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      Carol Duvall, a TV Queen of Crafting, Dies at 97

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      On Michigan television and then on national shows, she showed viewers how to make all sorts of decorative and practical items. The responses she got could be moving.Carol Duvall looked at the plastic foam trays that meat or vegetables come packaged in and saw picture frames. To her, “rock, paper, scissors” wasn’t a children’s game; it was a list of what you needed to make a personalized gift for someone to place on the mantel or in the garden.Ms. Duvall encouraged countless television viewers to make their own picture frames, greeting cards, place mats, jewelry, Christmas decorations and more, first in Michigan and then nationally through programs on ABC and HGTV.Newspapers called her the queen, or sometimes the empress, of crafting. Some of her fans called her a savior of sorts, the person who showed them a skill that they turned into a business, or who gave them something constructive to do while going through chemotherapy or recovering from surgery.Ms. Duvall, host of “The Carol Duvall Show,” which ran on HGTV for more than a decade, died on July 31 in Traverse City, Mich. She was 97.Rita Ann Doerr, who had been married to her son Michael and accompanied her to many public appearances, confirmed her death, at an assisted living complex that had been Ms. Duvall’s home for several years.Ms. Duvall was on television from the medium’s earliest days. She told The Detroit Free Press in 1997 that in 1951, living in Grand Rapids, Mich., she turned up at a tryout for WOOD-TV, Michigan’s first television station outside of Detroit, and won a spot on a show for children called “Jiffy Carnival.” She said that her father was surprised when she showed him her first paycheck, for $5 — he had thought that she would have to pay the station to be on television.The company that owned the station also owned a radio station, and Ms. Duvall was soon a frequent presence on both. In 1962 she moved to WWJ-TV of Detroit, where she hosted “Living,” a morning show. Two years later the station asked her to fill a five-minute gap between a travel show and the evening news, but didn’t give her much guidance.“I did anything I could possibly think of” to fill the time, she told the Knight Ridder News Service in 1999. She would talk about books she’d read or movies she’d seen. And occasionally, she would try to demonstrate some crafty thing she remembered from childhood, like making a yarn doll.“Every time I did something like that, I just got tremendous response,” she said. “So I started making stuff. I didn’t know what I was doing.”“I’m not a crafter who got on television,” she added. “I’m a television person who got into crafting.”She did those bits for 14 years, then retired, or so she thought. In 1988, when ABC was starting a daytime show called “Home,” a producer remembered her and persuaded her to do crafting segments on the new show, which aired until 1993.In 1994 she joined the new HGTV network with “The Carol Duvall Show,” which lasted more than 1,000 episodes, winding down in 2005. She was also featured regularly on the Lifetime Network shows “Our Home” and “Handmade by Design.”The crafts she demonstrated were things anyone could do. She began a picture frame project by cutting the bottom from a plastic foam tray and covering it in colorful fabric. A homemade greeting card was livened up with a butterfly design complete with bits of wire for antenna. Her 2007 book, “Paper Crafting With Carol Duvall,” includes a “Rock, Paper, Scissors” chapter: Find a smooth stone, cut up some colorful paper or family pictures with scissors, and glue them on the rock.Her show often featured guest crafters with a particular expertise — in stenciling, for instance, or coffee can creations.“Her interview skills brought out the very best in every guest artist and designer that appeared on the show,” Cherryl Greene, her assistant and producer on many shows, said in a written tribute.In the days before Etsy, Ms. Duvall’s HGTV show helped spread the gospel of crafting.“What she’s done is bring crafting into the realm of the mainstream,” Don Meyer, a spokesman for the Hobby Industry Association, told The Stuart News of Florida in 2003 on the occasion of her HGTV show’s 1,000th episode.In interviews over the years, Ms. Duvall told of fans who said they had built businesses that enabled them to feed their families based on craft-making they had learned from her show. She was especially moved, she said, by fans who told her that her shows had helped them while recovering from illness or surgery, or had simply given them the confidence that they could do something creative.Ms. Duvall’s appeal was that viewers could identify with her, Ms. Doerr said, especially when she bungled something on the air and cracked her and her guest up.“She was so approachable and natural,” Ms. Doerr said in a phone interview. “She would laugh at herself.”Carol-Jean Reihmer was born on Jan. 10, 1926, in Milwaukee to Leo and Alice (Davies) Reihmer. When she was 11, the family moved to Grand Rapids.She studied theater for a time at Michigan State University and remained interested in it; a 1953 article in The Lansing State Journal mentioned that she was appearing in a summer theater production of “The Glass Menagerie” in Grand Rapids.By then she was already on local television. The new medium was something of a mystery back then, even in her own home.“I was on the air a whole year before we even had a television set in our house,” she told The Free Press in the 1997 interview. “Nobody even knew what I did when I left the house.”In 1972 she published her first book, “Wanna Make Something Out of It?”Ms. Duvall’s marriage to Carl Duvall, in 1945, ended in divorce. Her son Michael died in 2011. She is survived by another son, Jack; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.Though Ms. Duvall attracted fans whenever she made public appearances, on one occasion, at least, she was surprised by her own celebrity. In the summer of 1997 she was at a TV critics convention in Pasadena, Calif., when the actor Dennis Franz of “NYPD Blue,” then one of ABC’s top shows, came up and shook her hand. She thought he’d mistaken her for someone else and told him who she was.“Oh, Carol, you don’t have to introduce yourself to me,” Mr. Franz said. “You’re in my kitchen every morning.” More

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      ‘Abbott Elementary’ and the Joys of Living Outside the Main Edit

