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Our chief film critics look at the new season in the new abnormal, while remembering the lessons of cinema history. Are we on the cusp of a new era or will this too pass?Movie theaters are open for business again. and the film world is abuzz with new release dates, in-person festivals, an accelerating Oscar race, an array of Covid-19 protocols and anxious prognostications. Is this the death of cinema (again) or its glorious rebirth? Or has it mutated into something new altogether, a two-headed Disney-Netflix monster with art somewhere in its genome? Our chief film critics, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott, have some thoughts on these matters. They also asked some industry veterans to weigh in.MANOHLA DARGIS Hello, friend — it’s been awhile. I recently returned from a book leave and having failed to win the lottery, I am back (happily!). I ignored most of the movie news while I was gone, though was sad to learn about the closure of my favorite theater here in Los Angeles, the ArcLight Hollywood, which was felled by the lockdowns. It felt like the beginning of the end of something, but here we are in a new season that looks more like 2019 than 2020 — even with requests to see our vax cards. What’d I miss?A.O. SCOTT You didn’t miss much, except for a few episodes in the continuing discourse — part soap opera, part séance, part tech seminar — about the Future of Movies. Judged solely from the slate of upcoming releases (some held back from 2020), that future looks a lot like the recent past. The fall will see new work from both Andersons, Wes and P.T. Jane Campion’s first feature in more than a decade. A new James Bond. The predominance of familiar directors and stars along with newly minted auteurs (like Chloé Zhao, following her best picture win for “Nomadland” with a Marvel spectacle) creates a reassuring sense of continuity. Cinema as we have known it seems to still exist.Richard Madden and Gemma Chan in Chloé Zhao’s new superhero movie, “Eternals.”Marvel/DisneyAt the same time — though not for the first time — it is widely feared to be in mortal peril. Some of that anxiety is Covid-specific. Nobody knows when or how this thing will end, and whether audiences will return to theaters in sufficient numbers to revive the old business models. The pandemic is not the only factor, and the future of movies and moviegoing may depend less on virus mutations or consumer preferences than on corporate strategy.If Covid stretches on, we will lose more art-house theaters, resulting in less box office revenue. At some point there won’t be enough theaters to generate sufficient revenue to justify releasing a movie theatrically. If you lay on how the past 18 months have changed viewing habits, it looks even worse: the art-house audience is more mature, and that demographic has so far not been eager to return to cinemas.— Richard Abramowitz, founder and chief executive of the distributor AbramoramaDARGIS That we’re social animals is what made me think that we’d get back into theaters, that and there’s too much money at stake. Moviegoing has been up and down forever. But for decades the major studios have been eroding exhibition — the moviegoing habit itself — with a business model that banks on a handful of youth-baiting tentpoles and some monster weekends. Their audience flocks to the theaters for a bit, and everyone else waits for home video (or not). I looked at the numbers for the last “Avengers” movie: it opened in American theaters in April 2019 and played through September, but it sucked up more than 90 percent of its domestic haul in 30 days.I imagine that a lot of people waited to see it, just as earlier generations waited for stuff to hit TV, cable, video — all once viewed as a threat to moviegoing. For a time, these different avenues seemed fairly complementary. But the habit of on-demand, whenever, wherever watching has proved overwhelming, which is bad for exhibition but good for the multinational companies that own the studios because they also own the companies which funnel stuff into homes. So, maybe these multinationals will shift exclusively to streaming. Maybe they’ll re-embrace theaters or buy them all up. In the end, I am far more worried about nonindustrial cinema and if its audience will return to theaters.Sure, there’s the occasional blockbuster they may want to see as an Imax experience and want to have that shared community experience, but like everything in the world, with the multitude of choices available and given time, effort and expense to go to the movies, most opt to see movies in the comfort of their homes.— Marcus Hu, co-founder of the distributor Strand ReleasingSCOTT The small screen is definitely getting bigger, whether we like it or not. Subscription revenue is unlikely ever to match blockbuster box-office numbers, but for a lot of independent-minded filmmakers, streaming offers money for projects the big studios don’t make anymore. For a long time, the big studios have been concentrating their resources on franchise, I.P.