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      Jennifer Coolidge Wanted Out of ‘The White Lotus.’ Now She’s Emmy Nominated.

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      “It’s really an incredible surprise,” said Coolidge, who on Tuesday received the first Emmy nomination of her long career for the series.Jennifer Coolidge was beloved by comedy fans even before her breakout performance in the HBO series “The White Lotus.” A scene-stealer in hits like “American Pie” and “Best in Show,” her skills as a character actress — full-body commitment, inimitable comic timing — have sustained her through nearly three decades in film and television. But no role has been as juicy or complex as Tanya, the wealthy and bereaved resort guest she plays on “Lotus.” The ensemble limited series, created by Mike White, tied with “Ted Lasso” for the second-most nominations this year after “Succession,” another HBO show. Seven of Coolidge’s co-stars, including Connie Britton, Natasha Rothwell, Alexandra Daddario and Murray Bartlett, were also nominated.In a phone interview, Coolidge discussed why she initially tried to get out of “The White Lotus,” filming the show’s second season in Italy, and what she wants to do next. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.This is your first Emmy nomination. How does it feel?It feels great! I thought I’d already lost. Someone told me that if you’re nominated someone calls you at 5:30 or 6 a.m. So, by 7 a.m., when it didn’t happen, I was like “OK. Oh well,” and sort of let it go. Then when I got a call from my publicist saying it had happened, I was so confused. But it’s even more thrilling. It’s really an incredible surprise.You got your start on television, playing one of Jerry’s girlfriends on “Seinfeld” in the ’90s. Are you thinking about what this means in the longer arc of your career?You know, I’ve never been part of the awards seasons or anything, so you just sort of get used to that. I just thought, “Wow, that’s not my future.” In a million years, I didn’t think this would happen. I just can’t believe it. Really seriously can’t believe it.What did you make of the role of Tanya when Mike first pitched it to you?I certainly didn’t think it was going to lead to this. You know it was a huge risk for Mike to give me this big part. I’m sure he had to jump through hoops to get me approved, and that they were thinking of some more famous actresses. But he gave me this shot, and I’m thrilled because it could’ve gone a different way. I was sort of nervous about it and I tried to get out of it. I truly did. I was nervous about vain things, like not looking right and not being able to deliver somehow. I just didn’t want to fail, and I didn’t want to be the only one in the cast who didn’t pull through. But it’s a great life lesson: When you want to try to get out of something, maybe it’s the best thing you could be involved in.When you were in that phase of feeling like you wanted to get out of the role, what made you change your mind?It was this friend of mine, Chase Winton. I was in her living room and she asked me, “Are you going to go do that show in Hawaii?” I said “No, I’m not. I’m not in good shape. I look like hell.” I was eating pizzas and things through Covid, and I wasn’t … I just said, “I’ll do it another time.” And she just gave me this lecture. “Are you kidding me, Jennifer? Do you know what an idiot you’re being in this moment? I have to talk you out of making a terrible mistake.” If it hadn’t been for her, I wouldn’t have done it. I was going to tell Mike that I needed foot surgery or something, some silly excuse. But I’m so glad she talked me into it. Even if it didn’t lead to an Emmy situation, just to go do that job was such a positive thing.What was it about your friend’s lecture that broke through to you?She said, “Just own it, Jennifer, whatever you are. You’re out of shape? You’re not prepared? Just own it. Show up anyway.”Did the character feel different from roles you’ve played in the past?There are other people in my life who have given me some cool roles. But this was really on a different level because Mike knows me really well. He knew that I lost my mother in my early 30s and that it was a big deal, so he wrote this very cool part that was tailor-made for me. There’s no one cooler than Mike White. He loves actors, and he loves writing them great stuff.Have you spoken with him yet?No, he’s in Italy. I’m sure he’s getting lots of messages. But Reggie, you’re my first call.I’m honored. Can you tell me anything about the next season of “White Lotus”?I just did five months on it in Sicily. I got back like two weeks ago. I’ve been instructed that I’m not allowed to leak anything, but I have to say, from what I’ve witnessed, watching what some of the new actors are doing, people will not be disappointed. It’s a very elaborate story Mike is telling, and it was just incredible to be a part of.What do you want to do next?I would love to do a serious play. There’s some original stuff that I’ve heard might be coming my way, but it’s not confirmed yet. I’m just excited because things like this open the door for cool stuff. It’s harder to make things happen when you don’t have a lot happening. And then the minute you have a lot happening, the seas part. So who knows? The sky’s the limit. You get used to thinking in a certain way, and then something like “White Lotus” happens and you start to have bigger thoughts.After me, who’s the first person you want to celebrate with?As you and I were talking one minute ago, I got a FaceTime from Mike White. So I will be excited to call him back. More

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      ‘The Wire’ Creators, David Simon and Ed Burns, on the Show 20 Years Later

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      David Simon concedes that it takes a special kind of [expletive] to say, “I told you so.”“But I can’t help it, OK?” he said recently. “Nobody enjoys the guy who says, ‘I told you so,’ but it was organic. Ed and I and then the other writers, as they came on board, we had all been watching some of the same things happen in Baltimore.”Two decades ago, Simon, a former cops reporter at The Baltimore Sun, joined Ed Burns, a retired Baltimore homicide detective and public-school teacher, to create HBO’s “The Wire.” Fictitious but sourced from the Baltimore that Simon and Burns inhabited, “The Wire,” which premiered on June 2, 2002, introduced a legion of unforgettable characters like the gun-toting, code-abiding Omar Little (played by the late Michael K. Williams) and the gangster with higher aspirations, Stringer Bell (Idris Elba).They were indelible pieces of a crime show with a higher purpose: to provide a damning indictment of the war on drugs and a broader dissection of institutional collapse, expanding in scope over five seasons to explore the decline of working-class opportunity and the public education system, among other American civic pillars.Michael B. Jordan, left, and Larry Gilliard Jr. in the first season of “The Wire.” The show’s drug dealers were as complex and three-dimensional as its police.HBO, via PhotofestThis was not the stuff of hit TV: In real time, the show gained only a small, devoted audience and struggled to avoid cancellation. But over the years, “The Wire” became hailed as one of television’s greatest shows, even as the systemic decay it depicted became more pronounced in the eyes of its creators.Burns and Simon went on to collaborate on other high-minded projects for HBO, most recently “We Own This City,” a mini-series created by Simon and their fellow “Wire” alumnus George Pelecanos, based on the true story of the Baltimore Police Department’s corrupt Gun Trace Task Force. In separate interviews, Burns and Simon discussed the legacy of “The Wire” — Burns by phone from his Vermont home and Simon in person in HBO’s Manhattan offices — and why it couldn’t be made in the same way today. They also talked about the inspirations for the show and the devastating effect of America’s drug policies. These are edited excerpts from those