Showtime

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Television

      How the ‘Yellowjackets’ ‘Weirdos’ Fell in Love and Wrote a Hit Show

      by

      The married creators of “Yellowjackets” always had big screenwriting dreams. Their idea about witchy teen cannibals struck the right alchemy.Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson share a marriage, a house in Los Angeles and a hit TV series that they created together. But not a computer screen, at least not when it comes to doing interviews.“We learned pretty early that one screen is not quite enough to contain us, gesture-wise,” said Nickerson, stationed in the living room. True enough, the creators of “Yellowjackets,” the second season of which began streaming on Friday (and airs Sunday on Showtime), both like to talk with their hands as they discuss the dark, witty psychological horror thriller that gave them their breakthrough after years of working in writers’ rooms for shows like “Narcos” and “Dispatches From Elsewhere.”They also like to share ideas, batting possibilities and pitches back and forth, exploring ideas that might have a chance of rising above the din. “One of those conversations just started around the idea of a girls’ soccer team being lost in the woods,” Lyle said from an upstairs room. Not a meditation on the hell of high school, or the futility of trying to outrun one’s past. This is Rule No. 1 in the Lyle-Nickerson book: Character and situation come first, laying the seedbed for themes and big ideas.“It’s not like we immediately started having conversations around trauma or female friendship,” Nickerson said. “We just started talking about characters and everything grew from there. At least that’s my story.”“I think that’s right,” Lyle confirmed from her post.Whatever the origin, the results have resonated. Showtime has already ordered a third season of “Yellowjackets” and signed the couple to an overall deal. Online discussions overflow with speculation about what might happen next or, sometimes, what the heck is going on now. The surviving members of that New Jersey high school soccer team — whose plane crashes en route to nationals in 1996 and who resort to doing very bad things to survive — have developed an ardent fan base.That those bad things appear to have involved some measure of witchcraft and, as the Season 2 premiere confirmed, cannibalism, is part of the appeal. Their creators, themselves native New Jerseyans who met in 2005 and shared a dream of screenwriting, are just happy they found an idea that stuck.“We’re constantly pitching things at each other, and I feel like 80 percent of the time the other person will go, ‘Huh,’” Lyle said. “And then 20 percent of the time or less, it’s like, ‘Ooh, save that one.’”“Yellowjackets,” it seems safe to say, was an “Ooh.”“I used to spend all day just living in fear of the night because that’s when my imagination was going to run wild,” Nickerson said.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesLyle, 43, and Nickerson, 44, met at a party given by a mutual friend in Jersey City. The theme was “beer Christmas”: Revelers drink beer from cans and then hang the cans from the Christmas tree. (The festivities continue: The friend now lives in Long Beach, Calif.; Lyle and Nickerson’s production company is called Beer Christmas.)They had heard about each other from other mutual friends, but Nickerson was usually busy helping his father with the family fast-food stand on the Jersey Shore, serving up burgers, hot dogs and sweet sausage sandwiches. “I was free labor all summer long,” he said.They were both outsiders of sorts. Lyle was a horror movie fiend; in eighth grade she was in a band that played Liz Phair and Sebadoh covers. (“Yellowjackets” boasts a killer ’90s indie-rock soundtrack.) Nickerson was a bit of a loner. “I never really found a thing or a group-level identity or a place to feel like I fit,” he said. “By the end of high school, I was just ready to get out of there.”After they finally met, realized they had shared aspirations, and fell in love, they did the natural thing: moved to Los Angeles with a suitcase full of spec scripts for various TV comedies, including “30 Rock,” “My Name Is Earl” and “The Office.” None were made. They wrote a one-hour pilot inspired by one of their favorite shows, “Veronica Mars.” Finally, their agents told them to write an original pilot and make it as weird as they wanted.In response, they wrote a high school murder mystery. It didn’t get picked up, but it helped them find their voice and generated that elusive commodity: industry buzz. Soon they were writing for the CW vampire series “The Originals,” and then the Netflix cartel drama “Narcos.” They were on their way.That they broke through with a witchy story involving cannibalism makes some sense. Lyle, who has an arm tattoo of a palm-reading chart (both are into tarot cards), recalled trying to convince a video-store clerk to rent her the cult horror favorite “Dr. Giggles.” She was 11. Nickerson was too freaked out by horror to give it a chance until he was older. His own mind was terror enough.