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      In ‘Extrapolations,’ Scott Z. Burns Dramatizes Some Inconvenient Truths

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      Years ago, when Scott Z. Burns was doing some uncredited script work on Steven Soderbergh’s escapist heist movie “Ocean’s Twelve” (2004), Burns made the mistake of cracking a joke about the popcorn movie they were making. Soderbergh quickly set him straight.Movies and TV shows are a transaction, Soderbergh told him. Filmmakers and showrunners tell viewers a story, and viewers give that story their time.“He told me that is a transaction that we, as storytellers, can’t afford to be cynical about,” Burns said in a recent video call. In other words, entertainment is the storyteller’s mandate.The lesson came in handy as Burns was writing, producing and directing multiple episodes of “Extrapolations,” the new limited series he created for Apple TV+, which debuts on Friday. The series, which features a large, illustrious cast — top names include Edward Norton and Meryl Streep — conjures eight hours of drama, science fiction and some occasional comedy from the subject of global warming. As subjects go, it’s a tough sell; the series could easily have come across like an urgent plea to eat your vegetables.But not if he could make it at least a little bit fun.“I don’t believe I’m going to move people or change their attitude about anything unless first I entertain them” said Burns, best known for writing the research-heavy Soderbergh movies “Contagion,” “Side Effects” and “The Informant!” (and for writing and directing the 2019 political thriller “The Report”). “That, to me, is the fun part of the job: creating entertainment that maybe sticks with somebody.”Make no mistake, it was a challenge. Telling multiple, sometimes interlocking stories that cover the years 2037 to 2070, “Extrapolations” is hugely ambitious, exploring climate change from religious, political, economic, technological and social perspectives. Each episode (with the exception of one two-parter) leaps ahead several years as the climate crisis worsens, traversing the globe from Alaska to India, much of it shot overseas. Fires rage, cities flood and famines spread but life continues, including all of the myopia, power-grabbing and need for deeper meaning that has always characterized human history.Mia Maestro and Edward Norton in a scene from Episode 4 of “Extrapolations.” The series follows multiple, often interlocking stories that track the future of climate change.Apple TV+Matthew Rhys (far left, with Heather Graham and, center and far right, Alexander Sokovikov and Noel Arthur), praised Burns’s ability to “view the world from many different perspectives.”Apple TV+It’s a series full of big ideas. But that is typical for Burns, said Matthew Rhys, who stars and has been friends with him for several years. (He also played a small but important role in “The Report.”“He is forever posing the questions that would never even cross my stratosphere,” Rhys said in a video call. “He has this expanse to his thinking and to his questioning, and also this enormous humanity and incredible sensitivity.”Born and raised just outside Minneapolis, Burns studied English literature at the University of Minnesota and originally wanted to be a journalist. His father worked in advertising, and Burns followed in his footsteps. He soon discovered that he was good at writing television commercials, which is how he met the actor and director Peter Berg. Berg was interested in directing ads in between his film and television projects. They became friends, and Berg hired Burns to write for the series “Wonderland” (2000), a drama set in a psychiatric facility modeled on Bellevue Hospital.The series lasted only one season, but the experience taught Burns two things about himself: He had a talent for writing screenplays, and he loved doing research. He would spend hours at Bellevue, immersing himself in the atmosphere and the history.“I think that’s where I became persuaded that research really is the solution to writer’s block,” he said. “That if you just continue to dig into your subject matter, it’s eventually going to reveal some cool story to you.”Kate Winslet and Larry Clark in a scene from the heavily researched Steven Soderbergh film “Contagion” (2011), which Burns wrote. Claudette Barius/Warner Bros.He takes a hands-on approach to gathering information and context, engaging experts and throwing himself into his subjects. For “Contagion,” that meant global pandemics (the film was released in 2011, nearly a decade before the Covid-19 outbreak). For “Side Effects” (2013), it was the world of antidepressants. In writing “Extrapolations” Burns consulted with the climate change experts Elizabeth Kolbert and Bill McKibben.He is also open to perspectives that diverge from his own. “I know that one of the reasons he brought me on is that he and I don’t see the world the same way,” Dorothy Fortenberry, an executive producer of “Extrapolations,” said in a video call. “We have very different lives and lifestyles. He’s agnostic, and I’m religious. We’re not a matched set, and I think he appreciated that.”Burns traces his environmental awakening to the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, in which some 11 million gallons of crude oil were spilled into Prince William Sound, Alaska. Burns took a leave from his advertising job to help clean otters affected by the spill. He soon realized that the otter center where he worked was part of a carefully planned strategy to rehabilitate Exxon’s image.“I think what I took from that was that a story, like a place that had been built to clean otters, wasn’t maybe what it looked like,” Burns said. “That was a big thing for me. I came back and I changed my relationship to advertising so I could do more work in the environmental space.”Years later, he jumped at an opportunity to work on Davis Guggenheim’s 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” joining as a producer.Al Gore, pictured in a scene from “An Inconvenient Truth.” He applauded Burns’s willingness to apply his storytelling skills to the subject of global warming. Eric Lee/Paramount ClassicsThe film, which won an Oscar for best documentary, turned an Al Gore slide show into a visually compelling and morally persuasive argument for heeding the dire signs of global warming. Viewed widely as an important moment in raising public awareness of climate change, it even spawned a sequel, 2017’s “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,” with Burns as an executive producer.Gore, who has remained friends with Burns, was particularly impressed with how Burns handled the episodes of “Extrapolations” that are set in the distant future, and his ability to turn real-world crisis into compelling narrative.