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      ‘Billions’ Season 7, Episode 8 Recap: Going Nuclear

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      Mike shows just how ruthless he is willing to be for sake of expediency.Season 7, Episode 8: ‘The Owl’Mike Prince is trying to do the right thing. A man for whom his wife, Andy, cares deeply has had a mountain-climbing accident in the Himalayas. He is injured and alone, in the path of a storm, running out of food and stranded on the Chinese side of the mountains.Mike has the resources to arrange a successful extraction, even under these physically and politically dangerous conditions. To rescue the man means risking an international incident and potentially ending his presidential campaign. Not to rescue him means the man will die, and Andy will lose someone who is more to her than a friend.So Mike does what you or I might like to think we would do under these circumstances. Risks be damned, he orders the rescue mission — confident that his seasoned pros won’t be caught but prepared to take the political hit if they do.At least, that’s the story it seems he’s telling himself, until circumstances on the ground change — or rather, until he changes circumstances on the ground.Despite his distaste for old-money blue bloods, Mike is dragged by his political adviser, Bradford, to a semiannual forest conclave for the rich and powerful called the Owl. In this secluded environment — clearly modeled after the Bohemian Grove, right down to the choice of its avian mascot — the nearly all-male elite can mix, mingle, urinate in the open air, go streaking through the snow, participate in tests of strength with offensive names and generally enjoy the rights and privileges of being right and privileged.There are two star attractions at this winter’s gathering, besides Prince himself. One is his chief political rival, the centrist Democratic governor Nancy Dunlop (Melina Kanakaredes, having a whale of a time playing a swaggering jerk). The other is the group’s ultimate political kingmaker and gray eminence, George Pike IV (Griffin Dunne, as quietly wolfish and menacing as a well-cast Imperial officer in a “Star Wars” project). Known to friends and foes alike as “Fourth,” Pike is there to decide which of these self-conceptualized common-sense mavericks deserves his backing.He gets his answer in the most horrifying sequence this show has seen since Bobby Axelrod paid a doctor to let a patient die. During a fireside chat in which Gov. Dunlop pushes for a nuclear-free world, Prince mocks the idea as hippy-dippy stuff and forcefully argues for the embrace of first-strike strategies. How would he know when to call down the fire? Well, he says, he would have to be sure, and being sure about things is why the people will want his finger on the button in the first place.Watching this room full of rich men discuss the incineration of millions as if they’re swapping fantasy football strategies is repulsive; there’s no other way to put it. It’s everything wrong with how decisions are made in this country, as wealthy people in no danger of facing consequences for their actions debate idly which lives are and aren’t worthless when stacked against the overriding importance of their own comfort and ambitions.Prince in particular talks as if he were purposefully demonstrating the wisdom of Chuck, who is also in attendance with his old-guard father; his friend and lieutenant Ira; and somehow, Charles’s personal Dr. Feelgood, Dr. Swerdlow. Chuck’s quest to stop Prince from reaching the White House — like the parallel sabotage campaign led by Wendy, Wags and Taylor — is predicated on the idea that no man this free of self-doubt belongs anywhere near power, let alone the kind of power present in the nuclear football. (A friendly but rueful conversation between Chuck and Prince as they pee against some trees hashes this point out directly.)Unfortunately for Chuck, Fourth doesn’t see things his way. In Prince’s tough talk about the bomb, Fourth hears a man willing to thumb his nose at the “nanny state” — a man truly made for a world where there is no black and white, no good and evil. Like many to-the-manner-born elites, Fourth is a natural constituent for a form of politics run by “big men with agendas — not the populace, not the rule of law and certainly not the voters.”Chuck leaves, visibly shaken. If self-styled guardians of the soul of the nation like Fourth don’t understand that they’re selling that soul by backing Prince, what hope does he have?Which raises another question: Is “Billions” the most chilling show on television right now? And I’m not talking about the wintry setting of this week’s episode. Like virtually every episode since Prince’s presidential ambitions became clear, “The Owl” casts an unflinching eye on the danger posed to American democracy by megalomaniacal strongmen, by the ultra-rich, and especially by the people who are both.In a sense, this is covered ground for the show. Chuck already took on billionaire overreach when he battled Bobby Axelrod for five seasons. His conflicts with the pointedly unnamed presidential administration in power in the show’s universe from 2017 to 2021, represented by odious officials like Attorney General Jock Jeffcoat and Todd Krakow, made a clear argument that authoritarianism, corruption and reactionary politics are correlated phenomena.But since Axe never got directly involved in politics, and since the former president was never depicted as an on-screen character, “Billions” has never had such an opportunity to explore all these issues up close by embodying them in one man. And in an episode that depicts the threat he presents in the starkest, most existential terms imaginable, it’s worth noting what that one man actually does.Mike Prince was trying to do the right thing, you remember. Even at the Owl, he, Bradford and Scooter hovered over his phone, listening for updates on the rescue mission. Then something goes south, just as the chopper reaches the stranded hiker: the Chinese military shows up out of nowhere, taking the man into custody and forcing Prince’s team to abort the mission lest they get involved in a shooting war with a foreign government.But here’s the thing: No one knows better than Andy that what Mike Prince wants, Mike Prince gets. If this rescue didn’t work, then, it’s because Mike didn’t want it to work. Confronted with this, Prince admits it: He tipped off the Chinese government and ended the mission after Fourth encouraged him to resolve the situation without provoking the Chinese government — or being seen as surrendering to them either.“You wanted him off the mountain,” he rationalizes half-heartedly. “He’s off the damn mountain.” The Himalayas are cold. Mike Prince is colder.Loose changeAs dark as this episode gets, there’s also a scene in which Kanakaredes and Rick Hoffman get on the floor and leg-wrestle with their shirts off. In general, when presented with two roads diverging in a wood, “Billions” takes the path more ridiculous, and that has made all the difference.To its credit, “Billions” has long presented sexual fetishism and kink not as a source of comedy (OK, not only as a source of comedy), let alone as a marker of deep psychological dysfunction. It has always been presented more as just a part of the sex lives of countless basically normal people (OK, normal by “Billions” standards). It picks up this torch again in a subplot involving Wags’s discovery that he has a certain scatological fetish that initially sends his wife, Chelz (Caroline Day), fleeing from the room. (“Stop saying words out of your mouth!” she stammers in one of the best lines of the night.) When Wendy explains to Chelz that the fetish represents Wags’s desire to be loved unconditionally, despite even the most repugnant parts of himself, Chelz is into it — but for Wags, the explanation kills the mood, like a magician revealing how the trick is done. And I call shenanigans! Figuring out why you’re into the weird stuff you’re into makes it more fun, not less.“I love breathing the same country air that Goldwater did.” Only Charles Rhoades Sr. could describe getting back to nature in these terms.“Ham can cram in with Woof,” says Charles at one point, referring to reshuffled sleeping arrangements among his Owl buddies. With nicknames like that, this is possibly the most “old-money Ivy League alumnus” thing anyone has ever said on television.When Prince learns the identity of Andy’s missing friend, whom he realizes is one of her open-marriage romances, he says flatly: “Ah, Derek. Good old Derek.” It’s good to hear the note of hurt and embarrassment in his voice; it’s an all-too-rare sign that he’s human.The episode ends with an image of hooded, chanting Owl members setting the towering wooden statue of their mascot ablaze. It’s a creepy image but also a gorgeous one. “Billions” is a very good-looking show; I can think of a few fantasy epics that could learn a thing or two from how it shot those cloaked figures in the torch-lit snow. More

