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      How ‘The Challenge’ Lasted 40 Seasons and Changed Reality Stardom

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      When Johnny Devenanzio swiveled in his chair and playfully called for his mother to bring some meatloaf, he knew exactly what he was doing. In his impression of Will Ferrell’s man-child from “Wedding Crashers,” he was really evoking Johnny Bananas, the Peter Pan-like alter ego he has played for much of his adult life on the grandfather of all reality-competition shows: MTV’s “The Challenge.”Devenanzio, 42, said he’d likely be a stay-at-home-son had his life not so permanently veered into the world of reality television. Or maybe he would have used his Penn State college degree to enter the world of finance. Of his large flock of one-time castmates, many have forged ahead with new careers, gotten married, started families. Not Devenanzio.“When I die I’m going to donate my brain to science to study what the long-term side effects of reality TV has been,” Devenanzio said over a Zoom interview. “Because I have literally clocked more hours than anyone on the show.”Devenanzio spoke just before embarking for Vietnam to film the 40th season of “The Challenge,” the flagship show on which he has appeared in more than half the seasons. Subtitled “Battle of the Eras,” the new season (premiering on Aug. 14) will feature 40 cast members representing various generations of the show vying for a slice of a million-dollar prize.That’s a long way from the show’s summer camp-vibes origin. The series premiered before the first Real Housewife ever chucked a drink, ahead of any chef-judge barking, “Hands up, utensils down,” and earlier than anyone surviving to outwit, outplay and outlast their competition. “The Challenge” even outstayed MTV predecessors like “The Real World” and “Road Rules,” which initially served as feeders for contestants to enter the show.The often harrowing daily challenges may be the underpinnings of the show, whether leaping from cars suspended over water or trying to fling fellow castmates off moving trucks.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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      Late Night Recaps Musk’s and Trump’s Two-Hour Chat on X

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      Stephen Colbert called it “a big night for weird old rich guys with no friends.”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.Excuses, ExcusesAfter a glitchy start, Elon Musk had a two-hour conversation with former President Donald Trump on X on Monday night.Stephen Colbert called it “a big night for weird old rich guys with no friends.”“But here’s the thing about Trump doing anything on Twitter now: It just reminds people of the awful reason he was banned to begin with.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe broadcast was delayed 40 minutes after its scheduled start, which Musk blamed on a cyberattack. Musk later implied it was done to silence Trump.“[imitating Trump] Hey, there. Lying is my thing, buddy.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“[imitating Trump] Stay in your lane, Elon. Oh wait, you can’t because you’re in a self-driving Tesla. Boom, you’re roasted by your Tesla. It’s on fire.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“It’s nice to know the guy who builds self-driving cars and spaceships hasn’t quite figured out how to broadcast a phone call.” — JIMMY FALLON“According to CNN fact checkers, former President Trump made at least 20 false claims during his interview last night with Elon Musk, starting with, ‘It’s great to be here.’” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (Sufferin’ Succotash Edition)“Elon Musk interviewed former President Trump live last night on X, and however crazy you think it was, it was crazier.” — SETH MEYERS“Also, what’s going on with his voice? He sounds like a sugared-up kid on Halloween who won’t take out his plastic vampire teeth.” — SETH MEYERS“I know the guy’s big on slurs, but this is next level.” — DESI LYDIC, guest host of “The Daily Show,” on Trump’s speech sometimes sounding slurred during the interview“[imitating Sylvester the Cat] Sufferin’ succotash!” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Can we get the guy some Fixodent?” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingThe actress Elizabeth Banks played jinx with Jimmy Fallon on Tuesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightThe actress Janet McTeer will sit down on Wednesday with Jeff Goldblum, her “Kaos” co-star and the guest host this week on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutPatti Smith.Vagabond Video/Getty Images.A new documentary about Electric Lady Studios highlights the Greenwich Village institution where artists like Jimi Hendrix, Patti Smith and Frank Ocean have recorded tracks. More

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      ‘Industry’ Blends ‘Succession’ With ‘Grey’s Anatomy’

