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      ‘Untamed’ Review: A National Park Procedural From Netflix

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      Onscreen, at least, there are enough rangers to keep Yosemite running and to investigate a mysterious death at El Capitan.In the category of “Shows That Play Differently Under the Current Administration,” this week brings “Untamed,” a new Netflix mystery mini-series set in Yosemite National Park.On one hand, you can’t help wondering whether all those rangers would have time to investigate a mysterious death on the face of El Capitan when the National Park Service has lost nearly 25 percent of its permanent staff since President Trump took office again. Aren’t there restrooms that need cleaning?On the other, hiring rangers who look like Eric Bana and Lily Santiago — who play the primary investigators of that mysterious death — might be explained as part of the recent “Make America Beautiful Again” executive order.Bana, 20 years along from his action-star heyday (when he appeared successively in “Hulk,” “Troy” and “Munich”), plays Kyle Turner, who is not just any ranger. He’s an agent of the National Park Service Investigative Services Branch, so he’s sort of a federal cousin to the naval investigators at “NCIS.” Maybe CBS would have gone ahead and called the show “NPSISB,” but Netflix, cautious by nature, has gone with “Untamed.”The title refers both to the landscape — mountainous British Columbia locations stand in for California — and to Turner, a laconic loner with a tragic back story and an entire Douglas fir’s worth of chips on his shoulder. Even his horse thinks he’s too intense.With Bana playing a modern lawman hemmed in by bureaucracy and fueled by guilt and resentment, “Untamed” sits between neo-frontier soap opera (like “Yellowstone”) and neo-western crime drama (like “Dark Winds” or the late, lamented “Longmire”). Mark L. Smith, who created the show with his daughter Elle Smith, has experience in this region of the American imagination, having played up the brutal aspects of the western mythos as a co-writer of “The Revenant” and creator of an earlier Netflix mini-series, “American Primeval.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why ‘Jaws’ Works

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      A new documentary explores how Steven Spielberg’s hit reshaped the movie industry 50 years ago and why it resonates today. Hint: It’s not the shark.On the most basic level “Jaws” is a movie about a relentless great white shark, terrorizing the residents of a beach community during a Fourth of July weekend. It was the razor-toothed beast who adorned the onslaught of T-shirts and other merchandise when the film came out 50 years ago, premiering in June 1975 and all but creating what we think of as the modern blockbuster. It was the shark who got the two-note tuba treatment from John Williams’s ominous score.But the new National Geographic documentary “Jaws @50,” now streaming on Disney+ and Hulu, makes one thing as clear as a summer day on Amity Island: “Jaws” is primarily about flawed people, not a scary fish. The real villain is not the shark, who, after all, would be happy to be left alone. (As the shark conservation biologist Candace Fields says in the documentary, “The sharks are not infesting the water. The sharks live in the water”).The bad guy is the avaricious mayor (Murray Hamilton), who insists on keeping the beaches open during peak season rather than shutting down for safety. The three heroes — the police chief Brody (Roy Scheider), the sea captain Quint (Robert Shaw), and the oceanographer Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) — form a carefully drawn triangle, written with a depth that has eluded most post-“Jaws” spectacles to this day.For Laurent Bouzereau, the author and filmmaker who directed “Jaws @50,” the human touches were what made “Jaws” a classic, and what guided a young Steven Spielberg as he turned Peter Benchley’s best-selling novel into a runaway hit movie.“The humanity of Steven’s approach to everything in his career started emerging in a movie like ‘Jaws,’ where it’s much more about people’s reaction to a crisis rather than the crisis itself,” Bouzereau said in a video interview. “You feel like you know these people, and they all stand out.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Rematch’ Recreates a Cultural Touchstone

