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      ‘Mythic Quest’ Is Only the Start of Her Real-Life Journey

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      Season 4 of the Apple series has Charlotte Nicdao’s character branching out in new directions. The actress is doing likewise, including as a director.Set in a video game studio, the sitcom “Mythic Quest” is full of eccentric workaholics. But none are more frantic, frenzied or anxious than Poppy Li, played by Charlotte Nicdao.A prodigious but petulant engineer, Poppy is given to meltdowns and primal screams, many stemming from a war of wills with her egomaniacal, codependent business partner, Ian Grimm, played by Rob McElhenney. (McElhenney created the show with Charlie Day and Megan Ganz, who also work with him on “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”)Over three seasons, Nicdao has viewed her character as everything from a “lovable underdog” to an unprintable descriptor. These days she’s looking favorably upon her geeky, gawky enfant terrible thanks to a paradigm shift in the fourth season, which debuted this week on Apple TV+. (Note the premiere episode is entitled “Boundaries.”)“There’s always this power imbalance between Poppy and Ian — like, who’s the queen, who’s the king?” Nicdao said. “This season, Poppy has got more power, there’s no question. But it’s not in the ways that you’d expect.”“Mythic Quest” is the first major American series for Nicdao, who grew up and still lives in Australia. Previously a classical pianist, singer and orchestral clarinetist, she started acting in high school productions and began her TV career at 17 on an Australian kids’ show. (Her father, Alfred Nicdao, is a well-known actor in Australia.)Nicdao with Rob McElhenney, a creator of the series who also plays her egomaniacal business partner at the video game company where they work.Patrick McElhenneyApple TV+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 the ‘S.N.L.’ Line That You and Your Friends Use?

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      “Making copies”? “Don’t make me sing”? “Wouldn’t be prudent”? We want to know. Talk amongst yourselves.My earliest memories of “Saturday Night Live” were hearing my parents incorporate catchphrases from Dana Carvey’s Church Lady — “Could it be … Satan?” or “Well isn’t that special?” — into casual conversation.Once I was allowed to stay up late enough to watch, I started doing the same thing — and looking for friends who didn’t think it was weird to respond to someone winning a video game with “We’re not worthy!”For the 50 years it has been on the air, “S.N.L.” has changed how we talk. That was the basis of our roundup of 50 catchphrases the show has popularized.Now we want to hear from you. Is there a catchphrase you’ve found yourself saying? Tell us about it and what your connection to it is.We will read every response and plan to publish a selection of them, but we won’t publish yours without following up with and hearing back from you. We won’t share your contact info outside the Times newsroom, and we won’t use it for any reason other than to get in touch. More

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      Melissa Rauch, ‘Night Court’ Star, on Her 10 Favorite Things

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      The “Night Court” star loves community theater and the “distilled joy” of watching people who perform just for fun.After almost a decade playing the microbiologist Bernadette on “The Big Bang Theory,” Melissa Rauch knew exactly what she wanted to do when the show ended in 2019.“I just fell in love with the format,” she said of the traditional style of filming in front of an audience. “It was my goal to bring more multicamera sitcoms to the landscape.”Rauch already had a production company at Warner Bros. And she had been a huge fan of the 1980s NBC comedy “Night Court,” starring Harry Anderson as Judge Harry T. Stone. Its irreverence. Its moments of heart. Its cranked-up, almost vaudevillian humor.So she set out to produce what she called a “newboot,” this time about Judge Abby Stone, Harry’s daughter. She just didn’t want to star in it. But the network was asking her to. So was John Larroquette, who was hemming and hawing about reprising his role as the lawyer Dan Fielding.“And I was like, ‘What am I doing?’” Rauch recalled. “If this script came to me, I’d be fighting for it. I’m being such a dummy.”Rauch finally told Larroquette that she was in as Abby.“I believe his words were, ‘Oh [expletive], now we’ve got to do this thing,’” Rauch said. (New episodes from Season 3 began airing last month on NBC.)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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      TikTok True Crime to Stream: ‘Dancing for the Devil’ and More

