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      The Outsize Genius of ‘I’m a Virgo’

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      The giant teenager in Boots Riley’s new Amazon Prime series is among television’s boldest moves in a while.Brobdingnag is somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. On the map included in Volume II of his 1726 satire “Gulliver’s Travels,” Jonathan Swift depicts it as an enormous peninsula somewhere north of California. Brobdingnag is the land of the giants: When Gulliver is shipwrecked there, he finds a race of people nearly 60 feet tall, wise and moral, repulsed by his descriptions of a venal and warlike British society. The West Coast no longer teems with such gentle giants, but according to the writer, director and musician Boots Riley, there remains one well south of Brobdingnag, near the spot Swift designates P. Monterey — there’s a giant living in Oakland, Calif.Riley’s new Amazon Prime series, “I’m a Virgo,” is a Swiftian fable by way of Charles Dickens, Ralph Ellison, Alan Moore and Spike Lee. It is, centrally, the tale of Cootie, a once-in-a-generation giant who becomes both a folk hero and a public enemy. As someone tells him in an early episode, “People are always afraid, and you’re a 13-foot-tall Black man.” Cootie’s adoptive parents keep him as sheltered as they can; he grows up watching the action on his block via a periscope. He’s a learned giant — his father requires him to read 10 hours a day — but he’s also electrified by screens, parroting lines from his favorite reality-TV shows. (His mantra — “from that day forward, I knew nothing would stop me from achieving greatness” — is a quote from a “Bachelorette”-style program.) His parents, trying to persuade him to stay in the safety of the two-story apartment they’ve built, show him a scrapbook of giants throughout history, many Black, enslaved or lynched for their gigantism; he will, they clearly fear, be a too-visible man, a projection screen for the fears and desires of others. (This is not a fate reserved for giants alone.) But when Cootie finally leaves the house as a teenager, he falls in love with this world, in all its sublimity and stupidity. Hearing bass for the first time, thumping from a new friend’s trunk, he becomes an angry poet: “It moves through your body like waves,” he tells his parents. “And it sings to your bones.”Riley’s Oakland, like Swift’s own West Coast, is rendered surreal by allegory. It has a housing crisis, police violence and rolling blackouts, but it also has a community of people who shrink to Lilliputian pocket size (they wear receipts for clothes) and a fast-food worker named Flora who can work at a Flash-like hyperspeed. There’s also a rogue white comics artist called the Hero who exacts vigilante justice on his largely Black neighbors — but even the idea of the fascistic law-and-order superhero seems pedestrian here. This show is not subtle about its vision or its allegories. “As a young Black man,” Cootie says, repeating his parents’ warnings, “if you walk down the street, and the police see that you don’t have a job, they send you directly to jail.” His new friends all laugh at his credulousness until one replies, “Metaphorically, that’s how it goes.”One of Cootie’s first rebellions is his insistence on trying a Bing Bang Burger, whose comically unappealing commercials he sees constantly on TV. We’re shown slack-jawed observers making videos before we see Cootie himself, standing in line, hunched over, his back pressed against the fluorescent lights of the burger joint. The actor Jharrel Jerome shows us Cootie’s trepidation by always playing him small, tilting his head against his shoulder, collapsing his frame inward, his lips in an expectant pucker. But when he sees Flora, assembling burgers with blurry speed, there’s a moment of connection. Cootie expands as she hands him his order and calls him “big man.” He bumps into the exit sign on the way out.It is fastidiously, hilariously committed to the bit, constantly doubling down on the logistics of Cootie’s bigness.“I’m a Virgo” comes on the heels of a few ingenious experiments in TV surrealism, from “Atlanta” to “Undone” to the recent farce “Mrs. Davis.” Perhaps Amazon and Riley were emboldened by these examples or energized by the idea of transcending them, because this series has the courage of its confabulations. Its fantastical concept works in metaphor just the same way it works in fact, as it reminds us with proud bluntness. Drunk in the club, Cootie waxes poetic to his friend Felix: “Friends,” he says, “can help you feel the inside of yourself and the rest of the world at the same time.” Felix takes a minute to soak that in before he nods his head and responds, more or less, “Hey, bruh, that’s real.”Premium cable networks and streamers have long built their brands around boundary-pushing and risk, even as their prestige series often settle into safe, predictable formulas. Then there are properties like the ever-expanding Marvel Universe, which might once have used superheroes to dramatize truths about our own world but has now disappeared into its own multiverses, swallowed up by digital battles and green-screen vistas. “I’m a Virgo” is a visual and ideological counterpoint to all this. It uses the conceit of a 13-foot-tall Black man to reach for insights about race, class and injustice, and it is fastidiously, hilariously committed to the bit, constantly doubling down on the logistics of Cootie’s bigness. Plenty of series mess around with television’s narrative structures or genre conventions, but this show is willing to break the most basic visual conventions of how you put humans together onscreen.Its fantastical concept works in metaphor just the same way it works in fact.And so Cootie has to be as real as television can make him. Most of his scenes are filmed using elaborate forced-perspective shots and scale models, not green screens or CGI. You can feel the difference. Cootie tends to look as if the walls are closing in, because they are. The show’s ramshackle, claustrophobic genius can be thrilling. I remember being stunned watching Christopher Nolan depict the depths of a wormhole using only practical effects; my awe was not dissimilar watching Boots Riley figure out how to shoot a slapstick, ultimately pretty sexy love scene between a normal-size woman and a 13-foot-tall man without leaning on digital effects for every frame. We see Flora and Cootie largely in close-ups, Flora centered neatly in her frame while Cootie fills his to the edges. There are occasional two-shots that use dolls as stand-ins, but mostly the scene uses sound to keep the actors in contact. The scene occupies nearly half its episode, as they work to figure out how their act of love can even be consummated, and Riley figures how to show it to us, and