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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Around the World in 80 Days’ and New Year’s Eve

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      David Tennant stars in a new Jules Verne adaptation on PBS. And Miley Cyrus, Pete Davidson and more appear in New Year’s Eve specials.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, Dec. 27-Jan. 2. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO (2019) 6 p.m. on Showtime. A drama that uses surreal imagery to comment on real issues of displacement, gentrification and income inequality, “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” centers on a young man, Jimmie (Jimmie Fails, playing a version of himself), who fights to reclaim his childhood home in a San Francisco transformed by wealth and those who wield it. “In moments,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The New York Times, “it feels as if Jimmie and his faithful artistic friend, Montgomery (Jonathan Majors, a mournful heartbreaker), are dreaming the movie into existence, pouring its surrealistic jolts and hallucinatory beauty out of their heads and straight into yours.”THE YEAR: 2021 9 p.m. on ABC. This annual year-end recap from ABC might strike some viewers as too daunting — this edition focuses on 2021, after all — but those in a reflective mood might appreciate the opportunity to look back at some of the biggest world events from the past year. Robin Roberts hosts.TuesdayBob Einstein in “The Super Bob Einstein Movie.”HBOTHE SUPER BOB EINSTEIN MOVIE (2021) 9 p.m. on HBO. Revisit the career of the comic actor and writer Bob Einstein, who died in 2019 at 76, in this feature-length documentary. After writing on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in the late 1960s, Einstein stepped in front of the camera as the character Super Dave, a parody of stuntmen like Evel Knievel. More recently, Einstein appeared alongside Larry David in “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” David pays tribute to Einstein in the documentary, alongside a roster of other interviewees including Steve Martin, David Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld, Rob Reiner, J.B. Smoove and Sarah Silverman. In a succinct description of Einstein’s magic, Silverman says, “The straight man is usually what the funny man bounces off of — but he’s both.”WednesdayMURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (1974) 8 p.m. on TCM. The director Sidney Lumet assembled a train full of famous actors for this classic take on the Agatha Christie story of the same name, about a billionaire’s on-rails murder. Albert Finney stars as the fictional detective Hercule Poirot, alongside Ingrid Bergman, Lauren Bacall, Sean Connery, Vanessa Redgrave and Anthony Perkins. Working from a screenplay adapted by Paul Dehn, Lumet fills the story with stylistic nods to classic big-budget Hollywood movies — this is a movie that felt old school even in the mid-70s. The result, Bosley Crowther wrote in his 1974 review for The Times, is a “terrifically entertaining super-valentine” to classic whodunits.ThursdaySPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE (2018) 4:30 p.m. on FX. Spider-Man once again proved his moneymaking superpowers this month with “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” which brought in the third-highest opening weekend box-office receipts in Hollywood history after a period of moviegoing malaise. But the animated rethink “Into the Spider-Verse” is probably still the recent Spidey movie to beat in terms of critical reception. It imagines its hero as a Brooklyn middle schooler named Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) who takes on the bad guys with the help of a group of heroes from different dimensions. In his review for The Times, A.O. Scott called the movie “fresh and exhilarating.”FridayMiley Cyrus and Pete Davidson will host an NBC New Year’s Eve special on Friday.Vijat Mohindra/NBCNEW YEAR’S EVE SHOWS various times on several networks. While the Omicron variant has thrown many people’s New Year’s Eve plans into doubt, there’s no shortage of events on offer in the televised realm. Highlights include MILEY’S NEW YEAR’S EVE PARTY HOSTED BY MILEY CYRUS AND PETE DAVIDSON, airing at 10:30 p.m. on NBC, with a slate of performers including Brandi Carlile, Billie Joe Armstrong and Saweetie; NEW YEAR’S EVE LIVE: NASHVILLE’S BIG BASH at 8 p.m. on CBS with Jason Aldean, Miranda Lambert, Darius Rucker and many more; and DICK CLARK’S PRIMETIME NEW YEAR’S ROCKIN’ EVE WITH RYAN SEACREST 2022 at 10 p.m. on ABC, with Billy Porter, Journey, Daddy Yankee, Avril Lavigne and Travis Barker, Big Boi with Sleepy Brown, and others.SaturdayGREAT PERFORMANCES FROM VIENNA: THE NEW YEAR’S CELEBRATION 2022 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The Vienna Philharmonic has long been prized for its warm, traditional “Vienna sound.” So expect to feel a disorienting sense of timelessness as it performs a New Year’s program anchored by Strauss waltzes in this celebratory concert. “It’s their obstinacy that has kept them so different, sound-wise, from the other orchestras of the world,” the conductor Zubin Mehta told The Times in 2014. “The oboes, the clarinets, the horns, the trumpets, the timpani are still the same type of instruments that their forefathers used.”Denzel Washington in “The Magnificent Seven.”Sam Emerson/MGM and Columbia PicturesTHE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (2016) 9:30 p.m. on Paramount Network. In less time than it takes him to wax poetic about the moral cost of killing in the just-released “The Tragedy of Macbeth” (“is this a dagger which I see before me?”), Denzel Washington cuts down a saloon full of bad guys in this western from Antoine Fuqua. A remake of the 1960 film of the same name — itself an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” — the movie casts Washington as a bounty hunter hired to free a town from the grip of a greedy villain (Peter Sarsgaard). He enlists the help of some other gunslingers, played by the likes of Ethan Hawke and Chris Pratt. It’s “a remake of a remake that’s as fresh as recycled recycling suggests,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. But, she added, Washington “has that ineluctable what’s-it for selling the goods no matter what their sell-by date. And he has nice help in his amusing backup team.”SundayMASTERPIECE: AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). David Tennant plays the peppy fictional adventurer Phileas Fogg in this new, family-friendly adaptation of the Jules Verne novel. Joining the quest to circumnavigate the globe are Fogg’s valet, Passepartout (Ibrahim Koma), and a young journalist (Leonie Benesch). More

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      ‘Insecure’ Finale Recap: Choosing Confidence

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      By the end, Issa and her friends had learned how to embrace the unexpected.Season 5, Episode 10: ‘Everything Gonna Be, Okay?!’Dreams can come true, even if they don’t look as tidy as we envisioned them. The things that haunt you might be the things you need to explore. In the final episode of the final season of “Insecure,” we see this happen in the lives of the characters we have come to love.We start this episode where we left off in the last. Issa is on her way home with Nathan, after he almost fought Lawrence at Tiffany’s going away party. When he drops Issa off, he breaks up with her.“I was wrong — this ain’t good for me,” he tells Issa, his eyes teary. “I gotta take a step back.”He chooses his sanity over the toxicity of Issa’s messiness. It’s important to note that Nathan is looking after himself: He realizes that he is constantly triggered by Issa and he needs to check in with himself. Issa’s open-ended relationship with Lawrence seems to spill all over the place and he does not want to be a part of that. Issa seems to take the breakup in stride and goes home. She doesn’t fight it.The next day Molly wakes her with food and love. She wants to make sure her friend is OK, but she does not know that Nathan has already broken up with her. In the bathroom, Issa gets dragged by her reflection: “You’re down bad. I don’t know where you go from here. You were tripping about all these decisions and choices, just to end up here.”