Television

Appearing on TV news shows lets Times reporters take their work to a wider audience. But the opportunities must be handled with care.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.“What do you think?”The host looks to you. Hundreds of thousands — even millions — of television viewers await your answer. What do you say?Annie Karni, a White House correspondent for The New York Times who is a regular guest on MSNBC, said she has been asked some version of that question often during her TV news show appearances over the past few years.“You’re there to talk about your reporting, even if the host is pushing you to offer an opinion,” she said.Ms. Karni is one of approximately 20 Times reporters who make regular appearances on television networks like CNN, CBS and MSNBC. Although most appearances are unpaid unless a journalist has signed a contract with a network, Ms. Karni and others see substantial pluses in the appearances.“Sources in Washington watch, and maybe someone starts to recognize you more and is more likely to return your call on your next story,” she said.“It’s also another way to bring the work of The Times to people watching a program who might otherwise not have seen it,” said Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent for The Times and a CNN contributor.Reporters are generally asked to appear on a show a few hours in advance, Ms. Karni said. They are given topics of discussion, along with any relevant articles to read, though producers do not supply precise questions.Before an appearance, Ms. Karni said she sometimes makes extra calls to her sources to get additional context.Katie Benner, who covers the Justice Department for The Times and recently signed on as a contributor at MSNBC, said she makes an extra effort to consider how to contextualize any topic she discusses for an audience that may be unfamiliar with it.“If there’s a major shooting and the Justice Department has deemed it a possible hate crime, the public should probably know what constitutes a hate crime,” she said. “Are they on the rise? Are we seeing a trend? If someone else addresses that, great. If not, I want to make sure it’s said.”Ms. Karni said the best way for reporters to learn how to present their work for a television audience is simply to do it repeatedly, but first-time guests aren’t completely on their own. The Times’s communications department offers media training for its reporters, which can include mock interviews. One thing that Ms. Karni said surprised her when she began appearing on TV was the streamlining and repetition necessary when summarizing reporting.“You want to come up with one or two things you want the audience to know and really emphasize those,” she said. “Even if it’s not the exact answer to the question you’re asked, it’s better than trying to think on your feet.”Even though a reporter may be on camera for only five minutes, the time required for TV appearances is hardly brief, Ms. Karni said. In addition to getting to and from the studio (during normal times, that is), reporters must catch up on all the news of the day, not just their specific stories. That can be the most difficult part, Ms. Karni said: the ability to pivot and to be prepared to speak on any pressing topic after a 15-minute cram session on the car ride over.But journalists have been appearing remotely since March 2020, which enables them to commit more like 10 minutes of their time rather than two hours. And reporters can make late-night appearances on shows like “Nightline” without worrying about catching a late car ride home.“It’s been a totally new world since the pandemic,” Ms. Karni said. “I bought a ring light for my bedroom, do my own makeup, and the whole thing is much quicker.”Ms. Benner agreed but said she missed one big perk: the hair and makeup team.“I normally don’t really wear any makeup, but they make you look amazing,” she said. “They’re also the funniest people and always make me laugh.”Mr. Kanno-Youngs, however, has become a little self-conscious about dialing in from his apartment. His dog stares at him from the couch, just waiting to bark; people tramp by in the hallway outside his door; and he ends up eyeing artwork in his background, wondering if it’s slanted.“That makes me nervous,” he said. “It’s like: ‘Geez, is this painting crooked in my background? Is Room Rater going to completely expose me because I didn’t wipe the kitchen counter?’”Aesthetics aside, Ms. Benner pointed out one critical rule to her appearances. “If, because of your schedule, you have to choose between reporting and being on TV, you should always choose reporting,” she said.But while Times journalists can spend months — or even years — reporting a single story, an appearance on a news show is, by comparison, over in a heartbeat.“There’s always a moment right after the host finishes and they go to the next guest,” Ms. Karni said. “You’re like, ‘Oh, wait, I have one more thing I want to say — come back!’” More

In its fourth season on “Masterpiece,” the cold-case drama keeps its delicate balance of mystery, melodrama and compassion.During four seasons on ITV, the British police drama “Unforgotten” has slowly and quietly built an audience and a reputation, an appropriate method for a show in which the main characters rarely raise their voices and are immediately ashamed of themselves when they do. (The show’s six-episode fourth season begins on Sunday on PBS’s “Masterpiece.”) More

