Television

Mr. Williams, who also starred in “Boardwalk Empire” and “Lovecraft Country,” was best known for his role as Omar Little in the David Simon HBO series.Michael K. Williams, the actor best known for his role as Omar Little, a stickup man with a sharp wit and a sawed-off shotgun in the HBO series “The Wire,” was found dead on Monday in his home in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, the police said. He was 54.Mr. Williams was found at about 2 p.m., according to the New York City Police Department. The death is being investigated, and the city’s medical examiner will determine the cause.His longtime representative, Marianna Shafran, confirmed the death in a statement and said the family was grappling with “deep sorrow” at “this insurmountable loss.”Mr. Williams grew up in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, where he said he had never envisioned a life outside the borough. But before he was 30, he had parlayed his love for dance into dancing roles with the singers George Michael and Madonna, and then landed his first acting opportunity with another artist, Tupac Shakur.Within a few years, he appeared in more roles, including as a drug dealer in the movie “Bringing Out the Dead,” which was directed by Martin Scorsese. Then in 2002 came “The Wire,” David Simon’s five-season epic on HBO that explored the gritty underworld of corruption, drugs and the police in Baltimore.Mr. Williams as Omar Little in “The Wire,” a groundbreaking portrayal of a gay Black man on television. HBOMr. Williams played Omar Little, a charming vigilante who held up low-level drug dealers, perhaps the most memorable character on a series many consider among the best shows in television history. Omar was gay and openly so in the homophobic, coldblooded world of murder and drugs, a groundbreaking portrayal of a gay Black man on television.Off camera, however, Mr. Williams’s life was often in disarray. He wasted his earnings from “The Wire” on drugs, a spiral that led him to living out of a suitcase on the floor of a house in Newark, an experience he described with candor in an article that appeared on nj.com in 2012.He finished filming the series with support from his church in Newark, but the drug addiction stayed. In 2008, he had a moment of clarity at a presidential rally for Barack Obama in Pennsylvania. With Mr. Williams in the crowd with his mother, Mr. Obama remarked that “The Wire” was the best show on television and that Omar Little was his favorite character.They met afterward, but Mr. Williams, who was high, could barely speak. “Hearing my name come out of his mouth woke me up,” Mr. Williams told The New York Times in 2017. “I realized that my work could actually make a difference.”Mr. Williams received five Emmy Award nominations, including one in the upcoming Primetime Emmy Awards this month. He was nominated this year for outstanding supporting actor in a drama series for his portrayal of Montrose Freeman on the HBO show “Lovecraft Country.”Mr. Williams as Montrose Freeman in “Lovecraft Country.”HBO, via Associated PressMichael Kenneth Williams was born Nov. 22, 1966. His mother immigrated from the Bahamas, worked as a seamstress and later operated a day care center out of the Vanderveer Estates, the public housing complex now known as Flatbush Gardens where the family lived in Brooklyn. His parents separated when he was young.When Mr. Williams was cast as Omar in “The Wire,” he returned to Vanderveer Estates to hone his role, drawing on the figures and experiences he had grown up with, he told The Times in 2017.“The way a lot of us from the neighborhood see it, Mike is like the prophet of the projects,” Darrel Wilds, 50, who grew up with Mr. Williams in Vanderveer, told The Times. “He’s representing the people of this neighborhood to the world.”Noah Remnick More

Joseph Moncure March’s “The Wild Party” (1928)Adam Chanler-Berat reads the prescient narrative poem that inspired T Magazine’s 2021 Fall Men’s issue cover story. Due to the era in which it was written, some of the language may be offensive.“I think I’m sort of exaggerating what the author meant, but there’s a bit in there that talks about gossip as an evolutionary tool to bind people together.” The actor Adam Chanler-Berat is paraphrasing the Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari’s best-selling book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” (2011) on a bench near the entrance of Greenpoint’s Transmitter Park, a few blocks from the Brooklyn apartment he shares with his boyfriend, the actor Kyle Beltran. “In the days of cave people,” he explains, “gossip was ‘that person’s going to steal your food.’ It was useful!”It’s natural for the subject to be on the 34-year-old’s mind because he’s just finished shooting the debut season of HBO Max’s “Gossip Girl” reboot, the first six episodes of which premiered this summer, with the rest airing in November. In line with the show’s secrets, which are disseminated via smartphones and social media, he found out about his casting when the creator, Joshua Safran, sent him a photo of his headshot on the wall of the writers’ room, along with an offer to star as a nerdy computer science teacher who helps revive the online rumor mill depicted on the original show. Though Chanler-Berat is an established stage actor, this is his first major screen role — a winking take on millennials who’ve been dethroned by a younger generation that now rules the internet they once claimed as their own. Not having auditioned, the invitation came as a surprise to the self-described “theater dweeb,” who first broke out in 2008 as the only “Next to Normal” cast member to have stayed throughout the musical’s entire original Off Broadway and Broadway runs. Since then, he has been repeatedly enlisted to help develop and refine new productions, a shrewd choice for creators looking to tap into the alchemy of intellect and emotional intuition evident in both his work and conversation.From left: Megan Ferguson, Tavi Gevinson and Chanler-Berat in the 2021 reboot of “Gossip Girl.”Karolina Wojtasik/HBO MaxAs he sees it, his “attitude has always been, ‘How do I come in and not mess things up, or get in anyone’s way?’” Lately, that has meant relaxing into being on camera, his fear of rocking the boat beginning to vanish, thanks in part to the pool of Broadway talent the series has hired. He was relieved to discover, for instance, that the 25-year-old Tavi Gevinson — with whom he had also been rehearsing for an upcoming revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Assassins” two weeks before lockdown — would be his main scene partner on the series. The writer-actress, now his close