, that we’re going to die old together.”Syl’violet and MatthewDina Litovksy for The New York TimesOne of the most difficult challenges for couples is getting them to see beyond their own entrenched perspectives, to acknowledge a partner’s radical otherness and appreciate difference and sovereignty. People talk a good game about their efforts, but it’s quite a difficult psychological task. To be truly open to your partner’s experience, you must relinquish your conviction in the righteousness of your own position; this requires humility and the courage to tolerate uncertainty. Coming to see the working of implicit biases on us, grasping that our views are contingent on, let’s say, our gender, class background or skin color, is a humbling lesson. It pushes us beyond assuming sameness, opening up the possibility of seeing our partner’s point of view.I’ve been working as a psychologist seeing individuals and couples since the mid-1990s, and in the past eight years, I’ve witnessed a tremendous change in the kinds of conversations couples can have. Not long ago, if I would ask a couple about the ways class or race played out between them, I’d typically be met with an awkward shrug and a change of topic. But recent events have reshaped the national conversation on power, privilege, gender norms, whiteness and systemic racism. Together these ideas have pushed us to think, talk, argue and become aware of the many implicit biases we all carry about our identities, unconscious assumptions that privilege some and inflict harm on others. These insights have also made it easier for people to realize there may be plenty of other unconscious assumptions undergirding their positions. I’ve been surprised and excited by the impact of this new understanding, and it has all made my work as a couples therapist easier.There has, of course, been ferocious pushback against many of these ideas, claims that they are divisive or exclusionary. #MeToo, B.L.M. and trans rights have been weaponized in service of the culture wars dominating the media. But in my practice, I’ve found that engaging with these progressive movements has led to deep changes in our psyches. My patients, regardless of political affiliation, are incorporating the messages of social movements into the very structure of their being. New words make new thoughts and feelings possible. As a collective we appear to be coming around to the idea that bigger social forces run through us, animating us and pitting us against one another, whatever our conscious intentions. To invert a truism, the political is personal.Some five years ago I started working on a documentary series called “Couples Therapy,” created by the filmmakers Josh Kriegman, Elyse Steinberg and Eli Despres and airing on Showtime, that chronicles 18 to 20 weeks of therapy with couples who courageously volunteer to have their sessions filmed. (The couples in this essay were filmed for the show, which makes it possible for me to write about them; only some of those who are filmed end up on air.) We are now several seasons in. I was drawn to the project knowing that the directors were committed to an honest, vérité portrayal of therapy, and to looking at the social factors that thread through people’s lives and relationships.I am also trained as a psychoanalyst. Psychoanalysis is about exploring unconscious motivations behind thoughts or actions. It allows people to gain access to how early experiences — vicissitudes of attachment and trauma — have shaped them, and to expand their capacity for thought and feeling. For couples, I incorporate systems thinking, a practice that focuses on the system — a couple, say or a family — and interprets how each individual unconsciously behaves in ways that serve the system as a whole.But what we mean by “unconsciously” is an ongoing debate. Freud was known in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for his singular focus on the private, interior world. In particular, he wrote about the epic battle between unconscious drives and forces of civilization. Traditional psychoanalysis has mostly focused on early scenes between the young and their caregivers as shaping the psyche, leaving the sociopolitical context to other disciplines. I am of a later theoretical school that, rather than seeing civilization in conflict with the self, sees the social contract, our relationship to the collectives we belong to, as nested in the deepest corners of our unconscious. For me, psychoanalytic exploration is just as much about our deep ethical dilemmas regarding how to live with one another, and our environment, as it is about early family dramas; my patients’ repressed experiences with the ghosts of their country’s history are as interesting as with their mothers.Over the years, I’ve come to see that one of the most pernicious issues couples struggle with is working through wrongdoing and blame. The claim “You hurt me” often sends couples spiraling. People want to feel like good and lovable beings; their intentions make perfect sense to themselves, and they hate being interpreted as selfish. In psychoanalytic jargon we often say, “No one likes being the ‘bad object.’” In fact, there are few things people resist more than being held responsible for causing harm. It immediately threatens to overwhelm the “offender” with shame (Am I a bad person?) and guilt (Have I caused irreparable damage? Should I be punished?). Yet serious hurt that goes unacknowledged leads to the accumulation of resentment and a deadening of the relationship.Our ongoing national conversations about systemic biases have made it easier for couples to acknowledge wrongdoings by easing people into the idea of unconscious complicity. Accepting that you are part of a complex social system and implicated in its biases no matter what you tell yourself can also help you accept that in other aspects of your life, you are partly governed by unconscious forces you do not necessarily recognize. In Freudian terms, the ego is not a master in its own house. In other words, to know if you’ve caused harm, it is not enough to ask yourself, “Did I intend to hurt the other?”; you may need to listen to the feedback of others. These insights can have ripple effects beyond an awareness of specific biases, becoming relevant