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      John Oliver Wins Emmy for Scripted Variety Series, Beating ‘Saturday Night Live’

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      HBO’s “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” bested NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” by winning scripted variety series in a clash between two titans accustomed to dominating the Emmys from opposite sides of the variety fence.Since the Emmys fractured the outstanding variety sketch categories into two in 2015, John Oliver’s political satire scored seven Emmys for variety talk and “Saturday Night Live” had claimed six for variety sketch.The shows were dumped into the same category this awards under scripted variety series, described by the Television Academy as shows that “are primarily scripted or feature loosely scripted improv and consist of discrete scenes, musical numbers, monologues, comedy stand-ups, sketches, etc.”The award for talk series will now honor traditional late-night shows like “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” The Television Academy deemed Oliver unfit because much of his show is scripted, while other late night hosts engage in lengthy, unscripted conversations.It’s a different category, but still another win for Oliver. “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” scored four total Emmy nominations.Oliver’s show also beat HBO’s final season of “A Black Lady Sketch Show” for the award.During his speech, Oliver thanked his staff, HBO and “our lawyers who are angry with us all the time.”Before being rushed off the stage by Doris Hancox, Anthony Anderson’s mother, Oliver mentioned that he had promised to get his children Pokémon cards while in California. “And I don’t know where to get Pokémon cards in L.A.,” he said. “So, if anyone knows where to get Pokémon cards between here and L.A.X., it’s a significant problem that I’ve worked myself into.” More

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      ‘True Detective: Night Country’ Review: Iced In

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      HBO’s eerie crime drama returns after a five-year break and trades in Southern gothic for Arctic horror.“True Detective” was never a series that went in for tender moments, but “True Detective: Night Country” — the show’s fourth season, after a five-year hiatus — takes a particularly unforgiving approach to the human condition. There is a moment late in the six-episide season, however, when the dour pop soundtrack turns sentimental and it’s clear that we are supposed to be tenderly moved by what is happening. What is happening is that someone is disposing of the dismembered body of the close family member they have just killed.Created for HBO back in 2014 by the writer and English professor Nic Pizzolatto, the original iteration of “True Detective” was a gothic crime drama, in anthology form, marked by Pizzolatto’s penchant for ostensibly profound, quasi-poetic dialogue — Raymond Chandler by way of Rod McKuen.The new season, directed and largely written by the Mexican filmmaker Issa López (it premieres on Sunday), dispenses with the poetry — it is by and large a plain-spoken affair. But where Pizzolatto’s “True Detective” stories were essentially traditional noirs with a gloss of pop psychology and horror-movie sensationalism, López commits fully to the outré and the supernatural. Parricide? That’s just coming up for air.López is coy about whether the cops, scientists, mine workers and Indigenous Alaskans who populate her story are actually dealing with malevolent spirits, but she is profligate in her use of horror effects to jolt the audience and goose the plot. Unseen voices abound, and dead people are frequently seen. Polar bears loom in the darkness. Oranges mysteriously, repeatedly appear out of nowhere and roll under characters’ feet. A group of men freeze together in a big jumble, naked and mid-scream, and have to be cut out of the ice and slowly thawed under bright lights. (Somewhere, “The Thing” is wondering why it didn’t think of that.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      A Reinvented ‘True Detective’ Plays It Cool

