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      ‘Desus & Mero’ Late-Night Show Ends After Four Seasons

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      Showtime said that the Bronx-bred hosts were “pursuing separate creative endeavors” after the duo collaborated on television shows, podcasts and a book.The Showtime late-night talk show “Desus and Mero” will not be returning for a fifth season, the network announced on Monday.The show’s hosts, Desus Nice (a.k.a. Daniel Baker) and the Kid Mero (a.k.a. Joel Martinez), interviewed former President Barack Obama and collaborated on projects including podcasts and a book, but are now “pursuing separate creative endeavors moving forward,” a Showtime representative said in an emailed statement.“Desus Nice and the Kid Mero have made a name for themselves in comedy and in the late-night space as quick-witted cultural commentators,” the statement said.After the announcement, Desus wrote on Twitter that he was “proud of the show my staff made every episode” and hinted he had more projects on the way.Before Showtime picked up “Desus and Mero” in 2018, the show aired on Viceland for two years. The pair, who both grew up in the Bronx, also hosted a long-running podcast, “Bodega Boys.”The television series upended the traditional model for late-night talk shows, with the hosts sitting in chairs next to their guests instead of cloistered behind a desk. They swapped carefully crafted opening monologues for a looser conversation style where they responded to news events and viral clips, building on each other’s jokes.The show’s fourth season on Showtime premiered in March with an interview with Denzel Washington that spotlighted Desus and Mero’s ability to pull candid, personal insights from celebrities and politicians in interviews that felt more like conversations. The two spoke with the Academy Award-winning actor, who grew up in Mount Vernon, N.Y., about different stops on the No. 2 subway line and the rising price of a pizza slice.Before Desus and Mero became a comedic duo, each had built a following on Twitter, where they would occasionally interact while making jokes about their day jobs and the Bronx.They had attended the same summer school and were familiar with each other, but it was a meeting they were both invited to by an editor at the pop culture website Complex that formally brought them together. That meeting led to a podcast called “Desus vs. Mero,” that premiered in 2013, then a web series.After they left Complex, they started the “Bodega Boys” podcast. In 2020, they published an advice book, “God-Level Knowledge Darts: Life Lessons From the Bronx.”Fans, known as the “Bodega Hive,” had speculated that the end of the comedic partnership could be near after the podcast stopped posting new episodes; the last one went up in November. Responding to a series of tweets that appeared to confirm the podcast had ended, Desus said last week that their fans “deserved better than this ending.” More

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      Trevor Noah Mocks Joe Biden for That Fist Bump

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      Noah called the president’s choice how to greet Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia “the whitest decision of all time.”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.KnuckleheadsPresident Biden’s fist bump with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia raised eyebrows over the weekend. On Monday’s “Daily Show,” Trevor Noah had a lot of opinions about that moment.“America obsesses about these things: ‘No, don’t look too friendly.’ It’s also funny how President Biden thought it would be better to fist bump Mohammed bin Salman because that seems less friendly than a handshake. That’s the whitest decision of all time.” — TREVOR NOAH“You know what Biden should have done if he didn’t want controversy in this? He should have gone in for the handshake and then given him the ‘Psych!’” — TREVOR NOAH“You know what I really think happened? I think Joe Biden’s team briefed him and they were like, ‘Mr. President, in Saudi Arabia, if you make them mad, and you have, they will chop off your hand. So hide your finger, get in, quick, in and out, in and out. Godspeed, Mr. President.’” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (Bennifer Again-if-er Edition)“That’s right, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez reportedly got married over the weekend. Because right now, that’s the only way a Red Sox fan can get a win in the Bronx.” — SETH MEYERS“That’s right, they got married at a drive-through chapel. You know inflation is bad when even those two are, like, ‘Let’s just do it in Vegas.’” — JIMMY FALLON“The guy who married them was, like, ‘Wow, you two are the best Ben and J. Lo impersonators I’ve ever seen — you’re really good.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Love is real! If they can make it work, there’s hope for every attractive millionaire celebrity couple with a skin-care line.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“And as I’m sure you know, the two were engaged years ago, but now they’ve made it official. It’s Bennifer again-i-fer! Or, as I prefer, ‘Jennifer 2: Jen-flecktric Boogaffleck.’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingDana Carvey, the guest host on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” brought his famous “Church Lady” impression from “Saturday Night Live” to Monday’s monologue.What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightCourtney Barnett, the Australian indie rock artist, will perform on Tuesday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutJoel Kim Booster in his Netflix special “Psychosexual.”Terence Patrick/NetflixSome seasoned stand-ups — Joel Kim Booster, Nikki Glaser, Bill Burr, Fahim Anwar and Cristela Alonzo — have stellar new comedy specials available for streaming this summer. More

