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      41 TV Shows to Watch This Fall

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      Noteworthy premieres include new seasons of buzzy hits (“Abbott Elementary,” “The Handmaid’s Tale”), reboots and revivals (“Quantum Leap,” “Willow”) and more.The fall television season got off to an early start this year with the arrival of the dueling franchise extensions and hopeful blockbusters, “House of the Dragon” on HBO and “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” on Amazon Prime Video. But TV’s vast landscape offers a lot more than expensively produced, effects-laden fantasy. From the relatable delights of “Abbott Elementary” to the highly specific hilarity of “Documentary Now!,” here are some noteworthy fall premieres, arranged in chronological order.All dates are subject to change.THE SERPENT QUEEN The story of Catherine de’ Medici, the 16th-century queen of France, in a satirical, talking-to-the-camera 21st-century telling, with Samantha Morton and Liv Hill as Catherine and a large cast, including Charles Dance, Colm Meaney and Ludivine Sagnier, as the clerics and aristocrats who underestimate her at their peril. Starz, Sept. 11.THE JENNIFER HUDSON SHOW The success of daytime talk-show hosts is notoriously hard to predict, and whether Hudson will have the right skill set and personality for the role is about to be seen. But she immediately becomes the most talented singer and actress in the field, for what that’s worth. Syndicated, Sept. 12.THE HANDMAID’S TALE This bleak allegory and nonlinear-TV pioneer — the first streaming show to win an Emmy for outstanding drama series — soldiers into its fifth season, with June (Elisabeth Moss) quickly coming down from the cathartic high of Season 4’s bloody conclusion. Hulu, Sept. 14.Elisabeth Moss in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” returning for its fifth season on Sept. 14.HuluATLANTA After a third season, ending in May, that was quietly received — and that dropped more than half of the show’s previous broadcast audience — Donald Glover’s prickly comedy quickly returns for a fourth and final go-round. FX, Sept. 15.THE U.S. AND THE HOLOCAUST Ken Burns, directing with Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, devotes six hours to an uncomfortable chapter of American history with an alarmingly familiar backdrop of racism and xenophobia. PBS, Sept. 18.QUANTUM LEAP Raymond Lee (the sympathetic diner owner in “Kevin Can F**k Himself”) plays a new time-jumping do-gooder in this reboot of the early-90s sci-fi series. The Quantum Leap project is restarted and the original hero, Sam Beckett, is still missing, so a Scott Bakula guest appearance seems pretty much preordained. NBC, Sept. 19.PARIS POLICE 1900 In the spirit of “Babylon Berlin,” this period policier sets standard crime drama against a vivid historical backdrop: the Dreyfus affair, organized and violent antisemitism, the rise of the pioneering lawyer Jeanne Chauvin (Eugenie Derouand) and the sometimes deadly career of the Parisian courtesan Marguerite Steinheil (Evelyne Brochu). MHz Choice, Sept. 20.REBOOT Steven Levitan, who grabbed the network-sitcom brass ring with “Just Shoot Me!” and “Modern Family,” indulges in some gentle self-parody. Judy Greer, Keegan-Michael Key and Johnny Knoxville play the cast of a hacky early-aughts family comedy who reunite for a new version written by a young woman (Rachel Bloom of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”) who is strangely obsessed with the original show. Hulu, Sept. 20.ABBOTT ELEMENTARY Quinta Brunson’s sitcom about struggling teachers at a Philadelphia elementary school, a breakout hit in the spring and an Emmy nominee for best comedy series, embarks on its second season. ABC, Sept. 21.Lisa Ann Walter, left, and Sheryl Lee Ralph in “Abbott Elementary,” returning for its second season on Sept. 21, on ABC.Scott Everett White/ABCANDOR Tony Gilroy has more on his résumé than a writing credit for “Rogue One,” and it looks as if his new “Star Wars” series might incorporate some of the real-world grit he displayed a feel for in the Bourne movies. That would be a good thing, though don’t tell it to your friend with the lightsaber collection. Disney+, Sept. 21.REASONABLE DOUBT Kerry Washington is an executive producer and a director of this legal melodrama created by Raamla Mohamed, who was a writer and producer on Washington’s breakthrough series, “Scandal.” Emayatzy Corinealdi plays a high-rent, high-stress Los Angeles lawyer whose conscience begins to bite her in the first scripted series from Disney’s Onyx Collective brand for creators of color. Hulu, Sept. 27.THE DARK HEART Gustav Möller, director of the Swedish film “The Guilty” (remade in America starring Jake Gyllenhaal), oversaw this five-part thriller inspired by real events. A woman who manages a civilian search team for missing persons takes on the case of a landowner and lumber baron who alienated a lot of people, including his ambitious daughter, before he disappeared. Topic, Sept. 29.SO HELP ME TODD A quirky-funny mystery series — in the long lineage of “Monk” — starring Marcia Gay Harden as a Type-A lawyer and Skylar Astin as her son, who’s better at investigating than he is at adulting. CBS, Sept. 29.Marcia Gay Harden stars in “So Help Me Todd,” premiering Sept. 29 on CBS.Michael Courtney/CBSANNE RICE’S INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE AMC takes its first step toward an Anne Rice universe, under the aegis of the veteran producer Mark Johnson (“Better Call Saul”). Jacob Anderson, the eunuch warrior Grey Worm in “Game of Thrones,” plays Louis, the Brad Pitt role from the movie version; Sam Reid steps in for Tom Cruise as Lestat; and the newcomer Bailey Bass, soon to be seen in several “Avatar” sequels, replaces Kirsten Dunst as the child vampire, Claudia. AMC, Oct. 2.EAST NEW YORK William Finkelstein, a creator of this cop drama, spent the 1990s and early 2000s writing and producing for a good roster of shows: “L.A. Law,” “Murder One,” “Brooklyn South,” “Law & Order” and “NYPD Blue.” On the other hand, he also created “Cop Rock” with Steven Bochco. Amanda Warren (the mayor in “The Leftovers”) plays a new precinct boss in the Brooklyn neighborhood of the title, heading a cast that includes Jimmy Smits, Richard Kind and Ruben Santiago-Hudson. CBS, Oct. 2.THE WALKING DEAD There was a time — and it was only six years ago — when “The Walking Dead” was drawing more than 12 million viewers an episode and the death of a major character was Monday morning news. Now more important as intellectual property than as weekly storytelling, the original series shuffles to the finish line with its final eight episodes. AMC, Oct. 2.Norman Reedus in AMC’s “The Walking Dead,” returning for its final season on Oct. 2.Jace Downs/AMCMAKING BLACK AMERICA: THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE Henry Louis Gates Jr. explores the codes, networks and private societies that Black Americans have created “behind the veil” of the color line in a four-part documentary series. PBS, Oct. 4.ALASKA DAILY Tom McCarthy, who made one of the best newspaper dramas of our time in the film “Spotlight,” created this series about an abrasive reporter (Hilary Swank) who gets canceled in New York and takes a job in Anchorage, lured by a story about the deaths of Indigenous women. The presence of Jeff Perry as her new boss probably isn’t the only thing that will remind you of the shows of the ABC stalwart Shonda Rhimes. ABC, Oct. 6.A FRIEND OF THE FAMILY Anna Paquin and Colin Hanks star in this true-crime mini-series as the parents of the actress Jan Broberg, who was kidnapped when she was 12 and again when she was 14 by the same family friend (played by Jake Lacy). The bizarre story has also been told in the 2017 feature documentary “Abducted in Plain Sight.” Peacock, Oct. 6.Jake Lacy and Anna Paquin in the Peacock mini-series “A Friend of the Family.”PeacockPENNYWORTH: THE ORIGIN OF BATMAN’S BUTLER This stylish “Batman” prequel series, about the former special-forces soldier who will one day be Bruce Wayne’s butler (as the show’s awkward new title makes clear), leaves Epix for a platform closer to its DC Comics roots. Season 3 also mostly leaves behind the alt-history British civil war that occupied the first two installments, jumping ahead five years and introducing superheroes. HBO Max, Oct. 6.LET THE RIGHT ONE IN John Ajvide Lindqvist’s ultra-bleak 2004 novel about a child vampire keeps circulating through the culture: It has inspired