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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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      The Comfortable Problem of Mid TV

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      A few years ago, “Atlanta” and “PEN15” were teaching TV new tricks.In “Atlanta,” Donald Glover sketched a funhouse-mirror image of Black experience in America (and outside it), telling stories set in and around the hip-hop business with an unsettling, comic-surreal language. In “PEN15,” Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle created a minutely observed, universal-yet-specific picture of adolescent awkwardness.In February, Glover and Erskine returned in the action thriller “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” on Amazon Prime Video. It’s … fine? A takeoff on the 2005 film, it updates the story of a married duo of spies by imagining the espionage business as gig work. The stars have chemistry and charisma; the series avails itself of an impressive cast of guest stars and delectable Italian shooting locations. It’s breezy and goes down easy. I watched several episodes on a recent long-haul flight and they helped the hours pass.But I would never have wasted an episode of “Atlanta” or “PEN15” on in-flight entertainment. The work was too good, the nuances too fine, to lose a line of dialogue to engine noise.I do not mean to single out Glover and Erskine here. They are not alone — far from it. Keri Russell, a ruthless and complicated Russian spy in “The Americans,” is now in “The Diplomat,” a forgettably fun dramedy. Natasha Lyonne, of the provocative “Orange Is the New Black” and the psychotropic “Russian Doll,” now plays a retro-revamped Columbo figure in “Poker Face.” Idris Elba, once the macroeconomics-student gangster Stringer Bell in “The Wire,” more recently starred in “Hijack,” a by-the-numbers airplane thriller.I’ve watched all of these shows. They’re not bad. They’re simply … mid. Which is what makes them, frustratingly, as emblematic of the current moment in TV as their stars’ previous shows were of the ambitions of the past.What we have now is a profusion of well-cast, sleekly produced competence. We have tasteful remakes of familiar titles. We have the evidence of healthy budgets spent on impressive locations. We have good-enough new shows that resemble great old ones.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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      Ewan McGregor and Mary Elizabeth Winstead Check In to ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’

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      The first time that Ewan McGregor and Mary Elizabeth Winstead shot a scene together, they were in a bathtub, mostly naked. McGregor, in a maximally unflattering wig, was sticking his gut out as far as it would go.“You were just trying to be as grotesque as you could be,” Winstead said affectionately.This was on a recent afternoon in the chilly basement of a midtown hotel where McGregor and Winstead perched on a love seat, his jacket over his shoulders, his hand on her knee. They met in 2017, on the set of the third season of “Fargo,” co-starring as Ray Stussy, a hapless parole officer, and Nikki Swango, his grifter sweetheart. (McGregor also played Emmit Stussy, Ray’s twin.) Two years later, in 2019, they filmed “Birds of Prey” but did not share scenes. They are also both participants in the “Star Wars” franchise — McGregor in the ’90s and ’00s films and the more recent “Obi-Wan Kenobi” series, Winstead in “Ahsoka” — though again they did not share scenes. In 2021, Winstead gave birth to their son. The next year, they married.Now, they have reunited onscreen for “A Gentleman in Moscow,” which premiered Friday on Paramount+ and debuts Sunday on Showtime. An adaptation of Amor Towles’s novel, it stars McGregor as Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, a mustached aristocrat sentenced to house arrest in a luxury hotel in the years following the Russian Revolution. Winstead appears as Anna Urbanova, an actress and the count’s sometimes girlfriend. Somehow, in the confines of the hotel, they make a life.McGregor plays a Russian count imprisoned in a luxury hotel and Winstead an actress who becomes his companion.Ben Blackall/Paramount+ with ShowtimeIn an hourlong conversation, in a hotel somewhat more modest than Moscow’s Metropol, they discussed claustrophobia, facial hair and the benefits and detriments of working with a spouse. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How did you get involved with “A Gentleman in Moscow”?EWAN MCGREGOR It came to me first. I loved the grand nature of the drama, the love and loss and romance. I feel like it’s rarer and rarer to get a chance to play that stuff. At the heart of it, it’s about a man who’s learning to be a husband and learning to be a dad and crawling out of his ideas of the aristocratic way of life to find who he really is.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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      Ruth Wilson on the True Horrors of ‘The Woman in the Wall’

