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      ‘The OA’ Creators Are Back With a Murder Mystery

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      “A Murder at the End of the World” resembles other luxe murder shows. But the mark of the creators, Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, is clear in its idiosyncratic tone and themes.The filmmakers Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij have what they call a “garden.” It’s not an actual garden, however. It is what Batmanglij described in a recent interview as a “garden of ideas that exists between us.”“Some of those seedlings we’ve been cultivating for years, since our early days of sitting on skateboards in one of our bedrooms in Silver Lake and talking to each other,” he said last month, sharing a booth with Marling in the lobby of the Bowery Hotel. “We were ready to cut one of those blooms and plant it.”The latest product of that garden is their new series, “A Murder at the End of the World,” premiering with two installments Nov. 14 on FX on Hulu. The seven-episode show has a conventional, almost trendy hook: It is a murder mystery set at a remote Icelandic luxury retreat for some of the world’s most influential people, details reminiscent of buzzy recent films and shows like “Glass Onion” and “The White Lotus.” But with its time-jumping structure, uniquely eerie tone and warnings about artificial intelligence and climate change, it is also unmistakably the work of the idiosyncratic creators behind “The OA,” “Sound of My Voice” and “The East.”However even they were surprised by the protagonist they ended up with, a Gen-Z amateur detective named Darby Hart, played by Emma Corrin (“The Crown”). A true-crime author who grew up trying to crack cold cases on internet forums, Darby and her sleuth skills are tested when a guest ends up dead at a gathering hosted by a tech billionaire (Clive Owen) and his former coder wife (Marling), where a remarkably advanced A.I. named Ray (Edoardo Ballerini) serves as an assistant to the guests.“All of a sudden this outlier poppy in the corner, Darby, showed up, and said, ‘I represent the times,’” Batmanglij said.In “A Murder at the End of the World,” Emma Corrin plays a young true-crime author trying to solve a murder. (With Harris Dickinson.)Chris Saunders/FXMarling, 41, and Batmanglij, 42, talk in metaphors and big ideas. This makes sense if you’ve seen their body of work, which includes surreal sagas about grand topics, among them the afterlife and the end of the world, often featuring characters who consider themselves soothsayers.They have been planting their seeds for decades. They met as students at Georgetown in 2001 and started collaborating a couple of years later when Batmanglij invited Marling, then a summer analyst at Goldman Sachs, to participate in a 48-hour film festival, making a short film over the course of one weekend.The experience convinced Marling, the class valedictorian who was a double major in economics and art (with a focus on photography), to leave her business ambitions behind. “We had found this profound space together,” she said. “We basically have been telling stories in one way or another much in that fashion ever since.”Their first co-written feature, “Sound of My Voice,” was directed by Batmanglij and featured Marling, her long blond hair giving her an ethereal look, as a mysterious cult leader who claims to be from the future. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011 alongside “Another Earth,” which Marling also starred in and co-wrote with another Georgetown friend of theirs, Mike Cahill. Both films sold and Marling was the de facto star of that year’s festival. But after their Sundance success and despite bigger offers from Hollywood, she and her cohorts opted to recommit to their indie mission.“We had this instinct of not doing those things, like not playing the girlfriend of the movie star in this sort of empty action film,” Marling said. “And to instead be like, ‘No, let’s keep telling our stories. Let’s keep getting better at telling them.’”Marling and Batmanglij followed up “Sound of My Voice” with “The East,” starring Marling and Alexander Skarsgard, about a woman who goes undercover with an anarchist group committing acts of eco-terrorism.“The OA” only lasted two seasons on Netflix but it built a devoted following.JoJo Whilden/NetflixTheir biggest platform yet came in 2016 when their series “The OA” debuted on Netflix. Marling played a formerly blind woman who arrives home, after a mysterious disappearance, having regained her sight and calling herself “original angel.” She tells the story of her life — which involves Russian aristocracy and a mad scientist experimenting on people with near death experiences — to a group of high schoolers and a teacher, showing them “movements” that can supposedly help them jump dimensions. In the even more ambitious second season, which debuted in 2019, there were plot lines about tree internet and a mind-reading octopus.Critics found the series fascinating and flawed, but it had a passionate following. When Netflix canceled the show after the second season, fans started a hashtag campaign and one even staged a hunger strike outside Netflix headquarters in Los Angeles.“It had scope and ambition and was, by design, not the lowest-budget project around,” said Cindy Holland, who was the streamer’s vice president of original content at the time. “It became clear that it was going to be unsustainable as an ongoing project in that form at Netflix at the time, and it was a fairly sad experience for all of us, including the audience.”Marling said she sees the unexpected end of the series now as almost prophetic. “‘The OA’’s cancellation was a harbinger for a transformation for something that was afoot in the industry,” she said.“The space had been disrupted, a bunch of creativity and market energy had rushed into that space,” she continued. “But now it was going to calcify or solidify into something that in many ways was a broken business model and much worse than what had been before.”“We make the world so real between ourselves at first, that it’s literally like a third place that exists,” Marling said of how she and Batmanglij develop their ideas.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesShe and Batmanglij are still convinced they will finish the story of “The OA” at some point, in some form, but they decided to move on to what would become “A Murder at the End of the World.” The pair wrote the episodes — some together, some separately, some with other writers — and took turns directing. The show’s themes seemed to get only more relevant as they were making it.“It was really eerie, actually, to see with this one the number of things that when we had set out to write it four years ago it was science fiction,” Marling said. “When we talked about any of this stuff with people, we had to explain what is a deep fake, what is an A.I. assistant, what’s a large language model — how does that work? And then by the time we were editing it, to see everything come to pass.”In an interview, John Landgraf, the chairman of FX networks, called the show a “Russian nesting doll of an idea” — a comparison Netflix also used regarding “The OA.”“There was a very rigorous depiction of technology and the physical world,” he said, explaining that the concept appealed to him because it promised a “very grounded, well-researched depiction that nevertheless had a very big set of abstract and imagistic and emotional ideas attached to it.”While fear of the apocalypse hangs over much of the Marling and Batmanglij canon, including “A Murder at the End of the World,” their work rarely feels dystopian.There is also a twinkly-eyed belief in the good of humanity lurking underneath the techno-terrors, and the need to pay attention to feeling over just data.“A Murder at the End of the World” takes place largely at a tech mogul’s remote Iceland gathering for influential people.Chris Saunders/FX“They want to be putting positive ideas out into the world,” said Alex DiGerlando, the series’s production designer and longtime collaborator. He said this optimism manifests in various ways on set — any time they are met with a potentially disheartening scenario, he said, they find a way to see the bright side.Among the roadblocks they hit while filming “A Murder at the End of the World” were supply shortages, Covid outbreaks and disruptive storms. Marling got hypothermia during their monthlong shoot in Iceland. (The hotel’s interiors were built on a soundstage in New Jersey.)“I was kind of blown away, to be honest, by how indefatigable they were,” Landgraf said. “They just literally did not, would not quit on anything until it was the very, very best they could possibly make it.”Marling said that the intensity of her and Batmanglij’s commitment takes root even before they share their ideas with anyone else.“We make the world so real between ourselves at first, that it’s literally like a third place that exists,” she said. “It has a floor and a door, and we can open the door and invite people in.”Floors, doors, gardens — Marling and Batmanglij might mix metaphors, but what’s clear is that they see their stories as tangible objects that they nurture together with a willingness to embrace the unexpected.“We don’t have a favorite plant or tree or seed or sapling in the garden,” Batmanglij said. “We treat them all with so much love because sometimes it’s the one that you don’t water at all that starts blooming.” More