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      The sitcom has tweaked the mockumentary formula to teach an invaluable lesson about the value of life off-camera.There is a scene, early in the second season of ABC’s “Abbott Elementary,” that neatly captures some most contemporary questions about the power and ubiquity of video. Teachers at Abbott, a public elementary school, are in their lounge, watching something alarming. A charter-school company has been running what’s essentially an attack ad against them, featuring unflattering video clips of them on the job. As they process seeing themselves eviscerated onscreen, a question hovers over the proceedings like chalkboard dust: How did the charter school obtain this footage in the first place? The answer comes from the school’s principal, Ava Coleman, who explains that she welcomed in the interloping camera crew — because she had a hard time telling them apart from the regular camera crew, the one supposedly filming the show we’re watching.“Abbott Elementary,” now reaching the close of its second season, is a mockumentary sitcom; its narrative frame involves the production of a documentary about “underfunded, poorly managed public schools in America.” The teachers are used to being filmed, if not always happy about it. (Ms. Schemmenti, the resident South Philly toughie, turns on the regular crew: “See, this is why I never trusted any of youse! Now get the cameras out of my face before I give you a colonoscopy with it.”) They have been subject to a classic sitcom trope, the misunderstanding that leads to humiliation. But the root of that humiliation is unlike most every sitcom character before them: They’ve been captured by the wrong cameras.The show isn’t exactly subtle in its suspicions about what recording culture has done to education.The way “Abbott” deploys comic mix-ups is a technique the show shares with traditional sitcoms, the 20th-century kind with their multicamera setups, stagelike sets and audience laughter (real or simulated). But “Abbott” exists in a world that has been slowly shedding that style. Many examples still exist, but by the end of the aughts, multicamera shows were already seen as quaint compared with their critically acclaimed new counterparts — single-camera comedies like “Arrested Development,” “The Bernie Mac Show” or “Modern Family.” These shows could borrow techniques from film, documentary and reality TV — cutaways, confessional interviews, voice-over — to access jokes unavailable in the old studio-audience setup. The most obvious predecessors of “Abbott” were among them: the American adaptation of “The Office” and, later, “Parks and Recreation,” both long-running NBC mockumentary sitcoms about close-knit workplace colleagues.“The Office” framed itself as a documentary about work at an ordinary company, then let that premise recede into the background; it wasn’t until its final season that it began to reckon with the camera crew’s yearslong presence. “Abbott” has introduced this quagmire much earlier. Across its sophomore year, it has repeatedly turned its attention to the inescapable surveillance we face today — not just from professional camera crews but from one another. Coleman’s gaffe is, in reality, just another expected incursion. The staff’s flabbergasted reaction is an instance of the characters’ not so much breaking the fourth wall as routinely banging their heads against it.The attack-ad scene parallels one from the show’s pilot, in which the premise is introduced. Principal Coleman barges into the teachers’ lounge boasting about the staff’s chance to become famous. After an older teacher, Mrs. Howard, reminds her why the crew is filming — the school is being cast as both underresourced and badly managed — Coleman replies that “no press is bad press.” It’s often unclear whether the biggest challenge facing the teachers is a lack of resources or the fact that Coleman is such an ineffective, uninterested leader. But the charter-school episode marks the first time that the main threat to their work is their own comfort with being observed. The principal may be hilariously awful, but in this case the teachers have ceded their privacy — and that of the small children they teach — to random strangers with cameras.The whole misunderstanding mirrors what the critic Ian Penman once called “the relentless publicity of modern life,” a quality that leads many of us to constantly re-evaluate our relationships with recording technology. On “Abbott,” the main characters have various levels of attachment to cameras and microphones, which wind through plots in countless ways. In one episode, Ms. Teagues — the idealistic protagonist played by the show’s creator, Quinta Brunson — introduces her co-workers to a TikTok challenge that helps them fund-raise for school supplies. Mr. Hill, the dorky young history teacher, tries to help his students start a podcast. Mr. Johnson, the school’s custodian, helps quash a TikTok-style fad and later mugs for the camera at a Sixers game.They’ve been captured by the wrong cameras.But the show sieves most of its video-​age anxiety through Principal Coleman. She pulls out her phone to record videos of teachers arguing. She spends her time watching survivalist reality-TV shows in her office. She live-streams online auctions. The show isn’t exactly subtle in its suspicions about what recording culture has done to education, for either the children or the staff, but Coleman’s online hustles and schemes are a joke that can point in either direction: Sometimes they’re selfish manipulations that waste everyone’s time, and sometimes they pop up in the final act to rescue the school.Crucially, though, it’s the least-pertinent footage that carries an important lesson “Abbott” has for viewers: the value of life lived outside the main edit. In real documentaries, the richest parts often capture something secret or ancillary, something “caught” from outside formal interviews. But these mockumentaries are scripted, meaning showrunners can simply write those moments in. Their use of such footage suggests that the real meaning of our lives is often found outside the stuff we’re presenting on camera for others to see. Even the attack ad speaks to this: Viewers know that the moments captured in that commercial represent only a sliver of what the characters have to offer.“Abbott” uses such incidental footage to interesting effect. In a first-season episode, we watch Mrs. Howard and Mr. Hill try to plant a garden, though neither really knows how. A stoic former substitute, Mr. Eddie, whose father owns a landscaping company, grumbles about the project. Over the course of the episode, the garden mysteriously improves — until, in the closing minutes, we see that Mr. Eddie has been tending to it in secret. In another episode, Ms. Teagues and her visiting sister get into an argument about deep-seated family trauma — one we see play out incidentally, caught by rolling cameras even though it has nothing to do with the supposed theme of the documentary.The question of why the fictional cameras of “Abbott” take this approach has, thus far, gone unanswered. But the show’s sustained critique of our video-saturated era — conditions that models like “The Office” and “Parks and Recreation” never had to contend with — suggests that the narrative function of this “minor” footage is crucial. TikTok and Instagram, two of Principal Coleman’s favorite platforms, might feature much comedy and the language of storytelling, but neither is all that good at doing what great sitcoms have always done: revealing the ways that people are messy and contradictory and fail to align their private and public selves. In this era of curated video, the way “Abbott” treats seemingly throwaway moments is a reminder that our biographical B-roll, in memories and private impressions, is the most valuable viewing material.Source photographs: Gilles Mingasson/ABC; Tim Robberts/Stone/Getty Images; Manu Vega/Moment/Getty Images.Niela Orr is a story editor for the magazine. Her recent work includes a profile of the actress Keke Palmer, an essay about the end of “Atlanta” and a feature on the metamusical “A Strange Loop.” More

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      The Oscars TV Broadcast Is Becoming Increasingly Ordinary