-driven entertainment at the expense of stand-alone features aimed at adult audiences. Streaming has picked up some of that slack.The upshot is that what you and I and others in our rapidly aging demographic understood by “going to the movies” may have been replaced by a different menu of choices and practices. What I mean is the idea of the movie theater as a destination, independent of a particular film that might be showing. A lot of the time, you’d just go and see whatever was there, and there was always something — art, trash or in between — worth the price of the ticket, which wasn’t all that much. A movie habit was easy enough to acquire, and a lot of us did.Kirsten Dunst in “The Power of the Dog,” Jane Campion’s new film.Kirsty Griffin/NetflixKids nowadays haven’t developed it in quite the same way. They have more screens, more options and different reasons for buying a ticket. I’m not lamenting, just observing. What I wonder about is the effect of these changes on the art form that we’re still calling by the anachronistic names cinema and film.The studios stopped making the kinds of movies I make around the time we were finishing “Moneyball” — I remember an exec telling me he would have passed on it if it had come to him then. In the years it took to get that movie made, the world for that kind of movie turned.— Rachel Horovitz, producerDARGIS Let’s check back in 50 years to see how streaming affected cinema, which is always a moving target. To be honest, while it’s interesting to see how the big companies are handling the newest normal, the work I tend to love has long had a separate ecology, with its own way of doing things, its own community and relations. In 1991, Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust” needed a slow release, critical love and word of mouth to make a dent, and the same is true of most of the movies we care about now. As a friend asked the other day, would Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” be “Parasite” if it had only been streamed? We both think the answer is no — it would still be great, but not a cultural sensation.Movies, unlike branded entertainment, need to live in the world, not just on personal devices. This isn’t about the putative romance of moviegoing, but how people experience art and culture, because while we’re talking about infrastructure, we are also talking about pleasure — the pleasure of the cinematic object, and the pleasure of your company and conversation. It’s frustrating that people keep writing lazy obituaries for cinema, something they have no feeling for or interest in. I don’t love all that’s transpired in movie history — the shift from film to digital, the loss of technical competency — but I remain buoyed by the persistence of the art and how its ecologies adapt and persevere.Even so, and I think I’ve said this before, I do increasingly view the segment of the movie world that I most worry about as akin to jazz. It’s something usually appreciated by a niche audience but that needs new blood — the kids you mentioned — to truly sustain it.Theatrical films will have exclusive windows in theaters, but those windows will be shorter and more flexible. But movies that matter, that have cultural impact, will again play exclusively in movie theaters for some time, likely 45 days.— Tom Rothman, chairman and chief executive of Sony Pictures’ Motion Picture GroupSCOTT I guess I’m always optimistic about the tenacity of artists and the curiosity of audiences, and aware that the good work most often gets done against the grain of whatever the system is at a given moment. But it’s nonetheless important to be critical of that system, and reasonable to wonder how its current iteration might stymie some kinds of originality while encouraging others.Daniel Craig as James Bond in “No Time to Die,” set for the fall.Nicola Dove/MGMThere’s no going back to any previous golden age, and the gold rubs off pretty quickly when you take a close look. The old studios whose products earned the designation “classical” were built on exploitation and predation, and ruled by autocratic moguls. Things were not much better, from an ethical or political standpoint, in the New Hollywood ’70s or the indie ’90s.Still, great and weird movies were being made then, as they are now. But I fear that many of them will languish in the streaming algorithms or in the margins of micro-distribution, estranged from even the smallish publics that might have discovered them. One cause for alarm — which has nothing to do with streaming per se — is the mass extinction of the local newspapers and alt-weeklies that nourished local film scenes across the country. The health of movies is connected to the health of journalism.[I worry] that the economic challenges will force the art-house cinemas away from the smaller titles that add significantly to diversity and inclusion in our cinematic landscape. Additionally, that the downsizing of newspaper and media coverage for smaller films will force the theater owners’ hands in these decisions.— Dennis Doros, co-founder of Milestone FilmsDARGIS The pandemic has brought specific issues to the fore — at the least, maybe improved theater ventilation will put an end to watching multiplex fodder in a miasma of despair and stale popcorn. More to your last point, I think that mostly what the pandemic has done is underscore, again, that all of us are still navigating the world created by the internet, which changed how we labor, play, read, watch, think. The movie industry has a history of different production-distribution-exhibition models that work until they don’t, yet throughout these shifts, movies kept being made and people kept watching them, and I imagine they’ll keep getting made and we’ll keep watching and talking about all of it.SCOTT Let’s hope so! Otherwise we may both find ourselves on permanent book leave. More

