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      ‘Cusp’ Review: Teenage Girls, Stuck With Shrugging Off Harm

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      What starts as a documentary about three Texan high schoolers becomes a look at the normalization of sexual abuse.Directed by Isabel Bethencourt and Parker Hill, the verité-style documentary “Cusp” follows three Texan teenage girls on summer vacation. The group of friends, Brittney, Aaloni, and Autumn, ages 15 to 16, live a seemingly carefree existence. But as we partake in the girls’ shenanigans — house parties, back seat gossiping, bedroom intimacies — their recurring testimonies about sexual trauma and consent stand out.A portrait of modern girlhood, this documentary ultimately becomes a bleak look at the normalization of sexual abuse among the very victimized young women.The film begins on a disturbing note: Two girls laze around on a tire swing as a boy nonchalantly approaches with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Though the location in Texas is unspecified, grassy flatlands, gravel roads and isolated bungalows suggest these are rural, working-class parts. (Press materials say the filmmakers, based in New York, met the girls on a road trip a few summers ago.)Brittney, who wears contoured makeup that adds years to her appearance, discusses her daily drinking and partying with a grin and shrug. Aaloni worships her freewheeling mother and loathes her chauvinistic father, who is never captured on camera. Autumn suffers a bad breakup, which sends her spiraling into reckless party mode. She even gets her nipple pierced by Aaloni, the one moment in the film not centered on boys and trauma.Either in voice-over or in discussions caught on camera, the girls speak candidly to their experiences with rape or sexual abuse and the regularity with which they are approached by older men who initially feign concern about their status as minors. Their hyper-awareness of these dynamics feels all the more tragic when one of them begins dating a controlling adult man.The film ends on a hopeful note, which feels contrived given the bottom line: that the cyclical nature of sexual abuse is resilient and yet unbroken.CuspNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters currently. On Showtime beginning Nov. 26. More

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      Get Your Kill Room Ready. Dexter Is Back.