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      A show that’s become a shrink-wrapped, anodyne exercise stuck safely to the script.To paraphrase Greta Garbo, give me back my slap.No, of course onstage assaults are unacceptable. But the 95th Academy Awards could have used a jolt of some kind as they wound their way through three and a half hours on Sunday night. There was a crisis team in place to handle the fallout from any unexpected catastrophes like Will Smith’s attack on Chris Rock at last year’s show, but there was nothing it could do about the ordinariness and sameness of the ABC broadcast.The audience in the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles roared for the early victories of sentimental favorites like Ke Huy Quan and Jamie Lee Curtis of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (for best supporting actor and actress) and the late — very late — victories of the film’s writers and directors, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, and star, Michelle Yeoh. And their speeches were stirring. But at the end of the now endless awards season, we knew that they would be, and we had a pretty good idea what they would say.There is now, through no one’s individual fault, a consistently promotional, exhortatory, shrink-wrapped feeling to the Oscars. After the depredations of streaming video and Covid-19, no chances are being taken. Jimmy Kimmel, reviving the role of the solo Oscar host, got off some good lines in his monologue — the movies are still distinct from television because “a TV show can’t lose $100 million.” (Though in the age of Netflix and Amazon, is that true?) But on balance it was safe, with the sharp jibes reserved for easy targets who weren’t there, like James Cameron and Tom Cruise. (“L. Ron Hubba Hubba,” maybe the best line of the night.)Kimmel addressed Smith’s slap at length without really talking about it. He focused on what would happen in the extremely unlikely event anyone went rogue this year, pointing out performers in the audience whose screen characters were brutal enforcers — Pedro Pascal of “The Mandalorian,” Michael B. Jordan of “Creed III” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” It was an odd way to signal that violence was unwelcome.(Smith, last year’s best-actor winner, was replaced as a presenter for the lead acting awards by Halle Berry.)More on the 95th Academy AwardsA24’s Triumphant Night: The art-house studio behind “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “The Whale” became the first studio in the history of the Oscars to capture the top six awards in the same year.Normalcy Reigns: After breathing a sigh of relief that the night went smoothly, our co-chief film critics discussed the academy’s carefully staged return to (fingers crossed?) a new normal.Oscar Fashion: Rihanna’s belly, Florence Pugh’s shorts and Cate Blanchett’s archival velvet brought new relevance to awards show dressing, our fashion critic says.After-Parties: Take a look inside the Governor’s Ball and Vanity Fair’s Oscar party, where the stars and filmmakers celebrated with moguls, musicians and models.In current fashion, the show opened not with a production number but a film montage, in this case a series of behind-the-scenes clips from nominated films. The attempt to hook audiences by bringing them inside the process of filmmaking and award-giving was also reflected in the deconstructed see-through set.The win for “Navalny” for best documentary feature was an early highlight.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesThis contemporary feint toward inclusiveness — if they can’t nominate more female directors, at least they can make viewers feel as if they’re getting an inside look — contrasts, for better and worse, with the glossy insiders’ party that the Oscars used to be.The surely unintentional effect, in a broadcast that sang the praises of the theater experience, is to make the movies feel smaller — more suited for the laptop screen and the Netflix interface. Winners don’t stick in the mind they way they used to. Did you remember that “Dune” took home six awards last year, twice as many as any other film? Or that “CODA” won best picture? (You’re welcome.)In this context, the purely promotional segments on Sunday — a long plug for the Academy museum, a creaky salute to Warner Bros.’ 100th anniversary — felt right at home but also, in their reinforcement of the show’s lumpen unremarkableness, more irritating than ever.And seemingly harmless attempts to signal virtue can backfire, as in Kimmel’s awkward and eventually condescending exchange with Malala Yousafzai.As always, there were moments that pierced the veil. The victory of “Navalny” in the documentary feature category, while its subject, the dissident Alexei Navalny, languishes in a Russian prison, was indelible. Julia-Louis Dreyfus and Paul Dano were polished and funny in their presentation of costume design; the award’s winner, Ruth Carter of “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” movingly invoked her mother, who had just died at the age of 101, asking the actor Chadwick Boseman to look for her in the afterlife. Yeoh, given carte blanche to emote, showed that feeling could be conveyed in an acceptance speech that was largely polished and non-self-aggrandizing.David Byrne injected a welcome note of weirdness, if not musicality, in the performance of the best-song nominee “This Is a Life” from “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” The production number “Naatu Naatu” from “RRR,” Lady Gaga’s unplugged performance of “Hold My Hand” from “Top Gun: Maverick” and Rihanna’s rendition of “Lift Me Up” from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” were unimpeachably professional. But the musical highlight of the night was undoubtedly the snatch of the Carpenters’ “Top of the World” sung by the composer M.M. Keeravani when “Naatu Naatu” won best song.When Kimmel wasn’t forced to ad-lib, he and his writers were generally on point. A call for audience votes on whether Robert Blake should be included in the In Memoriam segment was slyly handled. (He wasn’t.) A joke about the editing of footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol didn’t mention Tucker Carlson or Fox News but made its point.The good moments, however, couldn’t change my sense that the modern Oscars have become something more to be endured than enjoyed. If you wanted a glimpse of the zeitgeist on Sunday night, HBO (“The Last of Us”) and TLC (“MILF Manor”) were the places to look. More

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      How to Watch the Oscars 2023: Date, Time and Streaming

