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      Has America Ignored the Workplace for Too Long?

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

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      Treat Williams, Actor Known for ‘Hair’ and ‘Everwood,’ Dies at 71

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      The veteran actor also starred in the movie “Deep Rising.” He died after a motorcycle accident in Vermont.Treat Williams, the actor known for his roles in the movies “Hair” and “Deep Rising” and the TV show “Everwood,” has died. He was 71.Mr. Williams died on Monday after an S.U.V. crashed into his motorcycle in Dorset, Vt., the Vermont State Police said in a statement.The crash occurred in the late afternoon near the Vermont-New York State border.The Vermont State Police said that a southbound S.U.V. attempting to turn left into a parking lot drove into the path of Mr. Williams’s northbound Honda motorcycle, adding that Mr. Williams was “unable to avoid a collision and was thrown from his motorcycle.”Mr. Williams, who was wearing a helmet at the time of the accident, suffered critical injuries and was pronounced dead at a medical center in Albany, N.Y., after being airlifted there, the state police said. The 35-year-old man whose vehicle hit Mr. Williams was not hospitalized.The police said an investigation was underway. No other details were immediately available.Richard Treat Williams was born in Stamford, Conn., in 1951. “Treat” is a Welsh name that has been in his family for generations.Mr. Williams moved with his family to Rowayton, Conn., as a young child, he told Vermont Magazine in a 2021 interview. His father was a World War II veteran who later worked for the Merck pharmaceutical company. His mother owned a sailing and swimming school on Long Island Sound.“Looking back on my younger years, I had an idyllic childhood, but I didn’t initially realize how idyllic it truly was until I grew older,” he told the magazine.Mr. Williams began acting in seventh grade, he told Vermont Magazine. Later, at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania, he quit the football team to focus on acting.Within a few years, he was on Broadway as the understudy to four of the male leads in “Grease,” including John Travolta. Then he began picking up roles in films starring James Earl Jones, Michael Caine and other A-list stars. One of his highest-profile roles was playing a hippie in the 1979 film version of “Hair,” directed by Milos Foreman.But his success wasn’t always assured. After a movie he starred in flopped in 1980 — the comedy “Why Would I Lie?” — Mr. Williams started flying planes for a company in Los Angeles.“I’d done eight films, none of which had been successful,” he told The New York Times in 1981. “I felt so out of control. I wasn’t working with people I wanted to work with. I was very frustrated.”Mr. Williams eventually came back to show business and racked up four more decades of roles in a wide variety of film and television projects.Among other highlights, he played the lead roles of a police officer-turned-informant in the 1981 film “Prince of the City” and a boat captain in the 1998 action movie “Deep Rising.”He also starred in “Everwood,” a WB television series about a New York neurosurgeon who starts a new life with his family in the mountains of Colorado after his wife dies in a car accident. The show debuted in 2002 and ran for four seasons.More recently, Mr. Williams played the impossibly single old flame of a woman who tries to sell her hometown in the 2020 Netflix musical “Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square.” He also played a retired detective in the 2022 HBO series “We Own This City.”Information about Mr. Williams’s survivors was not immediately available.Hours before he died, Mr. Williams, who lived in Manchester Center, Vt., posted a photo on Twitter that he appeared to have taken from the seat of his lawn mower.“Mowing today,” he wrote. “Wish I could bottle the scent.”Jesus Jiménez More

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      Pat Sajak, Longtime ‘Wheel of Fortune’ Host, Says He Will Retire

