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      Austin Butler Sings ‘Blue Christmas’ With Cecily Strong in Her Last ‘SNL’

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      After a surprise announcement hours before the broadcast, Strong, an 11-season veteran of the show, bid a tearful goodbye.“Saturday Night Live” was lucky to have had Cecily Strong for as long as it did. Since joining the show in 2012, she has contributed memorable recurring characters, like The Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With at a Party, and an array of celebrity and political impersonations, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kyrsten Sinema and Jeanine Pirro. She performed at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner and was a co-anchor of the Weekend Update desk.There was a moment, at the end of the 2020-21 season, when Strong appeared to be saying goodbye to “S.N.L.” — singing “My Way” as she doused herself in a tank that was supposed to be filled with wine — but she nonetheless returned the following year.And while she was not part of the exodus of cast members that preceded the start of its current 48th season, she did not appear in the first three live episodes — instead, she was performing a one-woman show, “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe,” in Los Angeles. And now her time on “S.N.L.” has indeed come to an end.The announcement of Strong’s departure was made online just a couple of hours before the start of this weekend’s broadcast, hosted by Austin Butler and featuring Lizzo as its musical guest.Strong herself got to bid farewell to “S.N.L.” in a Weekend Update segment in which she played her recurring character Cathy Anne, a disheveled woman who is always yelling outside Michael Che’s window.In her Cathy Anne guise, Strong said that she was wearing a Santa hat because “it’s covering up a giant open wound — I got a little bit scalped.” (She explained further that this had happened because she “fell asleep on the escalator.”)Strong went onto say that she was “a little emo tonight, because, truth is, I’m here to say goodbye.” She explained that she was going to prison because all of the crimes she had confessed in her various appearances had finally caught up with her: “You know, drug use, trespassing, destruction of property, crack, impersonating a police horse, meth and crack.”But, she said, she hoped prison would give her “much needed stability, and I’m not too scared ’cause I got friends on the inside — they seem to be doing OK.” (Here, the screen showed a graphic of the “S.N.L.” alumnae Kate McKinnon and Aidy Bryant, wearing orange jumpsuits and prison tattoos.)Strong gradually slipped out of character as she addressed the audience, saying: “Everybody has to go to jail at some point, right? It’s just my time now. But I had a lot of fun here. And I feel really lucky that I got to have so many of the best moments of my life in this place with these people that I love so much.”The tears came later, at the end of the episode, when Butler, who played Elvis Presley in the recent film “Elvis,” joined Strong, Kenan Thompson and several other “S.N.L.” cast members to sing a sentimental cover of “Blue Christmas.”But at the end of her Weekend Update segment, Strong told everyone not to be sad because, as she sang once again to the tune of “My Way”: “I did it high, Che.”Cold open of the weekFormer President Donald Trump pretty much handed “S.N.L.” a script for its opening sketch when he announced on Thursday that he would begin selling a set of digital trading cards depicting him as various fantastical characters.James Austin Johnson brought his studied nonchalance to his recurring role as Trump, pitching the $99 offer — “seems like a lot, seems like a scam, and in many ways it is,” he said — while also mocking the larger concept of NFTs: “You can also get them for free by just going online and just looking at them, maybe, I don’t know, maybe taking a screenshot.”“But we’d really prefer it,” he added, “if you sent the $99.”Celebrity impersonation of the weekIt has been less than a week since HBO aired the season finale of “The White Lotus.” But if you already find yourself missing its star and muse Jennifer Coolidge, then Chloe Fineman has you covered in this holiday-theme segment where she captures Coolidge’s breathless amazement at everyday occurrences.In “Jennifer Coolidge Is Impressed by Christmas Stuff,” Fineman oohs and ahhs about Christmas lights. (“One year I got the blinking ones,” she explains; “I left my Christmas tree on all night and learned my cat was epileptic.”) And she blithely asks a pianist, played by Michael Longfellow, if he was the composer of the tune he just played — that tune being “Jingle Bells.”