Television

What’s Streaming#BLACKAF Stream on Netflix. “We’re celebrating my dad’s new Netflix show,” Drea (Iman Benson) says at the self-referential beginning of this new sitcom. “I don’t know exactly what it’s about, but pretty sure it has something to do with black stuff.” Created by the screenwriter Kenya Barris (“black-ish,” “Girls Trip”), “#blackAF” stars Barris as a fictionalized, exaggerated version of himself. The show’s Kenya is a successful, cynical screenwriter living an extravagant Los Angeles life and raising children with his wife, played by Rashida Jones. The show explores issues of race, class and wealth — with family dynamics that should resonate well beyond the story’s rarefied setting. “Most families are functionally dysfunctional,” Barris said in a recent interview about the show with The New York Times. “You want the house to be a little bit messy,” he added. “You want the mom to be a little bit frayed. The dad to be a bit out of touch. Some of those things are just part of what family is. I want people to realize that that dysfunction is part of our functionality.”SELAH AND THE SPADES (2020) Stream on Amazon. This debut feature from the filmmaker Tayarisha Poe was praised by critics when it debuted at last year’s Sundance Film Festival. Set at a fictional, prestigious boarding school in Pennsylvania, the movie centers on Selah (Lovie Simone), the head of a powerful clique who takes under her wing a new student, Paloma (Celeste O’Connor), whom she mentors in navigating the school’s knotted social order. The dynamic between the two shifts when Paloma begins to threaten Selah’s grasp on social power. In her review for The Times, Teo Bugbee called the film “exceptionally composed.” Poe, she wrote, “designs her frames with care and sets a languid pace, a relief from the desperate freneticism of many teenage tales.”HERE WE ARE: NOTES FOR LIVING ON PLANET EARTH (2020) Stream on Apple TV Plus. The artist and illustrator Oliver Jeffers’s children’s book “Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth” gets an infusion of star power in this animated short film adaptation. Ruth Negga and Chris O’Dowd voice parents walking their young son through essential pieces of knowledge, like why humans keep track of time. Meryl Streep narrates.What’s on TVHAROLD AND LILLIAN: A HOLLYWOOD LOVE STORY (2017) 8 p.m. on TCM. Harold Michelson was a storyboard artist, art director and production designer who worked on classic movies including “The Graduate,” “West Side Story” and “Spaceballs.” Lillian Michelson was a film researcher who contributed to “Scarface,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and more. Together, they were a behind-the-scenes Hollywood power couple. Their lives and work are profiled in this documentary from Daniel Raim, which includes interviews with its two subjects and some of their friends and collaborators, including Francis Ford Coppola and Mel Brooks. In her review for The Times, Monica Castillo wrote that the film “maintains a free-flowing tone as it uncovers the work that went into creating some of the indelible scenes in Hollywood history.” More

Brian Dennehy, a versatile stage and screen actor known for action movies, comedies and classics, but especially for his Tony Award-winning performances in “Death of a Salesman” in 1999 and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” in 2003, died on Wednesday in New Haven, Conn. He was 81.His agency, ICM Partners, announced his death. His agent, Brian Mann, told The Chicago Tribune that the cause was cardiac arrest resulting from sepsis. Mr. Dennehy lived in Connecticut, where he was born.Brawny and gregarious, Mr. Dennehy was often called on to play an Everyman or an authority figure: athletes, sheriffs, bartenders, salesmen and fathers. He was in scores of movies — “First Blood” (1982), “Gorky Park” (1983), “F/X” (1986) and “Presumed Innocent” (1990) were among them — as well as an assortment of television series. But his first love was always the stage.“He was a towering, fearless actor taking on the greatest dramatic roles of the 20th century,” Robert Falls, artistic director of the Goodman Theater in Chicago, where Mr. Dennehy did some of his finest work, said in a phone interview. “They were mountains that had to be climbed, and he had no problem throwing himself into climbing them.”Mr. Dennehy, who once played college football, thrived on roles that let him contrast his physical presence with an emotional vulnerability.