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      Sandra Elkin, Creator of a Pioneering Feminist Talk Show, Dies at 85

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      “Woman,” which she hosted, brought frank talk about issues like birth control, pay inequality and homosexuality into millions of homes in the 1970s.Sandra Elkin, who as the creator and host of the weekly PBS talk show “Woman” in the mid-1970s brought frank discussions about birth control, job discrimination, health care and other issues confronting American women into millions of living rooms across the country, died on Nov. 8 at her home in Manhattan. She was 85.The cause was a heart attack, said her son Todd.Ms. Elkin was a stay-at-home mother in suburban Buffalo in 1972 when she approached the management of WNED, the local PBS member station, with an idea: a half-hour public affairs show focused on women and their concerns as the sexual revolution and second-wave feminism reshaped the gender landscape.Although she had no experience working in television, the station was sufficiently impressed with her pitch to give it the green light after just two weeks of negotiation.“Woman” was an immediate local hit, and after its initial season PBS picked it up for nationwide distribution. By 1974 it was reaching about 185 stations as far-flung as Fairbanks, Alaska, and Corpus Christi, Texas, distant from the liberal cities where the women’s movement had first emerged.Guests included a Who’s Who of contemporary feminism. Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Dorothy Pitman Hughes and Susan Brownmiller all trooped to Buffalo to speak with Ms. Elkin. She also led an all-female crew to Paris to film an interview with Simone de Beauvoir.But most of her guests — housewives (and househusbands), prisoners, blue-collar workers — were far from famous, by intention. Ms. Elkin insisted that the show was about information, not entertainment, and that she was there merely as a “conduit.”“We don’t play the usual talk-show games,” she told The Buffalo News in 1975. “There’s no baiting guests or embarrassing them.”That’s not to say Ms. Elkin and “Woman” shied from controversy. Ms. Brownmiller sat for a two-episode interview about rape. An episode about birth control featured diaphragms and intrauterine devices, intimate items that many viewers probably considered exotic or even frightening, especially in conservative corners of the country.Still, the show won broad viewership among both men and women, in part thanks to Ms. Elkin and her unguarded warmth as a host. She had never wanted to be on camera, and she agreed to do so only after the first season ended and the original moderator, Samantha Dean, moved to another station.Sitting on a couch facing her guest, often with one leg tucked under her and casually dressed in jeans and a sweater, Ms. Elkin made viewers feel they were simply listening in on two friends talking.“Women love to teach each other things, to tell each other what they think,” she said in 1975. “I love being a part of this.”Sandra Ann Marotti was born in Rutland, Vt., on Oct. 16, 1938. Her father, John, was a tailor, and her mother, Lisle (Thornton) Marotti, was a secretary for an investment firm.She studied theater at Green Mountain College. While working in summer theater in Vermont she met Saul Elkin, a theater student at Columbia University. They married in 1958.The couple settled first in Vermont and in 1969 moved to Buffalo, where Mr. Elkin taught at the State University of New York.Ms. Elkin and a friend, who were growing bored as homemakers, pitched a conventional women’s show to WNED, focused on things like cooking and decorating. But they shelved the proposal when the friend moved to Florida.In 1972, the station asked if she was still interested. Yes, she replied. But she had a different idea.“A few years ago I started writing questions that were bothering me and my friends,” she said in an interview with The Kane Republican, a newspaper in Pennsylvania, in 1977. “I found that they broke down into categories that turned into the list of topics I first presented” to the station.She started with 30 show ideas, enough for a full season and then some. She didn’t need to search for more — within weeks of the first episode, Ms. Elkin found herself inundated with suggestions, via letters, phone calls and casual cocktail party conversations.After some 200 episodes, “Woman” went off the air in 1977. It ended for a variety of reasons, among them Ms. Elkin’s move to New York City and PBS’s decision to withdraw support from the show in favor of a more slickly produced women’s interest series with a magazine-style format.Ms. Elkin and Mr. Elkin divorced in the early 1980s. She married her longtime partner, Anke A. Ehrhardt, in 2013. Along with her son Todd, Dr. Ehrhardt survives her, as do another son, Evan, and two grandchildren.In New York, Ms. Elkin pursued a second career as a literary agent. She also produced videos on H.I.V. education at the height of the AIDS crisis and later traveled to South Africa to produce similar videos for local viewers.For the last two decades, she had pursued a series of long-term photography projects. One involved portraits of women around the world. Another focused on women town clerks in Vermont, the sort of people she considered the “first firewall of our democracy” — people she said were needed now more than over.“We’re at the precipice with democracy,” she said in a 2020 interview with the website Think Design. “We’re certainly at the precipice with climate change and with institutionalized racism and sexism. We’ve just got to step up and do what we need to do.” More

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      ‘The War on Disco’ Explores the Racial Backlash Against the Music

