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      In ‘Succession,’ Democracy Goes Up in Smoke

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      On Sunday night, the Roys pondered whether to sell out democracy in exchange for their father’s kingdom. In the real world, the going rate is usually cheaper.This article includes spoilers for the most recent episode of “Succession.”In Sunday’s episode of “Succession,” a TV network sold out democracy. The most implausible part of the story was how high a price the sellers got for it.In the episode “America Decides,” the heirs to the conservative media empire Waystar Royco helped Jeryd Mencken, a Nazi-curious presidential candidate, claim a violence-tainted election by ordering their cable-news network to call it for him. The multibillion-dollar reward: Mencken would kill Waystar’s pending sale to a Swedish tech bro, handing Kendall and Roman Roy the kingdom after their father’s death.In reality, cable news favors for antidemocratic political forces come much cheaper. But let’s deal with the fake news network first.In the “Succession” episode — which probably should have carried a content warning for anyone who has followed the last couple of presidential elections — the night begins with the Democrat, Daniel Jimenez, ahead in the polls. The results end up tight enough to be decided by a highly convenient, apparently intentional fire in a Milwaukee vote counting station, which incinerates enough pro-Democratic ballots to swing Wisconsin to the Republican Mencken.After watching the previous episode, I sketched out a scenario in which the Roys’ network, ATN, has to take sides in a contested election, with the fate of the deal at stake. This doesn’t make me Nostradamus. “Succession” is predictable in the best way. It simply sets up conditions, gives characters motivations, then lets them act in their interests. It’s only as unpredictable as you fool yourself into believing it is.So there’s chaos and opportunity. There’s a fire and an election call that, while not carrying the force of law, would determine the narrative advantage in a legal (or extralegal) showdown.For America, it’s the choice between remaining a country where elections are won with ballots or becoming one where they’re won with torches. For the Roy siblings (minus Connor, conceding the end of his libertarian vanity campaign), it’s a golden jump ball, and each one of them reacts in character.Roman, who has always vibed with Mencken’s edgelord energy, sees no reason not to get on the good side of a history-smashing win. Roman knows who Mencken is, better than any of the Roys do; in Season 3, it was to him that Mencken expressed his openness to borrowing ideas from “H,” his pet name for Hitler. But what’s a little fascism between friends?This had to be a rough episode for Team Roman, the “Succession” fans who love his broken-toy impishness and “Clockwork Orange” banter. He is funny, even while electing a white nationalist, telling his sister, Shiv, “It’s only spicy because if my team wins, they’re going to shoot your team.” That’s exactly what has always made him dangerous. Does he endorse Mencken’s worldview sincerely or ironically? Does it matter? Does an ironic arson fire burn any cooler?His siblings respond with different flavors of ineffectiveness. Shiv, once a Democratic operative, is horrified at the “nightmare” of a President Mencken. But not horrified enough to sabotage her own schemes. Given the chance to ask the Jimenez campaign to promise to kill the Waystar sale — a deal she has been secretly working against her brothers to make happen — she fakes a call instead, and gets caught out. It’s a double-or-nothing bet with democracy as her stake, and she loses.Kendall, meanwhile, resists with the force of a wall of Jell-O, telling Roman, “I don’t necessarily feel good about this.” Necessarily: On “Succession,” statements of principle are always hedged.Kendall knows the stakes too. He wants to be good, or to be seen as good, and his daughter recently had an upsetting run-in on the street with an alt-right racist. But he also wants to win his company back. As often happens when he can’t reconcile his self-interest with his self-conception, he shuts down like a glitching robot, until learning of Shiv’s betrayal pushes him to push ATN to call the election.Respecting their viewership: Nicholas Braun, left, and Matthew Macfadyen in “Succession.”Macall Polay/HBOHis anger at Shiv is a reason, but it’s not the reason. As usual on “Succession,” this is about the money, and the dysfunctional family competition in which the money keeps score. As the brothers argue, Roman accuses Kendall of “big brother”-ing the election call, using seniority to get his way, just as Kendall did at dinner time when they were kids.If only little Roman had gotten steak, we might have gotten democracy.In our reality, of course, the ordinary pressures of the cable news business might have sufficed to force the call, deal or no deal, steak or chicken. As we just saw in the Dominion voting machines libel trial, Fox News — the none-too-subtle real-life analogue to ATN — indulged election theft hoaxes simply to try to hang on to its existing audience (at an eventual cost of hundreds of millions of dollars so far and potentially more).