(Fun fact: the real Coolidge auditioned for “S.N.L.” in the 1990s, along with the future cast members Will Ferrell, Chris Kattan and Cheri Oteri, but she didn’t get the gig. She has yet to host the show, wink wink!)Questionable holiday treat of the weekPerhaps on some Christmas past, you had the misfortune of being served some dry, brittle candy made out of marzipan and formed into some improbable shape like a cash register or a bunch of bananas. (And if not, consider yourself lucky.)But clearly someone in the “S.N.L.” writing staff had a score to settle with marzipan and channeled it into this exceptionally silly sketch in which Thompson and a group of excitable British children (played by Butler and the cast) fail to make it sound appealing, even when they try to sing marzipan’s praises.As Thompson explains, “Just remember, don’t eat it within 12 hours of going to sleep, or after 12 hours of waking up.”Weekend Update jokes of the weekOver at the Weekend Update desk, the anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che continued to riff on Trump’s entry into the NFT market and the arrest of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX:Jost began:Insiders are saying that the House Jan. 6 committee will refer at least three criminal charges against Donald Trump, but after this week, I think he’s pretty much locked down that insanity plea. [His screen shows a trading-card image depicting Trump as a comic-book hero with lasers coming from his eyes.] Semiretired maniac Donald Trump has launched a collection of digital NFT trading cards depicting him in various costumes, including cowboy, superhero and, most unbelievable of all, guy who didn’t dodge the draft.As the screen beside him showed an image of Trump wearing a fighter pilot suit, Jost continued:I’m honestly just relieved that he’s wearing an American military uniform. It’s such a funny move to get into NFTs after the whole market just crashed. It’s like getting into Kanye now. Which Trump also kind of did.Che picked up the thread:Sam Bankman-Fried, the former C.E.O. of the cryptocurrency company FTX, was arrested on fraud charges in the Bahamas — I’m going to guess while swimming in a T-shirt. Prosecutors allege that Bankman-Fried took funds from FTX customers to make large political donations. That money will now be used to make sure the cameras outside his jail cell aren’t working. More

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      The Best of Late Night This Year

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      Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesThe hosts had plenty of news to riff on this week, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s joke about the Jan. 6 riot; a report that dozens of G.O.P. lawmakers had texted the former chief of staff Mark Meadows about overturning the 2020 election; and President Donald Trump releasing NFT trading cards of himself as a superhero.Here’s what the hosts had to say → More

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      A New ‘Best Man’ Gives Equal Time to the Women

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      “The Best Man: The Final Chapters,” a new series sequel to the popular films, deepens the franchise’s female characters, introduces new faces and tackles a wider range of issues.The broom-jumping romantic comedy “The Best Man” debuted in theaters in 1999, delivering a bougie Black bonanza that would prove to have true staying power.For his film directing debut, Malcolm D. Lee assembled for “The Best Man” a cast of young Black actors, anchored by Morris Chestnut, Taye Diggs and Nia Long, to play successful late-20s college buddies navigating the messier aspects of love and friendship as one couple prepares to wed.There was no encroaching systemic racism for them to overcome and there were no societal ills looming large (unless you count the male characters’ misogynistic views). It was just two hours of beautiful people representing every shade of brown, sporting their best Y2K wear, thriving professionally and being decadently self-involved to the beat of a neo-soul soundtrack.“It was such an important film during that time for the culture,” Long said. “We, as Black people, were seeing ourselves in a different way for the first time, and were thirsty for that.”Lee, who also wrote the film, said he wanted Black filmgoers to “feel seen, and to normalize what I know as being Black in America.”The film grossed an estimated $34.5 million (on a budget of $9 million), helped start the careers of Regina Hall and Sanaa Lathan, and became a Black rom-com classic, joining the ranks of Diggs’s 1998 star-making vehicle “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” and the Long-led 1997 drama “Love Jones.” The 2013 follow-up, “The Best Man Holiday,” doubled its predecessor’s box office numbers with a Christmas-themed tear-jerker that reunited the age-defying actors.Released in 1999, “The Best Man” starred emerging young actors like, from left, Monica Calhoun, Morris Chestnut and Diggs.Michael Ginsberg/Universal PicturesNow, more than two decades since they danced the Electric Slide to Cameo’s “Candy” during the first film’s climactic reception scene, the ensemble is back together for another installment. “The Best Man: The Final Chapters,” a limited series premiering on Peacock on Dec. 22, picks up where the sequel left off, in the aftermath of one character’s tragic loss and amid the shock of yet another wedding announcement. (And still, the actors seemingly have not aged a lick.)“It’s kind of amazing that we’re all alive and healthy, and that we’re all thriving in this business,” Lathan said. “When we came up, there were literally a handful of us working and fighting for the same jobs.”With eight hourlong episodes to work with (all dropping at once), Lee and the other writers expanded the story to give equal time to the women, introduce some new faces and tackle a more robust range of issues.The two films offered a glimpse of the interior lives of four Black men who’ve been through it all together. There’s the ambitious novelist Harper (played by Diggs); his N.F.L.