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      What Is ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ Doing to Soccer?

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      Hollywood has turned a perfectly good fourth-tier Welsh team into a TV show instead. That can’t be great.Last month, the Welsh soccer club Wrexham A.F.C. embarked on a buoyant tour of America that it called the Wrexham U.S.A. Invasion Summer ’23. The team packed stadiums from North Carolina to Southern California. It played against the megaclubs Chelsea and Manchester United. Its ticketholders enjoyed fan zones equipped with bustling merch stands and cardboard cutouts of Wrexham personalities — even a pop-up version of the Turf Hotel, a pub in the actual Wrexham, a city of 135,000 in the north of Wales. One popular activity was taking selfies with Wayne Jones, the Turf Hotel’s publican, a touring member of the summer jolly.Wrexham is a place with a familiar Rust Belt trajectory: mill and mine closures, job losses, economic depression. Before the season that began this month, its team played in the National League, the fifth tier of English soccer — a universe away from Chelsea and the top-flight Premier League. (The National League still includes a few teams that aren’t fully professional.) Typical attendance at Wrexham’s Racecourse Ground used to be less than 5,000 a game. In Chapel Hill, the team played in front of more than 50,000.The reason for the change is, of course, the FX docuseries “Welcome to Wrexham.” In 2021, the actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney bought the club and set about changing its fortunes, on camera. During the pandemic, the British actor Humphrey Ker had given McElhenney a viewing recommendation: “Sunderland ’Til I Die,” a docuseries about the decline of another soccer club in a postindustrial town. McElhenney loved it and, as Ker told The Athletic, formulated a plan to tell the same story in reverse: buy a struggling football team and turn it into a competitor. He wanted to reverse-engineer a feel-good sports documentary. He would also end up satisfying America’s love of underdog stories set in quaintly hard-up corners of Britain (like “The Full Monty,” recently revived as an FX series) and creating an odd real-life analog for the hugely popular “Ted Lasso.”The reverse-engineering project has, clearly, been a success. The show, with its portrait of the tight-knit community surrounding the club, attracted a devoted-enough audience that sales of the club’s jersey spiked wildly. (The team dropped its previous front-of-shirt sponsor, a Welsh trailer company, in favor of TikTok.) Wrexham matches — which, even in Britain, would have been considered obscure — can now play on ESPN. “It’s the real underdog thing,” one fan at the U.S.A. Invasion told The Evening Standard.It was an underdog thing. Since taking over, McElhenney and Reynolds have stocked Wrexham’s roster with players who are, frankly, too good to be playing in the National League. Paul Mullin, for instance, is a striker whose copious goal scoring helped get Cambridge United promoted a league; he instead jumped two tiers down to join Wrexham. (He was injured during the U.S.A. Invasion and stayed in the country to recuperate — in McElhenney’s Los Angeles home.) Last season, the four highest-paid players in the National League all played for Wrexham. At the season’s end, the club was promoted to League Two, the fourth tier of English soccer, for the first time since 2008. In the days that followed, Wayne Jones had to shut down the Turf Hotel: Despite his best efforts to prepare, he ran out of alcohol. When the show’s second season begins in September, streaming on Disney+, it’s a safe bet that every episode will be seen by far more people than will fill the Racehorse Ground for a whole season’s worth of Wrexham matches.In 2021, the sale of a different soccer club made international news. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund took a controlling interest in Newcastle United, a competitor in the Premier League. Unlike Wrexham’s story — which has been treated as a kind of homespun pushback to a world in which private-equity billions slosh around and sports teams are used as state propaganda — the Saudi purchase was castigated, internationally, as a new nadir in professional sports’ capitulation to the richest entity in the room. (The head of Amnesty International U.K. bashed the league for “allowing those implicated in serious human rights violations to walk into English football simply because they have deep pockets.”) Reynolds and McElhenney do not represent an autocratic petrostate and are implicated in no human rights violations, but the two takeovers do have one thing in common: Both the actors and the Saudi sovereign-wealth fund are operating in spaces where their wealth distorts everything around them.Longtime Wrexham supporters are certainly delighted by the team’s successes, but they must also recognize that the club has become something new and different: both an athletic behemoth and a pop-culture one. It’s not just that the roster is full of what are effectively ringers, being paid situationally outlandish amounts from what I can’t help imagining are the profits of the “Deadpool” franchise. Reynolds and McElhenney have created an ouroboros in which TV funnels fans and money to the team, leading to successes that in turn create more TV. It’s a clever gambit for endless expansion, but also one that, as the club’s U.S. tour underlined, risks turning Wrexham into more of a media project than a soccer team.It also feels directly opposed to the communitarian values that, ostensibly, made Reynolds and McElhenney interested in the team in the first place. For a decade before their arrival, Wrexham had been a community club owned by a coalition of fans called the Wrexham Supporters Trust. One of the club’s former board members, Spencer Harris, posted online this spring to take issue with the title of a BBC program about the club — “Wrexham: Hollywood or Bust” — and its suggestion that without the actors, Wrexham was doomed. “4,000 supporters trust members took over an insolvent business,” he wrote, “turned it around and handed over with cash in the bank after a global pandemic.” The trust didn’t even profit off the sale; in the interest of helping the club’s prospects, members essentially gave the team to Reynolds and McElhenney in exchange for a guarantee that they would add £2 million to the budget.That fan base now shares its connection to the team with all those who will binge-watch “Welcome to Wrexham” and feel their own sense of ownership — and with the actors, who sometimes overtake the club’s identity entirely. (One recent headline assessed the team’s prospects like this: “Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney are on track for the League Two points record!”) As a new television season begins, it will surely become untenable for “Welcome to Wrexham” to ignore its own impact on the club it’s documenting.For what it’s worth, English football is full of less complicated tales of resiliency. Luton Town, for instance, is a small club from just outside London. The team’s nickname is the Hatters. Their home ground, Kenilworth Road, has its modest entrance stitched through a row of terraced houses. While not self-owned, its ownership consortium is made up of local fans who willingly ceded a small share and a set of veto rights to the Luton Town Supporters Trust. At its lowest ebb, the club played in the fifth tier. It doesn’t spend a lot of money, because it doesn’t have a lot of money. But the team has scouted well and hired good coaches, and this coming season, having won its way up the ranks, it will compete in the Premier League. Someone should make a documentary about that. Or, honestly, maybe they shouldn’t.Opening illustration: Source photographs by Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images; Christopher Furlong/Getty Images; Drew Hallowell/Getty Images; Jan Kruger/Getty Images. More

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      Timothy Olyphant Is Back for a New Chapter of ‘Justified’

