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      Mark Shields, TV Pundit Known for His Sharp Wit, Dies at 85

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      A former campaign strategist, he became a fixture in American political journalism and punditry and was seen on “PBS NewsHour” for 33 years.Mark Shields, a piercing analyst of America’s political virtues and failings, first as a Democratic campaign strategist and then as a television commentator who both delighted and rankled audiences for four decades with his bluntly liberal views and sharply honed wit, died on Saturday at his home in Chevy Chase, Md. He was 85. His daughter, Amy Shields Doyle, said the cause was complications of kidney failure.Politics loomed large for Mr. Shields even when he was a boy. In 1948, when he was 11, his parents roused him at 5 a.m. so he could glimpse President Harry S. Truman as he was passing through Weymouth, the Massachusetts town south of Boston where they lived. He recalled that “the first time I ever saw my mother cry was the night that Adlai Stevenson lost in 1952.”A life immersed in politics began in earnest for him in the 1960s, not long after he had finished two years in the Marines. He started as a legislative assistant to Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin.He then struck out on his own as a political consultant to Democratic candidates; his first campaign at the national level was Robert F. Kennedy’s ill-fated presidential race in 1968. Mr. Shields was in San Francisco when Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. “I’ll go to my grave believing Robert Kennedy would have been the best president of my lifetime,” he told The New York Times in 1993.He had successes, like helping John J. Gilligan become governor of Ohio in 1970 and Kevin H. White win re-election as mayor of Boston in 1975. But he was certainly no stranger to defeat; he worked for men who vainly pursued national office in the 1970s, among them Edmund S. Muskie, R. Sargent Shriver and Morris K. Udall.“At one point,” Mr. Shields said, “I held the N.C.A.A. indoor record for concession speeches written and delivered.”As the 1970s ended, he decided on a different path. Thus began a long career that made him a fixture in American political journalism and punditry.He started out as a Washington Post editorial writer, but the inherent anonymity of the job discomfited him. He asked for, and got, a weekly column.Before long, he set out on his own. While he continued writing a column, which came to be distributed each week by Creators Syndicate, it was on television that he left his firmest imprint.From 1988 until it was canceled in 2005, he was a moderator and panelist on “Capital Gang,” a weekly CNN talk show that matched liberals like Mr. Shields with their conservative counterparts. He was also a panelist on another weekly public affairs program, “Inside Washington,” seen on PBS and ABC until it ended in 2013.In 1985, he wrote “On the Campaign Trail,” a somewhat irreverent look at the 1984 presidential race. Over the years he also taught courses on politics and the press at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.Mr. Shields during a taping of “Meet the Press” at the NBC studios in Washington in 2008.Alex Wong/Getty Images for Meet the PressHis longest stretch was as a commentator on “PBS NewsHour” from 1987 through 2020, when he decided at age 83 to end his regular gig. A self-described New Deal liberal, Mr. Shields was the counterpoint to a succession of conservative thinkers, including William Safire, Paul Gigot, David Gergen and, for the last 19 years, David Brooks.In a panegyric to his colleague, Mr. Brooks wrote in his New York Times column in December 2020 that “to this day Mark argues that politics is about looking for converts, not punishing heretics.”Mr. Shields’s manner was rumpled, his visage increasingly jowly, his accent unmistakably New England. He came across, The Times observed in 1993, as “just a guy who likes to argue about current events at the barbershop — the pundit next door.”His calling card was a no-nonsense political sensibility, infused with audience-pleasing humor that punctured the dominant character trait of many an office holder: pomposity. Not surprisingly, his targets, archconservatives conspicuous among them, did not take kindly to his arrows. And he did not always adhere to modern standards of correctness.Of President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Shields said dismissively that “the toughest thing he’s ever done was to ask Republicans to vote for a tax cut.” The House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy was “an invertebrate”; Senator Lindsey Graham made Tonto, the Lone Ranger’s loyal sidekick, “look like an independent spirit.” In both major parties, he said, too many are afflicted with “the Rolex gene” — making them money-hungry caterers to the wealthy.Asked in a 2013 C-SPAN interview which presidents he admired, he cited Gerald R. Ford, a Republican who took office in 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Ford, he said, was “the most emotionally healthy.”“Not that the others were basket cases,” he said, but “they get that bug, and as the late and very great Mo Udall, who sought that office, once put it, the only known cure for the presidential virus is embalming fluid.”Politics, he maintained, was “a contact sport, a question of accepting an elbow or two,” and losing was “the original American sin.”“People come up with very creative excuses why they can’t be with you when you’re losing,” he said. “Like ‘my nephew is graduating from driving school,’ and ‘I’d love to be with you but we had a family appointment at the taxidermist.’”Still, for all their foibles, he had an abiding admiration for politicians, be they Democrats or Republicans, simply for entering the arena.“When you dare to run for public office, everyone you ever sat next to in high school homeroom or double-dated with or car-pooled with knows whether you won or, more likely, lost,” he said. “The political candidate dares to risk the public rejection that most of us will go to any length to avoid.”Mark Stephen Shields was born in Weymouth on May 25, 1937, one of four children of William Shields, a paper salesman involved in local politics, and Mary (Fallon) Shields, who taught school until she married.“In my Irish American Massachusetts family, you were born a Democrat and baptized a Catholic,” Mr. Shields wrote in 2009. “If your luck held out, you were also brought up to be a Boston Red Sox fan.”Mr. Shields, right, talking with Sandy Levin, Democrat of Michigan, before a meeting of the House Democratic caucus at the Capitol in Washington in 2011.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesHe attended schools in Weymouth and then the University of Notre Dame, where he majored in philosophy and graduated in 1959. With military conscription looming, he chose in 1960 to enlist in the Marines, emerging in 1962 as a lance corporal. He learned a lot in those two years, he said, including concepts of leadership encapsulated in a Marine tradition of officers not being fed until their subordinates were.