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      What to Watch This Weekend: TV’s Juiciest, Glitziest Sports Show

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      The new season of “Formula 1: Drive to Survive,” which has spawned a legion of imitators, is available now on Netflix.Lewis Hamilton, as seen in “Formula 1: Drive to Survive.”Dan Vojtech/NetflixSeason 6 of “Formula 1: Drive to Survive,” is now on Netflix, and in many ways it remains as fun and juicy as ever — full of petty immaturity, glamorous lifestyles and alluring European impishness. In the show’s hands, a race for 10th place is as compelling and high-stakes as the one for first — partly because that’s how the sport can work but also because Max Verstappen, the driver who came in first in 19 of the 22 races, didn’t participate in the show this season.The enormous success of “Drive to Survive” spawned, and continues to spawn, an entire league of imitators. “Tour de France: Unchained” and “Make or Break,” about surfing, come the closest to “Drive” in capturing athletic intensity, general charisma and dazzling locations. The raw brutality of cycling and the sanguine individuality of surfing are fascinating in their own rights, but the glitz factor, a pillar of “Drive,” is largely absent.“Break Point,” about tennis, is plenty exciting but more diffuse; because it includes both male and female pros and because of the nature of tennis tournaments, its athletes are not all in competition with one another. “Full Swing,” about golf, is an unlovable spectacle of cowardice and greed. “Six Nations: Full Contact,” about rugby, has plenty of scrappy charm, moment to moment, but doesn’t gel overall. The drivers on “NASCAR: Full Speed” all blend together.Series that follow a sport for a whole season are the clearest descendants of “Drive.” But other access shows like “Quarterback,” “Under Pressure: The U.S. Women’s World Cup Team,” “Angel City” and “Race: Bubba Wallace” are adjacent, too. All claim to offer an insider perspective but are too superficial and uncritical to have any real purchase — and they don’t compensate for that superficiality with sheer volume of story lines the way “Drive” does.“Drive” will not reign forever, particularly because it continues to list toward reality show. And not a nutritious reality show; a Bravo one. A big episode this season centers on Lewis Hamilton re-signing a contract with Mercedes, and it plays out as a tale of commitment and integrity for all parties. He would never race for Ferrari, we’re told. But the first few seasons of “Drive” got me motor-pilled enough that now I follow the sport’s comings and goings, and I know that Hamilton has indeed signed with Ferrari for the 2025 season, much in the way “Vanderpump Rules” fans all knew the ins and outs of Scandoval eons before it made its way into the show.“Drive” already has to contend with the fact that, like all sports shows, it is straightforwardly spoilable, so additional contrivances just add more drag. Luckily there’s still plenty of easy pleasure within the series, at least another few seasons of gas in its tank. More

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      With Richard Lewis, Kvetching Was Charismatic

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      The comedian gave his Jewish neurotic persona a nervy cool even as he threw his whole body into his comedy.In the 1980s, Jewish characters were scarce on television. There were broadcasters (Howard Cosell) and the occasional talk show host (Joan Rivers), but no Jews leading a cast on prime time. Then in the final year of the decade, that changed, and a glut of anxious men arrived, kvetching, quipping and dating shiksas.Jackie Mason had his own sitcom, short-lived; Jerry Seinfeld had his, a classic. Then the following year, Rob Morrow played a Jewish doctor fish-out-of-watering in Alaska on “Northern Exposure.” But to my young Jewish eyes, none of them was as charismatic as Richard Lewis on the sitcom “Anything but Love.”Constantly grappling with a thick mane of hair, he played a smart Chicago journalist who charmed his love interest, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, whose royal status back then was derived from being pursued by an only slightly more relentless man in “Halloween.” Whereas Michael Myers paced calmly in a silly jumpsuit, Lewis bellyached in moody black outfits. For those who know him as the cranky friend of Larry David on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” it may be a surprise that Richard Lewis, who died at 76 this week, cut a seductive figure: clever, cool, darkly morose.“Anything but Love” didn’t have the inspired absurdity or cutting wit of “Seinfeld,” and it began with the most sentimental theme song in the history of television. (Second place: “Family Ties.”) But Lewis brought a nervy energy that pushed against the saccharine instincts of network sitcoms. If he seemed like a new kind of Jewish neurotic comic, he built this persona in comedy clubs. His stand-up was full of stories about his love life that somehow managed to be self-deprecating and glamorous. He once told David Letterman, “The woman I’m with now insisted on having intercourse only with a raven on her shoulder.”William Knoedelseder’s book “I’m Dying Up Here,” about stand-up in the 1970s, presents Lewis as the Lothario of the scene, dating stars like Debra Winger and once picking up a Danish baroness at the Improv in Manhattan with this line: “I’ll take you out for a tuna fish sandwich anywhere in the city.” It worked.Lewis belonged to a class of young stand-ups, like Seinfeld and Bill Maher, who were influenced by the acerbic Everyman persona of Robert Klein. But Lewis eventually developed a frenetic, jazzy style that also owed something to chaos agents like Mel Brooks and Robin Williams. His jokes were delivered with rollicking energy, making misery a full-body exercise, slumping, pacing and, most of all, gesticulating. His comedy had choreography, a visual language of pointing, air-sawing and face clasps. To say he talked with his hands seems insufficient. His whole body never shut up.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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      Richard Lewis and Larry David’s Lifelong Friendship

