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    ‘Dexter’ Has Been Resurrected Again. He Has Company.

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    Networks are releasing fewer scripted series than they did several years ago, but brand extension mania has only intensified in franchises like “Dexter,” “Yellowstone” and “Power.”On a morning in mid-May, inside a trailer at the base of a Long Island hotel, Kat St. John, a set costumer, attacked a gray collared shirt with a spray bottle. The shirt was bloodstained. Between shooting days, the stains had dried.“We have to add new blood,” she said as she sprayed.This was on the set of “Dexter: Resurrection,” the newest iteration of the Showtime franchise surrounding Dexter Morgan, the vigilante serial killer played by Michael C. Hall. The original series debuted in 2006 and ended in 2013. A reprise, “Dexter: New Blood,” premiered in 2021. A prequel, “Dexter: Original Sin,” followed in 2024 and has since been renewed.Though “New Blood” seemingly left Dexter bleeding out in the snow, “Resurrection,” which begins July 11 on Paramount+ with Showtime, returns Hall’s killer to TV. His survival is a miracle, but given television’s suffocating embrace of reboots, revivals, sequels, prequels and TV movies, also not really a surprise. This trend isn’t new: The New York Times’s James Poniewozik surveyed it back in 2018, arguing that with the expanding volume of TV, “it’s a battle for anything new to get attention.”But while that proliferation has since slowed, with networks and streamers now releasing fewer scripted series than they did several years ago, brand extension mania has only intensified. Until fairly recently, franchises were the small screen purview of procedurals, unscripted series, “Star Trek” and the occasional Norman Lear sitcom. Now the impulse toward world building extends to even prestige or prestige-adjacent dramas.”Dexter,” with Lauren Velez and Hall, ran from 2006-13 on Showtime. Early seasons were acclaimed but the ending was widely criticized.Dan Littlejohn/ShowtimeIt is easy enough to imagine a “Dexter” of past decades justifying a spinoff or a remake. But not three of them. And three isn’t even a lot anymore.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘And Just Like That …’ Season 3, Episode 6 Recap: The Dams Break

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      Charlotte decides she can no longer keep a secret. Tensions between Aidan and his ex erupt, just not the way Carrie would have wanted.Season 3, Episode 6: ‘Silent Mode’I didn’t think it was possible for the relationship between Carrie and Aidan to become any more disconcerting. But wow, in this regard, the writers have succeeded.Toward the end of this week’s episode, Aidan drops a bomb: He slept with Kathy. He and his ex-wife were both upset after a failed attempt to send their troubled son Wyatt off on a wilderness trip, and somewhere in between sobs, they fell into bed.Carrie is stunned at this confession for all of about 45 seconds. I know because I counted while watching this scene for the fourth or fifth time. In less than a minute, she bypasses any pain and skips completely ahead to grace and empathy. “I understand how that could happen,” she says.I’ve written before that I think Aidan has become, or maybe always was, a covert narcissist. His behavior is, unfortunately, not very surprising. But is Carrie really so far under his thumb that she doesn’t even spare a second for her own hurt?Or, perchance, is she feeling a sense of karmic relief? After all, in another life known as the original “Sex and the City” series, Carrie cheated on Aidan with Mr. Big (Chris Noth) — whom she subsequently married. She also cheated on Big with Aidan when they shared a kiss in Abu Dhabi in the movie “Sex and the City 2” — all of which is to say, maybe Carrie really can see how that could happen.A few things about this plot point, though, are a little tough to square. First, nothing we have seen this season would suggest that there is any compassion, let alone physical passion, left between Aidan and Kathy. They’re not just exes, they’re at odds. They disagree, to the point of contempt, on how to handle Wyatt, as we saw in the blowup just two episodes back. It’s difficult to imagine them finding comfort in each other over yet another Wyatt debacle.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Bet Your Life’ Is a Perky, Ghostly Dramedy