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      “I like to think there’s been some growth.”This was the actor Timothy Olyphant in New York last month, musing on the trajectory of his career from a TriBeCa sidewalk. He was referring specifically to the task of resurrecting past roles, which he first did a few years ago in the 2019 movie revival of “Deadwood.”Now comes “Justified: City Primeval,” an eight-episode limited series premiering on July 18, on FX. It features Olyphant returning to what is arguably his signature character, Raylan Givens, the Stetson-sporting deputy U.S. Marshal who anchored the Kentucky crime drama “Justified” for six seasons.The new show follows Raylan to Detroit for a fish-out-of-water adventure with a murderous baddie (Boyd Holbrook) and a sharp-elbowed but alluring lawyer, played by Aunjanue Ellis. The creators describe it as the existential evolution of a character, invented by the crime fiction grandmaster Elmore Leonard, who is starting to realize that he can’t chase killers forever and that he is running out of chances to connect with his teenage daughter.“It’s a mature, grown-up version of the show that we did,” said Michael Dinner, who created the limited series with Dave Andron. Both are former writers and executive producers on “Justified,” which ended its run on FX in 2015.The creators and Olyphant, who is also an executive producer on “City Primeval,” hope to bring back Raylan for at least one more series after this one. But first, they are going to find out if people are still interested in the character or “Justified” without the original show’s evocative backwoods setting and colorful criminals, played by the likes of Walton Goggins and Margo Martindale.“Justified: City Primeval” moves the action from Kentucky to Detroit, where Olyphant’s character, Raylan, joins a sharp-elbowed lawyer played by Aunjanue Ellis.Chuck Hodes/FXOlyphant (left, with Claire Danes and Dennis Quaid) plays a man who marries into the family of a celebrity chef in the Max series “Full Circle,” directed by Steven Soderbergh.Sarah Shatz/Max“With all due respect to our original cast, who I loved, adored and miss, it was really a fun experience being with all these new cast members but still feeling like we were doing our show,” Olyphant said. “This feels right in the sweet spot, but I don’t know, it could be a total failure.”If he didn’t seem particularly bothered by the possibility of tainting the legacy of his most famous creation, this is partly an effect of his affect. In conversation Olyphant is easygoing and quick-witted, qualities he brings to his work that also belie another of his defining traits: a simmering intensity.That combination proved perfect for the darkly comic, morally murky world of “Justified.” Olyphant’s performance in the series shifted his previously hit-and-miss career into a higher gear, which in turn has made his future prospects less dependent on the success of the “Justified” revival.As it happened, Olyphant was in New York for a screening of a different twisty crime thriller: “Full Circle,” in which he plays a Manhattanite with secrets who has married into the wealthy family of a celebrity chef, played by Dennis Quaid. (Other stars include Claire Danes, Jharrel Jerome and CCH Pounder.) Premiering Thursday on Max, the gripping six-episode serial revolves around a botched kidnapping with international repercussions.“Full Circle” was directed by Steven Soderbergh, the latest on a list of talented people with whom Olyphant long wanted to work and now has. Others include Quentin Tarantino, who cast Olyphant as the 1960s TV cowboy James Stacy in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” (2019), and David O. Russell, who hired him to play a disfigured thug in “Amsterdam” (2022). Kenneth Lonergan made him the center of his acclaimed play “Hold On to Me Darling” (2016).“You can throw Larry David on the list,” Olyphant said, referring to his appearance as a smarmy groom in “Curb Your Enthusiasm” in 2020. “I don’t know how long I’ll keep doing this, but I’ll show up every day for that guy.”There was also a brief run as a “Star Wars” lawman in “The Mandalorian” and “The Book of Boba Fett,” and a longer one as a Mormon U.S. Marshal in “Fargo.” He played a zombie’s husband in the horror comedy “Santa Clarita Diet” and himself in two different sitcoms: “The Good Place” and “The Grinder.” Earlier this year he had a memorable turn as a grizzled tour manager with terrible hair in “Daisy Jones & the Six.”Soderbergh, who said he had wanted for years to cast Olyphant, called him “the best example of an experienced professional, in that he can give you anything that you want.”“That is the best thing I can say about somebody,” he added.The afternoon after the “Full Circle” screening, Olyphant reclined in a metal chair outside a TriBeCa cafe and marveled at the company he is keeping these days.