“Would not our country be a more just and human place,” he wrote in 2010, “if the brass of Wall Street and Washington and executive suites believed that ‘officers eat last’?”As he set out on his career in politics, he met Anne Hudson, a lawyer and federal agency administrator. They were married in 1966. In addition to his daughter, a television producer, he is survived by his wife and two grandchildren. There were bumps along the road, including a period of excessive drinking. “If I wasn’t an alcoholic, I was probably a pretty good imitation of one,” he told C-SPAN, adding: “I have not had a drink since May 15, 1974. It took me that long to find out that God made whiskey so the Irish and the Indians wouldn’t run the world.”Some of his happiest moments, he said, were when he worked on political campaigns: “You think you are going to make a difference that’s going to be better for the country, and especially for widows and orphans and people who don’t even know your name and never will know your name. Boy, that’s probably as good as it gets.” More

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      Ken Bode, Erudite ‘Washington Week’ Host on PBS, Dies at 83

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      Beginning in 1994, he brought to the moderator’s role credentials as a political activist, an academic and a national correspondent for NBC News.Ken Bode, a bearded, bearish former political operative and television correspondent who, armed with a Ph.D. in politics, moderated the popular PBS program “Washington Week in Review” in the 1990s, died on Thursday in Charlotte, N.C. He was 83.His death, in a care center, was confirmed by his daughters, Matilda and Josie Bode, who said the cause had not been identified.Beginning in 1994, Mr. Bode (pronounced BO-dee) coupled congeniality and knowledgeability in steering a Friday night discussion among a rotating panel of reporters about the issues of the day coming out of Washington. His role, as he saw it, was to “bring in people who are really covering the news to empty their notebooks and provide perspective, not to argue with each other,” he told The Washington Post in 1999.As host of the program, now called “Washington Week,” he succeeded Paul Duke, who had helmed that roundtable of polite talking heads for two decades, and preceded Gwen Ifill, a former NBC News correspondent who died in 2016 at 61. The program, which debuted in 1967, is billed as TV’s longest-running prime time news and public affairs program. The current host is Yamiche Alcindor.The program’s loyal and generally older viewers were so brass-bound in the 1990s that when Mr. Bode took over, even his beard proved controversial. He proceeded to introduce videotaped segments and remote interviews with correspondents and bring more diversity to his panel of reporters.He also took more liberties with language than his predecessor.Mr. Bode moderating an episode of “Washington Week in Review.” He hosted the program from 1994 to 1999 while teaching politics at DePauw University in Indiana. PBSEnding an interview with Bob Woodward of The Washington Post about President Bill Clinton’s economic policies, Mr. Bode quoted a British newspaper’s snarky prediction that the president’s impending visit to Oxford, England, would present people with an opportunity to “focus on one of the president’s less well-publicized organs: his brain.” He described a vacancy on the Supreme Court as constituting “one-ninth of one-third of the government.”Still, Dalton Delan, then the newly-minted executive vice president of WETA in Washington, which continues to produce the program, wanted to invigorate the format. He proposed including college journalists, surprise guests and people-on-the-street interviews and replacing Mr. Bode with Ms. Ifill (she said she initially turned down the offer) — changes that prompted Mr. Bode to jump, or to be not so gently pushed, from the host’s chair in 1999.Kenneth Adlam Bode was born on March 30, 1939, in Chicago and raised in Hawarden, Iowa. His father, George, owned a dairy farm and then a dry cleaning business. His mother, June (Adlam) Bode, kept the books.Mr. Bode in his office in 1972, when he was involved in Democratic politics.George Tames/The New York TimesThe first member of his family to attend college, Mr. Bode majored in philosophy and government at the University of South Dakota, graduating in 1961. He went on to earn a doctorate in political science at the University of North Carolina, where he was active in the civil rights movement.He taught briefly at Michigan State University and the State University of New York at Binghamton, and then gravitated toward liberal politics.In 1968, Mr. Bode worked in the presidential campaigns of Senators Eugene McCarthy and George S. McGovern. He became research director for a Democratic Party commission, led by Mr. McGovern and Representative Donald M. Fraser of Minnesota, that advocated for reforms in the selection process for delegates to the 1972 Democratic National Convention. He later headed a liberal-leaning organization called the Center for Political Reform.His marriage to Linda Yarrow ended in divorce. In 1975, he married Margo Hauff, a high school social studies teacher who wrote and designed educational materials for learning-disabled children. He is survived by her, in addition to their daughters, as well as by a brother and two grandsons.After working in politics, Mr. Bode began writing for The New Republic in the early 1970s and became its politics editor. He moved to NBC News in 1979, encouraged by the network’s newsman Tom Brokaw, a friend from college, and eventually became the network’s national political correspondent. In that role he hosted “Bode’s Journal,” a weekly segment of the “Today” show, on which he explored, among other issues, voting rights violations, racial discrimination and patronage abuses, as his longtime producer Jim Connor recalled in an interview.Mr. Bode left the network a decade later to teach at DePauw University in Indiana, where he founded the Center for Contemporary Media. While at DePauw, from 1989 to 1998, he commuted to Washington to host “Washington Week in Review” and wrote an Emmy-winning CNN documentary, “The Public Mind of George Bush” (1992).Beginning in 1998, he was dean of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism for three years and remained a professor there until 2004.Mr. Bode said he retired from broadcast journalism for family reasons. “I was raising my kids from 100 airports a year,” he said. As he told The New York Times in 1999, “I knew then that my problem was, I’ve got the best job, but I’ve also got one chance to be a father, and I’m losing it.” More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches’ and Awards Shows

