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      Late Night Roasts New York Mayor Eric Adams Over His Indictment

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      Jimmy Fallon joked that it’s “always fun when the city mimics the exact plot of a Batman movie.”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.You Never Forget Your FirstNew York City Mayor Eric Adams has been indicted on five federal charges of bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations.“Yeah, it’s always fun when the city mimics the exact plot of a Batman movie,” Jimmy Fallon said on Thursday.“Yep, Adams is the first sitting mayor of New York City to be indicted. It’s shocking. When Rudy Giuliani heard that, he was, like, ‘That can’t be right.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Well, it turns out Eric Adams was right — crime is way up in New York City.” — SETH MEYERS“Imagine having to call Rudy to ask, ‘You never got indicted as mayor — what’s your secret?’” — SETH MEYERS“I’ll bet he’s really regretting holding that press conference with a trash can full of shredded evidence.” — SETH MEYERS“Can someone check if there’s bottle service at Rikers?” — DESI LYDICThe Punchiest Punchlines (More Eric Adams Edition)“New York Mayor Eric Adams was indicted yesterday on federal criminal charges, and that distant laughter you hear is coming from every rat in New York City: ‘[imitating rat] You thought you was gonna take us out? Now what, wise guy?’” — SETH MEYERS“Fellow Democrats are calling on him to resign, whereas Republicans are urging him to run for governor of North Carolina.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“That’s right, Eric Adams was indicted yesterday on federal criminal charges. Oh, please let his little robot cop do the arrest. It’ll be like when Allison Williams realized she shouldn’t have built M3gan.” — SETH MEYERS“Now, to be fair, Adams is, of course, innocent until proven guilty — although it would be a lot easier to believe he wasn’t doing crimes if he didn’t dress like a gangster from ‘Guys & Dolls.’” — DESI LYDIC“It’s a sad day in New York City when foreign nations are bribing the mayor to rush permits. That is the mob’s job, OK? Those should be American bribes!” — DESI LYDICThe Bits Worth WatchingStephen Colbert harmonized with the country singer Chris Stapleton on Thursday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This Out“We really did consider each other brother and sister, even though I might have had a small crush on her as well, which was weird,” John Francis Daley said of his relationship with Linda Cardellini.Chris Haston/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal, via Getty ImagesPaul Feig, Judd Apatow, and several cast and crew members reflect on the sleeper hit status of “Freaks and Geeks” as the show celebrates its 25th anniversary. More

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      ‘The Queen of the Villains’ Is a Complex Japanese Wrestling Drama

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      The five-part Netflix series tells the story of a female wrestler in the 1980s who might have gone a little too deep into character.Yuriyan Retriever stars as Dump Matsumoto in “The Queen of the Villains.”NetflixDump Matsumoto was a reviled — and thus beloved — heel in the All Japan Women’s Pro-Wrestling league in the 1980s. “The Queen of the Villains” (on Netflix, in Japanese with subtitles, or dubbed) is a colorful five-part scripted drama based loosely on her young life and early career, and it traces both her rise and the increasing popularity of women’s pro wrestling in Japan at the time.The show lands more as a boppy superhero origin story than as an earnest biopic: It is at times bright and exaggerated, a tidy tale about messy people and an absolute bonanza of retro tracksuits. Yuriyan Retriever stars as Dump, though for much of the show she is simply Kaoru, a young woman with nowhere to put all her anger and ambition. Her father is an abusive drunk who drifts in and out of her life, stealing from her mother and belittling her and her younger sister. As a tween, she learns that her father has a secret other family — including another daughter also named Kaoru. It’s enough to make a good girl go bad.Our Kaoru falls in love with wrestling, with being encouraged to be strong, tough and violent. A grim determination to simply keep going is as powerful as any suplex, and the ring is one of few places where being a larger woman is an asset.But it isn’t always easy for Kaoru to keep track of what’s real and what’s just for show, and as she dissolves into her Dump persona, some other wrestlers recoil. It’s all a fun sisterhood until Dump brings a chain into the ring and starts choking people. And few friendships survive repeated stabbings in the scalp with a fork.“Queen” itself reflects Dump’s ambiguous realities. We’re never sure how cranked up the artifice of it all is, how much of a match is choreographed, the degree to which the wrestlers agree on what is fake. Dump wrestles in a few “hair matches,” in which the winner cuts the loser’s hair, but she also holds a colleague down and shaves her hair outside the ring, at their dorm. Inept, indifferent management leaves the wrestlers to establish standards on their own. But they don’t always agree on what’s safe and acceptable, or on whose star-making moves should get priority.Appropriately for a show about pro wrestling, “Queen” feels both illicit and wholesome. Retriever’s performance captures Kaoru’s innocence and ferocity — the turmoil of being proud of and afraid of what’s inside you. More