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      Set in the high-pressure world of investment banking, the series, now in Season 3, started out unremarkably but has since become appointment viewing.When “Industry,” a jargony drama about climbing the ladder in the investment banking industry, debuted back in 2020, it was clunky and too generic, and it often telegraphed its twists. But the show found its sea legs, and its slick second season was a ruthless, breathless treat — fast and good-mean. Each episode turned the temperature up and up and up, taking the conflict among our miserable bank bébés from a simmer to an aggressive boil.Then it cranked things even hotter, turning steam to plasma in its last moments — a wilder, more significant phase change.Season 3, which began on Sunday, picks up a few months into this shift. Harper (Myha’la) is licking her wounds after her ouster from the high-pressure London firm Pierpoint, but she has landed at FutureDawn, the female-led, ostensibly socially-conscious fund from Season 2. She is working as an assistant, well outside — and, in her eyes, well beneath — her biz-whiz skill set, but she has never been one to follow workplace rules. She aligns herself with an equally disgruntled senior portfolio manager, Petra (Sarah Goldberg, of “Barry” fame), and starts sharpening her knives.“Industry” can sometimes feel like “Succession Jr.” with its icy palate, its appetite for financial lingo, its characters’ soulless scheming and lines like “I haven’t done blow since 9/11” and “the only famous salesman is Willy Loman.” The incessant shouting, lies, secrecy and debt recall “The Bear,” and its snappy critiques of faux liberalism remind me of “Hacks.” (“I never watch [porn] … unless it’s directed by women,” brags one guy, on a private jet.)But the show it reminds me of most is still “Grey’s Anatomy”: “Industry” also begins on everyone’s first day, with our crew of newbies jockeying for top spots and hooking up with each other, enduring grueling hours and harsh — alluring — mentorship. The rookies’ ingenuity is sometimes valorized, but sometimes it is illegal, and sometimes super-duper illegal. Each character’s family of origin has some murky secret, and none of them are quite sure whether they should be ride-or-die loyal to one another or “all’s fair in work and war” competitors.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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      ‘Bad Monkey,’ Bad Deer, Bad Weather: The Fun of Filming in Florida

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      Alex Moffat, an actor and comedian best known for his work on “Saturday Night Live,” rarely shouts at deer. But during a tense scene in the new crime comedy “Bad Monkey,” a Key deer, a member of an endangered species native to the Florida Keys, kept entering the frame. In one exasperated moment, Moffat, in character as a disreputable real estate developer, turned to the deer and shouted, “Go back to the woods or whatever!”The line wasn’t in the script. But it’s definitely in the show.Developed by Bill Lawrence and debuting Wednesday on Apple TV+, “Bad Monkey” tracks a cop turned health inspector, Andrew Yancy (Vince Vaughn), who pursues a case involving a severed arm, Medicare fraud, voodoo-adjacent witchcraft and a menacing capuchin. It is based on Carl Hiaasen’s novel of the same title, and as with most Hiaasen tales, it is set in a version of the sunshine state defined by raw natural beauty and equally raw Florida-man shenanigans.Not a lot of shows shoot in Florida — blame the lack of film infrastructure; blame the absence of tax breaks; blame the deer and the gnats and the 99 percent humidity. Even shows set in the state will typically shoot in North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana or, as in the case of Lawrence’s Florida-centric comedy “Cougar Town,” Los Angeles. This is understandable. When you film in Culver City, you rarely need to hire armed alligator wranglers.Hiaasen, a former Miami Herald columnist, had been burned by Hollywood before. He strongly preferred a Florida shoot, especially for the scenes set in the Keys.“There’s nowhere in California that looks like that,” Hiaasen said.Lawrence (“Ted Lasso,” “Shrinking”), who had long had his sights on “Bad Monkey,” made that happen.“Feeling authentically Florida and a little sweaty and dirty, it really mattered,” he said.“We wanted to really capture the nature and the beauty of the state,” said Lawrence, right, with the actor Ronald Peet. Scenes set in the Bahamas, such as the one above, were also shot in Florida.John Brawley/ACSWe 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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      When I Get Anxious, These Videos Help Calm My Mind

