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      Drake Bell Will Detail Abuse He Suffered as a Child Star

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      The former Nickelodeon actor is set to describe sexual abuse he experienced at the hands of a former dialogue coach, according to a new docuseries. Court documents detail the back story.Jared Drake Bell, a former star of the hit Nickelodeon series “Drake & Josh,” will speak publicly about abuse he suffered at the hands of a 41-year-old dialogue coach when he was 15, according to the network airing a new docuseries about the grimmer aspects of children’s television.Mr. Bell, now 37, will describe his relationship with the dialogue coach, Brian Peck, who pleaded no contest in 2004 to two felonies: oral copulation with a minor, and lewd and lascivious acts with a child, according to public records.Mr. Peck was sentenced to 16 months in prison and registered as a sex offender in California, according to state records. Before entering his pleas, he worked in children’s television for years, including on hit Nickelodeon shows like “All That.”Mr. Bell could not be reached for comment and a trailer released by Investigation Discovery, which produced the docuseries, coming out March 17, “Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV,” did not contain any details of his account. But a transcript of Mr. Peck’s sentencing hearing in 2004 quotes the victim, who is not identified, as saying, “I have to live with this for the rest of my life. And let me tell you, it’s horrific.”Attempts to reach Mr. Peck were also not successful. In the transcript, Mr. Peck said he felt “deep and profound remorse” for his actions and took responsibility for them. He said he found the victim to be an “extremely talented” working professional who he considered “equal to me and my friends.”In court records reviewed by The New York Times, prosecutors said Mr. Peck sexually abused the teenager over a period of four months in 2001 and 2002. Mr. Peck was 41 and the victim was identified as being 15 years old.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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      For Casting Directors, the Hunt for a Killer Never Stops

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      Procedural dramas are often relaxing to watch, but the hectic sprint to find and cast new patients, clients and crooks each week is anything but.On a Monday afternoon in February, Findley Davidson and Jonathan Tolins met for a video call. Tolins, the showrunner for the new CBS procedural “Elsbeth,” and Davidson, the show’s casting director, were finalizing casting for the sixth episode, which visits the offices of an exclusive plastic surgeon, and discussing the seventh, which attends a country club wedding.“Elsbeth” is a “howdunnit,” in which Carrie Preston’s cheery, distractible legal savant (a character first introduced on “The Good Wife”), identifies a murderer already known to the audience. Each episode requires a buzzy guest star to play the murderer — the show had already secured the likes of Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Jane Krakowski and Blair Underwood. In the seventh episode, the killer is the father of the bride, a man who projects country club clout. Davidson and Tolins, who had each come with a list of preferred actors, batted A, B and C-list names around like so many celebrity tennis balls. Quickly, they assembled a ranked list of about a dozen men, more diverse in ethnicity and mien than Tolins’s initial character description — “old WASP-y money” — might suggest. (They eventually landed on the live-wire comic actor Keegan-Michael Key.) Then it was time to blue-sky the eighth episode.“They just keep coming,” Davidson said.Other well-known “Elsbeth” guest stars this season include Blair Underwood. Elizabeth Fisher/CBSProcedural dramas — legal, medical, homicidal — are a durable form of comfort television, with familiar bands of lawyers, doctors and cops solving thorny problems in about 45 minutes of screen time. But each week’s new cases require new clients, new patients, new victims and killers and crooks, some at least mildly famous and each of them plausible for whatever fantastical circumstance the writers have dreamed up.All of which means that delivering the satisfying, sink-into-your-sofa consolation of such shows involves a hectic, grueling, often maddening sprint to assemble new troupes of actors week after week, with casting directors receiving hundreds, sometimes thousands of submissions for every role. Within just a few days, auditions are vetted, offers are made, parts are cast. Then the process begins all over again.“It’s go, go, go,” said Jason Kennedy, the casting director for the CBS series “NCIS.” He noted that the pandemic and the actors’ strike had constricted the process further. “There seems to be even less time there than there was before, and a lot more actors to consider,” he said.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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      Late Night Finds Super Tuesday Super Predictable

