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      Netflix’s ‘Transatlantic’ Tells of World War II Rescues

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      A Netflix series dramatizes the efforts of Varian Fry, an American who helped save some 2,000 people from the Nazis without his government’s support.When Anna Winger, the co-creator of the new Netflix series “Transatlantic,” relocated to the vibrant French port city of Marseille last year, she found a dilapidated villa awaiting her. The “relic,” as she called it, was ideal for her purpose: the recreation of the Villa Air-Bel where, early in World War II, a dapper American named Varian Fry oversaw an extraordinary rescue operation for artists and writers, most of them Jews, hounded by the Nazis and the Vichy government of occupied France.Arriving in Marseille in mid-August, 1940, determined to help those in danger after witnessing the abuse of Jews in Berlin in 1935, Fry had to battle not only the French authorities and Nazi ideology, but also his own risk-averse United States Consulate in Marseille.Improvising at a time when the United States had not yet entered the war, Fry, a rebel in a suit, navigated a narrow path until his forced departure in late August 1941. He was determined to secure safe passage and overseas visas for the thousands of “foreign undesirables” who soon came knocking on his door.Among the some 2,000 people he rescued were the artist Max Ernst, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt and the German novelist Heinrich Mann.In his book “Assignment: Rescue,” written after the war, Fry wrote of Nazism that “I could not remain idle as long as I had any chance at all of saving even a few of its intended victims.”For many years, Winger had been obsessed with the story of “this man alone doing something very brave,” she said in an interview. In 2018, she started working on the project, and in 2020, she optioned Julie Orringer’s novel “The Flight Portfolio,” which became the basis for the fictionalized events in the series.Winger, who created the shows “Unorthodox” and “Deutschland 83,” lives in Berlin, where “as a Jew you think of these stories all the time,” she said. Her parents, both anthropologists, were Harvard professors and “a lot of people in the generation above them were refugees from Europe.” For her, “the impact of the emigration made possible by Fry is immeasurable in its influence on midcentury American thought.”Filming on “Transatlantic” began in Marseille in early 2022; war broke out in Europe just a few days later. With millions of refugees eventually pouring out of Ukraine, the moral dilemmas of conflict that the series explores felt particularly pertinent. “For all of us, it was top of mind and seeped into our daily lives in Marseille,” Winger said. She would go home to a Berlin dealing with a vast influx of refugees.The show captures not only the life-or-death seriousness of Fry’s mission to save refugees of another war, but also something of the louche, living-on-the-edge drama of a city that has always been a crossroads, and in 1940, unlike the northern half of France, was not directly occupied by German troops.Filming on “Transatlantic” began in Marseille in early 2022, and war broke out in Europe not long after.Anika Molbar/NetflixThe Marseille that Fry and his motley team of driven young anti-Fascists encountered had something of the freewheeling intrigue captured in “Casablanca,” another story of people suspended by war in a foreign place, aching in limbo for love and visas. Inevitably, money and sex — the currency of clandestine escape — have their place in “Transatlantic.”“We try to be true to the history but also make fun by working with it in a heightened way,” Winger said. The degree of fictionalization in the series has already caused controversy; Sheila Isenberg, the author of a book on Fry, called the show a “travesty.”Much of this pushback has been focused on the decision to depict Fry having a gay relationship. In 2019, James D. Fry, his son, wrote a letter to The New York Times stating that “My father was indeed a closeted homosexual.” He was responding to a New York Times review by Cynthia Ozick of the Orringer novel that said of Fry, “there is no evidence of homosexuality,” contrary to the novel’s portrayal of him.“We consider the letter from his son, James Fry, to The New York Times to be the last word on the subject,” Winger said via email.In the show, Fry, played by Cory Michael Smith, works closely with Mary Jayne Gold (Gillian Jacobs), an American heiress who brings her money, energy and connections to the mission, as well as with Albert O. Hirschman (Lucas Englander), a German Jewish intellectual who would become a distinguished American economist.Their activities meet the stern disapproval of the American consul general in Marseille, Hugh S. Fullerton (renamed Graham Patterson in the show), who is played by Corey Stoll. Fullerton, hewing to the then-neutral State Department line, wants to keep the United States out of the war. His vice consul, Hiram Bingham IV (Luke Thompson), thinks otherwise, however, and he quietly helps Fry with travel documents, some of them fraudulent.The interactions between these characters, their relationships and ruses, their hopes and hypocrisies, form the narrative backbone to “Transatlantic.”Mary Jayne Gold (Gillian Jacobs) and Graham Patterson (Corey Stoll) have a dalliance on the show, even as he is resistant to the team’s rescue efforts.Anika Molbar/NetflixOne night last spring, Winger shot scenes featuring Jacobs and Stoll in the recreated Villa Air-Bel, on the outskirts of the city. The consul, a loyal diplomat incapable of an act of rebellion against State Department policy, has a dalliance with the heiress, “that has a transactional nature to it, a question of getting people out,” Stoll said.They embrace. They argue. He wants to spend the night with her. She asks him to leave. Over and over the actors played the scene until Winger was satisfied that the exchange between the pair achieved the right degree of sparring and sexual tension.Fry and Gold may be on the same side, but they bicker a lot. To play the central character, “I spent a lot of time reading about Fry, going to Columbia University, where all his papers are,” Smith said in an interview in Marseille. “He was unassuming and demure, which I appreciate, yet he burned with a contrarian courage that led him to row against the tide.”A literary journalist, enamored of European writers and artists, Fry was 32 when he arrived in Marseille. He had been sent to France from New York by the newly formed Emergency Rescue Committee (the forerunner of the International Rescue Committee), established by American and German intellectuals. With him he brought a list of people to rescue, including Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton and Alma Mahler, who would eventually escape across the Pyrenees carrying Symphony No. 10, the last work of her former husband, Gustav Mahler.Fry thought he could get the job done quickly. But as Alan Riding wrote in his book “And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris,” Fry found himself in a “no man’s land of Gestapo spies, corrupt French police and refugees galore.”Initially installed at the Hôtel Splendide, Fry quickly gathered a talented team of volunteers. Continuously hounded, detained for several days in late 1940, Fry faced off with Fullerton, the American consul, who repeatedly advised him to leave or face arrest, and in January 1941 refused to renew Fry’s passport unless he returned to the United States.To the U.S. authorities at the time, Fry was a troublemaker, his effort to protect Jews and anti-Nazis a renegade operation undermining a craven official policy.The events portrayed in the show are many-faceted, Smith said, but a core truth is inescapable: “There were civilian heroes before our government was ready to step in.”Initially installing himself at a hotel, Fry far right, quickly gathered a talented team of volunteers.Anika Molbar/NetflixJacobs, who plays Gold, a sometime pilot of impetuous courage, said she found the part fascinating for its multiple dimensions. Gold makes mistakes, and her relationship with Fry is sometimes tense. He “views her as too impulsive, while she sometimes thinks he is too cautious,” Jacobs said, and yet, Gold’s moral core is clear: “She knows what she does is the right thing to do.”Englander, the Austrian actor who plays Hirschman, another of Fry’s volunteers, said in an interview on set that filming the show made him reflect on his family’s own history.“We never spoke of our Jewish past,” he said. “Grandpa had to run away — that was all we said in my family.” When Englander came to lines in which Hirschman speaks about his past before fleeing Germany, he said: “I felt my grandfather so strongly. I needed minutes of crying and coffee and cigarettes to recover. Now, I feel a compulsion to give something to life and help today’s refugees.”Fry never ceased in his search to find ways out, until he was hounded out of the country after 389 days. He was told by the Vichy police, with the apparent backing of the American consul general, that he had “gone too far in protecting Jews and anti-Nazis,” Riding wrote in “And the Show Went On.”Back in the United States, Fry wrote a groundbreaking article for The New Republic in 1942 titled “The Massacre of the Jews.” It had little effect. The slaughter continued, with Western powers doing their best to look away.Anna Winger, a creator of the show, left, was obsessed with Fry and his story for many years before she started working on the project.Anika Molbar/NetflixWriting and teaching, Fry lived out the rest of his life in relative anonymity, and died at the age of 59. It was only in 1967 that France honored him with a Légion d’Honneur, the country’s highest order of merit.During production, Smith found himself thinking about Fry as an American hero defying his own government.“There’s a real fight in America about exceptionalism, about what it means to be an exceptional nation,” he said. “Is it loving your country unyieldingly? Or is it taking a scalpel to it and looking at it honestly. This show is asking people to look realistically at our history.” More