conversations.Could you have ever imagined “The Wire” would have had this kind of staying power two decades later?ED BURNS The first thing that comes to my mind is that this show will live forever, because what it tries to portray will be around forever. It’s just getting worse and worse. That’s all. And it’s expanding; it’s not just an urban thing anymore. It’s everywhere.DAVID SIMON Ed and I in Baltimore, George in Washington, Richard Price in New York — we’d been seeing a lot of the same dynamics. There were policies, and there were premises that we knew were not going to earn out. They were going to continue to fail. And we were fast becoming a culture that didn’t even recognize its own problems, much less solve any of them. So it felt like, “Let’s make a show about this.”I didn’t anticipate the complete collapse of truth, the idea of you can just boldly lie your way to the top. I did not anticipate the political collapse of the country in terms of [Donald] Trump. [The fictitious Baltimore mayor in “The Wire,” Tommy Carcetti] is a professional politician. Donald Trump is sui generis. It’s hard to even get your head around just how debased the political culture is now because of Trump.From left, the director Clark Johnson, the executive producer Robert Colesberry, Simon and Ed Burns on the set of “The Wire” in 2002.David Lee/HBOThe show seemed to hint at the collapse of truth with the fabricated serial killer story line in the final season, and how the media ran with it.SIMON We very much wanted to criticize the media culture that could allow the previous four seasons to go on and never actually attend to any of the systemic problems. We were going there, but I didn’t anticipate social media making the mainstream miscalculations almost irrelevant. You don’t even have to answer to an inattentive, but professional press. You just have to create the foment in an unregulated environment in which lies travel faster the more outrageous they are. If truth is no longer a metric, then you can’t govern yourself properly.BURNS If you look at the map, half of the Midwest and West are drought-ridden, and we’re treating it like how we used to treat a dead body on the corner or a handcuffed guy. It’s like a news thing or bad automobile accident: “Oh my, look, that tornado ripped apart this whole town.” And that’s it.There’s no energy. I’ve always thought about trying to do a story where the government has developed an algorithm to identify sparks, the Malcolm Xs and the Martin Luther Kings, these types of people, when they’re young, and then they just either compromise them away with the carrot or they beat them away with a stick. Because you need sparks. You need those individuals who will stand up and then rally people around them, and we don’t have that — those sparks, that anger that sustains itself.Is it a conflicting legacy that “The Wire” has gained a greater audience over the years, yet the institutional decay that it illuminates has seemingly worsened?BURNS Recently, the Biden administration and the New York mayor’s administration said they want to increase the number of police on the street. It amuses me that what they’re doing is a definition of insanity: You try something, it doesn’t work. You try it again, it doesn’t work. It’s about time you try something different. They’re still doing the same thing.Granted, “defund the police” is not the right way of presenting the argument. But rechanneling money away from the police to people who could better handle some of the aspects of it would be good. And then doing something even more dramatic, like creating an economic engine, other than drugs, to help people get up and start making something of their lives.In “The Wire,” even well-intentioned officers like Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West, left, with Benjamin Busch and Jonnie Louis Brown) were subject to a police department with misplaced priorities.Paul Schiraldi/HBOHow should “We Own This City,” be viewed in relation to “The Wire?”SIMON It’s a separate narrative. We’re very serious about having attended to real police careers and real activities and a real scandal that occurred. So no, it’s not connected to “The Wire” universe in that sense. It is a coda for the drug war that we were trying to critique in “The Wire.” If “The Wire” had one political message — I don’t mean theme; if it just had a blunt political argument about policy — it was, “End the drug war.” And if “We Own This City” has one fundamental message, it’s “END. THE. DRUG. WAR.” In capital letters and with a period between every word. It’s just an emphatic coda about where we were always headed if we didn’t change the mission of policing in America.Is a goal of “We Own This City” to provide a sharper critique on policing than “The Wire” provided?SIMON No. I don’t think there’s that much difference between the two, other than the depths of the corruption of the bad cops. Police work is as necessary and plausible an endeavor as it’s ever been.In many cases, and in many places like Baltimore, the national clearance rate has been collapsing for the last 30, 40 years. That’s not an accident. That’s because they’ve trained generations of cops to fight the drug war. It doesn’t take any skill to go up on the corner, throw everybody against the wall, go in their pockets, find the ground stashes, decide everybody goes, fill the wagons. That’s not a skill set that can solve a murder.That’s not me saying, “Oh, policing used to be great.” No, I understand there were always problems with policing. But we’re one of the most violent cities in America. And all the discourse about abolish the police or defund the police — I’d be happy to defund the drug war. I’d be happy to change the mission, but I don’t want to defund the police. Good police work is necessary and elemental, or my city becomes untenable. I’ve seen case work done right, and I’ve seen case work done wrong, and it matters.BURNS I’m sorry [Baltimore] was labeled the city of “The Wire,” because we could’ve taken that show into any city, in exactly the same way. Akron, Ohio, would have suddenly become the “Wire” city. So it’s a shame that it was pushed onto this little town.From left, Clark Johnson, Brandon Young, Michelle Paress and Tom McCarthy in the final season, which criticized “the media culture that could allow the previous four seasons to go on and never actually attend to any of the systemic problems,” Simon said.Paul Schiraldi/HBOWould “The Wire” be greenlighted if you pitched it today?BURNS No, definitely not. HBO was going up the ladder at the time. They didn’t understand “The Wire” until the fourth season. In fact, they were thinking about canceling it after three. We caught that moment where networks were thinking, “Oh, we need a show for this group of people.”But now, it’s got to be “Game of Thrones.” It’s got to be big. It’s got to be disconnected from stepping on anybody’s toes. I’ve watched a couple of the limited series on HBO, and they’re good shows, but they’re not cutting new paths. They are whodunits or these rich women bickering among themselves in a town. I don’t see anybody saying, “Hey, that’s a really great show.”SIMON No, because we didn’t attend, in any real way, to the idea of diversity in the writers’ room. I tried to get Dave Mills, who had been my friend since college, to work on “The Wire.” But that would have been organic. It was just a friend; it wasn’t even about Black and white. But other than David, who did a couple scripts for us, and Kia Corthron, the playwright, did one, we were really inattentive to diversity. That wasn’t forward thinking.Why were we inattentive? Because it was so organic to what I’d covered and what Ed had policed. And then, I started bringing on novelists. The first guy was George Pelecanos, whose books about D.C. were the same stuff I was covering. And I happened to read his books, and I was like, “This guy probably could write what we’re trying to do.” And then he said: “Look, you’re trying to make novels. Every season’s a novel. We should hire novelists.” And so we went and got Price. If I had it to do over again, I would have to look at [the diversity of the creative team] in the same way that I looked at later productions.In retrospect, is there anything else that you wish that the show had done differently?BURNS I wish that Season 5 took a different direction, as far as the newsroom was concerned, and didn’t debase the idea of investigation. But it’s fine. What we tried to get across is that the kids that we saw in [Season 4] were becoming, as they approached adulthood, the guys that we saw in [Seasons] 1, 2, 3 and 4. It was continuous. This is just the next generation.