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      in Television

      No Diamonds Here, but These Gemstones Still Shine

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      For all the repellent narcissism of its members, the family of HBO’s “The Righteous Gemstones” has been a deeply humanizing example of evangelical Christian faith.An early scene in the coming season of HBO’s “The Righteous Gemstones” showcases the newest product in a long and somewhat troubled line of consumer goods from the fictional first family of televangelism.These “luxury” enclosures, called Prayer Pods, offer sanctuary from the din and prying eyes of public spaces, starting at $1 a minute. “A tiny little, eensy, teensy, weensy bit of Christ when you need him the most,” says Jesse Gemstone, the oldest of the three Gemstone children.But sales of the pod tank when word gets out that nonbelievers are using them to meet less virtuous, self-gratifying needs. On Reddit, people start calling them “squirt yurts.”The Prayer Pod is a signature plot device from the mind of Danny McBride, the “Gemstones” creator, who also stars as Jesse, a sometimes lovable blowhard and a legend in his own mind. Like his brother and sister, with whom he constantly bickers over control of the Gemstone empire, Jesse has been handed immense wealth and privilege but somehow thinks he deserves more.Since the show debuted in the summer of 2019, McBride has developed Jesse and the sprawling Gemstone brood into some of the most outrageous satirical characters on television. On Sunday, the story arc of the Gemstones bends toward its conclusion with the premiere of the fourth and final season and a plot twist introducing Bradley Cooper as the newest relative.From left, Kelton DuMont, Skyler Gisondo and Gavin Munn as the children of Amber and Jesse Gemstone (Cassidy Freeman and Danny McBride) in “The Righteous Gemstones.”Connie Chornuk/HBOWe 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

      In ‘Deli Boys,’ Two Actors Find Dream Roles Playing No One’s Hero

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      It had happened to Saagar Shaikh many times: He would audition for a part, get a callback, then never hear from anyone again. Later, when he would watch the show, movie or commercial he had auditioned for, the same guy always seemed to fill the role he had wanted.So perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised Shaikh when he got the bad news about “Deli Boys,” a new Hulu series about two pampered Pakistani American brothers who become entangled in a convenience-store crime ring. Shaikh had auditioned to play Mir, the buttoned-up business-school grad, and had even tested for the character.But now his manager was calling to tell him that the role had been offered to someone else.Was it Asif Ali, Shaikh asked? The manager sighed.“And here we are today,” Shaikh said last month, sitting within arm’s reach of Ali at a photo studio in Burbank, Calif. It was just a few weeks before the premiere of “Deli Boys” — which now stars them both. Ali had indeed gotten the role of Mir. But Shaikh wound up landing the other lead: the lazy, entitled, hard-partying brother, Raj.Shaikh and Ali play Raj and Mir, two sons of a convenience store mogul who discover that their father was also running a criminal operation. James Washington/Disney“Now I completely understand why he gets all the jobs,” Shaikh said of Ali, “because I worked with him for a whole season.”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

      Late Night Recaps Zelensky’s Casual Friday at the White House

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      “I don’t see you asking Elon Musk if he owns a suit,” Seth Meyers said of the reporter who questioned Ukraine’s president about his attire.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Bad Fashion PoliceOn Friday, President Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine during a tense televised meeting at the White House. Things went bad after a conservative reporter asked why Zelensky hadn’t worn a suit to the Oval Office and whether he owned one.On Monday’s “Late Night,” Seth Meyers noted that Zelensky hadn’t been the only casually dressed visitor to the White House lately: “I don’t see you asking Elon Musk if he owns a suit, even though he shows up to cabinet meetings.”“People care about the cost of groceries and health care, not whether the president of Ukraine has ever been to a Men’s Wearhouse.” — SETH MEYERS“The guy’s the leader of a country that was invaded by Russia, and you’re grilling him like a fop at a garden party: ‘I have a question — is your stylist legally blind or just farsighted?’” — SETH MEYERS“Oh, Zelensky, you’re so poor and war-torn, you’re down to one Brooks Brother.” — JON STEWART“You’re so war-torn, you’ve given up the meaningless protocols of business attire.” — JON STEWART“His nation was invaded, he’s — against all odds — held off a much bigger army for three years, and we’re like, ‘And would it kill you to smile more, dress a little nicer? You’re a beautiful country, nobody would know! Show off what you got, know what I’m talking about? Maybe some of those rare metals I’ve been hearing something about.’” — JON STEWART“This poor man. They’re bombing every hospital in his country, he’s sitting there with the half-wit fashion police talking about what he is wearing.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Everyone knows Donald Trump prefers his leaders shirtless and on a horse.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Ukrainian President Zelensky was criticized for what he wore to the White House meeting on Friday, but, in his defense, most suits his size come with a sailor hat and a giant lollipop.” — GREG GUTFELD“So Friday, Zelensky entered the White House in his military fatigues and left with a boot up his [expletive].” — GREG GUTFELDThe Punchiest Punchlines (Real Housewives Edition)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