“Mr. Dennehy is a big bear of a man, but sometimes more of a teddy bear than a grizzly,” Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times in 1990 after seeing Mr. Dennehy’s performance as the protagonist Hickey in Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” at the Goodman, which Mr. Falls directed. “There’s a buried, dainty tenderness in his burly frame as well as a hint of festering violence.”Mr. Falls also directed Mr. Dennehy’s two Tony-winning turns, which started at the Goodman. Ben Brantley of The Times, in his review of the Goodman’s production of “Salesman,” the Arthur Miller play, called it the performance of Mr. Dennehy’s career.Mr. Falls said in the interview that Mr. Dennehy’s background — he had come to acting somewhat late, after knocking around in various blue-collar jobs — had helped make his portrayal of Willy Loman, one of the great roles of the American theater, so memorable.“When he did ‘Salesman,’ he just brought everything to that role,” Mr. Falls said. “It was tailored for him. He knew those people. He knew that world.”Brian Manion Dennehy was born on July 9, 1938, in Bridgeport, Conn., to Edward and Hannah (Manion) Dennehy. He grew up on Long Island.He enrolled at Columbia University on a football scholarship, though, he said later, what he really wanted to do was perform with the Columbia Players.“In those days, the Players had an artistic definition of themselves which didn’t allow a football player to be active,” he told the alumni magazine Columbia College Today in 1999. “I remember going up there a few times and distinctly feeling unwelcome.”His first newspaper notices were not as an actor but as a tackle on the Columbia football team. He was picked to be one of the senior captains, but in July 1959 The Times ran an article headlined, “Football Captain-Elect Drops Out of Columbia.”Mr. Dennehy, who said he had struggled academically, left school to join the Marines, serving in the United States, South Korea and Japan while he and his first wife, Judith Scheff, had two children. After leaving the service he completed his bachelor’s degree at Columbia in 1965 while working variously as a cabdriver, trucker, butcher, bartender and motel clerk to support his family.He also spent time as a stockbroker — Martha Stewart was a co-worker — though he admitted that he hadn’t been a very good one and hadn’t enjoyed the work.“I was sitting in the bullpen at Merrill Lynch down at Liberty Plaza and 30 guys got off the elevator with their attaché cases and headed for their desks,” he told the Columbia publication. “I thought to myself, ‘I’ve got to get out of here.’ And I did. Eventually, I was an overnight success — after 15 years.”He had been acting in community theater productions, mostly on Long Island, for years, but in the mid-1970s he branched out.“The thing was,” he told the Long Island newspaper Newsday in 1991, “you could work in community theater for 30 years and no one would spot you, no matter how good you were. Eventually, I had to take a chance in New York.”His first mention as an actor in The Times was in 1976, when he was in a showcase production of Chekhov’s “Ivanov” by the Impossible Ragtime Theater. An agent named Judy Schoen saw the show and happened to be looking for “a pro football type,” as Mr. Dennehy put it, for a role in the movie “Semi-Tough.” He was cast, and small roles in other movies and television series came quickly after that.By 1982, when he landed a regular role in the TV series “Star of the Family,” The Associated Press was calling him “one of Hollywood’s busiest character actors.” That same year his role as an overzealous sheriff in “First Blood,” the Sylvester Stallone hit (the first of Mr. Stallone’s “Rambo” movies), was something of a breakout.For the next four decades Mr. Dennehy seemed to have as much television and film work as he wanted, racking up more than 45 credits in the 1980s alone. In 1990 he received the first of six Emmy nominations, as outstanding supporting actor in a mini-series or special for the TV movie “A Killing in a Small Town.”In 1992 he played the serial killer John Wayne Gacy in “To Catch a Killer,” another mini-series. On the other side of the law, he played a Chicago police investigator, Jack Reed, in six TV movies in the 1990s, directing and earning writing credits on four of them himself.Another well-known role in the 1990s was Big Tom, the father of Chris Farley’s character in the 1995 comedy “Tommy Boy.”In recent years he had recurring roles in the TV series “Public Morals,” “Hap and Leonard” and “The Blacklist.” His last Broadway appearance was in 2014 in A.R. Gurney’s “Love Letters.” In an interview with The Times in conjunction with that show, he was asked about favorite fan letters he had received.