films, plays, a comic book and a TV pilot, with Thomas Kretschmann, that wasn’t picked up. Now the story makes it to TV with Demián Bichir as the father of the girl vampire (Madison Taylor Baez) who’s forever 12. Showtime, online Oct. 7, cable Oct. 9.THE MIDNIGHT CLUB The latest from Mike Flanagan, whose atmospheric horror series (“The Haunting of Hill House,” “Midnight Mass”) have won a following on Netflix. Heather Langenkamp plays the doctor at a hospice where the patients like to tell one another scary stories. Netflix, Oct. 7.BECOMING FREDERICK DOUGLASS The documentarian Stanley Nelson (“Attica,” “Freedom Riders”) fills in some important chapters in his epic yet quotidian history of Black life in America with this film and with “Harriet Tubman: Visions of Freedom” (Oct. 4), both directed by Nelson and Nicole London. PBS, Oct. 11.CHAINSAW MAN Anticipation is running high in the anime world for the MAPPA animation studio’s adaptation of “Chainsaw Man,” a dark-comic, body-horror manga about a young devil hunter with a deadly appendage. Crunchyroll, Oct. 11.SHERWOOD The cast of this BBC mystery series is a lengthy British-TV who’s who: David Morrissey, Lesley Manville, Claire Rushbrook, Philip Jackson, Joanne Froggatt, Terence Maynard, Kevin Doyle, Robert Glenister, Clare Holman, Lorraine Ashbourne, Adeel Akhtar, Pip Torrens and Mark Addy, among others. Morrissey is the detective investigating a bow-and-arrow murder in Robin Hood’s old Nottinghamshire haunts that brings up hatreds from a 1980s miners’ strike. BritBox, Oct. 11.THE WINCHESTERS Jensen Ackles returns to the “Supernatural” universe, reassuming his role as the monster hunter Dean Winchester in this prequel series. This time Dean, in a supporting role, is tracking down the real story of the younger days of his mother and father (Meg Donnelly and Drake Rodger), which sounds like a good strategy for avoiding pesky continuity questions. CW, Oct. 11Drake Rodger and Meg Donnelly in “The Winchesters,” premiering Oct. 11 on the CW.Matt Miller/CWDOCUMENTARY NOW! One of TV’s greatest pleasures returns after a more than three-year hiatus. The fourth season, hosted, as always, by Dame Helen Mirren, will include sendups of “My Octopus Teacher,” “The September Issue,” “When We Were Kings” and Werner Herzog’s “Burden of Dreams.” IFC, Oct. 19.FROM SCRATCH Zoe Saldana stars in a mini-series that crosses cultures — a Black American woman falls in love with a Sicilian chef during her Wanderjahr in Italy — and genres, mixing picturesque Euroromance and sorrowful survivor’s tale. Netflix, Oct. 21.THE PERIPHERAL Scott B. Smith, who wrote the screenplay (based on his own novel) of the excellent 1998 thriller “A Simple Plan,” is the creator and showrunner of this series based on a dystopian, alternate-futures mystery by William Gibson; Chloë Grace Moretz stars; and Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan are among the executive producers. That’s an awful lot of bleak-noir experience. Amazon Prime Video, Oct. 21.GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S CABINET OF CURIOSITIES Del Toro takes on the Alfred Hitchcock role, playing master of ceremonies for an eight-episode horror anthology. (A previous title included the words “Guillermo del Toro Presents.”) The first season’s directors include Jennifer Kent (“The Babadook”), Catherine Hardwicke (“Twilight”) and Ana Lily Amirpour (“A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night”). Netflix, Oct. 25.SHERMAN’S SHOWCASE Diallo Riddle and Bashir Salahuddin’s consistently clever, stealthily sophisticated, unabashedly nostalgic sendup of old-school variety shows finally returns for a second season. IFC, Oct. 26.Bashir Salahuddin, foreground, in “Sherman’s Showcase,” returning for its second season on Oct. 26, on IFC.Michael Moriatis/IFCTRUE CRIME STORY: INDEFENSIBLE Back for a second season, the comedian Jena Friedman applies the adversarial techniques of topical late-night humor to the true-crime genre, in 20-minute episodes that are less investigations — the facts of the cases are generally pretty plain, at least in Friedman’s eyes — than expressions of darkly comic outrage. SundanceTV, Oct. 27.BIG MOUTH Since Nick Kroll broke the third-dimensional wall in the Season 5 finale and had a heart-to-heart with his animated character, Nick Birch, will any of his castmates get to follow suit in the sixth season of this raunchy paean to puberty? The real-life John Mulaney would probably have some interesting things to say to his animated counterpart, randy Andy Glouberman. Netflix, Oct. 28.MANIFEST A hit in reruns on Netflix after being canceled by NBC, this paranormal mystery-melodrama gets a fourth and final season at its streaming home. Netflix, Nov. 4.DANGEROUS LIAISONS This new adaptation of the Choderlos de Laclos novel was announced nearly a decade ago, with Christopher Hampton, who had already based a play and a film on the novel, attached as writer once again. Hampton didn’t remain as the writer — he gets an executive producer credit — but the mini-series has arrived billed as the “origin story” of the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont. Apparently they weren’t always jaded monsters. Starz, Nov. 6.MOOD Like Phoebe Waller-Bridge (“Fleabag”) and Michaela Coel (“Chewing Gum”) before her, Nicole Lecky turns a hit one-woman play into a buzzy British TV series. She plays Sasha, a broke and unemployed young Londoner who finds herself in the potentially lucrative and liberating — and also potentially exploitative and dangerous — world of the influencer economy. BBC America, Nov. 6.Nicole Lecky in “Mood,” premiering Nov. 6 on BBC America.Natalie Seery/BBC Studios, via Bonafide FilmsTULSA KING On the same night that Tyler Sheridan’s flagship show, “Yellowstone,” begins its fifth season, his portfolio of manly genre dramas grows with the addition of this mash-up of gangster story and neo-western. It’s also Sheridan’s latest action-hero reclamation project: Sylvester Stallone stars as a Mafia capo sent to oversee operations in the foreign territory of Tulsa, Okla. Paramount+, Nov. 13.LIMITLESS WITH CHRIS HEMSWORTH Deploying the charm he brings to his depiction of the Norse god Thor for Marvel, Hemsworth headlines a wellness-and-longevity documentary series for Marvel’s corporate parent, Disney. (The sound of his unadulterated Australian accent makes him even more charming, if that’s possible.) Subjects like how to deal with stress and the value of fasting are addressed with superheroic energy. Disney+, Nov. 16.WELCOME TO CHIPPENDALES Robert Siegel, fresh off “Pam & Tommy,” and Jenni Konner of “Girls” are the showrunners of a mini-series starring Kumail Nanjiani as Steve Banerjee, the unlikely and eventually ill-fated founder of a male-stripping colossus. Hulu, Nov. 22.WILLOW Ron Howard’s 1988 fantasy film “Willow” is not the first piece of intellectual property anyone would have predicted for a reboot, but when George Lucas is involved — he received “story by” credit on the film — anything can happen. Lucasfilm and Howard’s Imagine Entertainment are producing this sequel series; Warwick Davis, now 52, returns as the title character. Maybe Willow will be a more consistent spell caster than he was as a teenager. Disney+, Nov. 30.Warwick Davis in “Willow,” premiering Nov. 30 on Disney+.Lucasfilm/Disney+THE ADVENTURES OF SAUL BELLOW Asaf Galay’s documentary, an “American Masters” offering, recruits wives, children and innocent bystanders to talk about being the real-life sources of Bellow’s books. Meanwhile, fellow novelists and critics like Charles Johnson, Salman Rushdie, Stanley Crouch and, in what may have been his last interview, a captivating Philip Roth certify or question Bellow’s place in the American pantheon. PBS, Dec. 12.And if all that isn’t enough for you, these new and returning shows are also coming this fall (new shows in bold):Sept. 11: “Monarch,” Fox; Sept. 12: “War of the Worlds,” Epix; Sept. 13: “The Come Up,” Freeform; Sept. 15: “La Otra Mirada,” PBS; “Vampire Academy,” Peacock; “The Light in the Hall,” Sundance Now; Sept. 16: “Los Espookys,” HBO; Sept. 18: “60 Minutes,” CBS; “SEAL Team,” Paramount+; Sept. 19: “Bob Hearts Abishola,” “NCIS,” “NCIS: Hawai’i,” “The Neighborhood,” CBS; “9-1-1,” “The Cleaning Lady,” Fox; Sept. 20: “FBI,” “FBI: International,” “FBI: Most Wanted,” CBS; “The Resident,” Fox; “New Amsterdam,” NBC; Sept. 21: “The Conners,” “The Goldbergs,” “Home Economics,” “Big Sky,” ABC; “Survivor,” “The Amazing Race,” CBS; “Chicago Fire,” “Chicago Med,” “Chicago P.D.,” NBC; Sept. 22: “The Kardashians,” Hulu; “Law & Order,” “Law & Order: Organized Crime,” “Law & Order: SVU,” NBC; “Thai Cave Rescue,” Netflix; Sept. 23: “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace,” HBO Max; Sept. 24: “Finding Happy,” Bounce; Sept. 25: “The Rookie,” ABC; “The Simpsons,” “The Great North,” “Bob’s Burgers,” “Family Guy,” Fox; “Van der Valk,” PBS; Sept. 27: “The Rookie: Feds,” ABC; “La Brea,” NBC; “Mighty Ducks: Game Changers,” Disney+; Sept. 28: “The D’Amelio Show,” Hulu; Sept. 29: “Young Sheldon,” “Ghosts,” “CSI: Vegas,” CBS; “Welcome to Flatch,” “Call Me Kat,” Fox; “Dragons Rescue Riders: Heroes of the Sky,” Peacock; Sept. 30: “Ramy,” Hulu; Oct. 2: “The Equalizer,” CBS: “Family Law,” “The Coroner,” CW: Oct. 3: “The Good Doctor,” ABC: Oct. 5: “Kung Fu,” CW: “Reginald the Vampire,” Syfy; “Chucky,” Syfy/USA; Oct. 6: “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Station 19,” ABC; “Walker, Independence,” “Walker” CW; Oct. 7: “The Problem With Jon Stewart,” Apple TV+; “Fire Country,” “Blue Bloods,” “SWAT,” CBS; Oct. 9: “NCIS: Los Angeles,” CBS; “Secrets of the Dead,” PBS; Oct. 10: “All American,” “All American: Homecoming,” CW; Oct. 11: “Professionals,” CW; Oct. 14: “Shantaram,” Apple TV+; Oct. 16: “Magpie Murders,” “Miss Scarlet and the Duke,” PBS; Oct. 20: “One of Us Is Lying,” Peacock; Oct. 21: “Acapulco,” Apple TV+; Oct. 26: “Mysterious Benedict Society” Disney+; Nov. 3: “Blockbuster,” Netflix; “The Capture,” Peacock; “The Suspect,” Sundance Now; “Kold x Windy,” WE; Nov. 4: “Lopez vs. Lopez,” “Young Rock,” NBC; Nov. 9: “Zootopia+,” Disney+; Nov. 10: “The Calling,” Peacock; Nov. 11: “The English,” Amazon Prime Video; Nov. 13: “Yellowstone,” Paramount; Nov. 18: “The L Word: Generation Q,” Showtime; “Planet Sex With Clara Delevingne,” Hulu; Nov. 23: “Pitch Perfect: Bumper in Berlin,” Peacock; Nov. 30: “Irreverent,” Peacock; Dec. 1: “Wicked City,” “Hush,” AllBlk; Dec. 22: “The Best Man: The Final Chapters,” Peacock. 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      U.K. Will Host Eurovision in 2023

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      Organizers had ruled out Ukraine from hosting because of safety concerns from Russia’s ongoing invasion.Britain, the runner-up of Eurovision 2022, will host the popular song contest in 2023 instead of war-torn Ukraine, which won the competition and the right to host next year’s event but was ruled out by organizers because of safety concerns.The announcement on Monday made official what had been widely predicted since Ukraine won the event in May. Tim Davie, the director general of the BBC, said in a statement that the process of choosing a city to host would begin soon.“Being asked to host the largest and most complex music competition in the world is a great privilege,” he said in the statement. “The BBC is committed to making the event a true reflection of Ukrainian culture alongside showcasing the diversity of British music and creativity.”Officials and artists in Ukraine protested last month when the competition’s organizers, the European Broadcasting Union, said that Russia’s ongoing invasion meant Ukraine could not provide “the security and operational guarantees” needed to host the event. Ukraine had offered three potential locations that it said were safe from the fighting: Lviv, in western Ukraine; the Zakarpattia region which borders Hungary and Slovakia; and the capital, Kyiv.Martin Österdahl, Eurovision’s executive supervisor, said in a statement on Monday that the 2023 contest “will showcase the creativity and skill of one of Europe’s most experienced public broadcasters whilst ensuring this year’s winners, Ukraine, are celebrated and represented throughout the event.”Representatives from UA:PBC, a Ukrainian broadcaster, will work with the BBC on the Ukrainian elements of the show, Eurovision said in a statement. Mykola Chernotytskyi, head of the broadcaster’s managing board, said in a statement that the event “will not be in Ukraine but in support of Ukraine,” adding that organizers would “add Ukrainian spirit to this event.”The competition invites artists from countries across Europe, plus some farther afield including Australia and Israel, to compete to be voted the best act. Over 160 million people watched in May as Kalush Orchestra, a Ukrainian rap act, was crowned the winner.Britain has hosted eight times before, most recently in 1998. At least 17 cities in Britain have said they intend to bid for becoming the host city, organizers said. More

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      Ncuti Gatwa Is the New Doctor on ‘Doctor Who’

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      Mr. Gatwa, a star of the Netflix series “Sex Education,” will be the first Black man to play the lead character in the enduring BBC science fiction franchise.Ncuti Gatwa, a star of the Netflix series “Sex Education,” will be the 14th actor and the first Black man to play the lead role of the Doctor in “Doctor Who,” the long-running British science fiction franchise about a time-traveling adventurer, the BBC announced on Sunday.He replaces Jodie Whittaker, who announced her departure last July after three seasons as the show’s first female doctor.Mr. Gatwa, 29, a Rwandan-Scottish actor, plays Eric Effiong, a gay man navigating his sexuality and identity in a religious Nigerian family, in “Sex Education,” the hit British teen comedy-drama series on Netflix.“It feels really amazing, it’s a true honor,” Mr. Gatwa told the BBC on Sunday as he arrived for the EE British Academy Film Awards, commonly known as the BAFTAs, where he was nominated for best male performance in a comedy program for his work on “Sex Education.”“This role is an institution,” he said of the Doctor. “It’s so iconic and it means a lot to so many people, including myself, and so it makes everyone feel seen as well. It’s something that everyone can enjoy, so I feel very grateful to have had the baton handed over and I’m going to try to do my best.”“Doctor Who” fans celebrated the news on Twitter on Sunday, with many expressing their excitement to see a doctor who resembles them. Others noted the low-key nature of the announcement: a tweet followed by a news release that the BBC shared on social media. In July 2017, the BBC announced Ms. Whittaker’s selection in a commercial that aired after the Wimbledon men’s final.In a statement shared by the BBC, Mr. Gatwa noted the importance of “Doctor Who” to fans worldwide, and acknowledged feeling “a mix of deeply honored, beyond excited and of course a little bit scared.”“Unlike the Doctor,” he added, “I may only have one heart, but I am giving it all to this show.”The BBC has aired 39 seasons of “Doctor Who” over nearly 60 years. The show, about an alien known as the Doctor who travels through time and space in an old-fashioned British police telephone booth called the TARDIS, has cultivated a legion of dedicated fans who call themselves “Whovians.”The Doctor regenerates into new people, and in turn, the show replaces its lead actor every few years. Though transitions to new Doctors are expected and eagerly anticipated by fans, the show’s previous attempts to change and diversify have not been universally embraced. When Ms. Whittaker’s turn as the Doctor was announced in 2017, some fans adopted the hashtag #NotMyDoctor and questioned why the character had suddenly changed genders.Ms. Whittaker’s final episode is yet to come, Russell T. Davies, the series showrunner, said in a statement. It will air in the fall during the BBC’s centenary celebrations, according to a trailer previewing the episode.Mr. Gatwa will make his debut as the Time Lord in 2023. More

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      A Duchess Brought Low by ‘A Very British Scandal’