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      Eight years after the lovable serial killer went into bearded self-exile, he returns for “Dexter: New Blood.” Here’s a refresher on where things left off.“Dexter” ended in 2013, with its protagonist self-exiled to the frozen North and most major characters dead. But you can’t keep a high-functioning psychopath down. “Dexter: New Blood,” which premieres on Showtime on Nov. 7, finds Michael C. Hall’s Dexter Morgan working at a fish and game shop under an assumed name. His side hustles including bladesmithing, goat farming and maybe some vengeance.In the intervening eight years, you may have forgotten a few details of the show — other than, say, its wildly unpopular finale. Here are a few mementos.The KillerDexter Morgan, born Dexter Moser, grew up in Miami, the adopted son of Harry Morgan (James Remar), a Miami Metro police officer, and his wife, Doris. He has an adoptive sister, Debra Morgan (Jennifer Carpenter). During the first season, it is revealed that Dexter also has a half-brother, Brian (Christian Camargo), and that the two boys witnessed their biological mother’s murder, via chain saw, and were left with her dismembered body in a blood-flooded shipping container for days. If you’re thinking trauma like that might make anyone into a serial killer, you’re right! Twice!When Dexter was still a child, Harry discovered the corpse of the neighbor’s yappy dog, which Dexter had buried alongside other animal bones. Accepting Dexter’s antisocial tendencies, Harry channeled those impulses into hunting — first animals, then, as Harry put it, “other kinds of animals” who have escaped justice. With Harry’s permission, Dexter killed his first human at 20, offing a nurse who was overdosing her patients.Dexter became a bloodstain pattern analyst for Miami Metro. Deb joined him there as a police officer, working first in vice, then in homicide, and in time becoming a detective. Eventually, Deb learned Dexter’s secret (walking in on your adopted brother mid-stab will do that) and later killed to protect him, which sent her spiraling. She also discovered that she was in love with him, an upsetting twist even for a show that specialized in upset.Armchair psychiatrists watching at home have diagnosed Dexter as a sociopath and a secret schizoid. Dexter claims not to feel human emotion. He lets the audience in on his real thoughts through voice-over, like this one from the pilot: “People fake a lot of human interactions. But I feel like I fake them all. And I fake them very well. And that’s my burden, I guess.” As the original series progressed, Dexter seemed to move closer to authentic emotion, maintaining friendships and romantic relationships and enjoying a close bond with Deb, even as he never lost his need to kill. He personified that predatory urge as his “dark passenger.”Is Dexter a bad person who does good things or a good person who does bad ones? Or neither? Or both? He loves a pulled pork sandwich and is surprisingly good at bowling.James Remar, left, plays Dexter’s adoptive father, Harry, who appears to Dexter in visions to remind him of the code.Sonja Flemming/ShowtimeThe CodeOnce he recognized Dexter’s death drive, Harry taught Dexter to adhere to a code. “There were so many lessons in the vaunted Code of Harry — twisted commandments handed down from the only God I’ve ever worshiped,” as Dexter put it. “One through 10: Don’t get caught.” Other rules: Never kill an innocent person. Kill only those beyond the reach of the justice system. Be prepared. Leave no trace.Dexter occasionally violated some aspect of the code. (He was caught surprisingly often. But that’s what happens when you run for eight seasons.) But he killed the wrong person only once, and he rarely lets emotions cloud his judgment. He often killed when threatened, but he sometimes refused to kill people — even dangerous or inconvenient people — when they failed to meet Harry’s criteria. He has even released a few people from his kill rooms.Dexter (Hall, with Sam Underwood) delivers a lecture to one of his many, many victims per the usual routine.Randy Tepper/ShowtimeThe RitualUnless acting in self-defense or within a significant time crunch, Dexter adhered to a specific ritual. Knocking his victims out with a synthetic opioid, he brings them to a plastic-draped kill room, decorated with photographs of their own victims. He undresses his prey, then binds them to a table with duct tape or cling wrap. Using a scalpel, he makes an incision on his victims’ cheeks, placing a droplet of their blood on a glass slide, adding the slides to his collection of trophies.Before killing his victims, whom he refers to as his playmates, he often toys with them, engaging them in conversation. His preferred weapon is a knife, but he knows his way around a saw — and an anchor, a cleaver and a pen. After the kill, he dismembers the bodies, places the parts into plastic trash bags and dumps them into the bay.Dexter at one of many funerals with his sister, Debra (Jennifer Carpenter, in plaid shirt), who . . . also later died.Sonja Flemming/ShowtimeThe DeadBy the time the original series ended, most major characters had died. There are Dexter’s direct victims, of course, a list that includes his brother, Brian; an ex-lover or two; and more than 100 others. Most of his known associates have also come to bloody ends, like his wife, Rita Morgan (Julie Benz), a victim of the Trinity Killer (John Lithgow), and several of Dexter’s co-workers, including James Doakes (Erik King), an antagonist, and Maria LaGuerta (Lauren Velez), his former lieutenant, shot by Deb in a bid to protect Dexter.Deb died, too. (More on that in a minute.) But deceased “Dexter” characters often cameo, courtesy of Dexter’s vivid imagination.Dexter said goodbye to his sister in the original series finale, and goodbye to his life in Miami.Randy Tepper/ShowtimeThat FinaleThe final season found Dexter stalking the Brain Surgeon, a serial killer with ties to a famous psychologist. The Brain Surgeon shot Deb in the abdomen. In the finale, she suffered a complication during surgery, a blood clot (way to work those metaphors) that left her in a vegetative state.Dexter had planned to escape to Argentina with his onetime girlfriend and fellow serial killer, Hannah McKay (Yvonne Strahovski), a poisoner, and Harrison, the child he had with Rita. But Dexter can’t escape himself. As a storm approached, he murdered the Brain Surgeon. With a pen! Sending Hannah and Harrison ahead, he turned off Deb’s life support and absconded with her sheet-wrapped body, which he dumped alongside his other kills. The hurricane arrived, wrecking Dexter’s boat and ostensibly killing him, too. But the final shots find Dexter in some frozen waste, having grown a lumbersexual beard and invested heavily in flannel.It’s an ending that no one saw coming. Probably because it lacked closure, retribution and attentiveness to Dexter’s journey toward personhood. Maybe the snowy new series, set in upstate New York, will provide that. More

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      ‘Dexter’ and the Shows That Wouldn’t Die