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      The game show host, a mainstay of American television, has starred on the program since 1981. He said he will step down in 2024.Pat Sajak, who as the host of “Wheel of Fortune” since 1981 became one of the most familiar faces on American television, announced on Monday that he will retire next year.“The time has come,” Mr. Sajak, 76, said on Twitter. “I’ve decided that our 41st season, which begins in September, will be my last.”Over the four-plus decades that Mr. Sajak has hosted the show, more than 10,000 people have auditioned for the “Wheel of Fortune,” which has drawn more than 26 million viewers per week, according to Sony Pictures Television, the studio that owns it.Suzanne Prete, executive vice president of game shows for Sony Pictures Television, said in a statement on Monday night that the studio was “incredibly grateful and proud to have had Pat as our host for all these years.”“We look forward to celebrating his outstanding career throughout the upcoming season,” Ms. Prete said.Mr. Sajak agreed to continue as a consultant for three years after his final season, Ms. Prete said.It was unclear who would take over the hosting duties after Mr. Sajak retires.Vanna White, Mr. Sajak’s longtime co-host, did not post any comment on social media on Monday night. She briefly stepped in for Mr. Sajak in 2019, when he needed an emergency surgery to fix a blocked intestine.While Ms. White filled in for Mr. Sajak, his daughter, Maggie Sajak, took over Ms. White’s puzzleboard duties. Ms. Sajak is a social correspondent for the show, posting digital content. The show, which was created by Merv Griffin in 1975, features contestants who try to guess word puzzles to compete for cash, of which more than $250 million had been awarded since it premiered, according to Sony. More

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      Book Review: ‘Wannabe,’ by Aisha Harris

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      In her essay collection “Wannabe,” Aisha Harris argues that Black critics can both appreciate, and demand more from, shifts in popular culture.WANNABE: Reckonings With the Pop Culture That Shapes Me, by Aisha HarrisBeing a Black critic in a time of exceptional art made by Black people has immense rewards and myriad risks. “Wannabe,” the debut essay collection from Aisha Harris, a co-host of NPR’s “Pop Culture Happy Hour,” is at its best when engaging with those risks and the thorny questions of her profession. In what ways does identity inform a critic’s work? And should it?Harris can laugh about the demands of endorsing positive representations of Blackness, no matter how trite (“When encountering Black art out in the wild, be on the lookout for Black Girl Magic, Black Love, Black Excellence and the direct involvement of Common and/or John Legend”). She cheekily pushes Issa Rae’s now-famous awards show proclamation — “I’m rooting for everybody Black” — to its most absurd extent: “It’s only right we take her at her literal word and support all Black artists and art, no matter how questionable, incompetent or just plain offensive they might be.” But when a podcast listener chastises Harris for finding the Will Smith movie “King Richard” middling, she roars back. “I don’t want to ‘just be happy’ about ‘King Richard,’” she insists. “I want interiority and surprise and characters who feel as though they have a reason to exist beyond retelling history.”It’s complicated, though. Harris recounts conflictedness about being disappointed by “A Wrinkle in Time,” which was directed by Ava DuVernay, whose film career was firmly on the rise. Harris, who wrote movie reviews for Slate and is a former editor at The New York Times, worried that a lukewarm piece could mean it would “be decades before another studio handed a movie of this stature to a woman of color.” Looking back, she arrived at a place that was “true to my own reactions to the movie without being scathing.”“Wannabe” is a blend of memoir and cultural analysis, framed as “reckonings with the pop culture that shapes me.” Harris flaunts a wide range of references, moving easily between decades and arenas. She makes smart use of Roger Ebert on Fellini, revisits “Key & Peele” sketches and dissects bell hooks’s analysis of the experimental film hero Stan Brakhage. The book is especially effective when its author leans on her personal experience. Harris grew up in Connecticut, in “predominantly white and suburban circles,” and she tenderly illustrates the trials of growing up “The Black Friend” in white environments.“These Black Friends,” Harris offers, “were a reminder of my isolation and the fact that I often felt as if I was a blip on the radar of the many white peers I attempted to befriend.”Harris braids her personal pain with incisive critiques of the trope and its limitations, constructing internal monologues for famous pop culture examples, like Gabrielle Union’s Katie in “She’s All That” and Lamorne Morris’s Winston in “New Girl.” She deftly connects the rise of the personal brand and the toxic cultures of online fandom (“The overpersonalization of pop culture begets acrimony and pathological obsession”); confronts her decision to not have kids through the prism of “The Brady Bunch” and Judd Apatow’s “Knocked Up”; and quotes from her own LiveJournal about a hurtful memory involving an oft-forgotten scene in Tina Fey’s “Mean Girls.”Still, for all its range, “Wannabe” contains occasions that demand more rigorous engagement. Contending with Dave Chappelle’s thorny legacy is limited to an aside: “While I recognize that present-day Dave Chappelle suffers from transphobic diarrhea of the mouth,” Harris writes, “I cannot pretend as though some of his old jokes no longer slap.” (She goes on to quote several of them.)And the recency of the pop references in “Wannabe” is both a strength and a weakness, and risks dating the book.The groundbreaking success of Disney’s “Encanto” and the multiple Oscar winner “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is likely to matter for a long time; Warner Bros. Discovery’s cancellation of the “Batgirl” film or the Harper’s letter on “Justice and Open Debate” might lose potency for the reader not engaged with the mostly-online #discourse.But enlisting movies and TV to explain the world is Harris’s expertise, arriving at “inadvertent self-formation by way of popular culture.” For readers already inclined to read culture to understand themselves, “Wannabe” is a compelling affirmation that they’re looking in the right place.Elamin Abdelmahmoud is a podcaster and the author of “Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces,” a New York Times Notable Book in 2022.WANNABE: Reckonings With the Pop Culture That Shapes Me | By Aisha Harris | 280 pp. | HarperOne | $29.99 More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘How Do You Measure a Year?’ and ‘Project Runway’