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      A new documentary about Frederick Douglass debuts on HBO. And both the Screen Actors Guild Awards and the N.A.A.C.P. Image Awards air this weekend.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, Feb. 21-27. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE ENDGAME 10 p.m. on NBC. An F.B.I. agent (Ryan Michelle Bathe) and a mysterious criminal mastermind (Morena Baccarin) fight to one-up each other materially and verbally in this new thriller series. The plot revolves around a series of major bank robberies in New York City. Expect fireworks: The “Fast and Furious” director Justin Lin is an executive producer of the show and directed Monday night’s debut episode.TuesdayFANNIE LOU HAMER’S AMERICA: AN AMERICA REFRAMED SPECIAL 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). This feature-length documentary special looks at the influential civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer. The program shows Hamer’s legacy as an advocate for voting and women’s rights and explains how she went from working as a sharecropper in Mississippi to organizing grass-roots campaigns.WednesdayFREDERICK DOUGLASS: IN FIVE SPEECHES (2022) 9 p.m. on HBO. David W. Blight’s Pulitzer-winning 2018 book, “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” is the foundation of this new documentary, which includes commentary by Blight and the scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. that speaks to the abolitionist’s crucial place in American history. But the documentary also takes advantage of its own medium, emphasizing the power of Douglass’s words: It features five actors — Jeffrey Wright, Nicole Beharie, Colman Domingo, Jonathan Majors and Denzel Whitaker — performing words from five Douglass speeches from several different decades. A sixth actor, André Holland, narrates.ThursdayAIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS (2013) 5:15 p.m. on Showtime 2. The filmmaker David Lowery had proven himself a skilled maker of moody dramas by last year, when he released the Arthurian romance “The Green Knight.” Lowery’s reputation is due in part to this somber quasi western. In it, Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck play Bob and Ruth, a couple that gets involved in a shootout. The fight leaves one man dead and a sheriff’s deputy (Ben Foster) injured. Bob goes to prison, and Ruth gives birth to their daughter. Later, Bob escapes and journeys back to Ruth. But he’s wanted, and things get complicated.FridayDaniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith in “Queen & Slim.”Universal PicturesQUEEN & SLIM (2019) 7:35 p.m. and 10:20 p.m. on FXM. Both the outlaw romance “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” (above) and Melina Matsoukas’s “Queen & Slim” feature couples whose lives are transformed, quickly, by violence. The story of Queen and Slim (played by Jodie Turner-Smith and Daniel Kaluuya) opens with an awkward first date that leads into a deadly encounter with an aggressive white police officer (Sturgill Simpson). They become fugitives on the run, and “Queen & Slim” turns into a road movie and a love story. What lingers, A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The Times, “are strains of anger, ardor, sorrow and sweetness, and the quiet astonishment of witnessing the birth of a legend.”SaturdayRyan Reynolds and Jodie Comer in “Free Guy.”20th Century StudiosFREE GUY (2021) 8 p.m. on HBO. This action comedy was a pandemic-era box-office success story. Now it can be a watch-from-home Saturday night diversion. A sugary sci-fi romp with notes of “The Truman Show” and “The Matrix” (but filtered through the director of “Night at the Museum”), “Free Guy” casts Ryan Reynolds as Guy, an Everyman who learns that he’s a side character in a video game. When he meets a player named Millie (Jodie Comer), Guy is drawn into a mission to stop the C.E.O. of the studio that created the game (Taika Waititi) from enacting evil deeds. The movie is “perky though predictable,” Maya Phillips wrote in her review for The Times.53RD ANNUAL N.A.A.C.P. IMAGE AWARDS 8 p.m. on BET. One of the joys of the N.A.A.C.P.’s annual Image Awards show is that it allows for some matchups that you don’t see at the Oscars, Emmys or Grammys. The ceremony recognizes movies, TV shows and music. Some of the categories in this year’s edition are fairly typical: Halle Berry, Andra Day, Jennifer Hudson, Tessa Thompson and Zendaya are all up for the best actress in a film award, while “Encanto,” “Luca, “Raya and the Last Dragon,” “Sing 2” and “Vivo” will compete for best animated movie. But other categories break genre boundaries: The nominees for entertainer of the year are Jennifer Hudson, Lil Nas X, Megan Thee Stallion, Regina King and Tiffany Haddish.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Marc Brown on the End of ‘Arthur’ and His Favorite Fan Theories

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      With the beloved PBS children’s show ending after 25 seasons, its 75-year-old creator answered some off-the-wall questions about his 8-year-old aardvark.From the minute Marc Brown meets you, he’s sizing you up. Just maybe not in the usual way.“People remind me of animals,” said Brown, the 75-year-old creator of the illustrated character Arthur Read, the 8-year-old bespectacled aardvark who, since the book “Arthur’s Nose” debuted in 1976, has been helping children navigate the world around them. “When the child that I’m talking to reads a book and all the characters are animals, they don’t care what color their skin is. They are immediately drawn to the character that they identify with and feel an affinity with.”For more than 25 years, Brown and a team at WGBH, Boston’s PBS affiliate, have produced the animated adaptation series “Arthur,” in which the aardvark, his friends and a lineup of animalized guest stars tackle difficult subjects like bullying, divorce and disability. The series, which has won praise from both children and parents for its candor in depicting challenging situations — as well as seven Emmy Awards and the distinction of longest-running children’s animated series on American television — will air its final episodes this week. (All four will air on Monday afternoon and stream free on PBS Kids.)Brown appears in animated form in an episode from the new and final season of “Arthur.”WGBH“One of the reasons I love ‘Arthur’ is because of the imperfections in our characters,” said Carol Greenwald, who created the show with Brown and now serves as an executive producer. “It’s important to show kids that you can really screw up and it’s not the end of the world. You can learn from your mistakes and come back a better person.”Both Brown and Greenwald said that the idea from start was for the series not only to reflect issues relevant to kids but also to present a world in which they could see themselves. When they first got started, Greenwald said, the WGBH team dispatched people with cameras to capture neighborhoods around Boston to help animators diversify the homes in Arthur’s world.