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      Streaming Has Won the Hollywood Debate. Is Best Picture Next?

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      A few years ago, the entertainment industry was arguing over whether movies on streaming services even counted as a film. Now, one is poised to win the Oscars’ top prize.Three years ago, Hollywood was engaged in a knock-down, drag-out fight over the future of cinema — what, exactly, constitutes a film — with the Oscars as the boxing ring.Netflix and other streaming insurgents insisted that the delivery route was irrelevant, that a film could be primarily viewed on an iPhone and still be a film. Theaters? Ticket sales? It didn’t matter.The Hollywood establishment, or at least most of it, was incensed: Big screens, they argued, are part of the very definition of cinema. “Once you commit to a television format, you’re a TV movie,” Steven Spielberg told a reporter at a European press junket at the time. “You certainly, if it’s a good show, deserve an Emmy, but not an Oscar.”And now?Unless the predictions are wrong and something unexpected awaits inside those gold leaf-embossed envelopes at the 94th Academy Awards on Sunday, a streaming service film — in a first — will win the Oscar for best picture. “CODA,” a dramedy from Apple TV+ about the only hearing member of a deaf family, is favored to receive the prize, having already won top honors at the predictive Producers Guild Awards, Screen Actors Guild Awards and Writers Guild Awards.A Netflix film, “The Power of the Dog,” could nudge past “CODA” to win the best picture trophy, awards handicappers say. But most are not predicting a win for nominees from traditional studios, including “Belfast” and “West Side Story.” Apple TV+ and Netflix have both campaigned aggressively, with Apple spending an estimated $20 million to $25 million to promote “CODA” and Netflix’s push for “The Power of the Dog” costing even more.“CODA,” which stars Troy Kostur and Marlee Matlin, has already won top honors from the Screen Actors Guild.Apple TV+For an industry in turmoil, with tech giants like Apple and Amazon upending entertainment-industry business practices and threatening Hollywood power hierarchies, the welcoming of a streaming service into the best picture club would amount to a seismic moment. Television and film have been merging for years, but lines of demarcation remain, with the Oscars as one. (Last year’s winner, “Nomadland,” from Searchlight Pictures, a traditional studio, was mostly seen on Hulu, but only because a lot of theaters were closed; it played in roughly 1,200 theaters in the United States and had an exclusive IMAX run.)Explore the 2022 Academy AwardsThe 94th Academy Awards will be held on March 27 in Los Angeles.The Hosts: Regina Hall and Wanda Sykes plan to keep the show moving and make it funny, though they will acknowledge the war in Ukraine.‘Seen That Before?’: Four of the best picture nominees this year are remakes or reboots of earlier films.Best Actress Race: Who will win? There are cases to be made for and against each contender, and no one has an obvious advantage. Hollywood Legend: Danny Glover will receive an honorary Oscar for his activism. He spoke to The Times about his life in movies and social justice.Return to the Playground: For his Oscar-nominated short film “When We Were Bullies,” Jay Rosenblatt tracked down his fifth-grade classmates.Among this year’s best picture nominees, “I think there’s a lot of the academy that might not even know what is a streaming movie and what isn’t a streaming movie,” said the producer Jason Blum, whose Oscar-nominated films have included “Get Out,” “Whiplash” and “BlacKkKlansman.”The digital forces that have reshaped music and television have been chipping away at cinema for a long time. “If ‘CODA’ and Apple win, which seems pretty likely, it will be in part because of Netflix, which has been banging on the academy door for years, and fighting the good fight — or the bad fight, depending on who you ask — to get streaming movies considered,” Mr. Blum said.The pandemic accelerated the disruption. Traditional studios like Paramount, Universal, Sony, Warner Bros. and Disney rerouted dozens of theatrical films to streaming services or released them simultaneously in theaters and online. For the second year in a row, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, citing the coronavirus threat, allowed films to skip a theatrical release entirely and still be eligible for Oscars. The academy had previously required at least a perfunctory theatrical release of at least a week in Los Angeles.This is about more than Hollywood egotism. The worry is that, as streaming services proliferate — more than 300 now operate in the United States, according to the consulting firm Parks Associates — theaters could become exclusively the land of superheroes, sequels and remakes. The venerable Warner Bros. has slashed annual theatrical output by almost half and built a direct-to-streaming film assembly line. Last week, Amazon boosted its Prime Video service by acquiring Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the old-line studio behind “Licorice Pizza,” which is nominated for three Academy Awards, including best picture.In a year when Hollywood largely failed to jump-start theatrical moviegoing, streaming services solidified their hold on viewers. Global ticket sales totaled $21.3 billion in 2021, down from $42.3 billion in 2019, according to the Motion Picture Association. (Theaters were closed for much of 2020.) Some theater companies have gone out of business, others have merged; the world’s biggest theater chain, AMC Entertainment, racked up $6 billion in losses over the past two years and its stock has dropped 66 percent since June. At the same time, the number of subscriptions to online video services around the world grew to 1.3 billion, up from 864 million in 2019, the group said.One film that struggled at the box office was Mr. Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” which received an exclusive run in theaters (per his wishes) of about three months. It collected about $75 million worldwide (against a production budget of $100 million and global marketing costs of roughly $50 million). “West Side Story” is now available on not one but two streaming services, Disney+ and HBO Max, where it has almost assuredly been viewed more widely than in theaters. But the film was never able to recover — among Oscar voters — from being branded a box office misfire. It received seven nominations, and is poised to win in one category, for Ariana DeBose as best supporting actress.Mr. Spielberg’s also-ran presence in the current Oscar race makes the ascendance of streaming contenders all the more striking: a lion in the fight to keep the Academy Awards focused on theatrical films is pushed aside. However unlikely, it is possible that “West Side Story” could come from behind and win the best picture trophy. So could Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast,” for that matter. Such an outcome would be a bit like 2019, when academy voters, turned off by an over-the-top campaign by Netflix to push “Roma” to best picture glory, instead gave the prize to “Green Book,” a traditional film from Universal Pictures.“The Power of the Dog,” from Netflix, is seen as another strong contender for best picture.Kirsty Griffin/NetflixIn 2019, the Oscars-centered clash between Old Hollywood and New was so heated, particularly on Twitter, that the Justice Department sent an unusual letter to the academy warning that changes to its eligibility rules could raise antitrust concerns. At the time, there was a push inside the 10,000-member academy to come up with a reasonable way to ensure that only films with robust theatrical releases were eligible for Oscars.Flickers of resistance remain.“There are many great companies that are streamers that like to loosely throw around the word ‘cinema’ without supporting it as cinema,” said Tom Quinn, chief executive of Neon, the indie studio behind “Parasite,” which won the 2021 Oscar for best picture, and “The Worst Person in the World,” a screenplay and international film nominee this year. He was referring to the tendency by the majority of the streaming companies to limit a film’s theatrical release, opting instead to release it on their apps.Our Reviews of the 10 Best-Picture Oscar NomineesCard 1 of 10“Belfast.” More