“I had a blast working with the writers,” Olyphant said of the “Justified” revival. “They picked up where we left off except for this time, there wasn’t anyone throwing things.”Philip Cheung for The New York Times“Being with Steven Soderbergh last night watching something that he’s made that I’m a part of, it just means the world,” he said. “I don’t know why it took me so long to get there, but it’s really nice to be there now.”Now 55, Olyphant retains an athlete’s physique — he had just come from swimming at Asphalt Green in Battery Park — but his hair has gone mostly gray. As he has revived old roles, he has entered a new phase of his life: His three children with Alexis Knief, his wife of over 30 years, are now grown, and one has followed her father not just into show business but also into the world of “Justified.” Vivian Olyphant plays Raylan’s daughter, Willa, in the revival. “Nepotism, you can’t beat it,” he cracked.Olyphant wasn’t sure he wanted to reprise his “Deadwood” role as Sheriff Seth Bullock. (Bullock got a promotion for the movie, adding yet another marshal to Olyphant’s résumé.) Once on set, however, he realized how much the show meant to him. It also gave him a final opportunity to work with David Milch, one of television’s greatest writers, whom Olyphant deeply admires. (Milch has since entered an assisted-living facility for Alzheimer’s care.)“I don’t know what I was so afraid of,” he said. “It was quite moving for everybody involved.”But Olyphant always figured he would play Raylan again. “It seemed like the kind of character that could age well,” he said.The new series updates Leonard’s 1980 novel “City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit,” one of his most beloved books. As Raylan joins the Detroit police in a case that encompasses a string of murders, a psychopathic aspiring singer, Albanian gangsters, corrupt cops and a crooked judge, he is frequently the odd man out in his own show.“I think they wanted that collision, which is why they sent him to one of the Blackest cities in the country,” said Ellis, who plays a defense attorney at the heart of the story. Other stars include Victor Williams, Vondie Curtis-Hall and Marin Ireland.During the original run of “Justified,” Olyphant was known as an occasionally demanding Leonard purist, insisting that the show stay true to the author’s dry wit and sneaky emotional complexity. That hasn’t changed — Ellis said Olyphant carried around a tattered copy of “City Primeval” on set “like it was the Bible” — though Olyphant suggested that the terms of engagement had evolved.“I had a blast working with the writers,” he said. “They picked up where we left off except for this time, there wasn’t anyone throwing things. They were all used to my [expletive].” (Dinner, who also directed multiple episodes, said that “he was a great collaborator.”)“The game has gotten simpler,” Olyphant said of his acting career. “I realize it’s all kind of a joke, just getting away with it.”Philip Cheung for The New York TimesAll productions have highs and lows, but this show’s were more extreme than most. In the plus column, Olyphant called working with his daughter, who studies acting at the New School in New York, “one of the greatest experiences of my adult life.”“So special and challenging, walking that line between trying to get a scene and trying to be a parent,” he said. (“He definitely did give a lot of notes,” Vivian, 20, said. “But in between takes, we would have a lot of fun.”)Less great: the night when the show, shot mostly in Chicago, was filming in a park and the cast and crew found themselves in the middle of an actual shootout. They all dove for cover as two cars tore down the street toward and past them, trading sprays of automatic gunfire.“You could hear the bullets kicking off the back bumper of the front car: tink, tink, tink,” Olyphant recalled. No one in the production was injured, but everyone was left shaken.“My heart goes out to the people that live in those neighborhoods because that is just not any way to live,” he said.So does Raylan age well? Is there growth? Viewers will have to draw their own conclusions.“The road in front of him is a lot shorter than the road behind,” Dinner said. “We get him into a place by the end of the story where he makes some decisions about his life.”Olyphant’s road is getting shorter, too, but the trade-off is that “the game has gotten simpler,” he said. “I realize it’s all kind of a joke, just getting away with it.” His co-stars say that whatever his penchant for downplaying the job, his enthusiasm for it is apparent.“He’s obviously very experienced now,” Danes said. “But there’s still that sense of giddiness and searching, which is wonderful.”Olyphant in turn takes inspiration from those with even more experience, from their example that growth can be its own reward. Co-stars like Quaid, he said, “seem to be having even more fun than I’m having.”“So if they’ll have me and keep inviting me to the dance,” he said, “I think I’ll keep showing up.” More

