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      in Television

      How Steven Soderbergh and Ed Solomon Straightened Out ‘Full Circle’

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      Their gripping new crime thriller for Max is loaded with twists and layers. But it is actually much simpler than what they originally conceived.The first time the director Steven Soderbergh and the screenwriter Ed Solomon worked together was on the murder mystery “Mosaic” (2017), which could be watched as a choose-your-own-adventure-style story using a smartphone app or as a six-episode HBO mini-series.“Mosaic” drew mixed reviews, but the two men learned a lot doing it. For their next collaboration — what eventually became the six-part series “Full Circle,” debuting Thursday on Max — they envisioned another show that would have two distinct, separately shot versions: one told in classic, linear fashion and another that would present the same events told from different perspectives and whose meaning changes depending on which path the viewer chooses.The idea was greenlighted in 2021, and Solomon started writing two versions that would tell the same story differently. Then last spring, reality hit.“When I got the schedule and I saw the number of days and the page count of just the linear, I was like, ‘This is physically impossible,’” Soderbergh said in a recent joint interview with Solomon. He added: “I had visions of ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ — that this was going to become a legendary folly.”Soderbergh decided to jettison the branching version. But then he had to tell Solomon, who had already written 175 pages of it in addition to the six linear episodes.“That was not a lunch that I was looking forward to,” Soderbergh said. It turned out, though, that Solomon already agreed with him. “It was just too much,” he said.There are few better ways to spend an afternoon than talking about film and television with these two men, who love making and watching stories. Soderberg’s résumé careens among blockbusters (“Ocean’s Eleven,” “Magic Mike”), daring oddities (“The Girlfriend Experience”) and the odd Liberace biopic (“Behind the Candelabra”). Solomon’s often has comic undertones, with films including “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” and “Men in Black.”Together, their efforts have had a decidedly noirish bent — sandwiched between their two series is the 1950s crime feature “No Sudden Move” (2021), for HBO Max. The premise of “Full Circle” follows suit, inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s suspenseful 1963 film “High and Low”: What if there were a kidnapping but the wrong child was taken?Even without branching, the story delivers plenty of twists and layers, toggling between two families in an unlikely entanglement: One is the Manhattan family of a celebrity chef played by Dennis Quaid (with Claire Danes as his shot-calling daughter and Timothy Olyphant as his son-in-law with a mysterious past); the other, led by a criminal matriarch (CCH Pounder), is rooted in a Guyanese community in Queens. In the middle stands a rogue Postal Service inspector played by Zazie Beetz (“Atlanta”).Timothy Olyphant and Claire Danes, right (with Lisa Janae), play a wealthy Manhattan couple who become entangled in a botched kidnapping of their son.Sarah Shatz/MaxCCH Pounder (with Phaldut Sharma) plays a crime boss based in Queens; she has mysterious historical links to the wealthy Manhattan family. Sarah Shatz/MaxSoderbergh and Solomon’s methods and history of close collaboration helped them turn on a dime and adapt the show as they went along.“Scenes were being rewritten, lines were being thrown in while we were doing it,” Phaldut Sharma, a Britain-based actor who plays Pounder’s right-hand man, said in a recent video call. “It was my first my first experience of doing a job in America and I thought this must be the norm, but members of the crew told me this is not really the way it normally goes.”Soderbergh, 60, and Solomon, 62, sat down for a lengthy chat at Soderbergh’s office, in the TriBeCa neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Steven works famously fast, editing himself at the end of every day on a shoot. How does the writer factor in?ED SOLOMON Most weekends we would meet, usually on a Sunday. I would get a text: “Are you around?” Which meant “I’m going to be in the office for the afternoon.” [Laughs.] And we would just talk through: “Where’s this going? And what does that mean for what we’ve got?” We were constantly reassessing — the writing continues as the shooting starts, and it continues as the editing is happening. I really appreciate how fluid you are with that.STEVEN SODERBERGH It has to swing both ways. I can’t say to Ed, “Rethink this,” or, “Rejigger that,” without looking at my own work and going, “I’m throwing out stuff that I worked hard on trying to figure out and shooting.”SOLOMON Sometimes the show outgrows your original idea, which is part of what’s exciting.“Full Circle” relies more on detail than on back stories — Quaid’s character, Chef Jeff, has a ponytail that speaks volumes about his personality. Was there a deliberate effort to be lean?SODERBERGH There can be a tendency to spoon-feed the viewer about the back story of the characters before you’ve even really gotten into the story. That’s something that I resist as a viewer, and it’s something that I’ve tried to resist as a filmmaker. Most things that I see, both movies and television, are too long. My motto is, if it can be pulled out and it still works, it should be pulled out. I want this thing to be all marrow as much as possible.Dennis Quaid plays a celebrity chef whose empire has some unsavory ties.Sarah Shatz/MaxThe loose, sometimes shaggy atmosphere recalls the noir movies of the 1970s. Were they part of your influences?SODERBERGH I’m after a sort of discovered precision. I want the construction of something that’s been considered, but I want it to feel like it’s happening right in front of me for the first time. I was looking at “The French Connection,” the Sidney Lumet cop films from the ’70s, because I did want that kind of feeling.What draws you to noir?SODERBERGH It’s just a very cinematic form of storytelling. The conflicts are clear, they’re interesting. They inevitably lead to some burst of violence, either physical or emotional, because the pressure builds up in the clash between people’s dreams and desires, and reality, and shifting loyalties, mistrust, all of these things. It’s a very sexy genre to work in as a director.SOLOMON When people are hiding their truth from others, and then the circumstances pressurize them and they’re trying harder and harder to keep that from coming out — to me that’s an exciting place to write from.SODERBERGH Genre is just a great and efficient delivery system for ideas. It’s built to have a sort of superficial narrative layer and then this subterranean thematic space that you can put anything you’re interested in, and that’s what makes it fun.Zack Ryan’s score is interestingly jarring. Why did you set a gritty thriller to such lush music?SOLOMON We talked about Douglas Sirk at the very beginning.SODERBERGH I like the juxtaposition of that visual aesthetic and the sonic aesthetic of a ’50s melodrama. I didn’t want a hip, trendy score — I wanted something very classical and emotional. Which is not typical for me, to be this in your face or in your ears with the music, trying to enhance the emotional state of the character you’re watching.SOLOMON I never told you this: I had a theory that the score was doing the work that the original branching narrative was going to do, which was all about inner life and people’s emotional experience, while this other crime story was going on.It’s always a risk when form and content don’t gel.SODERBERGH I’ve seen extremely skilled filmmakers whose style is so developed and so detailed, you can feel the intelligence and the work. It exposes the fact that the script they’ve shot isn’t as good at its job as they are at their job. Your talent has to match your ambition — you need both, but if they’re out of whack, it’s not going to happen for you. I’ve seen talented people who are not ambitious enough. We see many more people who are more ambitious than they are talented. The universe eventually tends to catch up with them.Too much back story is “something that I resist as a viewer,” said Soderbergh (right, with Solomon, middle, and Olyphant). “And it’s something that I’ve tried to resist as a filmmaker.” Sarah ShatzDo you feel the writers’ strike is making people think harder about how movies and TV are made? Are you reflecting on the way you create?SODERBERGH It’s something I think about a lot. My entire career has been a test of my ability to improve and optimize my work process, which is about getting to the best version of something as quickly as possible with the least amount of drama and ego. I don’t feel that the work we’re doing is necessarily important with a capital I, but it’s also not meaningless. I want to be in that space of taking it as seriously as it needs to be taken to be good. Because if you take it too seriously, it tips over into indulgence, and that’s not what I want.SOLOMON I think art made by human beings has a feel that cannot be replicated. The problem is, the people making decisions on the highest level that are all about bottom line and “How can I get rid of as many human beings as possible?” don’t have the ability to judge what is good art and not good art. My fear is, if we don’t draw a line in the sand now, we’re going to continue to a place where a lot of people are out of work.What keeps you on your toes?SODERBERGH I need a pocket of fear to keep me alert.Where was that pocket on “Full Circle”?SODERBERGH The complexity of the story, of the schedule. You need that sense that this could go sideways if I don’t execute at the best of my ability. You’ve got to find this balance of being self-critical without being paralyzed. You have to make decisions but you’ve also got to be willing to say to yourself: “That can be better. It has to be better.”SOLOMON I want to be a better writer on the other end of it. I want to know that I will have learned a lot about myself, about this project. I will push myself to a degree that when I come out the other end of it, I’m moving forward, I’ve learned stuff. More

