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      In ‘A League of Their Own,’ Abbi Jacobson Makes the Team

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      Abbi Jacobson really can play baseball, she insisted. Just not when the cameras are rolling. “I fully get the yips when someone is watching me,” she told me.This was on a recent weekday morning, on a shady bench with a view of the ball fields in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Jacobson lives nearby, in an apartment she shares with her fiancée, the “For All Mankind” actress Jodi Balfour. This morning, she hadn’t come to the fields to play, which was good — the diamonds swarmed with little kids. (It was good, too, because while Jacobson can play, I can’t, though she did offer to teach me.) And honestly, she deserved to enjoy her off season.In “A League of Their Own,” arriving Aug. 12 on Amazon Prime Video, Jacobson stars as Carson Shaw, the catcher for the Rockford Peaches. Carson is an invented character, but the Peaches, a team from the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which debuted in 1943, are delightfully real. For five rainy months, on location in Pittsburgh, Jacobson, 38, had to catch, throw, hit and slide into base. Is some of this computer-generated magic? Sure, but not all. Which means that Jacobson played while plenty of people were watching. And she played well.“She’s really good,” said Will Graham, who created the series with her. “Abbi is constantly self-effacing and self-deprecating but is actually a badass.”Carson, a talented, anxious woman, becomes the team’s de facto leader. As a creator and executive producer, as well as the series’s star, Jacobson led a team, too, onscreen and off. This is work that she has been doing since her mid 20s, when she and Ilana Glazer created and eventually oversaw the giddy, unladylike comedy “Broad City.” On that show, she became a leader more or less by accident. On “A League of Their Own,” which was inspired by Penny Marshall’s 1992 film, Jacobson led from the get-go and with purpose, infusing the script with her own ideas about what leadership can look like.Jacobson plays a talented, anxious catcher who becomes her team’s leader. Her character’s story is one among many in a series that celebrates a range of women’s experience.Amazon Studios“The stories that I want to tell are about how I’m a messy person, and I’m insecure all the time,” she said. “And then what if the most insecure, unsure person is the leader? What if the messy person gets to own herself?”So is Carson’s story her story?“Kind of,” she said, squinting against the sun.Jacobson, who has described herself as an introvert masquerading as an extrovert, is approachable but also watchful, an observer before she is a participant. Even in the midst of animated conversation, she has an attitude that suggests that if you were to leave her alone with a book, or a sketch pad, or maybe her dog, Desi, that would be fine, too.Her favorite pastime: “I like to go and sit in a very populated area with like a book. Alone,” she said.On that morning, she wore a white tank top and paint-stained pants, but the stains were pre-applied and deliberate, sloppiness turned into fashion. The bag she carried was Chanel. She didn’t look a lot like a baseball player, but she did look like a woman who had become comfortable in her own skin, who had cleaned up most of her private mess and put the rest of it to professional use.“She’s a boss,” said the writer and comedian Phoebe Robinson, a friend. “And she knows herself in her core.”Jacobson grew up in a Philadelphia suburb, the youngest of two children in a Reform Jewish family. She played sports throughout her childhood — softball, basketball, travel soccer — until she gave them up for jam bands and weed.“That team mentality was very much my childhood,” she said.After art school, she moved to New York to become a dramatic actress, then veered into comedy through improv classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade. She and Glazer wanted to join a house improv team, but team after team rejected them. So they created “Broad City” instead, which ran first as a web series and then for five seasons on Comedy Central. A “Girls” without the gloss, trailing pot smoke as it went, it followed its protagonists, Abbi and Ilana, as they blazed a zigzag trail through young adulthood. The New Yorker called the show, lovingly, a “bra-mance.”For Jacobson, the show was both a professional development seminar and a form of therapy. Through writing and playing a version of herself, she emerged more confident, less anxious.“Having this receipt of her anxiety in the character allowed her to look at it and grow in a different direction,” Glazer said.Jacobson began developing “A League of Their Own” with Will Graham as “Broad City” was wrapping up.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesIn 2017, when “Broad City” had two seasons to go, Graham (“Mozart in the Jungle”) invited Jacobson to dinner. He had recently secured the rights to “A League of Their Own,” a movie he had loved as a child. He thought it could make a great series, with a few changes. The queerness of some characters — rendered in the movie through blink-and-you-miss-it subtext — ought to be more overt this time. In the film, in a scene that lasts just seconds, a Black woman returns a foul ball with force and accuracy, a nod to the league’s segregation. This, too, deserved more attention.Graham had pursued Jacobson, he said, for her integrity, her smarts, her flustered, nervy optimism. He wanted the experience of making the show to be joyful. And he wanted the stories it told — particularly the queer stories — to convey joy, too. He sensed that Jacobson, who came out in her mid 30s, could deliver.“She’s so funny, and also so emotionally honest — and so unafraid of being emotionally honest,” Graham said.As Jacobson finished the final seasons of “Broad City,” development began on the new series. She and Graham threw themselves into research, speaking to the some of the surviving women who had played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League or in the Negro leagues. They also spoke with Marshall, via phone, before her death in 2018. Marshall had focused primarily on the story of one woman: Geena Davis’s Dottie. Graham and Jacobson wanted to try to tell more stories, as many as an eight-episode season allowed.“The movie is a story about white women getting to play baseball,” Jacobson said. “That’s just not enough.”Gradually the show took form, morphing from a half-hour comedy to an hourlong dramedy. Then it found its co-stars: D’Arcy Carden as Greta, the team’s glamour girl; Roberta Colindrez as Lupe, the team’s pitcher; Chanté Adams as Max, a Black superstar in search of a team of her own. Rosie O’Donnell, a star of the original movie, signed on for an episode, playing the owner of a gay bar.Chanté Adams, left, was impressed by Jacobson’s leadership on set. “She always makes sure that everyone’s voice is heard and included,” she said.Amazon StudiosThe pilot was shot in Los Angeles, which doubled first for Chicago and then for Rockford, Ill. The coronavirus hit soon after, delaying production until last summer. Rising costs pushed the show to relocate to Pittsburgh, which is, as it happens, a rainy city, a problem for a show with so many game-day sequences. But the cast and crew handled it.“There was kind of a summer camp quality to it,” Graham said.And Jacobson, as Glazer reminded me, spent many years as a camp counselor. So a lot of that summer camp quality was owed to her. And to the incessant baseball practice she insisted on.“There was so much baseball practice, truly months of baseball practice,” Carden said. “We were a team more than we were a cast. That was Abbi. Abbi’s an ensemble person.”Adams first met Jacobson in the audition room. (As a longtime “Broad City” fan, she struggled to keep her cool.) On set, Jacobson immediately impressed her.“I don’t know how she does it,” Adams said. “But even as a leader and the star of the show, she always makes sure that everyone’s voice is heard and included.” After filming had ended, Adams said, Jacobson kept showing up for her, attending the opening night of her Broadway show.“It just melted my heart,” she said. “Abbi is the epitome of what it means to be a leader.”Jacobson doesn’t always feel that way, but she feels it more often than she used to. “Sometimes I can really own that,” she said. “And sometimes I go home, and I’m like, how am I the person? Or what’s happening here?” So she lent that same self-doubt to Carson, a leader who evolves when she acknowledges her vulnerability.“The movie is a story about white women getting to play baseball,” Jacobson said. “That’s just not enough.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesBut Carson’s narrative is only one among many in a series that celebrates a range of women’s experience: Black, white and Latina women; straight, queer and questioning women; femme women; butch women; and women in between. Many of the actors are beautiful in the ways that Hollywood prefers. Many aren’t.Yet the show insists that all of these women deserve love, friendship and fulfillment. In an email, O’Donnell observed that while the movie had focused on one woman’s story, this new version gives nearly every character a rich inner life “in a beautiful and accurate way that brings the characters’ humanity to the forefront.”Carden has known Jacobson for 15 years, since their early improv days. No one had ever seen her as a romantic lead until Jacobson dropped off a glove and a hand-drawn card (“Adorable and romantic,” Carden said) and invited her to join the team. Carden was proud to take the role and proud, too, to work with Jacobson again.“She’s changed none at all,” Carden said. “She’s always been Abbi, but the confidence is different.”Jacobson wears that confidence lightly. Glimmers of uncertainty remain. “I’m never the person that you’re like, She should lead the show,” she told me in Prospect Park.But clearly she is. When no team would have her, she made her own, and now she has made another one. After an hour and a half, she picked up her purse and her coffee cup and she walked back through the park. Like a boss. Like a coach. Like a leader. More

