Television

James Drury, an actor best remembered as the stolid, black-hatted title character of the long-running NBC western “The Virginian,” died on Monday at his home in Houston. He was 85.Karen Lindsey, his assistant, confirmed the death in an email but did not specify a cause. Mr. Drury, who had iceberg-blue eyes and a no-nonsense mien befitting a frontier hero, appeared on television westerns like “Broken Arrow,” “Cheyenne” and “Wagon Train” before he landed the role on “The Virginian.” The show, which was loosely based on Owen Wister’s novel “The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains” (1902), began airing in 1962.Mr. Drury’s character, the tough but fair foreman of the Shiloh Ranch in Wyoming, was never named, and little of his history was revealed. He tussled with cattle rustlers and other outlaws threatening the ranch until “The Virginian” was canceled in 1971, after 249 episodes.Only two other television westerns, “Gunsmoke” and “Bonanza,” lasted longer (“Gunsmoke” the longest).“The Virginian’s” weekly episodes were, unsual for a primetime series, 90 minutes long, requiring a grueling shooting schedule that Mr. Drury, speaking to Cowboys & Indians magazine in 2016, compared to “making a movie a week.”The show featured many stunts, including tricky riding sequences and fistfights, that Mr. Drury sometimes took part in himself rather than having a stuntman take his place.This had its advantages, like allowing Mr. Drury’s face to appear in action shots, and its disadvantages, like risking injuries. In one choreographed fight, a stuntman threw an extra punch, “which was not in the script and hit me in the temple like a Missouri mule,” Mr. Drury said in an oral history interview. He spent the next several days of shooting trying to hide the golf ball-size lump on his head.“The Virginian’s” cast, which rotated over the years, included Lee J. Cobb, Clu Gulager, Roberta Shore and Charles Bickford.The show also featured a host of guest stars, like Bette Davis, Lee Marvin, Joan Crawford, Robert Redford, Leonard Nimoy and Harrison Ford. Mr. Drury and Doug McClure, who played the lighthearted cowhand Trampas, were the only actors to stay with the series for its entire run.In 2018, Mr. Drury told the Oklahoma newspaper The Daily Ardmoreite that he was grateful for his years as the Virginian, even though the role defined the rest of his career.“The Virginian was an indelible character,” he said. “I had a great deal of issues getting past being seen as the man in the black hat.”James Child Drury Jr. was born on April 18, 1934, in New York City to James and Beatrice Drury. His father was a professor of marketing at New York University, and his mother’s family owned a ranch in Salem, Ore.He spent much of his childhood on the ranch, learning horseback riding, marksmanship and other skills that would prove useful to his career in westerns. He started acting in the theater when he was 8.Mr. Drury attended New York University but left after signing a contract with MGM. He appeared in films like “Forbidden Planet” (1956); “Love Me Tender” (1956), Elvis Presley’s first feature film; and “Bernardine” (1957), Pat Boone’s first feature. He also appeared in movie westerns like Sam Peckinpah’s “Ride the High Country” (1962).Mr. Drury’s first two marriages, to Cristall Orton and Phyllis Mitchell, ended in divorce. His third wife, Carl Ann Head, died in 2019.He is survived by two sons, James Jr. and Timothy; a stepdaughter, Rhonda Brown; two stepsons, Frederick Drury and Gary Schero; four grandchildren; and several great-grandchildren.After “The Virginian” went off the air, Mr. Drury starred on the television show “Firehouse” and appeared on shows like “Walker, Texas Ranger” and “Kung Fu: The Legend Continues.” He was also a regular at western festivals around the country, where fans were still eager to meet the man in the black hat. More

What’s on TVBROKEN PLACES 10 p.m. on PBS. (Check local listings.) This documentary from the writer-director Roger Weisberg looks back over his decades of work about at-risk children, weaving in the voices of researchers like Dr. Nadine Burke Harris and Dr. W. Thomas Boyce. Both pediatricians, Harris and Boyce have been recognized for their work with children whose development is affected by adversity. Through a series of interviews, these experts present hypotheses about why some people may be better equipped to overcome the challenges presented by their upbringings than others. Bobby Gross, 35, is one of the subjects who had been filmed when he was young, at age 5, in this effort to track people confronting adversity.ANTIQUES ROADSHOW: TREASURE FEVER 8 p.m. on PBS. (Check local listings.) This longstanding collectors’ classic will air a timely segment, “Treasure Fever,” continuing the tradition of appraising historical items with auction house experts. This time, the focus is on the history of medicine. The antiques include a doctor’s bag from the Lakota Sioux and the sword of a Civil War medical officer.What’s StreamingPIXOTE (1981) Stream on Criterion. The Portuguese word “pixote” roughly translates as “peewee” or “small child” — but the title character of this movie has a persona that is anything but. Though Pixote is a child, the streets of São Paulo — as well as its bars, brothels and juvenile detention centers — have left Pixote looking “about 60 years old,” Vincent Canby wrote in his review for The New York Times. The movie follows its protagonist who, after breaking out of detention, must survive in the city with the help of his new friends — and includes resorting to stealing and killing. “Pixote” is the third film by the director Hector Babenco, who “looks at his juvenile vagrants at eye level, in closeup,” Canby added, “as if he were one of them, making no judgments on their behavior, seeing no further into the future than they do.”INDIA SONG (1975) Stream on Mubi. A comment from the director Marguerite Duras on ennui, or “leprosy of the soul,” “India Song” is a meticulously arranged film about an unsatisfied woman who has come to an unfortunate end. Most of the movie takes place in the French Embassy in Calcutta, where the French ambassador lives with his wife, Anne-Marie (Delphine Seyrig). Anne-Marie is pictured in a red evening dress surrounded by her lovers and suitors — whom she has grown tired of — in a drawing room cut off from the rest of India. In what is perhaps a stylistic representation of Anne-Marie’s condition, the film’s dialogue is disembodied from its images, Canby wrote in his review for The Times, adding that “the movie looks and sounds like something shot underwater.”DEADWATER FELL Stream on Acorn TV. The actors David Tennant and Cush Jumbo star in this British mystery drama making its North American debut. After the suspicious killings of some members of a Scottish family, everything the characters know about each other is questioned. More

