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      Film and TV Writers on Strike Picket Outside Hollywood Studios

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      Those in picket lines at the headquarters of companies like Netflix were critical of working conditions that have become routine in the streaming era.Ellen Stutzman, a senior Writers Guild of America official, stood on a battered patch of grass outside Netflix headquarters in Los Angeles. She was calm — remarkably so, given the wild scene unfolding around her, and the role she had played in its creation.“Hey, Netflix! You’re no good! Pay your writers like you should!” hundreds of striking movie and television writers shouted in unison as they marched outside the Netflix complex. The spectacle had snarled traffic on Sunset Boulevard on Tuesday afternoon, and numerous drivers blared horns in support of a strike. Undulating picket signs, a few of which were covered with expletives, added to the sense of chaos, as did a hovering news helicopter and a barking dog. “Wow,” a Netflix employee said as he inched his car out of the company’s driveway, which was blocked by writers.In February, unions representing 11,500 screenwriters selected Ms. Stutzman, 40, to be their chief negotiator in talks with studios and streaming services for a new contract. Negotiations broke off on Monday night, shortly before the contract expired. Ms. Stutzman and other union officials voted unanimously to call a strike, shattering 15 years of labor peace in Hollywood, and bringing the entertainment industry’s creative assembly lines to a grinding halt.“We told them there was a ton of pent-up anger,” Ms. Stutzman said, referring to the companies at the bargaining table, which included Amazon and Apple. “They didn’t seem to believe us.”The throng started a new chant, as if on cue. “Hey, hey! Ho, ho! This corporate greed has got to go!”Similar scenes of solidarity unfolded across the entertainment capital. At Paramount Pictures, more than 400 writers — and a few supportive actors, including Rob Lowe — assembled to wave pickets with slogans like “Despicable You” and “Honk if you like words.” Screenwriting titans like Damon Lindelof (“Watchmen,” “Lost”) and Jenny Lumet (“Rachel Getting Married,” “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds”) marched outside Amazon Studios. Acrimony hung in the air outside Walt Disney Studios, where one writer played drums on empty buckets next to a sign that read, “What we are asking for is a drop in the bucket.”Another sign goaded Mickey Mouse directly: “I smell a rat.”But the strike, at least in its opening hours, seemed to burn hottest at Netflix, with some writers describing the company as “the scene of the crime.” That is because Netflix popularized and, in some cases, pioneered streaming-era practices that writers say have made their profession an unsustainable one — a job that had always been unstable, dependent on audience tastes and the whims of revolving sets of network executives, has become much more so.The streaming giant, for instance, has become known for “mini-rooms,” which is slang for hiring small groups of writers to map out a season before any official greenlight has been given. Because it isn’t a formal writers room, the pay is less. Writers in mini-rooms will sometimes work for as little as 10 weeks, and then have to scramble to find another job. (If the show is greenlit and goes into production, fewer writers are kept on board.)“If you only get a 10-week job, which a lot of people now do, you really have to start looking for a new job on day one,” said Alex Levy, who has written for Netflix shows like “Grace and Frankie.” “In my case, I haven’t been able to get a writing job for months. I’ve had to borrow money from my family to pay my rent.”Lawrence Dai, whose credits include “The Late Late Show with James Corden” and “American Born Chinese,” a Disney+ series, echoed Ms. Levy’s frustration. “It feels like an existential moment because it’s becoming impossible to build a career,” he said. “The dream is dead.” More

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      Stream These 6 Titles Before They Leave Netflix in May

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      A couple of comedies, a couple of coming-of-age tales and more are leaving for U.S. subscribers next month. Catch them while you can.This month’s mix of titles leaving Netflix in the United States include two coming-of-age comedy dramas, a twisty thriller throwback, a wrenching Holocaust documentary and two uproarious comedies (one of them smuggled into an animated family film). Give them a stream before they’re gone. (Dates reflect the last day a title is available.)‘Side Effects’ (May 16)The director Steven Soderbergh is always a little bit ahead of the curve, and back in 2013, years before the current vogue of nostalgia for the erotic thrillers of the ’80s and ’90s, he assembled this steamy, twisty story of sexual deception and left-field double-crosses. (It was the early 2010s, so there is also a healthy dose of villainy for the health-care and pharmaceutical industries.) The final film before his short-lived retirement, it had Soderbergh reuniting with several of his previous stars, including Jude Law (“Contagion”), Catherine Zeta-Jones (“Traffic”) and Channing Tatum (“Magic Mike”), who are joined by Rooney Mara in a femme fatale turn that is alternately sensuous and scary.Stream it here.‘The Last Days’ (May 18)The first film released by the Shoah Foundation, and executive produced by no less a major name than Steven Spielberg, “The Last Days” won the Academy Award for best documentary feature of 1998. It tells the story of a grim and lesser-known chapter of the Holocaust: how German troops invaded Hungary in March of 1944, long after it was clear that World War II was lost, and proceeded to murder hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews anyway. This chronicle of pure evil is told by the director James Moll as a story of survival and perseverance, focusing on five survivors of the Holocaust and the inspirational ways they spent their spared lives.Stream it here.‘Edge of Seventeen’ (May 31)One of several gay-themed coming-of-age comedy-dramas of the late 1990s, this earnest and truthful tale from the director David Moreton and the screenwriter Todd Stephens has become something of a classic in the queer canon, and for good reason. Set in Stephens’s hometown, Sandusky, Ohio, circa 1984, it beautifully captures a moment when both explicit and coded gay content was becoming part of the mainstream, and when its sensitive teen protagonist, Eric (Chris Stafford), was finding out that his romantic ideals were not quite reflected by his Midwestern, mid-80s reality. Moreton’s direction deftly approaches its rom-com conventions with uncommon candor.Stream it here.‘Galaxy Quest’ (May 31)This wry and witty cult comedy from the director Dean Parisot mixes two wonderful comic ideas well. It is, first and foremost, a winking satire of not only “Star Trek” but also the entire (and, at the time of its 1999 release, comparatively nascent) fan-catering “geek” culture, focusing on a short-lived “Trek”-style television show that has become an obsession object for a generation of super fans. And it is also a swashbuckling comic adventure of its own, playfully borrowing the “Three Amigos” model of fictional characters mistaken for real heroes, as the cast of the sci-fi show is drafted to prevent a real alien invasion. Sigourney Weaver is having a blast, Tim Allen invokes the bloated ego of his Shatner-esque star with ease and Alan Rickman steals the show as the classically trained Shakespearean thespian saddled with the show’s Spock role.Stream it here.‘My Girl’ (May 31)Every generation has its own story about the movie that unexpectedly reduced them to a weeping mess. And if their parents were ripped to shreds by “Old Yeller,” most ’90s kids can tell you their own sob story about heading to the multiplex for what looked like Macaulay Culkin’s charming follow-up to “Home Alone,” only to find … well, not that. Let it suffice to say that the future fast-talking, foul-mouthed “Veep” co-star Anna Chlumsky (the film’s actual star; Culkin’s was a minor supporting role) is charismatic and sympathetic as a young woman going through one of those summers where everything changes, while Dan Aykroyd and Jamie Lee Curtis provide both warmth and comic relief as the grown-ups in her life.Stream it here.‘Rango’ (May 31)The Disney juggernaut (and, to a lesser extent, the Illumination Entertainment invasion) has become so pervasive in family entertainment that it’s easy to miss kid-friendly entertainment that appears without that imprimatur. But this 2011 adventure from Nickelodeon Movies and Paramount Pictures is a delight, offering as much entertainment for parents as for kids — or perhaps more, as the screenwriter is the “Gladiator” scribe, John Logan, and his clearest inspiration is the decidedly adult ’70s classic “Chinatown.” Gore Verbinski directs his “Pirates of the Caribbean” leading man, Johnny Depp, in the title role of a lost chameleon who becomes sheriff of a small animal town in the desert; the similarly adult-friendly supporting cast includes Ned Beatty, Isla Fisher, Timothy Olyphant, Bill Nighy, Harry Dean Stanton and Ray Winstone.Stream it here. More