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      Trevor Noah Rips Russia for Brittney Griner Sentence

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      “We all know Russia doesn’t care about what Brittney Griner did,” Noah said, calling Russia “the same country that’s breaking every human rights law on the planet.”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.Most Valuable PlayerThe American basketball star Brittney Griner was found guilty of a drug-related offense and was sentenced to nine years in a Russian penal colony on Thursday.On “The Daily Show,” Trevor Noah said he hoped the sentence was a negotiation tactic and that President Biden could now trade a Russian war criminal for Griner.“Whoever America has in prison, send them to Russia. Yeah, it seems like they win, but don’t forget, that person now has to live in Russia. Yeah, yeah. They’ll get there and be like, [imitating a Russian criminal] ‘This whole country is prison. I miss food in Alcatraz, no!’” — TREVOR NOAH“We all know Russia doesn’t care about what Brittney Griner did. This is the same country that’s breaking every human rights law on the planet, but they’re like, ‘That woman has vape cartridge. She’s real criminal.” — TREVOR NOAH“Now, Biden will try to negotiate a deal to bring her home, and if that doesn’t work, he’s going to send Jon Stewart to get the job done for him.” — JIMMY FALLON“Now if we had more time, we could talk about how this could have been avoided if the W.N.B.A. paid their stars enough so they didn’t have to go and play in Russia in the off-season to make money.” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (Choco Taco Update Edition)“That’s right, President Biden is getting some things done.” — JIMMY FALLON“That’s right, the Choco Taco could return in the coming years. Apparently you cannot rush the artisanal process of folding an ice cream cone in half.” — JIMMY FALLON“What? This is amazing! Klondike ended the Choco Taco and the fans brought it back. This is the kind of passion you normally only see in, like, the Beyhive or BTS army. They should get their own name, like the Choco Taco flock’o.” — TREVOR NOAH“They had so much demand for their product line that to keep up, they had to eliminate the Choco Taco and all of its popular toppings, like tableside choco-mole.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingOn Thursday’s “Tonight Show,” Brad Pitt gave Jimmy Fallon an idea of what to expect from his new film “Bullet Train.”Also, Check This OutLina Iris Viktor’s piece “Eleventh” from 2018 is on display as part of the exhibition. The mixed media work includes 24-karat gold.Lina Iris Viktor; via Hayward GalleryDescribed as “a feel-good show about death,” “In the Black Fantastic” looks beyond Afro-Futurism at London’s Hayward Gallery. More

