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      In Opening Statements, Cosby Is Accused of Assaulting Judy Huth as Teenager

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      The trial stemming from Ms. Huth’s lawsuit, which says Mr. Cosby sexually assaulted her when she was a minor, began in Los Angeles as her lawyers described what she says occurred in the Playboy Mansion.Bill Cosby had taken Judy Huth and her friend to the game room of the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles in 1975 when she asked to use the bathroom in an adjoining bedroom, Ms. Huth’s lawyers said in court on Wednesday.When she came out of the bathroom, Mr. Cosby was sitting on the bed. “He taps on the bed,” said Nathan Goldberg, a lawyer for Ms. Huth who has said she was 16 at the time, as if to say, “‘Come here.’”“When she did timidly, that’s when he pounced,” Mr. Goldberg said during opening statements in the trial of a civil case brought by Ms. Huth against Mr. Cosby for sexual assault.In their opening remarks, Mr. Cosby’s lawyers disputed Ms. Huth’s account, suggesting she had been an older, and willing, visitor to the Playboy Mansion who, by her own account, did not flee after an encounter with Mr. Cosby but rather stayed on for hours, swimming in the pool and watching a movie.“Boy, did Judy and Donna enjoy themselves,” a lawyer for Mr. Cosby, Jennifer Bonjean, said, referring to Ms. Huth and her friend.The trial, expected to last seven to 10 days, is being held at the Santa Monica branch of Los Angeles Superior Court.In their filings, Mr. Cosby’s lawyers have denied the allegations, describing them as a fabrication. “We believe that Mr. Cosby will fully be exonerated once the jurors hear the evidence as well as examine the many inconsistent accounts given by Ms. Huth,” Mr. Cosby’s spokesman, Andrew Wyatt, said in a statement.The Sexual Assault Cases Against Bill CosbyAfter Bill Cosby’s 2018 criminal conviction for sexual assault was overturned, the first civil case accusing him of sexual misconduct has now reached trial.The Civil Trial: Judy Huth has accused Mr. Cosby of assaulting her as a teenager. She sued in 2014, but the case had been on hold while he was criminally prosecuted.Criminal Conviction: In 2018, a jury found the disgraced entertainer guilty of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his home near 14 years earlier,His Release From Prison: After the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the conviction, Mr. Cosby was released from prison on June 30, 2021.The Ruling: The conviction was overturned on the grounds that prosecutors violated Mr. Cosby’s rights by reneging on a promise not to charge him.In detailing Ms. Huth’s account, Mr. Goldberg said Mr. Cosby tried to kiss her and put his hands down her pants. When she told him she was on her period, he dropped his pants, and “took her hand with his” and forced her to perform a sex act, he said.Mr. Goldberg spoke for a little more than an hour, recounting how Ms. Huth and her friend were playing Frisbee when they spotted Mr. Cosby filming a movie in a park in San Marino, Calif.He invited them onto the set and days later brought them to his tennis club, where, Mr. Goldberg continued, Mr. Cosby encouraged them to take a drink every time they lost at pool. Afterward, Mr. Goldberg said, Mr. Cosby had them follow him in a car to the Playboy Mansion, where the encounter in the game room occurred.Mr. Goldberg said Ms. Huth wanted to leave at that point, but her friend, Donna Samuelson, persuaded her to stay. Ms. Samuelson, who testified on Wednesday, said that Mr. Cosby had Ms. Huth “locked in the room,” and said Ms. Huth was crying when they went outside.“She grabbed her purse and said we are getting out of here,” Ms. Samuelson told the court. “She told me Bill Cosby tried to have sex with her.”She said she and Ms. Huth talked for about half an hour in her car, but she persuaded her friend to stay because she thought spending an evening at the mansion would calm her down.“She told me not to tell anyone,” said Ms. Samuelson. “It was embarrassing and humiliating to her.”They swam and ordered drinks, mingled with famous actors and, later, watched a movie. Only years later, in 2014, when Ms. Huth’s son turned 15 and other women started to come forward with similar accounts about Mr. Cosby, did the emotional damage of what had happened to Ms. Huth come to the fore, her lawyer said.“It was like a cork popped out of the bottle and all of her buried feelings rushed to the surface,” Mr. Goldberg said.Ms. Huth has produced photographs of the visit taken by Ms. Samuelson at the mansion showing Ms. Huth with Mr. Cosby. Ms. Bonjean accused Ms. Huth and her friend of “saving mementos of their rape,” raising questions about why a sexual assault victim would keep such tokens of the visit. The photographs were part of “a plan to make a buck,” said Ms. Bonjean, who spoke for about an hour. “Judy Huth has been trying to cash in on these photos for decades.”Mr. Cosby’s legal team has also introduced records from the Playboy Mansion that showed Mr. Cosby visiting with two unnamed guests, and said the records showed that the two guests had stayed at the mansion for about 12 hours. Ms. Huth’s suit, first filed in 2014, had been largely put on hold while Mr. Cosby was being criminally prosecuted in another case in Pennsylvania where he was accused of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand. The 2018 criminal conviction in the Constand case was overturned last year by an appellate court on “due process” grounds, and he was freed from prison.Ms. Huth’s case is now being followed by some of the many other women who have accused Mr. Cosby of sexual misconduct, in part because it is the first civil case accusing Mr. Cosby of sexual assault to reach trial. Mr. Cosby has denied all allegations of sexual assault, and said any encounters were consensual.Bill Cosby has denied sexually assaulting Ms. Huth and has challenged the timeline she has put forth of when they met. Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Cosby has acknowledged meeting with Ms. Huth at the Playboy Mansion but denied her allegation of sexual battery and has challenged her contention that she was a minor at the time.Ms. Huth’s legal team said it intends to introduce two other women to testify about similar encounters with Mr. Cosby.One of the women will testify, Mr. Goldberg said, that Mr. Cosby, whom she met at a doughnut store where she worked, was also taken to the Playboy Mansion by Mr. Cosby. In the game room, Mr. Cosby gave her a pill, the lawyer said, and he assaulted her as she lost consciousness.“In each instance, he meets them in circumstances that don’t appear threatening,” Mr. Goldberg said. “He takes them places where they seem comfortable. They don’t feel threatened in this mansion, the movie set. He does not care about their family or friends nearby. He has no fear.”Mr. Cosby, 84, has invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and will not testify or attend the trial, his spokesman has said. Ms. Huth, 64, attended court Wednesday and is expected to testify later in the trial.Ms. Huth also reported her accusation to the police in 2014, but prosecutors declined to file criminal charges because the statute of limitations had passed.She was able to file a lawsuit because under California law, in some cases, the statute of limitations can be extended for people who say they only recently recognized as adults the damage done by a repressed incident of sexual abuse they experienced as a child.The deadline to file such a suit is determined in part by when the person, as an adult, becomes aware of the severe psychological effect of the abuse.Mr. Cosby’s lawyers have questioned whether she had only remembered the alleged abuse a short time before filing the suit because, they said, she had contacted a tabloid about it 10 years earlier.They also tried to stop the trial from going ahead when Ms. Huth recently changed her recollection about when the encounter occurred. She initially said that it had happened in 1974, when she was 15. But more recently she concluded that it was actually in 1975, when she was 16. The law in California, then and now, holds that a 16-year-old is classified as a minor, but Mr. Cosby has contended that he did not meet Ms. Huth until several years later.She said she only recently realized she had the date wrong after, among other things, reviewing documents put forward by Mr. Cosby that clarified when the movie filming she recalled witnessing had taken place. More