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      “The War on Disco,” a new PBS documentary, explores the backlash against the genre and the issues of race, gender and sexuality that informed it.The plan was simple enough: Gather a bunch of disco records, put them in a crate and blow them to smithereens in between games of a doubleheader between the Chicago White Sox and Detroit Tigers at Comiskey Park. What could possibly go wrong?This was the thinking, such as it was, behind Disco Demolition Night, a July 1979 radio promotion that went predictably and horribly awry. The televised spectacle of rioters, mostly young white men, storming the field in Chicago, sent shock waves through the music industry and accelerated the demise of disco as a massive commercial force. But the fiasco didn’t unfold in a vacuum, a fact the new “American Experience” documentary “The War on Disco” makes clearer than a twirling mirror ball.Premiering Monday on PBS, “The War on Disco” traces the rise, commodification, demise and rebirth of a dance music genre that burned hot through the ’70s, and the backlash against a culture that provided a safe and festive place for Black, Latino, gay and feminist expression. Originating in gay dance clubs in the early ’70s and converted into a mainstream sensation largely through the 1977 movie “Saturday Night Fever,” disco engendered simmering resentment from white, blue-collar kids who weren’t cool enough to make it past the rope at Studio 54 and other clubs. The film details disco’s role as a flashpoint for issues of race, class, gender and sexuality that still resonate in the culture wars of today.“Saturday Night Fever” helped turn disco from a club phenomenon into a mainstream sensation.Alamy, via PBS“These liberation movements that started in the ’60s and early ’70s are really gaining momentum in the late ’70s,” Lisa Q. Wolfinger, who produced the film with Rushmore DeNooyer, said in a video call from her home in Maine. “So the backlash against disco feels like a backlash against the gay liberation movement and feminism, because that’s all wrapped up in disco.”When the Gay Activist Alliance began hosting feverish disco dances at an abandoned SoHo firehouse in 1971, routinely packing 1,500 people onto the dance floor, the atmosphere was sweaty and cathartic. As Alice Echols writes in her disco history book “Hot Stuff,” gay bars, most of them run by the mob, traditionally hadn’t allowed dancing of any kind. But change was in the air largely because of the ripple effect of the Stonewall uprising in 1969, when regulars at a Greenwich Village gay bar fought back against the latest in a series of police raids. Soon discos were popping up throughout American cities, drawing throngs of revelers integrated across lines of race, gender and sexual orientation.Some of disco’s hottest artists were Black women, including Gloria Gaynor and Linda Clifford (who is a commentator in the film). Many of the in-demand DJs, including Barry Lederer and Richie Rivera, were gay. In its heyday disco was the ultimate pop melting pot, open to anyone who wanted to move through the night to a pulsating, seemingly endless groove, and a source of liberation.“The club became this source of public intimacy, of sexual freedom, and disco was a genre that was deeply tied to the next set of freedom struggles that were concatenate with civil rights,” said Daphne Brooks, a professor of African American studies at Yale University who is featured in the film, in a video interview. “It was both a sound and a sight that enabled those who were not recognized in the dominant culture to be able to see themselves and to derive pleasure, which is a huge trope in disco.”Studio 54 in 1978, as seen in “The War on Disco.” The club was famous for its glamorous clientele and restrictive door policy.Alamy, via PBSAll subcultures have their tipping points, and disco’s began in earnest in 1977. The year brought “Saturday Night Fever,” the smash hit movie about a blue-collar Brooklynite (a star-making performance from John Travolta) who escapes his rough reality by cutting loose on the dance floor. Inspired by the movie, middle-aged thrill seekers began dressing up in white polyester and hitting the scene. The same year saw the opening of Studio 54 in Manhattan, which became famous for its beautiful-people clientele and forbidding door policy.“There was this image of the crowd outside the door on the news, with people being divided into winners and losers,” said DeNooyer, the “War on Disco” producer. “And the majority were losers because they didn’t get by the rope. It was an image that spoke powerfully, and it certainly encouraged a view of exclusivity.”At least one man had reason to take it all personally. Steve Dahl was a radio personality for Chicago’s WDAI, spinning album rock and speaking to and for the white macho culture synonymous with that music. On Christmas Eve in 1978 Dahl lost his job when the station switched to a disco format, a popular move in those days. He didn’t take the news well. Jumping to WLUP, Dahl launched a “Disco Sucks” campaign and, together with the White Sox promotions director Mike Veeck, spearheaded Disco Demolition Night.Organizers expected around 20,000 fans on July 12, 1979. Instead, they got around 50,000, some of whom sneaked in for free. Admission was 98 cents (WLUP’s frequency was 97.9), leaving attendees plenty of leftover cash for beer. Located in the mostly white, working-class neighborhood of Bridgeport, Comiskey Park had a built-in anti-disco clientele.During the first game of the doubleheader, fans threw records, firecrackers and liquor bottles onto the field. By the time the crate of records was blown up, the place was going nuts, with patrons storming the field and rendering it unplayable. The White Sox had to forfeit the second game.The Disco Demolition Night promotion at Chicago’s Comiskey Park quickly spun out of control, with thousands of people storming the field.Chicago History Museum, via PBSThere were other anti-disco protests around the country in the late ’70s, but none so visible or of greater consequence. As the film recounts, reaction was swift; radio consultants soon began steering toward nondisco formats. “Disco Demolition Night was a real factor, and it did happen very quickly,” DeNooyer said. “And we hear from artists in the film who experienced that.” Gigs started drying up almost immediately.Commercial oversaturation didn’t help. Disco parodies were becoming rampant, including a memorable one in the 1980 comedy “Airplane!,” and novelty songs had been around since Rick Dees’ “Disco Duck” in 1976 (followed up by the lesser-known “Dis-Gorilla” in 1977). But the film makes clear that the Disco Demolition fiasco and resultant coverage was a major factor in the death of disco’s mainstream appeal.