The ‘Atlanta’ Finale on Hulu Changes Everything
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‘Fall TV’ Is Dead. But Buzz Will Always Be With Us.
Two television critics ponder what fall TV even means in the streaming era and discuss the series they’re most looking forward to this season.Each fall brings an onslaught of new television shows, but now so does every other season of the year. As another autumn approaches, James Poniewozik and Margaret Lyons, television critics at The New York Times, discussed what “fall TV” even means in the streaming era, along with the new and returning series they’re most looking forward to.JAMES PONIEWOZIK Remember fall TV? I do!I am old enough to remember when there was not just fall TV season, but fall-TV-season season. Come summer’s end, the big networks would roll out splashy prime-time TV preview specials that had the fresh, promising smell of new school supplies. My pop-cultural Christmas was the Saturday-morning preview special, when Kristy McNichol or Kaptain Kool and the Kongs would unveil the latest junk food for preteen eyeballs.Now, what even is fall? This year, big premieres like HBO’s “House of the Dragon” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” on Amazon, will have landed before Labor Day. I’m not even talking about the eternal “death of broadcast TV” here — it’s still around and even has a few decent shows — but just the general shift in how and when people watch new TV. In the streaming era, premiere season (which really is all year round) is less about what you’re going to watch immediately, and more about adding to your to-do list of shows to watch eventually.I mean, it still feels like fall, by the rhythm of the sidereal calendar I had imprinted in me by Sid and Marty Krofft. But if fall falls in a forest of year-round content, does it make a sound?Sheryl Lee Ralph, left, and Janelle James in “Abbot Elementary.” The acclaimed ABC sitcom returns in September for its second season.Gilles Mingasson/ABCMARGARET LYONS In addition to the year-round scheduling and overall increase in the number of new shows each year, new series aren’t just competing against one another — they’re up against the entire streaming catalog. The buffet has gotten bigger and more elaborate, but also the kitchen is open and the pantry is stocked, and you know how to cook.Do we lose anything when we “lose” “fall TV”? Pour one out for the people who for some reason relish being marketed to en masse, but from where I sit (on the couch), year-round scheduling is good! I want to be delighted by a show that comes out the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day; I want intense summer fare for muggy nights. Buzz knows no season, and schedule diffusion enables smaller shows that might have been buried during glut times to break through during more fallow weeks.Reboot culture has given us the end of endings. I wonder if streaming and year-round scheduling contribute to the end of beginnings.PONIEWOZIK Yes, chef! (Sorry. Kitchen metaphor = obligatory “The Bear” reference. I don’t make the rules.)The networks’ traditional approach of premiering dang near everything on TV the week after the Emmys was not great either for TV watchers or TV makers. So much material at once! So many cancellations! And then vast periods of nothing. Now there is always TV. But also, There. Is. Always. TV. If I’m nostalgic for anything, it’s that rare seasonal sugar rush of “My shows are coming back!”Yet I still feel a tiny bit of that. “Abbott Elementary” — a straight-up, joke-packed broadcast sitcom that makes a bunch of episodes a year and is actually good — is coming back on ABC in September, just as the framers of the Constitution intended. I’m glad we now have cable and streaming shows of all lengths and styles (again, I watched “The Bear”), but it’s nice to see the old machine can still occasionally work.Anything you’re looking forward to? Or is “forward” meaningless in the eternal present of streaming?A new season of “The White Lotus,” premiering in October, is set in Italy. With, from left, Michael Imperioli, Adam DiMarco and F. Murray Abraham.Fabio Lovino/HBOLYONS I think “Abbott Elementary” is a good example of an ambiguous beginning: ABC aired a preview of “Abbott Elementary” in December, after which the episode was available on Hulu, and then the pilot re-aired in January — a one-off on a Monday before the show moved to its Tuesday time slot for the remainder of its run. Now it’s getting a well-deserved fancier rollout, segueing from sleeper hit to crown jewel; a reintroduction of sorts.In terms of looking forward, I’m counting the days for the returns of Apple TV+’s “Mythic Quest,” IFC’s “Sherman’s Showcase” and “Los Espookys” on