More stories

  • in

    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ and 55th N.A.A.C.P. Image Awards

    The 20th season of this medical drama airs on ABC. And CBS hosts the annual awards show honoring excellence in film and television.For TV viewers like me who still haven’t cut the cord, here is a selection of cable and network shows, movies and specials broadcasting Monday through Sunday, March 11-16. Details and times are subject to change.MondayLAKEFRONT EMPIRE 10 p.m. on HGTV. This new real estate series takes viewers to Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks, a Midwestern vacation destination made famous by the Netflix show “Ozark.” This series follows a group of realtors, including Peggy Albers, who often talks about her remarkable turnaround from serving more than 15 years in federal prison for selling methamphetamine to becoming a successful agent at the lake.TuesdayIn a scene from “Lionheart,” Dan Wheldon with his son Sebastian.Michael Voorhees/HBOTHE LIONHEART 9 p.m. on HBO. Dan Wheldon was best known by his nickname, “The Lionheart,” and won the Indianapolis 500 twice. In a tragic accident, he died in a crash in 2011 at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. This documentary blends archival and present-day footage to tell the story of Wheldon’s sons, Sebastian and Oliver, who have since followed their father’s footsteps and entered the world of racing.PASSWORD 10 p.m. on NBC. This game show, which originally aired in the 1960s on CBS, is coming back for its second season, with Keke Palmer as host and Jimmy Fallon as a panelist. This season will feature guest stars, including Chance the Rapper, Howie Mandel and Joe Manganiello, playing the game that is a mix between charades and telephone.WednesdayTHE AMAZING RACE 9:30 p.m. on CBS. It’s hard to believe that this reality competition series premiered in 2001, just as iPods and iTunes were introduced. As for 36 seasons now, teams of two will embark on heart-racing challenges around the world for a cash prize of $1 million.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

  • in

    Former Trump Aide Alyssa Farah Griffin Becomes a Liberal Favorite

    Now and then during an election cycle, a Republican pundit becomes something of a hero to Democrats.Peggy Noonan, a conservative Wall Street Journal columnist and former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, filled that role in the months leading up the 2008 election, after she had pilloried the second Bush administration over its invasion of Iraq and criticized Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee.Nicolle Wallace and Steve Schmidt, veterans of John McCain’s failed 2008 presidential campaign, reached pundit primacy on MSNBC excoriating the tea party activists then in ascendance.A rising star of the current season is Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former communications director for President Trump who is now a co-host of ABC’s “The View” and a regular commentator on CNN.Ms. Farah Griffin, who resigned from the Trump administration in December 2020, garnered wide attention with a tweet she posted on Jan. 6, 2021: “Dear MAGA — I am one of you. Before I worked for @realDonaldTrump, I worked for @MarkMeadows & @Jim_Jordan & the @freedomcaucus. I marched in the 2010 Tea Party rallies. I campaigned w/ Trump & voted for him. But I need you to hear me: the Election was NOT stolen. We lost.”Three years later, Ms. Farah Griffin, 34, spends many of her nights at the CNN headquarters in the Hudson Yards district of Manhattan, bantering with Van Jones, David Axelrod and other liberal commentators.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

  • in

    ‘Free to Be … You and Me’ Took the Revolution to the Playground

    Fifty years ago, the TV landmark showed Gen X kids that no one else has the right to tell you who you are.“Free to Be … You and Me,” the 1974 kids-TV special and feminist milestone, begins with footage of children riding a carousel. I was one of them. Not literally — I watched the show on TV like millions of other baby Gen X-ers. But these kids, laughing and spinning, were my cohort at a strange point in history.We were born at the tail end of one of the country’s great periods of social revolution. Our mothers were getting jobs outside the home, and so was Mary Richards on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Later in our childhoods would come the era of Phyllis Schlafly and He-Man, and things would jerk backward again for a while, maybe without our even being aware of it at the time.But on “Free to Be,” the future was baby steps away. The theme song, by the New Seekers, imagines a land “where the children are free” and says that “it ain’t far to this land from where we are.” The children transform into cartoons on lively horses. They leap out of the spinning wheel’s orbit, galloping through an animated desert, girls and boys side by side.In the show’s animated stories, chivalry doesn’t protect girls, self-reliance does: In “Ladies First,” a “tender, sweet young thing” who insists on special treatment ends up eaten by tigers.ABCMarlo Thomas, the former star of the sitcom “That Girl,” created “Free to Be” as an album in 1972, in collaboration with the Ms. Foundation for Women. She was inspired, she said in the introduction to a 2010 DVD of the TV special, by reading bedtime stories to her niece — books that “told girls and boys who they should be, who they ought to be, but seldom who they could be.”Through songs, skits and stories, “Free to Be” told them they could be, and do, anything. Girls could run races and grow up to be doctors; boys could play with dolls and grow up to push a stroller. A princess could decide not to marry a prince, or anybody. A man could cry.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

