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      ‘The Gilded Age’ Enriches Its Portrait of Black High Society

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      The air felt different as I sat across from Phylicia Rashad, Audra McDonald and Denée Benton. I was lifted simply by being with these women, three generations of Broadway royalty. (Of course, as the former Clair Huxtable, Rashad qualifies as TV royalty as well.)Now they are together on “The Gilded Age,” the HBO drama about late 19th-century New York City and the old-money elites, arrivistes and workers who live and clash there.I was initially worried about the show when it debuted in 2022. As a long-term fan of the creator Julian Fellowes’s more homogenous hit “Downton Abbey,” I feared this American counterpart would similarly overlook the racial dynamics of its era. But I was pleasantly surprised by the nuance of the character Peggy Scott (Benton), an aspiring journalist and secretary for Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) and a member of Brooklyn’s Black upper-middle class.An early version of Peggy had the character posing as a domestic servant to gain access to Agnes. But Benton and the show’s historical consultant, Erica Armstrong Dunbar, pushed for a more multifaceted exploration of the lives of Black New Yorkers, who often interacted with Manhattan’s white elite even as they lived separately. (Dunbar and I were colleagues at Rutgers University.)This season, “The Gilded Age” has its most diverse and in-depth portrayal of Black high society yet, often pitting Peggy’s mother, Dorothy (McDonald), against the aristocratic Elizabeth Kirkland (Rashad), who arrived on the show on Sunday. Like other wealthy mothers on this show, Elizabeth spends most of her time trying to control the marital fate of her children and discriminating against other families, like the Scotts, that she believes to be socially inferior.Audra McDonald, left, and Denée Benton in the new season of “The Gilded Age,” which includes the show’s most in-depth portrayal of Black high society yet.Karolina Wojtasik/HBOWe 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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      These Americans Went Looking the Britain Found Onscreen. They Found a Different Story.

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      Like the lead character of “Too Much,” they moved across the Atlantic with visions of Jane Austen and Merchant Ivory. The reality was a little less dreamy.In the first episode of “Too Much,” Lena Dunham’s loosely autobiographical new series that premieres on Netflix this Thursday, Jessica (played by Megan Stalter) arrives in London from Great Neck, N.Y. She is subletting a flat in the fictional Hoxton Grove Estate, and expects to find verdant grounds surrounding a stately building, like something one might find in a Merchant Ivory production.“Good luck with that, love,” the cabdriver laughs as he drops her outside an apartment block with peeling paint. After all, the Britain we see onscreen — in period dramas or in modern Richard Curtis romantic comedies like “Notting Hill” — tends to emphasize a certain aspirational loveliness. It also tends to gloss over details — like the fact that “estate” can refer to both sprawling mansions and public housing.This well-established idealization means that when Jessica first meets Felix (Will Sharpe), an indie musician inspired by Ms. Dunham’s real-life indie musician husband, Luis Felber, he quickly hypothesizes her reasons for being in London: “Let me guess, you’re one of those ‘Love Actually’-loving girls?” he asks with a grin. “You’re on a pilgrimage?”Characters like William in “Notting Hill” (far left) and Mr. Darcy in “Pride and Prejudice” contribute to some Americans’ fantasies of British life, like Jessica’s in “Too Much.”From left; Alamy; Netflix; BBCWhile the British pilgrims fled to America’s shores about 400 years ago, Ms. Dunham, who moved to London in 2021, is one of the many Americans making the reverse journey today, seeking refuge in the coziness they have seen depicted onscreen or on the page. But as these Americans adjust to regional accents and codes of conduct, many are surprised by what they find. “It didn’t take long for me to understand some of the decay underneath the facade,” Ms. Dunham said in an email.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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      The ‘Sex and the City’ Resurgence Has a Secret Ingredient: Contempt