HBO. The final seasons of “Atlanta” on FX and “The Good Fight” on Paramount+ are nigh.I’m also wondering if we’re about to go through another vampire moment, with “Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire,” on AMC, and Showtime’s series adaptation of “Let the Right One In” both coming out this fall. And I am curious about Susan Sarandon and Hilary Swank both starring in network dramas, of all things (Fox’s “Monarch” and ABC’s “Alaska Daily,” respectively). My guess is our tastes overlap pretty heavily here.PONIEWOZIK Indeed, “Atlanta” and “The Good Fight” are two of the shows I’m most anticipating this season. Both captured, in very different ways, the surrealness of life in America this past six years or so.I’m hoping “The White Lotus,” on HBO, can be as strong as an ongoing anthology as it was when I thought it would be a one-off limited series. And as a former ’80s fantasy nerd, I’m at least … curious about the Disney+ series version of “Willow.” The Ron Howard movie, which opened in theaters in 1988, was not the blockbuster its producers hoped it would be. (Its current TV legacy is lending a name to a character, Elora Danan, on FX’s “Reservation Dogs.”) Now that fantasy is almost as ubiquitous a genre as cop shows, maybe its time has finally come.As always, I also just want to laugh. So I agree about “Sherman’s Showcase” — welcome back, it has been too long!Warwick Davis returns for a series version of “Willow,” premiering in November on Disney+. (With Graham Hughes, right.)Lucasfilm/Disney+LYONS Yes, “Willow” is very high on my “hmmm” list, as well. Is this a title people have been clamoring for? Perhaps!Another thing I wonder about is whether the diminished primacy of the fall season is part of television becoming less standardized in general. How many episodes are in a “season”? How long do shows go between seasons? How many seasons do we consider a good run? Are there still prestigious time slots or needle-moving lead-ins? What are the rules?PONIEWOZIK Things were simpler when the rule was, “You make TV from September to May, and you keep doing it until the ratings give out.” It’s better, in theory, that shows can now be the length that a story requires. In practice, TV isn’t always sure what size it should be anymore.Some invisible standards committee recently decided that eight to 10 episodes is the optimal length for a streaming series. Often, it is! (I was one of those critics who used to praise British TV for making two six-episode, no-filler seasons and calling it a day.) But sometimes a show feels compressed. I really liked Jason Katims’s “As We See It” for eight episodes on Amazon, but it felt like it once would have been a 22-episode Jason Katims dramedy on NBC.On the more-is-not-always-more front, this fall we’ll get the finale of AMC’s “The Walking Dead,” which began in the first Obama administration, when Netflix was somewhere you watched old movies. I don’t know how many marathon runs like that we’ll see again.Christine Baranski in “The Good Fight,” back for its final season in September.Elizabeth Fisher/Paramount+LYONS And of course “The Walking Dead” can’t actually die: There are already two current spinoffs and a few more in the works.I doubt we will see another show with that kind of ratings success. But I think the long-running series is a hallmark of network and cable now, which both sometimes feel like they’re mostly forever shows. “The Simpsons” is going into its 34th season, “Law & Order: SVU” into its 24th, “NCIS” into its 20th and “Grey’s Anatomy” into its 19th. “The Challenge” debuted in 1998 and was recently renewed for a 38th and 39th season.“South Park” is in its 25th season. “Bob’s Burgers” is going into its 13th and “The Goldbergs” into its 10th. “Curb Your Enthusiasm” has been airing on and off since 2000. “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” started in 2005. “The Real Housewives of Orange County” started in 2006 and “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” in 2007. These are all still prime-time mainstays!Streaming platforms haven’t been around long enough to have any truly long-running shows, but I wonder if their models are designed to ever generate or support one. Is “Love Is Blind” going to follow a “Bachelor”/“Bachelorette” model and outlive us all? Stranger things have happened … but also, “Stranger Things” has happened, and it’s hard to picture that show running for 10 seasons.PONIEWOZIK I don’t know, those last “Stranger Things” episodes sure felt 10 seasons long.But yeah, there’s a divide between your deathless animated sitcoms, procedurals and game/reality shows — I’ll be there for “Survivor” Season 43 — and highly serial shows, which have started to tend toward shorter