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      ‘Yellowjackets’ Shows Us the Teenage Girlhood We Were Hungry For

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      In a cabin in the wilderness, a group of starving teenage girls, a teenage boy and one adult man wake to an unfamiliar smell. Their noses twitching in the air, they leave their thin blankets and head out into the snowy wild in socks and insufficient clothes. Outside, their friend, whose body they tried to cremate last night, has turned into smoked meat. They surround her corpse, girl-shaped but foodlike, like a pig from the barbecue pit. One of the girls stands near the charred flesh, knife in hand. “She wants us to,” she says. A few moments later, the feast begins.Thus “Yellowjackets,” Showtime’s hit drama, answered, in the second episode of its second season, the question teased throughout its first: What and whom are these girls going to eat? Named for a New Jersey high school girls’ soccer team whose plane crashes in the Canadian Rockies en route to the 1996 national championships, “Yellowjackets” toggles between the team’s 19-month sojourn in the wilderness and the present day, when the surviving members struggle with the aftereffects of what happened to them. The show has become a sensation, garnering five million viewers per week, making it Showtime’s second-most-streamed show ever. In addition to the standard BuzzFeed meme roundups, the show has spawned exuberant fan fiction and forums that include suggested paper topics (“ ‘Yellowjackets’: Yellow Wallpaper for the 21st Century”) and frenzied theories about what, exactly, the Yellowjackets did in the woods.Plot mysteries abound: What happened to the hunter who died in the cabin where they shelter? Is there a malevolent spirit in the woods, and will it follow the girls to safety? But the show also grapples with questions of a more existential tenor, making it catnip for a demographic aging out of youth and into middle age, performing the excavations and re-evaluations that accompany midlife. Do people ever really change? Does trauma echo forever?As Showtime teased the second season (which began streaming in late March) and the internet forums buzzed with anticipation for the revelations promised therein, I headed to the frigid north to see for myself. The sky over British Columbia was ashen and spitting indifferent snow as I navigated the slush to the Vancouver soundstage where much of the show was filmed. On the way to the set, I listened to the official “Yellowjackets” playlist, groaning with pleasure as one after another 1990s jam issued forth. I was vibrating with excitement.I first came to the show as an exhausted mother with a free Showtime trial, repulsed and compelled by the unforgettable first scene of the pilot, written by the creators (and spouses) Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson and directed by Karyn Kusama. In it, a girl runs barefoot through the snow in a filmy nightie, blood in her tracks, until she falls into a pit and is impaled by sharpened sticks. Later, figures shrouded in animal pelts string her up naked and bleed her dry. It’s one of the most gruesome opening sequences I’ve ever seen on television, but “Yellowjackets” doesn’t sustain the wild pitch. One of the show’s winning qualities is the way it juxtaposes brutal violence with familiar scenes of soccer practice, futile groping in frilly bedrooms and the malaise of middle age, all against the soundtrack of the ’90s.Two hours and a rapid PCR test later, I sat in the dark of a tent, watching as two young women formed a kind of Pietà in a pool of warm yellow lamplight. One, Courtney Eaton, playing the character Lottie with eerie poise, lay on her side in a nest of blankets. The other, Sammi Hanratty, portraying the marvelously weird Misty, knelt behind, her frizzy blond hair aglow, bringing unspeakable news from beyond the cabin’s walls. Karyn Kusama was behind the camera, making minute, courteous corrections to the angles and expressions of the actors’ pliant faces over the course of two scenes. The spoilers fell thick as the manufactured Canadian snow blanketing the adjacent stage. I was watching the season finale unfold in real time.‘We didn’t want it to be about being women in a man’s world.’It was the last few days of shooting, and many of the primary executives were also on hand: the showrunners, Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson and Jonathan Lisco, and the producer Drew Comins. Comins was immediately identifiable as the show’s hype man; “Buzz, buzz, buzz!” was his cheerful greeting when we were introduced. They gathered together in the tent to watch the shoot. “Karyn loves to live in the painting,” someone murmured, seeing the same Pietà in the light of the lamps.Kusama joined us for a moment between shots. Lately, she has enjoyed vindication following the commercial flop and subsequent cult ascension of her 2009 film, “Jennifer’s Body” (another representation of women doing upsetting things). I asked her about something she said in a previous interview, about the ongoingness of TV and the way it allowed celebrated characters like Tony Soprano and Don Draper to not change — to occupy the uneasy Dantean position of being midway through the journey of life, but without Dante’s final ascent up to virtue and improvement. “Yellowjackets” claims its own form of ongoingness, giving female characters the same opportunities to flail in midlife, while anchoring them to a traumatic formative experience that made them heroes, of a sort, in their own lives. Kusama took on an oracular aspect in the dark as she spoke. “Any marginalized psyche is often positioned as an object, not a subject,” she said. The Yellowjackets “are characters who got through most of high school, learning that hard terrible lesson in female adolescence, that you’re not the subject of your own story.”The first episodes of the first season established this truth with a light touch, showing the girls leaving something nasty behind them: the guys yelling “Show us your tits,” the mean girls who prank call, alcoholic mothers, violent fathers. After the crash, the problem is simply the Yellowjackets, trying to survive. It’s the perfect canvas for Kusama, who was drawn to the idea of “living completely in your appetites and starvation.” Kusama believes questions of appetite “are very rich ideas for women: being hungry, being fed, feeding each other.” For her the show conveys “a very pure relationship to the metaphor,” and indeed these were the subjects of the day’s scenes, about which I now possessed sinister knowledge.When Kusama, who is also an executive producer, first met with Lyle and Nickerson to discuss the pilot, she likened it to a war story. She told me that the real wilderness of the show is “female interiority, female experience, female transformation and the presence of a kind of unchangeable chaos in women,” a delicious phrase. “It is progress to see ourselves change,” she said, “but the reality of many people’s lives is that the patterns we learn early are the patterns we enact and re-enact for years to come.” Part of the show’s inquiry, she said in the darkness, is “to what degree is positive change possible,” given that there is “very real anguish in their past.”As the sounds of activity outside the tent picked up and it was clear our time would soon come to an end, I asked Kusama about the challenge of exploitation that invariably lives in a show about cannibal teenage girls. “Yellowjackets” is in some ways a quintessential Dead Girl show, an idea explored by the writer Alice Bolin in her book on the subject to account for shows like “True Detective” and “Twin Peaks.” These mysteries are structured around beautiful, dead white girls and “the investigator’s haunted, semi-sexual obsession” with them. In “Yellowjackets,” it is the audience who steps into the inspector’s role, only to find our voyeurism thwarted, at least most of the time, by a conscientious editorial sensibility. It’s a fundamental conundrum of storytelling, Kusama said, “the urge to entertain and engage versus the urge to confront and provoke.” She approached her episodes with a firm rule: “None of this is a joke,” she told herself and her colleagues. It was imperative for her to treat these characters “with some degree of gravity, because otherwise I really wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.”I walked through the extant sets — a remarkable recreation of the Canadian forest replete with the scent of real (salvaged) pine trees dangling from the rafters — past rooms of stacked up crates with labels like “antlers” and “fur.” I followed Lyle, Nickerson and Lisco to the warren of modular offices tucked above the soundstages. I admired Lyle’s outfit as we walked, an array of ’90s layers befitting the “Yellowjackets” universe: a leopard cardigan, a red animal-print skirt, black tights, boots. It was such a good outfit that I forgot to look at the men.We took off our masks and sat in a circle. Trucks bearing the material of filmmaking rumbled around the buildings on the roads below the window. I raised the topic of covertly dignified treatment of teenage girls. Lyle and Nickerson, who previously wrote for “Narcos,” Netflix’s drama about the life and death of Pablo Escobar, knew that