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      ‘Late Show’ Staff Arrested at U.S. Capitol Complex Won’t Be Prosecuted

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      The Justice Department said it would not proceed with charges of unlawful entry against staff members from “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” who were arrested at a Capitol building last month.Federal prosecutors said late Monday that they would not prosecute staff members of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” who were arrested last month at the United States Capitol complex on charges of unlawful entry.When members of a production team for the CBS show were arrested on June 16, they had been filming a segment featuring Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, a cigar-chomping canine puppet that is voiced by the comedian Robert Smigel, who was among those arrested. Mr. Colbert later said on his show that they were guilty of “high jinks with intent to goof.”The arrests, in a hallway of the Longworth House Office Building, were notable in part because they occurred soon after Congress began holding televised hearings into the Jan. 6, 2021 attack, in which supporters of President Donald J. Trump violently stormed the Capitol complex.The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia said in a brief statement on Monday that it would not move forward with misdemeanor charges against the nine people arrested by the Capitol Police because the case wasn’t strong enough.The crew members had been invited to enter the building on two separate occasions by congressional staff who never asked them to leave, although the Capitol Police did tell some members of the group that they were supposed to have an escort, the statement said.In order to sustain convictions on charges of unlawful entry, prosecutors would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that “these invited guests were guilty of the crime of unlawful entry because their escort chose to leave them unattended,” it said.“We do not believe it is probable that the office would be able to obtain and sustain convictions on these charges,” the statement said, adding that the defendants would not be required to attend a court hearing scheduled for Wednesday.The statement did not say whom the production team had visited at the Longworth House Office Building. Mr. Colbert said on his show that the team had been invited to interview Democratic and Republican members of Congress about the Jan. 6 hearings.Spokespeople for the Justice Department and CBS did not immediately respond to requests for comment overnight.After the arrests last month, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson said that the “Late Show” producers had committed “insurrection.” Mr. Colbert said a few days later that such criticism amounted to a “shameful and grotesque insult” to the memory of those who died in the Jan. 6 attack.“But who knows,” he joked on his show, “maybe there was a vast conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States with a rubber Rottweiler.”Glenn Thrush More

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      ‘Better Call Saul’ Season 6, Episode 9 Recap: Bye Bye Love

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      Kim and Gus make some difficult decisions of the heart. Mike goes on a mission of mercy.Season 6, Episode 9: ‘Fun and Games’Let’s break with tradition and start at the end of this whipsawing episode, which delivers two quick jolts in its closing minutes.The first is Kim’s decision to quit both the law and her marriage. Her rationale? That together she and Jimmy are a hazard, both to themselves and to others. A newlywed who is not as rash might have considered less drastic solutions — maybe a week in Bali, a bit of therapy. But Kim is nothing if not unpredictable, and there have been many moments in this show when you are certain she’s going to break up with Jimmy only to then see her give him a smooch. What we saw here was the same thing in reverse.If Kim were presenting a legal argument, we would say it started logically enough — hey, these two do produce some toxic chemistry — but got wacky by the end. She says that she withheld the news from Jimmy that Lalo was alive because she knew what would happen — that Jimmy would protect her, hide with her and end the plot against Howard. And were that to happen, “We’d break up,” as she puts it.Why? “Because I was having too much fun!” she shouts.Whoa. The implication here is that the scam was so unnervingly delightful, and harmful to others, that she must quit her co-conspirator, like an alcoholic who keeps crashing the car and swears off booze. That’s a guess. It’s difficult to fathom the inner life of someone