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    For Casting Directors, the Hunt for a Killer Never Stops

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    Procedural dramas are often relaxing to watch, but the hectic sprint to find and cast new patients, clients and crooks each week is anything but.On a Monday afternoon in February, Findley Davidson and Jonathan Tolins met for a video call. Tolins, the showrunner for the new CBS procedural “Elsbeth,” and Davidson, the show’s casting director, were finalizing casting for the sixth episode, which visits the offices of an exclusive plastic surgeon, and discussing the seventh, which attends a country club wedding.“Elsbeth” is a “howdunnit,” in which Carrie Preston’s cheery, distractible legal savant (a character first introduced on “The Good Wife”), identifies a murderer already known to the audience. Each episode requires a buzzy guest star to play the murderer — the show had already secured the likes of Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Jane Krakowski and Blair Underwood. In the seventh episode, the killer is the father of the bride, a man who projects country club clout. Davidson and Tolins, who had each come with a list of preferred actors, batted A, B and C-list names around like so many celebrity tennis balls. Quickly, they assembled a ranked list of about a dozen men, more diverse in ethnicity and mien than Tolins’s initial character description — “old WASP-y money” — might suggest. (They eventually landed on the live-wire comic actor Keegan-Michael Key.) Then it was time to blue-sky the eighth episode.“They just keep coming,” Davidson said.Other well-known “Elsbeth” guest stars this season include Blair Underwood. Elizabeth Fisher/CBSProcedural dramas — legal, medical, homicidal — are a durable form of comfort television, with familiar bands of lawyers, doctors and cops solving thorny problems in about 45 minutes of screen time. But each week’s new cases require new clients, new patients, new victims and killers and crooks, some at least mildly famous and each of them plausible for whatever fantastical circumstance the writers have dreamed up.All of which means that delivering the satisfying, sink-into-your-sofa consolation of such shows involves a hectic, grueling, often maddening sprint to assemble new troupes of actors week after week, with casting directors receiving hundreds, sometimes thousands of submissions for every role. Within just a few days, auditions are vetted, offers are made, parts are cast. Then the process begins all over again.“It’s go, go, go,” said Jason Kennedy, the casting director for the CBS series “NCIS.” He noted that the pandemic and the actors’ strike had constricted the process further. “There seems to be even less time there than there was before, and a lot more actors to consider,” he said.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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      Joanna Merlin, Known for Her Work Both Onstage and Off, Dies at 92

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      Soon after appearing in the original Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” she began a new career as a prominent casting director.Joanna Merlin, who, after originating the role of Tzeitel, the eldest daughter, in the hit Broadway musical “Fiddler on the Roof,” became a renowned casting director, notably for Stephen Sondheim musicals including “Into the Woods” and “Follies,” died on Oct. 15 at her younger daughter’s home in Los Angeles. She was 92.Her older daughter, Rachel Dretzin, said the cause was complications of myelodysplastic syndrome, a bone marrow disease.The idea of becoming a casting director came from Hal Prince, the powerful producer of “Fiddler,” after she had left “Fiddler” to raise her two young daughters. He had interviewed several candidates and told Ms. Merlin that most of them “just didn’t like actors,” she told Backstage magazine.“He felt that since I was an actor and a mother, that I might be a good choice,” she added. “He understood that I was raising children and told me that he didn’t care what hours I put in, just as long as I got the work done.”She set to work in 1970, casting replacement actors in “Fiddler” during its last two years on Broadway. For the next two decades, she cast six musicals that were composed by Sondheim and produced (and usually directed) by Mr. Prince on Broadway: “Company,” “Follies,” “A Little Night Music,” “Pacific Overtures,” “Side by Side by Sondheim” and “Merrily We Roll Along.”From left, Ms. Merlin, the composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, the director Harold Prince and the playwright George Furth during a casting session for the 1981 Broadway musical “Merrily We Roll Along.”Martha Swope/The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsHer casting credits also include two other Sondheim musicals, “Sweeney Todd” and “Into the Woods”; Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s “Evita”; and “On the Twentieth Century,” by Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Cy Coleman. All those shows except “Into the Woods” were directed by Mr. Prince.