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      in Music

      “The White Lotus” Dance Remix is the Hottest Club Song

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      Variations of the spine-tingling intro music have played at rave parties, Australian music festivals and Sundance.On a recent club night in Chicago, a high-pitched woman’s voice that sounded like a gobbling turkey — dropping acid — brought everyone to the dance floor. Some people swayed, twisting their hips and twirling their hair in a hypnotic lock step. Others pumped their fists and jumped up and down. One woman let out a high-pitched scream, as though she’d just spotted Chris Hemsworth at the grocery store.The tune was the EDM dance remix of “Renaissance (Main Title Theme),” the wordless title music that plays over the opening credits of Season 2 of “The White Lotus,” the hit HBO Max series about a group of wealthy people who vacation at the luxury resort — and the people who serve them.Since the second season, set in Sicily, began in late October, remixes of the oscillating harp notes, written by the Chilean Canadian composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer, have spread across TikTok, SoundCloud and in the EDM community. Remixes are now playing in clubs and at music festivals. Last weekend, at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, Diplo unveiled his own mix at 1:30 a.m. “Renaissance” is a variation on the series’s Season 1 theme, “Aloha! — Main Title Theme,” also by Mr. Tapia de Veer,  which features drums and bird songs (that season was set in Maui) and won an Emmy for best original main title theme music. “Aloha” had the same choppy melody, though it did not take off on TikTok or spawn a club following like “Renaissance.”What’s different about Mr. Tapia de Veer’s new beat? Here’s how the song became a crowd-pleasing anthem.Wait, doesn’t everyone nowadays just skip past a show’s theme song?Aah, the “skip intro” button debate. When it’s the intro song to “The Big Bang Theory?” Yes. When the composer has won an Emmy? Your loss.When did the song take off on TikTok?After the first episode of the new season dropped Oct. 30, someone realized: The high-pitched yodeling was danceable. And unlike the Season 1 variation, “Renaissance” climaxes to a throbbing EDM beat near the one-minute mark (the entire song runs 1 minute and 38 seconds long).Over the next few months, thousands of videos flooded the platform, with users setting the ethereal earworm to their own kooky dance moves, frying eggs and lawn manicuring.Why can’t I get it out of my head?Edward Venn, a professor of music at Leeds University in England, broke it down for British GQ in the fall: “It’s the way that the initial minor chord moves to the major — offering a sense of hope, of respite — only for it to slide back, continually and unstoppably, to the threatening implications of that minor chord,” he said.So how did it get into clubs?For weeks, Twitter, TikTok and Instagram users have been sharing videos of partygoers dancing ecstatically as the twisted operatic notes soar through basement bars and packed clubs.The rapper and “Euphoria” star Dominic Fike closed a set at the Terminal 5 music venue in Manhattan with the eerie melody in December, the latest instance of a tune from TV becoming a party staple (we see you, Wednesday Addams and your jerky, infectious “Goo Goo Muck” dance).Where else has it shown up?It turns out that the operatic discothèque sound bath — punctuated by human screeches — works just as well on a large scale as a small one. The Killers opened several stadium shows in December with the song.Days before the show’s finale, a music festival in Australia played the song, to which many in the crowd of thousands of bucket-hatted and fanny-packed revelers tried to vocalize — erm, sing? — along.A heart-pounding remix of the ululating anthem even made an appearance at the end of a “Saturday Night Live” skit last weekend, played by another pop culture phenom: the killer robot doll M3gan, the newly minted camp horror icon with some dance moves of her own.What are some of the best remixes?One popular mash-up features Jennifer Coolidge and her meme-ready rant: “Please, these gays. They’re trying to murder me.”  Another, unveiled by the Dutch DJ Tiësto at a Miami Beach club on New Year’s Eve, makes you want to bang your head until you can’t feel your face. And there is a luscious tech house beat by Westend that will have your stereo shaking.“It captured the feral nature that’s inside all of us and that especially comes out on the dance floor,” said Tyler Morris, a New York-based DJ and music producer who spins under the name Westend. “Every time I play it in my DJ sets, it’s a showstopper.”How do you dance to it?Fist pumps, waving arms and synchronized — or not — flailing limbs, seem to be popular. The robot — or even a fast-moving zombie imitation à la “The Last of Us” — might work well here.Any word on the theme music for Season 3?While the show has been renewed for a third season, there’s no word yet on the next resort destination. The only thing that might be more popular than the EDM “Renaissance”? A K-pop version. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Stars at Noon,’ ‘Vortex’ and More of This Year’s Streaming Gems