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      Her fictional character lives in an unstable reality and may have killed someone. But the history of Ireland’s notorious “Magdalene laundries” is all too real.Ruth Wilson has ducked into a cabin in the French Alps, taking a break from an activity she enjoys when she isn’t acting. “I’ve been skiing this week,” she said last week in a video interview. “It’s been a passion for years. It’s very dangerous. I can go head-down into something.”She said that last part with a smile. Wilson, an English actress known for playing Idris Elba’s psychopathic nemesis in “Luther,” likes going to extremes and working without a net. Last year, at the Young Vic theater in London, she tested her endurance in “The Second Woman,” a 24-hour production in which her character goes through the same breakup scene 100 times, with 100 different scene partners. (Some, like Elba and Toby Jones, were trained actors; most were not.) For her first professional Shakespeare assignment, a 2019 Broadway production of “King Lear,” she played both Cordelia and the king’s Fool (opposite Glenda Jackson’s Lear).Wilson’s latest role, in the limited series “The Woman in the Wall,” is no less daunting. (It premieres on Friday on Paramount+ With Showtime, having debuted in Britain in August.) She plays Lorna, a woman haunted by her years at one of Ireland’s “Magdalene laundries,” at least a dozen of which operated across the country from the 19th century until the last one closed in 1996. Run by Catholic nuns, the mostly for-profit laundries used unmarried, pregnant and otherwise ostracized women for hard, unpaid labor, often after mothers were forcibly separated from their children.Lorna, who is packed off to a fictional laundry at age 15, wants desperately to find her daughter. Like many babies born to unwed Irish mothers like Lorna, she was sold into adoption against her mother’s will. Hundreds of others are buried in unmarked graves.“We’re trying to land on what it must feel like for some of these women from the laundries, for this constant trauma to be coming back,” Wilson (with Frances Tomelty) said.Chris Barr/BBC with Paramount+ and ShowtimeAs the series begins, Lorna, a chronic sleepwalker and outcast, is startled to find a dead body in her home. This happens around the same time a popular priest is found murdered. The six-episode series leans into Lorna’s tortured perception and subjective experience; she is antisocial and unstable but also the target of gaslighting by those in her seaside Irish town who insist that nothing all that bad happened to her when she was young.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?  More

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      ‘The Curse’ Ending: What Just Happened?

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      The season finale of Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s horror-comedy arrived on Friday. Three New York Times critics discuss the show’s curses, blessings and confounding conclusion.On Friday, the first season of “The Curse,” Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s cringe horror-comedy on Showtime and Paramount+, came to an audaciously unpredictable end. Three New York Times critics — James Poniewozik, chief TV critic; Alissa Wilkinson, movie critic; and Jason Zinoman, critic at large — discussed the confounding conclusion, the show’s religious themes and the sublime inscrutability of Emma Stone’s performance.JAMES PONIEWOZIK Greetings, “Curse”-heads! We have seen the finale, and I can now confidently say: lol wut?Ten uncomfortable, ingenious episodes ended with one of the biggest literal and figurative upendings in TV history (spoilers ahead). Asher Siegel (Nathan Fielder) has his personal field of gravity reversed like a horror-comedy Fred Astaire, hurtling off the Earth to an apparent frozen death in orbit, while his wife, Whitney (Emma Stone), goes into labor and gives birth to their child. All this, and Vincent Pastore cooks meatballs!I haven’t seen an episode of TV this audacious, confounding and transfixing since “Twin Peaks: The Return.” I haven’t seen a series so thoroughly and unexpectedly shift direction in its finale since … ever?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?  More

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      To Make ‘Fellow Travelers,’ Ron Nyswaner Had to Fall in Love

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      The new drama, which follows a gay romance over several decades, is the first TV series created by the Oscar-winning writer of “Philadelphia.”Ron Nyswaner, the Oscar- and Emmy-nominated screenwriter, can still recall a chance meeting on a beach more than 50 years ago. Then a teenager and a self-described “Jesus freak,” he’d come to Ocean City, N.J., to attend a Youth for Christ conference. Late one night, he said, while walking alone, he saw “a gorgeous, muscular guy” across the sand.That young man asked him to speak in tongues — it was an invitation to religious ecstasy and nothing more. Nyswaner complied. He told me this story over lunch in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood, on a stormy afternoon in September, as a way to explain that, for him, “sex and the sacred have always been united.”He wanted that same union for “Fellow Travelers,” a new series that premieres Friday on Paramount+ and then on Showtime on Sunday.Moving back and forth from the early 1950s to the late ’80s, “Fellow Travelers,” based on the 2007 novel of the same name by Thomas Mallon, is a précis of 20th-century queer history viewed through a turbulent relationship between two men. Matt Bomer (“White Collar,” “Magic Mike”) stars as Hawkins Fuller, Hawk