“Arthur lived in a beautiful little house with a picket fence,” she said, “but we wanted to diversify the world enough that kids who lived in apartment buildings, or in smaller, lower income neighborhoods, would feel like they were as a part of that story.”And Elwood City, Arthur’s fictional home, did come to feel like home for many viewers, not just in Boston but also around the world. So when one of the show’s writers revealed in July that the show had wrapped production — and when PBS later announced that the series’s final episodes would air this winter, the reaction, at least on social media, was a collective balled fist (a riff on a popular Arthur meme).Arthur, a bespectacled 8-year-old aardvark, debuted in Brown’s 1976 book “Arthur’s Nose.” The books were adapted into a PBS animated series for 25 seasons.Calla Kessler for The New York TimesArthur’s friends are all animals, too. “People remind me of animals,” Brown said.Calla Kessler for The New York TimesBut for fans who have been with Arthur across more than 250 episodes, there’s some consolation: The characters will live on in a new Arthur podcast, games and digital shorts — and the series’s final episode will flash forward to provide viewers a glimpse of what Arthur and his friends grow up to be.“There are definitely some surprises,” Greenwald said.In a recent video call from his sunny West Village living room, Brown was candid, sprightly and puckish. His clothing and furnishings were impeccably tidy, his white hair neatly combed — it wasn’t hard to see where Arthur, fond of polo shirts and V-neck sweaters, took his sartorial cues. Brown, who is still an executive producer of the show, reflected on its longevity and why now was to right time to end it, and he talked about some of his new projects, including the long-gestating Arthur movie that has gained new momentum recently. (He also set the record straight on a few fan theories.) These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Congratulations on 25 years! Did you ever think you would be having this conversation when the first episode premiered in October 1996?Not in my wildest dreams. I thought it’d last two years — if I was lucky.Many authors help create a show, then step back. Why are you still so intensely involved after 25 years?I still have the same feeling I had when PBS came to me and wanted to put Arthur on television. I had invested 15 years before that in the characters, and I was getting lots of letters from kids. It felt like a little family, and I wanted the characters to be faithful to my vision. And so I’ve been a guard in the corner in that way.“I thought it’d last two years — if I was lucky,” Brown said of the animated adaptation, which premiered in 1996. Today it is the longest-running animated children’s show on American TV. GBHSo many of the stories are inspired by real-life experiences you had when your kids — Tolon, Tucker and Eliza — were little. Now that they’re adults, is it more difficult to come up with fresh ideas?So many episodes grow out of our writing team’s experiences — and it turns out they’re still helpful and relevant to kids! There are episodes, like the one on head lice, that every time we run them, because it’s still an ongoing problem for a lot of kids, it gets a lot of positive feedback.Why end it now, then?Technology has changed in the last 25 years, and kids are now watching stories on their iPhones, listening to podcasts, playing games on their devices — they’re getting information so many other ways. We’re looking for ways to try new things.Have you been surprised by the reaction?It was wonderful to see the response. I’m still getting many messages on my Instagram page: “Is Arthur really over?” I love seeing reactions from these young adults who grew up with Arthur, the fact that these characters are still fresh in their minds. It’s great that he’s touched so many people so deeply that they want him to continue.In the first book, “Arthur’s Nose,” Arthur looked like an aardvark with a long snout, not a mouse with glasses. What happened?The second book, “Arthur’s Eyes,” came from when my son Tolon was getting glasses. He came home and said, “Dad, I thought all my friends were better-looking.” You can’t make that up! So of course Arthur had glasses, too. As the series went on, I just got to know him better, and he became more lovable and more humanlike — and his nose got shorter. It was not intentional!Have you ever met an aardvark?[Laughs.] I haven’t had any encounters with aardvarks, although I think there may be one that lives in an apartment across the street.The series is notable for its diverse characters, including ones with blindness, dyslexia, autism and dementia. How did you ensure those representations were accurate?We work with a series of experts for each episode, like the one we did about Arthur’s grandfather, Dave, who was struggling with Alzheimer’s and doesn’t remember Arthur’s name. Things like that are so important, and so many families are dealing with that. We heard from a dad who watched the show about autism and discovered through the show that his son was autistic and wrote to thank us. The show helped parents understand their kids. Matt Damon’s mom happens to be one of our wonderful experts who’s helped us with many episodes. That’s how we got Matt Damon as a guest star. The poor guy didn’t know what hit him!The show made headlines in 2019 when it revealed that Mr. Ratburn, Arthur’s teacher, is gay. The episode also showed his wedding to a man. Did you have any worries about how people would react?We want to represent the world around us. When we wanted to have Arthur’s teacher get married, we thought it could be opportunity for him to marry a same-sex partner — and kudos to PBS, who got behind us and let us do that, and do it in a way that wasn’t about his sexual orientation. It was about the fact that their teacher, who they love, found a partner who he loved, and they were happy for him.When The New York Times talked to you in 1996 — shortly after the first episodes aired — you were getting 100,000 letters a year from kids. How much fan mail do you get these days?I get letters asking for Francine’s phone number — well, Francine [a monkey character on the show] doesn’t have a phone number! Years ago, I was really stupid: In the book “Arthur’s Thanksgiving,” I put our home phone number in a little illustration of a bulletin board that says “Call Arthur at 749-7978.” Every Thanksgiving, the phone began to ring and ring and ring. My wife, Laurie, had the best response. You’d hear a little voice say: “Hello? Is Arthur there?” And she’d say, “No, he’s at the library.” That was when we lived outside Boston; it went on for a few years!Brown in his Manhattan home with his cat Romeo. “I haven’t had any encounters with aardvarks,” Brown said, “although I think there may be one that lives in an apartment across the street.”Calla Kessler for The New York TimesWhat’s next for you?For three years now, I’ve been working on a new preschool animated show called “Hop.” It’s a little frog, and one of his legs is a little shorter than the other. It’s a show about the power of friendship, solving problems together and kindness.And my dream for an Arthur feature film, which I