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      in Television

      Bo Burnham Has Turned His Absence Into Performance

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      He’s managed to turn his supposed absence into a performance, whether on “The Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show” or in your social media feed.Early in his bold and vexing new reality show, Jerrod Carmichael hears a knock at the door and opens it to find a very tall man in a ski mask and goggles just standing there. He pauses to process, then concludes: “This makes sense.”Most viewers probably thought: Really? But certain comedy fans would come to a different response: Welcome back, Bo Burnham.Sure, we don’t know it’s him. On “The Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show” (HBO), this lanky masked man is referred to as Anonymous and his voice is disguised. But if this isn’t Bo Burnham, it’s a pretty good impression — or at least, one of him dressed to rob a bank.Burnham has been conspicuously quiet since rocketing to superstar status by producing one of the signal works of art about the pandemic, the 2021 musical comedy “Inside.” He dropped out of a role in a TV series and appeared in no new specials, movies or live shows. Except for “Inside” outtakes, he hasn’t shown up in any new work — until, possibly, now.Starring in three of the eight episodes, Anonymous comes off like a performance piece, half-abstraction and half-person, with no background, identity, face. He stands out more by revealing little, which is only one of the ways he’s in opposition to Carmichael, who is seen doing stand-up in short clips and having thorny, difficult conversations with his loved ones. Anonymous plays a crucial role, an exasperated ombudsman, picking apart the entire enterprise from the inside, providing a critique of its authenticity and the perils of performing for an audience.These are hallmarks of Bo Burnham’s work dating at least to his far-too-overlooked MTV sitcom, “Zach Stone Is Gonna Be Famous,” a satire of reality shows.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

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      Jean Smart of ‘Hacks’ Is Having a Third Act for the Ages

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      Calling someone a “hack” is a particularly vicious insult. It implies that they have no talent or, worse, that they have wasted it. The slight is hurled early on in “Hacks,” the popular HBO series starring Jean Smart as Deborah Vance, a seasoned comedian who teams up with a younger one named Ava (Hannah Einbinder) to freshen up her act. When they meet, Ava takes stock of Deborah — her glitzy mansion, her residency at a casino in Las Vegas, a hustle selling branded merchandise on cable TV — and sees her as the definition of a hack, a sellout cashing in on her former fame. Deborah is unfazed. Amused, even. What does this kid know about her career, about years of hard work, about the unfairness, sexism and disregard? Deborah, meanwhile, sees Ava as a bit of a hack herself — an entitled and spoiled young internet persona who was canceled for posting a joke about a closeted senator. (“Sounds like a Tuesday for me,” Deborah retorts when Ava complains about it.) Deborah is a workaholic on the verge of bitter, someone who grew tired of being cut and so became a knife. She’s shameless, litigious, petty, vengeful, stubborn — qualities that become a comedic asset for the character and a narrative engine for the show. Just how far is Deborah Vance willing to go? Throughout the first two seasons, much of the drama — and delight — is in seeing Ava puncture Deborah’s carefully lacquered facade with her Gen Z earnestness and sharp wit. In one of the show’s funniest moments, Deborah bluntly asks Ava, “You a lesbian?” Ava leans back in her chair while considering the question. She responds with a treatise reflecting the identity politics of a generation raised with nonexistent boundaries and zero sexual shame, ending with a graphic description of how she orgasms. Deborah doesn’t miss a beat. “Jesus Christ!” she exclaims. “I was just wondering why you were dressed like Rachel Maddow’s mechanic!” Deborah and Ava are mirrors for each other, gifted and perspicacious performers at opposite ends of their careers, both trying to be their most audacious selves in an industry that will dispose of them the moment they cross an invisible line.Over the last three years, “Hacks” has earned its two Emmy nominations for outstanding comedy series by cultivating a polyphonic, fast-paced humor relentless as Deborah’s own quick mind. There are constant insult jokes about Ava’s appearance (“Your manicurist must use a paint roller!”); manic banter between Jimmy, Deborah’s beleaguered agent, and his delusional assistant (played brilliantly by the comedian Meg Stalter); antic bits like a seemingly poignant scene of Deborah’s daughter playing classical piano as a reflection of her gilded upbringing, before it devolves into absurdity when the music is revealed to be the theme song from “Jurassic Park.” And then there are the battles royale in which Ava and Deborah fire hilarious barbs back and forth until their frustration gives way to awe at each other’s cleverness and something like respect blooms. It’s weaponized therapy.Hannah Einbinder and Jean Smart in the new season of ‘‘Hacks.’’MaxWe 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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      in Television

