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      Don’t Stop Believin’? Considering a TV Golden Age, 10 Years Later

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      “Difficult Men,” Brett Martin’s book about the prestige TV boom, has been rereleased in a 10th-anniversary edition. In an interview, he reflects on how TV has changed since he wrote it.Tony Soprano, Don Draper and Omar Little glower from the cover of “Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution,” Brett Martin’s canon-codifying 2013 book about the prestige TV boom of the 2000s. But as difficult and revolutionary as those fictional antiheroes were, the title just as well describes their brilliant, gnomic, sometimes cruel creators, like David Chase (“The Sopranos”), David Simon (“The Wire”) and Matthew Weiner (“Mad Men”).“Difficult Men,” whose 10th-anniversary edition was published in paperback this summer, is a history of the remarkable moment, starting nearly 25 years ago, when business imperatives and risk-taking executives empowered ornery writers with network experience and chips on their shoulders to create era-defining, artistically lasting programs.One of the book’s through lines was that these shows tended to revolve around men who resembled the way their creators saw themselves: as mavericks taking arms against bureaucratic inertia. It’s a theme that Martin, a New Orleans-based journalist, said he might de-emphasize today in favor of delving into the depth and richness of the characters.“The artistic triumph the original shows allowed,” Martin said earlier this month, “was to create all these real human stories and specific, idiosyncratic characters — which is more important than the easy antihero formulation.”The past decade has seen a societal reckoning with misconduct in the culture industries, including television. Some of the showrunner behavior Martin chronicled in his book — icing out disfavored writers, halting entire productions for petty personal whims, throwing tantrums — looks different now.In a new preface for the anniversary edition, Martin says that were he writing “Difficult Men” now, he would focus more on “the knotty question of how the same men who provided, in many ways, the most astute critiques of toxic male power that mainstream culture had ever seen could nevertheless end up confirming and recapitulating precisely the same dynamics in their own workplaces.”A 10th anniversary edition of “Difficult Men” was released this summer.Even in 2013, Martin held up counterexamples like the showrunners Alan Ball (“Six Feet Under”) and Vince Gilligan (“Breaking Bad”), who ran artistically successful programs while being, by all accounts, nice guys and good bosses.In other respects, 2013 turned out to be a convenient year for a book about this Golden Age of television. It was the year “Breaking Bad” ended and James Gandolfini, the “Sopranos” star, died. And it was the year that “House of Cards,” the first original series commissioned by Netflix, debuted. In a phone interview, Martin discussed why the shows he wrote about still hold up and how the emergence of streaming has affected prestige TV. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Was there one show that provoked you to write the book?It was “The Sopranos,” in both an abstract and a literal sense. I had been hired to write the official coffee table companion during the final season. I maybe outstayed my welcome, treated it like a real reporting job, was there for quite a long time and got a chance to peek behind the scenes. It was a revelation to me: the size of the operation, the ambition, the way people talked about their work — the sense of something very big being made. The number of times I had to explain what a showrunner was back then is, in and of itself, an indicator of what an alien world that was.It’s such a funny term.It just occurs to me what kind of a technical term “showrunner” is, how unromantic. It really is something that, like, the Teamsters would come up with. It’s so literal and so nonartistic: You keep things running. The term betrays the kind of factory mentality that applied to television at the time.Did you think of yourself as establishing a canon?It was very obvious what at least three of the four main shows that I was going to write about were, and most of the peripheral ones as well. In my original proposal, the fourth show was, actually, “Rescue Me” — which is a show whose first few seasons had been perhaps unfairly forgotten but felt very much in keeping with these other shows. It felt extremely daring in being one of the first shows where 9/11 was being treated in a fully rounded way. My first editor pushed me to include “Battlestar Galactica,” but it just really wasn’t my bag. And then “Breaking Bad” asserted itself as the book was being written and became very obviously the ending place. There were the other HBO shows, and “The Shield” was an important step as well, but there weren’t many examples I left out.Have any of the shows in the book not stood up as much as you expected?Quite the opposite: The shows you think might have been dated have proven riveting in ways they maybe weren’t even when they were on. The America of Tony Soprano, the America of Walter White and very much the America of “The Wire” has proved itself to be the dominant America in the past 20 years. “The Sopranos” became this huge pandemic rewatch, and I think it’s because it’s so recognizable: The themes — the rot at the center of America, the grift of American life, the anxiety Tony Soprano has — are all super familiar to us now.Younger generations have adopted “The Sopranos”; it appears in countless memes.It’s great entertainment. It had to be: It had to resemble entertaining network television in many ways. It was still operating as a Trojan horse. It had to be funny and human, and it had to be consumable because the high-art part, the ambition part, was something nobody was looking for.How did the men you wrote about respond to your book?I never heard a word from any of them except for Vince Gilligan, who wrote me a beautiful blurb on the back of the new edition. Not surprisingly, because the book ends making the point that one doesn’t have to be that difficult to create these wonderful shows.Few would be interested in defending some of the behavior you document. But does the fact that it happened during the creation of these really great series make any of it easier to accept?It’s hard for me to see how a lack of empathy for people who work for you is a necessary part of the creative process. I do think people’s feelings could get hurt in a very intense workplace, and I don’t think every hurt feeling is avoidable. But I do think one can maintain a basic level of decency — let alone avoid using your power destructively — and still create quality work. I believe it because I’ve seen the shows that prove it, and because I’m optimistic.There are women characters and characters of color in these shows, but the protagonists and the creators behind them are all white men. Does that taint the legacy of that era?It wasn’t a huge surprise that white men writing about white men dominated the first phase of this new world. But the door had been opened. “Orange Is the New Black” came out something like three weeks after my book. “Transparent” was soon after as well. What came after delivered on the promise, which is that all these other kinds of stories were going to be able to be told, and all these other kinds of voices were going to be empowered. “Atlanta” and “Reservation Dogs” are other deliveries on that promise.What effect did the rise of streaming platforms, with their hundreds of millions of subscribers, have on Hollywood’s appetite for ambitious TV?When the book was published, it was more important [to the producers of these early prestige series] to stand out and find the right kinds of viewers than to have the most. It made sense that that attitude moved from subscription cable to basic — in my book, it’s HBO to FX and AMC — and streaming seemed it would be another step in that. But it does seem as though every piece that I identified as being crucial to the invention of this new TV is now a flashpoint in the writers’ strike: shorter seasons, writer-producers, writers’ rooms. And it’s depressing. With all the stuff that looked great, the streamers saw there were opportunities for cost savings.Are there ways streaming made TV better for viewers?Oh, my God. Look how much work we got! So much that I can’t keep up — that I feel a constant sense of anxiety about missing things. Look how many new voices we got. That’s been the trade-off. More