“America Decides” plays as if the writers committed the pretrial discovery file to memory. The episode follows Tom Wambsgans, Shiv’s estranged husband and ATN’s head, through an ulcer-making election night. He is sleep deprived and coked up, under pressure to deliver big ratings for the Roys and scary antifa stories for his audience, which is getting raw, uncut propaganda from ATN’s farther-right competitors.This was much the dynamic at work in the internal messages disclosed in the Dominion suit, which showed Fox stars and executives freaking out over competitors like Newsmax, who were gaining traction by embracing the election-fraud lie. (And of course, Fox’s worries stemmed from viewers’ fury over election night, particularly about the network calling Arizona for soon-to-be President Biden.)Asked why ATN isn’t reporting the evidence that the ballots were torched by Menckenite brownshirts, Tom says, “We need to respect our viewership” — phrasing almost verbatim from the Fox messages. “Respecting this audience whether we agree or not is critical,” the host Sean Hannity texted after the 2020 election.So ATN brings out its sneering alt-rightist, Mark Ravenhead, to insinuate that the fire was a false flag, while Tom suggests booking an egghead historian to tell viewers that everything is fine and normal. “Succession” has always had a feel for how the shamelessness of extremists defeats, and is enabled by, the flaccid reasonableness of centrists.Of course, ATN, like Fox, operates in a larger media environment, and the episode is less clear on how election night is playing elsewhere, especially on PGN, the in-world analog to CNN. There’s a brief clip suggesting that PGN, and presumably other mainstream news, is treating the election as undecided while the legal process plays out. (On a story level, this suggests that the election and Waystar Royco’s fate may have a few turns yet to take.)In our reality, mainstream outlets have their own pressures and owners. CNN, which is part of Warner Bros. Discovery, has a new head, Chris Licht, and a reported new corporate mandate to reposition after years of pugilistically covering President Trump.CNN spent the 2020 campaign trying to learn the lessons of 2016 by scaling back on airing live Trump rallies and assertively fact-checking him in detail. Now — knowing full well that the former president tried to overturn a democratic election — it seems determined to spend the 2024 campaign unlearning the lessons of 2020.Thus last week, CNN granted Donald J. Trump an hour of live TV to be as dishonest about the attempts to overturn the last election as you knew he would be if, at any point in the last few years, you watched CNN. While the town hall moderator, Kaitlan Collins, interjected corrections, he boisterously played his “rigged election” hits to a cheering crowd.CNN got a spectacle; the former president got a live platform for another dominance-politics performance. The morning after the town hall, Licht reportedly told the CNN staff: “Kaitlan pressed him again and again and again and made news. Made a lot of news.” And, he said, “that is our job.”Here, life echoes “Succession” once more. At the end of election night, with ballots burning and Mencken delivering a dog-whistley speech about making America “clean,” Roman insists that nothing he or ATN did that night was that bad or consequential. “We just made a night of good TV,” he says. When the smoke clears, you can always tell yourself that you didn’t start the fire. More

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      Alan Ruck Is Ready to Leave the Roy Family

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      The article includes spoilers for the most recent episode of “Succession.”One of the most impressive tricks HBO’s “Succession” has played on viewers over the course of four seasons is generating sympathy for reprehensible people. Sunday’s episode, in which democracy is discarded, apparently because Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin) had to eat too much chicken as a child, puts most of that sympathy to rest.It also ended the ludicrous presidential campaign of Connor Roy (Alan Ruck), the eldest and most bumbling Roy son, who launched his bid to confront what he saw as America’s biggest problems: “usury and onanism.” But even in conceding, Connor insults voters and issues a veiled threat to unleash the “Conheads,” his followers, after saying that he wouldn’t stoop to petty behavior. It was perhaps the darkest moment for a character who has largely been relegated to buffoon status, but Ruck sees Connor’s ignorance as his main political tool.“He’ll believe whatever sounds good to him that day,” Ruck said in a recent video call full of vivid anecdotes and laughter. “He’ll read something online or he’ll hear something on television, then that’ll become, like, the central plank of his platform for that day. And then tomorrow could be something completely different because he’s just not a focused person.”As Connor, Ruck, 66, has spun decades of character-actor chops into some of the series’s most scene-stealing moments: the “hyperdecanting” of a bottle of wine in a Vitamix blender; the rage over butter texture while overseeing his father’s gala ceremony; the suggestion to his call-girl-turned-fiancée, Willa (Justine Lupe), that they have “razor wire and bum fights” at their wedding to gin up fanfare for his presidential campaign.“Hands down the best writing I’ve ever encountered, week after week,” he said. “But I do think that it’d be fun to move on to something else after playing basically the family [expletive], you know, for what amounted to six years.”Ruck sees the series as “a gift” in a career that has often been feast or famine, with occasional day jobs to pay the bills. In 1986, he played Cameron Frye in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”— a quintessential Gen X character in a quintessential Gen X teen comedy. But the role didn’t immediately translate into stardom, and Ruck found Cameron’s shadow to be quite long.Ruck was considered too old for “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” But once he auditioned, “everybody just thought he was perfect,” said his co-star Matthew Broderick. (With Mia Sara.)Paramount Pictures, via Getty ImagesAs the relationship between Connor and Willa turned into something more real than transactional, the actors discussed how to make that evolution work, Justine Lupe said.David M. Russell/HBO“There were a lot of spotty years where I was just, like, basically making just enough money to stay alive,” he said. “When people would come up during that period and say something about ‘Ferris Bueller’ it would kind of really irritate me because I felt, well, that was it. That was my shot.”Of “Succession,” he said, “I dreamed about a show like this for years.”Growing up in a suburb of Cleveland, Ruck found solace in acting once he reached high school. As a student at the University of Illinois, he said, he spent most of his time on a stage. The college’s performing arts complex was designed by Max Abramovitz, the architect behind David Geffen Hall, but “there was another sort of student theater that was just a small theatrical space in an armory,” Ruck said. “They’d give you a budget of 25 bucks, and you could put on any play you wanted. So it’s just a lot of experience over a short period of time.”He moved to Chicago in 1979, a time when the theater scene, anchored by companies like Steppenwolf and the Wisdom Bridge, was beginning to take off. And after the box office success of “The Blues Brothers” (1980), he said, Hollywood became more interested in the city, making it an ideal place to be a budding actor.