“What I found so interesting with Joanna,” James Lapine, who directed “Into the Woods” and wrote its book, based on the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales, said in a phone interview, “was her determination to pursue nontraditional casting in the theater, which for me, at a young age, was something I hadn’t thought much about.”Ms. Merlin’s pursuit of diverse casting led Mr. Lapine to choose a Black actress, Terry Burrell, to replace the white one who had played one of Cinderella’s evil stepsisters, and Phylicia Rashad, who is Black, as a replacement for Bernadette Peters in the leading role of the Witch.In 1986, Ms. Merlin was a founder of the Non-Traditional Casting Project (now the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts), which seeks more opportunities for actors of color and actors with disabilities.Ms. Merlin, noting that there were many talented, nonwhite actors, told The Record of Hackensack, N.J., in 1990. “The reason they should be cast is because they’re good,”Ms. Merlin also cast six films, including Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” (1987), for which she won the Casting Society of America’s Artios Award. She also won an Artios for “Into the Woods.”Ms. Merlin, far right, with Zero Mostel, center, and three other “Fiddler on the Roof” cast members (from left, Maria Karnilova, Tanya Everett and Julia Migenes) backstage after the show’s opening night in 1964. Associated PressJo Ann Dolores Ratner was born on July 15, 1931, in Chicago. Her parents were Russian immigrants: Her father, Harry, owned a grocery store, and her mother, Toni (Merlin) Ratner, helped in the store and became a sculptor in her 60s.She moved to Los Angeles with her parents and her sister when she was 15.She attended the University of California, Los Angeles, for a year in the early 1950s and, after acting in plays in the Los Angeles area in the early and mid-1950s, appeared in her first movie role, a small part in Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments” (1956).After some more screen work and roles in Off and Off Off Broadway plays, Ms. Merlin made her Broadway debut in 1961 in Jean Anouilh’s “Becket,” as Gwendolen, the mistress of Thomas Becket, one of Britain’s most powerful figures in the 12th century, who was played by Laurence Olivier. Later that year, she returned to Broadway to portray Sigmund Freud’s wife in Henry Denker’s “A Far Country.”After four unsuccessful auditions for a role in Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” which was staged by Jerome Robbins, she auditioned eight times for Mr. Robbins when he was casting “Fiddler on the Roof,” which opened in 1964. Although she lacked a strong singing voice, she was cast as Tzeitel, the oldest daughter of Tevye the milkman, the show’s principal character.The syndicated columnist Leonard Lyons wrote that when Ms. Merlin was pregnant in 1965 with her daughter Rachel, Zero Mostel, who played Tevye, told the stage manager: “Joanna’s baby just kicked. Send baby a note — not to kick.”She left the show in 1965 after Rachel was born, returned as Tzeitel a year later, and departed again in 1967 when she was replaced by her understudy, Bette Midler (who was also Rachel’s babysitter). After Julie’s birth in 1968, Mr. Prince made his offer.She continued to act, mostly in films and on television. Her roles included the dance teacher in “Fame” (1980), Julia Roberts’s mother in “Mystic Pizza” (1988) and an old Jewish woman in a short film, “Beautiful Hills of Brooklyn” (2008), which she and Ragnar Freidank adapted from a one-woman play by Ellen Cassedy.TV viewers might be most familiar with Ms. Merlin’s recurring role in “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” She played Judge Lena Petrovsky 43 times from 2000 to 2011. No other actor has played a jurist more often in the “Law & Order” franchise. She also appeared, as two different defense lawyers, in five episodes of “Law & Order.”Ms. Merlin as a lawyer in a 1994 episode of “Law & Order.” She also played a judge in 43 episodes of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” setting a record for the franchise.Jessica Burstein/NBCUniversal, via Getty ImagesHer career as an acting teacher began in 1998 at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and a year later she began holding workshops dedicated to the acting technique of her teacher, Michael Chekhov.In the foreword to her book, “Auditioning: An Actor-Friendly Guide” (2001), Mr. Prince wrote: “Her taste is impeccable. In no instance can I remember her recommending anyone less than interesting for a role.”In addition to her daughter Rachel, a documentary filmmaker, and her daughter Julie Dretzin, an actress, Ms. Merlin is survived by five grandchildren. Her first marriage, to Marty Lubner, ended in divorce. Her marriage to