“The farther into the future you extrapolate, the more difficult it is to find the most accurate projection of what might happen,” Gore said by phone. “But I think that he’s really done a terrific job.”“There is kind of a cottage industry of books about how storytelling is the way we all best absorb information, so the importance of highly skilled storytellers has grown,” Gore added. “It’s great that Scott has applied that skill to this challenge.”Compared to the “Inconvenient Truth” films, the flashy, effects-heavy “Extrapolations” feels like “Ocean’s Twelve,” with a similarly star-studded cast. It includes Marion Cotillard and Forest Whitaker, who play a married couple living a contentious, futuristic “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” existence; Sienna Miller, who plays a pregnant marine biologist wondering what the future holds for her unborn child; David Schwimmer, who plays a slippery lawyer willing to grease some wheels to preserve the temple where his family worships; and Kit Harington, who plays a powerful tech mogul lording over all he sees, Elon Musk style.It makes for a lot of intellectual and artistic juggling. To that end, Rhys, who plays a craven casino mogul trying to make a fast buck in Alaska, praised Burns’s ability to “view the world from many different perspectives and approach them all with equal empathy.”Daveed Diggs, who plays a rabbi in a rapidly flooding Miami, was drawn to the scope of “Extrapolations.” “I just thought it was a really big swing,” he said, “and I like things that are big swings.” Apple TV+That enormous scope was a specific draw for Daveed Diggs (“Hamilton,” “Blindspotting”), who plays a rabbi trying to balance faith, social obligation and the reality of rapidly rising Miami sea levels in two early episodes.“I just thought it was a really big swing, and I like things that are big swings,” he said in a video call. “I wasn’t sure how it was all going to work, but the world building was so smart to me. It is trying to create something that allows us to discuss the reality of climate change in the same way that we discuss other elements of popular culture.”“Extrapolations” also fits neatly into a running Burns theme: The world is a scary place, and humans have devised all manner of ways to screw it up. But they also have the capability to fix it, and this gives him hope.“People who know me would probably say I tend to be a little darker and drier than a lot of other humans,” he said. “But I know that we have all of the solutions to all of these problems. I also recognize that the amount of change that we have to engage in is massive, and human beings don’t tend to change very rapidly.”Perhaps his latest endeavor can help push things along. And maybe even provide some entertainment along the way. More

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      Jimmy Kimmel Says Trump Can’t Blame Mike Pence for Jan. 6

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      Pence could be blamed for a lot of things, Kimmel said, but not the attack on the Capitol: “They tried to hang him on Jan. 6.”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Passing the BlameAt a public appearance in Iowa over the weekend, former President Donald Trump blamed former Vice President Mike Pence for Jan. 6.“Listen, Mike Pence can be blamed for a lot of things, like shampooing with white-out, but he didn’t cause Jan. 6,” Jimmy Kimmel said. “They tried to hang him on Jan. 6.”“Trump said since Pence refused to help him overturn the election, he, ‘in many ways deserves blame for what happened at the Capitol,’ which is the presidential equivalent of, ‘If the teller had just put the money in the bag, everybody would have made it home safe.’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“He said if Mike Pence hadn’t refused to overturn the election, ‘you wouldn’t have had Jan. 6 as we call it.’ Yeah, right. That’s what the calendar calls it, too.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I have to say, I can’t wait to see Pence debating Donald Trump. It’s going to be like Elmo versus Cocaine Bear.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (I Created a Monster Edition)“Meanwhile, ahead of his speech in Iowa, Trump said that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is ‘probably’ his biggest rival for the Republican presidential nomination. Trump said his only other rivals are the Justice Department and high cholesterol.” — JIMMY FALLON“The former president also went after his chief 2024 rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whom he claimed is in the national spotlight only because of the former president’s 2018 endorsement, saying, ‘If it weren’t for me, Ron DeSanctimonious would right now probably be working at a law firm or maybe a Pizza Hut.’ Or, if he was really ambitious, a combination law firm-Pizza Hut.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“The former president also explained his new nickname for DeSantis, saying, ‘I use the word Ron DeSanctimonious or Ron DeSanctus, it’s just a shorter version.’ Yes, because all nicknames need a nickname.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingThe rapper Bad Bunny joined James Corden for a round of Carpool Karaoke on Tuesday’s “Late Late Show.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightVice President Kamala Harris will sit down with Stephen Colbert on Wednesday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutMelanie Lynskey’s character in “Yellowjackets” is as comfortable skinning a rabbit as she is defrosting a roast.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesThe New Zealand actress Melanie Lynskey stars in two of TV’s current hit thrillers: “Yellowjackets” and “The Last of Us.” More

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      Laverne Cox on a Year as the Red Carpet Host of ‘Live From E!’

