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      You’ve Just Watched the Super Bowl. What Will You See Next?

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      The TV network that airs the N.F.L. title game wants to retain as many viewers as possible. There are various strategies, with CBS choosing to debut the crime drama “Tracker.”Some of the most precious television real estate comes immediately after the National Football League’s season finale, one of the few programs to still corral a giant audience.The network that airs the Super Bowl wants to retain as many of those viewers — 115 million people last year — as possible with the postgame slot. It has been a powerful tool to debut new shows, as CBS will do on Sunday with “Tracker,” a crime drama about the hunt for missing people that stars Justin Hartley, and it has also showcased already popular ones, such as NBC did in 1996 with “Friends.”Either strategy can prove effective.“It’s really a year-by-year basis when you have the Super Bowl and to think, ‘What are the different weapons you have to deploy?’” said Amy Reisenbach, the president of CBS Entertainment.New ShowsFor nearly two decades, the Super Bowl has cycled among Fox, NBC and CBS. (In 2027, ABC will air its first Super Bowl since 2006.) “There isn’t really any other platform like it on TV,” Reisenbach said, adding, “It’s a huge opportunity to get eyeballs.”Networks plan out the postgame slot about a year ahead of time, said Dan Harrison, the executive vice president of program planning and content strategy at Fox Entertainment.CBS chose “Tracker” in May, Reisenbach said, after executives viewed the pilot episode and felt it could appeal across demographics because of Hartley’s popularity with both men and women. The decision to debut a new show follows the strategy CBS used for “Undercover Boss” (2010) and for its two most recent Super Bowl lead-outs, “The World’s Best” (2019) and “The Equalizer” (2021).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Can Taylor Tomlinson Have It All and a Life, Too?

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      In September, the night before the comic Taylor Tomlinson made her Radio City Music Hall debut, she called one of her three siblings in tears, asking: “Why do I feel like it’s not enough?”This emotional moment had long passed when she strode onstage the next day wearing a stylish black suit, sleeves rolled up, and commanded the cavernous room with an hour of cheerful, intricately woven jokes delivered at a fast clip. One theme was how professional success does not necessarily translate into personal happiness. She killed. The following afternoon, sitting outside at a Manhattan coffee shop near her hotel, Tomlinson described dispassionately how she cried before the career highlight of selling out Radio City. “There have been times when I thought I’m only good to people 40 feet away,” she said.Tomlinson, 30, who undertook her first theater tour just two years ago, has emerged as one of the most acclaimed, in-demand superstars in comedy, the rare young stand-up with mass appeal in the current fragmented landscape. After two Netflix specials produced in her 20s (and a third premiering next month), she became the only woman to make the top 10 grossing comic tours of 2023. She performed 130 shows, more than anyone else on that list, including Kevin Hart, who topped the list. And to follow that up, she is taking over the late-night TV slot vacated by James Corden on CBS, debuting Jan. 16 as the host of the comedy show “After Midnight.”I followed Tomlinson for 10 months, tracking the development of her new special, periodically seeing shows and debriefing her afterward. What I saw up close is that spending the year in and out of hotels is isolating, but so is being a rapidly ascendant comic at her level of success. “There sometimes feels like there isn’t anyone my age to talk to,” Tomlinson told me.Tomlinson with Stephen Colbert when it was announced she would be taking over the late-night spot following his show.Scott Kowalchyk/CBS via Getty Images“IF YOU WANT to make yourself feel sad, compare your career to Taylor’s,” Dustin Nickerson, her good friend and the opening comic throughout her recent global tour, told me, before comparing her to a five-tool player in baseball who has all the skills to be great. “Watching her this past year has been watching someone become a celebrity.”The actor and comedian Hannah Einbinder described Tomlinson as “the voice of her, of our generation,” before calling her the Taylor Swift of comedy. “She talks about universal experiences — relationships, love — but in a new way. She’s the most evolved comic out there. She’s for everyone.” Einbinder paused, adding: “It’s hard to be for everyone.”Tomlinson is too modest (and a die-hard Swiftie) to accept the comparison to the pop star, but it’s a useful one. Just as Swift established herself in country music, Tomlinson, another blond, wholesome-seeming prodigy, began in a conservative niche: the church circuit. Both Taylors are prolific artists whose work resonates with broad swaths of people through personal stories, sometimes about ex-boyfriendsTomlinson began working on her new hour focusing on comedy about being single after many years of serial monogamy. Then she started seeing someone, so she incorporated him until they broke up, which she told me was inevitable because she was working on new material and Swift was putting out an album. “All the signs were there,” she joked. “Those are my horsemen of the apocalypse.”After the split, an uncomfortable thought immediately occurred to her: This will be good for my career, bad for my life.Around the time of the Radio City performance, she was interviewing for “After Midnight,” a show built on a rotating cast of comics joking about memes or viral stories. She got the job in November, becoming one of the few comedians hosting a nightly show on network television, the kind of plum gig that has long been a Holy Grail for entertainers. Yet when the show’s producers asked her in an interview why she wanted the job, Tomlinson said she responded: “I’m kind of lonely.”She has been open in her comedy about mental health issues, including a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and she has a joke where she says every one of her emotions “demands a parade.” Onstage, you might say she often leads the marching band, which, incidentally, she performed in during high school. Mixing goofy act-outs with punch-line-dense jokes filled with surprising pivots, Tomlinson makes even the heaviest subjects seem spikily funny. Her sets never go long without a laugh.Offstage, she has a more patient and coolly professional manner, impeccably grateful, remarkably free of kvetching and trash talk. She enjoys analyzing the mechanics of comedy and is at her most expansive there, in the details. But there is a certain haunted quality that periodically emerges, a past hovering over her present, one that she has been excavating in therapy.“I stopped talking to my father last year,” she said in a club in 2022, then noticed something shift in the crowd: “People get really sad when you say you don’t talk to your parents anymore because they wish they had the balls to do it.”When I first met her, backstage at a February show in Boston, that bit was gone and she said she missed some of the heavier subject matter she used to include in her set, without being more specific. Some of that would creep back in, on the margins. One funny bit refers to taking a boyfriend to meet her parents as visiting “the scene of the crime.”Raised in a conservative Methodist family north of San Diego, she has talked about the scars left by her mother’s death from cancer when Tomlinson was 8. It bonded her to her siblings, all of whom remain close. Brinn, two years younger than Taylor, the oldest, told me by phone that Taylor took the role of “surrogate parent.”When the producers of the new late-night show “After Midnight” asked Tomlinson why she wanted the hosting job, she said she told them, “I’m kind of lonely.