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      in Television

      Samuel L. Jackson and Walter Mosley Team Up for a Sci-Fi Fable

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      In a joint interview, the actor and writer discuss “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey,” their “fairy tale” about an old man negotiating dementia and family drama with the help of a wonder drug.Samuel L. Jackson made his name in the movies, Walter Mosley in literature. But when it was time for these two arts legends to collaborate, they knew television was the only medium that would work.“The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey,” a new limited series starring Jackson and written by Mosley, based on his 2010 novel, tells the story of an elderly Atlanta man with dementia and a family that wants his savings. Just when it looks like all Ptolemy has left is to count his remaining days, two people alter the course of his life. One is Robyn (Dominique Fishback), a teenage family friend who decides Ptolemy is worth taking care of. The other is a neurologist (Walton Goggins) working on a new drug that will bring back Ptolemy’s cognizance — but only for a short time, after which he’ll be worse off than ever (shades of the Daniel Keyes novel “Flowers for Algernon” and its film adaptation, “Charly”).In the series, Jackson’s title character reclaims his life with the help of a young caretaker played by Dominique Fishback.Hopper Stone/Apple TV+In his newfound lucidity, Ptolemy comes to terms with events and people from his past, including the one true love of his life, a beauty named Sensia (Cynthia Kaye McWilliams), and Coydog (Damon Gupton), a childhood mentor who left behind an unusual inheritance. As these figures come and go from his mind, Ptolemy also takes it upon himself to solve the murder of a beloved nephew (Omar Benson Miller), a task appropriate to Mosley’s bread-and-butter turf of crime fiction.Jackson and Mosley were also executive producers on the series, which premieres Friday on Apple TV+. The project was personal for both of them: Each has had loved ones who suffered from dementia. During a freewheeling video interview — Jackson was in London (where he’s filming the Marvel mini-series “Secret Invasion”), Mosley in Los Angeles — they discussed the fairy tale quality of “Ptolemy,” why television was the best option for the project, and how the story jumped across the country from Los Angeles to Atlanta, among other subjects. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.“It’s a fairy tale,” Jackson said of his new series. “In reality, there is no cure for Alzheimer’s or dementia, but we get one, however momentarily.”Erik Carter for The New York TimesWho is Ptolemy Grey?WALTER MOSLEY He’s all of us everywhere. This is a destination that either we reach ourselves in our own experience, or with people that we know and love and live with, as far as aging, dementia and death. These things impact everybody’s lives. It’s a great thing to have Sam taking it on and bringing it to a neighborhood that other people don’t seem to think about very much.SAMUEL L. JACKSON As based in reality as we want it to be, he’s actually at the center of a fable. He’s this mythical character that Walter created who has a real-life problem at the beginning, but Walter allows us to circle back and see a life well lived. It’s a fairy tale. In reality, there is no cure for Alzheimer’s or dementia, but we get one, however momentarily, that allows him to be clear about everything that’s happened in his life, in a flash.How does the series address the experience of dementia?MOSLEY A lot of people will see somebody who’s experiencing dementia or Alzheimer’s, and they think, ‘They’re crazy.’ But in reality, there’s something really going on in there, no matter how far gone they are. We allow an audience to identify not only with the character that Sam’s playing, but with our own lives. That was what the book meant to me, to be able to do that.JACKSON Those of us who have had to deal with that know that when those people are sitting there, they may not answer your questions or be present for what you want them to be present for, because they’re busy inhabiting something else that gives them solace in the lost space that they’re in, or that we think they’re in. But they may not be lost at all. They just don’t bother with what you are trying to put on.I talked to my mom when she had dementia and she’d be like, “You’re disturbing me. Stop asking me things that I’m supposed to know the answer to, or you think that I know the answer to, or that I don’t want to be engaged in right now.” When she wanted to engage, she engaged. So this story touched me in a real place.“This is a destination that either we reach ourselves in our own experience, or with people that we know and love and live with, as far as aging, dementia and death,” Mosley said.Erik Carter for The New York TimesAnd through the story, you get to invent a cure, albeit a temporary one.MOSLEY That’s the great thing about imaginative creativity. You look at Jules Verne: He’s the guy who invented the [electric] submarine, who invented the rocket to the moon. He invented all of this stuff in his imagination, and of course, it’s stuff we wanted. I was reading the newspaper yesterday, and they said umbilical cord stem cells have cured a woman of AIDS. This one woman is cured, and they did it from umbilical cord stem cells. If you put the possibility out there, lots of people are going to be thinking about it.Walter, you’ve worked in television quite a bit by now, including as an executive producer on the crime drama “Snowfall.” Sam, you have mostly stuck to movies. What made TV the right medium to tell the story of Ptolemy?MOSLEY Television has the potential to do some amazing things that are good for drama, good for actors, and good for an audience to be able to understand and identify with characters who have real arcs of change. We’re coming up on our final season of “Snowfall,” and we’re going to get to see how things are going to work out or fall apart. That’s what’s been fun.JACKSON There’s a great satisfaction for me to have a character development that allows an audience to go back and say, “OK, that’s where he started. Oh, that’s why he’s this guy. Oh, that’s why he treats women this way.” We watched movies for a very long time before we realized something like “Roots” could come along and be a mini-series. All of a sudden, boom, there’s “Roots,” and you go, “[expletive], that’s the way to tell the story.”The novel takes place in Los Angeles, but the series takes place in Atlanta. Why the move?JACKSON Georgia has better tax breaks.MOSLEY Yes, it wasn’t feasible to do it in L.A. First, we were going to go to Atlanta and try to make Atlanta look like L.A. But Atlanta doesn’t look like L.A.JACKSON There’s not one palm tree in Atlanta.Did setting the series in Atlanta add anything thematically?JACKSON There are certain elements of Atlanta that are historically indigenous to telling a story like this. Anybody who’s lived in any place that’s full of Black people will recognize this. How many white people are in this story? There’s the doctor, and the nurse. A lot of people are going to look at this and go, “Where are the white people?” You didn’t encounter them unless you had to when I was growing up in the South. In Atlanta, they had Black insurance companies, they had Black newspapers. Everything you needed, you could get in the Black community. You didn’t have to go outside of it.MOSLEY I really do think that all of those things are trace elements that impacted the making of the series, with the actors and the crew just being in Atlanta. We would tell the story anywhere