Season 3, Episode 4: ‘The Mother of Exiles’“No one knows you like I do. No one knows me like you.”Those were Dolores’s words to Charlotte-bot in a hotel room on last week’s episode of “Westworld,” which went out of its way to withhold the answer to a question that the show’s fans had been guessing about since the end of Season 2: Whose pearl is inside Charlotte-bot? The line suggested that somehow Dolores had saved Teddy’s pearl and popped it in Charlotte-bot’s head, or maybe it was her father, since both of them had been part of her loop. It was obvious that the writers were teasing us with a little misdirection, but the possible candidates were narrowed.And now this week, in a flurry of crosscuts across multiple planes of action, comes a mega-reveal: Charlotte-bot is Dolores. Martin Connells, the glowering “fixer” for Liam Dempsey Jr., is now a host and also Dolores. And Musashi (Hiroyuki Sanada), the Singapore yakuza boss sitting on barrels of android amniotic fluid? He’s Dolores, too. Dolores is clearly a believer in the idea that if you want something done right, do it yourself. Now the replicated control units she smuggled out of the park are a Borg-like hive of deadly, calculating, mission-oriented robots who have elegantly coordinated roles to play in the A.I. rebellion.The twist feels like a cheat, just as the show’s agonizing coyness about Charlotte’s host identity felt like a cheat. The assumption had been that bodies could be reproduced but control units could not, and that the pearls Charlotte-bot took out of the park each belonged to a separate host. But the writers of “Westworld” seek out assumptions like lemon juice to paper cuts, and this particular reveal has been calibrated to sting a little.Keep in mind, too, that Charlotte-bot told Dolores last week that she felt the real Charlotte was asserting herself, so along with these copies of pearls and copies of bodies, other metaphysical struggles are possible. So the question will then become not only who controls what body but also how much control those bodies can exert over them. Which is essentially a question about what “who” even means. Buckle up for that.In the meantime, Dolores’s plans are proceeding apace, since she has anticipated everyone’s moves, installed copies of herself in the right host bodies and choreographed an ambush, like Michael Corleone at the baptism in “The Godfather.” She and Caleb use encryption keys in the bloodstream to raid the hapless Dempsey’s bank account. She swiftly neutralizes Bernard and Stubbs’s attempt to stop her from a “kill and replace” plan to install herself at the head of Incite. She uses a Musashi-bot to run a sword through Maeve and put down the Serac threat for now. And, in Caleb, she has found a crucial disciple in the human world — at least for as long as he doesn’t question the mission, as Teddy did.In Charlotte form, Dolores also makes quick work of William, the Man in Black, but not before Ed Harris does quite a bit of acting. There’s no doubt that William is a tragic figure, though he’s brought all of the tragedies upon himself. He was instrumental in conceiving Westworld and unleashing the robot apocalypse that is currently on the march. His choices also led to his brother-in-law Logan sinking into despair and dying of an overdose, his wife Juliet slicing her wrists in the bathtub and William himself shooting his daughter Emily by accident, due to an itchy trigger finger and a loose grip on reality. Now he’s haunted by all these ghosts, Emily’s especially, and shattering enough mirrors to guarantee several decades of bad luck.Charlottes comes to William with the ostensible purpose of securing his support to take Delos private before Serac seizes the company in a hostile takeover. But getting him cleaned up and presentable allows the show — and Harris — too much latitude in expressing his mental state. In the first season, when a younger William, played by Jimmi Simpson, was exploring the park, it was fascinating to witness his corruptibility, but the Man In Black character is a caterwauling bore, doomed to rattle around the labyrinth of his own twisted conscience. There’s nothing in the center of that maze.Paranoid Androids:The question ghost-Emily poses to her father, “What if every choice you ever made wasn’t a choice at all, but something written in your code?,” continues to draw a connection between humans and hosts, and their similar inability to follow their own paths. The message of the third season is that humans have loops, too, and they also have monitors to make sure they stay on them.A flashback with Dolores and Bernard foreshadows the multiple Doloreses twist: “You taught me that anything was possible. We could be anyone we wanted, live however we want. Isn’t that what you believe?”The future may be a hellish Silicon Valley dystopia, but picking out clothes without the hassle of changing rooms is an undeniable victory for progress.Incidentally, Paris has been nuked. There will be no follow-up questions at this time.Genre is a hell of a drug. As is “Genre.” More