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      How Will ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ Write Notts County’s Story?

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      Notts County is having one of the most remarkable seasons in its long history. It might even win the league. But you don’t get to star in someone else’s drama.NOTTINGHAM, England — The irony of it all, really, is that Notts County would make a terrific subject for a documentary.The elevator pitch is simple. After more than a decade of financial strife and rolling existential crises — featuring both a convicted fraudster and fictional Gulf investment — the oldest professional soccer club in the world puts together a record-shattering campaign, one that promises to restore the team to something close to its former glory.The casting is rich and compelling. There is a fallen Premier League prodigy searching for a home, a virtuoso Portuguese playmaker who has never seen an opponent he cannot nutmeg, and a 26-year-old striker experiencing such an absurd hot streak that he was, at one point, being compared to Erling Haaland. Tasked with shaping them into a team is a manager whose adventurous, accomplished approach is still just a little unorthodox in the mud-spattered lower reaches of English professional soccer. But the results are spectacular.In a division that is competitive to the point of arbitrary, the team loses only twice all season. It has scored more than 100 goals, and it’s on course to break the league’s points record with four games left. It might yet win the title. Plenty of shows have been commissioned on less.That is the story of Notts County’s season, but that does not mean it is the story that will be told. Millions of viewers will, in all likelihood, come to think of the club as an antagonist: an obstacle to be overcome, a threat to be parried, a challenge to be met. And that means one of the most remarkable campaigns in Notts County’s long and occasionally illustrious history will be relegated to a supporting role in someone else’s story.Notts County will enter Monday’s game tied with Wrexham on points. But only one of them can win the league.Mary Turner for The New York TimesTwo Teams, One NarrativeA few weeks ago, the producers of “Welcome to Wrexham” — the FX documentary following the takeover and attempted revival of the Welsh town’s forlorn soccer team by the actors and entrepreneurs Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney — made contact with executives at Notts County. Out of courtesy, they said, they wanted to establish how much the club wanted to feature in the show’s second season.It is hard to see how Notts County will not play a prominent role. For months, it and Wrexham have been locked in a breathless race to escape the National League, the fifth tier of English soccer. There is only one automatic promotion slot available — bringing with it a guaranteed return to the ranks of the Football League — and neither side has blinked in its pursuit of it.The pace has been eye-watering. Both are expected to end the season with more points than the division has ever seen. Their nearest rival is 25 points adrift. Each has fed off the other’s refusal to wilt. “We’ve been pushing each other,” said Connell Rawlinson, the Notts County captain. (He was born in Wrexham, and still lives close by: add that to the list of subplots.) “If Wrexham didn’t have us and we didn’t have them, would either of us be as good as we are?”Strictly speaking, Wrexham has long had the edge. Its squad is deeper, and more expensive. It has an extra game to play, as well as the home-field advantage when it meets Notts County on Monday evening, a match with the air of a ready-made season finale.In public, Notts County’s manager, Luke Williams, has done what he can to prepare the club — the fans, the executives, his players — for disappointment. “It’s not that we’re not clear,” he said after watching his side pick apart yet another opponent in late March. “It’s that we’re not even close. We need a two-loss swing.” One of those defeats duly arrived on Friday — Wrexham lost at Halifax — but it still held that crucial game in hand.In private, Williams acknowledges that the prospect of being forced to go through the National League’s somewhat arcane and distinctly treacherous playoff system in search of a second chance at promotion “haunts” him. “I haven’t slept since Christmas,” he said.Mary Turner for The New York TimesNotts County, founded in 1862, is the oldest professional soccer club in the world. Mary Turner for The New York TimesThe players have reacted slightly differently. “I’d rather be part of doing something like this, having that pressure and that stress, than sitting in mid-table with nothing to compete for,” Rawlinson said. “I’m sure the Wrexham team and the fans are enjoying it, too.” He paused, at that point, and thought about the truth of that statement. “Well, maybe not the fans, so much.”That graciousness is fairly typical of relations between the clubs. Given the intensity of their title race — and the stakes involved — it might be expected for a sporting rivalry to metastasize into an outright hostility, particularly given the advantages at Wrexham’s disposal.It is the Welsh club, after all, that can call on TikTok and Expedia as sponsors, and McElhenney, Reynolds and his wife, Blake Lively, as regular guests. Notts County’s stardust extends no further than the singer Jake Bugg, born in Nottingham, who sponsors the club’s away jerseys.That financial primacy has a real-world impact. When Wrexham was short of a goalkeeper, it coaxed Ben Foster, a former England international, out of retirement. Notts County had to recall a 19-year-old from a loan at a club two divisions below.For the most part, though, there is no sense of outrage or oppression. Instead, Rawlinson, said, there is a recognition that both teams are “steeped in history, and that neither club should be where they are.”“The publicity Wrexham has brought has been great for the division as a whole,” he said. “There are a lot of eyes on these games now.”There will be far more, though, who encounter them not as contemporaneous sporting events but as something else: a small part of a broader narrative, one that is packaged and polished and consumed on a delay of several months, once the conclusion is known.“I was coming out of a game a few weeks ago, when we’d just got to 97 points,” said Tom Wagstaff, a founder of the Notts County Talk YouTube channel. “As annoying as it is that we’re not clear at the top, it is incredible to be involved in something like this. I genuinely think it’s the best title race the league has ever seen. But I don’t know if that is how it will be perceived.”“The publicity Wrexham has brought has been great for the division as a whole,” Notts County’s captain said. “There are a lot of eyes on these games now.”Mary Turner for The New York TimesEnd GameThe framing, after all, is not in Notts County’s hands. The act of making television, after all, involves not simply telling a story but choosing which aspects of that story should be accentuated. Documentaries necessarily have a perspective. And that perspective changes the way a story is not only told, but understood.Nobody in Nottingham is particularly worried that “Welcome to Wrexham” will cast Notts County as the bad guys, the villains of the story of this season. Nobody at the club seems especially offended at the idea that the show might present the team backed by Hollywood money as in some way “plucky.”But they know that, however the season ends, far more people will watch the documentary than follow the National League in real time. For those viewers, Notts County’s story will not be a stand-alone achievement, a thing that happened in its own right and with its own meaning, but rather something that exists solely as it pertains to its effect on Wrexham. Its meaning will be contorted and confused and to some extent lost. It will not be consumed as sport at all, not really. It will just be part of the plot.In that, perhaps, there is a solace. “Really, we’ve done them a favor,” said George Vizard, Wagstaff’s co-presenter on YouTube. “If it wasn’t for us, they’d have won it weeks ago. And for the show, it must be better to win it like this than it would be if they had won it at a canter.” The story will, in the end, be about Wrexham. But it will be thanks to Notts County that there is now a much better story to tell. More