-star best friend, Lance (Morris Chestnut); Quentin (Terrence Howard), the resident Lothario and pot-stirrer; and Julian, or “Murch” (Harold Perrineau), the peaceable doormat. They grew older together on the big screen, but the series finds them finally growing up.As “The Final Chapters” opens, Harper has achieved many of his career goals but is still as unmoored as ever. Lance remains a grief-stricken widower who is now floundering as a single parent. (His wife Mia, played by Monica Calhoun, died in the film sequel.) Quentin is still a showboating provocateur, but he is slowly learning how to show his vulnerable side. By contrast, Murch, the people-pleasing family man, has picked up a little of the edge that his cocky friend sloughed off.“We’ve come a long way,” Diggs said. “We’ve all, as actors, lived our lives and had intense situations that lend themselves to our acting work, and you can see it in this series. It all comes through.”The series finds the core friend group, played by, from left, Terrence Howard, Diggs, Perrineau and Chestnut, older and wiser but still negotiating life and love.PeacockLee said he had been brewing up next-phase ideas for the gang ever since “Holiday” proved to be a hit, and he even wrote a draft of a script. But a third movie never happened, Lee said, because of the actors’ conflicting schedules and his stalled budget negotiations with Universal Pictures, which distributed the first two films.After Lee signed a development deal in 2018 with the production studio Universal Television — the studio is, like Peacock, part of NBCUniversal — he began to rework the sequel concept as a limited series.Lee, who also directed, among other films, the hit 2017 comedy “Girls Trip” and the 2021 “Space Jam” sequel, “A New Legacy,” sought out a seasoned TV pro to help him make the transition to the small screen. Enter Dayna Lynne North, who was fresh off a stint as a writer and executive producer for HBO’s “Insecure.” She had been a “Best Man” fan since attending the 1999 premiere screening of the first movie with her USC film school squad. Signing on to write and share showrunning duties on the series with Lee was a full-circle moment for her.“It’s basically like watching LeBron play and having him come over and be like, ‘Hey, you want to come down here and see if you can make this shot?’” North said, referring to the Lakers star LeBron James. “It felt like home to me — I get where these characters are, and I know the world of television.”“I came in knowing that I wanted to dive deeper into the women’s lives,” she continued. “We hadn’t gotten the same window into the women of ‘The Best Man.’”“I think we’ve done a great job of showing growth,” said Long, right, with Lathan in the new series.Matt Infante/PeacockIndeed, male egos rampaged through the films, in the form of grandstanding, trash-talking, territory-claiming and brawling, while the women’s roles mostly took a back seat. The series brings the ladies to the fore.“I think we’ve done a great job of showing growth, maturing and being true to how life works, because it is complicated,” Long said.Her character, Jordan, once primarily an embodiment of the “one that got away” type, ascends ever higher in her TV executive career while grasping for work-life balance. Hall’s Candace, who arrived to the franchise as a bachelor-party stripper and won Murch’s affections with her love of literature, adds graduate school to her already packed schedule as a mother and school administrator. And Lathan’s Robyn, Harper’s grounded, patient wife, gradually begins to emerge from his long shadow.“It has been really synergistic in a weird way,” Lathan said of returning to the role. “The evolution of her growing her self-worth has been parallel to what’s been happening to me. She’s stepping into her power, and how that manifests is not necessarily expected.”And then, there’s Shelby, the clear front-runner in the “Most Improved” category. Played by Melissa De Sousa, the character began as a snarky shrew who dominated the submissive Murch until she lost him to Candy near the end of the first film. She returned in the sequel as a scorned reality-TV drama queen, hellbent on stoking fires. The new Shelby is still brash, but she has more to offer than audacious one-liners.“I had to fight for more because I was the least developed out of all of them,” De Sousa said. “People liked her, but they liked to hate her.”She said she had asked Lee to flesh out the role for the series. “I said, ‘It’s really important that you show Shelby as a fully developed woman,’” she recalled telling him. “‘You have to show her heart.’” (Lee said he had already intended to do so.)Malcolm D. Lee, center, had been thinking about another “Best Man” sequel since the second film came out in 2013.Clifton Prescod/PeacockBeyond presenting the women with more depth, the series also travels outside the friendship bubble, giving its characters more to chew on than just who-slept-with-or-kept-secrets-from-whom melodrama.The story bounces between the 2010s and the present (with episode titles cleverly referencing Black literature, including Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” and “An American Marriage” by Tayari Jones). The plot is studded with Covid-related business busts, a racial microaggression that snowballs into a run-in with the New York Police Department, gentrification woes, a #MeToo moment and a Black Lives Matter protest.