“The most interesting was from John Wayne Gacy, who was in prison at the time, awaiting execution,” he said. “I played him in ‘To Catch a Killer.’ It was a letter of disappointment in the fact that one of his favorite actors had participated in this calumny. The movie revealed that 33 bodies of young boys were buried in the crawl space of his little house. His explanation: ‘Lots of people had access to that crawl space.’”Mr. Dennehy’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1974. In 1989 he married Jennifer Arnott. She survives him, as do three children from his first marriage, Elizabeth, Kathleen and Deirdre; two children from his second marriage, Cormac and Sarah; and several grandchildren.One of Mr. Dennehy’s best-known film roles was as an extraterrestrial in “Cocoon,” Ron Howard’s 1985 film about residents of a retirement home who are rejuvenated by swimming in the aliens’ pool. The movie was shot in Florida. For an article marking its 25th anniversary, Mr. Dennehy told The St. Petersburg Times that cicadas had been in season and chirping loudly during the filming — so loudly that before Mr. Howard called “action,” a crew member would fire a gun to quiet the insects.“You could get two or three minutes when they would shut up, and you could actually shoot and record,” Mr. Dennehy said. “That would be the last thing done before we’d roll the cameras.”Derrick Bryson Taylor contributed reporting. More

Garry Marshall, the noted producer and director, was talking about the best-known character in one of his best-known television shows.“I always wanted a tall Italian boy,” he said in an oral history recorded in 2000 for the Television Academy. Instead it was a 5-foot-6-inch Jew named Henry Winkler who ended up playing the Fonz on “Happy Days,” a portrayal so distinctive that what had been envisioned as a supporting role became one of the most recognizable characters in television history.The man responsible for that casting leap of faith was one of Mr. Marshall’s fellow executive producers on the series, Thomas L. Miller.“Tom Miller was the whole key to casting Henry Winkler,” Mr. Marshall said in the oral history. Mr. Winkler, who was an unknown when he auditioned for the role in 1973, concurred.“Tom took me to makeup, plucked my unibrow, told me what to do,” he said in a telephone interview. And it was Mr. Miller who called him that October — on his birthday, no less — and told him he had won the role. He had only just arrived in Los Angeles from the East Coast.“Two weeks into my stay I hit the jackpot,” Mr. Winkler said. “And a lot of it was thanks to Tom, who made sure that I came across with the right image, and Garry, who changed his mind about the character.”Mr. Miller, who produced dozens of other TV shows, including “Perfect Strangers” and “Full House,” died on April 5 in Salisbury, Conn. He was 79.The cause was heart disease, Warner Bros. Television, which had worked with the production company run by Mr. Miller and Robert L. Boyett, said in a statement.Mr. Miller was not generally known for the kinds of groundbreaking shows that draw critical acclaim and awards. What he and his production partners did draw were viewers.“Our award is that 30 million people are watching,” Mr. Miller told The Los Angeles Times in 1990. “To me, the goal is to entertain.”“Happy Days,” which premiered in 1974, ran for a decade with 255 episodes. “Perfect Strangers” racked up 151 episodes from 1986 to 1993, overlapping for much of that time with “Full House” (192 episodes, 1987-95). Other long-running shows that had Mr. Miller as an executive producer included the “Happy Days” spinoff “Laverne & Shirley” (1976-83), “Valerie” (later renamed “The Hogan Family,” 1986-91), “Step by Step” (1991-98) and “Family Matters” (1989-98).Some producers are less hands-on once a TV series is launched, but Mr. Winkler said Mr. Miller was an active presence on “Happy Days.”“He was there at every shoot,” Mr. Winkler said. “He was part of the family, and a creative part. He was there in the editing room. He knew where to put the violins for the emotional moments.”