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      Netflix’s ‘One Piece’ Shines Brightest With Its Casting

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      Netflix’s breakout global hit does right by its characters by getting actors who capture the spirit of the original.When Iñaki Godoy smiles as Monkey D. Luffy in Netflix’s live-action adaptation of the beloved anime “One Piece,” his face broadens and brightens and his eyes pop with boyish delight. No combination of physical attributes and fancy effects could replicate Luffy’s doofy 2D ear-to-ear half-moon grin in the animated original. But Godoy gets pretty damn close.Say what you will about the show overall (I’d say it’s a perfectly tolerable reimagining of an overrated series), “One Piece” excels at capturing the spirit of the original, primarily through the depictions of its motley crew of pirate-protagonists in a quest for a treasure called the One Piece. This success is indicative of a wider trend that might help anime fans — who’ve been traumatized with years of godawful adaptations of their favorite series — sleep better at night. Recent live-action anime adaptations like “One Piece” are slowly but surely improving the genre, and it all starts with casting.Emily Rudd, who plays Nami, a cunning thief who hates pirates yet still joins Luffy’s crew, channels the wit and relentlessness of the original character — with more bite. Mackenyu Arata, as the cantankerous, heavy-drinking swordsman Roronoa Zoro, masters the fighter’s disaffected glare and confidence, while also pulling off the identical bang-arrangement of his animated counterpart’s green hair. (Mackenyu’s emerald mane isn’t quite the same shade as Zoro’s mint ’do, but potato-potahto.) Jacob Romero Gibson brings emotional grounding to the silly pathological liar Usopp, and Taz Skylar, who had no martial arts training before filming, performed all of his own kicks as the flirtatious cook Sanji.Godoy as Monkey D. Luffy in “One Piece.”NetflixGood casting in live-action anime adaptations shouldn’t be taken for granted; in fact, it’s been the reason that several have crashed and burned. The most notorious example may be the “Ghost in the Shell” film from 2017, starring Scarlett Johansson as a whitewashed version of the protagonist, Major Motoko Kusanagi. But that casting flub was about more than just skin color; the choice was an erasure of a foundational element of the original, in which the character, setting and philosophy are all based in East Asian culture and ideas. And there have been many others: “Dragonball: Evolution,” “The Last Airbender” and Netflix’s 2017 “Death Note” film. In each movie, the casting revealed how the adaptation only showed a cursory understanding of the context around the original series.Totally reinterpreting the characters or opting for unconventional casting can be especially problematic in shonen (the popular, typically mainstream anime targeted toward young boys, e.g., “One Piece,” “Dragonball,” “Naruto,” “Pokémon”). These series, which often feature fantastical lands, repetitive arcs and steadily escalating boss battles, are ultimately centered around the colorful protagonists and their sense of kinship and camaraderie.Netflix’s last big anime adaptation, “Cowboy Bebop,” made several missteps, but the show’s lead cast was not one of them. John Cho, Mustafa Shakir and Daniella Pineda not only embodied their characters aesthetically — as in Cho’s impressive coiffure matching Spike’s mad mop of hair — but also in the way they spoke and even walked. (Just look at Cho sauntering through the dusty western-style towns in space.)Monkey D. Luffy in a scene from the anime series “One Piece,” created by Eiichiro Oda.Shueisha/Toei AnimationThe bungled anime adaptations represent an unfortunate hangup of American studios and creators: distrust that these stories can translate unless they’re westernized. Settings change. Characters’ back stories are altered. Recurring jokes, anime tropes and cultural references are lost for being too inside-baseball for an American audience. The result, like “Cowboy Bebop,” is too often a perverted version of the anime, both too distant from the original story and too literal an approximation of an animated medium whose visual style and humor become cheesy when brought to life.The hopeful view is that “One Piece” is marking a change in the tide — yes, ocean pun intended — for American adaptations. Netflix in particular is trying to reach anime fans with an impressive list of live-action adaptations slated for the future: “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” a new “Death Note,” “Yu Yu Hakusho,” “My Hero Academia” and, of course, more “One Piece,” after the show rose to the top of Netflix’s charts immediately upon its release.Perhaps by the time the straw hat pirates return in Season 2 there will be more good adaptations to speak of, not just in terms of casting but in the writing, filming, world-building and everything else that brought fans to the original series in the first place. If not — well, there’s about a century worth of cute, horrifying, sad, funny, surreal anime to watch out there. Take your pick. More

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      Michael Gambon, Dumbledore in the ‘Harry Potter’ Films, Dies at 82

