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      Succession Finale: Was Tom Wambsgans a Reference to Bill Wambsganss?

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      When Tom Wambsgans outmaneuvered the Roy siblings, getting himself named as the U.S. executive running Waystar Royco for GoJo at the end of a rollicking finale of the HBO series “Succession,” it likely came as a shock to many of the viewers at home. But to fans of baseball’s early days, and internet conspiracy theorists, the signs were there for Tom to come out on top, besting three competitors at the same time.“It’s me,” Wambsgans said to his wife, Shiv Roy.The clues were there for some, thanks to Bill Wambsganss, a second baseman for Cleveland from 1914 to 1923. Wambsganss didn’t hit much, and there’s little indication he was a stellar base runner or a top-notch fielder. But he had one moment of pure glory, turning the first — and only — unassisted triple play in World Series history.Tom Wambsgans also did not stand out to many ahead of the finale for much beyond his poor treatment of Cousin Greg and his destructive relationship with his wife. But his unusual surname, and the notion that he would have to knock out three opponents at once, caught fire on social media in recent days, thanks to a viral TikTok by Sophie Kihm, the editor in chief of Nameberry, an online catalog of baby names.Thanks to her video, people began to speculate if the show’s writers had tipped their hands as to who would come out on top — and how. The theory had existed in various places for awhile — some believe it explained the ending of Season 3 — but, as the series began to wrap up, the idea that Tom could end up winning, just like Wambsganss, started to feel more and more plausible.Whether the connection was intentional or not, it shined a light on a player who has been all but forgotten beyond one outrageously good play. Sean Forman of Baseball Reference reported on Sunday night that there had been a surge of traffic on Wambsganss’ player page in the wake of the show’s finale.What people are finding is an unremarkable player who made a play that is worth all the attention.Wambsganss and Cleveland were facing Brooklyn in the 1920 World Series. In the fifth inning of Game 5, with Cleveland leading by 7-0, Brooklyn’s Pete Kilduff and Otto Miller both singled. Clarence Mitchell then hit a liner that looked as if it could score a run or more.In a breathless story about the game the next day, which ran on page A1, The New York Times recounted what happened once the ball left Miller’s bat. Wambsganss, who had been playing fairly far from second base, “leaped over toward the cushion and with a mighty jump speared the ball with one hand,” the paper reported.“Wamby’s noodle began to operate faster than it ever did before,” the article continued. “He hopped over to second and touched the bag, retiring Kilduff, who was far down the alley toward third base.”With two outs already having been recorded on the play, Wambsganss turned his attention to Miller.“Otto was evidently so surprised that he was just glued to the ground, and Wamby just waltzed over and touched him for the third out,” the paper reported.The play gave Wambsganss a level of notoriety that eclipsed anything else about his career, or even his life despite his having gone on to manage in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.“Funny thing, I played in the big leagues for 13 years, 1914 through 1926, and the only thing that anybody seems to remember is that once I made an unassisted triple play in a World Series,” he said in the 1966 baseball oral history, “The Glory of Their Times.” “Many don’t even remember the team I was on, or the position I played, or anything. Just Wambsganss-unassisted triple play! You’d think I was born on the day before and died on the day after.”With “Succession” having completed its wildly popular run on television, we will never know if Tom Wambsgans was able to thrive after completing a triple play of his own, or if he would come to be defined only by the one moment, as Wambsganss was.In Wambsganss’s defense, it has been more than 100 years since the unassisted triple play, and people are still talking about him. You would have to assume Tom Wambsgans would be OK with having the same fate. More

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      in Music

      ‘Succession’: A Soundtrack Fit for a Concert Hall

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      Nicholas Britell’s score for the HBO series, which concludes on Sunday, has developed, episode by episode, into a classic theme-and-variations work.There comes a moment near the start of most “Succession” episodes when a faint beat enters the scene, right before some punchline or turn of the screw.Then the show’s theme music kicks in. Over snippets of vintage family videos, a piano fantasia as grainy as the footage unfurls like a sample for swaggering hip-hop alongside courtly, imperious strings.Like any effective theme, it lodges itself in your head immediately. But this music’s composer, Nicholas Britell, isn’t a mere tunesmith, and he doesn’t stop there. Over the four seasons of “Succession,” which ends on Sunday, he has written something unusual in television: a sprawling yet conceptually focused score that has developed, episode by episode, into a classic theme-and-variations work that would be just as fit for the concert hall as for the small screen.This is characteristic of Britell, who doesn’t tend to simply set the emotional tenor of a scene. A screen composer at the forefront of his generation — not a successor to John Williams and his symphonic grandeur but rather a chameleonic, sensitive creator of distinct sound worlds — Britell draws as freely from late Beethoven as he does from DJ Screw, and is as compelling in modes of aching sincerity and high satire alike.Britell is one of the foremost screen composers of his generation, drawing freely from a diverse array of influences including classical music and hip-hop.Clement Pascal for The New York TimesAnd in “Succession,” he evokes a classical music tradition in which a composer doodles at the piano to improvise on a theme, putting it through permutations based on mood and form. This could serve as good parlor entertainment, but also the basis for inventive, kaleidoscopic works; Britell’s soundtrack, in its pairing of piano and orchestra, has an ancestor in Rachmaninoff’s concerto-like “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” He would do well to adapt his score into a similar piece.With his theme and variations, Britell offers a parallel of the show itself: an idée fixe established at the start — a patriarch’s departure from the top of his business empire is more of a when than an if — and a circular (some would say static) plot about the ways in which three of his children maneuver to take over.It is a premise that carries on even after the father’s death early this season; the most recent episode, about his funeral, demonstrates the psychological hold Logan Roy still has over his children and how, united in grief, they nevertheless continue to scheme.The musical seed for all this couldn’t be simpler: not the theme for the main titles, but a lumbering, eight-chord motif that appears within it, and at the start of the “Strings Con Fuoco” cue.From there, variations surface with nods to Classical and Baroque forms: a dancerly minuet or rondo, a concerto grosso of angular strings, a wandering ricercare.Many cues have titles resembling those of a symphony’s movements, tempo indications like “Adagio” and “Andante Con Moto.” Others could blend in with a chamber music program, like Serenade in E flat, or Impromptu No. 1 in C minor, which shares its name with one of Schubert’s most famous piano solos.That can’t be a coincidence. Listening to Mozart’s Fantasia in C minor (K. 475), “Succession” fans might feel transported to the show’s soundtrack.An excerpt from Mozart’s Fantasia in C minor (K. 475)Mitsuko Uchida (Decca)In the first two seasons, Britell followed a fairly confined playbook of the eight-chord motif’s different guises: a beating piano similar to that Mozart fantasia, darkly regal strings and brasses.Generally, each variation was recognizably developed from the same cell. The biggest departures occurred whenever the Roy family left New York. For an episode at Connor’s New Mexico estate, Austerlitz, Britell interjected a guitar variation not heard before or since.Scenes in England took on a stately fanfare. And, at the family’s country house, preparations for a meal were accompanied by a Schubertian violin sextet.Something changed by Season 3. The music, like the story, became more openly emotional; for every cunning rondo, there was a doleful largo. Unsteady ground onscreen translated to surprises in the sound, such as Britell’s first use of a choir at the end of the season finale. Again the score swerved, stylistically, when characters were away from Manhattan. During the climactic episodes, set in Tuscany, he put his theme through an Italian prism for cues like “Serenata — ‘Il Viaggio.’”In the final season, Britell has expanded his palette of variations even further. Logan Roy’s authoritarian monologue on the floor of his news channel ATN is given a coda of chilling dissonance. Suspended chords conjure the in-between state of the children after his death. The irrepressible feelings at the most recent episode’s funeral might as well have a cue title like “Appassionata.”The question is, how will Britell’s theme and variations end? Historically, composers have gone one of two ways: by revisiting the beginning, as in the Aria of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations, or with the potential for further development, as in Beethoven’s “Diabelli” Variations.You could ask the same of the Roy children, who going into the series finale are behaviorally similar to where they started but also, on a deeper level, are not. Will they achieve resolution? Or will their cycles of intrigue continue? Chances are, the answer will be in Britell’s music.In the final season of “Succession,” Britell has expanded his palette of variations even further.Clement Pascal for The New York Times More