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      The revival of the serial-killer drama is TV’s latest refusal to let a supposedly finished franchise rest in peace.The first thing to die in “Dexter: New Blood” is irony. The murder weapon is the subtitle.Oh, there’s blood, all right. That’s what Showtime’s righteous-serial-killer franchise promised from 2006 to 2013, and we get it in the very first episode of this revival, in snow-staining buckets. What we don’t get, in the four competent but redundant episodes screened for critics, is the “new”: any hint of a fresh creative impulse in a series that had worn itself out years before it left the air.Then again, in “New Blood,” as in so many of TV’s ubiquitous revivals, novelty is not really the point. The point is to give people more of what they already expect, by pulling out the electroshock paddles and reanimating any property with a following.You might have thought that interest in a “Dexter” comeback would have been squelched by the (supposed) series finale, a contender for the TV disappointment hall of fame. Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall), whose foster father taught him to channel his bloodlust into killing only the deserving, seemed to end his story by piloting a boat into a hurricane off the coast of Miami, to join his murdered sister, Debra (Jennifer Carpenter), in death. That is, until the final scene upended the closure and consequence, revealing our slayer alive and working in a lumber yard.“New Blood,” which begins Sunday on Showtime, finds Dexter living a new life — but not that one. He’s living in upstate New York (played by picturesque Shelburne Falls, Mass.) as “Jim Lindsay” (a seeming nod to the novelist Jeff Lindsay, whose “Darkly Dreaming Dexter” the series was based on). Hall’s distinctively icy delivery now has a climate to match.Jim’s a solid citizen, dating the local police chief (Julia Jones), chopping firewood, going out line dancing and working at a sporting goods store selling knives and guns. (In the original series, he worked as a forensic blood-spatter expert; “Dexter” loves its wry vocational choices.)Do we need to call it a spoiler that Jim/Dexter finds it not so easy to control the “dark passenger” that drives him to kill? That his romance with a law officer becomes uncomfortably complicated, as his relationship with the police officer Debra once was? That he still retains the knowledge of how to set up a home slaughter shack? Then consider all eight seasons of “Dexter” a spoiler, because “New Blood” gives you little that you aren’t used to, beyond the temperature.It even brings back Debra, now a taunting imaginary presence in Dexter’s mind. It’s a fun, flashy role for Carpenter, but it does little dramatically except to rehash Dexter’s past torments and manically externalize his inner state, which is already amply told-not-shown through the series’s voice-over.Jennifer Carpenter returns as Debra, Dexter’s dead sister, who is now an imaginary presence.Seacia Pavao/Showtime, via Associated PressThe newish wrinkle is the sudden appearance of his son, Harrison (Jack Alcott), last seen as a tot heading off into exile in Argentina. He is now a teenager with Dexter’s thousand-mile stare and a lot of questions.His inopportune visit, and Dexter’s worry that Harrison has inherited the dark passenger, has the potential to emotionally complicate the story. But it mostly serves as one more source of pressure in the season’s busy cat-and-mouse game. There’s also a string of missing young women in the area; a potential school shooting; and the appearance of that staple of brooding cable dramas, a Symbolic Mystical Deer.Sanguinary and superfluous, “New Blood” ends up being an example of the worst traits of two different TV eras at once.The original “Dexter” began well into cable’s antihero