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      After he made his mark in London in the 1970s, he went on to play a wide range of roles, including Edward VII, Oscar Wilde and Winston Churchill.Michael Gambon, the Irish-born actor who drew acclaim from both audiences and peers for his stage and screen work, and who won even wider renown as Albus Dumbledore, the firm but kindly headmaster of the Hogwarts wizarding school, in the “Harry Potter” films, died on Wednesday night. He was 82.Mr. Gambon’s family confirmed his death in a brief statement issued on Thursday through a public relations company. “Michael died peacefully in hospital with his wife, Anne, and son Fergus at his bedside, following a bout of pneumonia,” the statement said. It did not identify the hospital where he died.The breakthrough that led the actor Ralph Richardson to call him “the great Gambon” came with Mr. Gambon’s performance in Bertolt Brecht’s “Life of Galileo” at London’s National Theater in 1980, although he had already enjoyed modest success, notably in plays by Alan Ayckbourn and Harold Pinter.Peter Hall, then the National Theater’s artistic director, described Mr. Gambon (pronounced GAM-bonn) as “unsentimental, dangerous and immensely powerful.” He recalled in his autobiography that he had approached four leading directors to accept him in the title role, only for them to reject him as “not starry enough.”After John Dexter agreed to direct him in what Mr. Gambon was to describe as the most difficult part he had ever played, the mix of volcanic energy and tenderness, sensuality and intelligence he brought to the role — in which he aged from 40 to 75 — excited not only critics but also his fellow performers.Mr. Gambon in the title role of Bertolt Brecht’s “Life of Galileo” at the National Theater in London in 1980. He called it the most difficult part he had ever played.Donald Cooper/AlamyAs Mr. Hall recalled, the dressing-room windows at the National, which look out onto a courtyard, “after the first night contained actors in various states of undress leaning out and applauding him — a unique tribute.”That brought Mr. Gambon a best-actor nomination at the Olivier Awards. He would win the award in 1987 for his performance as Eddie Carbone in Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” at the National Theater. Again it was his blend of vulnerability and visceral force that impressed audiences; Miller declared that Mr. Gambon’s performance as the embattled longshoreman was the best he had seen. Mr. Ayckbourn, who directed the production, described Mr. Gambon as awe-inspiring.“One day he just stood in the rehearsal room and just burst into tears — no turning upstage, no hands in front of his face,” Mr. Ayckbourn said. “He just stood there and wept like a child. It was heartbreaking. And he did angry very well too. That could be scary.”Michael John Gambon was born in Dublin on Oct. 19, 1940. He became a dual British and Irish citizen after he and his seamstress mother, Mary, moved to London to join his father, Edward, an engineer helping to reconstruct the city after it had been badly bombed in 1945.By his own admission he was a dreamy student, often lost in fantasies of being other people, and he left school “pig ignorant, with no qualifications, nothing.” When the family moved from North London to Kent, he became an apprentice toolmaker at Vickers-Armstrongs, which was famous for having built Britain’s Spitfire fighter planes.The teenage Mr. Gambon had never seen a play — he said he didn’t even knew what a play was — but when he helped build sets for an amateur dramatic society in Erith, Kent, he was given a few small roles onstage. “I went vroom!,” he recalled. “I thought, Jesus, this is for me, I want to be an actor.” He joined the left-leaning Unity Theater in London, performing and taking lessons in improvisation at the Royal Court.This emboldened him to write to Micheal MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards, the founders of the Gate Theater in Dublin, claiming to be a West End actor passing through the city en route to New York. An invitation ensued, as did a job as the Second Gentleman in “Othello,” followed by an offer to join Laurence Olivier’s new National Theater, which (Mr. Gambon said) was seeking burly six-footers like himself to play spear carriers.Several small or nonspeaking roles followed — Mr. Gambon remembered little but saying “Madam, your carriage awaits” to Maggie Smith in a Restoration comedy — until Olivier himself advised him to seek better parts in the provinces. That he did, closely modeling an Othello in Birmingham in 1968 on the Moor famously played at the National by Olivier, an actor Mr. Gambon said he always regarded with “absolute awe.”Mr. Gambon didn’t make his mark in London until 1974, when he played a slow-witted veterinary surgeon in Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy “The Norman Conquests.” One scene, in which he sat on a child’s chair so low that only half his face was visible, became celebrated for the hilarity it generated. Indeed, Mr. Gambon said, he actually witnessed a man “laugh so much he fell out of his seat and rolled down the gangway.”Mr. Gambon in 1987, the year he won an Olivier Award for his performance in Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge.”John Stoddart/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesMr. Gambon said he disliked looking in mirrors; so unpleasant did he find his face that he compared it to a crumpled plastic bag. His jowls and his heavy build meant that he never played Hamlet or any obviously heroic or conventionally good-looking characters, yet he won universal admiration for his versatility. He seemed able to grow or shrink at will. For a man compared to a lumberjack, he was astonishingly fleet and nimble. One critic saw him as a rhinoceros that could almost tap-dance.And he brought a paradoxical delicacy to many a role: King Lear and Antony, which he played in tandem for the Royal Shakespeare Company; leading roles in Pinter’s “Betrayal” and “Old Times”; Ben Jonson’s Volpone at the National Theater; and the anguished restaurateur in David Hare’s “Skylight,” a performance he took from London to Broadway, where it earned him a Tony Award nomination for best actor in 1996.At the time he was best known in the United States for a television performance as the daydreaming invalid in Dennis Potter’s acclaimed 1986 mini-series, “The Singing Detective.” Though he always said that the theater was his great love and he pined for it when he was away, he often appeared on screens both large and small during a career in which he was virtually never out of work.Before being cast as Dumbledore, Mr. Gambon was best known in the United States for his performance as the daydreaming invalid in Dennis Potter’s acclaimed 1986 mini-series, “The Singing Detective.”BBCFrom 1999 to 2001, he won successive best-actor BAFTA awards, for “Wives and Daughters,” “Longitude” and “Perfect Strangers.” His portrayal of Lyndon B. Johnson in the 2002 mini-series “Path to War” won him an Emmy nomination, as did his Mr. Woodhouse in the 2009 adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Emma.”His television roles varied from Inspector Maigret to Edward VII, Oscar Wilde to Winston Churchill. And in film he played characters as different as Albert Spica, the coarse and violent gangster in Peter Greenaway’s “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover,” and the benign Professor Dumbledore.Mr. Gambon took over the role of Dumbledore, a central character in the Harry Potter saga, when Richard Harris, who had originated it, died in 2002. Reviewing “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” in which he first appeared in the role, A.O. Scott of The New York Times wrote that the film, though noteworthy for its special effects, was also, like the two earlier films in the series, “anchored by top-of-the-line flesh-and-blood British acting,” and noted that “Michael Gambon, as the wise headmaster Albus Dumbledore, has gracefully stepped into Richard Harris’s conical hat and flowing robes.” Mr. Gambon continued to play Dumbledore through the final movie in the series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,” released in 2011.For all the attention that role brought him, Mr. Gambon claimed not to see this or any other performance as a great accomplishment; he tended to answer interviewers who questioned him about acting by saying, “I just do it.” But in fact he prepared for his roles conscientiously. He would absorb a script, then use rehearsals to adapt and deepen his discoveries.“I’m very physical,” he once said. “I want to know how the person looks, what his hair is like, the way he walks, the way he stands and sits, how he sounds, his rhythms, how he dresses, his shoes. The way your feet feel on the stage is important.” And slowly, very slowly, Mr. Gambon would edge toward what he felt was the core of a person and, he said, rely on intuition to bring him to life onstage.Though he was no Method actor, Mr. Gambon did use memories when strong emotions were needed. He found it easy to cry onstage, he said, sometimes by thinking of the famous photograph of a naked Vietnamese girl running from a napalm attack. Acting, he said, was a compulsion, “a hard slog, heartache, misery — for moments of sheer joy.”Mr. Gambon in the 1989 film “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.”Steve Pyke/Getty ImagesIn person Mr. Gambon was elusive; he said that he didn’t exist aside from his acting and that he hated the idea of celebrity, even popularity. He adamantly refused to reveal anything about his private life to interviewers, though it’s on public record that he married Anne Miller when he was 22 and that together they had a son, Fergus. They both survive him. It is believed that they remained on good terms even after he had two other sons, Tom and William, with the set designer Philippa Hart.He was knighted in 1998.His engineering apprenticeship left him fascinated with the workings of mechanical things: clocks, old watches and especially antique guns, of which he possessed scores. He also took delight in fast cars; he once appeared on the television show “Top Gear” and drove so recklessly that a section of the track he’d taken on two wheels was renamed Gambon Corner.He became notorious for impish behavior on and off the stage. A qualified pilot, he promised to cure a fellow actor of his fear of flying by taking him up in a tiny plane, then mimed a heart attack as, his tongue lolling, he nose-dived toward outer London. Mr. Ayckbourn recalled a moment in “Othello” when Mr. Gambon shoved Iago’s head into a fountain. “Shampoo and set, shampoo and set,” roared the Moor — but such was the emotion already generated the audience reportedly didn’t notice.“I’m actually serious about my work,” Mr. Gambon once said. However, much of that work came to a premature end after he played a wily, drunken, needy Falstaff at the National Theater in 2005, followed by the alcoholic Hirst in Pinter’s “No Man’s Land” in 2008.Having admitted that he often felt terrified before making an entrance, he had panic attacks while rehearsing the role of W.H. Auden in Alan Bennett’s “The Habit of Art” in 2009 and was twice rushed to a hospital before withdrawing from the production. By then he was finding it difficult to remember lines. After playing the nonspeaking title character in Samuel Beckett’s “Eh Joe” in 2013, he announced that he would no longer perform onstage.He continued to appear on film and television, notably as the ailing title character in “Churchill’s Secret” in 2016. But his departure from theater meant that he ended his stage career with a deep sense of loss.“It’s a horrible thing to admit,” he said. “But I can’t do it. And it breaks my heart.”Alex Marshall More