“We were fast becoming a culture that didn’t even recognize its own problems, much less solve any of them,” Simon said. “So it felt like, ‘Let’s make a show about this.’”Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesOther than the fact that the issues it highlighted are still prevalent, why do you think “The Wire” has such staying power?SIMON Nothing’s in a vacuum. I would credit “Oz” for showing me that there was this network out there that would tell a dark story and tell an adult story. “Homicide” [Simon’s first book] had been made into a TV show. But with “The Corner” [Burns and Simon’s nonfiction book centered on a West Baltimore drug market], I was like: “The rights are worth nothing. Nobody’s going to put that on American television.” And then I saw “Oz,” and so that was the moment where I looked at HBO and said, “Oh, would you like to make a mini-series about a drug-saturated neighborhood and about the drug war?”And then the other places we stole from: We stole from the Greek tragedies, the idea that the institutions were the gods and they were bigger than the people. So, thanks to the college course that made me read Greek plays. Thanks to “Paths of Glory,” which was a movie about institutional imperative, the [Stanley] Kubrick film — I took stuff liberally from there. Thanks to a bunch of novelists, Pelecanos, Price, [Dennis] Lehane, who decided they were willing to write television. Obviously, the cast and crew and everyone.But it was a show that was ready for where TV was going to end up, and that’s where a lot of luck is involved. The idea that you flick on your TV screen and decide you want to watch something that was made 10 years earlier or has just been posted; or you’ll wait until there are enough episodes to binge watch it; or you have insomnia, so you’ll watch four hours of a mini-series and just acquire it whenever the hell you want — boy, I didn’t see that coming.BURNS It’s like a western: It’s mired in legend. But the legend is actually reality. Today, 20 years ago, 20 years from now — it’s the same thing. And each generation coming up, each bunch of kids coming up, discover it and inject more life into it. More

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      Marty Callner Might Be the Most Influential Comedy Director

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      Marty Callner made the first modern special, setting the template still in use. (He was also key to hair-metal videos. But that’s another story.)Since comedy is often overlooked at the Oscars, why doesn’t it have its own awards show?It’s been tried, but the self-seriousness of such events can be an odd fit. So when Netflix started an awards show celebrating the greats in stand-up — who will be inducted into the Hall of Fame being built at the National Comedy Center — it was inevitable that a participating comic would make fun of the whole thing.At the recent Los Angeles taping of that awards show, “The Hall: Honoring the Greats of Stand-Up,” which premieres on Thursday, Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers, George Carlin and Robin Williams were inducted with speeches by Dave Chappelle, Chelsea Handler, Jon Stewart and John Mulaney. When Mulaney introduced Williams by reading a letter from the late comic’s daughter, he appeared momentarily emotional before pausing to say: “I don’t want to cry at a fake awards show.”That didn’t sit right with Marty Callner, the show’s co-creator (with Randall Gladstein) and director, who cut that quip in the edit. “It’s real,” he told me in the backyard of his Malibu home. “The Hall” has been a longtime dream of his, an effort to reintroduce classic comedy to younger generations, and an honor that he says comics will appreciate and care about. “These guys are still human beings and they still have egos and they still want a legacy.”John Mulaney inducting Robin Williams into the Hall of Fame on the new special.Terence Patrick/NetflixCallner, 75, has his own complicated relationship with a public legacy since his remarkable career has largely existed in the background. In fact, he might be the most successful director you have never heard of.Over the past five decades, Callner has worked with some of the most famous brand names in popular culture — Madonna, Jerry Seinfeld, the Dallas Cowboys — and was a formative figure at the dawn of two modern art forms: the stand-up special and the music video, neither of which are known for giving much credit to the director. If that weren’t enough innovation, he also created “Hard Knocks,” a hit reality show that for 20 years, turned N.F.L. training camp into a soap opera.“The Hall,” whose inductees were chosen by a panel of comedy industry types like club owners and agents chosen by Callner, is only the latest institution he’s built, but it’s one he speaks about with personal passion, especially since he knew each of the first four comics being inducted. “Stand-up is such a part of my life that I wanted to give back,” he said.Callner was raised by a single parent (his father left when he was 2) in Cincinnati, a midcentury television hub. He credits a 1969 trip on synthetic psilocybin for awakening his previously dormant creativity, started working an entry-level job in live local news and immediately fell in love. He hung around the Cincinnati station at all hours, sponging up shot composition and camera angles. When a director suddenly left one afternoon for a family emergency, Callner got his chance, moving on to direct commercials and Boston Celtics games including their championship season in 1974. His success led to two offers: to work for NBC Sports, a national behemoth, or for a relatively unknown new cable channel called HBO, where he would be able to shape its look and style (and direct live coverage of Wimbledon). Callner bet on the option where he could have more sway. It wouldn’t take long for this to pay off in his big break.Two months after “Saturday Night Live” premiered in 1975, he directed a show that started a tradition that rivals it: “An Evening With Robert Klein” was the first HBO stand-up special. Shelley Berman and Bob Newhart had made specials for television the previous decade, but it was Klein’s hour that pointed the way to the future, even opening with a backstage scene of the comic preparing. This cold open would become such a stand-up special cliché that Callner said he wouldn’t use it again.HBO had a couple of advantages over network television: It presented longer sets, and, critically, comics could curse. The line that Klein cared most about, Callner said, came after he swore: “What a catharsis,” he quipped.Callner zoomed in on him during this moment to emphasize the point.The day after the show premiered, a positive review in The Times described the process of using five cameras to capture an uncensored long-form portrait of the comic as “innovative.”“That changed my life,” Callner said, adding that the article led HBO to sign him up for a series of specials that made the cable channel the central home for this nascent form. He directed the first specials of Robin Williams, Steve Martin and Carlin, who became a good friend and the best man at his wedding. Did Carlin give a speech? “I’m sure he did but I don’t even remember being there,” Callner said, smiling. “It was the 1980s.”The look of these early specials did not draw attention to itself. “I learned the comedy directs me,” he said. “If a comedian is doing something physical, it better be a head-to-toe shot. If he’s making a poignant point, it better be on a close shot. It was reportage. My job was to capture their genius and not take shots that were superfluous. I see all kinds of directors today making this mistake. They are cutting around to show off.”