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HILLSBOROUGH, Calif. — Live from his home kitchen in the Bay Area, Martin Yan flashed a smile, raised his cleaver and chanted the catchphrase that the 150 or so people watching him online were clamoring to hear: “If Yan can cook, so can you!” More
He conceived and produced “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” and was its face for 20 years, after four decades as an NBC News correspondent.Bob Abernethy, who capped a four-decade career as an NBC News correspondent by injecting religion, one of the most under-covered subjects on television, into national programming with a weekly series that ran for 20 years on PBS, died on May 2 in Brunswick, Maine. He was 93.His death, at a heath care facility, was confirmed by his daughter Jane Montgomery Abernethy. The cause was Alzheimer’s dementia.The grandson of a Baptist minister in Washington whose congregation included President Warren G. Harding and Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, Mr. Abernethy had retired from NBC in 1994 after covering the collapse of the Soviet Union, the nascent space program and Congress.He was not ready to stop working, though. Armed with his deep faith, intellectual curiosity and a theology degree he had earned from Yale Divinity School during a one-year leave of absence in 1984, he persuaded WNET, the PBS station in New York, to produce “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly,” a half-hour nonsectarian series that Mr. Abernethy hosted and presided over as executive editor beginning in 1997.Within 10 years of its launch, the show — which Mr. Abernethy had described as “a news program, no preaching” — was airing on 250 public stations nationwide, winning some 200 industry awards. He and his collaborators went on to broadcast regularly until 2017, when he was 89.With the journalist William Bole, Mr. Abernethy edited “The Life of Meaning: Reflections on Faith, Doubt, and Repairing the World,” (2007), an anthology of interview transcripts from the PBS program.“Nothing I have done has been as personally satisfying as founding and working on” the program, he wrote in the introduction to the book, adding, “The main reason for that is the many opportunities the show provides for sitting down with the likes of Archbishop Desmond Tutu — extraordinary men and women who speak as naturally about their faith and doubt and spiritual practices as they do about the weather.”Mr. Abernethy in an undated photo. He persuaded PBS to produce “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly,” becoming its host and executive producer.David HollowayOther guests included the Dalai Lama, President Jimmy Carter, the Rev. Billy Graham and Jonathan Sacks, at the time the chief rabbi of the United Kingdom.The series covered a wide range of topics, including atheism, abortion, assisted suicide, sexual abuse by clergy and organ transplants.“Finding this line between sensitivity to the spiritual dimensions of a story on the one hand and objective, traditional skepticism is a constant struggle and a very appropriate one, but I think we’ve got it right,” Mr. Abernethy told The Washington Post in 2000. “This is a matter of good reporting. Unless you get the spiritual element of the story, you’re missing something very important. It’s like interviewing Babe Ruth and not asking about hitting.”When “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” was approaching the end of its run, Jerome Socolovsky, the editor in chief of Religion News Service, was rueful, telling the news service Current in 2016, “The media landscape will miss this crucial provider of video stories about religion that didn’t favor one or the other but gave viewers a full perspective on religious news developments.”Robert Gordon Abernethy was born on Nov. 5, 1927, in Geneva to Robert and Lois May (Jones) Abernethy. His father worked for the Y.M.C.A.’s international newspaper. After Bob was born, the couple returned to the United States. His father began to teach religion at the Hill School in Pottstown, Pa., but died of complications of appendicitis in 1930.Bob and his mother moved in with his paternal grandparents in Washington, where his grandfather was senior minister of Calvary Baptist Church. She taught piano at the National Cathedral School.After graduating from the Hill School, he enrolled in Princeton University but interrupted his studies to serve with the American occupying Army in postwar Japan, where he hosted a program for Armed Forces Radio. Returning to college, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from what is now the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.Coming from a family of pastors, he felt “a certain amount of pressure on me to become a minister, too,” he told the website Resources for Christianity in 2013, “but I never heard a call.”Mr. Abernethy married Jean Montgomery in 1951; she died in 1980. In addition to their daughter, Jane, he is survived by his second wife, Marie (Grove) Abernethy, whom he married in 1984; their daughter, Elizabeth C. Abernethy; and four children from Ms. Abernethy’s first marriage. He had homes in Brunswick as well as in Washington and Jaffrey, N.H.Mr. Abernethy was a member of the United Church of Christ. His wife is a member of the Russian Orthodox Church.He joined NBC News after receiving his master’s from Princeton in 1952. Early on he wrote and hosted “Update,” a program for young people, and was later a Washington interviewer for the “Today” show. He anchored the evening news for KNBC in Los Angeles among other assignments.One posting was to Moscow, after he had completed his leave from NBC News to study theology in 1984. Before he left, he recalled: “I ran into a guy I had known who asked me, ‘What’s new?’ I said, ‘I took a year’s leave from NBC and went to divinity school. I got married and we had a baby. What’s new with you?’”He never stopped working. At his death, he was hoping to document the lives of homeless people through video interviews, for a future broadcast. More
