Genius (TV Program)

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    ‘Genius: MLK/X’ Offers Portraits of the Icons as Vital Young Men

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    “We wanted to take them off the T-shirts and make them real,” said Gina Prince-Bythewood, who created the series with her husband Reggie Rock Bythewood.The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are among American history’s most thoroughly chronicled figures, their voices and mannerisms captured forever on recording after recording, their lives picked over in book after book.By himself, Malcolm X has been the subject of two Pulitzer-winning biographies in the past 13 years and just last year Jonathan Eig’s “King: A Life” landed a spot on Barack Obama’s yearly best-books list. Both men adorn countless T-shirts, posters and memes. They aren’t just people; they’re also symbols — of civil rights, of social progress, of a decade that saw many of its heroes murdered.But symbols don’t make for particularly compelling drama. So when Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Aaron Pierre signed on to play King and Malcolm X, respectively, in the new National Geographic series “Genius: MLK/X,” which premiered earlier this month, they knew their imperative was to make their iconic characters as human as possible and leave more famous portrayals in the past.“The first thing I had to do, and the first thing I needed everyone around me to do, was to stop speaking about them as icons,” Harrison said in a video interview last month alongside Pierre. “I had to live in the moment that they existed. They did not know who they were or where they were going.”Gina Prince-Bythewood, who, with her husband, Reggie Rock Bythewood, are among the executive producers of the series, put it this way: “We wanted to take them off the T-shirts and make them real and tangible for an audience. And to do that, you need to show their humanity.”Jayme Lawson, as Betty Shabazz, and Pierre in “Genius.” The series emphasizes the strength and support of the men’s wives.Richard DuCree/National GeographicWe 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

      Best Movies and TV Shows Streaming in February: ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith,’ ‘Shogun,’ More

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      “Genius:MLK/X,” a “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” series, a remake of “Shogun” and “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans” are among the new arrivals.Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of February’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)New to Amazon Prime Video‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’ Season 1Starts streaming: Feb. 2Based on the 2005 blockbuster film of the same name, the spy thriller series “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” stars Donald Glover (who also cocreated the show with Francesca Sloane) as a spy code-named John who gets paired with a spy code-named Jane (Maya Erskine) in an operation that has them posing as a married couple. While trying to get a handle on their assignment, the fake spouses also have to get to know each other, and to figure out whether it’s helpful or detrimental to their mission to have actual romantic chemistry. Though there are chase scenes and explosions sprinkled throughout, this take on the “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” premise is more grounded. It’s about two attractive single people in New York City, balancing a relationship and a very, very strange job.Also arriving:Feb. 8“The Silent Service”Feb. 9“Upgraded”Feb. 13“Five Blind Dates”Feb. 16“This Is Me … Now: A Love Story”Feb. 19“Giannis: The Marvelous Journey”Feb. 23“Jenny Slate: Seasoned Professional”“Poacher”“The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy” Season 1Feb. 29“Red Queen”Dario Argento in the documentary “Dario Argento Panico.”ShudderNew to AMC+‘Dario Argento Panico’Starts streaming: Feb. 2The Italian filmmaker Dario Argento has been a favorite of genre fans and cinephiles since the 1970s, when his stylish, blood-soaked thrillers like “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage” and “Suspiria” introduced a unique cinematic language, halfway between Hitchcockian suspense and Grand Guignol theater. In the Shudder documentary “Dario Argento Panico,” Argento and some of his collaborators and admirers (including the directors Guillermo del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn) look back across his long career, discussing his unique vision as well as the controversies surrounding the violence in his movies and the intensity of his working methods. The film is a comprehensive introduction to an artist whose work and personality can come off as aloof and demanding, but who has long appealed to people who don’t mind a challenge.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 Music