“I used to spend all day just living in fear of the night because that’s when my imagination was going to run wild,” he said.Shauna (Sophie Nélisse, center, with Courtney Eaton, left, and Jasmin Savoy Brown) gets the cannibalism started in the Season 2 premiere by snacking on her dead friend’s frozen ear.Kailey Schwerman/ShowtimeMelanie Lynskey, who plays the adult Shauna, praised Lyle and Nickerson’s complementary qualities. “They’re such a good team,” she said.Kimberley French/ShowtimeThere’s enough fear to go around in “Yellowjackets,” which, for all its sensational qualities, explores truths that resonate more broadly. As they developed the idea, the creators took long walks though Griffith Park in Los Angeles, talking about the characters and what they mean to one another. Deeper themes emerged.“A lot of the thematics really just grew out of trying to put these people in scenarios together and looking at their relationships,” Lyle said. “It just became quickly apparent that it would be really complicated, in hopefully a great way.”Complication, of course, comes standard in high school relationships, even those that don’t involve witchcraft or cannibalism. Tawny Cypress, who plays the adult version of Taissa, a survivor who grows up to become a state senator, described the story as universal. Her character experiences a frightening form of dissociative identity disorder, and winds up sacrificing the family dog in a cultish ritual. But less extreme versions of life can still be terrifying.“High school sucked for everybody,” Cypress said in a video call. “Nobody came out unscathed, and we carry that around with us still. These girls had a much bigger experience, but we all are stuck with things that formed us back then.”Karyn Kusama, an executive producer on the series and an accomplished film director (“Girlfight,” “Destroyer”), was even more specific.“This idea of girls feeling they need to destroy each other in order to survive felt very emotionally familiar to me,” she said in a video call. “I just thought it was an interesting thing to explore in real terms, and then allow the metaphor to be quite powerful and clean while the narrative event is extremely messy.”Season 1 hinted at the most extreme expression of that metaphor, a taboo subject that never really came to fruition: cannibalism. The pilot all but promised it, to the point that viewers might have fairly wondered: Who will be eaten? When? By whom? And is there hot sauce?“I don’t think people will be disappointed this season,” Lyle said in reference to the cannibalism teased by the first season of “Yellowjackets.” The Season 2 premiere has already begun to deliver. Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesNickerson sounded a little sheepish about what he called the first season’s “lack of cannibalism.” But he swore they weren’t teasing. (They have since confirmed in interviews that the girls would eventually get their fill, and the Season 2 premiere gets things started when Shauna, played as a teen by Sophie Nélisse, makes a frozen snack of her dead best friend’s ear.)“It wasn’t that we set out to be like, ‘Well, there will be no cannibalism in the first season,’” he said. “It was more that it didn’t feel like we had gotten the characters to a place where that would feel organic. We wanted viewers to be with them as much as possible to make this seem like not a salacious choice, but the only choice.”Lyle added: “I don’t think people will be disappointed this season.”Lyle and Nickerson didn’t quite finish each other’s sentences when we spoke. But they came pretty close, glossing and elaborating on a point here, gently correcting there. It’s not all fun and games when they work at home, but they appear to complement each other in productive ways.Melanie Lynskey, who earned an Emmy nomination for her performance as Adult Shauna, said she saw a definite pattern in the couple’s creative relationship.“Ashley’s so funny and so quick and kind of gathers her thoughts in a very businesslike way,” she said by phone. “And Bart is more emotional; he takes a minute to get to the thing. But along the way, there are all these great stop-offs, and they’re such a good team.”Cypress, a fellow New Jerseyan, was more succinct about the couple: “I [expletive] love those weirdos.” More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      ‘Desus & Mero’ Late-Night Show Ends After Four Seasons