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      The show’s sequel, now in its third season, subjects beloved characters to a parade of humiliations. It’s oddly captivating.When I think of my childhood, and the moments that would have made it difficult for my parents to imagine I was anything other than a latent homosexual, I see myself sitting pretzel-style at the foot of an almond-colored couch while my mother and her three best friends drink martinis and watch “Sex and the City.” I was too taken with the show’s glamour and prurience to register the uncanny dynamic: Here were four cosmopolitan 30-something women, mostly single or divorced, convening to watch television’s foremost avatars of 30-something cosmopolitanism discuss the vagaries of sex and dating. I could not possibly have felt as “seen” by Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte as my mother and her girlfriends probably did — but I did think of these ladies as fairy godmothers of a sort, telegraphing a future where I too might gather over frothy cocktails at trendy Manhattan establishments to debate the merits of bisexuality or golden showers.More than two decades later, we are experiencing a “Sex and the City” resurgence. First came the premiere, late in 2021, of a limp postscript of a show called “And Just Like That …,” which is currently trudging through its third season. Then, last year, the original series arrived on Netflix, introducing the show to younger viewers, who took more to its screwball cadence than its bygone sense of glamour. “Sex and the City,” they found, was bizarrely suitable to the tongue-in-cheek conventions of internetspeak, and so the show has lately birthed a whole litany of memes. In almost all of them, the characters are treated as objects of amusement, not aspiration.One clever joke poked fun at Carrie’s tendency to listen to her friends’ predicaments and then respond with exasperating recapitulations of her own. Charlotte remarks on, say, the earthquake that hit New York City last year. Miranda, always smug, insists that the Richter scale is obsolete, while Samantha, always horny, wisecracks about a man who made her walls shake. And of course Carrie, whose pick-me solipsism has become a point of fascination for newcomers, declares that “Big is moving to Paris!” — wrenching the conversation back to the emotionally unavailable tycoon who would torture her for years before dying, unceremoniously, of a Peloton-induced heart attack.This is how we’ve all come to regard the ladies of “Sex and the City,” even those of us for whom they once represented some pinnacle of refinement: They now read like parodies of themselves, characters we regard with a sort of loving derision. It’s a testament not only to the comforting rhythms of the sitcom format but also to this show’s genuine achievements in characterization: No matter how much these women annoy or exasperate us, we know them so intimately that we can always imagine, with a reasonable degree of both accuracy and scorn, how each might react to any given topic.And this is what makes “And Just Like That …” such a strange and fascinating product: It is a reboot that feels, at times, openly hostile to its own source material and even to the characters themselves. It cannot seem to resist subjecting them to mounting humiliations, either in a clumsy effort to atone for the minor sin of the original’s tone-deafness or, perhaps, because viewers actually want to see beloved characters tormented this way.The characters register as lab rats in a sadistic experiment with camp and caricature.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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      How the Women of ‘Too Much’ Made Lena Dunham’s Rom-Com Just Right

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      When Lena Dunham moved to London in 2021, she had given up on love. “The rest of my life is just going to be about my family and my animals and my job,” she remembered telling herself.If you have seen Dunham’s previous work, which often skews anti-romantic, this will make a special kind of sense. In the six-season HBO series “Girls,” a generation-defining traumedy, Dunham, a writer, director and occasional actor, viewed love with a conjunctival eye — itchy, gritty, irritated.But love had not given up on Dunham. Just after her move, she met the musician Luis Felber. She didn’t anticipate anything serious. “I was seeing it as fleeting — it’s fun to hang out with a boy during the pandemic,” Dunham said on a stupidly beautiful June morning in New York. She was wrong. By the fall of that year, they were married.Soon, there were reports that Dunham and Felber were developing a show based on their relationship. That 10-episode show, “Too Much,” arrives on Netflix on July 10.“Too Much,” with Will Sharpe and Megan Stalter, was inspired by Lena Dunham’s own story of meeting her husband, Luis Felber.NetflixIs “Too Much” a romantic comedy? Yes. Is it inspired by Lena’s own story? Sure. But “Too Much” wants more — inclusivity, expansiveness, a reconsideration of the love stories we tell and about whom we tell them.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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      Ronny Chieng on Trump’s Nobel Nomination: Consider the Source

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      An endorsement from Benjamin Netanyahu for the Nobel Peace Prize is like “a Husband of the Year nomination from O.J. Simpson,” the “Daily Show” host said.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.More War Than PeaceDuring a dinner on Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel presented President Donald Trump with his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.On Tuesday’s “Daily Show,” Ronny Chieng referred to Netanyahu as “kosher Thanos.” Among world leaders who meet with President Trump and want to “butter him up with a special surprise — well, Bibi went all out,” Chieng said.“Yes, a Peace Prize nomination from Netanyahu is very meaningful — right up there with a Husband of the Year nomination from O.J. Simpson.” — RONNY CHIENG“But Mr. Netanyahu, let me tell you something: If you think you can get Trump to keep sending military aid to Israel by sucking up to him, well, guess what? You can expect that money in your bank account by close of business.” — RONNY CHIENGThe Punchiest Punchlines (Vacation From the Vatican Edition)“Now, this is the time of year when everyone’s on summer break, and that includes the Pope. Yes, for real. Pope Leo is reportedly taking a six-week vacation. Yes. Hold on, he’s taking six weeks off? Who the hell does he think he is, Jimmy Kimmel?” — ANTHONY ANDERSON, guest host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live”“Seriously. The dude wears robes and slippers all day. He’s got no wife, no kids — his whole goddamn life is a vacation. Oh, excuse me, Father. Your whole damn life is a vacation.” — ANTHONY ANDERSON“And, by the way, Father, starting Friday, I will be available if you need someone to guest-pope.” — ANTHONY ANDERSONThe Bits Worth WatchingOn Tuesday’s “Daily Show,” The New Yorker’s executive editor, Michael Luo, spoke with Ronny Chieng about the hidden history of Chinese Americans, detailed in his new book, “Strangers in the Land.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightThe WNBA superstar Candace Parker will discuss her new book, “The Can-Do Mindset,” on Wednesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutMs. Jackson if you’re nasty.Bonnie Schiffman/Getty ImagesThe Amplifier revisited Janet Jackson’s lover-girl era with six of her most sensual songs. More

