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      TV Shows and Movies Streaming in September 2023: ‘The Wheel of Time,’ ‘Gen V’ and More

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      Spinoffs and chillers abound in a month filled with tons of new television. Here’s the best of what’s coming to Amazon, Max, Apple TV+ and others. Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of September’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)New to Amazon Prime Video‘The Wheel of Time’ Season 2Started streaming: Sept. 1Season 1 of this handsome-looking fantasy series introduced some of the major characters and concepts from the first book of the novelist Robert Jordan’s hefty “The Wheel of Time” saga. Season 2 adapts parts of the second and third books — “The Great Hunt” and “The Dragon Reborn” — and continues moving the pieces into place for the grand apocalyptic battle prophesied at the start of the story. Rosamund Pike returns as the mystic Moiraine, who is helping a group of young people escape the shadowy forces pursuing them. Josha Stradowski plays Rand al’Thor, who may be his land’s last best hope to stand up against the Dark One and his minions — or may be the one to usher in a new age of chaos.‘Neighbours: A New Chapter’ Season 1Starts streaming: Sept. 18The original run of the soap opera “Neighbours” began in 1985 and concluded in 2022 after 38 seasons and nearly 9,000 22-minute episodes. During that time, the show’s melodramatic tales of suburban Melbourne life were seen around the world and introduced viewers to future stars like Natalie Imbruglia, Kylie Minogue, Radha Mitchell, Guy Pearce and Margot Robbie. Now Amazon Studios and Fremantle Australia are bringing the series back, along with some of the old cast (including Pearce), who join an array of new characters. Plans are to run 200 episodes a year for the next two years on Amazon’s ad-supported, free-to-stream Freevee service, where viewers can also watch the older episodes, giving Americans a chance to immerse themselves in these Australians’ love affairs and personal crises.‘Gen V’ Season 1Starts streaming: Sept. 29A spinoff of the adults-only superhero satire “The Boys,” this action-dramedy series is set at a special school for young crime fighters, where the students engage in the same kinds of cliques, rivalries and romances that happen in any normal school but with the constant threat that super powers make every conflict more dangerous. A few of the adult characters from “The Boys” will drop in on the new show (which has a creative team drawn from some of that show’s writers and producers); but the focus here is on the kids, who have a lot in common with classic comic book super teams like the X-Men and the Teen Titans. Expect plenty of irreverence and dark humor, along with some sly takedowns of familiar superhero mythology.Also arriving:Sept. 1“God. Family. Football.”Sept. 5“One Shot: Overtime Elite”Sept. 8“Sitting in Bars with Cake”Sept. 12“Kelce”Sept. 15“A Million Miles Away”“Wilderness” Season 1“Written in the Stars” Season 1Sept. 22“Cassandro”Sept. 22“The Fake Sheikh”Norman Reedus in the latest “Walking Dead” spinoff, “The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon.”Emmanuel Guimier/AMCNew to AMC+‘The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon’ Season 1Starts streaming: Sept. 10Like “The Walking Dead: Dead City” earlier this year, the latest entry in the long-running, ever-expanding “Walking Dead” franchise takes one of the most popular characters from the show’s original run and plops him in another part of the world. Norman Reedus reprises his role as Daryl Dixon, a talented marksman and tracker who had to overcome his loner tendencies to become a vital part of an embattled postapocalyptic community in the American southeast. In this new series, Daryl takes his talents to France, where he allies with a tough nun (Clémence Poésy) who shows him the unique ways that continental Europe handled the zombie outbreak and helps him to figure out who he can trust.Also arriving:Sept. 1“Perpetrator”Sept. 8“Blood Flower”Sept. 10“Ride With Norman Reedus” Season 6Sept. 15“Elevator Game”Sept. 20“Thick Skin”Sept. 22“The Angry Black Girl and Her Mother”Sept. 29“Nightmare”LaKeith Stanfield in a scene from “The Changeling,” based on the Victor LaValle novel.Apple TV+New to Apple TV+‘The Changeling’Starts streaming: Sept. 8Like the Victor LaValle novel that inspired it, the supernatural horror series “The Changeling” combines everyday drama with terrifying nightmares, in a story that sprawls across multiple generations. LaKeith Stanfield plays Apollo, a shy book dealer who is haunted by memories of the father he barely knew. He is also attracted to a vibrant but eccentric woman named Emmy (Clark Backo), whom he eventually marries. The show’s creator and writer, Kelly Marcel, shifts the narrative focus freely among different characters and different eras, as a crisis with Emmy and their newborn child drives Apollo to confront his troubled family history. In doing so, he finds that his past is shrouded in the kind of wondrous darkness common to fairy tales, and he is challenged to untangle fantasy from fact in an enchanted version of New York City.‘The Morning Show’ Season 3Starts streaming: Sept. 13One of Apple TV+’s flagship series returns for a third season of punchy boardroom drama, set in the modern TV news business. The show is still powered by its two charismatic leads: Jennifer Aniston as the veteran morning show anchor Alex Levy and Reese Witherspoon as Bradley Jackson, a feisty hard news reporter who has become Alex’s co-host. Billy Crudup and Mark Duplass play two of the behind-the-camera bosses who sometimes make morally questionable choices. This season they are joined by Jon Hamm as a cocky tech billionaire who might be able improve their network’s cash-flow. Although “The Morning Show” started as a ripped-from-the-headlines look at how the #MeToo era has upended the male-dominated media, the series has since opened to encompass other hot-button contemporary issues, which in Season 3 include cyberattacks and corporate blackmail.Also arriving:Sept. 20“The Super Models”Sept. 22“Still Up”Sept. 29“Flora and Son”Sinclair Daniel, left, and Ashleigh Murray in a scene from “The Other Black Girl.”HuluNew to Hulu‘The Other Black Girl’ Season 1Starts streaming: Sept. 13Part wry social commentary and part intense mystery-thriller, “The Other Black Girl” examines the racial and gender dynamics of the New York publishing industry. Sinclair Daniel plays Nella, an aspiring assistant editor who befriends Hazel (Ashleigh Murray), her publishing house’s latest hire and the only other Black person in her department. When Hazel’s collegial advice starts derailing Nella’s career — around the same time that Nella starts experiencing some unnerving paranormal activity around the office — she begins looking into her new friend’s past and the history of their employers. Adapted from a best-selling Zakiya Dalila Harris novel, this show finds the humor and the anxiety inherent in the life of a woman who is struggling to stand out in a tough business without losing her identity.Also arriving:Sept. 6“Never Let Him Go”Sept. 13“Welcome to Wrexham” Season 2Sept. 14“Dragons: The Nine Realms” Season 7Sept. 20“American Horror Story: Delicate” Part 1Sept. 22“No One Will Save You”Sept. 27“Love in Fairhope” Season 1Nikesh Patel and Rose Matafeo in scene from Season 3 of the Max series “Starstruck.”Mark Johnson/MaxNew to Max‘Starstruck’ Season 3Starts streaming: Sept. 28This charming romantic comedy is one of the streaming era’s hidden gems, and it is ripe for discovery now that the fall TV schedule has been thinned out by the actors’ and writers’ strikes. Through its first two seasons, “Starstruck” followed the unlikely on-again/off-again love affair between Jessie (Rose Matafeo), a young New Zealander struggling to make ends meet in London, and Tom (Nikesh Patel), an A-list movie star who is smitten with her. Season 3 has the couple going their separate ways but still frequently and awkwardly crossing paths. The show’s short, breezy episodes capture how the “getting to know you” phase of romance can be equal parts exciting and difficult, especially when one of the people involved is rich and famous.Also arriving:Sept. 2“The Venture Bros.: Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart”Sept. 13“Donyale Luna: Supermodel”Sept. 21“Young Love” Season 1A scene from the Season 4 premiere of “Star Trek: Lower Decks,” which centers on the underlings of a starship.Paramount+New to Paramount+ With Showtime‘Star Trek: Lower Decks’ Season 4Starts streaming: Sept. 7“Star Trek” fans who are still buzzing from the excellent, recently completed second season of “Strange New Worlds” should roll those warm feelings over to the fourth season of the animated “Lower Decks,” which has established its place as one of the best of the modern “Star Trek” shows. Like “Strange New Worlds,” “Lower Decks” balances old-fashioned “interstellar adventure of the week” stories with involved subplots and rich character development. This cute-looking cartoon is fundamentally comic — following the goofy mishaps of a bunch of Starfleet’s least vital employees — but its writers and animators respect the franchise’s lore enough to deliver cleverly plotted, action-packed episodes, season after season.Also arriving:Sept. 8“Dreaming Whilst Black”Sept. 12“Football Must Go On”Sept. 17“The Gold”Sept. 18“Superpower”Sept. 22“Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court”Sept. 26“72 Seconds”Colin Woodell as Winston Scott in a scene from “The Continental: From the World of John Wick.”Katalin Vermes/Starz EntertainmentNew to Peacock‘The Continental: From the World of John Wick’Starts streaming: Sept. 22Fans of the first “John Wick” movie will always remember the moment when its weary hit man hero walked into a strange, assassin-friendly hotel called the Continental and was reminded of its arcane codes of behavior. Suddenly a movie that had previously seemed like a low-stakes underworld revenge thriller opened up into something more fantastical and globe spanning, with a dense mythology. The TV mini-series “The Continental: From the World of John Wick” is set in the 1970s and stars Mel Gibson as Cormac, the hotel’s New York manager at that time. Colin Woodell plays a young version of the franchise’s Winston Scott, who is tasked by Cormac to solve a family problem that may threaten the viability of this super secret criminal hideaway.Also arriving:Sept. 4“Chucky” Season 2Sept. 28“Dino Pops” Season 1 More