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      Tunnel through time with vintage B-roll.It was a grainy video, autoplaying in my Facebook feed, that first grabbed my attention. It seemed vaguely familiar — like a home movie from my childhood in suburban Boston but without the main characters, leaving only a warm, generic 1980s ambience. In the clip, kids in wide-collared shirts amble around a school cafeteria with burgers, tater tots and little square boxes of chocolate milk served by lunch ladies in those big buglike eyeglasses my grandmother used to wear. The video ended after about two minutes. Next, I watched a street glide by from the window of a moving vehicle: Kenmore Square, Boston, January 1977. The camera panned across storefronts — Strawberries, Paperback Booksmith, College Donuts — but I didn’t recognize anything until it zoomed out and the famous Citgo sign was revealed, perched atop the building where it still sits today.Discovering these videos felt like time-traveling back to some precise moment when nothing of note happened. They are just short, contextless clips of old B-roll — the background film cut into broadcasts to break up the main footage — culled from the collections of WGBH, a 69-year-old Boston public-television station. In 2018, James Auclair, a station employee, began regularly posting the videos to social media. They infiltrated my own Facebook algorithm in the fall of 2023, which, it turns out, was just when I needed them. That August, I eagerly applied for a dream-job faculty position at a university, and I knew I was in for months of consistent, nagging anxiety about my professional future. When I came across the footage Auclair was posting under the handle GBH Archives (they dropped the “W” a few years ago), I was hooked: Here, finally, was a reprieve from the swirl of negative thoughts in my head.I’ve devoured, by now, countless hours of B-roll. I’ve watched shoppers peruse CDs at the long-shuttered Tower Records on Newbury Street in the ’90s, transporting me back to Saturdays in high school when my friends and I browsed the rap and hip-hop racks for hours. Cars as big as boats — station wagons, sedans and vans like my parents drove — roll over the Tobin Bridge in 1979; drivers reach out their arms to pass cash and coins to toll attendants. I’ve watched ice skaters gliding over the frozen Charles River in the late ’70s and hairsprayed teenagers in leather and oversize sweaters smoking cigarettes outside their high school in the ’80s.I’m not the only one hooked on these B-roll clips: YouTube is full of “retro B-roll” material, and GBH Archives alone has more than 200,000 combined followers on Facebook, X and Instagram. For some viewers, the appeal is pure nostalgia — many comment wistfully on the absence of cellphones or the predominance of suits and ties and dresses. Others note changes in the ever-evolving cityscape. Every so often, someone recognizes their younger self in a video.Where the format of television news can crowd out thought, these videos create space for it.What I love most is that the videos contain no narrative; they feel like ambient music — hypnotic, meditative. Rather than tell you what to think or fear, they just show you things. There’s a funny intellectual twist here: Television is an entertainment medium, and the primary purpose of these B-roll clips was to keep viewers visually engaged so they wouldn’t get bored watching a single shot of a newscaster talking. Watching this remediated B-roll subverts that purpose. There are no quick shots and snappy edits, no breaking news alerts or sensational chyrons, just slow and boring slices of life. Where the format of television news can crowd out thought, these videos create space for it. 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 Tackles Trump’s Obsession With Crowd Size

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      “The fact that Kamala Harris is pulling such huge crowds is really getting under his, let’s call it, skin,” Stephen Colbert said of former President Donald Trump.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.Crowd WorkFormer President Donald Trump falsely claimed in a series of posts on Truth Social that Vice President Kamala Harris had used artificial intelligence to create images and videos of large crowds at her rallies.On Monday’s “Late Show,” Stephen Colbert said that “Trump’s crowd envy has set his brain to ‘broil’” over the thousands of people confirmed to be in attendance.“[imitating Trump] Fake crowd, everybody! Many people are asking — no, many people are asking, ‘Is it cake?’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“The fact that Kamala Harris is pulling such huge crowds is really getting under his, let’s call it, skin.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“It is the definition of insanity to think that this crowd here is A.I., though I would not be surprised if Harris generated Tim Walz with A.I. by just using the prompt ‘Sympathetic Meatloaf.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“OK, OK, that’s one of those mom-and-pop issues for the single-issue crowd size voter.” — JON STEWART“First of all, I guarantee Trump has no idea what A.I. stands for. He probably thinks it’s a steak sauce: [imitating Trump] ‘She A1-ed the crowd. She gave out free bottles of steak sauce to people on the street to get them to come in. That’s why I was there. I was wearing a Kamala T-shirt and camo hat.’” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (Olympics Edition)“Yep, the big winners at the Olympics were Team USA, China and the French pole-vaulter’s Tinder account.” — JIMMY FALLON“He didn’t medal. You know I felt bad for him, but, then again, I didn’t.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingOn Monday, Jeff Goldblum kicked off a week of guest hosting for his neighbor, Jimmy Kimmel.What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightThe “Saturday Night Live” star Bowen Yang will appear on Tuesday’s “Late Night.”Also, Check This OutShelby Lynne left Nashville behind two and a half decades ago. When she returned this time, she found a group of female collaborators who supported her new vision.Eric Ryan Anderson for The New York TimesThe singer-songwriter Shelby Lynne makes her return to country music with her 17th studio album, “Consequences of the Crown.” More