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      A look back at some of the finest under-the-radar streaming picks of the year.December is upon us, prompting a glut of year-end best-of lists from film critics, awards-giving bodies and various experts. Most of those feature titles you might not have seen, and some you haven’t even heard of. In that year-end wrap-up spirit, this month’s guide to the hidden gems of your subscription streaming services consists solely of films released in the United States during the past calendar year. Check out some obscurities, and impress your friends and colleagues at holiday parties.‘Stars at Noon’Stream it on Hulu.Claire Denis’s erotic drama is immersed in the worlds of journalism, espionage and geopolitics, but the real subject is one of her standbys: the sexual dynamics between men and women, and the transactional nature therein. The participants here are Trish (Margaret Qualley), an underemployed American journalist in Nicaragua who’s doing a bit of sex work as a side hustle, and Daniel (Joe Alwyn), a British businessman who’s both buying and selling. Denis keenly observes how the power shifts between them, and rarely without a struggle; their dialogue scenes have a cockeyed unpredictability, particularly since one or both is always in a state of desperation. Alwyn is fine, good even, but Qualley is a revelation; she is, by turns, funny, sexy, savvy and broken.‘Vortex’Stream it on Mubi.The extremist Argentine-French filmmaker Gaspar Noé’s most recent effort is his gentlest, though only because he’s best known for provocations like “Irreversible,” “Enter the Void” and “Climax.” Here, he tells the story of a long-married couple (played by the Italian filmmaker Dario Argento and the French actress Françoise Lebrun) and how their idyllic retirement is ripped apart by her increasingly debilitating dementia. It sounds not unlike Michael Haneke’s devastating “Amour,” a similarly dour tale of aging and mortality, but Noé inserts an additional visual dimension: He plays out the events in split-screen, with her separative frame a devastating visualization of her mental isolation — a stylistic flourish that makes this harrowing drama all the more affecting.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.Rian Johnson:  The “Glass Onion” director explains the streaming plan for his “Knives Out” franchise.‘The Survivor’Stream it on HBO Max.Once upon a time, a Barry Levinson-directed feature based on a true story, with an all-star cast and successful debut at the Toronto International Film Festival, would have been a shoo-in for Oscar consideration. In today’s peculiar marketplace, it’s bought up by HBO only to never be seen again. But this is a stellar historical drama, with Ben Foster in fine form (both dramatically and athletically) as Harry Haft, an Auschwitz captive who survived his time there by boxing, and later used those skills to make a career as a boxer in America. The fight scenes are brutal, the dramatic stretches wrenching, and Levinson orchestrates his first-rate cast with aplomb.‘Elesin Olba: The King’s Horseman’Stream it on Netflix.In 1943, in the region of Africa now known as Nigeria, the longstanding tradition of the tribal king’s horseman committing ritual suicide after the death of the king (and thus following him into the afterlife) was prevented by British colonialists. That true event inspired Wole Soyinka’s venerable play “Death and the King’s Horseman,” which was adapted into this absorbing feature film by the Nigerian novelist, playwright and filmmaker Biyi Bandele (who died just before its premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival). The portraiture of customs and rituals is fascinating, and the Brits are properly villainous. But the film truly comes alive in its closing scenes, a thought-provoking and thoughtful contemplation of mortality and responsibility.‘Navalny’Stream it on HBO Max.Between interviews for Daniel Roher’s documentary, but on a hot mic, the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny tells a friend, “He’s filming it all for the movie he’s gonna release if I get whacked.” That candor and fearlessness was part of what made Navalny a thorn in the side of Putin’s Kremlin, and as such, he was the target of a likely assassination attempt by poisoning in 2020. Roher’s cameras follow Navalny as he recovers, prepares to return to Russia and participates in an independent investigation of the poisoning, resulting in an explosive, accidental confession by one of the perpetrators. Roher carefully avoids outright hagiography (via evenhanded discussion of Navalny’s image and ethics), using his access and materials to assemble a first-rate, though nonfiction, political thriller.‘My Old School’Stream it on Hulu.The story of a supposedly 17-year-old secondary school student who was revealed, after over a year in classes, to be a 32-year-old former student caused a sensation in Scotland (where it occurred) and across Europe — so much so that it was slated to be adapted into a feature film, with the actor Alan Cumming in the leading role. That film was never made, but now the story has become a documentary, and since the film’s subject would consent only to an audio interview, Cumming appears on camera to lip-sync the man’s words. (Got that?) The rest of the tall tale is told via animation, archival footage and alternately funny and contemplative contemporary interviews with the classmates of “Brandon Lee,” who attempt to puzzle out why they were so easily fooled, and (in the stellar closing sections) how well they remember the entire affair. The director Jono McLeod tells the story straight, as they all heard it and as “Lee” told it, which makes for a wild, twisty ride indeed.‘Free Chol Soo Lee’Stream it on Mubi.Everybody loves the story of an innocent man, wrongfully accused and then rightfully freed, and it’s been a standby of documentary cinema since (at least) “The Thin Blue Line.” Julie Ha and Eugene Yi’s film begins as that movie, relating how Chol Soo Lee was convicted and imprisoned for a murder in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1973, based on scant evidence and flimsy eyewitness testimony, only to become a common cause for the Korean American community until he was finally freed more than a decade later. But that’s only part of the story. With sensitivity and nuance, the filmmakers follow Lee’s troubled post-prison journey, reminding us that happy endings are often temporary. A riveting and often heartbreaking tale. More

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      in Television

      Is Bilal Baig Ready for Fame? Sort Of.