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      On HBO’s ‘Succession,’ if You’re Eating Food, You’re Losing

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      When it comes to the high-powered Roy dynasty, food is for the weak and striving.Autumn light filters through the treetops of Central Park West, streaming into Jean-Georges, giving the gray banquettes a matte, silver gleam. The space is plain, severe in its neutrality, undeniably grand and hushed. Each table, though in clear view of the others, is luxuriously cocooned by space, almost private.It’s the ideal place, really, for the Roy children — the scions of the Waystar Royco media empire on HBO’s “Succession” — to discuss their father’s funeral arrangements.The conversation is brisk, and though they chose Jean-Georges as their meeting spot, they don’t eat the food. They leave the pastries — the dark, oversize canelés and fruit-studded buns — along with the platter of fanned, cut fruit, completely untouched. They get up from their seats without so much as unraveling a napkin or dirtying a plate. The slight, feathered mark of Shiv’s nude lipstick on a coffee cup is the only trace of their presence.It’s not unusual for the Roys to avoid eating. From Logan’s humiliating game of “Boar on the Floor” to the menacing box of doughnuts he sends his children when they try to meet in secret, the food on “Succession” has always been deliciously toxic, dissonant and loaded — a clear line into the family’s trauma and power dynamics.But in the final season, things are especially warped and grim. It’s as if the show has stepped into its Ozempic era and real power can only be found in the total absence of appetite. For those with meaningful status in “Succession,” food doesn’t exist for pleasure or nourishment — it barely exists at all. If a character does have a nibble, no matter how small, it tends to be a red flag.At a business retreat in Norway, Tom Wambsgans, right, passes on the buffet.Graeme Hunter/HBOTom Wambsgans, Siobhan Roy’s husband, didn’t come from money, but married into this super-rich family, and has carefully studied their patterns and prerogatives. He is hyper-aware of the contradictions and intricacies of America’s unspoken upper-class etiquette — and often the first to criticize a faux pas.“She’s wolfing all the canapés like a famished warthog,” Tom tells cousin Greg, clocking the inappropriate date Greg brought along to Logan’s birthday lunch. Because what could be more plebeian, what could signify her being any more out of place, than actually eating the food?Not long after, at Logan’s wake, Tom misjudges his position and nominates himself to take over as interim chief executive for the company. If it wasn’t already clear he’d made a terrible mistake, it is when Tom pops a fish taco into his mouth. As he’s powerless, chewing, Karl imagines how the board might see him: “You’re a clumsy interloper and no one trusts you. The only guy pulling for you is dead, and now you’re just married to the ex-boss’s daughter, who doesn’t even like you.”By the time the Waystar team flies to Norway to finalize the sale of the company to Lukas Mattson, the billionaire chief executive of GoJo, Tom sees hospitality as pure gastro-hostility. As Waystar’s senior executives pile their plates with food at a buffet, he’s careful not to be seen eating breakfast at all. “Ambush!” he calls out cheerfully to his colleagues. “You took the bait, fattened for the kill.”And Tom’s not wrong. A GoJo executive comments on the portion size, too: “Hey, easy buddy, leave some for us.” The Waystar team’s desire for breakfast pastries isn’t the only thing that now feels embarrassing — the Americans are overdressed for the countryside, anxious for the deal to go through, fearful of losing their jobs. Their hunger, their appetite, their keenness, it’s a squishy surplus of vulnerability.As Season 4 opens, Logan is competing with his children to buy Pierce Global Media, and escapes his own birthday party in a huff to visit Nectar, a Greek-owned coffee shop on Madison Avenue. (For Town & Country, Charlotte Druckman wrote about this excursion as its own kind of power move.)In a rare moment of vulnerability, we see Logan eating. But first, he insists to his bodyguard, Colin, who is on the clock, that Colin is his best friend, that human beings are merely economic units in the market, that he isn’t sure what happens when we die. Emotionally, he’s a mess.“Nothing tastes like it used to, does it?” Logan says wistfully. “Nothing’s the same as it was.”Connor Roy and Willa Ferreyra hosted their rehearsal dinner at the Grill, a classic Midtown power-lunching spot. It ends up predictably miserable.Macall B. Polay/HBOIn the episode that aired on Sunday, the family reaches the heights of both their incompetence and their power. Election Day in the newsroom was already tense for Tom without the Roy siblings stomping around, sliding notes directly to TV anchors, pushing their agendas on his top voting analyst, scrolling through Twitter, reframing the headlines because, well, the right-wing candidate asked them to. Tom loses his temper when Greg approves cheap sushi as his lunch.It’s not much of a power move — it is not, for example, Logan telling the staff to scrape an entire over-the-top steak and lobster dinner for the family into the trash, then order pizza instead — but it’s the only move that Tom, who has lost control of the newsroom, who never had any control over in the first place, has left. He will allow the election results to be nudged and massaged, the newsroom to be compromised and swayed. He will allow the world to burn, but look, he is above the sushi. He will not touch the sushi.Greg, on the other hand, is happy to dig into his “bodega sushi” as the siblings pressure Darwin, ATN’s election analyst, to call the election before he’s ready. It’s a devastating and hilarious sequence. “This isn’t actually a numbers thing,” says Roman. “I’m just going to say we’re good and that’s on me.” “You can’t make the call ’til I make the call,” says Darwin, angrily.But a moment later, Darwin has given up all sense of editorial integrity and is punished for it, as he accidentally smears wasabi from Greg’s sushi into his own eyes. Greg, in a bumbling, misguided effort to help, pours stinging, lemon-flavored LaCroix right into the wound.It’s as if he didn’t know there’s no making things better with food — there is only making things worse.Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. More