David Dretzin ended with his death in 2006 after a car accident in which he suffered a traumatic brain injury. Her sister, Harriet Glickman, died in 2020.For “Pacific Overtures,” which takes place in Japan after Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s visit in 1853 and which had an all-Asian cast, Ms. Merlin engaged in “what may be one of the most poignant talent searches undertaken for a Broadway show,” according to a 1976 article in The New York Times.Racism and economics often forced Asian actors out of the profession at the time. So when she had no luck finding actors in New York, she worked with Asian community and theater groups, Asian newspapers and the State Department to fill the roles. A third of those ultimately signed for the production were nonprofessionals.Among them was the actor Gedde Watanabe, who was a young street singer in San Francisco when she approached him and invited him to audition.“I didn’t believe her,” Mr. Watanabe said. More

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      Richard Belzer, Detective Munch on ‘Law & Order: S.V.U.,’ Dies at 78

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      A stand-up comic, he called his hard-boiled character on the long-running TV drama “Lenny Bruce with a badge.”Richard Belzer, who became one of American television’s most enduring police detectives as John Munch on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and several other shows, died on Sunday at his home in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France. He was 78.The death was confirmed by Bill Scheft, a friend of Mr. Belzer. Mr. Scheft, who has been working on a documentary about Mr. Belzer’s life and career, said that the actor had suffered from circulatory and respiratory issues for years.As Detective Munch, Mr. Belzer was brainy but hard-boiled, cynical but sensitive. He wore sunglasses at night and listened to the horror stories of rape victims in stony silence. He was the kind of cop who made casual references to Friedrich Nietzsche and the novelist Elmore Leonard. He spoke in quips; when accused of being a dirty old man, he responded: “Who are you calling old?”In a 2010 interview with AARP The Magazine, Mr. Belzer — who was a stand-up comic when he was not playing Munch — described his television alter ego as “Lenny Bruce with a badge.”With Munch, Mr. Belzer found phenomenal success. In 2013, when the character was written out of “SVU” — as the “Law & Order” spinoff is often called — Mr. Belzer wrote in The Huffington Post that he had appeared as Munch in more than 500 hours of programming on 10 different shows.The character’s run began in 1993, on “Homicide: Life on the Street,” and included guest appearances on “Sesame Street” and “30 Rock.”At his retirement, Mr. Belzer was often described as the actor with the longest run playing the same character on television, as well as the actor who had played the same character on the largest number of different shows.Mr. Belzer performing in Central Park in 2011. Karsten Moran for The New York TimesA life of mistreatment, misbehavior and missed opportunities prepared Mr. Belzer for his star turn as a streetwise detective.Richard Jay Belzer was born on Aug. 4, 1944, in Bridgeport, Conn. He grew up in a housing project in the city. His father, Charles, co-owned a wholesale tobacco and candy distributor, and his mother, Frances (Gurfein) Belzer, was a homemaker.“Our mother didn’t know how to love her sons appropriately,” Leonard, Mr. Belzer’s brother and a fellow comedian, told People magazine in 1993. “She always had some rationale for hitting us.”Richard added, “My kitchen was the toughest room I ever worked. I had to make my mom laugh or I’d get my ass kicked.”She died of cancer, and Charles died by suicide before Mr. Belzer turned 25. Leonard jumped from the roof of his Upper West Side apartment building and died in 2014.Mr. Belzer routinely fought authority. “I was thrown out of every school I ever went to,” he told AARP. He served in the army for a little under a year, then received a discharge on psychiatric grounds after repeatedly injuring himself.He went on to work as a truck driver, jewelry salesman, dress salesman, dock worker, census taker and reporter for The Bridgeport Post. In that job, he dreamed of becoming a serious writer — but instead spent his free time dealing drugs.In 1971, Mr. Belzer answered an ad in The Village Voice for auditions for a sketch show, and soon enough he found himself performing stand-up. In 1975, he began working as a warm-up comic for the “Saturday Night Live” audience, but his friend Lorne Michaels did not invite him to join the cast. Mr. Belzer accused Mr. Michaels of breaking a promise to him — a charge Mr. Michaels did not comment on to People.Absent fame or fortune, Mr. Belzer became the bohemian prince of New York City comedy. His fans included Robert De Niro, John Belushi and Richard Pryor. Mr. Belzer gained renown for working the crowd, which often meant insults — labeling, for instance, the bejeweled get-up of a drunk audience member as “Aztec pimp” — but could also include his attempting to start a brawl.He held court at an Upper East Side club called Catch a Rising Star, where he was given an hourlong slot on a nightly basis. In 1981, a Rolling Stone profile described him as spending his final three dollars on a taxi to his set, performing while on quaaludes and mocking a famous talent manager in the audience.