The writer’s latest investigation of human frailty and craven behavior focuses on wealthy resort guests and the hotel workers who cater to their whims.Last September, the writer-director Mike White checked into a recently reopened but still deserted Four Seasons on Maui. He was the first guest since March. The staff gave him a standing ovation. More

Mike White’s one-percenter satire for HBO is a sun-soaked tale of money, death and customer service.What do people expect from their vacations? Rest? Sure. Fun? Absolutely. But also miracles.They want one week out of the year to somehow rectify the other 51; to make them fall in love, or back in love; to strengthen tattered family bonds; to provide closure; to create deathbed memories; to summon magic, serendipitously yet on demand. More

The filmmaker’s commercial for a crypto company is one of many recent marketing efforts to make digital cash palatable for newbies.Before Spike Lee accepted cryptocurrency, he turned down Crocs.Years ago, the filmmaker rejected an offer to buy into the Colorado company that makes perforated foam clogs, a decision that caused him to miss out when its stock soared on the strength of the footwear fad.“I wish I would’ve given some money back then,” Mr. Lee said in a recent interview. “Anytime something is new, you’re going to have people who are going to be skeptical. With some of the best ideas, people thought the inventors were crazy.”Now he has taken a leap into another cultural craze, having agreed to direct and star in a television commercial for Coin Cloud, a company that makes kiosks for buying and selling Bitcoin and other virtual currencies. Although cryptocurrency is not widely used for transactions, an increasing number of merchants now accept it as payment.The commercial, which he shot last month, is one of several recent marketing efforts meant to broaden the audience for a form of currency that can intimidate people accustomed to cash and credit cards.Mr. Lee, outfitted nattily in a straw hat and gold-tipped cane while filming part of the commercial on Wall Street, led a diverse cast that included his daughter Satchel, the “Pose” actress Mj Rodriguez and the drag queen Shangela. Other shoot locations included Fort Greene Park and the Chillin’ Bar and Grill in Washington Heights, where breakfast patrons craned to catch a glimpse of the director as he filmed a Coin Cloud machine on the sidewalk.“Old money is not going to pick us up; it pushes us down,” Mr. Lee says in the commercial, which portrays the cryptocurrency system as a more accessible and equitable alternative to traditional, discriminatory financial institutions.“The digital rebellion is here,” he says.Cryptocurrency has also been known to intimidate investors, with its extreme volatility and the overwhelming number of virtual alternatives, known as coins. The marketing of this relatively new money has so far been limited mostly to ads on trade websites and targeted pushes on social media, where aficionados swap meme-fueled in-jokes about coin values rocketing to the moon.The industry is increasingly betting that celebrities can help demystify cryptocurrency for the uninitiated.The actor Alec Baldwin offered crisp definitions of cryptocurrency in a series of online ads for the crypto trading platform eToro, and the National Football League star Tom Brady signed on as a brand ambassador for FTX, a crypto exchange that also has a deal to sponsor Major League Baseball.Alec Baldwin is advertising for the cryptocurrency trading platform eToro.eToroThe actor Neil Patrick Harris recently appeared in a TV commercial for the digital currency kiosk operator CoinFlip. “Now anyone, anywhere, can turn cash into crypto!” he declares.EToro and Coinbase, another exchange, collectively spent $22.8 million on advertising last year, nearly double the $12.4 million they shelled out in 2019, according to the research firm Kantar. In recent months, Coinbase hired the Martin Agency, the advertising company behind GEICO and DoorDash.As Madison Avenue fields more inquiries from cryptocurrency clients, agency executives are feeling pressure to better communicate the investment risks, rather than romanticize the industry.“I get very nervous because I start looking at the way that some of the platforms are specifically targeting younger investors,” said Alex Hesz, the chief strategy officer of the advertising giant DDB Worldwide. In the face of frenzied cryptocurrency trading, ad agencies should push for moderation and diversification, he said. “Maximizing is what’s being encouraged here — the idea that this is an amazing asset, and as much as you want to put in, come on and jump on in, the Bitcoin’s lovely,” Mr. Hesz said. “We would never feel comfortable for an alcohol client, or a high-salt or high-sugar or high-fat client, to encourage that level of unequivocal behavior.”Some celebrity endorsements of cryptocurrencies have run into trouble. In 2017, the Securities and Exchange Commission cautioned that some famous people were hyping the virtual currency sales known as initial coin offerings without disclosing that they had been paid to promote them. The commission has since settled charges against the boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr., the music producer DJ Khaled and the actor Steven Seagal.Social media influencers and e-sports stars have also been linked to shady cryptocurrency schemes, accused of pumping up coins just before their value crashes.Coin Cloud’s chief marketing officer, Amondo Redmond, said he hoped Mr. Lee’s stature would help elevate the industry by delivering something “more than just cool creative, but that is really at the forefront of digital currency becoming mainstream.”“It’s more than just adding a celebrity face,” he said.Mr. Lee, who won an Oscar in 2019 in the best adapted screenplay category for “BlacKkKlansman,” has worked on ads for Capital One, Uber and, most famously, Nike. In the 1980s and 1990s, he directed and starred in commercials for Air Jordans, playing his cinematic alter ego Mars Blackmon opposite Michael Jordan.“That was lightning in a bottle,” Mr. Lee said from a flight bound for the Cannes Film Festival, where he is the first Black person to lead the festival jury.He declined to say how much he had been paid for the Coin Cloud commercial, but noted that “if anyone’s known my body of work over the last four decades, you kind of know about the way I see the world, and when they approached me, it fit in line.”As the coronavirus pandemic continues to highlight financial disadvantages for people of color, Mr. Lee hopes to promote cryptocurrency as neutral to race, gender, age and other identifying characteristics.But he was no expert before filming began, and had to take “a crash course” on crypto. He insisted that the commercial include a line urging viewers to do their own research on virtual money.Mr. Lee said he now planned to invest in virtual coins. He said he would not, however, go anywhere near the digital ownership certificates known as nonfungible tokens.“NFTs, I don’t understand that,” he said, laughing. “I’m old school, so sometimes my children have to turn on the TV — all those remotes and stuff.” More