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      For Norm Macdonald and Bo Burnham, No Audience Is No Problem

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      Filmed during lockdown, a new Netflix special from Norm Macdonald and outtakes from Bo Burnham’s “Inside” suggest that crowd laughter can be limiting.If a comic tells a joke in the forest, did it really kill?There’s a school of thought, one I have long been sympathetic to, that believes that stand-up without a live audience isn’t stand-up at all. Just listen to the debrief among famous comedians that, oddly, follows right after Norm Macdonald’s “Nothing Special,” his posthumous set recorded in his home during lockdown in 2020 and released this week on Netflix.Dave Chappelle compares comedy without an audience to a swim meet without water. David Letterman keeps returning to the point that without an audience, Macdonald didn’t have his “partner,” and something was missing. The closest to a dissent comes from Conan O’Brien, who makes the point that Macdonald always seemed like he could do comedy by himself, saying that when Macdonald appeared on his talk show, the host felt irrelevant.Macdonald is perhaps uniquely positioned to serve as an example of the shortcomings of the audience. His standards could be higher than the crowd’s. There are stories of him deciding to do jokes on “Saturday Night Live” that he knew were funny even if they died in rehearsal.This final special, a raw and moving production, is a gift to fans. It’s a pleasure to hear one last time his faux-folksy locutions (“It doesn’t make no sense”) and the way his jokes could twist (“I have opinions that everyone holds, like, I don’t know, yellow is the best color”) or move full steam ahead. After years of therapy, he says, he discovered why he has a fear of flying. “It’s the crashing and the dying,” he says, his wide eyes twinkling.Judged by aesthetic slickness and tight jokes, this hour isn’t nearly as successful as his last one, from 2017, “Hitler’s Dog, Gossip & Trickery.” But it’s mesmerizing in different ways. There’s something uncanny about letting the jokes stand on their own, the quiet awkwardness and messy intrusions (a dog barks, a cellphone goes off) offering a reminder that something bigger than showbiz is happening here, a glimpse of a man facing the end, giving his last jokes everything he’s got.Norm Macdonald made Netflix’s “Nothing Special” in his home during lockdown in 2020; he died last year.NetflixMacdonald, who died of cancer last year and is quoted in a scroll at the start of the special saying he filmed it before a medical procedure because he “didn’t want to leave anything on the table in case things went south,” becomes unusually earnest about his mother, expressing what she means to him. In what seems like a tangent, he points out that she didn’t speak with irony and couldn’t tell a good story but she “knew how to love.” As he gazes off, his face inches away from the screen, you might wonder if this is heartfelt or part of a joke (hint: could be both) before the punchline lands. There’s a cleverness as well as a poignancy here that I don’t think could be replicated if an audience were there.Live entertainment is of course singular, and the lockdown only emphasized my appreciation for it. But despite what you might have heard, audiences are often wrong. (Think of the famous comic you hate the most and I promise you they have delighted the crowd.) The audience has an underexamined impact on the aesthetic of specials. Comics spend so much time thanking and praising the people in the seats that it’s worth at least considering an opposing view.Here goes: The audience in specials is fundamentally manipulative, a bullying intrusion on the relationship between artist and observer at home. It can operate like peer pressure. And just as it adds to the excitement of stand-up, the steady, familiar sound of laughter, the most beloved cliché in all of comedy, can also be limiting. When Macdonald talks about his fear of dying and finding a different God than he expected, no sound distracts from the poignancy, and you find yourself looking closer at his face, studying it for clues, hints that may or may not be there.The pandemic forced so many comics to learn about performing to screens. Most didn’t like it, but some had considerable success. And a comic working by himself, Bo Burnham, made “Inside,” the most acclaimed special last year and one of the finest works of art about that period.As it happens, Burnham, who has been relatively quiet for the past year, released over an hour of outtakes from “Inside” the same week that Macdonald’s special premiered.Burnham and Macdonald are from different generations and have clashing styles, one theatrical and flamboyantly satirical, the other deadpan and folksy. But they share a love of language and a bone-deep ironic sensibility. And in these specials, both haunted by death, they show that removing the audience can access emotions a traditional special cannot.Burnham tapped into the pandemic zeitgeist while mounting a musical comedy that portrayed his own unraveling mind. The lockdown became a metaphor for larger trends of the internet age, and “Inside” became a hit not only on Netflix but also on social media, among young audiences who will delight in and study this fertile new release, free on YouTube.Burnham includes many cut songs and satirical sketches as well as alternative versions of familiar bits. It doesn’t play like a director’s cut, but it’s also more than a series of odds and ends not ready for prime time. If anything, it’s instructive to see how some of the bits are funnier than what is in the original special.In one outtake, Burnham performs a parody of a Joe Rogan podcast.YoutubeAmong the darlings that Burnham killed was a scathing, spot on parody of a Joe Rogan podcast, with Burnham on split screen playing two different guys. It captures an essential incoherence of so many thin-skinned comics when they complain about offended audiences: The podcasters insist they are just telling inconsequential jokes a second before describing comics as philosophers.An even more hilarious spoof comes later when multiple versions of Burnham, one representing the writer of “Inside,” the other the director and on and on, appear in a grid onscreen to be interviewed by a glib internet journalist. When they’re asked why there isn’t more diversity, they all freeze and then one Burnham pipes up to flamboyantly offer gratitude for the question. Burnham is gifted at mocking the performative liberal sanctimony of the moment as well as corporate attempts to exploit it, such as his very realistic YouTube ads that pop up below. One reads, “It’s mental health awareness decade at Kohl’s,” followed by the promise: “All laceless shoes 60 percent off.”He has a song at the end of these outtakes that is a clever riff on the chicken crossing the road joke. It could have been a closer to the special, but he cut it. Instead, we see him panicking at the sight of an audience.Performing to no one doesn’t fit most comedy, but it has its advantages. Burnham and Macdonald created a more direct relationship with the viewer, one with more intimacy than can be generated by a close-up.Burnham wanted to capture the uneasy mood of the early pandemic as viscerally as possible. And he clearly succeeded. When my 13-year-old daughter saw “Inside,” her first reaction was: “Is he OK?”It’s not something you would ask about a comedian who just received a round of applause. More

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      What to Know About Bill Cosby’s Civil Trial on Sexual Assault Accusation