we learn how to see it — but it’s sweet, not leering. Usually, in Riley’s frame, the giant man is the real thing, and the world around him is either distorted or built anew. With Flora, whose own strangeness the show also honors and protects, the world reimagines itself in relation to the giant.The visual gags exist alongside other spectacular fantasies. One of Cootie’s friends organizes a general strike to protest the inequities of the health care system. There’s a guerrilla attack on a power plant. A vigilante cop is converted to communism. (What’s a wilder pitch: that the power of argument persuades a law-and-order ideologue to abandon carceral capitalism or that one kid in Oakland turns out to be really, really tall?) Riley, himself an avowed communist, has always been an unabashedly political artist, but what’s radical here isn’t the politics alone; it’s what the politics free the show to do. “I’m a Virgo” makes the idea of tearing up systems of power feel less destructive than boundless, and it does this by tethering its political vision to a revolution in the way we see human bodies onscreen. Its narrative feels almost spontaneous, teeming with strange and unexpected life. Riley has made his radicalism feel verdant, generative, self-sustaining. In the land of the only living giant, that’s real.Opening illustration: Source photographs from Prime VideoPhillip Maciak is The New Republic’s TV critic and the author of the book “Avidly Reads Screen Time.” He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Below the Belt’ and a Juneteenth celebration

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      A new documentary from Hillary Clinton about living with endometriosis is on PBS, and a commemoration of Black survival and culture streams live on CNN and OWN.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, June 19-25. Details and times are subject to change.MondayBLACK POP: CELEBRATING THE POWER OF BLACK CULTURE 8 p.m. on E! The N.B.A. star Stephen Curry is an executive producer and the actress La La Anthony the narrator of this four-part docu-series exploring the influence of Black celebrities and entertainers on pop culture. With a spotlight on Black icons including Muhammad Ali, Serena Williams and Spike Lee, the series demonstrates how figures like these have shaped music, film and sports — and American culture at large.JUNETEENTH: A GLOBAL CELEBRATION FOR FREEDOM 8 p.m. on CNN and OWN. The second iteration of this commemorative celebration of Black culture and survival aims to educate and uplift viewers. The presentation includes preshow coverage of Black trailblazers and creators (beginning at 7 p.m.), and performances from artists like Miguel, Kirk Franklin, SWV, Davido, Coi Leray and Jodeci. The three-hour special will be streamed live from the Greek Theater in Los Angeles.TuesdayChristopher Lloyd, left, and Michael J. Fox in “Back to the Future.”PhotofestBACK TO THE FUTURE (1985) 6 p.m. on AMC. Set in 1985, this Oscar-nominated film turned cult classic follows the teenage Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) after he is accidentally sent back in time, to the year 1955, and encounters his parents as high schoolers who haven’t fallen in love yet. After inadvertently causing his mother to fall for him instead, Marty must find a way to secure his future existence by bringing his parents together — while also figuring out how to get back to the year 1985. “In less resourceful hands, the idea might quickly have worn thin,” Janet Maslin wrote in her review of the film for The New York Times. But the film’s director, Robert Zemeckis (“Forrest Gump,” “The Polar Express”), she writes, “is able both to keep the story moving and to keep it from going too far,” concluding that “one of the most appealing things about ‘Back to the Future’ is its way of putting nostalgia gently in perspective.”WednesdayMike Ricker, left, and Eric Tumbarello in “LA Fire and Rescue.”Chris Haston/NBCLA FIRE & RESCUE 8 p.m. on NBC. This new docu-series from the producers of the fire and rescue squad drama “Chicago Fire” tells the real-life stories of members of the Los Angeles County Fire Department. Through footage of rescues and interviews with firefighters, the series documents the lived experiences of those working on the front lines of California’s (and the nation’s) most populous county.CHINA’S CORPORATE SPY WAR 10 p.m. on CNBC. Featuring interviews with government officials and lawmakers, including the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, and the U.S. Senators Mark Warner and Marco Rubio, as well as a number of intelligence experts, this hourlong documentary explores the world of economic espionage, focusing on China’s campaign to steal trade secrets from some of the biggest businesses in the United States. Reported by Eamon Javers, a veteran Washington correspondent and author of a book on corporate spying, the documentary argues that the campaign is more malicious than a desire for information in order to compete with American companies — maintaining that it’s rooted in China’s wish to destroy key businesses in its pursuit of global economic domination.BELOW THE BELT: THE LAST HEALTH TABOO 10 p.m. on PBS. Four women ranging in age and background share their stories in this feature-length documentary about the struggles of patients with endometriosis, a chronic condition that the World Health Organization has said affects 10 percent of women and girls. Hillary Clinton is one of the executive producers of the film, which explores how patients often fight to have their symptoms believed, diagnosed and treated in a broken healthcare system.ThursdayAnthony Anderson, left, and his mother, Doris Hancox, in “Trippin’ With Anthony Anderson and Mama Doris.”Simone Padovani/E! EntertainmentTRIPPIN’ WITH ANTHONY ANDERSON AND MAMA DORIS 10 p.m. on E! In this eight-episode mini-series, the Emmy Award-nominated actor Anthony Anderson (“Black-ish,” “Law & Order”) takes his mother, Doris Hancox, on a six-week vacation through England, France and Italy. The mother-son duo navigate new cultures, and their clashing personalities, in a series of adventures — like walking in African Fashion Week and hunting for truffle — as their relationship deepens.FridayTauba Auerbach in “Art in the Twenty-First Century: Bodies of Knowledge.” Art21ART IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: BODIES OF KNOWLEDGE 10 p.m. on PBS. This Peabody Award-winning series about contemporary visual art follows a group of 12 artists who share their thoughts and creative processes while painting, designing and sculpting pieces of artwork inspired by the current moment. The second episode of Season 11 — which premiered in April — focuses on the artists Anicka Yi, Tauba Auerbach, Hank Willis Thomas, and the Guerrilla Girls as they explore the concepts of truth and