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      ‘The Curse’ Ending: What Just Happened?

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      The season finale of Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s horror-comedy arrived on Friday. Three New York Times critics discuss the show’s curses, blessings and confounding conclusion.On Friday, the first season of “The Curse,” Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s cringe horror-comedy on Showtime and Paramount+, came to an audaciously unpredictable end. Three New York Times critics — James Poniewozik, chief TV critic; Alissa Wilkinson, movie critic; and Jason Zinoman, critic at large — discussed the confounding conclusion, the show’s religious themes and the sublime inscrutability of Emma Stone’s performance.JAMES PONIEWOZIK Greetings, “Curse”-heads! We have seen the finale, and I can now confidently say: lol wut?Ten uncomfortable, ingenious episodes ended with one of the biggest literal and figurative upendings in TV history (spoilers ahead). Asher Siegel (Nathan Fielder) has his personal field of gravity reversed like a horror-comedy Fred Astaire, hurtling off the Earth to an apparent frozen death in orbit, while his wife, Whitney (Emma Stone), goes into labor and gives birth to their child. All this, and Vincent Pastore cooks meatballs!I haven’t seen an episode of TV this audacious, confounding and transfixing since “Twin Peaks: The Return.” I haven’t seen a series so thoroughly and unexpectedly shift direction in its finale since … ever?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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      Late Night Finds Trump Incapable of Dealing With Facts

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      A judge initially denied Trump the chance to speak at his criminal fraud trial, “but, as 27 women can tell you, Trump doesn’t take no for an answer,” Stephen Colbert said on Thursday.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.Stick to the FactsFormer President Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial wrapped up on Thursday. The judge initially denied Trump’s request to speak during closing arguments.“But, as 27 women can tell you, Trump doesn’t take no for an answer,” Stephen Colbert said on Thursday.So when Trump’s lawyers tried one final time, the judge allowed Trump five minutes, so long as he stuck to the facts.“Yep, the judge let Trump speak on the condition that he stick to the law and facts, two things people on trial for fraud are famously great at.” — JIMMY FALLON“Before he allowed former President Trump to address the court today, Judge Arthur Engoron asked, ‘Do you promise to just comment on the facts and the law?’ Good luck. That’s like asking Jake, ‘Do you promise you won’t talk about State Farm?’” — SETH MEYERS“You’re not going to believe this: Trump said he did nothing wrong, and you know what? He’s never lied to us before, so.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“The judge overseeing his civil fraud trial today allowed former President Trump to speak for five minutes after his legal team finished their closing arguments, and now he’s facing 11 more counts of fraud.” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (Bye-Bye, Belichick Edition)“After 24 seasons as head coach, Bill Belichick is leaving the New England Patriots. Yep, even though Belichick is in his 70s, the job offers are already rolling in. Today, ABC asked him to be the next ‘Grizzled Bachelor.’” — JIMMY FALLON“I don’t know about you, but I’ll miss the way Bill Belichick’s smile lit up a room.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“My staff over here tells me that upon hearing the news, Patriots fans everywhere were absolutely deflated.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingOn Thursday’s “Late Show,” Colman Domingo spoke with Stephen Colbert about forging relationships with friends of Bayard Rustin to better portray the civil rights leader in the Netflix biopic, “Rustin.”Also, Check This OutWhen the producers of the new late-night show “After Midnight” asked Taylor Tomlinson why she wanted the hosting job, she said she told them, “I’m kind of lonely.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesLike another famous Taylor, the stand-up comedian and host of the soon-to-debut “After Midnight” Taylor Tomlinson is finding life can be lonely at the top. More

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      What to Watch This Weekend: A Powerful Australian Drama

