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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘True Detective: Night Country’ and ‘Doctor Zhivago’

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      The fourth season, with Jodie Foster, Kali Reis and a touch of the supernatural, wraps up. TCM airs a classic romance.With 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. 12-18. Details and times are subject to change.MondayNCIS 9 p.m. on CBS. This nautical-flavored police procedural is back for its 21st season. Since its premier in 2003, it has spawned five spinoff series: “NCIS: Los Angeles,” “NCIS: New Orleans,” “NCIS: Hawai’i,” “NCIS: Sydney” and “NCIS: Origins.” We can expect the newest of the three, “Origins,” to debut sometime this season in a backdoor-pilot episode. You’d wonder how many naval crimes a writing team could possibly come up with, but they show no signs of slowing down.THE HOST (2006) 11:45 p.m. on Flix. The director Bong Joon Ho received international acclaim for his 2019 film “Parasite,” but his monster epic about a man’s quest to rescue his daughter from a mutated creature in the Han River is not to be missed. It’s a pastiche that nails every genre it splices, moving deftly from incisive satire to campy horror/sci-fi to searing family drama.TuesdayEoin Macken in “La Brea.”Mark Taylor/NBCLA BREA 9 p.m. on NBC. This sci-fi drama about a family separated by a sinkhole that opens up a time portal (sure!) will air its series finale, a continuation of last week’s episode “The Road Home.” The show was marginally popular during its first season, earning itself a People’s Choice nomination for sci-fi/fantasy show, and though it was nominated again the next year, this third and final season only ran for six episodes. If you’ll miss watching the show or want a D.I.Y. experience, see: tar pits.WednesdayGHOST ADVENTURES: SCREAMING ROOM 10:01 p.m. on Discovery. If you time your Valentine’s dinner plans well enough, you can arrive home to pour a few nice glasses of red wine, cuddle up to your sweetheart and turn on the most romantic viewing material imaginable: Zak Bagans, a “paranormal investigator” and proprietor of a haunted museum in Las Vegas with a dulcet-toned bro voice who, here, rewatches an episode of his own ghost-hunting reality show, “Ghost Adventures.” I’m really only half-kidding about its V-Day airing date — I do find ghosts romantic.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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      All the Super Bowl Commercials So Far, Ranked

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      Here is our ranking of the Super Bowl commercials we have been able to track down ahead of the big game.In the spirit of “Who actually watches the game?,” here is our ranking of all the Super Bowl commercials we have been able to track down so far, from best to worst.Ground rules: Only ads being shown on the national CBS broadcast during the game are eligible. Certain spots, including several advocating a boycott of Tesla and a number of CBS promos for its own primetime series, were omitted from this ranking. Commercials not available beforehand or with a live component — including spots from FanDuel, TurboTax, the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism and the controversial Chinese e-commerce company Temu — will be added after the game. (If Travis Kelce proposes to Taylor Swift in a surprise ad for The Knot, we will probably have our winner.)The Best of the BunchThese are the ones we’ll remember for at least a day or two.BMWChristopher Walken makes fun of people making fun of Christopher Walken, with a cameo performance by the Super Bowl halftime star Usher. As always, he walks the walk.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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      Brian McConnachie, Humor Writer ‘From Another Planet,’ Dies at 81

