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    In ‘Dying for Sex,’ Michelle Williams Isn’t Looking for Love

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    In this new series, based on a true story, Michelle Williams plays a terminally ill woman who wants to devote her remaining days to sexual exploration.Oh how the body keeps the score in “Dying for Sex,” an eight-episode FX dramedy, arriving Friday on Hulu, about a woman with terminal cancer. And if the big mort is near, maybe some petite mort is in order.Michelle Williams stars as Molly, who is sitting in an inert couple’s therapy session with her mild husband (Jay Duplass) when she answers a call from her doctor. Her cancer is back, and it’s Stage 4. She walks out of the office and out of her sexless marriage and into the loving embrace of her BFF (Jenny Slate) and a world of unbridled sexual exploration.Well, bridled a little, in that Molly engages in some bondage play as the show goes on. Her medication is making her horny, but also, simply being alive is itself a horn-inducing endeavor. She experiments with everything, starting with a marathon masturbation session where she tries a variety of vibrators and erotica: a cam guy, a nature documentary, the movie “Speed.” She has never really tried to figure out what she likes, and she’s never had an orgasm with a partner. She wants both of those things to change, and she can’t waste any more time.“You’re going to be dead in five years,” she tells herself. “Nothing matters.” Might as well hit on the guy in the elevator.Might as well swipe and swipe and have all kinds of interesting encounters. She’s not looking for love, she’s looking for pleasure — though she finds a bit of both. She unlocks her inner domme and gets the rush of her life by (consensually) kicking her neighbor (Rob Delaney) squarely in the penis. Unfortunately, this act also breaks her hip; the cancer is in her bones.“Dying” is based on a true story and adapted from the nonfiction podcast of the same name, which was created by the real-life Molly, Molly Kochan, and her best friend, Nikki Boyer, who is a producer on this show. (Kochan died in 2019.) The TV series was created by Kim Rosenstock and Elizabeth Meriwether, and it lives and dies by Williams’s performance.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Through Tears, ‘Mid-Century Modern’ Makes Them Laugh

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      On an evening in mid-January, there were bouquets piled outside of Linda Lavin’s trailer on the Disney lot in Burbank, Calif. Nearby, on a soundstage, a black ribbon was wrapped around her caricature.Lavin had died on Dec. 29, at age 87. Now the creators and cast of “Mid-Century Modern,” a Hulu sitcom that shoots in front of a live studio audience, had returned to work to honor her. That night, they would film a half-hour episode designed to pay tribute to her character, Sibyl Schneiderman, while also eulogizing an actress with an outstanding seven-decade career.That was hard enough. Even harder: They had to make it funny.“The job is to make sure it doesn’t get too sad and too sentimental,” said James Burrows, the multicamera-sitcom legend who directed the episode. “You have to remember it’s a comedy, and you’ve got to make the audience laugh.”I had reached out to the sitcom’s creators back in the fall. A new sitcom set among gay men in later life — think “Golden Girls” for the marriage equality set — it sounded like a hoot. It also offered a chance to explore how depictions of queer relationships have changed since the 1990s.But when Lavin died unexpectedly after most of the season had been shot, an irreverent sitcom with an impressive zingers-per-minute rate suddenly had to pivot. So the reporting assignment pivoted, too. (All 10 episodes arrived on Friday.)The ensemble of “Mid-Century Modern” played a group of gay men living in Palm Springs, Calif., with the mother of Lane’s character, played by Lavin.Chris Haston/DisneyWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Mid Century Modern,’ Plus 8 Things to Watch on TV this Week