historical record through art.SaturdayMarlon Brando in “On the Waterfront.”Turner NetworksON THE WATERFRONT (1954) 8 p.m. on TCM. Inspired by a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning articles by Malcolm Johnson on terrorism and racketeering on New York’s waterfront, written for The New York Sun in 1948, this Academy Award-winning crime drama focuses on union violence and corruption among a group of longshoremen in Hoboken, N.J. The film stars Marlon Brando (who won Best Actor for his role) as Terry Malloy, a boxer turned dock worker who becomes embroiled in the murder of his colleague Joey (Ben Wagner). With the rest of the longshoreman afraid to speak out after rumors spread that Joey was killed because he planned to testify against their corrupt boss and the union, the film follows Brando’s Malloy as he wrestles with how to move forward. A review in The Times described the drama as “an uncommonly powerful, exciting and imaginative use of the screen by gifted professionals.”Sunday2023 BET AWARDS 8 p.m. on BET. Streaming live from Los Angeles, the BET Awards — an annual ceremony that celebrates the work of Black artists and athletes — will commemorate hip-hop’s 50th anniversary with a lineup of hip-hop performances spanning decades and styles. Featured artists include Fat Joe, Soulja Boy, DJ Unk, E-40, and Lil Uzi Vert, among many others. More

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      Samantha Irby Says It’s OK to Hate Your Body

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      As far as descriptions of writers go, “humorist” has an old-fashioned, almost quaint ring to it, the literary equivalent of haberdasher or lamplighter. But across four book-length collections — the newest is the best seller “Quietly Hostile” — Samantha Irby has always brought scabrously honest, never pat and, it must be said, operatically scatological vivacity […] More

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      A Few of Andrew Koji’s Favorite Things

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      The star of the Max martial-arts drama “Warrior” starts his days with meditation and Morning Pages, and powers down with PlayStation.In November, Andrew Koji wrapped the third season of “Warrior,” the martial-arts television drama inspired by the writings of Bruce Lee. He’s still recovering.At 35, he’s “just past the peak age of an athlete,” he said, massaging his upper arm during a video call from London, “and I am feeling it.”In “Warrior,” which begins airing June 29 on Max, Koji plays a Chinese immigrant whose search for his sister forces him into the role of hatchet man for a gang.After he finished work on Season 2, Cinemax, which produced the first two seasons, canceled the show, the pandemic hit and his gut told him that “Snake Eyes,” his 2021 G.I. Joe movie, wasn’t going to be good.“I was like, ‘This is it — my time has come, my career’s over and the world is ending,’” he said. “A little bit dramatic there.”Then he landed a part in the Brad Pitt movie “Bullet Train,” playing an alcoholic father intent on avenging his son’s death. And “Warrior” was picked up by Max for a third season.“I’ve got more options now,” he said, “but I’m definitely not in that position where I’m getting great scripts sent to me. I’m still having to hustle and figure out the next move and be smart.”Koji’s list of cultural essentials is more categorical than specific, like a book in his hand and a poem in his head. “I try to live my life as non-materialistically or attached to things as possible,” he said. “But it did make me think, ‘What are the things that I do need?’”These are edited excerpts from our conversation.1MeditationMeditation is the start of my day and something I always take with me. It has helped me through tough times. I believe it helps entering the state of “flow” for creativity and helps us sit through and deal with negative and challenging states of mind.2Pen and PaperI need this wherever I go. I journal for my own sanity and use a similar practice of the “Morning Pages” from “The Artist’s Way.” I write ideas, thoughts, images, things I want to develop. For every character I play, I create a notebook with back stories, inner monologues, abstract ideas, and add to it over time.3Poetry From MemoryIf I’m not on a job, I like to keep my brain sharp by memorizing a speech, a poem or a passage that I connect with. The last one was Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If.” Before that it was a passage from a Taoist book about how insignificant we are in the vastness of the cosmos, yet how we should still strive to be a better part of it.4ExerciseTraining has become a big part of my life again after almost 10 years of more unhealthy and self-destructive habits during my early struggling acting years. It helps me avoid or work through negative states. Anything that can take me out of my head and into the body — training with weights, the punching bag, Brazilian jiu-jitsu or yoga.5TeachersIf we don’t keep learning throughout our lives, I think we stagnate. I’ll always look to study as much as I can between work, studying with a Japanese language tutor, meditation teachers, martial-art teachers or any subject that helps inspire me creatively and think differently about something. I studied film and theater in college, and I remember my drama teacher at the time saying, “You should never become an actor.” Then I found a class at the Actors’ Temple, and a great teacher called Tom Radcliffe opened my eyes to maybe I could be doing this, that I had the potential to be a good actor.6Nonfiction“Man’s Search for Meaning,” Bruce Lee’s “Striking Thoughts,” “Hardcore Zen,” “The Road Less Traveled.” “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” is what I’m reading now. Older books that remind me why we do what we do on a deeper level I find helpful in this increasingly superficial modern western world.7Traveling in JapanKyoto is one of my favorite places — exploring temples, disconnecting from technology, going off the beaten path. One of my favorite trails so far was the Kumano Kodo, an ancient pilgrimage route.8American and Japanese ClassicsPop and more modern music I can take or leave. But Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Frank Sinatra, Joe Hisaishi and Shigeru Umebayashi — any music that evokes or moves my soul, rather than being light and catchy, can help inspire some creative thought.9Stand-up ComedyDave Chappelle, Bill Hicks, Jim Jefferies — I used to have a habit of taking life incredibly seriously, and I need to remember to laugh and find humor in things that annoy or upset me. Stand-up comedy is such an incredible and primal craft form. I’ll usually try and find a comedy show or stand-up night when I’m in a new city.10PlayStationLast but not least, an indulgence. Watching TV and films gets my gears turning too much, but PlayStation helps me switch off my brain. More

