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      in Television

      ‘Based on a True Story’: The Vogue of Killer Content

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      A new Peacock satire puts the ethics of America’s true-crime obsession on trial by making a serial killer more than just a subject. He’s also the star.In a September 2022 episode of “You’re Wrong About,” a history podcast, the writer Michael Hobbes noted that the number of serial killers might be diminishing, which could be a problem, he said — for true-crime fanatics, anyway.“Step it up out there, serial killers,” he said. “You got to produce good content.”Hobbes was joking, but serial killers and the podcasts devoted to them feed an ever growing true-crime industry worth millions of dollars. Now the eight-episode Peacock satire “Based on a True Story,” which arrived in full last week, poses a troubling question: What if serial killers weren’t only the subjects but also the hosts, or even the producers, of a true-crime podcast?The idea isn’t entirely far-fetched. The true-crime world is saturated with podcasts that have been criticized as being ethically compromised and flawed, accused of offenses including plagiarism, racial insensitivity and pro-police bias. True-crime TV series have likewise been criticized: the docu-series “The Jinx,” for edits of a killer’s confession; “Making a Murderer,” for its presentation and omission of details; and the scripted drama “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” for humanizing its subject at the expense of Dahmer’s victims.“Based on a True Story,” created by Craig Rosenberg (“The Boys”), is a dark, comic sendup of true crime and its conventions, clichés and moral compromises. Matt (played by Tom Bateman) is a friendly plumber by day and the feared West Side Ripper by night. When a married couple in desperate need of excitement and cash (the pregnant Ava, played by an also-pregnant Kaley Cuoco, and Nathan, played by Chris Messina) discover his identity, they blackmail him into embarking on a scheme to create a podcast from the killer’s point-of-view.“Finally, some good luck!” Ava says. “A serial killer has fallen into our laps.”One central challenge, however, was how — and whether — the creators and cast of “Based on a True Story” could avoid committing the same crimes as the genre it claims to critique. It is, after all, still a comedy about some particularly gruesome murders.For Cuoco and Messina, it was important to keep the actions of their own characters in proper perspective.“Every day, I would turn to Kaley and say, ‘Is this supposed to be funny or serious here?’” Chris Messina (with Kaley Cuoco) said about trying to nail the tone of the satire.Peacock“In my opinion, Ava and Nathan are just as bad as the killer,” Cuoco, who is also an executive producer, said in a recent phone interview. “I know Ava is trying to believe, Well, this is us stopping him. It’s wrong and it’s funny at the same time.”Messina said, in a separate interview, that figuring out the tone had been a persistent struggle.“Every day, I would turn to Kaley and say, ‘Is this supposed to be funny or serious here?’” he said. “Obviously, with people being murdered, it’s no laughing matter. But there is a screwball comedy and terror along with a big heart.“Like, in the Coen Brothers’ ‘Fargo,’ when they are putting someone in a woodchipper. Why am I laughing one minute and horrified the next?”As the story gets underway, the absurdities quickly mount. In the beginning, Matt is supposed to be merely the interview subject, his voice disguised. But as the plot progresses, he emerges as a de facto showrunner.He upgrades the locations and equipment. He provides a new edit, changing the beginning, the ending and the music. He rejects every note about the narrative and the brand.“These seem like completely ridiculous conversations given that you are talking about people who have been murdered,” Bateman said. “And the funny thing is, he’s getting more and more artistically involved because it’s the first time in his life he’s ever felt seen.”Michael Costigan, an executive producer, said he thought the podcasters’ artistic squabbles also spoke to a common error in the true-crime world: losing track of the reality of the crimes.“Kaley’s character is pitching her ideas and forgetting something: ‘I’m sitting across from the perpetrator,’” he said. “We thought, This is absolutely talking about a metaphor for how millions of people get lost in stories as escapism. But what are they escaping into? What are they forgetting about?”Jason Bateman, another executive producer (no relation to Tom), said he had thought a lot about the show’s tone, and wanted to make sure it wasn’t too “silly” or “camp,” grounding character actions in reality. It was, he acknowledged, a difficult line to walk.Partly as a mirror of their own internal debates, the writers and producers created a character, played by Ever Carradine, who is the mother of a West Side Ripper victim. Her participation in a true-crime panel raises questions of whether she is honoring or exploiting her daughter.The show takes Nathan and Ava (Messina and Cuoco) to a true-crime convention, where all sorts of horrific crimes and killers are monetized. Elizabeth Morris/Peacock“We wondered in those scenes, what is the line?” Costigan said. “This is her wanting to talk about her daughter but then also participating in this world, too. We’re really hoping that the audience can have their cake and eat it, too — that you see the duality, see the world from both lenses.”Critics have pointed to recent studies in suggesting that fans of the genre, a large percentage of whom are women, can suffer from a kind of true-crime brain, a sense of heightened fear that is out-of-sync with the overall decline in violent crime of recent decades. It has also, as the advent of the web sleuth attests, created a lot of self-appointed experts. Ava’s wine-and-crime club of true-crime obsessives are fans of a podcast called “Sisters in Crime,” which leads her to believe she has mastered the genre.“Ava says things like ‘DB’ for dead body,” said Cuoco, who admitted that she is a huge “Dateline” fan. “She talks like she’s actually on one of those shows.”The same delusion that allows Cuoco’s Ava to figure out that Matt is the West Side Ripper also, unfortunately, leads her to believe she can control a serial killer — and to lose sight of the victims. In the original script, Ava and Nathan were to be the parents of teenagers, but when Cuoco became pregnant, she suggested that Ava be pregnant as well. It helped raise the stakes and address why Ava would be so blinded by her need to make money.“Her life is chaotic,” Cuoco said. “This is a distraction.”To find a potential fan base, the characters take an exploratory trip to CrimeCon, a series of real-life conventions for true crime aficionados, held in cities like Las Vegas, New Orleans and Orlando. As the actors and other producers explained, Rosenberg, himself a true-crime fan, had started thinking more about how criminals become celebrities after attending one such event. (A Peacock spokesman said Rosenberg was unavailable to comment because of the continuing writers’ strike.)“Craig said he heard people there discussing who their favorite serial killers were, as if they were football players,” Tom Bateman said. His character, walking around the convention floor, observes merchandise being sold in his name, as it is for other serial killers. But he isn’t ranking as highly as he thinks he should be.Cuoco said she had enjoyed making a humorous examination of the genre. But there were some sobering issues about true-crime, she acknowledged, that even this satire couldn’t fully address — including the future of the genre, which she said was “already at an extreme.”“There is a fine line,” she added. “I do not condone a serial killer doing a podcast in real life. But I feel like I would be one of those people who say, ‘This should be illegal,’ and then probably go in my car and listen to it. We can’t help ourselves.” More