“My job was to capture their genius and not take shots that were superfluous,” Callner said, with an Emmy for “Hard Knocks” on his desk.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesBy the end of the decade, Callner had become bored with specials and excited by a flashier art form in its infancy at another young cable channel, MTV.His first video, Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take it,” was a slapstick production that leaned on his comic background. In it, a boy (played by his son) sends his angry dad out the window thanks to the power of his declaration, “I want to rock!” (which was Callner’s voice dubbed in). This proved to be a major hit and led to directing jobs on hundreds more videos, including 18 with Aerosmith and four with Cher. It was Callner’s idea to put Cher on a cannon on a Navy ship in the video “If I Could Turn Back Time.” Asked why, he said, “It was phallic,” which is hard to argue with.In these early days of MTV, the aesthetic for videos was up for grabs, said Rob Tannenbaum, who co-wrote “I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution” and is an occasional contributor to The Times. He explained, “Devo wanted them to be avant-garde films; Duran Duran wanted them to be Patrick Nagel-style reveries; Marty Callner thought videos should be funny, which proved to be a more durable concept.” He added, “He understood, early on, that videos could be about more than amusement — they could be about branding and even mythology.”To be sure, they were also about scantily clad women (MTV once gave him a note that his video for the Scorpions’ “Big City Nights,” had too many women in bikinis) and hair, lots of it. As much as anyone, Callner created the visuals for the era when rock was dominated by flowing, feathered locks. The secret auteur of the genre known as hair metal was his hairdresser wife of 40 years, Aleeza Callner, who blow-dried the heads of the members of Whitesnake, Poison, Kiss, the Scorpions — not to mention Sam Kinison and Jerry Seinfeld.After a career directing television that tapped into the raw American id, Callner, who said he hated the objectification of women “even though I can’t say I wasn’t culpable,” is now looking at an unlikely new idea. He’s planning a festival called “America’s Wedding” in which 2,000 couples would get married at the same time in Las Vegas.For now, he is focused on “The Hall,” which Netflix aims to make an annual tradition. Callner, who once directed a tribute to Lenny Bruce, said that the influential stand-up received the fifth most votes, and hopes he gets inducted in a future show.Asked if it ever bothers him that his work is so much better known than he is, he said what mattered to him was the final product. “I didn’t become a household name,” he said, in front of a beautiful view of the water, “but I did become the highest paid television director in Hollywood, and the reason is: I made people a lot of money.” More

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      Ann Sarnoff, Warner Bros. Chief, Is Set to Leave

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      LOS ANGELES — Ann Sarnoff, the chief executive of the WarnerMedia Studios and Networks Group, will leave the company, with an announcement coming as soon as this week, three people briefed on the matter said.Ms. Sarnoff, who declined to comment, was chosen to lead Warner Bros. in 2019 despite limited Hollywood experience, becoming the first woman to hold the role. She is departing as WarnerMedia, a division of AT&T, is set to complete a merger with Discovery. Ms. Sarnoff’s boss, Jason Kilar, who has been chief executive of WarnerMedia since 2020, announced his exit on Tuesday.Like Mr. Kilar, Ms. Sarnoff found herself without a seat in the game of musical chairs that accompanies the merging of competing companies, said the people briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential information. The Warner Bros. Discovery management structure is still unknown, but David Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery, who will run the new company, is expected to take over at least some of Ms. Sarnoff’s portfolio. She has had a dozen direct reports.Her job has involved oversight of HBO and HBO Max; the Warner Bros. movie and television studio; several cable channels, including TBS and TNT; and a large consumer products division. Breaking down the siloed nature of some of those units has been one of Ms. Sarnoff’s accomplishments.After news of her departure became public, Mr. Zaslav said in an email that Ms. Sarnoff had been “a passionate and committed steward,” leading “with integrity, focus and hard work in bringing WarnerMedia’s businesses, brands and work force closer together.” In an email of his own, Mr. Kilar called Ms. Sarnoff a “first-tier human being” and “the definition of a selfless leader.”Ms. Sarnoff’s job security has been the subject of Hollywood gossip for months, with agents and Warner-affiliated producers insisting that she was on her way out and some members of her team insisting the opposite. That kind of speculation can be deadly in show business, with whispers congealing into conventional wisdom, often resulting in an irrecoverable position of weakness in the view of Hollywood’s creative community.To be fair, Ms. Sarnoff, whip smart and affable, never got the opportunity to really do her job. The pandemic shut down the entertainment business roughly seven months after she started. AT&T, which hired her, decided to spin off WarnerMedia last May.Before joining WarnerMedia, Ms. Sarnoff held leadership roles at Nickelodeon, the Women’s National Basketball Association, Dow Jones and BBC America. More

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      Why TV-Inspired Vacations Are on the Rise

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      TV-themed itineraries are on the rise, taking travelers on adventures with familiar shows during a time of uncertainty.With 70 percent of Americans watching more TV in 2021 than they did in 2020, binge-watching has skyrocketed during the pandemic. Now, as borders reopen, restrictions ease and travel restarts, tour advisers are fielding an increasingly popular request: immersive, TV-themed itineraries that allow travelers to live out their favorite shows’ story lines.In Britain, where all travel restrictions are now lifted, hotels in London have partnered with Netflix to offer Lady Whistledown-themed teas inspired by “Bridgerton” high society. In Yellowstone National Park, travelers are arriving in Wyoming not for a glimpse of Old Faithful, but for a chance to cosplay as John Dutton from the hit drama “Yellowstone.”And in South Korea, where vaccinated travelers can now enter without quarantine, street food vendors on Jeju Island are anticipating a run on dalgona candy, the honeycomb toffees that played a central role in “Squid Game.”