“It made it easier,” Diggs said of the more topical scenes. “It wasn’t like we had to go and do research to find out how we thought this character would feel, because it’s all very fresh.”As the characters left their comfort zones, so too did Lee, who opted to share directing duties for a change. He directed four episodes, and Stacey Muhammad (“Queen Sugar”) and Charles Stone III (“black-ish”) took one each. The revered film and TV polymath Robert Townsend (“Hollywood Shuffle”) directed the two remaining episodes, bringing out the cast’s and crew’s inner fans. (“I’ve been in this business for a minute, so it’s great to be able to still feel star-struck,” Diggs said.)While it all amounts to plenty of change for a beloved franchise, both onscreen and behind the scenes, Lee’s original vision remains intact. The goal has always been to depict the kind of people Lee knows in his own life — “upwardly-mobile, aspirational people who wanted to ‘make it.’” he said.“But when you make it, guess what? Life is still there,” he continued. “When we get older, reality sneaks in — not just the big events like weddings and funerals but also those in-between things with career, family, your parents and kids.“We wanted to deal with all of those things, but also have the eye candy and the nostalgia.” More

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      A Comedian’s Stunt Is a Sly Protest of Qatar’s LGBTQ Laws

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      Joe Lycett appeared to shred cash after demanding that David Beckham end his relationship with the World Cup. It was his latest performance with a point.LONDON — Hours before the opening ceremony of Qatar’s World Cup, the comedian Joe Lycett dropped great wads of cash into a shredder.Days earlier, he had posted a video in which he addressed the footballer David Beckham. Lycett called him a “gay icon” for appearing on the cover of a British gay lifestyle magazine. But he also gave him a week to stop being a World Cup ambassador for Qatar, which outlaws homosexuality and was reportedly paying Beckham 10 million pounds (more than $12 million) to promote the tournament.After hearing nothing from Beckham, the British comedian, wearing a pair of safety goggles and a frilly rainbow shirt, live-streamed himself feeding £10,000 of his own money into a wood chipper. He was subsequently criticized in British newspapers and on social media for shredding money at a time when many in the country are struggling financially.Except, in a follow-up video, Lycett revealed that he hadn’t really destroyed the cash, and instead had donated a total of £10,000 to two L.G.B.T.Q. charities. “To threaten to destroy money in a cost-of-living crisis? It’s a horrific thing to do,” he said, referring to Britain’s surging inflation rates.It was Lycett’s latest act of public performance as protest, an approach he had previously used to take on the British Conservative Party and Shell, the energy company. In a recent interview in a London pub, Lycett, 34, said he thought of these efforts as stunts: “War-gamed, and plotted.”Lycett, a popular stand-up comedian and TV personality in Britain who identifies as pansexual and so is attracted to people regardless of their gender identity, remembered visiting Qatar in 2015 as part of a comedy tour. “I didn’t feel safe there,” he said, adding that he was advised by the organizers not to leave his hotel. In Qatar, same-sex relations are punishable by up to seven years in prison, according to Human Rights Watch.Lycett onstage at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2015. Earlier in his comedy career, Lycett said he preferred to make “gentle and nonabrasive” jokes “about cheese and being middle-class.”Richard Dyson/AlamySoccer fans around the world have expressed concern about Qatar’s human rights record, and when he heard that the World Cup was taking place in the Arab nation, Lycett was appalled. He hoped putting pressure on Beckham “to say or do something” would have “a much larger knock-on effect” in actively improving L.G.B.T.Q. rights in Qatar, he said.Beckham declined to comment for this article, but in a TV special made by Lycett that aired Thursday in Britain, Beckham’s team made a statement that read, in part: “We understand that there are different and strongly held views about engagement in the Middle East but see it as positive that debate about the key issues has been stimulated directly by the first World Cup being held in the region.”In an email after the show’s broadcast, Lycett said he was shocked by the statement’s “absence of even mentioning L.G.B.T.Q.+ people,” and its use of the word “debate.” “Essentially Beckham (or more likely his team) are saying human rights are up for debate,” Lycett said.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      Can Daniel Kitson Redefine the Relationship Between Comic and Audience?

