Television

Michael Jordan seemingly has everything. He toppled almost all of his foes as a player. There was his individual greatness. Team greatness. Much business greatness.So why, after all these years, would Jordan, who rarely gives interviews, take part in a lengthy documentary series rehashing his epic time with the Chicago Bulls?It’s the legacy.What emerges in “The Last Dance,” a 10-part documentary series produced by Netflix, ESPN and Jordan that had its premiere on Sunday night, is what amounts to an extended defense of Jordan’s career as many are considering the contributions of the 21st century’s best basketball player: LeBron James. At least in the eight parts ESPN allowed journalists to screen. (On Monday, ESPN said the first two episodes on Sunday averaged 6.1 million viewers in two hours on ESPN and ESPN2, making it the most highly viewed documentary in the network’s history.) Consider the most contentious debate in the N.B.A., which the show is now recharging, intentionally or not:Jordan or James? Who is the best of all time? Six rings, or three? Oh, but Jordan couldn’t do it without Scottie Pippen and played in a watered down league. Yeah, but LeBron couldn’t do it without Wade and Bosh. And the league is soft now. No, the league is better now! Jordan never beat a team as good as the 2016 Golden State Warriors! Yeah, but Jordan didn’t lose to the 2011 Dallas Mavericks!Jordan hears these conversations loud and clear, even though he won’t publicly partake in them. “I think he’s made his mark,” Jordan said of James at a news conference in January. “He will continue to do so over a period of time. But when you start the comparisons, I think it is what it is. It’s just a standup measurement. I take it with a grain of salt. He’s a heck of a basketball player, without a doubt.”But the timing of his agreeing to cooperate with the producer Mike Tollin is apt: As Tollin said in an article in The New York Times last week, Jordan’s cooperation to participate in the documentary and greenlight the release of the long-hidden footage came on the same day that James and the Cleveland Cavaliers were celebrating winning the N.B.A. championship in 2016. That is some grain of salt.“I take a redeye to Charlotte for a meeting, I turn on ESPN in the morning as I’m getting dressed, and there’s the Cavaliers’ parade as I’m heading in to see Michael,” Tollin said of his first face-to-face meeting with Jordan and his business advisers Estee Portnoy and Curtis Polk. “He said yes in the room, which doesn’t happen too often in my business.”Maybe this is coincidence. But Jordan has managed his image to the finest detail. A documentary is, in theory, supposed to provide an unvarnished look at a person or its subject. But “The Last Dance” is not that. Michael Jordan’s production company, Jump 23, is a partner in the project. Commissioner Adam Silver, who in the 1990s was the head of NBA Entertainment, told ESPN that a condition of allowing the film crew to follow the Bulls around during the 1997-98 season was that none of the footage could be used without Jordan’s permission. Optically, very little of this is unvarnished.Sam Smith, the veteran N.B.A. writer who wrote a critical portrayal of Jordan in his 1992 book, “The Jordan Rules,” wrote a piece last week in which he said he asked the director of the film, Jason Hehir, whether he went to Jordan for permission to interview him for “The Last Dance.”Smith wrote, “So the director dithered a bit and somewhat shyly answered, well yes, they asked Jordan if it was OK to interview me.” The director, in Smith’s telling, said Jordan told them he didn’t care who they talked to. “Michael being Michael,” Smith added.Even if Jordan gave the greenlight to everyone, clearly his approval was on the team’s mind if what Smith said was correct. (A spokesman for ESPN said Jordan did not personally approve which people could be interviewed.)Hehir gave a quotation recently to The Athletic, in which he recalled Jordan discussing his treatment of a teammate, Scott Burrell: “When you see the footage of it, you’re going to think that I’m a horrible guy.” Yet many of the interactions that you see with Jordan and his teammates in the series present the image Jordan has long cultivated for himself: competitive and willing to win at all costs — hardly anything that will make basketball fans think less of him. If anything, that relentless drive to win will endear him more to fans.I am reminded of that viral clip of Jordan and Tom Brady playing pickup basketball with other unidentified players from 2015 in the Bahamas.