“You could walk into any talent agency on a Wednesday, and just say, ‘Hi, I’m new,’ and they’d sit down and talk with you,” he said. “Talk about this with people who started in New York or Los Angeles, and they’re like, ‘What are you talking about? You can’t just go see somebody.’ So it was like the top of the minors.”When Broadway casting directors came to Chicago to audition actors for Neil Simon’s “Biloxi Blues,” Ruck eventually landed a role. He moved to New York and shared the stage with Matthew Broderick, his future “Ferris Bueller” co-star, who remembered Ruck as having that “aura of the ‘Chicago good actor’ thing.”Mark Mylod, a “Succession” director and executive producer, said Ruck’s understanding of Connor’s delusional worldview brought “this beautiful soul to the character.”Daniel Dorsa for The New York Times“He had the look of somebody like a James Dean,” Broderick said, laughing. “Everybody in that play, we all had, like, very different personalities. But we all really did turn into kind of a unit, and Alan was a hugely important part of that.”It was during that run of “Biloxi Blues” that casting began for “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” Ruck had met the director, John Hughes, in Chicago when he auditioned for an early version of “The Breakfast Club,” and his agent put his name in for the role of Cameron. But the casting directors thought Ruck, then 28, was too old.“But then he came in and read and just sort of knocked John Hughes out,” Broderick said. “Everybody just thought he was perfect.”“Ferris Bueller” was a hit and remains widely beloved nearly four decades later. But three years after starring in it, Ruck was working in the sorting room of a Sears shipping warehouse in East Los Angeles. He had moved to the city after landing a pilot with Nell Carter for NBC, but it failed, and he had a wife and young daughter to support.His co-workers had no knowledge of his acting career, he said. One day as Ruck was smoking in the break room, one co-worker pointed him out to another. “He said, ‘You ever see that movie ‘Ferret Buford’s Day Off’?” Ruck recalled, laughing. “‘That looks like the [expletive] with the dad car!’”Ruck eventually found plenty of sitcom and dramatic TV roles, most prominently in ABC’s “Spin City,” and landed bit parts in films like “Young Guns II,” “Speed” and “Twister.” It’s the type of trajectory that can be hard on an actor’s ego and paycheck but gives them space to sharpen. For Ruck, it showed him exactly what he was looking for.“I worked on a sitcom for, you know, 18 episodes, and then there was nothing for a year,” he said. “So that gets pretty discouraging, because you’re not doing what you’re supposed to do.”By the time “Succession” was casting in 2016, Ruck, who is now married to the actress Mireille Enos, had settled into more of a rhythm, taking whatever parts came to him. He was filming the Fox series “The Exorcist” in Chicago and flying home to Los Angeles on the weekends, while Enos was pulling 16-hour days filming “The Catch” and caring for their two young children. One weekend she asked him to join her and their 2-year-old son at a music class before he flew back to Chicago. Then he got a call from his agent: There was an audition for an HBO show, but he’d have to miss the class.“I turned to Mireille and I said, ‘Honey, I have an audition for an HBO show,’ and she burst into tears,” he said. So he kept his promise: “We went to music class, and we banged tambourines for like an hour.” Then he stopped by the “Succession” executive producer Adam McKay’s house on his way to the airport and auditioned in his living room.With no time to read the script in advance, he was told to improvise, which proved handy once he got the job and filming started. Mark Mylod, a “Succession” director and executive producer, said Ruck’s understanding of Connor’s delusional worldview brought “this beautiful soul to the character.” This was especially apparent during what Mylod called “freebies,” or extra takes in which the actors try alternate lines or improvise their own.“Alan is brilliant at that,” Mylod said. “You give him a freebie and basically he could run a 10-minute roll of film without ever breaking character.”Ruck sees Connor’s stupidity as his main political tool. “He’ll read something online or he’ll hear something on television, then that’ll become, like, the central plank of his platform for that day,” he said.Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesMost of Ruck’s scenes are with Lupe, many of them excruciatingly awkward. But as their characters’ relationship grew into something more than merely transactional, Lupe said, their offscreen dynamic solidified. They texted each other regularly about how to make their scenes illustrate that evolution.“That was really helpful” she said. “We felt like we could do it together, instead of having to create a whole narrative on my own, or him having to create a whole narrative on his own.”Lupe pointed out their wedding scene from earlier this season. It amounted to only a few seconds of screen time in an episode destined to be remembered by viewers for the death of the paterfamilias, Logan Roy (Brian Cox). But what Lupe recalls is the emotional intensity of the filming of Willa and Connor’s nuptials.