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      This Turkish Netflix series puts a metaphysical spin on the small-town murder mystery formula.Ata Demirer, left, and Ugur Yücel in a scene from “Bet Your Life.”Nazim Serhat FiratThe Turkish dramedy “Bet Your Life,” on Netflix (in Turkish, with subtitles, or dubbed), is a prototypical, even generic streaming show on most fronts. Guy returns to small hometown and gets roped into solving a mystery — one he’s more connected to than he realizes — while flanked by a pesky sidekick and a beautiful love interest. Along the way, he has to resolve some daddy issues, which he resists for the majority of the season until a big meltdown in the penultimate or maybe antepenultimate episode breaks down his defenses, at which point he will pant, weep and transform. Solve the crime, get the girl, mature from man-child to man.The spin here is that the pesky sidekick is a ghost, the mystery surrounds his murder, and everything plays out in a small Turkish town.Isa (Ata Demirer) is a gambling columnist who hasn’t made a good bet in years. Now he’s in a mountain of debt, and some unsavory types are after him. Before he can flee home, Refik (Ugur Yücel) shows up at his apartment — Refik, the local richie rich whose suicide was just on the news. Refik knew Isa’s late father, who in his day also channeled the spirit world, and Refik’s estranged daughter, Seda (Esra Bilgic), owns the vineyard where Isa’s aunt and cousin work. Perhaps they can help each other.Refik and Isa bicker to no end while Isa also clumsily romances Seda and learns more about his own family. Isa shows off his vintner skills, dreaming up a wine coupage to save Seda’s business, but she eventually grows concerned with his habit of having conversations with what appears to her to be thin air. But how can he say, “Actually, I’m talking to your dead dad, whom you hated and who is indeed a pain, though he and I have grown to love each other in gruff ways”? How indeed.The formula for these kinds of shows is a formula for a reason, and it works shockingly well here, even as various facets of “Bet” are either not very good or get lost in translation. A lot of the series exists on a wholesome, hokey plane, but flashes of cleverness, especially from Yücel’s performance, help, and the mysticism is fun and appealing. It’s not that the show qua show is so wonderful, but the same-but-different intrigue of an international McDonald’s applies here, too. More

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      Somebody Explain Why Everybody Loves Phil Rosenthal

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      When Phil Rosenthal, host of the Netflix food and travel show “Somebody Feed Phil” and creator of the enduring sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond,” began selling out live shows last year, no one was more surprised than Ray Romano.Mr. Romano, the sitcom’s star, showed up at the Paramount concert hall on Long Island, expecting to stir up excitement among fans and help out during the Q&A. No one had a question for him, he said; they just wanted to tell Phil about their favorite places to eat in Lisbon or Nashville.“How did this happen?” the actor asked me over the phone last week. “I’ve been doing stand-up for 30 years. He goes to Poland and eats meatloaf and sells out theaters around the world?”There is no shortage of armchair-travel television: It pours from Hulu, Amazon Prime, National Geographic and Food Network, not to mention the fire hose that is social media. But somehow, Mr. Rosenthal has broken through and become a global star.Ray Romano, left, the star of “Everybody Loves Raymond,” said Mr. Rosenthal forced him to travel overseas for the first time by writing episodes set in Italy. (Brad Garrett, right, played Mr. Romano’s brother.) NetflixSeason 8 of his show dropped on June 18, making it the longest-running unscripted show on Netflix. In August he’ll start a North American tour, and a second cookbook, “Phil’s Favorites” — the first was a New York Times best seller — will come out in November.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      From No Home to a Perch in Hollywood, a Filmmaker Finally Breaks Through