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      The two comics were born three days apart in the same Brooklyn hospital, and their paths never stopped crossing. They became the best of friends — in their own way.If ever a Hollywood friendship was destined to be, it might have been the one between the comics Larry David and Richard Lewis, who died from a heart attack on Tuesday at 76. They were born just three days apart in 1947 at the same Brooklyn hospital. When they were 12, they met at summer sports camp, and instantly detested each other. That would set the tone that would define their friendship — and their onscreen relationship — for the rest of their lives.“I disliked him intensely,” Lewis told The Spectator last year, calling the young David cocky and arrogant. “When we played baseball, I tried to hit him with the ball. We were archrivals. I couldn’t wait for the camp to be over just to get away from Larry. I’m sure he felt the same way.” (He did. “We hated each other,” David said during a 2002 interview.)About a decade or so later, they found themselves performing at the same New York comedy club — both honing their similar brand of neurotic humor — but didn’t recognize one another at first. Later that same night, something clicked inside Lewis: “I looked at his face, and I said, ‘There’s something about you, man, that spooks me.’” With that, their memories were jogged.“We became instant best friends,” David said of Lewis during that 2002 interview, at the Paley Center for Media. In 2010, talking with Howard Stern, Lewis said, “When I became a comic, he loved my work, and I loved his work.”“For most of my life, he’s been like a brother to me,” David said of Lewis in a statement on Wednesday, shared by HBO. “He had that rare combination of being the funniest person and also the sweetest. But today he made me sob and for that I’ll never forgive him.”David was not available for questions on Thursday morning.Last month, Lewis spoke to The Times’s Melena Ryzik about those early days. “Without sounding too pompous about it, I always dug comedians who were the same onstage as they were offstage,” Lewis said, referring to David. “There wasn’t too much fake stuff going on, they didn’t create a character, they were just who they were.”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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      Tom Sandoval’s Interview Shows the Perils of Doing PR for Reality TV

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      Publicists who work with “unscripted” people say it presents several challenges.Tom Sandoval, a star of “Vanderpump Rules,” has shared a lot in the decade that he has appeared on that reality TV show, the 11th season of which began airing on Bravo in January. But in a recent interview with The New York Times Magazine, Mr. Sandoval, 41, said things that surprised even people who were well familiar with his penchant for shocking behavior.Speaking about the public interest in an affair he had with a co-star while he was dating another co-star, a tryst known as “Scandoval,” Mr. Sandoval said that he was not a historian of pop culture, but that he “witnessed the O.J. Simpson thing and George Floyd and all these big things, which is really weird to compare this to that, I think, but do you think in a weird way it’s a little bit the same?”Mr. Sandoval also said he felt that he received more hate for his affair than the actor “Danny Masterson, and he’s a convicted rapist.” He spoke in the presence of a member of his publicity team, which to some was as astonishing as his comments.The writer who interviewed Mr. Sandoval for The Times Magazine wrote that a representative for Bravo contacted her after their conversation took place and before it was published to relay concerns about what he had said.Alyx Sealy, a publicist for Mr. Sandoval, declined to comment for this article. Bravo declined to participate. Adam Ambrose, a publicist who represents reality stars and who has represented Mr. Sandoval in the past, said in an emailed statement that working with people on reality TV could present unique challenges because of the nature of that genre.“Unscripted stars portray and are their authentic selves, so at times the lines can be blurred for them to discern between being in front of the camera and speaking to the media,” said Mr. Ambrose, the founder of Brand Influential, a public relations company in Los Angeles, who emphasized that he was speaking generally and not about any specific client, past or present. “Sometimes they may be perceived as uncoachable, making it more challenging to manage their media presence from a P.R. perspective.”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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      ‘The Regime’ Review: Kate Winslet Will Make You Love Her