A lusty new production is both an enticement and a warning as we tentatively explore intimacy after a year of forced solitude.What will be the idiom, in my modest estimation, to best define our relationship to sex during the Covid-19 pandemic? “Stay home if you sick, come over if you thicc” — so say the boys of Tinder.It’s not quite Shakespeare — or is it? I’m willing to bet that if they lived in 2021, Romeo and Juliet would quickly become fluent in our contemporary language of lust and seduction. After all, sex has always been an element of Shakespeare’s play, though portrayals of it have changed in productions over the last 400 years, depending on trends and cultural attitudes.So it would make sense, after the pandemic year we’ve had, that we’re in for a spate of sexy Shakespeare — frilly ruff and all. And “Romeo and Juliet” — including the lusty new filmed production that premiered last week on PBS — looks like it’ll be the play of this spicy summer to come.I’ve already encountered other renditions in the last couple of weeks: the Public Theater’s bilingual “Romeo y Julieta,” the Actors Theater of Louisville’s “Romeo & Juliet: Louisville 2020.” An interactive production is forthcoming from England’s Creation Theater.Though a play about intimacy, yearning and death feels right for the moment, I have to admit my discomfort with all those honeyed kisses and sweet nothings: The pandemic has left me unprepared for lovers meeting at any distance closer than six feet.The sexiness of “Romeo and Juliet” depends not just on a director but on the temperature of the times, whether the drafty climate of a chaste family dinner with Granny or the febrile blaze of a Friday night date set to a playlist of ’90s R&B jams.Though the Elizabethans of Shakespeare’s time were down for lewd wordplay and suggestive winks in the text, stage depictions of physical intimacy were a step too far. The Victorians? Stuffier than a mouth breather during allergy season, they tended to shift the story toward innocent love rather than lust.Romeo and Juliet got a movie makeover in the 1960s, however, when the director Franco Zeffirelli premiered his sensual adaptation, including a famous nude love scene, during the peak of the sexual revolution.And if you had a pulse in the ’90s you caught Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in Baz Luhrmann’s wistfully romantic “Romeo and Juliet,” which seemed charged by the melancholic sighs of disenchanted youth — appropriate for the decade of irony and grunge.Orlando Bloom, left, and Condola Rashad in the 2013 Broadway production of “Romeo and Juliet.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhich presents the question of where we are now. (The dull and curiously sexless 2013 Broadway production, starring Orlando Bloom and Condola Rashad, had little to add.) Have dating apps and the sex-positive and body-positive movements brought us to a new age of uninhibitedness?Honestly, I’m not sure. Many of our austere cultural standards around sex, cuffed to religious conventions, economics and antiquated notions about gender, still haunt us behind closed doors — even as much of our media uses sex as consumer currency. But a pandemic that made isolation the rule surely has changed our relationship to physical intimacy.That — not personal prudishness or naïveté — is why too sexy of a “Romeo and Juliet,” like the new filmed edition starring Jessie Buckley and Josh O’Connor, leaves me scandalized, as though I didn’t grow up in a household with HBO.The fabric of the film feels cut from the central couple’s marital bedsheets — the intimacy is that palpable. Scene after scene feels like it’s taking place by candlelight. The hovering camerawork peeks over shoulders to catch a kiss or embrace.Cutting many of the play’s crass euphemisms (including the nurse’s many opinions on matters of the heart and, well, other parts of the body), this “Romeo and Juliet” builds from the physical tension among the characters.They tease one another, as Mercutio does Romeo and Benvolio in his Queen Mab’s speech; then he draws in Benvolio (depicted here as his lover) for a single electric moment before promptly shoving him away.Simon Godwin’s direction is tactile, obsessed with hands and the ways an open-palmed welcome, a single-finger caress, the taut-knuckled hardness of a fist can signify romance, or violence, or both.The confidential meeting of the lovers in the tussle of bodies at the Capulet shindig, the hesitant first touch of their fingers and, later, the urgent consummation — none of this is surprising. Neither is it risqué.And yet, to me, it felt alarming — pornographic even — given how we have spent the last year painfully aware of what threats proximity could breed.Last spring NYC Health released a much-mocked guide to safe sex during the pandemic, encouraging masturbation as the most Covid-friendly alternative to, in Shakespearean terms, sheathing one’s dagger. No more sweaty tangling of limbs in a dark bar, no more post-date kiss on the sidewalk outside a restaurant. Or at least not without risk.Even as more of us get vaccinated, intimacy will likely feel like a fresh adventure, for good and for bad. Some singles are emerging from their quarantine bubbles anticipating a “hot vax summer” of horny hookups and experimental exploits. Others are circumspect, our social skills atrophied and our inhibitions increased in response to a lethal disease.For the next several months, as we recover from a kind of intimacy-deprived PTSD, Shakespeare’s sexiest play — a play that links lust to violence, even death — may read as extreme, even subtly subversive.That’s the magic of the Bard, isn’t it? Racy enough for reprobates and rakes, or priggishly read by a congregation of stately stiff-backs, the work is spacious enough to accommodate any disposition. I might be too shy to subscribe to Romeo and Juliet’s steamy OnlyFans, but, hey, there are plenty out there who aren’t. More