‘I’m not saying Rudy was drunk, but that’s usually when guys from Brooklyn start to imitate the queen of England,’ Seth Meyers 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.‘What Is He Doing?’This weekend’s 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks would not appear to be very good fodder for lighthearted late-night humor. But that was until Rudy Giuliani got involved.On Saturday, Giuliani turned a speech commemorating the occasion into a wandering, unfunny but still-comic monologue. He impersonated Queen Elizabeth II and reminisced awkwardly about his run-ins with Prince Andrew.Trevor Noah was one of many late-night hosts who responded with baffled amusement.“You know your speech went off the rails when people watching it are like: ‘I wish this guy would talk more about 9/11. What is he doing?’” — TREVOR NOAHOn “Late Night,” Seth Meyers said there was reason to agree with the commentators who suggested that Giuliani was not in full command of his faculties.“I’m not saying Rudy was drunk, but that’s usually when guys from Brooklyn start to imitate the queen of England.” — SETH MEYERS“I guess Rudy can add this tape to his reel of impressions if he ever auditions for ‘America’s Not Talent.’” — SETH MEYERSTaco Bell EnvironmentalismTaco Bell recently started a program that aims to help customers recycle the plastic from used sauce packets by having them mail those packets back.Noah said the idea deserved points for creativity but probably wouldn’t actually do much to help the environment.“This idea has all sorts of problems with it. For one thing, people who eat at Taco Bell don’t care about the environment. I mean, they don’t even care about their own bodies.” — TREVOR NOAH“Yeah, this is a weird idea, but what did you expect? Coming up with weird ideas is Taco Bell’s whole thing. This is a place that will still wrap a soft shell around a hard shell and wrap that inside a Dorito’s chip — which is delicious, but you really think their idea to save the environment is going to make sense?” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (M.T.A. Edition)“At the Washington Football Team’s season opener, a pipe at the stadium burst over a group of fans, and some people said it might have been sewage. I don’t know; take a look. [Shows footage] Well, that’s a good omen for the season, you know? Washington is still looking for a team name; it’s too bad the Browns are already taken.” — JIMMY FALLON“An investigation concluded last week that a recent M.T.A. subway outage that shut down 83 trains was caused by someone accidentally flipping a power switch. Said one man, ‘So thaaaat’s what it does.’” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingDr. Anthony Fauci talked to Noah about combating vaccine hesitancy and what he called the need for vaccine mandates.Jimmy Kimmel’s wife, Molly McNearney, came up with a skit that allows her to declutter their house at the same time: It’s called “Win Jimmy’s Crap.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightJustice Stephen Breyer, who at 83 has been fending off calls from fellow liberals to step down, will talk to Stephen Colbert on Tuesday. Will Colbert hold his feet to the fire?Also, Check This OutThe Metropolitan Opera performed Verdi’s Requiem on Saturday, the company’s first time playing inside its theater since March 2020.Richard Termine/Met OperaAnthony Tommasini, The Times’s chief classical music critic, gave an enthusiastic review to the first performance at the Metropolitan Opera since the start of the coronavirus pandemic: a staging on Saturday of Verdi’s Requiem in commemoration of 9/11. More

Fueled by “The Queen’s Gambit” and “The Crown,” Netflix dominated the competition at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards over the weekend.Netflix took home 34 Emmys at three separate ceremonies on Saturday and Sunday, while Disney+, the streamer’s closest competitor, won 13 awards. HBO and its streaming service, HBO Max, the perennial Emmys heavyweight, won just 10 awards.Each year, the Television Academy, which organizes the Emmys, announces the winners for dozens of technical awards in the lead-up to the biggest prizes that are announced at the main event, the Primetime Emmy Awards. This year’s prime-time ceremony will take place on Sunday and will be broadcast on CBS.“The Queen’s Gambit,” a limited series about a chess prodigy, won nine Creative Arts Emmys over the weekend, more than any other series. Its closest competitors, with seven awards each, were the Disney+ Star Wars action adventure show “The Mandalorian” and the NBC stalwart “Saturday Night Live.”Although the Creative Arts Emmys are not quite prime-time ready — they include awards like best stunt performance, best hairstyling and outstanding lighting direction for a variety series — they count all the same in the Hollywood record books, and the leaderboard for the 73rd Emmy Awards is now officially underway.The weekend ceremonies also handed out a few key acting awards. “The Queen’s Gambit” took the prize for best cast in a limited series. It beat out a pair of acclaimed HBO series, “I May Destroy You” and “Mare of Easttown.” “The Crown” won for best cast in a drama, and the Apple TV+ show “Ted Lasso” won for best cast in a comedy. Both are favored to take more prizes at the main event.Netflix’s dominance all but guarantees that it will win more Emmys than any other TV network, studio or streaming platform, making 2021 the first year it will beat out its chief rival, HBO, to claim ultimate bragging rights. Three years ago, in a first, Netflix tied HBO for top honors. Going into this year’s Emmys ceremonies, HBO, aided by HBO Max, led all networks with 130 nominations, one more than Netflix.The 73rd Emmy Awards will effectively be a showcase for television achievement during the pandemic. Because of production shutdowns and delays, the number of TV shows in the second half of last year and the first half of this year declined. Submissions for the top categories this year were down 30 percent.The ceremony, hosted by Cedric the Entertainer, will take place indoors and outdoors on the Event Deck at L.A. Live, near the Emmys’ usual home at the Microsoft Theater in downtown Los Angeles. Attendance will be drastically reduced, but in contrast to last year’s remote ceremony, most winners are likely to deliver their acceptance speeches in person. More

A new documentary by Frontline, in partnership with The New York Times, examines how competitive pressure, flawed design and problematic oversight of the Boeing jet led to two crashes that killed 346 people.A new documentary by Frontline, in partnership with The New York Times, investigates the Boeing 737 Max catastrophe, and will air on PBS on Tuesday, Sept. 14, and will be streaming on PBS.org/frontline, YouTube and in the PBS Video App.Ruth Fremson/The New York Times‘Boeing’s Fatal Flaw’Writer/director Thomas JenningsReporters David Gelles, James Glanz, Natalie Kitroeff and Jack NicasWatch the new documentary by Frontline, in partnership with The New York Times, on Tuesday, Sept. 14, on PBS and streaming at pbs.org/frontline, on YouTube and in the PBS Video App.Airplanes are designed to go up after takeoff, but that’s not what happened to Lion Air Flight 610 when it left Jakarta, Indonesia, in October 2018.“You don’t see planes diving on departure,” one Indonesian aviation expert said. And yet the Boeing 737 Max jet, piloted by an experienced crew, went into an irrecoverable nosedive minutes after takeoff. All 189 people on board were killed when it crashed into the Java Sea.Four months later, 157 people died when another 737 Max, operated as Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, plummeted to the earth, ringing new alarms about the aircraft. Days later, the jet was grounded.“Boeing’s Fatal Flaw,” a new documentary by Frontline, featuring reporting by The New York Times, investigates the causes of the two crashes and how a software system that was supposed to make the plane safer played a role in the catastrophes.The Boeing 737 Max began as a success story: The plane was the company’s best selling jet ever, with hundreds of billions of dollars in advance orders from airlines around the world. But our reporters’ investigation shows that, early on, the tale had all the elements of a tragedy in the making.Internal Boeing documents and interviews with former Federal Aviation Administration officials and congressional investigators reveal how competitive pressures influenced the efforts to bring the 737 Max to market. And The Times’s investigation details how an essential software system known as MCAS was implemented with insufficient oversight and inadequate pilot training.“Boeing’s Fatal Flaw” traces The Times’s investigation. Boeing declined to be interviewed for the film, but the documentary includes details from our reporters’ on-the-record interview with the company’s chief executive, Dave Calhoun. The film also features on-camera interviews with congressional investigators, aviation experts and family members of the passengers aboard the two fatal flights.You can watch on Tuesday, Sept. 14, on PBS and streaming at pbs.org/frontline, on YouTube and in the PBS Video App.Featured ReportersDavid Gelles writes the Corner Office column and other features for the Business section. Since joining The Times in 2013, he’s written about mergers and acquisitions, media, technology and more.James Glanz is a reporter on the Investigations desk. Before joining the desk, he spent nearly five years in Iraq as a correspondent and Baghdad bureau chief. On Sept. 11, 2001, he covered the collapse of the twin towers and, for two years, continued to report from ground zero. He has a Ph.D. in astrophysical sciences from Princeton.Natalie Kitroeff is a foreign correspondent covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. Before that, she was a business reporter writing about the economy for The Times. She also covered the California economy for The Los Angeles Times and reported on education for Bloomberg.Jack Nicas has covered technology for The New York Times since 2018. Before joining The Times, he spent seven years at The Wall Street Journal covering technology, aviation and national news.Producers Vanessa Fica and Kate McCormickSenior producer Frank KoughanExecutive producers for Left/Right Docs Ken Druckerman and Banks TarverExecutive producer of FRONTLINE Raney Aronson-RathFRONTLINE, U.S. television’s longest running investigative documentary series, explores the issues of our times through powerful storytelling. It is produced at GBH in Boston and is broadcast nationwide on PBS. More