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      Fall TV Reflects the Hollywood Strikes, but Not How You Think

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      The tired familiarity of the reality-heavy network schedules is a reminder of the issues that led to the work stoppages.Fall TV this year rolls in amid the fog of the writers’ and actors’ strikes. The networks have been slow to commit to their schedules, still rejiggering their lineups for September and beyond. Cable outlets have been bumping the release dates of in-the-can shows, lest they wither without promotion by their stars, an activity prohibited by the actors’ guild during the strike. The streaming archives beckon.At first glance the fall network schedules suggest the work stoppages have had an impact: They are overstuffed with reality competitions and game shows, whose employees generally work under different contracts from those of the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA.ABC’s Wednesday prime-time lineup consists of “Celebrity Jeopardy!” followed by “Celebrity Wheel of Fortune” followed by “The $100,000 Pyramid.” On Thursdays CBS added a new competition called “Buddy Games” to go along with the long-running “Big Brother” and another installment of “The Challenge: USA.” On Fox, celebrities endure military training on Mondays (“Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test”), guess songs on Tuesdays (“Celebrity Name That Tune”) and croon in ridiculous outfits on Wednesdays (“The Masked Singer”).However, aside from “Buddy Games,” essentially summer camp competitions for groups of adult friends, none of the shows in the previous paragraph are new — the networks have been churning out unscripted prime-time shows by the bushel for years. Overall, their lineups are eerily steady, more like an extended summer season of familiar titles and reruns than an uncharacteristically barren fall slate.So the schedules end up reflecting the strikes not because they look radically different, but because their numbing sameness is a reminder of the issues that led to the work stoppages — that everything is simply “content,” and the only kind of value is monetary value.Jesse L. Martin and Maahra Hill in NBC’s “The Irrational,” one of the few new scripted series arriving this fall.NBCWhat are we to assume about the studios’ feelings toward the people who make television when their offerings suggest apathy regarding the people who watch it? Or perhaps these lackluster lineups are the product of corporate strategy, now that seemingly all of TV has been consolidated within a few media megaliths that are transforming how shows get made and creators get paid.It is little wonder ABC is happy to offer up singing contests and celebs spinning the Wheel when Disney, its owner, would like you to subscribe to Hulu and Disney+ for scripted family and prestige shows along with franchise fare like the Marvel and “Star Wars” series. CBS? Oh, you mean the broadcast home of the Viacom empire, where you can also watch repeats of Paramount+ shows like “FBI True” and “Yellowstone?”(This shift isn’t limited to networks, of course. Think not of HBO as a refined tastemaker in a separate TV universe from home-makeover shows and insects pulled from people’s bodies — imagine instead an array of treasures and garbage and the “Friends” catalog all piled up under one meaningless heading: Max.)This is hardly the first fall to be full of reality shows. ABC was always going to air another season of “Dancing With the Stars” (this will be its 32nd); NBC was always going to air “The Voice” (Season 24); CBS was always going to air “Survivor” (45) and “The Amazing Race” (35); and Fox has slotted “Hell’s Kitchen” (22) in its fall line-up plenty of times. Even though the CW is largely ceding any claim to original programming, opting instead to fill out its fall schedule with an array of existing foreign shows, it is still airing new episodes of its version of “Whose Line Is It Anyway?,” which begins its 12th season in November.NBC is spreading out the reruns of the “Law & Order” and “Chicago” franchises, its reliance on the Dick Wolf universe a core programming strategy for much of the past three decades. ABC will keep “America’s Funniest Home Videos” alive until the sun eats the earth. Fox’s animated comedies are shelf stable for the time being.Even most of the new fare colors comfortably inside the lines. ABC’s “Golden Bachelor” is “The Bachelor” with a 71-year-old widower at its center. NBC has two scripted dramas: “The Irrational” and “Found,” each a spin on the crime procedural, lest any American go more than a few minutes without seeing someone ducking under yellow crime-scene tape. Fox has a new cartoon from Dan Harmon (“Krapopolis”), his third current animated series. CBS is airing the original British version of “Ghosts” as a companion to reruns of its American version — an inspired choice in its way, but also a simple one, given the adaptation’s success.Otherwise, our newcomers include the already mentioned “Buddy Games,” hosted and executive produced by Josh Duhamel, who previously made two movies based on the same concept, and two CBS game shows: “Lotería Loca,” hosted by Jaime Camil, a TV version of the bingo-style game lotería; and “Raid the Cage,” an adaptation of an Israeli show that involves people grabbing prizes out of a cage. Lastly, there is Fox’s “Snake Oil,” a hybrid of “Shark Tank” and “Bullsh*t,” hosted by David Spade.From left, Charlotte Ritchie, Katy Wix and Jim Howick in the original British “Ghosts,” which CBS will run alongside reruns of its own version.Monumental Television, via CBSTo be fair, the networks have been counted out many times before, and shows like ABC’s “Abbott Elementary,” which scored eight Emmy nominations in July, and “Ghosts” demonstrate that there is still plenty of fun and specialness to be had in a broadcast format. Those and other sitcoms and procedurals could be back with new episodes in the new year. (Or perhaps even earlier, if the strikes somehow get resolved soon.) But such sparks are rare.Way back in the early 2000s, premium cable shows began to mostly outshine network ones and plenty of streaming series have since done the same — winning awards, amassing cachet, draining our wallets. Fair enough! After a while, it seemed like the networks were barely putting up a fight; cop shows and singing competitions as far as the eye can see, plus “Grey’s Anatomy” and “The Simpsons.”But now the new flashy ride at the fair is not a pricier, fancier platform; it’s free, ad-supported streaming television. The increasing popularity of these platforms, like the Roku Channel, Tubi, Pluto and Amazon’s Freevee, suggests that viewers want to recreate the basic-cable experience of yesteryear with marathons of classics, but they also want fun and interesting original shows (Freevee’s “Jury Duty” got four Emmy nominations this year, including for best comedy) and are happy to tolerate ads. That’s a network television audience.That also means networks could occupy a different space in the public imagination — the main floor isn’t the penthouse, but hey, it’s not the garden unit or the storage basement either. Mass-appeal comedies and long-season dramas still have value in the streaming era, perhaps more now than ever before as a way to lure parents and children away from their individual screens.Maybe a fall of game shows will eventually alienate viewers and consequently, convince program executives of the worth of actual creativity. Maybe it will lead to more adventurous attitudes in Hollywood when the strikes eventually end. Maybe the next time the networks have to put things on hold, we will actually feel the loss. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Minx’ and ‘Office Race’