decided wasn’t ever going to happen, might actually happen in a way I could be proud of. When that idea was hatched 15 years ago, I spent way too much time out in Los Angeles talking to people that weren’t making a whole lot of sense — in my mind. But now I think I’ve found the right people.Can we do a quick speed round? There are several fan theories that I’d love to have you confirm or deny.Sure.Let’s start with the most plausible: Arthur lives in Pennsylvania.Well, I grew up in Erie, Penn. Lakewood Elementary School was where I went to elementary school. I can still see my third-grade class, and all my friends, many of whom turned into characters in Arthur’s world. But I also lived in Massachusetts for many years, and I used a lot of elements from there — the movie theater in “Arthur’s Valentine” was the theater down the street where we lived. When Carol and I were trying to come up with a name for Arthur’s hometown, she suggested Elwood City, which is also in Pennsylvania, near a place where she lived as a child. That’s how it happened, folks!Arthur gets married.I’m not telling you! You’ll have to tune in and find out.Arthur takes place in a multiverse.No? [Laughs.]Arthur is a reality series directed by Matt Damon.I hadn’t heard that one. That’s interesting.The whole show is acted out by aliens.Well, we did do something similar a few years ago with Buster and his fascination with aliens, so …That’s not a no?I couldn’t be happier inspiring people’s imagination. That’s a good thing! More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Missing in Brooks County’ and ‘Sisters With Transistors’

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      A documentary about a Texas border region plays as part of PBS’s “Independent Lens” series. And a documentary about women in electronic music airs on Showtime.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, Jan. 21-Feb. 6. Details and times are subject to change.MondayINDEPENDENT LENS: MISSING IN BROOKS COUNTY (2021) 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Hundreds of people have died trying to migrate from Mexico to the United States through Brooks County, Tex., in the past two decades. This documentary looks at what makes the region, on the southern end of Texas, so perilous for those crossing the border, and explores work that activists and community members are doing to address the crisis. It focuses on two families who turn to Eddie Canales, the founder of the South Texas Human Rights Center, for help finding missing family members.CELEBRATING BETTY WHITE: AMERICA’S GOLDEN GIRL 10 p.m. on NBC. This hourlong special celebrates the life and career of the comic actress Betty White, who died in December at 99. Many famous people will pay tribute to White, including Drew Barrymore, Cher, Bryan Cranston, Ellen DeGeneres, Tina Fey, Goldie Hawn, Anthony Mackie, Tracy Morgan, Jean Smart and President Biden.TuesdayA scene from “Barbara Lee: Speaking Truth To Power.”Greenwich EntertainmentBARBARA LEE: SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER (2021) 8 p.m. on Starz. “A Super Bowl touchdown roar.” That’s how The New York Times described the reception that Representative Barbara Lee received from an audience in Oakland, Calif., at a community gathering in October 2001. The reason for the crowd’s enthusiasm: Lee was the only member of Congress to vote against invading Afghanistan in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks. This documentary looks at Lee’s life both before and after that pivotal move. Interviewees include Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, the CNN commentator Van Jones and the actor Danny Glover.Remembering Betty WhiteThe actress, whose trailblazing career spanned seven decades, died on Jan. 31. She was 99. Obituary: After creating two of the most memorable characters in sitcom history,  White remained a beloved presence on television. Remembered Fondly: Hollywood stars, comedians, a president and seemingly the entire internet paid tribute after her death was announced. Final Prank: People magazine found itself in an awkward spot when a cover for White’s upcoming 100th birthday hit the newsstands right before her death.From the Archives: In a 2011 interview, White shared the memory of a relationship she held dear to her heart — with an elephant.WednesdayLUCY IN THE SKY (2019) 7:15 p.m. and 9:50 on FXM. Earlier this month, the “Fargo” and “Legion” showrunner Noah Hawley released a dark new novel, “Anthem,” that imagines teenage characters several years after the Covid-19 pandemic. For a multiformat double feature, pair the book with Hawley’s film “Lucy in the Sky,” where Natalie Portman is a lovesick astronaut.ThursdayThe composer Maryanne Amacher in a scene from “Sisters With Transistors,” a documentary that explores how women shaped electronic music.Peggy Weil/Metrograph PicturesSISTERS WITH TRANSISTORS (2021) 6:30 p.m. on Showtime. When the multimedia musician and composer Laurie Anderson mentions “radical sounds” while narrating this documentary, the phrase has a clear double meaning. Not only did synthesizers and other digital technology, a focus of the film, create never-before-heard sounds during the 20th century, but it gave opportunities for female composers like Daphne Oram, Maryanne Amacher and Clara Rockmore to innovate outside of the traditional, male-dominated music industry. The film explores the work of these women and more, arguing that their importance in shaping electronic music has been overlooked. The result, Glenn Kenny wrote in his review for The Times, is “informative and often fascinating.”SCREAM (1996) 8 p.m. on BBC America. The shrieks came with a laugh in “Scream,” Wes Craven’s horror-parody that gave new life to the slasher genre when it hit theaters just over 25 years ago. The movie spawned a slew of sequels — the latest of which came out earlier this month — but even this first entry feels like something of a sequel, so filled is it with references and callbacks to previous, genre-defining movies, including “Halloween” and “Friday the 13th.” It introduced the character Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), a suburban teenager who is stalked by a masked killer with a long face. BBC America is airing it alongside its first sequel, SCREAM 2 (1997).Friday2022 WINTER OLYMPICS OPENING CEREMONY 6:30 a.m. and 8 p.m. on NBC. The Winter Olympics in Beijing formally begin on Friday with an opening ceremony set to include the traditional cauldron lighting and parade of nations. (Other than athletes, American presence at the games will be subdued: The United States is among the countries whose governments have planned for a diplomatic boycott of the games, citing human rights abuses.) The ceremony will be covered live at 6:30 a.m., then rebroadcast at 8 p.m. as a more polished special.STAND AND DELIVER (1988) 10 p.m. on TCM. The actor Edward James Olmos took a break from the sheen of “Miami Vice” to play a schlubby (but deeply gifted) math teacher in this late ’80s drama. Directed by Ramón Menéndez and based on actual events, the