Introducing a duffel bag by Telfar, and a new TV channel to fight the bots.On Sunday, Telfar, the rebellious anti-fashion-with-a-capital-F brand, held a news conference to announce its latest project, Telfar TV.The 24-hour live TV station will be accessible via an app on smart TVs. The channel won’t be on YouTube or Instagram, the company said; there will be no way to share its programming or leave comments.It’s not yet clear what that programming may be or when it will air, though that seems to be the point: Telfar TV is a “void,” and a “vessel” for expression by the designer Telfar Clemens and his community.But here’s where fans of Telfar’s enormously popular shopping bags, the typically sold-out Bushwick Birkin, should pay close attention: Watching Telfar TV may be the best way to score a bag. Mr. Clemens is tired of bots — tired of the robots or people or robot-people who snap up his bags only to resell them for 10 times their original price.He is “here to take back every bag that the bot has stolen from us and give it right back to everybody in this room,” Mr. Clemens said.At unannounced intervals the TV station will air a QR code allowing viewers to shop the latest bag drop. The drop won’t be announced anywhere else. “We can drop exactly as many bags as people are watching,” said Babak Radboy, the creative director of Telfar.This will be tested with a new bag shape: the duffel, a buttery leather cylinder with long and short straps, imprinted with the brand’s “T” logo on its sides. Like the original Telfar shopping bag, it comes in small, medium and large sizes.“Wait, who wants one?” Mr. Clemens asked at the news conference, after rolling out black and white versions of the bags on a pedestal and unveiling them like a game show prize, eliciting cheers and grabby hands thrust in the air. “You gotta check out TC TV.” More

The best of prime-time television will be honored during the 73rd annual Emmy Awards and the tradition of Monday Night Football continues.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, Sept. 13-19. Details and times are subject to change.MondayMONDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL 8:15 p.m. on ESPN. Monday Night Football returns with a game between the Baltimore Ravens and the Las Vegas Raiders. Though the N.F.L.’s 18-week season officially began last Thursday, the Monday night games begin this week. The tradition of broadcasting Monday Night Football began in 1970, making it one of the longest running prime-time programs in television history. After a hiatus, Trevor Noah will be back on the set of “The Daily Show.”THE DAILY SHOW WITH TREVOR NOAH 11 p.m. on Comedy Central. Trevor Noah will be back on Monday with “The Daily Show,” following a hiatus that began in June. Since the start of the pandemic, Noah has been calling his show “The Daily Social Distancing Show,” with production and filming taking place at his home. Though Comedy Central released a trailer dubbing this “the new era of ‘The Daily Show,’” it is unclear whether the rest of this season, the show’s 26th, will be filmed at the well-known “Daily Show” set with a live audience or back at Noah’s apartment.TuesdayEXTINCTION: THE FACTS 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). In the last of this four-part series, David Attenborough explores the millions of species at risk of extinction. Studies have found that humans are speeding up extinction, and we are currently in a phase of mass extinction. In the series, Attenborough explains how those extinctions and changes in biodiversity could effect humans through threats to food and water security, increased risk of climate change and a greater risk of more pandemics.THE PAPER CHASE (1973) 8 p.m. on TCM. This film, directed by James Bridges and starring Timothy Bottoms, follows a first-year student at Harvard Law as he navigates his schoolwork and a new relationship. Vincent Canby, the New York Times critic, wrote that “there are some funny, intelligent sequences along the way, but by the end it has melted into a blob of clichés.”WednesdayFUTURE OF WORK 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). PBS wraps up its “Future of Work” series this Wednesday. It has explored the changing norms in workplaces and the long-term impact we see in educators, workers and communities. Amid the pandemic, a lot of businesses have shut down, implemented “work from home” policies or laid off employees entirely.ThursdayFrom left, Nilsa Prowant, Aimee Hall and Codi Butts on “Floribama Shore.”Courtesy of MTVFLORIBAMA SHORE 8 p.m. on MTV. The fifth season of “Floribama Shore” is premiering on Thursday night. The show, which debuted in 2017, is an MTV production inspired by the notorious and wildly successful “Jersey Shore.” This show follows the lives of seven young adults from the Florida Panhandle and beyond. With roughly the same format as “Jersey Shore,” the cast members share a “shore house” and don’t have access to cellphones or social media. Season 5 will take place on a farm in Georgia.BROOKLYN NINE-NINE 8 p.m. on NBC. “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” is wrapping up its eight-year run with a one-hour series finale on Thursday. The episode’s title — “The Last