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      in Movies

      Can the Tribeca Festival Make Audio Appealing?

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      The Tribeca Festival and audio artists each have something the other wants. Can they make it work?When Winnie and Alex Kemp submitted their first original fiction podcast “The Imperfection” to the 2021 Tribeca Festival, they set their expectations near the curb.The couple, co-founders of the podcast studio Wolf at the Door, believed in the project. Making the nine-episode series — a surrealist caper about two impaired friends whose psychiatrist goes missing — had been a nearly yearlong labor of love, but early signals from the market had been humbling. An agent the couple hired to find distribution for the show had come back empty-handed, and emails to 200 journalists generated just one reply — a rejection.At the Tribeca Festival, which dropped the word “film” from its name that year and expanded its focus on video games, virtual reality, music and audio, “The Imperfection” received a warmer reception. It was among the inaugural slate of 12 officially selected podcasts to premiere at the festival.Being chosen by Tribeca meant “The Imperfection” was featured with the other festival selections on the Apple Podcasts and Audible home pages, helping it reach the top 20 of Apple Podcasts’ fiction chart. The show was later nominated for best podcast of the year and best fiction writing at The Ambie awards, the industry’s answer to the Oscars. And the Kemps got new representation with the Creative Artists Agency; last year, they sold the television rights to the show, and they will co-write the pilot script.“It was a huge boon to us helping our first show get found,” Winnie Kemp said. “There are so many shows out there; the hardest thing to figure out is, ‘How do I cut through the noise?’”Winnie and Alex Kemp submitted their original fiction podcast “The Imperfection” to the 2021 Tribeca Festival.n/aThough it has never equaled the most prestigious galas of the film world, the Tribeca Festival, which began last Wednesday and will feature audio selections this week, has emerged as a uniquely appealing showcase for podcast creators. The demand for credible curatorial organizations is high in podcast land, where an explosion of titles — over two million have been created since the start of 2020, according to the database Listen Notes — has made it hard to break out even as overall listenership has increased.While other festivals exist specifically for audio storytelling, and some documentary festivals include podcast selections, Tribeca’s history — it was founded in 2002 by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff — and association with Hollywood talent have made it an instant player in the audio community.“This is the next frontier of interesting, creative, independent storytelling — so much so that discoverability has been a challenge for audiences,” said Cara Cusumano, the director and vice president of programming at the Tribeca Festival. “That’s our forte; there was a place for us to play a role in this ecosystem and deliver an experience that you won’t find anywhere else.”This year, 16 podcasts are competing for various awards in fiction and nonfiction categories. The selections include Alissa Escarce, Nellie Gilles and Joe Richman’s “The Unmarked Graveyard,” a documentary series about the anonymous dead of New York’s Hart Island cemetery; Georgie Aldaco’s “These Were Humans,” a sketch comedy series that imagines the artifacts of an extinct human race; and Glynnis MacNicol, Emily Marinoff and Jo Piazza’s “Wilder,” a nonfiction series about the life and legacy of the “Little House on the Prairie” author Laura Ingalls Wilder.The festival will also host live tapings and premieres of several podcasts that are not in competition, including “Pod Save America,” Crooked Media’s popular political talk show; “Just Jack & Will,” the actors Sean Hayes and Eric McCormack’s new “Will & Grace” rewatch podcast and “You Feeling This?” an Los Angeles-centric fiction anthology from James Kim.Davy Gardner, the curator of audio storytelling at Tribeca, said the festival aims to demonstrate that podcasts deserve a comparable level of “cultural recognition” to films.“Tribeca is giving these creators the full red-carpet treatment,” he said. “This is its own art form and we want to help elevate it and push it forward.”Film festivals have long been the envy of audio artists. In the early 1990s, Sundance helped create a vogue for independent and art-house films that blossomed into a booming market. Filmmakers who entered the festival with few resources and no name recognition could exit it with the backing of a major studio and a burgeoning career.No similar infrastructure exists for independent podcasters. As major funders like Spotify and Amazon have consolidated around easy-to-monetize true-crime documentaries and celebrity interview shows — a trend that has intensified amid industrywide economic woes and a series of layoffs — many artists have struggled to find support for less obviously commercial work.“If you don’t have a promotional budget or aren’t attached to a big network it’s really hard to find an audience,” said Bianca Giaever, whose memoiristic podcast “Constellation Prize” was featured by the Tribeca Festival in 2021. (She is also a former producer of the Times’ podcast “The Daily”). “It’s a vicious cycle, because then less of that work gets made.” Bianca Giaever’s memoiristic podcast “Constellation Prize” was featured by the Tribeca Festival in 2021.n/aOf course, even award-winning films at the biggest festivals don’t always become hits. And podcast creators at Tribeca have to compete for audiences and prospective business partners accustomed to filling their schedules with movie premieres.Johanna Zorn, who co-founded the long-running Third Coast International Audio Festival and presented audio work at multiple documentary film festivals in the 2010s, said the payoff sometimes fell short of the promise.“We went to some fabulous film festivals and we were happy to be there,” she said. “But did they help us get real press coverage? Get us into a room with people who could lead us to the next thing? Give us something that we could really build on? Not so much.”To cast the podcast selections in an optimal light, Gardner and his colleagues have had to learn how to exhibit an art form not customarily experienced in a communal setting. They have planned around a dozen events at theaters and other venues around Manhattan that will pair excerpts from featured work with live discussions or supplementary video.One thing they won’t include? Quiet rooms with only an audio track and an empty stage.“I’ve tried it,” Gardner said wearily. “It’s incredibly awkward.” More