who says, “I love you, too, but so what?”Let’s leave aside, for a moment, Jimmy’s reaction and focus on a connected question: What will Mike think? Kim has been given instructions to deliver an Academy Award-worthy performance in a real-life documentary called “Nothing to See Here” in the aftermath of Howard’s murder. And now she has left her job and Jimmy. That will raise exactly the sort of questions Mike didn’t want. This is a problem.The Return of ‘Better Call Saul’The “Breaking Bad” prequel is ending this year.A Refresher: Need to catch up? Here’s where things left off after the first seven episodes of the show’s final season, which aired this spring.Bob Odenkirk: After receiving a fifth Emmy nomination in July, the star discussed bringing some measure of self-awareness to the character of Saul for his final bow.Stealing the Show: Kim Wexler’s long slide toward perdition has become arguably the narrative keystone of the series, thanks to Rhea Seehorn’s performance.Writing the Perfect Con: We asked the show’s writers to break down a pivotal scene in the ​​transformation of Jimmy McGill into Saul Goodman.On to the second jolt. Right after the breakup argument, the episode jumps forward in time to Saul Goodman’s louche and extravagant life, which is filled with Xanax, prostitutes and Roman-influenced, self-mythologizing décor and art, all of it in the comically opulent house that we saw in the opening episode of this season.Is the sudden end of this relationship with Kim supposed to explain this transformation? Lots of people have their hearts broken. Some evolve. Very few emerge with entirely different personalities. Perhaps we’re to believe that Saul was hiding inside Jimmy and emerged courtesy of the trauma of Kim’s departure. Granted, Kim’s farewell is quite a trauma. It’s just hard to believe that it steered a slightly crooked, often endearing and largehearted man into total depravity.That said, we know that in the future, Saul will hastily exit Albuquerque when he gains infamy in “Breaking Bad” and emerge with as a nebbish named Gene Takavic, managing a Cinnabon in Omaha. The writers have already signaled that this character can shift in shape.The less confounding part of this episode comes near the beginning. Gus has been summoned to the south-of-the-border home of Don Eladio, where Don Hector accuses him of killing Lalo and plotting to usurp the cartel. Unruffled, Gus answers this potentially fatal allegation by declaring it too preposterous to dignify with words. Then Eladio and his underling Bolsa make Gus’s case on his behalf, and in doing so demonstrate how well Fring has covered his tracks, with an assist from Lalo, who left behind a burned corpse with matching teeth.Hector is left to ring his bell in frantic, fruitless protest. Point to Gus, who seems to derive much of the meaning in his life by tormenting his foe. The scene ends with a moment that explains why. Fring stares at the pool, the same place where years ago, Hector shot and killed Max Arciniega, the love of Gus’s life. At that moment, Gus was lying next to Max, close enough to watch blood gush into the pool.Gus is haunted by that memory, and when he returns to his home in Albuquerque, we watch him regain his life, his happiness and his routine. But there are limits. When he visits what appears to be his favorite restaurant, he has a long conversation with a waiter and oenophile named David (Reed Diamond), who dazzles Gus with his good looks and tales of vineyard hopping through Europe as a young man. Nobody has ever spoken to Gus for so long, and through David’s entire monologue, Gus seems pleasantly rapt. This is smitten Gus, a side of the man we’ve never seen.Instead of asking for a date, which is what happens in the rom-com version of this interlude, Gus quickly leaves while the waiter is retrieving an even rarer bottle of wine. Fring has either decided he can’t get hurt again or concluded that love isn’t for a man in his position. It’s a weakness he can’t afford because to enemies, loved ones are easy targets. They end up dead, or sent on suicide missions to kill other people, like Kim in the previous episode.The finest part of this strangely long scene — six minutes! — comes at the end, when there’s a lingering tight shot of Gus’s face and we see him segue from relaxed and joyful to tense and withdrawn. Without a word of dialogue, you can see him come to a firm decision. He must keep his monastic, loveless life.Mike uses some of his post-clean-up downtime to visit Manuel Varga (Juan Carlos Cantu) and explain that his son, Nacho, is dead. (He does this because he has been taught about the agony of not knowing the fate of a loved one by Anita, his grief counseling buddy from Season 3, whose husband vanished in the New Mexico wilderness years earlier, a source of wrenching sorrow for her.) On the plus side, he says, Nacho’s killers will soon come to justice. Mr. Varga corrects Mike. It won’t be justice. It will be revenge, he says.In a cast of characters who are corrupt and wicked in various shades of gray, this humble upholsterer is here to remind viewers what uncompromising goodness actually looks like. To him, even a guy like Mike, who has an acute sense of fairness, is just another hoodlum.Odds and EndsSaul Goodman has finally turned up in the flesh, albeit for just a few minutes. Kind of nervy — naming a show for character who debuts in the ninth episode of the sixth season.What’s with the tip that Gus left at that restaurant? Obviously, $201 is generous for a glass of wine. But why the added $1? Did he think $200 just isn’t quite enough?Jimmy’s line, “What’s done can be undone,” is a nod to Macbeth, and a famous utterance by a Lady Macbeth — the original female gangster — who rues her role in murdering King Duncan of Scotland. “What’s done,” she says, “cannot be undone.”Lady Macbeth is an apt and interesting model for Kim. She sort of pushes her husband into the plot against the king, much as Kim pushes Jimmy to trap Howard. And Lady Macbeth has seriously strong scheming chops, just like Kim. Consider her psychological assault on Howard’s widow, Cheryl (Sandrine Holt) at Howard’s wake. First, she conjures a memory of seeing Howard “snorting something” off his desk at the office. When Cheryl begins to believe that her husband just might have had a drug problem, Kim comforts Cheryl and implies that everyone else might be wrong.“You were his wife,” she says. “You knew him better than anyone.”Well played, madam. Keep in mind that there’s often a price for such wicked manipulations. Lady Macbeth goes insane and then commits suicide. Kim has an easier time of it, at least so far. She leaves the work and the man she loves.Four episodes left, and a lot of story to tell. The future of Gene Takavic. The fate of Kim. There are engineers and a crew to hire, a super lab to build. Walter White and Jesse Pinkman are due any minute.Please leave thoughts — and any theories about Gus’s tipping habits — in the comments section. More

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      An ‘Impossible Dream’ Comes True, Again, for Marylouise Burke in ‘Epiphany’

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      The 81-year-old actress stars as an eccentric dinner party host. When she was a teenager, though, wanting to act was a secret she didn’t dare tell.The staircase in Brian Watkins’s play “Epiphany,” at Lincoln Center Theater, goes up and up. Tall and imposing, it’s the kind of centerpiece to a set that makes you wonder, when you arrive for a performance, who is going to be climbing and descending it.The actor Marylouise Burke, for one, spends considerable time dashing up and down those steps, which she knew from the script would be in the show. So when her agent got a call asking her to play the lead role of Morkan, the warmly eccentric host of a dinner party fueled by existential desperation and touched with spiritual longing, she asked him to inquire: Was it going to be “a normal staircase or a crazy staircase?”Not that she wasn’t tempted by the part, with which she had felt immediately simpatico since performing it in a prepandemic reading. But Burke, who is 81, diminutive and a longtime favorite of the playwright David Lindsay-Abaire, shattered both wrists and her left kneecap two years ago when she tripped on a pothole in front of the West Village building where she has lived in a studio apartment since 1977.And sometimes, she said the other afternoon, sitting a bit shyly for an interview in the theater’s glass-walled lobby, “you have a designer who decides that the floor is going to be absurd because the script is absurd or something like that. I just knew I needed it to be even steps going up. You know, they can’t all be different heights, or tilted.”Burke, seated at center left, with her fellow castmates at the dinner party table in the Lincoln Center Theater production of “Epiphany.”Jeremy DanielIn John Lee Beatty’s design, they are neither. Burke is on perfectly solid ground, which leaves her free to do the destabilizing. That is something of a specialty of hers: luring an audience in with a portrayal that on its surface is so instantly fascinating that we never think to expect that there’s more underneath. And there is always, always more underneath — comic, tragic or very possibly both.To Tyne Rafaeli, the director of “Epiphany,” Burke’s “particular brand of humor” and “ability to mask a simmering fragility” made her the ideal match for Morkan, a character who draws even new acquaintances toward her and elicits from them the impulse to help her.“Marylouise is that,” Rafaeli said. “She has that effect on other artists. People who are around Marylouise, they want to collaborate with her. They want to lean toward her. She just has that kind of energetic pull. So the line between her and the character is very thin, obviously.”Morkan is for Burke a rare starring part. Another was Kimberly, the teenager with the rapid-aging disease in Lindsay-Abaire’s “Kimberly Akimbo,” a role she originated in 2001, long before the play morphed into a musical. A character actor, Burke has been performing on New York stages since she arrived in the city in 1973, when she was 32 and eager “to have more opportunities to act for free,” she said, kidding but not. “It never occurred to me that I would ever in my whole life get paid to act.”Burke with John Gallagher Jr. in David Lindsay-Abaire’s 2001 play “Kimberly Akimbo” at City Center’s Stage I.