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      There were times, a year ago, in Iceland, on a glacier, in the dark, in temperatures well below freezing, when Issa López thought to herself: “Who wrote this? What is wrong with this person?” López, the showrunner and director of Season 4 of the HBO anthology series “True Detective,” had only herself to blame.This shivery “True Detective,” subtitled “Night Country,” premieres on Jan. 14. Set in Ennis, a fictional town in northwest Alaska, it stars Jodie Foster as the chief of police and Kali Reis as an intimidating state trooper. Opening just as the area descends into months of unrelieved darkness, the six-episode season has an icy milieu and a female gaze forcefully distinct from the show’s past outings.Created by Nic Pizzolatto, “True Detective” debuted nearly a decade ago as a bayou noir starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. Sultry, macho and spanning two timelines set 17 years apart, it entwined a familiar serial killer investigation with sweaty philosophy and intimations of the supernatural. Though that first season had its critics, it made for essential, much debated viewing. The second season, set in an unglamorous Southern California exurb and starring Colin Farrell, Taylor Kitsch, Rachel McAdams and Vince Vaughn, made a smaller, grimmer splash, as did the third season, which starred Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff and relocated the action to the Ozarks.That third season, which premiered in January 2019, attracted significantly fewer viewers. That might have meant the end of “True Detective.” But HBO believed the franchise could continue. The network began to search for a new showrunner for Season 4, preferably a woman of color. (Earlier seasons skewed overwhelmingly male and largely white, in front of the camera and behind it.) Among the potential candidates was López, a Mexican filmmaker who had written and directed a roster of Spanish-language features, including “Tigers Are Not Afraid,” a movie about missing and murdered women and children that mingled crime, fantasy and horror.Foster was drawn in by the original script but asked that her character, a somewhat blinkered white woman, be aged up and that the story’s center to be ceded to Reis’s.Michele K. Short/HBOThat film impressed Francesca Orsi, HBO’s head of drama. The essence of “True Detective,” Orsi said by phone in a recent interview, “is the way in which the horror genre is encapsulated within the detective noir narrative.” Confident that López could accomplish this, Orsi invited her to pitch a new season.López had spent nearly two decades pitching American networks and studios. She understood that network interest was no guarantee that a project would be made. And she knew that when it came to English-language work, she would be considered a risk, untried. So she decided there was no harm in dreaming big. And dark. And cold.“You write the impossible,” López said during a video call last month. “You write what you want to see.”Though López grew up in more temperate climates, she is a fan of the John Carpenter horror movie “The Thing,” set in Antarctica, and of the Alaskan vampire comic “30 Days of Night.” Assuming the project would never be greenlighted, she wrote what she wanted to see: an “existential whodunit,” as she put it, set in Alaska’s furthest, iciest reaches. To her surprise and mild dismay, HBO said yes.“It was so much fun to dream that world,” López said. “Except then I had to go there and shoot it.”López decided there was no harm in dreaming big when she pitched HBO her idea for the new season of “True Detective.” “You write the impossible,” she said. “You write what you want to see.”This season — the first without Pizzolatto, though he retains an executive producer credit — can be seen as a photo negative of the first. It is chilly rather than steamy, shadowed rather than sunlit, tundra-dry instead of humid. Despite occasional flashbacks, it restricts itself to a single timeline. In the first season, women appeared mostly as beleaguered wives or prostitutes. Here the gaze and the detectives are defiantly female.Is this still “True Detective”? While Pizzolatto was not available for comment, López argues that it is. This season retains what she sees as the series’s essentials: two detectives, shrouded in secrets and enmeshed in a landscape that holds secrets of its own. The series, she believes, favors a kind of expressionism in which the inner lives of the characters explode into the environment.“The darkness around them comes from inside of them,” she said. That’s certainly true of this season, though the earth’s axis may want to have a word. And if López exchanges the first season’s meditation on male toxicity and identity for a consideration of female victimhood and agency, she also returns the series to its roots in cosmic horror, even calling back to the certain Season 1 symbols, like the spiral.Orsi sometimes doubted the wisdom of having handed a marquee franchise to someone with little television experience, but López’s choices and attitude reassured her. “Every step of the way, I was taken aback by how confident she consistently was about what we were asking of her,” Orsi said.That confidence also inspired Foster, who hadn’t done substantive television work since her breakthrough role in the 1976 film “Taxi Driver.”“I read the script and I was like, this is beautiful,” Foster, sitting beside López, said. “There was so much that I was curious about and that I wanted to learn from. Then I met Issa and that really nailed it. I could tell that she had a collaborative spirit.”Before this new season of “True Detective,” Foster hadn’t done substantive television work since her breakthrough role in “Taxi Driver.” “I read the script and I was like, this is beautiful,” she said.The initial episode finds Foster’s Liz Danvers called into investigate the sudden disappearance of the employees of an Arctic research station. (These men are later found naked and frozen into a single block of human ice. Call it a cold case.) The mystery reunites her with Reis’s Evangeline Navarro. Former colleagues, they fell out years ago, in the wake of a gruesome domestic violence case.In the initial drafts, López wrote Navarro as Latina. But after researching the region, López decided that the character should have Native ancestry, specifically Iñupiaq. Foster asked for other changes. She felt that Danvers, a somewhat blinkered white woman whom she nicknamed “Alaska Karen,” should be aged up and that she should cede the story’s center to Navarro.Previous iterations of “True Detective” had depended on at least two major stars. Reis, a former professional boxer who made her acting debut two years ago in the revenge drama “Catch the Fair One,” is a relative newcomer. But no one mistrusted that she could shoulder a series, even as she differs in meaningful ways from Navarro.Reis, who was born and raised in Rhode Island, is of Wampanoag and Cape Verdean descent; Navarro is Iñupiaq and Dominican American. Reis’s language is not Navarro’s language, her ceremonies not the character’s. But they share a single-mindedness, a sense of duty and purpose. So Reis threw herself into research. “I just really want to make sure that I represented Alaska Natives, Iñupiaq people,” said Reis, who sat beside Foster and López in last month’s video interview. (They were all dressed in polite neutrals, though Reis had accessorized her outfit with a fierce-looking choker.) “I didn’t grow up seeing my face on the screen. I wanted to make sure that they could look on the screen and see themselves.”Reis, who is of Wampanoag and Cape Verdean descent, threw herself into researching the cultural background of her character, who is Iñupiaq and Dominican American.Though Navarro is deeply intuitive and alive to the supernatural, Reis was determined that she present as a modern woman and an effective officer, avoiding cliché. “She’s not going to be the token Native,” Reis said.To further that, she met with various Iñupiaq women, as well as several Native state troopers. She quizzed them, respectfully, on what they ate, what they wore, what slang they used. She asked the troopers how they squared their responsibilities to their community with their duties as law enforcement officers.Informed by these conversations, she, Foster and López set about creating what the earlier seasons of “True Detective” hadn’t made space for: women who are as changeable, difficult and complicated as the men.“We’re not really used to seeing women like that,” Foster said.López had done her own research, some online, scouring YouTube and Instagram for videos, some on a visit to Alaska, where she sat with Inuit men and women, ate the caribou and seal they hunted, went snowmobiling with them on the frozen seas. At a local grocery store, she noted the ruinous price of Oreo cookies. That went into the script, too. With the help of Barry Jenkins, an executive producer, the production also brought on Cathy Tagnak Rexford, a native Alaskan who is partly of Iñupiaq descent and Princess Daazhraii Johnson, who identifies as Neets’aii Gwich’in, as producers. As López told it, Rexford and Johnson asked for more scenes of food-making, of laughter, of community. (They could not be reached for comment.)As Alaska lacked the infrastructure to support a six-month shoot, the production had to make do with an area outside of Reykjavik and some computer-generated caribou and polar bears. The shoot was, Foster said, an intimate experience, with the dark and the frigid mitigated by the camaraderie and the beauty of the Northern Lights.Perhaps that beauty softened some of the script’s elements. There is no shortage of existential horror (body horror, too — missing eyeballs, a severed tongue), but the show entertains the possibility of justice and the notion, not entirely foreign to the “True Detective” franchise, that if other people are the source of most suffering, they can also provide comfort.All these months later, cozy on a sofa with her colleagues, López can look back on the experience warmly. “I learned to love the ice and the cold air, and now I miss it,” she said. “I would love to go back there for a vacation. Never to shoot again, though.” More