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      The elusive stand-up seems to believe in making his listeners work. But it’s not out of contempt. Instead, he’s trying to forge an intimate human bond.STILLINGTON, England — Under a tent by a mill on an August night, the stand-up comic Daniel Kitson found the most apt rustic setting to poke fun at comics leaning on modern technology. He described performers’ postshow tweets of gratitude to ticket-buyers as another way to say: “Give me your compliments.”He groused about podcasts, singling out the worst of the genre as “great guys chatting,” shows he termed “for wankers by wankers.” Offering the opposing viewpoint, he said they are easy to listen to before rebutting himself: “Should be hard.”Daniel Kitson — whose last two decades of stand-up performances and ambitious theater works put him in contention for greatest comedian working today — believes in making the audience work. Not just because his rapid-fire monologues can be dense and elusive. Just finding him can be a challenge, since he’s not on social media and doesn’t do interviews, talk shows or podcasts. Most of all: Despite being prolific, his new work is not on any streaming service and only a few recorded shows can be bought on his site. This has made him an unknown quantity to vast swaths of comedy fans, but also a figure of some mystique inspiring committed admirers who will go to great lengths to see him. Which is how I found myself in the British countryside over the summer.His stand-up focused on the pandemic and the fear it inspired. His jokes quickly veered from aggressive to ruminative, dirty to philosophical, but he punctuated them with ideas that stuck in the brain, like the one that suggested people who add a yell to their sneeze are, on some level, “letting a little terror out.” He found the early pandemic oddly unifying: Everyone in the world was stuck at home at the same time. Kitson stopped taking trips to the United States and Edinburgh (he has die-hard followings Off Broadway and at the Fringe Festival in Scotland), but in some ways the pandemic made him a more accessible artist.I was grateful that in the most fearful moments of 2020, he started a radio show from his home that I listened to every day, providing some quiet charm to interrupt the steady bass line of sirens outside my Brooklyn window. More significantly, he taped a new show, an audio play named “Shenanigan” that he sold on his site. But, consistent with his ethos, he kept distribution small, just 2,000 copies, available only in record, CD or cassette tape formats. (None are currently for sale.)An intricate, layered narrative told with literary precision and propulsive sound effects, “Shenanigan” feels less like his stand-up or solo shows than something entirely new. Its premise, reminiscent of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” turns the romantic comedy inside out. Darting back and forth in time to chronicle the dissolution of the relationship between a couple, Bob and Poppy, Kitson introduces each section he narrates by the number of weeks, days or hours before the breakup.This structure creates suspense but also draws attention to its own artifice, as does the science-fiction conceit at its center: A dystopian company called A Better Beginning erases memories of couples’ first meetings and implants a more romantic version. It was founded by a heartbroken man who believes art has ruined relationships by setting up unrealistic expectations for love.Kitson periodically interrupts the narrative to give us scenes of him making the show, a spoof of himself as pretentious and obsessive but also a running commentary on the themes he’s exploring, especially in conversations with a female friend. She wants to know if the show is really about his own aversion to long-term relationships. Kitson balks, not just offering the dodge that it’s all made up, but going further, adding that there is no such thing as a true story. “It’s like a wood fire,” he says. “The story-ness affects the truthiness.”He’s right, in a way, and in focusing on the origin story of a relationship, he found a resonant metaphor to illustrate and expand his point. For many people, telling this tale is as close as they will get to understanding how a comedian’s set, refined through repetition, can’t help but blur the line between truth and fiction. To take one example, after so much retelling, the memory of the story of how your parents met tends to crowd out the actual events in their minds.Kitson displays a skepticism about romantic love but a more subtle and fascinating kind about stories. Our cultural faith in stories has never been greater and more unquestioned, what a recent book by the literary theorist Peter Brooks described as “our mindless valorization of storytelling.” Kitson did not write a didactic show, but he seems to be suggesting that the power of stories is more limited than we think. A good story can evoke real emotions, but it can’t replace them.Seeming to spoof himself, Kitson sounds self-important notes, telling his friend that his goal as an artist is to show, not tell, leaving it up to the audience to put it together. One of the nice things about the audio play is that its narrative is so fractured that it benefits from multiple listens. I have occasionally felt this with his plays, that the ephemerality of theater doesn’t always suit them. Ultimately, Kitson is a comic who likes the sound of laughter. He isn’t trying to be esoteric for its own sake. His insistence on producing his work his own way is not a rejection of the crowd, but it does reflect an interest in reinventing his relationship with them.His goal appears to be to forge a more intimate, human bond, a point he made implicitly in the live show I saw in Yorkshire. At various points he singled out audience members, gently explaining a joke to one who didn’t get it; urging another who looked sleepy and struggling to stay awake, not to feel bad, to close their eyes and rest; and telling a person in the front row that if he wanted to put his foot onstage, he should go ahead.This appeared to me to be a demonstration that he was paying as much attention to us as we were to him, modeling a relationship between performer and patron as peers, each deserving attention and care. But maybe that’s just a story I am straining to tell to make sense of disparate comments. That’s the tricky thing about art. Once you put it in the world, it’s out of your hands. Maybe forgotten or reshaped by memory. This can happen in life, too, even the most major events.Kitson himself said that he hadn’t processed the events of the pandemic, before pausing to speculate that maybe we never process anything. “Maybe we just forget stuff and the rest becomes the narrative.” More