“We had vows that we exchanged with each other that kind of helped us get to the place where that felt like an authentic presentation,” she said. “In between takes, Alan would say these things like about how great it was to work together and about how the run had been with each other. And I was just like, ‘No, don’t! I’m gonna cry!’”Next up for Ruck are roles in two films: “The Burial,” a legal drama with Jamie Foxx, and a sequel to “Wind River.”. And while he will miss the camaraderie of the cast and crew of “Succession,” he feels he’s gotten everything he could out of Connor Roy — and some things he could do without.“It’s weird when you play a character that’s so easily dismissible,” he said, laughing. “People continually call you ‘moron.’ You know, it gets under your skin a little bit — I’ll be happy to let that go.” More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Ghosts of Beirut’ and ‘The Secrets of Hillsong’

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      A spy drama based on a decades-long manhunt comes to Showtime, and a new FX documentary brings back former Hillsong pastors to reflect on the church’s scandal.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, May 15-21. Details and times are subject to change.MondaySTREET OUTLAWS: LOCALS ONLY 8 p.m. on DISCOVERY. This new series in Discovery Channel’s “Street Outlaws” universe follows the street-racing duo Farmtruck and AZN, previously introduced in “Street Outlaws: OKC,” as they journey across the U.S. in search of the speediest local street racers. The chance to race against a veteran Street Outlaw driver (and a $5,000 prize) await the racers in an elimination process that spans ten episodes and both coasts.SUMMER BAKING CHAMPIONSHIP 9 p.m. on FOOD NETWORK. Just in time for barbecue season, this new whimsical cooking competition show hosted by Jesse Palmer asks contestants to bring their best warm-weather recipes to the table. For a $25,000 cash prize, ten chefs will compete in a series of summer-themed challenges.TuesdayFrom left, Angel City Football Club players Ali Riley, Sydney Leroux, Lily Nabet, and Jun Endo in “Angel City.”Will Navarro/Angel City Football Club/HBOANGEL CITY 9 p.m. on HBO. This new docuseries explores the infancy and rise of Angel City Football Club, the Los Angeles-based, female-founded soccer team whose early investors include the tennis star Serena Williams and the World Cup winners Mia Hamm and Abby Wambach.WednesdayClint Eastwood, left, and Bee Vang in “Gran Torino.”Anthony Michael Rivetti/Warner BrothersGRAN TORINO (2008) 11 p.m. on AMC. The Academy Award-winning director Clint Eastwood’s “vitality as an artist shows no sign of waning,” Manohla Dargis pronounced in her review for The New York Times. Set in Detroit, the film follows the unlikely friendship between Walt Kowalski (Eastwood), a cantankerous and bigoted retired factory worker who served in Vietnam and has just buried his wife, and Thao (Bee Vang), Walt’s teenage neighbor of Hmong descent.ThursdayTHE ONE 9 p.m. on TV ONE. The Grammy Award-winning gospel singer Kirk Franklin and his wife, Tammy, host a new competition dating show that adds a soul-searching element to the matchmaking process. Two Atlanta singles will meet with eligible bachelors and bachelorettes in hopes of finally finding “the one” in a series of adventurous dates. The Franklins are there to provide love and life advice along the whole way.DOCTOR ZHIVAGO (1965) 9:45 p.m. on TCM. This Oscar-winning historical romance, a dramatization of Boris Pasternak’s 1957 classic but controversial novel of the same name, follows a decades-long, star-crossed love affair set against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution. Bosley Crowther praised the director David Lean’s mise-en-scène in his 1965 review for The Times, in scenes ranging from “a snow-filled Moscow street” to “a country cottage frosted with shimmering ice.” Omar Sharif earned a Golden Globe for best actor for his performance as the titular Doctor Zhivago.FridayBELLE COLLECTIVE 8 p.m. on OWN. In the third season of this reality series, six glamorous businesswomen in Jackson, Miss., grapple with issues in their personal and professional lives as they’re tasked with redefining what it means to be Black, female and successful.Danai Gurira in “Great Performances: Richard III.”Joe SinnottGREAT PERFORMANCES: RICHARD III 9 p.m. on PBS. Recorded at the outdoor Delacorte Theater in Manhattan during a 2022 “Shakespeare in the Park” performance, the Public Theater’s rendition of Shakespeare’s tragedy is now available for all to watch. The play’s verse is “extraordinarily pungent and the questions obviously eternal,” Jesse Green described in his review for The Times, lauding the “Black Panther” star Danai Gurira’s portrayal of the ruthless titular character as “unflaggingly energetic” and “vocally thrilling.”Carl Lentz in “The Secrets of Hillsong.”FXTHE SECRETS OF HILLSONG 10 p.m. on FX. This four-part investigative docuseries recalls the rise and fall of Hillsong, the megachurch that counted actors, athletes and musicians on its roster before it became embroiled in a sex-abuse scandal. Though not the first documentary to tackle Hillsong’s fall from grace, this series will feature interviews with former pastors Laura and Carl Lentz, speaking for the first time since their public expulsion from the church.SaturdayLOVE TO LOVE YOU, DONNA SUMMER 8 p.m. on HBO. This love letter to the life and legacy of the Grammy Award-winning singer Donna Summer is directed by the Academy Award-winning filmmaker, Roger Ross Williams, and Brooklyn Sudano, Summer’s daughter. Through the recollections of those closest to her, photographs and home video footage (much shot by Summer herself), the film follows the artist from her career beginnings as a musical theater vocalist to her rise as the “Queen of Disco.”SundayGHOSTS OF BEIRUT 10 p.m. on SHOWTIME. From the creators of the Israeli espionage thriller series “Fauda,” this four-part spy drama is based on the decades-long global manhunt for Imad Mughniyeh, a Lebanese military commander who is believed to be the mastermind behind a string of high-profile terrorist attacks in the 1980s and 1990s. More