“He understood the audience,” Mr. Winkler added, “and then, if you had a problem, he understood you.”Thomas Lee Miller was born on Aug. 31, 1940, in Milwaukee to Edward and Shirley Miller. He earned a bachelor’s degree in drama and speech in 1962 at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, then set out for Los Angeles, where he worked for the director Billy Wilder on “Irma la Douce” (1963), “The Fortune Cookie” (1966) and other films.After four years with Mr. Wilder he developed TV shows at 20th Century Fox, then became a vice president of development at Paramount Studios before embarking on his producing career, founding a production company with Edward K. Milkis. Miller-Milkis Productions joined with Mr. Marshall, who died in 2016, to produce “Happy Days” (which was set in Mr. Miller’s hometown) and “Laverne & Shirley.”Mr. Boyett eventually joined the group, and in the mid-1980s, after Mr. Milkis’s departure, the company became Miller-Boyett Productions. Miller-Boyett shows, including “Full House” and “Family Matters,” were a key part of ABC’s Friday night sitcom lineup, known as TGIF. Mr. Miller and Mr. Boyett’s most recent TV producing credits were on “Fuller House,” a Netflix sequel to “Full House.”In 2000 Mr. Miller and Mr. Boyett, his life partner as well as his business partner, relocated to New York, where they were among the producers of a number of Broadway shows, including “Tootsie” last year.Mr. Miller, who lived in Salisbury, moved to Connecticut with Mr. Boyett in 2007. Mr. Boyett survives him along with a brother, Robert, and a sister, Kitty Glass.Mr. Miller aimed for shows that didn’t try to deliver a Message with a capital M but did have heart.“It’s never about lecturing, it’s about entertaining,” he told The New York Times in 1990, “but we always like to have somebody in our shows make some human connections, so the people who watch it say, ‘Yes, I understand that and I like it.’” More

Carrie Mathison’s very first words on “Homeland” are: “I don’t care where he is. Find him. It’s urgent.” They are shouted in a tone of unvarnished scorn at her colleague’s slowness, lack of insight and imagination. Carrie Mathison, a C.I.A. agent played by Claire Danes, does not mince words. She does not avoid conflict or difficult feelings. In fact, she has bipolar disorder (sometimes untreated, according to story-line needs), so difficult feelings are actually her thing. Many (dudes, mostly) are put off by her dogged, sawing pursuit of truth, and distrust the instincts born behind her beautiful spinning eyes. They are always institutionalizing her, always wrong, and she is always getting out of the institution to prove it. She is also a single mother.Bottom line: Carrie Mathison has her hands full, and never goes anywhere without her cross-body bag.“Does Carrie take her bag from the car to wherever she was going, or whomever she was interrogating?” Ms. Danes said over email of her character’s bags. “The shorthand for this question was always, ‘Does she take her friend?’ Occasionally, it was a more explicit ‘best friend,’ but never necessary because the lack of competition was a given.”I like Carrie Mathison. I love Claire Danes. I detest cross-body purses. You see, I like a nice solid shoulder bag, a hobo, a doctor bag, a tote, like the deep green Prada Issa Rae carries in her first scene in “The Photograph.” That’s a bag, people. Good bags elevate the beauty of women onscreen and in person, whereas cross-body bags erase, with their placement on the body, all beauty, all sexuality, all sensuality, all grace, all style, all life. Cross-body bags cut the form in a half, and the purse itself is so silly-looking, so flimsy. Also, if all you need to carry are your phone and your debit card, why don’t you just put them in your pocket? And if you haven’t taken the trouble to wear something with pockets, but you have taken the trouble to go out and purchase this ridiculous little body pendant, then what, exactly, is your problem? When I told this to Katina LaKerr, the costumer designer who created Carrie’s look on “Homeland,” she just laughed. “Carrie is a superhero,” Ms. LaKerr said. “A cross-body bag is the only choice.” I didn’t argue. But that doesn’t mean I will let this go.The series finale of “Homeland” airs on April 26, after eight seasons. If you rewatch the show purely for bag spotting (it happened to me), you will start to recognize the main players.Carrie starts out with a nondescript black one with a flap, but Ms. LaKerr refined this look into a Marc by Marc Jacobs cross-body with subtle but sturdy gold hardware that became, by the middle of Season 3 and onward, a Carrie staple. A gray cross-body, its provenance sadly lost to the sands of time, accompanies Carrie through much of Season 5, in Berlin. Now, in Kabul, Afghanistan, for Season 8, she carries a black Le Donne, and as Carrie ends the show’s run, she’ll be back in the United States, carrying a more sophisticated Rag & Bone. “We always keep track of which bags might no longer exist, due to events in the story line,” said Debra Beebe, the show’s current costume designer.When I told Ms. Beebe that I don’t like cross-body bags, she also said that Carrie’s job demands them, a point that I’m willing to concede. But many women who are not Carrie Mathison, who never hit people over the head with bricks, who don’t get repeatedly kidnapped, wear cross-body bags, and what, exactly, is their problem?