period, a flourishing of difficult protagonists that, at best, gave us “The Sopranos” and “Breaking Bad,” series that forced their audiences to confront the moral implications of being invested in the villain. At worst, it simply offered audiences excuses to revel in the vicarious thrill of bad behavior.For its first couple seasons, “Dexter” was a mischievously provocative narrative. It offered a funhouse-mirror reflection of gory police shows like “CSI” — Dexter was both spatter-analyzer and spatter-maker. And it invited us to wonder about the nature of morality: Was Dexter actually a moral person, or just a monster who’d learned a neat trick?But as it went on, the show gave its protagonist and its audience more and more loopholes. Interrogating the show’s premise — basically, a permission structure for the audience to have fun with a vigilante murderer — would ruin the fun. Instead, the show let you enjoy Dexter’s macabre handiwork and even cheer him on to evade capture, because his victims were evil, because without him someone would commit even worse crimes, because he was in the end a kind of victim.The new series likewise seems to be mostly comfortable as a darkly comic romp, opening with a stalking sequence set to Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger” — get it? — and quickly setting up new cartoon antagonists who are basically begging to get themselves serial-killed. The series’ promise of guilt-free bloodletting hasn’t aged well, even on ice.In the current era of TV, “New Blood” is the latest revival indulging the idea that fans always deserve to get more of the things they liked, because they can — creative dead-ends and supposedly final endings be damned. But this time at least, Dexter did not act alone.This fall brought us the “Sopranos” prequel movie, “The Many Saints of Newark,” a well-made and pointless exercise in remember-when (as Tony once put it, “the lowest form of conversation”) that allowed stars like Vera Farmiga and Corey Stoll to trot out their impersonations of beloved characters while adding nothing to the original story beyond a hint of sadness.“The Many Saints of Newark” features younger versions of “Sopranos” characters like Junior (Corey Stoll) and Livia Soprano (Vera Farmiga).Barry Wetcher/Warner Bros.Because fan bases existed and the checks cleared, we got more “Gilmore Girls,” “Roseanne,” “Will & Grace,” “Arrested Development” and “Veronica Mars,” plus the “Breaking Bad” movie “El Camino” — efforts that played on the affection for TV classics without building on them. This December, a de-Samantha-fied “Sex and the City” will return in the form of HBO Max’s “And Just Like That …”Not every revival or spinoff is a bad idea — but it needs to have an idea beyond “I want more.” “Better Call Saul” can stand with the original “Breaking Bad” because the prequel developed its own picaresque story and voice. “Twin Peaks: The Return” in many ways surpassed the original, by embracing artistic adventure rather than nostalgia.Good, bad or adequate, though, the collective effect of all these continuations and extensions is to rob finales of finality. It denies artists and audiences the power of believing that “The End” is the end. Maybe the “New Blood” season could serve as a do-over, a for-real-this-time finale for “Dexter” after its unsatisfying first try. But would anyone bet on that?Of course, nobody wants critics saying that John Updike shouldn’t return to Rabbit or Margaret Atwood to Gilead; no one wants to squelch the next “Godfather, Part II” in the name of preventing the next “Godfather, Part III.” Sometimes franchises genuinely have more creative life in them.But often they just need to stay buried. As “Jim Lindsay” says in “New Blood,” explaining why he changed his name: “Dexter had to die.” Amen, brother, and yet here we are. You had one job. More