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      Ms. Huth has sued Mr. Cosby, asserting that he sexually assaulted her in the 1970s when she was a teenager.Bill Cosby is being sued by Judy Huth in civil court in Los Angeles. The trial started Wednesday after a jury was selected last week.Ms. Huth has accused Mr. Cosby, 84, of sexually assaulting her as a teenager and sued him in 2014. But the civil suit was largely put on hold while Mr. Cosby was being criminally prosecuted in another case where he was accused of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand.Mr. Cosby’s criminal conviction in the Constand case in Pennsylvania was overturned last year by an appellate court, and he was freed from prison.Ms. Huth’s case is being followed by some of the many women who have accused Mr. Cosby of sexual misconduct, in part because it is the first civil case accusing Mr. Cosby of sexual assault to reach trial.Mr. Cosby has denied sexually abusing Ms. Huth and the other women who have made that accusation against him, suggesting any sexual encounters were consensual.The Sexual Assault Cases Against Bill CosbyAfter Bill Cosby’s 2018 criminal conviction for sexual assault was overturned, the first civil case accusing him of sexual misconduct has now reached trial.The Civil Trial: Judy Huth has accused Mr. Cosby of assaulting her as a teenager. She sued in 2014, but the case had been on hold while he was criminally prosecuted.Criminal Conviction: In 2018, a jury found the disgraced entertainer guilty of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his home near 14 years earlier,His Release From Prison: After the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the conviction, Mr. Cosby was released from prison on June 30, 2021.The Ruling: The conviction was overturned on the grounds that prosecutors violated Mr. Cosby’s rights by reneging on a promise not to charge him.What does Ms. Huth say happened?In court papers, Ms. Huth says that she and a friend met Mr. Cosby in 1975 when they wandered onto a movie set in a park in San Marino, Calif., where Mr. Cosby was shooting a film.Days later, at his invitation, they went to his tennis club, she says in court papers, where he gave her and her friend alcohol before taking them to the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles. There, Ms. Huth says in her lawsuit, he forced her to perform a sex act on him in a bedroom. She says Mr. Cosby tried to put his hand down her pants and then forced her to fondle him.What does Mr. Cosby say?Mr. Cosby acknowledges meeting with Ms. Huth at the Playboy Mansion but denies her allegation of sexual battery and has challenged her contention that she was a minor at the time.His lawyers have pointed out in court proceedings that Ms. Huth’s recollection regarding when the encounter occurred has changed. She initially said that it had happened in 1974, when she was 15. But more recently she concluded that it was actually in 1975, when she was 16, according to court papers. The law in California, then and now, holds that a 16-year-old is classified as a minor, but Mr. Cosby has contended that he did not meet Ms. Huth until several years later.Why is this a civil trial?In 2014, when she filed the civil case, Ms. Huth also reported her accusation to the police. But the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office declined to file criminal charges because the statute of limitations had passed.Ms. Huth was able to file a lawsuit because under California law, in some cases, the statute of limitations can be extended for adults who contend they were victims of sexual abuse as children but repressed the experience.In 2020, California law was amended to further extend the statute of limitations for sexual assault filings in civil court.Is Mr. Cosby facing other civil suits?The civil case is one of the last unsettled lawsuits against Mr. Cosby.He has already faced multiple other civil cases filed against him by women, many of whom sued him for defamation after his legal team dismissed as fictions their accusations of sexual misconduct by him. Eleven civil cases ended in settlements, with 10 of the settlements having been agreed to by Mr. Cosby’s former insurance company over his objections, according to his spokesman.Mr. Cosby also settled a civil case Ms. Constand brought against him in 2006 for $3.4 million.One other ongoing civil case was filed last year by Lili Bernard, an actor and visual artist, who accused him of drugging and sexually assaulting her at a hotel in Atlantic City in 1990, when she was 26. Mr. Cosby has denied her account. The Bernard case is still in its early stages.Why was Mr. Cosby released from prison?Mr. Cosby was found guilty in 2018 of drugging and sexually assaulting another woman, Andrea Constand, at his home near Philadelphia and was given a three to 10 year sentence in state prison.But that conviction was overturned last year on due process grounds. An appeals court ruled that a “non-prosecution agreement” with a previous prosecutor meant that Mr. Cosby should not have been charged in the case.How does this civil case differ from the criminal case?In this civil case in Los Angeles Superior Court, the burden of proof is lower than in a criminal trial. It will be in front of a 12-person jury, with at least nine of 12 votes needed for a verdict. It is expected to last seven to 10 days. Ms. Huth is seeking damages.Mr. Cosby has invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and will not testify and will not attend the trial, his spokesman has said. Ms. Huth is expected to testify, as is the friend who she has said accompanied her to the Playboy Mansion in 1975. More

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      Gil Birmingham Took the Road Less Traveled

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      A star of “Under the Banner of Heaven” and “Yellowstone,” he started performing when there wasn’t much room for Indigenous actors. His persistence is paying off.Early in “Under the Banner of Heaven,” FX’s limited Hulu series based on the true story of two grisly murders in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Detective Bill Taba makes his stand. His partner (Andrew Garfield) on a small-town Utah police force, a church member, is getting territorial and pulling rank. Taba, a Paiute Indian played by Gil Birmingham, isn’t having it.“I’m well aware that my skin is darker than most in this valley,” Taba, who comes from Las Vegas, tells his younger partner. “And I’m very well aware that’s not smiled upon in a 99 percent L.D.S. town. But I know cases like this a hell of a lot better than you do.”It’s the kind of moment, with a Native character taking charge and claiming authority, that was rarely found on TV until recently. The kind of moment that excites Birmingham. Best known for playing the tribal chairman Thomas Rainwater on the hit western “Yellowstone,” Birmingham, who is of Comanche heritage, has become one of the most visible Native actors on television. That means he’s not just doing it for himself.Birmingham (left, with Andrew Garfield) plays a detective in “Under the Banner of Heaven,” an FX series based on the true-crime book by Jon Krakauer.Michelle Faye/FX“I think there’s a responsibility to represent all of our people truthfully,” Birmingham said from Los Angeles a few weeks before the series finale of “Banner,” which comes to Hulu on Thursday.“Generally speaking, you might be the only Native on a set,” he added. “So you really have to have some integrity about the nature of the portrayal of the character.”Birmingham, a tall, muscular and youthful 68, has been at this for a while, even if you’ve only noticed him recently. He’s one of those overnight success stories that took a few decades to tell.A military brat raised around the country — San Antonio, Kentucky, San Francisco, Alaska — he trained to be a petrochemical engineer. His one-word assessment of his first career: “boring.” He preferred singing, playing guitar and body building. Then, one day in the early ’80s, a music video producer approached him as he worked out in a Los Angeles gym and offered him his first acting job, for the 1982 Diana Ross video “Muscles.” Go to YouTube and there’s a young, shirtless Birmingham, laughing and flexing.Tell him you’ve seen the video, and you’ll get a characteristically dry response: “Well, my apologies.”“He’s got a wicked sense of humor, but you don’t know it at first,” said Dustin Lance Black, the creator of “Under the Banner of Heaven,” from his London home. (The show is based on the 2003 investigative book by Jon Krakauer.)“I think sly is a good way to put it,” Black continued. “You’ll be sitting there, and he’ll be very quiet, and you realize he’s listening because he’ll just slip in a little barb that shows just how closely he’s observing. And that humor, it’s like a scalpel. It cuts right down into the truth.”After “Muscles,” his physique continued to serve him. He spent several years playing Conan the Barbarian at the Universal Studios of Hollywood theme park, using his free time to go on auditions. “There’s a whole journey of sacrifices that you’re making in your life to keep following that road and be diligent with it and be persistent,” Birmingham said. “I didn’t have the same appreciation for it in the beginning as I did later.