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      Newly arrived to Hulu, the brisk four-part series stars Aisha Dee of “The Bold Type.”Aisha Dee in a scene from the Australian miniseries “Safe Home.”HuluAisha Dee (“The Bold Type”) stars in “Safe Home,” now on Hulu, a brisk Australian miniseries about domestic violence that blends a few formats, sometimes to powerful effect.Dee plays Phoebe, a communications pro who leaves a job at a prestigious law firm for one at an underfunded domestic violence legal clinic, partly out of a vague sense of altruism but also because she is having an affair with her boss’s husband (Thomas Cocquerel). But this is a fancy contemporary drama, and you know what that means: That arc is told in flashback because in the present, a teary, weary Phoebe is in a police interrogation room, explaining her connection to a terrible crime.Also woven in are other devastating portraits: Diana (Janet Andrewartha), a shell of a grandmother who has lived under the domineering control of her husband for 36 years; Ry (Tegan Stimson), a young woman whose need to escape her violent mother makes her vulnerable to the advances of an unsafe co-worker; Cherry (Katlyn Wong), a mom who speaks only Cantonese and is struggling with the unhelpful legal bureaucracies that protect her abusive husband.Each facet of the show is, on its own, dialed in, and Cherry’s tale in particular illuminates the compounding aspects of suffering. In one scene, she and her elementary school-age daughter listen by speaker phone as the school principal scolds Cherry for her children’s tardiness. “You need to try and put your children first,” the principal says, with an edge in her voice. “She says you’re trying your hardest,” the daughter translates. “You’re doing a good job.”But sometimes that potency gives way to well-intentioned but lifeless patness. The least effective arc finds Phoebe reciting all the talking points for the clinic to government employees and journalists, and some of the dialogue feels closer to an educational pamphlet than to human or artistic expression. Luckily the soapier side of “Safe Home” brings a needed momentum to the series but doesn’t cheapen its sense of overwhelmed despair. If you want something that lands between “Big Little Lies” and “Maid,” watch this. More

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      ‘Echo’ Review: Marvel Tries to Have It Both Ways

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      The entertainment behemoth’s latest series for Disney+ minimizes superheroics in favor of Southwestern noir, but there’s a tug of war between its action-thriller and cultural-historical imperatives.Maya Lopez is, in the Marvel television universe, a deaf Choctaw girl whose mother dies and whose father then moves from Oklahoma to New York City to work for a criminal kingpin (conveniently known as Kingpin). After her father also dies, Maya — embittered and alienated — is groomed for a life of crime by Kingpin and becomes a deadly underworld enforcer. Eventually, one betrayal leads to another and Maya heads back to Oklahoma and the real family that she hasn’t seen for years.That’s more or less what happens in the first episode of the Marvel miniseries “Echo,” which premiered all five of its episodes Tuesday night on Disney+. I don’t feel bad spelling it out because those first 50 minutes of the series are an origin story that is also, to a large degree, an extended Previously On summarizing Maya’s role in the earlier Marvel-Disney+ series “Hawkeye.” And “Echo,” in turn, is an entr’acte setting up a future series, “Daredevil: Born Again.”Such are the demands that pull ever harder on any individual piece of narrative etched into the Marvel cinematic circuit board. Committed fans can shrug off or even enjoy the incongruities fostered by corporate storytelling. But no one should feel like a killjoy for thinking, well, that was repetitious (and perhaps, as a consequence, pretty perfunctorily scripted), or for being bemused when Daredevil does an extraneous one-minute flyby just to maintain the brand.That’s one direction in which “Echo” is tugged. But there are other forces at play. That Maya, a.k.a. Echo, was conceived — more than 20 years ago — as deaf and Native American (Cheyenne in the comics) means that in the 2020s her story will inevitably be taken as an opportunity for the celebration of identity and heritage.That’s fine in itself, but within the five relatively short episodes of “Echo” it sets up a tug of war between an action-thriller imperative and a cultural-historical imperative that ends up as a losing battle for both sides. The show’s writers, including the creator and showrunner, Marion Dayre, have failed to braid the two strands in interesting or dramatic ways. (It’s not a good sign that each episode lists from three to seven writing credits.) Instead, what could be — and occasionally is — an entertaining Southwestern noir has its energy sapped by the intrusion of Choctaw history and myth, while the history and myth are devalued by being put at the service of what is mostly a formulaic thriller.It doesn’t help that the historical elements are handled in a broad, gimmicky fashion that is probably meant to make them accessible but just plays as trying too hard. While Maya (Alaqua Cox) battles her former partners from New York, who track her down in Oklahoma, she has visions of a succession of female ancestors who look out for her and offer her their supernatural powers. That’s about all there is to it, so to give those elements more weight onscreen, and to provide an impression of originality, the show tricks them 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?  More

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      Clive Owen Takes on ‘Monsieur Spade,’ Inspired by Bogart