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      ‘Baby J’ Review: John Mulaney Punctures His Persona

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      In his highly anticipated new Netflix special, the comic changes his pace to deliver bristlingly funny material about addiction, rehab and what it means to be likable.In his new special, “Baby J,” we hear John Mulaney before we see him.“In the past couple years, I’ve done a lot of work on myself,” says one of the most distinctive voices in comedy, as a black screen transitions into an empty backdrop of a stage. “And I’ve realized that I’ll be fine as long as I get constant attention.”Then in a glamorous, swirling shot orchestrated by the theater director Alex Timbers, the camera gives the comic what he needs. It retreats to reveal Mulaney, 40, in a maroon suit, before circling to give us a picture of the commanding power of stardom. Shot from behind, we see his perspective: a hazy mass of people underneath chandeliers in between an ominous series of statues inside the Symphony Hall in Boston.It’s a striking image setting up a series of bristling comic vignettes that dig into Mulaney’s drug addiction, intervention by friends and stint in rehab. One is tempted to say this is his most personal work, but that isn’t quite right. That first shot tips us off to a theme: You can be invisible in front of a crowd. Mulaney’s comedy, however, has become spikier, pricklier, sometimes slower while remaining as funny as ever, like he’s a pitcher who learned to mix up speeds. He has performed versions of this material throughout the last two years, and this special arrives on Netflix so meticulously honed that the polish doesn’t even show.At some point in the last decade, John Mulaney stopped being merely a very successful comedian and transformed into something larger in the culture: the boyish sweetheart in a scene full of creeps, the wife guy who doesn’t need children to be happy, the aspirational theater kid. I didn’t grasp this shift until, in a short period of time, he checked into rehab, got a very public divorce, and had a child with the actress Olivia Munn. Judging by the reaction online, not to mention the texts on my phone, people had feelings about this — lots of them. Mulaney made the word “parasocial” go mainstream.For comics, being in the news like this can be tricky terrain, both a problem and an opportunity. “Likability is a jail,” Mulaney says at one point in “Baby J,” and his self-deprecating punch lines about his own vanity could be viewed as a prison break. He recalls that when he was young, he would feel jealousy toward the kid who had suddenly become the focus of his classmates’ sympathies when his grandfather died. “Did you ever, like me, hope …” he says, abruptly pausing his cadence to let the audience anticipate his embarrassing thoughts about the possible benefits of the death of grandparents.Mulaney has always spoken at a rapid if precise clip, heavily influenced by Spalding Gray, the pioneering confessional monologuist. (“If story rhythms were legally protected like song hooks, I would be in prison,” Mulaney once tweeted about Gray.) Mulaney’s rat-a-tat-tat delivery demanded you keep up with his thought process. It still does, but his cadence has become more intricate, and the biggest laughs in this new special come from making the audience think they are ahead of him, placing an idea in their head, then slowing down to a pause or stammer to let it percolate.This tactic requires patience and deft timing but can produce an intense response, the comedy equivalent of letting you hear the scratching under the bed while postponing the reveal of the monster long enough to let your imagination run amok.Some of Mulaney’s biggest laughs in “Baby J” come from making the audience think they are ahead of him, placing an idea in their head, then slowing down to a pause or stammer to let it percolate.Marcus Russell Price/NetflixThe stories he tells here present a desperate man, including one about a very sketchy doctor who gives him prescription drugs in exchange for some low-level deception and the removal of his shirt. Mulaney has such a chipper affect that he can put across grim material without weighing the show down, a superpower these days when ambitious comics are often expected to do more than tell jokes.His description of his intervention is a comic highlight, with act-outs of Nick Kroll and Fred Armisen. He’s hilariously flattered by the intervention’s star-studded attendance, “a ‘We Are the World’ of alternative comedians over the age of 40.” And when the woman running it says that she heard he was nice, he corrects her: “Don’t trust the persona.”The funniest part of the special, which at over an hour and 20 minutes is longer than most released by Netflix these days, is an elaborate description of a text he got in rehab from Pete Davidson that a nurse woke up him to read. “Some people suggested we did drugs together because he has tattoos and I am plain,” Mulaney says, a gentle poke at the shallowness of the media and public.This story takes off when we learn that Mulaney had put Davidson’s number in his phone under the name Al Pacino, which gives Mulaney a chance to perform the scene a second time from the nurse’s perspective, including an amazing impersonation of late-era Pacino. I can’t do this justice, except to say that the phrase “daddy khaki pants” made me laugh out loud.Silliness has long been central to Mulaney’s humor, and part of it comes from the incongruity of his seeming either younger than his age or much older (he favors archaic words like “nay” instead of “no”). The titles of his specials tell a Benjamin Button story: “New in Town,” followed by “The Comeback Kid” and “Kid Gorgeous,” followed by “Baby J.” The way it’s going, “Fetal Position” could be next.This is a highly anticipated special, and the modern stand-up event tends to be about something more messy than jokes. When Jerrod Carmichael came out of the closet, he ended his special abruptly, with loose ends; Chris Rock flashed raw emotion in his vengeful response to being slapped by Will Smith. Mulaney remains a tightly controlled performer. His special mostly avoids his divorce and new child, focusing instead on his drug addiction.That story has a happy ending, with him going to rehab and emerging not only sober, but also no longer needing the approval of others. It’s a dramatic, abrupt evolution. “What is someone going to do to me that’s worse than what I would do to myself?” he asks, hinting at his own self-destructive tendencies. “What, are you going to cancel John Mulaney? I’ll kill him.”That’s not the Mulaney his fans thought they knew. But it’s worth noting that if you revisit his first special from 2012, you’ll find a story about lying to a doctor to get drugs (Xanax in that case) as well as a confession that he had a drinking problem that started when he was 13 that he had since kicked.How much has changed with him is something we can never truly know. But we, the audience, can be naïve about our entertainers. We assume we understand them, and when they do something at odds with their persona, we feel betrayed, even angry. Yet no one ever asks us to take accountability for getting it wrong. You would think by now we would approach show business with a little more skepticism. But the truth is that we don’t want to, and great performers intuitively understand that. They’re gifted at creating intimacy with the viewer, at making us believe.John Mulaney appears to have become, as many veteran comics do, more cynical about this relationship, and speaks to it after relating an anecdote that makes him look bad. “As you process and digest how obnoxious, wasteful and unlikable that story is, just remember,” he says, eyes glassy, “that’s one I’m willing to tell you.”This suggests he has done even more unlikable things, but also that whatever you might think, you don’t really know him. An artist who respects his audience less would state this directly. John Mulaney lets the mind wander. More