      Review: ‘Genius: Aretha’ Speaks Loudest When It Sings

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      Cynthia Erivo is dynamic in a bio-series that is strongest when it makes the case for the Queen of Soul as a creative force.At a recording session in 1967, Aretha Franklin (Cynthia Erivo) sits at the piano and plays a chord none of her studio musicians recognize. It’s “funky,” one of them says. But it’s also “celestial.” Earth and heaven. Body and soul.To create something new out of nothing more than vibrations in the air is as good a definition of genius as any. And it expands on the definition implied in the first two seasons of National Geographic’s bio-anthology, which focused on Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso. These “Think Different” poster stars were not exactly out-of-the-box choices, and “Genius,” its title notwithstanding, plodded in that mushy middle ground where dutiful biography meets mediocre storytelling.Choosing Franklin, who died in 2018, for Season 3 is a statement, not just because it breaks the series’s Great Man pattern to focus on a Black, female popular entertainer. It’s also an extension of Franklin’s own career-long project: to be recognized not simply as a volcanic performer but as a thoughtful interpreter, artist and creator.So “Genius: Aretha,” which airs eight episodes over four nights starting Sunday, has an argument, and an opportunity to shake up the format. It does — sometimes.The new “Genius” spends most of its time in routine music-biopic mode: exposition, childhood traumas, historical checkpoints. But in the moments when it finds its groove, thanks to Erivo’s incandescent performance and its insight into Franklin’s process, it socks it to us.The showrunner, Suzan-Lori Parks (a Pulitzer Prize winner for her play “Topdog/Underdog”) hopscotches decades in her narrative. One thread follows Franklin through the meat of her career (from her 1960s breakthrough to the 1970s, in the seven episodes screened for critics). The other has Little Re (a luminous Shaian Jordan) finding her voice, literally and figuratively, as the daughter of C.L. Franklin (Courtney B. Vance), a high-profile pastor in Detroit.The elder Franklin was a civil-rights advocate and gospel-caravan preacher, who, as people say of him, loved Saturday night as much as Sunday morning. The breakup of his marriage over his infidelities weighs on Little Re and the older Queen of Soul. But as a performer in his own right — Vance finds the rolling-thunder musicality in his sermons — he recognizes and promotes his daughter’s talent early. (He also keeps a hand in her career long into her adulthood.)The indispensability of the Black church to American culture — it gave our song music and lyrics — is a through line of “Aretha.” (It would make a good companion to PBS’s recent “The Black Church.”) Another through line: Franklin’s determination to maintain her independence and vision among the men in her life, first C.L., then her first husband and manager, Ted White (Malcolm Barrett), given to jealous fits and violent tantrums.Unfortunately for those hoping to hear the hits, “Aretha” did not have the rights to “Respect” and “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.” But this shifts the season’s focus toward more unexpected, artistically revealing choices, like her finding the gospel sway in Elton John’s “Border Song.”It’s no surprise that Erivo, a Grammy and Tony winner for “The Color Purple,” can re-create Franklin’s gale-force vocals. But her performance is more than imitation. It’s an idea of the character, her passion and dignity, her release and control, the way that music transports her.Projecting confidence and protecting her image is key to Franklin, in an industry that would gladly tell her who she is. After a frustrating effort to break out as a jazz singer, she forms a long, sometimes contentious partnership with the producer Jerry Wexler, a curiously cast David Cross. (Fairly or not, it’s hard not to see and hear Cross’s “Arrested Development” persona in his bearing and speech; while the show brings the funk, he brings the Fünke.)Courtney B. Vance playing Aretha’s father, C.L. Franklin, in one of many flashback scenes starring Shaian Jordan as the singer’s younger self, nicknamed Little Re.Richard DuCree/National GeographicThe most interesting parts of “Aretha” are in the stage and the studio, not just for the excellently produced songs but also for the series’s rendering of her art. Franklin, as “Aretha” presents her, knows who she is.She is a musician, not formally trained, but with an acute producer’s ear. (During one session she has someone return an empty pizza box to the top of her piano for the ineffable tone it gives the instrument.)She is Black, and Blackness becomes increasingly central to her music and her politics — which are also rooted in her early church experience. (Her conversations with the family friend Martin Luther King Jr., played by Ethan Henry, recall the discussions in “One Night in Miami” about the obligations of the Black artist.)All these aspects converge in the sixth episode, about the recording of her 1972 live album, “Amazing Grace,” at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, filmed by Sydney Pollack for a movie that would stay in the can for nearly a half century. Just as the performance synthesized Franklin’s history and identity, her personal vision and community consciousness, so the episode brings together the threads of “Aretha.” It might have made a strong movie, or the centerpiece of a more tightly focused series.But “Aretha” feels bound, like the earlier “Genius” seasons, to give us the usual encyclopedia entry of life moments. The high points are connected by overfamiliar biopic beats and historical moments conveyed through TV news broadcasts. The scripts and the direction hold the viewer’s hand, using melodramatic scoring and imagery and blunt dialogue. (“You’ll get there,” Wexler says, “when you realize you’re Aretha Franklin and nobody else.”)While the series has an animating sense of Franklin as an artist, she is a moving target as a person. Her determination could make her difficult, with colleagues and family, and “Aretha” faces this — when, for instance, she undercuts her sister Carolyn (Rebecca Naomi Jones), also an aspiring singer. But the series sometimes seems caught in the void created by Franklin’s careful image management; the central figure turns reserved and enigmatic at key moments.This adds up to a revealing portrait of Franklin’s art inside a fuzzier bio-series of her life, which is a trade-off, but better than the reverse. After all, the name of the franchise is “Genius,” and Parks’s story sings convincingly of why Franklin deserves the same title as Einstein and Picasso. “Aretha” is a vibrant effort to give her artistry some R-E-S-P-E-C-T, even if we don’t entirely find out what it means to her. More