“The War on Disco” also features a 2016 interview with Dahl, who insists racism and homophobia had nothing to do with that particular display of anti-disco fervor. Demolition Night attendees who were interviewed for the film echo this sentiment.“I would not dispute that is their truth,” Brooks said. “But I think one of the insidious ways that white supremacy has done a number on this country is that it permeates every aspect of our cultural lives. People don’t want to be told that they’re entangled in something that’s not entirely of their control.”It’s also important to note that disco didn’t die so much as its more mainstream forms ceased to be relevant. The music and the culture morphed into other dance-ready genres including house music, which ironically emerged in Chicago. When you go out and cut loose to electronic dance music, or EDM, you are paying homage to disco, whether you know it or not. The beat is still pulsating. The sexual and racial identities remain eclectic. The Who may have bid “Sister Disco” goodbye in their 1978 song, but the original spirit lives on. As Brooks put it, “Its vibrancy and its innovations just continued to gain momentum once the spotlight moved away from it.”The culture, and its devotees, outlived the clichés. Disco is dead. Long live disco. More

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      ‘Annika’ Review: The Detective Would Like to Have a Word With You

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      Nicola Walker plays a cop who works out her issues by talking to the audience in a “Masterpiece” mystery on PBS.A detective whose unit investigates waterborne crimes walks onto a bridge, looks into the camera and says, “Call me Annika.” She then proceeds to chat with the audience about Ahab and his white whale while she watches a murder victim being pulled from the River Clyde.That was our introduction to the British crime drama “Annika,” and through two seasons (the second premieres Sunday as part of PBS’s “Masterpiece”) the heroine has continued to talk to the audience: agonizing over her complicated relationships, thinking through her cases, delivering deadpan ripostes unheard by the other characters onscreen. And in each episode she invokes a literary work — “Twelfth Night,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” a Scottish ballad about a kidnapped child — that ties into that week’s story in subtle or, somewhat more often, obvious ways.That might sound like a double deal-breaker, and I clicked away from “Annika” the first time I heard the words “Moby-Dick.” But I knew I would return to it, because Annika Strandhed, the Norwegian-born, Glasgow-based cop, is played by Nicola Walker — an actress whose ubiquity on British television is entirely justified by the wry, layered humanity she brings to all her characters. Walker’s ability to flesh out the emotions lurking beneath self-consciousness and awkwardness makes the first-person conceit of “Annika” not just tolerable but apt and engaging.The prominence of her voice in the series also flows naturally from the show’s source, “Annika Stranded,” a BBC drama podcast about an Oslo homicide detective that was a solo showcase for Walker. (Both shows were created by Nick Walker, who is no relation to Nicola Walker, if you can believe it.) The television show supplies Annika, who relocates to Glasgow to lead a fictional outfit called the Marine Homicide Unit, with a three-person investigative team, a lonely but good-humored teenage daughter and a sometime love interest, who happens to be the daughter’s therapist.That’s a standard complement for a series of this type, and aside from the protagonist’s fourth-wall-breaking, “Annika” is a typical British cop show, in the categories of regional and serio-comic. It boasts lovely Scottish scenery, with side trips to places like Edinburgh and the Hebrides, and spends a lot of its time on or near the water. It’s a dead-body-of-the-week show with a sense of humor that is perched comfortably between dark and twee; it could be a more literate, more serious cousin of “Midsomer Murders” or “Monk.”The homicide cases mostly have the eccentric origins that this subgenre calls for — a tech billionaire drowned in his basement aquarium; a body pulled out of the North Sea encased in a block of ice — and their solutions can seem almost beside the point, an impression that grows stronger in the new season. The forensics sessions and computer searches and sudden flashes of deduction have a cookie-cutter familiarity; the most invigorating aspect of the police work is the show’s fetish for slapstick foot chases, which commence about twice an episode.A little perfunctoriness in the mysteries can be excused, though, given the overall pleasure to be had from Walker’s performance. Annika tends to her team more or less ably, but her work suffers from the strain she puts on herself by making a hash of her personal life. She is buoyant and fun-loving beneath a heavy mantle of fierce Nordic repression, and Walker’s mastery of stumbles, stammers and brief, piercing embarrassment keeps us on the character’s side.Walker has a natural genius for establishing rapport with an audience, demonstrated in domestic melodramas like “The Split” and “Last Tango in Halifax” and in a succession of crime dramas. The best of those was the wonderful cold-case series “Unforgotten,” which she led for four seasons until her character was killed off in an arbitrary and dramatically unsatisfying fashion. “Unforgotten” returned for a fifth season last month (also on “Masterpiece”) with a new detective played by Sinead Keenan, and it was still very good — taken as a whole, it’s superior in writing (by Chris Lang) and direction (by Andy Wilson) to “Annika.” But without Walker, it doesn’t speak to us in quite the same way. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Waco: The Aftermath’ and ‘The Hummingbird Effect’