we were, but making it in Atlanta was in itself an experience, and that experience had to impart some of its history to the series.Let’s talk a little about the collaboration between you two. Walter, why was it important to have Sam onboard for this?MOSLEY Sam is a great actor, but that’s just a very small part of the answer to your question. I wrote the book 13 years ago. Sam knew the book better than I did. He’d say, “No, no. Don’t you remember? You did this,” and I’d say, “Oh, yeah. OK.” He’s also an executive producer, and his commitment to the book and getting it made is why we got it made. When I was shopping it, people would say, “Sam Jackson doesn’t do television.” Well you’re right, but he’s going to do this. His commitment to it, his talent in doing it, his willingness to play a very different kind of role than he usually does and to make that work so beautifully — it was really great.Sam, what is it about Walter’s work that pulls you in?JACKSON Walter is a very feet-on-the-ground kind of guy that understands and knows his characters and knows the environment that those characters are in. Environment is very important when you’re a reader. I read a lot, two or three books at a time. Descriptions and character development are very important things, no matter what, and Walter has a command of those things that a lot of writers don’t. I read bad novels along with good ones, but I always know that I’m going to get something very satisfying when I’m reading a Walter Mosley book. More

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      The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to HBO, Hulu, Apple TV+ and More in March

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      Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of March’s most promising new titles.(Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)John C. Reilly, Quincy Isaiah and Jason Clarke in “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty”HBONew to HBO Max‘Drive My Car’Starts streaming: March 2Nominated for four Academy Awards this year, including best picture, this critically acclaimed drama is a captivating meditation on loss and regret. Directed and co-written by Ryusuke Hamaguchi (adapting a Haruki Murakami short story), “Drive My Car” has Hidetoshi Nishijima playing Yusuke Kafuku, a renowned actor and theater director who is mourning the death of his wife and muse. When he agrees to direct a multilingual stage adaptation of “Uncle Vanya” in Hiroshima, Yusuke bonds with his designated driver, while also forging a wary relationship with the play’s star — who was his late wife’s secret lover. Though the movie has a three-hour running time, Hamaguchi moves the plot fairly briskly from one quietly intense scene to another, bringing a beautiful blue tinge to the story of a man haunted by all things he has left unsaid and undone.‘Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty’Starts streaming: March 6The sports reporter Jeff Pearlman’s book “Showtime” covered the rise of the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers, an exciting and star-laden team who helped the N.B.A. become an international phenomenon. The TV adaptation “Winning Time” turns that tale into a stylish period dramedy and features an all-star cast recreating an era when a handful of strong, often conflicting personalities changed the whole culture of professional basketball. The producer Adam McKay (who also directed the first episode) and creators Max Borenstein and Jim Hecht deploy a storytelling style reminiscent of McKay’s movie “The Big Short,” where characters like Jerry Buss (John C. Reilly), Jerry West (Jason Clarke), Magic Johnson (Quincy Isaiah) and Pat Riley (Adrien Brody) sometimes break the fourth wall to help explain the fine details of business management, on-court strategy and handling superstar egos.‘Minx’ Season 1Starts streaming: March 17Set amid the freewheeling publishing industry in early 1970s Los Angeles, “Minx” stars Ophelia Lovibond as Joyce, an activist who gets the chance to create and edit the feminist magazine of her dreams — so long as she is willing to include erotic photo spreads of naked men. Jake Johnson plays Doug, a successful pornographer who mentors Joyce, a proudly independent woman embarrassed to admit the troubles she has had adjusting to the age of sexual liberation. Created by Ellen Rapoport, “Minx” finds humor in the ways that certain gender-role expectations and stereotypes persist even in an “anything goes” era of free love and progressive politics.Also arriving:March 1“The Larry David Story”March 2“West Side Story”March 3“Gaming Wall Street”“Little Ellen” Season 2“Our Flag Means Death” Season 1“The Tourist” Season 1March 8“Ruxx” Season 1March 10“Dune”“Theodosia” Season 1March 13“Game Theory with Bomani Jones” Season 1March 13“Blade Runner: Black Lotus” Season 1March 15“Phoenix Rising”March 17“DMZ” Season 1“Jellystone!” Season 2March 18“Lust” Season 1“Pseudo”March 20“Amsterdam” Season 1March 24“King Richard”“One Perfect Shot” Season 1“Starstruck” Season 2March 31“Julia” Season 1“Moonshot”Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball as seen in “Lucy and Desi.”Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesNew to Prime Video‘Lucy and Desi’Starts streaming: March 4The comedian and producer Amy Poehler directed this homage to the groundbreaking Hollywood power couple Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, taking a comprehensive look at their impressive careers and rocky marriage. With the help of rare home movies and old audio interviews — combined with new comments from Carol Burnett, Bette Midler and others — Poehler and her team detail how Ball and Arnaz worked their way up in show business, before creating the groundbreaking sitcom “I Love Lucy” and founding the influential television studio Desilu Productions. This is a film about two widely beloved entertainers who helped change television with their business savvy and their stubborn refusals to compromise, even as they worked to exhaustion and made each other miserable behind the scenes.Also arriving:March 4“The Boys Presents: Diabolical”March 7“2022 Academy of Country Music Awards”March 10“Harina”March 11“Upload” Season 2March 18“Master”March 25“Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls”Steve Sang-Hyun Noh, center, with Minha Kim and Inji Jeong in “Pachinko.”Apple TV+New to Apple TV+‘Pachinko’ Season 1Starts streaming: March 25Min Jin Lee’s best-selling historical novel “Pachinko” inspired this ambitious drama, which follows one Korean family across three countries and seven decades against the backdrop of war and military occupation. Created by Soo Hugh — a writer and producer on “The Terror” — and featuring the work of the acclaimed indie film directors Kogonada and Justin Chon, “Pachinko” weaves together story lines from multiple time periods, including from a Korean fishing village in the early 20th century and Japan around the time of World War II and the late 1980s, when global business concerns were shrinking a lot of the old distinctions between regions and ideals. Like the book, the series is about the legacies and connections that sustain people through times of turmoil.Also arriving:March 4“Dear…” Season 2March 11“The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey”March 18“WeCrashed”Amanda Seyfried portraying Elizabeth Holmes in “The Dropout.”Beth Dubber/HuluNew to Hulu‘The Dropout’Starts streaming: March 3Amanda Seyfried plays the scandal-plagued biotech entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes in “The Dropout,” a miniseries based on the podcast of the same name. Anyone who has read the various investigative exposés about Holmes’s failed start-up, Theranos, already knows the yarn of how the company claimed to have developed a groundbreaking blood-testing device that never worked as promised. “The Dropout” goes deeper into Holmes’s past, framing her less as a hapless fraud than as a well-meaning misfit who was in too much of a rush to become rich and famous.