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      LOS ANGELES — Don’t get her wrong. Laverne Cox loves Joan Rivers.“Joan is for me the originator of everything,” Ms. Cox said. The comedian, who died in 2014, was the first host of “Live From the Red Carpet,” now called “Live From E!,” and perhaps the best-known red carpet commentator in history.Ms. Rivers could bite with the strength of a diamond-collared toy poodle, drawing blood that only sometimes splashed back on her. She’d scream and curse and fire off jokes about celebrities’ bodies and outfits. There was scorched earth all over the trails she blazed.“But I’m not Joan, there’s only one Joan, and the times are very different, too,” said Ms. Cox, 50, wrestling with whether she wanted to use the phrase “political correctness,” or if that was too dated. “It would be a tricky time for Joan.”Ms. Cox, the current star of E!’s red carpet show, doesn’t bite like that. She considers herself a nerd, particularly when it comes to the craft of acting — casually citing Chekhov in conversation, and once reciting a Macbeth monologue on air, egged on by Denzel Washington, while producers urged her to wrap it up.She skews more “fan girl” (her words) than “Fashion Police,” the former E! talk show with segments including “starlet or streetwalker.” Ms. Cox did make appearances as both a “Fashion Police” guest and subject. Giuliana Rancic, who preceded Ms. Cox as the network’s red carpet host, once praised her during a Screen Actors Guild Awards recap. “I love Laverne Cox,” she said, “and I don’t want to say anything bad.” Then she called her dress “hideous.”Generally, the red carpet no longer nurtures this kind of discourse. There has been a shift, over the last decade, from seeing famous people as wealthy elites deserving of mockery to just-like-us humans deserving of compassion. E! hiring Ms. Cox, whose first show as host was in December 2021, seems to be part of this shift.Laverne Cox at a “Live From E!” rehearsal on the champagne carpet, before Sunday’s Academy Awards. Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times“We were looking for a fresh voice and fresh perspective, particularly somebody who could be both a Hollywood insider and a fan,” said Cassandra Tryon, the senior vice president for live events for NBCUniversal television and streaming (NBCUniversal owns E!). “It’s like moving from a journalistic interview to a host of a party, and everybody wants to talk to the host.”The strategy, according to the network, has been working. While awards shows have struggled with viewership, the Grammy Awards’ live carpet telecast in February drew about 1.1 million viewers — the most for any E! program since 2020 (surpassing a season premiere episode of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians”).“It is a craft too, by the way, to be a host,” Ms. Tryon said, sitting in a room at the Hollywood Roosevelt, where the courtyard becomes an E! set during the Oscars. It was the eve of what she called the network’s Super Bowl.Oh, the humanity.“I feel nervous,” Ms. Cox said toward the end of rehearsals late Saturday afternoon. Outside of the Dolby Theatre, plastic still covered the champagne-colored carpet and mummified a jumbo Oscars statue facing the E! cameras.She had spent five hours on Friday reviewing and reworking questions for the nominees and presenters. There was a thick stack of cue cards for every name — some confirmed to stop and speak to Ms. Cox on the carpet, others more wishful. (“We always prep Cate” — Blanchett, that is — “and she never stops,” Ms. Cox bemoaned to her producers.) A card could have four questions, but once cameras start rolling, only one or two may make it to air.During rehearsal, she not only read her scripted lines, but she also practiced asking questions to stand-in actors playing Colin Farrell, Lady Gaga and more. Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesThe Oscars carpet is a particularly overstuffed carpet; E! doesn’t get a platform here, unlike at some other ceremonies. Which means there is a steady torrent of people — attendees, staff, photographers, publicists, assistants — jostling behind Ms. Cox as she works.Her interviews must be quick, to maximize the number of high-profile guests featured during E!’s three-hour broadcast, which jumps between Ms. Cox’s carpet interviews and a group of commentators at the Hollywood Roosevelt, or stationed on a nearby rooftop.Ms. Cox has an earpiece and at least two people cuing her on-site: a stage manager and a supervising producer named Sam Bellikoff, the creator of the cue cards and master of pronunciations (“Ana de Armas,” “Banshees of Inisherin”), who sometimes sits at Ms. Cox’s feet, tapping her leg. (One piece of E! interviewing wisdom imparted by Ms. Tryon: Skip asking people how they’re feeling, since everyone asks that, and the answers are often generic.)In explaining what she’s trying to accomplish as a host, Ms. Cox pointed to a Grammys interview with Machine Gun Kelly, in which he admitted to lacking “self-love,” in the context of losing awards. Ms. Cox told him: “Ultimately, there’s nothing outside of us that can make us love ourselves more. It has to come from inside.”That moment epitomized her desire to “create space for people to come and be themselves,” she said. “It can be frivolous. It can be silly.” She has no problem screaming as if she’s about to faint, casually asking her co-hosts for “tea” or referring to her interview subjects as just “girl.”“But it can also be deep,” she said. “What does it mean to be human?”“Thank you for sharing that,” Ms. Cox told Machine Gun Kelly at the Grammys in February, after he spoke about his need for validation.E!She interviewed Questlove, who won best documentary feature in 2022, at the Academy Awards on Sunday. E!Speaking to Questlove on Sunday about his next documentary — about Sly and the Family Stone and mental health in the Black community — Ms. Cox cited the phrase “post-traumatic slave syndrome,” coined by Joy DeGruy. “Where was the mental health after emancipation?” Ms. Cox said. Later in the show, she asked the director Sarah Polley about Rooney Mara’s use of a fart machine on the set of “Women Talking.” She whips between nuance and nuttiness.“In doing this job, I feel like the public has gotten to see a different side of me,” said Ms. Cox, who is best known for her role on “Orange Is the New Black,” which was on Netflix from 2013 to 2019, and earned her four Emmy nominations and two SAG ensemble acting awards. “It’s been a different way for me, hopefully, to highlight people’s humanity. As an artist, we’re arbiters of empathy and humanity. And I think it’s possible as a red-carpet host to also do that.”Yet it’s harder to do that in 60-second increments, in the heat of a celebrity battle zone, dodging Molotov cocktails of opulence and Ozempic.Speaking by phone on Monday, Ms. Cox said she felt “off” during the previous night’s broadcast, during which she completed 31 interviews (according to E!). She had some trouble breathing comfortably after choosing a particularly tight corset to wear with her Vera Wang gown (“ethereal Blade Runner,” she called the sea-foam-and-black look), and she noticed the Oscars guests seemed more weary, compared with their excitement at the start of the awards season.Ms. Cox between interviews (she did 31 of them) on Sunday.