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      ‘Somebody Somewhere’ Celebrates a Life With Tears and Jokes

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      When the sudden death of Mike Hagerty, one of the show’s stars, forced the creators to retool the new season, they sprinkled tributes to him throughout the episodes.In the first episode of the new season of “Somebody Somewhere,” the poignant Kansas-set comedy that returned to HBO this week, Sam (Bridget Everett) receives a letter from her father, Ed. The letter informs her that he has gone to join his brother in Corpus Christi, Texas. Ed, a farmer, has charged Sam with feeding the chickens, mowing the lawn and cleaning out the barn. Sam begins her chores, but when she finds Ed’s baseball cap, she begins to tear up.“It just feels really weird to be here with all his stuff,” Sam says. “I know he couldn’t have cleaned out this barn — it would have broken his heart. I didn’t know it would break mine.”Heartbreak might seem like a strong reaction to some rusted farm equipment. But Mike Hagerty, the actor who played Ed, had died unexpectedly in May 2022, at the age of 67, about a month before filming began for the Season 2. Ed lives on, sailing across the Gulf of Mexico; his absence and Hagerty’s absence inform most of the season. In its quiet, fine-grained way, these episodes of “Somebody Somewhere” provide a eulogy in comedy form, with grief triangulated and transformed.“We knew we wanted to dedicate the season to him,” Hannah Bos, a “Somebody Somewhere” creator, said in a recent video call. “We wanted to celebrate him.”Hagerty, a Chicago native and an alum of the Second City comedy troupe, best known for a five-episode run as the building superintendent on “Friends,” joined the series for the pilot in 2019. Carolyn Strauss, an executive producer, had worked with him before, on the short-lived series “Lucky Louie.” She bet that Hagerty — bushy haired, jowly, with a heart as big as a prairie — would bring warmth and solidity to the taciturn Ed. She won that bet.When Everett, a Kansas-born actress and cabaret star, met him for a chemistry read, she started crying before he had even said a word. “I felt immediately really safe,” she said on that same video call. Strauss and Paul Thureen, the show’s other creator, were also on the line.“It just felt like the right match and the right person and also like I’d met a friend,” Everett said. “I’m not trying to be corny; it’s just really how I felt.”Bos and Thureen enjoyed writing for Hagerty, knowing that he could make any line sound grounded and sincere, that he could endow even simple dialogue with depth. And Everett felt that she grew as an actor every time she was opposite him. He felt to her, she said, like a surrogate father.“Often I get really nervous on sets,” she said. “His affable, calm, steady hand, it set me at ease.”Bridget Everett, left, said that when she met Hagerty, “I immediately felt really safe.” (With Mary Catherine Garrison, bottom left, and Kailey Albus.)Elizabeth Sisson/HBOHagerty seemed to enjoy himself, too. In February 2022, in Los Angeles, HBO hosted a special screening for the Season 1 finale. Strauss chatted with him there, and she recalled him cracking that the show had taught him two words he’d never heard before in his long career: “Season 2.” To celebrate, he bought himself a Toyota RAV4.That spring, ‌Hagerty entered Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, feeling unwell. The Season 2 scripts had already been written, and he planned to participate in a table read from his hospital bed. But he was ultimately too ill to join. On May 5, following an adverse reaction to an antibiotic, he died.The initial response from the producers and his co-stars was a mix of shock and grief. There was a group Zoom call, with cast and creators crying in their separate windows, sharing memories of Hagerty.“He really did feel like a North Star in terms of what we were creating and what we had done,” Strauss said. “So it was hard to believe; it felt very unreal.”Twining with the grief was an understandable amount of panic. The shoot was set to begin in two weeks, and Hagerty was meant to be in almost every episode. Amy Gravitt, HBO’s executive vice president of comedy, made many individual calls, telling the showrunners and producers to take all the time that they needed to mourn — to put off worrying about the show. But Bos and Thureen knew that to put it off for too long would risk losing actors and crew members. A frantic rewrite began.At first, no one knew what to do about Ed, but Strauss, Bos and Thureen felt that they shouldn’t have him die. Season 1 had begun shortly after the death of Sam’s sister Holly — as the show follows Sam’s halting steps toward self-acceptance and a full adult life, the thinking went, another death and an explicit focus on grief would set her back too far.Everett wasn’t so sure. Her own sister and father had died a year apart, and she figured the show, which operates with an unusual degree of realism, might as well mirror that. But after sleeping on it, she agreed.Production was pushed back two weeks. Strauss worried that wouldn’t be enough time for a full rewrite, but she didn’t share that worry with the others. As originally written, the season had focused partly on Ed growing too old for hands-on farming and on his relationship with his wife, an alcoholic. He also played a role in a season-ending wedding. All of that had to be retooled. So Bos, Thureen and Everett got to work on Zoom. Thureen said these sessions, however fraught, brought relief.“It helped in a weird way to have something to focus on,” he said. “It turned into a creative problem-solving thing.”With Strauss’s help, they all worked to find a metaphor that would account for Hagerty’s absence and honor his life. Together they came up with the idea of the brother’s boat and sending Ed across the water, finally free. They also made him a presence throughout several episodes, via occasional letters and phone calls.Jeff Hiller and Everett in the new season of “Somebody Somewhere,” which includes several subtle tributes to Hagerty.Sandy Morris/HBOWhen it came time to do the scene in the barn, Everett was anxious about how it would feel to act without Hagerty. “That was going to be an emotional house of cards for me,” she said. “We all kind of felt it. Just being there without him was devastating.” She had learned the monologue about cleaning out the barn by heart, but when it came time to speak it, the loss of Hagerty overtook her. The tears she cries in the scene are very real.“We only did it two times or three times because it was just a little much,” she said. “I just wanted to say it and then let it go.”Later in the season, there is a funeral for a different character. This became an oblique tribute to Hagerty, with his memory shadowing several of the eulogies. “A poetic honoring,” Thureen called it. And in the final episode, a wedding reception pauses to honor Ed.“Raise your glasses everybody, raise them high — this is to Ed,” a character says. It was a way of making sure that Ed was still there, still a part of this family and this community.If “Somebody Somewhere” is renewed for further seasons, Ed, however far away, will remain a part of them. The creative team is already kicking around Ed-centered ideas for Season 3. Hagerty, in his own way, remains with the show, too.“His impact endures,” Strauss said. “He’s left everybody with a gift: that gravity and humor and forthrightness that characterize him, we all carry it.” More