  • in

    Lisa Ann Walter of ‘Abbott Elementary’ on the Show She’ll Never Forget

    “I would challenge anybody to see Patti LuPone in her prime sing ‘Evita,’” the actress said, “and not say, ‘That was the best show I’ve ever seen in my life.’”It was a Monday morning in Los Angeles and Lisa Ann Walter had the day off from “Abbott Elementary,” the ABC sitcom about an underfunded public school in Philadelphia.But that didn’t mean she wasn’t working.The Season 3 premiere was a little more than a week away, and even though Walter knew where her character — the veteran second-grade teacher Melissa Schemmenti — was headed, she would divulge only that “there are changes. Big changes.”But there were plenty of other things to discuss: Her stand-up tour. A movie script she’d written during the pandemic. A project that’s an animated series about a single mom of teenage boys called “Bitter.” The $1 million she’d bagged for the Entertainment Community Fund on “Celebrity Jeopardy!” The playoff dinner the night before that began with a pot of chili and ended up a smorgasbord.“I go overboard,” she said in a video call.Then there’s the project she’s doing with her bestie Elaine Hendrix — she couldn’t talk about that either — who played Meredith to Walter’s Chessy on “The Parent Trap” some 25 years ago.“Elaine and I can’t go anywhere together without people losing their minds,” Walter said before talking about the origin story of “Outlander,” her fixation on muscle cars and kissing during bar trivia. “I always used to say I don’t really have to do anything else with my career.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1‘Sense and Sensibility’ OnscreenI think Emma Thompson is a genius with the screenplay. It’s Alan Rickman at his finest. It evokes enough of that period, the lushness and quietness, that it’s genuinely that article. But it’s modern enough where it resonates — that need to find your person.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

  • in

    Melissa Benoist Hits the Campaign Trail in ‘The Girls on the Bus’

    After six years on “Supergirl,” the actor and producer took a crash course in political journalism to prep for a new Max series.Melissa Benoist has made a habit of playing journalists on television.She spent six years as the hero of “Supergirl,” Kara Danvers, who works in media when she’s not saving the world. Now Benoist is taking on the role of a campaign reporter named Sadie McCarthy in the Max series “The Girls on the Bus,” a very loose adaptation of the former New York Times reporter Amy Chozick’s nonfiction book “Chasing Hillary.”But Benoist does not think she’d be a good fit for the profession. Asked about the choice of some political reporters to refrain from voting in the elections they cover, she explained in a phone interview that she would be a “terrible journalist.”“I’m too emotional,” she said. “I’d for sure be biased.”“The Girls on the Bus,” created by Chozick and Julie Plec (“The Vampire Diaries”), is a fictional and frothy account of the lives of women chronicling a series of Democratic presidential contenders on their way to the national convention. Benoist’s Sadie works for a New York Times stand-in called The New York Sentinel, and is given an opportunity to return to the road after being publicly embarrassed during the previous election cycle when a video of her crying after her candidate lost, a journalistic no-no, went viral.The show has a fantastical bent, and not just because Sadie has conversations with the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson (P.J. Sosko). Despite arriving in an election year and taking inspiration from Chozick’s book about covering Hillary Clinton, the political landscape of the show looks very different from our current one. Sadie and her cohorts grapple with familiar topics, but they do so in a sort of parallel universe where the bonds they form while tracking down sources is at the center of the tale.In the series, Benoist’s character, left, competes and bonds with other reporters on the campaign trail played by, from left, Carla Gugino, Christina Elmore and Natasha Behnam.Nicole Rivelli/MaxFor Benoist, the show is her first series regular role since “Supergirl” and her first venture as a producer. In an interview, she discussed her crash course in political reporting and why that word “girl” keeps following her around. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.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

  • in

    ‘The Late Show’ Goes Live to Recap the State of the Union

    “Depending on what happens in November, next year might just be a Kid Rock concert and an immigrant catapult,” Stephen Colbert joked.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.Biden State of Mind“The Late Show” went live on Thursday night, after President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.Stephen Colbert said that the press had so far described Biden’s address as “feisty, fiery, heated, supreme, crunch wrap. I’m sorry. It’s really late and I’m hungry.”“It was kind of a tense night, because it feels like this might be the last time we get a State of the Union. Depending on what happens in November, next year might just be a Kid Rock concert and an immigrant catapult.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Now, coming into tonight’s speech, critics said Biden’s State of the Union challenge was to dispel ‘old-man vibes.’ Really? In Congress? Kinda hard to fight off the old-man vibe when you’re speaking to a room that looks like an open casket convention.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“On the Democratic side, they wore white. On the Republican side, they were white.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (State of the Union Edition)“Well, guys, if you’re watching at home, I assume you’re still cleaning up from your big State of the Union party. Yeah. What kind of wings do you want — right wing, left wing?” — JIMMY FALLON“Yeah, earlier tonight, President Biden delivered the annual State of the Union address, and Biden’s speech was historic. It was the first time that the font size on the teleprompter was 8,000.” — JIMMY FALLON“Biden looked out at the members of Congress and said, ‘Finally, a place where I seem pretty young.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Thanks to rules giving former members of Congress floor access, George Santos attended the State of the Union. Come on! You can’t just go back to your old job like you never left — unless you’re Jon Stewart. Keep it up, Jon! You’re crushing it.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Tonight, the room was filled with over 500 members of Congress, but Senator Mitch McConnell wasn’t there. Well, he attended, but he wasn’t there.” — JIMMY FALLON“Ahead of the president’s arrival there, members of the Supreme Court filed in. Interestingly, Justice Clarence Thomas did not attend. It’s nice to know he’s willing to recuse himself from something.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingOn Thursday’s “Daily Show,” Ronny Chieng asked his “Kung Fu Panda 4” co-star Awkwafina to interview him about his role in the movie.Also, Check This OutKaty O’Brian and Kristen Stewart in “Love Lies Bleeding.”Anna Kooris/A24Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian find love in a hopeless place in Rose Glass’s new neo-noir thriller “Love Lies Bleeding.” More