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      In a new show on Prime Video, Claire Foy plays a British aristocrat whose sex life became the subject of salacious tabloid stories in the 1960s.LONDON — Everybody loves a sex scandal, and a posh one is even better. The great and the good brought down in disgrace: That’s a story people want to hear.In “A Very British Scandal,” a three-part series streaming on Prime Video from April 22, Claire Foy plays the Duchess of Argyll, a real-life aristocrat whose sex life was pored over in a 1960s court case that created a media frenzy and riveted the nation. When the BBC aired “A Very British Scandal” this past December, nearly 7 million people tuned in.The show is a companion to “A Very English Scandal,” another hugely popular Amazon-BBC coproduction in which Hugh Grant played an upper-crust politician who suffered a similar fate.These stories, Foy said in a recent interview, appealed to elements of Britain’s national character. “We’re perverts, aren’t we?” Foy said. “Deep down, all British people love it: We love gossip and love the titillating things other people are getting up to,” she added. “Anything that happens behind closed doors, we’re all completely obsessed with.”In the show’s final episode, one of the duchess’s aristocratic friends bemoans the British public’s desire to know what the upper classes are up to. “The little people in their grubby pits look up to us, because we are not them,” says the friend, played by Julia Davis. But stories about the duchess’s sex life, she says, “are dragging us down so we look just like them.”Foy’s character was never one of “the little people,” but she wasn’t always an aristocrat, either. She was born Margaret Whigham, in Scotland, in 1912. Her father, a self-made textiles millionaire, moved the family to New York when she was a child, and she lived there until she was 14. Back in Britain, she became a much-photographed debutante with a fancy trans-Atlantic sheen, and a fixture of newspaper society pages. After a string of high-profile relationships and a first marriage that ended in divorce, she became the Duchess of Argyll in 1951 when she married the duke, Ian Campbell (played by Paul Bettany in the show), whose family had been part of the Scottish aristocracy since the 1400s.A glamorous A-lister who counted society columnists as her friends, the duchess cultivated a chic media image. And she realized early on she could make money from what we would now call her “personal brand,” taking cash from tabloid newspapers to appear in fawning articles. (“Beautiful! Rich! Distinguished!” read a teaser for a 1961 Daily Mirror splash. “This is the Duchess of Argyll the world knows.”)The duchess, photographed in 1955 for magazine coverage of the London social season. She initially had a symbiotic relationship with the British press. Bert Hardy/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesBut when her marriage to the duke broke down, she lost control of the story. The couple’s nasty divorce case — in which the duchess’s intimate photos were presented in court — made her the subject of salacious newspaper articles and gossipy anecdotes, and later, “A Very British Scandal” and even an opera.During the trial, the duke submitted a list of 88 men he said the duchess had slept with during their marriage, as well as Polaroids he had stolen from her that showed the duchess performing oral sex on an unknown man whose head was not in the frame.Ruling in the duke’s favor to grant the divorce in 1963, the judge said the duchess was a “completely promiscuous woman” who had indulged “in disgusting sexual activities to gratify a debased sexual appetite.” The details of the “headless man” photos were gleefully written up in British newspapers, which raked over the case for months. Margaret the glittering socialite became Margaret “the dirty duchess.”Over the rest of her life, she frittered away the fortune she inherited from her father on a series of unsuccessful law suits and dubious investments. Her personal relations didn’t fare much better: She fell out with a daughter from her first marriage, and many of her friends. The duchess died in penury, at 80, in a London retirement home. The first hymn at her funeral, in 1993, began, “Dear Lord and father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways.”Sarah Phelps, who wrote the script for “A Very British Scandal,” said that the duchess’s case and the media furor around it represented “the end of an era.” It was “the birth of a different kind of journalism, and a way of writing about sex and scandal in a very, very prurient way,” she said. And it paved the way for later media depictions of Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse and Meghan Markle — “that viciousness and anger that is directed at women in the public eye,” she said.When the initial outrage faded, the duchess remained the subject of snickering innuendos for decades. Grinning men would pose for photos beside the boarding sign for a Scottish boat that shared her name: “Queue here for the Duchess of Argyll.” Today’s TV audiences will have more sympathy for the duchess, who now looks like a victim of “slut-shaming,” and the nonconsensual sharing of her photos like “revenge porn.” It’s unlikely many viewers will judge her for a sex act that some women’s magazines now offer tips on performing. Yet they might still find it hard to warm to the duchess, who Foy plays as an arrogant, scheming snob.“She lied and she cheated, and she did all sorts of really awful things,” Foy said. “In her defense, they were also done to her.”As a person in the public eye, she sympathized with the duchess and her treatment by the press. “She was one thing, and then they decided she was something else,” Foy said. “Journalists dictate the public perception of you in my industry,” she added. “You are completely in the hands of the people who write the story.”Allison Cook portrayed the duchess in a 2013 production of the opera “Powder Her Face,” staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.Sara krulwich/The New York TimesAnother author of the duchess’s story is the British composer Thomas Adès, whose 1995 opera “Powder Her Face” casts her as its antiheroine. First presented at the Cheltenham Festival in England, when Adès was just 24, “Powder Her Face” has since been performed over 300 times across Europe and the United States, according to Faber, its publisher.Adès said he started out by looking for a classic operatic plot: “someone in a grand position, who’s outwardly very strong and impressive, who is dismantled and brought low by forces from the outside.” Philip Hensher, the opera’s librettist, remembered the Argyll divorce case, Adès said: The duchess fit the bill perfectly.Whereas “A Very British Scandal” ends with the courtroom judgment, “Powder Her Face” picks up at the end of the duchess’s life, when she was broke and holed up in a hotel she couldn’t afford. In a series of dreamy flashbacks, Adès recreates some key vignettes from the story of her life, including the liaison with “the headless man” as an aria from the duchess that begins with words and ends with humming.“You can’t really pretend that she’s an entirely sympathetic character, that she’s Mimì,” said Adès, referring to the fragile seamstress who dies of tuberculosis in Puccini’s “La Bohème,” “as much as I think she’s such a tragic figure.” The duchess, he added, was “formidable, and did plenty of things that were pretty questionable.”Paul Bettany, center left, plays the duke in “A Very British Scandal,” alongside Foy’s duchess.Alan Peebles/Amazon Prime VideoDespite a persistent whiff of scandal, the duchess continued to lead an active life in London high society for most of the rest of her life, said Lady Colin Campbell, a relative by marriage. “She was certainly a notoriety, but she was never a pariah. People would gossip and say, ‘Oh, look who’s here: Margaret Argyll,’” said Lady Campbell, 72. “But she rose above it, as simple as that. She simply ignored it,” she added.In her later years, when money was running low, the duchess tried again “to convert her fame into income,” Lady Campbell said. In 1986, Margaret published “My Dinner Party Book,” a guide to entertaining, aimed at housewives, that nonetheless included advice like “never invite the Lord Chancellor and two ambassadors to your dinner party at the same time.” (The book did not sell well, Lady Campbell said.)Two years later, at 76, the duchess appeared on “Wogan,” the BBC’s flagship chat show. The presenter, Terry Wogan, trod carefully around the incident that had made her most famous, gently asking, “What about your own story? Your own story was extremely colorful — do you think it would make a good plot?”“Oh, let’s pray not,” the duchess replied. “Let’s not even think about that.” More

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      A Century of the BBC, a ‘Quasi-Mystical’ Part of England’s Psyche