“I just want to fast forward to the part of my life where everything is OK,” Issa tells her reflection.That is exactly what happens next, sort of. We fast forward to Molly’s birthday. Her mother, siblings, Taurean and Taurean’s parents are at her place to celebrate her. It is the last time Molly will celebrate a birthday with her mother, but she does not know it yet. Tiffany is in town from Denver, and Kelli has a tall hunk by her side named Desmond. The girls all seemed to have moved on in life, but not Issa. She is contemplating leaving Los Angeles. Molly encourages Issa to consider her personal growth.Molly seems to have found her tribe, her community, but so has Issa. We fast forward again to Issa’s birthday, thrown at Crenshawn headquarters, which lets us know that she chose to collaborate with him instead of going to MBW. In lieu of gifts, her assistant asked people to donate to The Blocc, and her friends donated $5,000. It is clear that Issa’s community supports her. At the party, Nathan shows up, and it is the first time they are seeing each other since his fight with Lawrence. He explains his behavior and donates some money to her in person. They iron out their wrinkles. It is nice to see them accept that they are not a good fit and walk away from each other in peace and with love.This frees Issa up. Another montage of aerial shots of Los Angeles moves us forward in time again, and the girls are finally in Denver visiting Tiffany for her birthday. Tiffany hates Denver but she is also working on figuring it out. At Tiffany’s, Lawrence is haunting Issa again.“You know what I always wondered, what would you have said to Lawrence if Nathan hadn’t interrupted?” Molly asked Issa.“It’s too late, anyway!” Issa responds.“Girl it’s not too late if that’s what you really want,” Molly tells her.It is the voice in Issa’s head that tells her she can’t do the things she wants to do, that holds her back. She knows how she feels about Lawrence, yet she ignores it to be safe, to fit in, to not be out of pocket. Molly reminds her she can just do her thing.“Sometimes it’s not that hard,” Molly says.Between Molly’s mother passing away and Issa learning that Kelli is pregnant, after telling everyone that she doesn’t want to have children, something shifted in Issa. That voice became smaller. The urgency of the first few episodes seems to have tripled for Issa, who is watching her peers grow, personally and professionally.That is how Issa ended up with Lawrence by the end of “Insecure.” She let go of the ideas that she had of herself and the expectations she thought her friends had for her. It was all in Issa’s head. That is where her reflection comes in: She was always talking to the mirror because her thinking was internal. In the real world, there were no expectations.What I didn’t expect in the final episode was a wedding. Even though Molly married Taurean — and I am so happy for her — the wedding seemed like more of a celebration between Issa and Molly, the true soul-mates on the show. We see Molly walk out of a church with Taurean and hit the dance floor, but it isn’t until Issa is helping her out of her dress that we see a ceremony of sorts. Issa is unwraps the corset of Molly’s dress, tells her that she is happy for her and we get to see their relationship become even more layered.“There goes my girl,” Issa tells Lawrence at the wedding while staring at Molly.In this episode, at Issa’s birthday party, before she tries to kick it to a very handsome man, Kelli yells out:“She woke up today and chose confidence!”May we all learn from Kelli, Issa, Tiffany and Molly, who each came to realize, through many tough trials and errors, that opening yourself up to the unexpected is a form of strength. Resisting such matters, whether it is a boyfriend that had a child during a breakup, a move to a place outside of what you know, changing your mind about wanting children or finally letting your guard down, does not lead to a full life — we must remain open as people to move forward. May we all leave our insecurities behind and choose confidence. More

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      ‘And Just Like That’ Recap, Episode 4: New Friends

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      Charlotte wants to change L.T.W. from a mom friend into a real friend. Carrie and Miranda nurture new connections.If Miranda was the white lady buffoon in Episode 1, it is Charlotte’s turn in Episode 4.Despite being a classic “‘Rules’ girl” and a master of playing hard-to-get (“I invented that game,” she once declared in the original “Sex and the City”), all that self-discipline Charlotte once reserved to pique men’s interest goes out the window when Lisa Todd Wexley says she is free for dinner on Thursday night — just two days away. Charlotte drops everything, even canceling Harry’s colonoscopy for the next morning, to throw an impromptu dinner party at her house.(Can’t Harry just book his own colonoscopy?)Charlotte desperately wants to morph L.T.W. from a mom friend into a real friend — a distinction actual moms, like me, will relate to. But it occurs to Charlotte that at the soiree she’s about to host, L.T.W. and her husband, Herbert (Christopher Jackson), will be the only Black people in attendance.Horrified that it will appear as if she and Harry have no Black friends (they don’t), she makes it her mission to recruit at least one fringe friend of color to invite. Just as she gets a bite from a fellow P.T.O. mom, L.T.W. abruptly backs out.But she and Harry still attend Herbert’s birthday party at L.T.W.’s house, and in a twist, they’re the sole white couple there. Charlotte has come prepared, having forced a cram session about contemporary Black authors on herself and Harry. It’s all for naught, though, when Charlotte walks in and immediately mistakes one of L.T.W.’s guests for a different Black woman they both know.It turns out, however, that Charlotte didn’t really need to study. When Herbert’s mother, Eunice Wexley (Pat Bowie), takes jabs at the seemingly frivolous art collection L.T.W. has amassed, Charlotte defends her, calling out the notable Black artists by name and talking up the importance of each work hanging on the wall — to the delight of L.T.W., who relishes taking her mother-in-law down a peg.Somewhere during these awkward scenes, Charlotte remembers who she is. She’s far more than the demure wife and mom she has been made out to be since she quit gallery life in the original “Sex and the City.” She’s highly educated and cultured, and she knows art impressively well. All she really had to do at that dinner party was be herself.I hope to see more of this multidimensional version of Charlotte as the series progresses, especially because she hasn’t been given a substantive story line since her struggles with infertility — a topic that comes up over dinner between Miranda and her law professor, Nya.The ‘Sex and the City’ UniverseThe sprawling franchise revolutionized how women were portrayed on the screen. And the show isn’t over yet. A New Series: Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte return for another strut down the premium cable runway in “And Just Like That,” streaming on HBO. Off Broadway: Candace Bushnell, whose writing gave birth to the “Sex and the City” universe, stars in her one-woman show based on her life. In Carrie’s Footsteps: “Sex and the City” painted a seductive vision of Manhattan, inspiring many young women to move to the city. The Origins: For the show’s 20th anniversary in 2018, Bushnell shared how a collection of essays turned into a pathbreaking series.Amid the bustle of a hip, crowded restaurant, Nya surprises herself (“Maybe it’s the hormones,” she quips) by telling Miranda that she’s undergoing her second round of in vitro fertilization, but that’s not her biggest revelation. She also says that when her first attempt failed, she felt a deep sense of relief. It’s a fair assumption that anyone going through the effort of fertility treatments must very much want a baby, but Nya isn’t so sure. She likes her life as it is and asks Miranda to confirm that motherhood is worth it. Miranda can’t quite make that promise.What unfolds between them is one of the more astute conversations about the plight of modern womanhood that I’ve seen on TV, maybe ever. Pushing beyond the trite topic of whether working mothers can “have it all,” the two characters grapple with the hard truth that no matter what kind of life is chosen, there are always roads not taken, and probably some level of regret. Reaching the pinnacle of your career doesn’t erase that, nor does having children. Despite coming from two rather different worlds, Miranda and Nya connect on this, and they move from acquaintances to confidantes.All the while, Carrie (whose real name is apparently Caroline! Who knew?) is wrapped up in selling the apartment she shared with Big. She taps the hotshot real-estate agent Seema Patel (Sarita Choudhury) who waltzes in and immediately replaces the colorful character Carrie has woven into the home’s décor with boring beige. Seema must erase anything that feels too much like the current owners, she explains, so that buyers can see themselves in the space.