“Hey, man, you guys still have YouTube?” Jordan, in his early 50s, says to one of his defenders after making a flawless jumper over him. “You better put on Michael Jordan for real.”That’s what “The Last Dance” is: Jordan reminding us who he is, or was, as James’s legacy emerges. Not just as a basketball player, but culturally. Would a documentary about James’s career attract multiple former presidents and A-list celebrities?The series eventually goes over some of the less savory aspects of Jordan’s legacy. But even then, he and several of his defenders are given ample time and space to explain them, or paint them in a more favorable light, such as Jordan’s bullying of Jerry Krause, the Bulls’ general manager, about whom Jordan made cracks about his weight.When teammates are described in unflattering situations, including drug use, Jordan and the documentary team make clear that he steered clear. As Jordan says, he didn’t go to clubs. He didn’t smoke or drink (at the time, he notes, though a glass of what appears to be bourbon sits next to him during some interviews).“I was looking just to get some rest, get up and go play,” Jordan says. In other words, you should Be Like Mike.That’s by design. The documentary is a product for Jordan. And Jordan doesn’t attach his brand to something that doesn’t benefit him personally.He said it himself.“Because you can always put your name on something, but most of the things that I do — practically all the things that I do — are very authentic in terms of my involvement,” he told Cigar Aficionado in 2017, after he gave the documentary the go-ahead. “I don’t want to just lend my name to a product. Because at the end of the day, that product is always going to represent my DNA. So I like to have some interest, I like to have some input, I like to have some participation. There’s nothing that goes out with my name on it that we don’t oversee, we don’t deal with.”That doesn’t mean “The Last Dance,” even as a hagiography, doesn’t have its compelling moments. The series is effective in emphasizing that Jordan is one of the greatest athletes who has ever walked on this planet, in case we forgot.It seems that no one wants to remind us more than Jordan himself.Marc Stein contributed reporting. More

No one in live comedy is thrilled about moving shows online. “Doing standup without an audience is like sex without an orgasm,” quipped Felicia Madison, the booker for West Side Comedy Club. “Why bother?”But in the era of social distancing, you make do. Comedians quickly adjusted, telling jokes on their social media feeds and holding online benefits. But after these efforts, everyone was faced with the daunting challenge of how to make live comedy economically viable for the long term.While many have decided to wait the quarantine out, some producers have built new online business models, charging money for stand-up or storytelling shows that are transitioning to streaming or inventing new kinds of talk shows on the internet. There’s been a startling amount of entrepreneurial experimentation in the last few weeks, proceeding in fits and starts, and it should have an impact on the culture long after the lockdown ends.Most traditional clubs have been slow to, and still resist, putting stand-up online. The Comedy Cellar in New York has held a free nightly conversation among comics, and the Comedy Store in Los Angeles has been quiet. The argument for caution in moving the business online is not merely artistic. Several producers expressed unease about asking for money during a crisis, preferring an optional tip over seeking a fee. “If someone is charging money it should either be for charity or they should be ashamed of themselves,” said Cris Italia, owner of the Stand. But doing nothing may not be a sustainable option, particularly for comedians.“This is the livelihood for many people, so I needed to figure out a way to make money,” said Marianne Ways, the booker for Butterboy, a Monday-night stalwart at Littlefield in Brooklyn. She moved the show, with hosts Jo Firestone, Maeve Higgins and Aparna Nancherla, online early, testing a free night on March 16 before charging $5 for the following week. She sold 812 tickets, which is far more than her 150-seat performing space could hold. Drawing a global audience helped, but 60 percent of the patrons were still from New York. These staggering numbers did not last, though, as competition increased. The audience dropped by roughly 50 percent each of the following two weeks before stabilizing at around 260 with a little less than half from New York.Ways has encouraged comedians to not just talk about the quarantine. She also learned that good lighting and staying stationary is key. She also arranged for performers to hear laughter from others on the bill if they wanted, which made a difference in the absence of an audience response. “It’s never going to be perfect, but it’s an experiment,” she said. “We’re doing our best.”Others are