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      David Hendy’s “The BBC” looks back at 100 years of wartime reporting, dramas, satires and weather reports.THE BBCA Century on AirBy David HendyIllustrated. 638 pages. PublicAffairs. $38.The British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC — the Beeb — turns 100 this year. “Hullo, hullo, 2LO calling, 2LO calling,” a few thousand listeners heard through the hissing ether at 6 p.m. on Nov. 14, 1922. “This is the British Broadcasting Company. 2LO. Stand by for one minute please!” What followed were short news and weather bulletins, read twice, the second time slowly so that listeners could take notes.David Hendy, in his thorough and engaging new book, “The BBC: A Century on Air,” writes that you can’t understand England without understanding the BBC. It occupies, he says, “a quasi-mystical place in the national psyche.” It’s just there, like the white cliffs of Dover.The BBC sparked to life in the wake of World War I. Its founders included wounded veterans, and they were idealists. Civilization was in tatters; they hoped, through a new medium, to forge a common culture by giving listeners not necessarily what they wanted, but what they needed, to hear.The audience was fed a fibrous diet of plays and concerts and talks and lectures; sports included Derby Day and Wimbledon. Announcers wore dinner jackets as well as their plummy accents, “as a courtesy to the live performers with whom they would be consorting.” Catching the chimes of Big Ben before the evening news became a ritual for millions.Equipment was primitive. A framed notice by the microphone warned guest speakers, “If you sneeze or rustle papers you will DEAFEN THOUSANDS!!!”Radio was new; the BBC felt that it had to teach people how to listen. “To keep your mind from wandering,” it advised, “you might wish to turn the lights out, or settle into your favorite armchair five minutes before the program starts; above all, you should remember that ‘If you only listen with half an ear, you haven’t a quarter of a right to criticize.’”The BBC gained a reputation for being a bit snooty, and soporific. One complaint can stand for many: “People do not want three hours of [expletive] ‘King Lear’ in verse when they get out of a 10-hour day in the [expletive] coal-pits, and [expletive] anybody who tries to tell them that they do.”The BBC took it from both sides. To mandarins like Virginia Woolf, it was irredeemably middlebrow; she referred to it as the “Betwixt and Between Company.” The BBC loosened up over time and took increasing account of working-class and minority audiences, and of audiences who simply wanted to laugh.The broadcaster was created by a Royal Charter; it has never been government-run, yet it must answer to government. Hendy recounts attempts to limit its editorial independence. Churchill and Thatcher were especially vocal critics: They felt there was something a bit pinko about the whole enterprise.The BBC’s scrupulous reporting during World War II gave it lasting prestige across the world. It largely lived up to the motto of R.T. Clark, its senior news editor: to tell “the truth and nothing but the truth, even if the truth is horrible.”During wartime, the company occasionally broadcast from a safer perch. When announcers intoned “This is London,” with British phlegm, they were often in a countryside manor. The London headquarters took a direct hit from a bomb in October 1940; the reader of the evening news “paused for a split second to blow the plaster and soot off the script in front of him before carrying on with the rest of the bulletin.” Seven people were killed in the attack. After the war, the BBC’s foreign services became a prop to the Commonwealth, the new euphemism for “empire.”One of this book’s best set pieces is of the BBC’s wall-to-wall televised coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953. One reporter referred to it as “C-Day.” This sort of thing had never been on TV before. The hard part, Hendy writes, was “persuading royal officials that mere subjects had a right to witness the ceremony in the first place.”Over time the BBC’s tentacles grew longer and more varied: Clusters of radio and television stations catered to different demographics. Competitors crept in.The satire boom of the postwar era arrived, led by “The Goon Show,” which ran from 1951 to 1960. There were TV dramas from iconic talents like Ken Loach and Dennis Potter. The BBC began to take the critic Clive James’s advice: “Anemic high art is less worth having than low art with guts.”From left, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan, members of “The Goon Show,” which aired on the BBC from 1951 to 1960.Mirrorpix via Getty ImagesLanguage battles fought at the company are never dull to read about. For decades, “bloody” could be used only rarely and “bugger” not at all. One internal stylebook, Hendy writes, “included a ban on jokes about lavatories or ‘effeminacy in men’ as well as any ‘suggestive references’ to subjects such as ‘Honeymoon Couples, Chambermaids, Fig leaves, Prostitution, Ladies’ underwear, e.g. winter draws on, Animal habits, e.g. rabbits, Lodgers, Commercial travelers.”The eclectic and influential disc jockey John Peel was brought in; so, alas, was the cigar-chomping comic Jimmy Savile, the zany-uncle host of shows like “Top of the Pops,” who was found after his death in 2011 to have molested dozens if not hundreds of children across five decades. An inquiry found that the BBC did not do nearly enough to stop him.The BBC’s nature documentaries were pathbreaking, and big hits. (They left James “slack-jawed with wonder and respect.”) Hendy walks us through how, under David Attenborough, these things got made. They take years, enormous staffs and a global network of freelancers willing to sit out in the cold and rain to get the money shots.Attenborough was told, early on, that he couldn’t appear onscreen because his teeth were too big. Richard Dawkins has written, in his memoirs, about how difficult it is to talk while walking backward, a crucial skill for any BBC documentary host.More recent BBC hits include the reality series “Strictly Come Dancing,” the brainy documentaries of Louis Theroux and the comedy-drama series “I May Destroy You.”The right has retained its distrust of the BBC, including up-to-date complaints about wokeness; it would like to see it become smaller and more “distinctive,” in the manner of PBS and NPR. These American stations have had nothing like the BBC’s cultural impact — though Greg Jackson, in his story collection “Prodigals,” was correct to refer to Terry Gross as the “Catcher in the WHYY.”Hendy can be critical of the company, but at heart he’s a fan. He reports that across any given week, more than 91 percent of British households use one BBC service or another. He cites academic surveys showing that the broadcaster’s news output is, if anything, tilted slightly to the right.The BBC can still be snoozy. I’m not the only person I know who, at least before Putin rattled the world’s cage, listened to the BBC World Service app at bedtime because it’s an aural sleeping pill.I deserve to lose style points for borrowing Hendy’s last lines for my own, but he puts it simply about the BBC’s precarious position: “We sometimes never know just how much we need or want something until it is gone.” More

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      In Joan Collins Documentary, She Just Gets on With It

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      The actress (don’t call her an actor, please) reflects on her seven-decade career, predatory Hollywood and why sometimes it’s better not to relive the past.LOS ANGELES — “I’m not a bad girl,” said Joan Collins, draped across a white sofa. “I was a very innocent girl. But I had dark hair and green eyes and I suppose they said that I smoldered.”This was on a recent, sun-strafed California afternoon in her apartment, part of a luxury building on the edge of Beverly Hills. Collins, an actress whose career has ranged from the sublime (“Land of the Pharaohs”) to the ridiculous (“Empire of the Ants”) to the sublimely ridiculous (“Dynasty”), wore white slacks, an aquamarine blouse and white espadrilles. A pink diamond the size of a strawberry weighted one finger; her hair had been teased toward the heavens. How many synthetic zebras had died for those nearby pillows? That pouf? So many.As for the smoldering, well, it was 85 degrees out. Wouldn’t anyone?Collins, 88, had invited me over — plying me with coffee, water, an assortment of deluxe cookies — to talk about “This Is Joan Collins,” a documentary that ran on the BBC on New Year’s Day and arrives Tuesday on BritBox.What did it mean to look back on her life for the project? “I’m not very analytical,” she said languorously. “I just do a thing. I just get on with it.”For the film, Collins gave the producers access to her archives and home movies. She otherwise discounts her contribution. “I said, ‘Just don’t put in too many of the nude bits,’” she said. But she narrates the film, with much of what she says adapted from her memoirs. “Here I am,” she purrs in the opening moments, “after seven decades in the business, to tell you a thing or two about how to survive the perils of the profession and what it really feels like to get what you want.”Collins was born in 1933, the eldest child of a dance teacher and a talent agent. As a child, she lived through the Blitz in London — the bombings, evacuations, dislocations — which has made her impatient with what she perceives as whining.