      by

      Showtime said that the Bronx-bred hosts were “pursuing separate creative endeavors” after the duo collaborated on television shows, podcasts and a book.The Showtime late-night talk show “Desus and Mero” will not be returning for a fifth season, the network announced on Monday.The show’s hosts, Desus Nice (a.k.a. Daniel Baker) and the Kid Mero (a.k.a. Joel Martinez), interviewed former President Barack Obama and collaborated on projects including podcasts and a book, but are now “pursuing separate creative endeavors moving forward,” a Showtime representative said in an emailed statement.“Desus Nice and the Kid Mero have made a name for themselves in comedy and in the late-night space as quick-witted cultural commentators,” the statement said.After the announcement, Desus wrote on Twitter that he was “proud of the show my staff made every episode” and hinted he had more projects on the way.Before Showtime picked up “Desus and Mero” in 2018, the show aired on Viceland for two years. The pair, who both grew up in the Bronx, also hosted a long-running podcast, “Bodega Boys.”The television series upended the traditional model for late-night talk shows, with the hosts sitting in chairs next to their guests instead of cloistered behind a desk. They swapped carefully crafted opening monologues for a looser conversation style where they responded to news events and viral clips, building on each other’s jokes.The show’s fourth season on Showtime premiered in March with an interview with Denzel Washington that spotlighted Desus and Mero’s ability to pull candid, personal insights from celebrities and politicians in interviews that felt more like conversations. The two spoke with the Academy Award-winning actor, who grew up in Mount Vernon, N.Y., about different stops on the No. 2 subway line and the rising price of a pizza slice.Before Desus and Mero became a comedic duo, each had built a following on Twitter, where they would occasionally interact while making jokes about their day jobs and the Bronx.They had attended the same summer school and were familiar with each other, but it was a meeting they were both invited to by an editor at the pop culture website Complex that formally brought them together. That meeting led to a podcast called “Desus vs. Mero,” that premiered in 2013, then a web series.After they left Complex, they started the “Bodega Boys” podcast. In 2020, they published an advice book, “God-Level Knowledge Darts: Life Lessons From the Bronx.”Fans, known as the “Bodega Hive,” had speculated that the end of the comedic partnership could be near after the podcast stopped posting new episodes; the last one went up in November. Responding to a series of tweets that appeared to confirm the podcast had ended, Desus said last week that their fans “deserved better than this ending.” More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      In ‘I Love That for You,’ Vanessa Bayer Sells Out