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      Damian Lewis Discusses the Future of ‘Billions’

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      In an interview, the actor talked about his character’s big twist and what it means for the Showtime series and his career.This article includes spoilers from Sunday’s Season 5 finale of “Billions.”One of TV’s last great antiheroes departed Sunday night on Showtime’s “Billions.” Bobby Axelrod, the proudly venal hedge-fund titan played by Damian Lewis, flew off into the sunset in the Season 5 finale, slipping the grasp of the law and his chief nemesis, Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti), one last time on his way to a less punitive future in Switzerland.While the character’s final scene was somewhat open-ended, with Axe (as he is most commonly known) being welcomed by the Swiss authorities after fleeing America, Lewis confirmed in a recent video interview that he was leaving the show.“There’s an opportunity maybe for me to return,” he said from his home in North London. “But for now, broadly speaking, Axe has been vanquished.”Lewis’s exit ends what amounts to “easily the most time I’ve spent playing one character,” he said. The actor was previously best known for his three-season stint on another Showtime series, “Homeland.”It also comes just months after a personal tragedy. Lewis’s wife, the acclaimed actress Helen McCrory, died in April, not long after “Billions” returned from its pandemic production hiatus. Lewis shot much of his final stretch on the show remotely, from England.Over five seasons on the pulpy markets-and-machers drama, Axe embodied the culture’s often contradictory feelings about the superrich. A self-made, self-described capitalist monster, he shamelessly destroyed anything — careers, lives, entire towns — that got between him and his next billion. But he did so with enviable audacity and panache, with an equally alluring penthouse-and-private-jet lifestyle.“When I’m walking down the street in New York, it’s: ‘Axe, you the man!’” Lewis said. “He’s a really despicable human being, but no one seems to care.”That’s owed largely to Lewis, who from the beginning imbued a character that could have been a sneering caricature with emotional depth and a predatory physicality. (When he was developing the character, his acting exercises included moving about on the ground like a cheetah.) Much as Jon Hamm and Bryan Cranston made Don Draper and Walter White irresistible even when they were awful, Lewis made Axe’s financial marauding fun to watch.“Damian Lewis is not an actor who’s scared the audience is going to dislike him,” said Brian Koppelman, who is a showrunner along with David Levien. “He is willing to play the character in as caustic a manner as the character requires, and he has faith that if he’s true to that, it will connect with the audience.”But after 60 episodes of elaborate, at times inscrutable schemes, and of Chuck and Axe squaring off in various configurations, Lewis was ready to move on.“It’s difficult to keep mining, creatively,” he said. “We know who he is.”And after six years of spending months at a time in New York filming “Billions,” he plans to stick close to home and to his two teenage children after “we had a sadness in our family,” he said, referring to McCrory’s death, at 52, from cancer.It’s a subject he’s reluctant to talk about, his normal expansiveness giving way to terse responses. He wants to remain in London for the foreseeable future for “obvious reasons,” he said. “It is self-evident.”Lewis said McCrory’s death did not explain his departure from “Billions.” He initially signed on for five seasons and “always just assumed that would be enough,” he said. Koppelman said the show, which premiered in 2016, had been building toward Axe’s departure for several years.But it does explain why Lewis spent much of the last few episodes appearing remotely. Actors and crew flew to England to shoot scenes that were framed within the show as a stint for Axe in Covid quarantine. (Lewis did return to New York for part of the final episode.)“We wouldn’t ask him to come to America in that situation — right after the love of his life passed away, who was a remarkable, incredible artist and human being,” Koppelman said.Lewis’s character channeled mercenary hedge-funders in the wake of the Great Recession, embodying the culture’s often contradictory feelings about the superrich.   Showtime“It’s Damian’s private life, so it’s not really ours to comment on,” he continued. “We just feel truly, unbelievably lucky to have had five years with Damian Lewis and Paul Giamatti together.”From the beginning, the cat-and-mouse dynamic between Axe and Chuck has been the show’s defining dimension. (A close second: The abundant awkward cameos by real-life financiers and Manhattan luminaries.)When the show returns on Jan. 23 for its sixth season, Corey Stoll’s Mike Prince, who arrived this season, will be the master-of-the-universe foil for Giamatti’s ethically ambiguous lawman. The finale found Prince literally taking Axelrod’s seat, after buying his company in an offer Axe couldn’t refuse.With his carefully cultivated image and world-saving rhetoric, the Prince character has more in common with our current crop of rocket-riding billionaires than with the mercenary hedge-funders Axe channeled in the wake of the Great Recession. (Andrew Ross Sorkin, a New York Times editor and columnist who chronicled the 2008 crash in his book, “Too Big to Fail,” is a creator and executive producer of “Billions.”)“A long-running show has to evolve,” Levien said. “So it’s like a reload in a great way, at the right time.” Showtime has not yet committed to a seventh season, but Gary Levine, the network’s president of entertainment, said, “From what I’ve seen of Season 6, I’m very encouraged.”For Lewis, who is currently preparing to shoot the British Cold War series “A Spy Among Friends,” his departure from American television comes almost exactly 20 years after he was introduced to U.S. viewers, as a star of the HBO World War II mini-series “Band of Brothers,” in September 2001. It also wraps up a decade he spent mostly on Showtime, beginning with his time on “Homeland” as the soldier turned sleeper agent Nicholas Brody. (“I’ve had to say goodbye to Damian twice now,” Levine said.)An Eton-educated Brit, Lewis has displayed a remarkable knack for playing blue-collar Americans. (Axe wears his Yonkers roots on the sleeve of his cashmere hoodie.) But he isn’t sure when, if ever, he will seek out another American series.“I don’t like closing chapters,” he said. “But it does feel like it’s the end of that for now.”Lewis won’t miss playing Axelrod, he said. But he is proud that he and the writers had been able to capture something about both the allure and the corrupting influence of extreme wealth. While there are still plenty of appealingly terrible rich people on TV — “Succession” returns Oct. 17 — Axe’s particular flavor of swaggering villainy has gotten rarer in an era currently defined by the likes of Ted Lasso.“We did somehow make him a thing in the culture,” Lewis said. “And that’s always fun to achieve.” More