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      The cheeky Starz show wraps up its second season, and Comedy Central premieres an original film.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, Sept. 4-10. Details and times are subject to change.MondayOFFICE RACE (2023) 8 p.m. on Comedy Central. This original movie from Comedy Central stars Beck Bennett as Pat, a lazy office worker, and Joel McHale as Spencer, his annoying boss. Wanting nothing more than to one-up his boss, who is also fitness obsessed, Pat commits to running a marathon with plans to defeat him. Alyson Hannigan, Kelsey Grammer and J.B. Smoove round out the cast.LITTLE RICHARD: I AM EVERYTHING 9 p.m. on CNN. After its world premiere in January at Sundance, this documentary about Little Richard is coming to small screens for the first time. Directed by Lisa Cortés, the film walks viewers through the rock ’n’ roll pioneer’s complicated personal and professional legacy. John Waters, Billy Porter, Mick Jagger and others help revisit and contextualize his life and his impact.TuesdayDetroit Lions running back Jermar Jefferson.Paul Sancya/Associated PressINSIDE THE NFL: 2023 SEASON PREVIEW 8 p.m. on The CW. The official N.F.L. season is starting on Sept. 7 (after three weeks of preseason games) with a game between the Detroit Lions and the Kansas City Chiefs. And as the season begins, so does this long-running companion show, now on the CW. Hosting this year is Ryan Clark, who’s joined by a panel of former players: Jay Cutler, Chad Johnson, Chris Long and Channing Crowder. The show also features previously unaired highlights and mic’d up commentary from N.F.L. players during games.WednesdayCRIME SCENE CONFIDENTIAL 9 p.m. on ID. Season 2 of the series returns for those fascinated by true crime: In the first episode, the crime scene investigation expert Alina Burroughs focuses on the 1988 murder of Margie Coffey, a young single mother in Ohio. A local police lieutenant was originally convicted in the case and served time in prison. But with advances in DNA and forensic technology, looking back at old cases can provide new information.EVOLUTION EARTH 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). As our planet rapidly changes, animals have had to keep pace and adjust their behavior to survive the ever changing environment. This series, over five episodes, explores areas all over the world (urban, rural, remote), checking in with the animals to see what adjustments they have had to make.ThursdayFrom left: Steven Kolb, Elaine Welteroth, Nina Garcia, Brandon Maxwell and Law Roach on “Project Runway.”Zach Dilgard/BravoPROJECT RUNWAY 9 p.m. on Bravo. The 20th season of this long-running show, and an All-Star season at that, is coming to a close. After many challenges, including creating looks out of toys from F.A.O. Schwarz, designing uniforms for fan-favorite cast members from “Below Deck” and the first ever “free” episode, where contestants could design whatever they wanted, only one person can be crowned winner.FridayMINX 9 p.m. on Starz. Though this series was originally axed by HBO Max before being brought back to life by Starz, it will successfully complete its second season this week. Originally centered on the creation of the first erotic magazine for women in the 1970s, the show’s second installment digs deeper into the lives and experiences of its characters, including Tina (Idara Victor) and Richie (Oscar Montoya), who have gotten closer as Joyce (Ophelia Lovibond) and Doug (Jake Johnson) drift further apart.SaturdayIMITATION OF LIFE (1934) 10 p.m. on TCM. This original film version of Fannie Hurst’s 1933 novel follows the widow Bea Pullman (Claudette Colbert) and her housekeeper, Delilah Johnson (Louise Beavers), who decide to start a business together in Atlantic City after Delilah shares her pancake recipe with Bea. The critic Andre Sennwald wrote in his November 1934 review for The New York Times, “On the whole the audience seemed to find it a gripping and powerful if slightly diffuse drama which discussed the mother love question, the race question, the business woman question, the mother and daughter question and the love renunciation question.”SundayTHE MASKED SINGER 8 p.m. on Fox. The goofy competition show, where celebrities don a full-body costume to sing and have judges guess who they are, is back for its 10th season. Nick Cannon is back to host, and the judges Ken Jeong, Nicole Scherzinger, Jenny McCarthy-Wahlberg and Robin Thicke are also returning. This special premiere will include performances from some of the show’s alumni as we gear up to guess who Donut, Anteater, Hawk, Hibiscus and S’More are.Norman Reedus in “The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon.”Emmanuel Guimier/AmcTHE WALKING DEAD: DARYL DIXON 9 p.m. on AMC. The last time we saw Daryl Dixon, he was riding away on his bike at the end of “The Walking Dead.” This series starts as he washes up in France and involves himself in an autocratic movement in Paris.DREAMING WHILST BLACK 10 p.m. on Showtime. Originally a BBC and A24 production, this British comedy follows Kwabena (Adjani Salmon), who decides to leave his soul-crushing, dead-end office job to work toward his dream of being a filmmaker. Along the way he has to deal with the financial risk and must manage his love life, all while navigating the racism, microaggressions and elitism. More