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      ‘Indian Matchmaking,’ It’s Time to Break Up

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      The Netflix dating show claims that tradition can find love where modernity has failed. But all it does is reinforce age-old prejudices.“In India we don’t say ‘arranged marriage.’ There is ‘marriage’ and then ‘love marriage.’” Of all the platitudes — and she spouts a lot of them — issued forth by Sima Taparia, the self-anointed top matchmaker of Mumbai and breakout star of Netflix’s “Indian Matchmaking,” none land more true than this one. It’s not as if finding husbands and wives for unpaired offspring hasn’t been a fixation of anxious parents across centuries and civilizations, even if in Europe and the United States, love may have finally entered the chat and stayed long enough to become unexceptional. But for older generations in India, parents’ finding spouses for their children has been the norm for so long that the idea of those same adult children’s marrying for “love” is still alien enough for it to occupy an entirely separate category — now a reality-TV show.“Indian Matchmaking,” whose third season premiered on April 21, follows the immaculately coifed, highlighted and bejeweled Taparia as she steamrolls through the lives of unhappily single men and women of Indian origin mostly living in America. She promises to find them the spouses of their dreams, as long as they don’t dream for too much. The cast varies (with some fan favorites and villains occasionally brought back) but most are seemingly well-off young people, urbane and cosmopolitan, who run their own businesses and attend boutique workout classes. This season’s standouts include an emergency-room doctor named Vikash, whose god complex extends to referring to himself in the third person as Vivacious Vikash and performing solo dances to Hindi songs at his friends’ weddings (and allowing video of himself doing so to be broadcast on the show); he wants a tall Hindi-speaking girl because he’s really attached to Indian “culture.” There’s Bobby, the over-energetic teacher who performs a math-themed rap that ends with him snarling “mathematics, boiii” at the screen. Arti from Miami lists weekly visits to Costco as her hobby.The activities that these aspirant matchees choose for the dates they go on (wine tastings, yoga with baby goats) are straight out of gentrified Williamsburg. Interspersed in between these scenes are cameos from their stony-faced parents, astrologers dispensing sex advice, face readers, tarot-card readers and Taparia’s own peremptory admonishments reminding them that they’re never getting everything they want in a partner, so they better start lowering their expectations now.She promises to find them the spouses of their dreams, as long as they don’t dream for too much.That she has not yet made a single match resulting in marriage over the course of two seasons and 16 episodes has deterred neither Taparia herself nor the makers of the show from continuing this Sisyphean journey into a third. She is not one to suffer from impostor syndrome or even, apparently, introspection, so her matchmaking methodology remains resolutely unchanged. The only big departure this time around is the expansion of her hunting grounds to Britain, where she commences her reign of terror in London by telling a 35-year-old divorcee named Priya that she “should not be so much picky.”To people like me, who grew up in this third-party matchmaking milieu, Sima Taparia or Sima Aunty (a nickname she gives herself) is just that — an aunty, an archetype we’ve known and avoided all our lives: the obnoxious and overbearing relative, neighbor or acquaintance with zero sense of boundaries. But to the global audiences who eagerly lapped up “Indian Matchmaking” during the early months of the pandemic, Taparia was a delightful novelty, in one moment tossing bon mots of conjugal wisdom with the serenity of an all-knowing sibyl (“You will only get 60 to 70 percent of what you want; you will never get 100 percent”) and in the next moment ordering a female client to get rid of her “high standards” with the brusqueness of a guidance counselor breaking it to an overzealous student that they’re not getting into Harvard.In India, the business of parents seeking brides and grooms for their children is a cruel and cutthroat one, having originated as a way to preserve caste endogamy.Throughout history, the coming together of two people in matrimony (holy or otherwise) has never been just about the union itself — it is the broader institution that reveals the deepest anxieties (financial, religious or racial) undergirding a society. “Indian Matchmaking” bills itself as just any other show about the caprices of trying to find love in a hostile world. It is predicated on the idea that seeking the help of someone as quaintly old-fashioned as a matchmaker is superior to the travails of dating online, where one must undergo far worse indignities like being ghosted or breadcrumbed. Here, at least, relationship expectations are mutual, and after all, what is a “biodata” (a curiously-named document Taparia uses in her practice) if not the same exaggerated dating-app profile but in résumé form and with fewer wince-inducing mentions about loving tacos and pizza.But in India, the business of parents seeking brides and grooms for their children is a cruel and cutthroat one, having originated as a way to preserve caste endogamy, and it continues to be fraught with violence from every side, a reality that is at odds with the show’s portrayal of the process as a decorous, civilized exchange that takes place over tea and manners. The most pernicious aspects are hidden behind a flimsy veneer of fabricated gentility, apparent in the many euphemistic phrases in which Taparia, the singles she is matching and their parents communicate. The show’s title itself reads like an awkward, faux-anthropological translation, when in reality, the Indian here in “Indian Matchmaking” is merely a stand-in for outrageously wealthy, landed upper-caste Hindus (with an exception here and there).Caste, one of the most malicious forces still dictating India’s social fabric, is gingerly intimated by low-voiced mumblings of “same community.” Openly declaring that you want to marry someone filthy rich would be uncouth, so the words “good family, good upbringing” are uttered frequently. Women cannot afford to be “picky.” Women have to be “flexible.” They must also learn how to “compromise.” My personal favorite of these, though, is “adjust,” one of the hardest-working euphemisms in Indian English, whose meaning linguistically can range from the squeezed addition of a third backside on a bus seat meant to fit only two, to a man’s parents’ demanding that the girl foredoomed to marry their son give up her professional career to pursue full-time daughter-in-law activities. Curiously enough, the men are spared the brunt of such exhortations.“In marriage, every desire becomes a decision,” remarked Susan Sontag in 1956, a strikingly trenchant line that I recalled when watching the show’s participants being quizzed about their “criteria” for a potential spouse. Initially, they start out reciting millennial-speak straight out of the 2012 twee-internet era: the desire for someone “kind” with a “sense of humor.” But upon further prodding, out come tumbling the real demands, the decisions that display that their modernity hasn’t yet overcome the inherited prejudices that govern this entire phenomenon. Costco-obsessed Arti cannot help mentioning that her father would have really, really, really loved for her to marry someone from her “community.” Vivacious Vikash, meanwhile, for all his insistence on Indian “culture,” forgot to specify that he wanted a Hindi-speaking girl from America (a “same community” of its own) and not the “very Indian” woman with the Indian accent that Sima Aunty found for him.Source photographs: NetflixIva Dixit is a staff editor at the magazine. Her previous articles include an appreciation of eating raw red onions and an exploration into the continued popularity of “Emily in Paris.” More