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Jessie Ware Is Dancing Into Her Second Act

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThe fifth Jessie Ware album, “That! Feels Good!,” is a robust, richly sung neo-disco manifesto, among the most vibrant music the singer has released. It marks a solidification of Ware’s second phase, following her early years making restrained club-soul and adult-contemporary R&B.This second phase was made possible at least in part by the success of “Table Manners,” the podcast she hosts with her mother, which has become central to Ware’s public flowering as a relatable celebrity. Now, she is making music that’s playful and untethered, but just as crisply delivered as ever.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about midcareer sonic switches, the importance of fantasy in music making, and how freedom outside of one’s music career can lead to liberation within it.Guests:Caryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editorLindsay Zoladz, a pop music critic for The New York Times and writer of The Amplifier newsletterConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      An Avett Brother Meets a Founding Son: John Quincy Adams

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      Bob Crawford is part of the folk-rock band the Avett Brothers. He’s also the host of a new podcast about the sixth president.Some professional musicians spend their days on the tour bus staring out the window, sleeping or pursuing various routes to oblivion. For Bob Crawford, the bassist for the folk-rock band the Avett Brothers, history has been his distraction of choice.“On the van, and later the bus,” he said recently in a video interview from his home near Durham, N.C., “I would read history books.”One day, he picked up Sean Wilentz’s mammoth study “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln.” From there, he moved on to “several books about Martin Van Buren,” as well as studies of Andrew Jackson, the rise of the two-party system and the knockdown congressional debates over slavery in the 1830s.Now, he’s put it all together in “Founding Son: John Quincy’s America,” a six-episode podcast about John Quincy Adams, America’s sixth president and a man, Crawford argues, for our own fractured times.“He knows democracy is on the line, he knows slavery is a moral evil,” Crawford said of Adams, who became a leading antislavery voice in the House of Representatives, where he served after leaving the White House. “He’s one of those transcendent characters. He deserves to be in the pantheon.”“Founding Son,” available through iHeartRadio starting April 13, is the latest entry in the crowded field of history podcasts. But it’s one where Crawford (who composed and played the show’s old-timey mandolin theme) hopes to use his musical celebrity and serious historical chops to illuminate a complex, formative period in the evolution of American democracy.The Early Republic, as scholars call it, may be a rich field of study. But it’s largely a blank for most Americans, who are a bit foggy on what exactly happened between the American Revolution and the Civil War.Adams, the only president to serve in Congress after leaving office, is a vehicle for tracing the arc of the period, which saw the United States transform from a nation dominated by its founding elites (like the Adamses) into an expansionist, populist democracy where every white male had the vote, regardless of property or station.“Founding Son” focuses on John Quincy Adams, the only president to serve in Congress after leaving the White House (and the earliest American president to be photographed).Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesAs a seven-year-old, Adams, the son of John Adams, witnessed the Battle of Bunker Hill, when his mother, Abigail, took him to the top of the hill to watch the gunpowder rise in the distance. And he lived long enough to serve in the House alongside Abraham Lincoln.And in an impossibly dramatic ending, Adams (spoiler alert!) died in the Capitol, after having a cerebral hemorrhage as he stood up to cast a vote relating to the Mexican-American War, which he opposed.“It’s almost poetic,” Crawford said. (Oh, Adams also wrote poetry.)Crawford, 52, grew up in Cardiff, N.J., where he recalled himself as an unimpressive student, although one with a passion for history. He recalled how one of his high school teachers, Mr. Lawless, would ask the class, “Does anyone who isn’t Bob know the answer?”If there was one person he wished he could have interviewed for the podcast, Crawford said, it was William Lee Miller, the author of “Arguing About Slavery,” who died in 2012.Kate Medley for The New York TimesOver an hour-long conversation about the podcast, Crawford, his upright bass visible on a stand behind him, regularly pulled books from the shelf to underline a point. (William Lee Miller’s “Arguing About Slavery,” he said, was a particular inspiration.) He repeatedly apologized for diving into a rabbit hole before diving into another one.With his neatly trimmed hair and soulful eyes, he gives off the vibe of the intense, idealistic high school history teacher who is also “in a band.” Except that Crawford (who earned a master’s degree in history online in 2020) really is in a band.Crawford joined with Scott and Seth Avett in 2001, after a decade of jobs that included selling shoes, working in movie production and slinging grilled cheese sandwiches “in the parking lot of Grateful Dead shows,” as the band’s official bio puts it. (In an email, Crawford clarified it was actually Phish.)Scott Avett, the band’s banjo player and co-writer, said that the podcast reflected Crawford’s steadfast character.