“On the outside, he was still ‘The Belz,’ in shades and black leather punk jacket, coke-dealer thin, lupine, always cool and relentlessly self-assured,” David Hirshey and Jay Lovinger wrote. But on the inside, he was “scared” — 37 years old and still struggling to afford meals.Mr. Belzer performing his stand-up act in 1988 at Caroline’s comedy club in New York.Catherine McGann/Getty ImagesHis life began turning around in the mid-1980s, when Mr. Belzer survived testicular cancer, quit drugs and married Harlee McBride, a former Playboy model and actress.In 1990, he found financial stability in a characteristically absurd and brutal fashion. Five years earlier, Hulk Hogan, demonstrating a wrestling move on Mr. Belzer on TV, knocked out the comic and dropped him headfirst to the ground. An out-of-court settlement enabled Mr. Belzer and Ms. McBride to buy a home in France, which they called variously the Hulk Hogan Estate and Chez Hogan.His career took off after he began appearing as Detective Munch on “Homicide,” when he was nearly 50 years old.Mr. Belzer’s first two marriages — to Gail Susan Ross and Dalia Danoch — ended in divorce. He is survived by Ms. McBride; two stepdaughters, Bree and Jessica Benton; and six step-grandchildren.Mr. Belzer came to own two homes in the south of France, and he built a basketball court at one of them. He enjoyed shooting baskets and waiting for one of his dogs to collect the rebounds. He read up on Roman history and visited ancient ruins.At the start of his career in television, he spoke happily about leaving behind his romantic, rough-and-tumble years in stand-up comedy.“I tell you,” he said to People, “I won’t miss making drunks laugh at 2 in the morning.” More

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      ‘Fall TV’ Is Dead. But Buzz Will Always Be With Us.

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      Two television critics ponder what fall TV even means in the streaming era and discuss the series they’re most looking forward to this season.Each fall brings an onslaught of new television shows, but now so does every other season of the year. As another autumn approaches, James Poniewozik and Margaret Lyons, television critics at The New York Times, discussed what “fall TV” even means in the streaming era, along with the new and returning series they’re most looking forward to.JAMES PONIEWOZIK Remember fall TV? I do!I am old enough to remember when there was not just fall TV season, but fall-TV-season season. Come summer’s end, the big networks would roll out splashy prime-time TV preview specials that had the fresh, promising smell of new school supplies. My pop-cultural Christmas was the Saturday-morning preview special, when Kristy McNichol or Kaptain Kool and the Kongs would unveil the latest junk food for preteen eyeballs.Now, what even is fall? This year, big premieres like HBO’s “House of the Dragon” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” on Amazon, will have landed before Labor Day. I’m not even talking about the eternal “death of broadcast TV” here — it’s still around and even has a few decent shows — but just the general shift in how and when people watch new TV. In the streaming era, premiere season (which really is all year round) is less about what you’re going to watch immediately, and more about adding to your to-do list of shows to watch eventually.I mean, it still feels like fall, by the rhythm of the sidereal calendar I had imprinted in me by Sid and Marty Krofft. But if fall falls in a forest of year-round content, does it make a sound?Sheryl Lee Ralph, left, and Janelle James in “Abbot Elementary.” The acclaimed ABC sitcom returns in September for its second season.Gilles Mingasson/ABCMARGARET LYONS In addition to the year-round scheduling and overall increase in the number of new shows each year, new series aren’t just competing against one another — they’re up against the entire streaming catalog. The buffet has gotten bigger and more elaborate, but also the kitchen is open and the pantry is stocked, and you know how to cook.Do we lose anything when we “lose” “fall TV”? Pour one out for the people who for some reason relish being marketed to en masse, but from where I sit (on the couch), year-round scheduling is good! I want to be delighted by a show that comes out the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day; I want intense summer fare for muggy nights. Buzz knows no season, and schedule diffusion enables smaller shows that might have been buried during glut times to break