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      Stephen Colbert Is Tickled by Trump’s Vow to Make Women Great Again

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      “I‘m not sure if he’s running for president or marketing a new brand of tampon,” Colbert said on Monday.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.Make Women Great AgainFormer President Donald Trump made several comments about women over the weekend, vowing that under his presidency, he would “protect women at a level never seen before,” saying they would be “healthy, hopeful, safe and secure.”“I‘m not sure if he’s running for president or marketing a new brand of tampon,” Stephen Colbert joked on Monday.“[imitating Trump] Women will be safe, secure — they’ll be safe, secure and unscented. I will install all my judges with a comfort glide applicator. Vote for me, or there will be heavy days. I’m talking about, your friends will be riding bikes and laughing in the pool, and you’re going to be sitting by yourself, dealing with that cup of blue juice.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“During a rally on Saturday in North Carolina, former President Trump spoke about his agenda for women and said, ‘Let’s talk about our great women, all right? Because women have gone through a lot.’ And I assume he’s speaking from experience.” — SETH MEYERS“In a post over the weekend on Truth Social, former President Trump said that if he is elected, ‘Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free.’ So now JD Vance is undecided.” — SETH MEYERS“‘Women are poorer than they were four years ago, are less healthy than they were four years ago, are less safe on the streets than they were four years ago, are more depressed and unhappy than they were four years ago, and are less optimistic and confident in the future than they were four years ago! I will fix all of that, and fast, and at long last this national nightmare will be over.’ This reads like a suicide pact.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“[imitating Trump] Their lives will be happy, beautiful, and great again — and if you don’t believe it, ask my wife Melania, who every night prays I drive my golf cart into a lagoon.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (The Oprah Treatment Edition)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Did ‘The West Wing’ Do to Us?

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      As Aaron Sorkin’s political fantasy turns 25, its romance has aged better than its politics.“‘I am the Lord your God. Thou shalt worship no other god before me.’ Boy, those were the days, huh?”Thus do we meet President Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen), Democrat of New Hampshire, in the pilot of “The West Wing,” which premiered on Sept. 22, 1999.Having your protagonist’s first line be the literal words of the Almighty is, shall we say, a statement. This was a series that saw politics as civic religion. It was a work of patriotic evangelism that appealed to our better angels but failed to match up to earthly reality.But before it was all that, it was a well-crafted, emotional workplace drama. The pilot finds the White House amid a number of crises, personal, political and in between. A flotilla of Cuban refugees headed for Florida is in danger. Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe), one of the president’s aides, has unknowingly slept with a prostitute. Another aide, Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford), may lose his job after having embarrassed a prominent religious conservative in a TV appearance. And President Bartlet has injured himself crashing a bicycle into a tree.The episode, written by the creator, Aaron Sorkin, and directed by Thomas Schlamme, establishes the show’s signature look and energy. The camera races to keep up with the staff; the dialogue has the rat-a-tat brio of a ’30s screwball comedy. The score, by W.G. Snuffy Walden, sauces the action in star-spangled emotion. Smart, smart, smart!, the pilot says. Busy, busy, busy!Above all, the pilot establishes the show’s core fantasy: That the right thing and the politically effective thing are the same thing. Josh drags himself into a forced-apology meeting with a religious group. It goes badly: His main antagonist shows herself to be a sour, meanspirited antisemite, and the meeting devolves into a shouting match, interrupted by Bartlet, who corrects a guest’s misquote of the First Commandment.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: Lots of Medical and Police Dramas