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      in Television

      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ and ‘Genius: Aretha’

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Grammy AwardsGrammys: What HappenedWinners ListBest and Worst MomentsBeyoncé Breaks RecordRed CarpetAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWhat’s on TV This Week: ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ and ‘Genius: Aretha’Revisit the 2011 adaptation of John le Carré’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” Or see Cynthia Erivo play Aretha Franklin in National Geographic’s “Genius: Aretha.”Gary Oldman in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.”Credit…Jack English/Focus FeaturesMarch 15, 2021, 1:00 a.m. ETBetween network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, March 15-21. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY (2011) 8 p.m. on HBO2. John le Carré, who died in December at 89, made a name for himself writing espionage novels with spy characters that are flawed and fallible. If they order vodka martinis it’s probably to stave off loneliness, not to look suave. Such is the case with the MI6 officer George Smiley, a recurring character in le Carré’s novels and the focus of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” which concerns an aging Smiley’s efforts to weed out a double-agent in the service’s ranks. Gary Oldman plays Smiley in this film version, which was directed by Tomas Alfredson and which, in her review for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis called a “superb” adaptation of le Carré’s novel. Oldman, she wrote, gives “a fascinatingly gripping performance that doesn’t so much command the screen, dominating it with shouts and displays of obvious technique, as take it over incrementally, an occupation that echoes Smiley’s steady incursion into the mole’s lair.”ROBIN AND MARIAN (1976) 6 p.m. on TCM. Five years after ostensibly hanging up his James Bond tux with “Diamonds Are Forever,” Sean Connery starred opposite Audrey Hepburn in this swashbuckling take on the Robin Hood legend. Connery plays an aging Robin Hood, who, after the death of Richard the Lionheart (Richard Harris), returns to Sherwood Forest to discover that Maid Marian, who has become the mother superior of a convent, has come under threat from Robin Hood’s nemesis, the Sheriff of Nottingham (Robert Shaw). The adventure is set to a score by John Barry, who also wrote the musical accompaniment for a slew of James Bond movies, including most of Connery’s.TuesdayMAYANS M.C. 10 p.m. on FX. This “Sons of Anarchy” spinoff has offered a distinctive blend of gasoline and adrenaline since its debut in 2018. The third season, which premieres on Tuesday night, continues the story of Ezekiel “E.Z.” Reyes (J.D. Pardo). It picks up after the events of the show’s intense Season 2 finale, which included a consequential murder.WednesdayThe singer Leon Bridges performing in 2016. Bridges is one of several artists slated to appear in the TV special “A Grammy Salute to the Sounds of Change.”Credit…Amy Harris/Invision, via Associated PressA GRAMMY SALUTE TO THE SOUNDS OF CHANGE 9 p.m. on CBS. The hip-hop artist Common will host this two-hour special, which will pay tribute to music’s ability to catalyze social change. Artists slated to appear include Yolanda Adams, Andra Day, Cynthia Erivo, John Fogerty, Gladys Knight, Patti LaBelle, Brad Paisley, Leon Bridges, Billy Porter and Gloria Estefan. The ongoing criticism of the Grammys’ lack of diversity, including its poor