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      Drew Barrymore Pauses Show’s Return Until End of Strike

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      Taping began on her talk show last week, but at the 11th hour Barrymore changed course, and at least two other daytime programs followed.After an onslaught of criticism over her decision to return her show to the air while Hollywood is on strike, Drew Barrymore reversed herself on Sunday and at least two other shows did the same.Barrymore announced her change of course in an Instagram post, just a day before her talk show was to begin broadcasting. Taping resumed last Monday for the daytime program.After the announcement, “The Jennifer Hudson Show,” which is produced by Warner Bros., and the CBS show “The Talk,” rolled back previously announced plans to start broadcasting new episodes on Monday. CBS said in a statement on Sunday regarding “The Talk,” that it would pause its season premiere and “evaluate plans for a new launch date.”The return of production for Barrymore’s show attracted picketers from the striking writers’ and actors’ unions, and on Friday, she defended her decision in an emotional Instagram video, saying, “This is bigger than me.”CBS Media Ventures, which produces “The Drew Barrymore Show,” echoed her resolution at that point, saying more than 150 jobs would be affected. The company noted that she would be using a fully ad-libbed format, without anyone replacing the production’s three striking writers.But on Friday night, she deleted the video, and on Sunday morning released a statement changing course. The syndicated program was to begin airing new episodes on Monday.“I have listened to everyone, and I am making the decision to pause the show’s premiere until the strike is over,” the statement said. “I have no words to express my deepest apologies to anyone I have hurt and, of course, to our incredible team who works on the show and has made it what it is today. We really tried to find our way forward. And I truly hope for a resolution for the entire industry very soon.”In a statement on Sunday, CBS Media said it supported her latest decision and understood “how complex and difficult this process has been for her.”Although Barrymore was not the only daytime talk show host to announce a return during the strikes, she has received the most criticism, perhaps in part because in May she decided to bow out of hosting the MTV Movie and TV Awards in solidarity with Writers Guild of America members.The daytime juggernaut “The View,” for example, has been airing new episodes filmed without its unionized writers.Bill Maher announced last week that his weekly show on HBO would be returning, defending his decision in a social media post, saying, “I’m not prepared to lose an entire year and see so many below-the-line people suffer so much.”Members of the Writers Guild have been on strike since May, and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists began its strike in July.Barrymore herself is a member of SAG-AFTRA, but as a host she is covered by a separate agreement called the Network Code, making it technically permissible for her to present the show during the strike.Late-night shows have the same option, but thus far, many network hosts have decided not to take it. Instead, five of the big-name hosts — Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers and John Oliver — have started a podcast together, with proceeds going toward supporting their staffs.Returning amid the strikes may look even less appealing to other hosts after Barrymore’s ordeal. A day after her show resumed production, the National Book Foundation dropped her as the host of the National Books Awards.Her social media pages were filled with people urging her to walk back her decision to resume production, advice she heeded in less than a week. More

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      ‘Live With Kelly and Mark’: Till Death (or Cancellation) Do They Part