“I have to say, every time I read about an actor today, they’ve all been abused or had terrible childhoods,” she said. “I had a great childhood, other than the war.”At 17, she signed with a British film studio. She doesn’t believe she was glamorous. Not then. But the press disagreed and she recalled some of the nicknames she was given: Britain’s bad girl, coffee bar vixen, the torrid baggage. She was typecast accordingly.At first, it bothered her, she said, “then I shrugged and just got on with it.”“I was a very innocent girl,” Collins said. “But I had dark hair and green eyes and I suppose they said that I smoldered.”Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesAt 21, Fox made her a contract player and she came to California. She had already separated from her first husband, Maxwell Reed, an actor who had raped her on their first date. As she wrote in her first memoir, “Past Imperfect: An Autobiography,” and reiterates in the documentary, most of the men she encountered in the business were predatory.She remembered being chased around a house in Palm Springs, a pass made in a car. Then she stopped remembering. “It’s all nasty memories that I don’t wish to relive,” she said. “It happened. It happened to girls all the time.”How did she survive it? She shrugged and got on with it. “A lot of the time, I would just laugh in their faces,” she said.In these early years, she developed a reputation for promiscuity, which wasn’t entirely deserved, even as it became part of her fame. (A 2015 auction of her belongings included not only love letters, but also her headboard.) “I did have a lot of boyfriends, but sequentially,” she said. “And I would sleep with some of them. Not at the same time. I think that I was ahead of my time, because women didn’t do that.”At 30, she married the actor and songwriter Anthony Newley and had two children. When her relationship with Newley ended, she married the music executive Ron Kass and had a daughter. Later, there was a fourth marriage, to the Swedish singer Peter Holm. (“The only one I didn’t understand was the Swede,” she said. “That was such a total mistake.”) She now lives with her fifth husband, the theatrical producer Percy Gibson. He was the one who brought the water and took away the cookies.She left the business after she married Newley and she struggled to return to it. The documentary includes clips of a particular low point, the real estate investors vs. mutant insects B movie “The Empire of the Ants” (1977). How did she handle schlocky material? “You do the best you can,” she said. “You learn your lines, you hit your marks and you get on with it.”Only rarely could she escape typecasting, but she shrugged that off, too, recounting a conversation she had with the actor John Gielgud, in which he told her that because she could never escape her physicality, she could never play an ugly woman. “That was true for a certain amount of years,” she said.She believes that good looks can be a deterrent when it comes to quality roles: “Which the young actresses of today realize, which is why most of them try to look as ordinary as possible.”In the late 1970s, she made a comeback with two soft-core films — “The Stud” and “The Bitch” — adapted from novels by her sister Jackie Collins. This exposure led to her most famous role, Alexis in Aaron Spelling’s nighttime soap “Dynasty.”Despite well-publicized on-set struggles, and the producers’ petty reaction to her demands for equal pay, she remains proud of “Dynasty.” Much of the memorabilia hung throughout her apartment dates from that era. “It was glamorous,” she said. “It was about very, very rich people, most of them good looking.” She compared it to the current hit “Succession,” though she remarked that on “Succession” they wear shabbier clothes.“Dynasty” ended more than three decades ago. Collins hasn’t had a great role since. She thinks she knows why. “Casting directors say, ‘Oh, no, we can’t use Joan Collins in this vixen, bitch part, because it’s too obvious.’ And ‘Oh, no, we can’t have her in this other role. She can only do vixen bitches.’”Collins has struggled to escape typecasting in her career, but shrugged it off. Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesStill, she has gone on, describing her glamorous life in columns for the British weekly magazine The Spectator, where Boris Johnson was once her boss. “Jolly, very funny, great buffoon,” was how she described him, acknowledging that buffoon was perhaps the wrong word.“He never cut a word of my diaries,” she added.Collins hasn’t changed much. (Even her look has altered very little, though she claims to have tried Botox only once: “I screamed and left the surgery.”) And she’s not sure if the entertainment industry has either. “I’m not having men making passes at me, so I don’t know,” she said. “But I think probably.” Still, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, she seemed worried mostly about the men.“Sadly, I think that now young men are suffering from being labeled toxically masculine,” she said, “because of this rise of anti-maleness.”And yet, she identifies as a feminist. “I believe that women are equal to men in every single way,” she said. “Except physical strength. People say you didn’t burn your bra, you wear lipstick. So what? I’m very proud of being a woman.” She added that she hates being called an actor, preferring actress.“What’s wrong with actress?” she said. “What’s wrong with mother? What’s wrong with woman? Girl? I don’t like having that word taken away.” (Had anyone tried?)This was about an hour into the conversation, just before I was ushered out of the apartment just as warmly as I had been welcomed in — a photographer had arrived, Collins had smoldering to do. But first I had to ask her about that opening line of the documentary: What does it really feel like to get what you want?She wakes up every morning and thanks “God or whoever it is,” she said. “I mean, I’m very lucky.”Then she added, with something that may have been a wink, “But you make your own luck sometimes, right?” More

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      Music for the Dark at an Experimental Festival

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      British fans gathered to enjoy an overnight program of alternative classical music — a loose, soothing genre that many have discovered during the pandemic.GATESHEAD, England — Early on Saturday evening, the final strains of Gavin Bryars’s looping “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet” faded into silence at a vast concert hall here. After some polite applause, several hundred audience members prized themselves out of chunky beanbag chairs and headed off to find their next listening experience.Ambling across the arts complex attached to the hall would have brought them to Kinbrae’s nature-themed synth landscapes. On an expansive concourse, they could have chilled out to Echo Juliet’s gently probing D.J. set, or held on for a sonic barrage from the electro duo Darkstar.All were on offer at the inaugural After Dark Festival, organized by the BBC’s classical music station, Radio 3, in Sage Gateshead, a shiny, undulating arts venue on the banks of the River Tyne in northeast England. The festival’s diverse lineup of music evades an easy collective term: Neo-classical? Experimental? Crossover? Alternative classical?Echo Juliet’s gently probing D.J. set was one of the more chilled out musical experiences at the festival. Mary Turner for The New York TimesDescribing it is a simpler task: United by its commitment to cross-pollination, the program combined approaches from improvisation, pop, jazz, spoken word and electronic music with a variety of traditional classical music signifiers. As well as slower rates of changes, it preferred curves over edges, minimal over maximal. Electronic elements frequently cropped up, as did multimedia collaboration, evident in the evening’s selection of tableaus, projections and animations.This loose genre has