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesMany comics come off as the reckless kid looking for attention, but part of what makes Tomlinson’s comic persona different is that she projects the image of a responsible young adult who can’t help but reveal the insecurities and bubbling emotions beneath. In the weeks before taping her special, she lost her voice, and only a few days before, her doctor told her she had mono. She took a steroid and did the show, brushing aside any possibility of postponing. “A lot of people have pushed through far worse,” she told me not long after. “Maggie Smith had cancer when she filmed ‘Harry Potter.’ Like, I’m fine.”Her father has lately been a more remote figure in her comedy specials than her mother. He was, however, critical to her stand-up origin story. He not only drove her to a comedy class that got her started on this path. He also took the class with her when she was 16. In the show at the end of the course, with an audience of 40 at a hole-in-the-wall church, she got the closing spot. When asked why her father didn’t, she said matter-of-factly: “’Cause I was better.” Sensing how this might come off, she added: “Look, he can sing and I can’t.”SINCE SHE WAS YOUNG, Tomlinson has known she wanted to do something creative, be an actor, a writer. But that first show was when, as she described it, the “real me” came out. Her best friend, Courtney Lem, was one of the audience members sitting on folding chairs that day and described the show as a revelation. “She was someone else, not nervous or shy,” Lem told me. “It was like seeing real magic for the first time.”One of the jokes Tomlinson told eventually made its way into her first late-night set on “Conan.” Its premise was that being abstinent was hard for a religious kid because “every time I miss a period, I’m like, ‘Oh no, I’m carrying the messiah.’”When her mother died, her father remarried 10 months later. At the time, Tomlinson didn’t think that was too soon, but as she got older, her mind-set shifted. “I’ve said to him as an adult: I wished you waited longer for us. He did not agree with me.”She described her childhood relationship with her father as rocky but felt on more solid ground after doing stand-up. “When I could do this trick, when I was a good performer, he was interested. And he was impressed. And I was somebody worth paying attention to.”In her telling, her father was a performer, a singer, who chose having a family and stable career as a teacher over pursuing his dreams. She was on the same path, she said, explaining that her entire family got married between the ages of 18 and 22. That was her plan, too. In college, she imagined marrying her religious boyfriend, having children and doing standup on the side. When her future husband broke up with her, he told her that she should keep doing comedy. It’s a conversation she describes as formative, but not as much as her next boyfriend, a comic, saying she was funny but didn’t work hard enough. “He’s very funny and talented and I have a lot of jokes about him,” she said. “Got a lot of closers out of that guy.”Her career took off soon after she left school for the college stand-up circuit, which led to a stint on “Last Comic Standing.” At 23, she was booked on “Conan” and received a network development deal. Tensions between her past and future emerged. She lost a church gig over this tweet: “I’m a wild animal in bed, way more afraid of you than you of me.” She eventually quit Twitter and stopped doing church gigs.Her first exposure on Netflix, a 15-minute set in the 2018 series “The Comedy Lineup,” was a turning point for her career and her relationship with her father and stepmother. “They liked the success but they didn’t like what I was saying,” she said. “They loved when I was clean. And when I did the 15 minutes, they were disappointed.”Over the past year, she’s examined this part of her life in therapy and locates a lot of her trouble here. “There were times when I felt my self-worth is so tied up in this job and what I could do and why is that?” she said, then added, referring to her father, “A big part of it is I felt it impressed.”Tomlinson projects the image of a responsible young adult, even pushing through mono instead of postponing a show.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesParadoxically, Tomlinson is an introvert, uncomfortable in groups of people. Dustin Nickerson said she’s the kind of person who wants to get invited to the party but won’t attend. When asked when she’s happiest, he mulled it over before saying: when she is making a connection with one person.And yet her work has often resonated most when she digs into her own personal mess. She describes herself not as a topical or political comic, but as one who finds humor that other people can relate to by drilling down into her own life. Before putting out her second special, which dealt with mental illness and her mother’s death, she showed it to her friend Lem, who was in town to help her move stuff out of a boyfriend’s place after a breakup. Lem was amazed that she could be so open, asking, “How could you talk about this stuff?” Tomlinson recalled telling her, “I can’t really help it.”She’s trying to pick her spots more now. She describes her new special as “lighter” than her last one, though it’s vulnerable in subtle ways, like how much it ingratiates or refuses to. She said she had been more sparing about what she reveals in podcasts and interviews. And the late-night show will, she hoped, provide a stabilizing force, a home base, a community where she will once again be a parental figure of sorts. Her sibling Brinn, who just recently left the restaurant business to work for their sister, describes it as a game-changer in giving her balance, saying: “I have never seen her happier to be doing something that is social.”After she got the late-night show, Tomlinson said she heard from a lot of people, including friends and family. Asked if that included her father, she paused for several long seconds, considering her next move. Then she very politely thanked me for the question but said she would rather not talk about it.Tomlinson knows she can’t appeal to everyone, but her goal is to appeal to as many people as possible — and that makes her alert to what resonates. For a comic who cares about being relatable, success can be tricky to navigate. What will not change is how she prioritizes stand-up above all else. She agreed to take the late-night job only after being assured she would just need to shoot the show three days a week, allowing her to tour over the weekend.Ever since watching and studying comics like Kathleen Madigan and Maria Bamford in high school, she has not only connected with standup but leaned on it. She said that she first lost some religious faith when her mother died (“They told me praying would work. That shook me.”) but just as important, she said, was entering stand-up. “I was raised in this environment where if you’re not Christian, you’re probably a bad person because no one’s holding you accountable,” she said. “In clubs, I found a lot of these people are more empathetic and kinder and open-minded than people I’ve been around. Far less judgmental in the stand-up world.”Even as a late-night host, what Tomlinson sounds most excited about is the community of stand-ups. And she thinks, rightly, that the show will provide a valuable new platform for young comics. She said she wished she was more social earlier in her career. When asked if Taylor Swift’s trajectory holds any lessons, she pointed to how the musician had evolved but didn’t completely reinvent herself and cited the musician’s Eras Tour charting her different phases: “She’s still her but saying, ‘This is the place I am at right now.’”You could say that Tomlinson is now entering her late-night era. She said that when she was younger, she used to dream of being a legend; she talked about that with Lem, her friend. They saw Swift in concert together last year in Los Angeles.A few eras into the show, Tomlinson said, she turned to Lem and said, “I changed my mind. I want to be a legend.” Tomlinson cracked up reflecting on this moment, then added: “Two eras later, I was like: ‘Looks too hard. Think of the amount of stalkers.’” More