runs or one-season limited series. Maybe “L.O.T.R.” could bring back the long-running serial. Elves are immortal!And then there’s … well, whatever Disney’s Marvel and “Star Wars” shows are. They’re sort of anthological, often running a single season each. But they’re also chapters in these interconnected, multiplatform, decades-spanning intellectual-property blobs, which are both sprawling and static. You know what to expect from the brand, and that’s what they give you. I had hoped these mega franchises might be freer to be weird and experimental on TV, but now “WandaVision” seems like the exception.Film critics wonder whether movies in the streaming era are becoming TV. Maybe — at least when it comes to recycling big-ticket I.P. — TV is becoming the movies. More
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What Makes Katt Williams Great? It’s Not the Jokes, It’s the Performance
His new special, “World War III” on Netflix, underlines the showmanship and drama that make him the finest arena stand-up of the moment.Katt Williams understands the importance of an entrance.In “World War III,” his new hour of stand-up on Netflix, you first see him racing across the stage like Tom Cruise hustling to save the world. His previous specials have been just as cinematic, with Williams strutting in wearing a massive fur coat and flanked by beautiful women or walking through the crowd in a cape while a voice-over tells you his thoughts.But his most spectacular introduction had to be from “Priceless” in 2014 when the curtain dropped to reveal a smoky stage with two women dancing on either side of a cage containing a lion. Not a sleepy one, mind you. This beast was jumpy. After a shot of the audience, a clever piece of misdirection by the director Spike Lee, the focus returned to the stage where one of the women opened a cage door slowly enough to let your mind wander to worst-case scenarios. Then a different Katt emerged.It’s the kind of showmanship (not to mention punning) you can expect from Katt Williams. In a recent interview with Arsenio Hall, Williams, a prolific performer, said his legacy would be not as the greatest comic, but as the most original. He’s got a case. In a landscape filled with stand-ups straining to go against the grain, carving out brands as renegades, Williams is a genuine eccentric.What other superstar would open his first special on Netflix, a famously global platform, with 10 minutes of local material about Jacksonville, Fla., the town he was performing in? Or say with such conviction that there is no such thing as cancel culture. (“I’m on my fifth second chance,” he once quipped.) Or find himself in so many beefs with amiable peers. He’s called out Cedric the Entertainer and Tiffany Haddish, but his fiercest feud is with Kevin Hart. The substance of their conflict is hard to figure out, but in terms of style, Williams always comes off with more flair: He once used a video any boxing promoter would appreciate to challenge Hart to a comedy battle for $5 million.But his distinctiveness starts with his cadence, a swaggering high-pitched voice that evokes the flow of Easy-E more than it does any comic. His delivery has a rhythm, a quickening beat that, once you clue into it, can make anything funny. Along with his live-wire physicality, this is what makes him the finest arena comic of the moment. His act is not about carefully honed jokes. In his new special, which is not one of his better ones, his take on Joe Biden is that he’s old and the world war of the title is a vague battle between truth and lies that never entirely coheres into a complete thought. He pokes fun at Anthony Fauci and makes some half-baked jokes about Adam and Eve being incestuous. Williams has said he stopped performing in clubs and instead develops jokes in front of thousands of people. You can tell.The tepidness of his material here seems almost like a challenge, as if he’s saying: Watch how I can make even these jokes work.The first 10 minutes of his new hour have maybe two good punch lines, and both are about chicken wings. The remarkable part is that they are completely unconnected. Most comics would have at least used a transition to tie them together and build momentum. But whereas there are many comics who can write a tight joke, there’s only one Katt Williams. He tosses ideas out and then, through force of charisma and performance chops, makes them amusing in a way no one else could.In the first chicken wing joke, the setup leans into his preacher voice, adopting a tone of religious solemnity to explain that the world is in serious trouble, convincing you he’s about to go deep before pivoting to a punchline that delivers the news with apocalyptic exasperation: “Taco Bell’s