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      Emma Thompson Is Right: The Word ‘Content’ Is Rude

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      The term may be popular in an age of blurring lines between platforms, but the Hollywood strikes have shown how the phrase can devalue creative work.Over the past couple of years, I’ve spent a disproportionate amount of time thinking about a scene from the 1986 Rodney Dangerfield vehicle “Back to School.” He stars as Thornton Melon, a self-made millionaire entrepreneur who, per the title, returns to finish his university education alongside his freshman son. On the first day of his intro to business course, Professor Philip Barbay (Paxton Whitehead) explains that they’ll spend the semester creating and running a fictional manufacturing company. “What’s the product?” asks the pragmatic Melon, who won’t let the point drop.“Let’s just say they’re widgets,” snaps the professor.“What’s a widget?” asks Melon.“It’s a fictional product,” Barbay replies. “It doesn’t matter.”At some point a few years back, an unholy union of like-minded tech bros, studio suits, media water-carriers and social media personalities settled on their own “widget,” a catchall phrase that would both encompass and minimize the various forms of entertainment they touch: “content.” And when news broke on Sunday night that the monthslong Writers Guild of America strike was coming to an end, Variety, the industry bible, gave this term its most skin-crawling deployment to date, noting that the W.G.A. strike had taken “a heavy toll across the content industry.”“No, absolutely not,” tweeted the TV writer and comedian Mike Drucker. “We’re not calling it ‘the content industry’ now, you psychopaths.”In fact, Variety itself had run, just a few days earlier, a pointed rebuke to the term from no less an authority than the Oscar-winning actor and screenwriter Emma Thompson. “To hear people talk about ‘content’ makes me feel like the stuffing inside a sofa cushion,” she said at the Royal Television Society conference in Britain last week.“It’s just a rude word for creative people,” she added. “I know there are students in the audience: You don’t want to hear your stories described as ‘content’ or your acting or your producing described as ‘content.’ That’s just like coffee grounds in the sink or something.”Thompson’s not only right about the implications of the phrasing. She’s right about the real-world impact of what is, make no mistake, a devaluing of the creative process. Those who defend its use will insist that we need some kind of catchall phrase for the things we watch, as previously crisp lines have blurred between movies and television, between home and theatrical exhibition and between legacy and social media.But these paradigm shifts require more clarity in our language, not less. A phrase like “streaming movie” or “theatrical release” or “documentary podcast” communicates what, where and why with far more precision than gibberish like “content,” and if you want to put everything under one tent, “entertainment” is right there. But studio and streaming executives, who are perhaps the primary users and abusers of the term, love to talk about “content” because it’s so wildly diminutive. It’s a quick and easy way to minimize what writers, directors and actors do, to act as though entertainment (or, dare I say it, art) is simply churned out — and could be churned out by anyone, sentient or not. It’s just content, it’s just widgets, it’s all grist for the mill. Talking about “entertainment” is dangerous because it takes talent to entertain; no such demands are made of “content,” and the industry’s increasing interest in the possibilities of writing via artificial intelligence (one of the sticking points of the writers’ strike) makes that crystal clear.Perhaps the finest example of this school of thought can be seen at Warner Bros. Discovery, where David Zaslav ascended to the throne of chief executive by overseeing the Discovery Channel’s transition from nature documentaries to reality swill. The “content”-ization of that conglomerate’s holdings is the only reasonable explanation for the decision to rename HBO Max as simply Max — removing the prestigious legacy media brand that most clearheaded, marginally intelligent people would presume to be an asset. It lost 1.8 million subscribers in the process, but that’s merely the battle; it won the war, because when you visit Max now, the front-page carousel is a combination of scripted series, HBO documentaries, true crime and reality competition shows. It’s all on equal footing; it’s all content. But “Casablanca,” “Succession” and “Dr. Pimple Popper” are not the same thing — and the programmers of a service that pretends otherwise are abdicating their responsibility as curators.The service also showed its hand with the baffling decision (later corrected, following threats from the writers’ and directors’ unions) to lump together all of a production’s writers, producers and directors under the single classification of “creators” — terminology that similarly attempts to simplify and minimize the hard work of writing and directing, while simultaneously elevating the wildly divergent efforts of social media personalities and Instagram influencers who will breathlessly brand themselves “content creators.” You’ll hear tech “geniuses” and “innovative” chief executives referring to showrunners and filmmakers with the same terminology, and it’s nonsensical. Martin Scorsese and Logan Paul are not in the same line of work. In practical terms, “content creator” neatly accomplishes two things at once: It lets people who make garbage think they’re making art, and tells people who make art that they’re making garbage.Perhaps this is all just semantics, an old man yelling at clouds about a shift in thinking and classification. But the ubiquity of “content” is no organic evolution; this is more complicated, and frankly more depressing, than that. Language matters. The way we talk about things affects how we think and feel about them. So when journalists regurgitate purposefully reductive language, and when their viewers and readers consume and parrot it, they’re not adopting some zippy buzzword. They’re doing the bidding of people in power, and diminishing the work that they claim to love. More

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      Hollywood Turns to Actors’ Strike After Writers Agree to Deal