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      “Sort Of,” the melancholy comedy loosely based on the performer’s life and experiences, returns for its second season on HBO Max on Dec. 1.Only a few minutes after the writer and performer Bilal Baig arrived at an upstairs gallery of the Whitney Museum of American Art, a fan approached.“Are you in a Canadian TV show?” a man in a pink shirt said. “It’s the best show ever.”Baig acknowledged the compliment politely, though so quietly as to discourage further conversation. The man’s wistful closing salvo: “I’ll never be as cool as you.”On that morning at the Whitney, Baig, 28, did look chic, in a knit dress, teal trench coat and high-heeled boots. Most people don’t wear jewel-toned leather without some comfort in visibility. But for Baig, a Toronto native and a queer transfeminine Muslim artist at the mostly sweet center of overlapping identities, being seen has its complications. (Baig typically uses they/them pronouns but accepts others. “Anything except the pronouns I was given,” they said. “Also, gender to me is so much about what other people are throwing on. I’m just rolling with it.”)In “Sort Of,” the HBO Max half-hour comedy Baig created with the writer and performer Fab Filippo, Baig stars as Sabi Mehboob, a gender nonbinary nanny and bartender. Baig is not Sabi. Sabi trained as an electrician; Baig studied theater. And Baig has been out for years longer, and in generally more accepting places. Yet overlap remains. Both share a watchfulness, as well as a sense of humor so dry it’s practically a weather event.Baig with Amanda Cordner in “Sort Of,” which returns for its second season on Dec. 1.HBO MaxWhen asked about similarities, Baig said, “The thing that I feel most connected to with that character is the level of guardedness, which is probably common in the transfeminine experience. I understand why Sabi doesn’t trust the world and trust people in general. I get that on a deep psychological level.“There is always a piece of, Is someone going to hurt me?” Baig continued. “Is someone looking at me in a way that maybe isn’t exactly how I want them to look at me? It’s fascinating. I live that every day.”“Sort Of,” which returns to HBO Max for a second season on Dec. 1, got started in 2018. Baig, a recent theater graduate who had a small role in a Toronto play, began chatting backstage with Filippo, who was also in the cast. Filippo suggested collaborating on a TV show, specifically a TV show inspired by Baig’s life. Baig had never really done TV before and was seriously considering abandoning acting for nonprofit work. But the idea was intriguing.“It felt challenging and scary,” Baig said. “So I really wanted to do it.”There were more conversations. Filippo recalled a day early on in which he admitted struggling with ‘they’ as a singular pronoun. “Like, ‘I just can’t get around the plural,’” he recalled saying. “And Bilal very gently said, ‘Or maybe you don’t quite see me yet.’ They held this really strong line with a kind of grace that was really exceptional.”Together the two creators decided that “Sort Of,” which grew to include the family for which Sabi nannies and also Sabi’s own families, biological and found, would focus on identity and transition in a general sense, not a particular one. A mellow, finely observed comedy, it recognizes that almost all of us are in transition in one way or another, if we will only stop to notice.Themes and questions that might have seemed pertinent — How does Sabi identify? Will people accept Sabi? Will people find Sabi attractive? — are mostly settled or not especially important. Instead, Baig and Filippo modeled the comedy on that of other shows about 20-somethings juggling jobs, friends and romantic partners.“If we just don’t change much about that but insert this body, this skin color, this gender into it, that felt fresh and funny to us,” Baig said. “And like, it’s possible.”Some elements were borrowed, directly or circuitously, from Baig’s life. Many of Sabi’s habits of gesture and expression are Baig all the way — the long pauses, the crushing deadpan, the purposefully blank expression. Sabi’s relationship with their parents doesn’t map onto Baig’s exactly. But Sabi does experience estrangement, particularly from their father. And Baig feels some estrangement, too.“The ties between us are, I feel, quite unraveled,” Baig said of their parents. “They know about the show. They know about how I move through the world. But it’s not rosy at all.”And yet Baig moves through the world with more sureness than Sabi, even as performer and character share a belief that the world may not always be welcoming. Ellora Patnaik, the actress who plays Sabi’s mother, has known Baig for years.“Bilal is in a place of much more confidence, and awareness, and really looking forward to the future with more certainty than uncertainty,” Patnaik said in a recent interview. “Not that everything is rock solid, especially in their community. But they can look at things and really, really feel like they have a bit more control over their life. Sabi, they’re still searching.”The creators didn’t want that search to feel singular. Baig and Filippo were determined to show a variety of genders, ages and sexual and racial identities, suggesting a rich spectrum of human experience rather than fixed points. And mindful of shows in which queer and transgender characters meet tragic ends, they wanted to provide a counternarrative.“That was actually easy,” Baig said. “All we had to do was not show Sabi getting killed. Literally, that was it.”Yet, “Sort Of” advances no particular agenda, and if the show is provocative, that provocation comes from its lived-in tone, its quietness, its broad acceptance of its characters.“I get human beings,” Baig said. “I get excited by them. I want to throw them in spaces where they’re talking to each other.”“The thing that I feel most connected to with that character is the level of guardedness,” Baig said about Sabi, the protagonist of “Sort Of.”Yael Malka for The New York TimesA company called Sphere Media put up the money for a sizzle reel, which convinced the Canadian Broadcasting Company to order the series. Just before filming began, HBO Max joined, too, which Baig described as terrifying: “It’s the pressure of, OK, we’ll be reaching so many more people.”“Sort Of” was spared the pressure of being the first show to orbit a nonbinary main character. That honor likely goes to Mae Martin’s Netflix comedy “Feel Good.” But that first shoot, which began at the height of the pandemic, still felt fraught.“Everybody thought they were going to die,” Filippo said. “Going to work was pretty scary.”Everyone made it through, and the show, which debuted in November 2021, quickly became a critic’s darling. (“It is the kind of representation everyone deserves,” a critic from Mashable wrote, “and ‘Sort Of’ makes it look easy.”) It received a Peabody and won the best comedy prize at the Canadian Screen Awards. Baig declined to submit in either the actor or actress categories, which helped nudge the awards toward removing gender from its acting categories altogether.This approval has brought Baig a level of fame that is just on the edge of comfortable. At the Whitney, I had planned to ask whether Baig was famous-famous or still only Canada-famous, which was when the man in the pink shirt approached. Turns out the man was from Toronto, so that was one answer.Baig said: “Especially in Toronto, there’s a respect. People say really nice things and then totally leave me alone.”If fame has never been the goal, Baig appreciates the opportunities it provides to tell more stories, stories that aren’t necessarily Baig’s own. “There’s more I want to create and say,” they said.In the meantime, Baig would welcome at least a third season to round off Sabi’s story. This next season focuses on love, in all of its forms. An additional season might see Sabi settling even deeper into their identity.“These walls that are up for them are just very slowly coming down,” Baig said.Baig has walls, too, of course, and they’ll come down or they won’t. But this sense of apartness, of reserve, has made Baig a keen observer of human behavior, a quality that twines with an innate empathy to produce the distinctive tone of “Sort Of” — caustic, melancholy, ultimately generous.An hour into the visit, we had taken the stairs down to an exhibit of Edward Hopper paintings. Baig paused at a painting of a woman sitting up in bed, lit by a low morning sun.“This feels like something I would do,” Baig said. “I’m good with it. I think sad people are fascinating.” More