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      Head of Paramount Pictures is ousted as ViacomCBS focuses on streaming.

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      In 2017, Viacom turned to one of Hollywood’s most seasoned and respected executives, James N. Gianopulos, to revive its flatlining Paramount Pictures operation. Mr. Gianopulos quickly stabilized the 1910s-era studio — repairing relationships with filmmakers and producers, building a thriving television division from near-scratch, and restoring Paramount to profitability.He was ousted on Monday, with his status as the consummate Hollywood insider having curdled into a liability, at least to ViacomCBS, the conglomerate that owns Paramount, where streaming, streaming, streaming is the new currency of the realm.Brian Robbins, 58, who runs Viacom’s children’s television business, will succeed Mr. Gianopulos, 69, as chief executive of Paramount Pictures, ViacomCBS said. Emma Watts, 51, the president of Paramount’s Motion Picture Group, was notably passed over for the job.The reversal of fortune for Mr. Gianopulos, who had two years left on his contract, did not shock the movie capital, where speculation about his standing inside ViacomCBS had been gossiped about for months. Shari Redstone, who controls the company, had signaled in private that Mr. Gianopulos had become a frustration. In particular, he had, at times, resisted a ViacomCBS effort to prioritize the Paramount+ streaming service at the expense of ticket sales and theaters. Big-screen releases remain of crucial importance to studio partners like Tom Cruise, who stars in Paramount’s “Mission: Impossible” series and coming “Top Gun” sequel.Shari Redstone, the chair of ViacomCBS, in July. She has been pushing the company to prioritize streaming.Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImagesBut the ouster rattled the film business nonetheless. It was seen by some as barbarous — tradition holds that senior statesmen get to write their own endings. And it added to a changing of the guard: Ron Meyer, a longtime film power at Universal, left last year amid a sex scandal, and Alan F. Horn, the chief creative officer at Walt Disney Studios, is widely expected to retire in the coming months.Bob Bakish, the chief executive of ViacomCBS, said in a statement that the leadership change would “build on Paramount’s strong momentum, ensuring it continues to engage audiences at scale while embracing viewers’ evolving tastes and habits.” He said Mr. Robbins was an “expert” at developing franchises by “leaning into the unique strengths of new and established platforms.”Mr. Bakish called Mr. Gianopulos “a towering figure in Hollywood” and thanked him for revitalizing Paramount. In the same statement, Mr. Gianopulos recounted a list of major changes he had successfully navigated over his nearly 40-year career — such as the introduction of VCRs and online film rentals — and wished Mr. Robbins “all the very best success.”For many film industry stalwarts, Mr. Robbins is an affront to their identities; he comes from television, said while holding one’s nose. Mr. Robbins has experience as a movie producer and director. But much of the Hollywood establishment also looks down on that part of his résumé, which includes “Norbit,” a commercially successful but critically reviled Eddie Murphy vehicle from 2007. Not exactly Oscar bait.Mr. Robbins gained fame as a young actor in the 1980s by playing a mulleted rebel on the ABC sitcom “Head of the Class.” In the 1990s and 2000s he worked as a television producer (“Kenan & Kel” on Nickelodeon, “Smallville” on the WB) and a film director (“Norbit,” “Varsity Blues”).By 2009, however, Mr. Robbins started to become disillusioned with Hollywood. Younger audiences — his specialty — were living online. He began experimenting with low-budget films starring YouTube personalities like Lucas Cruikshank (a.k.a. Fred Figgelhorn) and started a YouTube channel, AwesomenessTV, aimed at teenage girls. In 2013, Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was then running DreamWorks Animation, bought AwesomenessTV for about $33 million. (Mr. Katzenberg remains a mentor.)“There is no movie business anymore!” Mr. Robbins was quoted by Fast Company as saying in 2013. “The model’s broken, and I see that as an opportunity.”Mr. Robbins was named president of Nickelodeon, which is also owned by ViacomCBS, in 2018. He has become known inside Viacom as a plain-spoken, never-say-die futurist who believes that Paramount+, the company’s relatively small streaming service, must be supercharged. Mr. Robbins has eagerly rerouted new children’s programming toward Paramount+ and away from Nickelodeon’s traditional cable channels. One such show, a reboot of “iCarly,” has been a hit for the streaming service.Mr. Gianopulos, or “Jim G” as everyone in Hollywood refers to him, will remain a consultant until the end of the year, ViacomCBS said. “Jim is nothing less than legendary in this business, and I am humbled and grateful to him for his years of mentorship and friendship,” Mr. Robbins said in a statement.Mr. Robbins will continue to lead Nickelodeon, ViacomCBS said. But he will not get all of Mr. Gianopulos’s portfolio; Paramount Television Studios will now report to David Nevins, the chairman and chief executive of Showtime Networks. More