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      How to Watch the Golden Globes 2024: Date, Time, Streaming

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      Hollywood usually looks to the annual awards as a party, but this year they also have an unlikely mission: A bid for relevance.The bar for a successful Golden Globes is usually low: Did at least one winner crack an acceptance-speech joke they’d probably regret the next day? Was there unpredictable political pontificating? Was the champagne still flowing into the wee hours?But then a Los Angeles Times investigation in 2021 revealed that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the eccentric, cloistered nonprofit of about 85 journalists that voted on the Golden Globes for some seven decades, had exactly zero Black members. The event has spent the last two years undergoing a reboot: The H.F.P.A. was dissolved. Private ownership took over, and new leadership was hired.This year, the Globes are back on TV, in their normal Sunday-night slot. (NBC didn’t broadcast the event in 2022, and last year’s pared-back Globes were booted to a Tuesday night because of football.) Now they’re on CBS, and a diversified voting body of more than 300 entertainment journalists has chosen the winners and added two new categories. (Oh, and they also found a new way to nominate Taylor Swift.)Will it be enough to win back audiences? (The 2023 Globes had about 6.3 million viewers, down 10 percent from the last televised Globes ceremony in 2021; by comparison, the Oscars draw about 19 million viewers.) Will the A-listers show up? Will the ceremony be a nod to the boozy, freewheeling affairs of old or play it more strait-laced like last year’s sober — some said, “boring” — ceremony?We’ll find out Sunday night. Here’s how to watch.What time does the show start, and where can I watch?The ceremony begins at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif. CBS is the official television broadcaster.Online, you can watch the show live on the CBS app, which is free to download, though you’ll need to sign in using the credentials from your cable provider. The show will also stream on Paramount+, though only subscribers who have the Showtime add-on will be able to watch live. For those who do not, the ceremony can be streamed beginning Monday on Paramount+. There are also a number of live TV streaming services that offer access to CBS, including Hulu + Live TV, YouTube TV and FuboTV, which all require subscriptions, though many are offering free trials.Is there a red carpet?Variety will stream red carpet arrivals beginning at 6:30 p.m. Eastern, 3:30 p.m. Pacific on its website and social media platforms as part of the official Globes preshow, which will be hosted by the Variety journalists Marc Malkin and Angelique Jackson and the “Entertainment Tonight” correspondent Rachel Smith. You can also watch on ETonline.com or the Golden Globes website.Who is hosting?The comedian and actor Jo Koy, who has released multiple Netflix specials and starred in the comedy movie “Easter Sunday” in 2022, will take the reins for the first time.Who is presenting?The lineup of actors, comedians and musicians who will hand out awards includes Amanda Seyfried, America Ferrera, Angela Bassett, Daniel Kaluuya, Florence Pugh, Gabriel Macht, George Lopez, Issa Rae, Julia Garner, Justin Hartley, Michelle Yeoh, Oprah Winfrey and Will Ferrell.Who votes on the awards?With the H.F.P.A. dissolved, an expanded group of more than 300 entertainment journalists from around the world is now responsible for selecting the nominees and winners. And the Globes have promised it’s a much more diverse group that now includes Black voters.What’s new this year?The Globes introduced two new categories, one for stand-up comedy on television and the other for blockbuster films — defined as those taking in at least $100 million at the domestic box office and $150 million worldwide (hello, “Barbie”-”Oppenheimer”-“Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” showdown).With the exception of the blockbuster category, which has eight slots, the categories now have six nominees each, up from five. In other words, more stars to populate the televised ceremony and the red carpet spectacle.Who is nominated?“Barbie,” Greta Gerwig’s live-action take on the popular doll, leads the pack with eight nominations, including three in the original song category. (Yes, “I’m Just Ken” made the cut.) Close on its heels is “Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s three-hour blockbuster biopic about the theoretical physicist who led the effort that produced the first nuclear weapons. It’s up for best drama, director and actor, among other awards.On the TV side, it looks to be a big night for “Succession,” which ended last spring and earned a record nine nominations. The audience favorites “The Bear” and “Only Murders in the Building” picked up five apiece.What should you watch for?“Oppenheimer” will be looking to bolster its case at the Oscars with wins here in the best drama and director categories. But don’t count out “Killers of the Flower Moon,” whose female lead, Lily Gladstone, could become the first Indigenous performer to win best actress in a drama.Among the TV nominees, Meryl Streep, who is up for best supporting actress in a comedy for her role as the actress Loretta Durkin in Season 3 of “Only Murders in the Building,” could break her own record for the most Golden Globe acting wins with a victory (this would be her ninth statuette). Ali Wong, who played a successful businesswoman drawn into a road-rage-fueled feud in the Netflix comedy “Beef,” could become the first actress of Asian descent to win best actress in the limited series category.And, if “Succession” wins best drama, it will tie the record for most wins in the category (currently held by “Mad Men” and “The X-Files,” which each have three).Will Taylor Swift be there?The singer picked up her fifth Golden Globe nomination, for her concert film, “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” thanks to the new blockbuster film category, but no word yet on her plans for the evening. Will the winners in the TV categories offer any hints about the Emmys next week?What a strange year: The dual actors’ and writers’ strikes that largely brought Hollywood to a standstill also bumped the Emmys from their normal September spot, even though voting took place in June. They’re now set to air after Jan. 15, even though the winners for the 2022-23 season were locked in months ago. Which is to say: Nope! More