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      A guide to everything you need to know for the 95th annual Academy Awards on Sunday night.It’s looking like the year of “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”The sci-fi smash from the directing duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert has already swept the top prizes at the four major Hollywood guild awards, and the only other films to ever do that — “Argo,” “No Country for Old Men,” “Slumdog Millionaire” and “American Beauty” — all went on to win the best picture Oscar.But! It’s the academy, and there’s always at least one surprise. Will Steven Spielberg spoil the Daniels’ bid for best director with his semi-autobiographical tale, “The Fabelmans”? Will Michelle Yeoh beat Cate Blanchett for best actress? Will Angela Bassett, who’s nominated for best supporting actress for her performance in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” bring home the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first acting Oscar? There’s sure to be drama.Among about 50 stars lined up to present trophies are Ariana DeBose, Florence Pugh and Jonathan Majors. (Another key question: Will DeBose reprise her viral BAFTAs musical rap?)Here’s what you need to know:What time do the festivities start?The ceremony begins at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific. On television, ABC is the official broadcaster. Online, if you have a cable login, you can watch via abc.com/watch-live/abc, or if you’re an ABC subscriber, via the ABC app. For cord-cutters, there’s also Hulu + Live TV, Sling TV, YouTube TV or Fubo, all of which require subscriptions, though many are offering free trials.Is there a red carpet?Well, there will be star arrivals, but they will be treading a champagne-colored carpet. To watch, head to the E! network beginning at 1 p.m. Eastern, 10 a.m. Pacific if you’re in the mood for some preshow celebrity spotting. (ABC will also have champagne-carpet coverage beginning at 1 p.m. Eastern, which you can watch live on its website, with no sign-in required.)Is there a preshow?The official Academy Awards preshow, “On the Red Carpet Live: Countdown to Oscars 95,” airs on ABC from 1 to 4 p.m. Eastern, 10 a.m.-1 p.m. Pacific (and will be available to stream on the ABC News Live website beginning at 1:30 p.m. Eastern, 10:30 a.m. Pacific until the start of the Oscars).Then, also on ABC, Ashley Graham, Vanessa Hudgens and Lilly Singh will host the “Countdown to the Oscars” lead-in show, which will offer a behind-the-scenes look at the big night, beginning at 6:30 p.m. Eastern, 3:30 p.m. Pacific.The Run-Up to the 2023 OscarsThe 95th Academy Awards will be presented on March 12 in Los Angeles.Trying to Fix the Oscars: Acceptance speeches on TikTok? They’re part of an urgent effort to win back viewers.Oscars Fashion: A Versace runway show was a fitting start to the series of extravagant days that represent the unholy marriage between Hollywood and fashion: Oscars weekend.Inside the Oscars Campaigns: Despite the big show of sealed envelopes, Oscars voting is a highly contingent, political process. Here’s how the quest for awards-season glory got so cutthroat.Reading Suggestion: A new book that tracks the history of moviedom’s biggest night examines the glamour, societal changes and bloopers embodied in 95 years of step-and-repeat.Who will be hosting?Jimmy Kimmel will return for his third round as M.C. after previously guiding the ceremonies in 2017 (the “Moonlight”-“La La Land” mix-up year) and 2018.Who will be presenting?Three of last year’s acting winners — Jessica Chastain, DeBose and Troy Kotsur — as well as Riz Ahmed, Halle Bailey, Samuel L. Jackson, Dwayne Johnson, Michael B. Jordan, Majors, Janelle Monáe, Deepika Padukone, Pugh and Questlove.Will Will Smith be there?Smith, who took home last year’s best actor statuette for his performance as the father of Venus and Serena Williams in the biopic “King Richard,” was barred from the Oscars and other academy events for 10 years after he slapped the comedian Chris Rock at the 2022 ceremony. (Rock recently joked about the explosive moment on a live Netflix show.)Will Jennifer Coolidge be there?It feels like she should be, right? But alas, no. (Or, at least, not that we know of!)What should you watch for?After considerable backlash from industry professionals following last year’s decision to pretape eight of the competitive categories, all 23 categories will be awarded live this year.And there are a number of milestones to keep an eye out for: Yeoh could become the first Asian star to win best actress for her performance as the multiverse-surfing mother in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” if she can hold off Blanchett’s ambitious conductor in “Tár.” If Spielberg, 76, wins best director for “The Fabelmans,” he would become the oldest winner in the category. And if John Williams, 91, wins best original score for “The Fabelmans,” he would become the oldest person to win a competitive Oscar.Is anyone close to an EGOT?Viola Davis became the 18th member of the club of overachievers who have an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony Award after she won a Grammy for the audiobook of her memoir, “Finding Me.” But sadly, none of the nominees have the chance to join her on Sunday.Who do we think will win?“Everything Everywhere All at Once” received the most nominations — 11, including best picture, actress (Yeoh), supporting actor (Ke Huy Quan) and supporting actress (Jamie Lee Curtis and Stephanie Hsu) — and there’s a very real possibility that it could win, well, everything everywhere all at once. The odds-making site Vegas Insider currently has it as the runaway favorite, distantly trailed by Martin McDonagh’s drama “The Banshees of Inisherin” and the German war film “All Quiet on the Western Front,” each of which earned nine nominations.Our Projectionist columnist, Kyle Buchanan, thinks Yeoh has the edge over Blanchett, and that Brendan Fraser, who underwent a full-body transformation to play an obese professor in “The Whale,” will triumph over the “Elvis” star Austin Butler.In the supporting categories, Quan is a virtual lock for supporting actor, but Buchanan is predicting Kerry Condon of “Banshees” for supporting actress. See his complete list of predictions here.What’s this I’ve heard about Andrea Riseborough?Ah, yes, the tale of this year’s surprise (understatement) best actress nominee involved a social media blitz on her behalf by a cadre of movie stars, snubs of Danielle Deadwyler in “Till” and Viola Davis in “The Woman King,” and an academy review of the campaign on her behalf. (The verdict? She’s clear — for now.) Here’s an explainer.I only have time to watch one film before ceremony. Which one should I choose?To get the most bang for your buck, we’d recommend “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” (Or just hop into the multiverse and watch all of the nominees simultaneously.) If you’re short on time, Sarah Polley’s female-focused drama “Women Talking” is the shortest of the best picture nominees, at 1 hour 44 minutes. Of course, “The Banshees of Inisherin” and “Triangle of Sadness” have an X factor in their favor: the donkey quotient. If you face a time crunch, you’ll want to save “Avatar: The Way of Water,” which stretches past the three-hour mark, for another day; you’re already committed to watching a three-hour-plus broadcast on Sunday night! (Then again, what better day than Oscars Sunday to devote more than a third of your waking hours to film?)OK, I watched “Everything Everywhere All at Once” — and wait, what was that ending?Here’s an explainer.Who is that Oscar statuette supposed to be a likeness of?It’s said to be modeled after the Mexican filmmaker and actor Emilio Fernández (who, the story goes, posed in the buff).Why are they called the Oscars, again?It’s said that when the longtime academy employee Margaret Herrick first saw the statuette in the 1930s, she remarked that it reminded her of her Uncle Oscar — a nickname for her second cousin Oscar Pierce.I’m hosting an Oscars party this year. What delicious food should I make?You can’t go wrong with loaded nachos, cheese straws or dipped chocolate anything. Feeling fancy? Try our caviar potato chips and lemon cream recipe.I need some joy in my life. What’s the quickest way to get it?Follow Ke Huy Quan on Instagram. More

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      With Its Future at Stake, the Academy Tries to Fix the Oscars (Again)