they wanted to make a show about women. “But we didn’t want it to be about being women in a man’s world,” Lyle said. “So we were like, ‘Well, I guess we can drop them into the wilderness in a plane crash and see what happens.’” For Nickerson, the frame was less important than the development of the characters, to give them “the dignity of a point of view” and let them proceed from there.When I suggested that the first season was a bit of a bait and switch, because audiences drawn in by the cannibalistic first episode will find all kinds of other complex human dramas playing out, Lyle agreed. “That slightly salacious or plot-driven outset to the story with the plane crash and the cannibalism,” she said, is “a little bit of a Trojan horse to just make you care about these women.” She went on, “It’s interesting that you almost need something like that to tell a story about women that is hopefully nuanced and complicated.”Lisco, who previously worked on hits like “N.Y.P.D. Blue” and “Halt and Catch Fire” and came on as a showrunner after Lyle and Nickerson sold “Yellowjackets,” spoke to the show’s juxtapositions as its strengths, its blend of the gruesome “reality of what they’re going through with real comedy, because the bizarre incongruities of life are with us always.” He thought people longed, perhaps because of the pandemic, “to feel something and feel the totality and richness of their human experiences.”“Yellowjackets” does have a little something for everyone. There’s a fundamental humor in the show’s timing: one moment of grotesque violence in the past, one moment of mundanity in the present, contrasts à la “The Sopranos” or “Breaking Bad,” but with teenage girls doing the things, broadening the innate disconnect. Gliding brashly and mostly successfully among horror, buddy detective, melodrama and light camp, the show also achieves something that I can only describe as the sometime triumph of Prime Time over Prestige, the marriage of surreality and strong character development within the confines of fast-paced entertainment doled out a week a time. It harks back to the golden age of weird prime-time shows like “Twin Peaks” or “Lost,” which delighted, shocked, titillated and annoyed, but never in quite the way audiences expected.Like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” another fan favorite that trucked in teenage-girl archetypes, “Yellowjackets” is occasionally quippy and self-referential. “Wow. I’ve never been in a French farce before,” says one doomed character when he hides from a husband in a bedroom closet. As adult Misty (Christina Ricci) prepares to kill a nosy reporter (long story), she ponders who might play her in a movie adaptation. “Who’s the one in that thing about those rich ladies that kill that guy?” she asks guilelessly, a nod to “Big Little Lies,” one reference to which Comins compared the show during pitch meetings. “Big Little Lies” disguised a searing portrait of abuse as a piece of gossamer lifestyle porn. “Yellowjackets” performs a similar trick: It sneaks a thoughtful excavation of teenage girlhood and middle-aged floundering into its genre pleasures.Toward the end of the day, I visited costumes, where Amy Parris, who like me is nearing 40, kept a stack of ancient magazines as reference material: Seventeen and Sassy and YM, which could have been mine. One magazine contains a photo of a teenage Christina Ricci and Elijah Wood — who joins the show this season as Walter, one of Misty’s fellow citizen detectives from the true-crime forums — together at the height of their early fame. It’s a potent reminder of the psychic resonance the show holds for someone who grew up with these referents. I read some headlines aloud: “A ballerina and her eating disorder.” “So you think you want a nose job? Read this first.” We briefly observed how nasty it was to be alive and teenage in the 1990s. And yet these nostalgic artifacts opened a yawning chasm of feeling. Perhaps the real resonance of the show is the age of its present-day characters — early 40s, just tipped into the zone of midlife where women have historically become invisible, a tendency that popular culture dances with and occasionally fights against.Retrospection is in the air. Younger millennials, apparently, are rewatching “Girls” in record numbers to parse the just-vanished particulars of their early 20s. Before “Yellowjackets,” I binged “Fleishman Is in Trouble” and was totally caught up in the backward excavation of its hapless middle-aged characters. I exchanged texts with my peers about the promised reappearance of Aidan on “And Just Like That,” an unheimlich but irresistible return to “Sex and the City,” a show that gave my generation a formative if deeply inaccurate picture of what our adulthood might hold. Cultural offerings like “Impeachment” or “I, Tonya” take up the specifics of the 1990s’ sensational moments and examine them in a new light. What a time, then, for both of the “Yellowjackets” story lines: its murderers’ row of former icons — Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci, Melanie Lynskey, now Elijah Wood — playing middle-aged roles, as well as the opportunity to see those characters as their past selves, a vicarious simultaneity.The show takes the common awfulnesses of teenage girlhood in that era (which of course persist today, with their own temporal inflection) — the unsettling sexual experiences or outright assaults; the casual racism; homophobia and misogyny; Kate Moss languishing in her underwear — and discreetly moves them out of the way. A primary love story in the woods is a queer one; the romance between Van (Liv Hewson) and Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) is a loving and fully realized relationship from the jump. The only adult man present, the team’s coach, Ben Scott (Steven Krueger), is gay, and his period-appropriate terror of being outed is understood and neutralized by the empathetic perspicacity of Natalie (Sophie Thatcher), who navigates her own halting romance with Travis (Kevin Alves), the only teenage boy in the cabin. Unlike the characters of “Euphoria,” whose goal seems to be to show as much pretend-under-age boob as possible, those in “Yellowjackets” have access to a form of fundamental self-respect and agency that many middle-aged women took years to attain. Maybe that’s part of the fantasy, too.There’s something fundamentally melancholy, though, about all this looking back. Toward the end of the first season, in a wilderness interlude, Van is attacked by wolves, her face torn open. Back at the cabin, the girls work together to hold her down while one draws a curved needle through her cheek to stitch the wound. In the next moment, we see 40-something Taissa (Tawny Cypress), now at Shauna’s modest New Jersey ranch house, where Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) makes up her teenage daughter’s bed, beneath a poster that reads “Keep Calm You Can Still Marry Harry.” The two old friends lie in bed, and Shauna muses about what would have happened had they not crashed, had she gone to Brown the way she planned, where she would “write amazing papers on Dorothy Parker and Virginia Woolf” and fall in love with a “floppy-haired, sad-eyed poet boy.” Taissa, meanwhile, describes a litany of successes that actually came to pass: Howard University, “a bunch of beautiful women,” “first string on the soccer team,” Columbia Law. But achieving a dream can also become ash in the mouth. “Not a single one of those things felt real,” Taissa says. It was their time in the woods, when everything was terrible and vivid and somehow fundamental — and cheeks were stitched with twine — when feeling and reality were truly one.Or at least that’s what the show wants us to think at first. That’s certainly how the characters feel in the early episodes, quietly assenting to the fate suggested in their bad marriages, puzzling children and unfulfilling jobs. But then the gang gets back together, and their efforts to keep their shared trauma among them amount to a kind of quest. Their days become unpredictable and enlivened again. At some point, viewers sense that the women approach their present-day escapades with the same ferocity they brought to their exploits in the wilderness.From some angles, this vicarious pleasure might confirm our worst suspicions that for women, middle age signals the decline after the peak. But the notion of a miserable midlife turns out to be another bait and switch. “Yellowjackets,” then, becomes a deliciously macabre play on the midlife crisis. Certainly, healing and redemption appear to fall outside the boundaries of a “Yellowjackets” universe. So, like other women before them, these restless heroines begin to make the most of the diversions life finds for them, grim as their circumstances might be: sex, camaraderie, adventure and wild fun.Source images for opening artwork: Showtime, the New York Public Library, Russell Lee via the New York Public Library.Lydia Kiesling is the author of “The Golden State,” which was a 2018 National Book Foundation “Five Under 35” honoree. Her novel “Mobility” is set to be published in August. Sarah Palmer is an artist, photographer, and educator based in Brooklyn. Her solo exhibition, “The Delirious Sun,” at Mrs. gallery in Maspeth, is on display until May 6. More