      Five Places to Visit in Toronto, With Eugene Levy

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      As you might guess from the title of Eugene Levy’s latest series — “The Reluctant Traveler” — he’s a guy who’s happy to stay put.The show, now in its second season on Apple TV, follows Mr. Levy, a 77-year-old comedy legend known for his roles in “Waiting for Guffman,” “American Pie,” “Schitt’s Creek” and more, as he defies his anxieties about airports, heights, temperatures, textures and vast swaths of the animal kingdom. With great consternation, he leaves his comfort zone — Canada, as he often reminds viewers — to shadow an expert moose caller in Sweden, herd 600 sheep through a German resort town and politely avoid an octopus aboard a Greek trawler.Mr. Levy, 77, was raised in Hamilton, Ontario, about 40 miles from Toronto, but has called Toronto home since he got his big break in a 1972 theater production of “Godspell.”Heather Sten for The New York TimesRaised in Hamilton, Ontario, about 40 miles southwest of Toronto, Mr. Levy got his big break in 1972 alongside Martin Short, Gilda Radner, Victor Garber, Andrea Martin and Paul Shaffer in a celebrated production of “Godspell” at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theater. He has since called the city — and one historic, leafy neighborhood — home.“Rosedale is a residential area that is right in the heart of Toronto,” he told me over coffee at Tavern on the Green, in New York, where he’d joined the cast of the fourth season of “Only Murders in the Building.” With new skyscrapers going up “a mile a minute” in Toronto, he said, the scene from our table in Central Park looked a little like his view from Rosedale. He and his wife, Deborah Divine, are neighborhood loyalists — Avant Goût, a local bistro, has been their go-to for decades — but spots in other areas rank high, too.Here are five of Mr. Levy’s favorite places in Toronto.Terroni Bar Centrale is in Summerhill, a neighborhood bordering Rosedale, where Mr. Levy and his wife, Deborah Divine, live.Eugen Sakhnenko for The New York TimesWe 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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      in Television

      Netflix Takes Comedy Live With Tom Brady Roast and Katt Williams Special

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      Sometimes that’s a good thing, as with John Mulaney’s variety show “Everybody’s in L.A.” But the Katt Williams special and Tom Brady roast were more uneven.On Friday night, in the premiere of his appealingly chaotic livestreaming variety show “Everybody’s in L.A.,” which runs every night this week, John Mulaney delivered a monologue about his adopted city next to a map that broke it down into a crooked jigsaw puzzle of neighborhoods.In his distinctive staccato cadence that could sell steak knives or a card trick as convincingly as the premise of a joke, he said, “One thing that unites every part of Los Angeles is that no matter where you go, there is zero sense of community.”For comedy fans, this past week felt different, because everywhere you went in Los Angeles, Netflix was there, blanketing the city in ads and shows for its Netflix Is a Joke Fest, running through May 12. It’s the biggest comedy showcase of the year (with more than 500 offerings, a 40 percent increase from the festival’s already mammoth debut event in 2022) but also something of a corporate flex. Who else could get Hannah Gadsby and Shane Gillis in the same festival or draw the talk-show titans Jon Stewart and David Letterman to host events? Or recruit Chris Rock to play the Billy Crystal role in a reading of the screenplay for “When Harry Met Sally,” with, as Rock introduced it, “an all-Black cast, like it was originally intended.” (Tracee Ellis Ross doing Meg Ryan’s fake orgasm, but louder, received standing ovations from the audience and onstage participants, too.)The most newsworthy shift this year was the aggressive move into livestreaming events, following the blockbuster success of Chris Rock’s 2023 special, “Selective Outrage,” about being slapped at the Oscars. (One of that ceremony’s hosts, Wanda Sykes, returned to the place it happened, the Dolby Theater, for a festival show and began by saying this time no one would get assaulted).For the live events, Netflix picked stars with current buzz. Along with the Mulaney variety show, Katt Williams followed up his viral “Club Shay Shay” interview with a new hour, “Woke Foke,” on Saturday, and Kevin Hart, whom Williams singled out in his interview for criticism, tried to bring back the dormant genre of celebrity roast on Sunday with “The Greatest Roast of All Time,” starring Tom Brady, widely considered the GOAT of quarterbacks. (After livestreaming, the shows can be watched on Netflix, sometimes in edited form.)As the last half-century of “Saturday Night Live” has proved, there is an undeniable excitement to live comedy, an irreplaceable energy that can create a sense of event. But there are significant dangers, not the least of which is that you can’t cut the boring or unfunny parts. Netflix built its comedy empire on elevating the standup special as an art form to rival film or TV. Highlighting live comedy represents a commercial move for Netflix, spotlighting events that promise unpredictability more than refinement, mess instead of polish.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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      in Television