“Then the very first pop culture exposure was with ‘Twilight.’ And I think that’s where most people came to know me.”From left: Pete Sands, Mo Brings Plenty, Birmingham, Cole Hauser, Kevin Costner and Wes Bentley in a scene from the runaway Paramount hit “Yellowstone.”Emerson Miller/Paramount NetworkAn actor’s big break is rarely high art. It’s usually something with a wide enough following to cement a face in the public consciousness. That’s what Birmingham got with the role of Billy Black, father of the hunky werewolf kid Jacob, in the five-movie “Twilight” franchise (2008-2012).More cotton candy than balanced meal, the movies, based on the megaselling vampire romance novels by Stephenie Meyer, made careers, including those of Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson. They also gave Birmingham his steadiest gig to that point.Most important to Birmingham, it made people happy.“Those movies give a lot of joy to a lot of people,” he said. “I know there’s some debate about whether the books are real literature. But if it speaks to people and it speaks to their heart and if it gives them some kind of joy or maybe escapism, then gosh, I think that’s such a great gift for any artist to give their audience.”Fast forward a few years. Birmingham is reading a script so good he can barely believe it. The writer has no shortage of confidence. The role is a droll Native American Texas Ranger named Alberto Parker, on the trail of a couple of bank robbers with his partner.The director, David Mackenzie, fights for Birmingham, and he gets the part, playing alongside Jeff Bridges in “Hell or High Water” (2016). The screenwriter, Taylor Sheridan, is floored.“‘I didn’t know who you were before,’” Birmingham recalled Sheridan saying. “‘But after seeing your work, you’ll never have to audition for me again.’” (Sheridan was unavailable to comment for this article.) And Sheridan was already cooking up a pet project, a TV series about a stubborn Montana rancher fighting to defend his land from encroaching modernity.That’s how Birmingham got the role of Thomas Rainwater on “Yellowstone,” the most watched show on cable. Ivy League educated, schooled in realpolitik, Rainwater is a thoroughly modern Indigenous character. He is also the savviest adversary of Kevin Costner’s rancher, John Dutton. Even as they do battle, they share a grudging, mutual respect.Birmingham got his start in a beefcake role in the 1982 Diana Ross video “Muscles.” “Well, my apologies,” he said when a reporter mentioned having seen the video.Michelle Groskopf for The New York Times“They share a real love for the land, and an intent to keep the land the way it is,” said Birmingham, who when we spoke was preparing to fly to Montana to shoot Season 5. The way Rainwater sees it, he is just trying to take back what was stolen from his people.Birmingham considers himself fortunate to have Sheridan, who also cast the actor in the film “Wind River,” in his corner. He is an ally when it comes to casting Native actors, Birmingham said. On top of that, he added, he’s just a great writer.“His work is unpredictable, and it’s so soulful,” Birmingham said. “It speaks in such a poetic language to the hearts of the characters.”“I’ll ride with whatever he writes,” he added.Birmingham is old enough to remember watching the likes of “Bonanza” and “Rawhide” during their first television runs in the ’60s. “They had horrible portrayals of Native people, with a lot of red facing,” he said, using a term for when white actors colored their skin to played minstrel versions of Native characters. He remembered his pleasant surprise at seeing “Dances With Wolves” in 1990, which brought dignity and several speaking roles to Native peoples. (And he appreciated the humor in its having starred and been directed by Costner, his “Yellowstone” adversary).Now Birmingham looks around a sees a different, fuller landscape. There’s “Yellowstone,” and there’s “Under the Banner of Heaven.” There’s the FX comedy “Reservation Dogs,” about four Native teens growing up an Oklahoma reservation, and there’s “Dark Winds,” the upcoming AMC series about two Navajo police detectives, starring Zahn McClarnon and created by Graham Roland, whose is of Native heritage.“Now we have projects and productions that are telling our story,” Birmingham said. “I think that’s the thing we’ve been waiting for, this opportunity to be able to tell our own stories from our own point of view.” More

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      Marvin Josephson, Who Scored Big Deals for Stars, Dies at 95

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      He started small as a talent agent in 1955, with an unknown kiddie TV performer who would soon become Captain Kangaroo.Marvin Josephson’s beginnings as a talent agent in the mid-1950s were humble, to say the least. His main client — practically his only client then, in fact — was Bob Keeshan, the children’s television performer who, with Mr. Josephson’s help, would become known far and wide as Captain Kangaroo.It wasn’t much of a foothold, but it was enough to start a career that would make Mr. Josephson a major behind-the-scenes force representing actors, directors, authors and more. In 1977, 22 years after he started his personal management agency and two years after his thriving company established a subsidiary called International Creative Management, which became an industry giant, a newspaper headline neatly summed up his reach: “Want to Make a Million? Hire Marvin Josephson.”He died at 95 on May 17 at his home in Manhattan. His daughter Nancy Josephson said the cause was complications of pneumonia.In a field where Michael Ovitz and other super-agents became almost as famous as the people they represented, Mr. Josephson kept an aggressively low profile. In 1991, when Newsday published a profile of him, he agreed to provide a photograph to go with it only if the article specified that he had declined to be interviewed in depth for the piece.“I am not someone who believes that an agent should get lots of publicity,” he told the newspaper, about the only thing he did tell it. “As a general rule, I believe the clients deserve the attention.”As his business grew, Mr. Josephson negotiated personally on behalf of only a select few of those clients, although he was adept at doing so. The “Want to Make a Million?” article in 1977 was occasioned by an estimated $5 million deal he had just struck on behalf of Henry A. Kissinger for his memoirs. He also personally handled deals for Steve McQueen, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, Colin Powell, Margaret Thatcher and others.Mr. Josephson was equally adept at acquiring other firms, some of them much larger than his own.“He’s more sponge than agent,” a 1969 article in The Los Angeles Times began, reporting about Mr. Josephson’s acquisition of the Ashley-Famous Agency — “a case of an ant eating a lion,” as the article said.He was also skilled at anticipating public tastes. Josephson Associates, his umbrella company, represented the producers, the director (Steven Spielberg), the writer and the screenwriter of “Jaws,” the top-grossing film of 1975. And, as The New York Times reported in June 1977, the firm had high hopes for another movie, released weeks earlier, that had been written and directed by another Josephson client, George Lucas. The movie was “Star Wars.”“Marvin is clearly one of the most important people in American entertainment,” the publisher Peter Osnos told Newsday in an interview for that 1991 profile, “but unlike many of the great powers, he has managed to protect his privacy.”Marvin Josephson was born on March 6, 1927, in Atlantic City, N.J. His parents, Joseph and Eva Rivka (Rounick) Josephson, ran a dress shop.He graduated from high school in Atlantic City, served in the Navy at the close of World War II, earned a bachelor’s degree at Cornell University and, in 1952, obtained a law degree at New York University. He went on to work in the legal department at CBS.