“It’s like we never lived here. Our life is just … gone.” Carrie tells Miranda over the phone, dejected.Oddly, that’s exactly why Carrie feels good when she’s around Seema. Seema never knew Big, so Carrie can tuck away the sad stuff when she is with her and simply enjoy the moment.That is until Seema accidentally breaks the frame that holds an old photo of Carrie and Big.Seema is ready to replace it, not thinking the broken glass is much of an issue, but Carrie is heartbroken. That frame was on Big’s side of the bed, she explains. He touched that glass over and over, and now one of the final connections she had to her late husband is in pieces.Seema sees she’s being insensitive, but in a slightly contrived fit of whataboutism, she brings up a recent moment when she felt Carrie had done the same. When Carrie commended Seema for “still putting herself out there” in the dating world, it stung. Seema has never really found love, and Carrie unwittingly rubbed that in. What’s more, Seema doesn’t feel all that bad for Carrie, she says, because at least Big was the love of her life, and she had him for years.Carrie is taken aback. Is Seema right? Is it actually better to have loved and lost?In a sense, we could all be asking ourselves the same question about Big.In recent days, two women have accused Chris Noth of sexual assault, as detailed by The Hollywood Reporter. Noth, who was enjoying some reupped fame from this reboot, as well as a viral Peleton ad — itself a response to some ill-advised product placement in Episode 1 and since taken down — has denied the accusations.I was never a fan of Mr. Big. Maybe he conjured up too many personal ghosts, and I wanted Carrie to see through that kind of whiplash-inducing lover faster than I had. Plenty of viewers adored his mystique, and if you were in that camp, or you at least loved the love they shared, that’s almost certainly tainted — it’s nearly impossible now to separate Big’s sleazier tendencies from this troubling new context.As for me, I thought Big deserved the boot long ago. I’m not sorry I don’t have to see his face, or Noth’s, on my screen anymore.Carrie may never see things that way, though, so a new beginning with new people may be just what she needs. As she and Seema exchange apologies and dig into takeout sushi, the agent-client relationship begins to dissipate and a genuine friendship starts to blossom.In case it isn’t abundantly clear, that’s the theme of this episode: Each main character advances her friendship with her new pal (over dinner, in each case, to really tie it all together). The producers promised these new characters would be layered and do more than simply serve as window dressing for the returning leads. This episode seems to be a bridge to those new story lines that will, I hope, continue to deepen.The show must go on without one more of its recurring characters, though, and that is Stanford, because the actor Willie Garson died in September while the series was filming. The disappearance of Carrie’s steadfast friend is accounted for when she opens a melodramatic letter from him explaining that he has jaunted off to Japan on tour with the TikTok cash cow he manages. Anthony got a letter as well, except in his, Stanford asks for a divorce.Stanford always had a catty side, which was one of his more endearing traits, but it is hard to imagine he would have Dear John’d both Carrie and Anthony in such a hardhearted way. Perhaps the writers didn’t want us dwelling in sadness over the loss of Garson, but it’s hard not to feel like we never knew Stanford at all. The Stanny we knew would have at least wanted to share one last cigarette with Carrie.Oh yeah, she’s smoking again. More

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      Peter Dinklage on ‘Cyrano’ and Life After ‘Game of Thrones’

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      Peter Dinklage doesn’t consider himself much of a singer, and swordfighting is outside his usual area of expertise. But the opportunity to master those skills is precisely what appealed to him about the new movie musical “Cyrano,” which Dinklage leads as a crooning, jousting poet.“I’ve got to be intimidated by it,” he said. “Anything that scares me gets my interest.”The 52-year-old actor first tackled the material in a stage musical written and directed by Erica Schmidt, Dinklage’s wife, with songs written by members of the band the National. After an Off Broadway premiere in late 2019, Schmidt’s “Cyrano” has now been made into a lavish film directed by Joe Wright (“Atonement”), which finds the title character covertly courting his true love, Roxanne (Haley Bennett), in the form of letters sent by the besotted soldier Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr.).Of course, that begs a very contemporary question: Did Cyrano de Bergerac invent catfishing? Though the new film retains the period setting of the 1897 Edmond Rostand play it was based on, Dinklage detects many modern-day parallels. “It’s exactly what we’re doing today with online dating, where you’re putting up a profile of yourself out there that is not necessarily true to who you are,” he said. “We all pretend to be other people to varying degrees.”Dinklage with Haley Bennett in the new movie musical “Cyrano.”Peter Mountain/MGMBut few pretend better than Dinklage, a four-time Emmy winner who played the sly and short-statured Tyrion Lannister for eight seasons of “Game of Thrones,” culminating with its controversial finale in May 2019.“‘Game of Thrones’ wasn’t really a TV show — it was like my life,” Dinklage said. “My family was there in Ireland six months out of every year, for almost 10 years. You dig roots down there, my daughter was going to school there. She developed an Irish accent because she was with little Irish kids all day long.”Still, in a recent and wide-ranging conversation via video call, Dinklage told me that he has found life since “Game of Thrones” to be quite liberating: “You feel this void, but then you also go, ‘Oh, wow. I don’t have to do that, so what am I going to do next?’ That’s the exciting thing.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.It’s my understanding that your wife, Erica, was fairly far along in adapting “Cyrano” before you read it and decided to star in it. What convinced you?Yeah, she was commissioned to write an adaptation of “Cyrano,” and she had the great idea of stripping it down to its bare essentials, replacing the long monologues about love with love songs. Most importantly for me, I finally connected with it because she got rid of Cyrano’s most famous attribute, which is the obviously fake nose on the handsome actor’s face.I’m an actor, I’ve worn prosthetics before, but the pretense of that didn’t jive with me. I’d always thought, “What’s the big deal? You get to take that off at the end of the show.” And then Erica removed it and I thought I had to play this part because now it’s about a guy who doesn’t know what to do in the face of love, who has nothing to blame but himself.What do you mean by that?I think Cyrano is in love with love, and so many of us are, but we have no idea what it is. I always jump ahead and think, well, what if Cyrano really got what he wanted? Would he and Roxanne start to annoy each other? Because he keeps her on a pedestal, is that why he loves her? I think so many people do that. They don’t want to get too close. They want to know the good stuff without the bad.How did you feel about love when you were in your 20s? Were you in love with the idea of love?Yeah, I think so. I think there’s a “Wuthering Heights” quality to all love when you’re younger, you know? “Romeo and Juliet” wasn’t written for 40-year-olds. I was guilty of always falling for someone where it wasn’t reciprocated, because keeping it at a distance is more romantic than bringing it up close. You fall for people you know aren’t going to return that, so it’s even more tormented, and you’re not interested in the people interested in you. That’s how my brain worked because I was a self-saboteur when I was young.When it comes to love, Dinklage said, “I was a self-saboteur when I was young.