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      41 TV Shows to Watch This Fall

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

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      Jana Schmieding Navigates Single Life With Indica and Stevie Nicks

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      The “Rutherford Falls” co-star talks about beading for joy, writing to Fleetwood Mac and (mostly) avoiding ghosts.Early in her career, Jana Schmieding didn’t feel like she could mine Native culture in her comedy. If for no other reason, the material would have had a hard time landing. To get the joke, you have to know what’s going on.“For comedy to exist you need to have a sort of a prior understanding,” she said. “You need to have a contextual understanding of the different power dynamics and the relationality. Because of Native erasure, it’s really hard to give audiences those kinds of deep cuts without first laying the groundwork.”Schmieding is part of two shows that are providing that context. In FX’s “Reservation Dogs,” she plays an Indian Health Service receptionist, a role that she says is being expanded in the second season. She’s also a writer and co-star on Peacock’s “Rutherford Falls,” a show about a town, a neighboring tribe and a reckoning of their shared history that’s inspired by a statue of “Big Larry,” the town’s founder.On “Rutherford Falls,” Schmieding plays Reagan Wells, a woman who runs the cultural center at a Native casino. Her close friend, Nathan Rutherford (Ed Helms), runs a heritage museum out of his home and acts as a kind of self-appointed town mascot. By the start of the new season — which premieres June 16 — some of the land in Rutherford Falls has been signed over to the Minishonka Nation in a settlement, including Nathan’s museum. The museum has been converted into the Minishonka Cultural Center, run by Reagan.“We’re providing the literacy needed in order to tell these jokes,” Schmieding said. “I think you’re going to see in season two of ‘Rutherford Falls’ a lot more in-community hijinks and acknowledging more relevant issues that Native people face in-community.”In a recent Zoom interview from her apartment in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles, Schmieding discussed the Native art, expensive butter and aunties — on records, onscreen and in her family — that help her navigate through life. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Beaded Jewelry I come from a long line of beaders and bead artists. I got into making beaded jewelry through my grandmother when I was a young girl and have been beading ever since. I bead for joy, I bead for focus, I bead for relaxation. I bead in the writer’s room and on set. It’s a nice, focused activity that’s tactile and artistic and that helps keep me cool.2. “Russian Doll” Before I canceled my Netflix account recently, I binged the second season of “Russian Doll.” We get to see a woman solve issues for herself and in her personal life by traveling through time. It’s fantastical and nuts. Also, she’s a single New Yorker. That’s the life that I lived for 11 years, and it was badass. To see women portrayed outside of the male gaze, outside of heterosexuality and even outside of partnership and the need for that, I’m obsessed. I gobble that up.3. Aunties Aunties play a sacred and important role in Native culture. I have a single, cool aunt who we call Fifi, who almost felt like more of my mother at times when I was growing up. Aunts have this amazing way of holding space without judgment for children where parents have a hard time being objective. Where my parents didn’t want me to party, my aunt wanted to make sure that I was doing it safely. There are things aunties can do that parents feel restricted by, and we need that in our culture. I still talk to my aunt all the time.4. Fleetwood Mac I’ve been listening to the band’s albums in their entirety, trying to pick up the flow of each one, as I’ve been writing a screenplay that honors aunties. Fleetwood Mac gives off auntie vibes. People think of Stevie Nicks as kind of this witchy lady — this ethereal, magical, romantic woman. I also see her as this carefree, wild, adult single woman who has paved her own path, been sexually free and holds this place in our culture of the hot auntie.5. Laurie Metcalf Aunt Jackie on “Roseanne” is the cool aunt OG: She’s single, she’s flighty, she’s sexy, she’s funny — she’s the best. I don’t think I’ve seen a bad Laurie Metcalf character. Her work never fails. I just saw her as the tour manager in the new season of “Hacks,” and I haven’t stopped thinking about her character. Give me Laurie Metcalf’s career. I would die.6. Fancy Butter I’m obsessed. I’ve been putting a lot of butter into my eggs lately. When I go to the grocery store, I just look for butter labels that are in French. I’m going straight for the brick that is just, like, one cup of butter and costs $8 or $9. It’s my splurge.7. Jamie Okuma She is a Native and Japanese-American bead artist and fashion designer. She’s an incredible artist. Michael Greyeyes and I have both worn some Jamie Okuma pieces on “Rutherford Falls.”8. “Are Prisons Obsolete?” I’ve read a lot of Angela Davis in my life. This book of hers is sort of an original text that I think is very helpful in understanding the need to re-evaluate and disrupt the criminal justice system right now. Native men and Native women have some of the highest rates of incarceration in our country. It’s a huge issue that we have faced since colonization.9. “Radio Rental” I like spooky podcasts, and “Radio Rental” is a great one. It’s people telling their own experiences with spooky ghosts. Something about being frightened and afraid of the unknown is very appealing to me. I’ve had spooky run-ins of my own, but I try to avoid them.10. Indica I’ve been having difficulty sleeping, so I’ve been putting a few drops of an indica tincture under my tongue before bed. My parents actually made a tincture that I used for a while. Last night I tried a gummy that had both indica and sativa and it was not doing the trick. If a little sativa gets in there, my brain is just, like: Oh, what do we wanna think about right now? I need something to just knock me out cold. More