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      Colbert Has Little Sympathy for Trump Voters With Buyers’ Remorse

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      “The Late Show” host Stephen Colbert said that Trump voters keep coming back for the same unappetizing thing they’ve been served time and again.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Bad BusinessA new poll indicates that some Americans feel buyer’s remorse about voting for President Donald Trump.On Thursday’s “Late Show,” Stephen Colbert pointed out that it’s mainly because, after more than a month in office, Trump has yet to eliminate inflation, as he promised during his campaign to do on Day 1.“That was his claim. He said it over and over again, and now, on Day 38, they still think things are too expensive. Somewhere in Delaware, Joe Biden is shaking his head, chuckling to himself, and thinking, ‘Why did I come into this room?’ ” — STEPHEN COLBERT“One thing that continues to make consumers anxious is the high price of breakfast. And with bird flu, there’s no end in sight. According to experts, egg prices could jump 41 percent, meaning this year’s Easter egg hunt is going to be The Purge.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“It’s getting so expensive — this is true — that here in New York, some bodegas are selling individual eggs, known as ‘loosie’ eggs, to customers who can’t afford full cartons. Yum, loose egg! And if you can’t afford those, there’s a guy in the alley in the back.” — STEPHEN COLBERTColbert said he had limited sympathy for Trump supporters.“They ordered the turd soup and then said, ‘Waiter, there’s turds in my soup.’ Then they came back four years later and asked, ‘Y’all still have that turd soup?’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Bad Sexist Jokes Edition)“So Jeff Bezos is launching a historic rocket mission in which Katy Perry, Gayle King and Lauren Sánchez will be the astronaut in an all-woman mission. They’re calling it the ‘Real Housewives of Mars.’ ” — GREG GUTFELD“The mission will last four hours, but the women are expected to take six weeks to get ready.” — GREG GUTFELD“Also, there will be a booster rocket following their spaceship carrying all their luggage — because they’re chicks.” — GREG GUTFELDThe Bits Worth WatchingThe actress Gabrielle Union talked about her role in the new all-star crime comedy “Riff Raff” on Thursday’s “Daily Show.”Also, Check This Out“This was the only way I could get invited,” O’Brien joked about his hosting duties.The comedian and former late night host Conan O’Brien feels nervous but excited about taking on the typically thankless role of hosting the Academy Awards. More

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      in Movies

      Conan O’Brien on his Oscars Hosting Gig

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      Conan O’Brien is not a cynic — at least not when it comes to the Oscars, which he is hosting for the first time on Sunday. The Emmy-winning comedian, podcaster, traveler and movie buff is genuinely excited — “I get to do this!” he enthused — but also thoroughly worried.“It’s the thing I wake up and think about at night: What’s the best way to tackle this? How? In a way that makes me creatively happy?” he said.Since he accepted the job late last year, O’Brien, 61, has had an emotionally taxing few months. In December, his parents, who were in their 90s, died three days apart, in his childhood home in Massachusetts. Not long after the double funeral, just as he was settling back in Los Angeles to work on the Oscars, the fires started there, and his home was evacuated. When his wife called to ask what to save, his only thought was of a 1980 letter from the author and essayist E.B. White. O’Brien had written to him, as a teenage fan, “and he wrote me back a really sweet letter,” O’Brien said. “So I said, just grab that. And if the rest goes, it goes.”He is still living in a hotel, where he has hung the letter on a wall, he said in a video interview from his office on Monday. The conversation was discursive — pensive and funny. Though he hosted the Emmys twice (most recently in 2006), he has never attended the Oscars. “This was the only way I could get invited,” he joked.His preparation has included bringing in 10 of his own writers to work with Oscar-night stalwarts, running jokes by the crew, and dropping in at clubs in Los Angeles to try out material. “I started seriously writing comedy around the time I was 18,” he said, “and it’s what I think about all the time.” Yet even for him, there is no formula. “It’s frustrating, but it’s not math. You can’t prove it. The only way to find out is to try it on people.”“This was the only way I could get invited,” O’Brien joked about his hosting duties.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