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      ‘Barry’ Is Ending. For Anthony Carrigan, That’s Nothing to Be Afraid Of

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      Anthony Carrigan was 7 the first time he stepped onstage. And he was terrified. Debilitating stage fright, which he would struggle with for decades, would have led most children to consider alternate careers. Carrigan, a star of the tar-black HBO comedy “Barry,” was not most children.Because even that first time, he felt something beyond terror. Diagnosed at 3 with alopecia areata, an autoimmune disorder that attacks the hair follicles, he often found himself stared at, gawked at, even in elementary school.“People would look at my alopecia and not really look at me,” he said. “That’s kind of a weird dehumanizing thing, when someone is looking at a part of you.” But onstage, he felt as though he could control how people saw him — which meant he could make sure they saw all of him, or at least all of the character he was playing.They are seeing him now. On, “Barry,” which returns for its fourth and final season on Sunday, Carrigan, 40, plays the gangster NoHo Hank. Originally meant to die in the pilot, NoHo Hank, powered by Carrigan’s sweeping, sunshiny, Emmy-nominated performance, has survived multiple assassination attempts and a presumed panther attack. The character has become a fan favorite, complete with catchphrases (“Hey, man,” “super great!”) and multiple GIFs of a Season 2 rooftop folk dance.Two days before I met him, a young woman stopped him on the street. “She just wept, like, Beatles-level mania,” he said. “She was really lovely, though, very sweet.”We were speaking on a Monday afternoon in early April at the Tin Building, an upscale food hall in Lower Manhattan. (He is based in Los Angeles, where “Barry” shoots, but his girlfriend lives nearby.) Alopecia has rendered him bald and without eyebrows or eyelashes, a look that causes a momentary neural jar, until the force of his personality — buoyant, sincere, self-actualized — takes over. Carrigan comes here often. Maybe not often enough.Originally meant to die in the pilot, NoHo Hank (Carrigan, left, with Michael Irby) has become a fan favorite, complete with catchphrases and many GIFs in his honor.Merrick Morton/HBOHe hadn’t made a reservation at the oyster counter, and for a moment it looked as if he wouldn’t be seated. I joked that he could pull a “Do you know who I am?” maneuver, and Carrigan had the decency to look appalled.“I’ve never done that!” he said. Once seated, he listened politely as a server described the oysters of the day. He declined the ones from Massachusetts. “I’m from Massachusetts; I know how salty we are,” he said, and ordered a dozen from Canada and Maine.After high school in Massachusetts, he studied acting at Carnegie Mellon University. His hair loss was still isolated to patches at that time, and professors often cast him as the longhaired bad boy, a look that determined most of his early roles. That hair and the worry that he would lose it were sources of anxiety. And after landing his first major role, as an amateur detective on the one-season Jerry Bruckheimer series “The Forgotten,” his alopecia progressed and he did lose it. At first he covered up, with hairpieces and eyebrow makeup, a must for character continuity. But when the series ended, he put the hairpieces away.“I really had nothing to lose at that point,” he said as he spooned horseradish onto an oyster. “Because I had no idea what my career was going to look like. I just knew that it was either try it with the way that I looked, or I was going to have to find a new career.”So he kept going, without wigs or false lashes, even when his representatives argued for them. He worried that this new appearance would limit the roles he was seen for. It did. But he suspected that this new self-acceptance would free him as an actor. Whatever parts did come his way, he would play the hell out of them.The parts did come. Gone was the bad boy. In its place, he discovered, was the bad guy. He began to play villains, chief among them Victor Zsasz, the psychopath he played for 20 episodes on the Fox superhero series “Gotham.” He fretted, sometimes, that he was helping to reinforce a stereotype of bald men as sinister. But it kept him in the Screen Actors Guild. And it netted him an audition for “Barry.”NoHo Hank, intended as a minor antagonist, is a member of a Chechen mob. Carrigan had little interest in playing another villain. But the script’s violent comedy delighted him. He went back to the formal exercises of his college days. How should Hank move? What animal would he be? A scorpion, he decided, which explains the puffed-out chest, the hands on hips, the scuttling walk.“He’s a lovable scorpion,” Carrigan explained at the oyster counter. “He doesn’t want to sting anyone, he doesn’t want to hurt anyone. But that’s just his nature.”He made his audition tape and sent it in. Alec Berg, a co-creator of “Barry,” recalled being struck at first by Carrigan’s atypical appearance, then by his skill and commitment.“For me, I just completely forgot that this is a guy who doesn’t have hair,” Berg said in a recent phone interview. “He just was that character so thoroughly.”When he and the series star and co-creator, Bill Hader, met Carrigan in person, they knew they couldn’t kill Hank so quickly. “He was lovely and so imaginative, he really understood the comedy,” Hader said, in a separate interview. “I was like, ‘I’d like the option that this guy lives.’”Hader described NoHo Hank as a “heavy.” But in Carrigan’s hands and in the wardrobe department’s shrunken polo shirts, he became the lightest heavy imaginable. He’s a people pleaser, a charmer. During a Season 2 near-death experience, he tells his underlings, needlessly, in his Chechen-accented English: “I know you look at me and see hard-as-nails criminal, stone-cold killer, ice man. But, uh, this is lie.” Hank should have had a career in hospitality, Carrigan said. Hank has said as much himself.Carrigan’s command of the role is exhaustive. He often devises new idioms for Hank, as when he substitutes “kid and the poodle” for “kit and caboodle” in a Season 4 episode. And he preapproves each polo shirt.“I’m playing the bad guy, but making him likable, making him winning,” Carrigan said.In playing both sides of Hank — Hank’s cheer, Hank’s sting — Carrigan complicates the stereotype of the bald villain, allowing “Barry” to pose knotty questions about good and evil, action and intention. Hank, that likable guy with the juice boxes, has killed an awful lot of people.“People would look at my alopecia and not really look at me,” Carrigan said about beginning to lose his hair as a child. But onstage, he felt as if he could control how people saw him.Evelyn Freja for The New York TimesThe complications that Carrigan brings to the part have drawn the attention of other directors. He played a robot in the 2020 comedy “Bill & Ted Face the Music.” Paul Weitz cast him as comic relief in the 2021 Kevin Hart film “Fatherhood,” attracted, Weitz said, by Carrigan’s “baked-in love of performance and love of human eccentricity.”So far, no role has rivaled Hank in its complexity or its blood-spattered joy. Carrigan knows this better than anyone. When “Barry” wrapped, just before Thanksgiving, he hung up Hank’s costume for the last time and there, in his trailer, said goodbye to him, thanking Hank for the chance to play, to experiment, to make mistakes. Then he stole Hank’s watch, a fake Rolex.Berg bet that Carrigan would find other roles. “He’s just the nicest, most genuine, friendly, lovely guy,” he said. “Part of who he is goes into Hank, but he’s not just playing himself, he’s really performing.”“I don’t think it’d be hard for him to step outside of that,” Berg added, “play other things.”When I met Carrigan at the oyster counter, he was trying to take that step. He had recently returned from a location shoot in Kentucky for a new film. And the director Alex Winter, his co-star in “Bill & Ted,” was writing a role for him in another movie. “He has heart and he has physicality,” Winter said. “And he has an incredible sense of humor.” Is the character a villain? “Everyone’s a villain in this thing,” Winter said.If Carrigan worries that no subsequent role will be as beloved as NoHo Hank, he worries less than he used to. “When I’m able to curtail my anxiety enough to feel loose and feel free, then I can go in any direction,” he said.As he ate his oysters, I noticed a signet ring on his finger, a recent gift from his girlfriend. The ring shows a rabbit. Rabbits are famously fearful animals. But this one, Carrigan pointed out, was running free. “The fear is no longer taking up space,” he said.He turned it around, showing an engraving of a trap. Would the rabbit fall into it?Carrigan shook his head. “I think he’s already escaped it,” he said. More

