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      In ‘The Bear,’ Abby Elliott Follows a New Recipe

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      The acclaimed kitchen hit has allowed Elliott, a comic actor from a famously funny family, to embrace her dramatic side.Abby Elliott knows her way around a comedy. A veteran of the Groundlings and the Upright Citizens Brigade, she joined “Saturday Night Live” at 21 and has since appeared in laugh-track-ready shows like “How I Met Your Mother” and “Odd Mom Out.” So in the spring of 2021, when FX approached her about a pilot for a new comedy, she was interested.“I kind of went into it like, Oh, should I do a voice?” Elliott said. “Or I could do a little catchphrase? That could be fun.”That show was “The Bear,” which returns for its third season on Thursday, on Hulu. Set largely in the fraught kitchen of a Chicago restaurant, it stars Jeremy Allen White as a troubled chef. Elliott appears as his forbearing sister. “The Bear” is a comedy only in the classical sense, in that it emphasizes human foibles and does not end in disaster. (Is a workplace rife with panic, money trouble and suicidal ideation not a disaster? Take it up with Emmys voters, who in January awarded it best comedy.) Otherwise it is dramatic, frenetic, extremely stressful.“I didn’t really quite understand how high the stakes would be,” she said.For what it’s worth, Elliott does consider “The Bear” a comedy. “It’s just like real life,” she said. “A lot of people find comedy in the darkness and the stress. It’s so relatable in that way.” But a funny thing happened on the way to the kitchen: “The Bear” made Elliott a dramatic actress. She does not do a voice.In “The Bear,” Elliott stars as the older sister of Carmy, the troubled chef played by Jeremy Allen White, left. (With Ayo Edebiri.)Chuck Hodes/FXI met Elliott, 37, at an Upper West Side cafe on a summer morning, the sun set to low broil, about a week before the Season 3 premiere. Though she lives in Los Angeles and works in Chicago, she had come to the East Coast for a family wedding and was enjoying a few days in the city afterward.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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      Russell Morash, ‘This Old House’ and ‘The French Chef’ Producer, Dies at 88

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      Hailed as a pioneer of D.I.Y. programming, he oversaw groundbreaking how-to shows on public television in the days before HGTV and YouTube.Russell Morash, a public television producer and director who helped turn a cookbook author, Julia Child, into America’s chef and transformed bathroom tile replacement and roof repair into addictive TV with “This Old House,” died on June 19 in Concord, Mass. He was 88.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his wife, Marian Morash, who said the cause was a brain hemorrhage.Hailed as the “father of how-to television” by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, which gave him a lifetime achievement Emmy Award in 2014, Mr. Morash helped usher in the D.I.Y. era with the enduring instructional shows that he helped create for the Boston PBS station WGBH.“The French Chef,” which debuted in 1963, with Mr. Morash as director and producer, and which became Ms. Child’s vehicle to mass-market fame, changed the way American’s thought about food with her distinctly American approach to French cooking. And “This Old House” proved an instant hit in 1979, and remains a ratings powerhouse after 45 years. As of last year, the show and a sister show, “Ask This Old House,” together had received 20 Emmy Awards and 119 Emmy nominations.Long before the Food Network, HGTV and other outlets created a how-to revolution on cable, Mr. Morash seized on the idea that craftspeople with no television experience could become stars of the small screen by sharing their insider tips and insights.“This Old House,” for example, made household names of Bob Vila, who previously ran a home renovation business, and Norm Abram, a carpenter whom Mr. Morash had originally hired to build a workshop in his backyard in Lexington, Mass.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 Culture Desk: Think ‘The Bear’ Is Overrated? Here’s What to Watch Instead.