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      ‘The Buccaneers’ Arrives With More Arrivistes

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      This Apple TV+ drama joins HBO’s “The Gilded Age,” back for its second season, in portraying the late 19th-century collision of old money and new.A newly moneyed woman in Gilded Age New York is desperate to gain the acceptance of the aristocracy. So she schemes to get the ultimate symbol of old money approval: a box at the exclusive Academy of Music. When she is denied, she helps spearhead the construction of a new see-and-be-seen cultural playground, the Metropolitan Opera House. Take that, aristocracy.Welcome to the second season of HBO’s opulent drama “The Gilded Age,” a series laden with emblematic showdowns between the gaudy arrivistes and the idle drawing-room class. By chance, “The Gilded Age,” which returned last week, is back just ahead of “The Buccaneers,” a new series on Apple TV+ that is set amid the same late 19th-century collision of old money and new, robber barons and debutante balls, gold diggers and status obsession.“The Buccaneers,” which premieres Wednesday, sends its wealthy but not sufficiently connected young ladies, their frocks and their deeply insecure parents all the way to London, skipping the middleman of old American money and going right to the source in search of marriageable dukes and lords. As you might imagine, culture clashes and broken hearts ensue.Donna Murphy as Mrs. Astor, left, and Carrie Coon as Bertha Russell, based on real women like Alva Vanderbilt, in “The Gilded Age.”Barbara Nitke/HBOTV’s Gilded Age dramas are somehow both alluring and repellent. It’s fun to watch ugly Americans make like combative peacocks. And the social dynamics seem to resonate in the 21st century, even if the details feel exotic and unattainable.“Hierarchy of classes is something that people seem to be more preoccupied with right now than at other times in the past,” said Esther Crain, the author of the lavishly illustrated “The Gilded Age in New York” and creator of the historical website Ephemeral New York, in a phone interview. “There’s this vast gulf between the very rich and everyone else, with a vanishing middle class. This really echoes the Gilded Age.”The “Gilded Age” opera house showdown echoes a pitched battle from the end of Season 1, in which Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon), the Academy of Music snub victim, hosts a buzzy ball at her palatial home for her teen daughter. She invites her daughter’s friend, whose mother, Mrs. Astor (Donna Murphy), is the unofficial gatekeeper of the old-money elite. But then the gatekeeper snubs the social climber, who subsequently disinvites the gatekeeper’s daughter. The chess game is on, and the children are the pawns.In her book, Crain details the historical events behind both the music hall duel and the dance dust-up. In real life, it was Alva Vanderbilt who hosted a “fancy dress” masquerade ball in 1883, and who snubbed Mrs. Astor’s daughter, Caroline, prompting Mrs. Astor to show contrition to her nouveau riche rival. The showdown was seen as a major victory for new money over old.In actual late 19th-century New York, Alva Vanderbilt was a new-money upstart.Library of CongressCaroline Schermerhorn Astor represented the old guard of New York society.Wikimedia CommonsThe new rich, based in the Fifth Avenue mansions of Manhattan, were largely a product of the Civil War and new fortunes made in the railroad, copper, steel and other industries. (Bertha’s husband, George Russell, played by Morgan Spector, is a railroad tycoon who finds himself dealing with labor issues in Season 2.)Unlike the old-money aristocracy who traced their wealth to their European ancestors, the new rich thrived in industry and flaunted their wealth, much to the old rich’s disgust and chagrin.“They thought, ‘We’re Americans, we’re the new guys, we’ve got something new to sell in this world, and we have a place here,’” said the “Gilded Age” creator Julian Fellowes in a video interview from his home in London. “For me, the 1870s and 1880s was when modern America found itself. The new people building their palaces up and down Fifth Avenue were doing it the American way. This was an American culture — a new way of being rich, a new way of being successful.”Of course, the new rich could also be reckless and dangerous. In Season 1 of “The Gilded Age,” George, who Fellowes modeled on the railroad magnate Jay Gould, drives a corrupt alderman to suicide. He lives not just to defeat his opponents, but to crush them and their families. For him and his ilk, capitalism is a blood sport.Alisha Boe and Josh Dylan in “The Buccaneers,” inspired by real-life “dollar princesses” who married into titled European families.Apple TV+The games are a little different (if only slightly less brutal) in “The Buccaneers,” which is based on an unfinished novel by Edith Wharton. Looked down upon by the New York aristocracy and seeking suitable husbands, five young nouveau riche women high-tail it to London, where they and their financial resources are coveted by title-rich but cash-poor families. Nan (Kristine Froseth) is courted by a sensitive duke. Conchita (Alisha Boe) has a frisky marriage with a lord, whose parents are monstrous, anti-American snobs. All have romantic escapades that are, in many ways, brazenly transactional.