selling chicken wings.”In the other chicken wing bit, the setup and punchline are almost incidental to what comes in between, which he delights in stretching out: He repeats lines like incantations, asks the audience to imagine a chicken, does an imitation of a chicken, and throws out disclaimers (“Look, I’m not a farmer”) and tangents. Part of what makes this so much fun is the improvisational sense he creates, the way he works off the crowd’s response, but it’s also how quickly Williams moves from silly to serious. As wonderfully goofy as his chicken impression may be, what’s really unusual about Williams is his gravity. Even in his funniest moments, he has an intensity that makes comedy dramatic. Donald Glover clearly saw this when he cast Williams in a dramatic role in “Atlanta,” for which he won an Emmy.In a typical special, the comic spends time warming up the crowd, digs in to race and racism, pokes fun at whatever president occupies the Oval Office and tells some elaborate sex jokes. Williams, who perspires as much as any comic who has ever gesticulated, attacks sex jokes with his entire body. In one of my favorite bits from “It’s Pimpin’ Pimpin’” (2008), he describes his signature sexual move as a try-anything maneuver, pantomiming a sort of one-man Rube Goldberg device.Last year, attending my first arena show since the pandemic, I saw Williams at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, doing much of the same material that is in his new special. It hit harder live. That may be because no comedian is better suited to remind you of the joys of laughing together.Like only a few other comics alive, Williams knows how to turn a huge crowd into a family affair. He buttered us up, then pushed buttons, gushing about having successfully mounted a show this size during a pandemic: “They said it couldn’t happen in New York,” Williams said. Of course, no one said that, but it felt good to hear and we all cheered ourselves.Katt Williams can seem ill at ease with the collegial small talk of show business, coming off as shy in interviews and seeming a bit awkward hosting a roast of Flavor Flav. (In a later special, he did a very funny and searching bit about feeling implicated in the racism of some of the jokes written for him.) But onstage alone, talking to a crowd, he’s smooth as can be. A seductive presence, he has that ineffable quality of stardom: a preternatural ability to connect. More
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Zazie Beetz Grew Up With Shel Silverstein and Nina Simone
The “Atlanta” actress talks about her latest film, “Nine Days,” her desire to become a doula, her love affair with all things French, and how Debussy and Lianne La Havas got her through some difficult times.In “Nine Days,” Zazie Beetz plays Emma, an unborn soul in an otherworldly limbo interviewing to inhabit a human body on Earth, or else vanish into oblivion. But unlike the other candidates in Edson Oda’s supernatural drama, Emma is seemingly unconcerned — she shows up late for her first appointment — with winning over Will (Winston Duke), who will decide her fate. Instead, she approaches the exercises to test her fitness with a guilelessness that at first confounds him — but that ultimately impels him to confront his own tumultuous existence.“I think that Emma is in some way what we all would hope to be in our purest sense of childhood wonder,” Beetz, who is German American, said. “She’s also somebody who’s very present. She might not have the opportunity to live, but there is something that is a semblance of life right there with her right now.”Conversing with Beetz, who speaks with an almost wide-eyed enthusiasm, you get the feeling that her onscreen outlook may not be too far from her real one.Still, the woman has range. An Emmy nominee for the role of Van, who shares a daughter with Earn (Donald Glover), in FX’s “Atlanta,” she will soon star alongside Jonathan Majors and Idris Elba in Jeymes Samuel’s western “The Harder They Fall,” and Brad Pitt and Sandra Bullock in David Leitch’s assassin thriller “Bullet Train.”Beetz was taking a break from shooting the new seasons of “Atlanta” — she revealed no plot details, other than mentioning a foray to Paris, a city that made her list of cultural essentials — when she called from the Minnesota family home of her fiancé, the actor David Rysdahl (who also appears in “Nine Days”). These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. “Clair de Lune” by Claude Debussy For a very long time after school, I would come home and listen to that every day as my wind-down. It was one of the pieces of music that guided me through my first experiences with anxiety and mood issues. And to this day I think of it as this