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      Margaret Lyons and Elyssa Dudley and The highly anticipated third season of “The Bear” arrives this week. Our television critic Margaret Lyons and television editor Jeremy Egner sat down to talk about their love-hate relationship with the show and dissect their favorite episode. And if you can’t stand to hear even one more “Yes, Chef,” they have recommendations for shows to watch instead.On today’s episodeJeremy Egner, the television editor of The Times.Margaret Lyons, a television critic for The Times.Photo Illustration by The New York Times; Photo: Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesThe New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter. More

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      Keith Robinson on Having 2 Strokes and Making a Netflix Special

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      After two strokes, the stand-up has recovered enough to make a new special. If anything, his health crises have sharpened his humor.When the stand-up comic Keith Robinson was 10 years old growing up in Philadelphia, his father was stabbed to death in a bar. Sitting in the restaurant above the Comedy Cellar in New York on a recent weekday afternoon, Robinson explained what happened dispassionately, adding that the killer died soon after.“He got shot accidentally on purpose,” he told me, flashing a mischievous grin and saying nothing more.This is the kind of story that Robinson, 60, likes to tell, one with prickly uncomfortable humor and some tough-guy swagger. But Robinson is currently at the center of a different kind of dramatic narrative, less HBO, more Lifetime channel: He had two strokes in four years, robbing him temporarily of speech and mobility; then, against the odds, he recovered enough to return to the stage.Robinson has been a fixture at the Cellar for three decades, as much a part of the fabled club as the microphone and the hummus. A comedy Zelig, he did stand-up on “Star Search” in the 1980s; was a regular on the Comedy Central show “Tough Crowd,” inspired by the table at the Cellar where Robinson, Colin Quinn and others hung out and bickered; and even wrote on the aborted third season of “Chappelle’s Show.” He has been a mentor to many comics, especially stand-ups from Philadelphia, most famously Kevin Hart who produced Robinson’s last special a decade ago.When Amy Schumer heard Robinson’s difficulty speaking after his second stroke, in 2020, “I thought he was completely done,” she told me by phone. Now she is the executive producer of his new special, “Different Strokes” (Netflix), a jarringly unsentimental take on his health crisis that tells what could be a feel-good story with cranky irreverence.Onstage, Robinson says that facing death taught him this lesson: “If there’s someone you wanted to punch, punch them now.”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 Meme-ification of Anthony Bourdain

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      The beloved chef’s admirers have given him a distinctly modern kind of digital afterlife — at the center of fondly parodic jokes.After Anthony Boudain took his own life in June 2018, the internet was flooded with content memorializing him: obituaries, remembrances, bereft tweets by celebrities and regular citizens alike. But one post in particular foretold the chef’s afterlife on social media. Kyrell Grant, who tweeted as @imbobswaget, suggested that Bourdain had the charismatic aura of someone you might expect to be well endowed — except she said that using a pithy new catchphrase that would quickly enter the popular lexicon, garnering its own entry on Dictionary.com.That message on Twitter (now X) may have marked a transition in how people memorialized Bourdain. He was remembered, chiefly, as someone lovable and accessible: straight-talking, salt-of-the-earth, as thoughtful as he was devil-may-care. A real grief surrounded his loss, and he inspired the same types of posthumous adoration so many figures do, complete with words-of-wisdom quotes pasted over nature photos. But it soon became just as common to see posts playing on his drinking habits or salty comebacks; people began to use images of him in the same ways we use images of pop-culture characters like SpongeBob SquarePants or Homer Simpson. Anthony Bourdain became, in short, a meme.Anthony Bourdain in Hanoi, Vietnam, in 2016.William MebaneLast month a new Bourdain meme made the rounds. The chef had offered several oft-quoted bits of advice urging people to explore and enjoy the world: “If you’re 22, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel,” or, “Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.” But this new meme paired a pensive portrait of Bourdain with ever more parodic versions of that sentiment. “Go to a [expletive] restaurant. I don’t care what. Go to a [expletive] restaurant and order a [expletive] beer.” A less profane version prodded the reader to take a chance on a Hinge date: “Show her a picture of your cats. Show her two. Give her a tissue while she cries over her ex. Jump over a fence to impress her. Break your ankle. Never hear from her again.” Another tribute hits like whiskey left at a virtual grave: booty shorts emblazoned with the words I MISS ANTHONY BOURDAIN.If you too miss Anthony Bourdain, and you want to engage in serious communion with his oeuvre, there’s a vast trove of media to satiate your craving: 11 books, various essays and graphic novels, hours and hours of television. He participated in countless interviews, appeared on podcasts, played characters based on himself in TV guest appearances. You might dip into the subreddit r/Anthony Bourdain, which, with its 61,000 members, is in the top 2 percent of Reddit communities by size; that forum, far more earnest than X, is often engaged in forlorn discussion.But even in that hallowed space, memes cannot help infiltrating. Yet another variation on fake Bourdain advice recently emerged there, imploring the viewer to eat at Chili’s and get an appetizer combo. Some commenters expected moderators to delete the parody; after all, it didn’t “honor” the group’s subject. Others argued that they shouldn’t. Bourdain was a prodigious Twitter user and a funny one; his afterimage, in most minds, is as someone who could laugh at himself. Surely, people felt, he would have appreciated the lightness of a good Bourdain meme.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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      Book Review: ‘Cue the Sun!’ by Emily Nussbaum