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt was another eight years before she got her Actors’ Equity card, in a tiny part in an Off Broadway production of Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Broken Pitcher,” starring Larry Pine. By now she has amassed nearly 50 years of New York theater credits — many in the strange downtown productions she loves, among them the title role in the Mabou Mines-Trick Saddle show “Imagining the Imaginary Invalid,” at La MaMa in 2016.Her screen credits include movies like “Sideways,” in which she played the sprightly broken mother to Paul Giamatti’s middle-aged wreck, and television series like Netflix’s “Ozark,” in which she had a darkly delightful, Season 3 arc as the marriage therapist to Laura Linney and Jason Bateman’s extremely crimey central couple.“I actually knew probably from the time I was 13 or 14 that I wanted to act,” Burke said from behind a white KN95 mask that engulfed her lower face. “But it seemed like such an impossible dream. And I never admitted that to anybody.”She spent her childhood in Steelton, Pa., a Bethlehem Steel company town where her father owned a grocery store and her mother was a homemaker with comic timing that Burke inherited. The town was proud of its high school football team, and she played fight songs on clarinet in the school band at their games. But she didn’t know anyone who acted.Her adolescence coincided with the cookie-cutter conservative age of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and her family’s expectation — “once they found out that I was smart” — was that she would become a teacher. Off at college, though, in what she called “a major rebellion,” she swiftly changed her major from education to English, with a philosophy minor, and started acting in school plays.“I just always felt better when I was in a play,” she said, wrapping her arms protectively around her body, making herself even smaller. “I just always felt more who I was.”Hang on, what is that arm-wrapping gesture about? Burke hesitated, considered. Then: “I’d like to be nice to that girl back there,” she said, meaning her young self, the one with the “incongruous dream.”Burke at Lincoln Center. When it comes to acting in his new play “Epiphany,” the playwright Brian Watkins said her “level of specificity is just a gift to a writer.”Celeste Sloman for The New York TimesAfter college she earned a master’s degree in English literature, and discovered as a teaching assistant that she hated getting up in front of a class to speak. Floundering after a brief marriage in her mid-20s, she found herself living with a sympathetic aunt in suburban Philadelphia, holding down day jobs and taking classes at night at the nearby Hedgerow Theater Company.For years after she moved to New York, office jobs — copy editing, proofreading, word processing — kept her afloat. When “Kimberly Akimbo” opened Off Broadway in 2003, she said, five of her ex-bosses came to see it with their wives.She first worked with Lindsay-Abaire on his play “A Devil Inside” at Soho Rep in 1997; his “Fuddy Meers,” two years later at Manhattan Theater Club, was a career turning point, because casting directors started to notice her.When Watkins asked Lindsay-Abaire about casting Burke for “Epiphany,” Lindsay-Abaire thought it would make perfect sense. While their plays are very different, he said, “there is that dual tone of funny grief that runs under both of our works.”He told Watkins of Burke’s extraordinary devotion to playwrights, which Watkins marveled at nonetheless when she questioned him closely on the pronunciation he intended for the exclamation “Agh,” which appears repeatedly in her lines.“That level of specificity is just a gift to a writer,” he said.Even more strikingly, Burke was fighting through brain fog and physical fatigue to learn her lines, having had Covid just before rehearsals started.But Morkan is in her bones now — and Burke does, as Lindsay-Abaire said, come “bounding down those stairs like she was a 14-year-old.”At a time when, she said, theater is still “not the same” as it was prepandemic, she feels grateful for Lincoln Center Theater’s caution about Covid protocols, and grateful that its audience is masked. She is also happy to be back onstage, alongside eight fellow actors, telling her character’s story.“It’s very precious to be going out there,” she said. “Going out there together.” More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Grown-ish’ and ‘The Old Man’

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      One show, on Freeform, begins its fifth season while the other, on FX, wraps up its first.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, July 18-24. Details and times are subject to change.Monday2022 MLB HOME RUN DERBY 8 p.m. on ESPN. As part of Major League Baseball’s All-Star Week, which includes its All-Star Game and the M.L.B. draft, it will be hosting its annual Home Run Derby. For the past two years Pete Alonso has been the winner of this event and the $1 million cash prize that goes along with it. With Alonso competing again this year, he is the one to beat.SID AND NANCY (1986) 10 p.m. on TCM. This movie, which centers on the Sex Pistols, Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, tells a fictionalized tale of the breakdown of the relationship between Sid (Gary Oldman) and Nancy (Chloe Webb). Though the film is somewhat of a love story, the couple’s actual relationship ended in 1978 when Spungen died at age 20 and Vicious died months later of an overdose while awaiting trial for her murder. The