to his intimates, a State Department employee. Jonathan Bailey (“Bridgerton”) plays Tim Laughlin, a milk-drinking, God-loving naïf who dreams of working for Senator Joseph McCarthy.As they tumble through the decades — in and out of bed, in and out of love — the lavender scare, the gay liberation movement and the AIDS crisis happen around and through them.In “Fellow Travelers,” Jonathan Bailey, left, and Matt Bomer play men who move in and out of one another’s lives as history unfolds around them.Ben Mark Holzberg/ShowtimeNyswaner, who was dressed in all black save for a tan raincoat, claims to dislike love stories. “Yuck!” he said. (The two chunky rings he wore, mementos of former relationships, may have belied this.) But his genius resides in making the political feel shockingly intimate. Despite its many congressional hearings, “Fellow Travelers” is a love story, one illustrated with some of television’s most screen-fogging queer sex scenes. The first time Nyswaner read the novel, he fell in love with Tim and Hawk. It was that love — sexual, sacred — that inspired him to make the series, the first he has created for television.Nyswaner, 67, grew up in small-town Pennsylvania. Gay and closeted, he was an outsider as a child, an observer. That, he believes, is what made him a writer. After graduating from the University of Pittsburgh, he enrolled in Columbia’s film school. While still a student there, he slipped a script to the director Jonathan Demme. Demme optioned it, and Nyswaner has supported himself as a writer ever since.His first major success came in 1993 with “Philadelphia,” directed by Demme, the story of Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks), a lawyer who believes he has been wrongfully terminated by his firm because of his AIDS diagnosis. (Nyswaner, whose script earned him an Oscar nomination, makes a cameo in a party scene dressed as a priest.)By that time, Nyswaner was in the throes of drug and alcohol addiction. In the five years after the film’s release, newly flush with fame and cash, his addiction worsened.“I dedicated myself to cocaine and alcohol and sex, with tragic results,” he said. (He details this tragedy, which involves the suicide of a sex worker, in his 2004 memoir, “Blue Days, Black Nights.”)There was heat on him in Hollywood then. But he showed up to more than one meeting high on methamphetamines, and the heat dissipated. Which didn’t especially bother him. Having found success early, he has rarely been swayed by the demands of the market.“I always just wanted to write what I wanted,” he said.“The best thing you can do with any marginalized character is to make them as fully human and complicated as every other straight character that’s out there in the world,” Nyswaner said.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesNewly sober, he proved this. He scripted the 2003 true-crime Showtime film “Soldier’s Girl,” about an Army private’s relationship with a transgender cabaret performer, and followed that with the 2006 adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s doomed romance, “The Painted Veil.” Neither was intended for mainstream success, but these works had the heartbreak he loved, the passionate intensity.In 2012, his management team asked him what he wanted to do next. “Get me out of my house,” he told them. He had spent two decades living in upstate New York. Now, he found himself craving the crush of a big city and the camaraderie of a writers’ room. Though he had already optioned “Fellow Travelers,” he back-burnered it in favor of moving to Los Angeles and joining two Showtime series: first the punchy noir “Ray Donovan,” and then “Homeland,” the fervid espionage thriller. In 2018, when his time on “Homeland” ended, he felt ready to turn to “Fellow Travelers.”In “Fellow Travelers,” Nyswaner expands on the themes that define much of his film work — the ways in which longing, sex and secrets intersect with the law. In the series, the historical characters and events are meticulously researched. (There are perhaps a few aesthetic lapses — did men really work out this much in the 1950s?) But Nyswaner wanted to offer something more than a history lesson. Hawk and Tim and the show’s other queer characters are intimately involved in this history, and they are not mere bystanders and victims. Occasionally, they are aggressors.“The best thing you can do with any marginalized character is to make them as fully human and complicated as every other straight character that’s out there in the world,” he said.Many of those complications are revealed in the sex scenes. Thirty years ago, “Philadelphia” received criticism for shying away from gay sexuality. “Fellow Travelers” is not so shy. “Perhaps I overcompensated,” he said, laughing.Nyswaner said each sex scene was intended to move the story forward and dramatize a power exchange.ShowtimeNyswaner, who has something of the provocateur in him, described a scene late in the series, a threesome that leads to a nervous breakdown, as “very much me” and “one of my proudest achievements.” (For that scene he educated the director on the uses of amyl nitrate.)If these scenes are not especially graphic, they are unusually specific in their mapping of power and desire. Nyswaner had rules for these scenes, which were carefully choreographed and scripted. Each had to move the story forward. Each had to dramatize a power exchange. And no act could be repeated, which invited creativity in the later episodes.The queer characters are all played by actors who openly identify as queer. “It wasn’t a requirement, but it was certainly a strong motivator for us,” Nyswaner said. He believes the casting may have contributed to the veracity and intensity of these scenes.