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      In an early scene in “Monsieur Spade,” a new six-part series from AMC, the American detective Sam Spade, played by Clive Owen, is lying on his side, grimacing as a doctor examines his nether regions. “Best prostate of the morning,” the doctor says cheerfully, snapping off his rubber gloves. Then he motions Spade his office to tell him he has emphysema and must stop smoking.Spade, the behatted and inscrutable hero of Dashiell Hammett’s novel “The Maltese Falcon,” getting a prostate check, and quitting smoking?Yes indeed. The new series, written by Scott Frank (“The Queen’s Gambit”) and Tom Fontana (“Homicide”), is set in 1963, some 20 years after the events of John Huston’s 1941 film, in which Humphrey Bogart played Spade. This time, the detective retired and living in the village of Bozouls in the South of France.When viewers meet Spade, he is living quietly in the South of France, mourning his wife.Jean-Claude Lother/AMCIn a flashback at the start of the first episode, we learn that Spade was hired to bring a girl, Teresa, to her father in Bozouls. Mission unsuccessful: Her father is missing. But Spade does meet a wealthy, glamorous widow, Gabrielle (Chiara Mastroianni), who asks him to stay and take on another job.The pair fall in love and marry, and when we meet Spade, he is a widower who has inherited Gabrielle’s beautiful house, swimming pool, vineyards and wealth. He is living quietly, still mourning Gabrielle (who we see in frequent flashbacks), speaking bad French and rather liked by the insular locals, until — naturally! — the past comes back to make trouble.“This genre has always been catnip for me,” said Frank, who also directed the show, in a recent joint interview with Fontana. But when he was approached about creating a show based on Spade, Frank said, he initially turned it down, because he had another Hammett project in mind.Then he had a thought: “What happens to these Bogart-esque guys when they get old.” He contacted Fontana, who suggested setting the series in the aftermath of the Algerian War, a conflict between France and the Algerian National Liberation Front that ended in 1962 with Algeria, a French colony, winning independence.At that time, “there was tension and a dark cloud” over France, Frank said. “It raises the question: Who is French and who isn’t? And then we have Sam Spade wrestling with his identity, his old life, his new life.”Owen, dapper in a dark suit and crisp white shirt during a recent interview at a London hotel, said that the role of Spade felt like a gift. “I am a huge lover of noir, a huge Bogart fan,” he said. “I have an original ‘Maltese Falcon’ poster on my wall.”Owen talked to Frank, he added, “about the older Sam Spade, how he would play with the idea of the macho guy, the smoker. But in essence we are embracing the source material.” He paused. “I didn’t get to wear the hat much, though.”Owen said he prepared for the role by “reading and rereading” Dashiell Hammett’s short stories and novels.Alice Zoo for The New York TimesFrank and Fontana certainly created a convoluted plot worthy of Hammett. Six nuns are murdered at the local convent, which houses an orphanage that is home to the now-teenage Teresa (Cara Bossom), the girl who Spade brought to Bouzols. The murders seem to concern a mysterious little boy from Algeria who everyone is trying to find, and the plot is threaded with church and state conspiracies, Algerian and World War II subplots, and is populated by a memorable cast of characters: a sardonic police chief (Denis Ménochet); Teresa’s devilishly villainous father, Philippe (Jonathan Zaccaï); and the obligatory femme fatale, Marguerite (Louise Bourgoin), a chanteuse who co-owns a bar with Spade.Owen’s dryly imperturbable performance is also a homage to Bogart, whose performances he adores, he said. In preparing for the role, as well as “reading and rereading” Hammett’s short stories and novels, Owen “drowned in Bogart,” he said. He recalled telling the director, “Don’t freak out, I am not going to do a bad imitation, but I am going to do it based on Bogart’s intonations.”What is interesting, Owen added is that “you think Bogart is laconic, but he is superfast and nimble, and the key thing was to fly through these beautiful rhythmic speeches, flick them out like it’s the easiest thing.”Though he speaks French in the show, Owen said he had not previously spoken the language, and learned it phonetically (with an American accent) for the show. “I found it hard,” he said. “I have so much respect for actors who perform in another language.”Bourgoin, who plays Marguerite, said in a telephone interview that “like every French person who discovers an American writing about France, I was afraid there would be anachronisms, clichés. But not at all: It’s so credible.”The cast of “Monsieur Spade,” including Denis Ménochet, second from left, as a local police chief, Jonathan Zaccaï, third from left, as the villainous father of Teresa, and Louise Bourgoin, far right, as a femme fatale who co-owns a bar with Spade.AMCIn an obligatory nod to a love interest, Marguerite and Spade’s platonic relationship is infused with a little sexual spice. But the relationship between Spade and the adolescent Teresa, who has grown up at the convent, is the emotional heart of the tale.