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      A contributor to National Lampoon, “Saturday Night Live” and “SCTV,” he had a patrician presence that belied a whimsical and sometimes anarchic wit.Brian McConnachie, who brought absurdist humor to three comedy touchstones of the 1970s and ’80s — National Lampoon magazine and the NBC television series “Saturday Night Live” and “SCTV Network” — died in hospice care on Jan. 5 in Venice, Fla. He was 81.The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his wife, Ann (Crilly) McConnachie, said.Mr. McConnachie — who stood 6-foot-5 and often dressed in a bow tie, suit and saddle shoes — had an elegant, patrician presence that set him apart from the wilder, more disheveled writers (most of them men) who often surrounded him.“Look, if you told me that he had been a welcomed member of the Algonquin Round Table, and he was there with James Thurber, I’d get that,” Alan Zweibel, an original “S.N.L.” writer who worked with Mr. McConnachie, said in a phone interview. “The rest of us were hooligans.”Yet even if he appeared to be more of a grown-up than other writers in the Lampoon and “S.N.L.” orbits, Mr. McConnachie’s laid-back, whimsical style — with some anarchic, disturbed twists — fit in well with the other writers’ contributions.“If the story of the National Lampoon were a script by Rod Serling,” Rick Meyerowitz, a leading illustrator there, wrote in “Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead” (2010), his history of the magazine, “the main character would have been Brian McConnachie, a man who his colleagues were convinced was from another planet.”In addition to writing for National Lampoon, Mr. McConnachie appeared in its “1964 High School Yearbook Parody,” among other places.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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      Puppy Bowl XX: Behind the Scenes at the Super Bowl’s Adorable Cousin

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      The other big game on Super Bowl Sunday? The 20th outing of Animal Planet’s football game for puppies (complete with a kitten halftime show).It’s frowned upon when N.F.L. players complain to the referees. But at least they don’t urinate on them.The same cannot be said for the competitors in the Puppy Bowl, Animal Planet’s canine football game that takes place in October but does not air until the afternoon of Super Bowl Sunday.The event’s referee, Dan Schachner, stays ready for all eventualities by keeping five identical uniforms in his dressing room so he can change when accidents occur. Mr. Schachner, 49, admitted he had gotten lax about handing out penalties for “premature watering of the lawn” since he began calling the game in 2011.“I don’t automatically reach for the flag,” he said. “We have a game to play.”This year’s Puppy Bowl, which will be televised at 2 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday, is the 20th edition of the event, a milestone for a program that began as a tongue-in-cheek feed of puppy playtime before evolving into a counterprogramming juggernaut.The three-hour skirmish over a football-shaped chew toy has been on the air for longer than “Grey’s Anatomy.” Animal Planet said last year’s Puppy Bowl “reached” more than 13 million viewers.Dan Schachner, who is the Puppy Bowl’s official referee, keeps five identical uniforms around so he is prepared for any accidents.Animal PlanetWe 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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      ‘True Detective’ Season 4, Episode 5 Recap: Dots Finally Connect

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      This week’s episode finally answers some questions that have been teased out for a long time.This week’s recap is posting earlier than usual because the episode premiered Friday on Max.Season 4, Episode 5: Part 5She’s awake. The show, that is.After last week’s episode spend too much time fussing over underdeveloped subplots and supernatural occurrences, this week’s hour snaps to attention like a procrastinating student who had been putting off a term paper. There have been stretches where “Night Country” has left the case untended, letting it thaw away in the background like the corpsicle at center ice. Too often, the show’s rich ambience has slipped into abstraction, leaving the detectives to wrestle with ghosts and lingering personal traumas while the more compelling tensions within Ennis are addressed in fits and starts. The forensics report on the scientists’ bodies only just came back this week!There are few ruminative moments in this penultimate episode and the excitement of the premiere comes rushing back, because there are finally some answers to the questions that have been teased out for so long. Danvers and Navarro are getting closer to the truth of what happened to the scientists and Annie K., which triggers the conspiratorial forces within the town and presents them with a race-against-the-clock scenario that not only reignites the show, but deepens its themes. In the classic noir tradition, the procedural elements are telling a larger story about the powers-that-be, like Jack Nicholson following a routine infidelity case into a web of municipal corruption in “Chinatown.”The mine has been the black heart of “Night Country,” pumping poison through the city’s water taps and government institutions. It remains to be seen what kind of threat Annie K. might have represented for the business, but Danvers and Navarro are more convinced than ever that the network of ice caves outside town hold the answer. Getting access to the caves, however, is no small matter. Their only feasible guide is Otis, a cagey German heroin addict with scorched eyeballs who once mapped the caves. They manage to get to base of the cave, but it is on mine company property and the entrance has been blown to pieces. Should they find another way in, they have to worry about the glass-like instability of the ice, to say nothing of Raymond Clark and other potential dangers.Meanwhile, Danvers’s young protégé, Peter, has something else to show for all the hard work that has finally gotten him kicked out of his house. After delivering information on Otis last week, Peter offers another file definitively connecting the mine to the Tsalal Research Station, which had been receiving funding in exchange for dubiously rosy pollution data. When Danvers gets called to a meeting at the mine offices with its owner, Kate McKittrick (Dervia Kirwan), and Ted, Danvers’s overseer and third-rate occasional sex partner, she assumes it is going to be a dressing-down about a protest that had turned violent, even though policing the scene was not her responsibility. She tucks the file away like a gun in an ankle holster.Danvers was right to expect an ambush. First, Kate presents surveillance footage of Danvers and Navarro scoping out the mine entrance and pumps her for information on why they were there. Then she cheerily offers the good news that the forensics team in Anchorage determined that the scientists had died en masse because of a freak weather event that kicked up when they were perhaps catching the last sunset before the long night. Danvers knows enough about the case by now to roll her eyes at this explanation, and she confronts Kate with the incriminating file, but Kate and Ted have another card to play. Ted knows the Wheeler case wasn’t a murder-suicide and suggests that Danvers and Navarro would be wise to stop snooping.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 Apple ’1984’ Ad Changed the Super Bowl Forever