“I do think it might have really made a difference and made everybody more comfortable,” he said.Nyswaner isn’t sure if writing about gay characters is a path that he chose for himself or one that the success of “Philadelphia” forged for him. Either way he is glad to walk it.“I so love, love, love being a gay man,” he told me over lunch. “I enjoy being slightly to the side of everything.” He worries, of course, for the state of L.G.B.T.Q. rights, but he has always enjoyed this feeling of being an outsider. “Outlaw” was another term he used.He isn’t dating anyone just now. His preference, he said, is for “unsuitable men, some of them are quite delicious.” Colleagues keep encouraging him to download a dating app, but so far he has resisted. These past few years, his primary relationship has been with Tim and Hawk, the characters he fell for a decade ago.“I wanted to live within that relationship,” he said. “And I have.” More

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      The Best Movies and TV Shows Streaming in October: ‘Loki,’ ‘Goosebumps’ and More

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      Here’s the best of what’s coming to Amazon, Max, Apple TV+ and others.Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of October’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)New to Amazon Prime Video‘Totally Killer’Starts streaming: Oct. 6The offbeat horror-comedy “Totally Killer” is a 1980s-style slasher film with a science-fiction twist. Kiernan Shipka stars as Jamie, a rebellious teenager who has lived her whole life in a small town that was the site of an infamous string of unsolved murders in 1987. When the masked killer — or perhaps a copycat — reappears and slays Jamie’s mother, Pam (Julie Bowen), Jamie travels back in time to 1987 to stop the original spree. While trying to figure out the identity of a knife-wielding maniac, the heroine handles the culture-clash of being a 2020s high school kid stranded in a clique-dominated, politically incorrect era.Also arriving:Oct. 3“Make Me Scream”Oct. 6“Desperately Seeking Soulmate: Escaping Twin Flames Universe”Oct. 10“Mr. Dressup: The Magic of Make-Believe”Oct. 11“Awareness”“The Greatest Show Never Made”Oct. 13“The Burial”“Everybody Loves Diamonds”Oct. 20“Bosch: Legacy” Season 2“Upload” Season 3Oct. 24“Hot Potato: The Story of the Wiggles”“Zainab Johnson: Hijabs Off”Oct. 26“Sebastian Fitzek’s Therapy”Oct. 27“The Girl Who Killed Her Parents: The Confession”Brie Larson in “Lessons in Chemistry.”Apple TV+New to Apple TV+‘Lessons in Chemistry’Starts streaming: Oct. 13Based on a Bonnie Garmus novel, this mini-series stars Brie Larson as Elizabeth Zott, a talented chemist who struggles to be taken seriously in the sexist 1950s scientific community. When her brazen defiance of her lab’s rules — coupled with an unwillingness to be subservient and girlie — gets her fired, Elizabeth reinvents herself as the host of a science-focused TV cooking show. “Lessons in Chemistry” covers a decade in the heroine’s life, balancing her rise to fame with her early struggles, while also following her brilliant, eccentric colleague and love interest Calvin Evans (Lewis Pullman). A combination of “Mad Men” and “Julia” — with a little bit of “Oppenheimer” mixed in — the series is a portrait of smart, independent people bucking the conformity of their times.Also arriving:Oct. 20“The Pigeon Tunnel”“Shape Island: Creepy Cave Crawl”Oct. 27“The Enfield Poltergeist”“Curses!” Season 1New to Disney+‘Loki’ Season 2Starts streaming: Oct. 5The Marvel Cinematic Universe has lately been all about the multiverse, with movies and TV series offering alternate versions of the classic Marvel characters living in parallel realities. Season 1 of “Loki” got that ball rolling, with a creative and mind-bending story about the roguish Norse deity running afoul of the timeline watchdogs in the Time Variance Authority. For Season 2, Tom Hiddleston returns as Loki and Owen Wilson is back as the frequently flustered TVA agent Mobius M. Mobius. Because of the proliferation of new multiverses unleashed in the Season 1 finale, many of the show’s characters find themselves subtly altered and stuck in other worlds, necessitating another trip through time, space and dimensions for these unlikely heroes.Also arriving:Oct. 2“Mickey and Friends Trick or Treats”Oct. 11“4EVER”Oct. 13“Goosebumps” Season 1Oct. 25“Primal Survivor: Extreme African Safari”Oct. 27“LEGO Marvel Avengers: Code Red”Zack Morris in “Goosebumps.”David Astorga/DisneyNew to Hulu‘Goosebumps’ Season 1Starts streaming: Oct. 13R.L. Stine’s perennially popular “Goosebumps” young adult horror novels get a new television adaptation, although unlike the original 1990s anthology TV series, this latest version (available on Hulu and Disney+) features concepts from Stine’s books inserted into a larger serialized story, with a single cast. Justin Long plays Nathan Bratt, the new high school English teacher in a quaint small town, as well as the new owner of a spooky old house that the local teenagers like to use for their parties. Before Mr. Bratt chases the kids away from their annual Halloween bash, five of