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      A limited drama series from Showtime puts the resurgence of the militia movement into context, and a new slate of programming comes to PBS in celebration of Earth Month.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, April 10-16. Details and times are subject to change.MondayFrom left, Tim Holt, Walter Huston and Humphrey Bogart in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”Warner Bros., via Everett CollectionTHE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948) 8 p.m. on TCM. Adapted from the 1927 novel of the same name by B. Traven, this Golden Globe and Academy Award winning film follows Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) and Bob Curtin (Tim Holt), two drifters living in Mexico, as they team up with a prospector (Walter Huston) and head for the hills of the Sierra Madre in hopes of finding gold. The film not only explores concepts of greed and self-preservation “in a most vivid and exciting action display,” Bosley Crowther wrote in his review for The New York Times, but it is also “a swell adventure film” with “fast and electric” details. Though the movie has been the subject of criticism for its stereotypes of Mexicans, in 1990, the Library of Congress selected “Sierra Madre” for preservation in the National Film Registry.TuesdayROAD WARS 10 p.m. on A&E. This documentary series centered around road rage in the United States is back for a second season, as the show’s film crew gets back on the road to document the accidents, wacky weather events and instances of extreme human behavior that take place on America’s roadways.WednesdayA female green-crowned brilliant hummingbird in “The Hummingbird Effect.”Filipe DeAndradeNATURE: THE HUMMINGBIRD EFFECT 8 p.m. on PBS. In celebration of Earth Month this April, PBS is featuring a new collection of programs, documentaries and specials devoted to the topics of climate change and sustainability. “The Hummingbird Effect,” a new episode in the natural history documentary series “Nature,” is one such special. Set in Costa Rica, the episode explores the tiny birds’ relationship to the flora and fauna around them, and how their existence is vital to the health of the overall environment in which they are a part.NOVA: WEATHERING THE FUTURE 9 p.m. on PBS. This new episode from the documentary series NOVA documents the effects of climate change in the United States. From heat waves and megafires, to intense rainstorms and long-lasting droughts, the documentary focuses on how Americans are adapting and innovating in reaction to extreme weather.ThursdayHEADLINERS WITH RACHEL NICHOLS 10 p.m. on SHOWTIME. Featuring interviews with “players, coaches and front office personnel” in the world of basketball, the show, which is hosted and co-executive produced by the veteran NBA reporter Rachel Nichols, will offer fans a more intimate portrait of the industry, while still establishing an on-site presence during important game days. Nichols previously hosted “The Jump,” a daily basketball show on ESPN, until its cancellation in 2021, when it was reported that Nichols had made disparaging remarks about one of her colleagues.THIS IS MARK ROBER 10 p.m. on DISCOVERY. Produced by Kimmelot and ITV America, this new series offers a behind-the-scenes look of the concepts and processes of some of the most engaging viral videos of the former NASA engineer and YouTube star Mark Rober. He first gained notoriety in 2018, when he posted a video pranking package thieves with an engineered glitter bomb box. Since then, Rober has amassed over 20 million followers on his YouTube channel, where he is known for his intricate engineering experiments, pranks and gadget videos. “This is Mark Rober” is a companion series to “Revengineers,” a prank show executive produced by Rober and Jimmy Kimmel, which premieres next week.FridayDandara Veiga, center, and the ensemble of Ballet HispánicoTeresa WoodNEXT AT THE KENNEDY CENTER: BALLET HISPÁNICO’S DOÑA PERÓN 10 p.m. on PBS. Through movement by the versatile choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, the dance company Ballet Hispánico paints a portrait of the life of Eva “Evita” Perón — the Argentine actress turned populist first lady. The ballet follows Evita’s ascent from poverty, showcasing her time as a performer and as first lady, and ends with her death from cervical cancer at age 33. In her review for The Times, Siobhan Burke highlights the ballet’s “thoughtful integration of movement” with its “handsome design elements,” adding that “this harmony stands out from the first, saintly image” of the performance.SaturdayKazunari Ninomiya at Saigo in “Letters from Iwo Jima.”Merie W. Wallace/Warner Brothers Pictures and DreamWorks PicturesLETTERS FROM IWO JIMA (2006) 3:30 p.m. on FLIXe. This Golden Globe and Academy-Award winning Japanese-language film portrays the Battle of Iwo Jima — the monthlong battle in 1945 between the Imperial Japanese Army and the United States Marine Corps and Navy that became memorialized through Joe Rosenthal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima.” Directed and co-produced by Clint Eastwood, it is the companion film to Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers,” which was released two months earlier. “Letters From Iwo Jima” portrays the battle from the perspective of the Japanese soldiers, while its companion depicts the same battle from the American perspective. In the film’s observation of the lives and deaths of Japanese soldiers “it is unapologetically and even humbly true to the durable tenets of the war movie tradition, but it is also utterly original, even radical in its methods and insights,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The Times, calling the film “the best Japanese movie of the year.”SundayWACO: THE AFTERMATH 10 p.m. on CMT, PARAMOUNT and SHOWTIME. This five-part limited series looks at the so-called Waco siege, — when federal agents raided the Branch Davidian religious group’s compound northeast of Waco in 1993. At the compound, 75 people were killed, a third of them children. Coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the tragedy, the series puts into context the recent resurgence of the militia movement in the United States through its focus on what happened after the siege: the trials of Branch Davidian members who survived, and the indoctrination of the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh. More