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      ‘The Fully Monty’ Returns After 25 Years, as a TV Show

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      A new series on Hulu and FX reunites the feel-good British film’s characters and its writer, 25 years later and in another age of austerity.“‘The Full Monty’ is Sheffield, and Sheffield is ‘The Full Monty,’” said the actor Robert Carlyle in a recent video interview.When the feel-good feature was released in 1997, the film put the former mining town in the north of England and Carlyle, its lead, in the spotlight. Made on a budget of about $3 million, “The Full Monty” garnered more than $250 million at the global box office; at the time, The New York Times declared the film “by far the biggest success at Fox Searchlight Pictures.”Written by Simon Beaufoy, the film followed a group of unemployed steelworkers in Sheffield, including Carlyle’s Gaz and his best friend Dave (Mark Addy), as they attempted to raise money and wrest back control of their lives by performing a strip show for the town’s women.Now, a new eight-part TV series, premiering Wednesday on FX and Hulu, returns to Sheffield 25 years later, in another period of austerity and economic downturn. Co-written by Beaufoy — with Alice Nutter, a screenwriter and former member of the music group Chumbawamba — the show reunites the film’s original cast, including Carlyle, Addy, Tom Wilkinson, Paul Barber and Lesley Sharp.“If they left it any longer, I think we may have all been dead,” deadpanned Carlyle, 62.“The Full Monty” was Addy’s debut film performance, and led to roles in “A Knight’s Tale” and Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood,” and, later, in HBO’s “Game of Thrones.” Carlyle had been best known for playing Begbie in Danny Boyle’s 1996 film “Trainspotting.” He also collaborated with the director on “The Beach,” “28 Weeks Later” and “T2 Trainspotting.”In a recent video interview, with Carlyle calling from New York and Addy joining from his home in Yorkshire, north England, the pair discussed the parallels between “The Full Monty” film and the TV reboot, and why it felt like the right time to revisit their characters. Below are edited excerpts from that conversation.From left, Addy and Carlyle in the show, which picks up the characters’ lives in Sheffield, 25 years after the events in the film. Ben Blackall/FXWhat was Beaufoy’s pitch for getting the gang back together?MARK ADDY I remember getting an email from Simon checking whether I’d have any interest in being part of a state-of-the-nation drama seen through the prism of characters that we’ve met 25 years ago. How have they fared in the intervening years? He was interested in looking at the N.H.S., Britain’s public health care service, the care system, education — all aspects of our society — in the same way he did with “The Full Monty.”ROBERT CARLYLE There are a lot of things that are precarious at the moment in the country. Conservative rule, austerity — people have been chipped away at, and so has the infrastructure of the country. That’s as good a reason as any to do something which reflects people’s current experiences.What’s changed for Gaz and Dave in the intervening years?CARLYLE From Gaz’s perspective, I don’t think a lot’s changed. It’s still pretty much a hand-to-mouth existence for him. He does a variety of jobs to survive.ADDY Dave and Jean, who’s played by Sharp, have moved to a slightly nicer area of Sheffield, but they’re struggling in their own way.“The Full Monty” film explored how several issues affected the characters’ masculinity. In the first episode of the series, Gerald (Wilkinson) questions what he’s “allowed” to say these days. What identity issues are the characters grappling with in the show?ADDY Our generation is struggling to know how to address a person. You’re worried you’re going to offend somebody by misgendering them completely innocently. But that has come from a place of more acceptance and tolerance. It’s a problem that’s been thrown up by an improvement.CARLYLE Everyone has to be respectful of gender pronouns and stuff like that. It’s easy to be dismissive, but it’s important. The way that I look at it, it’s not much to be asked to call someone “they” or whatever they want to be called.One of the last great “isms” that seems to be up for grabs is ageism. Hopefully the show addresses that a little. Just because you get to your 60s, you’re not worthless.With Barber’s character, Horse, who is now in his 70s, you see how the welfare system that failed younger men is now failing an older generation.From left, Horse (Barber), Gaz (Carlyle) and Dave (Addy). In the show, the characters navigate another period of austerity and economic downturn in Britain. Ben Blackall/FXCARLYLE The whole Horse arc is tragic. There’s a moment I loved, you know when he goes to the supermarket? He’s got the packet of sausages and he’s slapping it against the self-checkout scanner. He says, “Where are all the checkout girls? They’ve all gone.” He’s trying to put money into that machine and the guy says, “Use a card.” But he hasn’t got a card. That’s something you don’t see on TV.At times, the show is also unapologetically silly. Why did a sense of lightness feel like the right approach?CARLYLE It’s what Simon Beaufoy does brilliantly. You can’t escape the politics in “The Full Monty,” but he’s able to balance that with humor. There’s no way any of these characters are self-pitying. It’s vital for it to have upbeat moments.ADDY It’s about how life goes on, the human spirit will hopefully see people through. The silliness tempers the tragedy.CARLYLE If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. And who wants to sit about crying all the time?Why do you think the show found a home on FX and Hulu in the United States, and on Disney+ in Britain, rather than on a British TV network like the BBC or Channel 4?CARLYLE I know it was offered to them. They weren’t interested. When I was told it was going to be Disney+ and FX, I was really surprised. This film had gone down in history as one of the biggest-grossing British independent films of all time. No one in Britain wants to stick some money into this?The film was released in a specific cultural moment in Britain in 1997. How important was that to its success?ADDY Massively.CARLYLE Tony Blair, his Labour government, Britpop. The whole explosion of popular culture. We were lucky, Mark and I, to be in the center of that.ADDY It was like, the worst of times are behind us, and things are going to get better.‌CARLYLE It rode along on the wave of optimism that prevailed at the tail end of the ’90s. But of course, that lasted about three days. Now, we’re back to where we’d been.The original film, released in 1997, was made on a budget of about $3 million, and garnered more than $250 million at the global box office.How did “The Full Monty” shape both your careers?ADDY I hadn’t done a film before. I’d done a lot of theater and was starting to make my way in the TV world. It changed everything for me. I remember Bobby saying at the time, this could do for you what “Trainspotting” did for me.CARLYLE “The Full Monty,” my God, who could have predicted that? It opened up a lot of opportunities across the pond. “The Full Monty” has been like a vast, warm shadow that’s followed me through my whole career.How do you feel about the fact that Gaz and Dave keep their clothes on this time?ADDY Relieved.CARLYLE Absolutely delighted, as I’m sure the audience will be. When Simon got in touch, the second line of the email said, “By the way, there won’t be any stripping.” More

