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    ‘Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light’ Review: No Century for Old Men

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    In the long-awaited sequel to “Wolf Hall,” Henry VIII’s royal fixer pays the price for success. (It’s his head.)“Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light” picks up where “Wolf Hall” left off, amid the gruesome beheading of Anne Boleyn in 1536, which we get to see this time in even more gruesome detail.In real life, however, there has been an unusually long gap between series and sequel. It has been 10 years since the release of “Wolf Hall,” based on the first two novels in Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell series. This means that in “The Mirror and the Light,” based on the final novel, the actor Mark Rylance is a decade older than the 50-something character he is playing.And it works, because the Cromwell in the new six-episode series (beginning Sunday on PBS’s “Masterpiece”) is haunted and beaten down by his work as Henry VIII’s political and matrimonial fixer, a job that included fabricating the evidence that led to Boleyn’s murder. In that first scene both we and Cromwell are reliving the beheading (necessary, from Henry’s point of view, because Anne, his second wife, had not borne a son).“The Mirror and the Light” is very much of a piece with the earlier “Wolf Hall,” written and directed by the same men — Peter Straughan and Peter Kosminsky — and with many actors returning to their roles, including Rylance and, as Henry, Damian Lewis. Among relatively recent historical costume dramas, the shows set a standard for polish and seriousness.But as the story of the commoner Cromwell’s decline and abrupt fall, “The Mirror and the Light” has an entirely different feel than the up-by-the-boot-straps, grimly celebratory “Wolf Hall.” The mood is nervous and ominous, as Cromwell begins to make errors and give in to his emotions. And it habitually casts its eye back in time, as Cromwell reassesses the often dirty work he has done. Picking up on a device from the novel, “The Mirror and the Light” continually drops in snippets of Cromwell’s guilty memories in the form of bits of film we have already seen across the two series.His guilt even has a supporting role in the form of the dead Cardinal Wolsey, the beloved master and mentor whose downfall Cromwell was unable to prevent. Cromwell now has late-night conversations with Wolsey’s slightly diaphanous ghost, scenes that are a little cringey but that do us the favor of keeping Jonathan Pryce and his archly disapproving eyebrows in the show.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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      HBO Ends Partnership With ‘Sesame Street’

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      The venerable children’s series must find a new home after about a decade on HBO and its streaming service, Max. Old episodes will be available through 2027.“Sesame Street” is relocating.Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit company that makes the venerable children’s educational program, is looking for a new distribution partner after Warner Bros. Discovery decided not to renew its agreement to air new episodes of the show on HBO and its streaming platform, Max.Max said the decision was part of a broader corporate shift away from children’s programming. The 55th season of “Sesame Street” — featuring Big Bird, Elmo, Cookie Monster and other colorful Muppets — will be the last to arrive on Max, in January. Old episodes will remain available through 2027.“Based on consumer usage and feedback, we’ve had to prioritize our focus on stories for adults and families,” a Max spokesman said. “And so new episodes from ‘Sesame Street,’ at this time, are not as core to our strategy.”Sesame Workshop partnered with HBO in 2015, granting the premium cable outlet a nine-month window of exclusivity for new episodes. Under the agreement, the episodes were later broadcast for free on PBS, which has aired “Sesame Street” since 1970.The deal provided a significant cash infusion for Sesame Workshop, which expanded its production schedule to 35 episodes a year from 18. It is unclear which platform might pick up the series, but contenders could include Apple TV+ (which aired three seasons of “Helpsters,” another Sesame Workshop children’s series), Netflix and Amazon.“We will continue to invest in our best-in-class programming and look forward to announcing our new distribution plans in the coming months,” a spokesman for Sesame Workshop said in a statement.Sesame Workshop and HBO have been accused of contributing to inequality by allowing families who can afford premium cable to get new episodes of the show before others. In 2022, nearly 200 episodes of the show were pulled from Max.“HBO is holding hostage underprivileged families from having access to timely first-run episodes of perhaps the single most educational children’s franchise in the history of electronic media,” Tim Winter, who was then the president of the Parents Television Council, said in a statement in 2019. More

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      ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ Is a Humanizing Look Into a Great Mind