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      in Theater

      Nathan Louis Jackson, Writer for the Theater and TV, Dies at 44

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      He wrote plays that tackled big issues like the death penalty and gun violence. He also wrote for series including the superhero saga “Luke Cage.”Nathan Louis Jackson, an acclaimed playwright who grappled with serious issues like the death penalty, homophobia and gun violence — and was also known for his work on television shows like “Luke Cage,” a Netflix series about a Black superhero — died on Aug. 22 at his home in Lenexa, Kan., a suburb of Kansas City. He was 44.His wife, Megan Mascorro-Jackson, confirmed the death. She said that she did not know the cause, but that Mr. Jackson had had cardiac problems over the past few years, including an aortic dissection and an aortic aneurysm.Mr. Jackson was still attending the Juilliard School when his play “Broke-ology,” premiered in 2008 at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts. The story of a Black family in a poor neighborhood of Kansas City, Kan., where Mr. Jackson grew up, it focuses on the confrontation between two brothers over the care of their father, William (played by Wendell Pierce), who has a debilitating case of multiple sclerosis — a disease that Mr. Jackson’s father, who died in 2001, also had.Reviewing the play in The Boston Globe, Louise Kennedy wrote that “what makes Jackson’s writing feel true and fresh — aside from its great humor”— was the way he portrayed the brothers. Malcolm, she noted, “isn’t just a selfish striver,” nor is Ennis “just a resigned martyr” — and William “isn’t just a passive victim.”Crystal A. Dickinson and Wendell Pierce in “Broke-ology,” which one critic called “a very promising debut in the big time for a playwright with a rare quality: heart.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA year later, after Mr. Jackson received his artist diploma in playwriting from Juilliard, “Broke-ology” opened at the Off Broadway Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center.“‘Broke-ology’ is a decidedly imperfect work,” Robert Feldberg wrote in The Record of Hackensack, N.J., “but it’s a very promising debut in the big time for a playwright with a rare quality: heart.”Mr. Jackson’s next play, “When I Come to Die,” explored the emotional turmoil of a death row inmate whose execution goes awry — the drug cocktail that was supposed to kill him managed only to stop his heart temporarily — forcing him to wonder what to do with an unexpected extension of his life, and if he will face another execution.“I started thinking about people in weird time positions, and these cats know exactly how much time they have left on this earth,” he said of death row inmates in an interview with The New York Times in 2011, when the play was running Off Broadway at the Duke Theater, a production of Lincoln Center Theater’s program for emerging playwrights. “But what happens if you get more of it?”Although Mr. Jackson established an early place for his work in New York City, he remained close to his Midwestern roots. In addition to living in Kansas, he was the playwright in residence at the Kansas City Repertory Theater, in Missouri, from 2013 to 2019.From left, Michael Balderrama, Chris Chalk and Neal Huff as Adrian Crouse in Mr. Jackson’s play ‘When I Come to Die.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat theater staged productions of “When I Come to Die” and “Broke-ology” and the world premieres of his “Sticky Traps,” about a woman’s response to protests by a homophobic preacher at the funeral of her gay son, who had killed himself, and “Brother Toad,” about the reactions in the Kansas City community to the shooting of two Black teenagers.“The beautiful thing about his writing is that he never told the audience what to think,” Angela Gieras, the executive director of the Kansas City Rep, said in a phone interview. “He’d share a story that was compelling and truthful and let the people have their own conversations.”Nathan Louis Jackson was born on Dec. 4, 1978, in Lawrence, Kan. His father, Cary, was a heating and cooling service technician. His mother, Bessie (Brownlee) Jackson, was a preschool teacher.Nathan said that he was not a good student in high school, and that he studied as little as he could.“Ironically, I failed English,” he told Informed Decisions, a Kansas State University blog, in 2017. “I didn’t want to read Shakespeare.”He graduated from Kansas City Kansas Community College with an associate degree in 1999. At Kansas State, where he majored in theater, he made his first attempt at playwriting by creating monologues for forensics competitions.“I’m there in the Midwest, and there ain’t no other Black folks doing this, so I’d just end up doing August Wilson every time,” he told The Times. “I wanted to do a piece that speaks for me, so I said, ‘I’ll just write my own stuff.’”Mr. Jackson wrote two plays in college that were recognized after his graduation by the Kennedy Center. He won the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award twice, for “The Last Black Play” and “The Mancherios,” which he adapted into “Broke-ology,” and the Mark Twain Comedy Playwriting Award, also for “The Last Black Play.”After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 2003, Mr. Jackson acted in a children’s theater, took graduate courses in environmental science and writing, and worked as the manager of a barbecue restaurant.He moved to New York City to attend Juilliard in 2007. He and his wife lived in a diverse neighborhood there, and he remembered seeing people from all over the world on the subway.But at the theater, “I did not see that,” he said in an interview with KCUR-FM, a public radio station in Kansas City, Mo., in 2016, “What I saw was predominantly white, older, and with a little money in their pockets.”He strove to write plays featuring “people marginalized by poverty, incarceration or gun violence,” Ms. Mascarro-Jackson said in a phone interview.“Lots of times they were Black characters,” she added, “because that’s what he knew.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Jackson is survived by his mother; a daughter, Amaya; a son, Savion; a sister, Ebony Maddox; and a brother, Wardell.Over the last decade, while continuing to work in the theater, Mr. Jackson also wrote episodes of several TV series, including “13 Reasons Why,” “Resurrection,” “S.W.A.T.,” “Southland,” Shameless” and “Luke Cage,” for which he was also an executive story editor. He spent a lot of time in Los Angeles, where he suffered the aortic dissection in 2019.“The series makes a bigger, grander statement about African American men and how we view them,” he told The Kansas City Star in 2016, referring to “Luke Cage,” a Marvel show whose title character is a former convict (played by Mike Colter) with superhuman strength and unbreakable skin who solves crimes in Harlem.He added: “It is undoubtedly a Black show. But at the same time, it’s just a superhero show. We deal with something all the other superheroes deal with. We just do it from a different standpoint.” More

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      Two Documentaries on School Integration Offer New Views of an Old Problem