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      Danny McBride Keeps It Righteous

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      The party started early. Like, 10:30 a.m., still-drinking-lousy-hotel-coffee early. It was late March, a warm and overcast coastal morning, and all I knew of the day’s schedule was that Danny McBride, the creator and star of the HBO comedy “The Righteous Gemstones,” planned to swing by with a driver who would take us to an oyster farm, located somewhere among the islands and salt marshes of South Carolina Lowcountry.I did not expect him to arrive in a fully stocked party bus with several of his closest associates, including his longtime collaborator David Gordon Green, though in retrospect perhaps I should have. While reporting a different story two months earlier, I had met Walton Goggins, who plays the oily televangelist Uncle Baby Billy in “Gemstones.” When I told him that I was going down to Charleston to see McBride, who lives and produces the series in the area, Goggins responded, “I hope you like tequila.”As an icebreaker, I shared this anecdote with McBride. On cue, his wife, Gia, an art director, furnished a bottle of Código 1530. “This is George Strait’s tequila!” McBride beamed, and a look ping-ponged around the bus that asked, “Too early?”It was not too early. As we raised candy-colored plastic shot glasses in the glow of two TV screens made to look like aquariums, I decided to stash my notebook for a while: Day 1 of my visit would be less about taking notes than about taking in the life McBride has made for himself since moving here from Los Angeles.McBride does little press, so getting to know him was, of course, the goal. When “Gemstones” returns on Sunday for Season 3, it brings back what has been the most Danny McBride of his creative efforts. It is his third HBO series — following the cult-favorite baseball comedy “Eastbound and Down” (2009-13) and the deranged public school comedy “Vice Principals” (2016-17) — and he created it alone. It sets a new personal benchmark for creative cursing and comic male nudity, which was already high.McBride created “The Righteous Gemstones” and stars as Jesse, the eldest son in a family of televangelists. (With Walton Goggins.)Jake Giles Netter/HBOMcBride’s characters offer “a funny and deeply complex view of men in general, especially men in America,” said his “Gemstones” co-star Edi Patterson. (With Adam Devine.)Jake Giles Netter/HBOIt is also his most Southern show. Both previous HBO series were set down South, but “Gemstones” is the first since he and his production company, Rough House Pictures, which he shares with Green and another longtime collaborator, Jody Hill, moved from Los Angeles to Charleston in 2017. It’s a true hometown production.Of McBride’s various creations, his most beloved have been Southerners who embody a flamboyantly American brand of male chauvinism, and Jesse Gemstone is no exception. The eldest son in a dysfunctional family of rich televangelists, Jesse vies perhaps only with the hard-partying narcissist Kenny Powers of “Eastbound” for McBride’s biggest blowhard, a high bar.It is the kind of satire that comes from a deep place of knowing. The kind whose execution appears so effortless that its target might not realize it is satire.“I know probably not his whole audience sees it the way I do — they’ll think, like, ‘Oh, I’m exactly like Kenny Powers,’ or whatever — but I think that’s part of the fun and part of the appeal,” said Edi Patterson, who plays Jesse’s unhinged sister, Judy, and is a “Gemstones” writer. “It’s such a funny and deeply complex view of men in general, especially men in America.”But “Gemstones” has also seen McBride, 46, broadening his creative range. He oversees every script, directs episodes. Its cast is a true ensemble, and its many characters and subplots have enabled him to explore new kinds of stories and relationships, some with tear-jerking sensitivity.Friends and colleagues reliably describe him as genuine, inclusive, a deep thinker. But more than many screen stars he is both blessed and dogged by fans who sometimes have trouble remembering he is not his boorish characters.I wondered whether the lines ever blurred for him, and whether the fan confusion chafed. The answer to both, he insisted, was no. He had left Hollywood and built a tight creative community 2,500 miles away for many reasons, and one of them seemed to be to preserve his integrity of self.“You can think I’m whatever, and if it makes you like the show more because you think that’s me, go for it,” he said the next day as we toured the “Gemstones” studios, located at a mall, inside a former Sears. “I would rather people not know what my deal is than clearly have an understanding of where the line is drawn.”“I don’t see myself as some alpha, and so I feel like there’s something inherently that makes me laugh about trying to present myself like an alpha,” McBride said.Elizabeth Bick for The New York TimesFunny enough, comedy is not McBride’s favorite genre — he prefers horror and reality TV — nor is it something he always pursued.Early on, he also didn’t imagine himself on camera. He wanted to write and direct. Raised Baptist, mostly in Fredericksburg, Va., he went to film school at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, in Winston-Salem, where he met Green; Hill; John Carcieri, another writer for “Gemstones”; and Ben Best, who created “Eastbound” with Hill and McBride and died in 2021. The film school was tiny, and then only two years old.