‘Atlanta’ Season 3Starts streaming: March 25After a four-year layoff, Donald Glover’s one-of-a-kind, award-winning dramedy “Atlanta” returns for its third and penultimate season, which was shot mostly in London. (Season 4 is currently slated to run this fall, wrapping up the series.) The story picks up with the aspiring rap star Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry) and his bumbling manager and cousin, Earn (Glover), trying to make inroads in the European market while they and their friends Darius (LaKeith Stanfield) and Van (Zazie Beetz) are feeling more alienated than usual by their surroundings. As always with “Atlanta,” expect the unexpected, as Glover and his creative team explore aspects of the Black experience that range from the subtly poignant to the comically surreal.Also arriving:March 1“Better Things” Season 5“The Savior for Sale”March 4“Benedetta”“Dicktown” Season 2“Fresh”March 6“Mark, Mary & Some Other People”March 8“India Sweets and Spices”March 10“American Refugee”March 14“Hell Hath No Fury”March 15“You Can’t Kill Meme”March 17“Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn”March 18“Deep Water”“Life & Beth” Season 1March 19“Captains of Za’atari”March 26“Mass”March 29“The Girl from Plainville”Oscar Isaac as the hero in “Moon Knight.”Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios.New to Disney+‘Moon Knight’ Season 1Starts streaming: March 30The latest Marvel Cinematic Universe television series features a cult-favorite superhero: a cloaked vigilante who draws inspiration and strength from an ancient Egyptian god. Oscar Isaac plays the hero, who has dissociative identity disorder but does his best to use the unique qualities of his different selves in his fight over evil. In the Marvel comics, Moon Knight is a fairly dark, violent character, similar to Batman and Daredevil in his knowledge of the criminal underworld and his willingness to crack skulls. The TV version is being pitched as similarly shadowy, as evidenced by the first season’s main villain: a charismatic religious cult leader played by Ethan Hawke.Also arriving:March 11“Turning Red”March 18“Cheaper by the Dozen”“More Than Robots”March 23“Parallels” Season 1March 25“Olivia Rodrigo: driving home 2 u”“The Wonderful Spring of Mickey Mouse” More

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      In ‘Severance,’ Adam Scott Gets to Work

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      The actor’s latest role is in another workplace series, but this one is more dystopian and involves elective brain surgery. Real-life parallels abound.“Severance,” an unnerving workplace drama, was originally scheduled to begin filming in March 2020, but pandemic shutdowns pushed the shoot to the fall. So in October 2020, Adam Scott, the show’s star, left his family in Los Angeles and flew to New York.For more than eight months, on the days when he could work — production paused a few times for positive tests, and Scott himself caught Covid-19 in February 2021 — he was driven to a busy studio in the South Bronx and surrounded by (shielded, masked) colleagues. Then he was driven back to a silent Tribeca apartment where he spent his nights alone, which made for an odd parallel with the show itself.“Severance,” which premieres its first two episodes on Apple TV+ on Feb. 18, takes a speculative approach to work-life balance. Scott plays Mark Scout, a department chief at Lumon Industries, a shadowy corporation. (When was the last time a TV show had a corporation that wasn’t?) Mark and his co-workers have each voluntarily undergone a surgical procedure known as severance, which creates a mental cordon so that your work self has no knowledge or memories of your home self and vice versa. Think of it as an N.D.A. For the soul.Scott, 48, hasn’t always had great balance. “My boundaries are all over the place,” he said. “I’ve often put far too much of my self-worth into whether I’m working or not and the perception of my work once I’ve done it. That’s unhealthy.” Living by himself, away from his wife and two children, grieving his mother who had died just before the pandemic, that balance didn’t get better.Scott in “Severance,” in which his character has a surgical procedure that creates a mental cordon between his memories of work and of home. The shoot was an oddly parallel experience.Atsushi Nishijima/Apple TV+Still, the job gave him a place to put those feelings. The role demands that he alternate between the guileless “innie” Mark, a vacant middle manager, and the dented “outtie” Mark, mourning his dead wife. Some scenes have the feel of a workplace comedy, a genre Scott knows intimately. (Imagine “Parks and Recreation,” where Scott spent six seasons, remade by Jean-Paul Sartre.)Others have the feel of a thriller, a drama, a sci-fi conjecture — all styles he is less familiar with. Ultimately, this dual role allows Scott to do what he does best: play a blandly handsome everydude while also showing the pain and shame and passion underlying that pose.“He has this understanding of how strange it is to be normal,” said Ben Stiller, an executive producer and director of the series. “There’s a normalcy to him, a regular guyness. He also has an awareness that there’s no real regular guy.”Scott has only ever wanted to be an actor. As a child in Santa Cruz, Calif., he watched as a film crew transformed his street into a set for a mini-series version of “East of Eden.” The road became dirt. The houses reverted to their Victorian origins. Horses and carriages drove past his lawn. This was magic, he thought, and he wanted to do whatever he could to enter what he called “that crazy magical make-believe world.”Whenever he had a moment alone (and as the youngest child of divorced parents, this was pretty often) he would imagine himself as the hero of his own movie — usually a Steven Spielberg movie. He acted throughout school, except for a year or two in high school when he worried what theater kid status would do to his popularity. But he was also a water polo player, so somehow it all worked out.Scott, 48, barely scraped by for years in pursuit of his acting dream until a role in the 2008 comedy “Step Brothers” changed his life. “I was hanging on by a piece of floss for 15 years,” he said. Philip Cheung for The New York TimesHe enrolled in a two-year program at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles. A classmate and fast friend, Paul Rudd, admired his work even then. “I’m like, this guy’s really funny,” Rudd remembered. “And dry and really bright, obviously.”Scott graduated at 20, made the rounds and spent a decade and a half booking just enough work to keep himself solvent — a few episodes here, a supporting part in a movie there — without ever feeling like he’d arrived.“I was hanging on by a piece of floss, for 15 years,” he said.In the early ’00s, his wife-to-be, Naomi Scott (then Naomi Sablan), asked him if he had a backup plan. “And it was so, so painful, his reaction to that,” she recalled. “He was like, ‘There is none.’”Then it happened. He landed a role in the 2008 Will Ferrell-John C. Reilly comedy “Step Brothers” after another actor dropped out. Then he starred as Henry in the cult Starz comedy “Party Down,” replacing Rudd, who had other commitments. He missed out on a role on the NBC sitcom “Parks and Recreation,” but the show’s creators brought him in at the end of the second season as Ben Wyatt, a love interest for Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope. Suddenly, he had become a left-of-center leading man.In “Step Brothers,” he played a yuppie chucklehead, but the roles in “Party Down” and “Parks and Recreation” felt more personal. He brought those years of not making it to Henry, a would-be actor whose career has been deformed by a series of beer commercials, and to Ben, a strait-laced accountant with a disreputable past.Scott with Ken Marino, left, in the cult Starz comedy “Party Down,” in which Scott played a failing actor whose career was deformed by a series of beer commercials.Ron Batzdorff/Starz“I was like, oh, of course, I feel deeply all of these things,” Scott said, “Having been here for 15 years and not having a whole lot to show for it, and being a bit wounded by the circumstances of this town.”He loved the work. “His defining characteristic is that he just really wants to do a good job,” Michael Schur, a creator of “Parks and Recreation,” told me.But he didn’t love everything that came with it. “I started getting recognized, and it just felt completely different than I had imagined that feeling for those 15 or so years.” Scott said. “It felt more like I had a disease on my face than it did being recognized.”