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesMs. Cox is handed cue cards with questions printed on them from a large alphabetized stack.Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times“I think I was frustrated with wanting to have deeper interactions and having so little time,” she said. “I’m always looking for connection. I’m always looking for something that feels authentic and unexpected.“There’s never enough time.”‘What story are you telling us with this look tonight?’If there’s one thing alone that will define Ms. Cox’s tenure as a red carpet host, it’s the way she has retooled the question “Who are you wearing tonight?”Backlash to that question began to swell in 2015, when celebrities including Reese Witherspoon drew attention to a campaign called #AskHerMore. After the #MeToo movement took off in late 2017, there was a call for interviewers, including Ms. Rancic and Ryan Seacrest on E!, to ask more substantive questions too.Yet Ms. Cox, a fashion enthusiast — she wore a vintage Mugler suit to her rehearsal Saturday — had no intention of eliminating the discussion of fashion. After she took over the hosting job, she asked attendees: “What story are you trying to tell with your look tonight?”The quality of answers vary. Sometimes they’re funny or thoughtful, and sometimes, as Austin Butler said of his Saint Laurent suit on Sunday night: “I don’t know what story I’m telling you. I just thought it was a beautiful tuxedo.” That’s fine with Ms. Cox, too. “The question for me is just an invitation to think differently about what we put on our backs,” she said.It is a question that has been applauded by the Representation Project, the organization behind the #AskHerMore campaign: “The way that she is approaching questions about fashion is a layer I’ve never seen on the red carpet,” said Caroline Heldman, the executive director. Ms. Heldman added that there is still work to be done. The Representation Project tracked four hours of red carpet coverage on Sunday night — two on ABC and two on E! — and found that women were still twice as likely as men to be asked about what they were wearing.A hair and makeup touch-up on the red carpet. Ms. Cox had “never worn anything like this Vera Wang dress before,” she said. “It’s good to take risks.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesBut the question is also rooted in Ms. Cox’s experience as a transgender woman. “My own relationship to fashion has always been an attempt to communicate to the world who I am,” she said. “Pre-transition, there was someone inside that was not reflected on the outside.”Generally, though, Ms. Cox said she appreciates that her identity and activism aren’t at the forefront of her hosting role: “What I do love about my job at E! is that, particularly as a host, I’m openly trans, but it’s not about me being trans.”Last month, at the Grammys, Ms. Cox was approached by Dylan Mulvaney, a TikTok creator who has been documenting her own transition, and who wanted to make a video with Ms. Cox. In the clip, Ms. Cox cautioned Ms. Mulvaney to “make sure you keep things to yourself — everything cannot be the public.”It was classic advice from Ms. Cox, who considers herself a private person. She referred to “having a cry” recently over not spending much time with her boyfriend, though when she was pressed for more details, she said she was “trying to keep him off the radar.”Ms. Tryon said E! considers Ms. Cox’s activism “as a plus” that gives her “a unique connection to celebrities.” That connection is the priority, Ms. Tryon said, along with “how to make it fun and light and safe for Laverne’s guests.”Ms. Cox said the only hesitation she had before taking the hosting job was whether it would make people in the industry, and in the public more widely, “forget that I’m also an actor,” she said. She is less worried about that now. Next week, she’ll travel to Georgia to begin work on a sitcom produced by Norman Lear. Her contract with E! runs through the end of 2023.But her appreciation for acting is not something that many in her E! audience — those watching the long hours of rapid interviews — are likely to forget. Often her questions and comments touch on the preparation and physicality and history of acting. She once got a note from her producers that said the audience didn’t like these craft questions, she said. It didn’t stop her.“I’m an actress,” she said. “I’m obsessed with craft.” More

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      Late Night Sums Up the Silicon Valley Bank Situation

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      “It’s pretty bad when the very first time you ever hear of a bank is when they’re going out of business,” Stephen Colbert said on Monday.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Don’t Bank on ItOn Friday, federal regulars seized control of Silicon Valley Bank, which was the 16th largest bank in the United States before its collapse.“It’s pretty bad when the very first time you ever hear of a bank is when they’re going out of business,” Stephen Colbert joked on Monday.“I don’t see how a bank could lose all their money that fast. Why don’t they just attach the money to those chains they put on the pens?” — STEPHEN COLBERT“It’s never good when people who are watching CNBC are shrieking louder than the people watching ‘Scream VI.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Silicon Valley Bank knew they were in trouble when they saw themselves in the Oscars’ ‘In Memoriam.’” — JIMMY FALLON“On the bright side, it was refreshing to hear about a crash that had nothing to do with a self-driving Tesla, don’t you think?” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Safe Word Edition)“President Biden spoke this morning about Friday’s collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and reassured Americans the country’s financial system is safe. But remember, this is a guy whose whole financial system is definitely a coffee can on a high shelf.” — SETH MEYERS“That’s right, President Biden reassured Americans the country’s financial system is safe. OK, I think the fact that you’re talking about a bank collapse proves it isn’t. That’s like going to a funeral and giving a eulogy about how Nana’s going to be fine.” — SETH MEYERS“Biden tried to put everyone at ease. He said, ‘Don’t worry, I got through the first Great Depression. I’ll get through this one.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Hearing from Biden actually did make me feel better, because you know if it were really bad, he would have been like, ‘Kamala, you take this one.’” — JIMMY FALLON“In response, Trump said, ‘It’s times like these where we need a president with experience of multiple bankruptcies.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingPresident Joe Biden took this week’s “The Daily Show” host Kal Penn on a tour of the Oval Office.What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightThe stand-up comic Mae Martin will talk about their upcoming Netflix special, “Sap,” on Tuesday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutSpecial Agent Allen Grove, who helps lead the F.B.I.’s art crime unit.Jake Michaels for The New York TimesThe F.B.I.’s art crime team is seeing increased interest in its work. More