“Three years of writing contracts convinced him that the pickings would be greener if he represented talent,” as Newsday put it, and in 1955 Mr. Josephson started his own personal management company. One potential source of business, he thought, might be the broadcast journalists he had come to know at CBS: When walking in Manhattan with one or another of them, passers-by would often stop to say hello and sometimes ask for an autograph.“They thought of themselves as newsmen,” he told The Miami Herald in 1984, “but they were becoming celebrities, or stars.”Charles Collingwood, the CBS newsman, became his first client, and others followed, including Chet Huntley and, years later, Barbara Walters. Then there was his other foundational client, Mr. Keeshan.At the time, 1955, Mr. Keeshan was on a local kiddie show, “Tinker’s Workshop,” on WABC-TV in New York. Mr. Josephson wanted to move him and the show to CBS, but WABC argued that the station, not Mr. Keeshan, owned the program.“Marvin went and saw the station manager and played him beautifully,” Mr. Keeshan, who died in 2004, told Newsday in 1991. “He said to him, ‘You know that the talent isn’t important, so what if Keeshan gives you the rights to “Tinker’s Workshop” and you let him go?’ The station manager said, ‘Gee, do you think Keeshan will go for that?,’ and Marvin said, ‘Maybe.’”The deal was struck, and “Tinker’s Workshop” was soon a footnote. At CBS in October 1955, Mr. Keeshan started “Captain Kangaroo,” which became the touchstone children’s program of generations.Marvin Josephson Associates, as Mr. Josephson’s company came to be called, didn’t stop growing for decades. In 1971 the company went public and was renamed Josephson International Inc. In 1975 it established ICM Artists to represent classical musicians; Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman were among its clients.Mr. Josephson took the company private again in 1988, and through the 1990s his subsidiaries represented countless A-list actors and writers. In the 1990s, he handed off many of his management duties to others, including his daughter Nancy. A controlling interest in the company was sold in 2005 to a private investor, Suhail Rizvi.Mr. Josephson married Ingrid Bergh in 1950. They divorced in 1970. In 1973 he married Tina Chen, who survives him. In addition to her and his daughter Nancy, who is from his first marriage, he is also survived by two other children from that marriage, Celia Josephson and Claire Josephson; two children from his marriage to Ms. Chen, YiLing Chen-Josephson and YiPei Chen-Josephson; a brother, Jack; 16 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Another son, Joseph, from his first marriage, died. More

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      ‘The Wire’ Creators, David Simon and Ed Burns, on the Show 20 Years Later

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      David Simon concedes that it takes a special kind of [expletive] to say, “I told you so.”“But I can’t help it, OK?” he said recently. “Nobody enjoys the guy who says, ‘I told you so,’ but it was organic. Ed and I and then the other writers, as they came on board, we had all been watching some of the same things happen in Baltimore.”Two decades ago, Simon, a former cops reporter at The Baltimore Sun, joined Ed Burns, a retired Baltimore homicide detective and public-school teacher, to create HBO’s “The Wire.” Fictitious but sourced from the Baltimore that Simon and Burns inhabited, “The Wire,” which premiered on June 2, 2002, introduced a legion of unforgettable characters like the gun-toting, code-abiding Omar Little (played by the late Michael K. Williams) and the gangster with higher aspirations, Stringer Bell (Idris Elba).They were indelible pieces of a crime show with a higher purpose: to provide a damning indictment of the war on drugs and a broader dissection of institutional collapse, expanding in scope over five seasons to explore the decline of working-class opportunity and the public education system, among other American civic pillars.Michael B. Jordan, left, and Larry Gilliard Jr. in the first season of “The Wire.” The show’s drug dealers were as complex and three-dimensional as its police.HBO, via PhotofestThis was not the stuff of hit TV: In real time, the show gained only a small, devoted audience and struggled to avoid cancellation. But over the years, “The Wire” became hailed as one of television’s greatest shows, even as the systemic decay it depicted became more pronounced in the eyes of its creators.Burns and Simon went on to collaborate on other high-minded projects for HBO, most recently “We Own This City,” a mini-series created by Simon and their fellow “Wire” alumnus George Pelecanos, based on the true story of the Baltimore Police Department’s corrupt Gun Trace Task Force. In separate interviews, Burns and Simon discussed the legacy of “The Wire” — Burns by phone from his Vermont home and Simon in person in HBO’s Manhattan offices — and why it couldn’t be made in the same way today. They also talked about the inspirations for the show and the devastating effect of America’s drug policies. These are edited excerpts from those conversations.Could you have ever imagined “The Wire” would have had this kind of staying power two decades later?ED BURNS The first thing that comes to my mind is that this show will live forever, because what it tries to portray will be around forever. It’s just getting worse and worse. That’s all. And it’s expanding; it’s not just an urban thing anymore. It’s everywhere.DAVID SIMON Ed and I in Baltimore, George in Washington, Richard Price in New York — we’d been seeing a lot of the same dynamics. There were policies, and there were premises that we knew were not going to earn out. They were going to continue to fail. And we were fast becoming a culture that didn’t even recognize its own problems, much less solve any of them. So it felt like, “Let’s make a show about this.”I didn’t anticipate the complete collapse of truth, the idea of you can just boldly lie your way to the top. I did not anticipate the political collapse of the country in terms of [Donald] Trump. [The fictitious Baltimore mayor in “The Wire,” Tommy Carcetti] is a professional politician. Donald Trump is sui generis. It’s hard to even get your head around just how debased the political culture is now because of Trump.From left, the director Clark Johnson, the executive producer Robert Colesberry, Simon and Ed Burns on the set of “The Wire” in 2002.David Lee/HBOThe show seemed to hint at the collapse of truth with the fabricated serial killer story line in the final season, and how the media ran with it.SIMON We very much wanted to criticize the media culture that could allow the previous four seasons to go on and never actually attend to any of the systemic problems. We were going there, but I didn’t anticipate social media making the mainstream miscalculations almost irrelevant. You don’t even have to answer to an inattentive, but professional press. You just have to create the foment in an unregulated environment in which lies travel faster the more outrageous they are. If truth is no longer a metric, then you can’t govern yourself properly.BURNS If you look at the map, half of the Midwest and West are drought-ridden, and we’re treating it like how we used to treat a dead body on the corner or a handcuffed guy. It’s like a news thing or bad automobile accident: “Oh my, look, that tornado ripped apart this whole town.” And that’s it.There’s no energy. I’ve always thought about trying to do a story where the government has developed an algorithm to identify sparks, the Malcolm Xs and the Martin Luther Kings, these types of people, when they’re young, and then they just either compromise them away with the carrot or they beat them away with a stick. Because you need sparks. You need those individuals who will stand up and then rally people around them, and we don’t have that — those sparks, that anger that sustains itself.Is it a conflicting legacy that “The Wire” has gained a greater audience over the years, yet the institutional decay that it illuminates has seemingly worsened?BURNS Recently, the Biden administration and the New York mayor’s administration said they want to increase the number of police on the street. It amuses me that what they’re doing is a definition of insanity: You try something, it doesn’t work. You try it again, it doesn’t work. It’s about time you try something different. They’re still doing the same thing.Granted, “defund the police” is not the right way of presenting the argument. But rechanneling money away from the police to people who