“She has lived a life of relative solitude, never had a familial environment and grew up in a frosty religious setting without anyone she loved,” said Bossom, who plays the character. “It has hardened her into a person who doesn’t show honest emotion, or not without great difficulty.” (Remind you of anyone?) As the show progresses, Bossom added, Teresa begins to emulate Spade’s speech patterns.“I think the more time he spends with her, the more he sees she is a bit of a chip off the old block,” Owen said with a laugh.Frank said he had been keen not “to do pretty Provence” nor to emulate “the off angles and dark shadows you have in typical film noir”; he was more influenced by the strong compositions and color palettes of 1960s and ’70s French films like “La Piscine” and “Le Cercle Rouge.” The whole idea, he said, “is that Sam is living a tranquil life.”Will there be more of Monsieur Spade in retirement? “If the show does well, I definitely have other ideas, “Frank said. Maybe Owen will get another opportunity to wear the hat. More

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      Can Taylor Tomlinson Have It All and a Life, Too?

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      In September, the night before the comic Taylor Tomlinson made her Radio City Music Hall debut, she called one of her three siblings in tears, asking: “Why do I feel like it’s not enough?”This emotional moment had long passed when she strode onstage the next day wearing a stylish black suit, sleeves rolled up, and commanded the cavernous room with an hour of cheerful, intricately woven jokes delivered at a fast clip. One theme was how professional success does not necessarily translate into personal happiness. She killed. The following afternoon, sitting outside at a Manhattan coffee shop near her hotel, Tomlinson described dispassionately how she cried before the career highlight of selling out Radio City. “There have been times when I thought I’m only good to people 40 feet away,” she said.Tomlinson, 30, who undertook her first theater tour just two years ago, has emerged as one of the most acclaimed, in-demand superstars in comedy, the rare young stand-up with mass appeal in the current fragmented landscape. After two Netflix specials produced in her 20s (and a third premiering next month), she became the only woman to make the top 10 grossing comic tours of 2023. She performed 130 shows, more than anyone else on that list, including Kevin Hart, who topped the list. And to follow that up, she is taking over the late-night TV slot vacated by James Corden on CBS, debuting Jan. 16 as the host of the comedy show “After Midnight.”I followed Tomlinson for 10 months, tracking the development of her new special, periodically seeing shows and debriefing her afterward. What I saw up close is that spending the year in and out of hotels is isolating, but so is being a rapidly ascendant comic at her level of success. “There sometimes feels like there isn’t anyone my age to talk to,” Tomlinson told me.Tomlinson with Stephen Colbert when it was announced she would be taking over the late-night spot following his show.Scott Kowalchyk/CBS via Getty Images“IF YOU WANT to make yourself feel sad, compare your career to Taylor’s,” Dustin Nickerson, her good friend and the opening comic throughout her recent global tour, told me, before comparing her to a five-tool player in baseball who has all the skills to be great. “Watching her this past year has been watching someone become a celebrity.”The actor and comedian Hannah Einbinder described Tomlinson as “the voice of her, of our generation,” before calling her the Taylor Swift of comedy. “She talks about universal experiences — relationships, love — but in a new way. She’s the most evolved comic out there. She’s for everyone.” Einbinder paused, adding: “It’s hard to be for everyone.”Tomlinson is too modest (and a die-hard Swiftie) to accept the comparison to the pop star, but it’s a useful one. Just as Swift established herself in country music, Tomlinson, another blond, wholesome-seeming prodigy, began in a conservative niche: the church circuit. Both Taylors are prolific artists whose work resonates with broad swaths of people through personal stories, sometimes about ex-boyfriendsTomlinson began working on her new hour focusing on comedy about being single after many years of serial monogamy. Then she started seeing someone, so she incorporated him until they broke up, which she told me was inevitable because she was working on new material and Swift was putting out an album. “All the signs were there,” she joked. “Those are my horsemen of the apocalypse.”After the split, an uncomfortable thought immediately occurred to her: This will be good for my career, bad for my life.Around the time of the Radio City performance, she was interviewing for “After Midnight,” a show built on a rotating cast of comics joking about memes or viral stories. She got the job in November, becoming one of the few comedians hosting a nightly show on network television, the kind of plum gig that has long been a Holy Grail for entertainers. Yet when the show’s producers asked her in an interview why she wanted the job, Tomlinson said she responded: “I’m kind of lonely.”She has been open in her comedy about mental health issues, including a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and she has a joke where she says every one of her emotions “demands a parade.” Onstage, you might say she often leads the marching band, which, incidentally, she performed in during high school. Mixing goofy act-outs with punch-line-dense jokes filled with surprising pivots, Tomlinson makes even the heaviest subjects seem spikily funny. Her sets never go long without a laugh.Offstage, she has a more patient and coolly professional manner, impeccably grateful, remarkably free of kvetching and trash talk. She enjoys analyzing the mechanics of comedy and is at her most expansive there, in the details. But there is a certain haunted quality that periodically emerges, a past hovering over her present, one that she has been excavating in therapy.