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      Four Stand-Up Specials That Punch Above Their Weight

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      Jaye McBride, Mike Vecchione and Kyle Kinane focus on punch lines and delivery. Mae Martin creates a vibe that works in a different key.Jaye McBride, ‘Daddy’s Girl’YouTubeSetups and punch lines get all the attention, but the stuff in between can be just as important, especially in short jokes where every word counts. Take this one by Jaye McBride: “I love old guys. The older the better.” Pause. “I don’t do online dating. I do carbon dating.” This could work without the second sentence — “The older the better” — but not as well. The reasons have as much to do with rhythm as meaning. It’s the kind of small touch that lets you know McBride, a bespectacled Comedy Cellar regular, has an ear for jokes.Her debut special, an offhanded if very funny production shot at Union Hall in Brooklyn, has a quick and jaunty style, a rough production for a stand-up act without frills. She is the first to tell you that her brand of stand-up leans more on punch lines than stories, but this doesn’t mean the hour doesn’t vary, showing off different genres of jokes. There’s the windy kind that abruptly shifts because of a twist that upends everything that came before. There’s the observational material: A transgender comic, McBride has one bit about etiquette that, no matter how sure you are, you can never ask someone if they’re trans. There are self-deprecating asides, some spiky transgressive stuff and satirical jokes designed to make a point. After telling us she transitioned 15 years ago, McBride quiets the crowd: “Don’t clap. I only did it to compete in the Olympics.”Mike Vecchione, ‘The Attractives’YouTubeOnstage, Mike Vecchione speaks in a hypnotically steady cadence, adopting an almost uncanny calm. Sometimes, this deadpan affect, slightly slower than normal speech, is used to play dumb. (He has a great bit about being praised for his emotional intelligence, which he claims is invented by smart people to make the dumb feel better.) At other times, the result is ludicrously arrogant, as when he confides that the pandemic was difficult for good-looking people like himself because of the masks. (“As attractives, we’re used to being treated a certain way.”)His jokes can be deceptively intricate, and while many comics lean on callbacks as a cheap trick, he finds clever ways to incorporate them. As with other stand-ups, Dave Attell’s influential delivery haunts his set. You hear its notes especially in the wry way Vecchione introduces jokes. (“Fine, guys, what’s my immigration policy? Is that what you want to know?”) But at his best, he finds a space between sarcasm and sincerity. Take his explanation that one of his passions is going to other cities and insulting their pizza. What New Yorker can’t relate? Or the spin on a familiar line flattering the audience: “You’re a great crowd because you’re getting my jokes.”Kyle Kinane, ‘Shocks and Struts’YouTubeWhen you first see Kyle Kinane, the gravel-voiced comic road warrior, he’s all by himself outside his van under a vast sky. This is not a flashy stand-up. He doesn’t play with form, have a message or belong to a specific school of comedy. His jokes don’t rely much on character work and they don’t tend to wade into big issues. But this solitary image fits him. Kinane finds humor in feeling out of place, reliably turning crusty irritation into eccentric flights of fancy. On his latest special, he grouses about nonchalant surgeons, circumcision and attractive people in playful language filled with turns of phrase that will make you smile or even cringe (he calls foreskin “the devil’s calamari”). But what encapsulates him at his best is a lament on jam bands. It’s a niche bit that leans on giddy contempt and detailed performance culminating in an act-out emphasizing the unlikely pathos of the guy in the band who desperately wants to end the song but can’t pull it off. It’s a hilarious tragedy.Mae Martin, ‘SAP’NetflixIn their new Netflix special, the nonbinary comic Mae Martin (star of the series “Feel Good”) patiently, and with considered cheerfulness, explains the difference between gender and sexuality while rebutting comics like Dave Chappelle and placing gender fluidity in historical context. But also, Martin says that if people are confused about the contemporary conversation about gender, that’s OK, too. “I do not understand Wi-Fi but I know that it’s real.” Martin says. “I don’t let it keep me up at night.”Martin, 35, discusses gender grudgingly, and their bit imagining Chappelle and Ricky Gervais, who also have Netflix specials, seeing “SAP” and changing their mind about their trans material has received headlines. But there’s also something awkward about this more straightforwardly sincere section of the special, an abrupt shift from what precedes and follows it. A sweetly charismatic performer, their intimate comic voice is skewed and sunny, mystical but somehow grounded. Martin hails from Canada, where they shot this special, on a set dressed like a forest, and the sideways anecdotal humor (at the end of one story, Martin points out there are no punch lines, it’s just a vignette) belongs to a rich legacy of oddball Canadian comedy. (A moose plays a significant role in a joke.)Pay close attention and you can see a sturdy introduction to an entire life here, from a cringe comedy story about conception to a horrified portrait of puberty to a romance-besotted 20s to the current jaded moment. Sighing over having to talk about potential baby names in yet another relationship, Martin says: “Let me wade through the graveyard of dead hypothetical kids.”The first half of the special is strong, filled with surprising bursts of dark poetry and strange characters, like a postman in Europe who buries the mail of an entire town. Martin loves this man, whose explanation is as offhanded and blunt as the comedian is. There are ideas that emerge throughout the special about identities, the ways we intensely curate them as children and stop as adults. A better show would find more connective tissue and a funnier one would tighten up some stories, cut one or two and add a few punch lines. But doing that might also make Martin seem more like everyone else. It’s already an amusing, effortless vibe here, one whose pleasures derive in part from being comfortable to be what it is. More