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      Fresh from a year of attending the prestigious Sundance labs and armed with a script that would become her first feature, the director Victoria Mahoney thought her life as a filmmaker was about to begin. It was 2006 and she was attending a party at the Sundance Film Festival for industry professionals to meet the new crop of lab graduates. Agents, producers and others were there to mine new talent for future collaborations.Mahoney and her pal, the documentary filmmaker Kirsten Johnson, stood in that room and waited to be approached. Crickets. Finally, an agent came over and asked about their involvement in the labs. They responded effusively. But instead of inquiring about their work, he asked if they could introduce him to one of their male colleagues. That agent signed that colleague in the room. Mahoney? Nothing. Not on the mountain. Not after the festival ended.It would take Mahoney 11 years to land an agent and 20 more to make her first studio film. That movie, “The Old Guard 2,” debuted this week on Netflix.Charlize Theron in “The Old Guard 2,” directed by Mahoney. (Theron reteams with Chiwetel Ejiofor, KiKi Layne, Matthias Schoenaerts and others for this sequel.)Eli Joshua Ade/Netflix“We all believe the fables of what happens when you’re at Sundance and you’ve come through the labs; we’ve seen it,” Mahoney said in a recent interview. “We weren’t viable. We weren’t anything. It’s indicative of a thousand things.”Mahoney’s story is not unfamiliar. So many toil in the film industry and are not rewarded with sustainable careers even when they receive accolades early on. What makes Victoria Mahoney distinct is that there never was a Plan B. She lived without a safety net for a decade, couch surfing at friends’ homes, even experiencing true moments of homelessness — nights when she didn’t know where she would be resting her head. But her belief in herself that she was destined to be a filmmaker? That never ebbed, regardless of her setbacks.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Will Sharpe, Star of Lena Dunham’s ‘Too Much,’ Is a Renaissance Man

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      When Will Sharpe arrived at Cambridge University in the mid-aughts, he was one of many undergraduates wanting to join Footlights, the storied sketch comedy troupe that had launched the careers of Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson. His friends thought it best to spend a few months figuring out what kind of comedy Footlights might favor before applying, but Sharpe wanted to jump right in.At a first-semester showcase open to nonmembers, Sharpe and his friends performed a wacky sketch that involved pretending to eat a tub of Vaseline by the handful. He was made a member and was later elected president of the troupe.Sharpe’s biweekly Footlights performances — which also included playing a white crayon that was sad it was never taken out of the box — “definitely encouraged a risk-taking attitude, because you could fail and try again, and fail and try again,” Sharpe recalled in an interview at a woodland cafe near his North London home.In the two decades since college, Sharpe, now 38, has tried — and often succeeded at — a variety of creative projects, including writing, directing, acting, playing music and performing comedy. Claire Foy, whom Sharpe directed in the 2021 biopic “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain,” described him in an interview with The New York Times as “a Renaissance man” — “a kind one.”American audiences, though, know Sharpe best from his chameleonic run of recent acting gigs: the stoic tech hunk in Season 2 of HBO’s “The White Lotus”; the earnest tour guide in Jesse Eisenberg’s Oscar-winning movie “A Real Pain”; and now, as Felix, the enigmatic indie musician in the rom-com “Too Much,” Lena Dunham’s new Netflix series arriving on July 10.Will Sharpe and Megan Stalter in “Too Much,” a new show by Lena Dunham for Netflix.NetflixWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Disney+, Amazon, Max, AMC+ and More in July