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      ‘The Rings of Power’ Season 2, Episode 7 Recap: ‘Light Endures’

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      Something is wrong with the candles in Celebrimbor’s workshop. Things are even worse outside.Season 2, Episode 7: ‘Doomed to Die’At the start of this “Rings of Power” season, Sauron — still in his Halbrand form — allowed himself to be captured in Mordor so that he could manipulate Adar into marching his orc armies toward Eregion. Sauron then arrived in Eregion well ahead of the orcs, transformed into Annatar and began manipulating Celebrimbor into forging rings for dwarfs and men, tainted with Sauron’s corrupting influence.This has been Sauron’s big plan in Season 2; and in the penultimate episode, it’s all starting to come to fruition. Throughout this episode, a battle rages outside Eregion, while inside Annatar pushes Celebrimbor to complete the rings — at the cost of the elf-lord’s reputation and sanity. Sauron is getting one step closer to his ultimate goal: total control of Middle-earth and what he promises will be “a perfect and lasting peace,” very different from the cruel rule of Morgoth.But does he actually believe his own pitch? Or is he more like some politicians, promising his future constituents whatever he has to in order to acquire enough power to never have to listen to them again? These are not idle questions. Whether Season 2 ends in hope or hopelessness will depend largely on whether Sauron can win enough small victories to tip the balance in his favor, forever.These are the stakes in an eventful and action-packed Episode 7. Here are four takeaways and observations:Celebrimbor sees the light … and then the darkAt the end of last week’s episode, we saw how Annatar had cast a spell to hide from Celebrimbor the reality of what Adar’s armies were doing to Eregion. This week, in a few remarkable scenes — notably and disturbingly quieter than the combat throughout the rest of the episode — we see more of how this illusion looks from Celebrimbor’s perspective as he works on the next set of rings, on what appears to be a lovely day.But there are glitches in the mirage. Celebrimbor keeps seeing the same mouse scurrying in the same way across the same stretch of floor. The gems in his hammer come and go. His candles never burn all the way down. Sometimes he catches a reflection of himself that shows how haggard he actually looks.Finally, Celebrimbor confronts Annatar and accuses of him of malicious trickery, howling, “No emissary of the Valar would do this!” He smashes a window, revealing the true horrors happening outside. But it’s too late. Annatar has effectively seized control of Eregion, having convinced the elves that Celebrimbor has become dangerously delusional. The city is already in ruins. And the worst is yet to come.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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      When the Devoted Wife Becomes a Winning Brand