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      A series dramatizes the 1997 chess match between a world champion and an IBM computer, a precursor of modern anxieties about artificial intelligence.It is rare that chess grabs the public’s attention — most people consider it to be too slow or too arcane to be engaging. But every now and then, the game transcends those obstacles, as it did in 2020, when Netflix released “The Queen’s Gambit,” about a girl genius who rises up to conquer the game of kings.It happens with real chess matches, too. It happened in 1972, when against the backdrop of the Cold War, a match for the world championship was played in Iceland between the American Bobby Fischer and the Russian Boris Spassky. Fischer won.And it happened again in May 1997, when Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, played a match against a black, six-and-a-half-foot tall, 1,500-pound computer named Deep Blue, developed at IBM.The last event is the subject of another television series, called “Rematch,” now streaming in Britain on Disney+. (It is not currently streaming in the United States; Disney declined to say when or if it would.) The six-part series walks viewers through what led up to the weeklong match held in midtown Manhattan and the unfolding drama culminating in (spoiler alert) Kasparov’s historic loss.Spinning a tale of human drama, corporate skulduggery, double-dealing and even espionage, “Rematch” also makes several explicit references to the attention that the match received, including by weaving in actual clips from contemporaneous news broadcasts.Though there are some fictional elements in the series, the hype was real.It was not hard to understand. The match pitted man against machine, something right out of science fiction. (In one scene in “Rematch,” characters joke about naming Deep Blue after sinister robots from “Alien” or “Terminator.”)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Late Night Fact-Checks Trump on His Uncle and the Unabomber

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      Jordan Klepper and other hosts poked holes in the president’s claim that his uncle had been the future terrorist’s professor at M.I.T. Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Weird Flex, BroAt an A.I. conference in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, President Trump said his uncle, John Trump, had been the “longest-serving professor in the history of M.I.T.” and held “three degrees in nuclear, chemical, and math.” Trump added that his uncle’s students had included Ted Kaczynski, who he described as being “seriously good.”“Wow, we went from zero to Unabomber like that,” Jordan Klepper said on Wednesday’s “Daily Show,” snapping his fingers.Klepper pointed out that while the president’s uncle had indeed been a well-known M.I.T. professor, he was not the longest-serving one, nor did he have degrees in “nuclear, chemical and math” (he had a Ph.D. in electrical engineering). He said it was also highly unlikely that he had told his nephew Donald a story about teaching the Unabomber, “because nobody knew who Kaczynski was until 1996, and Trump’s uncle died in 1985.”“Kaczynski did not go to M.I.T. He went to Harvard. [imitating Trump] ‘Yes, but sometimes old Ted would take the crosstown bus over to M.I.T, then he would go around correcting people. He’d say, ‘I actually didn’t go to school here, you know, you don’t actually know me. I’m a figment of the imagination of your dumbest nephew.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“So the whole thing we just heard wasn’t just a small lie, it was like a full hallucination.” — SETH MEYERS“Now, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe Trump just misspoke, made a slip. I mean, who among us hasn’t accidentally told people that our uncle taught the Unabomber?” — JORDAN KLEPPER“What I’m saying is, isn’t it great that we finally have a president whose brain works perfectly?” — JORDAN KLEPPERThe Punchiest Punchlines (Snoozefest Edition)“But the big story today is that Trump lashed out at his own supporters who are criticizing him over the Epstein files, calling them ‘weaklings who have bought into B.S. hook, line and sinker.’ Trump hasn’t been this mad at the people he loved since McDonald’s introduced salads.” — JIMMY FALLON“No, he’s right. The Epstein saga is a total snoozefest. I mean, the most powerful man in the world is blocking information about a cabal of the rich, the famous and the royal befriending a con man, who regularly flies off on his private plane to his private island to do super-illegal sex stuff. Then the con man is arrested, people are afraid he’s going to name names, but before he can, he mysteriously dies right after being taken off of suicide watch in a federal prison during the administration of the guy who is blocking the release of the information. Boring!” — STEPHEN COLBERTWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Everyone’s Obsessed With True Crime. Even Prisoners Like Me.