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      Across television, film and social media itself, here are four picks that explore crime stories associated in some way with the imperiled app.TikTok continues to be on shaky ground in the United States. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court upheld a law passed by Congress last year that required a ban of the Chinese-owned app unless it was sold to a government-approved buyer.Hours before the law took effect, TikTok went dark briefly, then flickered back to life when President Trump, a day before his inauguration, indicated support for the app. He then signed an executive order stalling the ban for 75 days.Whether the app will disappear for good is unclear, but in the meantime, here are four true-crime stories associated with TikTok — the most downloaded app in the United States and the world in 2020, 2021 and 2022 — that captured broader attention.Documentary Series“Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult”It’s of course no secret that the glossy dance videos that have populated TikTok since its inception, along with much online content, is more fantasy than reality. But that’s little comfort to the revelations uncovered in this 2024 Netflix series.“Dancing for the Devil” primarily spends time with dancers who were managed by the talent company 7M Films and were members of Shekinah Church — both entities founded and led by Pastor Robert Shinn — as well as desperate family members of those still involved with 7M. These families claim that their loved ones are essentially trapped.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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      Michael Palin on His Diaries and Adventurous Life

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      In 1969, the British comedy writer and performer Michael Palin, then building a career out of being extremely silly, did something utterly sensible: He quit his 40-cigarettes-a-day smoking habit and began keeping a diary instead.Over the years, his meticulously maintained journals captured the rise of Monty Python — the hallowed sketch troupe he formed with Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle and Terry Jones — including the creation of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” and “Life of Brian.” Later, they chronicled a surprising career development, when Palin reinvented himself as an amiable presenter of travel documentaries, crossing the globe for acclaimed series like “Around the World in 80 Days.”The first volume of his diaries, “The Python Years,” was published in 2006. The fourth, “There and Back,” will be released in the United States on Tuesday. In a video interview from his home in northwest London, Palin, 81, fielded questions about the four decades’ worth of life covered in his diaries and more. He’s come to expect this sort of inquisition.“That’s the thing about publishing your diaries,” Palin said. “I have to be able to justify my behavior in my life in a way.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How did quitting smoking lead you to start keeping a diary?When I gave up smoking — it was virtually overnight — it was a quite extraordinary feeling of effective use of willpower. In the back of my mind, I thought, how else can I use this newly enlivened willpower? Keeping a diary must have been the first thing that came into my head.Palin started keeping a diary in 1969, the same year Monty Python began. “The diaries constantly surprise me, how I completely contradict myself,” he said.Max Miechowski for The New York TimesWe 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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      Review: In ‘Common Side Effects,’ It’s Fungus vs. Them

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      A weird, deadpan animated thriller finds a new timeliness in ancient medicine.From “The Last of Us” to athlete’s foot commercials, fungus does not have the best of reputations on television. But what if it could save us all?“Common Side Effects,” a wryly funny animated conspiracy thriller beginning Sunday on Adult Swim, suggests that not everybody would be pleased.Marshall Cuso (Dave King), an eccentric environmentalist and self-employed scientist, discovers a rare mushroom on an expedition to Peru. The fungus, a ghostly specimen called the Blue Angel, can cure almost any illness and heal seemingly fatal injuries — including the ones Marshall sustains when he is attacked by gunmen immediately after making his discovery.Back in the States, pursued by the Drug Enforcement Administration and other, more mysterious figures, Marshall runs into Frances Applewhite (Emily Pendergast), his former school lab partner who is now unhappily working for a pharmaceutical giant. Together, they make a pact to bring the magic mushroom to the people and protect it from the forces who would like to erase all traces of its existence.Who are those forces? Them. And who’s them? “Big Pharma, the insurance companies, the government,” Marshall explains. “All the people who make tons of money just from keeping us sick.”A figure like Marshall — nerdy, neckbearded, with a prominent belly hanging from his Hawaiian shirt and one big theory that explains it all — would usually be portrayed on TV as, at best, a well-meaning kook, a side character who exists for laughs and exposition. Even in the conspiracy-riddled world of “The X-Files,” he would be more of a Lone Gunman than a Fox Mulder.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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      Forget the Punchline. It’s the Setup to These Jokes That’s Tricky.