“He does hold a lot of facts, and it’s really impressive,” said Avett (who voices dialogue for Charles Francis Adams, one of John Quincy’s sons, and the abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld). “But that’s not the point, which is how he carries those facts and who he is when expressing them.”Crawford, center, onstage with Scott and Seth Avett of the Avett Brothers.CrackerfarmAnd it’s not just Crawford’s friends who are impressed. Wilentz, who appears on the podcast, also praised his historical chops.“He’s really quite versed,” Wilentz said. “He had a lot of really specific questions to ask, some of which I didn’t know the answer to.”Crawford’s side gig as a history podcaster started in 2016 with “The Road to Now,” which he created with the historian Benjamin Sawyer. (Recent episodes have covered Benghazi, Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy and the history of March Madness.)Last year, Crawford hosted “Concerts of Change,” a SiriusXM docuseries about human rights benefit concerts from the 1970s to the 1990s. While working on that, he got an invitation from a friend to pitch a show to iHeart, and suggested Adams.The initial response was lukewarm. “They asked, was he involved in any true crime?” Crawford recalled.But eight months later, they bit. Will Pearson, the president of iHeartPodcasts, said what ultimately sold him on the project was the combination of Crawford’s enthusiasm and knowledge and the unfamiliarity of the John Quincy Adams story.“In my opinion one of the strongest elements of a good history podcast is the element of surprise,” he said.Crawford wrote the show (a coproduction of iHeartPodcasts, Curiosity Inc., and School of Humans) himself, with help from James Morrison, a producer who also works on the Smithsonian podcast “Side Door.” (Adams is voiced by Patrick Warburton, familiar to some as Elaine’s boyfriend on “Seinfeld.” Andrew Jackson is voiced by Nick Offerman, of “Parks & Recreation.”)Crawford with notes for the podcast. “He’s really quite versed,” said the historian Sean Wilentz, who appears on the podcast.Kate Medley for The New York Times“Founding Son,” which takes a largely chronological approach, has a certain whiskery dad-history vibe. There are dramatic set pieces (some with Ken Burns-style voice-overs and sound effects) about events like the battle of the Alamo and the 1838 burning of Pennsylvania Hall, an abolitionist meetinghouse in Philadelphia that was destroyed by a racist mob. (Burns himself pops up as the voice of Roger Baldwin, the lawyer who represented the enslaved people who revolted aboard the Amistad.)But even as Crawford focuses on elite politics and Congressional maneuvering, he makes clear that politics was far from just a white man’s game.He acknowledges the crucial role of Black abolitionists like David Walker, whom he likens to the Black musicians who inspired rock ‘n’ roll — the creative sparks who are rarely given enough credit.And he notes that the antislavery petition drives of the 1830s, which led to the notorious “gag rule” forbidding any mention of slavery in Congress, were largely the work of women, who played a growing role in national politics despite being denied the right to vote.“Founding Son” underlines the story’s resonance to contemporary politics, with terms like “one-term president,” “alternative facts” and “deep-state cabal.” There are even accusations of a “stolen election,” after Adams — despite losing the popular and electoral votes — was elevated to the presidency in 1825, following a back room deal in Congress.)But Crawford, who calls himself an “unaffiliated” voter, also allows plenty of room for those aspects of history that don’t satisfy a contemporary thirst for a simplistic morality play.Crawford said he wanted to avoid turning the past into an oversimplified morality play. In history, he said, “everyone’s a hero, everyone’s a villain.”Kate Medley for The New York TimesConsider the treatment of Adams’s archrival, Andrew Jackson. Today, Jackson — a slaveholder who pursued a brutal policy of Native American removal, in defiance of the Supreme Court — is anathema to Democrats who not so long ago celebrated him as a founder of the party. And Crawford seconds the opinion of Lindsay Chervinsky, a historian featured on the podcast: There’s a word for him, and it’s “not a nice one.”But he also notes that it was Jackson who blocked John C. Calhoun’s doctrine of “nullification,” which held that the Constitution allowed states to reject federal legislation.As for Adams, for all his noble fight against slavery, some of his rhetoric — like his lament that American leaders, unlike Europe’s, were “palsied by the will of our constituents” — does not sound great today.In history, Crawford said, “everyone’s a hero, and everyone’s a villain.”As for today’s politics, he laments the intensity of the polarization, and the loss of any connection with a “shared reality.” But the dysfunction, as he sees it, is not equally shared.“Today the parties are clearly out of balance,” he said. “And yes, it seems to be that the Republican Party of 2023 bears no resemblance to its former self.”What comes next, he said, “is a story for someone else to tell many years from now.” In the meantime, he’s outlining another history podcast he hopes to record.“It’s juicy and reflects this moment,” he said, launching into an enthusiastic elevator pitch. “I’m not dallying in presentism — not doing that! But man.”He paused: “And I’ve already got a whole shelf of books.” More