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      Jeremy Strong to Star in Broadway Revival of ‘An Enemy of the People’

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      The production, with a new script by Amy Herzog and directed by Sam Gold, will begin early next year.“Succession” is ending. So what’s next for Jeremy Strong? He’s returning to Broadway.Strong, whose celebrity has skyrocketed with his portrayal of the scheming Kendall Roy in HBO’s “Succession,” will star next year in a Broadway revival of the classic play “An Enemy of the People.” Strong will portray the title character, Dr. Thomas Stockmann, a physician who becomes a pariah when he decides to reveal that the water in local spa baths is contaminated.The play was written in 1882 by Henrik Ibsen and has been staged on Broadway 10 times, most recently in 2012. There have been other New York productions, too; a socially distanced one-woman version of the show was staged at the Park Avenue Armory in 2021, while the coronavirus pandemic was raging.This new production will feature a script rewritten by the playwright Amy Herzog, who is no stranger to reimagining Ibsen: Her revised version of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” is now on Broadway, with Jessica Chastain in the starring role.Strong, who won an Emmy award for his work on “Succession,” previously appeared on Broadway in a 2008 revival of “A Man for All Seasons.” He has also appeared in several Off Broadway productions.The “Enemy of the People” revival will be directed by Herzog’s husband, Sam Gold, who won a Tony Award for directing the musical “Fun Home,” and whose more recent Broadway ventures have been polarizing productions of Shakespeare’s “King Lear” and “Macbeth.”“An Enemy of the People” is scheduled to run for 16 weeks in early 2024; an announcement on Friday did not specify the exact dates or the theater, and did not reveal any further casting. The producers are Seaview (Greg Nobile and Jana Shea) and Patrick Catullo, who previously collaborated on Mike Birbiglia’s one-man show “The Old Man & the Pool.” More

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      How Liverpool Put on a Song Contest for Ukraine

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      This year’s event would be “Ukraine’s party,” a broadcasting official said. It just happens to be taking place in Britain.When Ukraine won last year’s Eurovision Song Contest, it gained the right to hold this year’s event. And despite Russia’s invasion, it insisted it would do it.Ukraine’s public broadcaster issued plans to host the spectacle in the west of the country, out of reach of Russian missiles, while politicians, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, said the nation would make it work.Even some foreign leaders backed its cause. Last summer, Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister at the time, told reporters that Ukraine won Eurovision “fair and square,” so it should host, regardless of the war.“It’s a year away,” Johnson said. “It’s going to be fine.”But Ukraine’s dream of staging this year’s Eurovision has failed to materialize. On Saturday night, the final of the glitzy contest — which is expected to draw a television audience of around 160 million — will take place 1,600 miles from Kyiv, in Liverpool, England.Last summer, after months of discussions, the European Broadcasting Union, which oversees the contest, agreed with Ukrainian authorities to the change of location. With Britain finishing second in last year’s contest, it was an obvious choice. Its public broadcaster, the BBC, agreed to organize the event.This is Britain’s ninth time hosting the contest since it began in 1956, but the BBC team knew this year would be different. Broadcasters that host Eurovision normally use the contest to advertise their country and its culture to a global television audience. This time, Britain would need to take a back seat.Commemorative merchandise on sale in central Liverpool.Mary Turner for The New York TimesThe Ukrainian flag displayed in a Liverpool branch of McDonald’s.Mary Turner for The New York TimesThe historic buildings on Liverpool’s waterfront were lit up in the colors of the Ukrainian flag on Wednesday.Mary Turner for The New York TimesMartin Osterdahl, the executive supervisor for Eurovision at the European Broadcasting Union, said in an interview that this year’s event would be “Ukraine’s party.” Britain just happened to be hosting it, he added, echoing a sentiment made by a British pop act.Shortly after the switch was announced, the BBC introduced a contest to select a city to stage the finals, eventually picking Liverpool over six other contenders. In October, the BBC hired Martin Green, an event producer who oversaw the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics, to oversee the event.In a recent video interview, Green, 51, said he flew immediately to Warsaw and met with Ukrainian broadcasting officials.Those officials said they wanted a Eurovision that was a huge “celebration of great Ukrainian culture — past, present and future,” Green recalled. They also wanted the reality of Russia’s invasion shown onscreen — something with the potential to strike a downbeat tone for the traditionally campy, showy spectacle. But they insisted the contest should still be fun, Green said.Alyosha, who was Ukraine’s Eurovision entry in 2010, performing in Liverpool on Wednesday.Mary Turner for The New York Times“It was really important to have that blessing — that permission — about the nature and style of the show,” Green said.Back in Britain, Green had just eight months to arrange the contest. He assembled a team — including outside agencies — to work on the event. (Over 1,000 people have contributed, he said.) Every week, his staff had video calls with Ukrainian colleagues to discuss and agree on aspects of the competition. Those included this edition’s slogan, “United by Music”; its stage design; and the special performances that take place onstage during breaks from the competition.Sometimes, Green said, the Ukrainian side had to delay scheduled calls at the last minute “because an air raid siren had gone off,” or cancel meetings entirely because of power cuts.