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      ‘The Diplomat’ Review: Save the Marriage, Save the World

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      Keri Russell stars in a Netflix political thriller that doubles as a high-style romantic comedy.Debora Cahn most recently served as an executive producer and writer on “Homeland.” Keri Russell most famously played a hyper-efficient assassin on “The Americans.” Their collaboration in the new Netflix series “The Diplomat” — Cahn created it, Russell stars — would lead you to expect something dark, violent and complicated.But a look further back in Cahn’s history shows that she started her career with a long run as a writer and producer on “The West Wing.” And that’s the spirit she’s brought to “The Diplomat,” a political thriller laced with romance and written, with some success, in an Aaron Sorkinesque high-comic, high-velocity style.So you would be right about complicated, at least. Geopolitical crises and amorous complications are thick on the ground, intertwining and constantly morphing in ways that can be hard to follow. (The serial twists and breathless explanations both contribute to and help to obscure the plot-greasing implausibilities necessary for a show that puts earthshaking events in a comic framework.)Russell plays Kate Wyler, a career American diplomat suddenly and surprisingly named ambassador to Britain. She arrives in London with her trailing spouse, Hal (Rufus Sewell), a more experienced and renowned diplomat who is now expected to smile for the cameras but otherwise keep his mouth shut. For them, artifice is an essential element in both statecraft and marriage.Kate and Hal’s union is on its last legs, as it turns out. But thanks to an improbable, possibly MacGuffinish twist, it is mandatory that they stay together. So one pole of the plot is their highly cultivated Bickersons act, a will-they-or-won’t-they screwball anti-romance between an unforgiving woman and a roguish, egomaniacal man; you may see ghostly images of Carole Lombard and John Barrymore. At the same time, Hal, along with Kate’s fiercely competent deputy, Stuart (Ato Essandoh), is tasked with turning the combative Kate into a more refined diplomat, an arduous process with echoes of “My Fair Lady” and “Kiss Me, Kate.”The rom-com complications — they also encompass Kate’s attraction to the British foreign minister (David Gyasi) and a classic secondary romance between Stuart and the C.I.A. station chief (Ali Ahn) — and the political machinations bounce off and intensify one another, in the old “West Wing” style. An attack on a British warship in the Middle East starts an eight-episode chain of events involving Iran and Russia that has Kate shuttling between the American president (Michael McKean) and the British prime minister (Rory Kinnear, who stands out in an excellent cast) and, with Hal’s help, salvaging U.S.-U.K. relations while pretty much literally saving the world.“The Diplomat” is concerned with the dynamics of the international order, the proper balance between idealism and realpolitik, and the fallout of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but it’s essentially a show about a marriage. The conceit of Kate as the undiplomatic diplomat — a woman whose stone-cold, steel-trap strategic abilities would be considered suitable for the Court of St. James’s — is, to put it kindly, absurd, but its main purpose is to set up the contrast with the smoother, more devious, more obviously diplomatic Hal.And you can see how Russell’s coldblooded excellence in “The Americans” would recommend her for the part of Kate. (In an amusing nod to Russell’s long run as the murderous Elizabeth Jennings, Kate is asked whether she poisoned a fellow diplomat and deadpans, “Not my style.”) But while she’s perfectly proficient, and has no trouble conveying the character’s intelligence and, when called for, her uncertainty or anger, Russell is not as funny as the show needs her to be. Relaxing into the role and giving the emotional connections the casual, spontaneous feel that the rom-com structure calls for are not her strengths.Luckily for “The Diplomat,” Sewell has no trouble getting in touch with his inner Barrymore, and he walks away with the show. Hal is petulant, childish and arrogant, but he’s smart and charming enough to get away with it, and Sewell both embodies the charm and shows us the flashes of doubt and nobility that redeem him. Making an over-scaled, too-good-to-be-true romantic construction like Hal feel absolutely real is a trick right up there with saving the world from global war. More