“When you fall in love with a character, you can’t get it out of your mind,” said Antonina Pattiz, 30, a blogger who last year got hooked on “Outlander,” the steamy, time-traveling drama about Claire Beauchamp, a nurse transported 200 years back in history. Ms. Pattiz and her husband, William, binge-watched the Starz show together, and are now planning an “Outlander”-themed trip to Scotland in May to visit sites from the show, including Midhope Castle, which stands in as Lallybroch, the family home of another character, Jamie Fraser.Mr. Pattiz is part Scottish, Ms. Pattiz said, and their joint interest in the show kicked off a desire on his part to explore his roots. “You watch the show and you really start to connect with the characters and you just want to know more,” she said.The fifth season of “Outlander” was available in February 2020, and Starz’s 142 percent increase in new subscribers early in the pandemic has been largely attributed to a jump in locked-down viewers discovering the show. During the ensuing two-year hiatus before Season 6 recently hit screens — a period of time known by fans as “Droughtlander” — “Outlander”-related attractions in Scotland, like Glencoe, which appears in the show’s opening credits and the Palace of Holyroodhouse, saw more than 1.7 million visitors. “Outlander”-related content on Visit Scotland’s website generated more than 350,000 page views, ahead of content pegged to the filming there of Harry Potter and James Bond movies.The Pattizs, who live in New York City, will follow a 12-day self-driving sample itinerary provided by Visit Scotland, winding from Edinburgh to Fife to Glasgow as they visit castles and gardens where Claire fell in love and Jamie’s comrades died in battle. Private tour companies, including Nordic Visitor and Inverness Tours, have also unveiled customized tours.The ‘Sex and the City’ UniverseThe sprawling franchise revolutionized how women were portrayed on the screen. And the show isn’t over yet. A New Series: Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte return for another strut down the premium cable runway in “And Just Like That,” streaming on HBO. Off Broadway: Candace Bushnell, whose writing gave birth to the “Sex and the City” universe, stars in her one-woman show based on her life. In Carrie’s Footsteps: “Sex and the City” painted a seductive vision of Manhattan, inspiring many young women to move to the city. The Origins: For the show’s 20th anniversary in 2018, Bushnell shared how a collection of essays turned into a pathbreaking series.Enduring trend, new intensityScreen tourism, which encompasses not just pilgrimages to filming locations but also studio tours and visits to amusement parks like The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, is an enduring trend. Tourists flocked to Salzburg in the 1960s after the release of “The Sound of Music”; in recent decades, locations like New Zealand saw a huge bump in visits from “Lord of the Rings” fans and bus tours in New York City have offered tourists a chance to go on location of “Sex and the City” and “The Marvelous Ms. Maisel.”But in this pandemic moment, where travel has for months been synonymous with danger and tourists are navigating conflicting desires to safeguard their health while also making up for squandered time, screen tourism is taking on a new intensity, said Rachel Kazez, a Chicago-based mental health therapist. She has clients eager to travel — another major trend for 2022 is “going big” — but they are looking for ways to tamp down the anxiety that may accompany those supersized ambitions.She said her patients increasingly are saying “‘I was cooped up for a year and I just want to go nuts. Let’s do whatever fantasy we’ve been thinking about’.”“If we’ve been watching a TV show, we know everything about it, and we can go and have a totally immersive experience that’s also extremely predictable,” Ms. Kazez continued. Cyndi Lam, a pharmacist in Fairfax, Va., has longed to go to Morocco for years. But she didn’t feel confident pulling the trigger until last month, when “Inventing Anna,” the nine-episode drama about the sham heiress Anna Delvey, began streaming on Netflix.In episode six of “Inventing Anna,” the character flies to Marrakesh and stays at La Mamounia, a lavish five-star resort. Ms. Lam and her husband are now booked to stay there in September.“Everybody can kind of relate to Anna,” Ms. Lam said. “I found her character to be fascinating, and when she went to Morocco, I was like, ‘OK, we’re going to Morocco.’ It sealed the deal.”In December, Club Wyndham teamed up with Hallmark Channel to design three suites tied to the “Countdown to Christmas” holiday movie event. They sold out in seven hours.Courtesy of Club WyndhamSensing a new desire among guests to tap into the scripted universe, dozens of hotels over the past year have rolled out themed suites inspired by popular shows. Graduate Hotels has a “Stranger Things”-themed suite at its Bloomington, Ind., location, with areas designed like the living room and basement of central characters like the Byers. A blinking alphabet of Christmas lights and Eleven’s favorite Eggo waffles are included. And in December, Club Wyndham teamed up with the Hallmark Channel to design three “Countdown to Christmas”-themed suites where guests could check in and binge Christmas films. They sold out in seven hours.“It was the first time we’d done anything like this,” said Lara Richardson, chief marketing officer for Crown Media Family Networks, in an email. “One thing we hear over and over from viewers is that, as much they love our products, they want to step inside a ‘Countdown to Christmas’ movie.”Vacation homes are also going immersive. For families, Airbnb partnered with BBC to list the Heeler House, a real-world incarnation of the animated home on the beloved animated series “Bluey,” and Vrbo has 10 rental homes inspired by “Yes Day,” the 2021 Netflix film about parents who remove “no” from their vocabulary. Celebrities are jumping in, too: Issa Rae, creator and star of HBO’s “Insecure,” offered an exclusive look at her neighborhood in South Los Angeles in February with a special Airbnb listing, at a rock-bottom price of $56.Tea on TV, now in London (and Boston)“Bridgerton,” Netflix’s British period drama about family, love and savage gossip, was streamed by 82 million households in 2021. (For comparison, the finale of “Breaking Bad” in 2013 had 10.3 million viewers; more recent streaming hits, including “Tiger King” and “Maid,” had fewer than 70 million). When season two of “Bridgerton” premieres on March 25, Beaverbrook Town House, a hotel built across two Georgian townhouses in London’s Chelsea, will offer a “Bridgerton” experience that includes a day out in London and drinks in the British countryside; nearby at the Lanesborough, a Bridgerton-themed tea, cheekily dubbed “the social event of the season,” will kick off the same day. In Boston, the Fairmont Copley Plaza now has a “High Society Package” for fans with flowers and a private afternoon tea.Contiki, the group travel company for 18- to 35-year-olds, had a “Bridgerton”-themed itinerary set for September 2021 but had to scrap it when the Delta variant hit; they’ve now partnered with Amazon Prime on a Hawaiian Islands trip inspired by “I Know What You Did Last Summer” set for July.Both Netflix and Amazon Prime have brand partnership teams that handle collaborations of this nature.“As we come out of this pandemic, the desire for more immersive experiences is really stronger than ever,” said Adam Armstrong, Contiki’s chief executive. “It’s about getting under the skin of destinations, creating those Instagrammable moments that recreate stuff from films and movies. It’s really a strong focus for us.”The popularity of “Bridgerton” on Netflix was eclipsed by “Squid Game,” the high-stakes South Korean survival drama, and despite that show’s carnage, travelers are booking Squid Game vacations, too. Remote Lands, an Asia-focused travel agency, reported a 25 percent increase in interest in South Korean travel and created a Seoul guide for fans and a customized itinerary.Some travel advisers say that some clients don’t even want to explore the locations they’re traveling to. They just want to be there while they continue binge-watching.Emily Lutz, a travel adviser in Los Angeles, said that more than 20 percent of her total requests over the past few months have been for travel to Yellowstone National Park, a result of the popularity of “Yellowstone,” the western family drama starring Kevin Costner on the Paramount Network and other streaming services. And not all of her clients are interested in hiking.“I had a client who wrote me and said, ‘All we want to do is rent a lodge in the mountains, sit in front of the fireplace, and watch episodes of ‘Yellowstone’ — while we’re in Yellowstone’,” she said.52 Places for a Changed WorldThe 2022 list highlights places around the globe where travelers can be part of the solution.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places for a Changed World for 2022. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘After Yang’ and the State of the Union