“They are just everywhere,” said Maria Sherman, a writer, whose 2019 Jezebel piece “Why Are All Bags Crossbody Bags Now?” chronicles her fruitless search for a not-cross-body bag and is the “Howl” of purse shopping. “Cross-body bags are supposed to be cool but I feel like they lack dignity,” she added. “Carrie might as well be wearing a backpack, or a fanny pack.”I told her how uncomfortable it makes me to have a drink or coffee with someone who leaves hers on the entire time (it happens more than you’d think); I can never shake the feeling that this person is always on the verge of getting up and walking out. Clare Vivier is the founder and C.E.O. of Clare V, a high-end purse company. Though she has unfettered access to some of the most beautiful bags in the world, she voluntarily owns nine of the cross-body variety, and said they’re extremely popular with her customers. She does have one cross-body bone to pick: “Carrie wears hers too long. It actually drives me crazy.”Carrie Mathison probably didn’t make the cross-body bag popular, Ms. Vivier said, but her look dovetails with how modern women are dressing now. “Women these days want to be chic, but comfortable and without impairment, so that we can tackle our harried lives, whether we are working moms or fighting terrorists,” she said. “Cross-body bags are a hands-free bag equivalent to sneakers with skirts — sporty but feminine.”Now, I have watched every single episode of “Homeland,” not only in spite of Carrie’s bags, but in spite of something infinitely more troubling: It centers the 20-year-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on American angst. It’s as if, with the hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis who died in these wars, the real battles were in the American intelligence community. I thought about how Carrie Mathison — working mom and terrorism fighter — loved the convenient hands-free cross-body bag. And I had to wonder (to invoke another television Carrie, of “Sex and the City”), could the bags and the show’s politics be related?I talked to Stephen Shapiro, a professor of English at the University of Warwick, in England, who has written on “Homeland,” prestige television and its messages about culture and class relationships. He suggested that the cross-body bag is about a lot more than convenience. “The bag seems to be taking its cue from military uniforms, and it’s evocative, the same way that the prevalence of S.U.V.s are, of the way that the Forever War let us copy the military in our everyday lives,” Mr. Shapiro said.Obviously, S.U.V.s aren’t military vehicles, but they have the same shape and heft. “When you see someone driving one,” Mr. Shapiro said, “you wonder if they are worried about running over an I.E.D. in the Target parking lot.” I have the same sensation looking at people wearing cross-body purses: What, exactly, do you feel you need to be prepared for?“To me, cross-body bags are so Elizabeth Warren feminist,” said Amy Westervelt, a climate writer, and a friend of mine. “They say to me: ‘We’re going to solve climate change by greening the military.’”Then there’s the whole hands-free thing, particularly notable since there’s a major story line around Carrie ordering a drone strike, and drone strikes are how Americans themselves have been able to be involved in this war, while often never touching or being touched by it. “The costume of a hands-free bag presents Mathison as innocent of dirty deeds,” Mr. Shapiro said. “These bags say, ‘My hands are clean.’”.Of course, I myself am not innocent. I saw every single episode the moment it came out, for all nine years. I just loved watching Carrie show all those sane, yawningly right-brained people how much better she, an electrically left-brained person, was than they were. Despite the casualties, I couldn’t stop watching. You could say it was out of my hands.And I will be watching all the way to the end, partly because I want to, partly because what else am I going to do, and partly because Ms. Beebe promised me that in one of the last episodes, Carrie goes to an event carrying a Tissa Fontaneda evening — not cross-body — bag. I can’t wait to see this bag. The spoils of empire are so beautiful, and never more so as they dwindle away.Sarah Miller is a writer who lives in Nevada City, Calif. More