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      John Cleese to Reboot ‘Fawlty Towers’ With His Daughter Camilla Cleese

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      Mr. Cleese will write and act alongside his daughter Camilla Cleese in a revival of the renowned BBC comedy.“Fawlty Towers,” the renowned 1970s British sitcom that starred John Cleese as a surly and snobbish hotel owner, will be rebooted with Mr. Cleese returning alongside his daughter Camilla Cleese, Castle Rock Entertainment announced on Tuesday.The original show, which Radio Times declared the best British sitcom of all time in 2019 after a survey of comedy experts, ran for two seasons of six episodes each, in 1975 and 1979. Mr. Cleese, now 83, played Basil Fawlty, who was forced to contend with disasters and ludicrous situations while displaying all the kindness and hospitality of sandpaper.In the reboot, Mr. Cleese’s character will open a boutique hotel with his daughter, whom he has just discovered he had, and deal with a more modern set of problems.Mr. Cleese, an original member of the Monty Python comedy troupe, has recently been dealing with a more modern set of problems in his real life as well.On social media, he has frequently railed against “cancel culture” and what he has deemed “woke” behaviors. He has signed up to host a show on GB News, a British right-wing television network, in which “no one will be canceled — and no topic will be too controversial for discussion,” the network said.In 2020, an episode of “Fawlty Towers” was removed from some streaming services because it contained racial slurs. Mr. Cleese called the decision “stupid,” telling the newspaper The Age that “if you put nonsense words into the mouth of someone you want to make fun of you’re not broadcasting their views, you’re making fun of them.”Some fans have also accused him of transphobia for his comments in support of J.K. Rowling, the author of the “Harry Potter” series.As with other British series in the 1970s, the original “Fawlty Towers” was shown in the United States on PBS. Despite interest from American broadcasters, the show’s small number of episodes and half-hour run time, without commercials, made it unable to fit American TV schedules.Castle Rock Entertainment did not say where the new series would air.Mr. Cleese said in a statement that he and his daughter developed the concept for the reboot with one of its executive producers, Matthew George, a producer of the films “Wind River” and “A Private War.”“When we first met, he offered an excellent first idea, and then Matt, my daughter Camilla, and I had one of the best creative sessions I can remember,” Mr. Cleese said. “By dessert, we had an overall concept so good that, a few days later, it won the approval of Rob and Michele Reiner. Camilla and I look forward enormously to expanding it into a series.”Mr. George, the Reiners and Derrick Rossi are the executive producers of the new “Fawlty Towers” series.“John Cleese is a comedy legend,” Mr. Reiner said in a statement. “Just the idea of working with him makes me laugh.”Amanda Holpuch More

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      Lloyd Morrisett, a Founder of ‘Sesame Street,’ Dies at 93

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      His observations about his 3-year-old daughter’s viewing habits led him to join Joan Ganz Cooney in creating a program that revolutionized children’s television.Lloyd Morrisett, a psychologist whose young daughter’s viewing habits inspired the creation of the revolutionary children’s educational television program “Sesame Street,” and whose fund-raising helped get it off the ground, died on Jan. 15 at his home in San Diego. He was 93.His daughter Julie Morrisett confirmed the death.Mr. Morrisett was a vice president of the nonprofit Carnegie Corporation in 1966 when he attended a dinner party in Manhattan hosted by his friends Joan Ganz Cooney and her husband, Tim. During the evening, Mr. Morrisett told the guests that his daughter Sarah was so mesmerized by TV that she would watch the test pattern on weekend mornings until cartoons began.Sarah had also memorized advertising jingles, which suggested to Mr. Morrisett that youngsters might more easily learn reading, writing and arithmetic if they were delivered in an entertaining way.“I said at one point in the conversation, ‘Joan, do you think television can be used to teach young children?’” he said in an interview on “BackStory,” a podcast about history, in 2019, “and her answer was, “I don’t know, but I’d like to talk about it.’”The idea was intriguing enough for Mr. Morrisett, along with Ms. Ganz Cooney, then a producer of public affairs television programming, and others to begin brainstorming about creating a program for preschoolers, particularly poor children who were likely to fall behind in the early grades, that would educate and amuse them.“‘What if?’ became their operative phrase,” Michael Davis wrote in “Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street” (2008). “What if you could create content for television that was both entertaining and instructive? What if it went down more like ice cream than spinach?”At Mr. Morrisett’s request, and with money from the Carnegie Corporation, Ms. Ganz Cooney traveled the country interviewing educators, animators, puppeteers, psychologists, filmmakers and television producers to produce a study, “The Potential Uses of Television for Pre-School Education.” That study became the blueprint for “Sesame Street.”Mr. Morrisett focused on raising $8 million to start “Sesame Street,” with about half coming from the United States Office of Education and the rest in the form of grants from Carnegie, the Ford Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.Mr. Morrisett had “magnificent political skills” that helped him raise money, Mr. Davis said in a phone interview. “He lived in that rarefied world and had connections. He was so believable and so clear and made so much damn sense.”In a statement, Ms. Ganz Cooney said, “Without Lloyd Morrisett, there is no ‘Sesame Street.’”The series made its debut on public television on Nov. 10, 1969, introducing children to a fantasy world where they could learn numbers and letters with help from a multiracial cast and a corps of Jim Henson’s Muppets that would include Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Bert and Ernie, Kermit the Frog, Cookie Monster and Elmo.Mr. Morrisett recalled that “Sesame Street” had a curriculum based on continuing research, designed to help children who watched the show succeed in school.