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      “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” the new Hulu reality show, centers on a clique of influencers in Provo, Utah. In their community, they are steered at young ages into marriages and pregnancies. But on TikTok, they converge into a #MomTok squad, executing coordinated dances in crop tops amid beige McMansions as they rack up followers and brand deals. Now they’ve been upgraded to reality television stars, a cast of frenemies who act out mean-girl scenes and hunt for loopholes in the strict codes of their church.It’s significant that the show identifies these women first as wives, not as influencers. They are professional content creators and, in some cases, family breadwinners. It is their social media popularity that landed them the show, not their unexceptional husbands. Several cast members are actually divorced.The “Mormon Wives” join an extended wife universe — see also: Bravo’s chaotic “Real Housewives” and Instagram’s ethereal tradwives — where the term “wife” no longer strictly refers to a woman’s marital status. “Wife” is a brand. In “Mormon Wives,” it suggests a woman whose public identity is defined by her relationship to the home. A woman whose worth is still measured by her proximity to the patriarchy, even as she claims that her profitable TikTok presence challenges it.These wife-themed shows and tradwife social-media accounts might qualify as simple brain-bleaching distractions, were they not proliferating during this particular presidential election season. The Trump campaign and some of its allies have repeatedly suggested that a woman’s domestic contributions are her highest calling — so much so that they have cast motherhood as a prerequisite for her participation in work outside the home. If a woman hopes to claim a role in public life, she must play the wife and mother everywhere that she goes.In comments from three years ago that resurfaced recently, Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, complained of “childless cat ladies” in business and politics, and railed against the “leaders of the left,” like the American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, whom he called “people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children.” (Like Kamala Harris, Weingarten is a stepmother.) Last week, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas appeared alongside Donald J. Trump and suggested that because Harris has not birthed children, she has acquired a character defect unbecoming of a leader: “My kids keep me humble,” Sanders said. “Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.”Meanwhile, since Elon Musk took over Twitter, rebranded it X and transformed it into what Charlie Warzel of The Atlantic has called “a right-wing echo chamber,” my feed has featured commentary about how infant formula is poison, day care causes mental illness and children ought to be home schooled or “unschooled” by devoted mothers. Instagram and TikTok supply montages of fantasy housewives: white women in pastoral settings, wearing aprons and kerchiefs, kissing their husbands, rubbing their baby bumps and proselytizing about the benefits of beef tallow.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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      ‘Nobody Wants This’ Review: Resuscitating the Rom-Com

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      Kristen Bell and Adam Brody star in a Netflix series whose familiar rhythms and punchlines are exactly the point.Recent high-profile attempts by streamers to resuscitate the feature-length romantic comedy with brand-name performers like Anne Hathaway, Nicole Kidman and Brooke Shields have all had the same problem: They were awful. The dead touch of cringey mediocrity could be felt immediately. You could hear the flatline alarm in the background.Primed for disappointment by those films, you feel the difference right away with the new Netflix romantic comedy series “Nobody Wants This”: It’s not bad. The jokes land. The story hums along. The people in it are real-ish — they may do cartoonish things, but they are not cartoons. Kristen Bell and Adam Brody, who play the central couple, are charming and work well together. Care has been taken in the depiction of a swoony, twilight Los Angeles that calls back to an indeterminate earlier era of the rom-com — the ’70s, the ’90s, somewhere in there.Created by Erin Foster, an actress and writer and a daughter of the music-business titan David Foster, “Nobody Wants This” (premiering Thursday) succeeds by keeping faith with its genre. It is not a nostalgic curio — the characters and the rhythms of their interactions feel up-to-date, at least by mainstream Hollywood standards — but there is a comforting continuity with things you have seen and liked before. Familiar moves are executed with confidence and a certain amount of style.That smooth rom-com fluency, and the feeling it inspires that here is something we have been missing, is the most notable thing about “Nobody Wants This.” The story, inspired by Foster’s own experiences as a podcaster and as a participant in the Los Angeles dating scene, is serviceable, largely rom-com standard but with a few wrinkles.Bell plays Joanne, who works a bad-girl, more-sarcastic-than-thou persona while apparently making a living doing a sex-and-relationships podcast with her sister, Morgan (Justine Lupe). At a dinner party, Joanne, who is not in any way religious, meets cute with her temperamental opposite, Brody’s Noah, a serious, soulful, inordinately considerate guy who happens to be a rabbi. (He is sometimes called the hot rabbi, reminiscent of Andrew Scott’s hot priest in “Fleabag.”)They are completely wrong for each other, as everyone else in the show loudly and insistently tells them (hence the title). Morgan, a serial dater herself, is anti-Noah because she is afraid of losing her sister, not to mention being one-upped by her; adding a layer of complication, Morgan is also convinced that if Joanne finds happiness, it will ruin their podcast.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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      ‘Freaks and Geeks,’ TV’s Least Likely to Succeed, Won by Losing