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      Joel Grey, on Making a Space for Art and Dreams

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      The prolific actor, writer and photographer just turned 90, in a 1970s-style West Village loft that speaks to his many passions.Rain threatened on a recent Tuesday morning, and there was a chill in the air. But inside Joel Grey’s loft in Manhattan’s West Village, it was spring.Yellow roses — some doing a solo act, some in a clump — pink and yellow tulips, and pink and purple hyacinths sat in various containers on the round table in the open kitchen, on the glass coffee table, on a side table and on the skinny, rectangular dining table. Yet more multicolored roses, splayed atop a cabinet, were — how to put this nicely? — pushing up daisies.Mr. Grey, who won a Tony in 1967 and an Oscar in 1973 for his ineradicable portrayal of the feverishly rouged M.C. in the musical “Cabaret,” stood at the kitchen counter trying to arrange a new grouping of tulips. (He spends $50 a week on flowers at the local Whole Foods.) But these seemed to be an uncooperative bunch. “You kids are being difficult,” he told them, turning away for a minute to say hello to a visitor.Based on the evidence of an admittedly small sample — a reporter, a photographer, a publicist — the eternally pixieish Mr. Grey greets guests as though they were the winning lottery tickets that he thought he’d lost.But perhaps some of this ebullience was situational. “You know, it’s almost my 90th birthday,” he announced, clapping his hands like a delighted child, and leading the way to his office. There, on a hanger, was an orange sweatshirt with “1932” emblazoned in large black numbers on the front. (For the record, April 11 was the day.)“A darling friend gave a sweatshirt to Duane Michals for his 90th birthday, in February,” Mr. Grey said, referring to the photographer. “And I told her, ‘I want one too!’”The Tony- and Oscar-winning actor Joel Grey lives in a loft in the West Village, where he is surrounded by art and the souvenirs of his travels.Stefano Ukmar for The New York TimesJoel Grey, 90Occupation: Actor, writer, photographerNot by design: “My style is not eclectic, but rather serendipity. I’m truly Mr. Serendipity. Nothing I’ve bought was planned. Everything in here is about the moment.”He bought the apartment in the late 1990s, based on a floor plan.“I wanted to be in the Village. It was a whole new world to me,” said Mr. Grey, who had been living on the top floor of the Hotel Des Artistes on West 67th Street in an apartment that was put together, room by room, from former maids’ quarters, and had a skylight and a terrace. “But my brother told me, ‘You can’t live down there.’ At the time, it was very scrubby and scruffy on the streets near the West Side Highway. The place where the boats came in — the piers — it was all very undone.”But what was scrubby and scruffy when measured against proximity to the Hudson River? Mr. Grey watches it roll by from the built-in daybed where he drinks his morning coffee and reads his morning paper: “It’s my friend and my partner and my serenity.”He was further captivated by the “wet-clay” possibilities of a new-construction building. “It was about open space,” he said, “which I found so alluring, and about the mystery of how to make it a home. It was an adventure.”Mr. Grey’s well-traveled Vuitton trunks have been repurposed as side tables.Stefano Ukmar for The New York TimesA very personal adventure. There’s no interest here in showing off designers or making vignettes. Minimalist and neutral, with clean lines, columns and concrete floors, the apartment is part 1970s SoHo loft, part midcentury-modern design, with a cowhide rug on the floor of the bedroom, a cowhide-covered butterfly chair and a Jens Risom woven chair.“But I don’t think about periods,” Mr. Grey said. “I think about exclamation points.”Perhaps the exclamation points are the works of art: by, among others, Richard Tuttle, Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, Joan Miró, Sally Gall and Mr. Michals. Woodcarvings of antelope heads stand in a row on a windowsill. African sculptures dot the piano. There’s a galley wall in the primary bathroom.Mr. Grey is, of course, best known as an actor and director (of the acclaimed 2018 Yiddish version of “Fiddler on the Roof”), and he continues to perform. He is part of the cast of “The Old Man,” a series scheduled to premiere on FX in mid-June. “I am not the old man,” he said, before anyone has a chance to ask.When Mr. Grey directed a Yiddish version of “Fiddler on the Roof,” his assistant gave him an appropriately themed pincushion. Stefano Ukmar for The New York TimesBut over the past dozen and a half years, Mr. Grey has also made a name for himself as a photographer. His work has been the focus of gallery