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      in Television

      A History Professor Takes On Hollywood

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      The life of a scholar used to be simpler, with success or failure whittled down to an easy dictum: “Publish or perish.”Today it’s more like publish and podcast or perish.“The definition of ‘public intellectual’ has really changed, and I’m proud to be a part of that,” Natalia Mehlman Petrzela said, moments after delivering a lecture to a class of undergraduates.Dr. Petrzela, an associate professor of history at the New School in New York, belongs to a group of scholars who are fluent in pop culture. In addition to publishing her work in peer-reviewed publications, she often presents her research through podcasts and other media outlets. And in a nod to her embrace of the new media economy, she has a side hustle: fitness instructor.But her decision to mix it up beyond the halls of academe has also landed her in the middle of a nasty social media drama and a Hollywood dispute. “This is the price of participation in a public sphere that is enormously different than academia,” she said.Estelle Freedman, a history professor at Stanford University who advised Dr. Petrzela on her Ph.D. thesis, described her as “a very serious scholar and a public intellectual who is quite unique in imagining, ‘How do we get scholarship out into the world and affect social change?’”Dr. Petrzela said she aims to be a “history communicator,” someone who’s able to reach large numbers of people with deeply researched works on the subjects that interest her. “I’ve got to meet the established standards of publishing in journals and being peer-reviewed,” she said, “but I’m also doing this other stuff and fighting for the legitimacy of topics that venture outside of politics and policy.”In her book “Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession,” Dr. Petrzela describes the cultural significance of fitness celebrities including Jack LaLanne and Richard Simmons and traces the rise of jogging, Jazzercise, yoga and Peloton. The book was published last month by the University of Chicago Press.Fitness is a topic that can easily be denigrated as an expression of trendy vanity, Dr. Petrzela said. “For that reason, I thought it was important that it was peer-reviewed and released by an esteemed press,” she said. “I don’t want to give fodder to skeptics who would say, ‘This is not serious.’”Cultural history is not a new discipline, but the academics who have ventured into that territory have tended to focus on eminent men, according to Nicole Hemmer, an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University.“Historians have studied popular culture throughout the 20th century and beyond, but the topics that have been taken seriously are those like Bob Dylan, his songs and political change,” Dr. Hemmer said. “Taking a serious look at the socioeconomic genesis and impact of Orangetheory and Peloton is pretty novel, and Natalia has put herself on the cutting edge of a realm of scholarship.”Dr. Petrzela’s wanderings from traditional paths of academia have also led her to podcasting. Along with Dr. Hemmer and another historian, Neil J. Young, she is the host of “Past Present,” a weekly show that analyzes cultural trends. In recent episodes, the three have taken a historical lens to “nepo-babies” — that is, the role of family relationships in Hollywood — and Ozempic, a diabetes medication that has gained popularity as a weight-loss drug.She has also found herself in the middle of the furious debates that are a daily part of social media.Late last year, Time magazine published an interview with Dr. Petrzela that included a mention of her research indicating that, in the early 1900s, amid an influx of immigrants into the United States, some exercise proponents encouraged white women to work out so that they could be strong enough to populate the country with white babies. Time’s headline seized on that point: “The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness.”In a post on Instagram, Donald J. Trump Jr. reacted to the article, saying, “Remember folks if it’s not climate change it’s white supremacy.” Amid the criticism that followed, Dr. Petrzela said she received death threats. “It escalated into a Twitter storm about ‘the woke professor’ who says exercise is racist, which was not the way I dreamed of introducing my book to the public,” she said.Dr. Petrzela was raised in Newton, Mass., the child of two professors of comparative literature at Boston University. Growing up, she hated sports and earned P.E. credits by taking a step-aerobics class at a Jewish Community Center. It was love at first v-step. “I couldn’t believe how much joy I felt doing something I previously thought I hated,” she said.After graduating from Columbia University, she completed stints as an analyst at an investment bank and a public-school teacher before earning a Ph.D. in history at Stanford University. Around the time she was defending her doctoral thesis, she became a Lululemon ambassador. The thesis became the basis of her first book, “Classroom Wars: Language, Sex and the Making of Modern Political Culture,” published by Oxford University Press in 2015.While working on “Classroom Wars,” she moved back to New York, where her boyfriend (now husband) lived. They joined an Equinox gym, where she encountered Patricia Moreno, a well known instructor in the New York fitness world who had created a program called intenSati, which blends roundhouse kicks and grapevines with shouted affirmations — think Jane Fonda at a self-help tent-revival.After studying under Ms. Moreno, Dr. Petrzela became a certified intenSati instructor. “She is the only fitness instructor of mine that I can securely say has a Ph.D. from Stanford,” said Tara Abrahams, an executive at The Meteor, a feminist media company, who has been attending Dr. Petrzela’s classes for about 10 years.As she built her career at the New School, publishing papers and essays in academic journals (History of Education Quarterly, The Peabody Journal of Education, Pacific Historical Review) and