“We were spending maybe a third of our budget on that research,” he told WBUR Radio in 2019, “and that was something that commercial television just couldn’t do.”Mr. Morrisett in 2009 with Joan Ganz Cooney at a benefit in New York for Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit company that produces “Sesame Street.”Bryan Bedder/Getty ImagesMr. Morrisett was born on Nov. 2, 1929, in Oklahoma City, and grew up in Yonkers, N.Y., and Los Angeles. His father, also named Lloyd, was an assistant schools superintendent in Yonkers, N.Y., and later a professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles. His mother, Jessie (Watson) Morrisett, was a homemaker.After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Oberlin College in Ohio in 1951, Mr. Morrisett studied for two years at U.C.L.A, then earned a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Yale in 1956. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley, but left after two years to work at the Social Science Research Council. He then joined the Carnegie Corporation as the executive assistant to its president, John Gardner. He later became a vice president.Mr. Morrisett never took an operational role at the Children’s Television Workshop, now Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization that produces “Sesame Street” and other programs, but he was an active chairman of its board until 2000. During that time he was instrumental in the creation and funding of “The Electric Company,” a series that taught language skills to children ages 6 to 10, which was broadcast in the 1970s and rebooted from 2009 to 2011.“He had this wonderful combination of being a child psychologist who was also a champion of media and technology and was research-based, which is the DNA of the company,” Sherrie Westin, the president of Sesame Workshop, said in a phone interview. She added, “He was a pioneer who believed that television could be an educational force.”When “Sesame Street” received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2019, a gaggle of Muppets onstage shouted “We love you” to Mr. Morrisett and Ms. Ganz Cooney, who were seated in the balcony.In addition to his daughters, Julie Morrisett and Sarah Morrisett Otley, Mr. Morrisett is survived by his wife, Mary (Pierre) Morrisett, and two grandchildren.Julie Morrisett said that, unlike her sister, she didn’t like television. “There’d be no ‘Sesame Street,’” she joked, “if I were the older daughter.”While chairman of Sesame Workshop, Mr. Morrisett was also president from 1969 to 1998 of the Markle Foundation and shifted its focus from medical research and education to supporting the study of mass communication and information technology.In an essay published in Markle’s annual report in 1981, Mr. Morrisett looked at the state of children’s television and advocated for a cable TV network devoted to younger viewers. (He did not mention Nickelodeon, which had started in 1979.)He argued that such a channel had to compete effectively for viewers’ attention, but that “the key for a new children’s television service will be to provide cultural and educational values widely believed necessary for leading a productive and satisfying life in our society.” More

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      Samuel West Takes Comfort in D&D, Mendelssohn and Ron Swanson’s Whiskey

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      The British actor, who appears in “All Creatures Great and Small” and “Slow Horses,” talks about bird-watching, history podcasts and why he stands up for rats.In the first episode of the current season of “All Creatures Great and Small,” Siegfried Farnon wins a rat in a drinking contest.The actor who plays him, Samuel West, felt victorious, too. He’d been angling for a rat to make its way into the PBS series — about a rural veterinary practice in England in the late 1930s — and has been a fan of them for even longer.“I’ve had five rats in my life, but they were sort of baby substitutes,” West said in a video interview last month from his family’s home in North London, which they share with a pair of kittens but no rats. “I can’t wait for my children to be old enough to have them again.”In addition to “All Creatures,” whose third season began in the United States this month, West can also be seen in Apple TV+’s spy thriller, “Slow Horses.” He spoke to us about the days he looks for 100 birds, the years he’s spent on a single stamp and why chamber music can feel more like acting than acting. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Dungeons & Dragons I was a very early adopter of Dungeons & Dragons. I started around Christmas of 1977, when I was 11, playing on the floor of the boy’s loos at school, literally sitting down with paper and rolling dice before school. Now, I play every week online. The game has evolved so much over the years. The new edition has completely transformed the game: It’s much simpler, it’s full of mechanics that are easy to learn, and it’s very inclusive.2. Tom Phillips He painted, wrote books, made art for album covers, wrote an opera called “Irma.” I met him when I was 16. I’d never really met an artist before, and I didn’t really know what an artist’s life was like. Tom showed me that it didn’t really have to be like anything, or it could be like as many things as you wanted, because it was only really limited by his skill and his curiosity, both of which seemed to be infinite.3. Darcy Clothing This clothing retailer in the United Kingdom used to be a very well-kept secret among costume designers who needed to buy a large number of period shirts dating as far back as the 16th century. Anyone can shop there