“Those were incredibly sobering moments,” Green said. “Ukrainians have such a sheer force of will to carry on, that sometimes you could easily forget.”German Nenov, a creative director with Ukraine’s public broadcaster, was a vital sounding board for the British team, Green said. In a recent interview, Nenov said it was sometimes “surreal” to be discussing sparkly outfits and dance performances as Russian bombs fell on Ukraine. “These past six months have probably been the most emotional of my life,” he said. “But thanks to Eurovision, I was able to stay strong. It gave me the ability to go on.”German Nenov, a creative director with Ukraine’s state broadcaster, in Liverpool. “These past six months have probably been the most emotional of my life,” he said.Mary Turner for The New York TimesNenov, 33, is overseeing several special performances by Ukrainian musicians that will play during competition breaks. With those, he said, he wanted to change viewers’ perceptions of his country. When Ukraine hosted Eurovision in 2005 and 2017, he added, those broadcasts featured clichés of traditional life, including embroidered outfits and dancing girls with flowers in their hair. “That’s not Ukraine,” Nenov said; this time, he would show a more modern vision of the country.Both Nenov and Green declined to give details of Saturday’s grand final, insisting it should come as a surprise for television viewers, but both said the show included Ukrainian and British pop stars. The war would be mentioned, Green said, but in an elegant fashion that was appropriate for “a great big singing competition.”Osterdahl, the European Broadcasting Union official, said that this year’s collaboration between two countries to host Eurovision was “unprecedented.” But if Ukraine wins again on Saturday, he would need another country to step up to host Ukraine’s next party. One day, he said, he hoped the war would end, and Ukraine could host for itself. More

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      Jacklyn Zeman, Nurse Bobbie on ‘General Hospital,’ Dies at 70

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      , She played the same role on the popular soap opera for nearly half a century and was nominated for four Daytime Emmy Awards.Jacklyn Zeman, an Emmy-nominated actress who for nearly a half-century played the role of Bobbie Spencer, a nurse on the long-running soap opera “General Hospital,” died on Tuesday in Thousand Oaks, Calif. She was 70.Her death, at Los Robles Regional Medical Center, came after a “short battle” with cancer, according to her family.In announcing Ms. Zeman’s death on Wednesday, the show’s executive producer, Frank Valentini, wrote on Twitter, “Just like her character, the legendary Bobbie Spencer, she was a bright light and true professional that brought so much positive energy with her to work.”As Barbara Jean (Bobbie) Spencer, Ms. Zeman was among the longest-lasting cast members on the series, which since 1963 has centered around the lives of characters who work in the hospital and in the wealthy business community in the fictional New York town of Port Charles. Ms. Zeman first appeared on the show in 1977 and was featured in nearly 900 episodes.Bobbie was a student nurse who had moved on from her past life as a prostitute who gave up a baby for adoption in Florida; vied for the affections of a law student named Scotty Baldwin; and was the younger sister of Luke Spencer, played by Anthony Geary.She portrayed her character as a loving but tough nurse who had emerged from a difficult past. In one scene, she defends her hard-knocks upbringing to Mr. Baldwin, saying she never had anything handed to her.“I wanted Bobbie to be bouncy and have a positive aura and energy,” she said in an interview last year with TV Insider. “I wanted her to have intelligence, humor and a love of people. Bobbie came from a dysfunctional background but she wanted to have kids and be a mother.”“I wanted the character to be perky and to come in like a hurricane,” she said.Ms. Zeman was nominated for four Daytime Emmy Awards for her work on the show and received a fifth nomination in 2021 for her acting on the television series “The Bay.”Jacklyn Lee Zeman was born on March 6, 1953, in Englewood, N.J., and grew up in Bergenfield. She was the oldest of three daughters born to Richard Zeman, an engineer with IBM, and Rita (Duhart) Zeman Rohlman, who worked for Scholastic Magazine.She began training in ballet at the age of 5, said Cassidy Zee Macleod, one of Ms. Zeman’s two daughters. When she was 15, she moved to New York City to pursue dancing and attended New York University briefly, Ms. Macleod said. She was cast as Lana McLain in 1976 on “One Life to Live” before her move to “General Hospital” in 1977.In addition to Ms. Macleod and Lacey Rose Gorden, another daughter whom she had with her third husband, Glenn Gorden (they divorced in 2007), Ms. Zeman is survived by two sisters, Lauren Fischetti and Carol Kolb, and two grandchildren. In April, “General Hospital” celebrated 60 years on the air. Ms. Macleod said that one of her mother’s last appearances was on the show’s nurses’ ball in April.Ms. Macleod said that her mother, who lived in Calabasas, Calif., adored the “strong-willed” role of Bobbie and that she and her sister recognized how deeply their mother’s role had affected people when some of the nurses caring for her described how Bobbie had inspired them.“We recognized how many lives she touched,” said Ms. Macleod. “They said they became nurses because of her.” More

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      British Spies, Japanese Teens and a German Cop’s Wild Ride