“The girls’ mothers are coming over to London in order to effectively sell their girls into the aristocracy,” Katherine Jakeways, the series’s creator, said in a video interview from her London home. “And the aristocracy are welcoming them with open arms because they’ve got roofs to mend.”Added Beth Willis, an executive producer, from her home in Scotland: “How lonely that would be for so many of them. In America they might speak up a bit more at the dining table. They sometimes had their own money. And to come over to England and find these freezing cold houses with roofs literally falling in and being treated like a cash point must have just been awful.”Here, too, there is historical precedent. In one example, the socialite Consuelo Vanderbilt, of the shipping-and-railroad Vanderbilt family, married the ninth Duke of Marlborough, becoming perhaps the best known of what were called the “dollar princesses.”“Some of these marriages were arranged and didn’t end happily, but others did end happily,” said Hannah Greig, a historical consultant for “The Buccaneers.” “Sometimes the origins of the marriage were forgotten, and it became a love story. History offers lots of examples that you can draw on, for all of the different experiences that we see in ‘The Buccaneers.’”Both series include characters representative of people who existed in Gilded Age society, even if they were under-acknowledged at the time. In “The Buccaneers,” Mabel (Josie Totah) is torn between a marriage of convenience, to a man, and a romance of passion, with her friend Conchita’s new sister-in-law (Mia Threapleton). In “The Gilded Age,” the old-money Oscar Van Rhijn (Blake Ritson) carries on a passionate affair with John Adams, a scion of the presidential dynasty, all the while plotting his own marriage of convenience (and wealth) with the Russells’ debutante daughter, Gladys (Taissa Farmiga). (In a refreshing twist, the most avid gold diggers in both series are men.)Denée Benton stars in “The Gilded Age” as a member of New York’s Black elite, working with the journalist T. Thomas Fortune, played by Sullivan Jones.Barbara Nitke/HBOOne of the central characters in “The Gilded Age” is Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), a representative of 19th-century New York’s Black elite. At odds with her tradition-minded druggist father, Peggy goes to work for the real-life pioneering Black journalist T. Thomas Fortune (Sullivan Jones) and blazes her own trail, even as she faces down racism in her everyday life.Peggy’s story line gives the series a chance to look at issues of inequality that festered beneath the surface of the Gilded Age.“This season especially we see questions about the direction of Black America,” said Erica Dunbar, a Rutgers University history professor and “Gilded Age” historical consultant, in a video interview. “It’s a theme that still exists. What is the best way to move forward for a group of people who have already been marginalized or oppressed for hundreds of years at this point?”It all unfolds against a bloodless but volatile civil war between those who have been rich a long time and their freshly minted competition. The aristocracy’s view of the barbarians at the gate can be summed up by Agnes Van Rhijn (Christine Baranski), who has no interest in letting the newbies crash the party: “You shut the door, they come in the window.”But this is a fight Agnes won’t win. She can lock her windows, but the Metropolitan Opera House is coming soon. Despite the pitched battles of yore, if there’s one thing we’ve learned since it’s that money is money. And those who have the most generally have the upper hand, no matter the source of their riches. More

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      in Movies

      ‘No Accident’ Review: Putting White Supremacists on Trial

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      A documentary chronicles the lawsuit filed against the leaders of the violent 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va.Kristi Jacobson’s legal documentary “No Accident” opens with footage of the “Unite the Right” rally in August 2017 in Charlottesville, Va.: White supremacists march with tiki torches and shout slurs such as “Jews will not replace us.” The grotesque gathering remains unsettling and infuriating to watch, but plunging us into the proceedings has a way of stating the ugly facts upfront.Some participants in the two-day rally faced criminal charges, but Jacobson documents the steps in a civil case filed that October in an attempt to hold rally leaders responsible for conspiring to commit violence. Tracking the litigation led by the attorneys Roberta Kaplan and Karen Dunn, Jacobson’s civil rights procedural delves into both the legal work and the emotional strain involved in a case like this one.Kaplan and Dunn’s team draws on damning excerpts from Discord, the social media site used by rally planners, and evasive, insulting depositions by conspirators such as Richard Spencer and Christopher Cantwell, who represented themselves in court. Jacobson shows the toll on some of the lawsuit’s nine plaintiffs, who recall the rally and the peaceful counterprotests on Aug. 12, when James Fields Jr. murdered Heather Heyer and injured dozens of others by driving his car into a crowd of protesters.The movie, which feels constrained by the trial’s pandemic-related restrictions, maintains a civilized tone throughout. But it’s hard to keep calm at the spectacle of white nationalists preaching hatred and violence one moment, then attempting to squirm out of responsibility and court the jury’s sympathy. Jacobson’s account does the necessary work of restating the facts and showing that people can be held accountable for fomenting this kind of terror and harm.No AccidentNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More