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      Colin Farrell, Jodie Turner-Smith and Justin H. Min star in a new sci-fi movie on Showtime. And President Biden delivers a State of the Union address.Between 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, Feb. 28-March 6. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTRAYVON MARTIN: 10 YEARS LATER 8 p.m. on BET. Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old Black teenager in Florida, was shot and killed almost exactly 10 years ago by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain. Gayle King, the co-host of “CBS Mornings,” hosts this hourlong special, which commemorates Martin and looks at the activism that his death continues to help galvanize. The program includes interviews with Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, and other mothers whose children have been killed by the police or by gun violence.MY BRILLIANT FRIEND 10 p.m. on HBO. The third season of the show, which centers on a friendship between two girls, Lenù and Lila, who come of age in mid-20th-century Naples, will debut on Monday night. It is adapted from the third of Elena Ferrante’s four Neopolitan books, “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay,” and finds Lenù and Lila grappling with careers, marriage and, eventually, motherhood. This will be the final season for the actresses Margherita Mazzucco, 19, and Gaia Girace, 18: The fourth book in the series, “The Story of the Lost Child,” which would be the focus of a potential fourth season, revolves around the characters in middle age. “I have never read the final pages of the fourth book,” Mazzucco told The New York Times recently. “I don’t want to know how it ends.”TuesdayPresident Biden in February. He is scheduled to deliver his State of the Union address on Tuesday.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesSTATE OF THE UNION 9 p.m. on various networks (check local listings); streaming on Facebook, Twitter, WH.gov and YouTube. President Biden is set to deliver his State of the Union speech to Congress on Tuesday night. Biden will presumably speak to the progress that his administration has made since his first address to Congress last year — including the passage of the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill and the nearly $1.9 trillion stimulus package — though he’ll have a lot more to cover. He’s likely to address Russia’s war on Ukraine, the selection of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as his nominee to the Supreme Court and the state of the coronavirus pandemic, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention loosen safety guidelines.Inside the World of Elena FerranteThe mysterious Italian writer has won international attention with her intimate representations of Neapolitan life, womanhood and friendship. Beginner’s Guide: New to Elena Ferrante’s work? Here’s a breakdown of her most important writing. Latest Novel: Following the success of her Neapolitan novels, the author returned to fiction with a suspenseful story about parents and their sins.English-Language Translator: The work of Ann Goldstein has helped catapult Ferrante to global fame. Humility is a hallmark of her approach.Onscreen: The HBO series based on Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend” is a testament to the elusive writer’s ability to create inscrutable characters.Lenù and Lila: The actresses playing the two protagonists in the HBO adaptation grew up with their characters. Here is what they said about it.THE LARRY DAVID STORY 9 p.m. on HBO. What’s the difference between Larry David the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” character and Larry David the successful producer and performer? Based on a trailer for “The Larry David Story,” the answer is a dusting of facial hair and a touch of introspection. David reflects on his life and career in this two-part documentary, which covers his upbringing in Brooklyn, his beginnings in comedy, his success with “Seinfeld” (which he co-created) and his more recent work on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” The documentary was directed by the comic and filmmaker Larry Charles, a staff writer on “Seinfeld” whose well-established rapport with David comes through in their conversations.WednesdayLA STRADA (1956) 6 p.m. on TCM. When the Oscar for best international feature is handed out at the Academy Awards ceremony next month, the winner will become part of a lineage that “La Strada” helped establish: This Federico Fellini classic was the first movie to win the best foreign-language film honor when that category became a competitive award at the Oscars in 1956. The movie raised the profiles of both Fellini and his wife and collaborator, Giulietta Masina, who plays a young woman who is sold to a traveling circus strongman (Anthony Quinn). “‘La Strada’ is often sentimental and not always convincing but the ending packs a wallop,” J. Hoberman wrote about the film last year in his “Rewind” column.ThursdayTilda Swinton in “The French Dispatch.”Searchlight PicturesTHE FRENCH DISPATCH (2021) 8 p.m. on HBO Signature. Wes Anderson drew inspiration from the old-school days of The New Yorker for this ornate anthology comedy, which follows a collection of eccentric magazine writers and their subjects — played by an ensemble that includes Bill Murray, Benicio Del Toro, Léa Seydoux, Jeffrey Wright, Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton — in a mid-20th-century French city. Typewriters clack. Cocktails disappear.FridayAFTER YANG (2022) 9 p.m. on Showtime. In his 2017 feature debut, “Columbus,” the filmmaker Kogonada used the modernist architecture of Columbus, Ind., to give a surreal, otherworldly undercurrent to a modest story about a close friendship. His new movie, “After Yang,” takes place solidly in the future: It centers on a mother (played by Jodie Turner-Smith), father (Colin Farrell) and young daughter (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) whose humanoid robot, Yang (Justin H. Min), breaks down. The loss of Yang is essentially the loss of a family member, but it may be possible to repair him.SaturdayVin Diesel, left and John Cena in “F9.” Giles Keyte/Universal PicturesF9 (2021) 8 p.m. on HBO. If the “Fast and Furious” movies went all-electric, and the grunt of gasoline engines was muted, the series could still rely on Vin Diesel’s voice to fill out the low end of the sonic spectrum. The latest installment of the series introduced a new villain, played by John Cena, and brought back the familiar faces of Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Helen Mirren and Charlize Theron. The movie also saw the return of the director Justin Lin, a veteran of the franchise who had stepped away for several years. Lin makes the movie “feel scrappy and baroque at the same time,” A.O. Scott said in his review for The Times.SundayLester Holt, left, and the former Attorney General William P. Barr in an NBC News primetime special.NBC NewsNBC NEWS PRIMETIME SPECIAL 9 p.m. on NBC. Lester Holt interviews the former Attorney General William P. Barr in this hourlong special. The two discuss Barr’s final days as Attorney General during the Trump administration, when he rebuked former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims of a stolen election by acknowledging that the Justice Department had found no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. The conversation also touches on policing in America, among other topics. More

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      Edi Patterson on Tapping Into Her Id for ‘The Righteous Gemstones’