offered stress relief and calm to increasing numbers of British music fans during the coronavirus pandemic. Coinciding with the spring equinox, After Dark was also an all-night affair, a continuous thread of sound flowing from Chelsea Carmichael’s fluttering sax lines at dusk to the sitarist Jasdeep Singh Degun’s set at daybreak. The overall effect was of one unbroken sound installation, with washes of sound always surreptitiously present.Elizabeth Alker, whose Radio 3 show “Unclassified” gives a platform to new composers and performers, said that the appeal of such music can be the portal it offers to less turbulent worlds. It has “a lot of space you can naturally escape into, particularly at a time when we don’t have much space in our daily lives — both head space and, during lockdown, physical space,” she said in a telephone interview.Alan Davey, who runs Radio 3, echoed this. “This music has really come into its own during the pandemic,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s possibly an escape inward, but it’s definitely an escape.”Jasdeep Singh Degun closes the festival with a traditional Indian raag, associated with the morning and played on a sitar. Mary Turner for The New York TimesChunky beanbags offer festivalgoers a comfy listening experience.Mary Turner for The New York TimesAndrew Hayes, left, and Matt Brown perform thrashing improvisations as Run Logan Run.Mary Turner for The New York TimesOver the course of the pandemic, a number of long-form performances have offered such escapism. In 2020, Max Richter’s eight-hour “Sleep” was simultaneously broadcast on radio stations across Europe, the United States and Canada during the Easter weekend. Later that year, the pianist Igor Levit streamed a 20-hour rendition of Erik Satie’s beguiling composition “Vexations.” Then this past January, the London Contemporary Orchestra presented a 24-hour program at the Barbican Center, featuring some of the longest pieces ever written.Staging the Gateshead festival’s 12-hour program overnight made sense, Davey said, since this kind of music has a “late-night vibe — it’s music in the dark, for when everything around is quiet.” But as the evening wore on, exiting one performance for another created a series of exciting jolts between worlds: leaving the BBC newsreader Viji Alles’s unnervingly chilled renditions of stormy Shipping Forecasts and meeting Darkstar’s set head-on; popping out of Christian Löffler’s atmospheric techno remixes and into the Bristol duo Run Logan Run’s thrashing improvisations; finding Arnold Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht” being piped into a deserted cafe area at 4 a.m.A plurality of experience also existed among the festivalgoers. At 7 a.m., a group of bleary-eyed friends who’d used the second half of the night as an extended after-party to their own event explained the music’s appeal.“It’s the kind of stuff I listen to when I’m overwhelmed,” Kate Bradley, 25 and a visual artist, said of Degun’s sunrise sitar set. Clara Hancock, 25, instead uses ambient and lo-fi music as background sound for work, and prefers to decompress to “super-fast happy music.”Tilly Pitt, 20, a student at nearby Durham University, said she discovered the genre as an escape from studying. “During lockdown, I spent so much time staring at the screen, so it was nice to focus on something else for a while,” Pitt said.And while some listeners plied themselves with coffee, intent on an evening’s hard concentration, others settled in for the night, nestling in sleeping bags and seeking opportunities for a tactical snooze.The Royal Northern Sinfonia, an orchestra local to Gateshead, performs a series of contemporary classical pieces as part of the festival. Mary Turner for The New York TimesHowever listeners approach it, the music’s extended duration actively encourages the mind to wander. During the pandemic, people listened to Radio 3 “for longer, and they were appreciating that chance to reflect,” Davey said. “For me, music is an abstract art form, but it does help you use the space to think and reconsider, and I think ambient classical music is that writ large,” he added.Some of the music at After Dark fits the ambient description, but experimentation also abounds, as it does on Corey Mwamba’s improvisation-focused Radio 3 show “Freeness,” which also hosted artists at the festival. It’s noticeable that, although there’s a growing audience in Britain for this music, its creators often come from places without a dominant classical tradition, like Scotland, Canada and Scandinavian countries. Alker’s Radio 3 show was born after she witnessed groups of talented classical musicians branch out into other disciplines.“There’s a generation of musicians who had this classical training, and they wanted to hold on to making music in a classical idiom, but socially and culturally, they have the same experiences as everybody else, going to clubs and karaoke bars,” Alker said. She cites Nils Frahm and the recent work of Jonny Greenwood, formerly of Radiohead, as examples of music which is, in its essence, classical, and yet stands slightly removed from the usual traditions.Despite the relaxation their music may have brought through lockdowns, it’s been a different story for artists. “During the pandemic, I was just trying to keep things together,” said Degun, the sitarist, in a telephone interview a few days before his performance at the festival. “Music for me during the pandemic was quite stressful,” as he had to adapt quickly to new ways of performing, recording and working.Many fans discovered the escapism of experimental, soothing classical music during the pandemic.Mary Turner for The New York TimesIndependent music-making can be precarious work, and the music on the program at After Dark was made by composers and performers without consistent institutional backing. One of the twins who make up Kinbrae made this point as they began their final track. “There were times when we felt we were never going to be able to do this again,” he told the crowd.Like Kinbrae, Degun relished the return to appreciative audiences, but decided on a more traditional set than the cross-genre compositions for which he’s known. “When Radio 3 contacted me and said they wanted me to play at sunrise, I really wanted to just play Indian classical music,” he said. He rarely gets the opportunity to perform raags — a particular melodic mode linked to times of the day — associated with the morning, he said, since “usually all our concerts are in the evening.”For Davey, the festival’s aim is both to celebrate alternative classical’s existing, late-night audience and to introduce a wider group of listeners to the genre’s soothing affects. As the sun rose slowly over the Newcastle skyline, and the sound of Degun’s expansive raag closed the festival, there was certainly ample space to think. More

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      Why TV-Inspired Vacations Are on the Rise

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      TV-themed itineraries are on the rise, taking travelers on adventures with familiar shows during a time of uncertainty.With 70 percent of Americans watching more TV in 2021 than they did in 2020, binge-watching has skyrocketed during the pandemic. Now, as borders reopen, restrictions ease and travel restarts, tour advisers are fielding an increasingly popular request: immersive, TV-themed itineraries that allow travelers to live out their favorite shows’ story lines.In Britain, where all travel restrictions are now lifted, hotels in London have partnered with Netflix to offer Lady Whistledown-themed teas inspired by “Bridgerton” high society. In Yellowstone National Park, travelers are arriving in Wyoming not for a glimpse of Old Faithful, but for a chance to cosplay as John Dutton from the hit drama “Yellowstone.”And in South Korea, where vaccinated travelers can now enter without quarantine, street food vendors on Jeju Island are anticipating a run on dalgona candy, the honeycomb toffees that played a central role in “Squid Game.”