Day” — could be a hint to fans that Andy Samberg’s character, Jake Peralta, is leaving the N.Y.P.D. What it means to be a police officer in 2021 has been a main focus of this final season. The writers worked in plotlines around real-life events that followed the murder of George Floyd.FridayTHA GOD’S HONEST TRUTH WITH LENARD ‘CHARLAMAGNE’ MCKELVEY 10 p.m. on Comedy Central. Lenard McKelvey, better known as Charlamagne Tha God, is hosting his first Comedy Central show. The program, which is executive produced by Stephen Colbert, will examine social issues through sketches, discussions and interpersonal experiments. McKelvey grew to notoriety on his New York-based radio show “The Breakfast Club,” which has since been inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame. He has also released two books: “Black Privilege: Opportunity Comes to Those Who Create It” and “Shook One: Anxiety Playing Tricks on Me.” The show will give viewers a new way to dive deep into McKelvey’s point of view.SaturdayTHE HARDER THEY FALL (1956) 6 p.m. on TCM. Humphrey Bogart stars in this movie as a former sportswriter who is hired by a shady fight promoter to boost a rising boxing star from Argentina. The film, which was based off a book of the same name, offers plenty of behind-the-scenes boxing-match drama. The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote, “With a fury and speed that keeps one dizzy for a matter of 10 rounds (or reels) — which, in screen time, is over 100 minutes — it bangs out a punishing tale.”SundayAn Emmy statuette on display in 2019. This year, the red carpet will be a little different.Etienne Laurent/EPA, via ShutterstockE! LIVE FROM THE RED CARPET — THE 2021 PRIMETIME EMMY AWARDS 6 p.m. on E!. Before an awards show, celebrities in designer clothing are usually featured together, but this year is a little different. Stars will be allowed to walk the red carpet (unlike last year’s show, which was virtual) in limited numbers. And only about a dozen members of the press will be allowed on the carpet. Hopefully, even with the limited press, audiences will get a glimpse of this year’s TV stars all decked out.73RD EMMY AWARDS 8 p.m. on CBS. Though this year’s Emmy Awards ceremony will be small, just nominees and their guests are allowed inside, and the mask mandate in Los Angeles will likely still be in effect, it is still a step toward normalcy after last year’s virtual ceremony. The show will take place at L.A. Live in downtown Los Angeles and will be hosted by Cedric the Entertainer. This year, “Ted Lasso” is poised to be one of the night’s biggest stars, with 20 nominations — breaking the freshman comedy series record of 19 nominations that was held by “Glee.” In an already momentous moment, the “Pose” actress Mj Rodriguez became the first transgender person to be nominated in a lead acting category. More

Axe continues to let his emotions lead his decisions. And now the consequences are teaming up to take him down.Season 5, Episode 9: ‘Implosion’“He’s not dead till I say he’s dead,” says Bobby Axelrod of his decabillionaire rival, Mike Prince.“Bobby Axelrod has to be wiped from the face of the earth,” says Mike Prince of his decabillionaire rival, Bobby Axelrod.Heck yeah, says I.“Billions” is never better than when its combatants (often a more apt word than “characters”) have well and truly joined the battle against one another, concocting complex schemes and building toward dramatic denouements for their rivalries. As this week’s episode drew to a close, not one but three worthy adversaries — Mike Prince; Chuck Rhoades; and, in something of a surprise, Taylor Mason — had all joined forces to take Bobby Axelrod down.Will it stick? Probably no more or less than all their past attempts, including those that took place in this very episode. Will it be fun to watch? I would bet a decabillionaire’s daily ill-gotten gains on it.This latest round of hostilities began in last week’s episode when Bobby reached out to the still-grieving mother of Prince’s former partner, whom he convinced to blast Prince on national television. It was one of the most effective reputation destroying maneuvers in recent “Billions” memory, and in addition to scrapping his ambassadorship to Denmark, it drove many of Prince’s clients, business partners and charity partners heading for the hills.Sure, he can talk a few of them into staying with an intimidating, Van Halen-quoting monologue or two. But the writing is on the wall, in letters so large even Princecan read them.So, after a meeting with his ex-partner’s mother, he does what he considers to be the right thing. Rather than let his plummeting reputation sink the impact-investment sector, he divests all of his do-good holdings so they’re not tainted with his sociopathic stink.Naturally, this is seen as good news within the halls of Axe Cap, specifically the Taylor Mason Carbon wing of the office. Taylor realizes they can buy up Prince’s former holdings on the cheap, shoring up both the sector and their own control of it.Axe’s response? He wants to offload everything Axe Cap owns in the sector, turning Prince’s good deed into the first domino that will sink the entire decarbonization market. Why? Just to make Prince look even worse than he already does.Taylor, of course, is aghast at the idea, which is both immoral and — this should be the more important