could better handle some of the aspects of it would be good. And then doing something even more dramatic, like creating an economic engine, other than drugs, to help people get up and start making something of their lives.In “The Wire,” even well-intentioned officers like Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West, left, with Benjamin Busch and Jonnie Louis Brown) were subject to a police department with misplaced priorities.Paul Schiraldi/HBOHow should “We Own This City,” be viewed in relation to “The Wire?”SIMON It’s a separate narrative. We’re very serious about having attended to real police careers and real activities and a real scandal that occurred. So no, it’s not connected to “The Wire” universe in that sense. It is a coda for the drug war that we were trying to critique in “The Wire.” If “The Wire” had one political message — I don’t mean theme; if it just had a blunt political argument about policy — it was, “End the drug war.” And if “We Own This City” has one fundamental message, it’s “END. THE. DRUG. WAR.” In capital letters and with a period between every word. It’s just an emphatic coda about where we were always headed if we didn’t change the mission of policing in America.Is a goal of “We Own This City” to provide a sharper critique on policing than “The Wire” provided?SIMON No. I don’t think there’s that much difference between the two, other than the depths of the corruption of the bad cops. Police work is as necessary and plausible an endeavor as it’s ever been.In many cases, and in many places like Baltimore, the national clearance rate has been collapsing for the last 30, 40 years. That’s not an accident. That’s because they’ve trained generations of cops to fight the drug war. It doesn’t take any skill to go up on the corner, throw everybody against the wall, go in their pockets, find the ground stashes, decide everybody goes, fill the wagons. That’s not a skill set that can solve a murder.That’s not me saying, “Oh, policing used to be great.” No, I understand there were always problems with policing. But we’re one of the most violent cities in America. And all the discourse about abolish the police or defund the police — I’d be happy to defund the drug war. I’d be happy to change the mission, but I don’t want to defund the police. Good police work is necessary and elemental, or my city becomes untenable. I’ve seen case work done right, and I’ve seen case work done wrong, and it matters.BURNS I’m sorry [Baltimore] was labeled the city of “The Wire,” because we could’ve taken that show into any city, in exactly the same way. Akron, Ohio, would have suddenly become the “Wire” city. So it’s a shame that it was pushed onto this little town.From left, Clark Johnson, Brandon Young, Michelle Paress and Tom McCarthy in the final season, which criticized “the media culture that could allow the previous four seasons to go on and never actually attend to any of the systemic problems,” Simon said.Paul Schiraldi/HBOWould “The Wire” be greenlighted if you pitched it today?BURNS No, definitely not. HBO was going up the ladder at the time. They didn’t understand “The Wire” until the fourth season. In fact, they were thinking about canceling it after three. We caught that moment where networks were thinking, “Oh, we need a show for this group of people.”But now, it’s got to be “Game of Thrones.” It’s got to be big. It’s got to be disconnected from stepping on anybody’s toes. I’ve watched a couple of the limited series on HBO, and they’re good shows, but they’re not cutting new paths. They are whodunits or these rich women bickering among themselves in a town. I don’t see anybody saying, “Hey, that’s a really great show.”SIMON No, because we didn’t attend, in any real way, to the idea of diversity in the writers’ room. I tried to get Dave Mills, who had been my friend since college, to work on “The Wire.” But that would have been organic. It was just a friend; it wasn’t even about Black and white. But other than David, who did a couple scripts for us, and Kia Corthron, the playwright, did one, we were really inattentive to diversity. That wasn’t forward thinking.Why were we inattentive? Because it was so organic to what I’d covered and what Ed had policed. And then, I started bringing on novelists. The first guy was George Pelecanos, whose books about D.C. were the same stuff I was covering. And I happened to read his books, and I was like, “This guy probably could write what we’re trying to do.” And then he said: “Look, you’re trying to make novels. Every season’s a novel. We should hire novelists.” And so we went and got Price. If I had it to do over again, I would have to look at [the diversity of the creative team] in the same way that I looked at later productions.In retrospect, is there anything else that you wish that the show had done differently?BURNS I wish that Season 5 took a different direction, as far as the newsroom was concerned, and didn’t debase the idea of investigation. But it’s fine. What we tried to get across is that the kids that we saw in [Season 4] were becoming, as they approached adulthood, the guys that we saw in [Seasons] 1, 2, 3 and 4. It was continuous. This is just the next generation.“We were fast becoming a culture that didn’t even recognize its own problems, much less solve any of them,” Simon said. “So it felt like, ‘Let’s make a show about this.’”Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesOther than the fact that the issues it highlighted are still prevalent, why do you think “The Wire” has such staying power?SIMON Nothing’s in a vacuum. I would credit “Oz” for showing me that there was this network out there that would tell a dark story and tell an adult story. “Homicide” [Simon’s first book] had been made into a TV show. But with “The Corner” [Burns and Simon’s nonfiction book centered on a West Baltimore drug market], I was like: “The rights are worth nothing. Nobody’s going to put that on American television.” And then I saw “Oz,” and so that was the moment where I looked at HBO and said, “Oh, would you like to make a mini-series about a drug-saturated neighborhood and about the drug war?”And then the other places we stole from: We stole from the Greek tragedies, the idea that the institutions were the gods and they were bigger than the people. So, thanks to the college course that made me read Greek plays. Thanks to “Paths of Glory,” which was a movie about institutional imperative, the [Stanley] Kubrick film — I took stuff liberally from there. Thanks to a bunch of novelists, Pelecanos, Price, [Dennis] Lehane, who decided they were willing to write television. Obviously, the cast and crew and everyone.But it was a show that was ready for where TV was going to end up, and that’s where a lot of luck is involved. The idea that you flick on your TV screen and decide you want to watch something that was made 10 years earlier or has just been posted; or you’ll wait until there are enough episodes to binge watch it; or you have insomnia, so you’ll watch four hours of a mini-series and just acquire it whenever the hell you want — boy, I didn’t see that coming.BURNS It’s like a western: It’s mired in legend. But the legend is actually reality. Today, 20 years ago, 20 years from now — it’s the same thing. And each generation coming up, each bunch of kids coming up, discover it and inject more life into it. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Julia’ and the MTV Movie & TV Awards