      by

      The “Saturday Night Live” veteran’s new sitcom draws on her experience of childhood cancer and her obsession with home shopping TV.Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.According to Vanessa Bayer, being diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia as a 15-year-old wasn’t all bad.It got her out of gym class. The attendance lady at her high school never marked her as tardy. She told a boy she didn’t like that she couldn’t be his date for the homecoming dance because she had chemo that weekend. (She didn’t). Her father talked his way out of a speeding ticket by using her illness as an excuse, a tactic he referred to as “dropping the L-bomb.”Bayer survived the L-bomb. The experience didn’t change her, she said, but it did intensify characteristics that were already inherent — determination, resilience, a borderline delusional sense of optimism. Who receives a diagnosis of cancer and accentuates the positive? Bayer does.“I was always a person who loved attention,” Bayer said chirpily. “This allowed me to get so much attention.”Bayer is getting attention now. On Sunday, Showtime will premiere the first episode of “I Love That for You” (the Showtime app will have it on Friday), a sitcom that draws on Bayer’s pediatric cancer and her longtime obsession with home shopping shows. She stars as Joanna Gold, a sheltered young woman and leukemia survivor who auditions to become the newest host on the Special Value Network. Nearly fired after her disastrous first hour on camera, she saves her job by telling her colleagues that her cancer has returned. (It hasn’t.)Bayer’s character pretends to have cancer in order to keep her job at a home shopping network.Tony Rivetti Jr./ShowtimePlaying Joanna isn’t cathartic for Bayer — she doesn’t seem to need catharsis — but it does offer her a chance to work through her past, this time with even more jokes. “It’s really nice to be able to have some distance from that time and to be able to laugh at it even more,” she said.Bayer grew up in a Reform Jewish family in the suburbs of Cleveland. A star student and a cross-country runner, she decided that she wouldn’t let her illness mess with her G.P.A., even when teachers told her she could coast.“It lit this fire under me,” she said. “It was important to me that everybody saw me as someone who wasn’t weak.”Diagnosed in the spring of her freshman year, she spent time in the hospital, then in outpatient treatment, completing chemotherapy just before her senior year. She graduated on time. As prom queen.She first performed comedy as a member of Bloomers, an all-female troupe at the University of Pennsylvania. After graduation, she moved to Chicago and studied and performed at various improv theaters, which eventually led to a spot on “Saturday Night Live” in 2010. There she created characters such as Jacob the Bar Mitzvah Boy and Dawn Lazarus, an anxious meteorologist. But long before she got paid for it, Bayer had relied on jokes as a coping mechanism.“I had to use humor to make everyone, including myself, feel OK,” she said, speaking of her time in treatment. Here comes that optimism again: “I also think it made me funnier.”She was speaking, from a bench on the fringes of Central Park, on a recent Friday afternoon. The temperature had climbed to nearly 70 degrees, but Bayer, who had just flown in on a red-eye from Los Angeles, was bundled against the spring in a belted coat, a knit beanie and Rag & Bone fleece sneakers. She had a green juice in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. A medical-grade mask had left a red mark high on each cheek.Even sleep-deprived and apparently very cold, Bayer radiated positivity. She smiled approvingly at the gamboling dogs, the sweating men, the woman who had arrived for a constitutional in high heels and full makeup. “Nothing like New York birds!” she said, when a flock of pigeons flew over, Hitchcock close. In high school she was voted Most Likely to Succeed. Most Likely to Bake a Mean Casserole would have tracked, too — even sitting in the middle of Manhattan, she emanated Midwestern normalcy and niceness.Over seven years on “Saturday Night Live,” Bayer (with Michael Che) was a dependable utility player with many memorable appearances on Weekend Update.Dana Edelson/NBC“She almost doesn’t seem like an actress,” said Molly Shannon, an “S.N.L.” veteran who now co-stars opposite Bayer as SVN’s superstar host. “She’s very steady and calm and grounded.”The comedian Aidy Bryant, who worked with Bayer in Chicago before they both found their way to “S.N.L.,” noted that Bayer has a way of turning that mildness into a strike force. When it comes to comedy, Bryant said, “She is a quiet, smiling assassin.”“Vanessa has a real reserved, polite, wonderfully Midwestern energy,” she added. “Then she hits with a punchline or a funny reaction or her truly incredible smile, which she can weaponize as a force of pain.”On “S.N.L.,” Bayer became a dependable utility player, often infusing characters (football widow, early career Jennifer Aniston) with a manic intensity — eyes overbright, speech a tick too fast. Taran Killam, another “S.N.L.” co-star, noted how calm the offscreen Bayer seemed, a composure he attributed to her history.