them encounter haunted objects that change their lives and put the community in danger.Also arriving:Oct. 1“Ash vs. Evil Dead” Season 1-3“Crazy Fun Park”“Stephen King’s Rose Red”Oct. 2“Appendage”“Fright Crewe” Season 1Oct. 5“The Boogeyman”Oct. 6“Bobi Wine: The People’s President”“Undead Unlock”Oct. 9“The Mill”Oct. 10“Moonlighting” Seasons 1-5Oct. 11“Nada” Season 1Oct. 12“Monster Inside: America’s Most Extreme Haunted House”Oct. 13“Nocebo”Oct. 14“Empire of Light”Oct. 15“Slotherhouse”Oct. 18“Living for the Dead” Season 1Oct. 20“Cobweb”Oct. 26“American Horror Stories” Season 3Oct. 27“Explorer: Lake of Fire”“Shoresy” Season 2Rhys Darby in Season 1 of “Our Flag Means Death.”HBO MaxNew to Max‘Our Flag Means Death’ Season 2Starts streaming: Oct. 5The first season of “Our Flag Means Death” arrived without a lot of fanfare. Initially, the show looked to be just a mild-mannered pirate parody, about a ship full of misfit outlaws led by the inept captain Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby). But as the season rolled on — and as Stede’s rivalry and romance with the notorious Blackbeard (Taika Waititi) became more central to the plot — the series’ creator David Jenkins began focusing more on piracy as a haven for people who yearn to live outside the mainstream. Season 1 ended on a cliffhanger, with Stede’s crew stranded on a deserted island and Blackbeard determined to get back to being mean. Fans have been eager ever since to learn how these twists will affect one of TV’s sweetest love stories.‘The Gilded Age’ Season 2Starts streaming: Oct. 29The “Downton Abbey” creator Julian Fellowes brings his uncommon knack for energetic historical melodrama to “The Gilded Age,” a lavishly decorated and irresistibly entertaining look at high society in 1880s New York City. Carrie Coon is superb as a shrewd social climber, married to a nouveau-riche tycoon (Morgan Spector) whose ruthless business tactics irritate the old money types. The rest of the cast includes Louisa Jacobson as a restless young woman living with her eccentric, judgmental aunts (Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon) and Denée Benton as an aspiring writer defying the era’s racist biases. Season 2 will continue Fellowes’s fascination with a pivotal era in American culture, when the upper-crust considered whether an ascendant democracy should still be following Europe’s unwritten rules of etiquette.Also arriving:Oct. 1“The Ringleader: The Case of the Bling Ring”Oct. 8“Last Stop Larrimah”Oct. 12“Doom Patrol” Season 4Oct. 19“Peter and the Wolf”“Scavengers Reign”Oct. 22“AKA Mr. Chow”Oct. 23“30 Coins” Season 2Jack Cutmore-Scott, left, as Freddy Crane and Kelsey Grammer as Frasier Crane in “Frasier.”Paramount+New to Paramount+ with Showtime‘The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial’Starts streaming: Oct. 6The final film from William Friedkin is both an adaptation of Herman Wouk’s provocative 1953 play “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial” (updated to modern times by Friedkin, who wrote the screenplay) and a summation of the director’s career-long fascination with the line between legal authority and raw power, as seen in his classic films “The French Connection” and “To Live and Die in L.A.” Jason Clarke plays Lieutenant Barney Greenwald, a Navy lawyer defending Lt. Stephen Maryk, who defied orders and relieved his commanding officer Lt. Cmdr. Phillip Queeg (Kiefer Sutherland) of duty during a storm. Though mostly confined to one courtroom set, the movie is a thrilling actors’ showcase; and as with the play, it toys with the audience’s sympathies, raising questions about how justice is properly served in a case involving the rigid military chain of command.‘Frasier’ Season 1Starts streaming: Oct. 12Kelsey Grammer returns to his most famous role, in a sequel series that surrounds the fussy psychiatrist Frasier Crane with a mostly new cast of characters. Crane moves back to Boston from Seattle and gets involved in the lives of his son, Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott), and his nephew, David (Anders Keith). Freddy has turned out a lot like Frasier’s father, Martin — rugged and unpretentious — while David has the same dry wit and nervous energy as Frasier’s brother, Niles. Like the old “Frasier,” this new one traffics in farce, with the comedy driven by misunderstandings and personality clashes.‘Fellow Travelers’Starts streaming: Oct. 27This historical romance tells a story that stretches from the 1950s to the ’80s, tracing a love affair between two political consultants whose lives are affected by the changing times. Matt Bomer plays Hawkins Fuller, a savvy, politically flexible congressional aide who has a fling with Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey), a right-wing speechwriter who admires Joseph McCarthy. Their relationship stretches across decades, through the more permissive ’60s and ’70s and into the conservative revival of the Reagan era. Adapted by the Oscar-nominated “Philadelphia” screenwriter Ron Nyswaner from a Thomas Mallon novel, “Fellow Travelers” is dotted with real-life historical figures and explicitly erotic sex scenes, illustrating how basic human needs can be undone by political expediency.Also arriving:Oct. 5“Bargain”“Monster High 2”Oct. 6“Pet Sematary: Bloodlines”Oct. 10“Painkiller: The Tylenol Murders”Oct. 16“Vindicta”Oct. 17“Crush”Oct. 24“Milli Vanilli”New to Peacock‘John Carpenter’s Suburban