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      A “Jaws” documentary, “Sinners,” “Washington Black” and the low-budget “Monster Island” arrive, and “Foundation” and “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” return.Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to their libraries. Here are our picks for some of July’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)New to Amazon Prime Video‘Ballard’ Season 1Starts streaming: July 9A spinoff of a spinoff, this cop drama stars Maggie Q as Renée Ballard, a dogged Los Angeles police detective first introduced in Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels. Ballard made her TV debut in Season 3 of “Bosch: Legacy,” the follow-up to the popular crime series “Bosch.” In the new show, Ballard is assigned to lead a new team consisting mostly of volunteers and police department reserves, tasked to investigate some of the city’s oldest, coldest cases. As often happens in these situations, sometimes the trail of clues leads to some dangerous places, where the powerful people dwell. The detective has to rely on her wits and determination — along with some occasional help from the now-retired cop Bosch (Titus Welliver), who knows a lot about defying authority.Also arriving:July 2“Heads of State”July 11“One Night in Idaho: The College Murders”July 17“Surf Girls: International”July 21“Justice on Trial” Season 1July 23“Shiny Happy People: A Teenage Holy War”Callum Woodhouse, left, and Dean Fujioka in “Monster Island.”ShudderNew to AMC+‘Monster Island’Starts streaming: July 25Though its title may conjure up images of Godzilla and King Kong, this gritty low-budget monster movie actually features a human-scaled nemesis: a ferocious fish-man known as the Orang Ikan, which resembles the title beastie from “Creature From the Black Lagoon.” Written and directed by Mike Wiluan, “Monster Island” is set during World War II, and has Callum Woodhouse playing a captured British soldier and Dean Fujioka playing a Japanese soldier. When the two are shipwrecked, they have to put aside their prejudices and work together to survive the predator that is stalking them both. Working with little funds and just a few locations — plus one nifty-looking creature costume — Wiluan delivers the kind of intense action and moments of gory horror that genre fans enjoy.Also arriving:July 4“The Luckiest Man in America”July 7“The Madame Blanc Mysteries” Season 4July 11“Push”July 17“The Furry Detectives: Unmasking a Monster”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Dana Carvey Calls His Biden Impression a ‘Delicate Thing’

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      For his portrayal of the former president on “Saturday Night Live,” Carvey admitted that he had to toe a careful line.Dana Carvey, the comedian and actor, said that impersonating former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. during the just completed 50th season of “Saturday Night Live” was a challenge because he said he believed Biden “was compromised mentally.”Carvey made the comment on a recent episode of his and David Spade’s podcast “Fly on the Wall” while discussing his portrayal of Biden, a Democrat, during his re-election bid in 2024. “It was a delicate thing in the comedy world,” Carvey added. “There were a lot of people that did not want to do anything that would kind of ding him in, like, an awkward way.”Carvey, a former “S.N.L.” cast member known for his many impersonations, including his portrayal of George H.W. Bush in the 1980s and 1990s, said that in order to make his version of Biden funny, it had to be recognizable, which is why Carvey mastered the former president’s squint and chuckle, as well as his lapsing into non sequiturs like insisting on “being serious right now,” even if what he last said was not a joke.In one episode that aired in late September, Carvey as Biden joined Kamala Harris, played by Maya Rudolph, at a rally after she won the Democratic nomination. He slowly walked to the podium and tossed out a number of Biden’s signature phrases (“by the way,” “guess what?”) before being rushed offstage, only to wander back. In another skit from November, after Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, won the election, Carvey’s Biden advises him to watch how he talks as president but stammers over his own words in doing so.It took two years for Carvey to master his impression of Biden, he said, and that the first six months of Biden’s presidency did not provide much material until he heard the president whisper and yell.“Biden eventually was my favorite because he had like 10 hooks,” Carvey said. “I loved it. It was in entering and exiting, but it was a real challenge to make it acceptable.”Biden’s age and mental state became flash points during the 2024 presidential election cycle. Conversations about it reached a fever pitch shortly after the first presidential debate in June, in which Biden meandered and mumbled through his answers. Weeks later and under intense pressure from members of his party, Biden dropped out of the race.Since then, there has been a litany of discussions and even books that examine the former president’s decline while in the White House. In May, Biden was diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. More

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      Anatomy of a Comedy Cliché

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      <!–>An early example is from the movie “Punchline,” when Tom Hanks chokes up telling a club audience that he disappointed his father, failing out of medical school:–> <!–>In “Obvious Child,” Jenny Slate stops joking in one set to say she was cheated on. Things get dark:–> <!–>After his jokes are met with awkward silence, Kumail […] More