shows and of several monographs. His most recent book of photographs, “The Flower Whisperer,” published in 2019, paid tribute to the nether regions of daisies, sunflowers, lilies, daffodils et al.Stuck inside during the pandemic, Mr. Grey began looking for — and photographing — the faces he saw in dried petals. They will be the subject of his next book. “Look up there. It’s a whole new world,” he said, pointing to a detail in the image of a dead blossom hanging on a partition in his office. “I see a bow tie.”Art and design have long been a part of his life. Growing up in Cleveland, the 8-year-old Joel fantasized about getting lost at the local museum and shut in overnight. Later, as work began taking him out of town, he invariably returned to New York with crafts. When, at the age of 19, he went to London to play the Palladium, he visited Positano, Italy, “and now I am looking at these monkey candlesticks I brought home,” he said, nodding toward the coffee table.A friend gave Mr. Grey a sweatshirt as a 90th-birthday present.Stefano Ukmar for The New York TimesShelves in Mr. Grey’s closet/dressing room display marionettes from Mexico; figures, bowls, vases and baskets from European ports; and, a little closer to home, collages made by his mother, Grace.The mother-son relationship, as chronicled in Mr. Grey’s 2016 memoir, “Master of Ceremonies,” was complicated. But it was because of Grace, he said, that even as a struggling actor, he cared deeply about his surroundings.“I always did up my apartments, even if I only spent a dollar and a quarter,” he said. “My mother and father taught me the importance of being professional and of making a place for myself. And my mother was all about making a space for art.”He has made the place and made the space. “It was all about, ‘Let’s figure this out,’” Mr. Grey said. “‘Let’s dream a little here.’ I’m a big believer in dreams.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More

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      The Moment That Janet Jackson’s Career Stalled and Justin Timberlake’s Soared

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      Jackson was vilified after her 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, while Timberlake’s popularity seemed to take off. Our new documentary examines how the superstars were treated after their unforgettable wardrobe malfunction.Reuters//Gary Hershorn (United States Entertainment)‘Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson’Producer/Director Jodi GomesReporter/Senior Producer Rachel AbramsReporter Alan LightWatch our new documentary on Friday, Nov. 19, at 10 p.m. on FX and streaming on Hulu.The term “wardrobe malfunction” has been part of our vocabulary ever since Janet Jackson’s right breast made a surprise appearance at the end of the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show.When Justin Timberlake tore off part of Jackson’s bustier in front of 70,000 people in Houston’s Reliant Stadium, over 140 million people watching on TV gasped — if they noticed.It happened so quickly (the moment lasted nine-sixteenths of one second) that even some of the halftime show’s producers missed it until their phones, and phones all over America, started ringing.“Did you see what just happened?” Jim Steeg, the National Football League’s director of special events, asked Salli Frattini, the MTV executive in charge of the halftime show. She had to rewind the tape to be sure.“We looked at the close-up shot. We looked at the wide shot, and we all stood there in shock,” Frattini recalled in a new documentary by The New York Times.Was it an accident? Was it planned? Was it a stunt?The ensuing uproar — from the N.F.L., from the Federal Communications Commission, from politicians and their allies — was the peak of a national debate at the time over what’s acceptable on America’s airwaves, and who gets to decide.In our documentary, premiering Friday at 10 p.m. Eastern time on FX and Hulu, we hear from the former commissioner of the N.F.L., Paul Tagliabue, and the MTV executives who were in charge of producing the halftime show. And we talk to some of the politicians who seized on the moment to try to rein in content that they deemed inappropriate.We also look back at Jackson’s long career, which never seemed to recover, while Timberlake’s soared. And we consider how issues of race and sexism mixed to consume one superstar’s legacy and propel another’s career to the next level.Supervising Producer Liz DayProducers Fred Charleston, Jr., Anthony McLemore, Timothy MoranCo-Producer Melanie BencosmeDirector of Photography Asad FaruqiVideo Editor Geoff O’Brien“The New York Times Presents” is a series of documentaries representing the unparalleled journalism and insight of The New York Times, bringing viewers close to the essential stories of our time. More