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      Premiering in September, the films take very different looks at what has and hasn’t changed in the almost 70 years since Brown v. Board of Education.You most likely know that the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education ruled that racial segregation in U.S. public schools was unconstitutional. You may also know that the decision ordered states to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.”Less talked about is the 1969 decision in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, which, after years of obstruction by many states through the 1950s and 60s, ordered that racially segregated schools must immediately desegregate. In other words: You know what we said back in 1954? We actually meant it.Black and white students rode the bus together as Black students from the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston were bused to mostly white enclaves of South Boston.Associated PressSome of the ramifications and subsequent events are captured in two complementary documentaries from the PBS “American Experience” series. “The Busing Battleground,” directed by Sharon Grimberg and Cyndee Readdean, explores the long buildup to and catastrophic results of busing in Boston, by which students were bused to schools outside their neighborhoods in an effort to desegregate the public school system. Busing saw the city explode in violence and exposed the ferocity with which residents were willing to defends ethnic neighborhood borders. It premieres on Sept. 11.“The Harvest,” produced by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Douglas A. Blackmon and the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Sam Pollard, takes Blackmon back to the small Mississippi town where he grew up, where he was part of the first local class of integrated students to matriculate from first grade to high school. It premieres on Sept. 12.The films arrive at a time when many of the hard-fought gains of desegregation have been reversed and when some schools, according to a report released in May by the U.S. Department of Education, are more segregated than they were before courts intervened. Both underscore what has changed — and what hasn’t — in the almost 70 years since Brown while also questioning tidy presumptions.“These two stories are in conversation with each other,” said Cameo George, the executive producer of “American Experience.” “In some ways they’re almost counterintuitive, because we are all accustomed to thinking that integration in the South was violent, and in the North communities were much more open and progressive. By putting the films together, it just challenges your assumptions in a really interesting way.”Both films also grapple with an unavoidable question: Why has the process been so difficult?Today, when segregation is rife in even some of the country’s most ostensibly liberal enclaves, the reasons aren’t always plain or openly acknowledged. In the decades following Brown, they were often pretty overt. A lot of white parents, in the supposedly enlightened North as well as the historically segregated South, were willing to go to great lengths to keep their children away from their Black peers. And a lot of politicians were happy to help them make it so.When many people think about segregated facilities — schools, water fountains, restrooms — they think about the Jim Crow South. But “The Busing Battleground” shows just how determined many white citizens were to keep Boston schools segregated, particularly in the largely Irish enclaves of South Boston and Charlestown.Many teens and parents hurled bricks, bottles, rocks and racist insults at the buses bringing Black students to South Boston High School in 1974. Donald Preston/The Boston Globe, via Getty ImagesThese were self-enclosed neighborhoods that didn’t cotton to change, or to Black people. “The Busing Battleground” shows how Black Bostonians, led by the tireless Ruth Batson, tried to integrate the city’s schools by way of the ballot box, direct action and the courts. The white people in power, led by Louise Day Hicks, then the head of the Boston School Committee, stonewalled and riled up public support for the status quo.“All the liberal, white, ‘Oh, that stuff happens in the South, we’re so progressive’ stuff just got thrown right out the window,” Readdean said in a video this month. “Nobody was progressive anymore.”Grimberg, on the same video call, added: “Our hope is that people see this as an important Northern civil rights story. We’ve heard lots of Southern stories, but this is a story of a very long, protracted struggle for educational rights for Black kids in the North.”By 1974, when the Federal judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. mandated the integration of Boston schools by busing, the tension had long been building. Images captured from the first days of busing, when Black students from Roxbury came to South Boston High School, remain disorienting in their violence. Many teens and their parents hurled bricks, bottles and rocks at the buses — and hurled the N-word with abandon. As you watch, you have to keep reminding yourself that this is a Northern city in the 1970s.One of the most potent and memorable images of the period, a Pulitzer-winning photo by Stanley Forman, shot during a Bicentennial protest by white high schoolers against busing, shows a Black attorney and civil rights activist, Ted Landsmark, being held by a couple of white protesters while another moves to assault him with an American flag. Landsmark is interviewed in the film, describing how he feared for his life on that day.“The Harvest,” too, features an image from Bicentennial commemorations, this one from Blackmon’s small hometown, Leland, Miss. The home movie shows a festive and peaceful parade through downtown, with Black and white Cub Scouts stepping in unison while a band, which includes a young Blackmon, marches along.As seen in “The Harvest”: Striking sharecroppers camped out in Washington, across from the White House, in 1966 after being kicked off their land near Leland, Miss.Scherman Rowland/UMass AmherstThe integration of Leland public schools wasn’t always so idyllic, as the film makes clear. But compared to what was happening in Boston, which one observer describes as “up South,” the Leland process was indeed a stroll down the street.Blackmon, who is white, was part of Leland’s class of 1982, the first integrated group of students to matriculate through the town’s public schools. (He did his senior year in another town after his father got a new job.) He recalled an upbringing defined by interracial friendships at school that generally didn’t carry over after the final bell rang — when, for instance, he wanted to play G.I. Joe dolls with his Black friends, and parents on both sides of the racial divide discouraged it.What he didn’t realize then was that the new private schools popping up after the 1969 Supreme Court decision were organized largely by White Citizens’ Councils — essentially white-collar versions of the Ku Klux Klan — with secret covenants to exclude Black teachers and students. Beneath the placid surface, Leland’s schools were resegregating.“There really was this overt plan to create a whole new system of schools, and to try to extract, if possible, all white kids from the public schools and then to actively undermine those schools,” Blackmon said from a family lake house in South Carolina. “But Leland was different in that it avoided some of that incredibly rough stuff that did happen in some other places in the South, and that we certainly saw in Boston.”Blackmon and his co-producer, Pollard, who is Black, worked together previously on the 2012 documentary adaptation of Blackmon’s 2009 book “Slavery by Another Name,” an account of the Jim Crow-era convict leasing system, for which he won a Pulitzer. It made sense to have a racially integrated creative team for such a contentious story. The makers of “The Busing Battleground” also found this to be the case.“It was valuable to have the two of us on this project,” Readdean, who is Black, said. “Sometimes, especially because the subject’s so raw for the people that lived through it, some of the whites maybe were more forthcoming talking to Sharon than they would have been with me. We wanted interviews with truthful recollection, not something where they’re trying to be all P.C.The Leland High School basketball team, as seen in the 1979 yearbook. The journalist Douglas A. Blackmon is at the far left in the back row.Leland School District“I felt the same way when we were talking with the Black participants, that they could just reveal what they wanted to reveal talking to me.”Both films come to the same unfortunate if inevitable conclusion: The schools of Boston and Leland have largely resegregated since the ’70s, with many white families fleeing to private or parochial schools, or to the suburbs. But Blackmon found some silver linings in the lives of his Black former classmates, some of whom left and came back to fill key municipal positions.One, Jessie King, is now the school district’s superintendent, at a time when Mississippi’s public schools are on the upswing. Another, Billy Barber, is police chief.They are the better part of the harvest that gives the film its title, residents who seized new opportunities and then gave back to the community where they were raised. They’re a reminder that not all of the purpose and intent that accompanied the integration of Leland schools have faded.“At a very fundamental level, the lesson and the takeaway is that you reap what you sow,” said George, the executive producer. “If you want a better educated population, and you want kids to graduate with not just academic skills, but personal skills, so that they can become productive members of the work force and productive members of society, you have to invest in that. It doesn’t just happen.” More