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      Beyond the appropriate awe, this two-part PBS documentary, co-directed by Ken Burns, adds human texture to the hagiography.“Leonardo da Vinci,” a four-hour, two-part documentary airing on PBS on Monday and Tuesday at 8 p.m. (check local listings), is a thorough and engrossing biography that can’t help but feel incomplete, so vast and unusual is its subject. “Leonardo, for his time, possesses the most knowledge in the world,” one expert explains.Narrated by Keith David and directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon, this is a straightforward but still lyrical analysis. We learn about da Vinci’s early life, family, education and lovers, and the doc does an admirable job of explaining not just excellence but innovation. Enumerating the areas of his curiosity alone could take four hours, so the focus here is more on his output, whose scope and impact are singular even now. (Though maybe we could revive a few more aspects of his influence: Painting is cool, but why are there so few weddings in which performers dressed as Greek gods bless the union and cavort around a giant gilded half-egg? Something to consider, party planners; da Vinci orchestrated one such event in 1490.)“For the first time in the history of Western culture, the process becomes the interesting aspect of how art is made,” another expert points out, and “Leonardo da Vinci” follows that path, too.But beyond the appropriate awe, there’s a through line here of half-starts, dead drafts and lemons — flying machines that can never work, hydroarchitecture that fails completely, paintings never realized for reasons unknown. Those efforts are presented here with an endearing “well, nobody bats a thousand” shrug, adding human texture to the hagiography. One of the greatest minds in human history trails off in one of his final mathematic exegeses because, he writes, “the soup is getting cold.” Geniuses: They’re just like us.Also this weekFrom left, Gracie Lawrence, Alyah Chanelle Scott, Pauline Chalamet and Amrit Kaur in a scene from Season 3 of “The Sex Lives of College Girls.”Tina Thorpe/Max“Interior Chinatown,” based on the novel by Charles Yu, arrives Tuesday, on Hulu.“Our Oceans,” narrated by Barack Obama, arrives Wednesday, on Netflix.After many failed attempts over the years, a TV adaptation of “Cruel Intentions” finally arrives Thursday, on Amazon Prime Video.In the vein of “Floor Is Lava” comes “Human vs. Hamster,” a doofy obstacle course series arriving Thursday, on Max.Season 3 of “The Sex Lives of College Girls” begins Thursday at 9 p.m., on Max. More

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      Ofra Bikel, Filmmaker With a Focus on Criminal Justice, Dies at 94

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      Her award-winning documentaries for PBS’s “Frontline” series shed light on serious flaws in several cases and helped lead to the release of 13 prisoners.Ofra Bikel, a crusading filmmaker for PBS’s “Frontline” investigative series whose documentaries about the criminal justice system in the United States exposed deep flaws in the convictions of 13 people, died on Aug. 11 at her home in Tel Aviv. She was 94.Her niece Tamar Ichilov confirmed the death. She left no immediate survivors.After making an eclectic mix of “Frontline” documentaries, including ones about the war in El Salvador, people over 75 who were beset with spiraling medical costs and the Solidarity movement in Poland, Ms. Bikel’s focus shifted mainly to criminal justice cases.“I hate injustice,” Ms. Bikel told The New York Times in 2005. “It just bugs me.”One case, in particular, consumed her for seven years.In 1990, she started looking into a case in Edenton, N.C., where seven people, including Bob and Betsy Kelly, a married couple who owned the Little Rascals Day Care Center, were charged with sexually abusing 29 children.Mr. Kelly was convicted and received 12 consecutive life sentences, but his conviction was overturned. His wife pleaded no contest after 30 months in jail. The other five defendants, including three of the Kellys’ employees, also spent long periods in prison before their releases.The case, which lacked physical and conclusive medical evidence, relied on testimony from many children who defense lawyers said had been manipulated by therapists.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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      Russell Morash, ‘This Old House’ and ‘The French Chef’ Producer, Dies at 88

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      Hailed as a pioneer of D.I.Y. programming, he oversaw groundbreaking how-to shows on public television in the days before HGTV and YouTube.Russell Morash, a public television producer and director who helped turn a cookbook author, Julia Child, into America’s chef and transformed bathroom tile replacement and roof repair into addictive TV with “This Old House,” died on June 19 in Concord, Mass. He was 88.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his wife, Marian Morash, who said the cause was a brain hemorrhage.Hailed as the “father of how-to television” by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, which gave him a lifetime achievement Emmy Award in 2014, Mr. Morash helped usher in the D.I.Y. era with the enduring instructional shows that he helped create for the Boston PBS station WGBH.“The French Chef,” which debuted in 1963, with Mr. Morash as director and producer, and which became Ms. Child’s vehicle to mass-market fame, changed the way American’s thought about food with her distinctly American approach to French cooking. And “This Old House” proved an instant hit in 1979, and remains a ratings powerhouse after 45 years. As of last year, the show and a sister show, “Ask This Old House,” together had received 20 Emmy Awards and 119 Emmy nominations.Long before the Food Network, HGTV and other outlets created a how-to revolution on cable, Mr. Morash seized on the idea that craftspeople with no television experience could become stars of the small screen by sharing their insider tips and insights.“This Old House,” for example, made household names of Bob Vila, who previously ran a home renovation business, and Norm Abram, a carpenter whom Mr. Morash had originally hired to build a workshop in his backyard in Lexington, Mass.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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      Jac Venza, Who Delivered Culture to Public Television, Dies at 97