and it’s all very good quality. Siegfried Farnon and I both get shirts there. I particularly like shirts with long, pointed, soft collars without stiffeners, like men wore in the 1930s.4. Stamp Collecting At a party 20 years ago, a woman was trying to pretend to be interested in the fact that I collect stamps and asked me how many I had. It’s not a question that anybody who collects stamps would ask somebody else. I realized that what she was asking about was an accumulation. And I thought, What’s the difference between an accumulation and a collection? I suddenly realized that a collection is defined by what it leaves out. That was incredibly enabling.5. Bird-watching If we’ve got a full day to go birding, we almost always go to Norfolk, which is the best bird-watching county in Britain, bar none. And we try and do what’s called a Big Day, which means we start just before sunrise — usually in a wood on the Norfolk/Suffolk border — and we drive through Norfolk maybe with one stop. Then we go along the A149, which I call the birding Silk Road, and we finish just after sunset listening for owls. We try and get to 100 species.6. Gem There’s a great restaurant in our neighborhood called Gem that serves Greek, Kurdish and Turkish food. Twenty years ago, I went in and they said, Before you order, do you want this? Because we’ve made too many and it’s really nice. So, I sat down and I had this sort of chopped-up kebab with tomato sauce and bread and butter. It was absolutely delicious. I had nothing else for about eight years.7. Lagavulin 16-Year-Old I have about 15 different whiskeys upstairs on a shelf. It takes quite a long time to get through because I don’t drink quickly. But it’s very warming and lovely in the winter. The darker, the peatier, the smokier, the better. My favorite whiskey is probably Lagavulin 16-year-old, which is the Scotch that Nick Offerman’s Ron Swanson drank on “Parks and Recreation.”8. Sleeper Train to Penzance The train leaves Paddington at five minutes to midnight, but if you have a sleeper, you can get on at 10:30 p.m., check into your room, and go to the buffet car for a whiskey — crisps for the children — before wandering back to your berth. In the morning, they knock on your door and bring you coffee and croissants or bacon rolls. If you’re lucky, when you lift your curtain, you can see the sun rising behind St. Michael’s Mount, and you get to Penzance at about five past 8. We just took our children and they adored it.9. “The Rest Is History” Sometimes when you’re looking out of the window or reading the paper and thinking, “God, everything’s a bit of a bin fire,” it helps to go back and look at other times in history where things were also a bit of a bin fire or to just get a bit more perspective on the fact that things change and even terrible things pass. That’s one of the reasons I like the podcast “The Rest Is History,” hosted by the British historians Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland. They have a wonderful series on the American Civil War.10. Mendelssohn Octet Felix Mendelssohn wrote the first version when he was 16. The piece is so brilliant, so joyous, so full of energy, tunes, life and vivacity. When I was a teenager playing cello, it was my gateway drug to chamber music. The chamber music repertoire actually reminds me more of acting than acting does sometimes — the togetherness between a string quartet and the way you have to really listen to each other. I love working with musicians because, in addition to being talented, they also practice. Actors, on the whole, don’t practice. More

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      The One About When Groucho Marx and Dick Cavett Became Great Friends

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      The beloved talk-show host, now 86, spoke about a new PBS documentary that tells the story of the friendship that changed his life.On a hot summer day in 1961, a young TV writer and aspiring comedian named Dick Cavett attended the funeral of George S. Kaufman, the renowned wit and man of letters. There he saw one of his heroes, Groucho Marx. Cavett approached Marx, and managed to tell him that he was a big fan.Without missing a beat, Marx responded: “Well, if it gets any hotter, I could use a big fan.”“That was the beginning of our friendship,” Cavett said last month. “I thought, well God, I’ve talked to him for actual minutes now. Nobody’s going to believe this. And suddenly he said: ‘Well, you seem like a nice young man. I’d like you to have lunch with me.’”Now, 61 years later, their relationship is the subject of a new PBS documentary, “Groucho & Cavett,” which premieres on Tuesday as part of the “American Masters” series.In a video interview from his home in Ridgefield, Conn., Cavett, 86, recalled with fondness his old friend, whose affection and mentorship changed the young Cavett’s life. As a writer for “The Tonight Show,” Cavett went on to write for Marx when Marx joined a brief rotation of hosts after Jack Paar left the show, in 1962. Starting in 1968, when Cavett got his own program on ABC, “The Dick Cavett Show,” Marx was a frequent guest.“Groucho & Cavett,” directed by Robert S. Bader, captures the mutual affection between Marx, who was in the later stage of his career, and Cavett, a talk-show host on the rise during a tumultuous time in American history. It also gives occasion to consider Cavett’s role in TV culture as an erudite, risk-taking and durable presence whose guests came on to engage in thoroughgoing, often contentious discussion with a dash of witty repartee.