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      Recent international series of note include “A Spy Among Friends” on MGM+ and “Sam: A Saxon” on Hulu.It has been a quiet season for international television on American screens — nothing has grabbed attention on a “Squid Game” or “Downton Abbey” scale. But barely a day goes by, in the streaming age, without an interesting series washing up from some foreign shore. Here are four recent shows worth tracking down, from an elegant British thriller to a Chinese dramedy about a demon god and an immortal warrior who meet cute on the mortal plane.‘A Spy Among Friends’Alexander Cary, a writer and executive producer on “Homeland,” wrote this six-episode spy thriller as a leisurely, literate, three- or four-dimensional game of chess. Based on the nonfiction book of the same name by Ben Macintyre, it tells the story of Kim Philby (and the other high-level Soviet spies known as the Cambridge Five) by focusing on a set of intertwined sparring matches: Philby’s with his friend and MI6 colleague Nicholas Elliott, sent to Beirut to bring the disgraced Philby home; Elliott’s with a (fictional) agent, Lily Thomas, assigned to interrogate him when he returns to London alone; and Elliott and Thomas’s with the MI6 hierarchy once he brings her around to his side.Made for the British streaming service ITVX and available here on MGM+ and Prime Video, “A Spy Among Friends” is smart, complicated (at times overly so) and saturated in a particular Cold War blend of tragic romanticism and kitchen-sink class politics. What makes it stand out, though, is its casting. Anna Maxwell Martin and Guy Pearce are excellent as Thomas and Philby, and Damian Lewis is outstanding as Elliott, the colorless spy’s spy whose skills and motives are in question until the end. Tightly controlled yet somehow relaxed, Lewis gives a performance in which the coldblooded manipulator and the sentimentally loyal bro coexist at every moment.Malick Bauer is an East German policeman tossed around by history in “Sam: A Saxon” on Hulu.Stephan Burchadt/Disney‘Sam: A Saxon’As triumph-of-the-spirit stories go, “Sam: A Saxon” is notably low on triumph. Sam Meffire, the subject of this German biographical mini-series from Hulu, grew up in Dresden, both acutely aware of how his skin color set him apart and fiercely loyal to his East German homeland; shortly before the Berlin Wall fell, he became the country’s first policeman of African descent. His life since then — he’s only 52 — has been a carnival ride that no screenwriter would be likely to dream up: first a poster boy in a national ad campaign designed to humanize the police, and then a fugitive fleeing to Africa to avoid arrest for armed robbery.Jörg Winger, a creator and the showrunner of “Sam,” was also a creator of “Deutschland 83” and its sequels, and the shows share a knack for embedding engaging characters in real-world events in a way that feels both credible and suspenseful. In this dramatized telling, Meffire, played by the imposing actor Malick Bauer, is a true believer who finds himself continually and perversely acted upon by history. He is tossed about by the fall of Communism, and by the ravages of capitalism, racist nationalism and crime that the collapse unleashes. “Sam: A Saxon” stands firm against streaming-video bloat: Its seven episodes barely contain the story it sets out to tell.“Skip and Loafer” presents an expressionistic depiction of the life of a high-school girl.Misaki Takamatsu,KODANSHA/”Skip and Loafer” Production Committee‘Skip and Loafer’This sweet, lightly sentimental slice-of-life anime, halfway through its 12-episode season on Crunchyroll (and available for purchase on Prime Video), is an example of something that Japanese animation provides more consistently than American live-action TV: a comic, even expressionistic depiction of high-school life that still feels unforced and natural. Mitsumi, the star student of her small seaside town, moves to Tokyo to attend an elite prep school. Ferociously single-minded, very impressed with herself and determined to take her new school by storm, she’s also a quick-to-embarrass country bumpkin, a classic setup for teenage comedy.An early scene of Mitsumi’s childhood friends chasing after her departing train is a ruse, a poke at the conventions of this sort of story in traditional anime and Studio Ghibli-style films. And the bending of perspectives continues: While Mitsumi runs a gantlet of welcoming ceremonies, classroom presentations and karaoke parties in Tokyo, we and everyone around her — new friends, old friends and family — can see the anxieties and mortifications that she thinks she is hiding. The show (whose cryptic title, taken from the manga on which the anime is based, probably alludes to Mitsumi and her slacker crush, Sousuke) is a lighthearted essay on loneliness and the life-or-death nature of every decision a 15-year-old makes.In “Till the End of the Moon,” Luo Yunxi and Bai Lu play characters who are entangled across time and space.Rakuten Viki‘Till the End of the Moon’While a demon god is in the process of destroying the world, the resolute mystical warrior Li Susu (Bai Lu) is sent back in time 500 years to find the demon while he is still in mortal form and kill him. Arriving in the kingdom of Sheng, she discovers that she is in the body of a headstrong, very poorly behaved princess who is married to — do I have to spell it out?“Till the End of the Moon,” which is 35 episodes into its 40-episode run on Rakuten Viki, was a major hit in China, where it wrapped up this week; its premiere reportedly drew the highest numbers in three years for a xianxia (immortal heroes) drama. It’s an excellent example of the Chinese streaming-video industry’s capacity for making slickly disposable, highly enjoyable entertainment that combines elements of costume drama and special-effects-laden fantasy action with a healthy portion of romantic comedy. The humor will largely translate for a Western viewer, and Luo Yunxi (“My Sunshine,” “Ashes of Love”), who plays both the annihilating god and the possibly sympathetic human prince, is a hypnotic camera subject. More

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      Striking Writers Are Worried About A.I. Viewers Should Be, Too.