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      in Television

      Evan Mock Is Having the Best Time

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      After a childhood of surfing and skateboarding on Oahu’s North Shore, the “Gossip Girl” star, party-circuit fixture and friend to many brands is making waves on the island of Manhattan.On a recent afternoon, Evan Mock was trying to do laundry in his East Village condo, but something was wrong with the dryer. Perturbed beeps cut through the retro-soul music playing in the airy third-floor walk-up. The machine kept starting and stopping. He mentioned a theory, something about excessive lint accumulation and a defective filter.Mr. Mock, 25, is probably best known for his role as the pink-haired, Park Avenue-raised, Tarkovsky-loving bisexual son of a right-wing media mogul on the HBO Max reboot of “Gossip Girl,” which returns for its second season on Dec. 1. But the downtown denizen has a lot of other things going on.A king of the “collab,” he has worked with brands including the Danish jewelry manufacturer Pandora and the Italian footwear designer Giuseppe Zanotti. He has modeled for designers including Paco Rabanne and Virgil Abloh. His skateboarding prowess has landed him a hefty sponsorship from Hurley and an elusive spot on the Instagram grid of Frank Ocean. A few months ago he started a fashion line, Wahine, with the stylist Donté McGuine.He is a bona fide multi-hyphenate, a party-circuit fixture, an it boy, a man about town. Also, he has frosted tips now.Mr. Mock with his usual order at Madhufalla Organic Juice and Smoothie Bar on Mulberry Street: a shot of wheatgrass juice and a shot of ginger.Ryan Jones for The New York TimesDespite the hyper résumé, Mr. Mock is laid-back. Serene. As the light streamed into his apartment, he reclined by a floor-to-ceiling corner window. “Sometimes it’s too much,” he said, referring to the intense sunlight. “But I’m not complaining.”He took a swig of coconut water from a Tetra Pak. His feet were up. They were clad in last month’s limited release North Face x Paraboot shoes, the ones with the vulcanized rubber outsoles, matelassé full grain leather uppers and an elastic collar — a mule so exclusive that it was not even available for purchase. As the streetwear website Hypebeast reported: “Simply put, you cannot buy this.”Growing up, Mr. Mock often went around barefoot. Born and raised on the North Shore of Oahu, his father put him on his first surfboard when he was 2 years old. “I caught my first wave before I could swim,” he said.He was home-schooled into his teenage years to accommodate peak surf hours. Around age 11, he also got into skateboarding. (“Pretty late,” he said.) By 16, he was making more than $15,000 a month from skateboarding sponsorships. He then moved to California to pursue what he called his “skateboarding dreams.” (He did air quotes around the words “skateboarding dreams.”)Hints of his modeling career were scattered throughout the tidy two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment. On his kitchen counter sat a Louis Vuitton purse — a brand for which he walked the runway in 2019. In the corner of the living room, there was an overflowing Rimowa suitcase — the luxury German luggage maker for which he wrote, co-produced and starred in an online commercial last year. It shows Mr. Mock skateboarding through Manhattan donning a Rimowa cross-body messenger bag as he recounts, in a voice-over narrative, a whirlwind romance with a girl he met outside a club in Barcelona. Entranced by her beauty, he speaks of impulsively buying her a ticket to accompany him to Paris. But a lost passport, a brief stint in airport jail and six-hour flight delay put an end to the fling.Across the room, by a stack of shoe boxes, what looked at first like a regular McDonald’s Happy Meal box, was, upon closer inspection, a box of Cactus Plant Flea Market x McDonald’s collectibles from the streetwear label’s limited-run release. The figurines (originally retailing around $10) were reportedly listed on eBay for over $25,000, though the prices have since dropped significantly.Mr. Mock got up to clean his lint trap. “Let’s just get on some bikes,” he said.He puts a lot of mileage on his VanMoof e-bike. The day before, he rode uptown for a “Gossip Girl” A.D.R. (automated dialogue replacement) session, then back down to the Lower East Side to check out a Japanese whiskey bar he might invest in on Chrystie Street.“We could go to Curbs,” Mr. Mock said, referring to a section of Lafayette Street that has become popular among New York skateboarders for the many curbs afforded by its triangular layout.He started to get changed, switching his white T-shirt for a vintage dark gray Number Nine T-shirt. Above the chest pocket it had a small graphic of a speech bubble containing the word “cigarettes.” “It’s a Japanese brand that was illest back in the day,” Mr. Mock said of Number Nine. “Everyone in Japan knows what’s up.”Mr. Mock with Mr. Hiraga in Lower Manhattan.Ryan Jones for The New York TimesHe put on and then took off a hoodie of his own design, a boxy Wahine zip-up. On the front, the outline of a valentine heart surrounding a word that cannot be printed in The New York Times. “I drew it on my friend’s bathroom wall and then I took a picture of it,” he said of the design’s origin.He completed the outfit with a pair of dark-wash Palace jeans, Ambush edition Nike Air Adjust Force sneakers, a silver bomber jacket, a Palace hat and Isabel Marant sunglasses. Outside, he glided through Alphabet City on his next-gen smart-tech bike. As the scenery swept by, he kept one hand in the pocket of the unzipped bomber.Near the REI store, he swerved lithely across Houston Street to give a hello kiss to the photographer Gray Sorrenti, who happened to be passing by with the model-actress Blue Lindeberg. The chance encounter took place directly across from the 55-by-75-foot Calvin Klein billboard where, one year ago, Mr. Mock had appeared, smiling down at NoHo in nothing but black boxer briefs and thigh tattoos.The next stop was Madhufalla, a juice and smoothie bar on Mulberry Street. Mr. Mock ordered his usual: a ginger shot and a wheatgrass shot. “Sweeter than you’d think,” he said. He downed both in the store and ordered an açai berry almond milk smoothie to go.“Sometimes it’s too much,” Mr. Mock said of the intense sunlight in his New York apartment. “But I’m not complaining.”Ryan Jones for The New York TimesAround the corner, at Curbs, he fist-bumped a couple of acquaintances before taking a seat on a bench. Between sips of the smoothie, he talked about “Gossip Girl.” The original CW series, which ran from 2007 through 2012, was, he said, “before my time.” And when the showrunner of the HBO Max reboot, Joshua Safran, reached out to him about playing the part of Aki Menzies, Mr. Mock had never acted.“There were a lot of different firsts,” he said. “When I first read the script, I thought there was nothing more opposite than my actual life. In terms of living somewhere cold, going to a private school, all the drama.”He paused. Then picked up again: “It’s funny, because I never actually went to school. But the character is basically me — besides being filthy rich, going to a private school and living uptown in New York.”A game of eight ball at Ace Bar.Ryan Jones for The New York TimesOn his first day of filming, he had to take part in a sex scene with Emily Alyn Lind, the actress who plays his girlfriend. The inherently awkward situation had the added discomfort of taking place in September 2020. Between shots, the cast members wore K95 masks and plastic face coverings. During their downtime, the actors had to isolate in a room by themselves until they were called back to the set. “But, honestly, I’m kind of glad it happened like that, because we got the weird stuff out of the way,” Mr. Mock said. “Hopefully, everything from here on out will be a little bit quote-unquote normal.”He watched a skateboarder wipe out in front of the bistro Jack’s Wife Freda. Ms. Lindeberg, the actress and model, walked by again. This is something Mr. Mock loves about New York: “You basically have no option but to see homies everywhere you go,” he said. As if on cue, another friend, the actor Nico Hiraga, rode up on a skateboard, joined shortly by another skateboarding friend, George Hemp.“We could go play pool,” Mr. Mock suggested.Soon Mr. Hiraga and Mr. Hemp got Citi Bikes, and the group headed north. All three biked almost exclusively one-handed. The ride was punctuated by more run-ins. On St. Marks Place, Mr. Mock pulled over to hug his brand-deal agent, Jenelle Phillip, who was outdoor-dining at Cafe Mogador. On East 10th Street, at the edge of Tompkins Square Park, he stopped to chat with the skateboarding documentarian Greg Hunt, who was out with his camera, trying to take advantage of the good light. Mr. Mock said he had spotted other familiar faces in the 12-block journey, but he couldn’t pull over for everyone.It was early evening by the time he and his friends reached the Ace Bar on East Fifth Street. “Meet the Fockers” was playing on the TV screen above the Skee-Ball machine.“I love this movie,” Mr. Hiraga said, smiling. “I’m in my saga era.”A few feet from the pool table, a man stood contrapposto, beer in one hand, the other, adamantly on his hip. Mr. Mock said he tends to stand similarly, in a kind of half-akimbo pose. Skateboarders have a certain way of holding themselves — Mr. Mock offered the word “feminine” to describe it, but then agreed that it’s more about fluidity, or a specific grace that comes from being in a constant negotiation with gravity.He added that he has broken each arm three times. In one spill, he broke four fingers. What happens, he explained, is that you learn how to fall.Mr. Mock frequently travels through Manhattan by e-bike.Ryan Jones for The New York Times“If you watch skaters fall, it looks like Bruce Lee fighting water,” Mr. Mock said. “Falling in the same certain type of way, you get reflexes after a while. You can save yourself most of the time, but sometimes you can’t.”Is breaking bones scary?“It just comes with it,” he said. “You expect it.”He turned back to the pool table, adjusting his Palace jeans, which were more or less held up by a leather belt that he said he had gotten from “some random dude in Rome.” More