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      The studios and the actors’ union haven’t spoken for more than two months, but a deal is needed before the entertainment industry can fully return.Hollywood’s actors are back in the spotlight.With screenwriters reaching a tentative agreement with the major entertainment studios on a new labor deal on Sunday night, one big obstacle stands in the way of the film and TV industry roaring back to life: ending the strike with tens of thousands of actors.The two sides have not spoken in more than two months, and no talks are scheduled.Leaders of SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, have indicated a willingness to negotiate, but the studios made a strategic decision in early August to focus on reaching a détente with the writers first. A big reason was the rhetoric of Fran Drescher, the president of the actors’ union, who made one fiery speech after another following the strike, including one in which she denounced studio executives as “land barons of a medieval time.”“Eventually, the people break down the gates of Versailles,” Ms. Drescher said after the actors’ strike was called in July. “And then it’s over. We’re at that moment right now.”Ms. Drescher has been less vocal in recent weeks, however. Only a resolution with the actors will determine when tens of thousands of workers — including camera operators, makeup artists, prop makers, set dressers, lighting technicians, hairstylists, cinematographers — return to work.The actors’ union offered congratulations to the Writers Guild of America, which represents more than 11,000 screenwriters, in a statement on Sunday night, adding that it was eager to review the tentative agreement with the studios. Still, it said it remained “committed to achieving the necessary terms for our members.”With a tentative deal in hand, the Writers Guild suspended picketing. But protests by actors will begin again on Tuesday, after a break for Yom Kippur on Monday. “We need everyone on the line Tuesday-Friday,” the actress Frances Fisher, a member of the SAG-AFTRA negotiating committee, said on Sunday on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “Show us your #Solidarity!”Dozens of Writers Guild members vowed to support the actors. “I know there’s a huge sign of relief reverberating through the town right now, but it’s not over for any of us until SAG-AFTRA gets their deal,” Amy Berg, a Writers Guild strike captain, wrote on X.Their support will go only so far, however. Writers Guild negotiators were unsuccessful in receiving the contractual right to honor other unions’ picket lines; writers will be required to return to work, perhaps before a ratification vote is final.It has been 74 days since the actors’ union and representatives of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of the studios, have talked. That will probably soon change given the high stakes of salvaging the 2024 theatrical box office, which will be in considerable jeopardy should Hollywood not be able to restart production within the next month. The TV production window for the remainder of the year is also closing, given the coming holidays.Restarting talks with the actors’ union is a bit more complicated than it sounds. For a start, SAG-AFTRA officials will need time to scrutinize the deal points achieved by the Writers Guild; those wins and compromises will inform a new bargaining strategy for the actors. Also, talks between studios and writers restarted only after leaders on both sides spent time back-channeling about the thorniest issues and seeing if there was a willingness to negotiate. Studios are likely to try the same strategy with the actors.The soonest that negotiations between actors and the studios could restart is next week, according to a person directly involved in the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the strike.Neither SAG-AFTRA nor the studio alliance commented on Monday.“There’s tremendous pressure on both sides to get this done,” said Bobby Schwartz, a partner at Quinn Emanuel and a longtime entertainment lawyer who has represented several of the major studios. “The deal that the Writers Guild and the studios struck economically could have been worked out in May, June. It didn’t need to go this long. I think the membership of SAG-AFTRA is going to say we’ve been out of work for months, we want to go back to work, we don’t want to be the ones that are keeping everybody else on the sidelines.”The dual strikes by the writers and the actors — the first time that has happened since 1960 — have effectively shut down TV and film production for months. The fallout has been significant, both inside and outside the industry. California’s economy alone has lost more than $5 billion, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom.Warner Bros. Discovery said this month that the impact from the labor disputes would reduce its adjusted earnings for the year by $300 million to $500 million. Additionally, share prices for other major media companies like Disney and Paramount have taken a hit in recent months.The industry took a meaningful step toward stabilization on Sunday night, though, with the tentative deal between the writers and studios all but ending a 146-day strike.The deal still needs to be approved by union leadership and ratified by rank-and-file screenwriters. “I’m waiting impatiently to see what the exact language is around A.I.,” said Joseph Vinciguerra, a Writers Guild member and a professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.The approval vote by union leadership is expected on Tuesday.Though the fine print of the terms has not been released, the agreement has much of what the writers had demanded, including increases in compensation for streaming content, concessions from studios on minimum staffing for television shows and guarantees that artificial intelligence technology will not encroach on writers’ credits and compensation.“We can say, with great pride, that this deal is exceptional — with meaningful gains and protections for writers in every sector of the membership,” the Writers Guild’s negotiating committee said in an email to members.On Monday, President Biden released a statement applauding the deal, saying it would “allow writers to return to the important work of telling the stories of our nation, our world — and of all of us.”The prospective writers’ deal should provide a blueprint for the actors, since many of their demands are similar.Union leaders for the actors said their compensation levels, as well as their working conditions, were worsened by the rise of streaming. Like screenwriters, actors have been terrified by the prospects of artificial intelligence. They are worried that it could be used to create digital replicas of their likenesses — or that performances could be digitally altered — without payment or approval, and are seeking significant guardrails to protect against that.The actors, however, have had several demands that the studios balked at, including a revenue-sharing agreement for successful streaming shows. The actors have also asked for significant wage increases, including an 11 percent raise in the first year of a new contract. The studios last proposed a 5 percent raise.Though the entertainment industry had been bracing for a work stoppage by the writers going back to the beginning of the year, the actors’ uncharacteristic resolve this past summer caught studio executives off guard.The actors last went on strike in 1980. By comparison, the writers previously walked out in 2007 for 100 days.The first worrying sign came in June when more than 60,000 actors authorized a walkout with 98 percent of the vote — a margin that even eclipsed the writers’ strike authorization. Then, as bargaining began, the studios saw the actors’ list of demands. Union leaders handed over a list that totaled 48 pages, nearly triple the size of their asks during the last contract negotiations in 2020.While bargaining was going on, more than 1,000 actors, including Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence and Ben Stiller, signed a letter to guild leadership saying that “we are prepared to strike.” The union called for a strike a little more than two weeks later. More