consideration for Axe — a money loser. So Bobby goes around his semiautonomous lieutenant and orders Taylor’s underling Mafee (Dan Soder) to make the trades. There goes the sector, and there goes all of Prince’s attempts to rehab his reputation along with them.For Bobby, this is just more tit-for-tat, a follow-up to Prince’s attempt to get at Axe by stranding at sea the first shipment of his frozen-pizza pet project. On the advice of his star pizza chef’s cousin, Paul Manzarello (Domenick Lombardozzi), Bobby buys up a bunch of Italian-made pizza ovens and recreates the entire shipment domestically, allowing his right-hand man, Wags, to show up Scooter, his counterpart at Prince’s firm, at a supermarket. For Prince, it’s the last straw: Axelrod delenda est.Chuck, meanwhile, continues his machinations against his old rival — while he’s not busy helping his dying father pick out coffins. Recognizing that his maneuverings unwittingly handed Axe the bank charter he had been seeking, Chuck reaches out to Drew Moody (an impressively sinister Michael Cerveris), attorney general for the tax-haven state of Delaware, in an attempt to nip the problem in the bud.Moody blows him off. “I don’t believe corporations are people,” he purrs. “They’re better than people, because they don’t [expletive] up when they get so obsessed with one thing they can’t see reality.” I’m not sure this tracks given Axe Cap’s behavior, but OK, sure.Chuck devises a novel workaround for this particular stone wall, though. He has his father, Charles Sr., appointed as special trustee to Axe’s new bank, ready to ride herd and make life for the fledgling operation a living hell, so long as he is still alive to do so.And that’s precisely the vulnerability upon which Axelrod seizes. Utilizing the secret employee files compiled by Wendy Rhoades before her big ethics investigation a while back, Axe discovers that his minion Danny Margolis (Daniel Cosgrove) is a donor match for the kidney transplant Charles needs to stay alive; by the time Chuck gets wind of it, the operation is all but underway. Now Bobby can say he has done the one thing Charles’s own son couldn’t: He saved the old man’s life.So much for that punitive trusteeship!But Prince is surprisingly optimistic. Recognizing an excess of emotion in Axe’s decision to cut his pizza partners in on atypically favorable terms, Prince sees the new bank as a blessing in disguise. With no one in place to stop him, Prince says, Axe will get reckless and make mistakes — “fatal ones.” All they have to do is let him run with it, continuing to cut corners and wage war against Prince until he makes a blunder from which he can’t recover.So when Taylor rolls into Chuck and Prince’s conversation and asks, point blank, “How are we taking down Bobby Axelrod?,” the last piece of the puzzle snaps into place. If these three together can’t do it, no one can.But what if that’s just it — what if no one can? Consider the fate of Nico Tanner, Axe Cap’s artist in residence. His relationship with Bobby has effectively ruined his artistic drive; he is now both overly attached to making money and bitterly resentful of his patron’s control over him. So he slashes the canvas of the final painting to which he was contracted with Bobby and winds up destroying his relationship with Wendy in the process. Raking in the big bucks only made him painfully aware of his need for the big bucks, and the result is an omnidirectional disaster.But not for Bobby. Sifting through the detritus of Tanner’s trashed studio, he snaps up the sketch of Wendy that Tanner penciled after a night together, then decides to hang a painting that Nico appears to have defaced with an entire can of black paint. That ruined painting isn’t ruined at all, as Bobby sees it — it has the power and emotion he was looking for all along.And why would he see it any different? Profiting from disaster is the Bobby Axelrod way. Or as Chuck puts it elsewhere in the episode, “Every time I move, I make his life better and mine worse.” Is Chuck’s alliance with Prince and Mason a way out of this dynamic, or will it simply dig the hole deeper?Loose change:Fans of Bobby DeNiro take note: This episode referenced both “The Irishman” (with Charles Sr. hilariously arguing that his life is now too short to watch a four-hour movie) and “Cop Land.”Prince refers to himself as “the Atomic Punk” to a recalcitrant investor, thus harnessing the power of Van Halen (it’s a reference to a song on their first album). Chuck paraphrased the Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth in last week’s episode. Here’s hoping Axe does karaoke to “Hot for Teacher” or something next week.Speaking of that old-time rock ‘n’ roll, it was nice to hear Bruce Springsteen’s “Adam Raised a Cain” on the soundtrack.Something to note: Rian, one of Mase Carb’s rising stars, nearly quits the firm over the sell-off debacle before being talked out of it by Taylor. I still feel like there’s a connection developing here that will go deeper than boss and employee.Don’t think for a second that Chuck’s alliance with Prince makes them friends. “Because I’m so rich, I’m inherently guilty?” Prince says during one of their first meetings. “It’s what I built a good chunk of my career on,” Chuck replies. Prince counters by saying the mega-rich can’t be policed by outsiders; the only way they can really do good in the world is “to demand it of ourselves.” Given his track record, I’m not filled with confidence. More