“It didn’t feel like this warm acceptance and hug,” he continued. “I always thought it would feel like love or something, but it’s a weird, isolating feeling.”Scott was speaking on a video call from his Los Angeles home. The call had started a little late because he had spilled an espresso all over the table where his computer sat. The espresso had come from a top-line Italian contraption that takes a half-hour to warm up and that he cleans lovingly every night. If these sound like the habits of a man to whom the small stuff matters, maybe!Scott (with Nick Offerman, left, and Sam Elliott, right) starred in the hit NBC comedy “Parks and Recreation” for six seasons. “He has a powerful store of humility,” Offerman said.Colleen Hayes/NBCIn conversation, he was candid, self-critical, determinedly nice, without quite sacrificing the wryness that often defines him onscreen. He had shown up in the video window — in glasses, ghost pale, neckbearded — wearing a T-shirt and a sweatshirt underneath a flannel. A half-hour in, he took the flannel off.“Sorry, I just started sweating under your question,” he said. (The question: “What made ‘Party Down’ so great?”) He doesn’t love doing press, but he made it seem as if we had all the time in the world. He kept telling me how great I was doing.“He has a powerful store of humility,” Nick Offerman, his “Parks and Recreation” co-star, had told me. Offerman also said that what Scott does so well — onscreen, but maybe offscreen, too — is to embrace what he called, “a sort of geeky normalcy, the flavor of behavior that most people try to avoid if they can help it, because it’s too human.” (Offerman also told me to ask what Scott does to his hair to make it so voluminous, but Scott wasn’t talking.)Scott isn’t cool. Unapologetic in his fandom, he has even made a podcast about how much he loves U2. His enthusiasm for R.E.M. is legendary. Often his characters go a little too hard, want things a little too much. (Evidence? “The Comeback Kid,” a Season 4 episode of “Parks and Recreation,” in which an out-of-work Ben takes a deep dive into Claymation. And calzones.)But several of his colleagues also identified a kind of reserve in him — a sense that he holds something back while performing, which makes the performance richer.“It didn’t feel like this warm acceptance and hug,” Scott said of becoming someone recognizable. “I always thought it would feel like love or something, but it’s a weird, isolating feeling.”Philip Cheung for The New York Times“There is something about the set of his eyes,” Schur said. “You just sense that there’s depth there, something that you can’t immediately access.”Poehler, Scott’s “Parks and Recreation” co-star, echoed this. “There’s a very internal, secret, secretive part of him as an actor,” she said.That tension makes him right for the linked roles of “Severance.” The try-hard part works for the “innie” Mark, a man who just wants to do a great job, no matter how bizarre the job is. And that reserve helps with “outtie” Mark, who spackles his pain with booze, jokes and distance.“It’s the same guy,” Scott explained. “It’s just one is more or less clean, and the other has lived many years and has gone through a lot of things.” Playing the “outtie” made him realize how much he had pushed away his own grief over his mother’s death. So that’s in there, too.It was a long shoot and, given the pandemic protocols, often a lonesome one. Some days were spent almost entirely within a windowless Lumon Industries room — all fluorescent light and plastic partitions and soul-crushing wall-to-wall carpet. “It definitely kind of drove me mad,” John Turturro, Scott’s co-star, told me.Scott put it more mildly. “It was a strange eight months,” he said.But he had a job, the only job he has ever wanted. So Scott, who has never held a real office job, showed up to the imitation office every day that a negative P.C.R. test permitted. He had work to do. More

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      The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to HBO, Hulu, Apple TV+ and More in February

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      Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of February’s most promising new titles.(Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)Olly Sholotan, left, as Carlton Banks and Jabari Banks as Will Smith in “Bel-Air.”Evans Vestal Ward/PeacockNew to Peacock‘Bel-Air’Starts streaming: Feb. 13At the start of each episode of the teen-friendly 1990s sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” the show’s star, Will Smith, would rap the premise of the show: all about how his character, Will, was shipped out of Philadelphia to live with rich relatives in Los Angeles after a fight threatened to derail his promising future. In 2019, Morgan Cooper wrote and directed a trailer for an imaginary “Fresh Prince” reboot, re-conceiving the original as a lurid, soapy modern prime-time drama for adults. Smith liked what he saw and bought the concept. The resulting series has the newcomer Jabari Banks playing Will: a smart and athletic kid torn between his obligations to his old West Philly crew and the expectations of his upper-crust Los Angeles kin.Also arriving:Feb. 3“Dragon Rescue Riders: Heroes of the Sky” Season 2Feb. 11“Marry Me”Bradley Cooper in Guillermo del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley.”Kerry Hayes/Searchlight Pictures, via Associated PressNew to Hulu‘Nightmare Alley’Starts streaming: Feb. 1In the end-of-year crunch of blockbusters and awards contenders, the director Guillermo del Toro’s visually sumptuous and thematically rich take on William Lindsay Gresham’s creepy 1946 crime novel, “Nightmare Alley” (previously adapted, beautifully, in 1947), didn’t draw as much attention or as big of an audience as it deserved. Now that it’s arriving on Hulu, fans of film noir will have another chance to catch up. Co-written by del Toro and Kim Morgan, “Nightmare Alley” has Bradley Cooper playing a sketchy drifter who gets a job at a carnival, where he learns the secrets of a mentalism act and starts passing himself off in high society as a psychic. As usual with del Toro’s work, the elaborate set designs and memorably offbeat characters are eye-catching, pulling viewers into a morally unsteady world where nearly everyone is either a hustler or a mark.‘Pam & Tommy’Starts streaming: Feb. 2The mini-series “Pam & Tommy” is partly about the tumultuous romance and tabloid scandals of the rock drummer Tommy Lee and the actress Pamela Anderson. The show’s third major character is played by one of its producers and creators, Seth Rogen, who takes on the role of a disgruntled carpenter looking to exact some revenge on the celebrity couple, selling their homemade sex tape in retaliation for an unpaid bill. Sebastian Stan plays Lee and Lily James plays Anderson in the series, which also features the work — and the ironic sensibilities — of the director Craig Gillespie (“I, Tonya”) and the screenwriter Robert D. Siegel (“The Wrestler”). While “Pam & Tommy” is based on a true story, it has a satirical edge, commenting on how the public sometimes prefers to be entertained by celebrities’ private lives more than by their actual work.Also arriving:Feb. 1“Your Attention Please” Season 2Feb. 3“The Deep House”Feb. 4“Beans”“The Beta Test”Feb. 5“Rick and Morty” Season 5Feb. 10“Gully”Feb. 11“Dollface” Season 2Feb. 17“A House on the Bayou”Feb. 18“The Feast”“The King’s Man”Feb. 22“How It Ends”Feb. 24“The Last Rite”“Snowfall” Season 5Feb. 25“No Exit”Alan Ritchson as Jack Reacher and Martin Roach as Picard in “Reacher.”Amazon StudiosNew to Prime Video‘Reacher’ Season 1Starts streaming: Feb. 4The author Lee Child’s best-known creation is Jack Reacher, a stoic, hulking ex-military policeman and inveterate wanderer who, in over two dozen novels, has frequently stumbled into dangerous situations where he has felt compelled to right wrongs and help the helpless. Tom Cruise played Reacher in two solid action movies, but fans of the books complained that the actor’s physical type was never quite right. The tall and muscular Alan Ritchson looks much more like Child’s character in the pulpy TV series “Reacher.” Its first season adapts the first Reacher novel, the 1997 “Killing Floor,” in which the beefy do-gooder kicks around the suspicious locals in a small Georgia town to unravel a murder mystery.‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ Season 4Starts streaming: Feb. 18Season 3 of this award-winning period dramedy ended on a down note, with the stand-up comedian Midge Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) being kicked off a lucrative tour and her manager, Susie Myerson (Alex Borstein), dropping into deep debt. After a two-year hiatus, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” is due for a reset — because this isn’t the kind of series where characters wallow for long. The creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino, and her writing-directing partner (and husband), Daniel Palladino, will keep moving their story further into the 1960s, when American popular culture started becoming a bit freer and Midge and Susie can find more outlets for a frank, funny, fast-talking kind of comedy.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      How Joel Coen Made ‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’

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      When your whole filmmaking career has been one of unexpected twists and turns, how do you surprise yourself? Adapt a Shakespeare play.You make enough movies about people chasing after things — outlaws, money, a kidnapped baby — and eventually someone comes chasing after you. In Joel Coen’s case, his pursuer was William Shakespeare.As Coen put it recently, “Shakespeare is unavoidable.” He gave a resigned chuckle and added, “For better or worse.”In a filmmaking career of nearly 40 years, Coen has chronicled a spectrum of well-spoken criminals and enlightened dudes in stories inflected with varying amounts of brutality and absurdity. He has directed 18 features and written several others with his brother, Ethan.Having built a filmography characterized by unexpected twists and turns, Joel Coen has himself taken what may seem like a surprising pivot away from that body of work. His latest film, “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” is a shadowy and phantasmagoric rendition of the Shakespeare play, presented in black and white.The movie, released theatrically in December and on Apple TV+ earlier this month, stars Denzel Washington as the murderous nobleman of the title and Frances McDormand as his scheming spouse, Lady Macbeth. It has already received numerous postseason plaudits and is considered a strong contender for Academy Award nominations; reviewing the film for The New York Times, A.O. Scott called it a “crackling, dagger-sharp screen adaptation.”Coen is a dedicated theatergoer and an avid reader, though not one with any special knowledge of or affinity for Shakespeare. “I came to it as an amateur,” he said. “I’m still an amateur.”But look closer at “Macbeth,” and there are aspects of the play that make it fitting and perhaps inevitable subject matter for Coen. “It’s a murder story,” he said. “In a way, it’s even a horror story.”Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand in the film. Washington said Coen told him to avoid “stick-up-the-butt Shakespearean acting.” Alison Rosa/Apple and A24This somber tale may have proved an ideal escape for the director, coming at an unfamiliar juncture when Ethan had decided to take a break from film. Just when Joel was seeking new approaches to his cinematic craft as a solo director, his inspiration emerged from a foundational text of English literature.“It was a deliberate choice to do something I had not done,” Coen said. “It was an opportunity to go out of the wheelhouse that I’d been in before. It’s something that demanded I do that.”Coen, 67, was speaking earlier this month in a video interview from California. His demeanor suggested a mixture of Harold Ramis and Larry David; he could be avuncular and witty, but also defensive and averse to self-mythologizing.A kind of interplay between high and low, serious and preposterous, foul and fair would seem to be omnipresent in the Coen brothers’ filmography, which has won them four Oscars, but Joel is not necessarily inclined to consider the through lines in their work.He acknowledged that he and Ethan had made some quirky films over the years but said that “it was a mistake to think that any of it is planned.”He added, “There’s never been any real design or architecture to what we’ve done.”But even that absence of strategy was upended after their 2018 western anthology, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” when Ethan decided to focus on other endeavors.Joel said that their partnership was flexible enough to accommodate this kind of disruption.“It’s not like when we first got together, we planned on working together for 40 years,” he said. “It just kind of happened that way. When we said, ‘Let’s do some other stuff separately for a little while,’ it’s not like there’s any plan for how long and what that would mean.”Joel said that making a movie without Ethan was like “having one eye put out” but added that there was “probably something healthy in taking a break.”At the very least, it gave Joel the space to contemplate alien terrain like “Macbeth.” This was a thought he’d been kicking around since at least 2016, when McDormand, his wife and frequent collaborator, asked him about directing a production of the play, in which she had starred for Berkeley Repertory Theater.Directing “Macbeth” for the stage did not appeal to Coen — “I don’t think I’d know what to do,” he said — but as a film, he saw its potential to allow him “to retreat from a lot of the ways I’d been working before.”“I wanted to go as far as I could away from realism and more towards a theatrical presentation,” he said. “I was trying to strip things away and reduce things to a theatrical essence, but still have it be cinema.”Coen and McDormand on the set. She is a producer on the film. The director explained, “I’ve always worked with members of the family.”Alison Rosa/Apple and A24On a visual level, that meant leaning into the ambiguities of Shakespeare’s play, avoiding depictions that would provide too much specificity about when or where things are taking place.“There is nothing certain about this movie, nothing sure about where it’s set,” said Bruno Delbonnel, the film’s cinematographer, who also worked with the Coens on “Buster Scruggs” and “Inside Llewyn Davis.”