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      Tom Smothers, Comic Half of the Smothers Brothers, Dies at 86

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      Though he played a naïve buffoon onstage, he was the driving force behind the folk-singing duo’s groundbreaking TV show.Tom Smothers, the older half of the comic folk duo the Smothers Brothers, whose skits and songs on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in the late 1960s brought political satire and a spirit of youthful irreverence to network television, paving the way for shows like “Saturday Night Live” and “The Daily Show,” died on Tuesday at his home in Santa Rosa, Calif., a city in Sonoma County. He was 86. He died “following a recent battle with cancer,” a spokesman for the National Comedy Center announced on behalf of the family.The Smothers Brothers made their way to network television as a folk act with a difference. With Tom playing guitar and Dick playing stand-up bass, they spent as much time bickering as singing.With an innocent expression and a stammering delivery, Tom would try to introduce their songs with a story, only to be picked at by his skeptical brother. As frustration mounted, he would turn, seething, and often deliver a trademark non sequitur: “Mom always liked you best.”Hoping to reach a younger audience, CBS gave the brothers creative control over “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” a one-hour variety show that made its debut in February 1967. For the next three seasons it courted controversy as it addressed American policy in Vietnam, religious fundamentalism, racial strife and recreational drug use.Running features like Leigh French’s “Share a Little Tea With Goldie,” replete with drug references, either delighted or scandalized, depending on the age and the politics of the viewer.“During the first year, we kept saying the show has to have something to say more than just empty sketches and vacuous comedy,” Mr. Smothers said in a 2006 interview. “So we always tried to put something of value in there, something that made a point and reflected what was happening out in the streets.”Tom, more liberal than his brother and largely responsible for the production of the show, brought in writers attuned to the thinking of the Baby Boom generation — among them Rob Reiner, Steve Martin, Pat Paulsen, and Mason Williams — and stretched the boundaries of taste at every turn.Steve Martin, left, who had been a writer on the original “Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” rejoined Tom, center, and Dick on a 20th-anniversary reunion show in 1988.CBS, via Getty Images“Easter is when Jesus comes out of his tomb, and if he sees his shadow he goes back in and we get six more weeks of winter,” Tom said on one show.Far more combative than his mild-mannered brother, who survives him, Tom fought network executives and censors until CBS, tired of complaints from its rural affiliates, especially in the South, abruptly canceled the show in April 1969 and replaced it with “Hee Haw,” a corn-pone counterpart to the fast-paced (and often controversial) “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” that featured country music stars.“In any other medium we would be regarded as moderate,” Tom Smothers told reporters at a news conference the day after the show was canceled. “Here we are regarded as rebels and extremists.”An Army FamilyThomas Bolyn Smothers III was born on Feb. 2, 1937, on Governors Island in New York Harbor, where his father, a West Point graduate and Army major, was stationed. The family relocated to Manila when Major Smothers was reassigned. Shortly before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the family moved again, to the Los Angeles area, where Tom and Dick’s mother, Ruth (Remick) Smothers, had grown up. She found work in an aircraft factory.Major Smothers remained on Corregidor in Manila Bay to fight and was taken prisoner on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines. He survived the Bataan death march, but in 1945 he died of injuries sustained when American planes mistakenly bombed the prison ship transporting him to a camp in Japan.Tom attended an assortment of schools as his mother descended into alcoholism and moved from husband to husband. In 1955, he graduated from Redondo Union High School, where he was a state champion on the parallel bars.While in high school, he and Dick, two years his junior, sang in a barbershop group that won second prize on “Rocket to Stardom,” a local talent contest broadcast from the showroom of a Los Angeles Oldsmobile dealer.At San Jose State College (now University), where Tom studied advertising, the brothers decided to ride the folk music wave and formed the Casual Quintet. In early 1959, by then a trio with Bobby Blackmore as lead singer, they began performing at the Purple Onion in San Francisco, a popular showcase for folk singers and comedians, billed as the Smothers Brothers and Gawd.Gradually, the brothers introduced comic patter into their act, satirizing the folk music scene and turning their sibling rivalry — which was genuine — into shtick. The act “slowly evolved to be a running argument between two brothers who sang but never finished a song,” Mr. Smothers said in 2006.Audiences loved it. Their two-week engagement at the Purple Onion was extended to nine months, and in 1961 the Smothers Brothers, now a duo, were booked into the Blue Angel in New York.Robert Shelton, reviewing the show in The New York Times, compared Tom’s delivery to “a frightened 10th grader giving a memorized talk at a Kiwanis meeting.”He added, “He speaks in a nervous, distracted sort of cretin double-talk that has him stumbling over big words, muffing lines with naïve unconcern, singing off-key, committing malapropisms, garbling lyrics and eternally upstaging his younger brother.”The brothers became regulars on “The Tonight Show” with Jack Paar, “The Garry Moore Show” and “The New Steve Allen Show.” They signed with Mercury Records and recorded “The Smothers Brothers at the Purple Onion,” the first of several successful albums. They toured college campuses nonstop.In 1963, Tom married Stephanie Shorr. The marriage ended in divorce, as did his marriage to Rochelle Robley. In addition to his brother, he is survived by his wife, Marcy Carriker Smothers; their son, Bo, and daughter, Riley Rose Smothers; and a grandson. His son from his first marriage, Thomas Bolyn Smothers IV, died this year.In a statement, Dick Smothers said, “Tom was not only the loving older brother that everyone would want in their life, he was a one-of-a-kind creative partner.”In 1965, CBS gave the brothers their own sitcom, “The Smothers Brothers Show,” produced by Aaron Spelling. It did not play to their strengths: Tom played a probationary angel sent back to earth to move in with and watch over his brother, a swinging bachelor played by Dick.The ratings were strong, but it was a miserable experience. Deprived of their instruments and a live audience, and saddled with a laugh track, the brothers struggled.