following suit. Dan Goodman, who produces Shtick a Pole in It, a seven-year-old East Village show that alternates stand-up and pole dancing burlesque, initially balked at the idea of performing online. But once it became clear the lockdown would last for months, he figured he had nothing to lose. For his April 25 show, he will charge $10, less than half his usual fee, and the performers will be able to see the audience on Zoom, but not hear the crowd until the show is over and the applause is unmuted.Moving live shows online presents a number of challenges, none more formidable than how to replace audience laughter. Some clubs charging tickets for new shows, like West Side and Eastville, began offering conversations between comics, instead of standup sets. Both still put faces of the crowd on the screen. At West Side, you can even direct-message other members of the crowd, giving it the feel of a comedy club mixed with a dating app. Watching shows on both platforms, I found myself drawn to the audience as much as the comedians.What became clear is that you don’t have to hear a laugh for it to make an impact. Some people guffaw with their whole body. There’s also something soothing about seeing all those faces, many presumably alone and isolated, a reminder that one of the most important reasons we go to see live entertainment is to be part of a community. But crowds of course want more than that. Madison said that while West Side initially did not want to put stand-up online, choosing instead to run talk shows and other productions rooted in conversations, she noticed that when people didn’t see jokes, they started logging off quickly. She has now starting programming traditional sets.New conventions are emerging in this suddenly online live-comedy world. “Close your tabs” has replaced “Turn off your cellphones,” and YouTube commenters have become the new hecklers. Comics are also finding a lot of material by playing with split screen, like two comics creating the illusion of melded faces or passing a prop from one screen to another. On a recent podcast, Joel Mandelkorn, a Los Angeles-based producer behind several shows including the popular Hot Tub with Kristen Schaal and Kurt Braunohler, said he had noticed a lot more prop-involved bits and funny facial expressions. “Zoom backgrounds are probably going to be hack in a couple weeks,” he added.Shows that depend less on frequent punch lines have an easier transition, which helps explain the success of Risk!, a storytelling show with Kevin Allison as the host. Its producer, JC Cassis, said she decided to move online in mid-March out of a sense of panic. With a staff of 20, including six full-timers, and revenue from podcast ads and corporate gigs drying up along with live shows, she concluded: “If we don’t figure out how to do shows online, we’re going to run out of money in a month.”She started studying shows online, settled on an inexpensive ticketing service (PayPal) and price point ($10 to $12), and announced she was selling tickets. Almost immediately, patrons responded, buying more than 360 tickets. The next week, that number grew. Last week, around 600 people saw the show, and with lower costs (no hotel rooms, agents or venue to pay for), she brought in three times as much profit.At the start, Allison glanced at the audience on his screen and saw fans from Singapore, Montreal and Tokyo, and exclaimed: “We have a hit on our hands.”He said he missed the live shows but had been surprised at how similar doing the online version is. “It feels very live,” he said. “There’s that performer thing of reading the room, but it’s going on in my head.”Cassis said she thought the success was partly because of the lack of competition, but she also cited loyal audiences, gained from a decade of shows, that do not want to see Risk! disappear.“People are stuck, and they need to feel they are not just watching Netflix but connecting with a community of people having a collective experience,” she said, adding that she thought shows should continue on Zoom even when things return to normal. “Necessity is the mother of invention. Why didn’t we do this before?” More

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Through her production company LaLaLand, the ‘Power’ actress teams up with Snapchat to bring the 10-episode series of ‘The Honeybeez of ASU’ to the social media platform.
Apr 20, 2020
AceShowbiz – Reality television star La La Anthony has teamed up with Snapchat bosses on a docuseries about a talented plus-sized dance squad.
The “Chi” actress Anthony has signed on to produce The Honeybeez of ASU, based on the performance troupe at Alabama State University, for her production company LaLaLand as part of a 10-episode Snap Originals series for the social media platform.
