Reality Television

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      ‘The Ultimatum: Queer Love’ Is a TV Rarity With Familiar Drama

      by

      Netflix’s latest dating reality show hit, which wrapped up on Wednesday, broke ground by focusing exclusively on queer and nonbinary couples.The finale of Netflix’s latest dating show hit, “The Ultimatum: Queer Love,” arrived on Wednesday after weeks of partner swapping that amounted to a milestone in romantic reality television: The first of the genre’s marriage contests that focused exclusively on queer couples.Like its predecessor, “The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On,” from last year, “The Ultimatum: Queer Love,” which premiered in May, follows couples who don’t agree about their future together (one wants to get engaged; the other is not ready). So they agree to split up and live with new partners for a few weeks in front of the cameras. After meeting, dating and committing to a “trial wife,” the original couples reunite to live together as married, also for a few weeks. Then, after eight episodes worth of soul-searching, they must decide whether to get engaged, end the relationship or leave with their “trial wife” — the “ultimatum” of the title.“I feel like we’re at a lesbian club, and all our exes are here,” a castmate named Tiff Der joked in the first episode, sitting by the compound’s firepit surrounded by Der’s partner-turned-ex (for the purposes of the show), Mildred Woody, and the eight other contestants they each went on short dates with that day.In the same scene, another contestant, Vanessa Papa, suggests the cast all have a “polyamorous orgy,” drawing head shakes and nervous laughter from the others. By that point, Papa was interested in both Lexi Goldberg and Rae Cheung-Sutton while her ex, Xander Boger, was hitting it off with someone else’s former partner nearby.Same-sex marriage became federally recognized eight years ago, and it’s taken that long for L.G.B.T.Q. people to get their own dating show focused on love and commitment — though a number of queer-inclusive reality shows have demonstrated an appetite for such series. In earlier such shows, like the bisexual-themed competition “A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila” (2007) and the all-pansexual season of MTV’s “Are You The One?” (2019), the focus was on the competition, not on lifelong commitment. In “Queer Love,” which wrapped up Wednesday with a final episode and reunion special, the only prize is the clarity gained from such an experiment, the first in which men are not potential partners.“The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On” hadn’t aired yet when the cast of the spinoff began filming, so the five couples who appeared in “Queer Love” had little sense of how the show would unfold. All they had to go on was the track record of the show’s production company, Kinetic Content, which is also behind the Netflix reality hit “Love is Blind,” as well as the long-running “Married at First Sight,” on Lifetime in recent years.In many ways, “Queer Love” is reminiscent of any other marriage reality show — their struggles and triumphs with their partners (trial and otherwise) are not unlike those experienced by “Love Is Blind” competitors after they emerge from their pods and pair off. Commitment angst and the allure of potential new partners are reliable generators of the interpersonal drama that reality producers crave, no matter the makeup of the couples involved.“It was a real accurate representation of who I am and how I navigate the world,” said Mal Wright, left, with Yoly Rojas in “The Ultimatum: Queer Love.”Netflix
      Der and Woody had been in a breakup-makeup-breakup cycle for almost two years, Der said, when they were approached by a casting producer about participating in “Queer Love.”“I actually said no at first because I’m like, ‘Actually, we’re in a really bad spot right now, so I don’t think so, I’m sorry,’” Der said in an interview. “And then she goes, ‘No, actually that’s what we’re looking for.’”Goldberg said she was approached at just the right time in her relationship with her partner, Cheung-Sutton. “It was kind of this question of, do you have a relationship where one person is questioning or dragging their feet?” she said.As universal as relationship frustrations can be, “Queer Love” also captures the specific ways queer women and nonbinary people relate to one another — for example, spending time with one another’s exes, whether intentional or not, is common in such a small community. For straight viewers, the show serves as a kind of voyeuristic microcosm; for queer ones, it provides a more relatable analog to the messy behavior of heterosexual dating shows like “The Bachelor” or “Love Is Blind.”Cast members, who ranged in age from 25 to 42 when they filmed, said they were encouraged by the production’s general queer competency — several crew members on set were L.G.B.T.Q., including the director of photography — but some noted blind spots. Yoly Rojas, a first-generation Venezuelan immigrant, said she was excited to be “a brown Latina femme on television,” but she was disappointed that her partner, Mal Wright, was the only Black person in the cast.“I don’t think that’s a fair representation of the community,” Rojas said. “It just felt still a little bit whiter than what I would’ve liked.”Wright initially was concerned about being portrayed as an aggressor — a common TV fate for butch and more masculine-of-center women or nonbinary people. “I didn’t want to be portrayed in a way that wasn’t true to me,” Wright said.But after watching the full season, Wright, who uses they/them pronouns, felt reassured: “There was no angry trope that got attached to me,” they said. “So it was a real accurate representation of who I am and how I navigate the world.”One of the show’s stranger moves — and probably its most controversial one — was its choice of host. Nick and Vanessa Lachey co-host both “Love is Blind” and “The Ultimatum: Marry or Move On,” but for “Queer Love,” Netflix brought in the actress JoAnna Garcia Swisher, a star of its show “Sweet Magnolias.” When Garcia Swisher is revealed as the host in the first episode, the cast appears surprised. It is Papa who finally pops the question: “Are you queer?”“I just wanted to know,” Papa, a fan of Garcia Swisher’s recurring role on her favorite show, “Freaks and Geeks,” said in an interview. “But she’s not, which is also great because now you have this mix of a queer cast and then this religious married-to-a-man host, so it’s like two worlds converging.”Other cast members were confused by the choice.“It took me a minute to warm up with Joanna because I didn’t get it,” Rojas said. “There’s no correlation to anything gay or to anything queer — like, it made no sense. But she’s a really sweet person, as understanding as one can be as a straight woman. She did her best.”Chris Coelen, an executive producer of the show, said Garcia Swisher had the most important quality for a host: curiosity. “Is JoAnna queer?” he said. “No, she’s not. Does she need to be to do a good job on show? I don’t think so.”The show puzzled some cast members and viewers by hiring a straight host, JoAnna Garcia Swisher.NetflixViewers of the show called out the strangeness of the hosting choice on social media. But overall “Queer Love” has been well-received and highly memed — praised by writers and viewers for giving queer women and nonbinary people a chance to see their own relationships reflected on an enormous platform like Netflix.“It’s all pretty standard reality show stuff,” Emma Specter wrote in Vogue. “But I wonder what it would have meant for me to watch 10 queer people date, break up, cry, have fun and drink disgusting-looking cocktails out of weird chrome glasses on TV in high school, when there were approximately zero out queer people in my actual life.”For the “Queer Love” cast, their appearances on the show came with a feeling of responsibility to not embarrass communities that historically have been ignored or misrepresented on TV. Goldberg, the youngest castmate, said the weight of the contestants displaying themselves in such a public way was palpable from their first group gathering.“It was kind of this unspoken thing,” Goldberg said. “Not that the stakes were higher, but that the importance of being good representatives was something we should consider day in and day out.”“But it doesn’t mean we don’t get to have relationships and feel and cry and deal with problems the way they arise,” Goldberg continued. “It just meant we do have to remember that this is important, and that there will be a lot of people that watch this and that look to this as a sense of normalcy in queer relationships that maybe they just never knew before.”Coelen, the executive producer, hopes “Queer Love,” in both its relatability and specificity, “lowers barriers between people in some way.”“Because people are people,” he continued. “And, like the ‌cliché, love is love, you know?” More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      Anna Shay, Star of Netflix’s ‘Bling Empire,’ Dies at 62