He led the cable giant, whose eclectic mix of shows would include collaborations with the BBC and documentary-style series like “Hoarders.”Nickolas Davatzes, who was instrumental in creating the cable television networks A&E and the History Channel, which now reach into 335 million households around the world, died on Aug. 21 at his home in Wilton, Conn. He was 79.The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his son George said.Mr. Davatzes (pronounced dah-VAT-sis) was president and chief executive of A&E, originally the Arts & Entertainment Network, which he ran from 1983 to 2005 as a joint venture of the Hearst Corporation and the Disney-ABC Television Group. He introduced the History Channel in 1995 and remained an aggressive advocate, both within the industry and as a spokesman before Congress, for educational and public affairs programming.By the mid-1980s, A&E had emerged — mostly through buying programming and building a bankable viewer audience by negotiating distribution rights with local cable systems — as the sole surviving advertiser-supported cultural cable service.“After 60 days here, I told my wife I didn’t think this thing had a 20 percent chance, because every time I turned around there was another obstacle,” Mr. Davatzes told The New York Times in 1989. “I used to say that we were like a bumblebee — we weren’t supposed to fly.”But they did. A&E became profitable within three years by offering an eclectic menu of daily programming that, as The Times put it, “might include a biographical portrait of Herbert Hoover, a program about the embattled buffalo, a dramatization of an Ann Beattie short story and a turn from the stand-up comic Buzz Belmondo.”“We don’t want to duplicate ‘The A-Team’ or ‘Laverne & Shirley,’” Mr. Davatzes told The Times in 1985. “There is a younger generation that has never seen any thought-provoking entertainment on television. They’ve seen a rock star destroying a guitar every 16 minutes, but they’ve never seen classical music.“By network standards,” he continued, “our viewership will always be limited. But that is the function of cable — to present enough alternatives so that individuals can be their own programmers.”Under the A&E umbrella, the network encompassed a broad mix of entertainment and nonfiction programming. It created a singular identity with scripted shows (“100 Centre Street,” “A Nero Wolfe Mystery”) and collaborations like its wildly popular co-production with the BBC of “Pride and Prejudice,” a mini-series based on the Jane Austen novel starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle.Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth in the mini-series “Pride and Prejudice,” a co-production of A&E and the BBC.Joss Barratt/A&EThe network continued to expand its scope to include documentary series like “Biography”; “Hoarders,” which might be classified as an anthropological study of compulsive stockpiling; and the History Channel’s encyclopedic scrutiny of Adolf Hitler.Mr. Davatzes was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush in 2006. The French government made him a chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 1989. He was inducted into the Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame in 1999.After his death, Frank A. Bennack Jr., the executive vice chairman of Hearst, called him “the father of the History Channel.”Nickolas Davatzes was born on March 14, 1942, in Manhattan to George Davatzes, a Greek immigrant, and Alexandra (Kordes) Davatzes, whose parents were from Greece. Both his parents worked in the fur trade.After graduating from Bryant High School in Astoria, Queens, he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1962 and a master’s in sociology in 1964, both from St. John’s University, where he met his future wife, Dorothea Hayes.In addition to his son George, he is survived by his wife; another son, Dr. Nicholas Davatzes; a sister, Carol Davatzes Ferrandino; and four grandchildren. Another son, Christopher, died before him.After serving in the Marines, Mr. Davatzes joined the Xerox Corporation in 1965 and shifted to information technology at Intext Communications Systems in 1978. A friend introduced him to an executive at the fledgling Warner Amex cable company, who recruited him over lunch and had him sign a contract drawn on a restaurant napkin. He went to work there in 1980, alongside cable television pioneers like Richard Aurelio and Larry Wangberg.The Arts & Entertainment Network took shape in 1983, when he helped put the finishing touches on a merger between two struggling cable systems: the Entertainment Network, owned by RCA and the Rockefeller family, and the ARTS Network, owned by Hearst and ABC.His strategy in the beginning was twofold: to focus on making the network more available to viewers, and not to be diverted by producing original programs, instead focusing on acquiring existing ones.“If you’re in programming, we know that 85 percent of every new show that goes on the air usually fails,” said in a 2001 interview with The Cable Center, an educational arm of the cable industry.“Our overall approach is to create a sane economic model,” Mr. Davatzes said in 1985. “I like to tell people working for us that we don’t eat at ‘21.’” More