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      Michael R. Jackson on the Soap Opera Origins of ‘White Girl in Danger’

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      The musical’s creator and creative team discuss their influences, including “Days of Our Lives,” “Showgirls” and D’Angelo.Hearing Michael R. Jackson, the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning playwright of “A Strange Loop,” speak about soap operas is like getting lost in a Wikipedia wormhole. With nary a pause, he rolls through the details of characters’ yearslong arcs, including every stolen identity, forbidden romance and vicious backstabbing — literal and figurative.He’s amassed decades of knowledge: He became hooked at 5 years old, when he started camping out in front of a “gigantic” wooden television set with his great-aunt. “I would watch ‘The Young and the Restless’ at 12:30, ‘Days of Our Lives’ at 1, ‘Another World’ at 2, ‘Santa Barbara’ at 3. And I would do that every day — Monday through Friday,” Jackson, 42, said in a recent interview. “The more I sat and watched with her, the more engrossed I got in these characters’ lives and the story lines. I sort of grew up obsessed with them.”So it’s not surprising that these shows, which he began recording on VHS when he was older, would eventually become a source of inspiration for Jackson: His new musical, “White Girl in Danger,” is rooted in soap opera themes and tropes. It’s now in previews in a joint production of Second Stage and Vineyard Theater, and is scheduled to open April 10 at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater.Latoya Edwards, center, as Keesha, a character who is trying to transcend racial stereotypes and get a more prominent story line.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe show takes place in Allwhite, a world defined by soap tropes and ruled by three white teen-girl stereotypes: Megan, Meagan and Maegan (pronounced MEG-an, Mee-gan and MAY-gan, FYI). Much of the show’s action takes place in and around Allwhite’s high school, where “the Megans” are preparing for a battle of the bands competition. Then there’s a Black girl named Keesha, who is trying to get her own story line and level up from being a forgettable Blackground character, forever stuck in slave narratives and police brutality stories. Meanwhile, the town’s residents are reeling from a mysterious spate of murders.In separate interviews, Jackson, along with the director, Lileana Blain-Cruz; the choreographer, Raja Feather Kelly; the set designer, Adam Rigg; and the costume designer, Montana Levi Blanco, spoke about the show’s many influences (including romance novels, Lifetime movies and Black girl groups) and how those influences were reimagined for the stage.Gothic melodramaJackson described “Days of Our Lives” as the soap opera that most shaped his understanding of and love for melodrama — specifically a 1993 episode in which the rich socialite Vivian Alamain (Louise Sorel) drugs her nemesis, Carly Manning (Crystal Chappell), and buries her alive. Jackson gushed about the scene, which begins with Vivian plucking the petals from a bouquet of roses, maniacally chanting “She loves me, she loves me not” atop Carly’s grave; he called Sorel’s “incredible” performance downright Shakespearean. “I was 12 years old and it was, to this day, one of the most seminal soap moments; it’s burned into me because I had never seen something so Gothic and terrifying happen,” Jackson said. “I was like ‘This is my form.’”There are many other iconic soap moments that are alluded to in “White Girl in Danger”: Adam Rigg designed a curtain inspired by a pink beaded rhinestone gown that Joan Collins, as Alexis Carrington Colby, wears in “Dynasty,” and looked back at a famous fight scene from the show between Alexis and Diahann Carroll’s Dominique Deveraux that leaves both characters — and the room they’re in — in tatters. Rigg used some of the background details of that scene — a vase, the peach and coral color palette of the room and furnishings — in the show’s set design.When it comes to characters and their roller-coaster arcs, Jackson’s favorites are Viki Lord (Erika Slezak), the “One Life to Live” matriarch with dissociative identity disorder whose alter egos emerge to dictate her romantic life, blackmail people, murder people and trap her enemies in secret rooms, and Kristen Blake (Eileen Davidson), the good-girl-turned-bad girl who also kidnaps and hides her enemies in secret rooms.Jackson’s love of these soaps runs deeper than the cloak-and-dagger plots and mustache-twirling villains. He even layered in musical references: The show’s opening number includes musical allusions to Peabo Bryson’s “One Life to Live” and the opening of “Another World,” sung by Gary Morris and Crystal Gayle.Three sides of Mark-Paul GosselaarMark-Paul Gosselaar, right, as the mischievous Zack Morris, with Mario Lopez as Slater, left, and Dustin Diamond as Screech, in “Saved by the Bell.”NBCThere are footprints of the late ’80s and early ’90s high school sitcom “Saved by the Bell” all over the musical, from Rigg’s kitschy Memphis-style design of the Allwhite school to Keesha’s colorblock windbreaker.And then there’s that show’s beloved Zack Morris, played by Mark-Paul Gosselaar. In “White Girl in Danger,” Jackson pulled from boyfriend tropes — not only Zack but also some of the other roles Gosselaar has played in his career — to mold a boyfriend character (known as Matthew Scott, Scott Matthew and Zack Paul Gosselaar, and played by one actor) opposite “the Megans.” Jackson cited as inspirations Gosselaar’s roles as a frat boy who sexually assaults a college freshman played by Candace Cameron in the TV movie “She Cried No” and as a loving, supportive brother in “For the Love of Nancy.”“This concept of three different boyfriends in one was born out of that, and Mark-Paul Gosselaar specifically, because he played all these parts really well,” Jackson said.Teen queen dreamsFrom left, Tara Reid, Rachael Leigh Cook and Rosario Dawson as small town musicians vying for a big break in the 2001 film “Josie and the Pussycats.”Universal Pictures, via Associated PressThe female clique atop the teen social hierarchy is a well-loved trope. For Kelly, the groups of alpha it-girls in movies like “Clueless,” “Jawbreaker” and “Heathers” greatly influenced how he choreographed “the Megans.”“The opening number, for me, is kind of like ‘Josie and the Pussycats,’” he said. “Everything they do is super cute and super meticulous.” There’s duality to their gestures, Kelly added, which can “flip from being really cute to being insidious.”Blain-Cruz mentioned “My So-Called Life,” and shows “about young women trying to navigate that in-between space of childhood and adulthood, but also claiming their own space.”“And those spaces generally tended to be occupied by white women or white girls,” Blain-Cruz said, noting that one of her favorite scenes to develop was a band rehearsal in which each of the girls’ performance styles recalls that of ’90s pop starlets.‘Hollywood, sex and murder’Gina Gershon, left, and Elizabeth Berkley in the 1995 film “Showgirls.”Murray Close/United ArtistsAffairs, dalliances and general sexcapades are hallmarks of soap operas, so “White Girl in Danger” follows suit with kooky seduction scenes, surprising bedfellows and sprays of bodily fluid. For the choreography of a scene featuring a sudden sexual reveal, Kelly enthusiastically references one of his favorite movies, the erotic 1995 drama “Showgirls.” He described it as “the wild and crazy cat-fight-love-festival that was between Elizabeth Berkley and Gina Gershon.”For Jackson, it wasn’t just the sexy daytime and prime time dramas that left an impression, it was also the work of the romance writer Jackie Collins.“I was like 10 years old and my older cousin gave me a copy of ‘Chances,’” Jackson said. “I devoured it, because it was so dirty. It was like my form of pornography, because I lived in a pretty strict religious home,” he continued. “That took me into this world of Hollywood, Vegas, gangsters, sex and murder.”Black music in the BlackgroundThere’s no “White Girl in Danger” without the Black characters who try to escape the racist, stereotypical Black stories in the Blackground. Three of the show’s Blackground women — Florence, Caroline and Abilene — serve as a kind of Greek chorus. For their fashion and choreography, Blanco and Kelly channeled the Pointer Sisters, the Mary Jane Girls, the Dreams, the Ronettes, even the trio of singer-narrators in “Little Shop of Horrors.” Kelly said the Blackground women represent “the trope of the three women 30 feet from stardom on the outskirts of every story.”For Tarik, a Blackground character whose roles are exclusively getting killed and going to jail, Black music was also prominent influence. “Tarik is every Black male stereotype from ‘Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ to its counterpart; he’s also D’Angelo. He’s also Ginuwine. He’s also Usher,” Kelly said, specifically calling out D’Angelo’s bare-chested video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel).” Though Tarik has his own deliberately underdressed jacket-open moment, Blanco’s costume design for him includes a “Fresh Prince”-style cap and Hammer pants. More