      by

      A Los Angeles socialite and heiress to a defense contractor, she lived most of her life in private before joining a reality show.Anna Shay, an heiress and Los Angeles socialite who became a breakout star of the Netflix reality show “Bling Empire,” has died. She was 62.Her family confirmed her death to The Associated Press in a statement, which said the cause was a stroke. It was not immediately clear when or where she died.“It saddens our hearts to announce that Anna Shay, a loving mother, grandmother, charismatic star, and our brightest ray of sunshine, has passed away,” said the statement provided to The A.P. “Anna taught us many life lessons on how not to take life too seriously and to enjoy the finer things. Her impact on our lives will be forever missed but never forgotten.”“Bling Empire,” which ran for three seasons on Netflix starting in 2021, centered on wealthy Asian and Asian American fun seekers in Los Angeles and was billed as the real version of the movie “Crazy Rich Asians.” Ms. Shay appeared in 22 episodes, according to the Internet Movie Database.Jeff Jenkins, who produced the show and other reality hits like “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” praised Ms. Shay’s performance in an interview with Town & Country magazine in 2021.“I consider it a personal gift that she agreed to participate,” he said. “But it’s also a gift to everybody watching.”Ms. Shay’s presence on the show was that of a sometimes intimidating, but well-loved matriarch. “Anna is nice to people,” Guy Tang, another cast member, said in one episode, “but you cross her line, she’s going to cut you.”Born in Japan, Ms. Shay was the daughter of Ai Oizumi Shay, who died in 2015, and Edward Albert Shay, who died in 1995. Her parents moved the family to Los Angeles from Tokyo in 1968, according to several news reports.Her father founded the defense contractor Pacific Architects and Engineers, which she and her brother Allen Shay sold to Lockheed Martin in 2006 for an estimated $700 million.Ms. Shay said on the show that she had been married and divorced four times.“I always meet people and then we become friends and that’s it,” Ms. Shay said, adding that all four spouses brought adventure to her life. (She met one of them when she was learning to fly helicopters, she said). Getting ready for a blind date on “Bling Empire,” she said she was open to marrying a fifth time. Ms. Shay never publicly shared her spouses’ identities.She is survived by a son, Kenny Kemp. A full list of survivors was not immediately available.Ms. Shay in a scene from “Bling Empire,” which ran on Netflix for three seasons.Netflix/Netflix, via Associated PressAfter the news of Ms. Shay’s death, her co-stars and other friends expressed their grief and posted tributes on social media.“We spent most of the pandemic together, slaying it on Rodeo Dr., grocery shopping, making Japanese plum wine and doing silly things,” Kane Lim, a fellow cast member who said he forged an off-camera friendship with Ms. Shay, wrote on Instagram.“You had a nonchalance about you that was mesmerizing,” he wrote. “I was lucky to get to know the real you.”She was known on “Bling Empire” for her personal style, a love for cooking and cutting zingers. In her first scene, she is seen sledgehammering a wall in her closet while wearing a red ball gown and a sparkling diamond necklace. When a friend asked what she was doing, she dryly answered, “I’m fixing my closet.”Ms. Shay was always surrounded by a security detail, including at her vast estate in Beverly Hills, something she said she had been used to from an early age as a member of a wealthy family.“My father, he was extremely protective as I was growing up,” Ms. Shay said on the show.Even though she spent much of her final years in front of cameras, she remained somewhat of a mystery. “Anna Shay can reach you, but you can’t reach Anna Shay,” Kelly Mi Li, another “Bling Empire” star, said on a podcast last year.“She was something special,” Pep Williams, an art photographer in Los Angeles, wrote on Facebook. “We used to race Ferraris and Lamborghinis from Beverly Hills to Palm Springs. So many good times just hanging out at the house talking about life, cars, and photography.”This spring, Netflix canceled “Bling Empire” as well as its spinoff, “Bling Empire: New York.”Mostly, Ms. Shay exuded a sense of confidence among the gossip and drama that the reality show inspires. “I don’t feel this need to compete,” she said in one episode. “I find it fiercely annoying.” More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      Padma Lakshmi Is Leaving ‘Top Chef’ After Its 20th Season