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      ‘Perry Mason’ Season 2, Episode 2 Recap: Mason for the Defense

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      Perry gets back to his true calling after his nose tells him something smells funny about the Brooks McCutcheon murder. That was fast.Season 2, Episode 2: ‘Chapter Ten’You can take Perry Mason out of criminal defense lawyering, but you can’t take the criminal defense lawyer out of Perry Mason. That Perry discovers this with no evident chagrin is a testament to the truth of it. You don’t gain a sourpuss like his without a keen sense of the injustice of the world; on the evidence of last season, he has the legal know-how to do something about it, and he’s not about to forget it.His true vocation comes calling again in the form of the Gallardo brothers, Mateo (Peter Mendoza) and Rafael (Fabrizio Guido). These two young Mexican American men have been charged with the oil heir Brooks McCutcheon’s murder by D.A. Hamilton Burger, who assigns his lieutenant Thomas Milligan (Mark O’Brien) as lead prosecutor. There’s just one problem, from the look of things: The Gallardo brothers didn’t do it.At first, Perry and Della are reluctant to take the case, primarily because, well, they don’t take criminal cases anymore. But for both legal minds, the wheels of justice are in motion. Della seizes an opportunity as Burger’s beard for a charity event at the home of the oil magnate Camilla Nygaard (Hope Davis) to try to convince him to accept a plea. (He demurs.) Funny how oil money keeps coming up.Perry, meanwhile, straight-up breaks into impound to case the car in which Brooks was shot, discovering that the official line — McCutcheon was shot by one of the nervous Gallardos during a random stickup — doesn’t match the bullet’s trajectory. After a jailhouse meeting with the brothers further debunks the theory, Perry and Della agree to take the case. Pulling a fat monthly retainer out of the grocer Sunny Gryce in order to bankroll the defense is all it takes.Almost all. To get to the bottom of things, they’ll need a top-notch private investigator, and with Perry’s old partner Pete Strickland working for Burger, the ex-cop Paul Drake is the man for the job. Paul is reluctant to take on another job from Perry, especially after his recent gig with Strickland landed a relatively decent loan shark behind bars. Ironically, it’s Perry’s admission that he has no way to win back Paul’s trust that convinces him that Perry can be trusted.After some nosing around — including in an evidence box tampered with by the same shadowy, fedora’d figure who kept popping up in the pilot — Team Mason discovers that Brooks’s gambling boat was deep in debt to a variety of stiffed contractors, most of whom were retained because the ship is falling apart.Perry and Paul pay a visit to the ailing vessel, with Paul forced to take the employee taxi. In short order, Perry stumbles across Brooks’s cocktail-waitress lover, bearing bruises on her neck from the rough extracurriculars we learned about in the season premiere. Paul learns from a chef that only one produce supplier will do business with them anymore. And the two men narrowly escape the clutches of the crooked Detective Holcomb, whose voice thrums with a lethality he barely bothers to conceal as Perry makes his very public escape.But some elements of the case remain outside Perry’s sphere of perception: to wit, that shadowy figure and his paymaster, an associate of Brooks’s father named Crippen (John Prosky). After the mystery man murders Charlie Goldstein (Matthew Siegan), the boat’s last produce supplier standing, Crippen torches a grand jury subpoena for Brooks that recalls the one served to the slain carrots-and-potatoes man earlier in the episode.It has all the makings of a grand conspiracy of the Los Angeles noir subspecies, but the most impressive thing about the plot of “Perry Mason” so far this season is how dependent it is on the charisma of the characters and the performers behind them. We can start with Juliet Rylance as Della, a character who is as compelling in a red gown and white gloves at a dull charity event as she is when she’s hollering at a boxing match with her new lady friend. As Drake and Holcomb, the actors Chris Chalk and Eric Lange deliver memorable line readings: There’s a lifetime of hard-earned cynicism in Drake’s telling Perry he doesn’t know how they’ll get to a point of trust, and there’s an unmistakable promise of violence in Holcomb’s invitation to Perry to return to his boat “anytime … anytime.”The star of the show in every way remains Matthew Rhys as Mason. Although he does his best to conceal it, he’s still every bit as sexy an actor as he was as Philip Jeffries in “The Americans”; I found myself thinking that it’s a good thing that Della’s romantic inclinations are so firmly established, otherwise the chemistry between him and Rylance might go up like a torched casino boat.But Rhys’s primary talent here is looking not outraged by but disgusted with injustice. From his fury over getting played by Milligan outside the courthouse to his dogged determination to look into the Gallardos’ case, he has the air of a man made physically ill by seeing decent people get jammed up. If you’re going to play a role synonymous with the successful defense of the innocent, that’s a vibe that serves you in good stead.From the case files:Here’s where I admit I’m not a big mystery guy; I’ve got nothing against the genre, it’s just not where my bread is buttered. But I think this redounds to my benefit because I spend approximately zero time trying to figure out whodunit before Perry, Paul, and Della do. I’m not a practiced enough viewer to delude myself into thinking I have any chance.From Davis as the oil tycoon to Gretchen Mol as Perry’s ex-wife to Katherine Waterston as their son’s obviously smitten teacher, this episode drops so many impressive actors on us in such quick succession that it feels like a flex.O’Brien earned my undying admiration with his turn on “Halt and Catch Fire,” a bonafide Peak TV masterpiece. He took a potentially thankless role as the new love interest of Mackenzie Davis’s lead character, Cameron Howe, and showed you what she saw in him, a more impressive feat than it sounds.Remember when I noted that there was no graphic violence in the season premiere? I suppose it depends on your definition of “graphic,” but audibly squishing a guy’s head like a melon is violent all right!I sometimes wish the wives on this show were given more to do than worry about their husbands. Then again, I suppose they wish the same thing. More