“It must have given her incredible perspective,” he said. “‘S.N.L.’ is a very passionate job, a dream job. It feels like it matters more than anything in the world. She would always be the first one to say: ‘Who cares? No big deal. So they didn’t like the sketch? Move on.’”“S.N.L.” has a famously punishing schedule. But Jeremy Beiler, a former “S.N.L.” writer who joined around the same time Bayer did, noted how she met the stresses of the job with buoyancy.“She only looks in one direction,” he said. “It’s only forward.”In 2017, after seven seasons on “S.N.L.,” Bayer moved on. Another comedian might have worried about what would come next. Unsurprisingly, Bayer stayed positive. “My attitude is just that stuff kind of works out,” she said. And it did work out, more or less, with guest spots, voice work, supporting roles in a few movies.“I had to use humor to make everyone, including myself, feel OK,” Bayer said, speaking of her time in cancer treatment as a teen. “I also think it made me funnier.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesAs she was leaving “S.N.L.,” her management team asked her about dream projects, and her mind somehow flashed on home shopping TV. She had watched the channels often as a child: The peek into adult life fascinated her, and she loved the elegance of the hosts and the ways in which they would spin seemingly extemporaneous stories in their attempts to entice buyers.She described the hosts’ particular rhythms and vocabulary as “the first foreign language I ever learned,” and the network most likely provided her first taste of improv, too. (In college, when it came time to write her first sketch, she wrote one set in the world of home shopping, in which the host was selling cardboard with a hole in it. It killed.)A few months later, over brunch, Beiler mentioned that he had, by coincidence, begun a series pilot set in the world of home shopping. They began to collaborate, even arranging a field trip to QVC’s headquarters in West Chester, Pa., where they met with two hosts, Jane Treacy and Mary Beth Roe, whom Bayer had idolized as a child, and also managed to score some free soft pretzels. (Everyone I spoke to mentioned Bayer’s enthusiasm for snacks, and most of them mentioned her gift for scamming her way into free ones.) In the gift shop, they bought matching QVC mugs.Back at work, with Jessi Klein as showrunner, they began to build out a back story for Bayer’s character, Joanna, that would give her stakes and drive. They decided to borrow from Bayer’s own story, particularly her diagnosis and treatment and the way that those years of chemo and radiation stunted her emotional growth for a while.“I didn’t understand dating at all,” she said. “It was just playing catch up. Even out of college and into my 20s, I always was trying to fake being an adult.” In an hour’s conversation, this was the closest she ever came to acknowledging that pediatric cancer hadn’t been entirely a walk in the park.Bayer didn’t mind lending Joanna her medical chart — she has never been shy about her diagnosis. As a teen she used it to win her family a trip to Hawaii courtesy of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. (She had thought about asking to meet Jared Leto, but she eventually decided she would prefer to meet him as a peer. Years later, she did.) Colleagues at “S.N.L.” have heard her introduce leukemia into the conversation just to get free ice cream, which jibes with advice she offered during our interview: If you are sick, use it to get whatever you can.Bryant said, “She always takes the things that are hard and makes them something that she can use to empower herself or use to her advantage.”Gradually, Joanna took shape, a woman more guarded than Bayer and more stunted, with her same love of snacks and her same gift for antic improvisation but none of her obvious success. A woman who lies about having cancer shouldn’t be a woman you root for, but Bayer has a way of communicating a kind of desperate brightness that makes terrible things seem less terrible, just because she does them with such enthusiasm.What the camera recognizes is what Shannon, who also survived a major childhood trauma (her mother, youngest sister and a cousin were killed in a car accident), identified as a shared joy and determination to wring the utmost out of life.“We don’t take it for granted,” Shannon said. “We feel so lucky that we’re alive. For real.”There are many stories about illness. (Admittedly, there are fewer of them set in the world of home shopping.) But this is one — with its snacks and its sunniness and its heroine’s determination to exploit her fake diagnosis for all she can — that seemingly only Bayer can tell.“I always wanted to do something about when I was sick,” she said contentedly, as the gentle chaos of Central Park swirled around her. “Specifically, the fun I had.”Audio produced by More