      by

      The host said she wanted to concentrate on her new show, “Taste the Nation,” her writing and “other creative pursuits.”Padma Lakshmi announced on Friday that she was leaving the Bravo reality-competition juggernaut “Top Chef,” which she has hosted for 19 of the show’s 20 seasons, calling it a “difficult decision” made “after much soul-searching.”“I am extremely proud to have been part of building such a successful show and of the impact it has had in the worlds of television and food,” Lakshmi, who also serves as an executive producer on the show, said in a statement posted on her social media accounts.“Many of the cast and crew are like family to me, and I will miss working alongside them dearly,” she continued. “I feel it’s time to move on and need to make space for ‘Taste the Nation,’ my books and other creative pursuits. I am deeply thankful to all of you for so many years of love and support.”Lakshmi did not immediately responded to a request for comment on Friday. In an interview with The New York Times earlier this year, she discussed why she had decided to go on the show in the early days of reality television. “I liked how serious they were about the food,” she said. “It wasn’t about the cat fights and lowest common denominator.”At the time, she said, she figured that if nothing else, “Top Chef” would at least expose her to an audience of potential book buyers who did not yet know her work. “We had no evidence that this would be a huge pop culture phenomenon,” she said.Since 2006, the original “Top Chef” — there have been numerous international adaptations and spinoffs since — has traveled across the United States, filming seasons in Boston, New Orleans, Kentucky and Colorado, among other places. Each season brings together up-and-coming chefs who compete against one another in the hopes of winning cash prizes (and acclaim in the food world) and avoiding elimination — and the dreaded order to “please pack your knives and go.”Next week, Bravo will air the finale of Season 20 of “Top Chef.” The season, titled “World All-Stars,” has been based in London, and brought together winners, finalists and memorable competitors from “Top Chef” adaptations from around the world.In a statement to The Times, the food writer Gail Simmons, Lakshmi’s co-star and fellow judge on “Top Chef” (along with the restaurateur Tom Colicchio), said she is “so grateful for all the knowledge she shared and for the friendship that saw us through countless milestones both on and off camera.”“I could not have asked for a better host and partner in the job,” Simmons went on. “I’ll always admire her work ethic and how she paved the way for so many women and people of color across the many industries she touches. She is an important person not just in my career, but in my personal life, and will remain so. There’s no denying her impact on our show and she will be missed in our future ‘Top Chef’ adventures.”Colicchio did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Officials at NBCUniversal and Magical Elves, the production company for “Top Chef,” praised and thanked Lakshmi in statements which suggested that they planned to continue the program. “We will miss her on set at the judges’ table and as an executive producer, but we will remain forever grateful for her unwavering dedication to connecting with our cheftestants and Bravo’s viewers alike,” Casey Kriley and Jo Sharon, the co-chief executives of Magical Elves, said in a statement.Lakshmi, 52, an Indian-born model, author and activist, has been praised for imbuing the reality show with grace and humor, becoming the undeniable face of the franchise.Last month, Lakshmi’s other television show, “Taste the Nation,” aired its second season, on Hulu. On it, she travels the United States, exploring what it means to cook and eat in America.Also last month, she was featured in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, posing in a gold-coin bikini. “This is me,” she wrote alongside a video of the photo shoot that she’d posted on Instagram. “I wouldn’t go back to my 20s if you paid me all the money in the world.”Her first cookbook, “Easy Exotic,” was published in 1999. Since then, she has released several other books, including “Tangy, Tart, Hot & Sweet”; a memoir, “Love, Loss and What We Ate”; a reference guide called “The Encyclopedia of Spices and Herbs”; and a children’s book, “Tomatoes for Neela.”Brett Anderson More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      How the Last Writers’ Strike Changed Things Onscreen

      by

      The impact included promising shows that lost their audiences, films rushed into production with flimsy scripts and turbocharging reality programming.The 2007 writers’ strike couldn’t have come at a worse time for the screenwriter Zack Stentz. After three years of being unemployed, Mr. Stentz was happily ensconced in a new job as an executive story editor on Fox’s “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.” He was working with a high-caliber group of writers on a show he described as “dark, thoughtful and weird.”Before the strike, the staff had successfully completed nine episodes of the show, which tracked the aftermath of events depicted in the blockbuster film “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” When the hourlong drama debuted in January 2008, it earned solid ratings and a loyal fan base. Still, Mr. Stentz, who has gone on to write for series like J.J. Abrams’s “Fringe” and Greg Berlanti’s “The Flash,” believes the 100-day strike ultimately sealed the show’s fate: a truncated two-season, 31-episode arc.“It was heartbreaking because we felt like we were doing something really special,” said Mr. Stentz, who recalled the show’s budgets being slashed during the second season, after the extended break caused ratings to plunge. “The conventional wisdom on the show is that it was ahead of its time and if it would have come out in the 2010s, it probably would have been a much bigger success.”“The Sarah Connor Chronicles” is just one of many television shows and movies whose fate was altered by the last writers’ strike, which cost the Los Angeles economy $2.1 billion in lost revenue. Movies like the James Bond film “Quantum of Solace,” “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” and “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” were among those rushed into production with unfinished scripts.Daniel Craig acknowledged he rewrote scenes for the James Bond film “Quantum of Solace” while on set.Susie Allnutt/Columbia PicturesThings were so grim on “Quantum of Solace” that the star Daniel Craig later admitted to rewriting scenes himself while on set. The film’s director, Marc Forster, who declined to comment for this article, told the website Collider in 2016 that he considered quitting what was then his biggest budget movie to date.“At that time I wanted to pull out,” he said. “But everybody said, ‘No, we need to make a movie, the strike will be over shortly so you can start shooting what we have and then we’ll finish everything else.’”Not every project suffered because of the work stoppage. Take the series “Breaking Bad.” According to one of the show’s producers, Mark Johnson, the character of Jesse Pinkman, portrayed by Aaron Paul, was originally supposed to die in the final episode of the show’s first season.The strike, however, forced “Breaking Bad” to halt production after just seven episodes. And, Mr. Johnson recalled in a recent interview, once the show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, realized how well the character played against Bryan Cranston’s chemistry teacher-turned-drug dealer Walter White, he decided to let him live.Jesse Pinkman lasted the entire 62-episode run, and Mr. Paul won three Emmys. “Because of the strike, we learned a lot about the show,” Mr. Johnson said. (Others have said the decision to keep Mr. Paul’s character was made before the strike, though other key plot elements of the show were adjusted.)The strike halted production on the first season of “Breaking Bad,” allowing major changes to be made to the plot arc of the show.Doug Hyun/AMCThe entertainment industry of today is much different from what it was 15 years ago, of course, and all the lessons learned during the last strike may not be applicable. Broadcast networks have cut back on scripted programming. Streaming services aren’t obligated to assemble a fall schedule. The major film studios have said they have enough movies in production to keep releasing them at a steady pace through the middle of 2024.“The dynamics are different now,” said Kevin Reilly, a veteran television executive. “Really, the only choke point is that at a certain point your development pipe gets a little bit dry. But I don’t think that’s even a speed bump in the streaming world. It would have to go on for at least six months for that to really start to feel the pressure. The same at the box office.”Studios have been leaning heavily into this narrative over the past few weeks. Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-chief executive, told investors during the company’s first-quarter earnings that because of its “large base of upcoming shows and films from around the world,” the streaming giant “can probably serve our members better than most.” Paramount Global’s chief executive, Bob Bakish, also said that the strike would have little impact on the company’s business in the short term.“We do have many levers to pull and that will allow us to manage through the strike even if it’s an extended duration,” he said during the company’s post-earnings conference call.Companies have said they have enough content in the pipeline to withstand the strike, but a prolonged work stoppage could have unforeseen consequences.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesBut a prolonged strike could have unforeseen effects just the same. Just one week into the shutdown, television shows like Netflix’s “Stranger Things,” HBO Max’s “Hacks” and Apple TV+’s “Loot” have halted production.It remains unclear how the studios will adjust should the strike be prolonged. As one writer, Joe McClean (“Resident Evil: Vendetta”), noted from the picket line last week, the 2007 strike led to a renewed boom in reality TV shows, which are relatively inexpensive to produce and don’t need writers.“There’s a pretty nice thread that can show that the last writers’ strike led to Donald Trump becoming president,” Mr. McClean said, referring to “Celebrity Apprentice,” which debuted in January 2008 and intensified Mr. Trump’s already significant television presence. “Because we had no writers and no good content on television, that was where all of the viewers were going, and it just elevated his star.” More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      Under the Hollywood Spotlight, a Fading Welsh Town Is Reborn