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      At the start of the Feb. 16 episode of the ABC morning talk show “Live With Kelly and Ryan,” before the actress Camryn Manheim demonstrated her knowledge of American Sign Language, before Ryan Seacrest and the show’s resident D.J. competed in a game called “Love Songs,” the show’s host Kelly Ripa made an announcement: Seacrest, who had hosted with her for six years, would soon be departing. His replacement? “My husband, Mark Consuelos, in what Ryan and I are calling the nation’s weirdest social experiment.”“Live,” which began in 1988 as “Live With Regis and Kathie Lee,” hosted by Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford, has always depended, as its executive producer Michael Gelman told me, on the illusion that the hosts are a married couple who have invited some unusually glamorous friends over for morning coffee. He referred to the hosts — any hosts — as “this faux husband-and-wife, only they’re better looking and smarter and more vivacious than your normal neighbors,” he said.But Ripa and Consuelos (“Riverdale,” “Alpha House”) are actually husband and wife. They’ve been married for over 27 years. “That’s 270” in showbiz years,” Ripa joked. What would it mean when Take Your Husband to Work Day was suddenly every day? What would it mean to perform your marriage for millions of households?“I can’t wait to watch,” Seacrest said back in February, grinning widely.Ripa said she doesn’t believe her chemistry with Consuelos on “Live” is anything special. “It is my job to make sure my partner looks good at all times, no matter who my partner is,” she said.Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesI visited the show on the first two mornings of the couple’s first full season together, in early September, about five months after Consuelos’s debut. There was no picket line to cross; the show does not employ Writers Guild members. Six cameras — three stationary, three roving — captured Ripa’s sleek blowout, her husband’s impossibly white teeth. This far into Consuelos’s tenure, their rhythms and repartee were established. She was the giddy cheer captain, a glammed up version of, as she put it, “a simple girl from New Jersey.” He was the hunky straight man.I wanted to know, as far one can ever know these kinds of things when it comes to unscripted television, just how much of this was for the many cameras and how much spoke to their real relationship. Marriage, after all, is another kind of performance, with each spouse filling what is hopefully a complementary role. These two seem better at that act than most. Where did the act end? Did it end?The first time Ripa and Consuselos pretended to be a couple was in 1995, during a chemistry read for the ABC soap “All My Children.” Ripa was already a star of the show, playing the party girl turned private investigator turned cosmetics chief executive Hayley Vaughan. Consuelos was auditioning to play her new love interest, Mateo Santos. The two actors had met in the rehearsal hall the day before, Ripa’s hair in giant curlers.“Are you sure you want this job?” she asked him. She gestured to a blob of toothpaste she had applied to a pimple. “Look what they do to you.”Consuelos did want the job. He and Ripa wanted each other, too. They were married, secretly, in Las Vegas, a year later and had their first child a year after that. Hayley and Mateo enjoyed a somewhat more eventful relationship: kidnapping, bigamy, arson, near death and at least one alternate personality. In 2002, in a soap-imitating-life move, their characters were written off, with Hayley moving across the country to host a talk show.In reality, the couple remained a quick cab ride from the ABC studios, with Ripa having joined Philbin as the co-host of what became “Live With Regis and Kelly,” a cozy, upbeat robe-and-slippers hour. But even off the soap, the couple’s onscreen lives remained intertwined, with Consuelos guest hosting “Live” nearly 100 times. They were familiar figures at galas, on red carpets, in the pages of glossy magazines, posting sultry pictures of each other on Instagram, rendering a relationship for the camera.Michael Gelman, a longtime executive producer of “Live,” said that the show has always depended on the illusion that the hosts are a married couple who have invited some glamorous friends over. Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesPhilbin retired in 2011, replaced eventually by Michael Strahan. After Strahan left in 2016 for “Good Morning America,” abruptly and amid tensions that have since been publicized, Ryan Seacrest took up the branded coffee mug. Last year, when Seacrest decided that he would soon move on, his heir was apparent.On the Tuesday after Labor Day, Consuelos, in a sweater tight enough to outline each pec, strode onto the living room set as though it were his second home. Which in a way, it is.Ripa, glamorous in a Barbie-pink dress, shared vacation photos and teased Consuelos about his workout habits, mentioning a recent ice bath. “He looked like a frozen margarita,” she told the audience.Consuelos didn’t mind the ribbing. He teed up punchlines for her. She finished his sentences. During a trivia segment, “Stump Mark,” Consuelos evaluated the truth value of a caller’s statements with terrifying seriousness. Ripa, who joked with me that her husband has “resting dictator face,” teased him for this, too.On one episode they did a segment that involved several team building exercises. “Trust falls and blindfolds? It’s like being at home,” Ripa said wickedly.“We know how to compartmentalize,” Ripa said of keeping certain elements of her and Consuelos’s personal and professional lives separate.Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesReally? Ripa thought so. “The version of us at home is very similar to the version you see on TV,” she said. “But we look nice and we sound good.” This was during a post-show chat on the following day in their actual home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. After the show, wardrobe changes and a few extra segments, a sleek, S.U.V. had spirited the couple from an ABC loading bay across Central Park to their townhouse.Ripa’s brand has always been one of extreme relatability. This house, with its imposing facade and marble interiors, was not quite so approachable, but it was somehow familiar. The living room where we sat (beige furniture, gold accents, light like poured honey) was more luxurious than the TV version but still hewed closely to it. Figuring out which was the simulacrum made my head hurt. Especially because offscreen the couple still sounded good. And they still looked nice, even as Ripa swabbed off her photo shoot makeup with a series of wet wipes.“I’m slowly melting back into myself,” she said, removing a false eyelash.That self seemed very like the TV one. She held her body more loosely, it’s true, and her manner was arguably more subdued, as was Consuelo’s. They do keep some things private, they assured me.“Talk about 401ks or wills, discussions we’ve had about passing things on, you wouldn’t want to watch that,” Consuelos said. Whether this had more to do with self-protection or audience savvy wasn’t quite clear.Their time in the soap, particularly that first year, when their relationship was a secret, has taught them not to let everyday worries or arguments bleed into airtime. “We know how to compartmentalize,” Ripa said.Friends and colleagues say that Consuelos and Ripa aren’t essentially different in real life from their onscreen personas. Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesEven so, colleagues confirmed that there wasn’t a lot of daylight between Ripa and her “Live” persona. The same went for Consuelos. Seacrest said that occasional obscenities were the only difference.“A few vocabulary choices are made, but the essence of their humor and their relationship is what we get every morning,” he said.The TV personality Andy Cohen, a longtime friend, agreed. “What they’re portraying onscreen is a natural extension of themselves,” he said. “For two people in this business, which can be so divisive, they really are such a unit together. And it really shines through in everything they do.” He added that for a long married couple, “they’re very hot for each other.”Between them is a palpable attraction, evident both on the “Live” set and back at home, as Ripa rested her bare feet against Consuelos’s thigh and I wondered if I should leave the room for a while. But Ripa doesn’t believe that the chemistry she and Consuelos share on “Live” is anything special.“I just know that as a co-host of a show, it is my job to make sure my partner looks good at all times, no matter who my partner is,” she said.Still, that chemistry helped make the choice of Consuelos an easy one for network, not so much for the couple, who delayed accepting the offer for months. Consuelos, who was finishing a seven-season stint on “Riverdale,” wondered if people would take him seriously as an actor once he was established as a permanent morning show fixture. There was also the more nebulous worry that he might be perceived as a nepotism hire.“I may have had a flash of, What is this going to look like?” he said.Ripa had her own concerns. For a woman who delights in jokes, she is wholly serious about the job and the comfort she believes it brings. She mentioned mothers struggling to breastfeed, patients undergoing chemotherapy, residents of nursing homes. These people, she insists, are the show’s audience. “There’s a lot of people that are counting on us to make them feel better,” she said.For a long married couple, “they’re very hot for each other,” the TV personality Andy Cohen, a longtime friend, said.Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesThat felt like a lot of responsibility for one couple. “We don’t want to be the people that ruin television,” she said.So far, television — or at least the narrow tranche of unscripted television not subject to contract negotiations — seems fine. Which isn’t a surprise. Consuelos was hardly an unknown quantity and if he has had to acquire a few more skills — intros, outros, how to pause an interview just before a commercial break — he has acquired them quickly. And ratings are steady, which means that the experiment, which was never especially weird, is a success.Gelman had told me that the other secret of the show, other than the faux husband-and-wife act, is the enjoyment that the hosts take in each other. “The audience knows when you’re having a good time versus when you’re faking it,” he said.If Ripa and Consuelos are faking it, no one can tell. Not me. Maybe not even the couple themselves. In their presence, the continuum of reality and performance, life and “Live,” felt as slippery as some very expensive skin care serum. It slid through my fingers every time. The easy banter that Ripa and Consuelos trade onscreen, they kept it going during the commercial breaks, as they accepted hugs and gifts from audience members. They kept it going at home.On the first day I visited the set, after the blindfold bit, the show ended. The cameras stopped rolling. The microphones cut out. Their work was done. But Consuelos and Ripa stayed in their seats, heads bent close together, still chatting. More