film casts Olmos as Jaime Escalante, a teacher at a public high school in East Los Angeles whose ability to motivate his students leads to impressive test scores that were called into question by prejudiced standardized-testing authorities. Olmos plays the part to “inspiringly great effect,” Janet Maslin said in her review for The Times in 1988. (He later received an Oscar nomination for his performance.) “If ever a film made its audience want to study calculus,” Maslin wrote, “this is the one.”SaturdayWillem Dafoe, left, and Bradley Cooper in “Nightmare Alley.”Searchlight PicturesNIGHTMARE ALLEY (2021) 8 p.m. on HBO. After its recent release in theaters, Guillermo del Toro’s latest haunted house of a movie hits smaller screens via HBO on Saturday night. Set primarily amid a grimy carnival, “Nightmare Alley” centers on a 1930s con man (Bradley Cooper) who finds success putting on a mentalist act. The real star, though, might be the setting: In her review for The Times, Manohla Dargis praised del Toro’s textured, polished world building, but wasn’t so enthusiastic about the rest of the film. “The carnival is diverting, and del Toro’s fondness for its denizens helps put a human face on these purported freaks,” she wrote. “But once he’s finished with the preliminaries, he struggles to make the many striking parts cohere into a living, breathing whole.”SundayGUY’S CHANCE OF A LIFETIME 9 p.m. on Food Network. Some competition shows offer their winners a cash prize that they can retire on. “Guy’s Chance of a Lifetime” offers an opportunity: Contestants vie for ownership of a Guy Fieri-branded chicken joint in Nashville. A winner will be revealed on Sunday night’s season finale. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Simple as Water’ and the American Music Awards

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      HBO airs a documentary about families affected by the civil war in Syria. And Cardi B hosts the 2021 American Music Awards on ABC.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, Nov. 15-21. Details and times are subject to change.MondayHOLIDAY BAKING CHAMPIONSHIP: GINGERBREAD SHOWDOWN 9 p.m. on Food Network. There may be few culinary situations more intense than baking for blood relatives. Food Network nods at that fact with this holiday baking competition show, which kicks off Monday night by challenging its contestants to make snow globe scenes out of coconut shavings and gingerbread.TuesdaySIMPLE AS WATER (2021) 9 p.m. on HBO. The Oscar-winning documentarian Megan Mylan gives an intricate, intimate look at the effect that the civil war in Syria has had on families in this ambitious documentary. Mylan follows an array of Syrian families whose lives have been changed by the war. They include a woman and four children living in a refugee camp in Greece; a man working as a delivery driver in Pennsylvania while applying for asylum for himself and his younger brother; and a husband and wife in Masyaf, in northwest Syria.“These stories avoid triteness by lingering on the daily, unassuming routines of their characters,” Claire Shaffer wrote in her review for The New York Times. The result, Shaffer said, is a film that’s “anything but simple when it comes to its technical achievements, weaving together familiar immigrant narratives in ways that still manage to surprise and stun.”Daniel Radcliffe in “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”Warner Bros.HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE (2001) 6:30 p.m. on Syfy. This first movie in the “Harry Potter” franchise hit theaters 20 years ago this month. The movie made celebrities out of its three young stars, Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson, and defined the look of the so-called wizarding world in which the stories are set, which until that point had existed only in readers’ imaginations.In a recent interview with The Times, Radcliffe reminisced about shooting the film. He looked back on some elements, like the use of practical special effects, fondly (“one of the great things about the films early on,” he said). Memories of, say, broom riding, came with more of a wince. “It was a broomstick with a thin seat in the middle, and you didn’t have stirrups — or, if you did, they were very, very high up,” Radcliffe explained, “so you were basically leaning all your weight onto your junk when you leaned forward.”WednesdayBOOGIE NIGHTS (1997) 11 p.m. on Showtime. The filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson is set to roll out his latest movie, the 1970s coming-of-age story “Licorice Pizza,” next week. That new movie shares its setting with Anderson’s 1997 period drama, “Boogie Nights” — both are set in the San Fernando Valley in Southern California.The story in “Boogie Nights” follows a young man, Eddie (Mark Wahlberg), who gets discovered in the late ’70s by a successful pornographer (Burt Reynolds) and becomes a star. The film, Anderson’s second feature, was how many viewers first discovered Anderson. In her review for The Times, Janet Maslin wrote that Anderson’s “display of talent is as big and exuberant as skywriting.” Everything about “Boogie Nights,” she wrote, “is interestingly unexpected.”ThursdayHIGH ANXIETY (1977) 10 p.m. on TCM. Mel Brooks spoofs Hitchcock as both the director and star of this satirical mystery movie. Brooks plays an anxious psychiatrist who gets accused of murder. The doctor’s quest to clear his name lets Brooks riff on scenes from “Vertico,” “Psycho,” “Spellbound” and “The Birds,” using the same brand of disgruntled humor he employed to great effect in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974), which TCM is airing at 8 p.m.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      How ‘Boeing’s Fatal Flaw’ Grounded the 737 Max and Exposed Failed Oversight

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      A new documentary by Frontline, in partnership with The New York Times, examines how competitive pressure, flawed design and problematic oversight of the Boeing jet led to two crashes that killed 346 people.A new documentary by Frontline, in partnership with The New York Times, investigates the Boeing 737 Max catastrophe, and will air on PBS on Tuesday, Sept. 14, and will be streaming on PBS.org/frontline, YouTube and in the PBS Video App.Ruth Fremson/The New York Times‘Boeing’s Fatal Flaw’Writer/director Thomas JenningsReporters David Gelles, James Glanz, Natalie Kitroeff and Jack NicasWatch the new documentary by Frontline, in partnership with The New York Times, on Tuesday, Sept. 14, on PBS and streaming at pbs.org/frontline, on YouTube and in the PBS Video App.Airplanes are designed to go up after takeoff, but that’s not what happened to Lion Air Flight 610 when it left Jakarta, Indonesia, in October 2018.“You don’t see planes diving on departure,” one Indonesian aviation expert said. And yet the Boeing 737 Max jet, piloted by an experienced crew, went into an irrecoverable nosedive minutes after takeoff. All 189 people on board were killed when it crashed into the Java Sea.Four months later, 157 people died when another 737 Max, operated as Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, plummeted to the earth, ringing new alarms about the aircraft. Days later, the jet was grounded.