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      in Theater

      Franne Lee, Tony Winner Who Also Costumed Coneheads, Dies at 81

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      She worked on “Sweeney Todd” and “Candide” and also on the early seasons of “Saturday Night Live,” contributing to the look of the Blues Brothers and the Killer Bees.Franne Lee, a costume and set designer who while doing Tony Award-winning work on Broadway in the 1970s also made killer-bee suits and cone-shaped headwear for early “Saturday Night Live” sketches, helping to create some of that era’s most memorable comic moments, died on Sunday in Atlantis, Fla. She was 81.Her daughter, Stacy Sandler, announced the death, after a short illness that she did not specify.Ms. Lee did some of her most high-profile work in the 1970s while in a relationship with the set designer Eugene Lee. She collaborated with him on productions including an acclaimed “Candide,” directed by Harold Prince at the Chelsea Theater Center in Brooklyn in 1973. It moved to the Broadway Theater in Midtown Manhattan the next year and ran there for 740 performances.“The production has been designed by those experts, Eugene and Franne Lee,” Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times, reviewing the Broadway incarnation, “and they have knocked the innards out of this respectable Broadway house and made it into an obstacle course of seats, musicians’ areas, catwalks, drawbridges and playing platforms, with one conventional stage thrown in at the end of the space for good measure and convenience.”The Lees shared the 1974 Tony Award for scenic design, and Ms. Lee won another for costuming, her specialty. As the story goes, one person who saw that “Candide” was a young producer named Lorne Michaels, who was creating an unconventional late-night show for NBC. He was impressed and brought the Lees in as designers on the show that, when it made its debut in October 1975, was called “NBC’s Saturday Night” but soon became “Saturday Night Live.”The original “S.N.L.” cast quickly made its mark with outlandish sketches, and Ms. Lee was integral to the look of those now famous bits — dressing John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in black when they became the Blues Brothers, turning cut-up long johns into the yellow-striped Killer Bee costumes, and more.Dan Aykroyd, left, and John Belushi as the Blues Brothers on “Saturday Night Live.” Ms. Lee designed their costumes.Edie Baskin/OnyxIt was costume designing on the cheap. Ms. Lee’s father, a tool-and-die maker, came up with the bouncy springs that were the Killer Bees’ antennae, which she finished off by sticking Ping-Pong balls on the ends. John Storyk, who first met Ms. Lee in 1968 when both worked at the short-lived Manhattan club Cerebrum, recalled in a phone interview dropping by the Lees’ apartment and seeing on her work table the beginnings of the cones that became the defining feature of the Coneheads, the extraterrestrials who were a recurring presence on the show in the late 1970s and later got their own feature film.In an interview for the book “Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers and Guests” (2002), by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller, James Signorelli, a longtime “S.N.L.” producer, said that Ms. Lee influenced fashion beyond the studio walls.“The way Franne Lee, our costume designer, dressed Lorne for the show suddenly became the way everybody in New York was dressing,” he said. “Lorne used to come out onstage wearing a shirt, jacket and bluejeans. Nobody had ever seen it. But before you knew it, everybody was sitting around in Levis and a jacket.”Laraine Newman, an original “S.N.L.” cast member, recalled one time when Ms. Lee herself became part of the action — not on the show, but during a photo shoot Ms. Newman was doing with Francesco Scavullo, the noted fashion and celebrity photographer. Ms. Newman was working a vampire look, complete with fangs.“Franne found me this incredible Edwardian black lace dress,” Ms. Newman said by email, “and we did wonderful shots with that, and then Scavullo had this idea that Franne should be my victim, and so there are shots of me like biting Franne’s neck. It was so hard not to laugh because Franne was making these faces trying to look horrified or drained of blood. It’s a wonderful memory, and it still makes me laugh when I think about it. She was so very talented.”Len Cariou, left, and Angela Lansbury in the original Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd.” Ms. Lee won a Tony Award for her costumes.Martha Swope/New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman CenterThat talent earned Ms. Lee another Tony Award in 1979 for her costume designs for the original Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd,” the Stephen Sondheim musical about a murderous barber who has his victims made into meat pies. The show was directed by Mr. Prince, who Ms. Lee said initially told her he was reluctant to take on the project despite her urging.“He told me: ‘You’re crazy, absolutely crazy! You can’t do a musical about people eating people,’” she recalled in a 2002 interview with The Tennessean newspaper. “‘I said, ‘Why not?’”Frances Elaine Newman was born on Dec. 30, 1941, in the Bronx to Martin and Anne (Marks) Newman. Her father had a small machine shop on Long Island, and her mother was an offset printing supervisor.Ms. Lee was studying painting at the University of Wisconsin, her daughter said, when she discovered her love of theater and costume design. She was married to Ralph Sandler at the time and relocated to Pennsylvania when his job took him there, doing costume and design work for local theaters. The couple divorced in 1967, and Ms. Lee relocated to New York.“Franne and I both answered the same ad,” Mr. Storyk said, recalling how they found themselves working at Cerebrum. Mr. Storyk designed the club; Ms. Lee was what was called a guide, leading patrons through the place, which promoted consciousness-raising and featured various interactive environments. It closed in less than a year.Ms. Lee, though, continued to pursue her theatrical interests, creating costumes for groups including Theater of the Living Arts in Philadelphia. She also met Mr. Lee. Among their earliest collaborations as scenic designers — with Ms. Lee still credited as Franne Newman — was a version of “Alice in Wonderland” staged by the director André Gregory in 1970 that drew rave reviews.Ms. Lee in 2015.Amber Arnold/Wisconsin State JournalThe two became a couple and Franne adopted Mr. Lee’s name, though the nature of their relationship remained hazy; Patrick Lynch, a longtime aide to Mr. Lee, said the two were never formally married. (Mr. Lee died in February.) In any case, their personal and professional partnership continued until 1980, the year Ms. Lee left “Saturday Night Live.”She continued to design costumes for shows in New York in the 1980s and ’90s, including a few short-lived Broadway productions and, in the mid-’90s at the Public Theater, Christopher Walken’s examination of the life and legend of Elvis Presley, “Him.”She also tried the West Coast for a time, working on a few television shows and made-for-TV movies. In 2001 she settled in Nashville, where she was involved in founding Plowhaus, a gallery and artists’ cooperative. She later lived in Wisconsin, and since 2017 she had lived in Lake Worth Beach, Fla., about 65 miles north of Miami, designing costumes for theaters in that area.In addition to her daughter, from her marriage to Mr. Sandler, Ms. Lee is survived by a son from that marriage, Geoffrey Sandler; a son with Mr. Lee, Willie Lee; a brother, Bill Newman; six grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.The frugal D.I.Y. ethos of her “S.N.L.” years stayed with Ms. Lee throughout her costume-designing career. In 2018 she worked on costumes for a production of Conor McPherson’s thriller “The Birds” (based on the same source material as the Alfred Hitchcock movie) at the Garden Theater in Winter Garden, Fla. It required a wedding dress, which she bought at a thrift shop for $45.“I’m a senior citizen,” she told The Orlando Sentinel, “so if I go on Wednesday, things are half price.” More