A new version of the teen drama arrives Thursday on HBO Max, still glamorous but also reflective of changed attitudes toward wealth and privilege.On a sultry June morning, a small battalion of camera operators, production assistants, and hair and makeup pros descended on a subway entrance on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. An assistant director barked a command and suddenly the ordinary commuters vanished, replaced by glam pedestrians attired in kicky fall fashion. Shoes gleamed, teeth glinted, each ponytail and pompadour shone. In an instant, a traffic median had transformed into a sweat-free space of sparkle, scandal, possibility. Spotted at 72nd and Broadway: “Gossip Girl,” back again. XOXO. More

HBO’s “Hacks” is more interested in its characters’ personalities than their output. But plenty of great stories have been told about the creative process itself.The premise of HBO’s smart hit comedy “Hacks,” just finished with its first season and renewed for a second, is that a played-out older Las Vegas comedian, Deborah Vance, ends up paired with a canceled and unemployable Gen Z comic, who is meant to help her write new material. Both of them view the association as beneath them. Deborah has always written her own material. Ava, who shows up for the job without even researching her new employer’s work, smarts under the perception that Deborah doesn’t regard her as very talented.When, in the second episode, a flat tire leaves them stranded in the desert, Ava begins to complain that Deborah is making the job unnecessarily hard, even though Ava is “good.” Deborah, regally outfitted in a flowing robe and parasol, responds coldly. “Good is the minimum,” she says. “It’s the baseline. You have to be so much more than good.” Even if you’re great, she says — and even if you’re lucky — you still have to work, and hard, “and even that is not enough.” Deborah doesn’t respect her new employee because Ava has done nothing to earn that respect and has in fact done much to discourage it. She then abandons Ava in the desert.Deborah may be a highhanded, abusive boss, but she is also right. Watching this show, though, you sometimes wonder if it believes her. Like most shows about creative endeavors, “Hacks” commits to the idea that its characters are hustlers: Deborah, in particular, is ruthless when it comes to keeping her Vegas time slots. But one thing that is rarely on the table in shows like this is real failure. (Deborah might lose her slots, and Ava her job, but we’ve seen enough of these stories to suspect those would only be stages on the way to their eventual success.) And despite Deborah’s speech, one thing we rarely see her and Ava do is actual work, hard or otherwise. They bounce jokes off each other, briefly, in the first episode, and Ava pitches Deborah a few times. We see Deborah’s standup, but aren’t offered much insight into her process. We barely see Ava’s work at all. These women are in comedy, but for all it matters to the show, they might as well be in car sales. At least in a show about a dealership, you would see them sell some cars.Taking failure off the table, rarely depicting creative work — these are linked choices, and in making them, “Hacks” is hardly alone. Even outside the realm of TV and film, you find things like Sally Rooney’s novel “Conversations With Friends,” about a poet whose poetry never appears in the book; everybody says she’s great, and we’re left to imagine why. You wouldn’t watch “Rocky” and expect to see neither training nor boxing, but in stories about artists, it’s typical to relocate all the struggle, all the drama, into the protagonists’ personal lives. They are blocked creatively because they are blocked personally. Or they are fine creatively, but personal conflict erupts right before the big show and pours out in their performance. The work, the talent, is a given. The story is elsewhere.