Josh O’Connor and Jessie Buckley star as the star-crossed lovers in a compelling stage-film hybrid adaptation.What’s written in haste may be repaired in haste. Or so the fine and fleet new “Romeo and Juliet” from Britain’s National Theater, available here on PBS’s “Great Performances,” convinces me.At 90 minutes, it is even shorter than the “two hours’ traffic of our stage” promised in its first lines but rarely honored in performance. (The entire play normally takes about three hours.) Yet as directed by Simon Godwin, this emotionally satisfying and highly theatrical filmed version scores point after point while whizzing past, or outright cutting, the elements that can make you think it was written not by Shakespeare but by O. Henry on a bender.If the cutting merely left what remains with a much higher proportion of penetrating insight and powerful feeling, that would be enough; “Romeo and Juliet,” at its best, anticipates the great later works in which complexity and ambivalence are made real and gorgeous in language. But the speed serves another function here: telling a story that’s mostly about teenagers with a teenage intensity and recklessness.Not that the stars are anywhere near their adolescence. Though Romeo is 17 or so and Juliet, 13, Josh O’Connor, who played mopey young Prince Charles in “The Crown,” is 30, and Jessie Buckley, the mysterious star of “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” 31. Still, there’s a reason they’re called actors: They can perform the acts a play requires of them. Onstage, at any rate, that would be sufficient.Under Simon Godwin’s direction, the masked ball in this “Romeo and Juliet” is closer to a rave.Rob YoungsonOn film, we need an extra push, which Godwin and Emily Burns, who adapted the text, provide by grounding us in a theatrical world before escorting us into a filmic one. The production begins unceremoniously with the cast in street clothes, entering a theater, unmasked and vulnerable, none more so than O’Connor, with the low-slung, “sticky-out” ears he says earned him his role on “The Crown.” Sitting on three sides of a small, square, scuffed playing space, the actors are barely past the greeting phase — O’Connor and Buckley smile shyly at one another, as if across a Veronese piazza — when the play leaps out of the gate.Purists not already offended will soon have plenty to set them off. The masked ball at which the lovers meet is not exactly courtly; it’s more like a rave, and Romeo is given just two lines (instead of 10) to fall for Juliet, who is moaning at the mic like Lana Del Rey.But impurists will be satisfied that the erotic intensity between them is so palpable, even when Godwin dissipates it by cutting away from the theatrical moment to a filmed montage in some other dimension. Similarly, the introduction of a passionate gay pairing among the supporting roles makes up in thematic coherence — the plot turns on forbidden love — what it lacks in textual fidelity.The trade-offs continue throughout. The most fascinating one finds Juliet’s parents inverted, Lady Capulet (Tamsin Greig) getting most of the lines Shakespeare wrote for her Lord (Lloyd Hutchinson). Greig, so funny on the Showtime series “Episodes,” is spectacularly entertaining as she explores what besides the habitual assertion of male power might motivate a parent to threaten a daughter with expulsion. Her interpretation, underlined by “evil” music, nevertheless denatures one key feature of the play, which now suggests that the Capulets are monsters when the really terrifying thing is that they’re not. They are upstanding citizens doing what’s expected.It is that atmosphere of immutable custom and inherited hatred that the lovers are desperate to escape. But Godwin’s staging makes clear by physical proximity and by judicious intercutting that these elements are related: Romeo and Juliet’s passion is as rash and irrational as the other characters’ repression and violence. As the outlines of their love are filled in, so is the hatred around them — and so are the set (by Soutra Gilmour) and props; swords that were simple wooden dowels in Act I by Act III are knives that look menacingly real. In youth, it seems, enmity precedes an enemy just as love precedes a lover.Tamsin Greig as Lady Capulet and Lloyd Hutchinson as Lord Capulet.Rob YoungsonAt every turn we are offered insights like that until, suddenly, we aren’t. Nothing Godwin can do to make the play rough and unfamiliar — whether by having Tybalt (David Judge) urinate on a wall or by excising greatest hits like “parting is such sweet sorrow” — can help it get past the place where the lovers’ ingenuity fails along with Shakespeare’s. The plot thread by which Juliet’s fake death prompts Romeo’s real one is so absurdly flimsy that adaptations have tried for centuries to fix it; Arthur Laurents’s workaround for “West Side Story” is especially strong.For me, though, no production of “Romeo and Juliet” survives the potions of Friar Laurence; they are a lot of magick to swallow in a play about such real and serious things. That Laurence is portrayed here (by Lucian Msamati) with great dignity, not as a nutty professor, helps, raising the profound if wishful idea that faith can correct for society’s failings. Even more movingly, Deborah Findlay, as Juliet’s fond nurse, is able to temper the role’s comic elements with an immutable loyalty to her mistress, and then temper that with something darker and arguably in fact disloyal. It’s a perfect trifold performance.That’s the thing about Shakespeare, at least for me: There comes a moment in many of his plays when only the actors can preserve the emotion the plot keeps leaking. Happily, that happens here: As the tragedy narrows, O’Connor and Buckley flood with feeling.Stars will do that. In the same way an enemy is just a receptacle for enmity that already exists, a starring role is whatever a star can pour ambient emotion into. O’Connor’s essence is a silent yearning — the kind that is not extinguished but fanned by satisfaction. (This is what made his otherwise insufferable Charles almost sympathetic in “The Crown” and the nearly silent young farmer in his breakthrough film, “God’s Own Country,” so expressive.) Buckley, whose face seems transparent at times, is more about wonder; her Juliet clearly wants Romeo but, more than that, is amazed by her good fortune in getting him.Even in a more conventional production — this one was meant to be performed live onstage but was retooled for the pandemic — you need that kind of incandescence to make the play make sense. Remember that Shakespeare was a young star, too, albeit 30 or so himself, when he wrote “Romeo and Juliet.” Indeed, it often seems that his title characters, in haste and passion, wrote it for him.Romeo & JulietThrough May 21; pbs.org/gperf More
