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      Can Japan’s First Same-Sex Dating Reality Show Change Hearts and Minds?

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      Producers of “The Boyfriend” on Netflix hope it will encourage broader acceptance of the L.G.B.T.Q. community in Japan, which still has not legalized same-sex unions.Japan is the only country among the world’s wealthiest democracies that has not legalized same-sex unions. Few celebrities are openly gay. Conservative groups oppose legislative efforts to protect the L.G.B.T.Q. community.But now, Netflix is introducing the country’s first same-sex dating reality series.Over 10 episodes of “The Boyfriend,” which will be available in 190 countries beginning on July 9, a group of nine men gather in a luxury beach house outside Tokyo. The format evokes Japan’s most popular romantic reality show, “Terrace House,” with its assembly of clean cut and exceedingly polite cast members, overseen by a panel of jovial commentators.The vibe is wholesome and mostly chaste. The men, who range in age from 22 to 36, operate a coffee truck during the day and cook dinner at night, with occasional forays outside for dates. One of the biggest (among very few) conflicts of the series revolves around the cost of buying raw chicken to make protein shakes for a club dancer who is trying to maintain his physique. Sex rarely comes up, and friendship and self-improvement feature as prominently as romance.In Japan, the handful of openly gay and transgender performers who regularly appear on television are typically flamboyant, effeminate comic foils who are shoehorned into exaggerated stereotypes. With “The Boyfriend,” Dai Ota, the executive producer, said he wanted to “portray same-sex relationships as they really are.”Mr. Ota, who was also a producer of “Terrace House,” which was made by Fuji TV and licensed and distributed globally by Netflix, said he had avoided “the approach of ‘let’s include people who cause problems.’”“The Boyfriend,” he said, represents diversity in another way — with cast members of South Korean, Taiwanese and multiethnic heritages.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Anything Can Happen, and Usually Does, on ‘Watch What Happens Live’

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      Two miniature horses, Aidan and Pearl, stood on the terrace of a tiny TV studio in SoHo earlier this month on a sweltering evening, one more equine guest than the producers of “Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen” anticipated. They were part of a bit for taping the late-night talk show’s 15th anniversary special and, apparently, booking a horse requires also booking it an emotional support horse.Andy Cohen, the show’s host and creator, brought his two children Ben, 5, and Lucy, 2, to meet the mini horses as producers whispered questions about the surplus. He soon headed back inside to provide emotional support of a different kind for the show’s humans. Gliding effortlessly between posing for photos with guests, including Sonja Morgan, a mainstay of “The Real Housewives of New York” who arrived in a diamond-studded (she said they’re fake) tiara, Cohen listened to instructions from his producers while also recording behind-the-scenes footage for social media.It was a lot of wrangling, even for Cohen — the core moderator and pot-stirrer of “W.W.H.L.,” the recap show that somehow manages to lure A-list celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Jennifer Lawrence to marvel at the antics of the stars in Bravo’s ever-expanding reality universe. Five nights a week, viewers can see Oscar-winners re-enact scenes from “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City”; so-called Bravo-lebrities dish about just-aired dirty laundry; or Cohen and Hillary Clinton drink from a shotski, a ski with shot glasses glued to it that allows multiple people to simultaneously knock one back.Cohen backstage with Bravo cast members (and Jerry O’Connell).Hunter Abrams for The New York TimesThe show, and the reality TV universe it obsesses over, delight in outrageous behavior that is under scrutiny as Bravo currently faces multiple lawsuits. Former cast members from several series accused the network and producers of racial discrimination, running an alcohol-fueled workplace and failing to respond properly to reports of harassment and assault. After an internal investigation, the network said it cleared Cohen of claims made against him by two former Housewives, including those detailed in a lawsuit from a former cast member who said the show’s producers had encouraged her to relapse to boost ratings. Cohen also apologized for sending one former cast member a video message that she said constituted sexual harassment.Many of the regular bits on “W.W.H.L.” are related to alcohol: Each episode begins with Cohen revealing a word of the night for viewers to drink to every time it’s uttered; each ends with him encouraging the audience to drink responsibly. Regardless, Cohen and his team maintained that drinking on set was optional and not essential to the show.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: ‘Cue the Sun!’ by Emily Nussbaum

