More stories

  • in

    How to Watch the Emmy Awards

    The Emmys are on Sunday night at 8 p.m. Eastern, two hours after the red carpet festivities begin.It has been only eight months since the strike-delayed Emmys ceremony in January, and now it is time for the television industry to toast itself once again.For the first time in the 75-year history of the Emmys, there will be two awards shows in the same calendar year. Here’s how to watch on Sunday:What time does the show start?The ceremony begins at 8 p.m. Eastern (5 p.m. Pacific) and will be held at the Peacock Theater in downtown Los Angeles. Unlike the Oscars, the Emmys usually finish on schedule, in about three hours.Where can I watch?ABC is broadcasting the ceremony, making it simple to watch for anyone with access to network television. Online options are a bit trickier. There are plenty of streaming services that have ABC, including YouTube TV or Fubo, but you will need a subscription to those distributors.The Emmys will eventually stream on Hulu, but with a significant catch: The ceremony will not be available until Monday.What’s eligible?Shows that premiered from June 2023 to May 2024. This is why the second season of “The Bear,” which premiered last year, is nominated for Sunday’s event, rather than the third season, which debuted three months ago.“Shogun” (25) and “The Bear” (23) lead the list of nominees.Who’s hosting?The father-and-son duo of Dan and Eugene Levy, the creators of “Schitt’s Creek.” The Levys are familiar faces to award show viewers: “Schitt’s Creek” won big at the Emmys in September 2020, held virtually because of the pandemic, and Dan Levy became the first performer to collect four Emmys during a prime-time telecast (for writing, directing, best supporting actor and best comedy).When is the red carpet?The cable network E! will air a red carpet show that begins at 6 p.m. Eastern and will be hosted by Laverne Cox, the comedian Heather McMahan and the E! host Keltie Knight.ABC has a red carpet show of its own; it begins at 7 p.m. Eastern and will be hosted by the veteran anchor Robin Roberts and the ABC News correspondent Will Reeve. More

  • in

    How to Watch and Stream the Emmy Awards: Time, Hosts and More

    The Emmys are on Sunday night at 8 p.m. Eastern, two hours after the red carpet festivities begin.It has been only eight months since the strike-delayed Emmys ceremony in January, and now it is time for the television industry to toast itself once again.For the first time in the 75-year history of the Emmys, there will be two awards shows in the same calendar year. Here’s how to watch on Sunday:What time does the show start?The ceremony begins at 8 p.m. Eastern (5 p.m. Pacific) and will be held at the Peacock Theater in downtown Los Angeles. Unlike the Oscars, the Emmys usually finish on schedule, in about three hours.Where can I watch?ABC is broadcasting the ceremony, making it simple to watch for anyone with access to network television. Online options are a bit trickier. There are plenty of streaming services that have ABC, including YouTube TV or Fubo, but you will need a subscription to those distributors.The Emmys will eventually stream on Hulu, but with a significant catch: The ceremony will not be available until Monday.What’s eligible?Shows that premiered from June 2023 to May 2024. This is why the second season of “The Bear,” which premiered last year, is nominated for Sunday’s event, rather than the third season, which debuted three months ago.“Shogun” (25) and “The Bear” (23) lead the list of nominees.Who’s hosting?The father-and-son duo of Dan and Eugene Levy, the creators of “Schitt’s Creek.” The Levys are familiar faces to award show viewers: “Schitt’s Creek” won big at the Emmys in September 2020, held virtually because of the pandemic, and Dan Levy became the first performer to collect four Emmys during a prime-time telecast (for writing, directing, best supporting actor and best comedy).When is the red carpet?The cable network E! will air a red carpet show that begins at 6 p.m. Eastern and will be hosted by Laverne Cox, the comedian Heather McMahan and the E! host Keltie Knight.ABC has a red carpet show of its own; it begins at 7 p.m. Eastern and will be hosted by the veteran anchor Robin Roberts and the ABC News correspondent Will Reeve. More