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      The awards telecast has been losing viewers for years. New leadership wants to reverse that starting Sunday, and ensure the financial well-being of the organization.The stage design for the 95th Academy Awards on Sunday is more Doctor Strange modern and less Dowager Countess musty. That means plentiful video screens, including ones that cover the sides of the theater, with nary a Swarovski crystal curtain — the old standby — to be seen.Unlike last year, when eight categories were awarded during a nontelevised portion, all of the Oscars will be handed out live on air. To make the telecast interactive and help viewers better understand crafts categories, such as sound mixing and art direction, QR codes will appear before commercial breaks to direct viewers to internet vignettes about the nominees and behind-the-scenes footage and photos.To reinvigorate the red carpet preshow, Oscars organizers hired members of the Met Gala creative team. Expect much more star power, specialized lighting (to make a process that happens in daylight seem more like evening) and better integration with the theater’s entrance.But some of the most important changes — part of an urgent effort to help make the Academy Awards more relevant to young people and draw a broader international audience — involve things that most viewers won’t notice. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will post video of acceptance speeches in the six biggest categories in near real-time on TikTok and Facebook, and all speeches will quickly be posted on Twitter. In a first, Disney+ will stream the Oscars show live in parts of Europe. The academy has also sought out new marketing partners like Letterboxd, a social media site for movie fans (8.4 million members, most of them are ages 18 to 34), in a sad-but-true admission that it must convince people that they should care about the Oscars.“We didn’t have to before,” Janet Yang, the academy’s president, said in an interview at the organization’s Beverly Hills offices. “We could rest on our laurels and just let it carry itself.”Last year’s telecast drew 16.6 million viewers, with a spike in ratings coming after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock onstage.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesOne might respond with exasperation: You’re only now figuring that out? Perhaps the time to pull out all the stops to keep the Oscars vibrant was five years ago, when the telecast, for the first time, attracted less than 30 million people, a 20 percent decline from the previous year. Since then, the number of viewers for the Academy Awards has dropped another 37 percent, according to Nielsen’s data. About 16.6 million people watched “CODA” win the Oscar for best picture at the most recent ceremony, with viewership swelling after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock onstage late in the show.The Run-Up to the 2023 OscarsThe 95th Academy Awards will be presented on March 12 in Los Angeles.Asian Actors: A record number of actors of Asian ancestry were recognized with Oscar nominations this year. But historically, Asian stars have rarely been part of the awards.Hong Chau Interview: In a conversation with The Times, the actress, who is nominated for her supporting role in “The Whale,” says she still feels like an underdog.Andrea Riseborough Controversy: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why the “To Leslie” star’s nod was controversial.The Making of ‘Naatu Naatu’: The composers and choreographer from the Indian blockbuster “RRR” explain how they created the propulsive sequence that is nominated for best song.But Ms. Yang can’t be held responsible. She was elected president only in August. The academy also has a new chief executive for the first time in 11 years; Bill Kramer, the former director of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, was appointed to that role in June. Together, Ms. Yang and Mr. Kramer have brought a blast of fresh air to the stuffy organization, working to improve transparency, calm a membership revolt over last year’s removal of several categories from the live Oscars telecast and shore up the academy’s wobbly finances.In the past, Ms. Yang said, “a lot of cultural institutions felt like they should be sitting on a hill, a little bit more protected, almost untouchable.” She added that the academy itself felt “ivory tower-ish,” but that it was now “a different time” and “a different culture.”ABC has exclusive rights to broadcast the Oscars ceremony until 2028 and provides the academy with about 80 percent of its annual revenue. Last year, Oscar-related revenue was $137.1 million, according to financial disclosures. Awards-related expenses totaled $56.8 million.The TV network generated an estimated $139 million across 70 commercials during last year’s show, according to Vivvix, which tracks ad spending. (To compare, ABC pulled in about $129 million across 56 ads in 2020.) A red-carpet preshow brought in an additional $16 million in advertising revenue.From left, Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, Steven Spielberg, Jamie Lee Curtis and Tom Cruise are among this year’s nominees.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesTo secure a distribution contract of similar value when its deal with ABC expires, the academy must reverse viewership declines. A less lucrative deal could imperil some of the organization’s year-round activities, including film restoration. “This is so important to the livelihood and future of the organization that we better confront it,” Ms. Yang said.In many ways, however, the academy is hamstrung when it comes to reinventing the Oscars telecast.ABC and other traditional television networks are shadows of their former selves, with younger audiences in particular decamping en masse to streaming services. Some other awards shows are following them, notably the Screen Actors Guild Awards, which will stream live on Netflix starting next year. After an ethics, finance and diversity scandal, the Golden Globe Awards, long broadcast on NBC, are also looking for a new distribution partner.Many viewers have long complained that the Oscars ceremony is overlong, with groan-inducing banter between presenters adding to a feeling of bloat. Last year’s Academy Awards was three and a half hours, despite moving eight of the 23 awards off the live broadcast. (The offscreen acceptance speeches were recorded, edited and incorporated into the live show.) In the past, the Oscars telecast has run as long as four hours and 23 minutes. Jimmy Kimmel will return as the host on Sunday, having previously served as M.C. in 2017 and 2018, and he has been planning a traditional monologue.“We are working very hard to deliver the show on time with all disciplines honored,” Mr. Kramer said.Ariana DeBose won best supporting actress during last year’s Academy Awards, which was three and a half hours.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesLinda Ong, the chief executive of Cultique, a consulting firm in Los Angeles that advises companies on changing cultural norms, said that people were still interested in the award show’s winners and the things they had to say. The problem for the academy, she said, is that “people don’t feel the need to watch the show to be part of the conversation.”“They just watch some clips on social,” she added.Ms. Ong noted that, in a once-unthinkable move that speaks to the Oscars’ fading relevancy, the season finale of HBO’s hugely popular post-apocalyptic drama, “The Last of Us,” will broadcast head-to-head against the ceremony. “That’s a big cultural tell,” she said.The academy is hopeful that Nielsen’s ratings meters for the Oscars will tick upward on Sunday. Big musical stars, including Rihanna, are scheduled to perform their nominated songs; Lenny Kravitz will perform during the “In Memoriam” segment. Lady Gaga will be absent, though, with Oscars producers saying on Wednesday that she was too busy filming a movie to perform her nominated song from “Top Gun: Maverick.”The nominee pool for best picture has never before included more than one billion-dollar ticket seller, according to box office databases, and this year there are two. “Top Gun: Maverick” collected $1.5 billion, and “Avatar: The Way of Water” took in $2.3 billion. The front-runner for best picture, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” generated $104 million in ticket sales. (Viewership tends to increase when popular films are nominated.)But the academy says it’s not just about TV anymore — that relying on Nielsen’s numbers alone to assess relevancy is outdated, and that online chatter and streaming-service viewing should also be taken into account. “We have to rethink our success metrics,” Mr. Kramer said, noting that the Oscars will be available for viewing on Hulu the next day.Conversations on social media during and after award shows can be significant. Last month’s Grammy Awards, for instance, attracted about 12.6 million viewers. On the day of the ceremony and the next day, the Grammys generated about seven million mentions on Twitter, according to ListenFirst, an analytics company.If nothing else, the academy is hoping for a smooth show on Sunday. In the past, the academy started to plan for the Oscars as late as November. This time, planning started in June.“It should be about unity and celebrating this industry,” Mr. Kramer said. “People are still consuming movies. People love movies. Perhaps they’re doing it on streaming more than they did a few years ago. But our art form is as relevant as ever.” More