      Kenan Thompson Takes on the College Protests on ‘Saturday Night Live’

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      The pop star hosted and performed as the musical guest. The comedian poked fun at the abundant promotion he has been doing for his Netflix movie.A fake commercial from this weekend’s broadcast of “Saturday Night Live” offered these tepid endorsements for “a bigass aluminum tray of penne alla vodka”: “Loved by none, but tolerated by all. Because it’s not that good. But it’s not that bad either.”So, think of this episode as the penne alla vodka of the season. It was hosted by Dua Lipa, who was also the musical guest. The first sketch of the night had something to do with parents of college students who have protested the Israeli offensive in Gaza. But if you stuck around until Weekend Update, you did get a surprise appearance by Jerry Seinfeld.That opening sketch, a satire of cable TV public affairs shows, was hosted by Michael Longfellow and featured Mikey Day, Heidi Gardner and Kenan Thompson as parents of college students who were weighing in on the protests at their children’s campuses.“I want to let my son make his own choices, but to be honest, it’s a little scary,” Day said.“My daughter is an adult and has to live her own life,” Gardner said.“Nothing makes me prouder than young people using their voices to fight what they believe in,” Thompson said — until it was explained to him that his daughter was one of these protesters.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

    • 100 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      Jerry Seinfeld Can No Longer Be About Nothing

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      The comedian, long beloved for his apolitical riffs, has been wrestling with what it means to be Jewish amid the Israel-Hamas war. Not everyone is pleased.Jerry Seinfeld became a mic-cradling, cereal-eating, “did-you-ever-notice”-ing avatar of American Jewish life with a brazenly shrugging persona: a merry indifference to weighty material as a comedian and in his megahit TV show about nothing, as petty and apolitical as he seemed to be.Now — off-camera, at least — Mr. Seinfeld appears to have reached his post-nothing period.Since the attacks of Oct. 7 in Israel, and through their bloody and volatile aftermath in Gaza, Mr. Seinfeld, 70, has emerged as a strikingly public voice against antisemitism and in support of Jews in Israel and the United States, edging warily toward a more forward-facing advocacy role than he ever seemed to seek across his decades of fame.He has shared reflections about life on a kibbutz in his teens, and in December traveled to Tel Aviv to meet with hostages’ families, soberly recounting afterward the missile attack that greeted him during the trip.He has participated, to a point, in the kind of celebrity activism with which few associate him — letter-signing campaigns, earnest messages on social media — answering simply recently when asked about the motivation for his visit to Israel: “I’m Jewish.”And as some American cities and college campuses simmer with conflict over the Middle East crisis and Israel’s military response, Mr. Seinfeld has faced a measure of public scorn that he has rarely courted as a breakfast-obsessed comedian, intensified by the more vocal advocacy of his wife, Jessica, a cookbook author.This week, as the couple and their children appeared together at the premiere of Mr. Seinfeld’s new movie (“Unfrosted,” about Pop-Tarts), Ms. Seinfeld attracted attention for another reason: She promoted on Instagram, and said she had helped bankroll, a counterprotest at the University of California, Los Angeles, where clashes with pro-Palestinian demonstrators have turned violent.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

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Marlon Wayans on ‘Good Grief’ and the Death of His Parents