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      CUE THE SUN! The Invention of Reality TV, by Emily NussbaumThere are times when Emily Nussbaum’s passionate, exquisitely told origin story, “Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV,” feels like something of a Trojan horse.Her expansive analysis begins with a simple proposition: an argument for why a genre that includes series like “The Dating Game” and “Alien Autopsy” deserves a book-length history in the first place.For Nussbaum, industry terms like “unscripted series” don’t quite encompass all the pop culture ground these shows negotiate. Instead, she settles on the phrase “dirty documentary” to cover a wide swath, describing a history that kicks off with the pioneering prank show “Candid Camera” in the 1940s, progresses to irreverent TV series like “The Gong Show” and “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” and eventually explodes into modern TV megahits like “Survivor,” “Big Brother” and “The Bachelor.”With muscular prose and an exacting eye for detail, Nussbaum, a staff writer for The New Yorker, outlines how such shows united high and low art into a potent concoction, ranging from “celebreality” soap opera to grand social experiments that explore romance, competition and ethics. Their secret sauce: placing people in contrived situations to spark entertaining, telegenic, revelatory behavior — often through conflict or embarrassment.“It’s cinéma vérité filmmaking that has been cut with commercial contaminants, like a street drug, in order to slash the price and intensify the effect,” Nussbaum writes. The result is “a powerful glimpse of human vulnerability, breaking taboos about what you were allowed to say or see.”The book culminates in one of America’s most persistent rule breakers, Donald Trump, documenting how the creator and executive producer Mark Burnett built NBC’s “The Apprentice” into a success that burnished the reputation of the playboy tycoon, resulting in “the most sinister outcome.”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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      Jay Johnston of ‘Bob’s Burgers’ to Plead Guilty in Jan. 6 Case