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      in Movies

      Stream These Great Movies Before They Leave Netflix in September

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      This month’s losses for U.S. subscribers include some of the most beloved titles and characters ever to grace a screen.The titles leaving Netflix in the United States are a real smorgasbord this month, from genre movies to children’s fare to two of the most beloved Oscar winners in cinematic history. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)‘Colette’ (Sept. 12)You may think you know what you’re getting when you click “play” on a period literary biopic starring Keira Knightley — but the director Wash Westmoreland is delightfully uninterested in hewing to expectations. This is no ordinary period literary biopic, because the French writer Colette was no period literary figure; she was an ahead-of-her time scribe and an unapologetically bisexual hedonist whose lust for life made for especially lively prose. Knightley is clearly having a good time subverting her prim-and-proper persona, while Dominic West is deliciously doofy as the man who brings her out of her shell before receding into her long shadow.Stream it here.‘Annihilation’ (Sept. 29)The writer and director Alex Garland is a rare creator of science fiction who truly seems interested in the “science” piece of the puzzle; unlike many of his contemporaries, who use the tools of futuristic fare as window dressing for mediocre action and adventure, he crafts films of ideas, approaching the possibilities of future technologies and alien interactions with contemplation and intellectual heft. Like his “Ex Machina” before it, this adaptation of the novel by Jeff VanderMeer is also as interested in character as it is in genre (if not more so), focusing on a biologist (a fine, and occasionally ferocious, Natalie Portman) who is investigating a possible alien life force while also grappling with the recent death of her husband (Oscar Isaac). Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez and Tessa Thompson round out the cast.Stream it here.‘Clear and Present Danger’ (Sept. 30)Harrison Ford’s second outing as Tom Clancy’s venerable hero Jack Ryan is a tense, well-crafted geopolitical thriller. Newly appointed as the C.I.A.’s acting deputy director, Ryan uncovers a scorcher of a secret: a covert war, conducted by intelligence operatives against a Columbian drug cartel, authorized at the top levels of the U.S. government. Willem Dafoe, Joaquim de Almeida and the “Mission: Impossible” favorite Henry Czerny are among the evil-doers, while James Earl Jones returns as Ryan’s boss and confidante. Ford’s “Patriot Games” director, Phillip Noyce, also returns, a director so deft at putting together a suspense sequence that he manages to generate nail-biting tension with a scene about deleting some files.Stream it here.‘Lawless’ (Sept. 30)The director John Hillcoat and the musician-turned-screenwriter Nick Cave reunited after the triumph of “The Proposition” (2005) for this 1930s crime film with a phenomenal cast, including Jason Clarke, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hardy, Shia LaBeouf, Gary Oldman, Guy Pearce and Mia Wasikowska. Cave’s story, adapted from the historical novel “The Wettest County in the World” by Matt Bondurant, concerns the bootlegging Bondurant brothers (Clarke, Hardy and LaBeouf), who find their business interests threatened by a crooked U.S. Marshal (Pearce) and a rival bootlegger (Oldman), among others. The period costumes and settings are stunning, and the sprawling cast meshes nicely; Hardy is especially strong as a man of few words but furious fists.Stream it here.‘A League of Their Own’ (Sept. 30)This 1992 smash, directed by Penny Marshall, is based on the true story of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League, formed in 1943 to help keep the national pastime going while World War II pulled male ballplayers out of the majors. Geena Davis stars as Dottie Hinson, star catcher of the Rockford Peaches, and Tom Hanks as Jimmy Dugan, the former baseball star and current drunk who coaches the team when he’s sober (which is infrequent). With able support from Jon Lovitz, Madonna, Lori Petty, David Straitairn and many more, this one is smoothly assembled, sensitively acted and riotously funny.Stream it here.‘Nanny McPhee’ (Sept. 30)A decade after winning the Oscar for her screenplay adaptation of “Sense and Sensibility,” Emma Thompson returned to the typewriter to pen the film version of a slightly less venerated literary property: the “Nurse Matilda” children’s novels, by the British author Christianna Brand. But it doesn’t feel like slumming; Thompson invests her screenplay with all the winking wit you would expect, and she absolutely goes for broke in her performance of the title role, a kind of warts-and-all Mary Poppins. The director Kirk Jones orchestrates the chaos with a sure hand.Stream it here.‘Rocky I-V’ (Sept. 30)The first five films of the Rocky franchise — starring, written and sometimes directed by Sylvester Stallone — vary wildly in style, quality and critical and commercial reception. But taken together, they create a fascinating portrait of mainstream American moviemaking from the late 1970s to the early ’90s, as the modest, character-driven drama of the 1976 original slowly but surely gave way to the montage-heavy, jingoistic bombast of “Rocky IV” from 1987. But for better or worse, each film offers its own pleasures, from the specificity of Stallone’s dialogue to the richly played supporting characters (particularly Talia Shire’s Adrian and Carl Weathers’s Apollo Creed) to the crowd-pleasing closing bouts.Stream “Rocky” here, “Rocky II” here, “Rocky III” here, “Rocky IV” here and “Rocky V” here.‘Star Trek’ / ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ (Sept. 30)When J.J. Abrams was announced as the director of a newly rebooted series of “Star Trek” films, he was still best known for his television work. The decision smacked of some desperation; after several “Star Trek” television spinoffs and numerous big-screen resurrections, what could anyone (let alone a not-yet-proven filmmaker) add to the mythos of the original “Enterprise” crew? But Abrams’s inaugural 2009 entry was an absolute treat, a sleek, well-cast popcorn picture that reinvigorated the original characters and story while also playing appropriate tribute. The 2013 follow-up, “Into Darkness,” is less successful but still an entertaining diversion, particularly for Benedict Cumberbatch’s take on Ricardo Montalbán’s villainous “Khan.”Stream “Star Trek” here and “Star Trek: Into Darkness” here.‘Titanic’ (Sept. 30)The 1912 sinking of the Titanic luxury cruise liner remains a source of fascination (and tragedy) in American culture, thanks in no small part to the long shadow cast by James Cameron’s 1997 Oscar winner and box office champion. It’s the kind of film that can be described only as “old fashioned”— not as a slam but simply as a statement of fact. Cameron so deftly mixes spectacle and special effects with poignant human interest (thanks primarily to the warmth and chemistry of its stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet) that one is legitimately reminded of “Lawrence of Arabia” and “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” It’s a throwback epic, and its appeal has proved timeless.Stream it here.‘Warm Bodies’ (Sept. 30)We’ve seen no shortage of zombie horror in the 21st century, from “28 Days Later” — written by the aforementioned Garland — to the “Dawn of the Dead” remake to the (paradoxically) unkillable “Walking Dead” series and its many spinoffs. But we haven’t seen very many zombie rom-coms, which makes this 2013 charmer from the writer and director Jonathan Levine (“Long Shot”) all the more commendable. Adapting the novel by Isaac Marion, Levine tells the story of R (Nicholas Hoult, later of “The Great”), a zombie who falls hard for the still-living Julie (Teresa Palmer). Well, every relationship has its issues.Stream it here. More