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      A new comedy starring Nathan Lane and Matt Bomer comes to Hulu, and this season of “The Bachelor” wraps up.Dive into dating.“The Bachelor” franchise has had a couple of explosive seasons in recent years, but for better or worse, Grant Ellis’s journey to find love has been pretty uneventful. With two women left vying for his attention, the three-hour finale will reveal who receives the final rose, if he gives one at all. Afterward, ABC often debuts its next female lead of “The Bachelorette,” but earlier this year the network announced that it would be skipping this season. Instead, we’ll have the more fun, raunchy and relatable “Bachelor in Paradise” coming back sometime this spring or summer. Monday at 8 p.m. on ABC.After writing a book of essays entitled “Survival of the Thickest,” Michelle Buteau created a Netflix series in which she stars as Mavis Beaumont, and it is returning for a second season. The first installment saw Mavis catch her partner in bed with another woman and deal with that fallout while receiving support from her crew of besties. Season 2 will continue to follow Mavis’s dating journey as a plus-size woman of color. In an interview, Buteau also noted that the show is her love letter to New York City, where it’s set. Streaming on Thursday on Netflix.Some international favorites.The third season of the British comedy “Big Boys” is coming stateside this week. The series, loosely inspired by the creator Jack Rooke’s university days, follows Jack (Dylan Llewellyn), a gay student who’s closeted and mourning the death of his father. He forms an unexpected bond with his roommate Danny (Jon Pointing), who is most often found chatting up girls but is also hiding his mental health struggles. The third season got rave reviews when it premiered in Britain in February — The Independent called it “one of the finest British comedies of the past decade.” Streaming on Tuesday on Hulu.The French show “Bref” started out as a YouTube series in 2011, with its one- to two-minute episodes amassing 131 million views. Now they have lengthened to 30 minutes, which allows the protagonist, played by Kyan Khojandi, to explore different facets of all his relationships. Streaming on Wednesday on Hulu.In “Caught,” a new Argentine series based on a book of the same name by Harlan Coben, Soledad Villamil plays an investigative journalist with a knack for exposing criminals who are often able to avoid justice. She’s faced with a dilemma when the prime suspect involved in the disappearance of a 16-year-old girl is someone she knows. Streaming on Netflix on Wednesday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Shared Custody’ Is a Prickly Spanish Divorce Drama

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      And as with many European series, this one, on Hulu, features plenty of cool sweaters and hot tempers.“Shared Custody” is a light divorce drama, though it is perhaps better seen as a cellphone drama: the buzzing, the ringing, the texting, the “just one second,” the deleted messages, the accidental photo uploads, the app notifications. Is everyone disconnected, or is everyone too connected?The show, on Hulu (in Spanish, with subtitles, or dubbed), follows Cris (Lorena López) and Diego (Ricard Farré) through the early stages of their divorce. They each tell their parents that they’re going to do things amicably, without lawyers, and that figuring out custody of their little girl won’t be that big of a headache.“You can’t do that,” Diego’s father grumbles. “And if you had gone to law school, you’d know that.”Episodes themselves have a sort of split custody. We see Cris at work, where she is told to keep her child and her separation a secret, lest she be pushed aside. Diego’s client, on the other hand, declares that fathers are inherently trustworthy and that she is impressed by his family life.We see each parent on a too-boozy night with friends and how each set of abuelos is both the cause of and solution to some of the issues at hand. Cris is too rigid and selfish — or wait, Diego is too lazy and has mooched off his family and wife forever. (“I’ve taken two degrees worth of digital marketing courses!” he brags to a friend.)As with many shows that cattily dissect the bougie, “Custody” includes a party held at the richest friend’s ostentatiously artsy house, where all the kids are screaming and running around, and all the grow-ups are forming hostile cliques. Things boil over! As with many European shows, this one features interesting sweaters and fabulous bathroom tiles. And as with many contemporary domestic dramas, it captures the misery of being around other people’s poorly behaved children.“Custody” is not dark or brutalizing, but neither does it shy away from how quickly Cris and Diego can take a whisper of disagreement and turn it into an opera of “you are in fact just like your parents, specifically in the ways you most fear and resent.” You know what, maybe we should get lawyers after all. More

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      ‘O’Dessa’ Review: One Song to Save Them All