“Everybody in that school was a misfit or a reject,” Green said. Their group bonded over one another’s VHS collections and found creative kinship and freedom. “It was all just a bunch of kids that kind of were trying to figure it out,” he said.Green was the first to make a splash after college with the critically lauded indie film “George Washington” (2000). After a main cast member of his next feature, “All the Real Girls” (2003), bailed a week into shooting, Green called “the funniest guy I know,” McBride, who was doing below-the-line postproduction work in Los Angeles.McBride asked his boss for time off, was denied, then quit and drove to North Carolina, where Green was shooting. The film debuted to rapturous reviews.Still, McBride’s break came a few years later with “The Foot Fist Way” (2008). Directed by Hill and written by Hill, Best and McBride, the film starred McBride as a Southern strip-mall taekwondo instructor whose ego grossly outstrips his skills. Copies circulated after its 2006 Sundance debut, landing eventually with Adam McKay and Will Ferrell, then producing partners, who got it into theaters. “Eastbound,” which McKay and Ferrell executive produced, soon followed.“With comedy, one of the tricks is knowing how you come off just physically,” McKay said. “And Danny knows he comes off like a guy who, if you cut him off in the parking lot of a Sam’s Club, would key your car while you’re in there shopping.”McBride said he was always satirizing a certain kind of guy he grew up with, a kind of guy he was not. He seemed amused by the outward contradiction.“I don’t see myself as some alpha, and so I feel like there’s something inherently that makes me laugh about trying to present myself like an alpha,” McBride said over lunch on Day 2 at a restaurant near his home. (McBride lives on an island near Charleston, and he had driven us there in his golf cart.)“They’re all just sort of dudes that I think have subscribed to this antiquated way of what the rules are, like what a dude’s supposed to be,” he added. “They’ve committed to it, and then the reality of it isn’t adding up to the illusion.”“Danny knows he comes off like a guy who, if you cut him off in the parking lot of a Sam’s Club, would key your car while you’re in there shopping,” Adam McKay, a past collaborator, said.Elizabeth Bick for The New York TimesMcBride and I talked a lot about masculinity, about fathers and sons. It is a central theme of “Gemstones” — and the Bible, he noted — with its “Succession”-like story about a powerful megachurch pastor (John Goodman) and his three feckless children. (Adam Devine plays the younger brother, Kelvin.) McBride’s own father left when he was young, and he hasn’t seen him since high school. But he insisted he isn’t resentful.“I like how my life turned out,” said McBride, himself a father of two. “Him exiting from our life is probably part of what enabled me to be able to go on and do the things that I did.” The biggest effect it had on his life, he said, was to make him more determined to be a supportive parent.McBride loves his characters and the South in the complex, sometimes ruthless way of familial love. On the surface, “Gemstones” picks some easy marks — megachurches, new money, homoerotic jocks; Season 3 promises monster trucks and militias — but soft targets can be tougher to nail. What allows for authenticity is affection, however complicated.“That’s the tightrope,” he said. “A lot of times I see, when things in the South are presented, it’s always such a boring take.”Back on Day 1, after we all spilled out of the party bus, we wound up on a muddy oyster skiff off Wadmalaw Island, several shots down, pulling salty Sea Cloud oysters straight from their floating cages. Still, having only just met McBride, it was hard not to wonder how much of the day’s events were a show put on for the benefit of a reporter — a good-time performance by a performer who plays characters who are constantly performing.I asked everyone I talked to about him afterward; they all insisted I shouldn’t flatter myself.“I want you to feel really special right now, but that’s kind of Danny,” said Cassidy Freeman, who plays Jesse’s beleaguered wife, Amber. When McBride is the ringmaster, “everyone’s invited,” she added. Hill called him “the fun coordinator of our group.”Cassidy Freeman, who plays the wife of McBride’s character in “Gemstones,” described him as an inveterate host.Jake Giles Netter/HBOWhen I reported back to Goggins, he put it this way: “He’s certainly not doing that as a way to impress you.” Whoever shows up, McBride “just rolls out the red carpet.”McBride seems to find community wherever he goes. Otherwise, he imports it. Green moved from Austin to Charleston. Rough House’s president, Brandon James, who was on the boat, moved with McBride from Los Angeles. As of last month, Hill was preparing to move there with his pregnant wife. For a time, the country singer Sturgill Simpson was in the Charleston crew. He’s in Season 3.It seems like creative utopia. The region’s lower production costs have made it easier for Rough House to develop an array of dream projects, relying on local crews fed and ferried by local businesses. Green’s 2018 “Halloween” sequel, which McBride helped write, was an early example. Green’s first film in their “Exorcist” sequel trilogy, for which McBride has a story credit, is scheduled for October.“I think what they’re doing is going to now become the norm with what’s changing here in Hollywood and the way commercial entertainment is made,” McKay said. “I think stuff is going to go hyperlocal, and I think it’s going to be really cool.”Dare to dream. For now, McBride seems genuinely grateful to have found a way to keep poking fun at things with his closest friends — to keep the party going.“Ultimately it’s really just trying to entertain people and give them something funny to laugh at,” he said. “It makes us laugh. And so we assume hopefully it will make other people laugh, too.” More

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      ‘Based on a True Story’: The Vogue of Killer Content

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      A new Peacock satire puts the ethics of America’s true-crime obsession on trial by making a serial killer more than just a subject. He’s also the star.In a September 2022 episode of “You’re Wrong About,” a history podcast, the writer Michael Hobbes noted that the number of serial killers might be diminishing, which could be a problem, he said — for true-crime fanatics, anyway.“Step it up out there, serial killers,” he said. “You got to produce good content.”Hobbes was joking, but serial killers and the podcasts devoted to them feed an ever growing true-crime industry worth millions of dollars. Now the eight-episode Peacock satire “Based on a True Story,” which arrived in full last week, poses a troubling question: What if serial killers weren’t only the subjects but also the hosts, or even the producers, of a true-crime podcast?The idea isn’t entirely far-fetched. The true-crime world is saturated with podcasts that have been criticized as being ethically compromised and flawed, accused of offenses including plagiarism, racial insensitivity and pro-police bias. True-crime TV series have likewise been criticized: the docu-series “The Jinx,” for edits of a killer’s confession; “Making a Murderer,” for its presentation and omission of details; and the scripted drama “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” for humanizing its subject at the expense of Dahmer’s victims.