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Bill Burr Is About to Hit Broadway. Broadway Better Duck.

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      Inside a spacious room on Manhattan’s West Side, rehearsal for the latest Broadway revival of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” was full of macho bluster and trash talk. And that was before the actors started running their scene.It was a Friday morning, and the show’s British director, Patrick Marber, back after being briefly out sick, approached two of his stars, Bill Burr and Michael McKean. They were sitting inside a makeshift restaurant booth, getting ready to play desperate real estate salesmen entertaining the idea of robbing their office.Then Marber noticed a satchel in front of them that he hadn’t seen before. “You were gone, so the play changed,” Burr responded in his staccato Boston cadence.Marber looked somewhere between annoyed and amused. Getting teased by one of the greatest living stand-up comics is an honor. But there was work to be done. Previews would start in just a few weeks, on March 10, at the Palace Theater. He turned, walked back to his table, picked up a vape and took a puff. Burr pounced. “What’s that?” he asked, a scornful snap in his voice. “Smoke a cigarette like a man!”Burr loves messing with people. There’s a more accurate verb than “messes,” of course, but I’m not going to use it here. It’s so intrinsic to his needling personality that when I asked him minutes before rehearsal why he’s studying French, Burr described a revenge fantasy of sorts: an eventual stand-up set in France meant to irritate Parisians snooty about Americans mangling their language. Only Bill Burr learns French “out of spite.”Ed Harris as Moss and Alec Baldwin as Blake in the 1992 film adaptation of “Glengarry Glen Ross.”New Line CinemaWe 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 Movies