in many aspects of our lives — in our relationships with partners or children, in reviewing our life history. As my friend Nick described it: “Everything about me was raised to believe I am not racist or privileged, but in recent years I realize how easy certain things have always been for me simply because I’m white. I am humbled. And that has changed the way Rebecca and I talk with each other.”One of the most difficult challenges for couples is getting them to see beyond their own entrenched perspectives, to acknowledge a partner’s radical otherness.A shift in our vocabularies has also played a role. Language tends to evolve to better accommodate experiences of the dominant social group, leaving other experiences obscured from collective understanding, and thus silently perpetuating bias and harm. When these gaps are filled by new concepts, social change can follow. The expanding lexicon around bias and privilege includes terms like “white fragility” or “white tears,” referring to white people’s defensive refusal to fully engage with accountability; other phrases like “virtue signaling,” being “a Karen” or “performative allyship” underline the difference between honest and fake engagement with questions of ethics, morality and responsibility. These terms have implications beyond race, and I’ve seen them work their way into the therapy room. They’ve helped couples see the difference between the wish to receive forgiveness and assurance of your goodness and actual concern for the one you offended. Analysts call this distinction the difference between guilt and guiltiness. Guilt entails feeling bad for having harmed another; guiltiness is the preoccupation with yourself — whether you are or aren’t guilty. This preoccupation is all about warding off shame, which blocks concern for others.Questions of guilt hovered over another couple I worked with. He had recently cheated on his wife. They were generally deeply supportive of each other, but after she found out about his transgression, she was terribly upset and also confused. Their attempts to talk about what happened were halting. #MeToo rhetoric was woven into their discussions, functioning as a superego, shaping and inhibiting what they could even think. She said that she felt that the lessons of the movement were telling her not to forgive but to leave him — “Especially now, if a woman is being wronged, you get out.” It was hard for her to know how she actually felt about it all. Early on, he couldn’t separate remorse from fear. He was terrified of getting into trouble, and guiltiness prevailed. His voice was hushed while he scrutinized me intently, worried about how he would be perceived: “There are a lot of men in this business right now who have taken positions of power and use them to have sex with people.”They were both white and understood their privilege and were apologetic about it. She often undid her own complaints — “I levitate out” — by having the thought, “Oh, poor cis white woman.” He was uncomfortable, too. He talked about reading the news “about another Black or brown person being killed. And it’s just like I feel a little — well, I feel guilty, to be honest, to be sitting here.” The lessons of the Black Lives Matter movement initially can provoke such paralyzing guilt and shame that people become defensive and stop fully thinking. Yet over time, I’ve found, the ideas can inspire deep psychological work, pushing people to reckon with the harm that has been done, the question of whom should be implicated, and the difference between virtue signaling and deeper concerns. These are tough and important lessons that can carry over into intimate relationships. In this case, the husband described a new understanding about the ways he exercised power at work: “Hold on. Have I been an ally? Has it just been optics?” These insights extended even to his way of speaking about his transgression. He had been rationalizing his behavior by saying that his wife was not giving him the attention he needed. But moving beyond what the couple called “optics,” now he was asking himself for a more thorough accounting of what his cheating was really about, and how it affected his wife. He explained how lonely he was if she traveled; he felt left behind and discarded, a feeling deeply familiar to him from early childhood. Acknowledging his vulnerability was hard for him, but it opened up a series of honest conversations between them. “I convinced myself she does not desire me,” he said. “I’m not the popular guy. I’m not the strong guy.” He linked those feelings to insecurities he felt as a teenager, when he suffered chronic teasing from kids at school for being perceived as effeminate.This new, nondefensive way of talking made it possible for her to understand how his transgression hit her where she felt most insecure, and he could see it, generating remorse and forgiveness between them. She described how it had become easier for both of them to “check” themselves for their impact on the other person, and quickly “notice or apologize.” In one session she said, smiling: “You were a jerk to me yesterday, and then you apologized a couple hours later. You recognized that you took out your frustration there on me because I was an easy target.” He realized that he stopped skimming over ways he caused others pain: “I actually was just thinking therapy and the Black Lives Matter movement have made me keenly aware of the words that just came out of my mouth, and the understanding that she reacted adversely to that, instead of me just going, ‘We move on, because that’s awkward.’ There’s a need now to address it.” He continued: “ ‘Did I just upset you? What did I do to just upset you?’”Couples work always goes back to the challenge of otherness. Differences can show up around philosophical questions like what is important to devote a life to, or whether it is ethical to have babies with a climate crisis looming; or it can be closer to home, like whether having a sexual fantasy about a person who is not your partner is acceptable; or even as seemingly trivial as the correct way to load a dishwasher. Whatever the issue, differences can become a point of crisis in the relationship. Immediately the question of who is right, who gets their way or who has a better handle on reality pops up. Narcissistic vulnerabilities about self-worth appear, which then trigger an impulse to devalue the other. Partners try to resolve such impasses by digging in and working hard to convince the other of their own position, becoming further polarized.The challenge of otherness may be easiest to see when we think of racial differences. This was certainly true for James and Michelle. Michelle was a calm, gentle, somewhat reserved African American social worker, and James, at the time a police officer, was a slight, wiry white man whose face did not reveal much feeling. They came in with classic conflicts around division of labor and differing parenting styles, and then the pandemic hit. Quarantined, working remotely and home-schooling their 3-year-old son, they started fighting about Covid protocols. Michelle was aware of the way that Covid was devastating Black communities and wanted to be careful. James, along with his fellow police officers and his conservative parents, thought the concern was overblown. Discussion about how race shaped James and Michelle’s experiences and ideas routinely dead-ended. If Michelle tried to bring up the topic, James would insist, “I don’t see color,” and say he didn’t know what she was talking about. In our sessions, Michelle sounded hopeless: She wanted him to understand how traumatizing Covid had been for Black people. But she was frustrated by his inability to acknowledge real difference, as if everyone was the same race. “He’s of the mind-set that ‘I don’t see color.’” She continued setting out his thinking: “ ‘I don’t want to hear what you have to say because that’s not how I think.’” That point of view “obviously angers me,” she said. James would shrug, expressionless. Michelle was describing the infuriating experience of trying to break through a barrier: Her husband wasn’t consciously aware that whiteness was a perspective that was constricting what he could imagine or comprehend.After George Floyd was murdered and protests of all kinds erupted across the country, the dynamic between James and Michelle started to shift. Psychoanalysts are often interested in people’s fantasies, the scenarios running under the hood of conscious thought that express hidden desires and fears. When I asked James and Michelle about theirs, they shared apocalyptic ones: Each was imagining a full-on race war. Michelle imagined loss of all contact and trust between Black people and white people. James, who seemed uncharacteristically tense, saw himself on one side of a divide and was envisioning an “all-out physical combat.” “With whom?” I asked. “With anybody outside of this household. Anybody that tries to come and take anything from us because they’re struggling to survive and they start looting to feed their family, they’re now coming to my house.” Yet over time, as the conversation about Black lives continued, his own identifications became more complex and nuanced. He still felt loyalty to his fellow police officers and his conservative family, but he became aware that those feelings were now in tension with Michelle’s beliefs and what he was witnessing on the news about police violence against Black men and loud public demand for police reform.Michelle and James with their son.Dina Litovksy for The New York TimesJames’s changing internal landscape was reflected in his clear distress about “the all-out chaos that a large conflict can bring if we’re further divided in this country. You wouldn’t know who to trust from place to place.” Not knowing whom to trust also meant he could no longer trust his old belief system — in which it was clear who was “good” and who was “bad.” This disruption was creating new concerns and fantasies. Rather than fearing looters, he now feared polarization: “Michelle might be able to seek refuge somewhere where I might get shunned, or vice versa.” He was terrified that they wouldn’t be able to keep their young child safe.Interestingly, engaging with the question of systemic racism did not polarize Michelle and James but rather helped them do the important psychological work that I doubt I, as their therapist, could have inspired in them on my own. Something began to shift inside James, and he was no longer assuming sameness. He was no longer imposing his version of reality on Michelle, but rather “mentalizing” — understanding his and her mental states as separate and different subjective experiences: thoughts, feelings, beliefs and desires. In a meaningful moment he said, “I know it hits her harder than it does me.” I was moved to hear James plainly state: “We can never truly know what each other goes through because we’re not each other. So all we can do is be in as much understanding as possible.” He also recognized that he felt less defensive, “because she’s not directly attacking me.” And he saw a way for the two of them to remain connected, despite their difference. “We could get into a debate or an argument and be on opposite sides of the spectrum, completely juxtaposed, and manage to come through it and learn something about another perspective.”Michelle, who often described herself as guarded, also began to drop her defensive posture. She was looking at him fondly, her voice warmer. “These are things that I never really heard him fully articulate, particularly about his insecurities and feeling caught in the middle. That’s helpful for me to hear, because it makes me more conscious and aware of how he’s feeling.” For the first time, they were each entertaining multiple perspectives. Love is ultimately measured by people’s capacity to see and care about the other person as they are; succeeding in this effort is how people in relationships grow.Dr. Orna Guralnik is a clinical psychologist, a psychoanalyst and an academic who serves on the faculty of the N.Y.U. postdoctoral program in psychoanalysis, teaching a course in identity and politics and psychoanalysis with culture in mind. She is also the therapist on the Showtime documentary series “Couples Therapy.” Her writing centers on the intersection of psychoanalysis, dissociation and cultural studies. Dina Litovsky is a Ukrainian-born photographer who moved to New York in 1991. In 2020, she won the Nannen Prize, Germany’s foremost award for documentary photography. More