friend, says on the phone a week later that she’s grown to become “deliriously excited” when seeing his name come up on her phone, announcing an incoming voice message, Chanler-Berat’s preferred method of communication, a fact that makes sense given his distinct cadence and tone, which call to mind both old-school elocution and the over-expressive giddiness of a lifelong theater kid. “They’re long, rambling and eloquent,” Gevinson says of the missives, “and he’ll end them with ‘But I don’t know what I’m talking about, bye!’”Gossip keeps finding its way into his conversation — “voice messages are so versatile: better than a text, more convenient than a phone call and you can delete them when you want,” he says — but there’s no point in reading any mischief into this choice; it’s more a genuine curiosity on his part about social behaviors and the impulse to communicate. (“Connecting with people is hard and scary, and there are so many ways people try to do that. Gossip, true or not, gives you a sense of connection to the person with whom you’re sharing information.”)Jennifer Damiano (left) and Chanler-Berat in the musical “Next to Normal” at New York’s Second Stage Theater in 2008.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesChanler-Berat (top) with Carson Elrod (left) and David Rossmer (right) in the play “Peter and the Starchatcher” at New York’s Brooks Atkinson Theater in 2012.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis awareness of self and others, apparent in the way his eyes track the dogs mingling around him, is perhaps what led to his being cast — perfectly and, once again, without an audition — as the lead in a 2016 Boston production of Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George.” The starring dual roles of Georges Seurat and his fictional great-grandson George are all about apprehension toward and disconnection from one’s work, one’s peers, one’s loved ones, one’s obsessions. Chanler-Berat, who was 30 at the time, didn’t think he’d “cracked” Sondheim (“I don’t think anyone ever has”) but believes he did what he was supposed to: “There are parts of the characters that feel like an arrested development, like angsty teens, and I think that’s what speaks to nerdy theater people about that show.” The richness of the writer-composer’s work, he says, suggests a continuum that invites performers to continually reflect on their own evolving relationship to the material. “It feels like it was somehow written for you,” he says. “Not for you to play, but for you to experience and hear. Months later, you still realize things you can’t imagine not having done in the performance.”He doesn’t remember the first time he heard “Move On,” the musical’s transcendent ode to making peace with life’s outcomes, but it still reminds him of his late aunt Shirley Shulman, a scenic painter for New Jersey’s Bergen County Players who got him into theater at a young age, dressing him up for small performances for their family around the holidays. Later, as when he was a “socially awkward lost kitten” in middle school (he grew up in Bardonia, N.Y.), she encouraged him to gravitate toward theater people, where he eventually found a community. Despite his crisp, potent singing voice, he still experiences bouts of stage fright, but he says he is “exposure therapy-ing” his way out of it: “The more musicals I do, the more I’m like, ‘Well, I guess my voice generally shows up.’”Chanler-Berat (left) and Phillipa Soo in a 2017 performance of the musical “Amélie” at the Walter Kerr Theater in New York.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt’s difficult to take his modesty seriously, given that he has originated an impressive number of roles in offbeat-but-popular Broadway musicals like “Next to Normal” (2009), “Peter and the Starcatcher” (2012) and “Amélie” (2017). Each role required — and, because of his eyes’ sincerity, received — a barefaced candor not often seen in leading men. When he reunites with Gevinson for “Assassins” at New York’s Classic Stage Company in November, it will be John Doyle’s final Sondheim revival before stepping down as C.S.C.’s artistic director, following a long streak of quintessential, stripped-down revivals. Chanler-Berat will play the would-be Reagan killer John Hinckley Jr., which will require him to draw from what Gevinson describes as his ability to be “very present, while embodying someone who has a lot going on inside.” The role seems ideal for this phase of his career and his life, marrying his character actor versatility with the parasocial themes that are as prevalent on “Gossip Girl” as they are among the musical’s presidential stalkers.Before the pandemic, Chanler-Berat’s schedule was set to involve the strenuous double duty of rehearsing and performing the psychologically demanding musical while spending long hours shooting on the “Gossip Girl” set. Subconsciously quoting the midcentury American actress Ethel Merman, who once said an eight-show-a-week musical requires living “like a [expletive] nun,” he says that such asceticism, combined with 4:30 a.m. wake-up calls — as mandated by the series’ hair and makeup sessions, protracted by Covid-19 safety protocols — would have presented an arduous reality. He trails off when thinking of this possibility, internalizing an exacting (but conquerable) challenge that would demand his inner perfectionist to simultaneously pour his all into two vastly different projects. Then he checks himself: “But that’s also the dream, are you kidding me?” More

Several networks will air specials timed to the 20th anniversary of Sept. 11. And “American Crime Story” will return for a third season.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. 6-12. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY (1968) 10:15 p.m. on TCM. Clint Eastwood is slated to return to theaters this month with “Cry Macho,” a modern-day western. The role gives Eastwood an opportunity to dust off one of his signature looks: grizzled man with a cowboy hat. The quintessential example of that look can be found in this Sergio Leone odyssey, in which Eastwood plays a bounty hunter caught up in a plot that involves buried treasure and betrayal. While the movie — and its score, by Ennio Morricone — has become a classic, initial reception was mixed. This “must be the most expensive, pious and repellent movie in the history of its peculiar genre,” Renata Adler wrote in her review for The New York Times in 1968. “If 42nd Street is lined with little pushcarts of sadism,” she added, “this film, which opened yesterday at the Trans-Lux 85th Street and the DeMille, is an entire supermarket.” Critical opinion regarding “The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly” has improved since — though the same cannot necessarily be said of 42nd Street.TuesdayBeanie Feldstein in “Impeachment: American Crime Story.”Tina Thorpe/FXIMPEACHMENT: AMERICAN CRIME STORY 10 p.m. on FX. After dramatizing the trial of O.J. Simpson and the murder of Gianni Versace, the anthology series “American Crime Story” turns to the events leading up to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton for its third season. This telling focuses on the perspective of the women involved, with Beanie Feldstein starring as Monica Lewinsky, Sarah Paulson as Linda Tripp, Annaleigh Ashford as Paula Jones and Edie Falco as Hillary Clinton. Clive Owen plays President Clinton. Lewinsky is a producer of the season, and discussed her involvement with it in a recent interview with The Times. “The reality is that this story has been part of a collective conversation for 20 years,” she said, “and as I evolve, as the world evolves, it comes to have different meanings.”BITCHIN’: THE SOUND AND FURY OF RICK JAMES (2021) 8 p.m. on Showtime. The life of the funk singer Rick James is revisited in this documentary, which aims to give a holistic view of James’s complicated legacy. Directed by Sacha Jenkins (“Fresh Dressed”), “Bitchin’” looks at James’s roots — including his enlistment in the Navy — his music and his famously wild lifestyle while also examining his relationships with women. The film is one answer to a question that the critic Candice Frederick asked in a recent article in The Times: “How do you reckon with the man who is just as famous for committing sexual assault and perpetuating misogyny in the music industry?”WednesdayWOMEN OF 9/11: A SPECIAL EDITION OF 20/20 WITH ROBIN ROBERTS 9 p.m. on ABC. Women who were affected by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, share their experience in this two-hour special hosted by Robin Roberts. Among those interviewed is Genelle Guzman-McMillan, who spent more than 24 hours buried in the rubble of 1 World Trade Center before being rescued. Also at 9 p.m., Vice TV will air TOO SOON: COMEDY AFTER 9/11, which explores the impact of the attacks on the work of comedians. Interviewees in that documentary include David Cross, Ahmed Ahmed, Janeane Garofalo, Hari Kondabolu, Cedric the Entertainer, and Marc Maron.ThursdayBenedict Cumberbatch in “Doctor Strange.”Disney/MarvelDOCTOR STRANGE (2016) 8 p.m. on TNT. If you watched the just-released “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” over the weekend and are in the mood for more Marvel, here’s a chance to revisit “Doctor Strange.” The actor Benedict Cumberbatch plays a neurosurgeon who goes on a spiritual journey, while Chiwetel Ejiofor, Tilda Swinton and Rachel McAdams also have major roles. Manohla Dargis called the film “giddily enjoyable” in her review for The Times. “Doctor Strange,” she wrote, “is part of Marvel’s strategy for world domination, yet it’s also so visually transfixing, so beautiful and nimble that you may even briefly forget the brand.”FridayDATELINE 10 p.m. on NBC. On Friday night’s special episode of NBC’s “Dateline,” Lester Holt interviews the family members of passengers and crew members who died on United Airlines Flight 93. Several other networks will also air programming timed to the 20th anniversary of 9/11. On History Channel, 9/11: THE LEGACY, airing at 7 p.m., looks at stories of children whose lives were impacted by the attacks. At 8 p.m., CBS will air THE RACE AGAINST TIME: THE C.I.A. AND 9/11. And at 9 p.m., the documentary DETAINEE 001 (2021) on Showtime looks at the case of John Walker Lindh, who became known as the “American Taliban.”ILANA GLAZER PRESENTS COMEDY ON EARTH: NYC 2020-2021 11 p.m. on Comedy Central. For some counterprogramming, consider this hourlong comedy special, which brings together an array of stand-up performances that riff on life during the pandemic, with Petey DeAbreu, Alison Leiby, Larry Owens, and Sydnee Washington.SaturdayYannick Nézet-Séguin conducting the Met Orchestra in 2019. Nézet-Séguin will lead the orchestra in Verdi’s “Requiem” to recognize the 20th anniversary of 9/11, in a performance that will air on PBS.Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting the Met Orchestra in 2019. Nézet-Séguin will lead the orchestra in Verdi’s “Requiem” to recognize the 20th anniversary of 9/11, in a performance that will air on PBS.GREAT PERFORMANCES: VERDI’S REQUIEM: THE MET REMEMBERS 9/11 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Saturday programming recognizing the 20th anniversary of 9/11 includes this special episode of PBS’s “Great Performances,” which features Verdi’s “Requiem.” Misty Copeland will host. The Met Opera’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, will conduct the orchestra, which will be joined by the singers Ailyn Pérez, Elina Garanca, Matthew Polenzani and Eric Owens.Sunday2021 MTV VIDEO MUSIC AWARDS 8 p.m. on MTV. The rapper and singer Doja Cat is slated to host this year’s edition of the MTV Video Music Awards. Nominees for the top prizes include Justin Bieber, Megan Thee Stallion, Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift; performers are to include Olivia Rodrigo, Camila Cabello, Lil Nas X, Foo Fighters and Kacey Musgraves. More

Chuck returns minus a beard and a lover. Axe returns minus the good sense to leave well enough alone.Season 5, Episode 8: ‘Copenhagen’Chuck Rhodes has shaved off his beard. But he wants to be clear: It’s not that big a deal.“You look ready to toss your cap in the air at West Point!” exclaims his underling Karl Allard (Allan Havey).Rhodes’s weary reply? “Don’t make a whole thing of it.”My guess, and it’s just a guess, is that this new clean-shaven Chuck Rhodes has more to do with the vagaries of scheduling talent for the back half of this Covid-scrambled season than a decision made in the writers’ room. If your show stars Paul Giamatti, and if he has gone beardless sometime during the many months since you were last able to film, then by God, your main character will go beardless as well.But “Don’t make a whole thing of it” doubles as a mantra for the entire … what should we call it? A half-season premiere? Season Five version 2.0? However you slice it, the writers have taken a steady-as-she-goes approach to the show’s return. No hard reset, no launching point for a slew of brand-new story lines — this is a standard “Billions” episode, which is to say it simply advances its pre-existing plotlines in dense and dizzying style, through crackling dialogue and confident performances.For Chuck, this means losing more than just his beard. His relationship with the Yale sex researcher Catherine Brant, played by