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      HBO airs a documentary about a father and daughter. And the fashion competition show is back for its 20th season.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, June 12-18. Details and times are subject to change.MondayFrom left, Adam Devine, Aubrey Plaza, Anna Kendrick and Zac Efron in “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates.”Gemma LaMana/Twentieth Century Fox Film CorporationMIKE AND DAVE NEED WEDDING DATES (2016) 7 p.m. on E!. If you’re looking for something goofy with a hint of escapism and a whisper of romance to start the week, this could be the movie for you. The story follows Mike and Dave (Adam Devine and Zac Efron), brothers who have been known to ruin family events with their antics. With the wedding of their sister, Jeanie (Sugar Lyn Beard), coming up, their parents tell them that they have to show up with dates. The brothers end up finding Tatiana and Alice (Aubrey Plaza and Anna Kendrick), who are trying to scam their way to a free vacation. Chaos ensues.TuesdayREAL HOUSEWIVES OF NEW JERSEY: REUNION 8 p.m. on Bravo. The ladies in New Jersey seem to have a lot to discuss this season, because the usual sit-down reunion with the Bravo producer and host Andy Cohen has been divided into three parts, with this being the final installment. Teresa Giudice, Melissa Gorga and Dolores Catania are just a few of the housewives who will be there, exposing texts and airing dirty laundry.WednesdayHOW DO YOU MEASURE A YEAR? 9 p.m. on HBO. If you were watching the musical “Rent,” that question would be answered, “In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee,” but for the filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt, he is asking the question perhaps more literally. Over the course of 17 years, Rosenblatt captured moments with his daughter, Ella, on her birthdays. From the ages of 2 to 18, Jay would sit Ella down and ask the same couple of questions — including how she would describe herself and how she would define the word “power.” The film earned an Oscar nomination this year.TEMPTATION ISLAND 9 p.m. on USA. Unlike reality dating shows like “Love Island” or “Bachelor in Paradise,” which send a bunch of singles to a beach to try to find love, this show sends already established couples to a beach in Hawaii. When they arrive, they are split up into different houses, each of which has singles who are ready to mingle. The object of the show is to see if the original couples are going to leave together or leave with someone else.Jordan Rodgers and JoJo Fletcher, the hosts of “The Big D.”Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesTHE BIG D 10 p.m. on E!. The “D” in this title refers to a not-so-fun word: divorce. JoJo Fletcher and Jordan Rodgers (of “Bachelor” franchise fame) host this reality show that brings together divorced couples who are looking for another shot at love. On the beaches of Costa Rica, the contestants can choose to try to rekindle things with their ex or find a new spark. The hosts, who are married, are also joined each episode by a relationship coach who tries to help the new couples and former couples through their new and old romances, and tries to set them up for relationship success in the future.ThursdayGUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER (1967) 8 p.m. on TCM. Katharine Houghton and Sidney Poitier star in this film about an engaged interracial couple who visit the woman’s liberal white parents, prompting her parents to confront their feelings of racism toward her Black partner. The film’s box office success had an impact on future film marketing as it related to race issues. It “is a most delightfully acted and gracefully entertaining film, fashioned much in the manner of a stage drawing-room comedy, that seems to be about something much more serious and challenging than it actually is,” Bosley Crowther wrote in his review for The New York Times.PROJECT RUNWAY 8 p.m. on Bravo. For its 20th season, this reality competition show is bringing back 14 memorable past contestants to again grind away on their sewing machines in the hopes of showing what they can bring to the world of fashion. Christian Siriano will return as a mentor, and judges for this season are Nina Garcia, Elaine Welteroth and Brandon Maxwell, with a list of celebrity guest judges lined up.FridayStacey Dash and Alicia Silverstone in “Clueless.”Paramount PicturesCLUELESS (1995) 8 p.m. on Pop TV. As IF you could miss the airing of this ’90s cult favorite. Follow Cher (Alicia Silverstone) as she navigates her crushes, tries to pass her driver’s test and schemes with her friends Dionne (Stacey Dash) and Tai (Brittany Murphy). The film, which is loosely based on “Emma” by Jane Austen, “is best enjoyed as an extended fashion show (kudos to the costume designer, Mona May) peppered with amusing one-liners, most of which Ms. Silverstone gets to deliver,” Janet Maslin wrote in her 1995 review of the film for The Times.SaturdayJOHN EARLY: NOW MORE THAN EVER 10 p.m. on HBO. The comedian John Early, probably most known for his role in “Search Party,” now has a televised special on HBO that is part stand-up comedy, part rock show. In it, he tells jokes, performs covers of songs and puts on behind-the-scenes-type skits.SundayRIDLEY: THE PEACEFUL GARDEN 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). This British police procedural stars Adrian Dunbar as the titular role — Alex Ridley, a former detective who had to take a leave of absence after losing his wife and daughter in a house fire and suffering a subsequent nervous breakdown. He comes back to the job to investigate the murder of a sheep farmer. Though the show can currently be found on BritBox, it is airing in the United States for the first time. More

