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      ‘Suits’ and ‘Friends’: Here’s What Americans Streamed in 2023

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      Hollywood was on strike for much of the year. And yet the time viewers spent streaming shows and movies went up. A lot.Last year, studios continued to pull back how much they spend on new TV shows. A pair of strikes effectively shut down Hollywood for several months, disrupting new releases of television shows and movies.And yet Americans kept on streaming.The time that people watched streaming services from their TV sets last year jumped 21 percent from 2022, according to a year-end review on streaming trends by Nielsen, the media research firm. There were nearly a million television shows and movies for Americans to choose from on over 90 streaming services.What did they watch? A lot of reruns, it turns out.Here’s a look at some of the trends.‘Suits’ Bests ‘Stranger Things’From left, Gaten Matarazzo, Finn Wolfhard and Sadie Sink in a scene from “Stranger Things.”NetflixIt’s well established that “Suits,” the USA Network’s legal procedural that aired from 2011 to 2019, was an unexpected streaming hit last year. Netflix subscribers began devouring it over the summer. They shattered records in the process.“Suits,” with 57.7 billion minutes of viewing time in 2023, eclipsed both “The Office” in 2020 and “Stranger Things” in 2022 (when its fourth season was released) as the most-streamed show on television sets in a single year, according to Nielsen. (The research firm began releasing yearly figures in 2020.)“Suits” was probably new to most viewers who watched it on Netflix, said Brian Fuhrer, a senior vice president of product at Nielsen.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?  More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Vanderpump Rules’ and the Grammys

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      The Bravo hit returns for an 11th season, and the Recording Academy hands out awards.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, Jan. 29-Feb. 4. Details and times are subject to change.MondayBAD ROMANCE 10 p.m. on ABC. In February 2023, Becky Bliefnick was murdered in her home, and her estranged husband, Tim Bliefnick, was immediately the primary person of interest. Evidence was found in the home and online, but one of the creepiest parts of the case is an appearance Tim made on “Family Feud” years earlier. The question he was asked didn’t seem out of the ordinary: “What’s the biggest mistake you made at your wedding?” His answer: “Honey, I love you, but said, ‘I do.’” This special edition of “20/20” takes a deeper look at the case.TuesdayVANDERPUMP RULES 8 p.m. on Bravo. I will always choose “Below Deck” over anything else in the Bravo universe, but I can humbly admit that this season premiere is going to be one of the network’s biggest must-watch moments all year. After “Scandoval” set the reality-television world aflame, this is the first chance to check back in with Tom Sandoval and Ariana Madix (minus Rachel Leviss, who has left the show). With Madix headed to Broadway to play Roxie in “Chicago” and Tom Schwartz coming off a slight character-redeeming run on “Winter House,” I personally can’t wait to see more drama unfold.WednesdayNaomi Watts and Tom Hollander in “Feud.”FXFEUD 10 p.m. on FX. Ryan Murphy is back at it with another season of his anthology series. When the show debuted in 2017, it focused on a feud between the actresses Joan Crawford and Bette Davis that exploded when they filmed “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” This season, subtitled “Capote vs. the Swans,” focuses on the fallings-out that the writer Truman Capote had with New York City socialites, including Ann Woodward, Babe Paley and C.Z. Guest.ThursdayFARMER WANTS A WIFE 9 p.m. on Fox. The second season, hosted by the singer and actress Jennifer Nettles, is bringing 32 “city girls” to the countryside to meet four single farmers to hopefully create a match. Look, it’s definitely not conventional (and might not be particularly successful), but I’ve read enough novels with the “big city girl moves to a small town and falls in love” trope that I’m willing to suspend my disbelief — for now.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?  More

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      ‘True Detective’ Season 4, Episode 3 Recap: Toxicity