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      CUE THE SUN! The Invention of Reality TV, by Emily NussbaumThere are times when Emily Nussbaum’s passionate, exquisitely told origin story, “Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV,” feels like something of a Trojan horse.Her expansive analysis begins with a simple proposition: an argument for why a genre that includes series like “The Dating Game” and “Alien Autopsy” deserves a book-length history in the first place.For Nussbaum, industry terms like “unscripted series” don’t quite encompass all the pop culture ground these shows negotiate. Instead, she settles on the phrase “dirty documentary” to cover a wide swath, describing a history that kicks off with the pioneering prank show “Candid Camera” in the 1940s, progresses to irreverent TV series like “The Gong Show” and “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” and eventually explodes into modern TV megahits like “Survivor,” “Big Brother” and “The Bachelor.”With muscular prose and an exacting eye for detail, Nussbaum, a staff writer for The New Yorker, outlines how such shows united high and low art into a potent concoction, ranging from “celebreality” soap opera to grand social experiments that explore romance, competition and ethics. Their secret sauce: placing people in contrived situations to spark entertaining, telegenic, revelatory behavior — often through conflict or embarrassment.“It’s cinéma vérité filmmaking that has been cut with commercial contaminants, like a street drug, in order to slash the price and intensify the effect,” Nussbaum writes. The result is “a powerful glimpse of human vulnerability, breaking taboos about what you were allowed to say or see.”The book culminates in one of America’s most persistent rule breakers, Donald Trump, documenting how the creator and executive producer Mark Burnett built NBC’s “The Apprentice” into a success that burnished the reputation of the playboy tycoon, resulting in “the most sinister outcome.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How ‘Couples Therapy’ Gets People to Go There

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      The Showtime series gives audiences an intimate look inside real relationships. Its couples are still navigating the aftermath.One night after a blowout fight with his fiancée, Josh Perez was lying in bed, typing silently on his phone.He was searching for contacts for the producers behind “Couples Therapy,” a documentary series he and his fiancée began watching during the pandemic. The show, which follows real couples in the New York area as they undergo about five months of therapy, had become a conduit for having difficult conversations about their own relationship. Perez hoped that being selected for the show could help them even more.Months later, Perez and his fiancée, Natasha Marks, sat on a couch inside a soundstage in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint. Across from them, on a TV set built to look like a therapist’s office, was Orna Guralnik, the psychoanalyst and therapeutic maestro of “Couples Therapy.”“I guess if I was to sum up why we’re here,” Marks said, searching Perez’s face as she spoke, “we just recently had a little baby boy, and our emotional and physical intimacy, for a while, has taken a tank.”Across the show’s four seasons — the latest was recently released on Paramount Plus with Showtime — a total of 20 couples and one polyamorous trio have revealed the kind of intimacies that Marks shared for the dissection of Guralnik and, by extension, a national TV audience. Online, the show has an active fandom that probes its relationships as if trading gossip inside a friend group. The attention has left most of the show’s couples grappling with both anticipated and unexpected consequences of televised therapy.Orna Guralnik, the psychoanalyst and therapeutic maestro of “Couples Therapy.”Paramount+ with ShowtimeWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Nick Mavar, ‘Deadliest Catch’ Star, Dies at 59

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      Mr. Mavar, who ran a fishing operation in Alaska, starred in the reality television show for 16 years and captained his own boat.Nick Mavar, a commercial salmon fisherman known for his tenacity and resourcefulness who was also a deckhand on the Discovery Channel’s extreme fishing reality show “Deadliest Catch,” died on Thursday at a hospital in King Salmon, Alaska. He was 59.His death was confirmed by his wife, Julie (Hanson) Mavar. His nephew Jake Anderson said that Mr. Mavar had a heart attack on Thursday while on a ladder at a boatyard in Naknek, Alaska, where he ran his fishing operation, and fell onto a dry dock.He was pronounced dead at a hospital, Mr. Anderson said.The Bristol Bay Borough Police Department in Naknek confirmed that Mr. Mavar had died but declined on Friday evening to share additional details.“Deadliest Catch,” which follows crab fishermen on their strenuous and sometimes brutal job off the Alaskan coast, is one of the top-rated programs on basic cable, drawing millions of viewers.The show premiered in 2005, and Mr. Mavar appeared in 98 episodes, working on a fishing boat called the F/V Northwestern until 2021.Mr. Mavar left the show while filming an expedition in 2020 after his appendix ruptured, revealing a cancerous tumor, Mr. Anderson said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      West Wilson of ‘Summer House’ Discusses His First Taste of Infamy