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      How Shane Gillis Both Plays to and Mocks Red Staters

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      The comic’s savvy approach fits into the evolving meaning of conservatism and has resulted in hugely popular stand-up specials, like “Beautiful Dogs” on Netflix.At the start of his new special “Beautiful Dogs,” Shane Gillis, a bulky comic with the mustache of a Staten Island cop, announces that America is the best country in the world and that all the others suck. His crowd roars. Then he says he’s only been to three other countries and when he boasts about his home abroad, they ask about mass shootings.“There’s really not a good comeback,” he says, shifting from swaggering to struggling, then exclaims, using a profanity: “What, are we going to give up our guns like a bunch of gay guys?” His tone flattens into resignation: “No, we’re just going to have shootings all the time.”This opening bit, which celebrates and satirizes rah-rah American jingoism in the style of “South Park,” encapsulates the Shane Gillis experience. It’s got the amiable idiot swagger, plus the trolling offensive spin. Then there’s the satirical overlay that subverts the perspective. It’s dumb and smart, cocky and self-mocking, homophobic but relentlessly self-aware.Since getting fired from “Saturday Night Live” in 2019 after videos surfaced of him using Asian and gay slurs on a podcast, Gillis has built perhaps one of the fastest growing comedy careers in America. His debut special, released on YouTube in 2021, racked up a staggering 14 million views, and he’s the most popular podcaster on Patreon with more than 71,000 paying listeners. “Beautiful Dogs,” his second special, has been lodged in Netflix’s Top 10 most popular shows since the streamer released it on Sept. 5. He regularly sells out theaters. Don’t be surprised if he becomes an arena act.Getting fired paid off. It made Gillis a martyr to some, and he was savvy enough to embrace those fans without tediously obsessing over cancel culture. He has said he understood the criticism of his comments, offered a halfhearted apology, then doubled down on lumbering through the china shop of cultural sensitivities. A comic who tells the crowd he has no female friends isn’t looking to appeal to everyone.There’s an element of shock jock to his persona. Onstage, his bits are more controlled and agile than they seem, and he’s skilled at winning fans in unexpected places. Speaking in an admiring 2022 New Yorker profile of Gillis, the comic Jerrod Carmichael, who came out as gay in his last special, called him one of the few truly funny comics working today. “His material still feels dangerous,” he said.Gillis, a 35-year-old former football player from central Pennsylvania, often holds the microphone with two hands, more like a singer than a stand-up. His attitude is less telling you the truth about the world than stumbling through the mess of his thought process. His appearance telegraphs rumpled ordinary guy, not polished entertainer. And he speaks to crowds as if he were messing around with friends. Few comics do more with the word “dude.”To fully understand his success, you must use a word taboo in certain comedy circles: conservative. Many comics who rail against cancel culture tend to flinch at that one. Call Joe Rogan one and you will hear umbrage and a list of his liberal policy positions. And look, no one likes to be pigeonholed. But there is a political valence to Gillis’s comedy and the way it fits into the evolving meaning of what it is to be right wing.Being conservative in the age of Trump is not as much about opinions on free markets or foreign policy anymore; now it can mean projecting a certain attitude, alternatively nostalgic and contemptuous, fixated on the supposed oppressiveness of liberal norms and bluntly giddy about transgressing them.That posture sits comfortably in the comedy scene. It’s no accident that two prime-time hosts on Fox (Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld) cut their teeth doing comedy, of sorts. Part of the reason Gillis is such a phenomenon is clearly political. (The title of the special is a Trump quote.)Right-wing media adores him. The Spectator called his success a major turning point in the resurgence of comedy. But unlike comics who are primarily animated by caricaturing and picking apart the left, Gillis lands a broader crowd by focusing on an affectionately mocking insider perspective of the half of the country that voted for Trump (which isn’t to say he did, though there’s no question he finds the politician hilarious).There are MAGA-like identity politics at the center of some of his bits, as when he describes the story of the first baseball game played by Jackie Robinson not as a civil rights landmark but as the moment when white people stopped being cool. “I know what I look like,” he says. “I got the body type of the guy who says, Let’s look at the rest of the body cam footage before jumping to any conclusions.”His last special lovingly poked fun at his “Fox News dad,” who goes to bed angry every night. In “Beautiful Dogs,” he describes himself as a bit of a history buff, which he calls a sign of “early onset Republican.” He levels with his audience: “If you’re a white dude in your 20s and 30s and can’t stop reading about World War II, it’s coming, brother.”The assumptions here are that being a Republican makes you a beleaguered outsider. He compares the pull of it to that of a person turning into a werewolf. “I’m not a Republican, but I can feel it,” he says. “It grows.”Gillis, who lives in New York, regularly works clubs here, and there’s a way that his comedy is pitched as an explanation of a red state sensibility for a blue state audience. Some of this can feel forced and far below his intelligence, tipping over into Larry the Cable Guy territory.He uses a hack sexist line, only to draw attention to how bad it is. His punchlines about porn cover well-trod ground, and his contrarian joke about terrorists is similar to the one that got Bill Maher fired from his ABC show after Sept. 11. Gillis can get stuck in his own bubble, drawing some familiar or easy laughs. His new special has more sex jokes than his last, some about his own grossness (“coughing during sex is funny”) and others about the hopelessness of being competitive with the Navy SEAL who previously dated his girlfriend.His most ambitious bit in the new hour involves a trip to George Washington’s Mount Vernon during the racial upheaval of 2020. He describes the absurdity of the historical re-enactors, but also the gruesome detail of the slave quarters, mapping how he vacillated between hero worship of our first president and denunciation of our country’s original sin.Not unlike his opening bit, Gillis moves back and forth on his feelings about our country through the narrative of Washington, his military exploits, his lore. “I was trying to be cool and liberal and hate him,” he says. “Couldn’t do it.”Interestingly, he includes a joke that is identical to one John Oliver recently told mocking the idea that we are more divided than ever by bringing up the Civil War. Of course, in the 19th century, we couldn’t express our dislike for one another as easily. But what hasn’t changed is that people remain curious about those different from them, even those they dislike or hate. It may be human nature or strategy. (Know thine enemy.)Partly people watch Shane Gillis for the same reason some liberals binge Fox News — to see how the other half thinks. More

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      Drew Barrymore Defends Show Return Decision in Emotional Video