New York Times critic Janet Maslin wrote in her 1986 review of the film that “what it does best is to generate odd, unexpected images that epitomize the characters’ affectlessness and rage.”TuesdayFrom left: Nick Jonas, Shakira and Liza Koshy in “Dancing With Myself.”Fernando Decillis/NBCDANCING WITH MYSELF 10 p.m. on NBC. This show featuring viral dancing challenges, a live studio audience and the celebrity judges Nick Jonas, Shakira and Liza Koshy is wrapping up its first season this week. Each episode features 12 contestants who learn short dances, often similar to TikTok dances, and then the live audience members vote for their favorites. “This is a show that is for everyone,” Shakira told The Times for an article in June. “It’s about celebrating the love of dance and personal stories among all people, not just professionals.”Wednesday2022 ESPY AWARDS 8 p.m. on ABC. The ESPY awards are going to be held on Wednesday night in Los Angeles. Steph Curry is stepping into the host role and he is up for three awards. (He has previously won two: Best Male Athlete in 2015 and Best N.B.A. Player in 2021.) The ESPYs announced the nominees in late June and the public voting period ended on Sunday. Other nominees include Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers and Katie Ledecky.GROWN-ISH 10 p.m. on Freeform. “Grown-ish” is coming back for a fifth season this week, with familiar faces, new faces and minus some characters. Season 4 of the show ended with a high school graduation which was a farewell to six characters: Ana, Nomi, Jazz, Luca, Sky and Vivek. Yara Shahidi (Zoey), Trevor Jackson (Aaron) and Diggy Simmons (Doug) are all returning to the show as their characters move from high school to college. Six new cast members — Matthew Sato, Tara Raani, Justine Skye, Amelie Zilber, Ceyair Wright and Slick Woods — are joining the show. This season will have an eight-episode run.ThursdayPrince during his Purple Rain Tour.Nancy Bundt/PBSPRINCE AND THE REVOLUTION: THE PURPLE RAIN TOUR 8:30 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). On March 30, 1985, at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, N.Y., Prince took the stage. Though it was previously available in 2017, the video recording of the concert has been remastered. The PBS broadcast of the show features performances of “Delirious,” “1999,” “Little Red Corvette,” and an 18-minute version of “Purple Rain.”THE OLD MAN 10 p.m. on FX. “The Old Man,” based on the novel by Thomas Perry of the same name, is wrapping up its first season this week. The show, which stars Jeff Bridges (Dan Chase), John Lithgow (Harold Harper) and Amy Brenneman (Zoe), follows a man who left the C.I.A. and has since been living off the grid. “The seriousness of the show’s approach to Chase, and Bridges’s excellence in the role, are what set ‘The Old Man’ apart,” Mike Hale wrote in his review for the Times, “but it’s also (through Week 4) a well-above-average if unusually pensive and introspective spy thriller.” The completion of this season has been a long time coming — the show first paused production at the start of the pandemic and then again when Bridges began chemotherapy for lymphoma and contracted the coronavirus while undergoing treatment.FridayKILLER’S KISS (1955) 8 p.m. on TCM. After his feature film debut “Fear and Desire” in 1953, Stanley Kubrick followed it up with this film noir. After a budding romance begins to form between Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith) and Gloria Price (Irene Kane), Gordon must search the city for Price after her evil boss kidnaps her. “Using Times Square and even the subway as his backdrop, Mr. Kubrick worked in an uncharacteristically naturalistic style despite the genre material, with mixed but still fascinating results,” the New York Times critic Janet Maslin wrote in her 1994 review of the film.SaturdaySUPERSTAR RACING EXPERIENCE 8 p.m. on CBS. This show, which aired its first season last summer, is finishing up a second season this Saturday. Every Saturday since mid-June, CBS has aired one race of the six-race, short-track racing series. The season began this year at the Five Flags Speedway in Pensacola, Fla., and finishes up Saturday at the Sharon Speedway in Hartford, Ohio. For the season finale, Dave Blaney, alongside his son Ryan Blaney, will represent Sharon Speedway.SundayJACKASS SHARK WEEK 2.0 9 p.m. on Discovery. Shark Week is back this Sunday and it will kick off with a collaboration with the cast of “Jackass,” for a second year in a row. Last year, the cast members performed stunts with the sharks that led to the guest star Sean McInerney, a.k.a. Poopies, getting bitten by a shark and rushed to the hospital. This year, McInerney is heading back into the shark-infested waters, alongside Chris Pontius, Wee Man, Jasper Dolphin, Dark Shark and Zach Holmes to overcome his fear of sharks. More

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      Jak Knight, Known for ‘Big Mouth’ Netflix Series, Dies at 28