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesHow do you grapple with that?You get a bit older and you realize that has nothing to do with anything. But it’s OK, because in your 20s, everybody should be a mess. I meet so many ambitious, professional young people in their 20s and they have everything together, and it seems like they haven’t made any of those really important mistakes, as opposed to when me and my friends were in New York in our early 20s and we’d go out drinking all night and smoke cigarettes and howl at the moon. We were all just fools, and it was fun.Do you remember the first time you met Erica?Of course. It was about 18 years ago now. We were all at a friend’s house and someone said, “They’re walking the elephants through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.” The circus was in town and it was snowing, and they were walking the elephants through Manhattan, a long line of them. It was like something out of a beautiful, fantastical, end-of-the-world, crazy, romantic movie. See? I always think about movies. So that’s the night we met, the night the elephants walked through Manhattan.By that point, had you been able to move past your tendency to torment yourself about love?I don’t think you do that. I think other people do that to you. If anybody’s been lucky enough to experience love, it just grabs hold of you. You don’t control how you feel, but you can choose what to do with it.Which is part of the issue with Cyrano, who may feel unworthy of love.I was raised Irish Catholic, so I totally feel unworthy of everything. That’s what hopefully this movie is speaking to, that unworthiness we all go through. When you meet somebody you love, they’re suddenly so important and so powerful that of course your go-to is, “I’m not worthy of this, because why would I be? This is so much bigger than me.”Do you think Erica removed the fake nose and reconceived Cyrano because she had you in mind for the role?Subconsciously, perhaps, because we had worked together before and we’re partners in life. But I definitely think she wasn’t just replacing the nose with my size in terms of a physical difference of the character. She just wanted to unearth. It’s kind of what I do: Every time I approach a role, I’m not just approaching it as someone my size, I’m approaching it as a flesh-and-blood human being with many more complications to the character.It’s so funny, just talking about this movie, I’m asked, “How does it feel to play a leading man?” That’s still part of the conversation because we’re still inundated by clichés. The domain of romantic leads has been beautiful white people for a hundred years now. That’s just what we’ve been served up, like Burger King, and then if we eat it, they’re going to make more of it. But my favorite filmmakers have been the ones who take risks, like Hal Ashby. I just worship “Harold and Maude” because look at who the romantic characters are. It’s a brilliant movie.Dinklage opposite Jasmine Cephas Jones and Blake Jenner in the stage version of “Cyrano.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIn the ’90s, you gave an interview where you said, “What I really want is to play the romantic lead and get the girl.”I think I was speaking more to the idea that they get to thread the whole narrative, and that’s sort of a joy. I had been playing a number of fun parts, but they were supporting parts. Behind the curtain of filmmaking, so much of it is continuity of character: If you come in for one or two scenes, you can just lay some dynamite, have some fun, and then you’re out of there, but there’s no real arc to your storytelling.I think what’s fascinating about “Game of Thrones” and why a lot of actors are now drawn to television, is because they get to do that slow burn. For example, if you take the character of Tyrion’s brother Jaime, he pushes a little kid out the window at the end of the first episode, but two seasons later, he’s a hero to the audience. It’s like, did you forget he pushed a kid out the window? It’s crazy the way you can just surf this narrative and take it wherever you want to go. I got to do that with Tyrion and you get to do that in the movie if you’re the lead, though you have to condense it a little bit more.What was it like to be famous at the height of “Game of Thrones” mania?It’s myriad different reactions I get on a daily basis. People mean well, but when you’re walking down the street with your kid and people take your picture without asking … I start to talk this way and then I stop myself, because for an actor to complain about that reflects poorly on you. Everybody is like, “You have a great life. What’s wrong with me taking your picture? You’re a performer, that’s my right.”But it’s not about that. It’s more about just on a human level, I’m not a zoo animal. I’m a person. Let’s say I’m having a really bad day, or I just got off the phone and you’re right in my face. Am I supposed to smile for you? And why aren’t you actually communicating with me? More often than not, people take pictures without asking, and sometimes when I respond, even kindly, they don’t say anything because they’re almost surprised I’m talking to them. It’s really wild. If you’re a fan of what I do, why would you pay me back with that?Dinklage with Sophie Turner in “Game of Thrones.”Helen Sloan/HBOSo what’s your read on why they act that way?I think a lot of people are totally removed from each other. Camera phones have become like fingers, an extension of themselves, and they don’t even think about it because that’s how everybody’s living. Much more famous actors than me can walk down Broadway if they hide themselves correctly, but I’m unable to do that, so it can be hard. I moved to New York City to be anonymous: “Who cares? Nobody looks twice.” And now, because of the technology, everybody does.George R.R. Martin wanted “Game of Thrones” to go on for two more seasons. Do you think it should have, or was that the right time to end?It was the right time. No less, no more. You don’t want to wear out your welcome, although I’m not sure that show could have. But I think the reason there was some backlash about the ending is because they were angry at us for breaking up with them. We were going off the air and they didn’t know what to do with their Sunday nights anymore. They wanted more, so they backlashed about that.We had to end when we did, because what the show was really good at was breaking preconceived notions: Villains became heroes, and heroes became villains. If you know your history, when you track the progress of tyrants, they don’t start off as tyrants. I’m talking about, spoiler alert, what happened at the end of “Game of Thrones” with that character change. It’s gradual, and I loved how power corrupted these people. What happens to your moral compass when you get a taste of power? Human beings are complicated characters, you know?I think some people really did want a happily-ever-after ending, even though “Game of Thrones” told us it was not that show from the very beginning.They wanted the pretty white people to ride off into the sunset together. By the way, it’s fiction. There’s dragons in it. Move on. [Laughs] No, but the show subverts what you think, and that’s what I love about it. Yeah, it was called “Game of Thrones,” but at the end, the whole dialogue when people would approach me on the street was, “Who’s going to be on the throne?” I don’t know why that was their takeaway because the show really was more than that.One of my favorite moments was when the dragon burned the throne because it sort of just killed that whole conversation, which is really irreverent and kind of brilliant on behalf of the show’s creators: “Shut up, it’s not about that.” They constantly did that, where you thought one thing and they delivered another. Everybody had their own stories going on while watching that show, but nobody’s was as good as what the show delivered, I think. More