“It was a nothing show,” Tom told The New York Times in 1967. “There was no point of reference, nothing meaningful, no satire in it.”After “The Garry Moore Show” failed to challenge “Bonanza” on Sunday nights, Michael Dann, the head programmer at CBS, took a chance on a Smothers Brothers variety show.Connecting With the YoungExpectations were low, but “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” connected with viewers, especially younger ones, and outperformed “Bonanza” in the ratings. The humor was irreverent, the writing was sharp, and musical guests like the Who and Jefferson Airplane broke the variety-show mold.The Smothers Brothers looked like clean-cut collegians, but their comedy could bite. They were at war with CBS almost from the beginning of their show’s run.CBSThe brothers looked like clean-cut collegians, but their cheery, up-tempo songs could bite. “The war in Vietnam keeps on a-ragin’,” one began. “Black and whites still haven’t worked it out./Pollution, guns and poverty surround us./No wonder everybody’s droppin’ out.”A war with CBS executives began almost immediately, and a pattern quickly developed. The censors would cut words, lines or entire sketches. Mr. Smothers would fight tooth and nail to have them reinstated, often successfully. When thwarted, he would complain loudly and publicly.After CBS cut the words “breast” and “heterosexual” from an early sketch, written by Elaine May, about two professional censors (played by Tom Smothers and Ms. May), Mr. Smothers told The Times: “The censors censored the censorship bit. It’s a real infringement of our creative rights.”He lost the first round of his campaign to have Pete Seeger, absent from television after being blacklisted in the 1950s, perform his antiwar ballad “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.” The segment was pulled in 1967 but broadcast a year later.“Television is old and tired,” Mr. Smothers told McCall’s magazine in 1968. “Television is a lie. The people who censor our shows are all conditioned to a very scared way of thinking, which is reflected in the kind of programs the networks put on. Television should be as free as the movies, as the newspapers, as music to reflect what’s happening.”CBS began insisting that an advance tape of each week’s show be sent to the network and its affiliates for their review. In April 1969, when the tape of a show that included a satirical sermon, delivered by the comedian David Steinberg, failed to arrive on schedule for the second time, CBS informed the brothers that they had broken their contract and that the show, whose option had been renewed two weeks earlier, would be canceled.The move was not a complete surprise.“Tommy has been sticking pins in CBS ever since he started feeling his oats when he found he could command good ratings,” Percy Shain, the television critic for The Boston Globe, wrote. “He has been at times snide, ugly, resentful, bullheaded. In his various arguments with the network he has refused to compromise one iota. Every deletion meant a battle.”TV Guide, in a stern editorial, deemed the cancellation “wise, determined and wholly justified.”For the rest of his life, Mr. Smothers remained convinced that President Richard M. Nixon, who had assumed office just three months earlier after defeating Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, had pressured CBS to cancel the show.“When Nixon said, ‘I want those guys off,’ they were off,” he told “Speaking Freely,” a television program produced by the First Amendment Center, in 2001. “If Humphrey had been elected, we would have been on.”The brothers briefly returned to network television in 1970 with the tepid “Smothers Brothers Summer Show” on ABC. The next year Tom, increasingly outspoken on politics, starred, without his brother, in “Tom Smothers’ Organic Prime Time Space Ride,” a syndicated half-hour variety show that was long on relevance and short on laughs.“I lost perspective, my sense of humor,” he said in the 2006 interview. “I became a poster boy for the First Amendment, freedom of speech, and I started buying into it. It was about three years when I was deadly serious about everything.”The brothers’ careers took some twists and turns after their TV show was canceled, including an appearance on Broadway in the comedy “I Love My Wife” in 1978.Hollywood and BroadwayTom pursued a career as an actor, in “Serial,” “The Silver Bears” and other movies. With his brother, he appeared in the comedy “I Love My Wife” on Broadway in 1978 and on a national tour.The brothers reunited on television in 1975 for a new, tamer version of “The Smothers Brothers Show,” broadcast on NBC, and a 1988 reunion show. They also appeared (not as brothers) in a short-lived 1981 drama series, “Fitz and Bones.” But their career ended as it had begun, in concert performances.Tom added a new comic persona to the act, Yo-Yo Man, performing dazzling yo-yo tricks that he learned after falling in love with the song “(I’m a) Yo-Yo Man.” In 2010, Tom announced that he and his brother were retiring as an act.Plans for a 2023 tour were announced last year, but the tour was canceled.At the 1969 Emmys, “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” received an award for outstanding writing achievement in comedy, variety or music. Mr. Smothers had removed himself from the show’s list of writers on the ballot, worried that his name might alienate voters. In 2008 the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences gave him a special commemorative Emmy for the show, presented by Steve Martin.In an interview for the Archive of American Television in 2000, Mr. Smothers looked back on the show and its impact. “It was the ’60s that we reflected,” he said. “The country was going through a revolution — a social revolution, a political and consciousness revolution, about government and its part. We tried to reflect that.”Alex Traub More

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      Rob Reiner Remembers Norman Lear and ‘All in the Family’

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      With “All in the Family,” Lear “tapped into something that nobody had ever done before or even since,” the star of the hit sitcom said.Reflecting on Norman Lear’s death, Rob Reiner was understandably heartbroken on Wednesday. Not only because he loved Lear, whom he’d first met as an 8-year-old, like a second father, as Reiner put it, but because Lear exited this world during a resurgence of many of the problems he’d tried to air out and squash through his television shows — namely, intolerance and bigotry.“He just couldn’t believe that this was happening to America,” said Reiner, who had seen Lear several times in the past couple of months, in a phone interview on Wednesday. “He would always say, ‘This is not the America that I grew up in and that we fought for to preserve. Something’s happened to this country that’s gone so far away from everything it stands for.’”“We’d talk about this, and he would say, ‘It’s like Alice in Wonderland,’” said Reiner, 76, an Oscar-nominated director. Reiner won two Emmy Awards for playing the liberal son-in-law, Michael, of the close-minded racist Archie Bunker on Lear’s most famous sitcom, “All in the Family,” which ran from 1971 to 1979 on CBS.The show aired in the era of appointment viewing, when there were only a handful of TV channels and households across the United States tuned in to the same programs at the same time. The shifting habits of American viewers, who can much more easily silo themselves in echo chambers when it comes to viewing habits, has only contributed to the fracturing and divisions, Reiner said.Of about 200 million Americans in the 1970s, “we were seen by 40-45 million people every single week,” he said. “There was no TiVo. There was no DVR. If you wanted to watch it, you had to watch it when it was on. That meant that you had a shared experience with 40 million people in America.”No matter the issue that “All in the Family” dealt with on any given week — and it tackled thorny topics that would be considered contentious today: abortion, racism, gun rights — that issue would became water cooler talk the next morning. “You don’t have those kinds of communal experiences where you can talk to people,” Reiner said.