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      Bill Maher Says Show Will Return Despite Writers’ Strike

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      The HBO host said he sympathized with the writers but needed to return for the good of other people who work on “Real Time With Bill Maher.”Bill Maher said his weekly HBO show would return to the air despite entertainment writers, including members of his own staff, still being on strike.“Real Time With Bill Maher” is the latest talk show to announce a return in recent days, even as the writers’ union has vowed to picket any “struck shows.”Drew Barrymore announced this week that she would begin taping new episodes of her talk show. “The Jennifer Hudson Show” and “The Talk” will also return. Other talk shows, including “The View” and “Live With Kelly and Mark,” have been taping throughout the strike.Mr. Maher said on his social media feeds on Wednesday night that it was “time to bring people back to work.”“The writers have important issues that I sympathize with, and hope they are addressed to their satisfaction, but they are not the only people with issues, problems, and concerns,” he wrote. “Despite some assistance from me, much of the staff is struggling mightily.”He also said he had been hopeful there would be some sort of resolution to the labor dispute by Labor Day, but “that day has come and gone, and there still seems to be nothing happening.”The writers have been on strike for 136 days, one of the longest screenwriter strikes ever (the longest was 153 days in 1988). Tens of thousands of actors have been on strike for two months as well, the first time writers and actors have walked out at the same time since 1960. The result has been a near-complete shutdown of Hollywood scripted production.There was hope throughout the entertainment industry that a resolution could be in the offing when the major Hollywood studios and leaders of the Writers Guild of America, the writers’ union, resumed negotiations last month after a lengthy stalemate. But over the past three weeks, bargaining has again stalled out, frustrating some big-name Hollywood showrunners in the process.More than 11,000 writers walked out in early May, arguing that their compensation levels and working conditions have deteriorated in the streaming era. The strike caused many talk shows to go dark, including “The Tonight Show,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and “Saturday Night Live.”After Ms. Barrymore announced that she was returning to her show, the backlash from writers — as well as others on social media — was swift. The Writers Guild promptly picketed outside the show’s studio. The National Book Foundation dropped Ms. Barrymore as host of the upcoming National Book Awards.In a statement on Wednesday night, the Writers Guild called Mr. Maher’s decision “disappointing,” and said that members would begin picketing the HBO show.“As a W.G.A. member, Bill Maher is obligated to follow the strike rules and not perform any writing services,” the guild said. “It is difficult to imagine how ‘Real Time’ can go forward without a violation of W.G.A. strike rules taking place.”Other talk show hosts have showed no indications of returning to work. Five late-night hosts — Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers and Mr. Maher’s HBO colleague John Oliver — have instead started a group podcast, “Strike Force Five.” Proceeds are going to their out-of-work staff.During the 2007 writers’ strike, which lasted 100 days, late-night shows returned after two months, even with writers still on picket lines. The “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno was reprimanded by the Writers Guild for performing a monologue that he wrote himself.Mr. Maher said on Wednesday that he would not perform a monologue or other “written pieces,” and would instead focus on the panel discussions that are a signature of the show.“I love my writers, I am one of them, but I’m not prepared to lose an entire year and see so many below-the-line people suffer so much,” he said. More

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      Tim Baltz on B.J.’s Test in ‘The Righteous Gemstones’