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      Ahead of the Season 2 finale, the actress, writer and producer talked about the joys of being Judy in this HBO comedy about a family of televangelists.This interview contains spoilers for the Season 2 finale of “The Righteous Gemstones.”It’s nearly impossible to find a Judy Gemstone quote that can be spoken aloud in a real church. When the character isn’t cursing or disparaging her siblings, she is referencing profane sexual acts and organs — all things unfit for a house of worship (and print).But beneath Judy’s abrasive, hypersexual surface is the decidedly calm and collected Edi Patterson, an actress, writer and producer on HBO’s “The Righteous Gemstones.” Trading her straight hair and chill demeanor for a curly wig and an unholy amount of sequins, she transforms into Judy, the rambunctious middle child in a family of Southern megachurch preachers, who craves validation and lacks any semblance of a filter.Patterson, who first worked with the show’s creator, Danny McBride, on the HBO series “Vice Principals” (which he created with Jody Hill) acts alongside him and Adam DeVine, who play Judy’s older and younger brothers — both of whom are just as stunted by sibling rivalry as she is, maybe more.Season 2 of the series, which ended Sunday, dove deeper into the Gemstone family drama, making new forays into real estate, motorcycle ninjas and Judy’s relationship with her beta-male husband, BJ (Tim Baltz). After an assassination attempt on the family patriarch, Eli (John Goodman), threatened to tear the Gemstones apart, the season finale brought the whole clan back together for a birth, some death and, of course, one last musical number.It also revealed a softer side of Judy — even though her dialogue was still largely unprintable.“It’s fun for people to watch Judy because she’s doing things that they want to do, and saying things they really want to say, and I think it’s fun to watch someone get to play id,” Patterson said. “I’m really grateful that I get to run downfield as fast as I can and let it rip.”In a recent video call from her hotel room in Winnipeg, Canada, where she was shooting the film “Violent Night” with David Harbour (“Stranger Things”), Patterson discussed BJ’s baptism, Eli’s near-death experience and why we can’t keep our eyes off Judy. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Where do you think Judy falls in the Gemstone hierarchy, being a middle child and the only daughter?Sadly, the default in those sort of systems is very patriarchy-centric, so she’s got a lot to prove. And she knows that she is equal to and as good as her brothers. But that’s part of the fun — she’s in a system where she’s going to need to prove it, probably over and over again. So that sums up all of her emotions of wanting to prove things; wanting to excel; wanting to be bad; all of it.How do you think Judy has changed over the course of this season?Well, she took a big swing with getting married at Disney World without her dad. That was a big, ‘Well, I’ll show them …’ and then she immediately felt bad. She’s got a lot of teenage emotions and angst happening.This season, she probably gets closer to what she wants, with BJ being more accepted than he was. She also has a bit of an emotional epiphany with Tiffany [Judy’s younger aunt, played by Valyn Hall] — basically going from feeling like Tiffany was a mold growing on something in her fridge to actual care and love. That was a really cool progression. Actual people never have a giant turnaround that you see in movies, like, “Now, I’m a different person, and I’m totally better.” I like the big ups and setbacks that the Gemstones have emotionally.That plotline where Judy and BJ kind of become Tiffany’s parents is a funny choice. What was that meant to bring out in each of them?We wanted to show Judy’s depth just a little bit and show she’s complicated, man, and complex. Like, yeah, her bark is loud and intense, and there’s a lot of it coming at you. But there’s also empathy in there, and she can honestly get her feelings hurt, and she can honestly care about whether or not she hurt someone else’s feelings. It was fun to show she’s actually not a full narcissist or a sociopath.Season 2 went deeper into Judy’s relationship with her husband, BJ (Tim Baltz), who was baptized in a very special onesie.HBO MaxEpisode 4 really stood out to me as Judy and BJ’s big moment — how was it to write, shoot and produce that whole baptism?That episode was such a blast. We got to kind of live on that insane set for a whole week and a half, and that was such a pleasure and a luxury. Because the set where we had BJ’s party felt so real and so … I don’t know … have you been to Vegas?I haven’t.Vegas has this weird, weird vibe where some hotels can actually be so blown out that they almost feel cozy. Something in you goes: “I’m safe to cut loose and everyone’s taking care of me.” And I don’t know, that room felt like the cozy side of Vegas.Like the Cheesecake Factory effect? Where you have way too many things going on at once?Totally! Everywhere my eyes look, there’s something interesting to look at. So it was just heavenly to be there for an extended period. And Danny directed that episode — it’s the only one he directed this season, and he’s just so good. It was really fun because, for instance, in the bathroom scene where I’m threatening BJ’s sister, Danny is clear about when there’s room to play with it and get crazy and find things. And there were a couple of wild things we found as we were doing it, like the smoking in the stall or kicking the stall door like a 1980s bully move.Do the particularly memorable lines, like “You can’t gobble the pie if you didn’t help bake it,” more often come from the scripts or happen spontaneously in the moment?A lot of the way they talk is in the crafting. I wrote that “gobble the pie” thing — a lot of times, I know that it’s specifically right for her if it makes me laugh and makes me go, “Oh my God, that’s so stupid.” That’s the highest praise for me. It’s probably right if it made me delightfully disgusted.In previous interviews, you have mentioned that you watched a lot of horror movies when you were growing up. Where do you think horror fits into “Gemstones”?What’s interesting is almost all of us who are writers on the show love horror movies. It’s probably a direction thing, too, because David Gordon Green and Jody Hill [who have directed most of the episodes] both like horror movies. They’re really good at making things truly suspenseful, or truly dramatic, or kind of creepy, or truly action-y. The love of horror makes people not pull back and go, “Oh, it’s comedy.” It makes everyone go further into all of it.You have also said that Judy is wearing ice skater outfits when she performs. If you had to make a mood board of things Judy finds glamorous, what else would be on there?Oh man, it would be covered with ice skaters. There’d be probably a bunch of stuff from Studio 54. Cher would be all over it. I feel like early Madonna would be all over it: It would be a fair amount of this move: [Patterson pulls one shirtsleeve down to reveal a shoulder.]So much of it would be from Judy’s kid brain of what was sexy and what was cool and powerful. I think so many of her notions about things are just stunted.There’s a point in the season where Eli Gemstone almost dies. What was that meant to evoke in the family?It just shows so quickly that even though they all think, “I can do this,” they’re all immediately like: “Oh God, I don’t want it. I just want him here.” They all adore their dad. Judy is very enmeshed with her dad and what he thinks of her. The second something terrible happens, all she wants is for him to be alive and well. Hence the vomiting. [Laughs.]You grew up in Texas going to church every week. What do you think your Sunday school teachers would say if they saw this show?Wow. It depends on which Sunday school teacher. I can think of some people from the church I grew up in that would be very disturbed by what I’m doing and probably not ever watch it — not even because it’s about a televangelist family, but because of the cursing. But a lot of people from the church love it.The thing about our show is we’re never making fun of religion, or people who are involved in religion, or believers. I think all the Gemstones are believers. They’re just messing up a lot. More

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      ‘The Gilded Age’: What Is Fact and What Is Fiction?