mainstream publications (The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate), she continued teaching intenSati. She also began to consider the role of physical fitness in American history and cultural life.And she dug deeper into podcasting. Along with Dr. Hemmer and Dr. Young, she created a limited podcast series, “Welcome to Your Fantasy,” that told the story of Steve Banerjee, the impresario behind the male dance club Chippendales, and the murder-for-hire charge that preceded his 1994 suicide. Dr. Petrzela was the host.Billed as a Spotify Original, and co-produced by Gimlet Media and Pineapple Street Studios, “Welcome to Your Fantasy” was a seamy, steamy true-crime drama that took place against a backdrop of the sexual, feminist and fitness revolutions of the 1970s and 1980s. Upon its release in 2021, it was a hit with listeners and earned glowing reviews from The Times, The New Yorker and The Financial Times.But Dr. Petrzela was not prepared for the sharp-elbowed culture of show business.Nearly a year before the “Welcome to Your Fantasy” podcast dropped on Spotify, a producer working with Pineapple Street Studios shared early episodes with Hollywood writers and producers to gauge their interest in a screen adaptation. As part of this effort, a producer sent episodes to the actor, screenwriter and stand-up comic Kumail Nanjiani and his wife and frequent writing partner, Emily V. Gordon. Ms. Gordon wrote in an email that she and her husband were not interested in optioning “Welcome to Your Fantasy.”“Kumail and I listened to the podcast and it’s such a fun story, but unfortunately I don’t think it’s the right project for us to write,” Ms. Gordon wrote in an email that Dr. Petrzela shared with The Times. “As much as we love watching crime stories, I don’t know if that’s a strength that we have as a writing duo. It didn’t spark an immediate take in our brains.”Pineapple Street Studios, Dr. Petrzela and the other producers involved with the podcast ended up signing a production deal with Netflix.A few months after the podcast became available, there was a plot twist: Hulu announced that Mr. Nanjiani would play the lead in a dramatic series based on the story of Mr. Banerjee, the Chippendales founder.He would also serve as an executive producer, as would Ms. Gordon. According to the show’s closing credits, it was “inspired by” “Deadly Dance: The Chippendales Murders,” a 2014 book written by K. Scot Macdonald and Patrick MontesDeOca and published by Kerrera House Press, a small independent publisher in Los Angeles.Netflix canceled its plans for a series based on “Welcome to Your Fantasy.” Hulu began streaming its series, called “Welcome to Chippendales,” in November 2022. The show was created by Robert Siegel, a writer and director who headed another Hulu series, “Pam & Tommy.”Dr. Petrzela, Dr. Hemmer and Dr. Young said they were struck by the similarities between the Hulu show and their podcast. They also said that the series included details that did not become public knowledge until listeners had heard “Welcome to Your Fantasy,” which included interviews with key players in the saga.“You don’t own history, and the lines of intellectual property can be really blurry,” Dr. Hemmer said. “But it raised big questions about what we do as scholars and what happens when that work becomes part of the entertainment field.”A spokesman for Hulu declined to comment. Mr. Siegel, the show’s creator, also declined to comment. Representatives for Mr. Nanjiani and Ms. Gordon said in a statement that, though the two were executive producers for the series, they were not creatively involved in the production. They added that their involvement “was limited to casting consultation, communication with the studio/network, marketing and editing.”Eleanor Kagan, the senior producer of “Welcome to Your Fantasy,” created a spreadsheet that laid out more than a dozen similarities between the podcast and the Hulu show. She and her fellow producers said they suspected that the Hulu series made use of their original reporting and narrative focus. In addition, they said, at least two key characters in the Hulu show were based on people who were interviewed extensively for “Welcome to Your Fantasy” and not mentioned in “Deadly Dance.”One of those people was Candace Mayeron, who once worked as a producer for Chippendales. She appears to provide the basis for “Denise” in the Hulu series, a character played by Juliette Lewis. Ms. Mayeron said that she tried to contact the writers and producers of “Welcome to Chippendales” (as well as representatives of Ms. Lewis) by email and phone to offer her consulting services free of charge, but no one replied to her.“There is no doubt that they relied on the podcast,” Ms. Mayeron said of the Hulu production.Dr. Petrzela’s latest book examines the history of fitness movements in the United States.Desmond Picotte for The New York TimesHodari Sababu, the first Black Chippendales dancer, seems to be the basis of the character named Otis in the Hulu show, portrayed by Quentin Phair. Over the years Mr. Sababu has given interviews about his Chippendales experience, but said he never went in-depth, as he did when he spoke with Dr. Petrzela for “Welcome to Your Fantasy.” Mr. Sababu also does not appear by name in “Deadly Dance.”Among the stories that he shared in the podcast was one in which Mr. Banerjee called a church to warn of the godlessness of Chippendales, resulting in a protest of the club that drew media attention. That incident is portrayed in “Welcome to Chippendales” as well. “I only watched part of the TV show,” Mr. Sababu told The Times, “but I thought, ‘How do they know that?’ The only way that they could know that is if they heard that podcast interview I did.”Dr. Petrzela is now focused on the classroom. This semester, she is teaching a class based on the research that went into her book on fitness, as well as a course called historical sources and methods. But she won’t forget her scrape with Hollywood.“I found myself really flabbergasted by this whole situation,” she said. “But then again, I come from a world of footnotes and source citations.” More