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      As the genre has boomed on cable, the incarcerated have found themselves watching more and more of it.In the early aughts, when I was waiting on Rikers Island to be tried for murder, I had to watch what everyone else in the communal day room was watching on TV: shouts of “Jer-ry! Jer-ry!” and announcements that “You are not the father.”After I was convicted, in 2004, and sentenced to 28 years to life in prison, TV would occupy even more of my time. Prisons do get cable: Normally, the population pays via things like fund-raisers and the profits from visiting-room vending machines. At Clinton Dannemora, a maximum-security prison near the Canadian border, I bought a 13-inch television from the commissary, and it felt like a privilege to watch what I wanted, alone in my cell. In Attica, where I transferred in 2007, we had the Oxygen channel, on which everyone would watch reality shows like “Bad Girls Club.” I enjoyed all the gossiping and scheming on “Big Brother” and “Survivor,” and when I put an ad on a dating website for prisoners I listed “The Bachelor” as my favorite show. The women who wrote to me related. I eventually married one.Her name was Danielly, and she watched a lot of true crime. It made her so paranoid that she hung a bell inside her front door to alert her to intruders. Once, while she was visiting me, I noticed her peering behind us — she had recognized another prisoner from an episode of “20/20.” This happens to me now too: I’ll be in the mess hall or the yard and recognize someone from a true-crime show. He’ll be scooping oatmeal or exercising, and I’ll remember the re-enactment of his crime, the bludgeoning or the burying.In 2016, I transferred to Sing Sing. By then, Oxygen had shifted from reality shows to true crime; the channel’s logo was even redesigned to resemble police tape. It would soon be airing a seemingly nonstop run of shows like “Buried in the Backyard.” For a few years I was transferred to a smaller prison in the Catskills, where we didn’t have in-cell TVs — but when it closed and I landed back in Sing Sing, I found that true crime had come to dominate what felt like every station. NBC American Crimes ran reruns of “Dateline,” “American Greed” and “Lockup,” which I once heard described as “prison porn.” (It’s strange to walk down the tier, look through the bars of someone’s cell and see a TV turned to “Lockup” — an inside look at prison for someone who is already inside a prison.) Merit TV had “Crime Stories With Nancy Grace.” As I write this, Court TV is running a marathon of “Interview With a Killer.”More than half of Americans now watch true crime, according to one YouGov poll. (The F.B.I. reports that between 1993 and 2022, meanwhile, the rate of violent crime in the United States fell 49 percent.) We watch those shows in here, too. As true crime exploded in popularity, the demand for fresh content had producers searching for stories to tell, exhuming murder cases from years and even decades ago. This is how Danielly eventually found herself watching a true-crime show about me, a drug dealer in prison for killing a rival.Some watch with the prison hierarchy in mind.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jimmy Fallon Fans the Flames of Burning MAGA Hats

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      People torched the hats in videos, apparently upset about the Jeffrey Epstein case. “People in China were like, ‘Oh, come on, we worked so hard making them,’” Fallon said.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Burning UpPresident Trump is still getting flak, from longtime supporters and others, for not releasing more information about the Jeffrey Epstein case. Some social media users expressed their feelings by posting videos of burning MAGA hats.“As of now, Trump is keeping the information totally classified, a.k.a. in the bathroom at Mar-a-Lago,” Jimmy Fallon said of the so-called Epstein files.“Yeah, the excuses are getting worse and worse. Today, Trump was, like, ‘A dog ate the Epstein files, then people in Ohio ate the dog.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Yeah, they’re burning the MAGA hats. People in China were like, ‘Oh, come on, we worked so hard making them.’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (With Friends Like These Edition)“In fact, Epstein’s infamous little black book included 14 different numbers for Trump and his representatives. I mean, he had 14 separate ways to contact Donald Trump. I mean, when I drop my kid off at camp, I give two emergency contact numbers and one of them is fake because I don’t need that hassle.” — JORDAN KLEPPER“Do you know how creepy with women you have to be for Donald Trump to pick up on it? I mean, that’s a real your-drunk-friend-taking-the-car-keys-from-you moment.” — JORDAN KLEPPERThe Bits Worth WatchingThe “Too Much” star Megan Stalter started “a big rumor” on Tuesday’s “Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightThe country superstar Jelly Roll will guest-host “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutAdam Scott, left, and Britt Lower in “Severance,” on Apple TV+. Both were nominated for Emmys.Apple TV+The dystopian Apple TV+ workplace drama “Severance” scored the most Emmy nominations this year. More

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      ‘American Idol’ Music Supervisor and Her Husband Are Found Slain

