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    Dabney Coleman, Actor Audiences Loved to Hate, Is Dead at 92

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    In movies like “9 to 5” and “Tootsie” and on TV shows like “Buffalo Bill,” he turned the portrayal of egomaniacal louts into a fine art.Dabney Coleman, an award-winning television and movie actor best known for his over-the-top portrayals of garrulous, egomaniacal characters, died on Thursday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 92.His daughter Quincy Coleman confirmed the death to The New York Times but did not cite the cause.Mr. Coleman was equally adept at comedy and drama, but he received his greatest acclaim for his comic work — notably in the 1980 movie “9 to 5,” in which he played a thoroughly despicable boss, and the 1983-84 NBC sitcom “Buffalo Bill,” in which he starred as the unscrupulous host of a television talk show in Buffalo.At a time when antiheroic leads, with the outsize exception of Carroll O’Connor’s Archie Bunker, were a rarity on television comedies, Mr. Coleman’s distinctly unlikable Bill Bittinger on “Buffalo Bill” was an exception. A profile of Mr. Coleman in Rolling Stone called Bill “a rapscallion for our times, a playfully wicked combination of G. Gordon Liddy and Groucho Marx.” (“He has to do something terrible,” Bill’s station manager said of him in one episode. “It’s in his blood.”)Mr. Coleman’s manically acerbic performance was widely praised and gained him Emmy Award nominations as best actor in a comedy in 1983 and 1984. Reviewing “Buffalo Bill” in The Times, John J. O’Connor said Mr. Coleman “manages to bring an array of unexpected colors to his performance” and called him “the kind of gifted actor who always seems to be teetering on the verge of becoming a star.” But the ratings were disappointing, and “Buffalo Bill” ran for only 26 episodes.Mr. Coleman with his co-star Geena Davis in a scene from the 1983-84 NBC sitcom “Buffalo Bill,” in which he played the unscrupulous host of a television talk show in Buffalo.Frank Connor/Stampede Productions, via Everett CollectionMr. Coleman revisited the formula in 1987 with the ABC sitcom “The ‘Slap’ Maxwell Story,” in which he played a similar character, this time an outspoken sportswriter for a struggling newspaper. He garnered another Emmy nomination for his performance and won a Golden Globe. But low ratings, this time combined with friction between Mr. Coleman and the producer Jay Tarses (who, with Tom Patchett, had created “Buffalo Bill”), led to its demise after just one season.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Paula Weinstein, Hollywood Veteran and Political Activist, Dies at 78

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      Raised by a McCarthy-era rebel, the producer and journalist Hannah Weinstein, she followed her mother’s path into movies and television, advocacy and action.Paula Weinstein, a movie producer, studio executive and political activist who became a fierce advocate for women in her industry, died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 78.Her sister Lisa Weinstein confirmed the death. She said the cause was not yet known.In the boy’s club of Hollywood, Ms. Weinstein was the rare female top executive: Over her long career, she was president of United Artists, a vice president of Warner Bros. and an executive vice president at 20th Century Fox. She was just 33 when she was hired at Fox in 1978, and when she was promoted to vice president a year later, The Los Angeles Times called her “the highest-ranking woman in the motion picture industry.”“A man can be mediocre in almost everything, but a women’s got to be perfect,” she told Life magazine that year, when she was included in an article about Hollywood’s “Young Tycoons.”But Ms. Weinstein, who colleagues said possessed a wicked sense of humor — her sister described her laugh as an infectious cackle — and a steely commitment to social justice, was unusual in Hollywood beyond her gender. As Ken Sunshine, the veteran public relations consultant and longtime Democratic activist, put it in a phone interview: “Unlike so many, she didn’t play at politics. To her, social and political change was paramount. She was the antithesis of a phony Hollywood activist looking for good P.R. or a career boost. She was unique in a sea of pretenders.”Ms. Weinstein accepted the Emmy Award for the HBO movie “Recount” in 2008. She was an executive producer on the film, which was based on the 2000 presidential election.Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesActivism was the family business: Her mother, Hannah Weinstein, was a journalist and speechwriter who in 1950 took her three young daughters to live in Paris and then London, fleeing the grim and punitive politics of the country’s McCarthy era. In Britain, where the family lived for more than a decade, Hannah Weinstein produced movies and television series using blacklisted actors and writers like Ring Lardner Jr. and Ian McLellan Hunter. She repeatedly told her daughters, as Lisa recalled, “If you believe in something, you have to be willing to get up off your ass and do something, and if you don’t get up off your ass, you really didn’t believe in it.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Home Sweet Home’ and ‘Succession’