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      6 TV Recap Podcasts for Better Binge Viewing

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      These shows will help you go deeper on your favorite small-screen series, whether cult classics or current staples.TV recap shows are among the oldest of podcast genres, and they’ve become even more plentiful during a Golden Age of television.As podcasts have exploded in popularity, actors from numerous series have started their own recap shows, in which they share behind-the-scenes anecdotes and nostalgic reflections. The quality of those star-led offerings can vary wildly, however, and the most rewarding episode-by-episode discussions are often hosted by die-hard fans who know a series inside out.Here are six of the best episodic recap podcasts — of both those types — to help you go deeper on your favorite small-screen shows, whether cult classics or current staples.‘Buffering the Vampire Slayer’There’s no shortage of podcasts about “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” the beloved series that followed Sarah Michelle Gellar as a teenage girl tasked with facing down the forces of evil. But this savvy, creative show, hosted by Jenny Owen Youngs, a musician, and Kristin Russo, an L.G.B.T.Q. activist, is special — not least because each installment ends with an original song inspired by the episode. Both Owen Youngs and Russo are queer women, and they approach “Buffering the Vampire Slayer” with an eye for marginalized viewpoints and systemic injustice. That often makes for frank discussions about the aspects of the series that haven’t aged well — particularly given recent accusations of misogyny against its creator, Joss Whedon — but that never takes away from the hosts’ clear love for “Buffy” as a flawed but powerful feminist text.Starter episode: “Welcome to the Hellmouth”‘The West Wing Weekly’An early example of a recap podcast co-hosted by one of the show’s stars, “The West Wing Weekly” avoids the pitfalls that can come with that setup. But Joshua Malina’s tenure on the NBC drama was an unusual one: His inscrutable character, Will Bailey, joined at a tricky moment midway through the series, shortly before the contentious departure of its creator, Aaron Sorkin. As the actor still wryly notes in his Twitter bio, he’s considered by some fans to be among the elements that “ruined The West Wing.” Malina, with that self-deprecating tone, and his co-host, the “West Wing” superfan Hrishikesh Hirway (known to many podcast fans as the creator of “Song Exploder”), make for a winning combination. Guests since the show’s debut in 2016 have included Sorkin, nearly all of the main cast members, and political figures who were fans of the show, like Pete Buttigieg and Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau. “The West Wing” has became a popular comfort watch for viewers seeking to escape into a more noble version of Washington, D.C., and the hosts’ rapport is a soothing side order, striking a tone that’s irreverent yet heartfelt.Starter episode: “Special Interim Session (With Aaron Sorkin)”‘Too Long; Didn’t Watch’Have you ever watched the pilot of a show, followed immediately by the finale? The answer is probably no, because it’s an ill-advised (not to mention ridiculous) way to actually experience a show. But it does make for an entertaining podcast. Putting a comedic spin on the traditional recap format, Alan Sepinwall, the chief TV critic for Rolling Stone, invites a different actor onto the show each week for a crash course in a classic series they’ve never seen. Much of the fun comes from the deliberate dissonance between guest and subject — Jon Hamm of “Mad Men” shows up to deconstruct “Gossip Girl,” and the comedic actress Eliza Coupe (“Happy Endings,” “Scrubs”) gets to grapple with “Breaking Bad” — as well as the guests’ bemused attempts to figure out the arc of a show having seen only the beginning and end.Starter episode: “Jon Hamm Watches Gossip Girl”‘A Cast of Kings’HBO’s fantasy behemoth “Game of Thrones” is tailor-made for intensive recapping, thanks to the dense mythology of its fictional world, its twist-filled storytelling, and its endless controversies. So unsurprisingly, there’s a dizzying array of “Thrones” recap shows to choose from — even one meant to send you to sleep — but this is one of the most consistent and sharp. Hosted by David Chen, a veteran podcaster, and Joanna Robinson, a cultural critic who is one of the internet’s most well-known “Thrones” commentators, “A Cast of Kings” provides detailed insight into every episode, and doesn’t shy away from critiquing the show’s blind spots when it comes to gender, race and sexual violence. It’s also spoiler-free, making it an ideal companion for those who are belatedly catching up on the show. And for those who’ve made it through all eight seasons of “Game of Thrones,” the podcast recently returned to cover the new prequel series, “House of the Dragon,” with the entertainment writer Kim Renfro replacing Robinson.Starter episode: “A Cast of Kings — Series Retrospective”‘Breaking Good’Bald Move was one of the earliest players in the fan-hosted TV podcast game, and has been producing recap shows for buzzy dramas and genre shows like “Justified” and “The Walking Dead” since 2010. The company’s “Breaking Bad” series might be the best showcase for the affable dynamic between the co-hosts Jim Jones and A. Ron Hubbard, who deliver analytical run-throughs of each episode that hold up just as well today. Although the podcast began during the fourth season of “Breaking Bad,” Jones and Hubbard have since gone back to recap the earlier seasons. With palpable enthusiasm, the duo delve into the psychologically nuanced story of Walter White, the chemistry teacher turned meth king, unpacking the deeper meanings of the show’s characters, visuals and even some of the misogynistic elements of its fandom.Starter episode: “Pilot”‘Gilmore Guys’The cozy dramedy “Gilmore Girls,” which followed the quirky lives of a fast-talking mother and daughter in small-town Connecticut from 2000 to 2007, found legions of new fans once Netflix began streaming episodes seven years after the finale. “Gilmore Guys,” hosted by Kevin T. Porter and Demi Adejuyigbe, took off that same day in October 2014. Porter grew up watching the show, while Adejuyigbe comes to each episode fresh, which makes for a more layered conversation than might have been had between two devotees. Over more than 200 episodes, Porter and Adejuyigbe have built up a following almost as dedicated as the one for the series itself, thanks in part to the reliably hilarious and insightful riffs from guests like the comedian Jason Mantzoukas and the writer Sarah Heyward.Starter episode: “They Shoot Gilmores, Don’t They? (with Jason Mantzoukas)” More

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      ‘Desus & Mero’ Late-Night Show Ends After Four Seasons

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      Showtime said that the Bronx-bred hosts were “pursuing separate creative endeavors” after the duo collaborated on television shows, podcasts and a book.The Showtime late-night talk show “Desus and Mero” will not be returning for a fifth season, the network announced on Monday.The show’s hosts, Desus Nice (a.k.a. Daniel Baker) and the Kid Mero (a.k.a. Joel Martinez), interviewed former President Barack Obama and collaborated on projects including podcasts and a book, but are now “pursuing separate creative endeavors moving forward,” a Showtime representative said in an emailed statement.“Desus Nice and the Kid Mero have made a name for themselves in comedy and in the late-night space as quick-witted cultural commentators,” the statement said.After the announcement, Desus wrote on Twitter that he was “proud of the show my staff made every episode” and hinted he had more projects on the way.Before Showtime picked up “Desus and Mero” in 2018, the show aired on Viceland for two years. The pair, who both grew up in the Bronx, also hosted a long-running podcast, “Bodega Boys.”The television series upended the traditional model for late-night talk shows, with the hosts sitting in chairs next to their guests instead of cloistered behind a desk. They swapped carefully crafted opening monologues for a looser conversation style where they responded to news events and viral clips, building on each other’s jokes.The show’s fourth season on Showtime premiered in March with an interview with Denzel Washington that spotlighted Desus and Mero’s ability to pull candid, personal insights from celebrities and politicians in interviews that felt more like conversations. The two spoke with the Academy Award-winning actor, who grew up in Mount Vernon, N.Y., about different stops on the No. 2 subway line and the rising price of a pizza slice.Before Desus and Mero became a comedic duo, each had built a following on Twitter, where they would occasionally interact while making jokes about their day jobs and the Bronx.They had attended the same summer school and were familiar with each other, but it was a meeting they were both invited to by an editor at the pop culture website Complex that formally brought them together. That meeting led to a podcast called “Desus vs. Mero,” that premiered in 2013, then a web series.After they left Complex, they started the “Bodega Boys” podcast. In 2020, they published an advice book, “God-Level Knowledge Darts: Life Lessons From the Bronx.”Fans, known as the “Bodega Hive,” had speculated that the end of the comedic partnership could be near after the podcast stopped posting new episodes; the last one went up in November. Responding to a series of tweets that appeared to confirm the podcast had ended, Desus said last week that their fans “deserved better than this ending.” More

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      B.A. Parker Can’t Get Enough of K-Dramas