“I stopped talking to my father last year,” she said in a club in 2022, then noticed something shift in the crowd: “People get really sad when you say you don’t talk to your parents anymore because they wish they had the balls to do it.”When I first met her, backstage at a February show in Boston, that bit was gone and she said she missed some of the heavier subject matter she used to include in her set, without being more specific. Some of that would creep back in, on the margins. One funny bit refers to taking a boyfriend to meet her parents as visiting “the scene of the crime.”Raised in a conservative Methodist family north of San Diego, she has talked about the scars left by her mother’s death from cancer when Tomlinson was 8. It bonded her to her siblings, all of whom remain close. Brinn, two years younger than Taylor, the oldest, told me by phone that Taylor took the role of “surrogate parent.”When the producers of the new late-night show “After Midnight” asked Tomlinson why she wanted the hosting job, she said she told them, “I’m kind of lonely.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesMany comics come off as the reckless kid looking for attention, but part of what makes Tomlinson’s comic persona different is that she projects the image of a responsible young adult who can’t help but reveal the insecurities and bubbling emotions beneath. In the weeks before taping her special, she lost her voice, and only a few days before, her doctor told her she had mono. She took a steroid and did the show, brushing aside any possibility of postponing. “A lot of people have pushed through far worse,” she told me not long after. “Maggie Smith had cancer when she filmed ‘Harry Potter.’ Like, I’m fine.”Her father has lately been a more remote figure in her comedy specials than her mother. He was, however, critical to her stand-up origin story. He not only drove her to a comedy class that got her started on this path. He also took the class with her when she was 16. In the show at the end of the course, with an audience of 40 at a hole-in-the-wall church, she got the closing spot. When asked why her father didn’t, she said matter-of-factly: “’Cause I was better.” Sensing how this might come off, she added: “Look, he can sing and I can’t.”SINCE SHE WAS YOUNG, Tomlinson has known she wanted to do something creative, be an actor, a writer. But that first show was when, as she described it, the “real me” came out. Her best friend, Courtney Lem, was one of the audience members sitting on folding chairs that day and described the show as a revelation. “She was someone else, not nervous or shy,” Lem told me. “It was like seeing real magic for the first time.”One of the jokes Tomlinson told eventually made its way into her first late-night set on “Conan.” Its premise was that being abstinent was hard for a religious kid because “every time I miss a period, I’m like, ‘Oh no, I’m carrying the messiah.’”When her mother died, her father remarried 10 months later. At the time, Tomlinson didn’t think that was too soon, but as she got older, her mind-set shifted. “I’ve said to him as an adult: I wished you waited longer for us. He did not agree with me.”She described her childhood relationship with her father as rocky but felt on more solid ground after doing stand-up. “When I could do this trick, when I was a good performer, he was interested. And he was impressed. And I was somebody worth paying attention to.”In her telling, her father was a performer, a singer, who chose having a family and stable career as a teacher over pursuing his dreams. She was on the same path, she said, explaining that her entire family got married between the ages of 18 and 22. That was her plan, too. In college, she imagined marrying her religious boyfriend, having children and doing standup on the side. When her future husband broke up with her, he told her that she should keep doing comedy. It’s a conversation she describes as formative, but not as much as her next boyfriend, a comic, saying she was funny but didn’t work hard enough. “He’s very funny and talented and I have a lot of jokes about him,” she said. “Got a lot of closers out of that guy.”Her career took off soon after she left school for the college stand-up circuit, which led to a stint on “Last Comic Standing.” At 23, she was booked on “Conan” and received a network development deal. Tensions between her past and future emerged. She lost a church gig over this tweet: “I’m a wild