“Hacks” is not centrally concerned with the business of show business. Its biggest story lines involve changes in gender politics and tastes — in comedy, but not only comedy — across generations. The show that Ava eventually pushes Deborah to write sounds personal, confessional, more like Hannah Gadsby’s “Nanette” than a Vegas comedy set. But we never see it; we’re only told it bombed, which might have been interesting to watch. Ava’s other major intervention is accusing Deborah of not sticking up for other women, which leads to a scene in which Deborah lectures a male heckler, then pays him $1.69 million to never again enter a comedy club. “Hacks” can get away with this — can avoid showing its characters developing their work — because we accept the premise that they are both talented. If it wanted to suggest they were bad or mediocre at what they do, we would have to see it.They assert that failure lies at the heart of all art, and that any story about art is a story about progressive failures.There are works out there about people who are artistic failures. Some have no talent, while others just have no luck. In the first two minutes of Elaine May’s “Ishtar,” we watch the two protagonists writing a song together, testing out lines, discarding what works and keeping what doesn’t. They do this throughout the movie, even in life-or-death situations, because writing songs is what they care about. The joke is that they are fine-tuning songs that are incredibly, unsalvageably bad, working toward an ideal of aesthetic perfection shared by nobody but them. This creative process is faithfully recreated by May, step by painful step, because the movie is ultimately about two guys who will never be what they want: great songwriters.In Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood,” we watch the titular director of comically hokey B-movies as he crafts “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” famous in some circles as the “worst movie ever.” Unlike May, Burton doesn’t leave the question of why Wood’s movies are so bad as a kind of holy mystery. They’re bad because Wood doesn’t attend to his actual work: He buzzes with such enthusiasm that he films one take of everything, no matter how bad. Like “Ishtar,” the film celebrates this delusional commitment by structuring itself as if it were the story of an artist who eventually won acclaim — and, like “Ishtar,” it revolves around people who are difficult to root for, not because they are unlikable but because they are incompetent. The opposite may be true for Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy,” in which Rupert Pupkin gets on TV by kidnapping a TV talk-show host. The big twist is that his routine is actually pretty funny; he’s just an unlikable guy whose name nobody can remember.The reason these movies are outliers is pretty simple: They were all bombs. (In the case of “Ishtar,” a bomb of such infamous proportions as to become a punchline for decades.) But by putting artistic struggle at their core, they assert that failure lies at the heart of all art and that any story about art is a story about progressive failures. Like Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner, failure chases something it will never have. But would we know anything about the Road Runner without it?Television shows dedicated to creative work, and creative failure, are harder to find. There was “30 Rock,” about a sketch-comedy show that was, pretty clearly, hacky, unfunny and poorly run. And yes, there’s probably only so much time audiences can be expected to spend watching people tinker with songs or jokes — but other kinds of television have figured out how to mix personal drama with the actual work of their characters. There’s no reason we can’t see Deborah and Ava working together; we just don’t. “Hacks” is meant to be a show about women and the work they do that goes unrecognized. But that work seems to be recognized least of all by the show. It would have been a crazy thing to dedicate an episode to Deborah’s routine and its failure to land. But it would have supplied the missing piece of her partnership with Ava. It would have been a crazy thing, but it would have made a better show, too. Source photographs: Screen grabs from HBO MaxB.D. McClay is a critic, an essayist and a contributing editor at The Hedgehog Review and a contributing writer at Commonweal. More

Shaka King’s historical drama about the Black Panthers airs on HBO. And Discovery spends a week with sharks once again.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, July 5-11. Details and times are subject to change. More