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      in Television

      5 Stand-Up Comedy Specials to Stream for the Labor Day Weekend

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      Todd Barry, Tracy Morgan, Sasheer Zamata, Chris Fleming and Jason Fried riff on weird characters, middle age, lost histories and more.Todd Barry, ‘Domestic Shorthair’Stream it on YouTubeTodd Barry speaks fluent sarcasm. After decades of refinement, honing his low-key deadpan into something flexible and distinctive, he can turn a sentence inside-out with the mildest shift in intonation, instantly divorcing what he says from what he means. The pivots in his jokes are subtle but crisp. Ever since David Letterman retired from late night, sarcasm has no better champion. Barry starts waving its flag as soon as the applause settles down on his very funny new special. “That is the type of forced fraudulent crowd response that will propel this whole show,” he says, enough of a hint of a smile to soften the blow.Barry is a taut joke teller more than a yarn-spinner. But his punchlines emerge from anecdotes filled with details about curious characters he’s met, tales that have the quirkiness and surprise of what you find in a sensitively observed short story. There’s the Uber drive who apologizes for not talking during the ride, the waiter who warns against the Italian dressing in a whisper and the cabinet salesman who says he loves his job because it allows him to eat with his customers. He filters the slightest interactions with them through his arch responses, mocking but not mean. His real adversaries are not people but hyperbole, nonsense or any pointless excess of emotion. And some of his most unexpected laughs are in his own mixing up of mountains and molehills. “My printer broke recently,” he said, gently shifting gears to a parody of concern. “Sorry to bum you out.”Tracy Morgan, ‘Takin’ It Too Far’Stream it on MaxIt’s been a rough couple of years for Tracy Morgan, the veteran comic, “30 Rock” scene stealer and all-time great talk-show guest. He almost died after being hit by a Walmart truck, then during the pandemic, his marriage fell apart. In his baggy new special, he says his wife “took that social distancing too far.”If you were looking for a bracing and introspective hour on his troubles, you came to the wrong place. Morgan just brings up his problems to crack wise about them. There is little attempt at timeliness (the expiration date on jokes about the slap at the Oscars has passed) or ambitious set pieces with tight jokes snapping into place. This is a comic coasting on charisma, which he can do as well as anyone. His main subject is middle age. He’s out to prove you don’t need to be mature in your 50s. Instead, he doubles down on sex and fart jokes, yanking his shirt up, rubbing his belly, finishing with a dozen or so minutes on what it’s like to sleep with older women. Ultimately, there’s no escaping the fact that aging changes you. Morgan confesses he pushed a lap dance away at a strip club, shouting: ‘You know my sciatica flared up!”Sasheer Zamata, ‘The First Woman’Stream it on YouTubeWhy does everyone know Amelia Earhart but not Jerrie Mock, the first woman to fly solo around the world? According to the comic Sasheer Zamata, whose second stand-up special is full of hidden histories, it boils down to marketing. Mock kept to herself, saying, “The kind of person who enjoys being alone in a plane is not the kind who enjoys being continuously around other people.” Zamata says she doesn’t “like going places or doing things,” so perhaps she can relate. Earhart married her publicist, and Zamata calls her the “original Kim Kardashian.”Her digression, filled with punchlines, is just one example of how this special unpacks lost or taboo stories. The political centerpiece of the set is about how we should talk more about female sexuality, especially for girls. She relates a story about masturbating for the first time with a lint roller, then opens the topic to the audience, resulting in some colorful crowd work. Zamata, a former “Saturday Night Live” cast member, turns jokes into carefully crafted vignettes, often hinging on a twist that leads her to widen her eyes for a long pause. She’s a poised performer, effortlessly moving from crowd work to dating tales to political gibes. Her description of being hit by a car becomes a peg for how people (including doctors) ignore Black women when describing pain but pay attention to them on the question of what is cool. Her solution? Black women should champion illness (“Sickle cell is sick as hell!”), and disease will be “gentrified out of our bodies.”Chris Fleming, ‘Hell’Stream it on PeacockWhenever a new Chris Fleming video appears on my feed, I stop and pay attention. In a scroll of sameness, he’s thrillingly unexpected, a shaggy-haired Los Angeles absurdist who often begins with an offhand and narrow idea (sitting in his car, considering the appeal of Adam Driver, say), then riffs on it with a gusto and flamboyance that accumulates its own comic momentum. His is a pointedly niche sensibility but responsible for some of the biggest laughs I have had on social media. His debut, a scattershot affair that mixes a performance at a theater with sketches, has some very funny oddball ideas, like his celebration of the Nissan Cube as the “one true asexual icon in American culture.”His precise dissection of basic families who think they’re really eccentric is a characteristic hobby horse. But these bursts of lunacy don’t build on one another. In the translation to long form, the pacing gets a little slack. Part of the problem might be editing (you must kill your darlings, especially when they involve sketches that go on too long) and an undercooked overall conceit. Fleming can’t seem to entirely decide if his aesthetic is going to be polished or ragged, his material revealing or purely absurd. He’s smart enough to commit to the personal and the weird, but absurdity requires its own rigor.Jared Fried, ‘37 & Single’Stream it on NetflixIn the crowded field of dating jokes, Jared Fried, an amusingly hyperventilating self-deprecator exploring red flags, online profiles and tensions between millennials and Generation Z, distinguishes himself in a couple of ways. In his very strong act-outs, he does an inspired impression of fake laughing that projects real discomfort. It gooses a familiar bit about married people talking to singles about the perils of matrimony into something spiky and layered. Secondarily, not since Leslie Jones has a comic done more with bulging eyes. While dead eyes can kill an act, expressive ones can illuminate it. More