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      An oral history of Apple’s groundbreaking “1984” spot, which helped to establish the Super Bowl as TV’s biggest commercial showcase.Four decades ago, the Super Bowl became the Super Bowl.It wasn’t because of anything that happened in the game itself: On Jan. 22, 1984, the Los Angeles Raiders defeated Washington 38-9 in Super Bowl XVIII, a contest that was mostly over before halftime. But during the broadcast on CBS, a 60-second commercial loosely inspired by a famous George Orwell novel shook up the advertising and the technology sectors without ever showing the product it promoted. Conceived by the Chiat/Day ad agency and directed by Ridley Scott, then fresh off making the seminal science-fiction noir “Blade Runner,” the Apple commercial “1984,” which was intended to introduce the new Macintosh computer, would become one of the most acclaimed commercials ever made. It also helped to kick off — pun partially intended — the Super Bowl tradition of the big game serving as an annual showcase for gilt-edged ads from Fortune 500 companies. It all began with the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’s desire to take the battle with the company’s rivals to a splashy television broadcast he knew nothing about.In recent interviews, several of the people involved in creating the “1984” spot — Scott; John Sculley, then chief executive of Apple; Steve Hayden, a writer of the ad for Chiat/Day; Fred Goldberg, the Apple account manager for Chiat/Day; and Anya Rajah, the actor who famously threw the sledgehammer — looked back on how the commercial came together, its inspiration and the internal objections that almost kept it from airing. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.JOHN SCULLEY On Oct. 19, 1983, we’re all sitting around in Steve [Jobs’s] building, the Mac building, and the cover of Businessweek says, “The Winner is … IBM.” We were pretty deflated because this was the introduction of the IBM PCjr, and we hadn’t even introduced the Macintosh yet.STEVE HAYDEN Jobs said, “I want something that will stop the world in its tracks.” Our media director, Hank Antosz, said, “Well, there’s only one place that can do that — the Super Bowl.” And Steve Jobs said, “What’s the Super Bowl?” [Antosz] said, “Well, it’s a huge football game that attracts one of the largest audiences of the year.” And [Jobs] said, “I’ve never seen a Super Bowl. I don’t think I know anybody who’s seen a Super Bowl.”John Sculley, right, with Steve Jobs in 1984. The ad would promote the company’s new Macintosh personal computer.Marilynn K. Yee/The New York TimesFRED GOLDBERG The original idea was actually done in 1982. We presented an ad [with] a headline, which was “Why 1984 Won’t Be Like ‘1984,’” to Steve Jobs, and he didn’t think the Apple III was worthy of that claim.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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      On Netflix’s ‘One Day,’ Emma and Dexter Meet Again