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      A documentary about Julia Child airs on CNN. And Vanessa Hudgens hosts an awards show on MTV.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, May 30-June 3. Details and times are subject to change.MondayJULIA (2021) 8 p.m. on CNN. In this documentary, the filmmakers  Julie Cohen and Betsy West — who were nominated for a Academy Award in the best documentary feature category for their work on “RBG” (2018) — tell the story of the cookbook author Julia Child and her upheaval of the male-dominated culinary and television worlds. The documentary uses archival footage, personal photos and first-person narratives to follow Child’s path to publishing “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” a book with an enduring influence: It topped the New York Times best-seller list in 2009, 48 years after it debuted, around the release of the film “Julie and Julia.”TuesdayGrandmaster Flash in “Origins of Hip-Hop.”Malike Sidibe/A&EORIGINS OF HIP-HOP 10 p.m. on A&E. This documentary series comes from Mass Appeal, a media company known for its production of “Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men” (2019) — which the Times critic Jon Caramanica called an “intimate” look at “how individuals use art as a lifeline.” The new show will tell the stories of hip-hop stars, including Busta Rhymes, Eve, Ice-T and Ja Rule. Narrated by the rapper Nas, each of the eight one-hour episodes explores the artists’ journeys to stardom. The series premieres with an episode on Fat Joe, one of the genre’s Latino stars.WednesdayTHE REAL HOUSEWIVES OF DUBAI 9 p.m. on Bravo. As the 11th entry in the franchise, “The Real Housewives of Dubai” premieres in a desert oasis following an opulent group of women — including Caroline Stanbury, a former Miss Jamaica — as they navigate a highly exclusive social scene. Teasers show metallic gowns in windy deserts and valleys of camels in the extravagant City of Gold. But after announcing the location, Bravo was hit with backlash on social media for overlooking the United Arab Emirates’ treatment of women and L.G.B.T.Q. people. The series has also been criticized in the past for featuring racially homogeneous casts. (In a 2019 article for The Times, the writer Tracie Egan Morrissey wrote that the show “shined its light on a certain type of woman: rich, opinionated and white”). But the women who make up the Dubai cast are among of the most racially diverse groups on the show to date.ThursdaySCRIPPS NATIONAL SPELLING BEE FINALS 8 p.m. on Ion. “Murraya.” This was the word that determined the best speller in the nation in last year’s tournament. Hosted by LeVar Burton, this year’s competition will include spellers from across the United States (and from four other countries) competing for a chance to be the 94th Scripps National Spelling Bee champion. Last year, a 14-year-old, Zaila Avant-garde, made history as the first Black American to win the Bee.N.B.A. FINALS 9 p.m. on ABC. The Golden State Warriors will play the winner of the Eastern Conference finals between the Miami Heat and the Boston Celtics in the first game of the National Basketball Association finals. Golden State returns to the finals for the first time since 2019 after defeating the Dallas Mavericks in the Western Conference finals last Thursday. It has been a long road rife with injuries and misfortune for many of Golden State’s key players, but the team’s celebrated core “is together again and playing some of its best basketball,” The Times’s Tania Ganguli and Scott Cacciola wrote in a recent article. Catch the second game on Sunday.FridayGloria Foster and Morgan Freeman in a production of “Coriolanus,” as seen in “American Masters: Joe Papp in Five Acts.”Estate of Bert AndrewsAMERICAN MASTERS: JOE PAPP IN FIVE ACTS 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Ahead of the 60th anniversary season of Shakespeare in the Park in Central Park, “American Masters” will air “Joe Papp in Five Acts,” a documentary that tells the story of Joseph Papp, the founder of the Public Theater and Shakespeare in the Park, and a producer of plays including “Hair” and “A Chorus Line.”BABES IN ARMS (1939) 8 p.m. on TCM. Directed by Busby Berkeley and starring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, “Babes in Arms” is the film version of the 1937 coming-of-age Broadway musical of the same title. In a 1939 Times review, the writer Frank S. Nugent praised Rooney: “‘Babes In Arms’ — to express it in two words — is Mickey Rooney,” he wrote. The film is followed by BABES ON BROADWAY (1941) at 10 p.m. on TCM, another Berkeley musical that stars Rooney and Garland.SaturdaySTAGE FRIGHT (1950) 8 p.m. on TCM. In “Stage Fright,” a suspenseful British film noir from Alfred Hitchcock, an acting student (Marlene Dietrich) goes undercover to prove that a singing star killed her husband. Though the movie has become known as a Hitchcock classic, the Times review in 1950 wasn’t exactly favorable. The critic Bosley Crowther called it a “rambling story,” one “without any real anxiety,” but praised the cast of “fine actors.”SundayThe actress Vanessa Hudgens earlier this month. Hudgens will host the MTV Movie & TV Awards on Sunday.Stefano Rellandini/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMTV MOVIE & TV AWARDS 8 p.m. on MTV. Vanessa Hudgens returns as host of the 2022 MTV Movie & TV Awards, where fans vote for their favorite films, shows and performances, and where Jack Black will receive this year’s Comedic Genius award. The ceremony will be followed by “MTV Movie & TV Awards: Unscripted,” which recognizes the best competition series, best reality romance, best music documentary, best reality star and other similar categories. The most-nominated reality programs are “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” “Selling Sunset” and “Summer House.” More

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      Ellen DeGeneres, a Signature Star of the Obama Era, Says Goodbye

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      The host had apologized after reports of misconduct at the “Ellen” workplace, but it wasn’t enough to undo a ratings crash. She makes her exit from daytime TV after a 19-year run.In the days leading up to the finale, the ovations grew longer and louder. Fans blew kisses, made heart shapes with their hands and screamed the host’s name. The outpouring signaled the end of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” a daily hour of daytime escapism that had reached its peak in less contentious times, when Beyoncé, Madonna, and Barack and Michelle Obama were happy to show off their goofiest dance moves side by side with the show’s star before an audience of millions.When the program made its debut in 2003, it seemed unlikely to be a hit. Ellen DeGeneres had been in limbo five years at that point, ever since ABC had canceled her sitcom a year after her groundbreaking announcement that she was gay. On Thursday, at the start of the 3,339th and final episode of her talk show, she recalled what she had been through and how much times had changed.“When we started this show, I couldn’t say ‘gay,’” Ms. DeGeneres said. “I said it at home a lot. ‘What are we having for our gay breakfast?’ Or, ‘Pass the gay salt.’”After mentioning that she also couldn’t say the word “wife” in the time before gay marriage was legal, the camera turned to the audience to capture Ms. DeGeneres’s spouse, the actress Portia de Rossi, before returning to the host.“Twenty-five years ago, they canceled my sitcom, because they didn’t want a lesbian to be in prime time once a week,” she continued. “And I said, ‘OK, then, I’ll be on daytime every day. How about that?’”But by the time of Thursday’s finale, Ms. DeGeneres, 64, was no longer at the forefront of social change. And despite the heartfelt send-offs delivered by fans and celebrity guests including Oprah Winfrey, Jennifer Aniston, and Pink, she was not going out on top.A turning point came in 2020, when BuzzFeed News reported allegations of workplace misconduct on the show’s set, which prompted an investigation and the firing of three high-ranking producers. Not long afterward, the ratings for “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” also known as “Ellen,” cratered. The show lost more than a million viewers for the 2020-2021 season, a 44 percent decline.Ms. DeGeneres took the stage at the 2014 Oscars, the second time she served as the ceremony’s host.John Shearer/Invision, via Associated PressMs. DeGeneres apologized to her staff and her viewers, but the show remained well behind onetime competitors like “Dr. Phil,” “Live With Kelly and Ryan” and “The View.” It seemed her fans had a tough time puzzling out the discrepancy between her sunny stage persona and the realities of the workplace she oversaw.In her just-concluded final season, she settled into a place atop the second tier of daytime talk, with a gap of about 100,000 viewers between her program and “The Kelly Clarkson Show,” and a greater lead over also-rans like“Maury” and “Rachael Ray.” In the final weeks of “Ellen,” some guests hinted at the difficulties of the last two years and implored the host to appreciate her contribution. Julia Louis-Dreyfus said she hoped Ms. DeGeneres understood “what a great thing it is that you’ve done with this show.”