Julianna Margulies, appears to have been another casualty of the forced break in production. The show writes her off with Chuck’s revelation that his threesome with her and a sex worker, hired by Cat for the occasion, proved disastrous when its lack of sadomasochism, the thing that really gets Rhodes’s engine revving, exposed fissures in their romantic connection.Chuck’s relationship with his alma mater produces more trouble than a regrettable sexual liaison, however. One of his former students, Merle Howard (Noah Robbins), led a revolt against Chuck’s assignment to take down the secretary of the Treasury, Todd Krakow (Danny Strong), during the season’s opening half. With the help of some photographic evidence provided by the Axe Cap sleazeball Bill Stearn, a.k.a., Dollar Bill (Kelly AuCoin), he has now resorted to blackmail, ordering Chuck to resign his post as the Attorney General of New York lest his long-ago role in rigging a Yale student election be exposed.Chuck has a moral leg to stand on here: His opponent in the election in question opposed divestment from apartheid South Africa, and the young Chuck joined friends in burning ballots in a bathtub to prevent this ultraconservative candidate from achieving power. Unfortunately for Chuck, that candidate grew up to be the university’s beloved chaplain, and a head-to-head morality-based showdown in the present day would not necessarily deliver Chuck a slam-dunk victory — not when election-rigging has been such a going concern in America in general, and on “Billions” in particular.“It was a student election — persuading Oingo Boingo to play Spring Fling, and not Sun City,” Chuck protests to Merle. “It’s not Il Duce in ’34!”“One leads to the other,” Merle responds without missing a beat.Chuck’s lawyer and best friend, Ira (Ben Shenkman), digs up an unseen file of dirt on Chuck’s old election opponent, over Chuck’s protestations. If Merle had a pistol,” Ira asks, “would you let him shoot you? No: You’d defend yourself and then go about making amends once you knew you were still breathing.”In the end, Merle blinks, withdrawing his threat and reporting himself to the university’s dean (Tawny Cypress). When she confronts Chuck about his youthful indiscretion, however, Chuck refrains from using Ira’s file, tendering his resignation from Yale’s faculty instead. Sic semper tyrannis, I guess.On the opposite side of the great “Billions” divide, Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) takes on an altogether more dangerous adversary than a law student: his fellow billionaire Mike Prince (Corey Stoll). When Bobby learns from his thoroughly hung-over right-hand man Wags (David Costabile) that Prince is on deck for an ambassadorship to Denmark, the two men dig for whatever dirt can cancel the appointment and ruin Prince’s reputation.They settle on Scooter Dunbar (Daniel Breaker), Prince’s equivalent to Wags. Using a small army of runners to cover up his own involvement, Scooter appears to have developed a serious sports-betting habit, precisely the kind of security vulnerability that gets people axed from government positions. (Or at least used to.)But Wags’s attempt to bigfoot Scooter on the issue backfires when Prince shows up to Axe Cap headquarters, revealing that the bets were his own. The reason he placed the bets through Scooter and the runners wasn’t to hide a dangerous vice, he says. It’s because, given his well-earned reputation as a power player, his position could tilt the betting odds were it widely known.Not that this stops Axe’s attack. Keying in on a stray mention by Prince of his past, Axe tasks his lieutenants to dig deeper. Once again, it’s Dollar Bill who gets the goods: According to the mother (Becky Ann Baker) of Prince’s late partner, Prince swindled his former partner and best friend out of a billion-dollar deal — contributing, she believes, to his death in a drunk-driving accident. The ensuing TV news exposé lets Prince know he has a real fight on his hands.Indeed, if there’s a through line for this episode, it’s about characters trying, and often failing, to stay true to the people and things that mean the most to them. The artist Nico Tanner (Frank Grillo), the current love interest of Wendy Rhoades (Maggie Siff), recoils from the culture of limitless cash and entitlement embraced by the Axe Cap/Taylor Mason Carbon power structure — although that doesn’t stop him from fleecing one of them for thousands of dollars for a mere scribble. (His vigorous, shirtless creation of a new painting before an enraptured Wendy, to the tune of the Velvet Underground’s euphoric song “Rock and Roll,” is the episode’s valedictory moment.)As for Taylor (Asia Kate Dillon), the wunderkind trader is aghast to discover that the Mase Carb up-and-comer Rian (Eva Victor) still works as a cater waiter in her off hours. The side gig is an attempt to keep alive her relationships to her old friends, she insists. But if other major investors see her at work, Taylor argues, they will question how Taylor runs the shop. At Taylor’s behest, Rian quits her side hustle and settles in for a cozy night in front of the telly with her boss. Is it just me, or is there reason to worry that Taylor’s right-hand woman, Lauren (Jade Eshete), won’t be the only woman in the young genius’s life before too long?And while Chuck scrambles to find a kidney donor for his father (Jeffrey DeMunn) — a course of action that leads to Chuck’s humiliation by Dr. Gilbert (Seth Barrish), whom he put away for ethical violations — his ex-wife, Wendy, is tapped by Charles Sr. to be his health care proxy.“I need you to be cleareyed and punch my ticket” should the need arise, Charles tells her.In the end, the episode’s most potentially momentous moment almost feels like an afterthought. Acting on a tip by his sinister go-to guy Victor Mateo (Louis Cancelmi), Axe buys up an obviously crooked payday lender that Chuck and his own lieutenant, Kate Sacker (Condola Rashad), have been looking into. Why? Because said lender has a bank charter, the golden goose for which Axe Cap has been searching all season.Game on, folks!Loose change:As, quite potentially, the most Tom Petty-friendly show on TV, “Billions” here deploys “It’s Good to Be King.” Ironically, of course.This week’s major cameos come in the form of The Bail Project’s governing board chair, Michael E. Novogratz, and the singer-songwriter Jason Isbell, whose obvious integrity challenges Tanner to stand by his own artistic instincts.I appreciated Chuck and Ira’s shout out to Mamoun’s, the New York/New Haven falafel mainstay. Boy, I could tell you some stories.This week in “concepts I didn’t know about until ‘Billions’ told me about them,” it’s hygge, the Danish ideal of being warm and contented. Has anyone on this show truly felt hygge at any time? More