“Based on a True Story,” created by Craig Rosenberg (“The Boys”), is a dark, comic sendup of true crime and its conventions, clichés and moral compromises. Matt (played by Tom Bateman) is a friendly plumber by day and the feared West Side Ripper by night. When a married couple in desperate need of excitement and cash (the pregnant Ava, played by an also-pregnant Kaley Cuoco, and Nathan, played by Chris Messina) discover his identity, they blackmail him into embarking on a scheme to create a podcast from the killer’s point-of-view.“Finally, some good luck!” Ava says. “A serial killer has fallen into our laps.”One central challenge, however, was how — and whether — the creators and cast of “Based on a True Story” could avoid committing the same crimes as the genre it claims to critique. It is, after all, still a comedy about some particularly gruesome murders.For Cuoco and Messina, it was important to keep the actions of their own characters in proper perspective.“Every day, I would turn to Kaley and say, ‘Is this supposed to be funny or serious here?’” Chris Messina (with Kaley Cuoco) said about trying to nail the tone of the satire.Peacock“In my opinion, Ava and Nathan are just as bad as the killer,” Cuoco, who is also an executive producer, said in a recent phone interview. “I know Ava is trying to believe, Well, this is us stopping him. It’s wrong and it’s funny at the same time.”Messina said, in a separate interview, that figuring out the tone had been a persistent struggle.“Every day, I would turn to Kaley and say, ‘Is this supposed to be funny or serious here?’” he said. “Obviously, with people being murdered, it’s no laughing matter. But there is a screwball comedy and terror along with a big heart.“Like, in the Coen Brothers’ ‘Fargo,’ when they are putting someone in a woodchipper. Why am I laughing one minute and horrified the next?”As the story gets underway, the absurdities quickly mount. In the beginning, Matt is supposed to be merely the interview subject, his voice disguised. But as the plot progresses, he emerges as a de facto showrunner.He upgrades the locations and equipment. He provides a new edit, changing the beginning, the ending and the music. He rejects every note about the narrative and the brand.“These seem like completely ridiculous conversations given that you are talking about people who have been murdered,” Bateman said. “And the funny thing is, he’s getting more and more artistically involved because it’s the first time in his life he’s ever felt seen.”Michael Costigan, an executive producer, said he thought the podcasters’ artistic squabbles also spoke to a common error in the true-crime world: losing track of the reality of the crimes.“Kaley’s character is pitching her ideas and forgetting something: ‘I’m sitting across from the perpetrator,’” he said. “We thought, This is absolutely talking about a metaphor for how millions of people get lost in stories as escapism. But what are they escaping into? What are they forgetting about?”Jason Bateman, another executive producer (no relation to Tom), said he had thought a lot about the show’s tone, and wanted to make sure it wasn’t too “silly” or “camp,” grounding character actions in reality. It was, he acknowledged, a difficult line to walk.Partly as a mirror of their own internal debates, the writers and producers created a character, played by Ever Carradine, who is the mother of a West Side Ripper victim. Her participation in a true-crime panel raises questions of whether she is honoring or exploiting her daughter.The show takes Nathan and Ava (Messina and Cuoco) to a true-crime convention, where all sorts of horrific crimes and killers are monetized. Elizabeth Morris/Peacock“We wondered in those scenes, what is the line?” Costigan said. “This is her wanting to talk about her daughter but then also participating in this world, too. We’re really hoping that the audience can have their cake and eat it, too — that you see the duality, see the world from both lenses.”Critics have pointed to recent studies in suggesting that fans of the genre, a large percentage of whom are women, can suffer from a kind of true-crime brain, a sense of heightened fear that is out-of-sync with the overall decline in violent crime of recent decades. It has also, as the advent of the web sleuth attests, created a lot of self-appointed experts. Ava’s wine-and-crime club of true-crime obsessives are fans of a podcast called “Sisters in Crime,” which leads her to believe she has mastered the genre.“Ava says things like ‘DB’ for dead body,” said Cuoco, who admitted that she is a huge “Dateline” fan. “She talks like she’s actually on one of those shows.”The same delusion that allows Cuoco’s Ava to figure out that Matt is the West Side Ripper also, unfortunately, leads her to believe she can control a serial killer — and to lose sight of the victims. In the original script, Ava and Nathan were to be the parents of teenagers, but when Cuoco became pregnant, she suggested that Ava be pregnant as well. It helped raise the stakes and address why Ava would be so blinded by her need to make money.“Her life is chaotic,” Cuoco said. “This is a distraction.”To find a potential fan base, the characters take an exploratory trip to CrimeCon, a series of real-life conventions for true crime aficionados, held in cities like Las Vegas, New Orleans and Orlando. As the actors and other producers explained, Rosenberg, himself a true-crime fan, had started thinking more about how criminals become celebrities after attending one such event. (A Peacock spokesman said Rosenberg was unavailable to comment because of the continuing writers’ strike.)“Craig said he heard people there discussing who their favorite serial killers were, as if they were football players,” Tom Bateman said. His character, walking around the convention floor, observes merchandise being sold in his name, as it is for other serial killers. But he isn’t ranking as highly as he thinks he should be.Cuoco said she had enjoyed making a humorous examination of the genre. But there were some sobering issues about true-crime, she acknowledged, that even this satire couldn’t fully address — including the future of the genre, which she said was “already at an extreme.”“There is a fine line,” she added. “I do not condone a serial killer doing a podcast in real life. But I feel like I would be one of those people who say, ‘This should be illegal,’ and then probably go in my car and listen to it. We can’t help ourselves.” More

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      Has America Ignored the Workplace for Too Long?