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      Milo Ventimiglia on the ‘Honest Deception’ of ‘The Company You Keep’

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      In his first regular TV role since the hit series “This is Us,” the actor plays a character who is himself a kind of actor: a charming con man.Milo Ventimiglia reached television stardom during the age of cable and streaming dominance. But his signature shows, including “Heroes,” “Gilmore Girls” and “This Is Us,” have all aired free of charge on network TV.And that’s just the way he likes it.“I’m a product of broadcast television,” Ventimiglia said in a recent video call. “I like the idea that anyone can turn their TV on and watch the show.”“People want to give exclusivity,” he added. “I prefer inclusivity.”Ventimiglia’s newest venture, “The Company You Keep,” based on the Korean series “My Fellow Citizens!,” follows suit, but with a twist on his usual handsome charmer persona. Premiering Sunday on ABC, the series tells the story of Charlie Nicoletti, the main talent in a family of Baltimore con artists that also includes his sister, Birdie (Sarah Wayne Callies); his dad, Leo (William Fichtner); and his mom, Fran (Polly Draper). It’s Ventimiglia’s first starring vehicle since the hugely popular “This is Us” ended its six-year run last year. (He is also an executive producer.)A smooth operator and skilled thief, Charlie finds himself facing changes bad and good as the series opens. The family, which owns a neighborhood bar as a front for their capers, has just been burned on a job, owing mostly to Charlie’s carelessness. The consequences are dire. Reeling from his mistake, Charlie falls into the arms and bed of Emma (Catherine Haena Kim). They’re a very secretive couple, especially with each other. She is a C.I.A. agent. He’s a con man.Unbeknown to them, their jobs are about to converge. It’s love, and lust, at first sight. Trust, however, is another matter.“It’s a different kind of communication when you are playing two people that are fundamentally in love, but there are a lot of obstacles to their being together,” he said. “I think it mostly comes down to communicating vulnerability.”Reeling from a mistake, Ventimiglia’s character, Charlie, falls into the arms and bed of Emma (Catherine Haena Kim), a C.I.A. agent.Eric McCandless/ABCVentimiglia, 45, was drawn to Charlie’s duality. “As a barkeep, he’s unremarkable, a simple neighborhood guy,” he said. “But as a con artist, he has to adapt and change shape and become somebody else believably, as a real human being, not a caricature.”Ventimiglia discussed the art of the con, moving on from “This Is Us” and why he looks to help military veterans however he can. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What was the transition from “This Is Us” like?I brought over about 90 percent of the “This Is Us” crew. For me, it was always them that made the show. It wasn’t just the subject matter. It wasn’t just those beautiful Dan Fogelman scripts that he and the writers crafted. It was the different departments, everything from camera to grips, electric, art departments, transportation, craft services, the folks that were feeding us. There was a lot of magic in that show, and I loved bringing that team over. I miss Fogelman, and I miss aspects of production. But because of the crew, there was no real loss.That was such a beloved show. Why do you think it struck a nerve in so many viewers?I think it had a commonality. Viewers were able to see themselves inside of a lot of the characters. It wasn’t built for one lane. It didn’t fall under any particular genre. It was just a show about everyone.The original title was “36,” which was the birthday that Jack and the three kids were celebrating. But Dan Fogelman kept toying with this idea: This is us and us and us. And it just makes sense. That’s what the show was about. It was about all of us, every single one of us. That always felt like the appeal: Everybody could relate to the life that was lived in those characters.I Imagine people often identify you with Jack.I remember once I was getting off a plane and a guy stopped me and said, “Hey, you’re that guy from that show.” I said: “Yes, sir, I am. Nice to meet you.” And he goes, “Man, you’re my Tuesday night.” I thought, wow. Every Tuesday, this guy sits down and he hangs out with me and my co-stars on the show. There’s something really rewarding about that when you know an audience member is giving you time.How do you approach playing a con man? It’s interesting that the word “con” comes from “confidence,” which Charlie definitely has.To be an actor, you’ve got to be confident in what you do, but you can’t cross that line and be cocky because you get knocked right down. And you’ve got to be confident as a con man to get people to do what you want need.With the cons that we’ve been setting up, and the characters that Charlie plays within those cons, it’s exciting and it’s fun. It’s given me an opportunity to stretch, not just playing one part, but playing several parts through a season.“At 45 years old, I feel like I’m just getting started,” Ventimiglia said. “That’s a good feeling.”Carlos Jaramillo for The New York TimesCharlie is kind of an actor in that sense.Totally. Either that or I’m realizing that acting is absolutely a con. When I was a little younger, I used to joke and say, “I lie for a living.” Then it turned into, “I wear makeup and read lines for a living.” Now, in a way, I’m back to what feels like an honest deception.How do you think the secrecy of the characters translates to the performances?It’s funny, in real life, romantic partners tend to under-talk things until they realize they need therapy. On set, we’re over-talking things for absolute transparency and communication to find the best possible solution that works for [Kim’s] character, my character, and then ultimately the show.You have worked with and supported several veterans organizations, including the U.S.O., Team Rubicon and America’s Gold Star Families. What is the source of that passion?My dad was a Vietnam War veteran, so I think I always had this understanding of the community from that point of view, and from studying the war. But having never served in uniform, I asked myself how I could serve the community. The work is never done. But I think it’s a community to which we owe a lot of gratitude. I nearly went into the Navy when I was 18. I had this grand idea that I was going to be flying jets because I grew up on “Top Gun.” But then I took a different path.When did you know that you wanted to be an actor?I’d always put on plays and stuff when I was a little kid. And I remember when award shows still felt glamorous, and I would hear Whoopi Goldberg talk to the camera at the end of the Oscars, when she was hosting, saying, “Maybe one day you’ll be on this stage.” That inspired me. I’d see an actor putting on a character, and then I’d see him putting on a different character. You’d see Michael Keaton as Mr. Mom. Then you’d see Michael Keaton as Batman. You’re like, Oh, it’s Batman. But no, it’s Mr. Mom.It was all an understanding that these people are playing different roles, and that is the profession of acting. How do you do that? How do you make those roles so convincing that you get to do the next one? It’s weird. At 45 years old, I feel like I’m just getting started. That’s a good feeling. More