“When you fall in love with a character, you can’t get it out of your mind,” said Antonina Pattiz, 30, a blogger who last year got hooked on “Outlander,” the steamy, time-traveling drama about Claire Beauchamp, a nurse transported 200 years back in history. Ms. Pattiz and her husband, William, binge-watched the Starz show together, and are now planning an “Outlander”-themed trip to Scotland in May to visit sites from the show, including Midhope Castle, which stands in as Lallybroch, the family home of another character, Jamie Fraser.Mr. Pattiz is part Scottish, Ms. Pattiz said, and their joint interest in the show kicked off a desire on his part to explore his roots. “You watch the show and you really start to connect with the characters and you just want to know more,” she said.The fifth season of “Outlander” was available in February 2020, and Starz’s 142 percent increase in new subscribers early in the pandemic has been largely attributed to a jump in locked-down viewers discovering the show. During the ensuing two-year hiatus before Season 6 recently hit screens — a period of time known by fans as “Droughtlander” — “Outlander”-related attractions in Scotland, like Glencoe, which appears in the show’s opening credits and the Palace of Holyroodhouse, saw more than 1.7 million visitors. “Outlander”-related content on Visit Scotland’s website generated more than 350,000 page views, ahead of content pegged to the filming there of Harry Potter and James Bond movies.The Pattizs, who live in New York City, will follow a 12-day self-driving sample itinerary provided by Visit Scotland, winding from Edinburgh to Fife to Glasgow as they visit castles and gardens where Claire fell in love and Jamie’s comrades died in battle. Private tour companies, including Nordic Visitor and Inverness Tours, have also unveiled customized tours.The ‘Sex and the City’ UniverseThe sprawling franchise revolutionized how women were portrayed on the screen. And the show isn’t over yet. A New Series: Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte return for another strut down the premium cable runway in “And Just Like That,” streaming on HBO. Off Broadway: Candace Bushnell, whose writing gave birth to the “Sex and the City” universe, stars in her one-woman show based on her life. In Carrie’s Footsteps: “Sex and the City” painted a seductive vision of Manhattan, inspiring many young women to move to the city. The Origins: For the show’s 20th anniversary in 2018, Bushnell shared how a collection of essays turned into a pathbreaking series.Enduring trend, new intensityScreen tourism, which encompasses not just pilgrimages to filming locations but also studio tours and visits to amusement parks like The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, is an enduring trend. Tourists flocked to Salzburg in the 1960s after the release of “The Sound of Music”; in recent decades, locations like New Zealand saw a huge bump in visits from “Lord of the Rings” fans and bus tours in New York City have offered tourists a chance to go on location of “Sex and the City” and “The Marvelous Ms. Maisel.”But in this pandemic moment, where travel has for months been synonymous with danger and tourists are navigating conflicting desires to safeguard their health while also making up for squandered time, screen tourism is taking on a new intensity, said Rachel Kazez, a Chicago-based mental health therapist. She has clients eager to travel — another major trend for 2022 is “going big” — but they are looking for ways to tamp down the anxiety that may accompany those supersized ambitions.She said her patients increasingly are saying “‘I was cooped up for a year and I just want to go nuts. Let’s do whatever fantasy we’ve been thinking about’.”“If we’ve been watching a TV show, we know everything about it, and we can go and have a totally immersive experience that’s also extremely predictable,” Ms. Kazez continued. Cyndi Lam, a pharmacist in Fairfax, Va., has longed to go to Morocco for years. But she didn’t feel confident pulling the trigger until last month, when “Inventing Anna,” the nine-episode drama about the sham heiress Anna Delvey, began streaming on Netflix.In episode six of “Inventing Anna,” the character flies to Marrakesh and stays at La Mamounia, a lavish five-star resort. Ms. Lam and her husband are now booked to stay there in September.“Everybody can kind of relate to Anna,” Ms. Lam said. “I found her character to be fascinating, and when she went to Morocco, I was like, ‘OK, we’re going to Morocco.’ It sealed the deal.”In December, Club Wyndham teamed up with Hallmark Channel to design three suites tied to the “Countdown to Christmas” holiday movie event. They sold out in seven hours.Courtesy of Club WyndhamSensing a new desire among guests to tap into the scripted universe, dozens of hotels over the past year have rolled out themed suites inspired by popular shows. Graduate Hotels has a “Stranger Things”-themed suite at its Bloomington, Ind., location, with areas designed like the living room and basement of central characters like the Byers. A blinking alphabet of Christmas lights and Eleven’s favorite Eggo waffles are included. And in December, Club Wyndham teamed up with the Hallmark Channel to design three “Countdown to Christmas”-themed suites where guests could check in and binge Christmas films. They sold out in seven hours.“It was the first time we’d done anything like this,” said Lara Richardson, chief marketing officer for Crown Media Family Networks, in an email. “One thing we hear over and over from viewers is that, as much they love our products, they want to step inside a ‘Countdown to Christmas’ movie.”Vacation homes are also going immersive. For families, Airbnb partnered with BBC to list the Heeler House, a real-world incarnation of the animated home on the beloved animated series “Bluey,” and Vrbo has 10 rental homes inspired by “Yes Day,” the 2021 Netflix film about parents who remove “no” from their vocabulary. Celebrities are jumping in, too: Issa Rae, creator and star of HBO’s “Insecure,” offered an exclusive look at her neighborhood in South Los Angeles in February with a special Airbnb listing, at a rock-bottom price of $56.Tea on TV, now in London (and Boston)“Bridgerton,” Netflix’s British period drama about family, love and savage gossip, was streamed by 82 million households in 2021. (For comparison, the finale of “Breaking Bad” in 2013 had 10.3 million viewers; more recent streaming hits, including “Tiger King” and “Maid,” had fewer than 70 million). When season two of “Bridgerton” premieres on March 25, Beaverbrook Town House, a hotel built across two Georgian townhouses in London’s Chelsea, will offer a “Bridgerton” experience that includes a day out in London and drinks in the British countryside; nearby at the Lanesborough, a Bridgerton-themed tea, cheekily dubbed “the social event of the season,” will kick off the same day. In Boston, the Fairmont Copley Plaza now has a “High Society Package” for fans with flowers and a private afternoon tea.Contiki, the group travel company for 18- to 35-year-olds, had a “Bridgerton”-themed itinerary set for September 2021 but had to scrap it when the Delta variant hit; they’ve now partnered with Amazon Prime on a Hawaiian Islands trip inspired by “I Know What You Did Last Summer” set for July.Both Netflix and Amazon Prime have brand partnership teams that handle collaborations of this nature.“As we come out of this pandemic, the desire for more immersive experiences is really stronger than ever,” said Adam Armstrong, Contiki’s chief executive. “It’s about getting under the skin of destinations, creating those Instagrammable moments that recreate stuff from films and movies. It’s really a strong focus for us.”The popularity of “Bridgerton” on Netflix was eclipsed by “Squid Game,” the high-stakes South Korean survival drama, and despite that show’s carnage, travelers are booking Squid Game vacations, too. Remote Lands, an Asia-focused travel agency, reported a 25 percent increase in interest in South Korean travel and created a Seoul guide for fans and a customized itinerary.Some travel advisers say that some clients don’t even want to explore the locations they’re traveling to. They just want to be there while they continue binge-watching.Emily Lutz, a travel adviser in Los Angeles, said that more than 20 percent of her total requests over the past few months have been for travel to Yellowstone National Park, a result of the popularity of “Yellowstone,” the western family drama starring Kevin Costner on the Paramount Network and other streaming services. And not all of her clients are interested in hiking.“I had a client who wrote me and said, ‘All we want to do is rent a lodge in the mountains, sit in front of the fireplace, and watch episodes of ‘Yellowstone’ — while we’re in Yellowstone’,” she said.52 Places for a Changed WorldThe 2022 list highlights places around the globe where travelers can be part of the solution.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places for a Changed World for 2022. More