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      “Spoiler: It’s Biden/Trump,” Stephen Colbert said. “It’s always been Biden/Trump. It will always be Biden/Trump.”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.Spoiler AlertSuper Tuesday all but solidified that the 2024 presidential race will be between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump.“Spoiler: It’s Biden/Trump,” Stephen Colbert said. “It’s always been Biden/Trump. It will always be Biden/Trump.”“In a recent poll, almost 50 percent of respondents said they believe ‘it is likely Democrats will replace Biden with another candidate before the election.’ No. No, they won’t. It’s Trump versus Biden. Stop making up election fan fic.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“But the president is not out there fighting alone. Oh, no. He is backed by Joe Biden’s superfans, many of them older, and most of them women. That’s right. Taylor’s got the Swifties, Beyoncé’s got the Bey-hive, but Joe’s got the early bird special.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Super Tuesday Edition)“Today was Super Tuesday, where 16 states and one territory got together and held an intervention for Nikki Haley.” — SETH MEYERS“Taylor Swift got on Instagram and encouraged her 282 million followers to vote. Yeah, which backfired when everyone voted for the blank space.” — JIMMY FALLON“Now, there’s one thing that could still drive voter turnout today, and that’s that Taylor Swift told her 282 million Instagram followers to vote in Super Tuesday’s primaries but refrained from endorsing any specific candidates or political party. We haven’t seen a celebrity take a stance this boldly neutral since Rob Lowe went to an N.F.L. game with a hat that said ‘N.F.L.’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingJordan Klepper asked Nikki Haley supporters to choose between Biden and Donald Trump on Tuesday’s “Daily Show.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightThe Oscar nominated actress Annette Bening will sit down with Seth Meyers on Wednesday’s “Late Night.”Also, Check This OutElim Chan, who came to global attention when she won the Donatella Flick Conducting Competition, is about to make her New York Philharmonic debut.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesThe first woman to win a prestigious conducting contest, Elim Chan, will make her debut at the New York Philharmonic this week. More

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      Janice Burgess, Nickelodeon Executive and ‘Backyardigans’ Creator, Dies at 72

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      Ms. Burgess oversaw the production of “Blue’s Clues” and drew on her own childhood for “The Backyardigans,” in which five cartoon animals imagine their yard as a place of otherworldly adventure.Janice Burgess, a longtime Nickelodeon television executive who sought to promote children’s curiosity and sense of play for decades, overseeing popular shows like “Blue’s Clues” and “Little Bill” and creating her own musical children’s show, “The Backyardigans,” died on Saturday in hospice care in Manhattan. She was 72.Her death was confirmed by Brown Johnson, a longtime friend and the creator of Nick Jr., who said the cause was breast cancer.In “The Backyardigans,” five cartoon animals — Tyrone, Tasha, Pablo, Austin and Uniqua — imagine their backyard as a place of adventure, traversing deserts, oceans, jungles, rivers and outer space while dancing and singing to music.With the series, Ms. Burgess hoped to help children use their imaginations to have fun. In 2004, Ms. Burgess said in an interview with The New York Times that the idea for the show stemmed from memories of playing in her own childhood backyard in Pittsburgh.“I really remember it as a wonderful, happy, safe place,” she said. “You could have these great adventures just romping around. From there, you could go anywhere or do anything.”Ms. Burgess drew on her own experience playing in her childhood backyard in Pittsburgh to create “The Backyardigans.” “I really remember it as a wonderful, happy, safe place,” she said.Nick Jr.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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      ‘Shogun’ Episode 3 Recap: The Not-So-Great Escape

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      Lord Toranaga, John Blackthorne and Lady Mariko draw closer as they battle enemy forces.Episode 3: ‘Tomorrow Is Tomorrow’A lovely scene is taking place at sea. After a daring escape, Lord Toranaga and his newfound English associate John Blackthorne are free from captivity. Much has been lost in the attempt. Toranaga’s wife, Lady Kiri no Kata (Yoriko Doguchi), remains in the clutches of the hated Lord Ishido, having fulfilled her part in the ruse that allowed her husband to flee. Lady Mariko’s husband, Buntaro (Shinnosuke Abe), sacrifices himself to prevent enemy soldiers from thwarting the escape. Or at least he appears to: Until we see a dead body, it’s probably wisest to consider this character still in play.As far as Mariko, Toranaga and Blackthorne are concerned, a lot of people gave all they had in order to safeguard them. There’s much for which the survivors can be grateful. How does Lord Toranaga choose to celebrate? With a diving lesson from the Anjin, the barbarian, John Blackthorne.Blackthorne rolls with the odd request. He’s becoming increasingly adept at acclimating himself to Japanese customs, and equally adept at knowing when to break them. Throwing a theatrical fit about the propriety of inspecting women’s quarters in light of European chivalric ideals is, after all, what enabled Toranaga to escape Ishido’s clutches while wearing his wife’s clothes. Toranaga names Blackthorne hatamoto, an honorific indicating high status earned through his courage in effecting Toranaga’s escape.If this lord, who has very obviously taken a shine to him, wants to learn to dive, then John Blackthorne will see it done.And so the episode ends, with the actors Cosmo Jarvis and Hiroyuki Sanada leaping from the vessel in their skivvies, racing each other to shore. It’s a delightful moment of recreation and repose, in a series driven by physical peril and paranoia. This is the kind of enriching material that makes a show worthwhile.Would that the same could be said for the rest of the episode. Despite all its hallmarks of a real nail-biter — an escape in disguise, a firefight in a forest, a heroic last stand, a race at sea — this episode fails as action filmmaking.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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      Book Review: ‘The House of Hidden Meanings,’ by RuPaul