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      ‘Cowboy Bebop’ Beats and the Universe of ‘Dune’: What ‘Arcane’ Is Made of

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      Netflix’s new animated series is based on the popular video game ‘League of Legends,’ but the show’s creators added some ingredients of their own.A word of reassurance to those who have not played — or perhaps even heard of — the sprawling online game “League of Legends”: The new animated series “Arcane” may be inspired by it, but newbies can jump in cold and still be transported. Not only is the action breathless, but the visuals conjured by the French studio Fortiche are breathtakingly, beautifully detailed.The show takes place in a steampunk-ish world where magic functions as technology, with all the benefits and dangers this implies. The upper-crust denizens of Piltover control the so-called “hextech” and lord it over those scrounging in the depths of the city of Zaun. Stuck in the middle of a power play between haves and have-nots — further complicated by personal revenges — are the badass sisters Vi (voiced by Hailee Steinfeld) and Jinx (Ella Purnell). Their tormented relationship is one of the primary narrative engines in “Arcane.”The show’s showrunners Christian Linke and Alex Yee are creative directors with “League of Legends” producer Riot Games, but they have looked beyond the game world to create the series.In a video call from their office in Los Angeles, Linke, 34, and Yee, 38, discussed some of the inspirations behind “Arcane.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.‘Peaky Blinders’NetflixBoth men really like this stylish, violent British crime drama set in post-World War I Birmingham. “There is writing that’s realistic, where it feels like you just can step into that world, and then there’s a world where characters just sound so much cooler than anything we would hear in everyday life,” Linke said. “In ‘Peaky Blinders,’ there is such an art to those exchanges. I also feel like I genuinely don’t know what the characters will do, and I think that’s something where ‘Peaky Blinders’ really shines.”Yee singled out the way the show, created by Steven Knight, immediately gave a sense of its universe, something they tried to emulate in the “Arcane” pilot. “Really early on, we have this image of Zaun as this kind of thriving under-city black market,” he said. “The kids go down in the elevator, with this huge music drop — it’s dangerous, but it’s exciting.”‘Lord of the Rings’Pierre Vinet/New Line CinemaWhile working on “Arcane,” Linke referred to Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the Tolkien epic so much that his colleagues joked that he should start paying up every time he mentioned it. “You want to have things that are somewhat grounded and it’s giving characters arcs, even smaller characters with limited screen time,” he said of looking to Jackson’s dense tapestry as an inspiration. “It’s not easy to create rules around magic and this and that, and still create a relatable character arc.”Yee, for his part, tends to look at “Dune” (“In my head I’m thinking of the book,” he specified) for inspiration, noting how it and “Lord of the Rings” helped him figure out how to design sprawling fantasy universes. “What both of those properties do really well is they take a look at the entire world and try to figure out how all of the elements play with each other. They also both straddle the tone spectrum really well.” “Arcane,” for example, brilliantly handles the balance between epic action sequences and intimate scenes, complex political intrigue and thorny personal bonds (including that between Jinx and the villainous Silco).‘Cowboy Bebop’SunriseMusic plays a big part in “Arcane,” with many original songs often providing a jolting, surprisingly effective contemporary counterpoint to the story — as when Curtis Harding and Jazmine Sullivan’s vintage-sounding soul song “Our Love” plays over a montage slowly revealing that Vi is going to sacrifice herself for her sister’s sake. A big influence on this approach is this delirious anime series from the late 1990s (which has recently been remade as a live-action show).“The grittiness of ‘Cowboy Bebop’ was an inspiration,” Yee said. “And the integration of music with the visuals. We quickly discovered that Fortiche can really accomplish a lot when you set them free with a little bit of music, just sort of chase whatever visuals they like. In Episode 7, the fight between Jinx and Ekko was very different in the script,” he continued, referring to a scene scored with Denzel Curry, Gizzle and Bren Joy’s “Dynasties & Dystopia.”‘Metropolis’TriStar PicturesHere Linke and Yee are not referring to Fritz Lang’s Expressionist silent classic but to Rintaro and Katsuhiro Otomo’s anime movie from 2001. “It’s a noir-ish setting in a near future where we have sentient robots and ships that feel like they can leave the planet, but it’s also a very stacked, layered city — a big part of the story is about ascending the different floors of the world,” Yee said. “There’s this sort of vibrance in the world that makes you feel like, ‘I don’t know that I want to be there,’ but you can’t take your eyes away from it.”That balance came into play when, for example, creating the street kids’ cool hide-out, which looks like a cross between a theater’s backstage and a semi-abandoned arcade. “We had to figure out how to make it look like a home, even though it’s dangerous,” Linke said. “‘Metropolis’ did some very cool locations: It feels like it’s this vertical maze and then someone took a little corner and made it there.”‘The Dark Knight’Ron Phillips/Warner Bros.There have been many iterations of Batman, from the silly to the tragic, and these swings were familiar to the “Arcane” pair. “There was definitely a parallel in, How do you ground characters from our game that in some cases are closer to the Adam West Batman — an animated character that never had to answer to more realistic story and world considerations?” Linke said. “What Christopher Nolan did with Batman became more about these grounded, emotional journeys and stakes.”A particular challenge was how to handle the character of Jinx, who is playful and colorful, and a loose cannon. “She couldn’t just be this cackling, loud character that if you see for the fifth time, you’re just going to be like, ‘OK, I got it now — is there anything else?’” Linke said. “We had to make sure that we turn game characters into real people.”Yee also points out as an inspiration the various ways the characters are “manifested,” as he put it, in “The Dark Knight.” In “Arcane,” the disfigured Silco is the kind of tortured soul whose distorted dreams become lifelong obsessions — not unlike the Batman villain Two-Face, for example. “What he really missed, or what he really wanted his entire life, was this feeling of being whole, of being respected and seen as someone worth your time and respect,” Yee said of Silco. “He just never had that.” More

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      LaChanze, at Home in ‘The Color Purple’ House