“Boeing’s Fatal Flaw,” a new documentary by Frontline, featuring reporting by The New York Times, investigates the causes of the two crashes and how a software system that was supposed to make the plane safer played a role in the catastrophes.The Boeing 737 Max began as a success story: The plane was the company’s best selling jet ever, with hundreds of billions of dollars in advance orders from airlines around the world. But our reporters’ investigation shows that, early on, the tale had all the elements of a tragedy in the making.Internal Boeing documents and interviews with former Federal Aviation Administration officials and congressional investigators reveal how competitive pressures influenced the efforts to bring the 737 Max to market. And The Times’s investigation details how an essential software system known as MCAS was implemented with insufficient oversight and inadequate pilot training.“Boeing’s Fatal Flaw” traces The Times’s investigation. Boeing declined to be interviewed for the film, but the documentary includes details from our reporters’ on-the-record interview with the company’s chief executive, Dave Calhoun. The film also features on-camera interviews with congressional investigators, aviation experts and family members of the passengers aboard the two fatal flights.You can watch on Tuesday, Sept. 14, on PBS and streaming at pbs.org/frontline, on YouTube and in the PBS Video App.Featured ReportersDavid Gelles writes the Corner Office column and other features for the Business section. Since joining The Times in 2013, he’s written about mergers and acquisitions, media, technology and more.James Glanz is a reporter on the Investigations desk. Before joining the desk, he spent nearly five years in Iraq as a correspondent and Baghdad bureau chief. On Sept. 11, 2001, he covered the collapse of the twin towers and, for two years, continued to report from ground zero. He has a Ph.D. in astrophysical sciences from Princeton.Natalie Kitroeff is a foreign correspondent covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. Before that, she was a business reporter writing about the economy for The Times. She also covered the California economy for The Los Angeles Times and reported on education for Bloomberg.Jack Nicas has covered technology for The New York Times since 2018. Before joining The Times, he spent seven years at The Wall Street Journal covering technology, aviation and national news.Producers Vanessa Fica and Kate McCormickSenior producer Frank KoughanExecutive producers for Left/Right Docs Ken Druckerman and Banks TarverExecutive producer of FRONTLINE Raney Aronson-RathFRONTLINE, U.S. television’s longest running investigative documentary series, explores the issues of our times through powerful storytelling. It is produced at GBH in Boston and is broadcast nationwide on PBS. More

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      ‘Muhammad Ali’ Docuseries From Ken Burns Is a Sweeping Portrait

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      A new four-part documentary series by Ken Burns paints a sweeping portrait of a man whose life intersected with many of modern America’s most profound changes.One day in the mid-1990s, Ken Burns had a cold while he was in Los Angeles to raise money for his next documentary. He ducked into a coffee shop for some hot tea, and after paying, one of the 20th century’s most ardent historians turned from the counter and locked eyes with perhaps its most towering icon. Muhammad Ali was sitting in a booth nearby. The two men stared at each other silently for longer than most strangers would — celebrities or not.“There’s was almost no movement on both of us except that kind of opening, that love that happens when you just feel unashamed and unembarrassed by the persistent gaze,” Burns said recently. “This wordless conversation; I have the script in my head, I heard his voice in my mind. But it was just without going over and shaking hands, of course, not asking for an autograph or anything like that.”By that point, Ali was in the clutches of Parkinson’s disease — hence the silence from a man who for many decades couldn’t stop talking: about his own beauty and skill, about how ugly and untalented his opponents were, about the injustice Black people across America had faced for hundreds of years.Nearly three decades later, Burns; his oldest daughter, Sarah; and her husband, David McMahon, have stitched together a sweeping portrait of Ali’s impact from more than 40 years of footage and photographs. “Muhammad Ali,” a four-part documentary series that premieres Sept. 19 on PBS, follows the arc of a man whose life intersected with many of modern America’s most profound changes — and who was also not as widely revered in his prime as he is now.David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker and author of “King of the World,” a 1998 biography of Ali, said “it was very clear that a lot of America found him dangerous, threatening to the way people were ‘supposed’ to behave — much less Black people.”“He won people over because he was right about the war,” Remnick continued. “He won people over because as an athlete, he proved himself over and over again to be not only beautiful to watch, but unbelievably courageous. So his athleticism and his superiority as an athlete couldn’t just couldn’t be denied, even when he lost.”In 1978, Ali beat Leon Spinks to win the heavyweight championship for the third time.Michael GaffneyThere has been no shortage of documentaries or biographies about Ali in the last few decades. For the filmmakers, the idea took root in 2014, when their friend Jonathan Eig was working on a book about Ali. (“Ali: A Life,” published in 2017.) Eig’s research led him to believe that a comprehensive film representation of Ali’s life had not been done before, and that the Burnses were the perfect team to do it.McMahon said it took only a few archival clips to convince them of the potential power of a wide-ranging Ali documentary. “There were so many possibilities to tie together all these threads that were kind of out there,” he said. “You’d see documentaries that had been about a single chapter in his life or a single fight, or books covering only a portion of his life.”The more the filmmakers dug into Ali’s life, Sarah Burns said, the more they realized “just how much there was to this story.”