Screams’Starts streaming: Oct. 13The influential genre filmmaker and composer John Carpenter lends his name, his music and — for one episode — his directing talents to this hybrid anthology series, which combines true crime and horror. Each episode is anchored by interviews with ordinary people who experienced something extraordinary, encountering real evil in the form of the creeps, the killers and the unexplained phenomena in their seemingly placid neighborhoods. The interviews provide the basic details for these tales; and then the bulk of each “Suburban Screams” episode consists of lengthy re-enactments that have the look and feel of an ’80s slasher movie, as though Carpenter’s “Halloween” were a documentary.Also arriving:Oct. 12“Superbuns” Season 1Oct. 19“Wolf Like Me” Season 2Oct. 20“Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken”Oct. 24“Krishnas: Gurus. Karma. Murder.”Oct. 27“Five Nights at Freddy’s”“L’il Stompers” Season 1 More

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      TV Shows and Movies Streaming in September 2023: ‘The Wheel of Time,’ ‘Gen V’ and More

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      Spinoffs and chillers abound in a month filled with tons of new television. Here’s the best of what’s coming to Amazon, Max, Apple TV+ and others. Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of September’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)New to Amazon Prime Video‘The Wheel of Time’ Season 2Started streaming: Sept. 1Season 1 of this handsome-looking fantasy series introduced some of the major characters and concepts from the first book of the novelist Robert Jordan’s hefty “The Wheel of Time” saga. Season 2 adapts parts of the second and third books — “The Great Hunt” and “The Dragon Reborn” — and continues moving the pieces into place for the grand apocalyptic battle prophesied at the start of the story. Rosamund Pike returns as the mystic Moiraine, who is helping a group of young people escape the shadowy forces pursuing them. Josha Stradowski plays Rand al’Thor, who may be his land’s last best hope to stand up against the Dark One and his minions — or may be the one to usher in a new age of chaos.‘Neighbours: A New Chapter’ Season 1Starts streaming: Sept. 18The original run of the soap opera “Neighbours” began in 1985 and concluded in 2022 after 38 seasons and nearly 9,000 22-minute episodes. During that time, the show’s melodramatic tales of suburban Melbourne life were seen around the world and introduced viewers to future stars like Natalie Imbruglia, Kylie Minogue, Radha Mitchell, Guy Pearce and Margot Robbie. Now Amazon Studios and Fremantle Australia are bringing the series back, along with some of the old cast (including Pearce), who join an array of new characters. Plans are to run 200 episodes a year for the next two years on Amazon’s ad-supported, free-to-stream Freevee service, where viewers can also watch the older episodes, giving Americans a chance to immerse themselves in these Australians’ love affairs and personal crises.‘Gen V’ Season 1Starts streaming: Sept. 29A spinoff of the adults-only superhero satire “The Boys,” this action-dramedy series is set at a special school for young crime fighters, where the students engage in the same kinds of cliques, rivalries and romances that happen in any normal school but with the constant threat that super powers make every conflict more dangerous. A few of the adult characters from “The Boys” will drop in on the new show (which has a creative team drawn from some of that show’s writers and producers); but the focus here is on the kids, who have a lot in common with classic comic book super teams like the X-Men and the Teen Titans. Expect plenty of irreverence and dark humor, along with some sly takedowns of familiar superhero mythology.Also arriving:Sept. 1“God. Family. Football.”Sept. 5“One Shot: Overtime Elite”Sept. 8“Sitting in Bars with Cake”Sept. 12“Kelce”Sept. 15“A Million Miles Away”“Wilderness” Season 1“Written in the Stars” Season 1Sept. 22“Cassandro”Sept. 22“The Fake Sheikh”Norman Reedus in the latest “Walking Dead” spinoff, “The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon.”Emmanuel Guimier/AMCNew to AMC+‘The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon’ Season 1Starts streaming: Sept. 10Like “The Walking Dead: Dead City” earlier this year, the latest entry in the long-running, ever-expanding “Walking Dead” franchise takes one of the most popular characters from the show’s original run and plops him in another part of the world. Norman Reedus reprises his role as Daryl Dixon, a talented marksman and tracker who had to overcome his loner tendencies to become a vital part of an embattled postapocalyptic community in the American southeast. In this new series, Daryl takes his talents to France, where he allies with a tough nun (Clémence Poésy) who shows him the unique ways that continental Europe handled the zombie outbreak and helps him to figure out who he can trust.Also arriving:Sept. 1“Perpetrator”Sept. 8“Blood Flower”Sept. 10“Ride With Norman Reedus” Season 6Sept. 15“Elevator Game”Sept. 20“Thick Skin”Sept. 22“The Angry Black Girl and Her Mother”Sept. 29“Nightmare”LaKeith Stanfield in a scene from “The Changeling,” based on the Victor LaValle novel.Apple TV+New to Apple TV+‘The Changeling’Starts streaming: Sept. 8Like the Victor LaValle novel that inspired it, the supernatural horror series “The Changeling” combines everyday drama with terrifying nightmares, in a story that sprawls across multiple generations. LaKeith Stanfield plays Apollo, a shy book dealer who is haunted by memories of the father he barely knew. He is also attracted to a vibrant but eccentric woman named Emmy (Clark Backo), whom he eventually marries. The show’s creator and writer, Kelly Marcel, shifts the narrative focus freely among different characters and different eras, as a crisis with Emmy and their newborn child drives Apollo to confront his troubled family history. In doing so, he finds that his past is shrouded in the kind of wondrous darkness common to fairy tales, and he is challenged to untangle fantasy from fact in an enchanted version of New York City.