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      Mr. Knight, who was a stand-up comedian, died on Thursday in Los Angeles, his family said.Jak Knight, a stand-up comedian, writer and actor known for his role on the animated Netflix series “Big Mouth,” died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 28.His family on Saturday confirmed his death in a statement that did not provide a cause of death.Mr. Knight had recently finished filming as an actor in the movie “First Time Female Director,” written and directed by Chelsea Peretti.Starting in March, Mr. Knight starred with Chris Redd, Sam Jay and Langston Kerman in the Peacock series “Bust Down,” which he also helped to create. He was also an executive producer on the HBO talk show “Pause with Sam Jay” and was nominated this year for a Writers Guild of America award for his work on the show.From 2017-21, he was a writer and producer for the hit animated sitcom “Big Mouth” and voiced the character Devon. Mr. Knight worked as a writer for the ABC comedy “Black-ish” from 2019-20. His 30-minute Netflix stand-up special aired in 2018 as part of “The Comedy Lineup” series.He was named a 2014 Comedy Central Comic to Watch, a 2015 New Face at the Montreal Just for Laughs Festival and an L.A. Comic to Watch by TimeOut in 2018.He opened for various stand-up comedians, including Dave Chappelle, Joel McHale, Eric Andre, Moshe Kasher and Hannibal Buress.Details about his surviving relatives were not immediately available.As news of his death spread, tributes to Mr. Knight appeared on social media.The comedian James Adomian said on Twitter that whenever he was performing with Mr. Knight, he knew it would be a “wildly funny night.”“He was winning big, all of it well deserved, so witty and memorable every moment on stage and off,” he wrote. More

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      Using Comedy to Push for Abortion Rights

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      Lizz Winstead, the “Daily Show” co-creator, has marshaled her contacts in the standup world to help supporters turn protest into action.“Things are awesome — never better!” joked Lizz Winstead, the comedian, producer and abortion rights activist. “Sleeping well; no diarrhea. Things are awesome.”Things are decidedly not awesome, but comic misdirection might as well be oxygen for Winstead, who has banked her career on satirizing politics and media and calling out hypocrisy, as the co-creator of “The Daily Show” and a host and director on the now-defunct left-wing radio network Air America. For most of the last decade or so, though, she has been singularly, steadfastly focused on one issue, abortion. Her preferred method for delivering her message is the variety show: a little schtick, a little song, a little taboo talk.“Don’t be ashamed of having an abortion,” the comedian Joyelle Nicole Johnson said onstage at “Bro v. Wade,” a benefit show in Brooklyn that Winstead organized recently with her group Abortion Access Front. “Maybe be ashamed of how you got pregnant. I got pregnant the classy way: On the floor. On an Amtrak train. In the handicapped restroom, babeeey!”Joking about abortion is nothing new; George Carlin went there, among many others. But Winstead’s goal is sharper: with righteous fervor and a Rolodex of comic all-stars, she leads a nonprofit that uses unexpected tools — like humor and men — to advocate for abortion as health care and as a fundamental human right.She told her own abortion story on a Comedy Central special in 1992, and in the decades since, has been warning, on stages across the country and in social media campaigns, that reproductive rights were in jeopardy. Long before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last month, Abortion Access Front was preparing. Now, it is mobilizing as never before: On Sunday it will host “Operation Save Abortion,” a livestreamed daylong training session, with more than 60 partners and 25 panelists from local and national care, funding and policy organizations, and secure ways for viewers to plan direct, on-the-ground action. It will be capped off by a set from Johnson, a board member and ride-or-die touring performer, who lately has become accustomed to delivering punch lines to an audience that has spent the day weeping.Joyelle Nicole Johnson, left, with Winstead, is a board member and ride-or-die touring performer for Abortion Access Front. Nina Westervelt for The New York Times“Politicians aren’t going to save us,” Winstead, 60, said. Laughter won’t either. But with her network of grassroots advocates, abortion providers and entertainers, she hopes to change the narrative around abortion, eliminate the shame and give newly fired-up supporters the tools to get involved. “If people have to march one more time, and rage and feel helpless and hopeless, they win,” she said of her anti-abortion opponents. “We need to give people who are, like, ‘What can we do?’ an answer,” she added.That includes the people responsible for 50 percent of a pregnancy — men. On the eve of Father’s Day last month, Abortion Access Front produced a “Dads for Choice” video starring W. Kamau Bell, the comedian, CNN host and commentator, and inviting men to consider who bears the monetary costs of contraception: “Nobody ever got pregnant from a vibrator!”