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      Ryan Seacrest Is Leaving ‘Live with Kelly and Ryan’

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      The Hollywood multitasker provided a steady hand at a somewhat tumultuous time for the talk show. He will be replaced by Mark Consuelos, the husband of “Live” co-host Kelly Ripa.Ryan Seacrest announced on Thursday that he was leaving “Live With Kelly and Ryan,” the syndicated morning talk show mainstay that he has hosted with Kelly Ripa since 2017.Ms. Ripa said Thursday on the show that a familiar face, and frequent guest host — her husband, Mark Consuelos — would assume co-hosting duties. The show will now be known as “Live With Kelly and Mark.”“I’m so grateful to have spent the last six years beside my dear friend of too many decades to count and will miss starting my days with Ryan,” Ms. Ripa said in a statement. “Ryan’s energy, passion and love for entertainment is one of a kind.”Mr. Seacrest, a Hollywood multitasker, arrived at “Live” after a one-year search, and provided a steady hand at a somewhat tumultuous time for the show. In 2016, when Mr. Seacrest’s predecessor, Michael Strahan, announced that he was leaving the show for “Good Morning America,” Ms. Ripa felt blindsided and that the Walt Disney Company — which syndicates the show — was favoring its morning show franchise over her longtime talk show, which she has co-hosted since 2001. She walked off the show, setting off a tabloid feeding frenzy.Mr. Seacrest’s arrival nearly coincided with what seemed at the time to be a formidable rival: NBC was giving Megyn Kelly a 9 a.m. talk show, and investing tens of millions of dollars in it.Although Ms. Kelly’s morning show could veer dark — “Megyn Kelly Today” often ran segments on topics like revenge porn and sexual harassment — Ms. Ripa and Mr. Seacrest kept it light, providing a soothing antidote to the divisive Trump years. Ms. Kelly’s show was trounced by “Live” in the ratings and was canceled roughly a year after it started.“Live,” which started in the 1980s as a New York talk show co-hosted by Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford, has long centered on a simple concept: two hosts chatting about their lives, and bringing in celebrities for breezy interviews.“The hosts have changed, but the overall concept continues on: two people, a man and a woman, and enjoying the chemistry between them,” said Michael Gelman, the longtime executive producer, in a 2017 interview.“Live” has been the top-rated daytime talk show among women ages 25 to 54, a demographic important to advertisers, for more than a year.Mr. Seacrest will continue hosting the show until the spring, and will also continue hosting “American Idol,” ABC said. He said in a statement that working with Ms. Ripa for the last six years had been a “dream job.”“It’s been a memorable ride, and now I’m excited to pass the baton to Kelly’s ‘real’ husband, Mark,” he said. More

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      ‘Schoolhouse Rock!’ at 50: Those Are Magic Numbers