“The country either sided with Archie or sided with Mike, and that made for great discussions,” he continued. Lear “definitely tapped into something that nobody had ever done before or even since.”Lear, who was 101 years old, drew inspiration from his favorite play: George Bernard Shaw’s “Major Barbara.” If you did not know that Shaw was a liberal, Reiner said, “you’d go to the play and you’d come away with the equal pro-war/antiwar — you’d come away with equal arguments on both sides, and it was made to spawn discussion.” And that’s what Lear wanted to do. “So he presented both sides. Archie had his side. And the character I played had my side, and we went at each other,” Reiner added.That approach would likely never gain ground today, Reiner said. “He put a racist out there and the way racists really talk. And now, if you said things like that, you would get canceled.”Lear would stir the pot. “He would ask us to look into ourselves and what did we think, what were our feelings about this. And we poured it into the show. So it made the show better. And he did that with everything he did. Fearless.”“This is the guy who — he flew 57 missions, bombing missions over Nazi Germany during the Second World War. And so he was scared enough in the sky,” Reiner said, adding that Lear was particularly disgusted by former President Donald Trump’s brand of politics. (“I don’t take the threat of authoritarianism lightly,” Lear wrote in The New York Times just last year.)Reiner reflected on comparisons between Trump and Archie Bunker. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser who remains an influential figure in right-wing circles, has playfully compared Bunker to Trump, at one point saying, “Dude, he’s Archie Bunker.”“I said, no, no, it’s not like Archie Bunker. Archie Bunker, he had conservative views and he certainly was racist and all those things, but he had a decent heart,” Reiner said. “You could argue with him. You could fight with him and stuff. You can’t do that now, and that’s the difference with him and Trump.”But it was Lear’s convictions and his desire to demystify tough topics that Reiner hopes will endure in the memories of Americans. “I’m going to miss him for a million reasons. He showed me the way, which is, you can take your fame and celebrity and you can do something with it, do something positive with it. And I learned from him.”“He always has hope. That’s what’s so great about him. He was a realist, but he also had hope that we would find the right path, and I still hope that we can,” Reiner went on. “He was a man who really cared about this country and wanted it to succeed and be a more perfect union and all that. And then we’re losing a guy, a real champion of America.” More

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      I Survived ‘Guiding Light’

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      The long-running CBS soap opera had plenty of drama, onstage and off. A former cast member looks back on its last days.Deep inside the CBS Broadcast Center in Midtown Manhattan, I stood in a corridor observing a melee.The soap opera where I worked was going off the air, and the wardrobe department had filled an empty suite of offices with piles of designer purses and handbags. With a limit of four per person, everything was first come, first served — and free.I saw secretaries, producers, executives, actors and security guards crawling, clawing and snatching up bags. Every other person was on a cellphone, and someone shouted, “You gotta get down here!” A Daytime Emmy Award-winner dove for a purple bag with a silver clasp in the shape of a jaguar. I fled before I got trampled.It was the late summer of 2009, the final weeks of “Guiding Light,” which had started as a radio program in 1937 and moved to television in 1952. “Only love can save the world,” ran the refrain of the show’s theme song. Not true! Only ratings could save us, and we didn’t have them.People who work in daytime drama excel at suspending disbelief. It came naturally to us as we toiled in an environment where it was normal to see angels, clones and time-traveling housewives strolling the halls with a script in one hand and a coffee in the other. But now that “Guiding Light” was coming to an end, we had to face reality.It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Soap operas were supposed to be forever. They were what New York actors did between theater roles, commercials and “Law & Order” guest spots. And if you left a daytime drama, you could always come back, sometimes as your evil twin.Soaps were in their big-hair heyday in the 1980s, when I started playing an orderly on “Guiding Light.” My character was a loyal employee of Cedars Hospital, a place where paternity results were routinely switched, nobody was ever asked about their insurance and every patient had a private room.I had what was probably the smallest recurring role on the show, and I loved it. My acting responsibilities included trailing Dr. Bauer on his rounds and agreeing with every single thing Nurse Lillian said. Many of my lines consisted of one word, like “Stat!” During surgery, I sometimes yelled it extra loud, just to remind people I was there. By the end of my 26 years on the show, there wasn’t an actor alive who could beat my “Stat!”My greatest challenge had to do with the side-by-side doors to the Cedars Hospital emergency room. These were the most counterintuitive doors I had ever encountered. To go into the E.R., a “Guiding Light” player had to grab the metal bars and pull them back; to get the doors to open on the way out, an actor had to pull the metal bars ever so slightly — and then push them forward.So it was common for the show’s emergency room scenes to be ruined when someone got stuck as they tried to make their way in or out. The presence of a weeping ingénue or a flying gurney would only complicate matters. As the show’s orderly, I was the one who had to deal with this vexing issue most often.In the waning days of “Guiding Light,” the plots got zanier and the budgets got smaller. One character, who had previously starred in a story line about her struggle with menopause, miraculously gave birth. Another developed superpowers that allowed her to shoot electricity from her fingertips.In the studio, someone remarked that our last few episodes would be bittersweet. “What’s sweet about it?” a technician growled. “It’s all bitter.”To unload decades worth of props, costumes and furniture, the producers set up a tag sale in the rehearsal hall, with no item priced above $20. It was jarring to hear strangers crowing about a light fixture they had snagged for 50 cents or the Armani suit they would have bought if it hadn’t had a bullet hole in the back.One afternoon, a woman barged into the dressing room I shared with a fellow actor. She was carrying an armful of gowns and a fur coat.“Mind if I change in here?” she asked.“Yes!” I said. “This is our dressing room.”She gave us a dirty look and left. I just sighed. It was like when a family member dies and relatives you’ve never seen show up to cart stuff away.On our last day in the CBS studio, I made my way down to the set. As if it were any other episode, the wardrobe girl snapped a picture of me in my scrubs for continuity purposes. This suddenly seemed absurd. She must have had the same thought. Right after taking the photo, she shrugged her shoulders and laughed.People seemed distracted. Everyone was talking about the sale down the hall and the giveaway still taking place upstairs.