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      Barrymore responded to continuing criticism after her decision to bring back her talk show amid the Hollywood writers’ strike.Drew Barrymore is not the only talk show host returning to air amid ongoing strikes by Hollywood writers and actors, but in the span of a week she has become perhaps the most high-profile target for criticism over the decision.On Friday, she doubled down, posting an emotional video on Instagram in which she apologized to striking writers, some of whom have picketed outside the studio where “The Drew Barrymore Show” resumed filming in New York City this week, and signaled that she had no intention of a reversal, at least for now.“My decision to go back to the show — I didn’t want to hide behind people, so I won’t,” Barrymore said in the video. “And I won’t polish this with bells and whistles and publicists and corporate rhetoric. I’ll just stand out there and accept and be responsible.”To begin filming the fourth season of her show amid the strike by the Writers Guild of America, the program has returned to production without its three unionized writers, and with a promise that the new episodes — the first of which is set to air on Monday — will not include written material that violates the rules of the strike. Other daytime talk shows with unionized writers on staff, including the “The View,” which began airing new episodes earlier this month, have taken a similar approach. “The Jennifer Hudson Show” and “The Talk” are among the shows that are also planning returns.A statement on Friday from CBS Media Ventures, which produces “The Drew Barrymore Show,” noted that although Barrymore is a member of SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union that is also on strike, she works with the talk show under a separate agreement called the Network Code, which makes it permissible for her to host the show amid the labor unrest. The company said that the show considered its staff and crew of more than 150 people when making the decision to resume production, and that the show will be “completely unscripted” until the end of the strike.“I wanted to do this because, as I said, this is bigger than me,” Barrymore said in her video, “and there are other people’s jobs on the line. And since launching live in a pandemic, I just wanted to make a show that was there for people in sensitive times.”She went on: “I weighed the scales and I thought, if we could go on during a global pandemic, and everything that the world has experienced through 2020, why would this sideline us?”Some of the criticism of Barrymore referenced her earlier decision to drop out as host of the MTV Movie and TV Awards in May, expressing solidarity with the striking writers.The actress’s apologetic, almost anguished explanation stood in contrast to that of Bill Maher, who announced this week that his weekly HBO show would return to the air, stating plainly, “It has been five months, and it is time to bring people back to work.”As backlash to Barrymore’s decision grew in recent days, the National Book Foundation dropped the actress as the host of its National Book Awards ceremony in November, after several high-profile writers were among the critics of her decision to return to air.“I want to just put one foot in front of the other,” Barrymore said in the video on Friday, “and make a show that’s there for people regardless of anything else that’s happening in the world.” More

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      Fall TV Quiz: Do You Like Game Shows?

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      The ongoing strikes by actors and writers in Hollywood mean the broadcast networks have fewer new and returning scripted series than usual this fall. Good thing they have plenty of game shows and reality contests to plug the gaps and a seemingly bottomless appetite for more! Elsewhere there are delayed premieres and other adjustments but don’t worry, there will still be plenty of TV to watch.So what can you expect to see in prime time this fall? Take this quiz to find out. Even if you’ve never read a Hollywood trade publication, a little familiarity with TV’s recent past will serve you well. (Note: Given the ongoing negotiations and uncertainty, all schedule information here is even more subject to change than usual.) More

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      ‘Billions’ Season 7, Episode 6 Recap: From Russia With Love