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      The Oscars TV Broadcast Is Becoming Increasingly Ordinary

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      A show that’s become a shrink-wrapped, anodyne exercise stuck safely to the script.To paraphrase Greta Garbo, give me back my slap.No, of course onstage assaults are unacceptable. But the 95th Academy Awards could have used a jolt of some kind as they wound their way through three and a half hours on Sunday night. There was a crisis team in place to handle the fallout from any unexpected catastrophes like Will Smith’s attack on Chris Rock at last year’s show, but there was nothing it could do about the ordinariness and sameness of the ABC broadcast.The audience in the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles roared for the early victories of sentimental favorites like Ke Huy Quan and Jamie Lee Curtis of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (for best supporting actor and actress) and the late — very late — victories of the film’s writers and directors, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, and star, Michelle Yeoh. And their speeches were stirring. But at the end of the now endless awards season, we knew that they would be, and we had a pretty good idea what they would say.There is now, through no one’s individual fault, a consistently promotional, exhortatory, shrink-wrapped feeling to the Oscars. After the depredations of streaming video and Covid-19, no chances are being taken. Jimmy Kimmel, reviving the role of the solo Oscar host, got off some good lines in his monologue — the movies are still distinct from television because “a TV show can’t lose $100 million.” (Though in the age of Netflix and Amazon, is that true?) But on balance it was safe, with the sharp jibes reserved for easy targets who weren’t there, like James Cameron and Tom Cruise. (“L. Ron Hubba Hubba,” maybe the best line of the night.)Kimmel addressed Smith’s slap at length without really talking about it. He focused on what would happen in the extremely unlikely event anyone went rogue this year, pointing out performers in the audience whose screen characters were brutal enforcers — Pedro Pascal of “The Mandalorian,” Michael B. Jordan of “Creed III” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” It was an odd way to signal that violence was unwelcome.(Smith, last year’s best-actor winner, was replaced as a presenter for the lead acting awards by Halle Berry.)More on the 95th Academy AwardsA24’s Triumphant Night: The art-house studio behind “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “The Whale” became the first studio in the history of the Oscars to capture the top six awards in the same year.Normalcy Reigns: After breathing a sigh of relief that the night went smoothly, our co-chief film critics discussed the academy’s carefully staged return to (fingers crossed?) a new normal.Oscar Fashion: Rihanna’s belly, Florence Pugh’s shorts and Cate Blanchett’s archival velvet brought new relevance to awards show dressing, our fashion critic says.After-Parties: Take a look inside the Governor’s Ball and Vanity Fair’s Oscar party, where the stars and filmmakers celebrated with moguls, musicians and models.In current fashion, the show opened not with a production number but a film montage, in this case a series of behind-the-scenes clips from nominated films. The attempt to hook audiences by bringing them inside the process of filmmaking and award-giving was also reflected in the deconstructed see-through set.The win for “Navalny” for best documentary feature was an early highlight.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesThis contemporary feint toward inclusiveness — if they can’t nominate more female directors, at least they can make viewers feel as if they’re getting an inside look — contrasts, for better and worse, with the glossy insiders’ party that the Oscars used to be.The surely unintentional effect, in a broadcast that sang the praises of the theater experience, is to make the movies feel smaller — more suited for the laptop screen and the Netflix interface. Winners don’t stick in the mind they way they used to. Did you remember that “Dune” took home six awards last year, twice as many as any other film? Or that “CODA” won best picture? (You’re welcome.)In this context, the purely promotional segments on Sunday — a long plug for the Academy museum, a creaky salute to Warner Bros.’ 100th anniversary — felt right at home but also, in their reinforcement of the show’s lumpen unremarkableness, more irritating than ever.And seemingly harmless attempts to signal virtue can backfire, as in Kimmel’s awkward and eventually condescending exchange with Malala Yousafzai.As always, there were moments that pierced the veil. The victory of “Navalny” in the documentary feature category, while its subject, the dissident Alexei Navalny, languishes in a Russian prison, was indelible. Julia-Louis Dreyfus and Paul Dano were polished and funny in their presentation of costume design; the award’s winner, Ruth Carter of “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” movingly invoked her mother, who had just died at the age of 101, asking the actor Chadwick Boseman to look for her in the afterlife. Yeoh, given carte blanche to emote, showed that feeling could be conveyed in an acceptance speech that was largely polished and non-self-aggrandizing.David Byrne injected a welcome note of weirdness, if not musicality, in the performance of the best-song nominee “This Is a Life” from “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” The production number “Naatu Naatu” from “RRR,” Lady Gaga’s unplugged performance of “Hold My Hand” from “Top Gun: Maverick” and Rihanna’s rendition of “Lift Me Up” from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” were unimpeachably professional. But the musical highlight of the night was undoubtedly the snatch of the Carpenters’ “Top of the World” sung by the composer M.M. Keeravani when “Naatu Naatu” won best song.When Kimmel wasn’t forced to ad-lib, he and his writers were generally on point. A call for audience votes on whether Robert Blake should be included in the In Memoriam segment was slyly handled. (He wasn’t.) A joke about the editing of footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol didn’t mention Tucker Carlson or Fox News but made its point.The good moments, however, couldn’t change my sense that the modern Oscars have become something more to be endured than enjoyed. If you wanted a glimpse of the zeitgeist on Sunday night, HBO (“The Last of Us”) and TLC (“MILF Manor”) were the places to look. More

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      ‘The Last of Us’ Finale: Who Are the Good Guys?