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      ‘Days of Our Lives,’ NBC Mainstay Since 1965, Moves to Peacock

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      The soap opera will be shown exclusively on the network’s streaming service, ending its 57-year run on broadcast TV.After more than 57 years and 14,000 episodes, NBC is moving “Days of Our Lives,” one of the last remaining soap operas, from its afternoon TV perch onto Peacock, the network’s streaming service.It will be replaced in the time slot by a news program, adding to the demise of the soap opera genre that, for most of television’s existence, was a steady presence on the major American networks each afternoon. “Days of Our Lives” will make its Peacock debut on Sept. 12, when the hourlong “NBC News Daily” will also premiere in its place on network TV.“With a large percentage of the ‘Days of Our Lives’ audience already watching digitally, this move enables us to build the show’s loyal fanbase on streaming while simultaneously bolstering the network daytime offering with an urgent, live programming opportunity for partners and consumers,” Mark Lazarus, chairman of NBCUniversal Television and Streaming, said in a statement.The move left just three soap operas remaining on network TV: ABC’s “General Hospital,” and CBS’s “The Young and the Restless” and “The Bold and the Beautiful.”Soap operas — named for the soap companies that advertised on them in the early days — began as radio programs in the 1930s, and moved to television in the ’50s in a 15-minute format. “Days of Our Lives” debuted on Nov. 8, 1965, as a half-hour program and expanded to an hour in 1975.The formula has in some ways changed little since the beginning: Plots feature heavy doses of love, lust, infidelity, heartbreak, murder and all manners of other intrigue, including occasional resurrections from the dead and brushes with the supernatural.For more than a decade, cancellation rumors have dogged “Days of Our Lives,” which follows a collection of characters in the fictional Midwestern town of Salem. In 2007, Jeff Zucker, then the president of NBC Universal Television, said the show was unlikely to continue past 2009. Soap opera ratings were sinking across the board; in 2009, CBS canceled “Guiding Light” after 72 years, and also canceled “As the World Turns” after 54 years.In 2011, ABC canceled “All My Children” and “One Life to Live.”But “Days of Our Lives” powered on, even as it attracted fewer than two million viewers per episode in recent years, far below the nearly 10 million who watched in the 1970s when it took over as daytime’s top-rated serial. It had the lowest ratings of the four remaining soap operas in the 2021-2022 season.In 2021, NBC renewed the program for two years, taking it into 2023. More

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      Trevor Noah Celebrates a Shocking Victory for Abortion Rights in Kansas

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      “Congratulations, Kansas. It’s moments like these I wish I knew which one of these states you were,” Noah joked on Wednesday.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.Not in Kansas AnymoreKansas voters rejected a constitutional amendment on Tuesday that would restrict and limit access to abortion rights in the state.“Congratulations, Kansas. It’s moments like these I wish I knew which one of these states you were,” Trevor Noah joked on Wednesday.“And may I remind you, Kansas is a state so bright red, it looks like me after 30 seconds on the beach.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Yeah, no one expected this. This was a bigger shock than when Batgirl found out her real nemesis was the C.E.O. of Warner Brothers.” — TREVOR NOAH, referring to a decision to kill a $90 million “Batgirl” movie“Wow, somewhere right now Brett Kavanaugh is angrily chugging a Coors Light tallboy with PJ and Squee.” — SETH MEYERS“And this is where you realize as well the anti-abortion views of right-wing lawmakers and some people on the Supreme Court — they don’t mirror what actual Americans want, right? It’s not accurate. And that’s a huge problem in this country. It’s like letting the craziest dude in your friend group plan your bachelor party. And you’re going to be like ‘I just wanted to play beer pong — how did we end up in a Bangkok prison? Not cool, Samuel.’” — TREVOR NOAH“They also changed their state bird from the western meadowlark to flipping off Sam Alito.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Bad Votes Edition)“So last night was a very good night for Donald ‘Jigglypuff’ Trump. In Michigan, his candidate defeated a Republican who voted to impeach him. In Arizona, his candidates won the primaries for senate and secretary of state, and in Missouri, the Eric he endorsed beat the other Eric that he endorsed. Yeah, it was the best night Trump has had that didn’t end with somebody signing an NDA.” — TREVOR NOAH“Most alarming about the elections is that many of the big winners include several election deniers backed by the former president. Apparently, the majority of Republican voters don’t trust voting, so after they cast their ballots, they got multiple stickers: ‘I voted.’ ‘Or did I?’ ‘Stop the sticker!’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“And these could have national implications because these Republicans, the ones winning now, they all believe in crazy conspiracy theories about Biden stealing the election in 2020. So if they win the final races, they could end up in charge of counting the votes in 2024. I don’t know about you, but I know for certain I do not trust them with their job.” — TREVOR NOAHThe Bits Worth WatchingThe stand-up comic Katherine Blanford made her television debut on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightLL Cool J will stop by Thursday’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”Also, Check This OutJennette McCurdy’s relationship with her mother is the narrative force at the center of her memoir.Ahmed Gaber for The New York TimesJennette McCurdy reflects on her time as a child actor and on her troubled relationship with her mother in her new memoir, “I’m Glad My Mom Died.” More