‘The Morning Show’ Season 3Starts streaming: Sept. 13One of Apple TV+’s flagship series returns for a third season of punchy boardroom drama, set in the modern TV news business. The show is still powered by its two charismatic leads: Jennifer Aniston as the veteran morning show anchor Alex Levy and Reese Witherspoon as Bradley Jackson, a feisty hard news reporter who has become Alex’s co-host. Billy Crudup and Mark Duplass play two of the behind-the-camera bosses who sometimes make morally questionable choices. This season they are joined by Jon Hamm as a cocky tech billionaire who might be able improve their network’s cash-flow. Although “The Morning Show” started as a ripped-from-the-headlines look at how the #MeToo era has upended the male-dominated media, the series has since opened to encompass other hot-button contemporary issues, which in Season 3 include cyberattacks and corporate blackmail.Also arriving:Sept. 20“The Super Models”Sept. 22“Still Up”Sept. 29“Flora and Son”Sinclair Daniel, left, and Ashleigh Murray in a scene from “The Other Black Girl.”HuluNew to Hulu‘The Other Black Girl’ Season 1Starts streaming: Sept. 13Part wry social commentary and part intense mystery-thriller, “The Other Black Girl” examines the racial and gender dynamics of the New York publishing industry. Sinclair Daniel plays Nella, an aspiring assistant editor who befriends Hazel (Ashleigh Murray), her publishing house’s latest hire and the only other Black person in her department. When Hazel’s collegial advice starts derailing Nella’s career — around the same time that Nella starts experiencing some unnerving paranormal activity around the office — she begins looking into her new friend’s past and the history of their employers. Adapted from a best-selling Zakiya Dalila Harris novel, this show finds the humor and the anxiety inherent in the life of a woman who is struggling to stand out in a tough business without losing her identity.Also arriving:Sept. 6“Never Let Him Go”Sept. 13“Welcome to Wrexham” Season 2Sept. 14“Dragons: The Nine Realms” Season 7Sept. 20“American Horror Story: Delicate” Part 1Sept. 22“No One Will Save You”Sept. 27“Love in Fairhope” Season 1Nikesh Patel and Rose Matafeo in scene from Season 3 of the Max series “Starstruck.”Mark Johnson/MaxNew to Max‘Starstruck’ Season 3Starts streaming: Sept. 28This charming romantic comedy is one of the streaming era’s hidden gems, and it is ripe for discovery now that the fall TV schedule has been thinned out by the actors’ and writers’ strikes. Through its first two seasons, “Starstruck” followed the unlikely on-again/off-again love affair between Jessie (Rose Matafeo), a young New Zealander struggling to make ends meet in London, and Tom (Nikesh Patel), an A-list movie star who is smitten with her. Season 3 has the couple going their separate ways but still frequently and awkwardly crossing paths. The show’s short, breezy episodes capture how the “getting to know you” phase of romance can be equal parts exciting and difficult, especially when one of the people involved is rich and famous.Also arriving:Sept. 2“The Venture Bros.: Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart”Sept. 13“Donyale Luna: Supermodel”Sept. 21“Young Love” Season 1A scene from the Season 4 premiere of “Star Trek: Lower Decks,” which centers on the underlings of a starship.Paramount+New to Paramount+ With Showtime‘Star Trek: Lower Decks’ Season 4Starts streaming: Sept. 7“Star Trek” fans who are still buzzing from the excellent, recently completed second season of “Strange New Worlds” should roll those warm feelings over to the fourth season of the animated “Lower Decks,” which has established its place as one of the best of the modern “Star Trek” shows. Like “Strange New Worlds,” “Lower Decks” balances old-fashioned “interstellar adventure of the week” stories with involved subplots and rich character development. This cute-looking cartoon is fundamentally comic — following the goofy mishaps of a bunch of Starfleet’s least vital employees — but its writers and animators respect the franchise’s lore enough to deliver cleverly plotted, action-packed episodes, season after season.Also arriving:Sept. 8“Dreaming Whilst Black”Sept. 12“Football Must Go On”Sept. 17“The Gold”Sept. 18“Superpower”Sept. 22“Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court”Sept. 26“72 Seconds”Colin Woodell as Winston Scott in a scene from “The Continental: From the World of John Wick.”Katalin Vermes/Starz EntertainmentNew to Peacock‘The Continental: From the World of John Wick’Starts streaming: Sept. 22Fans of the first “John Wick” movie will always remember the moment when its weary hit man hero walked into a strange, assassin-friendly hotel called the Continental and was reminded of its arcane codes of behavior. Suddenly a movie that had previously seemed like a low-stakes underworld revenge thriller opened up into something more fantastical and globe spanning, with a dense mythology. The TV mini-series “The Continental: From the World of John Wick” is set in the 1970s and stars Mel Gibson as Cormac, the hotel’s New York manager at that time. Colin Woodell plays a young version of the franchise’s Winston Scott, who is tasked by Cormac to solve a family problem that may threaten the viability of this super secret criminal hideaway.Also arriving:Sept. 4“Chucky” Season 2Sept. 28“Dino Pops” Season 1 More