    • 50 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      Fashioning ‘The First Lady’

      by

      The new Showtime series on Michelle Obama, Betty Ford and Eleanor Roosevelt makes the connection between substance and style.It is a coincidence, but a telling one, that the day after “The First Lady,” the series that is a revisionist take on presidential wives as seen through the intertwined stories of Michelle Obama, Betty Ford and Eleanor Roosevelt, premiered on Showtime, Dr. Jill Biden hosted the White House Easter egg roll. Or rather, the Easter “Eggucation” roll.There she stood, the current first lady and the only one out of more than 50 (official and acting) to keep her pre-administration day job, like a bouquet of hyacinths in a pink dress festooned with a veritable garden of florals, a coordinating purple coat and fuchsia gloves, flanked by her besuited husband and two life-size bunnies. She exuded warmth and family values, embodying the platonic ideal of a political spouse, while also promoting her signature cause (education).Dr. Jill Biden at the annual White House Easter egg roll at the White House this week.Doug Mills/The New York TimesIf ever there was a real-life illustration of the balancing act between role-playing and real issues that is part of performing one of the strangest non-job jobs that exists, this was it.After all, what is the first lady? Unelected, but part of the package; beholden to the West Wing, but in an office, if not an Office, of her own; emblematic, somehow, of American womanhood writ large. The human face of an administration.Which is to say, said Sean Wilentz, the George Henry Davis 1886 professor of American history at Princeton, she is supposed to be “the ideal wife as helpmeet: swearing (or affirming), to the best of her ability, to preserve (cook, care), protect (as in protecting time) and defend (no matter what) the president.”Exactly how strange that position is, forms the heart of “The First Lady,” a bit of historical didacticism dressed up as pop culture entertainment that makes the case for the presidential wife as the progressive social conscience of an administration, thus aiming to change the narrative from one largely focused on image-making (clothes! holiday events! state dinners!) to one focused on substance.Gillian Anderson as Eleanor Roosevelt.Boris Martin/ShowtimeYet what the series, which flips between moments in each first lady’s life that are connected thematically, rather than chronologically, may do best is illustrate just how intertwined the roles actually are — onscreen as in life. The first reaction of viewers (at least on social media) was not to the premise of the show, which gives its first ladies credit for, among other things, championing women’s rights and desegregation (Eleanor Roosevelt, as played by Gillian Anderson); changing the conversation around breast cancer, mammograms and addiction (Betty Ford, played by Michelle Pfeiffer); and fighting for gay marriage and exposing racism (Michelle Obama, by Viola Davis). Rather, it was to the facial tics, especially the lip pursing, of Ms. Davis as Mrs. Obama.By how they look, we think we know them. “The two things are intrinsically connected,” said Cathy Schulman, the showrunner and executive producer of “The First Lady.” When it comes to first ladies, how they present in the world becomes shorthand for who they are and what they do. It’s the bridge of “relatability” (in the words of the show’s Barack Obama) from the White House to every house. Onscreen as, perhaps, on the political stage.Viola Davis as Michelle Obama.Jackson Lee Davis/ShowtimeIt’s why, even as the characters themselves chafe against the strictures of their new position — as Laura Bush warns Mrs. Obama, people are going to judge everything she does, including what she wears; as Mrs. Obama rolls her eyes at attempts to make her a “Black Martha Stewart”; as Mrs. Ford announces her belief that you can be “ladylike” and yourself at the same time — Ms. Schulman and Signe Sejlund, the costume designer for the series, were focused on getting the clothes as accurate as possible.It was, Ms. Schulman said, “crucial.” Starting in late 2020, teams of researchers began collecting historical documentation and images from the periods represented, many of which had been preserved for posterity, the better to build wardrobes that could consist of about 75 changes for each woman. These included such major public sartorial statements as their wedding dresses, inauguration outfits and the gowns they wore for their official White House portraits.Jason Wu, who designed both of Mrs. Obama’s inaugural gowns, agreed to recreate the first one — the silver-white dress that seemed to proclaim a new dawn — for Ms. Davis. (In part because the original had been donated to the Smithsonian, and he wanted one for his archive.) Ms. Sejlund scoured the RealReal for a copy of the Milly dress Mrs. Obama wore in her portrait, and found it, albeit in the wrong size, so she acquired more fabric from the designer to reinvent it.Michelle Pfeiffer as Betty Ford.Murray Close/ShowtimeSome are clones of the originals, including Mrs. Ford’s shirtdresses, often paired with the silk scarves she favored, her many polka dots and her quilted bathrobes — especially the yellow robe she wore when she left the hospital after her mastectomy, when, Ms. Schulman said, “she knew the place would be crawling with journalists.” It was a canny choice that reflected her desire to be as transparent as possible about connecting her own situation to that of other women. (How many first ladies before her had been publicly photographed in their dressing gowns?)And some are conceptually the same, like the wide belts that, along with the pearls, cardigans and sleeveless sheaths, became a signature of Mrs. Obama, but which were shrunk down to be in proportion with Ms. Davis’s smaller frame. Then there was the giant floral necklace Eleanor Roosevelt wore to her husband’s first inauguration, which, while very au fait in the early 1930s, “looked almost ridiculous when you see it with a modern eye,” Ms. Sejlund said.From left, Gillian Anderson as Eleanor Roosevelt and Lily Rabe as Lorena ‘Hick’ Hickock.Boris Martin/ShowtimeThe necklace was ultimately left in the closet, unlike the collection of jaunty hats that were a Roosevelt trademark and that played a starring role in Mrs. Roosevelt’s 1941 visit to Tuskegee Army Air Field, where she demonstrated her support for Black airmen with a flight that was so smooth, she announced to the world, she “never lost” her hat.All such accessories are on some level recognizable because they serve as wormholes to the events portrayed. We may not remember them exactly, but we’ve probably seen the picture. It exists in our shared memory book, just as the photo of Mrs. Biden in her stylized florals with the rabbits will. Acknowledging that likelihood doesn’t take away from her achievements or the connection she made between holiday décor and learning. It supports it.They are, after all, effectively costumes for real life characters playing a very specific role in a show everyone can watch. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Television

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

      by

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

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Television

      ViacomCBS renames itself as it plays catch-up with Paramount+, its streaming service.