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      Kate Winslet is commanding (and funny) in HBO’s screwball sendup of rising authoritarianism.Of all the recent reboots of 20th-century franchises, among the hottest and most terrifying is populist authoritarianism. It is playing in revival halls on multiple continents, drawing a wide range of performers and cultivating a rabid fan base.History may be repeating in real life as tragedy. But HBO’s lightly-yet-darkly entertaining “The Regime,” a six-episode series beginning on Sunday, plays it as full-on farce.“The Regime,” written by Will Tracy (“The Menu,” “Succession”), deposits us in a palace somewhere in “Middle Europe.” Chancellor Elena Vernham (Kate Winslet), who rules her small country through surveillance, violence and telegenic charisma, has developed the debilitating fear that the residence is infested with deadly mold spores.Whether the mold is real is immaterial; her retinue of advisers, oligarchs and sundry quacks must behave like it is. And the fear underlying Elena’s paranoia is clear. Seven years after taking power in the “free and fair election” that ousted her left-leaning predecessor (Hugh Grant), she senses that her kleptocratic state is rotting from within.Her deliverance arrives in the form of Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts), a soldier reassigned to palace duties after putting down a workers’ protest a touch too enthusiastically. (The press nicknames him “The Butcher.”)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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      The Comedy, and the Horror, of the Infertility Plot

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      Onscreen, assisted reproductive technology is a double-edged device, representing women’s empowerment, or their exploitation.“Scrambled” is a romantic comedy about a woman who falls in love with her decision to freeze her eggs. Nellie, a 34-year-old perma-bridesmaid, is wasted and alone at yet another wedding when she is struck by the fear that her fertility may peak before her romantic situation is resolved.The conventional romantic comedy may culminate in marriage, but “Scrambled” leads Nellie toward a procedure that extends the timeline of her own marriage plot. Nellie (Leah McKendrick, who also writes and directs the film) gets her happy ending from an embryology lab. “You were no accident,” she tells one of her cryogenically preserved eggs. “You were one of the most intentional things that I have ever done.”Reproductive technologies are increasingly assisting in human conception (even as the Alabama Supreme Court has complicated their use), and they have become familiar narrative devices, too. Their meaning is double-edged. “Scrambled,” with its oddball cheer, gives fertility treatments an empowering gloss. But an emerging horror genre sharpens the same technologies into instruments of exploitation, turning clinics into torture chambers and doctors into demons. The deus ex machina of assisted reproduction can be a blessing or a curse, depending on the god who sent the machine.After swigging from the sentimental techno-optimism of “Scrambled,” I chased it with a wave of recent downers: I watched “False Positive,” the 2021 horror movie in which Lucy (Ilana Glazer) is subdued by a creepy fertility clinic; “Dead Ringers,” the 2023 limited series in which Rachel Weisz plays a pair of twin gynecologists; and “American Horror Story: Delicate,” the latest installment of the FX horror anthology series about an actress (Emma Roberts) who attempts to secure a baby and an Oscar with the help of her ambiguously sinister publicist (Kim Kardashian).As I watched these horror stories, I found myself counting their clichés on both hands. In the standard fertility-horror plot, a wealthy white couple will report to a an experimental clinic. Its staff will forgo scrubs for bespoke costumes resembling clerics or Stepford wives. An inscrutable and potentially supernatural ultrasound reading will occur. A woman will struggle to conceive, and this difficulty will be blamed on her careerism. She will be instructed to ingest strange tinctures and coached to mistrust her own mind. Her terror will be dismissed as “pregnancy brain” or “hormones.” Her pain will be denied. Her male partner will collude with a male doctor behind her back. Her female friend will be in on it, too. In the end, her pregnancy will be simulated, sabotaged or terminated without her knowledge or consent.In “American Horror Story: Delicate,” an actress (Emma Roberts, right) attempts to secure a baby and an Oscar with the help of her sinister publicist (Kim Kardashian, left).Eric Liebowitz/FXWe 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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      Richard Lewis and ‘The (Blank) From Hell’