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      In ‘Litvinenko,’ a Former Russian Spy Investigates His Own Murder

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      A new dramatization of the 2006 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko shows the former spy, played by David Tennant, helping the police in his final hours.LONDON — In the middle of AMC+’s new dramatization of the poisoning of the intelligence agent Alexander V. Litvinenko, a police officer asks a pathologist about the state of the man’s organs when he died. The doctor thinks for a moment, as though considering how graphic to be, and then replies, “Sludge.”It’s a visceral moment in “Litvinenko,” a limited series written by the “Lupin” creator George Kay that depicts Litvinenko’s 2006 poisoning in London via a cup of tea laced with the radioactive element polonium 210, and its aftermath.While many viewers will remember the photo of Litvinenko on his deathbed, gaunt and newly bald, that appeared on front pages around the world, fewer will know the details of his final days, and how — convinced he was poisoned by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — he aided the investigation into the attack, even as his internal organs were failing.The story of a former K.G.B. agent assassinated in broad daylight in the dining room of a British hotel could have made for a sensationalized show about international intrigue. But “Litvinenko,” which comes to AMC+ and Sundance Now on Friday, instead focuses on the human cost behind the headlines.Most of the running time of the series’s four episodes is spent with the police investigating the murder and the Litvinenkos themselves — Alexander (played by David Tennant), but also his widow Marina (Margarita Levieva), who for years agitated for the British government to hold an inquiry into her husband’s death.The police officers investigating the poisoning are featured heavily in the show, including Clive Timmons (Mark Bonnar), center left, and Peter Clarke (Daniel Ryan), second from the left. ITVX/Sundance NowKay’s research for the program involved close collaboration with Marina, as well as the investigating officers, including Brent Hyatt, the London police officer who took 18 hours of statements from Litvinenko in the hospital.That was one way the murder investigation started before anyone had “actually died,” as one of the show’s police officers notes. Litvinenko used the hours it took for the poison to wreck his body “to tell the police what he knew, so he was not just a witness to his own murder, he was a detective in it,” Kay said in a video interview.The first episode covers this time immediately following the poisoning, when every minute was precious. The second shows the weeks following Litvinenko’s death, when the police scrambled to put the pieces together and contain the threat of radiation poisoning to the British public.The subsequent episodes cover the months, and eventually years, that Marina spent fighting for an inquest, and then a public inquiry, into her husband’s death.“We wanted to give a sense of the perseverance of Marina Litvinenko,” Kay said. “She’s the one person who didn’t retire or give up or look the other way, or try and get in the way of the justice. She kept going, and it took her a decade in the end.”“I want people to understand not only what happened to me, to my family, but why it’s happened now to many families,” said Marina Litvinenko, played in the show by Margarita Levieva.ITVX/Sundance NowIn many ways, Marina is the show’s lead character. The widow said she saw cooperating with the show’s creators as her duty.“I want people to understand not only what happened to me, to my family, but why it’s happened now to many families,” she said. Putin’s actions since 2006, including the war in Ukraine, have cost “millions” of people their loved ones, she added.A 2019 play about Litvinenko’s murder, “A Very Expensive Poison,” was written by Lucy Prebble with input from Marina, and there was also a 2021 opera. But this television show arrives after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and so in a changed political landscape.Tennant said that the brutal war had been “the moment that the world woke up to Putin, and what he was.” He added: “I think either people didn’t really understand that until now, or they understood it, but it was inconvenient to acknowledge.”In 2006, Britain saw Russia as a supposedly friendly power. At the time the British government condemned Russia’s refusal to extradite Andrei Lugovoi to face trial for the murder in Britain, but in 2013, Home Secretary Theresa May admitted that successive British governments had blocked a public inquiry into the poisoning out of concern for “international relations.”Andrei Lugovoi, whom the British government sought to prosecute for the poisoning, is depicted by Radoslaw Kaim.ITVX/Sundance NowMay eventually agreed to Maria’s long-fought-for public inquiry, which in 2016 found that the poisoning was “probably approved” by Putin.While “Litvinenko” is a show with big political concerns, the persistence of ordinary people is what ultimately motivates it. Tennant said the time he spent with Marina preparing for the role drove that home for him.