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      Jennette McCurdy Is Ready to Move Forward, and to Look Back

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      In her memoir, “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” McCurdy, best known for her role in“iCarly,” reflects on her time as a child actor and on her troubled relationship with her mother.When Jennette McCurdy was 16, she was in her third year on “iCarly,” the hit teen sitcom on Nickelodeon. Millions of young viewers admired her for her comic portrayal of Sam Puckett, the wisecracking pal of its title character, and she was proud that her lucrative work was helping to support her family.McCurdy was also living under the stringent control of her mother, Debra, who oversaw her career, determined her meals — her dinners consisted of shredded pieces of low-cal bologna and lettuce sprayed with dressing — and even administered her showers.Her mother gave her breast and vaginal exams, which she said were inspections for cancer, and shaved her daughter’s legs while McCurdy remained largely uneducated about the changes her body was experiencing.She struggled with obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders and anxiety triggered by the constant attention she received as a celebrity, but she felt trapped in her work. She also believed she owed her unfaltering loyalty to her mother, who had recovered from breast cancer when Jennette was very young, only for her cancer to return in 2010, at the height of her daughter’s fame.Debra McCurdy died in 2013, and Jennette, now 30, is still reckoning with the gravitational pull exerted by her mother, who steered her to the trade that gave her visibility and financial stability while she controlled virtually every aspect of her daughter’s existence.When Jennette McCurdy wrote a memoir, which Simon and Schuster will publish on Aug. 9, it was clear to her that her relationship with her mother would provide its narrative force. “It’s the heartbeat of my life,” she said recently.McCurdy as Sam and Miranda Cosgrove as Carly in “iCarly.”Lisa Rose/NickelodeonThe book is titled “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” and its cover bears the image of McCurdy, a narrow half-smile on her face, holding a pink funeral urn with confetti strands peeking over its rim. The presentation might be off-putting to some readers; the author is well aware. But she also feels it accurately encapsulates a coming-of-age story that is alternately harrowing and mordantly funny.When you have grown up as she has, feeling tenderness and anger toward a person you’ve seen wield immense power while fighting for her own life, she said, “You can’t believe how hard and how laughable it is at the same time. That’s completely my sense of humor.”“I feel like I’ve done the processing and put in the work to earn a title or a thought that feels provocative,” she added.Though McCurdy may have the résumé of a seasoned Hollywood veteran, she carried herself like a wide-eyed tourist on a visit to New York in late June. Over afternoon tea at the BG Restaurant in midtown Manhattan, she gazed at fellow patrons, asked for Broadway theater recommendations and chided herself about a transcendental meditation class she’d taken near her home in Los Angeles.“So far, I haven’t seen any results,” she said with a chuckle, “but we’ll see.”When it comes to new endeavors, McCurdy said, “I think things should feel natural. So much of my life was about forcing or pushing things. So when something feels like it’s working, I’ll let that be, and anything else can fall by the wayside.”As McCurdy recounts in her memoir, she was 6 when she started auditioning for acting roles, having been shepherded into the work by her mother, who was her herself discouraged from becoming an actress by her own parents.Growing up in Southern California, McCurdy was cast in TV commercials and shows like “Mad TV,” “Malcolm in the Middle” and “CSI” before landing “iCarly,” which had its debut in 2007. Yet she never had any illusions about who was really benefiting from these accomplishments. As she writes of the moment she learned she had booked “iCarly,” “Everything’s going to be better. Mom will finally be happy. Her dream has come true.”McCurdy endured various embarrassments and indignities at Nickelodeon, where she writes of being photographed in a bikini at a wardrobe fitting and being encouraged to drink alcohol by an intimidating figure she simply calls the Creator. In situations where her mother was present, Debra did not intervene or speak up, instructing Jennette that this was the price of showbiz success: “Everyone wants what you have,” she would tell her daughter.When McCurdy was promised an “iCarly” spinoff, she assumed she’d be given her own show — only to receive a co-starring slot on “Sam & Cat,” which paired her with the future pop-music sensation Ariana Grande.There, she says her superiors on these shows prevented her from pursuing career opportunities outside the show while Grande thrived in her extracurricular work. As McCurdy writes, “What finally undid me was when Ariana came whistle-toning in with excitement because she had spent the previous evening playing charades at Tom Hanks’s house. That was the moment I broke.”McCurdy, as Sam, and Ariana Grande as Cat in Sam & Cat, on Nickelodeon.Lisa Rose/NickelodeonAs McCurdy grew older and more independent, her relationship with her mother became further strained. The book reproduces an email in which her mother calls her “a SLUT,” “a FLOOZY” and “an UGLY MONSTER,” then concludes with a request for money for a refrigerator. When Debra had a recurrence of cancer and died, Jennette, then 21, was liberated — and left to navigate a complex world without her guidance, contending with destructive romantic relationships, bulimia, anorexia and alcohol abuse.