      by

      A former industrial hub, Wrexham had long been in decline. Now, it’s reviving as the globally famous star of a reality series about its once forlorn soccer team’s rejuvenation.In the Welsh language, the virtually untranslatable word “hiraeth” (pronounced here-ayeth) describes a blend of nostalgia and longing for a time that can never be recreated.For Wrexham, a working-class town in northern Wales, it was a feeling that came to define a postindustrial malaise that descended in the 1980s as the last remaining coal mines shuttered their rickety gates and, later, the furnaces at the nearby steelworks ran cold.Only the beloved soccer club, Wrexham A.F.C., remained: the oldest team in Wales, a perennial also-ran but still an indomitable source of local pride.“We went through so much as a town,” said Terry Richards, 56, a lifelong fan of the club as he sat at home in the team’s bright scarlet jersey. “Those were difficult times.”Wales has its legends of heroes returning to save the day, but few could have predicted that an unlikely pair of Hollywood actors, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, would waltz into town just over two years ago and buy the ailing club. That set off a chain of events that catapulted the town out of the doldrums and into the international spotlight, casting the residents as the main characters in their own Hollywood reality show based around the soccer club, “Welcome to Wrexham.”Few could have predicted that the two famous actors would walk into the town in the first place. But Mr. McElhenney, an American who had binged on sports documentaries during lockdown, conducted an exhaustive search for a down-and-out soccer team with growth potential, landing on Wrexham A.F.C., and persuaded Mr. Reynolds to join him in his pet project.Players from Wrexham A.F.C. practice at the Racecourse Ground while crews from the documentary series “Welcome to Wrexham” film them.Mary Turner for The New York TimesAfter paying the bargain sum of around $2.5 million, they moved into town (the Canadian-born Mr. Reynolds even bought a house) and began overhauling the team’s operation. They revitalized the training facilities and upgraded the roster, offering comparatively enormous salaries that attracted established players from the upper levels of English soccer.Last Saturday, that Hollywood story finally got its very own Hollywood ending — the team’s promotion after its winning season into the English Football League, the next tier of England’s multilevel soccer pyramid, after a 15-year absence. As the referee blew the final whistle, generations of teary-eyed supporters leaped from the stands onto the rain flecked field in joyous celebration.In that moment, a town was reborn, and that lingering “hiraeth” was no more. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Hollywood, Both Frantic and Calm, Braces for Writers’ Strike