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      Sunday’s episode was a test for Baltz’s character, but B.J. seized the moment. Still, his victory came at a price.This interview contains spoilers for Sunday night’s episode of “The Righteous Gemstones.”The first thing to know is that the testicles were fake — in one of the shots, at least. Anyone who has seen Sunday night’s episode of the HBO televangelist family satire, “The Righteous Gemstones,” knows which shot.Near the end of the episode, the sixth of Season 3, Tim Baltz’s character, B.J., gets in a brutal brass-knuckle fight with a naked man that spills onto a suburban front lawn. Just when it seems that B.J. is out cold, his eyes fly open and he reaches, grabs, twists. The neighborhood children watch in horror.In an instant, the typically mild-mannered B.J. has victory well in hand. His nemesis, the philandering Christian rock guitarist Stephen (Stephen Schneider), drops to his knees and pays a brutal price for his affair with B.J’s. wife (Edi Patterson).It was a difficult scene to film, Baltz said last month by video from his home in Los Angeles, and not only because of the endless takes. He also did most of his own stunts — and accidentally got punched in the face several times.“There were a lot of little very quick decisions that either injured us, or barely avoided injury,” Baltz said of shooting the scene, which took all day. He added: “That’s the most intense day of work I’ve ever had.”Baltz grew up in Joliet, Ill., near Chicago, and he has the kind of boyish blond looks, deadpan delivery and cheery Midwestern affect that can make it difficult to tell whether he’s putting you on. (Given the circumstances, I believed him about the shoot.) That affect is one reason he is so convincing as B.J., a sensitive soul who lets his wife dress him in shiny pink rompers and who Rollerblades in full protective gear: It’s hard to believe that anyone could ever really be that earnest; B.J. keeps surprising you because he really is.“Despite being an atheist or a nonbeliever, he’s the most pious and religious character in the show,” Baltz said. “Which is odd,” he added, for a character who married into a family of preachers.Baltz’s character, B.J., has been a pushover for most of the series but Sunday’s brutal battle was a turning point.Jake Giles Netter/HBOB.J. also may be the most meme-worthy character in “Gemstones,” which is saying something in a show created by and starring Danny McBride. Baltz talked about the character, his outfits and the true cost of B.J.’s fight. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.First things first: How did you guys choreograph that, uh, decisive shot?That fight scene took an entire day to film. Once we got outside, we were worried about losing light, and with the camera looking up, the camera moving, I have to grab these fake testicles. I’m looking up at Stephen, who’s barely covering his own junk, and I’m like: “All right man, here we go, and we’ve got to get it right for the camera, too.”There was a stuntman involved for at least some of your parts, right?Yeah. My stunt double for the show has been a guy named T. Ryan Mooney, who looks shockingly like me. Same body type, too. To be honest, I don’t think that I’m like B.J. in real life, but I never feel more like my character than when I watch a guy who looks like me and has my body type do insane stunts, and he does it for a living. It’s kind of emasculating. But aside from B.J. getting thrown through the lattice work or when he gets dragged off the brick steps into the front yard, every shot you see, I did.Stephen seems like a champ for having done his whole part naked. What were your conversations about the scene like?He was really awesome. He was wrestling with whether he should go au naturel or use a prosthetic. It ended up being the last shoot day of the season for both of us, so there was a lot of buildup and anticipation. Stephen would come into town every few months to film stuff, and I would be like, “Let me take you out to dinner, man, because we’re going to have an intense day.” And then halfway through the season, he’s like: “I’m going to do it. I’m going to be naked. I just think there are only so many challenges in life, and I see this as a challenge.”Baltz tried to get to know his co-star Stephen Schneider ahead of time. “By the end, I considered him a dear friend, this naked guy I had to fight,” he said.HBOPresumably he had to get your consent.I mean, the intimacy coordinator definitely called several times to prep me. But for me, it was more like: “All right, this guy’s being really vulnerable with this. So every time he comes into town, we’re going to get to know each other so that we’re buddies going into this.” And honestly, it really worked. By the end, I considered him a dear friend, this naked guy I had to fight.You’ve played around with this image of the wholesome naïf a lot over the years. How much of that feels like you?I grew up playing sports — I was hypercompetitive. I really am not like [B.J.] at all. If I relate to the character in any way, it’s just the kindness and the generosity that he has, and I think a lot of people see that as being a mark in our society.When you book something, you lean into it as hard as you can whether it’s a nice character or someone creepy. But this one in particular you have to understand, Where does the unconditional love come from? And how do I keep in touch with that? This season that really gets tested for the first time, and it gets tested so much that he thinks that he has to change who he is. And the fight scene is the culmination of that.After the fight, B.J. tells Judy, “I hope you like me now.” Does he feel worse about beating up Stephen than he feels about having gotten beat up himself?I think he’s probably more hurt that he betrayed his own values. Danny always said: “When you play B.J., he’s the eyes of the audience within the show. He’s looking at the family the way we all look at the family.” I’ve carried that with me the entire time. So that moment is, “Not only did you cheat on me, but you made me betray myself.”Do you think there’s any part of standing up for himself that he takes in a positive way?I think so. It’s a fascinating evolution of the character. When I first read it, I was excited because I think it puts that card on the table for him. I think parts of our culture see something like that as a rite of passage, or something that you have to rise to the occasion to do. So in that sense, he does do it. But when he comes back, you can also look at that final line as saying, “I’m not the same anymore, so I hope you like what this has changed me into.” You can’t go back after something like that.Baltz said he his not anything like B.J. “If I relate to the character in any way, it’s just the kindness and the generosity that he has,” he said.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesIt’s like a more complex George McFly moment.Right. The sliding-door part of that [“Back to the Future”] trilogy is you see what happens if he doesn’t throw the punch, and his life is miserable. And then if he does throw the punch, everything is saved and the family’s OK. With this, I think B.J. probably looks at it and is like, “No, that’s a doorway that I can step back and forth from as I see fit now.” The truth is, his values are, “You shouldn’t do that.” He was forced to do it, and he rose to the occasion. But if given a choice, then he probably wouldn’t.Can we talk about the outfits? There’s a flamboyant dimension to them, and I’ve always wondered what that signifies.There’s a blend of a few things. First, I think he starts as Judy’s kept man; this is her wardrobe for him, and he feels a bit out of place. And then I think he gets more comfortable with it and starts to take bigger swings. Also, if you walk down King Street in Charleston [S.C., where the series is filmed], you will see guys kind of dressed like that. Maybe not as opulent, but the color palettes — there’s a lot of pastels.A lot of salmon.Before I’d really explored Charleston and saw some of these outfits, I thought, “Whoa, this is really out there.” And then in the real world you see it, and these people aren’t making a joke of it. They’re going about their regular lives. I always say that if B.J. was a Christian holiday, he’d be Easter because of the pastels. And it’s incumbent on me to feel comfortable and live in those outfits without making them the point of the joke. More