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      Different Sides of Bill Walton and Wilt Chamberlain in New Series

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      New documentaries explore the star-crossed careers and delicate spirits of Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Walton, two of basketball’s greatest.Pity the poor 7-footer.That’s the message of two new documentary series about storied basketball players: “The Luckiest Guy in the World,” about Bill Walton (available in the “30 for 30” hub at ESPN Plus), and “Goliath,” about Wilt Chamberlain (premiering Friday at Paramount+ and Sunday on Showtime).Serious and thorough, “Luckiest Guy” and “Goliath” are positioned to draft on the success of an earlier basketball biography, ESPN’s popular Michael Jordan series, “The Last Dance.” But while they are also portraits of men with supreme physical gifts, they are less focused on their subjects’ on-court exploits and more determined to get inside the players’ heads. The sportswriter Jackie MacMullan delivers what could be a thesis statement for both in “Goliath”: “I’ve found that big men are much more sensitive than we realize.”Chamberlain, who died of heart failure in 1999, and Walton both have well-defined personas, which they participated in creating. Each series spends a lot of its time picking apart the received wisdom about its subject while also indulging, for the sake of dramatic impact and storytelling shorthand, the very stereotypes it wants to deconstruct: Chamberlain the unstoppable, insatiable giant; Walton the goofy, fragile flower child.The four-episode “Luckiest Guy” was directed by the accomplished documentarian Steve James, always to be remembered for “Hoop Dreams,” and was made with the full cooperation of Walton, 70, who revisits old haunts and sits down for an entertaining round table with Portland Trail Blazers teammates like Lionel Hollins and Dave Twardzik. It’s engagingly introspective and personal, in part because James pushes back against Walton’s incessant recitation of the title phrase. How can Walton call himself the luckiest guy in the world, James asks from behind the camera, when his career was utterly ravaged by injuries that eventually crippled him and drove him to consider suicide?That, broadly speaking, is the idea that haunts both documentaries. The conundrum of Walton’s and Chamberlain’s careers is that they were marked by success — college and professional championships, statistical domination (in Chamberlain’s case), reputations for unmatched athletic skills — and defined by disappointment. Neither won as often or as easily as he should have, in Walton’s case because of injury and in Chamberlain’s because of the dominance during the 1960s of the rival Boston Celtics and their center, Bill Russell, enshrined in sports mythology as the hard-working Everyman to Chamberlain’s sex-and-statistics-obsessed egotist.“Goliath,” directed by Rob Ford and Christopher Dillon, is a more workmanlike and conventional project than “Luckiest Guy.” But across three episodes it makes a persuasive case for Chamberlain as a generous, sensitive soul who was both blessed and constrained by his stature and his extraordinary all-around athletic ability.It does its sports-documentary duty, laying out Chamberlain’s triumphs and more frequent setbacks on the court. But it is more interested in the trails he blazed as a Black cultural figure and self-determining professional athlete, and it favors writers, pundits and scholars over basketball players in its interviews. (The scarcity of images from Chamberlain’s younger days in the 1940s and ’50s is compensated for with shadow-puppet scenes reminiscent of the work of Kara Walker.)Watching the series side by side, the differences between the two men are less interesting than the sense of commonality that emerges. Both were self-conscious stutterers who learned to endure, and perform under, the most intense scrutiny. Chamberlain may have been more flamboyant, but Walton, in “Luckiest Guy,” is just as conscious of his affect — there’s an ostentatiousness, and no small amount of ego, in the way he performs modesty. (James also challenges Walton’s lifelong, generally debunked claim to be only 6 feet 11 inches tall.)The veteran sports fan might see another commonality: As good as they are, neither “The Luckiest Guy in the World” nor “Goliath” is as exciting to watch as “The Last Dance.” This is a bit of a conundrum, because both Chamberlain and Walton are, quite arguably, more complex, interesting and moving figures than Michael Jordan. But Michael Jordan is a nearly unparalleled winner. And while winning isn’t the only thing, it is, for better or worse, the most compelling thing about the subject of a sports documentary. More