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      The insurrectionists at Prince Cap aren’t doing a great job of slowing Mike down. But Chuck might just have a new redheaded ace up his sleeve.Season 7, Episode 6: ‘The Man in the Olive Drab T-shirt’“The irresistible force meets the immovable object.” This quote should be familiar to Chuck Rhoades. As this week’s episode of “Billions” goes to great lengths to point out, Chuck is fan of professional wrestling. He would no doubt recall the wrestling commentator Gorilla Monsoon excitedly describing the clash between Hulk Hogan and his friend turned nemesis Andre the Giant at WrestleMania III with these exact words. Indeed, Chuck’s erstwhile ally, the Russian oligarch Grigor Andolov (John Malkovich), references the match by name during this very episode.But the sentiment should be a familiar one to Chuck as well. There he is at the beginning of this week’s episode, on a remote airstrip in Iceland, staring down his old nemesis, the fugitive billionaire Bobby Axelrod. Generally speaking, when the irresistible force meets the immovable object, a clash occurs. This time, however, the meeting is agreed upon in advance and pursued with a level of politeness, even honor, of which I doubted either man was capable.At any rate, by the time the closing credits roll, neither one has tried to body slam the other, figuratively or otherwise.That’s the best thing about Chuck and Bobby’s big reunion, actually: the lack of fireworks. Sure, their meeting is set against the spectacular, glowing green backdrop of the aurora borealis, but that’s as showy as the scene gets. This isn’t the Bride finally tracking down Bill, it’s two guys who dislike but respect each other, seeing if they can’t do a little “I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine” business. A fiery throw-down might have been satisfying on a lizard-brain level, but with few exceptions, these are not lizard-brained men.At any rate, Bobby has found himself with a Grigor Andolov problem. Despite Axe’s role in having Andolov expelled from the United States, the two have found themselves on the same end of an arms deal with Ukraine. That Andolov is acting against his own government, one not known to tolerate dissent, much less outright treason, weighs heavily on his mind. But so does the divorce proceeding brought against him in New York court.Unless Grigor can show up in person to contest the case, he tells Bobby, he’ll lose a fortune. And unless Bobby agrees to help him, Bobby will lose his life. So Axe swallows his pride and, using Wendy as a proxy, makes contact with Chuck, whom he knows has the legal know-how to allow a wanted man like Andolov back into the States. For his part, Chuck feels it’s a deal worth making if it puts Axe in his debt.Unfortunately, what’s good for Axe and Andolov is bad for, well, pretty much everyone else: Solicitor General Adam DiGiulio, Attorney General Dave Mahar of New York, Gov. Bob Sweeney of New York (Matt Servitto) and even the slimy ex-treasury secretary Todd Krakow (Danny Strong), who is using his hedge fund to bankroll Andolov’s ex. And it turns out that that’s not all he’s doing with Andolov’s ex.How best to placate all these political power players? How can Chuck make Andolov look like enough of a good guy to get through customs but enough of a bad guy to get a pop (that’s wrestling jargon for a positive reaction) from the Kremlin, which already suspects that he is playing for the other teamFor advice, Chuck turns to Paul Levesque, also known as Hunter Hearst Helmsley, best known as Triple H, the professional wrestler turned chief content officer and head of creative for the W.W.E. Hunter, as Chuck calls him, is known to fans for having a great mind for the business. Who better to coach the group on how they can all come out looking like winners — the kind of outcome the new, relatively enlightened Chuck Rhoades prefers at any rate?The answer turns out to be rather simple. Chuck gets Andolov into the country as an expert witness in a different case. He allows the menacing robber baron to threaten to throw Krakow off a rooftop unless he puts the kibosh on the divorce filing and stops shtupping Grigor’s ex-wife. Then Chuck makes a big show of arresting him, at which point Andolov makes an even bigger show of being the most comical pro-Russian “heel” (wrestling jargon for villain) since Nikolai Volkoff. The American politicians look good to their domestic audience, Andolov looks good to his, and the slimy Krakow survives to ooze another day. Everyone’s a winner!The same cannot be said for the participants in the Mike Prince story line. Like a trio of plotters straight out of Shakespeare, Wendy, Wags and Taylor are constantly kibitzing in hopes of taking their dreaded boss down before he can win the White House. In this episode, they adopt a two-pronged strategy. While Wags whispers in the ear of Kate Sacker, Mike’s formidable legal counsel, so that she’ll drop him for her own congressional run, Wendy orchestrates a disastrous quasi-focus group with Prince Cap employees, all of whom kiss Prince’s posterior when he’s in the room. (They describe him as an egomaniac who loves the smell of his own flatulence when he’s not.)The ploy is meant to shake the confidence of Prince, who loves himself and is convinced everyone else either feels the same way or simply needs to get to know him better. To learn that his biggest earners think he’s a narcissist with a God complex is a body blow to his self-esteem — potentially enough to persuade him to call off his presidential campaign.But Wendy and company didn’t count on Mike’s wife, Andy, nor on Kate’s master-of-the-universe father, Frank (Harry Lennix). Andy tells Mike that people love him not because he is inherently lovable but rather because everyone loves a winner. That’s the air he needs to project during his upcoming televised speech, which he paid to have air in prime-time on every network. Frank tells Kate it’s always best to stick with a winner, even when the going gets tough, because association with a winner is what gets people to pick up the phone when you call.So Kate rescinds her resignation. Prince gives his big speech and reaps a huge bounce in the polls. Both Prince and his campaign guru, Bradford, praise Wendy for pulling off the exact opposite of what she intended. And Chuck stares nervously at Prince on his computer screen, clearly wondering if the time has already come to call in that favor from Axe.At this point in its run, “Billions” feels a bit like a spinning top starting to wobble — but I mean this as a compliment. There are only so many times the schemes of one of the show’s preposterously competent main characters can go right before they start to go disastrously wrong. Each meticulously plotted episode moves us incrementally closer to that tipping point.Loose changeIn a tertiary plot, Charles Rhoades Sr. asks Chuck to intervene in an acquaintance’s case of posthumous paternity (don’t ask). It turns out to be a cover for Charles’s feeling that he has lost of control over his legacy when he discovers his wife and daughter praying together — despite his insistence that their daughter be raised an atheist. As he does elsewhere with Triple H, Chuck consults an expert on control: Mistress Troy (Clara Wong), his former dominatrix. It is she who gives Chuck the idea to tell his dad to, in effect, stoop to conquer: Act acquiescent now, and he’ll wind up with a kid and wife who love him more, allowing him to exert more control in the longer term. Everyone’s a winner, again. Sort of.In addition to seeing the returns of Malkovich, Strong, Lennix and Servitto, this episode also welcomed back Rick Hoffman as the repugnant Dr. Swerlow, Charles’s … medical adviser, I guess? Wearing an Adidas tracksuit with “The Doc” monogrammed on it, Swerlow provides obscene expertise to anyone within a 20-foot radius — including Ira, whom he’s been providing with sublingual sexual performance-enhancing medication sub rosa for some time. Hence the videos from last week, I suspect.“When did I become Lex Luthor?” Mike asks Wendy plaintively. I dunno, Mike, probably when you decided to run for president as a bald billionaire, something the comic-book villain did over two decades ago. He won, too, if you can somehow imagine a United States of America willing to elect a wealthy megalomaniac as president. Try not to strain yourself.This week’s opening- and closing-credits needle drop: PJ Harvey’s brutally bitter alt-rock classic “Rid of Me.” It’s great to hear the song play while Paul Giamatti quietly emotes, though I maintain that hearing an unassuming friend absolutely tear through it at karaoke is the ideal way to experience it.Yes, that was President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine talking to Axe, but if you thought he might have better things to do than make a cameo on “Billions,” you would be correct. A Showtime spokesperson confirmed that the show edited existing footage of him into the episode. More