through during more fallow weeks.Reboot culture has given us the end of endings. I wonder if streaming and year-round scheduling contribute to the end of beginnings.PONIEWOZIK Yes, chef! (Sorry. Kitchen metaphor = obligatory “The Bear” reference. I don’t make the rules.)The networks’ traditional approach of premiering dang near everything on TV the week after the Emmys was not great either for TV watchers or TV makers. So much material at once! So many cancellations! And then vast periods of nothing. Now there is always TV. But also, There. Is. Always. TV. If I’m nostalgic for anything, it’s that rare seasonal sugar rush of “My shows are coming back!”Yet I still feel a tiny bit of that. “Abbott Elementary” — a straight-up, joke-packed broadcast sitcom that makes a bunch of episodes a year and is actually good — is coming back on ABC in September, just as the framers of the Constitution intended. I’m glad we now have cable and streaming shows of all lengths and styles (again, I watched “The Bear”), but it’s nice to see the old machine can still occasionally work.Anything you’re looking forward to? Or is “forward” meaningless in the eternal present of streaming?A new season of “The White Lotus,” premiering in October, is set in Italy. With, from left, Michael Imperioli, Adam DiMarco and F. Murray Abraham.Fabio Lovino/HBOLYONS I think “Abbott Elementary” is a good example of an ambiguous beginning: ABC aired a preview of “Abbott Elementary” in December, after which the episode was available on Hulu, and then the pilot re-aired in January — a one-off on a Monday before the show moved to its Tuesday time slot for the remainder of its run. Now it’s getting a well-deserved fancier rollout, segueing from sleeper hit to crown jewel; a reintroduction of sorts.In terms of looking forward, I’m counting the days for the returns of Apple TV+’s “Mythic Quest,” IFC’s “Sherman’s Showcase” and “Los Espookys” on HBO. The final seasons of “Atlanta” on FX and “The Good Fight” on Paramount+ are nigh.I’m also wondering if we’re about to go through another vampire moment, with “Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire,” on AMC, and Showtime’s series adaptation of “Let the Right One In” both coming out this fall. And I am curious about Susan Sarandon and Hilary Swank both starring in network dramas, of all things (Fox’s “Monarch” and ABC’s “Alaska Daily,” respectively). My guess is our tastes overlap pretty heavily here.PONIEWOZIK Indeed, “Atlanta” and “The Good Fight” are two of the shows I’m most anticipating this season. Both captured, in very different ways, the surrealness of life in America this past six years or so.I’m hoping “The White Lotus,” on HBO, can be as strong as an ongoing anthology as it was when I thought it would be a one-off limited series. And as a former ’80s fantasy nerd, I’m at least … curious about the Disney+ series version of “Willow.” The Ron Howard movie, which opened in theaters in 1988, was not the blockbuster its producers hoped it would be. (Its current TV legacy is lending a name to a character, Elora Danan, on FX’s “Reservation Dogs.”) Now that fantasy is almost as ubiquitous a genre as cop shows, maybe its time has finally come.As always, I also just want to laugh. So I agree about “Sherman’s Showcase” — welcome back, it has been too long!Warwick Davis returns for a series version of “Willow,” premiering in November on Disney+. (With Graham Hughes, right.)Lucasfilm/Disney+LYONS Yes, “Willow” is very high on my “hmmm” list, as well. Is this a title people have been clamoring for? Perhaps!Another thing I wonder about is whether the diminished primacy of the fall season is part of television becoming less standardized in general. How many episodes are in a “season”? How long do shows go between seasons? How many seasons do we consider a good run? Are there still prestigious time slots or needle-moving lead-ins? What are the rules?PONIEWOZIK Things were simpler when the rule was, “You make TV from September to May, and you keep doing it until the ratings give out.” It’s better, in theory, that shows can now be the length that a story requires. In practice, TV isn’t always sure what size it should be anymore.Some invisible standards committee recently decided that eight to 10 episodes is the optimal length for a streaming series. Often, it is! (I was one of those critics who used to praise British TV for making two six-episode, no-filler seasons and calling it a day.) But sometimes a show feels compressed. I really liked Jason Katims’s “As We See It” for eight episodes on Amazon, but it felt like it once would have been a 22-episode Jason Katims dramedy on NBC.On the more-is-not-always-more front, this fall we’ll get the finale of AMC’s “The Walking Dead,” which began in the first Obama administration, when Netflix was somewhere you watched old movies. I don’t know how many marathon runs like that we’ll see again.Christine Baranski in “The Good Fight,” back for its final season in September.Elizabeth Fisher/Paramount+LYONS And of course “The Walking Dead” can’t actually die: There are already two current spinoffs and a few more in the works.I doubt we will see another show with that kind of ratings success. But I think the long-running series is a hallmark of network and cable now, which both sometimes feel like they’re mostly forever shows. “The Simpsons” is going into its 34th season, “Law & Order: SVU” into its 24th, “NCIS” into its 20th and “Grey’s Anatomy” into its 19th. “The Challenge” debuted in 1998 and was recently renewed for a 38th and 39th season.