The Honeybeez of ASU, which follows the dance squad and their coach during the highs and lows of the 2019-2020 competitive season, launches on 25 April (20).

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What’s on TVBETTER CALL SAUL 9 p.m. on AMC. The fifth season of this series saw Jimmy McGill’s transformation into the Saul Goodman character we know from “Breaking Bad” accelerate in earnest. At the end of Season 4, he announced his intention to start a criminal law practice using the Goodman alias but it wasn’t until this season that Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) began to fully embrace his relationship with the underworld. He was quickly drawn into a conflict between the Salamanca family, members of the Juárez Cartel, and Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), who is affiliated with the cartel but working to establish his own empire. The die may have been cast, but Jimmy’s relationship with his wife, Kim (Rhea Seehorn), has kept him from falling too far too fast.THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA 9 p.m. on HBO. In the first episode of this adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel, Charles Lindbergh was an obnoxious voice on the radio whose isolationist and anti-Semitic sentiments were disturbing to Herman Levin (Morgan Spector) and his wife, Bess (Zoe Kazan), but not a clear and present threat to their well-being. Unfortunately, in this alternative history, Lindbergh didn’t remain an ineffectual agitator. He defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, signed a neutrality pact with Nazi Germany and began his own persecution of American Jews. These political developments have devastated the Levins, who were upwardly mobile before Lindbergh’s ascension. Their son Sandy is being turned against them by anti-Semitic propaganda and Alvin, their nephew, is being shadowed by the F.B.I. Even if the country manages to reverse its direction in the final episode of the mini-series, serious damage has already been done to the family.What’s StreamingPARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3 (2011) Stream on Amazon, Hulu and Tubi. Rent on Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. This installment of the found-footage horror franchise is a prequel to the 2009 low-budget hit. It explains how Katie, the main character of the original movie, and her sister Kristi, the star of the sequel, came to be connected to the demonic force that terrorizes the women and their partners in the first two movies. The trouble begins when Kristi started conversing with an imaginary friend, Tobi. It’s clear from the beginning that he’s no figment of the imagination, but even once Julie, the girl’s mother, recognizes the threat, it’s far too late. It turns out that the family’s connection to Tobi runs deep.BALTHAZAR Stream on Acorn TV. In the second season of this French crime series, Tomer Sisley returns as the gifted but eccentric forensic pathologist Raphaël Balthazar. His ability to coax answers from the dead is unparalleled but one case continues to stymie him even after more than 13 years: the killing of his wife. Balthazar pursues new clues in her case while working with the taciturn police commander Hélène Bach (Hélène de Fougerolles) on others. More

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Later during co-star Kandi Burruss’ baby shower, the two Bravo personalities are also involved in a heated argument as Kenya accuses NeNe of trying to spit on her.
Apr 20, 2020
AceShowbiz – “The Real Housewives of Atlanta” season 12 aired its finale on Sunday, April 19. The explosive episode featured rivals NeNe Leakes and Kenya Moore taking their beef further with them dissing and dropping bombshell claims about each other.
Following their below-the-belt jabs, Kenya called NeNe “a bully” who “has very few friends.” That seemed to be the last straw for NeNe, who later made a shocking allegation about Kenya’s marriage to her estranged husband Marc Daly.
“I don’t talk about her on red carpets, and I can say a lot of things,” the 52-year-old Bravo personality began. Insinuating that Kenya and Marc weren’t official, she continued, “Kenya’s marriage license has never ever been found by no one. She ain’t JLo (Jennifer Lopez). She ain’t [Beyonce Knowles], and they found their marriage license but they can’t find hers.”
According to NeNe, it only proved that “they are not legally married.” She added, “So there is nothing to divorce. I heard it was a handshake and an agreement that they get together and have a baby and she paid for them.”
“I am not anywhere talking about that because that’s her baby,” NeNe alleged. “You see me on a red carpet asking where her eggs were found, saying it was Marc’s sperm and some eggs that they bought or found out of the country somewhere — that’s why the baby looks so much like him.”