Lynn Novick and Ken Burns revisit the life of Ernest Hemingway on PBS. And a documentary about a civil suit against the Ku Klux Klan airs on CNN.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 5-11. Details and times are subject to change.MondayHEMINGWAY 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Lynn Novick and Ken Burns look back at the life of Ernest Hemingway in this new three-part documentary, which airs over three consecutive nights beginning on Monday. The program aims to give an evenhanded assessment of Hemingway’s life and legacy, recognizing the uglier elements (racism and anti-Semitism) while paying tribute to his work. The result is a documentary that is “cleareyed about its subject and emotional about his legacy,” James Poniewozik wrote in his review for The New York Times. “It celebrates his gifts, catalogs his flaws (which included using racist language in his correspondence) and chronicles his decline with the tragic relentlessness its subject would give to the death of a bull in the ring.”TuesdayFOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL (1994) 10 p.m. on TCM. The director Mike Newell and the screenwriter Richard Curtis worked together on this classic British romantic comedy, about two people (played by Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell) whose love develops in fits and starts. It is, Janet Maslin wrote in her review for The Times, “elegant, festive and very, very funny.”WednesdayEXTERMINATE ALL THE BRUTES 9 p.m. on HBO. Raoul Peck (“I Am Not Your Negro”) blends archival footage, clips from Hollywood movies, scripted scenes and animation into a rumination on the history of European colonialism and American slavery in this new four-part series. The first two parts air on Wednesday at 9 p.m. and 10 p.m.; the second two air on Thursday night at the same times.ThursdayDiane Keaton and Al Pacino in “Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone.”Paramount PicturesMARIO PUZO’S THE GODFATHER, CODA: THE DEATH OF MICHAEL CORLEONE (1990) 6:45 p.m. on Showtime. Should “The Godfather, Coda,” be considered a 1990 release, or a 2020 one? It’s both, really. This re-edited version of the “The Godfather Part III,” released last year, is more than a standard extended director’s cut: Revisiting the film three decades after its original release, the director Francis Ford Coppola tweaked the opening. And the ending. And a lot of material in between, too. The changes are meant to sharpen a trilogy-capping movie that never managed the kind of acclaim that the original “Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II” did. Coppola had originally envisioned the film as “a summing-up and an interpretation of the first two movies, rather than a third movie,” he said in an interview with The Times last year. He had never wanted to use the “Part III” label in the first place. The title, he explained, “was the thread hanging out of the sock that annoyed me, so that led me to pull on the thread.”FridayDOING THE MOST WITH PHOEBE ROBINSON 11 p.m. on Comedy Central. The comedian Phoebe Robinson, known to many as one of the erstwhile co-hosts of the podcast “Two Dope Queens,” is on her own in hosting this new comedy series. Well, sort of: Each episode finds Robinson spending time with a different famous face. She goes horseback riding with the comic Whitney Cummings. She meets Kevin Bacon at a ropes course. The first season also includes appearances from the fashion designer Tan France, the model Ashley Graham, the comedian Hasan Minhaj, the actress Gabrielle Union and several other guests.AMERICAN MASTERS — OLIVER SACKS: HIS OWN LIFE (2021) 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Ken Burns and Lynn Novick are on PBS earlier this week with their new documentary, “Hemingway,” but on Friday night Burns’s younger brother, Ric Burns, gets a turn in the director’s chair. He’s the filmmaker behind this feature-length documentary, which profiles the neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, whose many explorations of the mind turned him into a best-selling author. Burns explores the life of Sacks, who died in 2015 at 82, through a “deftly edited mix of archival footage, still imagery, talking-head interviews and in-the-moment narrative,” Glenn Kenny wrote in his review for The Times. Kenny added that, “while the movie steers around the details of how post-fame Sacks became something of a brand, it beautifully presents a portrait of his compassion and bravery.”SaturdaySidney Flanigan in “Never Rarely Sometimes Always.”Focus FeaturesNEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS (2020) 5:45 p.m. on HBO Signature. A young woman takes a long journey to get an abortion in this latest movie from the filmmaker Eliza Hittman. The story follows Autumn (Sidney Flanigan), a 17-year-old who gets on a bus to New York City after being told that she needs parental permission to obtain an abortion in her home state, Pennsylvania. She’s accompanied by a cousin, Skylar (Talia Ryder), who helps her jump over the many hurdles along the way. The result is a film that “tells a seldom-told story about abortion,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. It does so, Dargis added, “without cant, speeches, inflamed emotions and — most powerfully — without apology.” She included it on her list of the 10 best movies of 2020.SundayBeulah Mae Donald, as seen in “The People v. the Klan.”CNNTHE PEOPLE V. THE KLAN 9 p.m. on CNN. After her son Michael Donald was killed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1981, Beulah Mae Donald successfully sued the hate group for $7 million, in what became a groundbreaking case. Her push for justice is at the heart of this four-part documentary series, which looks back at work by civil rights activists to dismantle the Klan’s power in the 20th century. The program ties those activists’ work to modern movements for justice.2021 BAFTA AWARDS 8 p.m. on BBC America. Chloé Zhao’s Oscars front-runner, “Nomadland,” and the British coming-of-age film “Rocks,” from the filmmaker Sarah Gavron, are the two most-nominated films at this year’s EE British Academy Film Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars. They lead a notably diverse slate of nominees, which comes after BAFTA’s voting rules were overhauled to address criticism of last year’s ceremony, when no people of color were nominated in the main acting categories and no women were nominated for best director. More