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      The hit novel became a movie, and now it’s a 14-episode Netflix series. More time let the screenwriter get deeper into the characters of Emma and Dexter.For the British author David Nicholls, the key to a good romantic story is avoiding the clichés. “The first kiss, the first night together, the wedding day. There are all these landmarks which are quite familiar and quite obvious,” he said recently.Instead, his 2009 novel “One Day” follows its two protagonists, Emma and Dexter, on the same day each year for two decades, as they weave in and out of each other’s lives as friends, partners and everything in between. What has happened on the previous 364 days is revealed slowly and indirectly, with many key moments left to the reader’s imagination.In 2011, the novel — which has been translated into 40 languages and sold millions of copies — was adapted into a film starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess, and the story has now found new life as a limited series, created by the Scottish screenwriter Nicole Taylor and available on Netflix.Emma, a hardworking student, and Dexter, a popular guy around campus, meet in the first episode on their last day of college. Ludovic Robert/NetflixWhile both adaptations closely follow the structure and plot of the novel, the show devotes the majority of its 14 half-hour-ish episodes to a different year in the pair’s lives. The film’s shorter run time meant significant cuts, so that it ultimately became a “little synopsis of the novel,” according to Nicholls. (In a Times review, the critic A.O. Scott wrote that the film “turns an episodic story into an anthology of feelings and associations.”)The show’s extended length allows more rounded characters to emerge for Emma (played by Ambika Mod, previously Shruti in “This Is Going to Hurt”) and Dexter (Leo Woodall, who was Jack in Season 2 of “The White Lotus”). We meet them in 1988, on their last night of college, where Emma has kept her head down and worked hard on a double major and Dexter has been a popular party guy, achieving below average grades in anthropology.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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      Seth Meyers Tackles the Supreme Court’s Trump Hearing

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      Meyers said Trump lacked “any sense of irony or self-awareness” when “he claimed it would be an attack on democracy to remove him from the ballot for attacking democracy.”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.‘The Tortured Lawyers Department’On Thursday, the Supreme Court heard arguments over removing former President Donald Trump from the ballot in Colorado because of a clause banning officials who engaged in insurrection from running for office.Trump didn’t appear at the hearing, but he gave a radio interview from Mar-a-Lago, in which Seth Meyers said that “without any sense of irony or self-awareness,” Trump “claimed it would be an attack on democracy to remove him from the ballot for attacking democracy.”“That’s what you did. That’s why this case is happening in the first place. It’s like if O.J. had gotten up in court and said, ‘If you put me in jail, you’ll be murdering my freedom!’” — SETH MEYERS“One of two things is possible: Either Trump is a shameless pathological liar who projects his crimes onto others, or he has what’s known in the medical community as ‘50 First Dates’ disease, where he wakes up every day and forgets what happened the day before. That would explain why Trump makes as much sense at his rallies as an Adam Sandler character.” — SETH MEYERS“It is funny to imagine that the drafters of the 14th Amendment somehow specifically exempted Donald Trump, of all people. That would explain why they added a clause saying ‘any person who engages in insurrection shall be barred from office unless said person is a boisterous and irksome real estate financier with peculiar physical features and a bizarre obsession with winged creatures slain by a wind-producing apparatus who once hosted a reality competition program on television, or whatever that is.’” — SETH MEYERS“First up, did you know that Trump’s legal team has been prepping for months? Also, they’re making an album called ‘The Tortured Lawyers Department.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Trump’s lawyers have also pointed out that the 14th Amendment says, ‘People who engaged in an insurrection cannot hold office’ — it doesn’t say they can’t run for office. But the point of running for office is to hold office. Unless you’re Nikki Haley. We’re not sure what her point is.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“And, finally, did you know the hearing was led by Chief Justice John Roberts? Also, he’s the only Chief that’s not worried about the 49ers.” — JIMMY FALLONWe 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