“The experience of being with her changes it from a story about politics to a story about a family,” he said.Kay also wanted to emphasize Litvinenko’s home life in the show. He “worked in Russian intelligence, but also he loved football and swimming, he was a dad, he got the tube home,” Kay said. “He lives a normal life in all but some aspects of his previous work. And it’s the same with Brent Hyatt.”Hyatt’s home life during the investigation, particularly his struggle to conceive a child with his wife, is brought to the forefront in “Litvinenko.” The show depicts both Hyatt (Neil Maskell) and Litvinenko trying to provide for their families in extraordinary circumstances. In the first episode, before Litvinenko is poisoned, we see his family having dinner and discussing his son’s school homework.“It’s very important to look at the human side of any event,” Marina said. The episodes highlight the work of all the ordinary people who helped her in her pursuit for justice, which was not just motivated by the political import of her husband’s work, but also by her devotion to him as a wife.“I think for some people, it will be a love story,” she said. “When, if you have a real love, you never give up.” More

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      Jimmy Kimmel: Trump NFTs Are ‘Literally Cards Against Humanity’

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      “At least last time, you got a red hat. Now he’s selling you nothing,” Kimmel said of Trump’s new digital trading cards.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.‘Cards Against Humanity’On Thursday, former President Donald Trump made what he’d promoted the day before as a major announcement: the release of digital NFT trading cards featuring Trump as a superhero, an astronaut and several other fantastical figures, for $99 each.Jimmy Kimmel complained that they’re not even real trading cards, but digital ones, “which is another way of saying nothing.”“At least last time, you got a red hat. Now he’s selling you nothing! It’s literally Cards Against Humanity.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“You know your campaign isn’t going well when your re-election strategy is, ‘Maybe people will like me as a Pokemon.’ Trump was like, ‘These cards are like classified documents — you’ve got to catch them all.’” — JIMMY FALLON“The ex-president of the United States, the ex-most powerful man in the world, has launched a line of trading cards. It’s Grope-e-mon, with Pikacoup.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“This is the least-dignified attempt at post-presidential merchandising since the launch of Tickle-me-Truman.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“And by the way, we already have Donald Trump trading cards — they’re called subpoenas.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“In a way, this is all kind of gratifying to me, because a monster who tried to install himself as our fascist strongman is now reduced to hawking a line of trading cards. It’s like if Hitler escaped the bunker and released Mein Komic Book.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (QAnon Meets QVC Edition)“After teasing a ‘major announcement’ on his social media platform Truth Social, former President Trump announced today he is releasing a collection of digital trading cards. It’s what his doctors are calling ‘a new symptom.’” — SETH MEYERS“I know we say ‘This is crazy’ a lot, but this is crazy! He’s selling NFTs like a crypto bro — while he’s running for president.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“He’s a business genius! Jumping in on the NFT market, when it’s at its hottest. Next, he’s releasing an exclusive line of rotary phones.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Also, got to love the timing of a former president launching his NFT line the same week a crypto scammer gets arrested. [imitating Trump] ‘They got S.B.F.? Looks like there’s an opening available, then!’” — SETH MEYERS“The timing, too. It’s astonishing. Three days after that FTX guy got arrested for fraud, Trump said, ‘Now is the time to get into the imaginary baseball card market.’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“If you saw that at 2 a.m., would you be like, ‘Am I having an Ambien dream?” — JIMMY FALLON“Oh, look at this — it’s like QAnon meets QVC, it really is.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Even the most die-hard Trump supporters were like, ‘OK, now I’m worried.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Even the MyPillow guy was going, ‘I think Trump’s lost it.’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingAnderson Cooper and Andy Cohen joined Stephen Colbert for “Rescue Dog Rescue” on Thursday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This Out“Drama is something I’ve always wanted to do from the beginning, and just went a long way round to get to it,” said Eddie Izzard, who for most of her career has been best known for comedy.Josefina Santos for The New York TimesThe British comedian and actor Eddie Izzard will play every character in a new Off Broadway adaptation of “Great Expectations.” More

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      What We Learned From ‘Harry & Meghan,’ Part Two

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      The second collection of episodes of the couple’s Netflix docuseries landed on Thursday. It dives deep into mental health and royal drama.LONDON — The second and final installment of “Harry and Meghan,” the highly anticipated Netflix docuseries, was released on Thursday, capping a week in which the couple’s personal lives were once again catapulted into the spotlight.The first three episodes of the series, released last week, dove into the makings of the couple’s relationship, their ongoing battle with the news media, the details of Meghan’s challenging family connections and more. Three more episodes were released Thursday.Love them, hate them or simply can’t live without them, people tuned in. The first set of episodes earned a staggering 81.5 million viewing hours, the most of any documentary in a premiere week, Netflix said on Tuesday. More than 28 million households had seen a part of the first