“iCarly” ended its original run in 2012, and “Sam & Cat” ran just one season from 2013-14, after which, McCurdy writes, she turned down a $300,000 offer from Nickelodeon if she agreed never to speak publicly about her experiences at the network. (A press representative for Nickelodeon declined to comment.)She was free to reclaim her personal life and pursue other projects, like the Netflix science-fiction series “Between.” But she found it difficult to let go of the resentment from how she’d been treated when she was younger. As she said in an interview, “It felt like all these decisions were being made on my behalf and I was the last one to know about them. That’s really infuriating. It led to a lot of rage.”Even now, McCurdy found that revisiting the era of her child stardom resurfaced raw feelings about a parent, and an industry, that had failed to protect her.“My whole childhood and adolescence were very exploited,” she said, her eyes brimming with tears. “It still gives my nervous system a reaction to say it. There were cases where people had the best intentions and maybe didn’t know what they were doing. And also cases where they did — they knew exactly what they were doing.”Marcus McCurdy, the oldest of Jennette’s three brothers, said that their mother was consistently volatile when they were growing up.“You were always walking on eggshells — is it going to be nice mom or crazy mom today?” he said. “One day she’d be fine, the next day she’d be yelling at everybody. Every holiday was super overdramatic. She’d lose her mind on Christmas if something wasn’t perfect.”Friends and colleagues from Jennette McCurdy’s time as a child actor said they could sense the tension in her relationship with her mother, even if they did not yet know the exact details.“Jennette can be outgoing, very forward and bright and electric,” said David Archuleta, the pop singer and “American Idol” finalist. “I could also tell she was very guarded, very protective of her mom and they were very close.”Archuleta, whose career was closely controlled by his father when he was a minor, said such arrangements can be destructive for children.“Because you’re always with that parent, they don’t really let you around anyone else,” Archuleta said. “You don’t look at it as a control thing — you look at it as, ‘Oh, they’re looking out for me.’ And they make you feel like everyone is against you.”Over time, Archuleta added, the parent may turn toxic. “It gets to where it’s like, ‘You can’t make any decisions on your own. You can’t do anything on your own. You’re too dumb.’”Miranda Cosgrove, the star of “iCarly,” said that though she and McCurdy quickly became close on the show, she was initially unaware of many difficulties her friend was facing, which McCurdy only revealed as they became older.“When you’re young, you’re so in your own head,” Cosgrove said. “You can’t imagine that people around you are having much harder struggles.”In a softer voice, Cosgrove added, “You don’t expect things like that from the person in the room who’s making everyone laugh.”“So much of my life was about forcing or pushing things,” McCurdy said. Now, “I think things should feel natural.”Ahmed Gaber for The New York TimesFor McCurdy, opening up about herself to the wider world has been a long-term process. In her late teens and early 20s, she wrote essays for The Wall Street Journal that shared some of her insights into child stardom. But today she feels she was not fully candid.“If I had been truthful at that time,” she explained, “I would have said, ‘Yeah, I wrote this and then I went and made myself throw up for four minutes afterward.’”A few years ago, McCurdy started writing a new series of personal essays, including several about her mother, and shared them with her manager at the time. “My manager sent me back a nice email that said, ‘This is great — I don’t really know what to do with this.’ I’ll never forget the ‘xoxo’ at the end.” (McCurdy no longer works with that manager.)Instead, she began performing a one-woman show, also called “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” in Los Angeles. Though the pandemic impeded plans to take the show on the road, McCurdy used some of her down time to craft the memoir. “I really wanted to build it out a lot more, get more into the childhood aspect of the story and work through the arc in a way that you only can with a book,” she explained.Marcus McCurdy said he supported his sister’s decision to write her memoir, even if her calling it “I’m Glad My Mom Died” has caused some consternation in the family.“Our grandmother is very upset about that title,” Marcus said, adding that he and his sister share a similar sense of humor. “It’s more of a coping mechanism,” he said. “You can either be like, ‘Woe is me, my life is horrible.’ Or you find the humor in these things that are really tragic.”Archuleta also said it was empowering for McCurdy to write her book. “It’s given her back some of her strength, her confidence,” he said.McCurdy is writing another set of essays about coming into her own in her 20s, as well as a novel. (Its protagonist, she said, is “either who I wish I could be in some aspects, or who I hope I never am in other aspects. But it’s probably me, right?”)Aside from a few watch parties that her family held for her earliest episodic TV work, McCurdy told me, “I’ve never seen any of the shows that I’ve been on.” For her, these were fraught documents of her suffering and unwelcome reminders of the helplessness she felt at the time.A few years ago, after the cancellation of her Netflix series, McCurdy decided to take a break from acting. As she writes in the memoir, “I want my life to be in my hands. Not an eating disorder’s or a casting director’s or an agent’s or my mom’s. Mine.” She did not take part in a recent revival of “iCarly” on Paramount+. But McCurdy said that her experience with her one-woman show has shown her there might be ways that performance could be constructive for her in the future.“It felt significant in repairing some of the really weighted, complicated relationships that I had with acting,” she said. “It felt like finally I’m saying my words and saying things I want to be saying. I’m myself.”Though McCurdy can still find it uncomfortable to reflect on her past, it also makes her hopeful to focus on the present and to see the friends and colleagues who are part of her life because she alone chose for them to be in it.“I have people around me now that are so supportive and so loving,” she said. “It makes me tearful with joy. I feel so safe. I feel so much trust and so much openness.” More