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      ‘The Changeling’ Review: Bye Bye Baby

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      LaKeith Stanfield stars in a dark modern fairy tale about a father who doesn’t listen when his wife has doubts about who (or what) is in the crib.A changeling is what a fairy or demon or troll leaves behind when it kidnaps a human baby. Take your eye off your newborn for just a second and you might find yourself raising a ravenous little monster that is not the one you gave birth to.“The Changeling” on Apple TV+ is about what happens when a mother comes to believe, perhaps correctly, that the tiny thing she is caring for is no longer her baby. Fittingly, the series is a kind of changeling itself: a pale echo of the 2017 novel by Victor LaValle on which it is based.The spotty track record for adaptations of books in the peak-TV era is a dead horse that I’ve beaten before. But it’s an inescapable subject. The advent of short, bingeable seasons and, until the money really runs out, the increased demand for shows has brought whole libraries to the screen.“The Changeling,” which is halfway through its eight-episode season, is a stark example of how out of sync the rhythms of good fiction can be with the demands of television. At the same time, it demonstrates the ways in which appealing performers and some visual style can keep you at least partly interested even when the story wanders.LaValle’s novel is a contemporary fairy tale, and it can feel deceptively light and simple on the page, but the history it relates is dark and soaked in despair. Like the Brothers Grimm, he uses his storytelling gifts to acclimate us to the horror, moving the narrative along so smoothly and propulsively that our nerves hover in a state of suspended agitation.The parents whose baby may or may not be human are Emma Valentine, a librarian, and Apollo Kagwa, a freelance book dealer who at first gives no credence to Emma’s suspicions. LaValle uses this framework to dig deeply into the insecurities of parents in the social-media age; at the same time he constructs a casual, street-level epic of New York City struggle and adventure that ranges from Apollo and Emma’s Washington Heights neighborhood to magically enhanced locations in the East River and the forests of Queens.Kelly Marcel, best known as the screenwriter of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” created and wrote the adaptation of “The Changeling,” and she seems to have been tugged in various directions: by a desire to pull viewers in quickly, by a need to stretch out the story (the season covers about two-thirds of the novel) and perhaps by a simple impulse to do something different.So LaValle’s eminently coherent, resolutely chronological story is artily fractured, and the current TV penchant for unexplained, repetitive flashbacks is indulged to a numbing degree. Unwilling to let the story build, Marcel pulls out elements of mystery and revelations about Apollo’s and Emma’s pasts that LaValle saved for key moments and moves them forward in ways that take away the story’s shape. (To help us navigate, she uses passages from the book as narration, which are read by LaValle.)Clark Backo plays a mother who suspects something is amiss with her child.Apple TV+More defensible, but not always successful, are the ways in which she expands the roles of Emma and of Lillian, Apollo’s mother. (LaValle’s novel is centered on Apollo and on the quest he has to undertake after horrific events beset his family.) More screen time for Clark Backo, as Emma, and for Alexis Louder and Adina Porter, as Lillian at different ages, is a good thing; and some new scenes that expand on Emma’s warrior mentality are well done.It all goes wrong for Marcel, though, in a wholly invented late-season episode designed as a showcase for Porter. A prime example of the inadvisability of the trend toward stand-alone “bottle episodes,” it is a magical-realist dream sequence set inside a fleabag hotel that, for the viewer, meticulously recreates the feeling of being trapped in your seat at an excruciating downtown play.LaKeith Stanfield, who is an executive producer of the series, soldiers bravely as Apollo. But Marcel has changed the valence of the character, making him more of a victimized Freudian basket case and less of the barbed egoist he was in the book; this flattens out Apollo’s emotional arc and makes him less interesting, and Stanfield’s performance is uncharacteristically bland. Marcel does a better job with one of LaValle’s best inventions, Apollo’s acerbic fellow book dealer Patrice, and Malcolm Barrett plays him with a sly energy that draws you to him whenever he’s onscreen.You can also perk up during the moments when “The Changeling” remembers that it’s a fairy tale, and the directors — including Dana Gonzales, Melina Matsoukas, Solvan Naim and Jonathan van Tulleken — give a little sparkle to a nighttime boat ride on the East River or a journey through abandoned subway tunnels.And for some of us, there’s a pleasure threaded through the series that isn’t often found on TV, even in literary adaptations: frequent depictions of the handling, reading, hoarding, buying and selling of books, serving as both a reinforcement of the story’s fairy tale underpinnings and as guiltless gratification for the bibliophile. That’s one aspect of the novel that didn’t get thrown out with the bath water. More