“Focus, people!” the director pleaded. “We have a show to do!”An older actress approached as I sat on a gurney.“Do you think now would be a good time to say a few words?” she said.“Like what?”“Well, I feel that ‘Guiding Light’ has chronicled the emotional history of the United States and —”I interrupted her to suggest that maybe she could wait until the end of the day, when the episode was done. She looked a bit deflated as I stepped away to stand beside Dr. Bauer. He draped an arm around my shoulders in what struck me as a brotherly gesture.In the final Cedars Hospital scene, I followed Dr. Bauer as he led the show’s matriarch to the bedside of her dying brother. During their deathbed heart-to-heart chat, the doctor and I withdrew discreetly. While making our exit, Dr. Bauer grappled awkwardly with the troublesome E.R. doors, causing a loud bang, as I sneaked a look at the camera. This would normally be considered a huge no-no, but today I didn’t care. Nobody did.“Cut!” the director shouted. “Moving on!”A prop guy snatched the stethoscope off my neck. Like a thundering herd, the crew headed to the next set. Before returning to his dressing room, Dr. Bauer reminded me to be sure to come to the party later.I was now alone in Cedars Hospital. I had logged so many hours in this fictional place, through three different studios, four casting directors, nearly my entire adult life. Now it was time to say goodbye. And that is one thing that people on soap operas are absolutely, positively not good at — endings.I took a slow pass through the set, just for nostalgia’s sake. I must have been in a daze, because I exited via the E.R. doors without thinking. For the first time ever, they gave way smoothly at my touch.I resisted the urge to look back. Striding down the hallway, I tossed my CBS I.D. card into a wastebasket. Above me, the On Air sign was dark.Raul A. Reyes is a contributor to NBC Latino and CNN Opinion More

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      How ‘Survivor’ and “Amazing Race’ Adapt to Climate Change

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      The CBS hit, along with fellow staple “The Amazing Race,” is learning to deal with climate change, globalization and other seismic shifts.Since its premiere in 2000, the hit CBS reality game show “Survivor” has taken place across the globe, with each season set in an exotic island locale: Pulau Tiga in Malaysia, Ko Tarutao in Thailand, Efate in Vanuatu and many, many more.But around a decade ago, the longtime host and executive producer Jeff Probst had an alarming realization. A growing population was making it harder to find remote islands without anybody on them. Extreme weather, including rising heat and more intense storms, was making it more dangerous to film. And burgeoning political unrest was making it more difficult to work with certain governments or in countries that no longer felt safe.“When we started in 2000, there were lots of places in the world we could go,” Probst said last week in a phone interview. “But over the years, starting in about 2012, 2013, it became clear that we were running out of places to shoot.”Both “Survivor” and its sister series, the globe-trotting adventure competition “The Amazing Race,” have been stalwart hits on CBS for nearly two decades. Both continue to draw sizable audiences: Last week’s Season 45 premiere of “Survivor” and Season 35 premiere of “The Amazing Race,” which screened back-to-back on Wednesday evening, were the most-streamed shows on Paramount+ that night, according to the network, with “Survivor” also topping NBC’s “America’s Got Talent” to win the night in broadcast ratings. But while the popularity of these shows has endured, producing them has continued to be a unique challenge — particularly as the world around them keeps changing.“Our show is really a time capsule of 20-plus years of seeing the world grow,” said Elise Doganieri, one of the creators and executive producers of “The Amazing Race” alongside her husband, Bertram van Munster. “The Amazing Race” challenges teams of American contestants to chart sprawling international courses that take them from one far-flung locale to another, and many of the cities that appeared in the series when it debuted in 2001 have been transformed over the intervening years. “We go back to places that we’ve been to before, but the world has evolved and grown so much, and the landscape has really changed.”Remote landscapes where the crew could shoot with little interference have since been built up, while locals in even the most out-of-the-way regions are more connected to the rest of the world. When “The Amazing Race” paid a visit to Dubai in the early 2000s, Doganieri remembered, the city was by and large still a sprawling desert landscape where “everything was old, with wooden boats and dhows.” Today, of course, “it’s the complete opposite: a futuristic ultramodern city.”“The Amazing Race” started its 35th season at the Hollywood sign. Nicolas Axelrod/CBSIn some ways, Doganieri said, making a show like “The Amazing Race” has gotten easier over time: advancing camera and cellphone technology has streamlined aspects of the production, and location scouting, which used to be done using still photography, can now be done using video.Other changes are more challenging. As with “Survivor,” climate change has begun to affect the way that “The Amazing Race” is made, with extreme heat and tropical storms sometimes interfering with the production. “Weather has made a big change in how we travel,” Doganieri said. “There’s more storms, especially over Asia, and we have flight delays and cancellations that push into the schedule.” Soaring temperatures in the summer have made filming the competition elements more demanding for both the contestants and crew. “We scouted in Asia for the first several episodes. It was hot when we scouted in April. When we filmed, it was 90, 95 degrees.”Although Doganiei said production is prepared for when it’s “unbearably hot” with “electrolyte drinks, snacks, water, anything to keep hydration up,” she admits that “it’s tough” in the midst of more and more grueling summers. “Most of our show is shot outside, so it really does affect you,” she said. “You have to really be aware of it.”“Survivor” solved its location problem by settling on one setting: the show has been set on the Mamanuca Islands in Fiji since its 33rd season. Earlier seasons were distinguished primarily by their location, with subtitles like “Survivor: Panama” and “Survivor: China” luring an audience in with the appeal of an intriguing new place. Shooting in Fiji again and again has removed that novelty, but Probst insists that it was a negligible feature to begin with. “It doesn’t really matter where you do it as long as it’s a real jungle,” he said.