      by

      Studios have moved up deadlines for TV writers, and late-night shows are preparing to go dark. But for other segments of the industry, it’s business as usual.Writers scrambling to finish scripts. Rival late-night-show hosts and producers convening group calls to discuss contingency plans. Union officials and screenwriters gathering in conference rooms to design picket signs with slogans like “The Future of Writing Is at Stake!”With a Hollywood strike looming, there has been a frantic sprint throughout the entertainment world before 11,500 TV and movie writers potentially walk out as soon as next week.The possibility of a television and movie writers’ strike — will they, won’t they, how could they? — has been the top conversation topic in the industry for weeks. And in recent days, there has been a notable shift: People have stopped asking one another whether a strike would take place and started to talk about duration. How long was the last one? (100 days in 2007-8.) How long was the longest one? (153 days in 1988.)“It’s the first topic that comes up in every meeting, every phone call, and everyone claims to have their own inside source about how long a strike will go on and whether the directors and actors will also go out, which would truly be a disaster,” said Laura Lewis, the founder of Rebelle Media, a production and financing company behind shows like “Tell Me Lies” on Hulu and independent movies like “Mr. Malcolm’s List.”Unions representing screenwriters have been negotiating with Hollywood’s biggest studios for a new contract to replace the one that expires on Monday. The contracts for directors and actors expire on June 30.“I support the writers,” Ms. Lewis said. “It’s challenging, though. Just as we are starting to recover from the pandemic, we could be going into a strike.”In recent weeks, television writers have been racing to meet deadlines that studios moved up. Worried about the possibility of having no income for months, some TV writers have been trying to push through new projects — to get “commenced,” Hollywood slang for a signed writing contract, which typically brings an upfront payment.One prominent talent agent, who like some others in this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation, said there was a “mad rush” to complete deals before next week. Some writers began removing their personal possessions from studio offices in anticipation of a walkout.Likewise, studio executives began calling producers last week to tell them to act as if a strike were certain, and to make sure all last-minute tweaks were incorporated into scripts, so production on some series could continue even in the absence of writers on set. Executives have delayed production for other series until the fall in cases where they determined scripts were not entirely ready.The president of one production company said this week that she was “freaking out” over a TV project in danger of falling apart because the star was available only for a limited period and the script was not ready.The writers room for the hit ABC sitcom “Abbott Elementary” is supposed to convene on Monday — the day the contract expires.“I’m making plans to go back to work when we’re supposed to go back to work,” said Brittani Nichols, a producer and writer on the show. “And if that doesn’t happen, I’ll be at work on the picket line.”The last Hollywood writers’ strike began in 2007 and lasted 100 days.Axel Koester for The New York TimesIf there is a strike, which could begin as early as Tuesday, late-night shows, including ones hosted by Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, are likely to go dark. Late-night hosts and their top producers have convened conference calls to discuss a coordinated response in the event of a strike, much as they did during the pandemic.During the 2007 walkout, late-night shows went dark for two months before they began gradually returning in early 2008, even with writers still on picket lines. Jimmy Kimmel paid his staff out of his own pocket during the strike, and later explained that he had to return to the air because his savings were nearly wiped out.Mr. Kimmel and other hosts, like Conan O’Brien, gamely tried to put together shows without their writers or their standard monologues. Jay Leno, on the other hand, wrote his own “Tonight Show” monologues, infuriating the writers’ unions in the process.Though there’s plenty of uncertainty in TV circles, there are also segments of Hollywood where it has been business as usual.Executives at streaming services seemed to exhibit what one senior William Morris Endeavor agent called a “frightening, freakish sense of calm,” perhaps because they were betting that any strike would be short. Most streaming services have been under pressure to cut costs — even deep-pocketed Amazon Studios laid off 100 people on Thursday — and a strike is one quick way to do that: Spending would plummet as production slowed.“It could lead to notably better-than-expected streaming profitability,” Rich Greenfield, a founder of the LightShed Partners research firm, wrote to investors this month.At several movie studios, there is little sense of alarm, partly because a strike would have almost no impact on the release schedule until next spring. (The movie business works nearly a year in advance.) One movie agent said everyone in her orbit was preparing for the Cannes Film Festival, which begins on May 16 and will include premieres for films like “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” and “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the latest from Martin Scorsese. Many movie executives were also preoccupied with CinemaCon this week, a convention for theater operators in Las Vegas.“The writers’ process is like 18 months to two years away from movies’ hitting our cinemas, generally, so you wouldn’t see an impact for quite a while,” said John Fithian, the departing chief executive of the National Association of Theater Owners. “There is a whole lot of writing already in the can — or the computer — for projects the studios are putting into production.”At the Walt Disney Company, the largest supplier of union-covered TV dramas and comedies (890 episodes for the 2021-22 season), more immediate worries have been the focus. Disney began to hand out thousands of pink slips on Monday as part of an unrelated plan to eliminate 7,000 jobs worldwide by the end of June. The company made news again on Wednesday when it sued Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.During previous union walkouts, television networks ordered more reality programming, which does not fall under the writers’ unions jurisdiction. The long-running “Cops” was ordered during the 1988 strike, while the 2007-8 strike helped supercharge shows like “The Celebrity Apprentice” and “The Biggest Loser.”Paul Neinstein, co-chief executive of the Project X production company, which made the most recent “Scream” movie and Netflix’s “The Night Agent,” said there had been a huge increase in reality TV pitches over the last month, even though his production company was not known for making unscripted television.“All of a sudden everybody’s got a reality show,” he said. “And that to me feels very strike-related.” More