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      The Westchester house where the Tony-winning actor lives is ideally sized for family reunions — and for spending time alone.“The Color Purple” house — that’s how the actor LaChanze refers to her five-bedroom home in lower Westchester County, N.Y. This has nothing to do with the exterior (it’s gray) or the interior (plum, lavender, lilac, fuchsia, mulberry and violet are underrepresented).But it has everything to do with LaChanze’s Tony-winning performance in the 2005 musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s celebrated novel. “Being in ‘The Color Purple’ was how I was able to buy the house,” said LaChanze, who is currently starring in the limited-run Broadway production — through Jan. 9 — of Alice Childress’s 1955 comedy-drama “Trouble in Mind.”Her other Broadway credits include “Once on This Island” (1990),“If/Then” (2014) and “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical” (2018). She won an Emmy in 2010 for the PBS special “Handel’s Messiah Rocks: A Joyful Noise.”Sixteen years ago, after considering various housing possibilities, LaChanze settled on the suburbs, because she wanted her children, Celia Rose Gooding, now 21, an actor, and Zaya LaChanze Gooding, 20, a college student, to have firsthand knowledge of lawns and trees. For herself, she wanted relatively new construction.“I knew I’d be living alone,” said LaChanze, 60, whose husband of three years, Calvin Gooding, a trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, died in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. “I knew I didn’t know how do repairs. It narrowed my options, because many of the properties in Westchester are much older.”“My mother always stressed that when you walk in the front door you should leave behind everything from the world outside,” said LaChanze. “I’ve incorporated that feeling into our living space.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesLaChanze, 60Occupation: ActorGreat performance: “People love to watch me make fried chicken on Instagram. My mother used to say, ‘If you can’t make a meal in under 30 minutes, then you’re not a good cook.’”“I was lucky,” she continued. “I found a house that was built in 2000. I’m the second owner.”She was, perhaps, even luckier in what surrounded the house: abundant greenery and a yard that was hard by both a park and the Bronx River.“People can’t cross over, so it’s like my own piece of the water,” LaChanze said. “It’s quiet and scenic. That’s pretty much what sold me.”She has since added a firepit and affixed a set of wind chimes to a birch tree near the deck. They ring in the key of A. “I love that,” she said. “A lot of Negro spirituals are written in that key. You hear that chord? It’s just beautiful.”Unlike those chimes, the house needed some fine-tuning. It had style, for sure; it just wasn’t LaChanze’s particular style.LaChanze’s three cats have the run of the house.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times“There were gold-plated fixtures and I was, like, ‘Nooooo,’” she said. Out they went, replaced by nickel.Down came the columns between the den and the kitchen to create an expansive space, and bookcases were built on either side of the fireplace. (One of the shelves holds a steel remnant from the twin towers.) Marble countertops, a marble floor, a glass-tile backsplash in shades of brown and copper, and a few coats of butter-yellow paint were part of the kitchen overhaul.“I kind of went to work in here a little bit,” LaChanze said with a laugh. “All my friends and fans who follow me on Instagram know what my kitchen looks like.”You can easily tell that this is the residence of someone who works in the arts. The framed awards and piles of scripts in the office, the area set up for recording sessions, the show posters on the wall in the basement gym, all make the point.“I recently did Spike Lee’s documentary on HBO,” LaChanze said, referring to “NYC Epicenters 9/11→2021 ½”. “He gave me a copy of the poster for the show and signed it for me.”LaChanze, a fan of the game bid whist, estimates that she has some 100 decks of cards.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesIt’s equally clear that this is the home of someone who cares about art. “I’m a little bit of a collector,” LaChanze said. “I call my foyer my international space, because I travel quite a bit and I have a bunch of art from a lot of different places” — a door from Nigeria, a drawing etched on the bark of a tree from Tonga, dung art from Rwanda.The foyer also holds a thriving fiddle-leaf fig, one of two that LaChanze, an enthusiastic gardener, bought this summer at Costco — for the bargain price of $69 each, she is proud to tell you — and has been tending ever since, first out on the deck, now by the stairs that lead to the second floor.“I just love it to death. Look how big it is,” she said, sounding like a very proud mother.And there, in a nutshell, you have the primary business that’s conducted at LaChanze’s house: nurturing.Here is where the actor’s large, far-flung family gathers twice a year for reunions, and where falling asleep on the custom-designed, brown crushed-velvet sectional in the den is encouraged. Here, too, is where a group of card-playing cronies comes every month for an evening of bid whist.“It’s something that’s big in my culture,” LaChanze said. “When I was young, my parents were playing with their friends, but then someone had to leave. They came and got me and taught me the game, so they could keep going, because you need four people.”Her affection for the game and its key component has stuck: She has amassed 100 decks of very elegant cards.“OK, so one night I was going down the internet rabbit hole, and I discovered this group of people in a card-collection club,” LaChanze said. “I joined, and every few months I get sent a new deck by a new designer. There are a lot of, I would say, biker dudes and magicians in the club, and it’s really a lot of fun to talk to these guys across the country about what we love about our cards.”“My mother used to say, ‘If you can’t make a meal in under 30 minutes, then you’re not a good cook,’” said LaChanze, who demonstrates how to pull off this culinary trick to her fans on Instagram.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesNear where LaChanze sets up the card table in the basement is a sofa upholstered in green velvet. “This is the first sofa my husband and I bought together,” she said, gently patting a cushion. “We were at Bloomingdale’s, and I was telling him that I’d love a good deep couch that we could spoon on and not feel uncomfortable. We both fit on this.”She added: “I’ve kept it so that my girls can have a little piece of their daddy in here.”When LaChanze comes home from the theater, she greets her three cats and then heads out to the deck, often with a glass of wine in hand, and listens to the wind chimes, or takes a walk down to the water or to the firepit.“I love my home,” she said simply. “My friends are telling me, ‘Well, LaChanze, you’re getting older. Your daughters are gone all the time. Why do you want to live in this big place alone?’”Alone? That’s not how she views it.She has her slice of the river. She has the stars. She has what she calls the heart-of-the-house light, a lamp in the dining room that is never switched off. She falls asleep every night to the lullaby of the Metro-North train whistle.“I love hearing that sound,” LaChanze said. “Because it reminds me I’m not by myself.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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      ‘Emily in Paris’ Season 2: Looks to Watch For

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      The Netflix show was derided for, among other things, an unrealistic approach to French dressing. What can viewers expect this season?After “Emily in Paris” arrived on Netflix last fall, the series — about a young American marketing wiz stumbling through life in a new city — was derided for portraying a fantasy version of French culture. Parisians bristled at the show’s inaccuracies and clichés, from people smoking in the office to the number of berets onscreen.“It’s the series that French people love to hate,” said Marylin Fitoussi, the show’s costume designer.Still, the show provided a welcome escape for those stuck at home. It was a warm bath for weary souls; a silly, romantic, candy-colored romp through a beautiful city untouched by the pandemic. The clothes played a part in that.Ms. Fitoussi had originally tried for realism with certain outfits. For Mindy (Ashley Park), an heiress moonlighting as a nanny and Emily’s first real friend in Paris, her instinct was to dress her in comfortable clothes and sneakers. But that changed after a conversation with the show’s costume consultant, Patricia Field, known for her fantastical costuming on “Sex and the City.”