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      ABC, NBC and Fox are all premiering new shows about doctors, cops or firefighters. The Voice is also returning, with Snoop Dogg joining the judges’ panel.For those who still enjoy a cable subscription, here is a selection of cable and network TV shows, movies and specials that broadcast this week, Sept. 23-29. Details and times are subject to change.Monday9-1-1: LONE STAR 8 p.m. on Fox. As we reminisce about “The West Wing” premiering 25 years ago and daydream about Rob Lowe’s Sam Seaborn (oh, just me?), it’s the perfect time to turn our attention to his current show about a fire station, which is returning for its fifth season.THE VOICE 8 p.m. on NBC. Gwen Stefani and Reba McEntire are back in their red swiveling judges’ chairs, this year joined by Snoop Dogg and Michael Bublé. While in Paris covering the Olympics, Snoop called the judges “a fearless foursome.”Zachary Quinto in “Brilliant Minds.”Rafy/NBCBRILLIANT MINDS 10 p.m. on NBC. If there’s something that we collectively can’t get enough of, it’s doctor shows. This one is inspired by the work of the famed neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, whose research and widely read writings illuminated disorders and cases he had studied or treated. The show stars Zachary Quinto as Dr. Oliver Wolf, a neurologist who works with his team not only to help solve their patients’ difficult cases, but also to deal with their own mental health.TuesdayMURDER IN A SMALL TOWN 8 p.m. on Fox. Based on the Karl Alberg books by L.R. Wright, this show follows Alberg (Rossif Sutherland), as he moves to a small town to become its police chief. And there is, of course, much more drama than expected in this seemingly idyllic community.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kelsey Grammer Analyzes 40 Years of Frasier: ‘I Have Nothing to Regret’

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      Kelsey Grammer likes his raw meat cut very fine. On a recent afternoon, at the restaurant of a Midtown hotel, he requested that his steak tartare be put through the grinder twice. He wanted it, he said, like velvet. The tartare, topped with its quail egg, was presented roughly chopped. “I’ll deal with it,” Grammer said uncomplainingly.Frasier Crane would never. On and off for 40 years on several different sitcoms, Grammer, 69, has played Frasier, a dyed-in-the-cashmere-wool snob and psychiatrist about town. The character is indelibly associated with Grammer. He can’t shake him, though Grammer mostly sees this as a boon.“It’s wonderful to spend your lifetime entertaining people,” he said.In 1984, Grammer, a stage actor who had studied at Juilliard, was cast on the sitcom “Cheers” as Frasier Crane, a love interest for Shelley Long’s waitress character, Diane Chambers. He stayed with the show until it ended in 1993.That same year, Grammer starred in a spinoff, “Frasier,” which saw the character move from Boston back to Seattle, where he lived with his father (John Mahoney) and brother (David Hyde Pierce). Grammer was often a tabloid fixture in those days, with an erratic personal life. Much married, he would eventually father seven children with four different women. He was arrested for drug possession and for driving under the influence. He now believes his chaotic behavior was a response to the trauma of his early life — in separate incidents, both his father and his sister were murdered.The revived “Frasier,” which premiered last year on Paramount+, has included other past characters like Frasier’s ex-wife Lilith, played by Bebe Neuwirth.Chris Haston/Paramount+But he stuck with the show until the 2004 finale. After that, Grammer moved on to other projects, but none lasted very long. And then in 2023, a “Frasier” reboot returned Frasier to Boston, reuniting him with his son, Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott), and his best friend, Alan (Nicholas Lyndhurst). The second season premiered Thursday on Paramount+.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Norman Reedus, ‘Walking Dead’ Star and Hieronymus Bosch Fan