      The Singular Charm of Parker Posey

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      One January morning, I arrived at the East Village studio of a “sound facilitator,” prepared to heal. The facilitator introduced himself as Gary. He led me past a refrigerator cloaked in an Indian tapestry and into an emptied living room, where I found Parker Posey perched cross-legged on a mat, facing a row of gongs. She appeared cozy and at ease, as if she had known the gongs for many years. Posey had invited me there to experience a sound bath, a New Age therapy that she first tried in Thailand, where she filmed the third season of the HBO anthology series “The White Lotus.” During a sound bath (according to Gary’s website), various chimes and bowls are played in an intentional therapeutic sequence; the treatment may uplift the spirit, release stuck energies and rouse engagement with the surrounding environment. Or it may not, but Gary seemed nice anyway.I joined Posey on the floor. The room filled with sounds that resembled the wait music for a planetarium. Gary then advised us that we were approaching the first full moon of the year, which he called “the wolf moon.” Posey turned to face me with spooked eyes, her mouth pulled into an arc of wry expectation. Then she stretched her legs high in the air, laid flat on the mat, and piled a sweater atop her face.Ninety minutes later, the two of us burst onto the street as if from a saloon door. When I arrived at the appointment, we were both wearing flowy black pants and black sweaters, and I was pleased I had guessed the correct attire for our encounter. But by the time we left, she had applied her Parker Posey costume over the base layer: earrings like glass shards, a pearl hair clip in the shape of a vine-picked berry, a slippery high-necked plaid overshirt, a prismatic silk scarf and a pair of round rose-tinted glasses. We walked in woozy circles around the village. Occasionally she produced her phone and waved its digital map in front of us as if it were a homing device. Whatever had happened up in Gary’s studio — brain-wave entrainment, or maybe just a permission structure for taking a film-length nap — my spirit was in fact uplifted, and Posey was engaged with her surrounding environment.To walk alongside Posey is to be reminded that a New York City sidewalk is a habitat still teeming with life. “Ha ha ha HA,” she said as we closed in on a poodle in a little sweater. “Yeah, I speak poodle!” she trilled to another. Manhattan’s pedestrians typically navigate its steroidal landscape in a dissociative state, but with Posey, every poodle is acknowledged, every commotion registered. A car drove up beside us and stopped at a light, blasting an accordion-forward Latin track. “I love this song!” she screamed to its occupants, craning her head toward the open window. Once she squatted on the sidewalk to greet a familiar dog, then crept over to retie both of my sneakers in double knots. “That was so fun, tying your shoelaces,” she said as she sprang up. “I’m a little mommy.”In the coming weeks, whenever I told anyone that I was profiling Parker Posey, they invariably had a story about her impish appearance in their own life. A journalist colleague said that as she reported to work on Sept. 12, 2001, Posey drifted past her, roller-skating through Lower Manhattan. Seemingly everyone below 14th Street has had a pleasant encounter with her at a dog run. Walton Goggins, Posey’s friend and co-star in “The White Lotus,” told me that when he first met her, at a friend’s barbecue in the Catskills, he felt instantly drawn into her world. “She has this fairylike quality about her,” he said. “She’s a person capable of doing what Emerson said so long ago — to see the miraculous in the common. And she uses phrases like, Isn’t that a gas?” Natasha Rothwell, who plays the weary spa manager, Belinda, on “The White Lotus,” said in an email that when Posey first approached her on set, Posey said she had lost her wallet and had just said a prayer to Saint Anthony, before asking Rothwell if she wanted to be her neighbor at the hotel. “She then gave me a hug and seemed to float away.”Parker Posey with Sarah Catherine Hook and Sam Nivola in the current season of the HBO series “The White Lotus.”Fabio Lovino/HBOWe 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

      5 Comedy Specials to Watch: Josh Johnson, Rosebud Baker and More

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      Stand-up shows from Josh Johnson, Rosebud Baker, Craig Ferguson and others investigate Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show, motherhood and the politics of dumplings.Ian Karmel, ‘Comfort Beyond God’s Foresight’(Stream it on YouTube)In his debut special, Ian Karmel, a veteran comic and writer for late night and award shows, turns his worst joke into one of his best by continually refusing to tell it. It’s a neat trick, characteristic of his unpredictably funny style. Explaining his hesitance, he makes a meal out of the idea that it once killed an audience member who died laughing. It’s one of many distinctive riffs.There’s a long act-out of a guy putting a bumper sticker on a car that is somehow very funny. He makes a CPAP machine hilarious. Part of his gift resides in the subtext. He can get a laugh from just saying “I like books” because it’s clear that he doesn’t mean it. There’s a finesse to his delivery. He speaks deliberately, never straining. He veers in unexpected directions, even on a sentence level. “I was on tour with my podcast,” he said, pivoting, “which is a sentence I sometimes think about saying to someone who fought in World War II.”Karmel is committed to skirting free of cliché, but not in an indulgent, hipster way. There’s nothing ironic about his mustache. His interests (sex, politics, figures of speech) are basic. It’s the way he handles them that stands out. For instance, his take on how worried we should be about our current political moment begins with an observation that many of the countries (Poland, Italy) that make the tastiest dumplings have at one point succumbed to fascism. “So, the question we need to ask ourselves as Americans is,” he says, pausing for a dramatic beat. “Does Hot Pockets count?Rosebud Baker, ‘The Mother Lode’(Stream it on Netflix)Many, if not most, stand-up specials are shot over multiple performances, then edited together to make it seem like one integrated whole. Rosebud Baker’s breakout new hour finds meaning in this benign deception, weaving together a performance from when she’s eight months pregnant and another one after she had the baby. Wearing the same color clothes, she cuts between the two even in the middle of a joke. This mixing is never addressed or commented on, but supports a question hovering over the special: Does having a child change you? Baker says it does, but her shots make a different argument.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