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      The high school cringe comedy was the undersung member of the Class of ’99. But its influence is everywhere.By the 25th reunion, you get a good sense of how time has treated a graduating class. This is certainly true of TV’s Class of ’99.There, in the center of the room, is “The West Wing,” that popular class president among dramas, holding court and reliving its glory days (even if some of its youthful luster is gone). There’s “The Sopranos,” the brooding film student that went on to big things, still exuding a sense of artsy danger. There are “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and “Family Guy,” still turning out new episodes, like classmates who stuck around and joined the faculty.And who’s that off in the corner? Oh, right: “Freaks and Geeks.” Weird, funny kid, never quite fit in. Used to hang out on the smoking patio, played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons. Whatever happened to them?In its freshman (and only) year, “Freaks and Geeks” spent a lot of time getting stuffed into lockers (or, at least, stuffed by NBC into undesirable time slots). An offbeat teen series about burnouts and nerds at a Michigan high school in the 1980-81 school year, it arrived on Sept. 25, 1999, with the praise of critics and a niche sensibility.That combo, in the days of mass network TV, tended to mark a new series as Least Likely to Succeed, and NBC axed it midyear. The complete season aired in 2000 on Fox Family Channel, a cable destination one step up from a test pattern.But like the homeroom wallflower who blossomed late, this bittersweetly brilliant one-season wonder aged well, into something influential, groundbreaking and — dare I say it — cool.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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      ‘Freaks and Geeks’ at 25: ‘It Was Slipping Away the Entire Time’

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      To twist a famous line from Jean Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game,” the awful — and hilarious — thing about high school is this: Everyone has their reasons. All adolescents are worlds unto themselves, whether they’re jerks, jocks, stoners, smart kids or underachievers. Each is an entire cosmos of yearning and hurt trapped inside a juvenile body.Perhaps no television show has ever done as much to document those reasons as the short-lived NBC series “Freaks and Geeks.” Set in Michigan in 1980, it followed the misadventures of the siblings Lindsay and Sam Weir (Linda Cardellini and John Francis Daley) and their respective crews of burnouts and dweebs.Afflicted with poor ratings, “Freaks and Geeks” was canceled after just one season. But it has lived on, first in fans’ memories and then on DVD and streaming, to be discovered by new viewers who embraced its zits-and-all depiction of adolescence and were thrilled by early sightings of future stars like Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jason Segel and Busy Philipps.“Freaks and Geeks” premiered on Sept. 25, 1999. On the occasion of its 25th anniversary, The New York Times spoke with veterans of the show, including the creator Paul Feig and the writer-executive producer Judd Apatow, about an experience that, like adolescence, was sometimes painful and embarrassing, but was nonetheless imbued with a kind of magic. These are edited excerpts from the interviews.‘We were a bunch of nerds.’A writer-director has many memories about the agonies of adolescence and decides to make a TV show about them.Paul Feig, left, based “Freaks and Geeks” on his adolescent experiences, and Judd Apatow, right, quickly signed on to produce.Jason Merritt/Getty ImagesWe 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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      5 Books to Read After Watching ‘Nobody Wants This’

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      These romance novels feature cross-cultural connections, charming banter and plenty of heart.There’s a long history in Hollywood of cross-cultural rom-coms — films and TV shows such as “Keeping the Faith,” “Bend It Like Beckham” and “The Nanny” that mine clashing traditions to find hilarity and heart. Colliding heritages naturally lend themselves to moments of comedic gold: Just think of a nonplused Andrea Martin in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” reassuring John Corbett’s vegetarian leading man, “That’s OK: I make lamb.”The series “Nobody Wants This,” which premieres on Netflix on Sept. 26, is the latest entry into this oeuvre. Joanne (Kristen Bell) is an agnostic, sex-positive podcast host with a history of toxic relationships; Noah (Adam Brody — Mr. Chrismukkah himself, no stranger to interfaith high jinks) is a pot-smoking rabbi with a fiercely protective mother who spends his free time playing basketball with the Matzah Ballers. Their story is as much about the universal awkwardness and hilarity of a budding romance as it is about the complex differences in their worldviews.Interfaith and cross-cultural romances are nothing new in the literary sense, either. If you’re craving more stories about clever people drawn together by chemistry and circumstance who also face the difficult work of navigating disparate backgrounds, these romance novels have got you covered.I think hot rabbis may be the new hot priestsThe Intimacy ExperimentBy Rosie DananNaomi Grant is a bisexual adult film actress with a master’s degree who runs a successful online sex-ed platform; she wants to expand into live seminars, but she’s having trouble finding an institution to support her. Enter Ethan Cohen, an unconventional (and very attractive) straight rabbi who invites Naomi to teach a course on human sexuality and relationships at his synagogue — a gamble aimed at reaching more young Jewish people and saving his dwindling congregation.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