record of recognizing people of color, is bound to create some dissonance — but the power of the artists, including those involved here, was never in question.FINIAN’S RAINBOW (1968) 5:30 p.m. on TCM. Four years before “The Godfather,” Francis Ford Coppola helmed this film adaptation of the 1947 fantasy musical “Finian’s Rainbow.” The story follows an Irish father (Fred Astaire) and daughter (Petula Clark) who steal a leprechaun’s pot of gold, then flee to the United States. While the film has its fans — including the Coen Brothers, who have expressed a love for it — it was largely panned by critics, including Renata Adler, who in her review for The Times in 1968 referred to the film as a “cheesy, joyless thing.”ThursdaySHREK (2001) 6 p.m. on Freeform. This spring marks 20 years since Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy and Cameron Diaz teamed up in the original, animated, tongue-in-cheek “Shrek” fairy tale. Its original audience might enjoy revisiting it for a dose of nostalgia — or perhaps to show it to their own children.FridayRenée Fleming and Robert Ainsley in “Great Performances at the Met.”Credit…Metropolitan OperaGREAT PERFORMANCES AT THE MET 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The New York performing arts venue the Shed announced last week that it will be reopening for indoor performances next month, with a lineup that includes a concert from the soprano Renée Fleming. But even most people who feel ready to return to indoor performances won’t get to go — the size of the virus-tested audience will be limited. Instead, they can get their Fleming fix remotely on Friday, when PBS airs this episode of “Great Performances at the Met.” The recorded program includes arias by Puccini and Massenet, plus works by Handel and Korngold. PBS is pairing it with “Live From Lincoln Center Presents: Stars In Concert” with Andrew Rannells, which airs at 10 p.m.SaturdayRELIC (2020) 8 p.m. on Showtime. Emily Mortimer, Bella Heathcote and Robyn Nevin play three generations of women haunted by one case of dementia — and perhaps more — in this horror debut from the director Natalie Erika James. The plot revolves around Edna (Nevin), an octogenarian who goes missing from her rural home. When Edna’s daughter (Mortimer) and granddaughter (Heathcote) go looking for her, they discover a sinister presence within the home’s dusty walls. In her review for The Times, Jeannette Catsoulis wrote that the film creates a “surpassingly creepy atmosphere and a patiently ratcheting unease.” The story, she added, “deftly merges the familiar bumps and groans of the haunted-house movie with a potent allegory for the devastation of dementia.”SundayCynthia Erivo in “Genius: Aretha.”Credit…Richard DuCree/National GeographicGENIUS: ARETHA 9 p.m. on National Geographic. The first two seasons of this National Geographic anthology series focused on the lives of Pablo Picasso (Antonio Banderas) and Albert Einstein (Geoffrey Rush). The third season, debuting Sunday night, dramatizes the life of Aretha Franklin (Cynthia Erivo). It was originally slated to air in May of last year, but was pushed back after the pandemic caused production delays. The new timing offers an interesting opportunity for viewers — the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, who was the showrunner for this season of “Genius,” also wrote the just-released historical drama “The United States vs. Billie Holiday.” Watch both back to back to see Parks revisit the lives of two giants in 21st century music.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More