animal in bed, way more afraid of you than you of me.” She eventually quit Twitter and stopped doing church gigs.Her first exposure on Netflix, a 15-minute set in the 2018 series “The Comedy Lineup,” was a turning point for her career and her relationship with her father and stepmother. “They liked the success but they didn’t like what I was saying,” she said. “They loved when I was clean. And when I did the 15 minutes, they were disappointed.”Over the past year, she’s examined this part of her life in therapy and locates a lot of her trouble here. “There were times when I felt my self-worth is so tied up in this job and what I could do and why is that?” she said, then added, referring to her father, “A big part of it is I felt it impressed.”Tomlinson projects the image of a responsible young adult, even pushing through mono instead of postponing a show.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesParadoxically, Tomlinson is an introvert, uncomfortable in groups of people. Dustin Nickerson said she’s the kind of person who wants to get invited to the party but won’t attend. When asked when she’s happiest, he mulled it over before saying: when she is making a connection with one person.And yet her work has often resonated most when she digs into her own personal mess. She describes herself not as a topical or political comic, but as one who finds humor that other people can relate to by drilling down into her own life. Before putting out her second special, which dealt with mental illness and her mother’s death, she showed it to her friend Lem, who was in town to help her move stuff out of a boyfriend’s place after a breakup. Lem was amazed that she could be so open, asking, “How could you talk about this stuff?” Tomlinson recalled telling her, “I can’t really help it.”She’s trying to pick her spots more now. She describes her new special as “lighter” than her last one, though it’s vulnerable in subtle ways, like how much it ingratiates or refuses to. She said she had been more sparing about what she reveals in podcasts and interviews. And the late-night show will, she hoped, provide a stabilizing force, a home base, a community where she will once again be a parental figure of sorts. Her sibling Brinn, who just recently left the restaurant business to work for their sister, describes it as a game-changer in giving her balance, saying: “I have never seen her happier to be doing something that is social.”After she got the late-night show, Tomlinson said she heard from a lot of people, including friends and family. Asked if that included her father, she paused for several long seconds, considering her next move. Then she very politely thanked me for the question but said she would rather not talk about it.Tomlinson knows she can’t appeal to everyone, but her goal is to appeal to as many people as possible — and that makes her alert to what resonates. For a comic who cares about being relatable, success can be tricky to navigate. What will not change is how she prioritizes stand-up above all else. She agreed to take the late-night job only after being assured she would just need to shoot the show three days a week, allowing her to tour over the weekend.Ever since watching and studying comics like Kathleen Madigan and Maria Bamford in high school, she has not only connected with standup but leaned on it. She said that she first lost some religious faith when her mother died (“They told me praying would work. That shook me.”) but just as important, she said, was entering stand-up. “I was raised in this environment where if you’re not Christian, you’re probably a bad person because no one’s holding you accountable,” she said. “In clubs, I found a lot of these people are more empathetic and kinder and open-minded than people I’ve been around. Far less judgmental in the stand-up world.”Even as a late-night host, what Tomlinson sounds most excited about is the community of stand-ups. And she thinks, rightly, that the show will provide a valuable new platform for young comics. She said she wished she was more social earlier in her career. When asked if Taylor Swift’s trajectory holds any lessons, she pointed to how the musician had evolved but didn’t completely reinvent herself and cited the musician’s Eras Tour charting her different phases: “She’s still her but saying, ‘This is the place I am at right now.’”You could say that Tomlinson is now entering her late-night era. She said that when she was younger, she used to dream of being a legend; she talked about that with Lem, her friend. They saw Swift in concert together last year in Los Angeles.A few eras into the show, Tomlinson said, she turned to Lem and said, “I changed my mind. I want to be a legend.” Tomlinson cracked up reflecting on this moment, then added: “Two eras later, I was like: ‘Looks too hard. Think of the amount of stalkers.’” More

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      Stephen Colbert Prays That Trump Can Deliver