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      A.I. screenwriting, a point of contention in the Writers Guild strike, may not yet be ready for prime time. But streaming algorithms and derivative programming have prepared the way for it.Television loves a good sentient-machine story, from “Battlestar Galactica” to “Westworld” to “Mrs. Davis.” With the Writers Guild of America strike, that premise has broken the fourth wall. The robots are here, and the humans are racing to defend against them, or to ally with them.Among the many issues in the strike is the union’s aim to “regulate use of material produced using artificial intelligence or similar technologies,” at a time when the ability of chatbots to auto-generate all manner of writing is growing exponentially.In essence, writers are asking the studios for guardrails against being replaced by A.I., having their work used to train A.I. or being hired to punch up A.I.-generated scripts at a fraction of their former pay rates.The big-ticket items in the strike involve, broadly, how the streaming model has disrupted the ways TV writers have made a living. But it’s the A.I. question that has captured imaginations, understandably so. Hollywood loves robot stories because they make us confront what distinguishes us as human. And when it comes to distinguishing features, the ability to conjure imaginary worlds is simply sexier than the opposable thumb.So the prospect of A.I. screenwriting has become potent, both as threat and rallying cry. Detractors of the striking writers taunted them on social media that software was going to horse-and-buggy their livelihoods. Striking WGA members workshopped A.I. jokes on their picket signs, like “ChatGPT doesn’t have childhood trauma.” (Well, it doesn’t have its own. It has Sylvia Plath’s, and that of any other former unhappy child whose writing survives in machine-readable form.)But it shouldn’t surprise anyone if the TV business wants to leave open the option of relying on machine-generated entertainment. In a way, it already does.Not in the way the WGA fears — not yet. Even the most by-the-numbers scripted drama you watch today was not written by a computer program. But it might have been recommended to you by one.Algorithms, the force behind your streaming-TV “For You” menu, are in the business of noticing what you like and matching you with acceptable-enough versions of it. To many, this is indeed acceptable enough: More than 80 percent of viewing on Netflix is driven by the recommendation engine.In order to make those matches, the algorithm needs a lot of content. Not necessarily brilliant, unique, nothing-like-it content, but familiar, reliable, plenty-of-things-like-it content. Which, as it happens, is what A.I. is best at.The debate over A.I. in screenwriting is often simplified as, “Could a chatbot write the next ‘Twin Peaks’?” No, at least for now. Nor would anyone necessarily want it to. The bulk of TV production has no interest in generating the next “Twin Peaks” — that is, a wild, confounding creative risk. It is interested in more reboots, more procedurals, more things similar to what you just watched.TV has always relied on formula, not necessarily in a bad way. It iterates, it churns out slight variations on a theme, it provides comfort. That’s what has long made strictly formatted shows like “Law & Order” such reliable, relaxing prime-time companions. That’s also what could make them among the first candidates for A.I. screenwriting.Large language models like ChatGPT work by digesting vast quantities of existing text, identifying patterns and responding to prompts by mimicking what they’ve learned. The more done-to-death a TV idea is, the greater the corpus of text available on it.And, well, there are a lot of “Law & Order” scripts, a lot of superhero plots, a lot of dystopian thrillers. How many writers-contract cycles before you can simply drop the “Harry Potter” novels into the Scriptonator 3000 and let it spit out a multiseason series?In the perceptive words of “Mrs. Davis,” the wildly human comedic thriller about an all-powerful A.I., “Algorithms love clichés.” And there’s a direct line between the unoriginality of the business — things TV critics complain about, like reboots and intellectual-property adaptations and plain old derivative stories — and the ease with which entertainment could become bloated by machine-generated mediocrity.After all, if studios treat writers like machines, asking for more remakes and clones — and if viewers are satisfied with that — it’s easy to imagine the bean counters wanting to skip the middle-human and simply use a program that never dreamed of becoming the next Phoebe Waller-Bridge.And one could reasonably ask, why not? Why not leave the formulas to machines and rely on people only for more innovative work? Beyond the human cost of unemployment, though, there’s an entire ecosystem in which writers come up, often through precisely those workmanlike shows, to learn the ropes.Highly formatted shows like “Law & Order” could be among the early candidates for A.I.-generated scripts. NBCThose same writers may be able to use A.I. tools productively; the WGA is calling for guardrails, not a ban. And the immediate threat of A.I. to writers’ careers may be overstated, as you know if you’ve ever tried to get ChatGPT to tell you a joke. (It’s a big fan of cornball “Why did the …” and “What do you call a …” constructions.) Some speculations, like the director Joe Russo’s musing that A.I. some day might be able to whip up a rom-com starring your avatar and Marilyn Monroe’s, feel like science fiction.But science fiction has a way of becoming science fact. A year ago, ChatGPT wasn’t even available to the public. The last time the writers went on strike, in 2007, one of the sticking points involved streaming media, then a niche business involving things like iTunes downloads. Today, streaming has swallowed the industry.The potential rise of A.I. has workplace implications for writers, but it’s not only a labor issue. We, too, have a stake in the war with the storybots. A culture that is fed entirely by regurgitating existing ideas is a stagnant one. We need invention, experimentation and, yes, failure, in order to advance and evolve. The logical conclusion of an algorithmicized, “more like what you just watched” entertainment industry is a popular culture that just … stops.Maybe someday A.I. will be capable of genuine invention. It’s also possible that what “invention” means for advanced A.I. will be different from anything we’re used to — it might be wondrous or weird or incomprehensible. At that point, there’s a whole discussion we can have about what “creativity” actually means and whether it is by definition limited to humans.But what we do know is that, in this timeline, it is a human skill to create a story that surprises, challenges, frustrates, discovers ideas that did not exist before. Whether we care about that — whether we value it over an unlimited supply of reliable, good-enough menu options — is, for now, still our choice. More