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Television

      ‘Indian Matchmaking,’ It’s Time to Break Up

      by

      The Netflix dating show claims that tradition can find love where modernity has failed. But all it does is reinforce age-old prejudices.“In India we don’t say ‘arranged marriage.’ There is ‘marriage’ and then ‘love marriage.’” Of all the platitudes — and she spouts a lot of them — issued forth by Sima Taparia, the self-anointed top matchmaker of Mumbai and breakout star of Netflix’s “Indian Matchmaking,” none land more true than this one. It’s not as if finding husbands and wives for unpaired offspring hasn’t been a fixation of anxious parents across centuries and civilizations, even if in Europe and the United States, love may have finally entered the chat and stayed long enough to become unexceptional. But for older generations in India, parents’ finding spouses for their children has been the norm for so long that the idea of those same adult children’s marrying for “love” is still alien enough for it to occupy an entirely separate category — now a reality-TV show.“Indian Matchmaking,” whose third season premiered on April 21, follows the immaculately coifed, highlighted and bejeweled Taparia as she steamrolls through the lives of unhappily single men and women of Indian origin mostly living in America. She promises to find them the spouses of their dreams, as long as they don’t dream for too much. The cast varies (with some fan favorites and villains occasionally brought back) but most are seemingly well-off young people, urbane and cosmopolitan, who run their own businesses and attend boutique workout classes. This season’s standouts include an emergency-room doctor named Vikash, whose god complex extends to referring to himself in the third person as Vivacious Vikash and performing solo dances to Hindi songs at his friends’ weddings (and allowing video of himself doing so to be broadcast on the show); he wants a tall Hindi-speaking girl because he’s really attached to Indian “culture.” There’s Bobby, the over-energetic teacher who performs a math-themed rap that ends with him snarling “mathematics, boiii” at the screen. Arti from Miami lists weekly visits to Costco as her hobby.The activities that these aspirant matchees choose for the dates they go on (wine tastings, yoga with baby goats) are straight out of gentrified Williamsburg. Interspersed in between these scenes are cameos from their stony-faced parents, astrologers dispensing sex advice, face readers, tarot-card readers and Taparia’s own peremptory admonishments reminding them that they’re never getting everything they want in a partner, so they better start lowering their expectations now.She promises to find them the spouses of their dreams, as long as they don’t dream for too much.That she has not yet made a single match resulting in marriage over the course of two seasons and 16 episodes has deterred neither Taparia herself nor the makers of the show from continuing this Sisyphean journey into a third. She is not one to suffer from impostor syndrome or even, apparently, introspection, so her matchmaking methodology remains resolutely unchanged. The only big departure this time around is the expansion of her hunting grounds to Britain, where she commences her reign of terror in London by telling a 35-year-old divorcee named Priya that she “should not be so much picky.”To people like me, who grew up in this third-party matchmaking milieu, Sima Taparia or Sima Aunty (a nickname she gives herself) is just that — an aunty, an archetype we’ve known and avoided all our lives: the obnoxious and overbearing relative, neighbor or acquaintance with zero sense of boundaries. But to the global audiences who eagerly lapped up “Indian Matchmaking” during the early months of the pandemic, Taparia was a delightful novelty, in one moment tossing bon mots of conjugal wisdom with the serenity of an all-knowing sibyl (“You will only get 60 to 70 percent of what you want; you will never get 100 percent”) and in the next moment ordering a female client to get rid of her “high standards” with the brusqueness of a guidance counselor breaking it to an overzealous student that they’re not getting into Harvard.In India, the business of parents seeking brides and grooms for their children is a cruel and cutthroat one, having originated as a way to preserve caste endogamy.Throughout history, the coming together of two people in matrimony (holy or otherwise) has never been just about the union itself — it is the broader institution that reveals the deepest anxieties (financial, religious or racial) undergirding a society. “Indian Matchmaking” bills itself as just any other show about the caprices of trying to find love in a hostile world. It is predicated on the idea that seeking the help of someone as quaintly old-fashioned as a matchmaker is superior to the travails of dating online, where one must undergo far worse indignities like being ghosted or breadcrumbed. Here, at least, relationship expectations are mutual, and after all, what is a “biodata” (a curiously-named document Taparia uses in her practice) if not the same exaggerated dating-app profile but in résumé form and with fewer wince-inducing mentions about loving tacos and pizza.But in India, the business of parents seeking brides and grooms for their children is a cruel and cutthroat one, having originated as a way to preserve caste endogamy, and it continues to be fraught with violence from every side, a reality that is at odds with the show’s portrayal of the process as a decorous, civilized exchange that takes place over tea and manners. The most pernicious aspects are hidden behind a flimsy veneer of fabricated gentility, apparent in the many euphemistic phrases in which Taparia, the singles she is matching and their parents communicate. The show’s title itself reads like an awkward, faux-anthropological translation, when in reality, the Indian here in “Indian Matchmaking” is merely a stand-in for outrageously wealthy, landed upper-caste Hindus (with an exception here and there).Caste, one of the most malicious forces still dictating India’s social fabric, is gingerly intimated by low-voiced mumblings of “same community.” Openly declaring that you want to marry someone filthy rich would be uncouth, so the words “good family, good upbringing” are uttered frequently. Women cannot afford to be “picky.” Women have to be “flexible.” They must also learn how to “compromise.” My personal favorite of these, though, is “adjust,” one of the hardest-working euphemisms in Indian English, whose meaning linguistically can range from the squeezed addition of a third backside on a bus seat meant to fit only two, to a man’s parents’ demanding that the girl foredoomed to marry their son give up her professional career to pursue full-time daughter-in-law activities. Curiously enough, the men are spared the brunt of such exhortations.“In marriage, every desire becomes a decision,” remarked Susan Sontag in 1956, a strikingly trenchant line that I recalled when watching the show’s participants being quizzed about their “criteria” for a potential spouse. Initially, they start out reciting millennial-speak straight out of the 2012 twee-internet era: the desire for someone “kind” with a “sense of humor.” But upon further prodding, out come tumbling the real demands, the decisions that display that their modernity hasn’t yet overcome the inherited prejudices that govern this entire phenomenon. Costco-obsessed Arti cannot help mentioning that her father would have really, really, really loved for her to marry someone from her “community.” Vivacious Vikash, meanwhile, for all his insistence on Indian “culture,” forgot to specify that he wanted a Hindi-speaking girl from America (a “same community” of its own) and not the “very Indian” woman with the Indian accent that Sima Aunty found for him.Source photographs: NetflixIva Dixit is a staff editor at the magazine. Her previous articles include an appreciation of eating raw red onions and an exploration into the continued popularity of “Emily in Paris.” More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      Inside the Pods With ‘Love Is Blind,’ the Reality TV Juggernaut