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      “That is a terrible idea, and please, Jesus, let it happen,” Colbert said of the former president’s initial desire to deliver his own closing argument in his fraud trial.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.Give Him a ShotFormer President Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial is expected to come to a close on Thursday. Trump had intended to deliver part of the closing argument himself, but he backed down after refusing to abide by the judge’s restrictions, including that he not give “a campaign speech.”On Wednesday, Stephen Colbert noted that Trump had been saying “a lot of crazy stuff about this trial” and hoped he might “also say crazy stuff during the trial” for the late night host’s own amusement.“That is a terrible idea, and please, Jesus, let it happen.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Unfortunately, this afternoon, the judge rescinded permission for Trump to give his own closing argument. Boo! I knew Justice was blind; I didn’t know she was a buzzkill.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Don’t worry, as a comedian, I immediately filed an appeal: ‘Your honor, please, that would get us through February. I mean, come on. Think about our jobs.’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Just the Two of Us Edition)“There’s nobody fun left to watch. It’s like a box of Lucky Charms without the marshmallows now.” — JIMMY KIMMEL, on Chris Christie’s dropping out of the presidential race on Wednesday“He made this tough decision after looking at the polls and realizing it was an easy decision.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Christie is not expected to make any endorsements at this time, but the timing of this decision indicates that he’s clearing the way for Nikki Haley to take all of his voter.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Of course, Chris Christie was the most high-profile and consistent critic of Trump still in the Republican primary — unlike Ron DeSantis, whose campaign slogan is ‘Ron DeSantis: Trump 2024.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Yep, it all comes down to this. After tonight, it’ll become clearer who will more not be the nominee.” — 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?  More

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      How a Show Forced Britain’s Devastating Post Office Scandal Into the Light

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      After years of delays, victims of one of the U.K.’s worst miscarriages of justice are finally being exonerated — thanks to a TV drama.More than 700 people convicted of a crime they didn’t commit. At least four suicides. A woman sent to jail while pregnant. Bankruptcies. Marriages broken, lives ruined.The shocking details of one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British history have been reported for years yet somehow stayed below the radar for most of the public, despite intense efforts by campaigners and investigative journalists.Until last week. A gripping ITV drama series, “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office,” which began airing on Jan. 1, achieved something that eluded politicians for a decade, cutting through a morass of bureaucratic and legal delays and forcing government action.The show dramatizes the fate of hundreds of people who ran branches of the Post Office across Britain, and who were wrongly accused of theft after a faulty IT system called Horizon created false shortfalls in their accounting.Between 1999 and 2015, they were pursued relentlessly in the courts by the Post Office for financial losses that never occurred. Some were jailed, most were driven into financial hardship, many suffered mental health issues and some took their lives.Under pressure, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Wednesday promised a new law to exonerate and compensate all known victims, a sweeping intervention that aims to finally bring justice after years of glacial progress.And the police suddenly said last week that they would investigate whether Post Office officials — who refused for years to admit that the IT they forced managers to use was at fault — should face charges. Meanwhile one of its former bosses, Paula Vennells, has handed back an honor bestowed by the queen in 2019, after more than a million people signed a petition demanding she be stripped of it.All this has left an intriguing question: how has a TV show achieved in one week more than investigative journalists and politicians in more than a decade?“However brilliant the journalism is, it maybe appeals to your intellect, to your head,” said Gwyneth Hughes, the writer of “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office.” “Whereas drama is designed to appeal to your heart — that’s what it has been doing for thousands of years.”Paula Vennells, the former chief executive of the Post Office, in 2012. She said she would hand back an honor bestowed by the queen in 2019 after a public outcry this week.Anthony Devlin/PA Images, via Getty ImagesMattias Frey, a media professor at City, University of London, argued that the drama shows the continuing power of terrestrial TV to change public perceptions and generate “one of those old fashioned water cooler moments” that fuels broader public debate.Even the show’s executive producer, Patrick Spence, was surprised by the scale of the reaction. Before the show was broadcast, he told his team that they shouldn’t be