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      The comedian, who died this week, said he coined the ubiquitous phrase. An episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” about a “nanny from hell” recounted his efforts to get credit for it.Go ahead and call Richard Lewis the comedian from hell. You’d be paying him a compliment.The stand-up comedian, who died on Tuesday, was known for his dark clothes, dark sense of humor and a recurring role as a, yes, even darker version himself on HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” He was a fixture in the comedy world for over half a century. But his most indelible legacy could be one simple phrase, spoken so often that its origin might never be questioned.“The (insert hated thing here) from hell.”It’s a phrase that seemingly has been around since time immemorial. The flight from hell, the day from hell, the lunch from hell. We’ve all been there, and we all know what it means, but where did it come from?According to Richard Lewis and the “Yale Book of Quotations,” it came from him.Posting on X, known then as Twitter, Mr. Lewis asked, “Where was my Nobel Peace prize?” and linked to a 2006 UPI article about his appearance in the “Yale Book of Quotations.”In a 2008 interview with Interview Magazine, Mr. Lewis said that “the truth of the matter is that whatever gift I have as a comedian, most of it was in the phrase ‘from hell.’”“I’m credited with popularizing that phrase because I felt victimized by everything,” he said.Mr. Lewis elaborated in a 2014 interview with the Nashville Scene.“I totally popularized the phrase in the late ’70s,” he said. “If you go on YouTube, you can see on Letterman, David would cut me off, and go, ‘You mean it was the bar mitzvah from hell?’ ‘That’s right!’ And I stopped saying it. I felt self-conscious. I was getting applause for it. I guess subconsciously I thought I was a victim of everything.”Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations” did not give him credit for the phrase, which became a story line in the episode “The Nanny,” during season three of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”The episode, which aired in 2002, weaves in Lewis’s attempts to get into Bartlett’s.“It was a real solid for Larry to do that for me,” he said. “That really immortalized it in some respects.” More

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      Late Night Speculates About Mitch McConnell’s Next Career Move

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      The senator is giving up his G.O.P. leadership post. “McConnell just turned 82, so that can only mean one thing: He’s running for president,” Jimmy Fallon said.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Leaving So Soon?On Wednesday, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said he would step down this year from his long-held position as leader of the Senate Republicans.“McConnell just turned 82, so that can only mean one thing: He’s running for president,” said Jimmy Fallon.“McConnell said that it’s time for the next generation of leadership. Then he looked around the Senate and realized the next generation is 75.” — JIMMY FALLON“Well, thanks to the woke left, another Confederate statue has been taken down.” — SETH MEYERS“He’s not stepping down till November because, at 82, that’s how long it takes him to step.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“He will be retiring to the Galápagos Islands to spend more time with the other 500-year-old turtles.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Low-Rent Wonka Edition)“Last weekend in Glasgow, a Willy Wonka-inspired experience was brought to a halt following complaints it was ‘an absolute shambles of an event’ after families traveled from all over, paying $40 a ticket for an ‘exhilarating and immersive adventure’ called Willy’s Chocolate Experience. Still better than the English attraction: Spotted Dick’s Custard Explosion.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“But when people showed up, they found something very different from what they found on the website. What they found was basically a big empty warehouse with vinyl backdrops tacked to the wall. They got to see Willy Wonka’s famous portable power generator, and they got to meet what appears to be a meth lab Oompa Loompa.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Parents were very upset. They called the police on the place. I have to say, though, honestly, I feel like the kids learned an important lesson about how disappointing the rest of their lives are going to be.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Look, I don’t know why everyone is so upset that the kids were traumatized. Have you seen the movie? Traumatizing kids is the authentic Wonka experience!” — MICHAEL KOSTA, guest host of “The Daily Show”The Bits Worth WatchingOn “Late Night,” Seth Meyers recapped his highly publicized ice cream shop visit with President Biden, in a segment Meyers referred to this time as “A Closer Lick.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightEugene Levy, who gets a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame next week, will appear on Thursday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”Also, Check This OutRichard Lewis on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” this season.HBOIn one of his last interviews, the late Richard Lewis reminisced about the early days of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” and about meeting Larry David when they were children at summer camp. More