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      Danny McBride Keeps It Righteous

      by

      The party started early. Like, 10:30 a.m., still-drinking-lousy-hotel-coffee early. It was late March, a warm and overcast coastal morning, and all I knew of the day’s schedule was that Danny McBride, the creator and star of the HBO comedy “The Righteous Gemstones,” planned to swing by with a driver who would take us to an oyster farm, located somewhere among the islands and salt marshes of South Carolina Lowcountry.I did not expect him to arrive in a fully stocked party bus with several of his closest associates, including his longtime collaborator David Gordon Green, though in retrospect perhaps I should have. While reporting a different story two months earlier, I had met Walton Goggins, who plays the oily televangelist Uncle Baby Billy in “Gemstones.” When I told him that I was going down to Charleston to see McBride, who lives and produces the series in the area, Goggins responded, “I hope you like tequila.”As an icebreaker, I shared this anecdote with McBride. On cue, his wife, Gia, an art director, furnished a bottle of Código 1530. “This is George Strait’s tequila!” McBride beamed, and a look ping-ponged around the bus that asked, “Too early?”It was not too early. As we raised candy-colored plastic shot glasses in the glow of two TV screens made to look like aquariums, I decided to stash my notebook for a while: Day 1 of my visit would be less about taking notes than about taking in the life McBride has made for himself since moving here from Los Angeles.McBride does little press, so getting to know him was, of course, the goal. When “Gemstones” returns on Sunday for Season 3, it brings back what has been the most Danny McBride of his creative efforts. It is his third HBO series — following the cult-favorite baseball comedy “Eastbound and Down” (2009-13) and the deranged public school comedy “Vice Principals” (2016-17) — and he created it alone. It sets a new personal benchmark for creative cursing and comic male nudity, which was already high.McBride created “The Righteous Gemstones” and stars as Jesse, the eldest son in a family of televangelists. (With Walton Goggins.)Jake Giles Netter/HBOMcBride’s characters offer “a funny and deeply complex view of men in general, especially men in America,” said his “Gemstones” co-star Edi Patterson. (With Adam Devine.)Jake Giles Netter/HBOIt is also his most Southern show. Both previous HBO series were set down South, but “Gemstones” is the first since he and his production company, Rough House Pictures, which he shares with Green and another longtime collaborator, Jody Hill, moved from Los Angeles to Charleston in 2017. It’s a true hometown production.Of McBride’s various creations, his most beloved have been Southerners who embody a flamboyantly American brand of male chauvinism, and Jesse Gemstone is no exception. The eldest son in a dysfunctional family of rich televangelists, Jesse vies perhaps only with the hard-partying narcissist Kenny Powers of “Eastbound” for McBride’s biggest blowhard, a high bar.It is the kind of satire that comes from a deep place of knowing. The kind whose execution appears so effortless that its target might not realize it is satire.“I know probably not his whole audience sees it the way I do — they’ll think, like, ‘Oh, I’m exactly like Kenny Powers,’ or whatever — but I think that’s part of the fun and part of the appeal,” said Edi Patterson, who plays Jesse’s unhinged sister, Judy, and is a “Gemstones” writer. “It’s such a funny and deeply complex view of men in general, especially men in America.”But “Gemstones” has also seen McBride, 46, broadening his creative range. He oversees every script, directs episodes. Its cast is a true ensemble, and its many characters and subplots have enabled him to explore new kinds of stories and relationships, some with tear-jerking sensitivity.Friends and colleagues reliably describe him as genuine, inclusive, a deep thinker. But more than many screen stars he is both blessed and dogged by fans who sometimes have trouble remembering he is not his boorish characters.I wondered whether the lines ever blurred for him, and whether the fan confusion chafed. The answer to both, he insisted, was no. He had left Hollywood and built a tight creative community 2,500 miles away for many reasons, and one of them seemed to be to preserve his integrity of self.“You can think I’m whatever, and if it makes you like the show more because you think that’s me, go for it,” he said the next day as we toured the “Gemstones” studios, located at a mall, inside a former Sears. “I would rather people not know what my deal is than clearly have an understanding of where the line is drawn.”“I don’t see myself as some alpha, and so I feel like there’s something inherently that makes me laugh about trying to present myself like an alpha,” McBride said.Elizabeth Bick for The New York TimesFunny enough, comedy is not McBride’s favorite genre — he prefers horror and reality TV — nor is it something he always pursued.Early on, he also didn’t imagine himself on camera. He wanted to write and direct. Raised Baptist, mostly in Fredericksburg, Va., he went to film school at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, in Winston-Salem, where he met Green; Hill; John Carcieri, another writer for “Gemstones”; and Ben Best, who created “Eastbound” with Hill and McBride and died in 2021. The film school was tiny, and then only two years old.