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      The music supervisor was found shot to death in a home in Los Angeles with her husband, Thomas Deluca, the police said. A 22-year-old was arrested in connection with the case.A longtime music supervisor for “American Idol” and her husband were discovered dead inside a Los Angeles home on Monday afternoon, the police said.The supervisor, Robin Kaye, 70, and her husband, Thomas Deluca, 70, were found dead of apparent gunshot wounds, Jennifer Forkish, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Police Department, told The New York Times late Tuesday afternoon. A suspect was in custody on Tuesday, Ms. Forkish said.In a statement provided to The Times earlier in the day, a spokesperson for “American Idol” confirmed a TMZ report saying that the program’s longtime music supervisor and her husband had died.“We are devastated to hear of Robin and her dear husband, Tom’s, passing,” the statement said. “Robin has been a cornerstone of the ‘Idol’ family since 2009 and was truly loved and respected by all who came in contact with her. Robin will remain in our hearts forever and we share our deepest sympathy with her family and friends during this difficult time.”The police responded to a home in the Encino neighborhood around 2:30 p.m. on Monday after being asked to perform a welfare check there, Officer Rosario Cervantes, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Police Department, said. Fire Department paramedics pronounced the victims dead at the scene.Homicide investigators have identified the suspect as Raymond Boodarian, 22, also of Encino, Ms. Forkish said. She added that the police have yet to determine a motive.The authorities took Mr. Boodarian into custody without incident, she said. Investigators are attempting to determine whether Mr. Boodarian had any connection to Mr. Deluca and Ms. Kaye, and if he had been involved in any past calls for police assistance to the residence.Ms. Kaye worked on more than 200 episodes of “American Idol,” according to her IMDB page. Her work was recognized over the years by the Guild of Music Supervisors, which gave her its award for best music supervision in reality television in 2014.Kirsten Noyes More

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      Netflix’s ‘Adolescence’ Earns 13 Emmy Nominations, Including Nod for Owen Cooper

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      The show, about a teenager suspected of killing a schoolmate, won three Gotham Television Awards last month and was a hot topic in the weeks after it was released.“Adolescence,” the hit Netflix series turned water-cooler talker about Jamie Miller, a teenage boy who is accused of killing a girl from his school, received 13 Emmy nominations on Tuesday, including one for best limited series or anthology.Stephen Graham, who played the teen’s father, Eddie, received a nod for best lead actor in a limited or anthology series or movie, and Owen Cooper, who played the troubled teen, Jamie, was nominated in the outstanding supporting actor category alongside Ashley Walters, who played a detective. Cooper’s nomination makes him the youngest ever nominee in that category, according to Deadline.Erin Doherty, who played a psychologist in the series, was nominated for outstanding supporting actress alongside Christine Tremarco, who played Jamie’s mother, Manda. Philip Barantini received a directing nomination, and Graham and Jack Thorne, who created and wrote the series, picked up a nod for outstanding writing.The show was released in mid-March and resonated with audiences. It quickly became the most watched show on Netflix in dozens of countries, according to the streamer.“Adolescence” and its themes inspired so much chatter that it reignited discussions in Britain on whether the government should restrict children’s access to smartphones. (A major question in the series concerns the extent to which Jamie may have been radicalized by misogynistic ideas online.) Prime Minister Keir Starmer told the House of Commons that he had watched it with his two children and that action had to be taken to address the “fatal consequences” of young men and boys viewing harmful content on the internet.In June, “Adolescence” won three trophies at the second annual Gotham Television Awards, including one for breakthrough limited series. Graham won for best lead performance in a limited series and Cooper shared a win with Jenny Slate of “Dying for Sex” for best supporting performance.Graham and Cooper’s onscreen bond was a highlight for critics, and there was much discussion around the series’s third episode, in which Doherty’s psychologist interviews Jamie. Cooper told The New York Times in April that he had initially been uncomfortable with the script.“Before every take, I just thought, ‘I’m never, ever going to be able to do this again, so I’m just going to put my all into it,’” he said.In the same interview, Graham said that there were no plans for a sequel. “It’s a stand-alone thing,” he said. “I’m not saying there will be, but if there’s a possibility of a Series 2, we would follow something completely different.”The 77th Primetime Emmy Awards will be held on Sept. 14 in Los Angeles. CBS will broadcast the ceremony. More