downhearted if ratings were modest, given the competition for eyeballs.The day after the series began he was informed by a colleague that more than 3.5 million people had watched the first episode. “I thought I had misheard her,” Mr. Spence said. Nine million people have now seen the series, according to ITV.He believes the show has inadvertently become a state-of-the-nation drama, articulating “a bigger truth, which is that we don’t feel heard, and we don’t trust the people who are supposed to have our backs.”The case is all the more shocking because the Post Office is an institution woven into the fabric of British life, more used to being portrayed in a benign role as in the popular TV show for children, “Postman Pat.”An official inquiry into the scandal was established in 2020, and more than £148 million, or more than $188 million, has already been distributed to victims from compensation programs. In 2019, 555 branch managers successfully challenged the Post Office in the High Court.Despite that, of the 700 criminal convictions, only 93 have so far been overturned, a sluggish pace that fueled campaigners’ anger.Former post office branch managers celebrating outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London in 2021, after a court ruling cleared them of theft and false accounting.Tolga Akmen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSince ITV’s drama aired, more victims have come forward, but dozens of other people died before they could receive compensation. When Horizon declared branch accounts were in deficit, managers were contractually obliged to make up shortfalls.Some paid from their own savings to avoid prosecution, even though they were sure they had done nothing wrong. Others pleaded guilty to lesser crimes to avoid jail although they were innocent.One victim, Lee Castleton, whose plight was featured in the drama, told the BBC that his Horizon account would swing abruptly from profit to loss and that more than 90 calls to a help line proved useless. The Post Office, he said, was “absolutely hellbent” on not assisting him.As news of his supposed wrongdoing filtered into the community, Mr. Castleton and his family were accused of theft in the street, his daughter was bullied at school and she developed an eating disorder. Forced to travel far afield to seek work, he slept in his car.Such stories provide the beating heart of “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office,” which is the result of three years of work. The truth of what happened was “unbelievable,” said Ms. Hughes, the show’s writer. “If I wrote those things fictionally, nobody would believe me, people would switch off.”The heroic Mr. Bates, played by Toby Jones, is portrayed as an even tempered and indefatigable character who — like other victims — was told by the Post Office that he was the only person to report problems with Horizon.The actor Toby Jones in character as Alan Bates, a man who is “a terrier; he’s wise, he’s clever, he’s very good at forward planning,” said Gwyneth Hughes, the writer of “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office.”ITVHe found others, formed a group of victims, and pursued their cases with meager resources, battling a succession of setbacks to achieve an extraordinary victory in the courts.“Everyone likes an underdog, and we had underdogs in spades,” said Ms. Hughes, adding that Mr. Bates might look like a mild-mannered bearded fan of real ale but is also “a terrier; he’s wise, he’s clever, he’s very good at forward planning.”“He is, in a way, a gift as a character, he has a complexity: cometh the hour, cometh the man,” she said. “He’s led this long march of the misunderstood and unheard, and kept his sense of humor.”A few politicians were allies in the victims’ cause, notably James Arbuthnot, a Conservative lawmaker (now in the House of Lords) who fought on behalf of a constituent wrongly accused of stealing £36,000.There is also a cameo role for another Conservative lawmaker, Nadhim Zahawi, who played himself in the drama, questioning Ms. Vennells, the former Post Office boss, during a parliamentary committee hearing.To viewers Ms. Vennells emerges as the obdurate face of the Post Office, someone determined to defend its reputation rather than engage with its victims, a stance all the more surprising because she is an ordained Anglican priest (although she stepped back from any major role in the church in 2021).Fujitsu, the Japanese company that developed the Horizon system, is also under increasing pressure, with politicians hoping to recover some of the costs of compensating victims from the firm, which still has billions of pounds’ worth of contracts with the British government.Professor Frey worries viewers may have seen a “simple David and Goliath story” whereas lawyers and politicians must grapple with something more complicated. He sees a risk that “the pressure that should be brought to bear on politicians in order to clean this mess up maybe comes in a way that is undifferentiated.”Ms. Hughes has concerns about that too. “I hope they do right by all our lovely sub postmasters, but I also hope they find a way to do so that isn’t going to cause further problems down the line,” she said. “Thank God that’s not my job.” More