meditation that guided me through one of my first emotionally very difficult times.2. Shel Silverstein As a child, I adored Shel Silverstein. I had many of his poetry books that I read over and over and over again. He had a very child-friendly playfulness in his work that also reflected very seriously on how we should engage with the world, a body of work that was philosophical and thoughtful and not condescending. It’s important to not condescend to children.3. “Fruits” by Shoichi Aoki My dad, when I was 11 or so, he gave me this book, just randomly came home with it one day. It’s photographs, one after another, of Japanese people of all ages dressed in Harajuku street fashion. It changed my point of view on how I could dress myself. My parents tell me from when I was very young, I was very clear that I wanted to clothe myself. And I’m still this way. I’ve always been like, “How do I create my own thing?” And “Fruits” — the colors and the combinations, and no rules around how you can express yourself — was positive and joyful and so unique. The next day, I came to school in this rainbow outfit. And then for years I was known as the Rainbow Girl.4. Doodling My entire life, all of my notebooks in school, constantly, constantly doodling, just an endless doodle of doodles. I couldn’t sit still without having a piece of paper and a pen with me. Even in note-taking, I was always very interested in making my notes look aesthetically pleasing. I think this is also partially a reason I’m still very analog. I can’t have an electronic planner.5. Nina Simone One of the first songs I consciously realized was hers that had a very profound impact on me was “Four Women.” I remember hearing that for the first time and I was dancing to it. It’s not just about music and it’s not just about sound. It is about truth. You feel her pain and her human self. That is also femininity and strength in womanhood and her unapologetic approach to her blackness and what she represented during her time. Of course, there are other artists that do a similar thing. But I don’t think Nina Simone makes it pretty, and that draws me in.6. “Zazie dans le Métro” My namesake is “Zazie dans le Métro,” which is a French book by Raymond Queneau, and [Louis Malle] made a movie of that. I grew up watching this movie. This film is about Paris relatively soon after World War II. The story is about a 10-year-old girl named Zazie who visits her uncle and her aunt in Paris for the weekend, and shenanigans ensue. Even though I would watch the German version, I always felt like I was her and this was me. I felt driven to be able to read my namesake and watch the film in its original language. So I was a French major in college and then I lived in Paris for a year.7. “Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth” I am obsessed with midwifery, to the point where I looked into school. I wanted to be a doula. A few years ago, David gifted me for Christmas this book because I am so interested in this transition and in this complete surrender of power in a way. I think women are looking death squarely in the eye as you give birth to a little being who is still, in my point of view, attached to the universe. I’ve never given birth, so maybe I’m romanticizing it all, and it’s terrible. But I want to help women feel empowered on their journey.8. Knitting When I was 8, my mom taught me very basic stitches. For a long time I could knit in one style: rectangle. Then four years ago, I picked it up in a serious way. I devoured videos on YouTube and bought all these books and taught myself a craft and a trade. And now I’m like: “I’ve learned a skill. I can make things that are useful to people.” I’ve found great pride in that.9. Period Clothing One of my most transformative moments in acting is when I put the costume on. It informs the character so much. It changes how they move, it changes how they engage with the world and who they are. I am enamored with the Jane Austen world. One of my favorite movies is “Marie Antoinette” by Sofia Coppola. And a huge part of that is the costuming and the aesthetic of it all. On red carpets, my inspiration for hair is honestly Marie Antoinette, and in my head that’s what my hair looks like — though obviously not what it looks like in real life.10. Lianne La Havas I discovered her when I was in college, and I felt this immediate kinship. She’s around the same age as me. She is also mixed race and her hair was similar to mine. At the time, the natural hair movement in the U.S. was just getting its wings, and I identified so much with how she looked. Each album she comes out with, she’s grown up more, and I’ve grown up in this same way. I feel this quiet friend who I’m like, “I know you.” More