      by

      SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — Peahens choose peacocks with more elaborate feathers, earthworms mate based on size, and baboons judge on hierarchy, but humans, as more intellectually evolved creatures, have been socialized instead to seek out love.For a tiny subset of the species, this mating ritual involves 10 days on a television set in Greater Los Angeles, where participants sit alone in 12-by-14-foot rooms listening to the disembodied voices of potential mates discuss such topics as their ideal number of offspring.That is the basis for “Love Is Blind,” the voyeuristic Netflix reality series built around buzzwords, booze and mild sensory deprivation that is set to release its Season 4 finale on Friday and air a live reunion special on Sunday. On the show, 30 singles sign up to date each other, separated inside these rooms — known as “pods” — with their conversations fed through speakers. They don’t see whom they’re talking to until they decide to get engaged — a commitment that also comes with a hastily arranged wedding where they can say “I do” or walk away.Pods are set up to film, hydrate and intoxicate contestants.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesIf it all sounds rushed, chaotic, a bit unhinged, the show’s creator, Chris Coelen, understands. Brandon Riegg, the Netflix executive who greenlighted the pitch about five years ago, described the idea with a synonym for bat guano, and he recalled telling Coelen that he would be lucky to get even one couple out of it.Despite the naysayers, Coelen felt confident that people would get engaged. After all, contestants on his show “Married at First Sight” had been marrying strangers for years.“People want to find love,” he said in an interview last month on the “Love Is Blind” set, where production was beginning on a new season, “and they’re willing to do some pretty wild things to find it.”The show premiered in February 2020, taking off as viewers were adjusting to their own versions of pandemic-mandated pod life, and has continued to captivate audiences. More than 30 million Netflix subscribers watched during the first four weeks after its premiere, the company reported, and Season 4, which kicked off in March, topped the previous seasons’ opening weekends by hours watched. Last year, according to Nielsen, “Love Is Blind” was the eighth most-watched original streaming series in the United States, ahead of “The Crown” and the “Lord of the Rings” spinoff “The Rings of Power.” Versions of the show based in Japan and Brazil have already been released, with U.K. and Swedish adaptations in the works.Kim Kardashian, Lizzo, Billie Eilish and Daniel Radcliffe are among the show’s celebrity fans, and contestants have built gigantic social media followings, with one married participant from Season 1, Lauren Speed-Hamilton, reaching 2.5 million followers on Instagram. The series has also fueled cottage industries on TikTok of amateur detectives digging into the contestants’ back stories and of therapists analyzing the relationship dynamics onscreen. At times, “Love Is Blind” has prompted musings on our fraying social fabric, with commentators declaring that the show “speaks to the state of modern romance” and “holds a mirror to a reality we’d rather ignore.”Shake Chatterjee, one of the contestants in the second season of “Love Is Blind.”Patrick Wymore/NetflixContestants don’t meet in person until they have gotten engaged.NetflixFor Netflix, its appeal was more fundamental. It matched the streamer’s ethos around unscripted programming, Riegg said: relatable and optimistic.“If you look at some of the most beloved and established unscripted franchises, they’ve been running for a very long time,” he added. “And I don’t think there’s any reason that ours can’t do the same.”‘Whatever happens, happens.’So how did “Love Is Blind,” with its absurd conceit, manage to position itself as the closest thing to “The Bachelor” for the cable-less generation?Coelen said it’s because the show puts it all out there, revealing contestants’ explosive dramatics and romantic indifference without coaxing anything out of them.Producers have included footage of one participant, Andrew Liu, appearing to apply eye drops to simulate tears for the camera after he was dumped in Season 3. One couple in the current season had enough of each other and split before they got to the altar. And when Shake Chatterjee, from Season 2, tried to suss out what his dates looked like by asking if he could feasibly carry them on his shoulders, the producers said they never considered intervening.The hosts are a married couple, Vanessa and Nick Lachey — the latter of whom was the subject of his own early-aughts reality series when he married Jessica Simpson. They rarely interact with participants, occasionally dropping in during the season and serving as therapist-like mediators during the reunions.“We just watch. We involve ourselves in nothing,” said Ally Simpson (no relation to Jessica), one of the show’s executive producers. During production, she sits next to Coelen in the control room, where they monitor as many as 10 dates happening simultaneously.Chris Coelen and Ally Simpson working behind the scenes. “We involve ourselves in nothing,” Simpson said.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesBut the concept of authenticity gets complicated when the location for the dates is a 68,000-square-foot studio next to an Amazon warehouse, where dozens of crew members zip around with walkie talkies and 81 cameras pan and zoom to catch every blush and giggle. (Contestants stay in hotels overnight, though the napping and cooking can sometimes make it appear as though they’re living on set à la “The Real World.”)Inside the two single-sex lounges where the singles congregate, the plants are plastic, a digital fire roars onscreen, and those metallic goblets that have become the show’s mascots are adhered to the shelves so that guests don’t knock them over.When Kwame Appiah, a tech worker who appears on the current season, says of a woman he has never seen, “I’ve just been smitten for a really long time,” he means six days.Then there’s the influencer industrial complex. In the three years since the show’s debut, cast members with new followings have promoted Smirnoff Spicy Tamarind vodka, Bud Light hard seltzer and Fenty lipstick, as well as yogurt and laxatives.When it comes to choosing a cast, the producers say they try to weed out those seeking social media fame or joining on a whim, but if such types slip into the roster, Coelen said, he believes they still tend to become invested in the process.“We build the machinery, and whatever happens, happens,” he said.A crew member affixes goblets to a shelf with mounting tape.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesThe contents of the fridge in the “men’s lounge.”Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesThe machinery starts with Donna Driscoll, the show’s head of casting, who has been with Coelen’s production company, Kinetic Content, since the second season of “Married at First Sight.” Interested singles apply online, but Driscoll’s team also seeks people out on social media and at bars, grocery stores and church groups.A third-party company conducts background checks and psychological evaluations, and the casting team creates what are called “compatibility grids,” a spreadsheet listing key characteristics, including the desire to have children. They are effectively trying to “stack the deck,” Coelen said, so that each person comes in with some compatibility, at least on paper, with others. (If love really is blind, it is also heavily vetted.)On the show, the contestants describe being at their wits’ end with dating norms of the 2020s, which tend to involve more swiping on touchscreens than IRL spontaneity.