“The more complicated the issues are, the more humor can break things down to their basic points, and clarify things,” Bell said. Especially for topics that have traditionally been deemed uncomfortable, “humor can invite people in.”Why might comedy be an especially effective tool now? “Well, the other stuff hasn’t worked,” said David Cross, who was part of the all-male “Bro v. Wade” lineup. “Look where we find ourselves.”Abortion Access Front performances feature sketch comedy; music; standups like Sarah Silverman, Michelle Buteau, Jenny Yang, Aida Rodriguez and Negin Farsad and notables like the writer Dan Savage and filmmaker Mark Duplass; and on the road, conversations with local abortion providers, to highlight their needs. Even pro-abortion-rights crowds are often edified and galvanized, according to audience surveys collected by a researcher from the University of California, Los Angeles.“To give you the joy and then the information and then give you something to do, that trifecta of an evening is magic,” Winstead said. Beginning in 2016, the showcases toured annually across dozens of cities, including in states hostile to abortion.David Cross performing at “Bro v. Wade.”Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesOne of the group’s messages is that everybody can find a way to contribute; abortion rights supporters need not march in every street protest or continually reach into their overstretched wallets. “If you have 10 minutes a month to give, I can give you something to do that’s meaningful,” Winstead said. “And I don’t want you to feel bad that that’s all you can give. Life is too messed up right now.”At one clinic, in Huntsville, Ala., Abortion Access Front and its volunteers planted hedges out front, to help block anti-abortion protesters. In Detroit, at the request of another clinic, they threw a block party as a gesture of welcome and gratitude to the community.“For a lot of these folks, in the only clinic in their state, they feel really isolated,” said Amy Elizabeth Alterman, an abortion scholar, ethnographer and public health researcher at U.C.L.A. Out of safety concerns or for social reasons, “many abortion providers don’t tell friends and family what they do.”Winstead’s organization, which has a full-time staff of 10 and many volunteers, served as a much-needed balm. “When a band of feminists explodes out of a van, wearing pro-abortion swag and saying, ‘Thank you for what you do. What can we do and how can we celebrate you?’ it’s often very emotional,” Alterman said. “Sometimes providers cry.”Winstead and the group are not trying to reach across the aisle to change anti-abortion evangelists’ minds. Since she became outspoken on the issue, she has personally experienced a backlash. “My parents, when they were alive, got calls constantly saying, your daughter’s a baby murderer,” she said. They were Catholic — “it really scared them.” Her shows were boycotted; old employers were called in efforts at intimidation. She “paid a lot of money,” she said, to erase her personal data from the internet.Now, “there’s no place I can get fired from — come at me, I don’t care,” she said. Fomenting any cultural shift requires real dedication, said Dean Obeidallah, the comic and radio host, who was on the “Bro v. Wade” bill and performed at Winstead’s first abortion-rights benefit a decade ago. “I can tell you from years of doing comedy, and trying to dispel stereotypes about Arab Americans, it’s never a light-bulb moment,” he said. “For people on your side already, you have to make them feel like they’re in the right place. For people who aren’t on the right side, or even have hate, it’s chipping away.”“To give you the joy and then the information and then give you something to do, that trifecta of an evening is magic,” Winstead said of her group’s performances.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesFor those in the Minnesota-born Winstead’s orbit, it’s not surprising that she rose from a politically minded standup to an activist leader. “She’s just one of those — you meet them throughout life — boundless energy, high-strung, talk very quickly, gesticulate wildly, kind of people,” said Cross, a friend for more than 30 years.Johnson, the comic who has been with the organization since it started, said, “I think she’s a non-somniac, like Obama’s a non-somniac, to be able to do all the things she does. Her brain is constantly worrying — since 2016, her hair has turned white.”Even for Abortion Access Front, whose allies long knew that reproductive care and women’s rights were under attack, the weeks since Roe v. Wade was overturned have been, as Winstead said, gut-churningly surreal and destabilizing. “I’ve always felt unsafe in this country,” said Johnson, who is Black, “but now it’s almost a slapstick level of unsafe. It’s chaos.”Winstead said, “This is almost our last shot, because we’re burned out — and that’s by design.”But this moment has also sharpened activists’ focus, and expanded their tent. Since Roe was overturned, “I talk about it every chance — you’re going to hear abortion, abortion, abortion out of Joyelle’s mouth,” Johnson said. “I do it for the women in the audience who are not as liberated as me, those women who cannot tell their closest family members. I hope it liberates some people.” Viva Ruiz, a performer and activist whose group, Thank God For Abortion, is involved in the training session Sunday, said, “Everybody needs to use their way — the more variance there is, the more tactics there are, the more successful we can be.” She added, “The thing is, to just not stop. To keep showing up.”Together, Winstead agreed, “we are more motivated to fight and stay in the fight. And be relentless.” More