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      It’s not easy to build a long and lucrative career by making comedy that some people might be tempted to call silly or sophomoric. If it were, more comedians would be as successful as Marlon Wayans. Wayans, the youngest sibling in a family dynasty that also includes his brothers Damon, Shawn and Keenen Ivory Wayans and his sister Kim Wayans, has over the course of his 30-plus-year career scored in nearly every format. He has starred in broad sitcoms (the WB’s “The Wayans Bros.”), irreverent sketch comedy (“In Living Color”) and slapstick movies (“White Chicks”; the first two installments in the “Scary Movie” franchise), and released three, let’s say, Rabelaisian standup specials. His newest effort in that realm, “Good Grief,” will premiere on Amazon Prime Video on June 4.Listen to the Conversation With Marlon WayansThe comedian talks to David Marchese on becoming a different person after the death of his parents.In that special, Wayans, who has also carved out an impressive sideline as a supporting dramatic actor in films, is branching out by using comedy to work through some seriously heavy emotions. “Good Grief” is all about the death of his parents as well as the nearly 60 other loved ones he has lost in recent years.When I talked with Wayans, he was in Albuquerque, where he was filming a psychological horror movie for Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw production company — and, ahead of the first of our two conversations, getting ready to host a party for the cast and crew.Since you’re having a party tonight, it seems perfectly natural to talk about the subject of your new special: the death of your parents. Isn’t that crazy? Other people are like, What’s your next special? “Oh, it’s a funny journey about the death of my parents.” But it wasn’t just the death of my parents. I lost 58 people that I loved in a matter of three years. It felt, like, biblical.How do you find the funny thing in the sad thing? It’s been a gift since I was a kid. I mean, all of us Wayanses, we’re crazy people. The worst thing happens, and the first thing we’d think is What’s funny about it? I remember when my cousin Ceddy died and my auntie buried him in jeans and a T-shirt and some Air Force 1s and a baseball cap. Damon looks and goes, “If there’s a dress code in heaven, I don’t think Ceddy’s getting in.” More

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      in Theater

      ‘The Cherry Orchard’ Review: Chekhov in the Fun Zone

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      Benedict Andrews’s production in London offers perfectly pitched comedy where other directors find somber tragedy.When Anton Chekhov wrote “The Cherry Orchard,” his 1904 play about a financially beleaguered aristocratic household in turn-of-the-century Russia, he thought of it as a comedy. Generations of theater directors — starting with Konstantin Stanislavsky in its original Moscow run — had other ideas, preferring to render it as a somber tragedy. In London, a new production sets out to do justice to the playwright’s vision by leaning in to the play’s comedic elements.Directed by Benedict Andrews, an Australian based in Iceland who had London hits with “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” the show runs at the Donmar Warehouse through June 22. It is a funny and, at times, raucous take which, despite some flaws, breathes new life into this old classic.The German actress Nina Hoss gives a controlled performance as Ranevskaya, who returns to her family estate after a grief-stricken exile to find its residents depressed and broke. She is a poignant picture of frayed dignity, her aristocratic self-possession increasingly brittle as the story progresses toward it sad denouement. But the real star of the show is Adeel Akhtar (“Murder Mystery”) as Lopakhin, the rapacious self-made magnate who persuades Ranevskaya to put the estate’s prize jewel, her beloved cherry orchard, up for auction.Hoss with Adeel Akhtar, who plays Lopakhin, the businessman who convinces Ranevskaya to put her orchard up for auction.Johan PerssonAkhtar renders Lopakhin as a cockney wheeler-dealer, by turns chummy and aggressive, whose brazen acquisitiveness is tempered by a raffish charm — he is fond of corny catchphrases like “see ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya” — and moments of humanity. A peasant’s son, he has transcended his origins but remains acutely conscious of them. (He tells us he is ashamed of his handwriting because it gives him away.) Despite Lopakhin’s almost cartoonish cynicism, we can’t help but like him, even when he buys up the orchard himself, intending to tear it down and turn it into a lucrative tourist resort.Michael Gould (“A View from the Bridge”) is outstanding as Ranevskaya’s brother, Gaev, the epitome of aristocratic dissipation as he pads about the stage in baggy sweatpants, sucking on a lollipop while delivering eccentric disquisitions. There are some eye-catching performances among the minor characters, too. June Watson is delightful as the octogenarian servant Firs, who is forever mumbling away to herself, semi-audibly, in irritable tones. And Eanna Hardwicke makes a brilliantly funny stage debut as the bookkeeper Epikhodov, whose clownishly squeaky shoes undermine the authority of his every utterance (most notably when he declares “I’m, quote-unquote, intellectually insatiable”).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