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      David McCallum, Actor in ‘NCIS’ and ‘The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,’ Dies at 90

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      An experienced character actor, he found fame in the 1960s as the enigmatic Illya Kuryakin, and again in the 2000s as an eccentric medical examiner on “N.C.I.S.”David McCallum, the Scottish-born actor who became a surprise sensation as the enigmatic Russian spy Illya Kuryakin on “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” in the 1960s and found television stardom again almost 40 years later on the hit series “N.C.I.S.,” died on Monday in New York. He was 90.“N.C.I.S.” announced his death in a post on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. The announcement did not include any further information.Trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, Mr. McCallum was an experienced character actor who could use an accent or an odd piece of clothing to give depth to a role. He played a wide range of parts across theater, film and television, from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in Central Park in 2000 to the voice of Professor Paradox on the animated television series “Ben 10: Ultimate Alien,” a decade later.He was hired in 1964 to play Illya Kuryakin, the Russian-accented sidekick of Robert Vaughn’s Napoleon Solo, on “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,” a tongue-in-cheek series about secret agents working for the fictional United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. His part was meant to be small; he had just four lines in the first episode. He suggested that Illya be made more interesting by having him be closemouthed about his personal life (“Nobody knows what Illya Kuryakin does when he goes home at night,” he told one interviewer) and somewhat antagonistic to Solo.The writers began to build up his character, and he became a fixture of the series and a two-time Emmy Award nominee. Somewhat to his annoyance, he also became a sex symbol.With his mysterious air, his Beatle haircut and his trademark black turtleneck, Mr. McCallum was a magnet for teenage fans. Sent on a publicity junket for the show to Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge in 1965, he was mobbed by screaming female students and had to be rescued by police officers.“McCallum’s motorcades are now, by order of the police chiefs of the cities he visits, forbidden to stop anywhere along the line of drive,” The New York Times reported in a 1965 profile. “If the entourage slowed, there would be carnage in the streets.”“The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” ended in 1968, and Mr. McCallum retreated happily to lower-profile roles. He continued to work steadily, mostly in B-movies and in supporting parts on television. He also played the title role in the short-lived series “The Invisible Man” (1975-76) and Emperor Joseph II in a revival of “Amadeus” on Broadway in 1999.But everywhere he went, he said, the Russian secret agent stalked him. “It’s been 30 years, but I can’t escape him,” he told The Times in 1998. “Illya Kuryakin is there 24 hours a day.”In 2003, the Russian shadow finally met his match in the bow-tied, bespectacled and eccentric medical examiner Donald Mallard, better known as Ducky, on the hit CBS crime series “N.C.I.S.” He remained with the show, which consistently ranked in the Nielsen Top 10, for two decades. He was still a member of the cast at his death.Mr. McCallum as the eccentric medical examiner Donald Mallard, known as Ducky, on the CBS crime series “N.C.I.S,” a role he played for 20 years.Monty Brinton/CBSIn interviews, Mr. McCallum said that besides Julius Caesar, Dr. Mallard was his favorite role, in part because it taught him so much about forensics. He studied with pathologists in Los Angeles and even sat in on autopsies, learning enough that the show’s writers would ask him for technical advice.David Keith McCallum Jr. was born on Sept. 19, 1933, into a musical family in Glasgow. His father was the first violinist for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London; his mother, Dorothy Dorman, was a cellist. He would later tell interviewers that his Scotch Presbyterian upbringing had left him emotionally circumscribed.“We Scots, we tend to be awfully tight inside,” he told TV Guide in 1965. “It has hurt me as an actor to be so — so naturally restricted.”Expected to follow in the family footsteps and pursue a career in music, he enrolled in the Royal Academy of Music to study oboe. But he found himself drawn to acting and switched to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. (He never completely lost interest in music, however; at the height of his “U.N.C.L.E.” fame, Capitol Records released several albums under his name, on which he conducted instrumental renditions of pop hits.)Mr. McCallum was drafted into the British military in 1951 and served two years, including 10 months in what is now Ghana as a small-arms expert. Not long after his discharge, he signed with the Rank Organization, a British production company, and began acting both in movies and on television.He met Jill Ireland, already a rising actress in Britain, when they were both cast in the Rank production “Robbery Under Arms” in 1957. He proposed seven days after they met, and they married that spring. In 1961, when he was cast as Judas Iscariot in “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (the movie would not be completed and released until 1965), the couple moved to Los Angeles.They appeared to flourish. They had three children. She became a busy TV actress and made several guest appearances on “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,” playing three different characters.But the strain of Mr. McCallum’s stardom took a toll on their marriage, and she left him for the actor Charles Bronson, whom she had met when Mr. McCallum and Mr. Bronson were both filming “The Great Escape” (1963). Less than a year after their divorce in 1967, Mr. McCallum married Katherine Carpenter, a model.She survives him. Further information about his survivors was not immediately available. Mr. McCallum and his wife lived in Manhattan. The Associated Press said that CBS said he died at a Manhattan hospital but did not explain why he had been hospitalized.When “N.C.I.S.” made Mr. McCallum a television star for the second time, he found fame much less oppressive than he had the first time. “In New York now I leave 15 minutes — because I walk everywhere in New York — between appointments because I am going to be stopped on the street to talk about N.C.I.S. for at least 15 minutes,” he told BBC Radio in a 2009 interview.“I love it,” he said, when asked if he ever grew tired of that kind of attention. “I’ve never got fed up with anything in my whole life.” More