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      The HBO period drama sets invented melodrama within actual historical story lines. Here are the back stories of elements that shape the world of the series.A scene in this week’s episode of “The Gilded Age,” Julian Fellowes’s frothy period drama on HBO, takes us to Central Park in the late 19th century. Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson), young, rebellious and newly arrived from the obscurity of Pennsylvania, is riding in a carriage with her two blue-blood aunts when talk turns to the subject of Caroline Astor, the fearsome doyenne of New York society.“Do you like Mrs. Astor?” Marian asks.“That’s like saying, ‘Do you like rain?’” her Aunt Agnes (a waspish Christine Baranski) replies. “She is a fact of life that we must live with.”It is one of many nods to New York history that appears in “The Gilded Age.” Set during a time of dramatic change, the series chronicles a moment when the city’s center of gravity moved uptown, when society’s rules were rewritten as swiftly as new European-inspired mansions sprung up along Fifth Avenue, and when old families like the Astors and the Schermerhorns were challenged socially and financially by arrivistes named Vanderbilt, Gould and Rockefeller.The era’s name, from a book co-written by Mark Twain, makes the point that the glitter was on the surface. “Gilded means gold-covered, not golden,” said Erica Armstrong Dunbar, a history professor at Rutgers University who was the main historical consultant for “The Gilded Age,” and a co-executive producer. “It was a time when economic inequality, racial segregation, violence and nativism was living side by side with luxury and opulence.”Carl Raymond, a social historian whose podcast, “The Gilded Gentleman,” focuses on the era, said the cultural shifts were driven largely by “huge changes in commercial infrastructure, when crazy money was pouring in and old New York was being challenged by new.”“It’s when the new society was being created and everybody was jockeying for power,” he said.The HBO series speaks mostly to the Gilded Age of our imagination, full of grand families, sumptuous furnishings, lavish entertainments, stringent social rules, massive fortunes and sky’s-the-limit ambitions.Roughly halfway through its first season, which ends on March 21, “The Gilded Age” has blended fictional melodrama with actual historical story lines, like the importance of the Black press, the influx of stratospherically wealthy railroad magnates into the city and a simmering society dispute over the fashionable opera house’s inhospitality to newcomers.The events have played out among some characters who were wholly invented and others who were clearly inspired by real people — Carrie Coon’s striving Bertha Russell, for instance, channels the similarly eyes-on-the-prize Alva Vanderbilt — as well as a few who are portrayals of actual historical figures. These include the aforementioned Caroline Astor (Donna Murphy), the queen of Gilded Age society; Ward McAllister (Nathan Lane), snobby social arbiter to the elite; Clara Barton (Linda Emond), the founder of the American Red Cross; and T. Thomas Fortune (Sullivan Jones), the Black writer, orator, civil rights leader and newspaper editor.Teasing out the real from the fictional is part of the fun of watching “The Gilded Age,” which was recently renewed for a second season. To help you along, here are the back stories of some of the elements that shape the world of the series.Denée Benton plays a reporter who writes for T. Thomas Fortune, a pioneering Black newspaper editor.Alison Cohen Rosa/HBOUptown vs. DowntownIn the first episode, the chef who works for the rapaciously ambitious new-money Russell family notes approvingly that the family has moved to stylish 61st Street, some 30 blocks north of their previous house. “Thirtieth Street is out of fashion,” he declares.Indeed, the early history of upper-class Manhattan is the history of northerly migration, from Bowling Green to Washington Square to Murray Hill to the 50s, and then straight up Fifth Avenue by the 1880s.“All of a sudden people you think are beneath you, people you didn’t want to associate with, are suddenly on your block,” said Esther Crain, author of “The Gilded Age in New York” and founder of the website Ephemeral New York, which explores interesting aspects of the city.She described it as a time when corruption, exploitation and graft were rampant, but also when the culture, lifestyle and institutions of the city began to take shape, cementing New York’s sense of itself as the center of everything.“New York was the microcosm of the era — the financial capital of the country, the industrial base for lots of big business,” she said. “It had the culture, the capital, the theater and shopping and fashion, and everybody who was anybody wanted to be here.”The Opera“The Age of Innocence,” Edith Wharton’s exquisite dissection of Gilded Age New York, opens with the main characters preparing to see “Faust” at the Academy of Music, the opera venue beloved by New York’s old guard. “Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the ‘new people’ whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to,” Wharton writes.Indeed, although Bertha Russell, the richest and most brazen upstart in “The Gilded Age,” attends the opera as a guest, she discovers to her dismay that all her wealth can’t buy her a coveted private box. The Academy had fewer than two dozen, owned by prominent New York families and passed to their heirs.Bertha Russell, a wealthy arriviste played by Carrie Coon, resembles the similarly steely Alva Vanderbilt. Alison Cohen Rosa/HBO“Going to the opera in this period was a social battlefield,” Raymond said. “It was about where you sat, what you were wearing — and most importantly, who saw you do it.” The layout lent itself to social peacocking, he said, with “boxes on one side of the stage looking at boxes on the other side.”In New York, rich people annoyed at being excluded from things tend to set up their own fancier alternatives. In this case, a group of new-money interlopers pooled their money and built a bigger and better building. (A character in “The Gilded Age” describes them as “J.P. Morgan, the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts — every opportunist in New York.”) The result, the first Metropolitan Opera House, opened in 1883 at Broadway and 39th Street. (Unable to compete, the Academy tried to reinvent itself as a vaudeville hall but closed several years later.)Dunbar said that the ease with which the rich could buy their way into society during the period reflected and bolstered one of the founding myths of America: that it was a place where anything was possible, as long as you did the work and made the money.“It may seem like this is just a case of ‘old’ rich people and ‘new’ rich people fighting, and who cares,” Dunbar said. “But it speaks to the changing of the guard, and the changing of traditions, and the way this nation has always grappled with change.”European SocietyAmerica was still a young country during the Gilded Age, barely 100 years old and forged by revolution that ostensibly repudiated the old ways. But for all that, Manhattan’s upper crust seemed determined to emulate European customs.In “The Gilded Age,” Mrs. Russell reflects the tastes of the time by boasting that her new chef is French. Her extravagant new home was designed to emulate grand European houses, as were the mansions built by real-life New York arrivistes of the era. (The interiors also were generally full of materials bought from European chateaus and imported at huge expense.) The new opera house was modeled on its European counterparts. Social customs, too — the elaborate codes of dress, manners and decorum, dictating who could be introduced to whom — were also very European, perhaps as a response by a nervous upper class to the exciting but threatening notion of American social mobility.“Caroline Astor’s model was Europe; she wanted to create a European American court,” Raymond said. “One of the funniest ironies about the Gilded Age is that you have a society desperately trying to emulate the courts of Europe and British aristocracy.”Caroline Astor, as depicted by the society portraitist Carolus-Duran. Mrs. Astor ruled New York society in the late 19th century.Sepia Times/Universal Images Group, via Getty ImagesMrs. Astor vs. Mrs. VanderbiltFor many years, Caroline Schermerhorn Astor was the ruler of New York society and the epitome of old-guard Manhattan. With the help of her friend Ward McAllister, she decreed who and what was worthy, or not. It was said that her parties were limited to 400 guests from just 25 “old” families.But she met her match in the staggeringly rich Alva Vanderbilt, who swept into New York and in 1882 installed herself in the most over-the-top new mansion the city had ever seen, at 52nd Street and Fifth Avenue. Designed under Vanderbilt’s watchful eye by the renowned architect Richard Morris Hunt and known as the “Petit Chateau,” it was enormous, made of limestone and done in a French Renaissance and Gothic style. It indeed looked like a castle, to the extent you can have a castle in the middle of an American city. Astor herself had two houses, one in the increasingly unfashionable 30s and one in the 50s. But neither was as nice as the Vanderbilt mansion.In 1883, Vanderbilt threw a lavish masked ball for more than 1,000 guests. Everyone clamored to be invited, but Astor and her daughter Carrie (who was said to be desperate to attend) were left off the guest list. The story goes that after Vanderbilt pointed out to McAllister that she had never been introduced to Astor, Astor promptly called on Vanderbilt — and swiftly received an invitation to the party.Alas, like virtually all the Gilded Age mansions, the Vanderbilts’ “Petit Chateau” eventually became too expensive for the family to maintain. In 1926, Vanderbilt heirs sold it to developers for $3.75 million, and it was destroyed. An office building now sits on the site. More