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      By making entertainment as well as education part of its mission, he gave the world “Great Performances” and other enduring programs. Jac Venza, a shoemaker’s son who almost single-handedly delivered to the proverbial “vast wasteland” that was American television in the 1960s and ’70s an oasis of cultural programming, including “Great Performances” and “Live From Lincoln Center,” died on Tuesday at his home in Lyme, Conn. He was 97. His death was confirmed by his spouse, Daniel D. Routhier.Mr. Venza never attended college. As an actor, he pronounced himself “dreadful.” As an aspiring artist, he began his career in Chicago by designing scenery for the Goodman Theater and window displays for the Mandel Brothers department store. But while still in his 30s, he began playing a vital role in bringing art to public television.He was working as a television producer when he was asked to collaborate with other TV innovators assembled by the Ford Foundation in the early 1960s to transform a limited service that generated no original programming into National Educational Television, the forerunner of the Public Broadcasting Service.While his fellow producers and other media experts were mulling how best to educate the viewing public through a nonprofit network, Mr. Venza recalled, he volunteered, “Why don’t we entertain them, too?”In the 1960s and ’70s, he introduced “NET Playhouse,” “Theater in America,” “Live From Lincoln Center,” “Great Performances” and, at the suggestion of the National Endowment for the Arts, “Dance in America.” He also imported popular BBC productions like “Brideshead Revisited.”He collaborated with choreographers like George Balanchine and Martha Graham, composers like Leonard Bernstein and playwrights like Tennessee Williams. Dustin Hoffman had his first starring role on television in a 1966 NET production of Ronald Ribman’s play “The Journey of the Fifth Horse.” A decade later, Meryl Streep appeared onscreen for the first time in the William Gillette play “Secret Service” on “Great Performances.”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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      ‘Guilt’ Review: When the Lights Go Out in Edinburgh

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      The final season of Scotland’s most notable TV drama, on PBS’s “Masterpiece,” is a suitably twisty and sardonic send-off for the battling McCall brothers.Contains spoilers for Seasons 1 and 2 of “Guilt.”“Guilt,” a pioneering series in Scottish television — it was the first drama commissioned by the newly formed BBC Scotland channel in 2019 — has built an audience well beyond its borders. A melancholy tale of family dysfunction presented as a complicated crime thriller, it combines British regionalism with peak TV-style poker-faced comedy in a way that has made it a critical darling around the world.Created and written by Neil Forsyth, “Guilt” has arrived in dense, lively four-episode bursts; the third and final season has its American premiere on PBS’s “Masterpiece” beginning Sunday. Each installment has been organized around a psycho-philosophical theme: first guilt, then revenge in Season 2, and now, as Forsyth described it in a BBC interview, redemption.But the pleasure of the show does not come from diagraming its moral lessons (unless that’s your thing), or from unwinding Forsyth’s sometimes maddeningly convoluted plots, which entangle sons and daughters of Edinburgh’s rough-and-tumble Leith district with the city’s gangsters, cops and politicians.What makes “Guilt” worthwhile is Forsyth’s knack for creating characters who work their way into our affections, less by their actions than by their unconscious, soul-deep responses to life in the grim confines of Leith and the promise of something better in Edinburgh’s more comfortable precincts.At the center of the web are Max and Jake McCall (Mark Bonnar and the marvelous Jamie Sives), brothers with very little use for each other who become bound in a seemingly endless cycle of lies, danger and recrimination. It begins in the opening minutes of Season 1 when Jake, with Max in the car’s passenger seat, accidentally runs into an old man, killing him. Jake, a gentle soul with an encyclopedic knowledge of pop music (he could have wandered in from a Nick Hornby novel), wants to call the police; Max, a rapacious lawyer with a near-sociopathic lack of empathy, says no.This is the original sin for which the brothers are still paying. Covering up their hit-and-run homicide embroils them with the Lynches, a married pair of quietly vicious gangsters whom Max and Jake are both on the run from, and scheming to take down, across the show’s three seasons. While the brothers work together for survival, they are also at each other’s throats, taking turns ruefully betraying each other, leading to imprisonment, exile and worse.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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      A New Film on William F. Buckley Examines the Godfather of Modern Conservatism