“My parents are like, ‘Why don’t you just go meet a guy at a bar?” said Chelsea Griffin, a speech-language pathologist from Seattle who is on the current season. “Who does that anymore?”Instead, with her phone confiscated, she met a guy at a production facility where a maze of dark hallways leads to pods and to a room where contestants sit for one-on-one interviews with a blurred backdrop positioned behind them.Coelen in the show’s control room.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesA camera inside the wall of one of the pods.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesAt the start of filming, budding romances begin with 10-minute speed dates, lengthening each day until the most lovestruck couples chat for hours, sometimes lingering until 3 a.m.“The rate at which you go in this experience, it’s hard for my mom to fathom. It’s hard for my brother to fathom,” Griffin said. “I could sit and try to articulate and explain the entire thing, and people still wouldn’t get it.”Members of the production team listen on headsets, logging moments like when someone says “I love you” or tears flow. They move contestant headshots around a bulletin board as they pair off and break up, like detectives on a crime procedural.At the end of the day, the contestants rank their dates on paper. The team then uses a variation on a Nobel Prize-winning algorithm, created by two mathematicians in the 1960s, to find a dating schedule in which everyone has matches. For the first four seasons, Simpson and Coelen organized the data by hand to determine the next day’s lineup of dates, but more recently, Simpson plugs the rankings into computer software.By day seven, the men are able to pick out engagement rings provided by the show. By day nine, after couples have typically spent about 30 total hours dating — albeit in separate rooms — some of them pop the question. If the answer is a yes, they finally meet.Then, it’s time to plan the wedding. Singles have been choosing among suitors they couldn’t see as far back as the 1960s (see “The Dating Game”), but “Love Is Blind” makes marriage its clear, televised conclusion.“You think about reality shows as being these zany, deviant enterprises, but when it comes right down to it, they promulgate some of our most conservative values,” said Danielle Lindemann, a sociologist who wrote a book about reality television. “Ultimately, this show is about heterosexual coupling that ends in marriage.”The lounge where male contestants gather between dates. On the show, contestants often describe being at their wits’ end with the norms of dating in the 2020s.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesSuccess, and scrutinyThe inherent limits of the show have opened it to critique. Though “Love Is Blind” might be more diverse than some reality shows in terms of race and body type, those selected for the “experiment” tend to be conventionally attractive heterosexual men and women in their 20s and 30s.Speed-Hamilton, who has gone on to co-host a podcast for Netflix about its reality series, accused the show last season of “cutting all the Black women” after the pods portion, adding that most of the couples seemed “forced” and only established “for entertainment purposes.”There have been other musings that this season of the show is falling into typical reality TV traps, zooming in on “mean girl” drama and casting people whose true intentions some viewers question. There have also been suggestions that the show has edited footage to ramp up the drama. Jackelina Bonds, a dental assistant from this season, wrote on Instagram that footage had been reordered so that it appears she went on a date before she broke up with her fiancé, when in fact, the date was afterward.Coelen said the production team works to portray the “accurate essence of each person’s journey.” He said the show focuses on building a diverse pool of participants from the start and chooses to follow the engagements that seem most genuine. Any “mean girl” behavior happened without their influence, he said.One of the most vocal skeptics of the show’s authenticity has been a former contestant, Jeremy Hartwell, who was not closely followed during his season. He filed a class-action lawsuit last year against Netflix and Kinetic Content, saying that the defendants cut off the cast from the outside world, plied them with unlimited alcohol and withheld food and sleep with the objective of leading the cast to make “manipulated decisions for the benefit of the show’s entertainment value.”Female and male contestants are kept separate throughout much of the filming of “Love Is Blind.”Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesThe crux of the lawsuit was an objection to the show’s payment structure at the time, which, the complaint said, involved a $1,000 stipend per filming week with a maximum of $8,000 in possible earnings. His lawsuit argued that the participants had been “willfully misclassified” as independent contractors rather than as employees who were entitled to minimum wage, overtime pay and various labor protections.Chantal McCoy Payton, a lawyer for Hartwell, declined to comment, citing the continuing litigation.Lawyers for Kinetic Content, which has said that the claims are without merit, asserted in court documents that Hartwell had been part of the show for only six days and did not qualify as an employee. Netflix lawyers argued that Hartwell had brought forward “extreme allegations” because he was “upset” about not being chosen by another contestant.Coelen declined to discuss the lawsuit, but his description of the show’s process was at odds with Hartwell’s claims.Daters are provided meals and can order food to the pods, he said, and while the alcohol supply is ample (the fridge in the lounge is stocked with champagne, beer, wine and hard seltzer), everyone decides for themselves whether they want to drink. There are two psychologists on the set, he noted, and the show offers to cover postproduction therapy for participants.Although the producers say they don’t interfere in relationships, Coelen, who is 54 and has been married for 16 years, said that they do suggest that the couples talk about important subjects like finances, parenting and religion, comparing the producers’ level of influence to Pre-Cana, a course for couples preparing to be married by the Roman Catholic Church. For instance, in Season 1, production team members encouraged one participant, Amber Pike, to tell her fiancé, Matt Barnett, that she had about $20,000 in student debt. The conversation did not go particularly well, but the pair got married anyway.“We really get invested in these relationships,” said Simpson, 45, who has been married for six years.Inside the single-sex lounges where the singles congregate, the plants are plastic and a digital fire roars onscreen.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesMembers of the production team listen to the contestants on headsets, logging moments like when someone says “I love you” or when tears flow.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesCoelen has tried to sell similarly gimmicky dating shows before. In 2017, his production company released an American version of a show called “Kiss Bang Love” in which singles met each other by kissing blindfolded. In “The Spouse House,” 14 singles bent on marriage moved in together. Both shows lasted only one season.With “Love Is Blind,” the numbers are starting to add up. From the first three seasons of the show, 17 couples came out of the pods engaged, six got legally married on the show, and four are still together.In an interview last month, Brett Brown, a design director at Nike whose marital fate will be unveiled Friday, said it is those early successes that keep viewers watching, curious to find out if this bizarre dating formula can spit out happy couples.Brown acknowledged that some participants might exaggerate their feelings in exchange for the global attention that comes with being a reality TV star.But not him.“I can only speak from my experience,” he said, “and I know that I was there for the right reason.”Susan Beachy contributed research. More