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      The Key to Gerri on ‘Succession’? ‘Inside She’s a Nervous Wreck’

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      For decades the New York theater world paid homage to J. Smith-Cameron, a veteran stage actress who has often been compared to Carole Lombard for her precise timing and comic verve. When she wasn’t doing Molière or Shakespeare, she was impressing critics and her fellow actors with her performances in plays by Paul Rudnick, John Patrick Shanley and Beth Henley.Now her hard-won local fame has been eclipsed by her breakout role on “Succession,” the HBO drama about a venal Murdoch-like family locked in a “King Lear”-like power struggle. As Gerri Kellman, the long-suffering general counsel and consigliere to Logan Roy, the vicious, vacillating patriarch played by Brian Cox, Ms. Smith-Cameron has turned an ancillary player into a surprisingly complex character. It’s a grown-up role for a grown-up woman.Gerri’s cool gaze, raised eyebrows and clipped interjections, along with her shrewd analyses of corporate shenanigans, have made her an avatar of female power for women of all ages, especially young professionals who find that attaining success in their fields may require them to tiptoe around monstrous male egos. As a result, Ms. Smith-Cameron has gone from a darling of the stage to social media star, with memes galore and Twitter accounts dedicated to Gerri’s every eye roll.“Characters like hers are often written as these barracuda businesswomen or hard-boiled lady detectives, people who are impenetrable or invincible,” Ms. Smith-Cameron said. “What I like about Gerri is she’s very powerful, but inside she’s a nervous wreck. She’s not impervious to things. That’s why I think she strikes a note. There’s a vulnerability to her and a jittery, thinking-on-her-feet quality. She’s not just coming in and blasting people.”On a brisk March afternoon, Ms. Smith-Cameron, who goes by “J.,” settled in with a cup of coffee onto a squashy blue velvet sofa in her living room. Brownie, a grizzled and wary 12-year-old terrier mix, was napping, fitfully, among the pillows, occasionally rousing herself to bark at a guest.For the last eight years, Ms. Smith-Cameron and her husband, Kenneth Lonergan, the playwright, screenwriter and director, have rented this cozy, two-story apartment in a Federal-style townhouse in downtown Manhattan from the actor Matthew Broderick. Mr. Broderick and Mr. Lonergan have been pals since high school, and they and Ms. Smith-Cameron have worked together, on and off, for decades.Ms. Smith-Cameron with Mr. Broderick in a 1999 production of Emlyn Williams’s “Night Must Fall” at the Lyceum Theater in New York.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“It’s been thrilling to watch J. cross over from a fixture on the New York stage into the collective consciousness,” Mr. Broderick said in a phone interview. “She’s so smart and her humor is so slyly funny. She doesn’t miss a joke.”There are a few Broderick touches in the apartment, notably paintings by Mr. Broderick’s mother, Patricia. “This one is called something like, ‘No matter how old or sick they are, no one likes to look a wreck,’” Ms. Smith-Cameron said, pointing out a piece above the fireplace, an expressionist image of a stately woman in disarray. “Isn’t it great? It’s so thought through.”Gerri has been good to the Smith-Cameron-Lonergan household.“She’s been supporting us for the last six years,” said Mr. Lonergan, who is known for the films “Manchester by the Sea” and “You Can Count On Me.” “No qualms with her whatsoever. Whatever she needs to get done it’s fine with me.”He mused about what, if anything, the character has in common with his wife.“J. has pointed out that Gerri is very anxious,” he said. “J. is sometimes anxious but not in a maneuvering way — she just gets anxious and overwhelmed. Her wheels are always turning. When you hug her, she’s very nicely hugging you back, but you get the sense she’s thinking of other things.”“I’m sorry,” Ms. Smith-Cameron said.It was Ms. Smith-Cameron’s rapport with Kieran Culkin, who plays Roman, the youngest, sassiest Roy, that inspired a “Succession” subplot that completely unhinged the internet. Gerri and Roman were in a jousting and affectionate mentor-mentee relationship as she took him under her wing. But the show’s writers, noting the actors’ off-camera banter, pushed the relationship further. (Off the set, the prankish Mr. Culkin teases Ms. Smith-Cameron as relentlessly as Roman does Gerri. This summer, during a cast dinner, she said, she was so exasperated with him she threw a drink in his face.)Ms. Smith-Cameron, with Kieran Culkin, in a scene from Season 3 of “Succession.” She went off script to call his character a “little slime puppy” in one episode.HBOMidway through the second season, Roman’s Gerri-baiting and his off-color jokes, and Gerri’s snappy retorts, had morphed into a queasy dominatrix-submissive scenario. During a phone call with Roman, Gerri realizes, to her horror, that her tart insults are turning the conversation into phone sex, at least on his end. Ms. Smith-Cameron found herself improvising, which was how the phrase “little slime puppy,” a put-down she coined on the spot, entered the popular lexicon. Or at least the vernacular of “Succession” fanatics.By the end of Season 3, things had gone completely off the rails. Roman tried to text Gerri a close-up of his anatomy, only to misfire, sending the photo to his father. For the first time in her career, Gerri found herself in a vulnerable position. That precariousness, and her response to it, will define her path in the show’s fourth and final season, which has its first episode Sunday.“Gerri is in a restless, insecure place through the whole season, but also, I feel, getting wise to her heft,” Ms. Smith-Cameron said. “I always felt like there was something kind of on the boil with her. I can say that it’s the first time in her career that she’s not felt on solid ground — and she’s angry about it. She’s angry with both Roman and Logan. She’s of an age and has accrued money and could easily retire, but she’s not the type. She’s a workaholic and I think she feels like she’s in her prime. People are always asking me, ‘Why does she take it?’ I think it’s thrilling for her, it’s a high, like surfing in a dangerous sea.“I don’t know that I could be Gerri in real life, and yet acting is very insecure,” she continued. “You have to go out and kill for food every time.”Ms. Smith-Cameron started acting in plays in New York in the 1980s. “I wasn’t trying to be on a big hit show,” she said.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesMs. Smith-Cameron, 65, was born Jean Isabel Smith in Louisville, Ky., the youngest of three children, and grew up in Greenville, S.C. Her father was an architect and engineer; her mother worked at Head Start and as an assistant librarian. Ms. Smith-Cameron studied at the Florida State University School of Theater in Tallahassee but dropped out, because she was working so much in regional theater and small films.She changed her name in stages: First to J. Smith, because Jeannie, as she was known, seemed too flimsy for an actor. She then exchanged Smith for Cameron, a family name, for additional heft. The hyphenate Smith-Cameron came a bit later, and by accident, after a director printed her name on a film poster that way.In the early 80s, Ms. Smith-Cameron moved to Manhattan and has worked to growing acclaim ever since. In the 1997 Off Broadway production of Douglas Carter Beane’s “As Bees in Honey Drown,” she played an irresistible con artist, delivering a manic mash-up of Auntie Mame and Holly Golightly in a role that won her an Obie. Ben Brantley called her performance “deliriously pleasurable” in his review for The New York Times.“In my 60s, to have this attention, it’s just weird,” she said. “It’s not like I didn’t have notice before, but I always did these off-the-beaten track things. I wasn’t trying to be on a big hit show.”Ms. Smith-Cameron has long been a booster of independent film. You can see her right now in “The Year Between,” by Alex Heller, a comedic drama based on the filmmaker’s own experience with bipolar disorder, which caused her to drop out of college and move back home with her parents. Ms. Smith-Cameron plays the tart Midwestern mother, and Steve Buscemi is her kindly husband. It’s not the first time they have been married onscreen. “He’s so great,” she said of Mr. Buscemi. “We both love to champion independent movies because they’re not built on the premise of making money. They’re exhausting, you have to work really hard fast, but when it fits, it’s a joy.”The actress in an ensemble scene from the 2022 film “The Year Between.”Gravitas Ventures“J. lifts people up,” said Zoe Winters, another fine stage actor scooped up by the “Succession” team who plays Kerry, Logan Roy’s immaculate assistant. “I’ll get texts from her that say, ‘You’re quite something. You’re dazzling.’ She has an endless capacity for that. Ultimately, I think what she’s always trying to do is make people feel good and make really good art.”Ms. Smith-Cameron and Mr. Lonergan met cute, as she put it, while working on a series of one-act plays in the mid-90s. She said she found him appealingly grumpy and quietly hilarious.As she recalled, “I was like, ‘Why have I never met this actor? He’s of an age, he’s really good, he’s really smart! Is he gay? Is he married?’ I began to do a little research.”She learned he was a playwright, acting in another’s scene, who had also written what she thought was the best play of the program. When they collided one night on the stairs of the theater, she complimented his work, comparing it to a William Inge play. When he looked blank, she challenged him, saying, “Don’t you know who William Inge is?”“I had been married and divorced in my 20s,” she said, “and I was going through a chilly spell. I didn’t think I’d fall in love or get married or have kids. So I was a little bitter and a little saucy. But I had never been this brazen.”The couple married in 2000; their daughter, Nellie, is 21.Ms. Cameron-Smith and Mr. Lonergan at the Season 4 premiere of “Succession” at Lincoln Center this month.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York Times“There’s something conspiratorial about J., as if she can’t wait to let the world in on the most delicious secret,” said Mr. Rudnick, who cast her in his 1994 Off Broadway comedy, “The Naked Truth.”“She was helplessly, magnetically funny,” Mr. Rudnick continued. “I kept making this one speech longer, just so I could watch J. perform it. She developed a brilliant set of almost balletic gestures, which she informed me were called ‘puppet hands.’ And over the course of an especially long rehearsal, we developed a system where if J. performed her monologue flawlessly, I’d give her a chocolate chip cookie. She of course ended up with an entire bag of Chips Ahoy!”Frank Rich, the former New York Times theater critic and an executive producer of “Succession,” said he had taken delight in Ms. Smith-Cameron’s stage work for years. Even though she has often been known for playing more flamboyant characters, he is not surprised by the nuanced quality she has brought to her character.“For Gerri, J. found this astringent comic tone that suggests she’s in on the joke of working for these entitled jerks who think they know what they’re doing but often have no idea,” he said. “She’s their corporate babysitter even as she has to be subordinate to them. There’s a tragicomedy to her situation, and J. is an actor who can deliver on that.”Ms. Smith-Cameron at home.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesMr. Lonergan, who had been puttering in the kitchen, wandered back into the living room, still mulling over the question of whether his wife has anything in common with the Waystar Royco general counsel.“The other thing I was going to say is, J. doesn’t take full command of things but they kind of go the way she wants them to go, sooner or later,” he said. “She’s very strong-willed. At first I would have said there wasn’t any similarity between J. and Gerri, but they both have their eyes on the main point. Both are extremely observant and notice shifts in what’s going on around them. They’re both interested in substance, and neither of them needs to be the center of attention in a room — and nobody is smarter than either of them in a room.”Ms. Smith-Cameron was beaming. “Thank you,” she said. More