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      Sadie Sink (“Stranger Things”) rules this postapocalyptic musical with a guitar and an attitude.The director Geremy Jasper begins his new musical in such a bombastic manner, complete with a mock-spaghetti western score, that it’s hard not to be at least intrigued. What is this cinematic U.F.O.?We are, we quickly learn, in a postapocalyptic future in which a certain Plutonovich (Murray Bartlett, from “The White Lotus”) rules the airwaves and people’s minds with a reality competition beamed from his Onederworld lair in Satylite City — think “America’s Got Talent” at Thunderdome.Despite the goofy names, these are scary times. A fresh-faced farm girl named O’Dessa Galloway (Sadie Sink, of “Stranger Things”) is informed that “It ain’t safe for a 19-year-old gal with stars in her eyes.” It’s actually even less safe for her parents, who are both summarily dispatched from the story within a few minutes. O’Dessa’s daddy (the singer Pokey LaFarge) was a rambler, so off she goes rambling as well, armed with his guitar. She ends up, naturally, in Satylite City, where she falls for the sweet Euri Dervish (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a sex worker and cabaret singer whose funky-cool abode has a heart-shaped tub.As he did for his previous film, “Patti Cake$” (2017), which was about an aspiring rapper in New Jersey, Jasper wrote the score with Jason Binnick. Their songs tend to be either emo Americana or power ballads; sometimes the first style builds into the second, as in “Yer Tha One.” And because O’Dessa has a mysterious prophecy to fulfill, she gets one song to rule them all, simply titled “The Song (Love Is All).” It’s worth noting that everyone sings well, sometimes surprisingly so. Sink, in particular, has an unforced elegance that carries even the by-the-numbers numbers.While you might assume Plutonovich is the antagonist, he is overshadowed by the enforcer and pimp Neon Dion (Regina Hall, having a ball), whose severe bangs, dramatic outfits and even more dramatic expressions position her as a villain retrofitted from a 1980s music video.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In ‘Good American Family,’ Ellen Pompeo Leaves the Hospital

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      At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Ellen Pompeo stood in a room of Picassos, mostly in the Cubist style. She paused in front of a portrait of a woman in a blue dress. The eyes were at strange angles, the mouth tucked to one side. The nose was somehow everywhere.Pompeo, 55, tilted her head, trying to resolve the features into one coherent face. Then she gave up.“There’s three sides to every story,” she said. “Or six sides. Or nine. That is why art keeps us alive: Because everybody gets to see things their way, to make sense of them.”For a long time Pompeo’s Hollywood story has been a simple one, the perspective fixed. She modeled sporadically throughout her 20s, had a starring role in one film and smaller parts in others. Since 2005 she has led the most popular medical show of the post-“ER” era, ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy.” Pompeo plays the surgeon Meredith Grey, a sturdy moral center in a fervid, ethically uncertain world.In the intervening years, barring a handful of crossover episodes on “Station 19,” a “Grey’s” sister show, Pompeo has amassed few other credits — a “Doc McStuffins” voice-over here, an appearance in a Taylor Swift video there. It wasn’t that she lacked artistic ambitions, but the “Grey’s” schedule was punishing and spending her brief hiatus making movies felt irresponsible, especially after she became a mother. (She and her husband, Chris Ivery, a music producer, have three children.)In 2022, she renegotiated her “Grey’s” contract, reducing the number of episodes she would appear in. This allowed for her first new substantive role in nearly two decades, as a flawed suburban supermom named Kristine Barnett, in “Good American Family,” a limited series that premieres on Hulu on Wednesday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Devil in the Family’ Is a Poignant and Terrifying Docu-Series