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      The new host of NPR’s “Code Switch” podcast counts Donny Hathaway’s voice, 50-minute naps and Otterbein’s Cookies as her essentials.B.A. Parker was a film professor in her 20s when she had to rush her students out of the hall so that she could speak with Ira Glass. She was interviewing for a fellowship with his show, “This American Life.”“They hired me to make stories for them, and I wanted to be a Black lady David Sedaris,” she said. “It still hasn’t fully happened, but there’s hope.”That led her to produce and co-host New York Magazine’s “The Cut” podcast for a few years, exploring trendy subjects like “Himbo culture” and life at historically Black colleges and universities. This month, the Baltimore native, who first moved to New York to attend Columbia University’s film school, will join NPR’s podcast about race in American society, “Code Switch,” as a host.“Having my voice and being on a podcast has always been about sharing my position with everyone and making them suffer through it,” she joked. “It’s about discussing something really serious, that makes people scared and angry, and using my goofy smile to say we’re getting through it together.”On a video call from her apartment in Bed-Stuy, she ran down a varied list of essentials that reflect a Brooklyn podcaster’s creature comforts. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.1. Naps I feel like we totally undervalue naps as adults. I think if we all just took a good 20-minute nap every day, we’d be a lot nicer. This working from home situation has kind of been cushy — I know this is a privilege that I have — but it’s been so draining since 2020, and I’m still working on this whole self-care thing, and I am down for a 2 p.m. nap. You’re supposed to only do either 20 minutes or 50, and I’m a 50-minute napper; 20 minutes doesn’t feel like enough, it doesn’t matter. I’m going to wake up tired anyway.2. K-Dramas I feel like they’re the closest thing to a modern-day Jane Austen. There’s one I watched recently, called “Start-Up,” where a girl holds a guy’s hand for the first time on the bus, and he turns away because he’s wiping tears from his eyes. And the man is, like, 32. It’s very chaste and lovely and cathartic and, by the eighth episode, you’re just sobbing. All of these shows, their hearts are wide open. I find that very soothing. There’s artifice to the drama of it, obviously, but you just want to hug everybody.3. A collection of spices from a friend For my birthday this year, my friend sent me this collection of spices from a place in Greenwich Village that has berbere, za‘atar, and all these Moroccan spices. I’m trying to expand my cooking. Working from home, you get tired of trying to cook for yourself. And you get into these bad habits of working until 8 p.m., and then trying to fix a meal? I don’t think so. Now I’m trying to be mindful of that and figuring out how to make lamb meatballs. I’ve been taking pictures of the things I make to send to her and her husband and be like, “I’m trying.”4. Donny Hathaway I feel like his voice is the truth. There’s this soulful longing that stirs something in me and makes me want to feel. He has a great live version of The Beatles’ “Yesterday” where all the old Black people in the venue are really digging it and shouting along. I usually play his live album while I’m trying to cook, it makes me feel like a grown up a little bit. You can feel when he is in his pocket, in a moment where everyone is just feeling, and you’ll hear a bunch of Black ladies screaming, “Yes! Oh my god, yes!”5. Jeff Bridges in “Fearless” I’ve been in love with Jeff Bridges since I was 9 years old and my dad made me see “White Squall.” “Fearless” is this movie from 1993 about a fairly privileged guy who survives a terrible plane crash, feels like he’s invincible and starts testing those limits. So it’s Bridges and Rosie Perez grieving and trying to understand what it means to be a survivor. I rewatched it in July 2020, when we were all an open wound and dealing with so much loss, and trying to process that. It was a film that I have gone back to to question what it means to survive.6. Reading like you’re 15 again You know when you were 15 and felt you had all the time in the world to just sit on your folks’ couch and read a bunch of stuff? I’ve decided to do that this summer, even though I do have a job. I like having the liberty to read all the time. Especially with this job, if I have to read, it’s for an interview or something, and it kind of takes the fun out of it. So I bought a bunch of plays and essay collections by bell hooks and Audre Lorde for myself. I’m still highlighting lines, because there are really interesting, edifying things in there, but I want to go back to reading without having questions in mind.7. Baltimore foods like Otterbein’s Cookies and cream of crab soup Otterbein’s are a local Baltimore cookie that I order when I get homesick. They’re thin and differently flavored. Everyone always talks about Berger’s Cookies, which are also from Baltimore, but don’t get lost in that.Trying to explain cream of crab soup is telling people that it’s not lobster bisque. It’s much richer. Eat it maybe twice a year or something; don’t attempt to have more because it is rich as hell. It’s the one thing living here that I really get homesick for. You can find a pierogi on any corner, but this soup is an elusive thing.8. The third row in a movie theater I’m nearsighted. But I still have this childhood notion that if I’m close to the screen, I’ll get the movie faster than the people in the back. And no one wants to sit there. I just saw “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” and didn’t know, going into an 11 p.m. showing at Alamo Drafthouse, that the movie was going to be like that. I laughed, cried. People in the theater also didn’t know it was going to be sad and I heard this one woman go, “Oh, no …” from behind me.9. Her grandmother’s prayer book Years and years ago, my grandmother gave me this tiny, stapled little blue book, which she got at a funeral home in the 1980s. There’s a prayer for success, a prayer for fear, a prayer for mourning, things like that. I basically grew up kind of sheltered, and with a village behind me, so when I first moved to New York, I would read through it to inspire me to go and raise my hand first in class or something. It’s become this totem that I treasure that gives me some comfort. I’m fairly religious, but not in an anti-science way. I believe in climate change and gay rights and am pro-choice; you know, regular human things.10. Trying to be more tender I think, as I get older, it becomes more of an effort to be tender with myself and others. With the kind of job that I have, it can be easy to view people as stories, and not as people. So I’m trying to be conscientious of how I help or hurt the world. This came about because I saw the movie “Cane River” at BAM a few years ago, which was made in the early ’80s, but wasn’t released [in the United States] until like four years ago, because the director Horace B. Jenkins had a heart attack right after it was made. The movie is just vibes; it’s Black people holding hands in a field, being tender with each other. If I’d seen my aunts and uncles being that kind of loving and soft with each other back then, it would have changed the direction of what Black cinema looks like. More