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      “We wanted to reinvent the show,” the actor said of his spinoff, “The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon.” Filming in Madrid gave him time to explore the Prado.When Daryl Dixon was introduced in the third episode of “The Walking Dead” in 2010, few viewers could have predicted this half-feral-looking character would end up leading the series. Or that Daryl, played by Norman Reedus, would headline a spinoff set in France.“We wanted to reinvent the show,” Reedus, 55, said in a video interview from Paris.“We just didn’t want to do the same storytelling as in Georgia,” he continued, referring to the location for most of the original series, “and we didn’t want to make an American tourist version of France. So we got French writers. We fought to have French as much as English.”Season 2 of “The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon” premieres Sept. 29 on AMC, but the new franchise is so successful that Reedus (who also appeared this year in the film “The Bikeriders” and has a second career as a photographer) is already working on the next installment in Spain.He talked about his connection with rock, art and food, as well as his 5-year-old daughter’s influence on his reading. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1‘Wild God’ by Nick Cave and the Bad SeedsNick Cave and Warren Ellis’s album “Carnage” was my go-to for the entire French filming portion of the first two seasons, and in Spain it’s this album. It just sings, full of life and stories and beautiful thundering bliss. I don’t know anyone that doesn’t love this band. Not one person.2‘Nina Simone’s Gum’ by Warren EllisI met Warren in Paris and we immediately hit it off. When he told me of this book, I immediately got it. I find it interesting to learn of the things that inspire the people that inspire me. He had noticed Nina Simone take out her gum before a show and stick it under the piano. As soon as the show was over, he bolted toward the piano and ripped the gum out. He had a gold cast made of it. He was wearing it as a necklace.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Penguin’ Review: The Dark Blight

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      The HBO series starring an unrecognizable Colin Farrell is further proof that there is no fun in the Batman universe.When was fun banished from Batman’s world? Certainly the tide turned with “The Dark Knight Returns,” Frank Miller’s 1986 series of comics. As exciting as they were, Miller’s books enshrined a claustrophobic, dystopian approach that has smothered many subsequent screen treatments.In the immediate aftermath of the books, the Tim Burton films “Batman” and “Batman Returns” found thrills in the darkness. But when I sit through the subsequent Christopher Nolan blockbusters, or Todd Phillips’s “The Joker,” or even Matt Reeves’s recent reboot film, “The Batman,” I feel as if I were being punished for not being a serious enough (or depressed enough) viewer.Reeves (“Dawn of the Planet of the Apes”) is a very talented director, and “The Batman” was easier to sit through than some of its ballyhooed predecessors. But it was ruinously long at three hours, its small store of familiar ideas about revenge and social decay running dry well before the movie ended. And Reeves’s Batman was such a stone-faced mope that poor Robert Pattinson spent the whole movie looking as if he were wondering where the bathroom was, not that he would have been any happier had he found it.But the movie was beautifully shot, and Zoë Kravitz was the latest in a line (Julie Newmar, Eartha Kitt, Michelle Pfeiffer) of great Catwomen. And it had an odd, sideshow-like bonus: a beautiful movie star, Colin Farrell, rendering himself unrecognizable under a reported 50 pounds of latex to play a battered, ugly, all too human variation on a classic villain, the Penguin. The performance wasn’t fun, exactly, but it was definitely something to look at.Now Farrell and his latex are back in “The Penguin,” an HBO series spun off from “The Batman.” (It premiered on Thursday night; its second episode will not appear until Sept. 29.) Even though the show is set in the immediate aftermath of the film, and the story features large-scale chaos, Batman is nowhere to be seen; apparently he’s taking a long vacation. So “The Penguin” is not a superhero show.Instead, as developed by Lauren LeFranc (“Impulse,” “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”) with Reeves as an executive producer, it is a particularly self-conscious gangster saga. Farrell’s Oswald Cobb (shortened from Cobblepot) is a midlevel mobster who sees an opportunity when his boss is killed and sets out to take over the Gotham City drug trade, peddling a new high called Bliss. Alternately opposed to him or allied with him is the boss’s daughter, Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti), recently released from Arkham Asylum with designs of her own on the top spot.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘La Maison’: Like ‘Succession,’ but Better Dressed (and French)