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      How ‘The Bear’ Captures the Panic of Modern Work

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      You don’t have to work in a kitchen to recognize the chaos and precarity the show depicts.The Original Beef of Chicagoland is the fitting name of the restaurant at the heart of the acclaimed FX series “The Bear,” which stars Jeremy Allen White as Carmy, a world-class chef who returns home to run his family’s sandwich shop after his older brother’s suicide. Of all American cities, Chicago is the one whose mythos is most closely associated with a particular kind of work: honest, meaty, broad-shouldered labor that forges you into something bigger, nobler. Like the city it’s set in, the restaurant in “The Bear” is an unpretentious place, humbly catering to “the working man.” But “the working man,” we soon learn — as a young, Black, female sous-chef mocks an older, white, male manager’s use of the label — is a contested term, especially in an environment where nobody does anything but work, and pretty much nobody has anything to show for it. It’s unclear, at first, why Carmy, once named one of Food & Wine’s “Best New Chefs,” has come back to the sandwich shop, but we’re gradually made to understand that he is returning, compulsively, to a traumatic site. Food was the thread that connected him to his brother, but his brother wouldn’t let him in the kitchen, and so off to Sonoma and New York he went, to make something of himself. The Original Beef of Chicagoland is also Carmy’s original beef — the core wound that ignited his ambition, the site of his connection to his family as well as his estrangement from it.The story of the prodigal son returning from some summit of achievement to his salt-of-the-earth hometown is a beloved American narrative, most often seen in Christmas movies about frazzled executives returning to their roots. They are intended to reify the comforting notion that work isn’t everything — that the real America is slow, simple, cozy and (above all) fair, a place that rewards you for your efforts, full of wise, avuncular coots and simple, patient girls who’ve been waiting all along. But when Carmy returns to Chicago, he finds his elders are either absent or trying to exploit him, and the only girl who’s interested in his feelings is his sister. Just as success failed to save him, honest work won’t either; it won’t even generate enough money to get by. The Original Beef may signal noble, can-do labor, but it’s also a decompensating system on the verge of structural collapse. A few episodes in, the toilet explodes, unleashing a geyser in Carmy’s face. An industrial mixer blows a fuse, knocking out the power. The gas goes out, forcing the kitchen staff to build makeshift grills outside. They have no choice; one missed lunch service could take them out. A 1980s arcade game called Ball Breaker blares stupidly, violently from one corner, handily summarizing the experience. “Your balls have been broken!!” its screen announces. “Continue?”“The Bear” has been praised for its visceral depiction of the stress of a professional kitchen, but you don’t have to have done restaurant work to recognize the chaos, panic and precarity the show captures so convincingly. In “The Bear,” work is a dumb, sadistic game that has left Carmy with unchecked PTSD. Intrusive thoughts and flashbacks fracture his consciousness; he even cooks in his sleep, almost setting his house on fire. Richie, the restaurant’s manager, takes Xanax because he suffers from “anxiety and dread.” (“Who doesn’t?” Carmy snaps.) Sydney, the sous-chef, has a cabinet stuffed with medication for heartburn and ulcers, problems that may have been sparked by a failed attempt to run her own business. (“It was the first time I didn’t have a complete and utter psychopath behind me screaming,” she says. “And I thought I wanted that, you know? But look where that got me.”) The restaurant is drowning in bills. When the characters aren’t yelling at one another at top volume, they’re often shutting down to cope with all the yelling. Their customers are like kids stuck in a car with warring parents. The word you see most frequently in writing about the show is “stressful,” but it’s often accompanied by descriptions of the workplace as “soul-crushing,” “toxic” or “abusive.” All this is intended as praise — the idea is that, despite its occasional excesses, the show has captured something relatable and true.Hustle has always been romanticized in American culture, which promises that nobly sacrificing yourself on the altar of endless work will pay off in the end. But it’s increasingly clear that for most people, it won’t. Twenty-two years ago, when Anthony Bourdain published “Kitchen Confidential,” he glamorized the kitchen as a kind of foxhole, populated by wild, dysfunctional hard-asses yelling profanities at one another while managing to crank out hundreds of plates every night. This may once have seemed exotic or picturesque, but that pressure-cooker environment has come to feel familiar to more and more workers in more and more industries. The American economy soared over the past decade, but life for most became harder: “In one of the best decades the American economy has ever recorded, families were bled dry by landlords, hospital administrators, university bursars and child-care centers,” Annie Lowrey wrote in The Atlantic in 2020. “For millions, a roaring economy felt precarious or downright terrible.” “The Bear” is compelling not because of how it recreates a kitchen but because it captures something about modern work in general.‘The Bear’ is compelling not because of how it recreates a kitchen but because it captures something about modern work in general.Carmy and Sydney work insane hours, rising at dawn and waiting for L trains on dark platforms, too exhausted to think about anything else. At times it seems as if work is how they escape from having to think about what is happening to them. Sydney tells someone her goal is simply to do her job and live her life, but it’s abundantly clear that, outside her job, she has little life to speak of. These conditions don’t spur creativity; on the contrary, they’re counterproductive. Carmy can’t spare time to listen to Sydney’s ideas about the dinner menu or encourage the pastry chef’s experiments with doughnuts. Exploring your talent, in this environment, might turn out to be another luxury the “working man” can’t afford, something that belongs exclusively to narcissists with financial backing. This inequality comes into focus early in the show: We see Carmy abused by an arrogant chef and, in Chicago, paid a visit by his mobster uncle, who talks down the restaurant — the place is unfixable, he says — before trying to buy it for himself. Carmy is furious to learn that Richie has been dealing cocaine in the alley behind the restaurant to keep it afloat, but Richie justifies his actions by co-opting the language of entrepreneurship, crediting this side hustle with getting the place through Covid. “That’s the kind of stick-to-it-iveness and ingenuity and out-of-the-box thinking that we look for in employees,” he says. “But that ship has sailed, my friend.” This is the startling milieu and message of “The Bear,” the thing that has struck a chord. The notion that hustle will eventually pay off is an insidious pipe dream. Everyone is in survival mode all the time. The system has failed. The place is unfixable. Source photographs: Screen grabs and photographs from FX More