“They said to me the magical sentence: ‘Marylin, we don’t care about reality,’” said Ms. Fitoussi, who appeared on a Zoom call wearing a black turban, a gold collared shirt under a printed yellow jacket, and an array of enormous sculptural rings. “That is my mojo in life.”For Season 2, out on Dec. 22, Ms. Fitoussi and Ms. Field were determined to push the show’s fashions even further. Emily (Lily Collins) is navigating a sticky love triangle but settling into life in Paris, and her style has become more sophisticated, if no less eye-catching. Even Emily’s imperious boss, Sylvie (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu), is pushing the boundaries of French work wear, turning up in metallic suits and dramatic fringe.As these outfits show, more is always more in Emily’s Paris.From left: Lily Collins as Emily and Ashley Park as Mindy. In dressing them for the show, the costume designers leaned into Emily’s penchant for obviousness and Mindy’s new place in the spotlight.Stéphanie Branchu/NetflixA Bold Print and a Power SuitEmily has evolved beyond a certain Eiffel Tower print from Season 1, but obviousness remains her signature. For a party on the Seine promoting a heart-shaped jewelry collection by Chopard, she wears a white Anouki dress covered in red hearts. Ms. Field was not sold on the dress when Ms. Fitoussi bought it. “In the beginning, I just didn’t know where in hell I would use it, because it just seems so silly in a way,” Ms. Field said over a video call. “But along came that scene.”Ms. Fitoussi said she loved the puffy sleeves. “Pat hated the sleeves, and I said, ‘The dress without the sleeves is nothing. It’s just a tube with some hearts,’” she said. (The red-and-pink striped jacket Emily wears with the dress had to be custom made to fit over them.)Mindy, meanwhile, has joined a band, bringing her vocal talents to the streets of Paris. (Ms. Park has been nominated for both a Tony and a Grammy.) Her performance scenes gave the costume team a chance to go wild with glitter and feathers. Case in point: the shimmering green Zadig & Voltaire suit she wears to sing at the Chopard soiree, paired with sparkly Roger Vivier pumps.“We’re so used to having Mindy look very sexy, very feminine, very outrageous,” Ms. Fitoussi said. “I said, ‘Why not a suit?’”To give this look “the Mindy touch,” in Ms. Fitoussi’s words, they raised the glamour quotient with a vintage rhinestone necklace that streams down her throat.Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu as Sylvie, Emily’s boss. Ms. Fitoussi had no interest in dressing her as the archetypal Frenchwoman, opting instead for bold colors and metallics.Stéphanie Branchu/NetflixA New Take on French StyleSylvie is the first to call Emily out on her ignorance of French culture and her American arrogance, reprimanding her for talking shop at parties and for treating Paris like her personal “amusement park.” But while Emily’s boss is in many ways the show’s archetypal Frenchwoman, Ms. Fitoussi had no interest in dressing her as such.“I know how to design the perfect Frenchwoman,” she said, rattling off “boring” basics: bluejeans, T-shirt, white sneakers, black or navy jacket, “beige if we are crazy today.”For Season 2, Ms. Fitoussi dressed Sylvie in several suits in shades of bright red and silver. (The silver one came to be known on set as her “Mick Jagger suit.”) One eye-catching office look includes a low-cut gold Saint Laurent button-down, a black Maje skirt with a thigh-high slit, and an Alaïa belt.“That is my idea of a business outfit,” Ms. Fitoussi said. “Black skirt, but instead of a white, black or navy blue, you put gold.”Jeremy O. Harris, center, as Gregory Elliott Dupree — a new character this season.Carole Bethuel/NetflixDesigning for a New CharacterSome of the most extravagant looks of the season belong to a new character, a fashion designer named Gregory Elliott Dupree (Jeremy O. Harris). He first appears in Saint-Tropez with a green and white Casablanca faux fur coat slung over his shoulders and a floppy Patou hat on his head (accessorized with a yellow Dolce & Gabbana flower pin).“The truth is, when Jeremy O. Harris walked in the door, he was dressed,” Ms. Field said. “I’m like, ‘Perfect. I don’t have any work to do.’”While Ms. Fitoussi has a special affinity for Gregory — “If I was a man, I would look exactly like Gregory Dupree” — she identifies strongly with Emily’s fashion sensibility. “I’m always very colorful, and I mix patterns because I was a textile designer,” she said. “In Paris, people call me ‘the parrot,’ call me ‘the clown.’”To her, the point is for Emily to retain her bold sensibility, even as she begins to learn the language and customs of her new city.“I don’t want her to look like an ordinary French girl,” Ms. Fitoussi said. “I don’t want to make a clone of what is French or what is supposed to be French fashion. If I do that, I fail.” More

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      The Best TV Episodes of 2021

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      Among the thousands of hours of television that came out this year, episodes of “Call My Agent,” “For All Mankind,” “Mythic Quest,” “Pose” and “WandaVision,” among others, stood out.From left, “Dave,” PEN15” and “Genius: Aretha” put out some of TV’s best episodes of the year.From left: Byron Cohen/FX; Hulu; Richard DuCree/National GeographicTelevision today comes in big portions, as anyone who spent seven-plus hours with the Beatles over Thanksgiving weekend can attest. But just as a marathon jam session can yield a few tight singles, the most memorable TV is still often the well-crafted individual episode. As Mike Hale, Margaret Lyons and I end another year’s binge as TV critics for The New York Times, here are a few of the installments from 2021 that topped our personal hit parades. JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘Call My Agent!’ (Netflix)‘Sigourney’More than 30 European actors — including stars like Isabelle Huppert, Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno — have graciously and often mercilessly lampooned themselves in this French dramedy, playing clients or prospective clients or angry former clients of the fictional talent agency ASK. In this Season 4 episode, an American stepped in, and Sigourney Weaver, speaking more than passable French and playing herself as an utterly charming manipulator, was flawless. (Streaming on Netflix.) MIKE HALE‘City of Ghosts’‘Bob & Nancy’Plenty of children’s shows are cute but “City of Ghosts” is also beautiful, and its poetic wistfulness about Los Angeles would be at home on a premium cable drama. Instead it’s in this plucky, naturalistic cartoon about ghost-hunting kids who have a podcast. I loved every episode of this show. But I picked “Bob & Nancy” because it’s about a marionette theater, and thus it toys with ideas of animating the inanimate — rich ground for a show in touch with the spirit realm. (Streaming on Netflix.) MARGARET LYONSHarley Quinn Smith in the finale of “Cruel Summer,” which offered both a happy ending and a surprising twist.Freeform/Bill Matlock‘Cruel Summer’‘Hostile Witness’This teen kidnapping mystery took all the hallmarks of prestige-y crime shows — split timelines, dark lighting, tangential secrets — and repackaged them with a kicky ’90s YA flare. It was one of the juicy highlights of the summer. But shows like this are only as good as their finales, and “Cruel Summer” managed the trick of both a happy ending and a thrilling, dark twist. (Streaming on Hulu.) MARGARET LYONS‘Dave’ (FXX)‘Somebody Date Me’Texting can be a crutch for TV shows, a way to use pop-up bubbles to give characters phone-enabled telepathy. Not so in this playful, smart half-hour, in which Dave Burd’s up-and-coming rapper made (and lost) a date with Doja Cat. As the two musicians courted with their thumbs, “Somebody Date Me” showed how context and time can change the meaning and reading of the smallest online (mis)communication. Thumbs-up emoji! (Streaming on Hulu.) JAMES PONIEWOZIKThe Season 2 finale of “For All Mankind,” with Krys Marshall, revolved around multiple white-knuckle missions.Apple TV+‘For All Mankind’ (Apple TV+)‘The Grey’Each season of this space-race alternative history is a multistage booster rocket. The slow-moving early episodes expend a lot of fuel, building energy and narrative force until the show reaches escape velocity. (My aerospace engineer readers, I beg you not to fact-check my metaphors.) The white-knuckle Season 2 finale moved with the deftness of a docking maneuver, as a U.S.