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      in Television

      Chris Chalk of ‘Perry Mason’ Takes a Deep Breath

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      Chris Chalk put his stamp on HBO’s dark, dynamic “Perry Mason” during a key scene in the first season, when his character, the deeply conflicted beat cop Paul Drake, pays a visit to Perry’s home. Paul has just danced around the truth on the witness stand to protect himself and his white superiors, and it doesn’t sit well. Nor does the cash payoff he received for his obedience.“Every day I got to wake up with this ball of fear inside of me,” he tells Perry, the defense attorney played by Matthew Rhys. “Gotta go put on that uniform, and go out there and play the fool.” And the wad of cash he received? “What they give me for being a good boy. I do not like feeling owned.”It’s a central moment in the series, which returns on Monday, a searing encapsulation of how it feels to be a principled and ambitious Black man in 1930s Los Angeles. Chalk conveys every nuance with relaxed intensity, a trait for which he is known by viewers and admired by peers.“He vacillates between being very intense and focused about his work and just really silly and fun,” Diarra Kilpatrick, who plays Paul’s wife, Clara, said in a video interview. “He lives between those two spaces.”This is an exciting time for Chalk. He plays a bigger role in the new “Perry Mason” season, as Paul goes to work as Perry’s chief investigator. He just returned from the Sundance Film Festival, where the new film in which he stars, “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” received a mostly positive reception. He recently directed his first feature, “Our Deadly Vows,” in which he stars alongside his wife, K.D. Chalk.But Chalk, like Paul, also carries a good deal of stress. During a video interview last month from his home in Los Angeles, he gulped from a large glass of corn silk tea, intended to ease some prostate issues that he said might be stress-related. He wears small bandages on a finger and a thumb, casualties of excessive smartphone use.“It’s life, isn’t it?” he said. “We all got our things, and we just have to breathe through it and be grateful.”From left, Matthew Rhys, Chalk and Juliet Rylance in a scene from “Perry Mason.” In Season 2, Chalk’s character, Paul, has become Perry’s chief investigator.Merrick Morton/HBOFor all of these slings and arrows, Chalk, 45, remains one of those actors for whom seemingly nobody has an unkind word.“I would love to talk about how awesome Chris Chalk is, it’s one of my favorite subjects!” wrote Alison Pill, who worked with Chalk on the HBO series “The Newsroom,” from 2012 to 2014. “Chris Chalk is like a one-in-a-million human,” Kilpatrick said. “When he walks into the makeup trailer, I’m always slightly envious-slash-borderline resentful, because he’s a physical specimen,” Rhys said in a video interview.“And he’s always very stylish — he looks good in every sense,” Rhys added. “I’m always like, ah, [expletive] you, Chalk.”Chalk, and Paul, are crucial to the mission of “Perry Mason.” Kilpatrick joked that the original “Perry Mason,” which starred Raymond Burr and aired on CBS from 1957 to 1966, was “the favorite show of every Black grandmother in the world.” But this is not your grandmother’s show. This “Perry Mason” is savvy about race, gender and class — the second season centers on two Mexican American teens charged with murdering a white businessman — elements that were rarely front and center in the original series.“Old-school ‘Perry Mason’ is lovely, but it’s literally only white people, and barely any women,” Chalk said.The new version, which premiered in 2020, focuses on a group of three outsiders in a gritty, noir-drenched Los Angeles: Perry, a disheveled, heavy-drinking private investigator-turned attorney still traumatized by his World War I experiences; Della Street (Juliet Rylance), Perry’s right hand, who is navigating the sexism of the courtroom and life as a closeted lesbian; and Paul, who is trying to do right by his conscience and his people in a time and place where the racism is out in the open.Chalk grew up poor in Asheville, N.C., where he said he had shotguns pointed at him. “The only way to survive was to shift who I was depending on how dangerous of a room I was in,” he said.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesMichael Begler, who, with Jack Amiel, assumed showrunner duties in the new season from Ron Fitzgerald and Rolin Jones, said that none of it worked without Chalk. (Fitzgerald and Jones stepped down to focus on other projects, a spokesman for HBO said; to take over, the network tapped Begler and Amiel, who had created “The Knick” for Cinemax, an HBO subsidiary.)“What was great about working with him is he was constantly challenging me as the writer to get it right,” Begler said in a video interview. “The story that we’re telling with him really lets us dive into not just the typical, ‘Oh yeah, there’s a lot of racism’ idea. We go deeper into what he’s feeling, and his ethics.“He goes deeper, and I think that speaks to Chris and who he is as a person.”He learned early. Chalk grew up poor in Asheville, N.C. “Asheville is lovely for tourists, but it’s a pretty racist place,” he said. “I definitely had shotguns put to the back of my head. I don’t think there are many people who would want to trade childhoods with me.”But his upbringing also turned out to provide unexpected training. “I believed at that time that the only way to survive was to shift who I was depending on how dangerous of a room I was in,” he said. “I became very good at that.”Chalk studied theater at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, then moved to New York, where he immersed himself in the drama world. He was a reader at Labyrinth Theater Company under the artistic director Philip Seymour Hoffman, and soon won parts of his own, culminating in the 2010 Broadway production of “Fences” opposite Denzel Washington and Viola Davis. Television and film followed, including roles in “Homeland,” “Gotham,” “Detroit” and “When They See Us.”With success comes new stress, Chalk acknowledged, and he has experienced a lot of both lately. “We all got our things,” Chalk said. “We just have to breathe through it and be grateful.”Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThere are, by most accounts, two Chris Chalks. One likes to joke around on the set and make friends. The other is an intense professional who seeks out serious conversation and cuts up his scripts and pastes the segments into an ever-ready notebook so he can make notes on each scene.Sometimes the two Chalks converge. Pill fondly remembered Chalk engaging her to read Amiri Baraka’s 1964 play “Dutchman” with him during downtime on the “Newsroom” set. The confrontational and allegorical play is about a Black man and a white woman on the New York subway.“So many of our conversations are about race and misogyny and the world, and they also come back to why we make art, and pragmatism and reality, and what the game is,” Pill said by phone. “He operates on all of these different levels all the time, and hopping back and forth between them is something that I think he does really well.”Chalk’s facility for switching modes — and codes — sounds a lot like Paul Drake. He spends his personal life with his family in the working class Black neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles. Then he enters the world of investigating for Perry, a world that sometimes puts him at odds with his own values and other Black people, an internal conflict that comes to a head in the new season. He has definitively moved on from his identity as a go-along-to-get-along police officer.“Paul was this ideal man, if one is behaving within the constructs of a white supremacist America,” Chalk said. “He was your Negro; you knew he was safe. And now, I don’t know. Paul might even be, dare I say, reckless.”Paul could stand to relax a little. So could Chalk, by his own admission. He’d like to get those prostate numbers to a better place. Reduce that cellphone usage. Maybe even tap into his lighter side a little more.“I like to do very dark and complicated things,” he said. But it might not be the worst idea, he ventured, to “throw some comedy in there to relax the system a little bit.”“The stuff I’ve done has largely been surrounding trauma,” he added. “I do enjoy doing that. But it might be time to do ‘Sesame Street.’” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Black Bear,’ ‘Sharp Stick’ and More Streaming Gems