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      The story of the disgraced mommy vlogger Ruby Franke has been covered extensively by the news media. A Hulu documentary offers surprising new insights.The three-part documentary “The Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke,” on Hulu, follows the chilling case of the popular mommy vlogger who eventually pleaded guilty to child abuse for the horrific torture of her children. The case has already been international news, tabloid fodder and discourse grist, but unlike a lot of buzzy streaming documentaries, “Devil” is not a sloppy rehash. Instead, it is pointed and insightful.“Devil” includes interviews with Franke’s two oldest children, Shari and Chad, and with her husband, Kevin. (According to the documentary, he has filed for divorce.) Its other big draw is unreleased footage that Franke recorded over several years, outtakes that include startling and cruel exchanges. “Just be yourself!” she snaps at one of her young daughters.“That is myself,” the little girl pleads.“Well then change it,” Ruby says.She admonishes her husband and Chad for not being chatty and expressive on camera. “Be excited,” she tells her son icily. “Even if you have to fake it. Fake being happy. ’Kay?” In another clip, she prods him to participate more, reminding him that he gets $10 for doing so. Kevin says in the documentary that the family’s YouTube channel brought in $100,000 per month at its peak.There are a lot of disturbing details here, and the director Olly Lambert manages the scope of the story well while still acknowledging its larger context. As much as “Devil” is a story about control, faith and abuse, it is also a story about YouTube, fame and performance.Some of the most arresting footage here looks just like any other peppy family vlog: the super-close-up, self-shot footage of a pert blonde woman in bright lipstick, chirping at her brood. Only she isn’t delivering chummy tips on the surprising versatility of tater tots or on how even mommy needs big belly breaths sometimes. She is berating a little girl, or describing how “selfish” her children are — children who are barely old enough for kindergarten.Part of the allure of social media is its claim that you can actually see what’s going on behind closed doors, that people are being “real.” They aren’t. They’re selling you something, be it lifestyle products or eschatology. The rule remains: Buyer beware. More

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      ‘Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna’ Review: Confusing Accounts

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      The Hulu documentary challenges ideas around who is responsible for the death of the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of “Rust.”“I don’t know how you get justice from an accident.” In 2021, the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was fatally shot on the set of the movie “Rust.” The new Hulu documentary “Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna,” directed by Rachel Mason, a friend of Hutchins, is not a chronicle of Hutchins’s life, nor a tribute to it. The film is instead a plodding but cleareyed account of the confusion, blame and scandal around her death.The documentary begins with a brief overview of the case, highlighting some of the crew members who were involved. The film goes on to challenge a schematic reading of who is responsible for Hutchins’s death, and even suggests that certain “Rust” producers were never held accountable for mismanaging the production.One compelling section highlights an email received by the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, which scolded her for neglecting her prop duties to focus on firearm supervision. The revelations offer new perspectives on a tragedy that was already thoroughly covered in the media.The film’s biggest letdown lies in its cursory tour of who Hutchins was apart from her final hours. Despite testimony from Hutchins’s friends that repeatedly references her artistry, Mason rarely incorporates clips of Hutchins’s cinematography outside “Rust.” When the documentary does find time for a montage of her work, it is only to illustrate a point about where the guns onscreen are being aimed.Last Take: Rust and the Story of HalynaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      In ‘Deli Boys,’ Two Actors Find Dream Roles Playing No One’s Hero

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      It had happened to Saagar Shaikh many times: He would audition for a part, get a callback, then never hear from anyone again. Later, when he would watch the show, movie or commercial he had auditioned for, the same guy always seemed to fill the role he had wanted.So perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised Shaikh when he got the bad news about “Deli Boys,” a new Hulu series about two pampered Pakistani American brothers who become entangled in a convenience-store crime ring. Shaikh had auditioned to play Mir, the buttoned-up business-school grad, and had even tested for the character.But now his manager was calling to tell him that the role had been offered to someone else.Was it Asif Ali, Shaikh asked? The manager sighed.“And here we are today,” Shaikh said last month, sitting within arm’s reach of Ali at a photo studio in Burbank, Calif. It was just a few weeks before the premiere of “Deli Boys” — which now stars them both. Ali had indeed gotten the role of Mir. But Shaikh wound up landing the other lead: the lazy, entitled, hard-partying brother, Raj.Shaikh and Ali play Raj and Mir, two sons of a convenience store mogul who discover that their father was also running a criminal operation. James Washington/Disney“Now I completely understand why he gets all the jobs,” Shaikh said of Ali, “because I worked with him for a whole season.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More