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      Why Did It Take HBO So Long to Make Shows About Women?

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      An early top executive at the network believed that “the man of the house” paid for cable TV subscriptions. That mind-set affected HBO’s programming for decades.On “House of the Dragon,” Emma D’Arcy plays a would-be queen who is weighing what to do in the face of betrayal. On “Euphoria,” Zendaya plays a high school student who starts using drugs shortly after leaving rehab. On “The White Lotus,” which returns for its second season on Sunday night, Jennifer Coolidge plays a dazed heiress trying to escape her troubles in the comforts of a Sicilian luxury hotel.These characters are the new faces of HBO, the Emmy-magnet cable network that, until recently, specialized in making programs about men for men. In fits and starts over the last two decades, the network has at last begun to move away from the leering lotharios of its early years and the tortured male antiheroes of its middle period to present shows built around complicated women who drive the action.In the 1980s, when HBO was just starting to make original programming, its top executives made a point of appealing to male viewers. It was a strategy that affected the network’s creative output for years to come.Jennifer Coolidge, center, in a scene from Season 2 of “The White Lotus.” Fabio Lovino/HBOEmma D’Arcy, right, with Olivia Cooke in HBO’s latest ratings hit, “House of the Dragon.”Ollie Upton/HBO“I’ve figured out through research, and in my own mind, that the man of the house decided whether to have HBO or not,” said Michael Fuchs, the channel’s top executive when it started to concentrate on original programming, in a 2010 interview with the Television Academy.“I made sure that there were things for men,” he continued. “If commercial television had a female slant, HBO had a male slant.”The network bet big on stand-up comedy specials featuring mostly male comics in the years when it was defining the look and feel of premium cable. Without the restrictions of broadcast TV, George Carlin, Chris Rock and Robin Williams were free to do their routines unfettered.In the 1980s, the network cemented its identity as one that appealed to men when it signed the heavyweight champion Mike Tyson to an exclusive deal. At the same time, HBO started airing the documentary series “Eros America,” which was soon renamed “Real Sex.” It kicked off a run of sex-focused documentary shows, which would include “G String Divas,” “Cathouse” and “Sex Bytes.”HBO’s early forays into scripted programming followed a similar tack. John Landis, an executive producer of “Dream On,” a comedy about a male book editor that made its debut in 1990, used the show’s gratuitous nudity as a selling point. “We have breasts in the script just for the sake of seeing breasts,” he said in a 1992 interview. “Excuse me, but what’s so bad about that?”Susie Fitzgerald, an HBO programming executive from 1984 to 1995, said “Dream On” appealed to her bosses because it was cheap to make and “it featured nudity — female nudity, of course.” She recalled HBO’s research executives preaching that men “controlled the remote.” That line of thinking became a factor in programming decisions, she added.Return to Westeros in ‘House of the Dragon’HBO’s long-awaited “Game of Thrones” prequel series is here.Playing Kingmaker: Fabien Frankel plays Ser Criston Cole, who got to place the crown on the new King of Westeros’s head. He is still not sure how he landed the role.The Princess and the Queen: Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke, who portray the grown-up versions of Rhaenyra Targaryen and Alicent Hightower, talked about the forces that drive their characters apart — and pull them together.A Man’s Decline: By the eighth episode of the season, Viserys no longer looks like a proud Targaryen king. The actor Paddy Considine discussed the character’s transformation and its meaning.A Rogue Prince: Daemon Targaryen is an agent of chaos. But “he’s got a strange moral compass of his own,” Matt Smith, who portrays him, said.Ms. Fitzgerald, who helped oversee HBO comedy specials starring Ellen DeGeneres, Roseanne Barr and Whoopi Goldberg, was part of the team behind the network’s first series to win widespread acclaim, “The Larry Sanders Show,” about an insecure talk-show host and cocreated by and starring Garry Shandling. Around the time of its debut, Ms. Fitzgerald said she floated the idea that a woman should be the lead of an HBO comedy series. She faced resistance when she brought it up, she said.The beginning of the shift toward productions centered on women did not come about until 1996, with the premiere of “If These Walls Could Talk,” a movie chronicling abortion in three different decades. It was produced by Demi Moore, who also had a leading role in the film.HBO didn’t give the green light to “If These Walls Could Talk” in the hope that it would attract large numbers of viewers and subscribers. The network’s main interest was in doing business with Ms. Moore, who was then at the height of her fame.“If These Walls Could Talk” did have something in common with HBO’s other productions, though: It had a strong point of view — fiercely in favor of abortion — and it was not a fit for broadcast TV or basic cable, which made money by keeping skittish advertisers happy.When the ratings came in, the executives were floored: “If These Walls Could Talk” had attracted the largest audience ever for an HBO production, contradicting its “man-of-the-house” programming strategy.Shortly afterward, HBO bought the option for “Sex and the City,” a book by Candace Bushnell on the lives of single women in Manhattan. The series ran from 1998 to 2004, becoming a cultural touchstone and winning 7 Emmys (out of 54 nominations). It also spawned two feature films, a popular sequel series, “And Just Like That,” for HBO’s streaming service, HBO Max, and countless memes.Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw in the long-running HBO series “Sex and the City.”HBO, via Everett CollectionBut just as “Sex and the City” was in the middle of its run, HBO went back to the old playbook, adding “The Mind of the Married Man” to its prime-time schedule. The half-hour series was centered on a married Chicago newspaperman, his married pals and their sex lives. Writing in Entertainment Weekly, the critic Ken Tucker called the show a “rancid little barf-com” and found fault with its “moronic sexism.” And soon after 10 million viewers tuned in for the “Sex and the City” finale, HBO returned to a bro-y sensibility with “Entourage,” about young men on the loose in Hollywood.When Casey Bloys, the current head of programming at HBO, joined the network in 2004, its audience was still largely male, thanks to a cluster of shows — “Oz,” “The Sopranos,” “The Wire” — that chronicled the exploits of male antiheroes and outlaws.“There was definitely a core male 25- to 54-year-old audience,” Mr. Bloys said.Some HBO series appealed to women — Alan Ball’s “True Blood” and Michael Patrick King’s and Lisa Kudrow’s “The Comeback” — but old habits were hard to shake.In 2010, Mr. Bloys and his colleagues in the programming department were impressed by a proposal from a 23-year-old writer and filmmaker, Lena Dunham, for a series about young women in New York. Other executives were against it, partly because of the age of Ms. Dunham’s central characters, who were more than a decade younger than the “Sex and the City” foursome.“The prevailing wisdom of the time was that men basically subscribed,” Mr. Bloys said. “So in conversations around ‘Girls,’ they said we had never done a show with that young a lead and a female lead that young. The idea was young adults were not deciding to subscribe to HBO because they weren’t the head of the household.”After Mr. Bloys and his associates prevailed, “Girls” became a critical hit and fodder for thousands of think pieces. “Veep,” starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a U.S. vice president, was right around the corner.Even so, shows about men remained HBO’s stock in trade, along with certain tropes that had devolved into cliché. In a 2011 essay, “HBO, you’re busted,” Mary McNamara, a critic for The Los Angeles Times, blasted the network for its overreliance on scenes set in strip clubs and brothels.Must every HBO drama, Ms. McNamara lamented, feature shadowy men conducting business against a backdrop of unclad women? She cited “The Sopranos,” “Game of Thrones,” “Rome,” “Deadwood” and “Boardwalk Empire” as the biggest offenders, noting that “HBO has a higher population of prostitutes per capita than Amsterdam or Charlie Sheen’s Christmas card list.”The cast of “The Mind of the Married Man,” a critical flop.Anthony Friedkin/HBOJames Gandolfini as the HBO antihero Tony Soprano.Anthony Neste/Getty ImagesBy the time Mr. Bloys took over the programming department in 2016, 57 percent of viewers of HBO’s Sunday prime-time lineup were male, according to Nielsen. As Mr. Bloys settled into his new role, the network began a reboot of the cultural shift it had attempted two decades earlier with “If These Walls Could Talk” and “Sex and the City.”“My philosophy as a programmer was, if you’ve got a male core, that’s great,” Mr. Bloys said. “You do want to make sure you’re tending to that core audience, but you also have to broaden out from that. You can do both.”As the #MeToo movement ousted men in positions of power in the media industry, the signature HBO protagonist began to change. There were still shows centered on tortured male antiheroes — “Succession,” for one — but more and more, a new character came to the fore: the tough but flawed heroine who is looking to right past wrongs.“Big Little Lies,” starring Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon, chronicled a group of women in Monterey, Calif., who band together after one of their husbands, an abuser, is murdered. In “Sharp Objects,” Amy Adams played a self-harming newspaper reporter who investigates the murders of two girls in her Missouri hometown. In “Mare of Easttown,” Kate Winslet immersed herself in the role of a damaged police detective working to solve the murder of a teenage mother in blue-collar Pennsylvania. “I May Destroy You,” a coproduction with the BBC, starred Michaela Coel as a struggling writer who attempts to shed light on her own past rape.Michaela Coel was the star, writer and producer of “I May Destroy You.”HBO, via Associated PressMs. Coel was the creative force behind “I May Destroy You.” Another female writer-producer, Marti Noxon, was the creator of “Sharp Objects,” a limited series based on the novel by Gillian Flynn. But several other HBO shows with female protagonists were led by men: David E. Kelley was the showrunner of “Big Little Lies”; Brad Inglesby created “Mare of Easttown”; and Saverio Costanzo was the creator of HBO’s adaptation of “My Brilliant Friend,” a show adapted from the Neapolitan novels series by Elena Ferrante.HBO reapplied the lesson it had learned from “Girls” when it signed off on “Euphoria,” a series about the drug-fueled escapades of teenagers created by Sam Levinson, with Zendaya in a starring role. Earlier this year, that show became the most-watched HBO program since the network’s biggest hit, “Game of Thrones.”The results of the shift have been evident in the makeup of the audience for HBO, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in November, and the streaming platform that shares its name. According to Nielsen, those watching the cable channel had a 50-50 male-female split in 2021, and 52 percent of HBO Max’s viewers in September were women.“I think that any brand — this is not specific to television — has to evolve,” Mr. Bloys said. “You can’t just kind of become comfortable and think, ‘Well, we know how to do one thing and let’s keep doing it.’” More