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      Looking for something different to stream? We have options for you.This month’s suggestions for the hidden gems of your subscription streaming services cut a wide swath of genres and styles, including a piercing psychological thriller, a moody marital drama and a buck-wild sex comedy, with a handful of first-rate documentaries to keep you anchored in reality.‘Black Bear’ (2020)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.When Aubrey Plaza arrived on the scene over a decade ago, her bone-dry wit, acerbic delivery and M.V.P. supporting turns in comic films and television suggested the second coming of Janeane Garofalo. But her electrifying dramatic work over the past few years — on “The White Lotus,” in “Emily the Criminal” and in this scorching portrait of psychosexual one-upmanship from the writer and director Lawrence Michael Levine — suggests something closer to Gena Rowlands. The wildly unpredictable psychological drama begins as a love triangle, with Plaza as an actor-turned-filmmaker on a remote retreat with a married couple (Christopher Abbott and Sarah Gadon, both excellent). Over the course of a long night, the trio flirt, hint and accuse, rearranging and regrouping their allegiances, until … well, then it goes somewhere else entirely, grippingly blurring the lines between life, art and their respective commentaries.‘Take This Waltz’ (2012)Stream it on HBO Max.The director Sarah Polley has been running the awards gauntlet for her latest film “Women Talking.” On Twitter, she took a moment to winkingly, winningly note the debt owed her by one of her competitors, requesting “that Steven Spielberg return my cast from ‘Take This Waltz.’” And “The Fabelmans” co-stars Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen are marvelous in Polley’s sophomore outing, as Margot and Lou, an easy-breezy couple whose comfortable marriage is drawn into doubt when Margot is suddenly thunderstruck by her attraction to a new neighbor (understandably, as he’s played by Luke Kirby). Polley masterfully takes what could have been a weepy melodrama or a scolding screed and turns it into a nuanced and probing meditation on what it truly means to be faithful.‘Sharp Stick’ (2022)Stream it on Hulu.Lena Dunham’s 2022 was a study in contrasts, with two night-and-day feature films to contemplate: her Amazon original “Catherine Called Birdy,” which seemed to challenge the very notion of who Dunham is and what she does, and the indie comedy-drama “Sharp Stick,” which took those notions into new and provocative territory. Her focus is Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth), a 26-year-old nanny who, rather ill-advisedly, discards her virginity with the scuzzy burnout father (Jon Bernthal) who employs her. Dunham’s knack for writing amusingly self-destructive women and dopey men remains intact, and her own turn as the mother caught in the middle is as thorny and complicated as the movie surrounding it.‘Cosmopolis’ (2012)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.The mixed reception that greeted Noah Baumbach’s recent film adaptation of Don DeLillo’s “White Noise” served as another reminder that there seems something uniquely tricky about turning the author’s thematically and historically dense works into quicksilver cinema. But in 2012 the director David Cronenberg was up to the challenge with “Cosmopolis,” turning DeLillo’s chronicle of a day in the life of a young billionaire into a snapshot of self-destruction in the Occupy era, while Robert Pattinson makes a particularly effective DeLillo protagonist, all cold surfaces and questionable motives.‘The Monster’ (2016)Stream it on HBO Max.Bryan Bertino’s tight, compact thriller finds a fiercely independent tween girl (Ella Ballentine) and her alcoholic mother (Zoe Kazan) on a long, tough drive through the lonely night — and then stranded in their car, wrecked while swerving to avoid a wolf on the road. But that wolf was trying to escape from another animal, and the women soon supplant the wolf as its prey. That sounds simple enough, but that’s also not all Bertino is up to; the picture’s intricate and ingenious flashback structure makes it increasingly clear that these two are perfectly capable of being just as monstrous to each other.‘The Pez Outlaw’ (2022)Stream it on Netflix.Amy Bandlien Storkel and Bryan Storkel’s documentary tells the story of Steve Glew, a collector, seller and smuggler of Pez candy dispensers — or, more accurately, Glew tells the story himself, not only narrating his tale with cheerful comic vigor, but starring in the documentary’s energetically stylized dramatizations of his various heists and high jinks. That irreverent approach is the right one for this low-stakes story, which takes the tools of the increasingly ubiquitous Netflix true crime documentary and exposes them as ridiculous. ‘Leave No Trace’ (2022)Stream it on Hulu.When the Boy Scouts filed for bankruptcy in February 2020, it was one of many national stories that quickly receded to the background in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Thousands of claims of sexual abuse finally came to light, ultimately surpassing 82,000 accusers. Irene Taylor’s documentary details the history of the organization, and its pattern of protecting accused pedophiles in its midst (all the while ostracizing gay Scouts and Scoutmasters as dangers to children). Taylor assembles an anatomy of a conspiracy, detailing exactly how these secrets were kept so safe for so long, all while tracking down survivors from around the country to hear their stories. It’s a troubling, infuriating piece of work, assembled with a delicate mixture of righteous indignation and necessary sensitivity.‘Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song’ (2021)Stream it on Netflix.Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine’s documentary is not, it should be noted, a traditional biographical portrait of the singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, and thank goodness, as there have been plenty of those. Instead, the filmmakers examine the long, strange, fascinating history of the title song — now easily his most recognizable composition, deployed in media of all kinds, covered by every artist worth their stripe, but initially a forgotten track on a poorly selling album. That odyssey, from ignored to iconic, is an inherently dramatic one, and Gellar and Goldfine bring it to life with panache, all while acknowledging that Cohen’s particular passion made its very inception something akin to musical magic. More