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      The educational snippets are the ultimate font of Gen X nostalgia. But what is it we’re nostalgic for?When I was in second grade, my teacher held a contest: The first students to memorize their multiplication tables would get dinner at McDonald’s. I was one of them. I’d like to credit hard work or the motivation of those golden fries, but in truth it was easy. I learned it from “Schoolhouse Rock.”It was not the last time that watching too much TV would pay off for me, but it was perhaps the sweetest.If you were an American kid around when I was (nineteen-seventy-cough), you probably have “Schoolhouse Rock” hard-wired into your brain too. The musical shorts, which began airing on ABC in 1973, taught Generation X multiplication, grammar, history and, eventually, nostalgia.That last lesson stuck best. Winona Ryder and company crooned “Conjunction Junction” and “I’m Just a Bill” in the 1994 generational-statement film “Reality Bites.” De La Soul borrowed “Three Is a Magic Number” as the backbone for their buoyant self-introduction, “The Magic Number,” in 1989. Nostalgia for “Schoolhouse Rock” is now itself old enough to be nostalgic for.On Wednesday, ABC will tap into that spirit with a prime time “50th Anniversary Singalong,” in which the Black Eyed Peas, the Muppets, Shaquille O’Neal and others will hook up the words, phrases and clauses of the Saturday-morning favorites.The Muppets are among the many guest stars who will appear in the ABC special “Schoolhouse Rock! 50th Anniversary Singalong.”Christopher Willard/ABCThe special promises wholesome family fun, and I can think of worse things to do on a weeknight than musically unpacking my adjectives in the judgment-free zone of my living room. But nostalgia is not just a fun emotion. Like some of the best “Schoolhouse Rock” songs, it carries a note of wistfulness.More on U.S. Schools and EducationHeavy Losses: A new global analysis suggests that children experienced learning deficits during the Covid-19 pandemic that amounted to about one-third of a school year’s worth of knowledge and skills.Police in Schools: Footage of a student’s violent arrest by a school resource officer has raised questions about the role of armed officers on campuses.Transgender Youth: Educators are facing new tensions over whether they should tell parents when students change their name, pronouns or gender expression at school.In Florida: The state will not allow a new Advanced Placement course on African American studies to be offered in its high schools, citing examples of what it calls “woke indoctrination.”In this case, it’s a reminder of a time when network TV gave us a common culture, language and lyrics, before we were sliced into subcultures and demographics. Pre-internet, pre-cable, pre-DVD — pre-VHS, even — “Schoolhouse Rock” convened a classroom of millions for three-minute servings of revolutionary art alongside installments of “The Great Grape Ape Show.”Like much classic kids’ TV, “Schoolhouse Rock” was brought to you by Madison Avenue. The ad executive David McCall, who noticed that his son could memorize pop songs but struggled with arithmetic, suggested to George Newall, a creative director, and Thomas Yohe, an art director, that they figure out how to set math to music.As Newell told the Times in 1994, they pitched the idea to Michael Eisner, then the director of children’s programming at ABC, who happened to be meeting with the legendary Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones. “I think you should buy it right away,” Jones said.Unlike the dutiful news interstitials that vitamin-fortified other Saturday-morning cartoon lineups, “Schoolhouse Rock” harnessed the power of comedy and ear worms. The facts and figures made it educational. But they weren’t what made it art.That was the animation, psychedelically colorful and chock-full of rapid-fire slapstick gags. Above all, there was the sophisticated music. The jazz composer Bob Dorough wrote the banger-filled first season, “Multiplication Rock,” surveying a range of styles from the duodecimal prog-rock of “Little Twelvetoes” to the spiraling lullaby of “Figure Eight.”The lyrics were sly and funny but could also detour, like a fidgety schoolkid sitting by the window, into daydreams. The blissful “Three Is a Magic Number” isn’t just a primer on multiples; it’s a rumination on the triad foundations of the universe, from geometry to love. (If your voice does not break singing, “A man and a woman had a little baby,” you’re doing something wrong.)The following seasons, about grammar, American history and science, added other contributors, including Lynn Ahrens, the future Broadway songwriter thanks to whom an entire generation cannot recite the preamble to the Constitution without breaking into song.The short “Conjunction Junction” was referenced in the 1994 film “Reality Bites,” a sign that nostalgia for “Schoolhouse Rock” is now itself old enough to be nostalgic for.ABC, via Everett CollectionThe words and numbers in “Schoolhouse Rock” were never just words and numbers. Like the early years of “Sesame Street,” the shorts had an anarchic spirit and a pluralistic sensibility. “I Got Six” is a funk explosion whose Afrocentric animation includes a dashiki-ed African prince with six rings on all 10 fingers. “Verb: That’s What’s Happening” — imagine if Curtis Mayfield taught your English class — depicts a Black superhero long before Black Panther made it to the movie screen.When my kids were school-aged, I got the full “Schoolhouse Rock” DVD set for them, which is to say, I got it for me. (You can now stream the ’70s seasons, plus a brief 1980s series about computers and a clunky 1990s revival, “Money Rock,” through Disney+.)Rewatching the series taught me about a new subject: Time.The songs are as catchy as ever. But to screen “Schoolhouse Rock” as an adult is to visit a different period in cultural history, and not just because of the bell-bottoms. The America of “Schoolhouse Rock” was divided by Vietnam and Watergate, but it could at least subscribe to basic common facts and civic principles.Consider Bill, the underdog paper hero of “I’m Just a Bill,” longing to become a law that would keep that cartoon school bus safe at railroad crossings. Now he’s a time traveler, from a pre-Reagan age when government activism, however imperfect, was considered a force for good.Today, with culture-warring politicians like the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, red-penciling school curriculums, weaponizing pronouns and hammering history teachers for “indoctrination,” the potential land mines add up. “The Great American Melting Pot” did not imagine a future president telling asylum seekers, “Our country is full.” When “Interjections” depicted a doctor giving a child a shot, it did not anticipate legislators denouncing Big Bird for advocating childhood vaccination.A scene from the anniversary special. Whatever its flaws, “Schoolhouse Rock” told children that they counted with the same numbers and were entitled to the same rights.Christopher Willard/ABC(Likewise, when “Elementary, My Dear” taught counting by twos with a gospel-style Noah’s Ark song, it didn’t fear repercussions for bringing religion into kids’ TV.)And that’s before you even get to “Science Rock.” “The Energy Blues” makes a matter-of-fact pitch for conservation that would cause smoke eruptions today. (In 2009, a climate-focused season, “Earth Rock” went straight to DVD.) When “Schoolhouse Rock” showed kids a three-minute video on how the body worked, there was no internet algorithm to suggest a rebuttal by someone who “did his own research.”That said, I wouldn’t romanticize the “Schoolhouse Rock” era as a paradise of educational consensus. In 1974, the year before the “America Rock” season began, protesters against desegregation in Boston threw rocks at buses carrying Black students. And the series had its own blind spots, which historians and educators have since pointed out.In particular, “America Rock,” an upbeat celebration of the bicentennial, covers the American Revolution and women’s suffrage but skips over the Civil War and slavery. (The Roots filled in this hole in a 2017 episode of “black-ish” with “I Am a Slave,” about Juneteenth.) “Elbow Room” is a jaunty story of westward expansion from the point of view of white settlers, with little note of who got elbowed out. (One scene shows a settler taking a toy arrow through his hat.) America’s unflattering history didn’t make the cut because mass broadcasting meant not alienating the masses.But whatever its limits, “Schoolhouse Rock” at least told us we were equal: We counted with the same numbers, our hearts pumped the same blood, we were entitled to the same inalienable rights.And it operated in a period when people saw the same media and accepted the same facts. Months after its premiere, the Watergate hearings also aired on national TV. They were able eventually to turn even many Republicans against President Nixon, in part because Americans watched the same story together, without a partisan cable and internet ecosystem to spin the investigation as a witch hunt.It’s tempting to say that you couldn’t make “Schoolhouse Rock” again today. But I’m sure you could, even if it would be slightly different. Current kids’ shows like Netflix’s “We the People” are in a way exactly that. What you couldn’t create again today is the mass audience, or the context in which we assembled, one nation, sitting cross-legged in front of our cathode-ray teacher.Instead, we have “Schoolhouse Rock” binge-watches and sing-alongs, which, like all exercises in nostalgia, offer the tantalizing pleasure of stretching to touch yesterday, though we know we can’t. The past is like infinity, a concept that “Schoolhouse Rock” also introduced to my generation. “No one ever gets there,” as “My Hero, Zero” taught us. “But you could try.” More