Mr. Scott, who played both Bozo the Clown and the original Ronald McDonald on television, was a longtime weather forecaster on the “Today” show who emphasized showmanship over science.Willard Scott, the antic longtime weather forecaster on the “Today” show, whose work, by his own cheerful acknowledgment, made it clear that you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, died on Saturday at his farm in Delaplane, Va. He was 87.His death was confirmed by his wife, Paris Keena Scott. She did not specify a cause, saying only that he had died after a brief illness.Mr. Scott, who had earlier played both Bozo the Clown and the original Ronald McDonald on television, was among the first of a generation of television weathermen who stressed showmanship over science. Throughout the late 20th century, he was also a ubiquitous television pitchman.A garrulous, gaptoothed, boutonnière-wearing, funny-hatted, sometimes toupee-clad, larger-than-life American Everyman (in his prime, he stood 6-foot-3 and weighed nearly 300 pounds), Mr. Scott was hired in 1980 to help NBC’s “Today” compete with its chief rival, ABC’s “Good Morning America.”Joining “Today” that March, Mr. Scott went on to sport a string of outré outfits, spout a cornucopia of cornpone humor and wish happy birthday to a spate of American centenarians, all while talking about the forecast every so often, until his retirement in 2015.Though he was meant to represent the new, late-model television weatherman, Mr. Scott brought to the job a brand of shtick that harked back to earlier times. He seemed simultaneously to embody the jovial, backslapping Rotarian of the mid-20th century, the midway barker of the 19th and, in the opinion of at least some critics, the court jester of the Middle Ages.There was the time, for instance, that he delivered the forecast dressed as Boy George. There was the time he did so dressed as Carmen Miranda, the “Brazilian bombshell” of an earlier era, dancing before the weather map in high heels, ruffled pink gown, copious jewelry and vast fruited hat. There was the time, reporting from an outdoor event, that he kissed a pig on camera.The pig did not take kindly to being kissed and squealed mightily.Mr. Scott, who began his career in radio before becoming a weatherman at WRC-TV, an NBC affiliate in Washington, had no background in meteorology or any allied science. But as he readily acknowledged, the weatherman’s job as reconstructed for the postmodern age did not require any.“A trained gorilla could do it,” Mr. Scott said in 1975, while he was at WRC.The only scientific asset one actually needed, he pointed out, was the telephone number of the National Weather Service.In more than three decades with “Today,” Mr. Scott traversed the country, delivering the weather on location at county fairs, town parades and quaint byways across America, as well as from NBC’s studios in New York.A frequent guest on late-night TV, he was a spokesman for a range of charitable causes and a commercial pitchman with wide television exposure — too wide, some critics maintained.The concerns he endorsed included Howard Johnson Motor Lodges, True Value Hardware, Burger King, Lipton tea, Maxwell House coffee, the American Dairy Association, the Florida Citrus Commission, Diet Coke, USA Today and many others.“A huckster for all seasons,” The New York Times called him in 1987.Mr. Scott’s onscreen persona — by his own account little different from his offscreen persona — divided viewers. Some adored him, inundating him with gifts, which he might display on the air. (Among them, the 1987 article in The Times reported, was “an airplane built out of Diet Coke cans.”)In January 1989, the country’s new first lady, Barbara Bush, broke ranks from the inaugural parade for her husband, George H.W. Bush, to dart over to Mr. Scott, broadcasting from the sidelines, and plant an impromptu kiss on his cheek.“I don’t know Willard Scott,” Mrs. Bush explained afterward. “I just love that face.”Then again, as The Boston Globe reported in 1975, there was this incident, from Mr. Scott’s days at WRC: “He was pushing a shopping cart in a Virginia supermarket recently when a little old lady charged by and smacked him with her umbrella. ‘I can’t stand you,’ she said.”The son of Willard Herman Scott, an insurance salesman, and Thelma (Phillips) Scott, a telephone operator, Willard Herman Scott Jr. was born on March 7, 1934, in Alexandria, Va.He was smitten with broadcasting from the time he was a boy, and at 16 he became a $12-a-week page at WRC-TV. After he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and religion from American University, Mr. Scott and a classmate, Ed Walker, took to the Washington airwaves with a comic radio show, “The Joy Boys.”With time out from 1956 to 1958 for Mr. Scott’s Navy service, “The Joy Boys” was broadcast on WRC-AM from 1955 to 1972 and on WWDC-AM in Washington from 1972 to 1974. Featuring humorous improvisation and topical satire, it won a large following.From 1952 to 1962, Mr. Scott also played the title character on “Bozo the Clown,” the WRC-TV version of a syndicated children’s show. In the early ’60s, on the strength of his Bozo, McDonald’s asked him to develop a clown character to be used in its advertising.As Ronald McDonald, Mr. Scott did several local TV commercials for the franchise but was passed over — in consequence of his corpulence, he later said — as its national representative.In 1967, he started doing the weather on WRC-TV. There, his exploits included emerging from a manhole one Groundhog Day dressed as an astoundingly large groundhog.When Mr. Scott was hired by “Today,” he supplanted the meteorologist Bob Ryan, who was fired to make way for him. Mr. Ryan, who held a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s in atmospheric science, had previously worked as a cloud physicist.Mr. Scott’s early weeks at “Today,” he later recalled, were “touch and go.”But by 1987, The Times reported, “his tenure there” was “credited with helping to catapult the show past ‘Good Morning America’ into first place in the breakfast-time sweepstakes.”Not all of Mr. Scott’s colleagues approved of his modus operandi. In 1988, Bryant Gumbel, a co-host of “Today,” wrote a confidential memorandum to an NBC executive in which he castigated the work of several colleagues, notably Mr. Scott.The memo, leaked to New York Newsday the next year, charged that Mr. Scott “holds the show hostage to his assortment of whims, wishes, birthdays and bad taste.”Though Mr. Scott publicly forgave Mr. Gumbel, giving him a conciliatory kiss on the cheek on a “Today” segment soon afterward, he said elsewhere that the memo had “cut like a knife.”With NBC colleagues, Mr. Scott shared three Daytime Emmys in the 1990s for coverage of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. He went into semiretirement in 1996, ceding regular forecasting to Al Roker while continuing to deliver birthday tributes.Mr. Scott’s first wife, Mary (Dwyer) Scott, whom he married in 1959, died in 2002. He married Paris Keena Scott, his second wife, in 2014. In addition to her, he is survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Sally Scott Swiatek and Mare Scott, and two grandchildren, Sally Marie Swiatek and John Willard Swiatek.Mr. Scott was the author of several books, including “Willard Scott’s Down Home Stories” (1984) and “Willard Scott’s All-American Cookbook” (1986).For all its burlesque jocularity, Mr. Scott asserted, his job was no less taxing as a result.