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      Late Night Is Tickled by Trump’s Indictment

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      “He was right — we’re finally saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again!” Stephen Colbert said of Donald Trump on Thursday.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.Merry Christmas!Former President Donald Trump was indicted by a New York grand jury on Thursday in connection with his role in paying hush money to a porn star, according to people familiar with the situation.“He was right — we’re finally saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again!” Stephen Colbert said. The host celebrated by eating an ice cream sundae out of a helmet on what was also the opening day of the 2023 Major League Baseball season.“I didn’t know it would feel this good!” he said.“This is good news for everybody, even him. He now gets to join his J6 Prison Choir!” — STEPHEN COLBERT“And, you know what, he should see whether that grand jury will cut him a check for $130,000, because he is so screwed.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“For the first time in the history of this country, an American president has been indicted for his role in paying hush money to a porn star, although, in fairness, that’s a pretty narrow window. Like when Grover Cleveland was president, porn stars were very hard to come by. Still, it’s historic, and it’s funny — it’s very, very funny.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“But hey, let this be a lesson to all you kids out there, OK? If you commit fraud to cover up an affair with a porn star, the law will catch up to you after, like, seven years and a full term as president.” — JOHN LEGUIZAMO, guest host of “The Daily Show”“Maybe instead of running for president, he’ll do another show, like ‘The Celebrity Apprehentice.’ Or maybe, maybe a sitcom like ‘Arrested Developer.’ We don’t know. All we know is that right now for the first time in seven years, Melania is smiling at Mar-a-Lago.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“He’s going to be arrested, he will be fingerprinted, he will be read his Miranda rights. Wait till he finds out, all this time, he had the right to remain silent. He’s going to kick himself. That’s going to be a tough pill to swallow.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Satisfaction Guaranteed Edition)“The report is that they are going to try to negotiate his surrender. Either that, or they’ll leave a trail of Big Macs leading to the prison.” — JOHN LEGUIZAMO“When she heard, Stormy Daniels was, like, ‘Oh, so this is what it feels like to be satisfied?’” — JIMMY FALLON“Who’s going to help Don Jr. pick out his Lunchable tomorrow?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“And you know, I take a firm stance against mass incarceration, OK? But for this, I’m willing to make an exception. I just hope they take it easy on him and put him at least in a cell with his lawyer.” — JOHN LEGUIZAMOThe Bits Worth WatchingJimmy Fallon enlisted puppies to predict the results of this year’s Final Four on Thursday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutTeyana Taylor stars with Aaron Kingsley Adetola in “A Thousand and One,” which won a grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival.Focus FeaturesAfter stepping away from recording music to focus on acting, Teyana Taylor landed the lead role in the drama “A Thousand and One.” More

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      ‘Star Trek: Picard’ Season 3, Episode 7 Recap: Moral Ambiguity

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      It turns out Starfleet is not the force for good that “The Next Generation” had us believe.Season 3, Episode 7: ‘Surrender’For much of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” Starfleet was presented as the most virtuous force in the universe — a body with the aim to do good. No conquest. No fighting. Just good old fashioned exploration. Any time a photon torpedo was fired, it was because the Enterprise was forced to fire by hostile forces. If there were corrupt admirals here and there, they were just bad apples. If the Federation tried to move Native Americans away from their home without their permission to satisfy a silly treaty, it was with noble intentions: to avoid war.After “Next Generation,” Gene Roddenberry’s utopian vision of mankind’s future began to give way to darker versions. “Star Trek: Insurrection” gave us a Starfleet-sponsored plan to steal a planet away from an Indigenous species. In “Deep Space Nine,” we saw Starfleet personnel repeatedly operating in a moral gray area, especially when it came to the Dominion War. In one of the best episodes of “Deep Space Nine,” Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks), the show’s hero, helped orchestrate the murder of a Romulan Senator in order to lure the Romulans into the war. Later in the series, we learned that Starfleet tried to orchestrate a genocide of the changelings through a virus — a story line that returned with gusto this week in “Picard.”“When you’re constantly subjected to these self righteous, self-proclaimed heroes, spewing their morality as if vomit were somehow virtuous, then sometimes, dear, a little bend, a little arch, a little antagonizing flair is required,” Lore snarls in front of Geordi in this week’s episode. It seems the “Picard” writers really wanted to take our favorite characters down a peg this season. (Note Shaw’s repeated mention of how often the Enterprise crew got themselves into trouble.)Geordi responds, “Lore has a perverted sense of what it means to be human.”Does he? Or does he have a perfect grasp of what it means to be human based on what we learn in this episode from Vadic?Vadic, after being “captured” on the Titan, tells Beverly and Jean-Luc that the Federation reneged on its promise to give the changelings the cure for the virus at the end of the Dominion War, and in fact, someone had to steal it. I’m a bit unclear as to how this is possible: This would seem to be in direct contrast with what we saw onscreen when Odo cures the Founders himself as a condition of the Founders’ surrender to end the war. Unless the Founders themselves chose to withhold the cure from certain changelings.But nevertheless, Vadic also reveals that she and nine other changelings were experimented on by Starfleet as prisoners of war, as part of Project Proteus. It’s a startling revelation: Starfleet tried to convert changelings into, as Vadic calls them, “perfect, undetectable spies, able to drop into any species and spread chaos,” and instead created the biggest threat to the Federation since … well, since the last one.It’s a far cry from the noble Starfleet that Jean-Luc loved and eschewed a family for. Even the enlightened Beverly isn’t as righteous as she used to be. She introduces the idea of a biological weapon to root out the changelings, which she acknowledges would be tantamount to genocide. The New Jean-Luc indulges the proposal and, later, floats the idea of executing Vadic, once he realizes that they won’t get anything of use from her once she is captured.“Are you and I so fundamentally changed that we’re willing to compromise everything?” Jean-Luc asks Beverly.“Yes,” Beverly says. “I think I’m losing my compass.”In “Next Generation,” this exchange would have led to a moralizing speech from Jean-Luc about how they cannot play judge, jury and executioner. And everyone would have gone home happy, and there would have been virtuous solution. But Jean-Luc and his friends are older now. Harder. They’ve seen some stuff. And deep down, they know Lore was right about what he said.Jean-Luc and Beverly move to execute Vadic and, of course, it doesn’t work. The force field goes down. Vadic escapes and takes over the Titan. Worst of both worlds!Odds and endsWhile finding out Vadic’s motivations in becoming a baddie was certainly a worthwhile addition to the season’s story line, Jean-Luc’s plan, like many of his actions this season, made no sense. His grand idea was to lure the changelings from the Shrike, a superior ship, onto the Titan? When he, of all people, should know is Lore is also onboard and really wants to get revenge on him? Why would Shaw leave a powerful villain alone in a room with just force fields and two older humans not known for their hand-to-hand combat? That’s what security teams are for!Fun cameo from Tim Russ as Tuvok. One takeaway from the conversation, despite its not really being with Tuvok, is that Seven still considers Tuvok a friend — another indication of how fondly she thought of her time on Voyager.It turns out that the generational inheritance Jean-Luc passed onto Jack is actually the abilities of Professor X, now that Jack can read minds and control other people just by thinking really hard.The Shrike needs an upgrade in its scanners. The ship can read that the Titan’s warp core is offline and that the ship is running on emergency power only, but it cannot tell if there is any life on board.Geordi’s speech to Data about mourning him was a nice moment for LeVar Burton. He got to say the goodbye to his favorite android that he didn’t get to say in Data’s previous two deaths. More