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      The new Apple TV+’s new series takes the viewer inside two rival Paris fashion houses, with gorgeous people in gorgeous clothes who will do anything for power.“Does she know our favorite dish is eating each other alive?”So one family member asks another in an early scene of “La Maison,” a glossy new drama from Apple TV+, about two rival high-end, family-owned French fashion houses: Ledu and Rovel.The show, which premieres on Friday, is filled with gorgeous people living in fabulous homes, fighting, scheming, flirting, plotting and betraying one another as they attempt to gain control of — everything!Yes, like “Succession,” but with more glamorous outfits and, well, Paris.Or akin to “a Shakespearean drama,” said Lambert Wilson, who plays Vincent Ledu, the longtime designer of the Ledu house, whose fall from power is fast and devastating when an unbridled rant about Asian clients goes viral, leading to his cancellation and unwilling resignation. Enter Paloma Castel (Zita Hanrot), a young, edgy designer with ideas about waste and sustainability, who is recruited by Perle Foster (Amira Casar), Vincent’s right-hand woman and former muse. (Amping up the tension and resentment, it turns out that Paloma’s dead father was Vincent’s lover.)Zita Hanrot as Paloma Castel, a young designer who comes onto the scene after Vincent Ledu’s fall from grace.Apple TV+In the other camp, the terrifying chief executive Diane Rovel (Carole Bouquet) schemes to have her company take over Ledu, helped by Vincent’s brother, Victor (Pierre Deladonchamps), who is married to Diane’s daughter (Florence Loiret Caille).“All the characters have scar tissue,” said Casar, “they are all damaged and lonely.” Her own character, Perle, is a watchful, lonely outsider. “On the one side, there is this old aristocratic family, the Ledus, who are hanging on to craft and tradition, on the other this nouveau riche bourgeoisie, the Rovels, who will destroy to have it all,” Casar said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Late Night Thinks It’s Unlikely That Neighbors Ate Your Cat

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      Before starting rumors about Haitians, please make sure your cat is actually missing, Ronnie Chieng implored on “The Daily Show.” 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.‘My Bad!’Erika Lee, a resident of Springfield, Ohio, who spread a rumor on Facebook that a Haitian neighbor had eaten a missing cat, deleted her post and expressed regret (but not before Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, made “cat-eating Haitians in Ohio” a campaign issue).“Oopsie doopsie! Sorry, I set off a race war in the middle of a presidential election,” Ronny Chieng mimicked on Thursday’s “Daily Show.” “That’s totally my bad!”Another Springfield resident, Anna Kilgore, who told the police that Haitians might have taken her cat Miss Sassy, later apologized to her Haitian neighbors after the animal turned up safe and sound.“Turned out, Miss Sassy — which is also my nickname for JD Vance — was in her basement.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Well if that isn’t the most Miss Sassy move I could possibly — [imitating Miss Sassy] ‘I’m gonna go hide in the basement to start some rumors. You know why? ‘Cause I’m sassy.’” — SETH MEYERS“By the way, if your cat goes missing, why would your first guess be someone ate it?” — SETH MEYERS“Here’s a little tip for anyone out there with a missing pet, OK? Before you accuse your Haitian neighbors of stealing them, maybe you could first try looking around your house.” — RONNY CHIENGThe Punchiest Punchlines (Rudy Rudy Rudy Edition)“At the rally, Trump did his usual rant about how New York has turned into a third-world hellhole. And to prove his point, he brought out a New York icon that has decayed beyond all recognition, Rudy Giuliani.” — RONNY CHIENG“Yeah, Rudy wasn’t actually invited — someone just said his name three times and he appeared.” — JIMMY FALLON“Rudy is so feral, I’m worried R.F.K. Jr. will put him in his trunk.” — RONNY CHIENG“He’s going to get you, and good luck trying to outrun Rudy Giuliani on three whiskeys.” — RONNY CHIENG, on Giuliani’s threat to anyone “behind” attacks on Trump: “I’m going to get you.”“That’s right, the guy who can’t differentiate a Four Seasons from a dildo store is gonna find you. You’ve been warned.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingSting performed his new song “I Wrote Your Name (Upon My Heart)” on Thursday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutDemi Moore in “The Substance.”MubiIn “The Substance,” Demi Moore stars as an aging actress who discovers a deadly cure for obscurity. More