  • in

    Steve Lawrence, Who Sang His Listeners Down Memory Lane, Dies at 88

    With his wife, Eydie Gorme, and sometimes on his own, he kept pop standards in vogue long past their prime. He also acted on television and on Broadway.Steve Lawrence, the mellow baritone nightclub, television and recording star who with his wife and partner, the soprano Eydie Gorme, kept pop standards in vogue long past their prime and took America on musical walks down memory lane for a half-century, died on Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 88.The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said Susan DuBow, a spokeswoman for the family. He had been diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s in 2019.Billed as “Steve and Eydie” at Carnegie Hall concerts, on television and at glitzy hotels in Las Vegas, the remarkably durable couple remained steadfast to their pop style as rock ’n’ roll took America by storm in the 1950s and ’60s. Long after the millennium, they were still rendering songs like “Our Love Is Here to Stay,” “Just in Time” and “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)” for audiences that seemed to grow old with them.Mr. Lawrence and Ms. Gorme recording in the 1960s. As Steve and Eydie, they performed at Carnegie Hall, on television and in Las Vegas.via Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesMr. Lawrence, a cantor’s son from Brooklyn, and Ms. Gorme, a Bronx-born daughter of Sephardic Jewish immigrants, met professionally in 1953 as regular singers on “The Steve Allen Show” a late-night show on NBC’s New York station that would go national the next year as “Tonight.” Their romance might have been the plot of an MGM musical of the ’40s, with spats, breakups, reconciliations and plenty of songs.When they finally decided to get married, Mr. Lawrence and Ms. Gorme faced a roadblock, as they recalled in a dressing-room interview with The New York Times at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas in 1992.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

  • in

    What to Watch This Weekend: A Surreal Family Comedy

    The Turkish series “A Round of Applause” offers a fresh and surprising vision of anxiety and alienation.Cihat Suvarioglu in a scene from “A Round of Applause.”NetflixThe Turkish series “A Round of Applause” (in Turkish, with subtitles, or dubbed) is a vivid, imaginative depiction of family neuroses. The concept of sublimated despair is a pillar of contemporary television, but the show’s surrealism is fresh and surprising — made even more so by the sense of creeping sameness of so many other shows right now.“Applause,” on Netflix, follows Zeynep (Aslihan Gurbuz), her husband, Mehmet (Fatih Artman), and her son, Metin (played at various ages by Rezdar Tastan, Eyup Mert Ilkis and Cihat Suvarioglu), though the show begins before his conception. First, Zeynep and Mehmet have some friends over for dinner, but the guests’ behavior becomes stranger and more childlike during the visit — they’re too scared to sleep in their own bed during a thunderstorm, they say. They behave petulantly at the breakfast table and eventually go so far as to call Zeynep and Mehmet “mom” and “dad.” The show’s surrealism gains momentum from there, and the warped perspective becomes more central — more grotesque, more exciting, funnier — as the show goes on.When we meet Metin, he’s in utero, portrayed as grown man, bearded and smoking and ranting like a political prisoner. He has already absorbed all of his mother’s unhappiness, he wails, yanking on a massive umbilical cord for emphasis. He lacks purpose; he feels oppressed; he doesn’t want to be born, not yet at least, not until he’s ready. Metin’s mournful skepticism of life itself plays out through his hyper-articulate childhood and adrift adulthood, first as a boy whose playground girlfriend dumps him for being “suffocating,” then as a 13-year-old who writes his mother a rap called “The Funeral of Meaning on Earth,” and later as a grandiose, depressed DJ. On the one hand, this despondence has been with Metin since before he even existed. On the other, it is nurtured throughout his life by his mother’s blind praise and his father’s emotional detachment.There are six half-hour episodes of “Applause,” and they left me in a glorious daze, both delighted by its absurdist humor and fascinated by its dreamlike vision of anxiety and alienation. The show is an unflattering portrait, but it’s not a caricature; its exaggerations become truer than true, more like a myth than a joke. More