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      The Queer Kids Are All Right. And Now They’re Making Me Better.

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      Here’s a list of every openly queer person I knew when I was 15:That’s it. None. Not even myself.Oh sure, Paul Lynde and Liberace were flouncing on television; closer to home, a boy I kept my distance from decoupaged his notebooks. But even if they really were what people whispered or snarled about them, it was not then an identity they would dare to acknowledge.Nor would I. Unable to see through their closet doors to the truth of what their lives might be, I did not have the benefit of their stories, which meant not having the benefit of my own.Cut to today, 50 years later. Another 15-year-old boy — like me intense, unathletic and bullied — is the lead character on “Heartstopper,” a hit teen romance. But this boy, Charlie, knows all about queerness. He is, after all, growing up in the 2020s and, more to the point, in 2020s pop culture. In that magical land, also known as Netflix, adolescence for people like him is not only survivable but often a lovefest, all closet doors blown off their hinges.And I do mean all. Charlie (adorkable Joe Locke) is happy to be gay, and why not: When he crushes on a dreamy and apparently straight rugby player, the rugby player promptly comes out as bisexual. Their romance is supported by a cute teenage lesbian couple they hang out with. Also in the group is a bookish nerd who realizes he’s asexual — or “ace,” as he explains, pinning a fun new name on that identity. Even the straight boy, vastly outnumbered, gets a queer love story when he falls for his best friend, a beautiful trans girl.Welcome to the classic lifeboat plot, checking boxes on a diversity agenda. But this time it’s mostly calm seas and clear sailing.Do I sound envious? I am. Also slightly embarrassed.Don’t get me wrong: My husband and I devoured the first two seasons. (The third is expected in the fall.) I’ve also been watching, with or without him — for these are guilty pleasures — a slew of other queer youth stories, all the while trying to sort out my feelings.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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      Jimmy Kimmel Breaks Down MAGA’s Super Bowl Conspiracy Theories

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      Is the N.F.L. rigged? Is Taylor Swift a psy-op? Kimmel says that “this nonsense is now everywhere your angry grandpa goes.”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.Chief ConcernsSupporters of former President Donald Trump are spreading conspiracy theories about the Super Bowl, Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs and his girlfriend, Taylor Swift.“Even this clown who ran for president, Vivek Ramaswamy, added his nut voice to the chorus of cuckoos,” Kimmel said on Tuesday. He pointed to the former G.O.P. candidate’s suggestion that Kelce and Swift were “an artificially culturally propped-up couple” and that the Super Bowl would be rigged, all to get President Biden re-elected.“And it’s not just on Twitter — this nonsense is now everywhere your angry grandpa goes,” Kimmel said, calling the conspiracy theorists “not-too-Swifties.”“The same people who believe Joe Biden has dementia and needs Kamala Harris to feed him butterscotch tapioca every night also believe that he has somehow planned and executed a diabolically brilliant scheme to fix the N.F.L. playoffs so the biggest pop star in the world can pop up on the Jumbotron during the Super Bowl in between a Kia and a Tostitos commercial to hypnotize her 11-year-old fans into voting for Joe Biden. I mean, it makes sense. It makes total sense. These people — these people think football is fake and wrestling is real.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“The average price for a ticket to see the Chiefs play the Niners is a little over $12,000 right now. But here’s the thing, it’s not just a football game; it’s also a live game of ‘Where’s Waldo?’ starring Taylor Swift, if you can spot her.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Ten grand’s a lot for a football game, but it’s dirt cheap to see Taylor Swift live, I will say that.” — JIMMY FALLON“Nothing like being down ten grand before stepping foot in Vegas, you know what I’m saying?” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Where Credit Is Due Edition)“I saw that Trump just took credit for the record-high stock market under Biden. Trump was like, ‘If I had not not lost the election, this never would have happened.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Even crazier, Trump said, ‘Eric and Don Jr.? That’s all Biden’s fault.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Chaos in the Middle East? Biden’s fault. Booming economy? All Donald Trump, three years after he left office! It’s incredible. You know, I’m starting to feel like he might be making some of this stuff up.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingOn Tuesday’s “Late Show,” Emma Stone explained why she wants to compete on the noncelebrity version of “Jeopardy.” What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightLola Tung, star of “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” will sit down with Seth Meyers on Wednesday night ahead of her Broadway debut in “Hadestown.”Also, Check This OutKlaus Biesenbach, director of the Neue Nationalgalerie, and the artist Kandis Williams, a co-curator, at the opening of the exhibition.Andreas Meichsner for The New York TimesAn exhibition in Berlin, “Josephine Baker: Icon in Motion,” highlights the groundbreaking entertainer’s life, career and influence. More