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      The PBS documentary “The Incomparable Mr. Buckley” implicitly and explicitly asks: What would William F. Buckley think of today’s Republican Party?William F. Buckley Jr., widely considered the godfather of modern conservatism, defended Joseph McCarthy and his communist witch hunts. He praised the “restraint” of Alabama law enforcement officers who brutally assaulted civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. He was also a silver-tongued intellectual who abhorred boorish thinking and behavior and savored debates with the sharpest minds of his era.Such a track record invites the question asked, implicitly and explicitly, in a new “American Masters” documentary: What would Buckley think of the current Republican kingpin, Donald Trump, and his followers? Would Buckley, who died in 2008, denounce the direction of the movement he helped start and disown a former (and perhaps future) American president who has expressed his admiration for a strongman Russian president? Or would he find a way to fold Trump and his supporters into his dreams of a conservative empire?In “The Incomparable Mr. Buckley,” which premiered last week on PBS and is streaming on PBS.org, Buckley’s son, the novelist and former George H.W. Bush speechwriter Christopher Buckley, gives a cryptic assessment of what the senior Buckley would think of Trump: “He might just have said, ‘Demand a recount,’” a riff on William F. Buckley’s oft-repeated joke about what he would do if he won his 1965 New York mayoral bid. In a recent video interview, however, Christopher Buckley was more direct.“I don’t equate Trumpism with conservatism,” he said. “I’m very glad my father and Ronald Reagan are not alive to see what’s happened to the G.O.P. and to the national discourse.”Others, including some who appear in the film directed by Barak Goodman, say it’s not that straightforward.“My own view is that Buckley would probably think about Trump more or less what he thought about McCarthy,” Beverly Gage, a history professor at Yale University and author of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning J. Edgar Hoover biography “G-Man,” said in a video interview. “He would see Trump as tremendously useful as a concentration of many of the themes and constituencies that Buckley stood for.”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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      What to Watch This Weekend: A Riveting True-Crime Drama

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      “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office,” premiering Sunday on PBS, is a shattering mini-series about a real-life injustice.Toby Jones stars in “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office.”ITV StudiosLegal thrillers and true-crime sagas often succeed at generating momentum but fail at conveying genuine humanity. “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office,” debuting Sunday at 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings), succeeds at both; it is a tender and shattering drama and a tense, twisty legal story.Toby Jones stars as Alan Bates, a British sub-postmaster who radiates decency and integrity. He’s convinced — as are we, immediately — that his new Post Office-issued kiosk is the source of grave accounting errors, but dozens of calls lead him nowhere. He is told, repeatedly, that he’s the only person encountering any problems, and the Post Office fires him and accuses him of theft. With the support of his thoughtful wife, Suzanne (Julie Hesmondhalgh, superb), he vows to clear his name.Thus begins a 20-year saga, one of baffling malfeasance by the British Post Office that led to widespread suffering, with hundreds of people falsely accused of crimes. The sub-postmasters were contractually responsible for the perceived shortfalls, which sometimes amounted to tens of thousands of pounds. Some, like Jo (Monica Dolan), pleaded guilty just to avoid jail time. Some served prison sentences not just for crimes they did not commit, but crimes that did not even occur. Some filed for bankruptcy; some died from suicide.“We just gotta trust in the British justice system, and everything’ll be all right,” says Lee (Will Mellor), one of the victims. He might as well be the guy in the horror movie who asks “what’s the worst that could happen?” before walking into a chain saw. When Alan finally manages to organize an advocacy and support group, we get our first glimmers of hope and relief barely poking through the Kafkaesque, viciously punitive morass.“Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office” is true story, but in tabloid parlance, it is an unbelievable true story — the injustice it depicts is so outrageous that it defies comprehension. The show’s real sense of reality, then, flows forth from precise portraiture by the show’s writer, Gwyneth Hughes, and from intimate, grounded performances by Jones and Dolan. By the end of the four episodes, I knew all the characters so well I swear I could pick out birthday presents for them, the heroes and villains both. More