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      Jimmy Kimmel Recaps Day Eight of ‘To Catch a President’

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      Kimmel complained that the grand jury is “leaving us hanging like Trump tried to do with Mike Pence.”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.Two More Weeks of WaitingOn Wednesday, Jimmy Kimmel joked it was “Day Eight of ‘To Catch a President.’”“The grand jury in Manhattan is still out, and they are going to stay out for two weeks,” Kimmel said, adding that they are “leaving us hanging like Trump tried to do with Mike Pence. But that’s a different indictment, I think.”“Some experts believe that it is possible the grand jury may already have voted to indict Donald Trump but that the Manhattan D.A. is slow-walking it to give him time to make preparations for his arrest, whereas others are saying it’s possible — and this is pretty crazy — that Donald Trump died two years ago and we’re all being haunted by his ghost.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Yep, a potential indictment is at least a month away. Melania was like, ‘Welp, cancel the party.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Even Ted Cruz was like, ‘You’re going on vacation now?’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Eyewitness Edition)“The reason we know this is good for the country is because neither Pence nor the former president want it to happen.” — STEPHEN COLBERT, on Mike Pence being forced to testify before a grand jury in the Jan. 6 investigation“The ex-president argued that his conversations with Pence fell under executive privilege, while Pence claimed that his role as the president of the Senate granted him legislative immunity. So, he was a part of the executive branch and the legislative branch. You can see it all in the new movie, ‘Every Job Everywhere All Mike Pence.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Another day has gone by, and the ex-president still has not been indicted for making illegal hush money payments to a porn star. I really thought it was going to happen today. After all, Wednesday is Cover Your Hump Day.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingKevin Bacon joined Jimmy Fallon for a parody called “Paint It, Black” on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightThe actress Maude Apatow, a star in “Little Shop of Horrors,” will appear on Thursday’s “Late Night.”Also, Check This OutThe artist Aura Rosenberg at her first major survey, “What Is Psychedelic,” at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn.Tonje Thilesen for The New York TimesArtist Aura Rosenberg’s first major survey, “What Is Psychedelic,” features 50 years of her work, including collaborations with Laurie Simmons, Louise Lawler, John Baldessari and Mike Kelley. More

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      ‘Ted Lasso,’ Season 3, Episode 3 Recap: Zava Superstar