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      Chronicling the high-heeled path to drag-queen superstardom, the new memoir also reveals a celebrity infatuated with his sense of a special destiny.THE HOUSE OF HIDDEN MEANINGS: A Memoir, by RuPaulAs “The House of Hidden Meanings” is RuPaul’s fourth book and his first straightforward memoir, it’s understandably being marketed as an opportunity to see the pop culture icon in a new light. The striking, almost intimidating, black-and-white cover photograph notably subverts the expectation of seeing Ru in glamorous technicolor drag. All the artifice has been stripped away, we’re being told: This is RuPaul stripped bare.But the meanings laid bare in the text contradict RuPaul’s narration again and again. What’s revealed is a striver high on his own supply who tries to spin his story as empathetic wisdom draped in Instagram-ready captions.About 70 pages in, RuPaul — at the time, a Black high school dropout driving luxury cars across the country to help a relative flip them for profit — declares without irony, “Americans have always been frontiersmen, people who are open to a new adventure, and I felt this as I drove cars alone, back and forth, across the United States.”I wearily recalled an earlier section of the book. Explaining the conservative environment of his childhood in San Diego, RuPaul summarizes the Great Migration in a paragraph that would be considered too concise even for a Wikipedia entry, then declares, “All the Black people in our neighborhood were transplants from the South, and so they had inherited a kind of slave mentality, which was based on fear.”Aside from breathtaking dismissiveness of the decades of racial violence that made the migration necessary, it’s chilling to see a public figure known as a champion of the marginalized so easily dismiss survivors of Jim Crow-era terror as people who “hold onto their victim mentality so fiercely; it becomes a defining feature of their identity.”The way we tell our stories has a way of telling on us. The memoir reveals an author who thinks he understands outsiders when, really, all he understands is that he wanted to become famous and eventually became famous. And given RuPaul Charles’s truly extraordinary talent, that would be fine if the book (and his brand) weren’t so invested in trying to convince the rest of us that he has unique insight into the joke called life.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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      Stephen Colbert Has a Few Questions for the Supreme Court

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      Colbert joked that justices were “again shoving their gavels up the election” by ruling that former President Donald Trump can appear on all state ballots in 2024.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 Only Place Where Trump Can Win the Popular Vote’On Monday, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that former President Donald Trump can appear on all 2024 election ballots.Stephen Colbert said the justices were “once again shoving their gavels up the election.”“Yes, the Supreme Court knows you can’t just let states decide who goes on their ballots,” Colbert said. “States are too busy deciding that life begins in the freezer section, next to the pearl onions.”“The majority says that disqualifying a candidate for insurrection can only occur when Congress passes legislation. OK, quick question: If Congress does decide to pass that legislation to disqualify a candidate for insurrection, what if he sends his mob to storm Congress to stop them from passing that legislation? Does that count as insurrection? Or do they have to pass more legislation about that before the next mob shows up? I’m just asking because, clearly, you guys haven’t put any thought into any of this stuff.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“That’s right, the Supreme Court ruled that states cannot keep Trump off their ballots, which means that the Supreme Court remains the only place where Trump can win the popular vote.” — SETH MEYERS“Speaking of former President Trump, today the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Colorado is not allowed to remove him from the 2024 ballot. Then out of habit, Trump immediately appealed the decision. He’s like, ‘This is a witch — oh, wait a minute, OK.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Trump celebrated the ruling, calling it a big win for America. That’s also what he said when McDonald’s brought back the McRib.” — JIMMY FALLON“Let that be a lesson to all you out there who might be thinking about subverting the Constitution in a presidential election. You go, boy!” — JON STEWARTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Rally Flubs Edition)“Donald Trump had two rallies this weekend, one in Virginia and one in North Carolina. But the two speeches had one unifying theme: His brain is broke.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Suddenly, Trump turned into a Spice Girl: ‘I really want to zig-a-zay ah.’ It sounded like his brain got a flat.” — 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