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      ‘Such Brave Girls’ Is an Audacious and Hilarious British Comedy

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      For fans of “Peep Show” and Sharon Horgan, this warped series about a dysfunctional family is in some ways a satire of the trauma comedy.The blistering British comedy “Such Brave Girls,” on Hulu, centers on a dysfunctional family and features many of the archetypes one sees in a sadcom. But instead of slow poignancy and personal growth, “Brave” is all about feral, filthy awfulness. It’s hilarious and electrified, perfectly deranged.Kat Sadler created and stars in the show as Josie, the suicidal, closeted-but-also-not older sister whose biggest turn-on is being fawned over for how damaged she is. Billie (Lizzie Davidson, Sadler’s real-life sister) is the boy-crazy — craaaaazy — golden child who sexts during her abortion. Josie and Billie always seem to get what the other wants: Josie has no use for the doting, useless man who pledges his love to her, whereas Billie would give anything to have her dirtbag show her a molecule of loyalty. Josie can barely interact with women she crushes on while Billie is unfazed by a brief fling with her doppelgänger and romantic rival. Their mom, Deb (Louise Brealey), openly loathes Josie when she isn’t too busy fawning over her weird widower boyfriend, Dev (Paul Bazely). Family!The show is not for the prudish. But the vulgarity is part of the fun, part of the show’s amped-up id. The characters here do and say cartoonishly monstrous things, especially about sex and intimacy, but there is truth inside their savagery. The desperation to be loved and understood can indeed outpace reason, so while the behaviors here are outlandish, they’re not nonsense. The naughtiness is rich and coherent.In some ways, “Brave” is a satire of the trauma comedy, and it uses similar beats and moments but does so in festive, warped ways. A doomed family camping trip goes, of course, poorly, and a tiff leads to Deb kicking a tree and screaming: “We! Do! Not! Need! Catharsis!” The sisters gas each other up but with some of the worst advice imaginable, and the self-actualization moments come out tangled and grotesque.The raunch and audacity remind me of “Peep Show” and of the Sharon Horgan comedy “Pulling.” And “Brave” shares with “Fleabag” that “Oh dang, this show is really going for it!” dazzle. To its huge credit, “Brave” tenaciously resists sweetness, and yet its fallen world and all of its ostensibly unlikable characters add up to something pretty easy to love.Both six-episode seasons are available now. More

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      Jon Stewart Thinks Congress Is Basically Pro Wrestling Without the Fun

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      The “Daily Show” host said the drama around President Trump’s big policy bill was about as authentic as a World Wrestling Entertainment match.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.ShenanigansPresident Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” became law last week while most late-night hosts were off for the holiday.On Monday’s “Daily Show,” Jon Stewart dismissed the drama around the domestic policy bill as Washington theater. He accused lawmakers and the news media of “fake narrative shenanigans and hypocrisies and fecklessness,” comparing the Republicans who denounced the bill (before voting for it) to pro wrestlers: “The only difference between that vote and wrestling is that wrestling is fun and takes actual courage.”“Ooh! It surprisingly got through! Like every other [expletive] thing Trump has wanted, from Qatari jet bribes to Epstein file secrecy to extorted media conglomerate protection money.” — JON STEWART“Now, there’s a lot of ways that we can walk through this tax and spending bill and how this bill encapsulates a ton of general Washington [expletive]. For instance, political hypocrisy. This bill was 970 pages. They jammed it through with barely any time to read it.” — JON STEWART“When it happens to them, it’s ‘shoving it down their throat. It’s an outrage!’ But when it’s for Republicans, it’s just, ‘Come on, America, relax the glottis, breathe through your nose.’” — JON STEWARTThe Punchiest Punchlines (July 4 Edition)“Joe Biden was seen struggling to set up a beach chair on July 4 weekend. It’s not his fault — he’s not used to a seat without a hole in the center of it.” — GREG GUTFELD“On the Fourth of July, Kamala Harris posted ‘Things are probably going to get worse before they get better.’ That’s also how she starts her speaking engagements.” — GREG GUTFELD“Yes, U.F.C., which stands for ‘U [Expletive] Crazy’?” — ANTHONY ANDERSON, guest host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” on Trump wanting a July 4 U.F.C. fight at the White House next year“I actually agree with the president. There should be a U.F.C. fight at the White House, between Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Right? It’ll be Golf Clubber Lang versus the Ketamine Machine.” — ANTHONY ANDERSONThe Bits Worth WatchingBlack Americans were asked to share the whitest thing about themselves on Monday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightCedric the Entertainer will reunite with Anthony Anderson on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutOzzy Osbourne onstage in Birmingham, England, on Saturday.Ross HalfinAt 76, Ozzy Osbourne officially retired from Black Sabbath with a farewell performance in his hometown. More