  • in

    Five Places to Visit in Toronto, With Eugene Levy

    As you might guess from the title of Eugene Levy’s latest series — “The Reluctant Traveler” — he’s a guy who’s happy to stay put.The show, now in its second season on Apple TV, follows Mr. Levy, a 77-year-old comedy legend known for his roles in “Waiting for Guffman,” “American Pie,” “Schitt’s Creek” and more, as he defies his anxieties about airports, heights, temperatures, textures and vast swaths of the animal kingdom. With great consternation, he leaves his comfort zone — Canada, as he often reminds viewers — to shadow an expert moose caller in Sweden, herd 600 sheep through a German resort town and politely avoid an octopus aboard a Greek trawler.Mr. Levy, 77, was raised in Hamilton, Ontario, about 40 miles from Toronto, but has called Toronto home since he got his big break in a 1972 theater production of “Godspell.”Heather Sten for The New York TimesRaised in Hamilton, Ontario, about 40 miles southwest of Toronto, Mr. Levy got his big break in 1972 alongside Martin Short, Gilda Radner, Victor Garber, Andrea Martin and Paul Shaffer in a celebrated production of “Godspell” at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theater. He has since called the city — and one historic, leafy neighborhood — home.“Rosedale is a residential area that is right in the heart of Toronto,” he told me over coffee at Tavern on the Green, in New York, where he’d joined the cast of the fourth season of “Only Murders in the Building.” With new skyscrapers going up “a mile a minute” in Toronto, he said, the scene from our table in Central Park looked a little like his view from Rosedale. He and his wife, Deborah Divine, are neighborhood loyalists — Avant Goût, a local bistro, has been their go-to for decades — but spots in other areas rank high, too.Here are five of Mr. Levy’s favorite places in Toronto.Terroni Bar Centrale is in Summerhill, a neighborhood bordering Rosedale, where Mr. Levy and his wife, Deborah Divine, live.Eugen Sakhnenko for The New York TimesWe 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

  • in

    The Problem With Celebrity Travel Shows? The Celebrities.