“Everybody in that school was a misfit or a reject,” Green said. Their group bonded over one another’s VHS collections and found creative kinship and freedom. “It was all just a bunch of kids that kind of were trying to figure it out,” he said.Green was the first to make a splash after college with the critically lauded indie film “George Washington” (2000). After a main cast member of his next feature, “All the Real Girls” (2003), bailed a week into shooting, Green called “the funniest guy I know,” McBride, who was doing below-the-line postproduction work in Los Angeles.McBride asked his boss for time off, was denied, then quit and drove to North Carolina, where Green was shooting. The film debuted to rapturous reviews.Still, McBride’s break came a few years later with “The Foot Fist Way” (2008). Directed by Hill and written by Hill, Best and McBride, the film starred McBride as a Southern strip-mall taekwondo instructor whose ego grossly outstrips his skills. Copies circulated after its 2006 Sundance debut, landing eventually with Adam McKay and Will Ferrell, then producing partners, who got it into theaters. “Eastbound,” which McKay and Ferrell executive produced, soon followed.“With comedy, one of the tricks is knowing how you come off just physically,” McKay said. “And Danny knows he comes off like a guy who, if you cut him off in the parking lot of a Sam’s Club, would key your car while you’re in there shopping.”McBride said he was always satirizing a certain kind of guy he grew up with, a kind of guy he was not. He seemed amused by the outward contradiction.“I don’t see myself as some alpha, and so I feel like there’s something inherently that makes me laugh about trying to present myself like an alpha,” McBride said over lunch on Day 2 at a restaurant near his home. (McBride lives on an island near Charleston, and he had driven us there in his golf cart.)“They’re all just sort of dudes that I think have subscribed to this antiquated way of what the rules are, like what a dude’s supposed to be,” he added. “They’ve committed to it, and then the reality of it isn’t adding up to the illusion.”“Danny knows he comes off like a guy who, if you cut him off in the parking lot of a Sam’s Club, would key your car while you’re in there shopping,” Adam McKay, a past collaborator, said.Elizabeth Bick for The New York TimesMcBride and I talked a lot about masculinity, about fathers and sons. It is a central theme of “Gemstones” — and the Bible, he noted — with its “Succession”-like story about a powerful megachurch pastor (John Goodman) and his three feckless children. (Adam Devine plays the younger brother, Kelvin.) McBride’s own father left when he was young, and he hasn’t seen him since high school. But he insisted he isn’t resentful.“I like how my life turned out,” said McBride, himself a father of two. “Him exiting from our life is probably part of what enabled me to be able to go on and do the things that I did.” The biggest effect it had on his life, he said, was to make him more determined to be a supportive parent.McBride loves his characters and the South in the complex, sometimes ruthless way of familial love. On the surface, “Gemstones” picks some easy marks — megachurches, new money, homoerotic jocks; Season 3 promises monster trucks and militias — but soft targets can be tougher to nail. What allows for authenticity is affection, however complicated.“That’s the tightrope,” he said. “A lot of times I see, when things in the South are presented, it’s always such a boring take.”Back on Day 1, after we all spilled out of the party bus, we wound up on a muddy oyster skiff off Wadmalaw Island, several shots down, pulling salty Sea Cloud oysters straight from their floating cages. Still, having only just met McBride, it was hard not to wonder how much of the day’s events were a show put on for the benefit of a reporter — a good-time performance by a performer who plays characters who are constantly performing.I asked everyone I talked to about him afterward; they all insisted I shouldn’t flatter myself.“I want you to feel really special right now, but that’s kind of Danny,” said Cassidy Freeman, who plays Jesse’s beleaguered wife, Amber. When McBride is the ringmaster, “everyone’s invited,” she added. Hill called him “the fun coordinator of our group.”Cassidy Freeman, who plays the wife of McBride’s character in “Gemstones,” described him as an inveterate host.Jake Giles Netter/HBOWhen I reported back to Goggins, he put it this way: “He’s certainly not doing that as a way to impress you.” Whoever shows up, McBride “just rolls out the red carpet.”McBride seems to find community wherever he goes. Otherwise, he imports it. Green moved from Austin to Charleston. Rough House’s president, Brandon James, who was on the boat, moved with McBride from Los Angeles. As of last month, Hill was preparing to move there with his pregnant wife. For a time, the country singer Sturgill Simpson was in the Charleston crew. He’s in Season 3.It seems like creative utopia. The region’s lower production costs have made it easier for Rough House to develop an array of dream projects, relying on local crews fed and ferried by local businesses. Green’s 2018 “Halloween” sequel, which McBride helped write, was an early example. Green’s first film in their “Exorcist” sequel trilogy, for which McBride has a story credit, is scheduled for October.“I think what they’re doing is going to now become the norm with what’s changing here in Hollywood and the way commercial entertainment is made,” McKay said. “I think stuff is going to go hyperlocal, and I think it’s going to be really cool.”Dare to dream. For now, McBride seems genuinely grateful to have found a way to keep poking fun at things with his closest friends — to keep the party going.“Ultimately it’s really just trying to entertain people and give them something funny to laugh at,” he said. “It makes us laugh. And so we assume hopefully it will make other people laugh, too.” More