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      Danvers and Navarro both must face some cold realities about who and what they represent in a community being poisoned by its biggest employer.Season 4, Episode 3: ‘Part 3’By Scott TobiasIn the first two episodes of “Night Country,” we knew Annie Kowtok as a dead person, a young Inupiaq activist who was stabbed 32 times and whose memory haunts the living every bit as much as the hallucinations that seem to slip in their minds during permanent darkness do.And so it’s especially powerful to meet Annie when she is associated with life, thanks to a stealthily placed flashback in the cold open in which she is helping an expectant mother through a water birth. Navarro has turned up to arrest her in connection with trespassing and destruction of private property at the mine, but the officer is literally disarmed by the scene she witnesses and is enlisted to help with: Annie is defiant about bringing an Inupiaq baby, the next generation, into the world.In perhaps the season’s strongest hour to date, the episode moves the procedural elements forward as expected, but the one common thread is the tug Annie and the town’s Indigenous population has on the consciences of our two lead characters. It starts with that flashback, in which Navarro has been put in the awkward spot of enforcing the law on the mine’s behalf, only to be put in a situation where she is disrupting an Inupiaq birth. For as much tension as we’ve witnessed in Danvers’s relationship with Ennis’s Native population, the show reminds us that Navarro, too, has complicated feelings about her place in the community. An Inupiaq herself, she has been hiding away from her own identity. Her sister has the kakiniit tattoo on her chin. Navarro, conspicuously, does not.To be a police officer in Ennis is often to represent the interests of the town’s biggest employer. Navarro and Danvers are not in the business of administering environmental justice or blowing the whistle on polluted groundwater. If there is tension around the mine, they’re the ones squelching protests or arresting activists like Annie for breaking the law. That, inevitably, puts them on one side of a stark racial line.The discomfort for Navarro is more acute, given her roots, but there is a lot of evidence in this episode that Danvers has been fighting her own conscience — and is perhaps starting to lose the battle. She rages at Leah to wipe the temporary tattoo marks off her face, perhaps as a protective instinct, but they’re on Annie’s face, too, and the weight of it seems to stir her sympathies.Meanwhile, the law is being administered much less delicately. It is a sharp narrative strategy to cut from the flashback with Navarro and Annie to a scene in which Hank is rounding up a civilian army to “search” for Raymond Clark, the missing scientist who had a secret affair with Annie. The term “search” is in scare quotes because Hank seems to have deliberately gathered a collection of armed-to-the-teeth yokels for a bounty hunt. He tells them that Clark is armed and dangerous and sends them on their way. When Navarro turns up to remind Hank that they want Clark alive, he replies, “Do we?”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?  More

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      5 Podcasts for Hollywood’s Awards Season

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      As Oscars night approaches, these shows offer expert analysis and predictions, insight into behind-the-scenes machinations and reflections on front-runners of the past.The 2024 awards season has felt unusually hectic so far, thanks to the strike-delayed Emmy Awards shifting from their usual fall airdate to January. To help make sense of it all — and unpack the discombobulated state of Hollywood now — these five podcasts offer a mixture of expert analysis and predictions for the major ceremonies, original reporting on the industry trends and behind-the-scenes machinations that influence voting, and reflections on Oscar front-runners of the past that probably shouldn’t have been.‘Little Gold Men’This Vanity Fair series debuted in 2015, which means it’s been on hand to chronicle some of the weirdest moments in Academy history, like the 2017 Best Picture flub (when “La La Land” was mistakenly announced as the winner instead of “Moonlight”), 2021’s muted Covid-era ceremony held in a cavernous Los Angeles train station, and the slap heard around the world in 2022. But even when there’s nothing quite so unusual going on, the analysis here always makes awards season more interesting. Hosted by the Vanity Fair journalists Michael Hogan, Katey Rich, Richard Lawson and Joanna Robinson, the conversation is always exhaustive and packed with expertise, exploring not just the contenders for Hollywood’s top prizes, but also the campaigning and strategizing that shape the race. Since many Oscar journeys begin at film festivals such as Sundance, Cannes, Venice and Toronto, there’s no shortage of news and releases to cover year round, not to mention interviews; recent guests have included Andrew Scott (“All of Us Strangers”), Emma Stone (“Poor Things”) and Greta Lee (“Past Lives”).Starter episode: “Oscar Voters, Start Your Engines”‘This Had Oscar Buzz’There’s a peculiar category of film that debuts with great fanfare, attracts plenty of awards buzz, and then fades from the cultural consciousness without a trace (and no awards). Not all of the films discussed on “This Had Oscar Buzz” fall into that bracket, but, as the title suggests, the focus is on the movies that had that buzzy aura around them, at least for a while. An early episode about “Cake,” a 2014 movie starring Jennifer Aniston as a woman living with chronic pain, exemplifies what works so well about this format — Aniston was lauded for her playing-against-type performance and campaigned intensely during that awards season, but was famously snubbed on Oscar nomination morning. The hosts, Joe Reid and Chris Feil, don’t belittle either the performance or the hustle, but rather use the hype around “Cake” as a jumping-off point to discuss Aniston’s career and celebrity more broadly, alongside the ins and outs of how exactly buzz gets built in the first place.Starter episode: “Alexander (With David Sims)”‘The Town With Matthew Belloni’Though not a traditional awards season podcast with predictions or play-by-play recaps, “The Town” is an invaluable resource for anyone hoping to understand the upheaval in Hollywood. Delivered in snappy episodes that clock in around 30 minutes, Matthew Belloni, a former editor of The Hollywood Reporter and a founding partner of the digital media company Puck, shares insights and exclusive reporting on the industry, whether the issue is last year’s monthslong writers’ and actors’ strikes, Disney’s succession woes or the cost-of-streaming crisis. In a recent episode, Belloni and Brooks Barnes, a Hollywood correspondent for The New York Times, went deep on the current state of the “unkillable” Golden Globes, which returned last year after a hiatus sparked by controversy surrounding its now-defunct unorthodox voting body, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Traditionally the first awards show on the calendar — and the most chaotic — the Globes have proved to have more staying power than many predicted, and this analysis is a good resource for anybody wondering why.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?  More