“Everything I do looks like it just falls into place,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1988. “Part of what I do is make it fall into place. You have to work at being a buffoon.”Michael Levenson More

The 18-year-old behind the viral Twitter account @CraigWeekend has offered people a routine reminder to take a load off.In a scene from “Saturday Night Live,” the English actor Daniel Craig stares into the camera and flops his arms halfheartedly, as if he meant to raise them above his head but got tired halfway.“Ladies and gentlemen, the Weeknd,” he says, announcing the episode’s musical guest: the Canadian pop star Abel Tesfaye. The studio audience begins to cheer.These four seconds of footage, notable if only for Mr. Craig’s ambiguous tone (was he exasperated? dubious? expectant? neutral?), were surely forgotten by most viewers after the episode was broadcast on March 7, 2020. But not by Miles Riehle.Watching Mr. Craig on “S.N.L.,” he was amused by what he saw as a double entendre. “It sounds like he’s welcoming in the weekend, as in Saturday or Sunday,” said Mr. Riehle, 18. “I was like, ‘Man, that’s really funny.’”Following in the footsteps of Twitter accounts that tweet only on specific dates — think “Mean Girls” and Oct. 3 — Mr. Riehle claimed the handle @CraigWeekend and started tweeting the clip every Friday afternoon.When the account took off months later, in November, “I was excited to have so many people following something that I was doing,” Mr. Riehle said. Soon, interview requests started rolling in.The extra attention, while thrilling, was also daunting, he said, “because now I have to make sure I keep all these people entertained.”That said, he seems to be sustaining the interest of his more than 450,000 followers, who Friday after Friday await his announcement that the workweek has come to an end. Some people message him when they feel he has not delivered his proclamation early enough.Mr. Riehle thinks the account’s appeal can be chalked up to its positive and predictable messages during a period marked by fear and uncertainty.“Given how much stress there was going on in the world, for a lot of people it was extra potent, being able to embrace the weekend and get excited for it,” he said. Fans of the account, he said, have developed “a community of good vibes.”“It always seems like people are nice to each other in the replies and the comments and the quote-tweets,” Mr. Riehle said. “I think that’s sort of rare on the internet.”He usually posts between 3:45 p.m. and 4:20 p.m. Pacific time, but never on the hour. “I kind of want to keep people on their toes,” he said.Indeed, that his followers know something is coming — but not exactly when — could be key to keeping them engaged, said John Suler, a psychology professor at Rider University.The predictability “is very reassuring to people, especially during a pandemic when people have little else to do on a Friday and everything else in life seems so unpredictable,” Dr. Suler said. “But then, he does mix in a bit of unpredictable reinforcement by posting at different times of the night.”Josh Varela, a fellow at Lead for America, a local government leadership program for recent college graduates, from Ventura, Calif., has notifications turned on for the account so he and his roommate know it’s time to put aside their responsibilities for the week.“Whenever @CraigWeekend tweets, we see it as the time we’ll crack open a beer and hang out,” Mr. Varela, 23, said.Derek Milton, a 34-year-old film director from Los Angeles, said that “any anxieties, any worries, any hardships that have accumulated over the past five days are relieved by a four-second clip.” He and his friends love the video so much that they recorded a parody version of their own while on the set of a photo shoot with none other than the Weeknd.Mr. Craig was not available to comment on the “S.N.L.” clip, but the Weeknd appears to be in on the joke. In May, he tweeted, “ladies and gentlemen, the …”It wasn’t hard for Mr. Riehle to fill in the blank.“I consider that to be a call-out tweet to me personally,” he said. “I think he likes it.”Mr. Riehle starts college this fall at the University of California, Davis, where he plans to study environmental policy and planning. He intends to keep running the account while in school.“I don’t know when it will end or if it will end,” he said. “Obviously if it gets to a point to where it’s harming my relationship with the internet, then I might get rid of it, but I have no plans right now to ever stop doing it.”For all the relief his account give the weekday 9-to-5 crowd, Mr. Riehle knows that, for some workers, the tweet could also be a dispiriting reminder of impending duties. He himself works as an ambassador for Orange County’s public transit service — on the weekend.“It is kind of ironic,” he said. More