She added, “I’m happy for her to be a mother. If she found an egg outside up under a chicken, I think it’s great that she had a baby.”
Later during Kandi Burruss’ baby shower, the two were also involved in an argument as Kenya accused NeNe of trying to spit on her. Clapping back, NeNe said, “If I wanted to spit on you, you would know you have been spit on.” Co-star Cynthia Bailey then defended NeNe, “I saw you throwing popcorn but I did not see you spitting.”
But the fight upset Kandi. “I get this but everybody is leaving and I never got to introduce my surrogate and this is taken over,” she told the ladies. “I’m sick of them,” she added to the producers. “It’s like, ‘Do you not get this is an important moment for me?’ ”

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Season 3, Episode 6: ‘Decoherence’With only two episodes left in the season, “Westworld” spent this week’s putting all the pieces in place for a mix-and-match battle royale between humans and hosts, hosts and hosts, and humans and humans. There was still the usual chatter over free will, mostly in a metaphysical group therapy session where William confronts his father and various incarnations of himself, but the episode was mostly about arranging the pieces on the board.Many major characters have clocked out for long stretches this season — Bernard has been close to a non-presence, for example, and the Man in Black has disappeared into his own navel — but all of them make an appearance here.The episode opens with Maeve in a simulation of the Valley Beyond, imagining the permanent reunion with her daughter that she has been pursuing for nearly the entire run of the show. (Maeve’s attachment to this sentimental and illusory mother-daughter relationship plays against the shrewdness and lethality she displays in almost any other circumstance. She can never see through it.) Burned by her failure to contain the Dolores’s coordinated insurrection, Serac wants to give her proper motivation to get the job done, and he wants to give her the team she needs to battle multiple Doloreses, Caleb and their mercenary hangers-on. So Hector gets taken out of cold storage and the other decommissioned host bodies are torched.The timing coincides with Serac’s successful corporate takeover of Delos, secured by murdering a board member in broad daylight. He wants Charlotte to deliver the data he has coveted, after which he intends to obliterate a trillion in intellectual property because keeping Delos operating isn’t a priority. This will surely be a blow to elites anxious to murder robots on their vacations, but Serac’s focus is entirely on Incite and Rehoboam and on getting back to exercising more control over human destiny.Serac figures out the big twist that Charlotte is actually Dolores — has he been reading Reddit threads, too? — but Charlotte-bot has prepared for this contingency and gases all his cronies in the boardroom. (Of course, he prepares for this contingency by being a hologram.)“Westworld” hasn’t needed to spend much time on how Dolores has learned to play various humans so convincingly, presumably because she has all the personal information required. But there’s a fascinating thread here about how the host and human separate from each other over time, as Dolores’s conscience processes events and relationships differently than Charlotte herself would have. It’s significant that the tip-off for Serac was Charlotte-bot’s interest in her son, whom the real Charlotte would never have prioritized over running the business. One of the basic conceits of “Westworld” is that the hosts are more human than humans, and Charlotte’s ex-husband and son are the beneficiaries of that — at least until they’re blown to bits for it.With the coalescence of forces in this episode, the good news is that the Man in Black, now dressed in white, finally has an active purpose this season, in alignment with Bernard and Stubbs. The bad news is that it takes some absolutely grueling scenes to get there. After proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’s not fit for group therapy, the Man in Black gets shifted to a special “A.R. treatment” that’s usually reserved for soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress. The treatment is invasive and confrontational, a virtual meet-up with his childhood, young adult, and elderly selves, along with his cruel stepfather. But there’s been so much foul anguish whipped up around this character that the treatment feels like another form of wheel-spinning. He marinates in the past without doing anything to move the larger narrative forward.The Man in Black’s emergence as a self-described “hero” completes all the table setting required for the homestretch, but some excitement is lost in the process. The show stages a few action sequences to try to quicken the pulse, including Maeve’s Nazi-punching warm-up in Warworld, the activation of the riot control robots at Delos and