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      Rachael Lillis, Who Voiced Popular ‘Pokémon’ Characters, Dies at 55

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      Ms. Lillis voiced the characters of Misty and Jessie in the animated series based on a video game. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in May.Rachael Lillis, an actress who voiced the original English versions of Misty and Jessie, popular characters in the 1990s “Pokémon” anime television series, and later in the franchise’s movies and games as well, died on Saturday in Los Angeles. She was 55.The cause was cancer, according to Laurie Orr, one of her sisters.Ms. Lillis started voice acting in the 1980s, according to her IMDB page, but her big break came in the late 1990s when she was cast in the English version of the “Pokémon” TV series, a popular Japanese anime based on the “Pokémon” video games. In hundreds of episodes over eight years, Ms. Lillis voiced the characters Misty, a trusted friend of the main character, Ash Ketchum, and Jessie, one of the show’s villains.She also voiced those characters in two “Pokemon” movies as the cultural phenomenon grew.Ms. Lillis, who lived in Los Angeles, also was the voice of Jigglypuff, whose fairy song put listeners to sleep and was one of the creatures the characters pursue.Ms. Lillis, who had dozens of other voice credits to her name, had a strong sense of humor and a talent for voice acting, said Eric Stuart, who voiced James, the other member of Team Rocket in the “Pokémon” series, and worked with Ms. Lillis for many years.“If you met her, you’d not say this was so natural for her,” Mr. Stuart said in a phone interview. “Rachael in real life was pretty low key, kind of quiet and sweet,” Mr. Stuart added. “The minute she stepped in that booth it was like this whole other energy came out.”Mr. Stuart first met Ms. Lillis in the mid-1990s, when there were not a lot of people dubbing anime into English.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: ‘Chimp Crazy’ and ‘The Challenge’

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      HBO airs a new documentary that could fall into the category “exotic animals as pets gone wrong.” The MTV competition show is back for a 40th season.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, Aug. 12-18. Details and times are subject to change.MondayCELEBRITY IOU 8 p.m. on HGTV. Drew and Jonathan Scott, whom you probably know from “Property Brothers,” are back for another season of this show, which allows celebrities to gift home renovations to someone. The first episode of this season features Mandy Moore, who works with Drew and Jonathan on a dream backyard for her friend Celina. Other celebrities featured include Wanda Sykes, Tony Hawk and Zach Braff.THE GREAT AMERICAN RECIPE 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Only three cooks are left on this season of this competition cooking show. Throughout the season, the chefs have used their family recipes to wow the judges — and the finale won’t be any different.TuesdayZac Efron in “Neighbors.”Glen Wilson/Universal PicturesNEIGHBORS (2014) 9 p.m. on E! Come for Seth Rogen being hilarious and stay for Dave Franco’s horrible Robert De Niro impression. This movie stars Rogen and Rose Byrne as parents who move into a new house with their baby. Unfortunately for them, Franco and Zac Efron live in the frat house next door, and after the couple calls the police for a noise complaint, the frat decides to make their lives a living hell. The movie is “a status report on mainstream American movie comedy, operating in a sweet spot between the friendly and the nasty, and not straining to be daring, obnoxious or even especially original,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times.WednesdayTHE CHALLENGE 8 p.m. on MTV. This reality competition show, one of the longest running, is about to begin its 40th season. Entitled “The Battle of the Eras,” it will feature competitors from the shows “The Real World,” “Are You the One?,” “Big Brother,” “Survivor,” “Love Island” and “Exatlón Estados Unidos,” meaning there will be lots of big personalities competing for the $1 million prize.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