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      The Best True Crime to Stream: Women Who Do Wrong

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      By and large, women and girls are the victims of violent crimes, not the perpetrators. But not always. Here are four picks across TV, film and podcast that turn the tables.If there’s one constant across the true crime genre, it’s that women and girls do not fare well. For those of us who follow it, there’s no avoiding or softening the horrific fates that often befall them. True crime, after all, is real life. And in the United States, men accounted for nearly 80 percent of arrests involving violent crimes in 2019, according to the F.B.I.; men also made up 88 percent of the arrests in instances of murder and non-negligent manslaughter that year.That said, there is a much smaller subset of true crime that is perhaps more gripping because it’s so rare: crimes perpetrated by women and even girls.Here are four picks you can watch or listen to:Television“Snapped”There are over 600 episodes across 32 seasons of this Oxygen series, which has been a true crime staple since its debut in 2004. Sure, “Snapped” has all the addictively cheesy trappings of bingeable, guilty-pleasure viewing — indulgent voice-over narration, abundant re-enactments. (The tagline? “From socialites to secretaries, female killers share one thing in common: They all snapped.”)But what this show delivers cannot be found anywhere else. Each episode explores a crime committed by a woman — crimes you probably would never have heard about otherwise, in part because they happen in America’s nooks and crannies. The stories are largely told through interviews with those involved, often including the criminals or victims themselves. And you get an entire story in about 45 minutes.While there are some re-emerging themes — namely, women who feel trapped in their lives — the crimes and motivations are expansive. Seasons 12 through 32 are streaming on Peacock, and new episodes and reruns are broadcast on Oxygen.DOCUSERIES“Evil Genius”The bizarre details of the crimes at the heart of this four-part 2018 Netflix series still linger in my mind: In 2003, Brian Wells, a pizza delivery guy, entered a small-town Pennsylvania bank wearing a collar bomb and carrying a cane fashioned into a shotgun. He produced a lengthy note demanding $250,000. Wells then failed to complete a complex scavenger hunt that presumably would have ended with a code or key to unlock the bomb affixed around his neck. News footage of him sitting on the street pleading with officers as the explosive ticks down is unforgettable. But this is just one layer of an onion that grows only more rotten.Directed by Barbara Schroeder and executive produced by Jay and Mark Duplass, “Evil Genius: The True Story of America’s Most Diabolical Bank Heist” quickly turns its focus to Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, the brilliant, terrifying, mentally unwell “evil genius” of the title. The life of Diehl-Armstrong, who had a string of dead boyfriends behind her, is explored in detail, uncovering a winding tale that never feels fully resolved.Documentary“I Love You, Now Die”Not long ago, this strange and sad story could have been the premise for a “Black Mirror” episode. Over thousands of text messages exchanged between two Massachusetts teenagers, Michelle Carter and Conrad Roy III, from 2012 to 2014, a tragedy unfolds that culminates in Roy’s suicide and Carter’s trial for her role in his death.In the two-part 2019 HBO documentary film “I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter,” the director Erin Lee Carr does the difficult job of centering the teenagers’ mind-set. Carr fills the screen with the texts sent between them — complete with the dings and swooshes of messages coming and going. “Romeo and Juliet” is mentioned. “It’s okay to be scared and it’s normal,” reads a text from Carter to Roy. “I mean you’re about to die.”Their exchanges, combined with courtroom footage of Carter sitting quietly as the proceedings are underway, raise all of the necessary questions. I found myself spinning in circles, turning over thoughts about accountability, coercion and the nebulous boundaries of technology.Podcast“The Retrievals”Over about five months in 2020, as many as 200 women who had egg-retrieval procedures at the Yale Fertility Center in Connecticut were exposed to a medical nightmare. A nurse at the clinic was stealing untold amounts of the pain medication fentanyl, swapping the liquid in the vials with saline — which was administered to the patients instead. Some of the women cried out during their procedures; others complained of pain later, while some blamed themselves, saying they had doubted their own intuition. Almost all were dismissed by those in charge, often blamed for their own pain.“The Retrievals,” from Serial Productions and The New York Times, is reported by Susan Burton, who interviews a dozen of these patients, all of whom are grappling with what they endured. Prepare to be bewildered by how the clinic tried to brush off the ordeal as mostly harmless, underscoring how women’s accounts of their own bodies are so commonly disrespected and diminished. More