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      in Television

      What’s on TV This Week: ‘The People vs. Agent Orange’ and Macy’s Fireworks

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      PBS airs a documentary about the enduring effects of Agent Orange. And the Macy’s annual fireworks display returns to New York in full force.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, June 28-July 4. Details and times are subject to change. More

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      That ‘Ziwe’ Look

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      On her new Showtime series, Ziwe Fumudoh’s feminine-with-a-wink style enables her sharp comedy.In the first episode of her new variety series on Showtime, the comedian Ziwe Fumudoh asks the writer Fran Lebowitz: “What bothers you more: slow walkers or racism?”“This character is hyperbolic,” Ms. Fumudoh said a few days before the premiere of “Ziwe.” “It’s only hyperbole that somebody would ask that question. And you see that reflected in how I dress.”Ms. Fumudoh was explaining how the wardrobe for the series came together: a tornado of pink that has sucked up a few feather boas, a mountain of crystal embellishments and an assortment of fuzzy hats, plastic visors, tiny sunglasses and opera gloves. When the costume designer Pamela Shepard-Hill would add a ring to an outfit, Ms. Fumudoh would ask for six more, “and then let’s do a cuff that’s entirely made of diamonds,” she said.On “Ziwe,” whether during a confrontational interview or parody music video, Ms. Fumudoh plays an audacious, quick-witted consumerist, whose attitude and armor is inspired by an unholy marriage of Dionne from “Clueless” and Paris Hilton in “The Simple Life,” along with a few other ultrafeminine pop culture figures of the 1990s and aughts. (In a sketch about plastic surgery, she wears matching pink sweatpants and a sleeveless crop top, wordlessly making a reference to Amy Poehler’s desperate mom from “Mean Girls.”)As a comedian who became famous for making people uncomfortable with questions about race and class, Ms. Fumudoh, 29, uses fashion like a weapon, creating an air of innocence with her Delia’s catalog looks, then slicing through it with the sharp heel of a Barbie stiletto.She is also an exceptionally physical performer, writhing and jumping through her musical numbers, whether channeling a jazzy “Chicago” siren or a girl-group member, circa 1999. Extensive legs-in-the-air choreography had to be taken into consideration when planning her ensembles, Ms. Shepard-Hill said.Ms. Fumudoh, in a LaQuan Smith catsuit, rose to prominence on Instagram Live, wearing equally bold outfits and makeup.Greg Endries/Showtime“We would have fittings, and I would be like, ‘OK, do your choreography,’” she said. “Then instantly: ‘That’s inappropriate. Take that off. That’s actually not OK for Showtime.”For the music videos in particular, hyperbolic Ziwe borrows from the real Ziwe’s closet. In a song called “Stop Being Poor” (a joke, in Episode 3, about people who believe being poor is a choice), Ms. Fumudoh wears a skintight all-crystal minidress by Aidan Euan of Akna.“How absurd is it to have a dress that luxurious in a time like this?” she said. “It so encapsulates the idea of ‘Stop Being Poor’ that I got it for ‘Stop Being Poor’ before we even wrote the song ‘Stop Being Poor,’ when I just knew that it was something I wanted to do.”In the 1920s-inspired number “Lisa Called the Cops on Black People,” she wears her own off-the-shoulder black velvet-and-mesh catsuit by LaQuan Smith.When putting together a mood board for the show, Ms. Shepard-Hill included iconic — a favorite “Ziwe” adjective — models like Donyale Luna and Naomi Campbell, as well as rappers like Rico Nasty and Saweetie. She included Josephine Baker, the music-hall star and World War II spy, too.“It was a real range of women that span time but are all iconic in their visuals, iconic in their style and sensibility,” said Ms. Shepard Hill, 37, who is also a stylist and instructor at Parsons School of Design.But in creating her wardrobe, Ms. Fumudoh was also thinking about the white comedians who dominate late-night TV and how to portray herself as the opposite of the suit-wearing men she calls “Jimmy, Jimmy, John, John,” whose wood-heavy sets are “really, really masculine — all blues and blacks and sharp images.”Ms. Fumudoh credits “Legally Blonde,” Rihanna and Lindsay Lohan (among others) as influences on her character’s style.Greg Endries/Showtime“If all of late night is painted with masculinity, my show is hyper-feminine,” she said. “I wear a lot of sparkles. You would never have seen John Oliver in a choker.“When I was growing up, and especially when I first started in media, the idea was to downplay your femininity. If a woman wants to be taken seriously, she wears glasses and pants and she talks with a lower voice like she works for Theranos.”On the wall of the set where Ms. Fumudoh conducts her interviews, there’s a large photo of a young Oprah Winfrey, who deeply influenced “Ziwe,” Ms. Fumudoh said. The Meghan Markle and Prince Harry interview was broadcast the night before the team began cutting the show, and the drama of it “really shaped the way we framed every episode.” It’s not a stretch to imagine Ziwe delivering the same scene-stealing “silent or silenced” line.There’s something else about the plastered photo of Ms. Winfrey that feels tied to “Ziwe”: In it, she’s wearing pink and pearls. Early in her career, Ms. Winfrey found a way to ask tough questions while communicating her femininity.In the first episode of “Ziwe,” when Ms. Fumudoh sits across from Ms. Lebowitz, Ms. Fumudoh wears a short black blazer dress with electric pink lapels, and her own thigh-high chunky-heel leather boots. It’s not a designer piece; it’s available at AD Los Angeles for $149.Despite the opulent aesthetic of “Ziwe,” the costume budget was somewhat limited, in part because it’s a new show, Ms. Shepard-Hill said. The dream, if there’s a second season? “A whole in-house team, where everything could be custom-built from head to toe,” she said.The blazer dress outfit was originally intended for a sketch in which Ziwe, channeling a billionaire Marilyn Monroe acolyte, announces her candidacy for New York City mayor. (“Gone are the days of old white men abusing the office of the mayor to do crooked favors for their ugly friends. Because I don’t have any friends, and I only do favors for myself.”)But Ms. Fumudoh felt strongly about wearing it for the first episode instead, using it to set that subversive anti-late-night host tone for the series.“That pink lapel is such a splash accent that it really captures what the show is,” she said. “All the outfits are telling a story in, like, 19 different ways, beyond the actual text that we write and say.” More

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      Ziwe Endorses Box Braids and ‘Real Housewives’