The 18-year-old behind the viral Twitter account @CraigWeekend has offered people a routine reminder to take a load off.In a scene from “Saturday Night Live,” the English actor Daniel Craig stares into the camera and flops his arms halfheartedly, as if he meant to raise them above his head but got tired halfway.“Ladies and gentlemen, the Weeknd,” he says, announcing the episode’s musical guest: the Canadian pop star Abel Tesfaye. The studio audience begins to cheer.These four seconds of footage, notable if only for Mr. Craig’s ambiguous tone (was he exasperated? dubious? expectant? neutral?), were surely forgotten by most viewers after the episode was broadcast on March 7, 2020. But not by Miles Riehle.Watching Mr. Craig on “S.N.L.,” he was amused by what he saw as a double entendre. “It sounds like he’s welcoming in the weekend, as in Saturday or Sunday,” said Mr. Riehle, 18. “I was like, ‘Man, that’s really funny.’”Following in the footsteps of Twitter accounts that tweet only on specific dates — think “Mean Girls” and Oct. 3 — Mr. Riehle claimed the handle @CraigWeekend and started tweeting the clip every Friday afternoon.When the account took off months later, in November, “I was excited to have so many people following something that I was doing,” Mr. Riehle said. Soon, interview requests started rolling in.The extra attention, while thrilling, was also daunting, he said, “because now I have to make sure I keep all these people entertained.”That said, he seems to be sustaining the interest of his more than 450,000 followers, who Friday after Friday await his announcement that the workweek has come to an end. Some people message him when they feel he has not delivered his proclamation early enough.Mr. Riehle thinks the account’s appeal can be chalked up to its positive and predictable messages during a period marked by fear and uncertainty.“Given how much stress there was going on in the world, for a lot of people it was extra potent, being able to embrace the weekend and get excited for it,” he said. Fans of the account, he said, have developed “a community of good vibes.”“It always seems like people are nice to each other in the replies and the comments and the quote-tweets,” Mr. Riehle said. “I think that’s sort of rare on the internet.”He usually posts between 3:45 p.m. and 4:20 p.m. Pacific time, but never on the hour. “I kind of want to keep people on their toes,” he said.Indeed, that his followers know something is coming — but not exactly when — could be key to keeping them engaged, said John Suler, a psychology professor at Rider University.The predictability “is very reassuring to people, especially during a pandemic when people have little else to do on a Friday and everything else in life seems so unpredictable,” Dr. Suler said. “But then, he does mix in a bit of unpredictable reinforcement by posting at different times of the night.”Josh Varela, a fellow at Lead for America, a local government leadership program for recent college graduates, from Ventura, Calif., has notifications turned on for the account so he and his roommate know it’s time to put aside their responsibilities for the week.“Whenever @CraigWeekend tweets, we see it as the time we’ll crack open a beer and hang out,” Mr. Varela, 23, said.Derek Milton, a 34-year-old film director from Los Angeles, said that “any anxieties, any worries, any hardships that have accumulated over the past five days are relieved by a four-second clip.” He and his friends love the video so much that they recorded a parody version of their own while on the set of a photo shoot with none other than the Weeknd.Mr. Craig was not available to comment on the “S.N.L.” clip, but the Weeknd appears to be in on the joke. In May, he tweeted, “ladies and gentlemen, the …”It wasn’t hard for Mr. Riehle to fill in the blank.“I consider that to be a call-out tweet to me personally,” he said. “I think he likes it.”Mr. Riehle starts college this fall at the University of California, Davis, where he plans to study environmental policy and planning. He intends to keep running the account while in school.“I don’t know when it will end or if it will end,” he said. “Obviously if it gets to a point to where it’s harming my relationship with the internet, then I might get rid of it, but I have no plans right now to ever stop doing it.”For all the relief his account give the weekday 9-to-5 crowd, Mr. Riehle knows that, for some workers, the tweet could also be a dispiriting reminder of impending duties. He himself works as an ambassador for Orange County’s public transit service — on the weekend.“It is kind of ironic,” he said. More

Also: Nate seems headed to a dark place, and Keeley and Roy explore whether there can be too much of a good thing.Season 2, Episode 7, ‘Headspace’At last: A clear vision of the trajectory of this season — hinted at last week — has come into focus. It’s not about wins and losses. We still have no idea of AFC Richmond’s chances of rejoining the Premier League. We don’t even know their next opponent in the FA Cup, following last week’s shocking upset of Tottenham Hotspur.What we do know is a little bit more about Ted and the journey he appears to be on this season. But I’ll come back to that. Let’s instead start at the beginning of the episode.To Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” the show posits the downside of a perfect relationship: Your jobs, interests and romantic ideals overlap so utterly that you are around each other every single minute. At least, that’s how things feel for Keeley. As self-evidently wonderful as Roy is, living with Angry Yoda 24/7 does sound a bit exhausting.And then, another subplot, more concerning still: Nate is obsessed with social media declaring him a hero after the win over Tottenham. But his father is still utterly dismissive. While yelling at other parts of the newspaper — “Let me know if they ever talk back,” says Nate’s mother — he ignores the back-page story about his suddenly famous, soccer-coach son.“They say humility is not thinking less of yourself,” he lectures Nate. “It’s about thinking about yourself less.”Maybe throw in a “Well done, son” somewhere? Or an “I’m proud of you”? Between Jamie and Nate (with Sam presented as a counterexample), Season 2 of “Ted Lasso” is turning into an exploration of poor fathering.And that’s all before the title sequence. We’ve already had a mouthful of plot, and we haven’t even tasted Ted’s crucial, perhaps season-defining, story line. Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.After the titles, we find Ted back in Sharon’s office, where he’d collapsed on the sofa last week. He seems much better than the curled-up fetal mess he was then, but only on the surface.The manic activity Ted has displayed in the last couple of episodes is again on full display, as he fiddles around about where to sit and anxiously messes around with Sharon’s vintage water-drinking bird. (Who would have guessed that the “Doctor! Floor! Ceiling! Trash can!” scene of two episodes ago would have been one of the most revealing moments of the season?)After Ted springs a quick trio of references to “Mad Men,” the “New Yorker” and “The Sopranos,” Sharon offers her most significant line of the season to date:“Don’t worry, Ted.”Like many, I’d initially imagined that Sharon would be a new foil for Ted, the old ones — Rebecca, Jamie, et cetera — having been so completely won over. But no. She is not here, like the others, to be helped by Ted. She is here to help Ted. And he clearly needs help.This will be the first of three visits Ted takes to Sharon this episode, and two out of three will