-Soviet conflict on the moon and a threatened war on Earth required risk and sacrifice on two celestial bodies and points in between. (Streaming on Apple TV+.) JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘Genius: Aretha’ (National Geographic)‘Amazing Grace’‘Pose’ (FX)‘Take Me to Church’The music and community of the Black church co-starred in two praiseworthy hours of TV. The Aretha Franklin bio-series peaked as it focused on the recording of the 1972 “Amazing Grace” live album at New Temple Missionary Baptist Church, fusing the artist’s past and present in a crucible of soul. In “Pose,” a grim diagnosis led Pray Tell (Billy Porter) back to his hometown and church community, both to confront the homophobia that drove him from it and give voice to the music that sustained him. (Stream “Genius: Aretha” on Hulu; buy “Pose” on Amazon.) JAMES PONIEWOZIKPerry Mattfeld, left, and David Webster, in the “Somewhere Over the Border” episode of “In the Dark.” CW‘In the Dark’ (CW)‘Somewhere Over the Border’This CW drama about a blind woman and her buddies, who run a rescue-dog agency and get involved in drug dealing and murder, is no more than a serviceable thriller. But the rapport among its central characters, Murphy (Perry Mattfeld), Jess (Brooke Markham) and Felix (Morgan Krantz), has developed into one of the more believable and moving portrayals of friendship on TV. When Murphy found herself stranded in a strange country, the strength of those ties was the foundation of a taut and agonizing hour. (Streaming on Netflix.) MIKE HALE‘Line of Duty’ (BritBox)Season 6, Episode 5Tension and deception pump through the veins of this breakneck procedural about a British internal-affairs unit, and no show does cliffhangers better. You could point to just about any episode; this one, with one of the heroes following a possibly dirty cop into an abandoned industrial park because that’s what the job called for, was off the charts. (Streaming on BritBox.) MIKE HALE‘Love, Death & Robots’‘The Drowned Giant’In just 13 minutes, this elegant short about a giant’s corpse that washes up on a beach one day captures, in a perfect snapshot, humanity’s tendency to desecrate marvels, to behold a world-changing event and decide simply to carry on. Based on a short story by J.G. Ballard, “The Drowned Giant” is rendered here in mostly realistic animation, with the giant’s clean-shaven cheeks, tidy fingernails and muscular chest shown in aching detail. In an era when so many shows just blend together, this episode stands out for its light touch and sad imagination. (Streaming on Netflix.) MARGARET LYONSIn a memorable episode of “Making It,” contestants like Jessie Lamworth, (right, with the host Amy Poehler) made Halloween costumes.Evans Vestal Ward/NBC‘Making It’‘All the Holidays at Once’Post “Great British Baking Show,” lots of reality competition series have gone away from the cutthroat in favor of the warm and fuzzy, and perhaps no show is warmer and fuzzier than the craft competition “Making It.” Each episode has its charms but “All the Holidays at Once” was especially thrilling, because unlike some of the show’s grander projects, crafting your own Halloween costume is pretty standard fare, even for layfolk. The contestants’ giddy joy in presenting their creations to the judges was matched only by my own giddy joy at seeing their silly and spectacular costumes. Jess won with her superb alien-abduction costume but when everything is this fun, don’t we all win? As a bonus, this episode also included Melañio telling a story about a bat in a toilet, a tale that will haunt me for the rest of my days. (Streaming on Hulu.) MARGARET LYONS‘Mythic Quest’ (Apple TV+)‘Backstory!’Having come up with one of the best pandemic-inspired episodes of 2020, this video game-industry comedy is gunning for TV’s high score in stand-alones. This installment gave the back story-obsessed game writer C.W. Longbottom (a wonderfully blustery F. Murray Abraham) his own flashback as a struggling sci-fi author in the 1970s — a funny and poignant tale of irony, professional jealousy and success at a cost. (Streaming on Apple TV+.) JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘Nuclear Family’ (HBO)Episode 3Ry Russo-Young’s three-part documentary about her lesbian mothers and the sperm donor who sued them for parental rights, threatening to pull apart her family, built to a powerful and eloquent conclusion. It both affirmed the importance of the battle her mothers fought and questioned the assumptions of everyone involved. (Streaming on HBO Max.) MIKE HALEIn a March interview with Oprah Winfrey, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle discussed their separation from the royal family.Harpo Productions/Joe Pugliese‘Oprah with Meghan and Harry’One so rarely gets to receive or send a “turn on your TV right now” text, especially in my line of work. So for that dual thrill alone this interview earned a place in my heart. It was the kind of programming that barely exists anymore: a tell-all network special in which celebrities share genuine new information with Oprah, the patron saint of soul-baring. There were Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, aglow in the California sun, decrying racism and candidly discussing mental health crises. Which would have been enough, but they also reset the royal narrative, gave Oprah eggs, fought back tears and gazed lovingly at one another — all while sitting in chairs sold by Christopher Knight from “The Brady Bunch.” Television, baby! I love you! MARGARET LYONS‘PEN15’ (Hulu)‘Yuki’Mutsuko Erskine had never acted before her daughter, Maya, cast her to play Maya’s mother in Hulu’s brutally funny teen comedy. Sometimes daughter knows best. This showpiece episode, in which a chance meeting with an ex-husband led Yuki to look down a road not taken, was a rich vignette of an immigrant’s experience and a subtle performance to cap off the role, literally, of a lifetime. (Streaming on Hulu.) JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘The Simpsons’ (Fox)‘The Dad-Feelings Limited’Who would have thought that the origin story of Comic Book Guy, done partly as an affectionate sendup of a Wes Anderson film, would be so lovely? (Streaming on Disney+.) MIKE HALE‘Snowfall’ (FX)‘All the Way Down’This brutal and only-as-sentimental-as-it-needs-to-be drama about a rogue C.I.A. agent and a young Black entrepreneur, partners in the crack wars in early 1980s Los Angeles, still does not get enough attention. That’s especially true of the stories written by the novelist Walter Mosley, like this chilling, tightly packed episode about rage, revenge, gentrification and wanting to go straight. (Streaming on Hulu.) MIKE HALEIn “WandaVision,” Paul Bettany and Elizabeth Olsen channeled multiple eras of TV including, in the premiere, 1950s sitcoms.Marvel Studios‘WandaVision’ (Disney+)‘Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience’Several installments of this superhero psychodrama, set in a bizarro-world version of classic sitcom formats, could have made this list. But might as well start at the beginning, in which Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) played house on a 1950s stage set whose made-for-TV perfection turned horrifyingly (and ingeniously) wrong. (Streaming on Disney+.) JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘What We Do in the Shadows’‘Casino’“Shadows” is one of the funniest shows on TV right now, and “Casino,” where the gang heads to Atlantic City, was my favorite episode this season. Nandor (Kayvan Novak) becomes entranced by a “Big Bang Theory” slot machine — “‘bazinga’ is the war cry of Sheldon,” he explains — and in perfect, cascading horror, this leads to the total dissolution of his understanding of the universe. “Shadows” is its best when the vampires’ grandiosity clashes with their vulnerabilities, especially their excitability, and I’ll never see another in-house ad on a hotel TV without thinking that it’s Colin Robinson’s favorite show. (Streaming on Hulu.) MARGARET LYONS More