Ken Burns’s latest documentary, premiering Monday on PBS, traces the complicated connections between the person, the persona and the storiesOne of the more unsettling moments in “Hemingway,” the latest documentary from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, finds Ernest Hemingway, big-game hunter, chronicler of violence and seeker of danger, doing one thing that terrified him: speaking on television.It is 1954, and the author, who survived airplane crashes (plural) earlier that year in Africa, had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He agreed to an interview with NBC on the condition that he receive the questions in advance and read his answers from cue cards.The rare video clip comes after we’ve spent nearly six hours seeing the author create an image of virile swagger and invent a style of clean, lucid prose. But here Hemingway, an always-anxious public speaker still recuperating from a cerebral injury, is halting and stiff. Asked what he is currently writing about — Africa — his answer includes the punctuation on the card: “the animals comma and the changes in Africa since I was there last period.”It’s hard to watch. But it is one of many angles from which the expansive, thoughtful “Hemingway” shows us the man in full, contrasting the person and the persona, the triumphs and vulnerabilities, to help us see an old story with new eyes.Burns, whose survey of American history is interspersed with biographies of figures like Jackie Robinson, Mark Twain and Frank Lloyd Wright, might have taken on Hemingway at any time over the past few decades. But there is an accidentally timely aspect to many of his timeless subjects. His “National Parks” in 2009, for instance, came in time to echo the Obama-era battles over the role of government.Now “Hemingway,” airing over three nights starting Monday on PBS, comes along as American culture is reconsidering many of its lionized men, from figures on statues to Woody Allen. And there are few authors as associated with masculinity — literary, toxic or otherwise — than the writer who loved it when you called him Papa.It’s tempting to say that Hemingway’s macho bluster doesn’t hold up well in the light of the 21st century, but it didn’t go unnoticed in the 20th either. He embraced manliness as a kind of celebrity performance. He fought with his strong-willed mother, who accused him of having “overdrawn” from the bank of her love. He married four times, finding his next wife before leaving the previous one, wanting each to give herself over to supporting him.He clashed spectacularly with his third wife, the writer Martha Gellhorn (played in voice-over by Meryl Streep), who matched him well, maybe too well to last. A free spirit who resisted marriage at first, saying “I’d rather sin respectably,” Gellhorn would not sideline her ambitions for his. (You might find yourself wishing you were watching her documentary.)The writer Martha Gellhorn was the third of Hemingway’s four wives.John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and MuseumEventually he found a fourth wife, Mary Welsh, who wrote in her diary that he wanted his wives to be “completely obedient and sexually loose.” Hemingway wrote to his son about Gellhorn, “I made a very great mistake on her — or else she changed very much — I think probably both — but mostly the latter.” The journey that sentence takes is a short story in itself.But “Hemingway” also complicates the popular image of Hemingway as he-man woman-hater (or, at least, woman-dismisser) in his life and his work. Starting with his early childhood, when he mother enjoyed “twinning” him and his sister, dressing them identically as boys or as girls, the film argues that Hemingway had an “androgynous” mind-set that disposed him to inhabit male and female perspectives in his work. (He also, the film says, experimented with gender-switching role-play with his lovers.)“Hemingway” takes as a test case the story “Up in Michigan,” which ends with a date rape. It was controversial at the time; Gertrude Stein called it “inaccrochable,” like a painting unsuitable to be hung. But the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien unpacks how Hemingway’s raw, tactile prose centers the woman’s thoughts and sensations. “I would ask his detractors, female or male, just to read that story, and could you in all honor say this was a writer who didn’t understand women’s emotions and hated women?” she asks. “You couldn’t.”O’Brien is no one-sided Hemingway booster. (She dismisses “The Old Man and the Sea” as “schoolboy writing.”) But she is the M.V.P. of a group of literary commentators here that also includes Mario Vargas Llosa, Mary Karr and Tobias Wolff, all of whom help “Hemingway” do the difficult work of describing an internal creative process from the outside.The series lays out how Hemingway stripped away excess from his language so that the reader would supply the emotion and thus feel it more deeply. He was inspired by Paul Cézanne, who would repaint the same view to find new ways of seeing it. He admired Bach for his mastery of repetition and used the device to rhythmic, incantatory effect in his prose.To the usual Burns toolbox of photo pans and archival film, “Hemingway” adds typewriter imagery — keys hammering on pages like irons in a smithy — and animations of manuscript editing.Its most powerful device, though, is the author’s own words. As sometimes happens with Burns’s celebrity voice casting, I found Jeff Daniels as Hemingway distracting at times for his recognizable voice. But Daniels (like Hemingway, a Midwesterner) gives the passages of fiction and memoir a velvet punch.You have to convey the power of the writing, after all, to show how literature is still shaped by Hemingway’s ideas of clarity, of mortality, of gender. “He changed all the furniture in the room,” Wolff says. “And we all have to sit in it.”This is true whether we sit easily or not. “Can you separate the art from the artist?” is a heated and dogmatic argument these days. You must sever the two, in a spirit of see-no-evil, to preserve the precious product; or you must handcuff them together, so that any judgment of a life becomes the judgment on the work, and the work a forensic rap sheet against its creator.Hemingway with his children, from left, Patrick, Jack and Gregory. His big-game hunting and fishing contributed to his image of virile swagger.John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum“Hemingway” doesn’t separate art and artist. Hemingway didn’t either. He created a public “avatar” that sometimes overshadowed his work (and threatened to make him a self-caricature) and wrote his life into his art (sometimes with cruelty toward friends and peers). But the documentary also recognizes that life and art don’t always correlate neatly or simply.The resulting biography is cleareyed about its subject but emotional about his legacy. It celebrates his gifts, catalogs his flaws (which included using racist language in his correspondence) and chronicles his decline with the tragic relentlessness its subject would give to the death of a bull in the ring.The biggest compliment I can pay “Hemingway” is that it made me pull my “Collected Short Stories” off the shelf after years, to read his piercing, full-feeling work in a new light. This life story is not entirely a pretty picture. But to quote its subject, “If it is all beautiful you can’t believe it. Things aren’t that way.” More