“We were creating this world where you never know if you’re looking up or down,” Delbonnel said. “You never know if it’s night or day.”That also meant digging down to find an essential Coen-ness in “Macbeth.” Carter Burwell, who has composed the scores for almost all the Coens’ films since their 1984 debut, “Blood Simple,” said that their movies are consistently concerned with “the pathos of people desperately trying to impose meaning on this life, this meaningless universe.”The stories they have told — including “The Tragedy of Macbeth” — put the viewer “in the position of seeing everything that’s going on and the poor characters being helpless,” Burwell said. “The characters think they’re smart, they think they’re on top of things. And we can see that, in fact, they’re just flailing helplessly.”Unlike, say, the brothers’ 2010 take on “True Grit” — when he deliberately did not watch the 1969 version — Joel Coen immersed himself in influences on “Macbeth”: He considered cinematic adaptations by Orson Welles and Roman Polanski, as well as Akira Kurosawa’s “Throne of Blood,” which transposes the drama to feudal Japan. He looked at films from Carl Dreyer, Masaki Kobayashi and F.W. Murnau, and read up on Edward Gordon Craig, the early 20th-century stage designer.And when paring down “Macbeth” to under two hours, Coen didn’t hesitate to unsheathe his sword, citing Welles’s 1948 version as a gold standard of sorts. “That’s a wacky movie,” Coen said. “Welles had no problem rearranging, cutting and inventing with Shakespeare. It was kind of liberating. You look at that and go, well, all right, he’s doing it.”McDormand, who has won three Oscars for her performances and a fourth as a producer of “Nomadland,” joined “Macbeth” as its leading lady and as a producer, for self-evident reasons. “I’ve always worked with members of the family,” Coen said.He had few words about the exit of Scott Rudin, who had produced Coen films like “No Country for Old Men” and “True Grit,” and who left this project and several others following a series of news media reports about his abusive behavior. “It’s a whole other discussion,” Coen said. “I don’t know what else to say.”Coen and Delbonnel spent several months designing the aesthetic of their “Macbeth” and planning the shots for when filming took place in Los Angeles. Delbonnel said that Coen brought him in much earlier and more extensively than in movies Joel had directed with Ethan.But in a fundamental way, Delbonnel said, Joel was no different than on previous films: “Sometimes he’ll ask you a question and say, ‘What do you think if we do that?’” Delbonnel said. “But then there’s a moment where he decides, OK, that’s what we’re going to do. And he knows exactly where it’s going.”Coen consulting with the cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel on a scene involving Kathryn Hunter. Nothing is certain in the film, not even where it’s set, Delbonnel said.Alison Rosa/Apple and A24Not that there was much hesitation in casting Washington, a two-time Academy Award winner, as the title character. Washington said he was just as eager for the role, as he’d never worked with either Coen but considered himself a fan of their “dangerous” films.“You’ll laugh or you’ll see somebody get their head blown off, possibly at the same time,” Washington said. “‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ is one of my favorite movies. I don’t even know why. It’s just so weird.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Mahershala Ali Finally Gets the Leading Role He Deserves

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      In a more just world, Mahershala Ali, one of America’s most gifted actors, would have played the lead in at least a dozen films by now.He’s certainly paid his dues and then some. Over the past two decades, the 47-year-old actor has starred or played key roles in prestige series (HBO’s “True Detective”), sci-fi franchises (“The Hunger Games”) and network-defining political thrillers (Netflix’s “House of Cards”). In 2017, he won his first Academy Award for his performance in “Moonlight,” a master class in what you can do with just 20 minutes or so of screen time, and a second Oscar two years later, for his performance in “Green Book.”So it may come as a shock to learn that Ali has never played the lead role in a feature film before, not until his star turn in the sci-fi drama “Swan Song,” now streaming on Apple TV+.“I always felt like a bit of a late bloomer,” Ali said.On a recent morning, in a wide-ranging video interview from his home in the San Francisco Bay Area, Ali, dressed in a black jacket over a crisp white Team Ikuzawa T-shirt, talked about “Swan Song,” the debut feature from the Irish director Benjamin Cleary.In “Swan Song,” Ali plays both a dying man and his clone.Apple TV+As if to make up for lost time, Ali plays not just one main character in the sci-fi drama, but two: Cameron, a terminally ill husband and father of a 5-year-old son; and Jack, the perfect clone of himself — complete with every one of his memories — who, unbeknown to Cameron’s wife and child, will soon replace him in order to spare them the grief and pain of having to watch him die. In several scenes, Ali shares the stage with Ali, with only himself to play against. “It was fun after it was hard,” he said with a laugh. “Fun after you move through the hard.”It was a winding life journey that took him to “Swan Song,” with stops and starts and moments of doubt along the way. Like the time he was in his second year of New York University’s prestigious graduate acting program and considered ditching it all to go back to working as a deckhand in San Francisco. “I was still in the union,” he said, “and it’s good money.”Or another time, in the middle of his acting career, when he took off a year and a half to care for his ailing grandfather. “He had a stroke in 2010, and I kind of dropped everything,” he said. “I was living in Las Vegas and taking care of him, just me and my grandma.”And there were other reasons that the actor is only now playing his first film lead. The industry was a lot different back when he was coming up, he explained — more stratified between movies and series, which made feature film roles, let alone feature film leads, tougher for TV actors like himself to come by. Those who started in TV were seen as TV actors only, and so his aim was just to be the best TV actor he could be. He was well into the third season of his third series, “The 4400,” before he was finally called on to “step on Brad Pitt’s character” (a monstrous child whom Ali’s character literally stumbles upon at a nursing home) in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”Ali is “a really powerful actor, but he also has a really calming energy as a scene partner,” said Awkwafina, his “Swan Song” co-star. “It was probably one of the best experiences I’ve had on a set.”Chanell Stone for The New York TimesOther film roles followed — in “The Place Beyond the Pines,” “The Hunger Games” and, in 2016, “Moonlight” — but no leads.Around the time “Moonlight” was released, a writer for The New York Times conceded that Ali’s rise, unlike those of some of his peers, “has not been meteoric.”“When I look at my trajectory, my start was a little slow, if you think about where I am at the moment,” Ali said.Even so, many of the supporting roles he was getting were ones any actor would kill for, like Juan in “Moonlight,” a hard-on-the-surface dope dealer bursting with love for his young charge. “I hadn’t seen that character,” he said. Or Don Shirley, the African American pianist in the biopic “Green Book” who hired an Italian American bouncer, played by Viggo Mortensen, to serve as his valet in the Deep South. “He was the most gracious type of rebellious you could be,” Ali said of the musician. “Somebody who was so smart and cunning and found a way to buck the system by hiring a white guy to carry his bags in and out of a hotel, and be his bodyguard, in 1962? I thought that was genius.”Ali won his first Oscar for his supporting turn in “Moonlight” (2016),  opposite Alex Hibbert.David Bornfriend/A24Two years later, he won best supporting actor again, this time for “Green Book,” alongside Viggo Mortensen.Patti Perret/Universal Pictures“Swan Song” came to Ali in 2019, after he read the script and asked to meet with Cleary, its writer. Cleary had won an Oscar for his 2015 short film, “Stutterer,” but had never directed a feature film before. After a single “really great conversation” between the two, Ali said yes to the project. “It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life,” Cleary recalled.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to HBO, Hulu, Apple TV+ and More in January