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      in Movies

      Minute-Long Soap Operas Are Here. Is America Ready?

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      Popularized in China during the pandemic, ReelShort and other apps are hoping to bring minute-by-minute melodramas to the United States.When Albee Zhang received an offer to produce cheesy short-form features made for phones last spring, she was skeptical, and so, she declined.But the offers kept coming. Finally, Ms. Zhang, who has been a producer for 12 years, realized it could be a profitable new way of storytelling and said yes.Since last summer, she has produced two short-form features and is working on four more for several apps that are creating cookie-cutter content aimed at women.Think: Lifetime movie cut up into TikTok videos. Think: soap opera, but for the short attention span of the internet age.The biggest player in this new genre is ReelShort, an app that offers melodramatic content in minute-long, vertically shot episodes and is hoping to bring a successful formula established abroad to the United States by hooking millions of people on its short-form content.“The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband” is one of the many short features you can watch on ReelShort, an app that offers short dramatic content meant to be watched on phones. ReelShort

      @reelshortapp On your 18th birthday, the Moon Goddess granted you a RED wolf. She said a new journey awaited you, but there were also evil forces after your power… Called weak your whole life, what POWER could you possibly have?! #fyp #reelshort #binge #bingeworthy #bingewatching #obsessed #obsession #mustwatch #witch #alpha #werewolf #moon #wolfpack #booktok #luna #drama #film #movie #tiktok #tv #tvseries #shortclips #tvclips #filmtok #movietok #dramatok #romance #love #marriage #relationship #couple #dramatiktok #filmtiktok #movietiktoks #saturday #saturdayvibes #saturdaymood #saturdaymotivation #saturdayfeels #saturdayfeeling #weekend #weekendvibes ♬ original sound – ReelShort APP 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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      The Women of ‘Feud: Capote vs. the Swans’ Are Birds of a Feather

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      Famous women play the famous women in Ryan Murphy’s new period drama. In a group interview, they discuss the series and the burdens of public life.The first season of Ryan Murphy’s “Feud” aired in 2017. A juicy survey of the bitter rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, the co-stars of “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,” the show earned 18 Emmy nominations, winning two. A second season, based on Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s troubled marriage, was developed then scrapped, mostly because Murphy felt that he could never outdo “The Crown.” Another iteration, centered on William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal, also fell apart. Murphy and his producers toyed with a half dozen other ideas, though never for very long.“It’s very easy to do a show where people are just nasty to each other,” Murphy said in a an interview earlier this month. “But feuds are never about hate. They’re about love.”Then Murphy read “Capote’s Women,” by Laurence Leamer, a gossipy, trenchant study of the novelist Truman Capote and the society women he befriended and later betrayed. Murphy had long been fascinated by Capote. He was equally entranced by the women Capote referred to as his Swans, self-created creatures whom he admired for their style, wealth and savoir faire. Their gift, as Capote wrote in his late collection “Portraits and Observations,” was to offer “the imaginary portrait precisely projected.”Tom Hollander plays Capote, whose betrayal of Babe Paley (Watts) was perhaps the most cutting.FX“It was a full-time job,” Moore said of the roles performed by the real-life women she and her co-stars play in “Feud.” “There were no casual sweatpants.”FXLeamer’s tale had luxury, treachery, artistry and spite. It had love, too, “the very fragile, wonderful relationships that exist many times between gay men and straight women,” Murphy said. With a script by Jon Robin Baitz and direction by Gus Van Sant, the story became “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans,” an eight-episode series that premieres on FX on Wednesday. (Episodes will stream on Hulu the day after they air.)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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      ‘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