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      How a Show About Truly Terrible People Became the Defining American Sitcom

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      As one of my last acts as a suburban teenager, about two weeks before moving out of my parents’ house for college, I watched the pilot episode of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” in my family’s living room. This would have been Aug. 4, 2005, a Thursday. A comedy about a group of malignant narcissists who own a trashy bar in Philly called Paddy’s, “Always Sunny” was, from Day 1, offensive even for an era in which offensiveness was so ingrained in our culture that it went largely unremarked upon. George W. Bush was seven months into his second term as president. You could still smoke in most bars. If you watched cable TV past 9 p.m., you would reliably see long infomercials for direct-to-video series like “Girls Gone Wild” or “Bumfights,” both of which were somehow less offensive than “Entourage,” then considered one of the smarter shows on HBO.Listen to this article, read by Robert PetkoffMy high school friends and I had all just received .edu email addresses from the colleges that accepted us, which was a prerequisite for joining a new social network called The Facebook, a website founded only the year before by a computer-science major in his Harvard dorm room; he made it shortly after creating another website, Facemash, a campuswide ranking system of female coeds by order of attractiveness. In a parking lot at NBC’s studios in Los Angeles, Donald Trump, who was the host of a reality show on that network, spoke into a hot mic during an interview with a host from “Access Hollywood” — who was George W. Bush’s first cousin — and remarked upon how he treats the women he encounters: “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”You can do anything. That was just how it was then. “Always Sunny” stood out to me immediately as the greatest sendup of a time when the bad guys kept getting away with it and the ignorance of an American culture that was happy to let them. Being so young, I didn’t know at the time that this would remain an evergreen topic 20 years later. Nor did I realize that “Always Sunny” would become — as it begins its 17th season this month on FX — the longest-running live-action sitcom ever to appear on television by a fairly wide margin.Our very method of viewing TV has changed immeasurably and continually over this period. Being a chronic “Always Sunny” watcher, I can track time, in a big-picture sort of way, by recalling how I viewed certain seasons of the show — basic cable, DVD box set, pirated online, streaming. And I’ll forever remember the spring of 2025 as the year I interviewed the show’s main cast over a series of Zoom calls and watched its 17th season in an early-look unfinished copy somewhere deep in the bowels of the Disney corporation’s online library. Through everything — mergers, acquisitions, wars, a life-altering pandemic, seismic technological and ideological shifts — the show remained itself, on the same network, using the same sets and writers and production staff, with the same actors doing the same characters.The series creator, Rob McElhenney, plays Mac, a closeted and deeply insecure man who serves, poorly and unnecessarily (because there are rarely any customers), as the bar’s bouncer. Last month, McElhenney legally changed his last name to Mac. But Charlie Day has always shared a name with his character, Charlie, the bar’s janitor, an illiterate stalker who suffers from what the DSM-5 has labeled pica, or the compulsive consumption of inedible objects, especially viscous chemicals like paint, bleach and suntan lotion. Working behind the bar are Dee (Kaitlin Olson), a failed actress with no self-worth, and her fraternal twin, Dennis (Glenn Howerton), who is the closest thing the group has to a true leader but is also a Ted Bundy-esque tyrant who keeps a kill kit in a hidden compartment in the trunk of his car. Worst of all is Dennis and Dee’s father, Frank, played against type by national treasure Danny DeVito, who is a little bit of all of the above. In his first appearance on the show, as part of a story line in which all members of the main cast fake being disabled, each for a distinctly idiotic reason, he pretends to be paraplegic in order to receive special treatment from the dancers at a strip club.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