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      In ‘The Diplomat,’ Keri Russell Shows Her Good Side

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      The actor’s first substantial TV role since the Soviet spy drama “The Americans” finds her switching sides, starring as a savvy civil servant tasked with upholding America’s reputation abroad.On a recent Thursday afternoon, the actress Keri Russell paused in a corner of Brooklyn Bridge Park to admire a starling.It was technically spring, though the weather had other ideas, and Russell, in subdued plumage, braved the wind in chunky boots and a black puffer jacket. Her hair was tousled. Liner ringed each eye, possibly a souvenir from the previous night’s too many margaritas with friends. She didn’t look much like a woman who devoted years of her life to undermining the American democratic project. Or like a woman now charged with safeguarding it.But Russell has been both of those women (and a lot of other women besides). At this point in her career, she is probably best known for her six seasons on the FX drama “The Americans” as Elizabeth Jennings, a Soviet sleeper agent with an ambitious collection of ruses and wigs who earned Russell three Emmy nominations. Now Russell has taken on an opposing role: In the “The Diplomat,” a Netflix series debuting on Thursday, she stars as Kate Wyler, a savvy U.S. civil servant tasked with upholding America’s reputation abroad.A veteran ambassador, Kate is about to take a post in Kabul when an international incident shunts her and her husband, Hal (Rufus Sewell), to London. An English manor house is not a war zone, but Kate behaves otherwise. Armored in punishing heels and sleek sheath dresses, she treats even polite conversation as battlefield maneuvers. But in a departure from “The Americans,” Kate’s work is almost entirely aboveboard. She wears no wigs.As some Canada geese waddled nearby, Russell considered the disparities between these two roles. “It was fun being a baddie, doing sneaky stuff,” she said. But “The Diplomat” also has its pleasures, she insisted. “It’s awesome to be smart and capable and dress people down and be so steady about it,” she said.If Elizabeth is a baddie, does that make Kate a goody? Russell gave a cagey smile. “We’ll see,” she said.In “The Diplomat,” Russell plays a veteran ambassador who is about to take a post in Kabul when an international incident shunts her and her husband, Hal (Rufus Sewell), to London. Alex Bailey/NetflixRussell began her career as a teenage dancer in “The Mickey Mouse Club” and then starred in “Felicity” as a capricious college student and the patron saint of dithery girls everywhere. She did not necessarily expect to spend her midcareer playing hypercompetent women while also showing the uncertainty that undergirds that competence. In addition to playing Elizabeth and Kate, she has also recently appeared as an indomitable mother in the horror comedy “Cocaine Bear” and as a cool, if not especially effective, assassin in “Extrapolations.”Felicity would not have excelled at either espionage or high-stakes diplomacy. “Felicity would write a poem about it,” Russell said. But that was 20 years ago. Russell, who in person is outspoken, unfussy, charmingly profane and so candid that she encourages similar candor in others and now absolutely has kompromat on me, has grown up. She has since become a mother. She has two children with her former husband, Shane Deary, and a young son with her partner Matthew Rhys, her co-star on “The Americans.”“Moms are like that!” she said of these recent capable characters. “You’re going to make it happen. A mom can do 37 things in one day!”Russell comes to this park, near the home that she shares with Rhys and her children, on the rare occasions when she has an early morning to herself. Sometimes, before anyone else is awake, she’ll ride her bike through the park’s loops. “It’s a beautiful, happening place,” she said, pointing out the roller rink, the basketball courts, a meadow, the indelible view of Manhattan across the East River.Over the last year or so, those mornings have been rarer. It was during the Christmas holiday of 2021, when Russell had volunteered to cook dinner for the children’s three sets of grandparents, that she received the scripts for “The Diplomat.” With Rhys already away for part of the year filming the gloomy HBO revival of “Perry Mason”—“I was already punishing him with guilt for not being home,” she said — she wasn’t looking for another starring role.Russell has played several indomitable mothers, including in the horror comedy “Cocaine Bear.”Universal PicturesStill, something in Kate’s ambition and savvy, as well as the humor of her marital tussles with Hal, called to her. She agreed to a video call with the show’s creator, Debora Cahn, a veteran of “Homeland” and “The West Wing.”Cahn had wanted Russell for the role, trusting that Kate would benefit from Russell’s beauty, grace and ability to convey emotions even in characters who control and repress their feelings. But Kate was a more neurotic proposition than past Russell characters — gorgeous enough to be the subject of a Vogue spread in the show but also sweaty, squirrelly, with a lot of angst behind the poise.“There’s a part of Kate that is itchy and twitchy and always uncomfortable in her own skin,” Cahn said in a recent phone interview.Russell was a woman of far more poise, Cahn assumed, but she knew that Russell was also a skilled actor. She could perform that discomfort. And yet, as she watched Russell squirm through the video call, she discovered that discomfort was part of the Russell package, too.“I get really nervous,” Russell confirmed in the park. “I do really sweat a lot.” (She didn’t seem to be sweating here, though it was quite cold.)This contradiction — glamour in the front, social anxiety in the back — helped Cahn explore the thesis of “The Diplomat,” which is that everybody sweats, even (or especially) the bodies in power.“In Buckingham Palace, in the Great Hall of the People, everybody in there is still a leaky human,” Cahn said.Kate, on the show, puts it more tartly. “You show people the nice parts because, believe me, that’s all that anyone wants to see,” she says.The effort that Kate makes to maintain a flawless veneer resonated with Russell, though largely because she has never had much patience with or talent for the public-facing aspects of her profession — the interviews, the award shows, the times when she has to perform a more idealized version of herself. She used to beat herself up for this unease, but she has since accepted it.“I’m like, that’s who I am,” she said.“I like to never be busy,” Russell said, despite recent evidence to the contrary. “I like to like drift away and roam the park.”Celeste Sloman for The New York TimesAnd yet, sets are places where she has always felt at home. “The Diplomat” filmed last summer, mostly in London and mostly on location. Sewell had never met Russell, his work wife, until they were both in the hair and makeup trailer, but he was struck by her openness and ease.“She immediately was very friendly and personable and easy,” he said. “I automatically thought it was going to be relatively straightforward working with her, because she was a lot of fun.”Fun is not necessarily a word that anyone would apply to Kate or that Kate would apply to herself. However sweaty Russell feels herself to be, she moves through the world, or at least through the park, with less strain and tension. (And she is fun. At one point, she pulled out her phone and showed a picture of herself looking unhinged in an ash-blond wig, an outtake from “The Americans.” She sends the picture to her friends when it’s time to party. “We don’t let her have chardonnay anymore,” she said of the image.)While Kate is a creature of ambition, Russell has always held her work more lightly, even as she pushes herself to give vivid, committed performances.“When I’m there, I work hard,” she said. “I want to be good.” But she drew a distinction between herself and Rhys, even though they take on many of the same projects. (He is in “Extrapolations” and “Cocaine Bear,” too.)“He likes to be busy,” she said. “I like to never be busy. I like to like drift away and roam the park.”She was near the river now. The sun turned the gray water gold. Ducks dabbled. Unlike Kate, no one needed her to save the world today or to sweat through her clothes while neutralizing some new crisis. Hypercompetence could wait. She needed only to find her way back through the park and text Rhys to see if he could meet her at an Italian restaurant close by. Among the 37 things, there was just time for a beer before school pickup. More