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      Trevor Noah Weighs In on the Killing of Ayman al-Zawahri

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      Noah argued that safe houses should be called something different because “every terrorist gets killed in a safe house.”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.Safety Not GuaranteedOn Monday, President Biden announced that an American drone strike killed the Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri.“What’s crazy is that America didn’t just kill him — they killed him with a razor blade missile,” Trevor Noah said on Tuesday, adding that he didn’t even know such things existed. “The weapons America has sound like things that kids just make up on the playground.”“America clipped the world’s most wanted terrorist off of his safe house balcony? I mean, also, at this point maybe we should stop calling them ‘safe houses.’ No, every terrorist gets killed in a safe house. They should — they should call it a house that you think you’re safe in, but you never know.” — TREVOR NOAH“I will say, you know, when you see stories like this, when you see stories about what America is capable of, this is where you realize there’s really no excuse for the amount of domestic terrorism in America, all right? Because al-Zawahri — al-Zawahri lived all the way in Afghanistan in some random safe house in the middle of nowhere, and America knew what time of day he liked to go out onto his balcony. But when a white supremacist posts on Facebook he’s going to murder everyone and buys an AR-15, everyone’s like, ‘There was no way to stop this. If only he liked balconies.’” — TREVOR NOAH“Reportedly, the C.I.A. targeted him with a drone strike while he was on the balcony of his house at 6:18 a.m. on Sunday. That’s so early. He was drinking from a mug that said, ‘Don’t talk to me until I’ve had my hellfire missile.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“That’s right, they got him with a drone. His last words were, ‘Wait, did I order same-day delivery?’” — JIMMY FALLON“Yeah, they took him out with a drone. And if that didn’t work, they were just going to send him an envelope that Biden licked.” — JIMMY FALLON“Yeah, Biden took out al-Zawahri, Obama took out bin Laden, and Trump said, ‘OK, who wants to order takeout?’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Pelosi Takes Taiwan Edition)“Well, everyone is talking about this, even though China said that there would be consequences, Nancy Pelosi ignored the warnings and decided to visit Taiwan. Poor Biden, he took out the top leader of Al Qaeda, and everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nancy just landed in Taiwan?” — JIMMY FALLON“Biden is like, ‘It’s a bold move that definitely could have waited until I was out of office!’” — JIMMY FALLON“Pelosi has clearly stolen the headlines from Biden. Now, to get back on top, Biden is thinking about getting Covid a third time.” — JIMMY FALLON“The threats from the Chinese government have not been subtle. Last week, the Chinese warned that, ‘Those who play with fire will perish by it.’ Have you seen California? That’s not the threat it once was, China.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“The Chinese continue to rattle their flaming saber, warning, ‘The visit would trigger severe consequences,’ and warned that their military won’t sit by idly, with their government explaining, ‘no matter for what reason Pelosi goes to Taiwan, it will be a stupid, dangerous and unnecessary gamble.’ That’s ominous. Also a perfect slogan for White Castle.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“The Chinese have also conducted live-fire drills in the South China Sea and scrambled jets as her plane landed in Taiwan. All of this for an 82-year-old woman with bones made of peanut brittle. Tensions are so bad the Defense Department has upgraded its readiness to Defcon: Mee-maw.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingThe stand-up comic Ms. Pat talked about her Emmy-nominated sitcom, “The Ms. Pat Show,” on Tuesday’s “Daily Show.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightKevin Bacon will join Jimmy Fallon on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutFrom left, Wes Studi, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai and Paulina Alexis in a scene from Season 2 of “Reservation Dogs,” which centers on a group of teenagers on an Oklahoma reservation.Shane Brown/FXThe second season of FX’s “Reservation Dogs” deepens the show’s emotion and builds on its sense of place. More

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      Burt Metcalfe, Who Left His Mark on ‘M*A*S*H,’ Is Dead at 87