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      A new series from Ava DuVernay debuts on NBC. And the third season of “Succession” begins on HBO.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Oct. 11-17. Details and times are subject to change.MondayNINE TO FIVE (1980) 10 p.m. on TCM. Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin play secretaries who revolt against their revolting chauvinist of a boss (Dabney Coleman) in this classic office satire. When the New York Times critics Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott included the film in their Weekend Watch column last year, they called it “a feminist lark with laughs, crude comedy, wafts of pot smoke and a catchy anthem written by Parton.”TuesdayCHUCKY 10 p.m. on Syfy and USA Network. How much of an origin story can a child doll have? Plenty, if that doll contains the soul of an adult serial killer. Chucky, the spooky doll first introduced in “Child’s Play,” the cult 1988 horror movie, gets his latest refresh in this new TV series. Unlike the 2019 big-screen rethink with Aubrey Plaza, which added an ostensibly brainy artificial-intelligence angle to the killer-doll tale, this new series has the original “Child’s Play” creator Don Mancini as its showrunner — so it should offer some more old-school scares. Syfy is debuting “Chucky” alongside another classically minded horror series, DAY OF THE DEAD, based on the 1985 George A. Romero film of the same name. The first episode of that series will air at 11 p.m. on Syfy and USA Network.A NIGHT IN THE ACADEMY MUSEUM 10 p.m. on ABC. Perhaps mercifully, this hourlong special has no relation to the “Night at the Museum” movies. Instead, the program gives a preview of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the newly opened museum in Los Angeles that displays a history of Hollywood as seen by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Tom Hanks and Laura Dern, both members of the museum’s board of trustees, will host the broadcast.WednesdayCMT ARTISTS OF THE YEAR 9 p.m. on CMT. Chris Stapleton, Gabby Barrett, Kane Brown, Kelsea Ballerini, Luke Combs, Mickey Guyton and Randy Travis are the honorees at this year’s CMT Artists of the Year event, an annual celebration of country music. Wednesday’s broadcast is slated to include performances from Barrett, Brown and Combs alongside other artists, including Yola, who will perform with Guyton.ThursdayKara Hayward in “Moonrise Kingdom.”Focus FeaturesMOONRISE KINGDOM (2012) 8:15 p.m. on HBO. Wes Anderson is set to return to theaters next week with “The French Dispatch,” his latest cinematic diorama. In the meantime, consider revisiting “Moonrise Kingdom,” Anderson’s tale of two 12-year-olds who run off into the wilderness together, and eventually reach a dreamy paradise. The film shows the pair’s adventure “with a beautifully coordinated admixture of droll humor, deadpan and slapstick,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. The messy humanity of Anderson’s characters, she wrote, is “rarely more deeply felt than in ‘Moonrise Kingdom,’” despite the fact that the film takes place in one of Anderson’s tidy, idiosyncratic realms. “Sometimes they’re called dollhouse worlds,” Dargis wrote, “though, truly, they feel more authentic than many screen realities.”FridayHOME SWEET HOME 8 p.m. on NBC. Home exchanges, the proto-Airbnb setup in which the members of one household swap places with those in another city as a means of traveling for cheap, can be a ripe source for drama. Ask most anyone who’s done one and you’ll likely hear tales of oddities found stashed away behind the Fritos in kitchen cabinets, or plumbing challenges, or any of the other bumps that can emerge when one family’s lifestyle is transplanted into a home set up for another’s. But you’ll also probably hear about the transcendent experience of essentially stepping into someone else’s life. The latter element is the focus of this unscripted series from the filmmaker Ava DuVernay. Each episode follows two families who swap houses for one week. The pairings are intended to set up each family for revelations about identity, and to challenge potential assumptions about race, religion, gender and other issues.LA FRONTERA WITH PATI JINICH 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The chef and TV host Pati Jinich has long presented food as a tool of diplomacy. “In my kitchen, the border experience is an inspiration,” she said in a 2018 episode of her PBS series “Pati’s Mexican Table.” Her new travel series, “La Frontera,” expands on that notion; it focuses on food in border towns in Mexico and the southern United States, including El Paso and Juarez.ALL ABOUT EVE (1950) 11:45 p.m. on TCM. Bette Davis plays an aging Broadway star whose life is derailed by a young fan (Anne Baxter) in this drama. The film won several Oscars, including two for the writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who got statues for both his direction and his screenplay. (The film also won best picture.) The work of Mankiewicz’s screenwriter brother, Herman, will be on display on TCM earlier in the night in CITIZEN KANE (1941), which will air at 9:30.SaturdayTHOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD (2021) 8 p.m. on HBO. The active malevolence of two assassins is dwarfed by the passive lethality of a wildfire in this thriller from the writer-director Taylor Sheridan. The story centers on a smoke jumper, played by Angelina Jolie, whose path crosses with that of a boy (Finn Little) who is being tailed by killers (Aidan Gillen and Nicholas Hoult). They’re out to silence him because of a secret he learned from his forensic accountant father (Jake Weber). The pursuit takes them all through the Montana wilderness; it kicks into gear when the forest is set ablaze.SundayJeremy Strong in “Succession.”David M. Russell/HBOSUCCESSION 9 p.m. on HBO. The third season of HBO’s grotesquely lavish satirical drama “Succession” will arrive on Sunday night after being delayed a year by the pandemic. The delay presumably gave viewers some extra time to catch their breath after the gasp of a Season 2 finale, which once again cleaved the fictional members of the Roy family — wardens of a media empire — into warring camps. Don’t expect the time off to have lessened the tension. More