    What used to be meaningfully informative programming, delivered by personable but only tangentially notable hosts, is gradually being swallowed up.In the resplendent green of Costa Rica, a peak reaches toward the clouds. Eugene Levy gazes up at it in awe. “That’s a volcano,” his host explains, adding that it last erupted about 10 years ago. Levy looks unsettled. “I was hoping it would be more dormant,” he says. The understated delivery is classic Levy, but it feels different, less endearing, in this context. The premise of Apple TV+’s “The Reluctant Traveler” is that the celebrity actor hasn’t liked to travel in the past, but is now pushing himself out of his comfort zone with televised trips to places like Finland, Italy and Japan. With that, he joins an increasingly established subgenre: the celebrity travel show. Netflix has “Down to Earth With Zac Efron.” TBS had Conan O’Brien’s “Conan Without Borders.” CNN had “Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy,” which was both a celebrity travel show and a celebrity food show — another thriving subgenre, with entries from Selena Gomez, Amy Schumer, Jon Favreau and Paris Hilton.The idea behind these programs is the same as ever: You settle in and watch your host learn about new places. It’s just that, in these shows, it’s the host’s very celebrity that inevitably becomes the star around which everything revolves. Consider Levy and that Costa Rican peak: You’re offered one moment to admire a beautiful scene before the active volcano becomes the setup for celebrity quipping. The shows’ stars can rarely help drawing attention this way, whether it’s with solemn head-nodding or relentless cleverness. O’Brien, traveling in Armenia, is so shameless in his pursuit of laughs that he almost seems to embarrass his Armenian-American assistant. Stanley Tucci, eating cantucci in Florence, has to remark that “anything that ends in ‘tucci,’ I like.” The celebrity travelogue doubles as proof of just how hard it is for performers to subordinate themselves to their surroundings.The point of featuring celebrities seems obvious enough; in a crowded TV market, a familiar host can lure people to watch a new show. The trade-off, of course, is that the format and subject matter — whether travel or food or, say, home renovation — will find itself drifting toward the formal demands of a reality show, sacrificing its capacity to inform to its host’s own shtick or charisma. The things we see must serve the narratives and characters of the stars, providing opportunities to play to or against their images, drawing out their particular moods or charms. A result is a suffocating and often superficial take on how fascinating or delicious everything is. Eventually you come to suspect that each show would feel functionally identical no matter where you sent the celebrity — that Stanley Tucci could tour America’s bowling alleys, or Zac Efron could sample Midwestern diners, or vice versa, without much changing. This is happening across the TV world: What used to be meaningfully informative programming, delivered by personable but only tangentially notable hosts, is gradually being swallowed up by celebrity.I still remember the first time I traveled abroad, and the feeling I had emerging from the Paris-Nord train station to behold one of the world’s most beautiful cities. It made me feel alien and bracingly helpless. I was an outsider. That was the whole point of my being there. That decentered feeling never really went away, neither on that trip nor on later ones. I wouldn’t want it to.Celebrity travel shows tend to evoke something close to the opposite of that feeling. This is not to say that you can’t learn anything from them. It’s just that the celebrity at the center will generally steal the spotlight from the locale itself. Levy, interestingly enough, seems to exhibit some self-awareness about this phenomenon; per his show’s premise, he seems, at times, to progress from fear of travel to an embrace of travel’s helplessness. In southern Utah, he spends time with his guide in the quiet of night, discussing the stars and the spirituality of the desert. It’s a striking contrast to your typical celebrity fare, in that it seems to capture Levy giving himself over to the unfamiliar in a strikingly vulnerable way.But it’s fleeting. The show has Levy spending a lot of time at luxury hotels, where fame affords him deferential treatment. Earlier in the Utah episode, he spends breakfast chatting with a chef (who is making one very elevated pancake) about whether he’s ever cooked for Brad Pitt or George Clooney. Much of the series revolves around this kind of celebrity-centric riffing. The show’s entire premise, after all, revolves around Levy’s own experiences and hang-ups, not the curiosities of a viewer or a would-be traveler. Offered “crocodile schnitzel” at Kruger National Park in South Africa, Levy tells his guide, “I’m going to enjoy watching you eat that,” and quips that he’ll just take a vodka-tonic. In Lisbon, his guide tells him the Portuguese people like to explore the world, and asks if Levy does, too. The actor says that “adventure is my middle name,” and that world exploration is “in my nature,” but he’s then seen confessing his deceit to the camera: “That’s where acting comes in. You know, when you can hide ineptitude on a scale like that, give me an Oscar.” He is traveling as a character in his own travel series, all while ostensibly trying to break free from that character’s limitations and experience new places — which he can never quite do, because the show is ultimately about the character, not the places.Travel stories have often benefited from a guide, from Matsuo Bashō’s “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” in the 17th century to Peter Matthiessen’s “The Snow Leopard” or Pico Iyer’s “The Lady and the Monk” in the 20th to Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” and “Parts Unknown” in the 21st. (Bourdain became a celebrity, but he had a curiosity and humility, an authenticity in his travels that could make him feel like he wasn’t.) These figures serve as proxies and narrators and cultural synthesizers, both standing in for us and offering us their impressions. When we come to trust them, it’s often precisely because they know how to step out of the way and help us engage with the places they’re exploring. The same goes for any other topic. We know names like “Julia Child” and “Bob Ross” because of how compellingly those people served their subjects, not because of their pre-existing star power. And, I suppose, because nobody at the time thought to develop “Learning to Paint With Mr. T.”I’m inclined to say the ideal travel show would merely be a video montage with someone reading a guidebook over it. The less narrative basis, the better. “Rick Steves’ Europe” and “Big City, Little Budget,” with Oneika Raymond, may be two series that come closest to that ideal, in that they’re basically video guidebooks. The hosts subordinate themselves to the places they visit. They aim to show people why to travel, and what it’s like — not to entertain them along the way.Not so today. In one episode of “The Reluctant Traveler,” Levy visits the Maldives, where he meets a local who seems eager to dispense some wisdom. “You really need to connect — remove your shoes, feel the sand,” he tells Levy, as the camera shows his bare feet and Levy’s footwear. You get the distinct feeling he’s saying this, in part, because it’s what Levy wants to hear. Still: Point taken. To center the place, you must decenter yourself. In travel, as in all things, fame is a distraction.Source photograph (Levy): Maarten De Boer/Contour by Getty Images.Nicholas Cannariato is a writer living in Chicago. He last wrote about common birds for the magazine. More