“I don’t remember being nervous,” said Cavett, right, as seen with Marx on “The Dick Cavett Show” in 1969. “But I was just so damn grateful.”Ron Baldwin, via PBS“There was nothing like it on television then, and there’s nothing like it on television now,” Bader said. “It was actually an intelligent conversation with people you care about, where in other settings, you just see them trying to be clever for eight minutes.”Bader’s first passion was Groucho — “I was an adolescent Marx Brothers fanatic,” he said. As a child he would sit by the television and tape Marx’s Cavett appearances with a cassette recorder. In college, Bader got the chance to meet Cavett, and he asked him a barrage of questions about Marx, which Cavett was happy to answer.By then, Bader was also a Cavett fan: “I realized he had got some pretty interesting people on,” he said. “It wasn’t just Groucho.” He went on to become friends with Cavett, producing a series of DVD compilations of the show and eventually making a documentary, “Ali & Cavett: Tale of the Tape,” about Cavett and his frequent guest Muhammad Ali. But the one he really wanted to make was “Groucho & Cavett.”You never knew what you might get when Marx walked onto Cavett’s stage — he was a guest seven times — but then that was true of “The Dick Cavett Show” in general. Across four decades and in various iterations, the show was a future time capsule of the politics, letters, movies, art and music of its day. Indeed, if you were a cultural figure and you didn’t visit Cavett’s show at the height of its influence in the 1960s and ’70s, it was almost as if you didn’t exist.The show’s ascendancy coincided with the popularization of rock ’n’ roll subculture, and Cavett took all comers, making them accessible to a wide viewership, in part, by keeping a foot planted firmly in the intellectual traditions of his mentors. Rock artists were among his most memorable guests, including Janis Joplin (who seemed to have a blast), Jimi Hendrix (exhausted, but engaged) and John Lennon and Yoko Ono (quite serious, as usual).“It’s funny because I never gave a damn about rock ’n’ roll until they started appearing on my show,” said Cavett, who just turned 86. “I think Janis Joplin was partly responsible because she had such a good time and she told everybody about it. And then I began to get them one after the other.”“The Dick Cavett Show” became a popular destination for rock stars like Janis Joplin.ABC Photo Archives, via Getty ImagesMarx remained friends with Cavett throughout the turbulent ’60s and gave him career advice. As explained in the film, Marx saw an appealing contradiction in Cavett, the Yale-educated Nebraskan, the erudite hayseed. Marx encouraged his young friend to pursue this idea through humor, and Cavett obliged.When Cavett got his own show, he was quick to book his hero. Marx would sing songs (“Lydia the Tattooed Lady”), tell stories and engage with the adoring audience. But mostly he would riff with his young protégé, who always seemed as if he couldn’t believe he was sitting there with Groucho Marx.“I think I was in a state of exalting disbelief and joy that I had Groucho sitting there and being Groucho Marx,” Cavett said. “I don’t remember being nervous, but I was just so damn grateful that I finally had him where I wanted him, so to speak. And that it was going well, and that it was wonderful.”Much of the time, Cavett was in stitches — Marx was, in that sense, one of the few guests who could render him speechless. “Virtually everything he says, if he wants it to be and he usually does, can be funny,” Cavett said. He rattled off some of his favorites. Like: “I’m not a vegetarian, but I eat animals who are.” Or: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them … well, I have others.” (This writer’s favorite, from “Animal Crackers”: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don’t know.”)Cavett wasn’t too shabby himself.“It was like you were listening to someone in the ’60s from the Algonquin Round Table,” said Ron Simon, the head of the curatorial department and senior curator at the Paley Center for Media, who has done several events with Cavett. “He could always come up with the precise word. And certainly there is a little bit of Groucho in Dick Cavett and his humor. So Cavett was talking to one of his idols, and that made it special.”Cavett with his dog, Reilly. He still tears up when he speaks of his friendship with Marx, who died in 1977.Timothy O’Connell for The New York TimesIt’s easy to see what Marx admired in his young friend. Cavett was soft-spoken but razor-sharp and unflappable, even when chaos was breaking out around him. (Listen to his voice barely change when in 1971 he offers a pugnacious Norman Mailer “two more chairs to contain your giant intellect.”) For a time, he grew his sandy hair long. He grew a beard. Richard Nixon wanted to destroy him.But his temperament didn’t change: He was insatiably curious and quick, whether he was talking to Truman Capote, Lillian Gish, Ronald Reagan, Sly Stone or Orson Welles. Today, one can scarcely watch a documentary about a late-60s or ’70s subject without a vintage Cavett clip popping up — Zelig-like, he stamps his mark on the subject at hand.Cavett knows he had the goods back then. “When I see myself on Decades, I’m often surprised at how good I am,” he said, referring to a network that carries reruns of his show. “That’s a terrible thing to say in public, but I’m completely entertained by myself.”Marx was entertained, too. He saw in Cavett a kindred spirit, a fellow wit.“Groucho was young in mind, although old in body at that point,” Bader said. He was still widely beloved, known for the television show “You Bet Your Life,” which he hosted from 1947 to 1961. The counterculture had embraced the anarchic spirit of movies like “The Cocoanuts” (1929), “Duck Soup” (1933) and “A Night at the Opera” (1935). He was a sort of éminence grise in American comedy, still revered by younger comics like Cavett. And Marx in turn never tired of the stage lights.“Dick gave Groucho this wide open forum, which he didn’t necessarily have when he went on other shows,” Bader said. “He would just take over.”Cavett tears up in the film as he recalls Marx’s death in 1977 at age 86. “We had lost Captain Spaulding,” he says in the film, referring to the name of the character Marx played in the 1930 movie “Animal Crackers.” For nine years, their friendship was a joyous on-air affair.But he still has the memories and stories, which he loves to share. Like the time a couple recognized the two men on a New York sidewalk and the man asked Marx to say something insulting about his wife.Marx paused, Cavett told me, then replied: “‘Well, with a wife like that, you should be able to think of your own insults.’“Let’s put it his way,” Cavett added. “I’ve never enjoyed a guest more.” More