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      He was the showrunner of the classic Korean War sitcom for its last six seasons, notably casting David Ogden Stiers as the pompous surgeon Winchester.Burt Metcalfe, who as the showrunner of “M*A*S*H” for the last six of its 11 seasons made a critical casting decision as he began his tenure and helped write the two-and-a-half-hour final episode, contributing ideas he had picked up on a trip to South Korea, died on July 27 in Los Angeles. He was 87.His death, at a hospital, was caused by sepsis, said his wife, Jan Jorden, who played a nurse in several episodes of “M*A*S*H.”Mr. Metcalfe had been an actor and casting director before becoming a producer of “M*A*S*H,” the sitcom about the staff of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War, a show widely regarded as one of the best series in television history. He joined for its first season, in 1972, at the request of Gene Reynolds, a friend and an architect of the show along with the writer Larry Gelbart. When Mr. Reynolds left after the fifth season, Mr. Metcalfe succeeded him as the executive producer running the series.“He was able to successfully guide the show because of his personality, which was unusual,” Alan Alda, who starred in the series as the surgeon Hawkeye Pierce, said in an interview. “He was unselfish, he was gentle, and he was interested in the humanity of the characters.”Mr. Metcalfe did not have to change much of what had been built by Mr. Reynolds and Mr. Gelbart, who left after the fourth season. For instance, he continued Mr. Reynolds’s practice of interviewing doctors and nurses who had served in the Korean War and who provided a rich supply of potential medical story lines. Mr. Alda, who wrote and directed many of the episodes, said he had pored over interview transcripts looking for a phrase that could inspire a story.When, at a conference in Chicago, Mr. Metcalfe interviewed doctors who had served in the war, one told him that the series had made him “a hero” to his family. “They watched the show and my son says to the neighbor kids, ‘My dad is Hawkeye,’” Mr. Metcalfe quoted the doctor as saying in an interview with the Television Academy in 2003.He said that under his direction, without what he called Mr. Gelbart’s “comedic intensity,” “M*A*S*H” had a more serious bent.“We delved more deeply into the characters’ personalities in ways we hadn’t done before,” he told the academy. “We got criticism in later years that it was becoming more serious and less funny.”Before the sixth season, Mr. Metcalfe’s first as showrunner, he faced the task of replacing Larry Linville, who was leaving the show after his run as the officious, rules-obsessed ninny Major Frank Burns. Mr. Metcalfe, who had originally cast Mr. Linville, said he wanted an actor who could play a much more formidable surgeon with a superiority complex. He found him one Saturday night when he saw David Ogden Stiers play a ruthless station manager on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” and he hired him to play the pompous surgeon Charles Emerson Winchester III.“When David Stiers was dying, I wrote him an email,” Mr. Metcalfe said in 2020 on “M*A*S*H” Matters,” a podcast hosted by Ryan Patrick and Jeff Maxwell, who played the food server Igor on the series. He told Mr. Stiers, he said, that hiring him to play Winchester “was the best decision I made of all the decisions I had to make on ‘M*A*S*H.’” Mr. Stiers died in 2018.Mr. Metcalfe, second from right, accepted a TV Land Award for “M*A*S*H” in 2009 alongside the cast members, from left, Allan Arbus, Ms. Swit, Mike Farrell and Mr. Alda.Fred Prouser/ReutersBurton Denis Metcalfe was born on March 19, 1935, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. His father, Louis, was a vending machine distributor who died when Burt was 3. Burt moved with his mother, Esther (Goldman) Metcalfe, a secretary, to Montreal, where he developed a love of acting. He performed comic sketches and imitations in front of his aunts, uncles and cousins; while attending a children’s theater school, he was asked to appear in half-hour radio dramas.Burt and his mother moved in 1949 to Los Angeles, where he finished high school. In 1955, he received a bachelor’s degree in theater arts at the University of California, Los Angeles.Over the next decade, Mr. Metcalfe was a working actor, appearing as a guest star on “Death Valley Days,” “The Outer Limits,” “Have Gun — Will Travel,” “The Twilight Zone” and other series; as a regular on the sitcom “Father of the Bride” in the 1961-62 season; and as a surfer named Lord Byron in the 1959 film “Gidget.”Feeling bored, he moved into casting in 1965. This eventually led Mr. Reynolds to ask him to find actors for two pilots: “Anna and the King,” an adaptation of the musical “The King and I,” and “M*A*S*H.”Both pilots were picked up, but “Anna and the King,” in which Yul Brynner reprised his stage and screen role, was canceled after 13 episodes. Mr. Metcalfe became an associate producer of “M*A*S*H” in addition to overseeing the casting; he became a producer in the fourth season, during which he directed his first three episodes (he would direct a total of 31). He became executive producer when Mr. Reynolds left to run the production of “Lou Grant.”A couple of years before “M*A*S*H” ended, Mr. Metcalfe went to South Korea to talk to civilians about how they had been affected by the war. One story — about a mother who had been with a group of South Koreans trying to escape from a North Korean patrol, and who smothered her baby to avoid jeopardizing their safety — stuck with him.Mr. Metcalfe contributed that story to the script for the series finale. In that episode, Hawkeye has a nervous breakdown on a bus ride with members of the 4077th and refugees after telling one of the refugees to quiet her chicken so as not to alert the enemy, only to realize later, under psychotherapy, that she had actually smothered her baby.Mr. Metcalfe was nominated for 13 Emmy Awards, including four for directing.He is survived by Emily O’Meara, whom he regarded as his daughter. His marriage to Toby Richman ended in divorce.Soon after “M*A*S*H” concluded, Mr. Metcalfe became the executive producer of the series “AfterMASH,” a sequel in which three characters from the original — Corporal Klinger (played by Jamie Farr), Colonel Potter (Harry Morgan) and Father Mulcahy (William Christopher) — worked at a veterans’ hospital in Missouri. It was canceled after 30 episodes.Mr. Metcalfe joked on the podcast that his decision to hire Mr. Stiers “was only a preface to making lots of bad decisions on ‘AfterMASH.’”He later became an executive at Warner Bros. and MTM Enterprises. He retired in the 1990s.“TV had changed by then,” Ms. Jorden said in a phone interview. “He said it had become meaner. And shows like ‘M*A*S*H’ only come around once in a lifetime.” More