“Not just the boxing, obviously,” she said, “but his relationships with Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, his family life, his marriages, his draft resistance and his courage and being willing to go to jail for his convictions, and also his battle with Parkinson’s — you know, his later life, his post-boxing life.” That “really hadn’t,” she added, “been explored in as much detail.”The new series traces a path from the young Cassius Clay in Jim Crow-era Louisville to the complicated, at times self-contradictory adult who won the heavyweight title three times and faced down the U.S. government over his refusal to fight in Vietnam. The filmmakers show him as not only a dominant heavyweight during his peak fighting years but also a figure of no small impact on society. Here is “The Greatest” clowning with the Beatles; standing at a podium with Malcolm X; embracing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; calling another Black fighter an “Uncle Tom” for refusing to acknowledge his name change, as a leering Howard Cosell tells the cameras to “keep shooting” the ensuing scuffle; and finally declaring publicly — at risk to his career and endorsements — that he was a Muslim.Ali had relationships with many other prominent 20th century figures, including Malcolm X.ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy Live NewsAli’s rise to stardom coincided with a period of intense cultural change in the United States, and his connection to the Civil Rights and antiwar movements is critical in distinguishing Ali the man from Ali the boxer, McMahon said — and in recognizing his impact on American audiences.“You can’t understand his refusal to be inducted into the U.S. Army without understanding his faith, without understanding the meaning of Elijah Muhammad in his life,” he said, referring to the mercurial and sometimes caustic leader of the Nation of Islam, with whom Ali had a close relationship. “We hadn’t really seen that explained. There were also perspectives that hadn’t been heard; we thought, ‘Who out there could tell us more about his faith?’”Eig, the biographer, shared a huge trove of contacts with the filmmakers, and they started their initial interviews in 2016, a week after Ali died. Dozens of writers, friends and boxing ambassadors participated: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Larry Holmes, Jesse Jackson, the novelist Walter Mosley, the ESPN writer Howard Bryant, the boxing promoter Don King. Over the next several years, the filmmakers unearthed more than 15,000 photographs and dug up footage that had not been seen publicly. A production company that had shot the “Thrilla in Manila,” Ali’s third and final bout with Joe Frazier, in the Philippines, had folded before the film could be used. Their footage was buried in a Pennsylvania archive.“This woman pulled these boxes out and said, ‘They say “Ali” on them — I don’t know what they are,’” McMahon said. “This is Technicolor, it’s 16-millimeter, shot from the apron [of the ring] — it just pops. And you see the fight in ways that had never been seen before.”Ali’s relationship with Frazier, who as a young fighter had been one of Ali’s fans, is one of the thornier aspects of the documentary. Ali’s treatment of him before their fights was quite cruel, employing some of the language of “racist white people,” as one commentator in the series says, to denigrate Frazier (who never forgave him). It’s part of the complex picture of Ali that the series provides: a people’s champion who could be petty; a devout Muslim who was a serial philanderer; an idealist who made a lot of people angry with his refusal to conform to public expectations.Bryant, the ESPN writer, said he didn’t think “people understand why this story is so heroic and so important and so unique.”“We just seem to think that every person out there, if they protest something, if they say something, if they face some sort of sanction, we put them in the same category as Muhammad Ali or Jackie Robinson,” he continued. “And it’s just such nonsense.”“Name me another athlete where the full weight of the United States government came down on one person. I’m not talking about the N.F.L. saying you can’t play when you’re already a millionaire. Colin Kaepernick obviously sacrificed and lost some things. It’s not the same thing. It’s not even close.”For two of Ali’s daughters, Rasheda Ali (from his second marriage, to Khalilah Ali, born Belinda Boyd) and Hana Ali (from his third, to Veronica Porche), the new documentary is an honest look at the father they knew mainly while he was under the weight of Parkinson’s. The film opens with a shot of him sitting with his oldest child, Maryum, encouraging her to look out the window so he can steal a bite of her food. The footage brought Rasheda to tears.Belinda Boyd became Ali’s second wife and changed her name to Khalilah Ali. Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos“I’ve never seen the family footage — and even the photos!” Rasheda said. “I was like, ‘Wow, where did you get that?’”“He was always making jokes and he was fun,” she added. “That’s the Muhammad Ali people don’t really see regularly.”Hana, who said that anyone other than the Burns would have been making “just another documentary about my father,” also noted that the more intimate footage helped fill in some of the nuances about him.“It’s so hard when you live a life like my father’s, where you’re so accessible, and so photographed, and his story’s been told so many times,” Hana said. “Honestly, I’ve seen so many documentaries about our father, and even just watching the beginning of this one, already, it was just different — it felt more personable.”The series comes to a close as Ali has become, as Ken Burns described it, “the most beloved person on the planet.” The footage of his trembling surprise appearance at the 1996 Olympics, in Atlanta, is a crucial piece of Ali’s lasting image and mythology. But as Burns put it, “mythology is a mask.”Bryant, who argued that Ali changed the relationship between athletes and fans, was more direct about the boxer’s evolving public image in those later years.Ali in Manhattan in 1968. Despite his popularity as a boxer, Ali angered many people with his refusal to conform to public expectations.Anthony Camerano/Associated Press“People hated his guts, and white people didn’t love him until he couldn’t talk,” Bryant said. “There were people — Black and white — who still called him Cassius Clay; there were people who still did not want to give him his due. And there were people who still held a lot against him.”“Then he couldn’t talk, and suddenly he belonged to everybody,” he said.Ken Burns suggested that this public redemption was akin to “a funeral where people are talking really nicely about other people.”“And you go, ‘Why can’t we do this in the rest of our lives?’” he said. “The funeral isn’t for the person who’s dead — the funeral is for the people who are left behind, and we’re always modeling the best, most human behavior. And yet, we don’t seem to be able to bring it to our own lives.”He quoted one of the journalists in the documentary, Dave Kindred, who said that in death, Ali “can’t hurt us anymore; he can’t make us mad anymore.”“He could no longer anger us, he could no longer make it difficult for us, to force us back on our own feelings, our own beliefs, our own prejudices, Burns said. Then there’s this room to forgive and perhaps exalt.”“It’s a long process with him,” he added. “And it’s so interesting that a great deal of that positive progress is from defeat.” More