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      ‘Succession’ Wins Best Drama at Emmys as HBO Triumphs Again

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      “Succession,” HBO’s portrait of a dysfunctional media dynasty, won best drama at the 74th Emmy Awards on Monday night, the second time the series has taken the prize.Jesse Armstrong, the show’s creator, also took home the Emmy for best writing, the third time he’s won in that category. And Matthew Macfadyen won best supporting actor in a drama for the first time for his performance on the show.It was the sixth time in eight years that HBO has taken the television industry’s biggest prize for a recurring series, making it yet another triumphant night for the cable network. HBO, as well as its streaming service, HBO Max, won more Emmys (38) than any other outlet, besting its chief rival, Netflix (26).“The White Lotus,” the cable network’s beloved upstairs-downstairs dramedy that took place at a Hawaiian resort, won best limited series, and tore through several other categories. The show won 10 Emmys altogether, more than any other series. Mike White, the show’s creator and director, won a pair of Emmys for best directing and writing. And performers from the show, Murray Bartlett and Jennifer Coolidge, both received acting Emmys.“Mike White, my God, thank you for giving me one of the best experiences of my life,” Bartlett, who played an off-the-wagon hotel manager, said from the Emmys stage.But HBO’s chronicles of the rich were not the only winners on Monday night.“Ted Lasso,” the Apple TV+ sports series, won best comedy for a second consecutive year, as the tech giant continues on an awards show tear. Apple TV+, which had its debut in November 2019, won best picture at the Oscars (“CODA”) earlier this year. And Jason Sudeikis repeated as best actor in a comedy as the fish-out-of-water soccer coach in “Ted Lasso.”There were other big moments in the comedy awards. Quinta Brunson, the creator of the good-natured ABC workplace sitcom, “Abbott Elementary,” about a group of elementary schoolteachers at an underfunded Philadelphia public school, won for best writing in a comedy. It was only the second time a Black woman won the award (Lena Waithe was the first, in 2017, for “Master of None”).In one of the night’s most electric moments, Sheryl Lee Ralph won best supporting actress in a comedy for her role on “Abbott Elementary” as a veteran teacher at the school. Ralph began her Emmys speech by singing “Endangered Species” by Dianne Reeves, and received a standing ovation from the room full of nominees. Her victory was also historic: It was only the second time a Black woman won the award. The last time was in 1987, when Jackée Harry won for her role in the NBC sitcom “227.”This has been the most competitive Emmys season ever: Submissions for all the categories surged, and 2022 is very likely to set yet another record for the highest number of scripted television series.But there was also a sense of concern among the executives, producers and agents in attendance at Monday night’s Emmy Awards, that 2022 represents the pinnacle of the so-called Peak TV era, which has produced the highest number of scripted television series, nearly every year, for more than a decade.Netflix, which lost subscribers this year for the first time in a decade, has laid off hundreds of staffers and is reining in its spending. HBO’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, has shelved projects and is about to lay off a significant number of employees. NBC executives are considering ending its prime-time lineup at 10 p.m., and handing the hour over to local stations.Business challenges aside, the night was mostly a feel-good celebration. Zendaya won her second Emmy by taking best actress in a drama for her role as a troubled teen in HBO’s “Euphoria.” Jean Smart repeated as the best actress in a comedy for her role as a Joan Rivers-like comedian in HBO Max’s “Hacks.”“Squid Game,” the blood-splattered, South Korean Netflix series, won a pair of awards: Lee Jung-jae for best actor in a drama, and Hwang Dong-hyuk for directing. Those wins represented a major breakthrough for a foreign language show as television becomes more global, and as American audiences are increasingly receptive to series with subtitles.Michael Keaton, who played a small town doctor in “Dopesick,” took the best actor award in a limited series. And Amanda Seyfried won best actress in a limited series for her well-received performance as Elizabeth Holmes in “The Dropout.”Emmy voters often have a habit of finding a winner, and sticking with it, and this year was no different. John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” won the best talk show category for a seventh consecutive year, and “Saturday Night Live” took the best variety sketch series for a sixth straight year.This year’s ceremony was the first return to the Microsoft Theater since the pandemic. Producers for the Emmys incorporated an element that it experimented with at last year’s ceremony, which took place inside a tent: Instead of theater-style seating, nominees were gathered around tables with bottles of champagne and wine around them.This year’s host, Kenan Thompson, the “Saturday Night Live” veteran, opened the ceremony in a top hat and led a group of dancers in a bizarre interpretive dance to theme songs of famous TV series like “Law & Order,” “The Brady Bunch” and “Game of Thrones.”During his monologue, Thompson took a dig at Netflix’s recent woes.“If you don’t know what ‘Squid Game’ is, it is the contest you enter when you’re in massive debt and desperate for money,” the host said. “Joining the cast next season? Netflix.” More