“Really,” Ms. Louis-Dreyfus added. “Honestly.”The comedian Howie Mandel continued the pep talk on the next episode: “I want nothing for you but the happiness that you have spread to everyone else — I want you to just bask in that. I want you to be happy. And I hope you’re happy.”Ms. DeGeneres and her wife, Portia de Rossi, at the Governor’s Ball in 2014.Noel West for The New York TimesMs. DeGeneres’s closest supporters blamed the ratings slide on Covid-19, which necessitated the taping of shows with no studio audience, rather than attributing it to the reports on the “Ellen” workplace, which included staff members’ complaints that they had faced “racism, fear and intimidation,” as well as sexual harassment from top producers.“It was a pandemic problem,” said Mike Darnell, the president of Warner Bros.’ unscripted division, which oversaw the show. “I think for a comedian — which, there’s very few in daytime — not having an audience makes an enormous difference.”Ms. DeGeneres, born in Metairie, La., started her out in a New Orleans comedy club, making a name for herself with observational material that sometimes veered into the absurd. An early routine, “Phone Call to God,” was inspired by the death of her girlfriend in a car crash. When she came up with it, she could see herself doing it on “The Tonight Show,” then the ultimate venue for stand-up comics.She was shortly into her career in 1984, when the cable network Showtime declared her the “Funniest Person in America.” Two years later, she was performing “Phone Call to God” on “The Tonight Show.” Johnny Carson called on her to sit beside him, a gesture he reserved for comedians whom he held in high esteem. She was the first female comic to be summoned by the longtime king of late night during a debut appearance.“Carson didn’t have many female comedians on the show,” said Wayne Federman, a stand-up comic and author of “The History of Stand-Up: From Mark Twain to Dave Chappelle.” “It was extra hard to get on as a female comedian. And sure enough, Ellen, the charming, disarming comedian that she was, did the show. And getting called over to the couch was remarkable. Carson was smitten.”Before taking on daytime talk, Ms. DeGeneres, shown here in a scene with Laura Dern, battled with ABC executives over the content of her 1990s sitcom, “Ellen.”ABC, via Getty ImagesIn 1994 she was starring in the sitcom “These Friends of Mine,” which ABC retitled “Ellen” after one season. It lasted more than 100 episodes — the benchmark for a network success — and made television history when Ms. DeGeneres, as well as the character Ellen, came out of the closet in 1997.She appeared on the cover of Time and sat for an “Oprah” interview, but the next season was the show’s last. As The New York Times reported at the time, she clashed with ABC executives over the sitcom’s story lines, which her bosses deemed overly focused on gay themes. At one point, the executives demanded that a special content advisory be included as part of the show.It took another five years before Jim Paratore, an executive at Telepictures, a division of Warner Bros., helped engineer her comeback. Executives at local TV affiliates were resistant to the idea of an out gay person hosting a daytime talk show, fearing a backlash. And when “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” premiered in 2003, executives at Warner Bros. were talking up another daytime property they had in the works, “The Sharon Osbourne Show,” in the belief that it had the better chance of catching on.“Sharon Osbourne was flying high at that point, and Ellen was coming out of a cancellation, and people didn’t want her to talk about being gay,” David Decker, an executive vice president at Warner Bros., said. “She wasn’t launched with a lot of tailwind — she was launched with a lot of headwind.”Little by little she proved her doubters wrong. Mr. Federman, the stand-up comic and historian, attributed her success to her unusual approach.“She always thought it was the job of the comedian to set the pace of the room — that she wasn’t going to let the audience dictate how hard she was going to have to tell the jokes or how fast she was going to have to do her routine,” he said. “She felt if she was in control, the audience would come to her — and that is exactly what happened.“Most comedians, if you don’t get the laughs, you speed up,” he continued. “She was always the one who slowed it down. Ellen had an uncommon confidence in her comedic rhythm. She was like, ‘I’m going to do this comedy at a very casual rate that people will easily fall into this.’ That was perfect for daytime television.”In awarding Ms. DeGeneres the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, President Obama credited her with pushing “our country in the direction of justice.”Al Drago/The New York TimesAfter a few years, the identity of “Ellen” was firmly in place. The host lavished her audience members, and people in need, with cash and prizes. She danced with fans and celebrity guests, reveling in the awkwardness — just be yourself, she said. As the internet gained traction, she invited early viral stars to her show, elevating them to wider fame.She came to embody a cultural moment — a time when Mr. Obama was president, gay marriage was newly legal and social media was regarded as a benevolent force. The feel-good vibe of “Ellen” fit in with a prevailing mood, and the show won dozens of Emmys. Ms. DeGeneres hit a peak in 2016, when Mr. Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. During the White House ceremony, he credited her with pushing “our country in the direction of justice,” saying she had pulled it off “one joke, one dance, at a time.”About a decade ago, moving beyond the jokes and dancing, Ms. DeGeneres adopted “Be Kind” as a motto, and it soon morphed into its own endeavor. Today, a yearly subscription to “Be Kind” costs $219.96. Those who sign up receive a box every four months containing items selected by Ms. DeGeneres. (The summer collection includes sunglasses, a planner and a bracelet.)Ms. DeGeneres at her talk show’s finale, which took place years after the height of her cultural influence.Michael Rozman/Warner Bros., via Associated PressFor Ms. DeGeneres, the Be Kind persona came in handy. When she was twice selected to host the Oscars (in 2007 and 2014), it was to clean up the messes left behind by performers whose performances were perceived as too biting or caustic — Chris Rock, Jon Stewart, Seth MacFarlane.Later, with Donald J. Trump dominating the news from his White House pulpit and the onetime tech darlings Facebook and Twitter becoming battlegrounds for heated cultural debates, Ms. DeGeneres’s lighthearted approach started falling out of favor. Even the viral sensations who once got a boost from her show didn’t need her anymore — TikTok was more than enough. Then came the workplace scandal, which seemed to undercut the “Be Kind” message.“Being known as the Be Kind Lady is a tricky position to be in,” she told viewers in the wake of the reports. “So let me give you some advice. If anyone is thinking of changing their title or giving yourself a nickname, do not go with the Be Kind Lady.”Daytime talk remains arguably the hardest TV genre to crack. Since Ms. DeGeneres entered the fray, the list of reality stars, news anchors and actors who have given it a go includes Queen Latifah, Jane Pauley, Kris Jenner, Bethenny Frankel, Bonnie Hunt, Tony Danza, RuPaul, Jeff Probst, Anderson Cooper and Ms. Osbourne. All came and went in a flash.The high price of daily television adds to the challenge. “The economics to produce north of 150 hours of television a year, with 34 weeks of originals and 170 episodes a year, is really expensive,” Mr. Decker, the executive, said. A new show may cost $20 million to $30 million to launch, he added. Further costs must go to hundreds of employees, sound stages (“Ellen” occupied three of on the Warner Bros. lot) and flying in celebrity guests.“You need a big rating to even cover your costs year over year,” Mr. Decker said. “It’s a very challenging economic model, and to lay that out over two decades of real secular change in our industry? It’s unbelievable, to keep a show going that long.”Ms. DeGeneres has said she plans to take some time off, but whatever comes next, the talk show will be the centerpiece of her legacy.“There will be other things, other great things, but there will never be a time like this,” Ms. Winfrey told Ms. DeGeneres on the third-to-last episode of “Ellen.” “Know that these are the glory days.” More