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      Ronny Chieng, Gary Gulman and other comics are experimenting with long buildups that can be audacious … when they work.A joke can be broken down into two sections: The setup, which isn’t necessarily funny, and the punchline, which better be.Facing a crowd that’s looking to laugh, comics tend to want to get to the payoff as quickly as possible. But there is a rich tradition of jokes that move in the opposite direction, where part of what’s funny is that the setup keeps going and going, long past what you expect.The most famous example might be the Aristocrats, the rare joke that inspired its own documentary. An old bit, it begins with a setup about family members trying to get an agent to book their act and its humor tends to be fundamentally dirty and gratuitous. But in the last year, some of the most ambitious new hours have used the long setup to develop more rarefied kinds of jokes, formally inventive, experimental and very funny.Witness the magnificently unusual joke midway through Ronny Chieng’s recent special, “Love to Hate It” (Netflix), which begins with him trying to find common ground with the MAGA movement, saying its supporters have a point that the country has problems. Slowing his aggressive rat-a-tat delivery, he lists evidence of decline — bad health-care outcomes, wealth inequality — and just when you expect a punchline to lighten the mood, he gets even more serious.Ronny Chieng kills with the long form in “Love to Hate It.”NetflixAdopting the tone of a politician, he says that we did not fulfill the implicit promise that if you worked hard and played by the rules, you could make it. At this point, the comedy seems to have ground to a halt. It’s also when Chieng’s pace shifts, from slow and deliberate to pointedly sped up as he rapidly unspools a grand unified theory. The tempo of his hard-to-follow chatter, which covers tax and trade policy, among other economic minutiae, indicates a departure from logical argument and a venture into the ridiculous. It recalls how everyone from Stanley Kubrick to Benny Hill has used fast forward to create comedy.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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      HBO Ends Partnership With ‘Sesame Street’

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      The venerable children’s series must find a new home after about a decade on HBO and its streaming service, Max. Old episodes will be available through 2027.“Sesame Street” is relocating.Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit company that makes the venerable children’s educational program, is looking for a new distribution partner after Warner Bros. Discovery decided not to renew its agreement to air new episodes of the show on HBO and its streaming platform, Max.Max said the decision was part of a broader corporate shift away from children’s programming. The 55th season of “Sesame Street” — featuring Big Bird, Elmo, Cookie Monster and other colorful Muppets — will be the last to arrive on Max, in January. Old episodes will remain available through 2027.“Based on consumer usage and feedback, we’ve had to prioritize our focus on stories for adults and families,” a Max spokesman said. “And so new episodes from ‘Sesame Street,’ at this time, are not as core to our strategy.”Sesame Workshop partnered with HBO in 2015, granting the premium cable outlet a nine-month window of exclusivity for new episodes. Under the agreement, the episodes were later broadcast for free on PBS, which has aired “Sesame Street” since 1970.The deal provided a significant cash infusion for Sesame Workshop, which expanded its production schedule to 35 episodes a year from 18. It is unclear which platform might pick up the series, but contenders could include Apple TV+ (which aired three seasons of “Helpsters,” another Sesame Workshop children’s series), Netflix and Amazon.“We will continue to invest in our best-in-class programming and look forward to announcing our new distribution plans in the coming months,” a spokesman for Sesame Workshop said in a statement.Sesame Workshop and HBO have been accused of contributing to inequality by allowing families who can afford premium cable to get new episodes of the show before others. In 2022, nearly 200 episodes of the show were pulled from Max.“HBO is holding hostage underprivileged families from having access to timely first-run episodes of perhaps the single most educational children’s franchise in the history of electronic media,” Tim Winter, who was then the president of the Parents Television Council, said in a statement in 2019. More