      by

      On Tuesday, Shari Redstone staged her second hourslong investor presentation in two years. Both events were designed for the same purpose — to reposition her old-line media company, ViacomCBS, as a streaming giant in the making, one capable of competing head-on with Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video, despite a late start.This time, there was less snickering.“Some of you thought we were on an impossible mission,” Robert M. Bakish, the chief executive of ViacomCBS, said during the presentation on Tuesday. “It’s not only possible. It’s happening.”To highlight the importance of its fast-growing Paramount+ streaming service, Ms. Redstone, the company’s chair, announced that ViacomCBS would rename itself Paramount Global.Paramount+ had 32.8 million subscribers worldwide at the end of its most recent quarter, up from fewer than 19 million a year earlier. In the three months that ended on Dec. 31, Paramount+ added 7.3 million customers, the result of offerings like “1883,” the prequel to “Yellowstone”; “Clifford the Big Red Dog”; and National Football League games. (A year earlier, ViacomCBS was adding about a million streaming subscribers a quarter.)The company’s streaming portfolio (Paramount+ and niche services from Showtime, BET and Nickelodeon) now has about 56 million subscribers. Mr. Bakish said that number would grow to 100 million by 2024, more than the roughly 70 million the company had previously forecast. The company also raised its 2024 streaming revenue goal to $9 billion, from $6 billion.Streaming brought in about $4.2 billion last year, including advertising sales from the free Pluto TV service.Paramount+ unveiled a barrage of additional programming to fuel continued growth. The expanded lineup will include fresh content from franchises including “Yellowstone,” “Beavis and Butt-Head,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” “Real World,” “Dora the Explorer,” “NCIS,” “SpongeBob SquarePants,” “Transformers” and “South Park.” Paramount+ will be the exclusive first stop after theatrical distribution for all Paramount Pictures movies beginning in 2024. (Many previously went to Epix, a premium cable channel.)Starting this summer in the United States, Paramount+ subscribers will be able to upgrade to receive Showtime content, including the new hit drama “Yellowjackets” and older series like “Billions.”ViacomCBS shares declined about 6 percent in after-hours trading. Richard Greenfield, a founder of the research firm LightShed Partners, cited investor concern about Mr. Bakish’s “meaningfully stepping up spending” on content.It may be growing quickly, but Paramount+ continues to lag behind competitors like Disney+, which added 11.8 million subscribers worldwide in its most recent quarter to reach 129.8 million. Netflix has about 222 million. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      ‘Billions’ Season 6, Episode 3 Recap: Street Fighting Man