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      Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to their libraries. Here are our picks for some of January’s most promising new titles.(Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)Danny McBride as the debauched eldest son of a megachurch pastor in “The Righteous Gemstones.”HBO MaxNew to HBO Max‘The Righteous Gemstones’ Season 2Starts streaming: Jan. 9With “Succession” and “Yellowstone” both on hiatus, fans of stories about larger-than-life businessmen and their deeply damaged offspring can redirect their attention to the second season of HBO’s pitch-black social satire “The Righteous Gemstones.” Danny McBride, who also created the series, stars as Jesse, the eldest son of Eli Gemstone (John Goodman), an evangelical pastor leading a thriving megachurch. Season 1 dealt with a series of scandals that rocked the Gemstones, widening the divisions between the libertine Jesse and his two siblings, the unpredictable Judy (Edi Patterson) and the pious Kelvin (Adam DeVine). Expect these new episodes to build on what McBride and his team did with their first run, which mercilessly mocked a family of pompous, hypocritical Southern preachers and established the complex history that provides context for their corruption.‘Peacemaker’ Season 1Starts streaming: Jan. 13Before the writer and director James Gunn made the blockbusters “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “The Suicide Squad,” he worked on two low-budget, subversive superhero movies: “The Specials” and “Super.” Gunn’s new TV series, “Peacemaker,” is ostensibly a spinoff of “The Suicide Squad,” following the dimwitted, hyper-macho antihero Christopher Smith (John Cena) as he starts working with an eclectic splinter group of rogue government operatives. The spirit of “Peacemaker,” however, is more aligned with Gunn’s earlier, grubbier films, which make crime and crime-fighting alike seem like warped endeavors, suffused with a strange melancholy. Equal parts violent and comic, the show explores the psyches of the men and women who dabble in costumed adventuring.‘The Gilded Age’ Season 1Starts streaming: Jan. 24The “Downton Abbey” creator Julian Fellowes turns his attention to 1880s New York City with his long-in-development “The Gilded Age,” another opulent melodrama about the mores and machinations of high-society types and their poorer relations and servants. The star-studded cast includes Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon as eccentric sisters who take in their bankrupt niece (Louisa Jacobson); Denée Benton as an aspiring writer defying the racial stereotypes of the age; and Carrie Coon as a shrewd social climber married to a nouveau riche tycoon (Morgan Spector). Those are just a few of the dozens of characters Fellowes weaves through stories of romance, politics, resentments, betrayals and the social upheaval that defined the end of the 19th century.Also arriving:Jan. 1“Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts”Jan. 7“Search Party” Season 5Jan. 9“Euphoria” Season 2Jan. 16“Somebody Somewhere”Denzel Washington as Macbeth in “The Tragedy of Macbeth.”Apple TV+New to Apple TV+‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’Starts streaming: Jan. 14The latest big-screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s Scottish play marks the solo feature-filmmaking debut of Joel Coen, working without his longtime creative partner and brother, Ethan Coen. Denzel Washington takes on the role of the ambitious Lord Macbeth, while Frances McDormand plays his wife, who encourages him to do whatever he must — even commit murder and destroy families — to seize power. Kathryn Hunter gives a striking performance as a trio of prophetic witches, playing them as unnervingly alien. The acting is terrific across the board, and the direction is as visually dynamic and snappily paced as Coens classics like “Miller’s Crossing” and “Fargo.”Also arriving:Jan. 7“El Deafo”Jan. 21“Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock”“Servant” Season 3Jan. 28“The Afterparty”Amir Jadidi as a down-on-his-luck Iranian businessman in “A Hero.”Amirhossein Shojaei/Amazon StudiosNew to Prime Video‘A Hero’Starts streaming: Jan. 21The two-time Oscar-winning Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi has made one of his best movies yet with “A Hero,” a gripping morality play that persistently subverts its audience’s expectations. Amir Jadidi plays Rahim, a luckless but likable entrepreneur who has been unemployed and stuck in a debtors’ prison since a business deal that went awry. When his girlfriend finds a purse containing gold coins, a furloughed Rahim decides to return it, and the resulting good publicity initially turns his fortunes around. But the seemingly selfless act also raises questions about his real motivations and the circumstances of the discovery. As the scrutiny intensifies, Rahim scrambles to cover his tracks, in what becomes a riveting story about a good person making terrible choices for the right reasons.Also arriving:Jan. 7“The Tender Bar”Jan. 14“Do, Re & Mi”“Hotel Transylvania: Transformania”Jan. 21“As We See It” Season 1Jan. 28“Needle in a Timestack”Hilary Duff and Francia Raisa in “How I Met Your Father.”Patrick Wymore/HuluNew to Hulu‘I’m Your Man’Starts streaming: Jan. 11In this German science-fiction romance, Dan Stevens plays “Tom,” a realistic humanoid robot companion being given a three-week trial by Alma (Maren Eggert), a lonely archaeologist who resents the assignment — even though Tom has been specifically engineered to make her happy. The charming Stevens is a superb choice to play an idealized version of an attractive, attentive gentleman. But “I’m Your Man” director Maria Schrader (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Jan Schomburg) is ultimately more interested in Alma, whose personal life and career have both been defined by her thwarted desires. This is a thoughtful drama about humanity’s yearning to let machines provide for our needs — and how that dream can only be realized if people can articulate what they really want.‘How I Met Your Father’ Season 1Starts streaming: Jan. 18This gender-flipped follow-up to the hit 2000s sitcom “How I Met Your Mother” has been in the works since 2013, going through multiple creative teams. The extended gestation may have been benefited “How I Met Your Father” head writers Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger, allowing them to bring the series more in line with the expectations of 2020s audiences — primarily by including more cultural diversity. Hilary Duff stars as a lovesick modern-day New Yorker named Sophie, while Kim Cattrall plays Sophie in the future, looking back at the days when she was trying to figure out which of the handful of men in her social circle might be her perfect match. The new show’s approach hews close to the original, using an old-fashioned sitcom style as it follows a bunch of bright and optimistic young people, stumbling through the early stages of adulthood.Also arriving:Jan. 1“Falling for Figaro”Jan. 3“The Year of the Everlasting Storm”Jan. 7“Pharma Bro”Jan. 10“Ailey”“Black Bear”“The Golden Palace” Season 1Jan. 13“Madagascar: A Little Wild” Season 6Jan. 14“Bergman Island”“Sex Appeal”Jan. 17“Georgetown”Jan. 20“The Estate”Jan. 27“Mayday”Jan. 30“Small Engine Repair”Josh Gad and Isla Fisher in “Wolf Like Me.”Mark Rogers/PeacockNew to Peacock‘Wolf Like Me’ Season 1Starts streaming: Jan. 13In this Australian romantic dramedy, Josh Gad plays a widowed father named Gary who has a chance encounter with an advice columnist named Mary (Isla Fisher) and feels the kind of personal connection he hasn’t known since his wife died. Mary likes Gary, too, but she has a big, scary secret that makes it hard for her to stay with any man for long. “Wolf Like Me” was written and directed by Abe Forsythe, whose 2019 horror comedy “Little Monsters” (also starring Gad) blended bloody zombie attacks into a relatively grounded story about people coping with everyday personal problems. This six-episode series is similarly genre-bending, injecting suspense and even a hint of the supernatural into a character study of a lost, lonely man, seeking companionship for himself and his child.Also arriving:Jan. 14“Use of Force: The Policing of Black America”Jan. 20“Supernatural Academy” Season 1“True Story with Ed & Randall” Season 1 More