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      Inside the Pods With ‘Love Is Blind,’ the Reality TV Juggernaut

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      SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — Peahens choose peacocks with more elaborate feathers, earthworms mate based on size, and baboons judge on hierarchy, but humans, as more intellectually evolved creatures, have been socialized instead to seek out love.For a tiny subset of the species, this mating ritual involves 10 days on a television set in Greater Los Angeles, where participants sit alone in 12-by-14-foot rooms listening to the disembodied voices of potential mates discuss such topics as their ideal number of offspring.That is the basis for “Love Is Blind,” the voyeuristic Netflix reality series built around buzzwords, booze and mild sensory deprivation that is set to release its Season 4 finale on Friday and air a live reunion special on Sunday. On the show, 30 singles sign up to date each other, separated inside these rooms — known as “pods” — with their conversations fed through speakers. They don’t see whom they’re talking to until they decide to get engaged — a commitment that also comes with a hastily arranged wedding where they can say “I do” or walk away.Pods are set up to film, hydrate and intoxicate contestants.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesIf it all sounds rushed, chaotic, a bit unhinged, the show’s creator, Chris Coelen, understands. Brandon Riegg, the Netflix executive who greenlighted the pitch about five years ago, described the idea with a synonym for bat guano, and he recalled telling Coelen that he would be lucky to get even one couple out of it.Despite the naysayers, Coelen felt confident that people would get engaged. After all, contestants on his show “Married at First Sight” had been marrying strangers for years.“People want to find love,” he said in an interview last month on the “Love Is Blind” set, where production was beginning on a new season, “and they’re willing to do some pretty wild things to find it.”The show premiered in February 2020, taking off as viewers were adjusting to their own versions of pandemic-mandated pod life, and has continued to captivate audiences. More than 30 million Netflix subscribers watched during the first four weeks after its premiere, the company reported, and Season 4, which kicked off in March, topped the previous seasons’ opening weekends by hours watched. Last year, according to Nielsen, “Love Is Blind” was the eighth most-watched original streaming series in the United States, ahead of “The Crown” and the “Lord of the Rings” spinoff “The Rings of Power.” Versions of the show based in Japan and Brazil have already been released, with U.K. and Swedish adaptations in the works.Kim Kardashian, Lizzo, Billie Eilish and Daniel Radcliffe are among the show’s celebrity fans, and contestants have built gigantic social media followings, with one married participant from Season 1, Lauren Speed-Hamilton, reaching 2.5 million followers on Instagram. The series has also fueled cottage industries on TikTok of amateur detectives digging into the contestants’ back stories and of therapists analyzing the relationship dynamics onscreen. At times, “Love Is Blind” has prompted musings on our fraying social fabric, with commentators declaring that the show “speaks to the state of modern romance” and “holds a mirror to a reality we’d rather ignore.”Shake Chatterjee, one of the contestants in the second season of “Love Is Blind.”Patrick Wymore/NetflixContestants don’t meet in person until they have gotten engaged.NetflixFor Netflix, its appeal was more fundamental. It matched the streamer’s ethos around unscripted programming, Riegg said: relatable and optimistic.“If you look at some of the most beloved and established unscripted franchises, they’ve been running for a very long time,” he added. “And I don’t think there’s any reason that ours can’t do the same.”‘Whatever happens, happens.’So how did “Love Is Blind,” with its absurd conceit, manage to position itself as the closest thing to “The Bachelor” for the cable-less generation?Coelen said it’s because the show puts it all out there, revealing contestants’ explosive dramatics and romantic indifference without coaxing anything out of them.Producers have included footage of one participant, Andrew Liu, appearing to apply eye drops to simulate tears for the camera after he was dumped in Season 3. One couple in the current season had enough of each other and split before they got to the altar. And when Shake Chatterjee, from Season 2, tried to suss out what his dates looked like by asking if he could feasibly carry them on his shoulders, the producers said they never considered intervening.The hosts are a married couple, Vanessa and Nick Lachey — the latter of whom was the subject of his own early-aughts reality series when he married Jessica Simpson. They rarely interact with participants, occasionally dropping in during the season and serving as therapist-like mediators during the reunions.“We just watch. We involve ourselves in nothing,” said Ally Simpson (no relation to Jessica), one of the show’s executive producers. During production, she sits next to Coelen in the control room, where they monitor as many as 10 dates happening simultaneously.Chris Coelen and Ally Simpson working behind the scenes. “We involve ourselves in nothing,” Simpson said.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesBut the concept of authenticity gets complicated when the location for the dates is a 68,000-square-foot studio next to an Amazon warehouse, where dozens of crew members zip around with walkie talkies and 81 cameras pan and zoom to catch every blush and giggle. (Contestants stay in hotels overnight, though the napping and cooking can sometimes make it appear as though they’re living on set à la “The Real World.”)Inside the two single-sex lounges where the singles congregate, the plants are plastic, a digital fire roars onscreen, and those metallic goblets that have become the show’s mascots are adhered to the shelves so that guests don’t knock them over.When Kwame Appiah, a tech worker who appears on the current season, says of a woman he has never seen, “I’ve just been smitten for a really long time,” he means six days.Then there’s the influencer industrial complex. In the three years since the show’s debut, cast members with new followings have promoted Smirnoff Spicy Tamarind vodka, Bud Light hard seltzer and Fenty lipstick, as well as yogurt and laxatives.When it comes to choosing a cast, the producers say they try to weed out those seeking social media fame or joining on a whim, but if such types slip into the roster, Coelen said, he believes they still tend to become invested in the process.“We build the machinery, and whatever happens, happens,” he said.A crew member affixes goblets to a shelf with mounting tape.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesThe contents of the fridge in the “men’s lounge.”Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesThe machinery starts with Donna Driscoll, the show’s head of casting, who has been with Coelen’s production company, Kinetic Content, since the second season of “Married at First Sight.” Interested singles apply online, but Driscoll’s team also seeks people out on social media and at bars, grocery stores and church groups.A third-party company conducts background checks and psychological evaluations, and the casting team creates what are called “compatibility grids,” a spreadsheet listing key characteristics, including the desire to have children. They are effectively trying to “stack the deck,” Coelen said, so that each person comes in with some compatibility, at least on paper, with others. (If love really is blind, it is also heavily vetted.)On the show, the contestants describe being at their wits’ end with dating norms of the 2020s, which tend to involve more swiping on touchscreens than IRL spontaneity.