end with him storming out angrily in distinctly non-Ted Lasso (maybe more Led Tasso?) fashion. The irony, clearly deliberate, is that Ted’s profound suspicion of psychotherapy is driven in large part by the fact that it is the professionalized version of what he does himself as a nonprofessional: get inside someone’s head as a paid quasi-friend and try to “fix” them. (Sharon makes this point herself fairly elegantly.)By the end of the episode, we still have little idea of precisely what is eating at Ted beyond his recent divorce. But Sharon’s role in the season — she is played, again, by the wonderful Sarah Niles — is much clearer. Stay tuned.That said, this is still a nascent story line. Let’s go back, for now, to our two big, pre-title-sequence subplots.Nate’s state of mind, which has been headed down a dark path for most of the season, has taken a still darker turn. His abuse of Colin, both on the pitch and off — you may recall he called him a “dolt” last episode — is accelerating, with him ultimately comparing Colin to a painter whose work hangs in a Holiday Inn. (Genuine question: Are Holiday Inns a significant presence in the U.K.? Or is this one of those moments when the series’s American roots show?)One of the things I’ve appreciated about this arc so far is that it understands that a deterioration like Nate’s isn’t linear. It takes place in fits and starts, sparked — in both directions — by specific occurrences. This episode, Nate has two clear moments of contrition, of maybe resetting himself in a good way for him and others alike. The first is when Coach Beard calls him out and a visibly stricken Nate asks, “Did you tell Ted?” (Beard subsequently disapparating is a nice touch, but one I hope won’t become a shtick.)The second is when Nate apologizes to Colin in front of the whole team. I love that while the rest of the team is using unprintable nouns to describe Nate’s behavior, Dani Rojas interjects — quite accurately — that he is a “wounded butterfly.”But Nate’s moments of self-correction don’t quite take root in his fragile psyche. All it requires is one nasty social-media comment to set him off, as he threatens to make the young kit manager Will’s life a “[expletive] misery” for coming up with his gag “Wonder Kid” jersey.It’s not clear precisely where this is all going. But I think it’s fair to say that it will get worse before it gets better.The episode’s other major plotline — Keeley’s need for just an ounce of “Me Time” away from Roy — is a new one, and one that seems to have been quickly resolved. (I should note that, having worked at the same organization with my wife not once but three times, I am supremely familiar with this dilemma. It may in fact be the closest I ever come to being Roy Kent.)I’m not sure there’s much more that needs to be said about this one, except that Roy’s effort at self-correction is vastly more successful than Nate’s. If anyone associated with “Ted Lasso” wants to pay me to market the “‘Roy Is Sorry for Not Understanding Keeley’ playlist,” well, you know where to find me. I promise it will be a chart-topper.So, Keeley and Roy are probably fine. Nate is getting worse. The Rebecca-Sam flirtation remains, for now, unresolved. And Ted’s manic-depressive turn requires further exploration. But don’t worry, Coach Lasso: We got you, babe.(Lots of) Odds and EndsPerhaps the biggest surprise of the episode was what didn’t happen. Last week concluded with the Big Reveal that Rebecca and Sam are romantic Bantr buddies — but that fact remains unrevealed to either of them. The episode reminded us that it was aware of this conundrum with its awkwardly-bumping-into-one-another scene, but that was it.How great is it that Keeley and Roy each describe the other at one point as “the cat’s pajamas”?Jan Maas’s role on the show has come into clearer focus, too. As a Dutchman, he has become the show’s inveterate truth-teller. When he sides with Jamie against Roy on the question of whether Jamie should crowd a teammate on the pitch — “He’s right, actually” — even Roy has no recourse but a frustrated obscenity.Ted’s reference to the Jerky Boys and the post-caller-ID decline of crank calling hit me particularly hard, as I devoted considerable energy to that vocation as a young teen. If you lived in Connecticut in the 1980s and received a call from “Fran the Funky Man at WDOD Waterbury” asking you to sing three lines of a Rolling Stones song in exchange for concert tickets — well, I apologize.Sharon’s line about needing to be Ted’s “tormentor” in order to be his “mentor” was a good one, but the subsequent exchange — Ted: “I like that”; Sharon: “I knew you would” — was priceless.Are Higgins and his wife becoming one of the great televisual romances of the 21st century? I say yes. The “have you seen her dressed in blue” moment in the bravura, five-minute “She’s a Rainbow” sequence from Episode 5 may be the highest point of an overall series high point.It was great to see Trent Crimm, who after his breakthrough role in Episode 3 of the first season (a.k.a. “the “Trent Crimm episode”) has become a kind of mascot for the show. But do more with him than having him seek a dumb, random quote from Ted. His screen time is precious!I’m not certain how Roy feels, but if people tried to cover up talking about me by jazz scatting whenever I entered the room, I think I’d be OK with that.As a premier Roy Kent fan from the start — I actually own a Kent jersey; I don’t get Nate’s issue with novelty gear — the idea that he is a fan of “The Da Vinci Code” is almost too terrible to bear. That said, his commentary, “You can’t put it down because the chapters are so short” is pretty spot on.After a slow week last time, we’re back in the game on pop-culture references, including (in addition to those already mentioned): Vladimir Putin, “Sex and the City,” Glenn Close, “Citizen Kane,” “Ratatouille, and “Twelfth Night” (Mae’s “If music be the food of love….”). Please remind me of others I missed in comments.Last week, folks pointed out that I should have cited Esther Perel and Brené Brown, and also offered two deep, deep cuts: The David-and-Goliath reference to “Steve Wiebe vs. Billy Mitchell” cited two past world champions of “Donkey Kong” (that was evidently a thing), and Ted’s voice mail greeting, “You gotta leave your name, leave your number…,” was a riff on an old “comic” answering-machine tape called Crazy Calls. (Hard as it is to believe, that was a thing, too.) Another reader pointed out that the Rebecca-Sam relationship parallels — in names at least — the romantic will-they-or-won’t they of Kirstie-Alley-era “Cheers.” I would say that’s a coincidence, but Jason Sudeikis is George Wendt’s nephew … More