“South Park” is in its 25th season. “Bob’s Burgers” is going into its 13th and “The Goldbergs” into its 10th. “Curb Your Enthusiasm” has been airing on and off since 2000. “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” started in 2005. “The Real Housewives of Orange County” started in 2006 and “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” in 2007. These are all still prime-time mainstays!Streaming platforms haven’t been around long enough to have any truly long-running shows, but I wonder if their models are designed to ever generate or support one. Is “Love Is Blind” going to follow a “Bachelor”/“Bachelorette” model and outlive us all? Stranger things have happened … but also, “Stranger Things” has happened, and it’s hard to picture that show running for 10 seasons.PONIEWOZIK I don’t know, those last “Stranger Things” episodes sure felt 10 seasons long.But yeah, there’s a divide between your deathless animated sitcoms, procedurals and game/reality shows — I’ll be there for “Survivor” Season 43 — and highly serial shows, which have started to tend toward shorter runs or one-season limited series. Maybe “L.O.T.R.” could bring back the long-running serial. Elves are immortal!And then there’s … well, whatever Disney’s Marvel and “Star Wars” shows are. They’re sort of anthological, often running a single season each. But they’re also chapters in these interconnected, multiplatform, decades-spanning intellectual-property blobs, which are both sprawling and static. You know what to expect from the brand, and that’s what they give you. I had hoped these mega franchises might be freer to be weird and experimental on TV, but now “WandaVision” seems like the exception.Film critics wonder whether movies in the streaming era are becoming TV. Maybe — at least when it comes to recycling big-ticket I.P. — TV is becoming the movies. More

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      Melissa Gilbert and Tim Busfield, on Their Upstate Escape

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      The ‘Little House on the Prairie’ star, who has a new memoir out, and her husband, the actor and director, collaborated happily on their Sullivan County retreat. Just don’t ask about the pleather recliner.Almost immediately after Melissa Gilbert and Tim Busfield married in 2013 — the third time for both of them — they swapped the glitter and hustle of Los Angeles for the low-key charms of small-town life in Mr. Busfield’s native Michigan.The experience was a tonic, for sure, but a five-year dose was sufficient. In 2018, Ms. Gilbert, who became a household name at the age of 10 as a star of the long-running series “Little House on the Prairie,” and Mr. Busfield, who is best known for his role on “The West Wing” and his Emmy-winning turn on “Thirtysomething,” relocated to Manhattan’s Upper West Side.Ms. Gilbert, now 58, was quickly cast in “The Dead, 1904,” an immersive theater adaptation of the James Joyce novella. Mr. Busfield, now 64, who is also a director, found work on TV shows like “Law & Order: SVU.”Gainful employment was all well and good, but Mr. Busfield, in particular, felt a lack in the fresh-air department. As Ms. Gilbert writes in her new memoir, “Back to the Prairie: A Home Remade, A Life Rediscovered,” “It became important for us to have a place where we could escape.”A Zillow search led them to Highland Lake, N.Y., a dot on the map in Sullivan County.The actor and former child star Melissa Gilbert, and her husband, the actor and director Tim Busfield, bought a house in Sullivan County in 2019. They call it “the cabbage,” an amalgam of “cabin” and “cottage.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesMelissa Gilbert, 58, and Tim Busfield, 64Occupations: She is an actor and writer; he is an actor and director.Big leap of faith on the prairie: “This is one of those places that most people would say, ‘Are you nuts?’ if you expressed interest in buying it,” Ms. Gilbert said. “But Tim and I are the best kind of nuts. We’re hopeful visionaries. We knew this house would shelter us well and serve us well.”What the couple found in their price range — a small structure with halfhearted half-timbering, peeling stucco and an interior crammed with the detritus of the previous owner — wasn’t pretty. But despite the mice and the mold and the mildew (and that awful smell), there was potential.The dropped ceiling in the kitchen hid a cathedral ceiling. The loft would prove to be an ideal music room. The living room had pine paneling and a fireplace. And the 14 bosky acres that came with the ramshackle house were ravishing.