“My parents are like, ‘Why don’t you just go meet a guy at a bar?” said Chelsea Griffin, a speech-language pathologist from Seattle who is on the current season. “Who does that anymore?”Instead, with her phone confiscated, she met a guy at a production facility where a maze of dark hallways leads to pods and to a room where contestants sit for one-on-one interviews with a blurred backdrop positioned behind them.Coelen in the show’s control room.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesA camera inside the wall of one of the pods.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesAt the start of filming, budding romances begin with 10-minute speed dates, lengthening each day until the most lovestruck couples chat for hours, sometimes lingering until 3 a.m.“The rate at which you go in this experience, it’s hard for my mom to fathom. It’s hard for my brother to fathom,” Griffin said. “I could sit and try to articulate and explain the entire thing, and people still wouldn’t get it.”Members of the production team listen on headsets, logging moments like when someone says “I love you” or tears flow. They move contestant headshots around a bulletin board as they pair off and break up, like detectives on a crime procedural.At the end of the day, the contestants rank their dates on paper. The team then uses a variation on a Nobel Prize-winning algorithm, created by two mathematicians in the 1960s, to find a dating schedule in which everyone has matches. For the first four seasons, Simpson and Coelen organized the data by hand to determine the next day’s lineup of dates, but more recently, Simpson plugs the rankings into computer software.By day seven, the men are able to pick out engagement rings provided by the show. By day nine, after couples have typically spent about 30 total hours dating — albeit in separate rooms — some of them pop the question. If the answer is a yes, they finally meet.Then, it’s time to plan the wedding. Singles have been choosing among suitors they couldn’t see as far back as the 1960s (see “The Dating Game”), but “Love Is Blind” makes marriage its clear, televised conclusion.“You think about reality shows as being these zany, deviant enterprises, but when it comes right down to it, they promulgate some of our most conservative values,” said Danielle Lindemann, a sociologist who wrote a book about reality television. “Ultimately, this show is about heterosexual coupling that ends in marriage.”The lounge where male contestants gather between dates. On the show, contestants often describe being at their wits’ end with the norms of dating in the 2020s.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesSuccess, and scrutinyThe inherent limits of the show have opened it to critique. Though “Love Is Blind” might be more diverse than some reality shows in terms of race and body type, those selected for the “experiment” tend to be conventionally attractive heterosexual men and women in their 20s and 30s.Speed-Hamilton, who has gone on to co-host a podcast for Netflix about its reality series, accused the show last season of “cutting all the Black women” after the pods portion, adding that most of the couples seemed “forced” and only established “for entertainment purposes.”There have been other musings that this season of the show is falling into typical reality TV traps, zooming in on “mean girl” drama and casting people whose true intentions some viewers question. There have also been suggestions that the show has edited footage to ramp up the drama. Jackelina Bonds, a dental assistant from this season, wrote on Instagram that footage had been reordered so that it appears she went on a date before she broke up with her fiancé, when in fact, the date was afterward.Coelen said the production team works to portray the “accurate essence of each person’s journey.” He said the show focuses on building a diverse pool of participants from the start and chooses to follow the engagements that seem most genuine. Any “mean girl” behavior happened without their influence, he said.One of the most vocal skeptics of the show’s authenticity has been a former contestant, Jeremy Hartwell, who was not closely followed during his season. He filed a class-action lawsuit last year against Netflix and Kinetic Content, saying that the defendants cut off the cast from the outside world, plied them with unlimited alcohol and withheld food and sleep with the objective of leading the cast to make “manipulated decisions for the benefit of the show’s entertainment value.”Female and male contestants are kept separate throughout much of the filming of “Love Is Blind.”Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesThe crux of the lawsuit was an objection to the show’s payment structure at the time, which, the complaint said, involved a $1,000 stipend per filming week with a maximum of $8,000 in possible earnings. His lawsuit argued that the participants had been “willfully misclassified” as independent contractors rather than as employees who were entitled to minimum wage, overtime pay and various labor protections.Chantal McCoy Payton, a lawyer for Hartwell, declined to comment, citing the continuing litigation.Lawyers for Kinetic Content, which has said that the claims are without merit, asserted in court documents that Hartwell had been part of the show for only six days and did not qualify as an employee. Netflix lawyers argued that Hartwell had brought forward “extreme allegations” because he was “upset” about not being chosen by another contestant.Coelen declined to discuss the lawsuit, but his description of the show’s process was at odds with Hartwell’s claims.Daters are provided meals and can order food to the pods, he said, and while the alcohol supply is ample (the fridge in the lounge is stocked with champagne, beer, wine and hard seltzer), everyone decides for themselves whether they want to drink. There are two psychologists on the set, he noted, and the show offers to cover postproduction therapy for participants.Although the producers say they don’t interfere in relationships, Coelen, who is 54 and has been married for 16 years, said that they do suggest that the couples talk about important subjects like finances, parenting and religion, comparing the producers’ level of influence to Pre-Cana, a course for couples preparing to be married by the Roman Catholic Church. For instance, in Season 1, production team members encouraged one participant, Amber Pike, to tell her fiancé, Matt Barnett, that she had about $20,000 in student debt. The conversation did not go particularly well, but the pair got married anyway.“We really get invested in these relationships,” said Simpson, 45, who has been married for six years.Inside the single-sex lounges where the singles congregate, the plants are plastic and a digital fire roars onscreen.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesMembers of the production team listen to the contestants on headsets, logging moments like when someone says “I love you” or when tears flow.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesCoelen has tried to sell similarly gimmicky dating shows before. In 2017, his production company released an American version of a show called “Kiss Bang Love” in which singles met each other by kissing blindfolded. In “The Spouse House,” 14 singles bent on marriage moved in together. Both shows lasted only one season.With “Love Is Blind,” the numbers are starting to add up. From the first three seasons of the show, 17 couples came out of the pods engaged, six got legally married on the show, and four are still together.In an interview last month, Brett Brown, a design director at Nike whose marital fate will be unveiled Friday, said it is those early successes that keep viewers watching, curious to find out if this bizarre dating formula can spit out happy couples.Brown acknowledged that some participants might exaggerate their feelings in exchange for the global attention that comes with being a reality TV star.But not him.“I can only speak from my experience,” he said, “and I know that I was there for the right reason.”Susan Beachy contributed research. More