#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Notebook‘Bridgerton’ Takes On Race. But Its Core Is Escapism.The Netflix hit departs from the homogeneous casting of most period drama, imagining an 18th-century Britain with Black royalty and aristocrats.Adjoa Andoh and Regé-Jean Page confer in an episode of the Netflix series “Bridgerton.”Credit…Liam Danniel/NetflixJan. 5, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ET“We were two separate societies divided by color until a king fell in love with one of us,” the quick-witted Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh) tells her protégé, the Duke of Hastings. “Look at everything it is doing for us, allowing us to become.” She insists, “Love, Your Grace, conquers all.”Appearing in the fourth episode of “Bridgerton,” the first series produced by Shonda Rhimes as part of her powerhouse Netflix deal, this conversation between the show’s main Black characters is the first explicit mention of race in a story that revolves around the duke, a Black man named Simon Basset (Regé-Jean Page), and his passionate courtship of Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor), the eldest daughter in the wealthy, white and titled Bridgerton family.The show’s casting diversity is its most immediately striking quality, not just in Black aristocratic characters like the duke and Lady Danbury, but also in the entrepreneurial Madame Genevieve Delacroix (Kathryn Drysdale) and the working-class couple Will and Alice Mondrich (Martins Imhangbe and Emma Naomi). All of them are central to the complicated social caste system that make up the show’s version of early 1800s London.“Bridgerton” is not Rhimes’s first dalliance with a multiracial cast in a British period drama. In 2017, she produced “Still Star-Crossed” on ABC, a story that began after the deaths of Romeo and Juliet and focused on their cousins Benvolio Montague and Rosaline Capulet, who were forced to marry in order to heal the family rift. Though Benvolio and Rosaline are intentionally cast as a interracial couple, race was neither a point of contention nor grist for social commentary. Instead, viewers were asked to suspend our contemporary racial perceptions in order to accept the colorblind Verona of the past. (This strategy, among others, was largely unsuccessful — “Still Star-Crossed” was canceled after only one season.)“Bridgerton” is set in an early 19th century Britain ruled by Queen Charlotte, who is portrayed by Golda Rosheuvel.Credit…Liam Daniel/NetflixIn contrast, the characters of “Bridgerton” never seem to forget their blackness but instead understand it as one of the many facets of their identity, while still thriving in Regency society. The show’s success proves that people of color do not have to be erased or exist solely as victims of racism in order for a British costume drama to flourish.Chris Van Dusen, the “Bridgerton” showrunner, was a writer on Rhimes’s “Grey’s Anatomy” before going on to be a co-executive producer on “Scandal,” a show that both recognized but did not entirely revolve around the interracial tensions of Olivia Pope’s romantic relationships. Applying that same approach to his adaptations of Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton novels, Van Dusen places us in an early 19th century Britain ruled by a Black woman, Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel).“It made me wonder what that could have looked like,” Van Dusen told The New York Times in a recent feature about the show. “Could she have used her power to elevate other people of color in society? Could she have given them titles and lands and dukedoms?”Such a move pushes back against the racial homogeneity of hit period dramas like “Downton Abbey,” which that show’s executive producer, Gareth Neame insisted was necessary for historical accuracy. “It’s not a multicultural time,” he said in a 2014 interview with Vulture. “We can’t suddenly start populating the show with people from all sorts of ethnicities. It wouldn’t be correct.”“Bridgerton” provides a blueprint for British period shows in which Black characters can thrive within the melodramatic story lines, extravagant costumes and bucolic beauty that make such series so appealing, without having to be servants or enslaved. This could in turn create openings for gifted performers who have avoided them in the past.“I can’t do ‘Downton Abbey,’ can’t be in ‘Victoria,’ can’t be in ‘Call the Midwife,’” the actress Thandie Newton told the Sunday Times of London in 2017. “Well, I could, but I don’t want to play someone who’s being racially abused.” She went on, “There just seems to be a desire for stuff about the royal family, stuff from the past, which is understandable, but it just makes it slim pickings for people of color.”For all its innovations, “Bridgerton” has its own blind spots. I found it strange that it is only the Black characters who speak about race, a creative decision that risks reinforcing the very white privilege it seeks to undercut by enabling its white characters to be free of racial identity.Stephanie Levi-John plays a Black woman in Tudor England in “The Spanish Princess.”Credit…Nick Briggs/Starz, via Associated PressWhen Lady Danbury expresses her optimistic belief in the power of love, the duke is more circumspect, countering that Black progress is fragile and dependent on the whims of whichever white king is in charge. But to actually see narrative evidence of this precariousness, you have to turn to other recent British period dramas that featured integral Black characters, like “The Spanish Princess” and “Sanditon.”Taking place in Tudor England, “The Spanish Princess” on Starz features Stephanie Levi-John as a Black woman named Lina who came to England as Catherine of Aragon’s lady-in-waiting. Based