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      In its stunning first-season finale, “The Last of Us” became a video game — and, in the process, morally potent TV.If you watch HBO’s “The Last of Us” there’s a good chance you know it’s based on a video game, even if you’ve never held a controller in your life. (I’ve never played the game, though before I reviewed the series I watched a 10-hour play-through video on YouTube, which I can safely say was a first in my career as a TV critic.)You didn’t really need to know the series’s origins to enjoy the zombie-apocalypse drama, though, and for most of the first season, it was easy to forget them. But in the season finale’s bloody and morally harrowing climax, “The Last of Us” fully embraced its video-game roots — and by doing so, became powerful TV.The setup: After a perilous cross-country journey, Joel (Pedro Pascal) has finally delivered Ellie (Bella Ramsey) to a medical center run by a resistance group called the Fireflies. Ellie, a scrappy teen immune to the zombie fungus, may be humanity’s only hope. But Joel learns at the last moment that the operation to extract a possible cure from her will kill her.As you’d expect, he springs into action. When he overpowers his guards in a stairwell, the narrative shifts into game mode. He collects the dead soldiers’ weapons in the same way a game character resupplies inventory. As he blasts his way through the hospital, the over-the-shoulder shots mimic the point-of-view vantage of gameplay; the clank of shell casings recall the sound design of modern games. You half expect to see a health and ammo meter somewhere in the corner of the screen.We have seen Joel pull off some spectacular fights, and the history of TV and cinema tells us to expect a battle royal here. This is not that. It’s a slaughter. The ambient noise fades behind a mournful score as Joel mows down the overmatched guards, as if he’s playing on easy mode. He shoots armed opponents and unarmed ones, grimly and mechanically.Finally, he makes it to the operating room, where Ellie has just gone under anesthesia. Point-blank, he executes the surgeon — who, however unethically, is trying to salvage an effort to save the human race — then orders the terrified nurses to unhook Ellie.He saves her. He wins. Isn’t this what you wanted?When “The Last of Us” was first announced, it may have seemed like a mismatch for HBO, that citadel of mature TV drama — at least if your image of video game adaptations was formed by “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.” But a video game, even or especially a shoot-em-up, can actually have a lot in common with the antihero drama format.Inside the Dystopian World of ‘The Last of Us’The post-apocalyptic video game that inspired the TV series “The Last of Us” won over players with its photorealistic animation and a morally complex story.Game Review: “I found it hard to get past what it embraces with a depressing sameness, particularly its handling of its female characters,” our critic wrote of “The Last of Us” in 2013.‘Left Behind’: “The Last of Us: Left Behind,” a prologue designed to be played in a single sitting, was an unexpected hit in 2014.2020 Sequel: “The Last of Us Part II,” a tale of entrenched tribalism in a world undone by a pandemic, took a darker and unpredictable tone that left critics in awe.Playing the Game: Two Times reporters spent weeks playing the sequel in the run-up to its release. These were their first impressions.Many great HBO dramas, going back to “The Sopranos,” have worked by making you share the perspective of imperfect protagonists. You may find Tony Soprano repellent, but you’re along for the ride. You spend time with him, you share in his conflicts, you laugh at his jokes. The act of following someone in a narrative makes you complicit — you want Tony’s story to keep going — which challenges you to question what you want and why you want it.Nothing makes you inhabit the experience of the protagonist quite like a video game. There is a challenge, enemies, a goal. You control the point-of-view character, and you want to win. So you are on the side of Mario, not Donkey Kong; the lone gunslinger, not the cannon fodder in the hallways.There is a history of games, including “The Last of Us,” that use this dynamic to make players confront complicity much as cable dramas do with viewers. The 2012 game Spec Ops: The Line puts the player in the position of a special-forces soldier who commits atrocities in the name of completing the mission. (“You are still a good person,” a loading screen taunts the player.)The “Last of Us” finale puts the controller, figuratively, in the viewer’s hand. You share Joel’s perspective. You have the gun. You have come to know Ellie, to laugh and grieve with her, to love her. You want her to live, and you have the charge of protecting her. So everyone standing in the way needs to die. Humanity will need to find some other way to save itself.Joel (Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) have overcome many threats together but their mission was intended to be for the benefit of humanity as a whole.Liane Hentscher/HBOWhat complicates the scene is that no one is entirely the good guy here. The Fireflies didn’t give Ellie the chance to choose her fate. But the scene also doesn’t offer the easy comfort of framing Joel as the underdog beating the bad guys. There are only people making lousy choices, trying to survive.In a conventional zombie story or game, what Joel does would be the right thing, the only option. Zombie narratives like “The Walking Dead” tend toward a simple moral framework: The world has gone to hell, the survivors have reverted to beasts, and all you can do is look out for you and yours. Pursuing noble obligations to a larger community only gets you killed.As my colleague Michelle Goldberg has written, “The Last of Us” has sometimes embraced this essentially conservative outlook, celebrating the wisdom of building fences and hoarding guns. But not wholly. Yes, there are raiders and cannibals out there, but Joel and Ellie also stay over in Jackson, Wyo., now a thriving communist society that does not, contra what “The Walking Dead” has led us to expect, hide a terrible secret.More important, as the finale makes painfully clear, the series rejects the easy moral escape clause of “It’s us against the world.” As much as Joel and Ellie may be a self-sufficient unit, they are still part of the world. Their choices have ramifications beyond themselves. And here, “protecting your own” may mean millions more dead, somewhere offscreen. The consequences of your beating the final level are not, whatever you might say, above your pay grade.Which is why, as disturbing as Joel’s shooting spree is, it is not the most chilling thing he does in the episode. The finale, like the video game, saves this for the end.We rejoin Joel driving away from the Firefly compound with Ellie. When she wakes up, he lies to her about what happened. “Turns out there are a whole lot more like you,” he says. But the Firefly doctors couldn’t figure out how to reproduce the immunity effect. “They’ve actually stopped looking for a cure.”The Fireflies were going to take Ellie’s life. Joel takes her hope.When I reviewed “The Last of Us” before the season started, I could talk about his act only in general terms. The series is “an extended horror story of single parenting,” I wrote. “Joel’s struggle is a heightened version of the everyday experience of how being responsible for a vulnerable life makes you vulnerable yourself, how it can make you do unforgivable things for them — or to them — in the name of protection.”Joel, as we now know, watched his daughter die at the beginning of the outbreak. It is not lost on anyone that he sees Ellie as a surrogate child. And to this point, under the worst conditions, he has done what a parent should: He has protected her and given her the wherewithal to face the dangers of the larger world