the massive fireball that consumes Charlotte’s SUV. But what’s missing from the episode is a more proper follow-through on the data leak that has thrown society into chaos. These are the horses Serac is trying to put back into the barns, but it’s hard to get a sense of how much human life has been transformed by the leak.The one exception is the fate of the Man in Black’s therapist, who learns along with her husband that she is projected to lose her medical license and get divorced because of multiple affairs with patients and an opioid addiction. For all the show’s talk about the potential for free choice, this destiny is accepted as such a given that her husband already leaves with the kids and she hangs herself in her office. It never occurs to anyone that she might steer clear of popping pills and sleeping with patients now that the algorithm has detailed the consequences. For the main characters on the show, such moments of existential recognition are a catalyst for change. Others, apparently, find it impossible to break out of their loops.Paranoid Androids:“You have no past because it’s always present.” That’s one good insight from Serac about what makes the hosts different from humans. All the experience and knowledge they have is easily accessible, whether it happened a minute ago and hundreds of lives ago. For characters like Dolores and Maeve, that makes it impossible to forgive and forget past transgressions. All grievances are raw.Likening humanity to “a thin layer of bacteria on a ball of mud hurtling through the void” and “maggots eating a corpse” in the same session is an excellent way to get kicked out of group therapy. If that was the Man in Black’s intention, mission accomplished.“My body will be reprinted shortly.” Sounds like a good “$25,000 Pyramid” clue for Things Robots Say.“I can keep you safe.” The ultimate empty promise when an all-knowing trillionaire and his goons have you and your family in the cross hairs. More

The British radio station has launched new educational contents in a bid to aid struggling parents homeschooling their children during the coronavirus lockdown.
Apr 20, 2020
AceShowbiz – Bosses at BBC Radio 4 are launching a new programme of content to aid parents homeschooling their kids during the coronavirus lockdown.
The new shows will support education and learning whilst children are at home amid the COVID-19 crisis, with Mohit Bakaya, Controller of BBC Radio 4, insisting he wants “the station to do more for families to listen and learn together.”
“We will present entertaining and informative programmes – new and archive – that are closely aligned with the school curriculum,” he explained. “The BBC is supporting the nation with the biggest education package we’ve ever undertaken, and with these new programmes and selected highlights from our archive Radio 4 is helping people continue their learning as part of the BBC’s expanded education efforts.”
“Homeschool History With Greg Jenner”, from the producers of much-loved Radio 4 podcast “You’re Dead to Me”, will provide 15-minute history lessons, with the “Horrible Histories” star describing the programme as a “short, lively, and funny narrative history aided by cheerful sound effects.”
“Every episode is written in collaboration with an expert historian, and delivers a snappy lesson, with a mini quiz at the end, to help kids fall in love with history,” he said.
Stuart Maconie will host quiz “My Generation”, which focuses on the events and culture of different decades within living memory, while “Open Book and Front Row” is a series of specially-commissioned introductions by leading contemporary writers to nine great works of English literature, all of which are key texts in the GCSE syllabus.
Highlights from the “In Our Time” archive, exploring subjects particularly relevant to school and university students, including Marie Antoinette, Feathered Dinosaurs, Carl Friedrich Gauss “prince of mathematicians,” and “Wuthering Heights”, will also be broadcast, along with the popular science series, “The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry”, which will investigate scientific mysteries relevant to the curriculum.

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The new ‘Party of Five’ series starring a whole new cast doesn’t last long as it is canceled by Freeform after airing the last episode of the first season in March.
Apr 20, 2020
AceShowbiz – The “Party of Five” reboot has been cancelled after just one season.
Bosses at U.S. network Freeform have opted not to renew the drama for a second season a month after the series wrapped its freshman season run with a March 4, 2020 finale.
The show, starring Brandon Larracuente and Emily Tosta, was never the big ratings winner producers hoped it would be.
The original “Party of Five” series, starring Matthew Fox, Scott Wolf, and Neve Campbell, ran from 1995 to 2000.

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