“You don’t see Fiji,” said Drea Wheeler, a former contestant. “You’re just on an island. You’re miserable. It’s hot. It rains. It still sucks.”In recent years, “Survivor” has tried to mix things up by devising overarching conceits.Jeffrey R. Staab/CBS“The real challenge,” said Rob Cesternino, a two-time “Survivor” contestant who competed in Panama and Brazil, “is keeping the show interesting with new ideas every season without changing locations.” In recent years, “Survivor” has tried to mix things up by devising overarching conceits, such as “David vs. Goliath,” in which “underdogs” compete against “overachievers,” and “Winners at War,” which featured the return of 10 previous “Survivor” victors. Although not all of these concepts have been considered successful, Probst said that he would “much rather the show burn out due to a bad idea than fade away due to boredom.”Probst also said that filming in Fiji has freed the producers up to spend more time working on such ideas, simply because the static setting has “made everything more streamlined.” The show’s 300-person international crew, which also commands a vast infrastructure including 40 boats and a helicopter, now knows what to expect from the setting season over season, removing some of the environmental unpredictability that could make producing “Survivor” such a risky endeavor. The number of possible options for the production would only continue to dwindle as time went on and the climate continued to change. Nor could they easily reuse old locales after departing them.“A lot of the places we visited in the past became popular because of ‘Survivor,’ and after we left they might have erected a resort on that island,” Probst said. “It was harder to find remote islands simply because there are more people on the planet. Storms were more intense, and there was no denying it — we had been out in these waters before and it was never like that. And it became less desirable to visit places where things were happening politically that made us feel unsafe, or that we didn’t want to be part of.” Given those considerations, sticking to Fiji just made sense.“I think in many ways this was the answer to a problem that was always fast approaching,” he said.“The Amazing Race” in Lijiang, China, in 2011. Shifting geopolitical concerns have restricted the scope of where the crew can now go.Robert Voets/CBSThat problem has continued to vex the producers of “The Amazing Race,” which still involves dozens of international settings per season. Shifting geopolitical concerns, a delicate matter for American productions abroad, have restricted the scope of where the crew can go, making it harder to find new and interesting places to shoot. “The world has gotten a little smaller,” said van Munster. “We’re not going to Russia right now. We’re not going to China. There are a lot of places in West Africa where I would love to go but where we can’t go. Senegal. Logistically, maybe we can figure it out. But is it safe? We don’t want to get ourselves in trouble in another country. The world is a tricky place.”Nor is this the only way in which the world seems to be getting smaller. Phil Keoghan, the host of “The Amazing Race” since its inception, said in a recent video interview that people are more aware of the world around them than every before — that globalization, in short, has changed the function of the show. “It used to be that we were almost opening up another universe for the audience, these unknown worlds that existed out there, these exotic places,” he said. “Some of that innocence has been lost. Now we’re watching Korean TV and Indian movies. We’re seeing the influence of the rest of world across social media. People who live in these places are sharing their homes with us in an intimate way.”Part of the reason that “Survivor” and “The Amazing Race” have endured throughout these many changes is precisely because they are so good at capturing them. As fly on the wall, cinéma vérité exercises, they are not only contending with the realities of an ever-shifting world, but they are also documenting them. What’s evolving, in the environment and in the landscape, is evolving before the eyes of the audience. “The genre we operate in, we go with the flow, and whatever happens in front of the camera we go with it,” van Munster said.“The world is changing so rapidly that what was fun 20 years ago is different fun 20 years later. But whatever it looks like, it’s always fascinating.” More

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      Drew Barrymore Pauses Show’s Return Until End of Strike

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      Taping began on her talk show last week, but at the 11th hour Barrymore changed course, and at least two other daytime programs followed.After an onslaught of criticism over her decision to return her show to the air while Hollywood is on strike, Drew Barrymore reversed herself on Sunday and at least two other shows did the same.Barrymore announced her change of course in an Instagram post, just a day before her talk show was to begin broadcasting. Taping resumed last Monday for the daytime program.After the announcement, “The Jennifer Hudson Show,” which is produced by Warner Bros., and the CBS show “The Talk,” rolled back previously announced plans to start broadcasting new episodes on Monday. CBS said in a statement on Sunday regarding “The Talk,” that it would pause its season premiere and “evaluate plans for a new launch date.”The return of production for Barrymore’s show attracted picketers from the striking writers’ and actors’ unions, and on Friday, she defended her decision in an emotional Instagram video, saying, “This is bigger than me.”CBS Media Ventures, which produces “The Drew Barrymore Show,” echoed her resolution at that point, saying more than 150 jobs would be affected. The company noted that she would be using a fully ad-libbed format, without anyone replacing the production’s three striking writers.But on Friday night, she deleted the video, and on Sunday morning released a statement changing course. The syndicated program was to begin airing new episodes on Monday.“I have listened to everyone, and I am making the decision to pause the show’s premiere until the strike is over,” the statement said. “I have no words to express my deepest apologies to anyone I have hurt and, of course, to our incredible team who works on the show and has made it what it is today. We really tried to find our way forward. And I truly hope for a resolution for the entire industry very soon.”In a statement on Sunday, CBS Media said it supported her latest decision and understood “how complex and difficult this process has been for her.”Although Barrymore was not the only daytime talk show host to announce a return during the strikes, she has received the most criticism, perhaps in part because in May she decided to bow out of hosting the MTV Movie and TV Awards in solidarity with Writers Guild of America members.The daytime juggernaut “The View,” for example, has been airing new episodes filmed without its unionized writers.Bill Maher announced last week that his weekly show on HBO would be returning, defending his decision in a social media post, saying, “I’m not prepared to lose an entire year and see so many below-the-line people suffer so much.”Members of the Writers Guild have been on strike since May, and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists began its strike in July.Barrymore herself is a member of SAG-AFTRA, but as a host she is covered by a separate agreement called the Network Code, making it technically permissible for her to present the show during the strike.Late-night shows have the same option, but thus far, many network hosts have decided not to take it. Instead, five of the big-name hosts — Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers and John Oliver — have started a podcast together, with proceeds going toward supporting their staffs.Returning amid the strikes may look even less appealing to other hosts after Barrymore’s ordeal. A day after her show resumed production, the National Book Foundation dropped her as the host of the National Books Awards.Her social media pages were filled with people urging her to walk back her decision to resume production, advice she heeded in less than a week. More