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      Barack Obama’s Netflix series “Working” tries to catch you up on decades of change — more than it has time for.Sheila steps into a wood-paneled room and addresses a ring of home-care aides in navy blue scrubs. Soft light filters through the curtains as they begin with a prayer: “Father God, as we go through this meeting, open up our minds, open up our ears, so we can hear, so we can see. Amen.” The aides take turns introducing themselves and offering brief sketches of their jobs. Sheila is their manager. They are employed by At Home Care, LLC, a business in southeastern Mississippi, and they are speaking to a camera — to a documentary crew that is filming their meeting for a mini-series titled “Working: What We Do All Day.” Some describe the closeness they have with the people whose bedpans they change, whose medications they administer. One, Caroline, her pulled-back hair flecked with gray, says she probably knows the clients she takes care of better than their own children do. Then Sheila asks: “Y’all have any questions for me? Any comments for me?”This innocent query opens a floodgate of discontent that takes both Sheila and the viewer by surprise. There are questions about time-keeping and payment-tracking systems. An aide named Amanda says a client had her drive 10 miles to pick up a pizza: “Is the GPS picking up all that?” No, Sheila says sympathetically, aides don’t get paid for extra driving. “It don’t seem right,” she concedes, “because you’re burning your gas.” None of this releases the pressure in the room; if anything, it just keeps building. “How are we supposed to live and survive?” one woman asks. “We have kids to take care of, homes to take care of.” Caroline notes that she has been with the company for almost three years without seeing a raise. Sheila stares downward, as though battening her emotional hatches.The scene is documentary gold. It requires no commentary, no interviews. It is a simple, powerful illustration of an American workplace, boiling like a pot of tomato sauce, ready to spit hot rivulets of grievance at anyone who stirs it. We feel for the workers. We feel for Sheila, who seems caught in a crossfire, trying her best. We feel righteous anger at whoever might be to blame for all this dissatisfaction. But who, precisely, is that? This is one of many big questions that “Working” may not have anywhere near enough time to answer.“Working” is a limited Netflix series hosted by Barack Obama and produced in part by Higher Ground, the production company he and Michelle Obama founded. In a voice-over, the former president tells us the production was inspired by Studs Terkel’s pathbreaking 1974 oral history, “Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do,” a hefty book that relayed the thoughts and stories of a wide swath of Americans, placing their words democratically side by side. The show’s four episodes, made available last month, aim for something similar, spending time with workers at all levels of the three companies it focuses on — letting viewers viscerally compare, say, the lives of a Manhattan housekeeper and the C.E.O. of the conglomerate that owns the hotel where she works. Money was clearly spent on this program. The cameras are slick, the angles creative, the songs expensively licensed. This may well be the production’s chief value: It is shockingly rare to see the daily lives of working-class people represented on TV so plainly and honestly, let alone with such a budget.In that context, watching Sheila’s meeting spiral out of control feels almost as subversive and revelatory as Terkel’s book. The problem arises when the show attempts to explain what, specifically, has gone wrong to make that eruption possible. Try as it might to stay close to the workers, the series can’t resist its periodic voice-overs, in which Obama delivers industrial-grade doses of information over spiffy archival footage of domestic workers or the movie “Wall Street” or the economist Milton Friedman. The scripts touch on all sorts of systemic forces, from the workers left out of the New Deal to the macroeconomics of the decline of the middle class.The fact that the show needs to reach all the way back to the New Deal era underlines a key problem: America’s perception of its own workplaces may be astonishingly out of date, steeped in denial about just how profoundly things have changed. The series wants to hang around working people, as Terkel did, to understand their hopes and dreams and contradictions. But it also wants to put forward an argument about what’s happened to American workers that involves catching the viewer up on several decades of complex changes — all presented by a politician who, you can’t help noting, happened to be in charge of the country for a key stretch of the time being explored.Did politicians participate in all that denial? This issue goes unaddressed, but the series does touch on the idea that popular media has long neglected the workplace. Television, Obama argues at one point, used to be full of representations of working and middle-class people and their jobs — say, in Norman Lear shows like “Good Times” or “All in the Family.” After the Reagan era, though, popular shows tended to follow upscale professionals, or to look more like “Friends” or “Seinfeld,” portraying people who lived comfortably despite being vaguely or fancifully employed. The nation’s jobs have shifted from industrial to service work, but even that seismic change — a work force now epitomized by nurses, waiters, retail clerks, delivery drivers — is rarely reflected in the stories we consume. Neither are developments like the erosion of job security, the rise of erratic scheduling, the invasive workplace surveillance — changes that marked Obama’s very own era in the White House.“Obtuseness in ‘respectable’ quarters is not a new phenomenon,” Terkel writes in his book. He offers the example of Henry Mayhew, whose 19th-century reports on working people in London “astonished and horrified readers of The Morning Chronicle.” The writer Barbara Ehrenreich later cataloged the way journalists and scholars “discovered” poverty in the 1960s after the breathless enthusiasm of the postwar economy cooled. (“We seem to have suddenly awakened,” the critic Dwight Macdonald wrote in a New Yorker review of one book on the topic, “to the fact that mass poverty persists.”) It’s easy to sense something similar in the audience for a documentary like “Working” — a sudden, belated understanding of the indignities creeping up toward even the most insulated professionals, and a growing sense of the workplace as a site of urgent, high-stakes conflict.In the final episode, Obama suggests his biggest worry is polarization, a fear of the problems that will arise if we cannot pay people enough for them to find dignity in their work. Terkel’s own animating concerns were more jarringly radical and succinct: He began his book with the admonition that since it was about work, it was, “by its very nature, about violence — to the spirit as well as to the body.” Obama is not quite there. His “Working” wants to show us what America’s jobs look like today, and to wake us to the possibility that we have spent too long underestimating their profound, dignity-robbing, politically consequential transformation. The series would need hours of explanatory montage to make up for all that lost time; if there’s anything it makes clear, it’s that the problem is far larger and more urgent than a few hours of television can aim to capture.Opening illustration: Source photographs from Netflix More