“As I stared up at one of the rotting deer heads on the wall, a lifetime of therapy kicked in and I thought I could do something here,” Ms. Gilbert writes in “Back to the Prairie.” “I just had to look past the crap.”Ms. Gilbert, a DIY-er of no mean talent, upholstered the sofa and love seat.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThe couple closed on the property in January of 2019, dubbed it “the cabbage,” an amalgam of “cabin” and “cottage,” and began mapping out plans for renovation and design.Money was an issue. A can-do spirit was — and is — the currency. “You see that she has overalls on,” Mr. Busfield said with an affectionate look at his wife. “She’ll have a hammer hanging out of one of those pockets in half an hour.”Just one example (or maybe two): After a protracted search, the couple found a sofa that was perfect in every way except color (an unfortunate shade of asphalt gray), so Ms. Gilbert took a chance on some burgundy slipcovers that she found online and then added other fabrics and cushions to create a whole new piece of furniture. She refreshed a love seat in similar fashion, in that case with a burgundy floral pattern and a checkered dust ruffle. For the record, she has also assembled a windmill ceiling fan and a table saw.But the couple called in the pros when necessary — as in the kitchen, where demolition, plumbing and rewiring were involved. They made a virtue out of the tight budget, conjuring a space that looks, delightfully, like a retro diner.The floating shelves were built with recycled bowling-alley wood and painted bright red, a look the couple loved. Ms. Gilbert added interest to the prefab cabinets by decoupaging their sides with recipes from old magazines. A large slice of corrugated tin roofing was sprayed with vinegar to give it a nicely raddled look, then mounted on a wall to hold the couple’s collection of cast-iron cookware. Chrome-and-red-vinyl chairs ring the farm table. Atop the cabinetry are Donald Duck and Olive Oyl figurines, an old set of Lincoln Logs and a vintage Coca-Cola syrup bottle, among other knickknacks.This is the first time, Ms. Gilbert said, that she has decorated a house with full partner participation. Her default in previous houses and previous marriages was “to do everything myself and go, ‘Ta-da! Here it is.’”If you come to visit, it’s likely that your picture will be snapped and added to the photo wall in the living room.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThat didn’t sit well with Mr. Busfield: “I would just go into whatever house we were in and start to do things, and he would go, ‘Wait a minute. Hello, I’m here.’”They were on the same page about the creation and outfitting of what they call the Woodstock bedroom — the house is a 20-minute drive from the site of the legendary 1969 rock concert. A lava lamp sits on a bureau in the corner, and the wall décor includes a 1960s-themed jigsaw puzzle that the couple assembled, sealed and framed, as well as a poster heralding a concert by The Who.“The room was designed with Pete Townshend in mind,” Mr. Busfield said, referring to the group’s co-founder. “We keep hoping he’ll come by one day and hang out.”The couple were also in agreement about a photo wall of family and friends in the living room. “We have a Polaroid camera that we keep here, and when someone comes to visit or stays over, we take pictures and add them to the wall,” Ms. Gilbert said.Seeing eye to eye is so very satisfying. Marital harmony is such a fine thing. So maybe now isn’t the time to bring up the brown-pleather recliner. Mr. Busfield wanted it and got it. Ms. Gilbert was horrified, she said, and didn’t mince words. She told her husband the chair was horrible, that it was “a grandpa chair.” The long and the short of it: She didn’t want the chair in the house.Mr. Busfield bought the recliner. At first, Ms. Gilbert hated it. Then she co-opted it.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesSo guess who won’t budge from the chair now?“I fell in love with it,” Ms. Gilbert said, shamefacedly. “I knit in it. I sleep in it.”“I’ve sat in it maybe twice in the last year and a half,” Mr. Busfield said.Raised beds for an herb-and-vegetable garden and a chicken coop were added during the Covid lockdown in 2020. Seven hens are currently in residence.Last summer, the couple put in new windows and painted the exterior of the house a soft yellow. Shutters were installed earlier this spring, and climbing roses were planted. There are plans for homemade window boxes this summer.A second bathroom would also be nice (although there is a functioning outhouse, and a couple of bathrooms in the RV that the couple bought to billet guests).“In my opinion, a house is never finished,” Ms. Gilbert said. “It’s always a work in progress.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate. More