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      When Mr. Wilson was accused on the reunion of misleading Ciara Miller, his castmate and former romantic interest, fan backlash was swift.When a 28-year-old unemployed journalist named Westling Wilson, who goes by West, was enthusiastically embraced by Bravo fans during his first season on the reality TV show “Summer House” this year, it made some wonder: Could he keep the good vibes going?Last week many viewers issued a resounding answer to that question: No. Over the course of the first episode of the “Summer House” reunion on Thursday, Mr. Wilson went, in some viewers’ eyes, from fan favorite to villain, due largely to the way he handled a breakup with his co-star, Ciara Miller.Ms. Miller, a 28-year-old nurse and model from Atlanta who has been on the show for several seasons, is known for not warming easily to new people, which made it all the more surprising when she and Mr. Wilson seemed to hit it off almost immediately.By the middle of the latest season, the two were cuddling, sleeping in the same bed at their shared Hamptons house and going on dates in New York City. Their will-they-or-won’t-they tension was a main story line, and audiences were fervently rooting for them to make it official.Their romantic fate wasn’t revealed until last week, when Mr. Wilson and Ms. Miller said in the first episode of a two-part reunion that, after several months of dating — during which Mr. Wilson took her to Missouri to visit his parents — he told Ms. Miller in December that he wasn’t ready to commit to a monogamous relationship.Fans were rooting for the relationship between Mr. Wilson and Ms. Miller, center, a nurse and model from Atlanta.BravoWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Alec and Hilaria Baldwin and Their 7 Children Get a Reality TV Series

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      “We’re inviting you into our home,” the actor, who is set to stand trial next month on an involuntary manslaughter charge, said as he announced a show about his family on TLC.Speaking with Alec Baldwin on his podcast last year, the talk show host Kelly Ripa made a pitch for him and his wife: “When I think about you and Hilaria and your seven young kids — now, I know what you’re going to say, but just go with me — this has reality TV written all over it,” she said.He didn’t dismiss the idea. In fact, he said the couple had already received pitches, and made one or two themselves.And on Tuesday, Baldwin, who is scheduled to stand trial next month on a charge of involuntary manslaughter in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the set of the film “Rust,” announced that a reality show featuring the couple and their “seven growing kids” would be coming next year to TLC. Its working title is “The Baldwins.”“We’re inviting you into our home to experience the ups and downs, the good, the bad, the wild and the crazy,” Alec Baldwin said in a video announcement with Hilaria that he posted to Instagram on Tuesday, interspersed with footage from inside their busy home.The announcement of the new show comes at a delicate time for Baldwin, 66, as he prepares to go on trial in New Mexico in the “Rust” shooting. Baldwin, who has pleaded not guilty in the case, has denied responsibility for the death of the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, who was killed when a gun that he was rehearsing with, which was not supposed to be loaded with live ammunition, fired a real bullet that struck her. Baldwin’s lawyers are continuing to seek the case’s dismissal, placing blame for the tragedy on the movie’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who was convicted in March of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 18 months in prison.Lawyers for Baldwin, who had a starring role in the western, have written in court papers that the tragedy has made it difficult for the actor to get work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Carl Radke of “Summer House” on His Broken Engagement and Sobriety

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      From getting sober, grieving the loss of his brother and calling off his engagement, Radke has let viewers in on the most intimate moments of his life.The first time Carl Radke appeared on television screens was during an episode of “Vanderpump Rules” that was actually a backdoor pilot for a new Bravo show, “Summer House.”In the episode, Radke is 29, working in New York City and drinking copiously on the weekends in a Hamptons share house with his friends Kyle Cooke, Lindsay Hubbard and a few others.The spinoff became a Bravo phenomenon all its own, one that has now spanned eight seasons, with Radke one of the few constants as the cast around him changed. Viewers have seen his tumultuous 30s play out onscreen: He has been in messy relationships, confronted his drinking and gotten sober, mourned the death of his brother and, in the Season 8 finale, called off his engagement.Over coffee in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where at 6 feet 5 inches tall Radke was certainly the tallest person in the room, he imagined his life if it hadn’t been spent in front of cameras for the past several years. “I feel like I would probably be married and have a family, but living a very, like, a lower key life,” he said, before going through some of the moments that have defined his time on “Summer House” so far.Radke and Cooke in the early days of “Summer House.” Eugene Gologursky/BravoThe early seasons: drinking, drinking, more drinkingThough many Bravo reality shows involved quite a bit of drinking (look no further than early seasons of “Vanderpump Rules”), Radke, Cooke and Hubbard were known to make others look like lightweights.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More