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      ‘S.N.L.’ Wonders What Men Will Do After Football Season Ends

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      Dakota Johnson hosted and Justin Timberlake was the musical guest in an episode that brought back some old favorites and also offered a few surprises.The Super Bowl may still be two weeks away, but as far as “Saturday Night Live” is concerned, this is your last weekend to experience authentic N.F.L. football.This latest “S.N.L.” broadcast, hosted by Dakota Johnson and featuring the musical guest Justin Timberlake, kicked off with a parody of CBS’s coverage of the A.F.C. championship game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Baltimore Ravens, with Andrew Dismukes and James Austin Johnson playing the anchors Tony Romo and Jim Nantz.Dismukes began with some enthusiasm for the game: “We’ve got two generational talents at quarterback,” he said. “Two elite defenses. I expect this to be an all-out battle for the next three hours.” Then a hint of emotion crept in as he added, “And after that, it’s all over.”“All over?” Johnson asked.“Football,” Dismukes said. “After today it’s just — it’s done.”Yes, there’s the Super Bowl, but, as Dismukes said: “That’s not real football. The Super Bowl is for commercials and Usher and people who never watch football asking how many points a touchdown is worth. Today is the last real football day for just us guys.”The rest of the CBS broadcast team tried to make their peace with this eventuality. “What are men supposed to do on Sundays now?” asked Mikey Day, who was playing the analyst Bill Cowher. “Just go to their friends’ houses for no reason?”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?  More

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      Ukraine Criticizes HBO, Saying New ‘White Lotus’ Actor Supports War