      by

      Prince forms an unsavory alliance to help make a giant land grab. Chuck grabs a bullhorn.“I look at every competitor as a potential partner … right up until I can’t anymore.” As far as one-sentence encapsulations of the Mike Prince Method go, it’s hard to beat this statement by the billionaire coprotagonist of the sixth season of “Billions.” In this week’s episode, titled “S.T.D.” (it’s not what you think), Prince drives one such competitor — one of the more odious figures in the “Billions” legendarium — to the edge of defeat, then rides in to save his bacon and enrich them both.It’s a feat of bargaining so impressive that it literally drives Prince’s enemy Chuck Rhoades into the street, wielding a bullhorn instead of his authority as Attorney General. In the end, Chuck may find the former more effective than the latter.The episode begins with a late-night rallying call by Ben Kim, one of the more timid soldiers in Prince Cap’s newly acquired army. As a friend of Mafee, who quit the firm with Dollar Bill after Bobby Axelrod’s ouster, Ben hears that Mafee and Stern’s outfit is snapping up land in anticipation of New York City’s 2028 Olympic bid. Their bank roller: none other than the disgraced former treasury secretary Todd Krakow (the ever-delightful Danny Strong).Rather than allow Krakow to elbow him out of the position he himself planned to take, Prince offers an alliance and is rebuffed. So he takes his case to the city’s new mayor, Tess Johnson (Gameela Wright), advising her to speak out against plans to build a new stadium in Manhattan, seen as crucial to the Olympic bid.At the same time, Chuck’s ace, Kate Sacker, uncovers Krakow’s role in the Olympics ploy and kills his various land deals. This sends Krakow scampering into Chuck’s office, demanding to know why on earth he would help Mike Prince on a matter like this. Chuck, who wasn’t previously aware of Prince’s involvement, advises Krakow to resubmit his real-estate plans on the up-and-up instead of through shell companies, the better to stick it to Prince.But the mayor’s anti-stadium news conference kills Chuck and Krakow’s anti-Prince maneuver — which, in turn, drives Krakow and Prince into each other’s arms. Krakow has the deals. Prince has the bankroll. All they need is a developer to help them out, whom they find in Bud Lazzara, the mogul Chuck humiliated in the previous episode.Now all Prince needs to come out on top is a way to placate employees like Ben Kim, Taylor Mason and Wendy Rhoades, who have sentimental attachments to the rival firm established by Mafee and Dollar Bill. This he produces in the form of a bailout by the venerable I-bank Spartan-Ives; it’s enough for Mafee to reinstitute his weekly dinner meet-ups with Taylor, to say nothing of saving the bacon of his and Dollar Bill’s firm, High Plains Management. (Its logo is two crossed six-shooters. Yee-haw!)With all his ducks in a row, Prince plans to go forward with a Manhattan stadium after all. Despite having single-handedly convinced the mayor to oppose such a development, he now woos her back with the promise of converting the athletes’ quarters he plans to build into low-income housing. It’s enough to lure her into a joint news conference for the city’s Olympic ambitions.But drawing on the lessons of his successful showdown with the upstate billionaire Melville Revere, Chuck is not about to be outdone. He literally stops traffic outside the news conference, then starts walking on top of the stopped cars, megaphone in hand. The billionaire class, he says as the top of some poor commuter’s car buckles under his dress shoe, will not be allowed to quintuple traffic and displace the city’s citizens — not on his watch, anyway. “Take back our city!” he exclaims, leading the assembled onlookers in a chant to that effect. As the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” drops on the soundtrack, Prince, Lazzara and Krakow can only stand and watch as their moment of triumph is co-opted.Running parallel to all this is a drama taking place behind the scenes at Michael Prince Capital: the struggle of Prince’s right-hand man, Scooter Dunbar, and his predecessor in the second-banana role, Mike Wagner. Wags still has the office adjacent to the boss’s, but after watching Scooter traipse back and forth from his comparatively distant digs, he finally relents and offers up the space to his replacement. Of course, this gives him an excuse to relocate to the lower floor, where all the grunts work, making him a man of the people.Dunbar, no dummy, recognizes the ploy and winds up offering half of his office to Wags — a maneuver that dovetails nicely with Prince’s repeated insistence that the two men work together, which they do rather well in the task of wooing the suave Colin Drache (Campbell Scott), a sort of Olympics whisperer. By bringing him aboard, they grease the wheels for Prince’s New York Olympic bid, but it’s their shared, teary-eyed love of the Harry Chapin song “Cat’s in the Cradle” that truly cements their new partnership. Wags crying real tears over this sentimental ode to the tenuous relationship between father and son? Stranger things have happened, especially on this show … but not very many.Loose change:The classic-rock needle drops keep on coming: This episode also offers up a double shot of Allman in the form of Gregg’s solo version of “Midnight Rider” and the Allman Brothers Band’s “Ramblin’ Man,” not to mention Chuck’s quoting Bruce Springsteen’s “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” Do I miss the days when Bobby Axelrod introduced, like, Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades” into the equation? Yes I do. But speaking as a Long Island native, a little Harry Chapin is always welcome.“I like being rich — ain’t gonna end up like Trump,” says Todd Krakow; unless I’m mistaken, this is the show’s most direct reference yet to the former president.Perhaps the show’s most breathtaking moment is the sight of the business-casual enthusiasts Mafee and Dollar Bill fully suited up for their big news conference with Krakow. I never knew they had it in them.I’m always here for a good “Billions” wrestling reference. Between Tuk’s “Austin 3:16” T-shirt (a reference to the former champion “Stone Cold” Steve Austin) and Mafee’s labored analogy of Wendy and Taylor’s maneuvers to an unprotected pile driver (a move in which a wrestler drives his upside-down opponent headfirst into the mat), this episode scratched that squared-circle itch.No “Godfather” references that I could spot this week, but the cinematic callbacks flew fast and furious; Mafee’s early quote from “Tombstone” and the comparison of Wags and Scooter to Riggs and Murtaugh from “Lethal Weapon” were just the tip of the iceberg.A giant portrait of Stacey Abrams on the wall? Michael Prince Capital really is different from Axe Cap. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Television

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

      by

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