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      ‘Beef’ Review: Mad in America

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      A thrilling dark comedy explores the complexity of anger, through a road-rage feud between two drivers who are more alike than it seems.“I’m so sick of smiling,” says Danny Cho (Steven Yeun) in the first episode of Netflix’s “Beef.” You may have noticed that he’s not alone in this. Blame it on the pandemic, the culture, the economy, but people are mad right now, on planes and on trains and — like Danny and his car-crossed antagonist, Amy Lau (Ali Wong) — in automobiles.“Beef,” a dark comedy about a road-rage incident that careers disastrously off-road, has good timing, but that’s not enough to make a great TV series. What makes this one of the most invigorating, surprising and insightful debuts of the past year is how personally and culturally specific its study of anger is. Every unhappy person in it is unhappy in a different and fascinating way.Amy and Danny’s high-speed chase through suburban Los Angeles, following a run-in at a big-box-store parking lot, sets the tone for all 10 episodes (which arrive on Thursday). The show floors the accelerator with heedless gusto, racing a course of revenge, subterfuge and terrible decisions.But what gives “Beef” its interest is its attention to the motivations that brought the pair to that parking lot in the first place.Danny, a hard-working, hapless contractor saving to build a house for his Korean parents, is trying to return merchandise while fretting over his family and finances. Amy, an entrepreneur who married into art-world money, is trying to sell her small business to the big store’s owner, a deal she hopes will finally allow her to exhale after years of pressure. Each is this close to breaking, and each, after their near fender-bender, ends up being the other’s last straw.It is easy to see how this could have become a cynical class-war story: His working-class struggle vs. her upscale ennui, his pickup vs. her Mercedes. Instead the creator, Lee Sung Jin (“Dave”), couples a raucous story with a generous spin on the truism that the biggest jerk you meet is fighting battles you know nothing about.Danny’s problems are more existential and dire: He is the hard-working son who has taken his family on his back, including not only his parents but also his crypto-bro younger brother (Young Mazino) and his ex-convict cousin (a volatile David Choe), who become dangerously entangled in his payback schemes. It’s not just cash that he lacks; he feels an emptiness, which he tries to fill by stress-eating Burger King chicken sandwiches and by joining a rock-gospel church, an intriguing if underdeveloped subplot.Steven Yeun in “Beef.” Most of the major characters are shaped by their family and upbringing.NetflixAmy has a cushier living situation, but her stressors are not so different. She smiles through endless microaggressions from Jordan (Maria Bello), her business’s rich white potential buyer, and the intrusions of her wealthy mother-in law (Patti Yasutake). Her husband, George (Joseph Lee), has the sweet but irritating chill of privilege. She keeps a gun (paging Mr. Chekhov) in a home safe, a seeming symbol of Amy herself — a sleek container that keeps something dangerous locked away.As their battle escalates, Amy and Danny become enmeshed in each other’s lives, and their similarities become clearer. “Beef” develops into something of a love story, except about hate. You’d expect Yeun (“Minari,” “The Walking Dead”) to excel in the show’s drama and the comedian Wong (“Tuca & Bertie”) to nail the humor, but they do the reverse just as well. Wong especially taps the tension behind Amy’s exquisite octagonal glasses, the pressure to provide and be perfect — she’s like Rachel Fleishman with a gun instead of yoga.That nearly all of the major characters in “Beef” are Asian is both a casual fact of the setting and integral to its themes. These are characters given less social permission for anger in America, in part because of “model minority” stereotypes of docility. (“You have this serene Zen Buddhist thing going on,” Jordan tells Amy.)But they’re also shaped by their family and upbringing. Amy describes learning to repress her emotions from her father — “Chinese guy from the Midwest, I mean, communication wasn’t his forte” — and her mother, a Vietnamese immigrant who “thought talking about your feelings was the same thing as complaining.”As philosophy, self-help and “Star Wars” have taught us, anger is a destructive emotion. “Beef” provides ample evidence of this, in the cascade of escalations that builds to a climax so weird and explosive that it defies spoiling. And the personal war brings out the best in neither Amy, who insults Danny as “poor,” nor Danny, who calls Amy “some rich bitch from Calabasas.”But “Beef” also pushes past easy cant to explore the idea that anger — even petty, stupid anger — can be liberating. At the end of the first episode, Amy and Danny meet face to face, and it does not end well; she winds up chasing him down the street on foot. He, despite having bought himself trouble he can’t afford, wears a wide, childlike smile. She, planning her next countermove, relaxes into a tiny grin.It’s the first lightness you see on either of their faces. Their dispute will prove to be the worst thing that has happened to either of them, but in the moment, it is also the best. They fight not just out of pride but also out of their seeming belief that their rage might somehow make everything right.Among the motifs that Lee Sung Jin weaves through “Beef” is hunger. Danny has his Burger King addiction — he eats like it’s his job, straining and puffing — while Amy has a sweet tooth, a legacy of her depressed childhood, that she has passed on to her daughter. Which brings us back to this weird, remarkable show’s title.Colloquially, “Beef” means “feud.” But this series shows you how anger can also, for some people, be meat. It fills an emptiness, it sustains, it momentarily satisfies — even if, in excess, it’s terrible for your heart. More