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      What will the signing of a world-class striker mean for AFC Richmond?Season 3, Episode 3: ‘4-5-1’Welcome to the Zava era. For those who skipped the first two episodes of this third season of “Ted Lasso” — and honestly, shame on you; go back, do the homework and rejoin us — Ted’s team has signed one of the greatest players of the age, a mercurial striker named Zava. (He is based closely on the real-life star Zlatan Ibrahimovic.) This was accomplished by Rebecca rudely accosting him while he was using a urinal last episode. Whatever works, right?Zava is immediately weird — showing up hours late with his cellphone on another continent, ostentatiously meditating while the rest of the team prepares for games, and so on. But so far he seems reasonably friendly, even if his preferred alignment is everyone in the midfield or on defense except him. This is the meaning of the episode’s title, “4-5-1”: He’s the “1.” As the coaches explain, all free kicks will be taken by Zava. All penalty kicks will be taken by Zava. And all corner kicks must be intended to set up Zava. Jamie, who was the team’s best player before Zava’s arrival, is visibly nonplused. But everyone else seems fine with the arrangement.And why not? The first time he touches the ball for Richmond, after Jamie passes it to him at the opening of his first game, he scores a goal from midfield, an insane feat. He follows up with scores off headers, off bicycle kicks, and even off something I’d never heard of called a “scorpion kick.”Again: What’s not to like? Richmond, universally picked to finish at the bottom of the Premier League — which would entail them being once again “relegated” to an inferior league — is now near the top of the standings.That said, I’m guessing the relationship between Zava and his teammates will sour before long, because a) the show has made a big deal about how he changes teams almost every season; and b) his real-life doppelgänger, Ibrahimovic, has a history of violent altercations with teammates. So stay tuned.There is another delightful musical choice for the montage where we see Zava dominating the Premier League and taking Richmond toward its peak: “Prisencolinensinainciusol,” a classic 1972 song by Adriano Celentano, performed with his wife Claudia Mori. It is a song written in nonsense-language that was meant to sound like English to a non-English-speaking audience. There have been various versions, but the original video is, in my modest opinion, one of the greatest of all time. (Again: 1972!)Having already apologized last week for missing a reference to “Jesus Christ Superstar” in the season premiere, I also need to cite the use of its titular song, “Superstar,” with regard to Zava this episode. Although I will confess it is, for me at least, one of the weakest songs of the musical, an unwisely adorned version of the brilliant “Heaven on Their Minds” that opens the show. (And again, that’s Anthony Head’s older brother, Murray, singing as Judas in a genuinely brilliant vocal performance.)Even Roy — Roy! — suggests that Crimm’s book about Richmond’s season might be a “fairy tale.” I offer as a semi-deep cut the idea that his niece, Phoebe, may be letting him play the dragon role more often in their ongoing “Princess and Dragon” game, the casting of which was clearly an issue of contention last season. As Roy requested in Episode 8, “Can I be the dragon this time?” I speak from experience: The male ego is a ridiculously fragile thing.In other news …Sam and RebeccaWe haven’t seen a lot of Sam so far this season, perhaps in part because the show seems reluctant to dive back into the Sam-Rebecca romance it ignited last season. I don’t think there was any mention of it at all in the first two episodes of the season, and it was still very much a live question at the end of Season 2. (I went back and checked!) Readers from last year will recall I was not much of a fan of this story line. Sam is 21 years old, Rebecca is roughly twice that age, and she’s the owner of the club that will make decisions about his salary, his career and all the rest.Last season she gave him the choice of staying with the team or leaving for another, which is something no responsible boss could ever do. However delightful Sam and Rebecca were together, this was a massive lawsuit — from Sam, from his teammates — waiting to happen.This episode, both Sassy (the return of Sassy, played by Ellie Taylor, is always a delight) and Keeley suggest that Rebecca is missing out on a good thing. Seriously, does AFC Richmond have an HR department? Does anyone comprehend employment law? And please don’t think that I’m expressing a double standard here: If she were a fabulously wealthy older man having a relationship with a much-younger female employee — Rebecca’s “grooming” line from last season hit all too close to the mark — the obvious moral, professional and possibly legal quandary would be only clearer. Situations like this are exactly why we rightly revile Rupert. (Remember: “I got bored with the same old, same old,” from last episode.)Rebecca is a beautiful, incredibly successful woman. John Wingsnight notwithstanding (remember him from the Season 2 premiere?), she can certainly find a perfectly kind, decent, loving man who is not her borderline-underage employee.But enough of my re-litigating a relationship that may already be over. Let’s look at Rebecca and Sam separately.RebeccaSo here’s the payoff (or at least early payoff) of Rebecca’s brief call last week with her mother, played by the tremendous Harriet Walter. Now, under pressure, Rebecca visits her mom’s psychic, Tish (Emma Davies). The opening is lovely: Rebecca asks for a White Russian, and Tish responds with a “Big Lebowski” reference. “I was literally just making a joke,” Rebecca allows. And Tish responds, “I know, that’s why I made two.” A psychic with a sense of humor? Sign me up.Rebecca then hears a lot of what sounds like nonsense, including the importance of a “green matchbook.” (Rebecca even checks her kitchen drawer to see if she has any.) And then: “You will have a family … you’re going to be a mother.” This is the cruelest thing one could say to Rebecca, whom you’ll recall Rupert didn’t want to have a child with, before immediately having one with his new, very-young wife, Bex (Keeley Hazell — and yes, she is the real-life Page 3 model whom Juno Temple’s character is named after). As Rebecca notes to Tish, explicitly: “You’re [expletive] cruel.”Ambreen Razia, left, and Juno Temple in “Ted Lasso.”Apple TV+Wow. This is what we call a major plot twist, one that will continue to bear fruit if the green matchbox from Sam’s restaurant is to be believed. But if this plotline is fulfilled, who will be the father or partner? Sam? He’s the obvious choice: It is, after all, his matchbook. But having a child with someone 20-plus years younger does seem a little Rupert-y, no? And Sam and Rebecca no longer seem to be an item. I welcome alternative theories. (No! Not John Wingsnight!)Sam’s RestaurantIt’s so nice to see a bit more of Sam (Toheeb Jimoh) this episode. He was arguably the breakout star of last season. (As he told Rebecca in the closet, “I’m only going to get more wonderful.” If only I could have honestly spoken that line … ever.)It’s the test run for Sam’s new restaurant and obviously a huge night for him. But perhaps not only for him. The moment in which Rebecca, next to Keeley, looks at Sam and obviously wonders what could have been — what might still be — is followed instantly by Keeley giving an all-but-identical look at Roy. What could still happen with Roy and Keeley? What has to still happen with Roy and Keeley? Don’t let me down, “Ted Lasso.” You broke one of the best things you had going, and I’m waiting for you to fix it. “There are better things ahead than any we have left behind,” Keeley tells Rebecca. That may be the least true line ever uttered on the show. Can Keeley do better than Roy? Can Roy do better than Keeley?TedAs noted earlier, a mild gimmick of “Ted Lasso” is that each season opens and closes on the face of the person who follows the clearest evolution. Rebecca, the first season; Nate, the second. This season, it’s Ted, who is long overdue. He came to the U.K. from Kansas and left his 10-ish son behind because he and his wife had split, as we learned in Season 1. His father killed himself when Ted was 16, as we learned in Season 2. This is the season — the presumptive final season — in which we will hopefully witness him healing himself, instead of others.The signs are not, for the moment, terribly good. He has discovered that his wife is dating and perhaps living with a new man, and that man, “Jake” or “Dr. Jacob,” is their former couples’ therapist. (Am I wrong, or is this the first time we’ve seen Ted’s ex-wife refer to herself as “Michelle Keller”?) Ted’s hands shake so much he scarcely sees Zava’s first goal. He has what is clearly a heavy pour of Scotch as he plows through social media confirming the relationship.Cardinal rule: Only see doctors who use either their first names or “Dr. [surname].” “Dr. [first name]” is no longer appropriate once you hit age 14. And while I don’t pretend to know the professional guidelines for dating someone you’ve treated in couples therapy, I think 18 months is not enough time passed. The presumptive rule should be “never.” The conflict between being meaningfully attracted to someone and being the person in charge of rehabilitating their current relationship — well, let’s just say that this is about as direct a professional conflict as I can imagine. You are not in Ted Lasso’s cool book, “Dr. Jacob,” and you’re not in mine either.Odds and EndsLast week, I suggested that Trent Crimm’s theme song should be the Kinks’ “A Well Respected Man,” but after this episode I think Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” would also be pretty terrific. Trent is just so easy to score. Maybe it’s the hair? If anyone has another song they think would be perfect for him, definitely cite it in comments.The moment in which Coach Beard suggests Jamie is being accidentally “ironic,” and Jamie retorts that, no, he’s being deliberately “hypocritical” — and then Ted notes that the whole scenario is ironic? Gold.I liked the moment when Jamie and Roy argued about “prima donna” versus “”pre-Madonna” and Jamie was basically right? He is growing before our eyes.Zava (who owns an avocado farm) asks Sam where he gets his avocados and, when told that they don’t really feature in West African cuisine, says “not yet”? A definite callback to Ted’s “not yet” response last week when Roy lamented his inability to continue enjoying playing at Chelsea once he felt his powers fading.The Coach Beard-Jane story line continues to do nothing for me, and I can’t imagine it does much for anyone else. Drop it, “Ted Lasso.”Perhaps I give myself away too much. But the “favorite Julie Andrews’s movies” scene in which Roy confesses a longstanding crush because of “the way you knew she’d always tell you off if you’d been bad” and Crimm sneaks in with a “Princess Diaries” reference? This is the office I totally want to work in, every day, forever.The “I think you mean ‘In Zava boots’” question addressed to Dani Rojas? No further comment necessary.Additional references: Daniel Day-Lewis(!), Public Enemy, “Mrs. Maisel” and no doubt many others I missed. Please let me know in comments. More