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      Writers Guild and Studios Reach Deal to End Their Strike

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      The Writers Guild of America got most of what it wanted. With actors still on picket lines, however, much of Hollywood will remain shut down.Hollywood’s bitter, monthslong labor dispute has taken a big first step toward a resolution.The Writers Guild of America, which represents more than 11,000 screenwriters, reached a tentative deal on a new contract with entertainment companies on Sunday night, all but ending a 146-day strike that has contributed to a shutdown of television and film production.In the coming days, guild members will vote on whether to accept the deal, which has much of what they had demanded, including increases in compensation for streaming content, concessions from studios on minimum staffing for television shows, and guarantees that artificial intelligence technology will not encroach on writers’ credits and compensation.“We can say, with great pride, that this deal is exceptional — with meaningful gains and protections for writers in every sector of the membership,” the Writers Guild’s negotiating committee said in an email to members.Conspicuously not doing a victory lap was the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of studios. “The W.G.A. and A.M.P.T.P. have reached a tentative agreement” was its only comment.For an industry upended by the streaming revolution, which the pandemic sped up, the tentative accord represents a meaningful step toward stabilization.But much of Hollywood will remain at a standstill: Tens of thousands of actors remain on strike, and no talks between the actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, and the studios were scheduled.The only productions that could restart in short order would be ones without actors, like the late-night shows hosted by Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert and daytime talk shows hosted by Drew Barrymore and Jennifer Hudson.The upshot: In addition to actors, more than 100,000 behind-the-scenes workers (directors, camera operators, publicists, makeup artists, prop makers, set dressers, lighting technicians, hairstylists, cinematographers) in Los Angeles and New York will continue to stand idle, many with mounting financial hardship. California’s economy alone has lost more than $5 billion from the Hollywood shutdown, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom.SAG-AFTRA has been on strike since July 14. Its demands exceed those of the Writers Guild and the studio alliance decided to prioritize talks with the Writers Guild, in part because of the hard line taken by Fran Drescher, the SAG-AFTRA’s leader. Among other things, the actors want 2 percent of the total revenue generated by streaming shows, something that studios have said is a nonstarter.Even so, the deal with the Writers Guild could speed up negotiations with the actors’ union. Some of SAG-AFTRA’s concerns are similar to ones raised by the Writers Guild. Actors, for instance, worry that A.I. could be used to create digital replicas of their likenesses (or that performances could be digitally altered) without payment or approval.The last sticking point between the Writers Guild and studios involved artificial intelligence. On Saturday, lawyers for the entertainment companies came up with language — a couple paragraphs inside a contract that runs hundreds of pages — that addressed a guild concern about A.I. and old scripts that studios own. The sides spent several hours on Sunday making additional tweaks.Talks between the writers and the studios began again this past week after a hiatus of nearly a month.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesThe tentative deal came after several senior company leaders joined the talks directly — among them Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive; Donna Langley, chair of the NBCUniversal Studio Group; Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-chief executive; and David Zaslav, who runs Warner Bros. Discovery. Typically, talks took place between union negotiators and Carol Lombardini, who leads the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, an organization that bargains on behalf of the eight biggest Hollywood content companies.Talks resumed on Wednesday after a hiatus of nearly a month, a period when each side insisted that the other was the one refusing to negotiate. Writers Guild leaders had come under intense pressure from some of its A-list members, including Ryan Murphy (“American Horror Story”), Kenya Barris (“black-ish”) and Noah Hawley (“Fargo”).Showrunners like Mr. Murphy did not push Writers Guild leaders to take what was already on the table. Rather, they agitated for an immediate return to negotiations, and cited as a reason the increasing financial hardship on idled Hollywood workers.Hollywood workers have taken more than $45 million in hardship withdrawals from the Motion Picture Industry Pension Plan since Sept. 1, according to a document compiled by plan administrators that was viewed by The New York Times. Mr. Murphy set up a financial assistance fund for idled workers on his shows and committed $500,000 as a starting amount. Within days, he had $10 million in requests.Studios have also been hurting. This month, Warner Bros. Discovery said that the dual strikes would reduce its adjusted earnings for the year by $300 million to $500 million. The stock prices for Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Global have taken a hit. Analysts have estimated that studios will forgo as much as $1.6 billion in global ticket sales for movies that were initially scheduled for release this fall but pushed to next year because of the actors’ strike.Negotiations between the studios and the writers began over six months ago. Union leaders repeatedly called the moment “existential,” arguing that the rise of streaming had worsened both compensation levels for writers as well as their working conditions.Over the last decade, the number of episodes for television series went down from the old broadcast network standard of more than 20 per season to as little as six or seven. Writers Guild officials said that fewer episodes often translated to lower income for writers, and left them scrambling to find multiple jobs in a year.The writers also took particular aim at so-called minirooms, a streaming-era innovation where fewer writers were hired to help conceive of a show, and they were frequently paid less.Putting guardrails around the use of artificial intelligence was an issue of some significance when negotiations began in late March, but it took on greater urgency to members as bargaining — and the strike — wore on.Prominent members of the Writers Guild had framed the strike as being about something loftier than Hollywood — they were taking a stand, they argued, against the evils of capitalism. Some of that sentiment peppered the reaction to the denouement. In a post late Sunday on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Billy Ray, whose credits include “Captain Phillips” and “Shattered Glass,” encouraged fellow writers to “stand with the actors” and workers everywhere. “That’s how we’ll save America.”The strike was one of the longest in the history of the Writers Guild. The last time writers and actors were both on strike at the same time was in 1960.With a tentative deal in hand, the Writers Guild suspended picketing. The union, however, encouraged members to join the striking actors’ picket lines, which will begin again on Tuesday. More