collection of episodes in the first four days, the streaming platform added.Episode four picks up at Harry and Meghan’s wedding in May 2018 and quickly tackles a number of matters, including Meghan’s connection to Queen Elizabeth II, the barrage of negative headlines she faced and her mental health challenges.If you don’t have time to watch, or if you enjoy spoilers, here are the main takeaways from the latest episodes.The wedding was a family affair, although it was an international spectacle.The fourth episode kicked off by reliving the couple’s star-studded wedding in May 2018. Although thousands of people were on the street hoping to catch a glimpse of the couple, and perhaps billions more were watching on television, the couple described it as a family affair, with numerous personal touches that seemed to make all the difference.Harry chose the song (Handel’s “Eternal Source of Light Divine”) that Meghan walked down the aisle to. “It was so beautiful,” she said. It was also revealed that Charles, Harry’s father, who was the Prince of Wales at the time and is now king, helped choose the orchestra for the ceremony.More on the British Royal FamilyBoston Visit: Prince William and Princess Catherine of Wales recently made a whirlwind visit to Boston. Swaths of the city were unimpressed.Aide Resigns: A Buckingham Palace staff member quit after a British-born Black guest said the aide pressed her on where she was from.‘The Crown’: Months ago, the new season of the Netflix drama was shaping up as another public-relations headache for Prince Charles. But then he became king.Training Nannies: Where did the royals find Prince George’s nanny? At Norland College, where students learn how to shield strollers from paparazzi and fend off potential kidnappers.Because Megan’s father, Thomas Markle, did not attend the ceremony, she asked Charles to walk her down the aisle. “Harry’s dad is very charming,” Meghan said. “I said to him like, ‘I’ve lost my dad in this.’ So him as my father-in-law was really important to me.”Meghan’s connection to the queen seemed to be strong, normal even.The episode dwells on Meghan’s first official royal engagement with the queen, about a month after the wedding. She and the queen took the royal train to Cheshire, England.“I treated her as my husband’s grandma,” Meghan said, remembering her private time with the queen. “When we got into the car in between engagements, she had a blanket,” Meghan said, and that the queen placed the blanket also over her knees. “I recognize and respect and see that you’re the queen, but in this moment I’m so grateful that there’s a grandmother figure, cause that feels like family,” Meghan said.The constant and negative tabloid headlines had a dramatic effect on Meghan.The fourth episode also underscored the mental health challenges and suicidal thoughts Meghan had, in part because of negative headlines shortly after they wed and during much of her pregnancy.“All of this will stop if I’m not here and that was the scariest thing about it — it was such clear thinking,” Meghan said.Doria Ragland, Meghan’s mother, recalled an emotional conversation in which Meghan expressed suicidal thoughts. “That’s not an easy one for a mom to hear,” she said, wiping away tears. “And I can’t protect her. H can’t protect her.”Harry said he was devastated by the toll the negative press coverage took on his wife and said he didn’t deal with it well.“I had been trained to worry more about what are people going to think,” Harry said. “And looking back at it now, I hate myself for it. What she needed from me was so much more than I was able to give.”The couple’s war with the media reaches a fever pitch.The fifth episode begins with the couple’s continued war with the news media and efforts to dodge paparazzi photographers while spending Christmas 2019 away from the royal family.The headlines about Meghan appeared to be incessant, pushing the couple to a breaking point. “I realized that I wasn’t just being thrown to the wolves,” Meghan said. “I was being fed to the wolves.”The couple described creating a plan that they hoped would bring them both safety and peace of mind. “The toll was visible, the emotional toll that it was having on both of us, but especially my wife,” Harry said. “We’re going to have to change this for our own sake.”They described plans to relocate to New Zealand or South Africa before they ultimately settled on Canada. They later moved to California.Harry said his grandmother, the queen, was aware that he and Meghan were having difficulties with their public roles and made plans to discuss it in early January 2020 when he returned briefly to Britain. However, that plan was thwarted, they said.“I remember looking at H and going, my gosh, this is when a family and family business are in direct conflict because they’re blocking you from seeing the queen, but really what they’re doing is blocking a grandson from seeing his grandmother,” Meghan said.Strained family ties take center stage.In a family meeting to discuss the couple’s decision to reduce their roles as working members of the royal family, Harry said he was presented with several options but quickly realized no agreement would be reached.“It was terrifying to have my brother scream and shout at me, and my father say things that simply weren’t true and my grandmother quietly sit there and sort of take it all in,” Harry said.Harry described that meeting as hard and said that it finished without a solid action plan.“The saddest part of it was this wedge created between myself and my brother so that he’s now on the institution side,” Harry said, acknowledging Prince William’s perspective.The couple announced in January 2020 that they were stepping back from their royal duties. The decision sent shock waves around the world and drew headlines that seemed to blame Meghan for the split.“How predictable that the woman is to be blamed for the decision of a couple. In fact it was my decision,” Harry said.The queen later said she was “supportive” of the couple’s decision.This story is being updated. Check back for more. More