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      Jay Johnston, also known for his work on “Mr. Show with Bob and David,” was charged last year with participating in the riot at the Capitol. He is expected to plead guilty at a hearing on July 8.The actor Jay Johnston, who voiced Jimmy Pesto Sr. on the animated Fox sitcom “Bob’s Burgers,” has agreed to plead guilty in the federal case against him over his participation in the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.The authorities arrested Mr. Johnston, 55, in California last summer and charged him with four counts, including civil disorder and entering restricted grounds. Mr. Johnston agreed to plead guilty to a single count of civil disorder in exchange for the other charges being dropped, according to a person familiar with the case who spoke on condition of anonymity. A plea agreement hearing is scheduled for July 8 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.A civil disorder charge carries a maximum prison sentence of five years, or a fine or both.Mr. Johnston was a regular on the groundbreaking 1990s television comedy “Mr. Show with Bob and David” and later had recurring roles on “The Sarah Silverman Program” and “Arrested Development.” His movie credits included “Anchorman” and “Men in Black II.”He was quickly named by internet sleuths when the F.B.I. published photos of him at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in asocial media post asking for the public’s help identifying him.The authorities also identified Mr. Johnston in police body camera and security footage of him pushing against officers and helping rioters push through a tunnel entrance into the Capitol, according to an affidavit prepared by the F.B.I.He is seen taking photos of the crowd, signaling others to join the push and giving water to rioters, who used it to wash their eyes out, according to the affidavit.Additionally, three people who know Mr. Johnston identified him to investigators in the images at the Capitol. One of those people showed investigators a text message sent by Mr. Johnston in which he admitted to having been at the Capitol.“The news has presented it as an attack,” the message stated, according to court documents. “It actually wasn’t. Thought it kind of turned into that. It was a mess. Got maced and tear gassed and I found it quite untastic.”Mr. Johnston had also booked a round trip from Los Angeles to Washington D.C., with his departing flight on Jan, 4, 2021 and his return set for three days later, according to court documents.The Daily Beast, an online news site, reported in December 2021 that Mr. Johnston lost his job voicing Jimmy Pesto Sr. on “Bob’s Burgers” after allegations spread that he had been at the Capitol.Mr. Johnston is one of more than 1,500 people to be charged for actions related to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, according to the Justice Department. He is set to join the more than 800 people who have pleaded guilty to charges.Alan Feuer More

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      ‘Babylon Berlin’ Review: Dancing While the World Begins to Burn

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      The long-awaited fourth season of the cult-favorite German thriller takes place in 1931, with the Nazis not quite in power.Far from the eyes of Emmy voters or the digital gremlins compiling streaming Top 10 lists, there is a series — a German period drama, of all things — that a small core of aficionados would argue is the world’s best television show.Some of their fondness may have to do with absence. It has been more than four years since a new season of “Babylon Berlin” became available in the United States. And the first three seasons, which resided formerly on Netflix, moved this year to MHz Choice, a boutique streamer of international series and films whose (unreported) subscription figures would probably constitute a good morning’s uptick for Netflix.So if you are part of the cult — tracking the right subreddit, commiserating with a Facebook friend group of the requisite sophistication — it is a very big deal that the 12-episode fourth season of “Babylon Berlin,” shown in Germany in 2022, is finally premiering on MHz Choice in the United States on Tuesday. (To answer the immediate questions: $7.99 a month, seven-day free trial, and the full season will be up by July 30.)Based on historical mystery novels by the German writer Volker Kutscher, the show is a sleek, louchely sexy blend of police procedural, love story, Freudian melodrama and expensively rendered costume epic. All of the elements (with the occasional exception of the heavy psychological symbolism) are juggled with finesse by the show’s creator-writer-directors, Achim von Borries, Henk Handloegten and Tom Tykwer. (Bettine von Borries and Khyana el Bitar are also credited as writers in Season 4.)The balls stay in the air with the mesmerizing rhythm of one of the cabaret acts at the show’s fictional nightclub, Moka Efti; the effect can be, to use the favorite descriptor among “Babylon Berlin” fans, addictive. The series — and the fourth season in particular, which has a story line involving the gathering of Berlin’s criminal gangs — has been compared to “M,” the great 1931 thriller by the German director Fritz Lang. But a better comparison would be to Lang silents like “Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler” and “Spies,” intricately assembled thrillers that are some of the most deluxe entertainments ever put on film.It helps, of course, that the place and time the show inhabits are Berlin in the Weimar era of the 1920s and early ’30s, a ready-made backdrop of artistic, cultural and sexual ferment in a city headed toward political and social catastrophe. The action hopscotches from police labs to the soundstages of expressionist films, from munitions factories to beer halls, from baronial manors to squalid tenements, with a studious devotion to the quality and evocativeness of costumes, sets and locations.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