and to accept her responsibility to it.But he fails Ellie in the way that many parents fail their children: out of love and fear. Maybe he doesn’t want her to feel guilty. Maybe he doesn’t want her to hate him. Maybe he suspects that, if she had the choice, she would have agreed to save the world instead of herself. She gave us good reason to believe that earlier, when Joel offered to turn around and leave with her. “After all we’ve been through, everything I’ve done,” she said. “It can’t be for nothing.”Joel’s tender betrayal of Ellie is unbearable partly because of the narrative structure “The Last of Us” borrowed from the video game. Ellie is, in game terms, a “playable character.” In the game, you play as Ellie while Joel is laid up with his wound. In the series, you join her point of view in the last two episodes before the finale, watching her fall in love in a flashback and then defend her own life while saving Joel’s.We have already been told that Joel has done horrible things to survive the apocalypse. But the unforgivable thing he does here is to make Ellie into a non-player character again, denying her the agency to be the protagonist of her own life.The second season will likely explore the fallout from Joel’s actions.Liane Hentscher/HBOIs it permanent? Maybe not. Just before the credits, Ellie questions Joel: “Swear to me that everything you said about the Fireflies is true.” He sticks to his story. She says, “OK,” but there’s a disquiet in her eyes. Is she accepting that she is no longer humanity’s hope for a cure? Or that she gave Joel a chance to tell the truth and can no longer trust him?This may be the question that hangs over the next season. With this gut-punch of a finale, “The Last of Us” has made its stakes about something bigger than simply keeping Ellie alive. All of us, it says, have the right to play our own game. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Lucky Hank’ and ‘The Hours’

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      A new comedy series starring Bob Odenkirk comes to AMC, and the Metropolitan Opera’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” premieres on PBS.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, March 13-19. Details and times are subject to change.MondayPaul Newman, left, and Robert Redford in “The Sting.”Universal PicturesTHE STING (1973) 8 p.m. on TCM. Set in Illinois in the late 1930s, this seven-time Academy Award-winning comedy follows the grifter Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford) as he teams up with an experienced con artist, Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman), to take revenge on the crime boss responsible for killing their mutual friend. As their plot unfolds, however, things don’t go according to plan. “‘The Sting’ has a conventional narrative, with a conventional beginning, middle and end, but what one remembers are the set pieces of the sort that can make a slapped-together Broadway show so entertaining,” Vincent Canby wrote in his review for The New York Times.TuesdayFrom left, Tyler DiChiara, Olivia Rose Keegan, Oscar Morgan, Fallon Smythe, Navia Robinson in “Gotham Knights.”Amanda Mazonkey/CWSUPERMAN AND LOIS 8 p.m. on The CW. After defeating supervillains and monsters in season two, Clark Kent (Tyler Hoechlin) and Lois Lane (Elizabeth Tulloch) are back for a third season. Now working at The Smallville Gazette, the couple finds their peace cut short when Lois is given a dangerous undercover assignment and their sons deal with their own dilemmas. Pulled in different directions, the Kents must work to keep their family together.GOTHAM KNIGHTS 9 p.m. on The CW. Set in Gotham City, this new series follows Bruce Wayne’s adopted son, Turner Hayes (Oscar Morgan), after he is framed for Batman’s murder and forges an unlikely alliance with the children of the superhero’s enemies. With the district attorney and police chasing them, the Knights will have to save themselves and the city.WednesdayALL THE KING’S MEN (1949) 6 p.m. on TCM. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name by Robert Penn Warren, this three-time Academy Award winning film tells the story of Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford), an ambitious politician from the rural South who campaigns against corruption, only to become corrupt himself. Loosely based on the rise and fall of Huey Long, the governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932, the film “follows this disillusioned fellow as he gets the hang of politics and discovers the strange intoxication of his own unprincipled charm,” Bosley Crowther wrote for The Times.ThursdayTHE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN (2022) 8 p.m. on HBO Signature. This Academy Award-nominated film from the director Martin McDonagh takes place at the tail end of the Irish Civil War in 1923 on a remote island. The lifelong friendship between Pádraic (Colin Farrell) and Colm (Brendan Gleeson) abruptly ends when Colm decides Pádraic is too dull for him. “McDonagh’s new film embellishes the cartography without necessarily breaking new ground. It’s a good place to start if you’re new to his work, and cozily — which is also to say horrifically — familiar if you’re already a fan,” A.O. Scott wrote in a review for The Times.FridayKathleen Kim and Renée Fleming stand singing onstage, surrounded by women in pastel house dresses holding bouquets of flowers. Kim is in a yellow sweater and red plaid skirt, and Fleming is in a white skirt suit.Evan Zimmerman/Metropolitan OperaGREAT PERFORMANCES AT THE MET: THE HOURS 9 p.m. on PBS. Adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning book and Oscar-nominated film of the same name, both inspired by Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” this opera connects a single day in the lives of three women across time: Woolf herself, writing her book; a midcentury homemaker, Laura, reading Woolf’s book; and a 1990s editor named Clarissa who, like Clarissa Dalloway, is organizing a party. “It is rendered as only opera can be: with an interplay of divas — Renée Fleming, Kelli O’Hara and Joyce DiDonato — who are enveloped by a restless and lush orchestra, and share a dream space with an ensemble of dancers who guide and observe them,” Joshua Barone wrote for The Times.SaturdayAMERICAN MASTERS: TWYLA MOVES 10:30 p.m. on WLIW21. Through original interviews, videos of Twyla Tharp at work and archival footage of select performances from her more than 160 dances, this documentary from the Emmy-winning filmmaker Steven Cantor delves into the life, career and creative process of the legendary choreographer. What’s most revelatory about the documentary, Gia Kourlas wrote for The Times, “is the way it dashes past those overarching themes to highlight something else: her wholly original dancing body. Like the woman living inside of it, it’s both meticulous and wild. This body has guts.”SundayEmilia Schüle in “Marie Antoinette.”Caroline Dubois/Canal+LUCKY HANK 9 p.m. on AMC, IFC, BBCA and SUNDANCE. Adapted from the novel “Straight Man” by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo, this new series is a midlife crisis tale starring the Emmy-nominated actor Bob Odenkirk (“Better Call Saul”) and Mireille Enos (“The Killing”). Narrated in the first person, William Henry “Hank” Devereaux, Jr. (Odenkirk) is the bitter chairman of the English department at a poorly funded university in rural Pennsylvania, and Enos plays his wife, Lily, who’s also questioning her life choices.MARIE ANTOINETTE 10 p.m. on PBS. This new period drama focuses on the complex life of a teenage Marie Antoinette (Emilia Schüle) as she is sent away from Austria to marry Louis XVI, the Dauphin of France (Louis Cunningham). The series follows Marie as she learns the rules of French court, tries to obey her mother — the Empress of Austria (Tony nominee Marthe Keller) — and deals with Louis’s solitary personality, all while struggling to be true to herself. More