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      On social media, Ukraine’s foreign ministry posted clips of the Serbian actor Milos Bikovic receiving a medal for cultural achievement from Vladimir Putin in 2018.Ukraine’s foreign ministry criticized HBO this week after Milos Bikovic was cast in the third season of “The White Lotus,” saying without evidence that the Serbian actor had supported Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.HBO announced on Jan. 12 that Bikovic, 36, would be joining the dark comedy about wealthy tourists at island resorts. On Wednesday, the foreign ministry of Ukraine made the accusations against Bikovic on social media, writing, “HBO, is it all right for you to work with a person who supports genocide & violates international law?”Bikovic was awarded the Pushkin Medal, which honors contributions to Russian arts and culture, by President Vladimir V. Putin in 2018 and received Russian citizenship by presidential decree in 2021.In February 2022, the day after the invasion began, Bikovic said on Instagram that he wished the war had not happened. “War and bloodshed on any side reminds us of how far humanity is from global unity and love,” he wrote in Russian and Serbian. “God save the lives of all those who are now in danger!”Ukraine’s foreign ministry and Bikovic did not respond to requests for comment. An HBO spokesman said questions should be directed to Bikovic’s representatives.President Biden has called Russia’s invasion genocide, and The New York Times has collected evidence of brutalities by Russia, including the willful killing of noncombatants.A 79-second video that Ukraine’s foreign ministry posted on social media interspersed scenes from “The White Lotus” with clips of Bikovic accepting the award from Putin and previous comments it said the actor had made about Russia. In a voice-over, it claimed that Bikovic was “the Kremlin’s foreign mouthpiece.”During Bikovic’s acceptance speech for the Pushkin Medal, he emphasized unity between Russia and Serbia. “What a joy for Russians and Serbs in our homeland because we have the same worldview,” he said in Russian.Ukraine barred Bikovic from entering the country in 2019 for what it called national security reasons. At the time, he told a Serbian publication that “from the human and poetic point of view the situation is absurd and interesting.”Before he was cast in “The White Lotus,” Bikovic acted in movies including “South Wind,” which follows a gang member in Belgrade; “Sunstroke,” about military officers remembering the collapse of the Russian Empire; “Ice,” in which he plays a figure skater; and “The Balkan Line,” about a military operation during the Kosovo war.Season 3 of “The White Lotus” is set to begin production in Thailand next month and is scheduled to air in 2025. It will feature Walton Goggins, Carrie Coon, Parker Posey and the returning cast member Natasha Rothwell. More

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      Gordon Ramsay Isn’t Going Anywhere

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      With a new season of his series “Next Level Chef,” reality TV’s most enduring antihero still reigns supreme. How long can he keep it up?Gordon Ramsay insists he never wanted to be the bad boy. His image as the brash, bellicose chef and restaurateur, as the master of the culinary meltdown, was, he said, largely a matter of getting off on the wrong foot.Ramsay was introduced to British viewers on “Boiling Point” (1999), a five-part series on Channel 4 chronicling his turbulent efforts to open his first restaurant. At around the same time, BBC Two launched “The Naked Chef,” a breezy, upbeat cooking show starring the young chef Jamie Oliver. The two shows, and the two chefs, could hardly have seemed more different.On the one hand, you had Ramsay, a surly perfectionist, firing a waiter for drinking water in view of customers. “And then literally at the same time, on another channel, there was Jamie,” he recalled in an interview last week, “this floppy-haired Essex boy, sliding down the banister doing one-pot wonders.”“The nation fell in love with him,” Ramsay said. Whereas with himself, he added, “the nation wondered what the hell was going on.”Ramsay’s explanation may not entirely account for his enduring infamy as an explosive TV tyrant — it wasn’t Oliver, after all, who named Ramsay’s signature series “Hell’s Kitchen,” and he hardly forced Ramsay to bludgeon countless chefs and restaurant owners with colorful jeremiads for the past 25 years on air. But that Ramsay still brings up old rivalries when discussing his reputation is revealing, a glimpse of the competitive intensity that has been crucial to his continuing success.That competitiveness is one reason that the host of roughly two dozen shows over the years, including “Next Level Chef,” returning on Sunday for its third season on Fox, still devotes so much of his down time to watching other food shows. It’s why, during the pandemic lockdown, he threw himself headlong into social media. And it’s also why, at 57, Ramsay has no intention of calling it quits.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?  More

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      ‘Ally McBeal’ Star Calista Flockhart Returns to TV

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      On a chilly January weekend in Los Angeles, I turned into a truffle pig. I foraged relentlessly all over town, looking for truffle fries.By Monday, when it was time to go to my interview, the only thing in my suitcase I could squeeze into was a Spanx dress.“My sister gave me this for Christmas,” I explained sheepishly to the famously lissome Calista Flockhart as I slid into a booth on the terrace of the Georgian Hotel. “I guess you’ve never owned any Spanx.”“I love Spanx!” she said. “In fact, I just ordered — no kidding — a pair of Spanx jeans. They make really cute jeans. They’re very wide.”Seeing my skeptical look, she reminded me: “It’s not only about sucking it all in. It’s about smoothing it all the way. No panty lines.”And then, as we sat in this romantic spot, looking out at the ocean, she said the thing that made me fall in love: “Would you like to nibble on something? How about some French fries?”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?  More