on an actual historical figure, the show thoughtfully fictionalized her struggle between her loyalty to Catherine and her love for her Moorish husband, Oviedo, and their twin boys as xenophobia rises throughout the kingdom, and Catherine’s marriage to King Henry VIII unravels.The series is set in the 16th century during a historical epoch in which slavery and race were not inextricably linked to each other. Here, Lina’s brown skin merely indicates her foreignness rather than marks her oppression, giving us insight into how such differences were interpreted and experienced before anti-Black racism was codified in Europe (and the Americas) as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.By the time we reach the early 19th-century world of PBS’s “Sanditon,” however, the long arm of the slave trade has reached the British seaside resort of the title. Adapted by Andrew Davies from an unfinished novel by Jane Austen, “Sanditon” expands the story of Miss Georgiana Lambe, Austen’s first Black character. Described briefly (and offensively) in the manuscript as a “mulatto” born to a white slaveholding father and enslaved Black mother in the British colony of Antigua, Georgiana in the series is an heiress, played by Crystal Clarke, whose wealth and exotic beauty make her the most sought after young woman in England’s south coast. Ultimately, I found Georgiana’s rarefied status to be the show’s biggest representational challenge: As I reveled in her splendor, I also found myself forgetting the enslaved labor that created it.Crystal Clarke as Georgiana Lambe in “Sanditon,” a series adapted from an unfinished novel by Jane Austen.Credit…Simon Ridgway/PBSBut racial trauma remains. Despite the attention that she receives, Georgiana is ultimately alienated in England because of her race, an experience that I found more realistic than Marina Thompson’s (Ruby Barker), another biracial debutante who also finds herself alone at court in “Bridgerton.”Other complex portrayals of Britain’s participation in the slave trade can be found in Amma Asante’s standout 2013 movie “Belle,” or in Pippa Bennett-Warner’s character on Hulu’s “Harlots,” who lives as a free but formerly enslaved Black woman in London in the 1780s.I’m also looking forward to the mini-series “The Long Song,” debuting later this month on PBS. Based on Andrea Levy’s novel of the same name, it unfolds at the dawn of emancipation in Jamaica in the 1830s. It is another story of England and the central role its Black subjects played in building its wealth and grandeur under King George and Queen Charlotte’s rule, though we’ll probably see far fewer corsets and society balls.By avoiding both slavery and the fervent British abolition movement that flourished in London in the early 19th century, “Bridgerton” ultimately opts for “Downton” escapism over a nuanced exploration of real-time racial dynamics, mostly relegating such aspects to the story’s past. In flashbacks we learn that the first Duke of Hastings was ruinously consumed by his newfound status, demanding, to the point of verbal abuse, absolute perfection from his wife, who dies in childbirth, and his son, who stutters as a child. (Shades of Papa Pope of “Scandal,” who once admonished his daughter, “You have to be twice as good as them to get half of what they have.”)With more seasons presumably to come, given the show’s popularity, I’m curious how far “Bridgerton” is willing to depart from Quinn’s novels in order to fill in the worlds of its other Black characters, especially Black women like Lady Danbury, Queen Charlotte and Madame Delacroix. They are the show’s most intriguing characters and they remain mostly unexplored — will they eventually be afforded as much complexity as the duke? As Daphne’s entire family?In a society in which gender and sexual mores dominate the actions and attitudes of all its characters, I want to see how these women learned to navigate those same structures differently shaped than everyone else. Because despite Lady Danbury’s beliefs that love conquers everything, I could not help but think that history ends up validating the duke’s skepticism and his sense that Black progress is always a fragile thing.But who knows? Maybe if I knew how Lady Danbury or Queen Charlotte came to be, I’d be so convinced that I’d finally be able to revel in a past that I haven’t quite seen myself in before.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More
#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHow the Networks Will Fill Airtime on a Quiet New Year’s EveIn a typical year, shots of raucous parties from around the world dominate news programming. This year, the networks had to get more creative.Times Square will be emptier than usual for New Year’s Eve this year, but TV networks are doing their best to fill the gaps with extra live performances and creative thinking.Credit…Michael M. Santiago/Getty ImagesDec. 30, 2020[Follow our New Year’s Eve live coverageWhat becomes of Times Square when you take away hundreds of thousands of cheering, shivering New Year’s Eve revelers?It may no longer be the “biggest, most exciting New Year’s Eve party on Earth.” But it may still be the night’s biggest TV production set.For this year’s pandemic New Year’s Eve, many television traditions will be scrapped, including the scenes of raucous celebrations across the world and impromptu interviews with exuberant party goers at bars and clubs, eager to say hello to their mothers and grandmothers back home.Instead, networks are doubling down on the segments that they can safely pull off. They’ve increased the number of performers and interview guests, decreased the number of crew members and brainstormed creative — and socially distant — locations to send their reporters to. (Instead of reporting from a crowd of partyers, for example, one CNN correspondent will report from a crowd of puppies, which are not known to spread the coronavirus.)So while the type of people who enjoy cramming themselves into crowds of strangers to watch the ball drop may be disappointed this year, the type that prefers to curl up and celebrate from their sofas will find their tradition largely intact.“In some respects it’s going to feel very similar to previous years,” said Meredith McGinn, an executive producer of NBC’s New Year’s Eve program, which is hosted by Carson Daly. “You will see the same confetti fly at midnight; you will see the ball drop.”But, like most things in 2020, there were some necessary adjustments.“Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” on ABC will send Ryan Seacrest roaming around a much emptier Times Square with a camera crew in tow — wearing a mask except when standing in designated areas. And CNN’s hosts, Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen, will reunite in Times Square for an evening of interviews and cheeky ad-libbing. (The hosts are close friends who have been in each other’s social “bubbles” during the pandemic.)This year, the Times Square camera crews and riggings are confined to a space between 45th and 47th Streets. It usually stretches from 41st to 59th.Credit…Carlo Allegri/ReutersIn a typical year, Cooper and Cohen invite interview guests up to their riser overlooking the crowds; this year, the network will superimpose images of the guests’ full bodies beside the hosts in a technique that they will jokingly call “teleportation.” On NBC, rather than cutting to raging parties, the network will broadcast small family gatherings from inside their homes. Even the Times Square production set is smaller: While it typically stretches from 41st Street to 59th Street; this year it is limited to a space between 45th Street and 47th Street.“We had to reinvent Times Square,” said Jeff Straus, the president of Countdown Entertainment, which co-produces the event with Times Square Alliance. He described the set up as a theater in the round, with two stages at the center. Three huge screens will provide close-ups of what’s happening onstage for the small number of guests.Emergency medical workers, frontline workers and essential workers were invited to bring their families to sit in specially designated areas in Times Square and watch the array of performances. In total, somewhere between 100 and 160 guests are expected to be present for the 11 scheduled musical acts, including a seven-minute show by Jennifer Lopez leading up to the final countdown. Those guests will be the subjects of the on-camera interviews, rather than the partyers among dense crowds of people, some of whom wait in Times Square for a dozen or more hours to ensure good spots.To pull off the broadcast, networks must follow state guidelines on pandemic television production, as well as protocols set by the various unions representing the crews and performers. They’ve devised plans for testing production staffers for Covid-19 before New Year’s Eve and for feeding production staffers without letting them get too close to one another. (NBC rented additional space in Times Square to make sure crew members could eat and maintain proper distance.)On Thursday, network employees will work from separate locations when possible. The director of “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve,” Glenn Weiss, is overseeing the broadcast from his office on 46th Street instead of in the “Good Morning America” studio at Broadway and 44th Street. And NBC cameras are stationed on the third floor of the Renaissance New York Times Square Hotel, where the network had to remove some of the hotel’s windows so that bird’s-eye-views of the event would not be hindered by glare.All of the acts at Times Square will be live, including performances by Lopez, Gloria Gaynor, Billy Porter, Cyndi Lauper and Pitbull. Many other performances will occur on stages outside of New York — including those by Brandy, Megan Thee Stallion and Miley Cyrus, all from Los Angeles, for ABC.The networks have lined up more pretaped material than usual, however. (Most have not said which of the performances were filmed in advance.)Highlights of PBS’s prerecorded New Year’s Eve programming include an opening performance of “Lady Marmalade” by Patti LaBelle.Credit…Dan Chung/Mount Vernon Ladies’ AssociationOn PBS, a New Year’s Eve program, called “United in Song,” was filmed in November at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and in September at George Washington’s Virginia estate in Mount Vernon, where about 120 audience members watched from a distance and masked violinists were separated from unmasked brass players with plexiglass. NBC is showing a new Blake Shelton music video. Spectrum News NY1 will roll a highlight reel of its reporter Dean Meminger’s flashy New Year’s Eve suits over the years.And networks are getting creative in other ways to fill the holes formerly filled by crowd shots and partyers. CNN will have one correspondent getting a tattoo, another skiing down an Oregon slope wearing a GoPro and an appearance from Carole Baskin of “Tiger King” fame.With the pandemic driving people away from bars and restaurants and toward their living rooms, executives say it’s possible that there will be more viewers than ever before. ABC, which tends to have the highest viewership on the holiday, peaked last year at about 21 million viewers, according to news reports.“I can never predict what the Nielsen gods will bring,” said Mark Bracco, an executive producer on ABC’s program, “but we’re hopeful that most Americans will be home on their couches.”In a year in which more than 338,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus, viewers may notice a tonal shift compared with the goofy — and sometimes tipsy — coverage of years past. The Champagne popping and 2021 eyeglasses will be interspersed with appreciations of health care workers and emergency medical workers, as well as reflections on the lives lost and the economic hardship.On ABC, Seacrest will interview President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his wife, Jill Biden, a rare political interview of someone other than the New York City mayor.And on PBS, an opening performance of “Lady Marmalade” by Patti LaBelle in a gleaming white suit opens the hour-and-a-half program that includes more serious notes, including a monologue from the actress Audra McDonald about trailblazing women throughout history and from the playwright and actress Anna Deavere Smith about the history of the slave cemetery at Mount Vernon as she walks through those grounds. On CNN, John Mayer is slated to perform a tribute to lives lost this year out of Los Angeles.“We’re all going to be celebrating the end of this horrific year,” said Eric Hall, the executive producer of CNN’s program, “and we’re also going to be celebrating the beginning of what looks to be a hopeful year.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More