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      The 29-year-old comedian brings her Instagram and YouTube antics to a prime time Showtime series, “Ziwe,” which premieres May 9.Ziwe, the mononymic master of the viral “gotcha!” moment, swears she isn’t out to get anyone.Sure, the 29-year-old Nigerian-American comedian’s largely white guests on her YouTube and Instagram Live show, “Baited With Ziwe,” have a proclivity to make cringe-worthy comments when it comes to race. (The Instagram influencer Caroline Calloway couldn’t correctly identify the Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton, and the cookbook author Alison Roman was nearly stumped when asked to name five Asian people.)But Ziwe doesn’t set out to embarrass her guests. “The goal is not to hurt anyone or get them canceled,” explained the Northwestern University graduate, who cut her teeth working on “The Colbert Report.” “The goal is to have a really thoughtful, productive conversation.”The confrontational questions — often about race — and uncomfortable pauses are, she said, intended to be a learning experience. “They’re all willing,” she said of her guests, though even she isn’t exactly sure why they agree to come on the show. “They’re open to looking silly for a greater discourse beyond both of us.”Ziwe, who uses only her first name professionally — her last name, Fumudoh, proved too tricky for comedy club hosts to announce — will bring her punch lines to a bigger screen when her new late-night sketch comedy series, “Ziwe,” which rhymes with “freeway,” premieres on Showtime on May 9.With six episodes, the series will feature guest interviews, musical numbers and field pieces, and will draw from her go-to brand of humor, which she describes as “highly satirical” and “bombastic.” (Her dream guest? Kim Kardashian. “I’d love to get her perspective on race in America as one of the most famous women in world history,” she said.)In a phone conversation from her Brooklyn apartment, Ziwe shared her cultural essentials, including how watching “The Real Housewives” counts as homework (hear her out), the benefits of box braids and why fuzzy rugs are bringing her all kinds of joy amid her claustrophobic work-from-home existence.1. “The Real Housewives”At first, I looked down at “Real Housewives.” I was like, “I never watch reality TV, I read books.” And then, in college, I started watching “Beverly Hills,” which is like this horrid, dark underbelly of reality TV — I’d never seen this type of storytelling before. Like, on “Orange County,” pretending to have cancer on national television for attention — who does that? As a writer and performer I’m constantly engaging with different characters and I’ll rewatch episodes trying to figure them out. I’ve watched full seasons in a day, from eyes open to eyes shut.2. Emma Brewin HatsThese faux fur, fuzzy bucket hats are my emotional support animals. Rihanna wore a green one in 2017, and I always was thinking about it, but never took the dive to purchase one. But then the pandemic happened and I just needed something to make me feel anything, so I bought a blue hat, and then a green one and an orange one and a black one and a wide-brimmed dark red one … I wear them every day, in a different color to fit my mood. They’re also great for Zoom calls when I don’t want to do my hair. I’m wearing one right now, actually!3. Nicholas Britell SoundtracksI’m writing a book and can’t listen to songs with lyrics when I write, and so I often turn to Nicholas Britell soundtracks, whether it’s “Succession” or “If Beale Street Could Talk” or “The King,” with Timothée Chalamet and Robert Pattinson. I love the way he uses strings and piano chords. “Moonlight” was his breakout moment for me, but he’s a really good composer with a wide range of work. I’ve listened to his entire catalog.4. DocumentariesI like to learn passively, and documentaries are a perfect vehicle for that. “Varsity Blues” is fantastic. The lack of impulse control to photoshop your picture as a coxswain for crew is beyond comprehension. It’s like “Real Housewives” where it’s stranger than fiction you could ever imagine. And they affect me viscerally! After watching the James Baldwin and Toni Morrison documentaries, I go to my computer and start writing furiously because it’s like, “These are great American authors, OMG, I want to be just like them.”5. Blood Orange San PellegrinoI ordered San Pellegrino at the beginning of the pandemic thinking it was seltzer, but I was surprised — and delighted — to learn it was actually juice. I had to cut myself off at one point, though, because I was drinking a lot of these. My friend was like, “You know there’s sugar in that, right?” I was like, “Oh no, it’s just juice, it’s cool,” and then I checked the can and there was sugar. But it’s so delicious. I have one San Pellegrino blood orange left in my fridge — if it’s just a really bad day, I get to drink that.6. CandlesI think every woman hits a certain age and you’ve got to buy a couple of candles. Frères Branchiaux ones, which are made by three young brothers of color who also do sprays for your linens, are really nice, and the profits go to homeless shelters. There’s a candle for every occasion — lavender for the winter, citrus for the summer, or a smoggy oak wood for fall. I have three on my coffee table, multiple in my room and a drawer full of them.7. “Clueless”I would argue my entire personality is based on this film, which was written and directed by Amy Heckerling and should have been nominated for an Oscar. It’s one of the best American satires of the 21st century. I’m so influenced by the schoolgirl outfits, the matching plaid sets, the mixing patterns and textures, the box braids. The fur cuffs — I love a fur cuff. Mona May was the costume designer for “Clueless,” and she was so forward-thinking setting trends for this definitive ’90s girl style.8. Box BraidsWhen I was a kid, my mom made me get box braids, and I’d be like, “Oh, God” — what kid wants to sit for eight hours to get their hair braided? And then I saw Dionne, a character in “Clueless” who had box braids, and I was like, “OK wow, this wasn’t just my parents forcing their culture on me.” It really helped me come into myself. The nice thing about box braids is once you’ve sat down for eight hours to do them, you’re free. It’s like “I never have to brush my hair for eight weeks,” you just get to whip your hair back and forth like Willow Smith. I started wearing box braids again the past two years and every summer, I’m like, “It’s box braid season.” I get 34 inches and I’m walking around like I’m Nicki Minaj knocking things over with my braids like a whip.9. Fuzzy RugsI love to sit on the floor. Maybe it’s this infantile thing with fuzzy hats and fuzzy rugs, but I am moved by textures. On my set for my new show, I have a chair upholstered with a fuzzy rug that I do all my interviews out of. And at home, I have a white fuzzy rug. I haven’t been to a beach in years so I have to replace the idea of sand with a rug. It’s just how it feels on your toes.10. “Oceans” By Jay-Z Ft. Frank OceanI’m a huge fan of Jay-Z as a rapper and Frank Ocean’s musicality, so the song is a really good marriage of two things I love. The melody is really, really calming, but then it has lines like “Only Christopher we acknowledge is Wallace/I don’t even like Washingtons in my pocket.” It’s just really audacious and bold and counterculture. More