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      Michael Batayeh, Comedian and ‘Breaking Bad’ Actor, Dies at 52

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      Mr. Batayeh starred in three episodes of the Emmy-winning series and performed stand-up comedy.Michael Batayeh, an actor best known for his brief role in the Emmy-winning series “Breaking Bad” and a comedian who was popular in the Arab-American community, died at his home in Ypsilanti, Mich. He was 52.His sister Ida Vergollo said he died on June 1 in his sleep after a heart attack. A coroner later found issues with his heart, she said.Mr. Batayeh appeared in “Breaking Bad” as Dennis Markowski, the steady manager of a laundromat that was a front for a meth lab. The character was killed after he showed interest in speaking to the Drug Enforcement Administration in exchange for immunity.As a comedian, Mr. Batayeh performed in major clubs in New York City and Los Angeles, as well as around the country and internationally.He also had credits on several popular television series, including “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” “The Bernie Mac Show” and “Boy Meets World.”Mr. Batayeh’s role as a cabdriver on “Everybody Loves Raymond” in 1998 signaled to his family that he had arrived as an entertainer, according to Ms. Vergollo, “because that’s when my dad first saw his last name on TV.” She said, “My dad was so proud of him and let him know that.”Michael Anthony Batayeh was born on Dec. 27, 1970, in Detroit, the seventh child of Abraham Batayeh, a Ford factory worker, and Victoria (Dababneh) Batayeh.The couple immigrated to the United States from Jordan in 1955. Michael Batayeh attended Wayne State University for three years before dropping out and moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the arts and start his own comedy troupe with a friend.“He was actually made to be a performer since he was very, very young,” said Ms. Vergollo, who recalled that her brother began playing the tabla, a pair of hand drums, at 5 years old and continued throughout his adult life.“My dad used to drag him up onstage at all the weddings,” she said.Mr. Batayeh is survived by his sisters Ida Vergollo, Diane Batayeh-Ricketts, MaryAnn Joseph, Madeline Sherman and Theresa Aquino. His eldest sister, Jeannie Batayeh, died from cancer in 2016.Mr. Batayeh often used his family as fodder for comedy. “He made fun of us a lot,” Ms. Vergollo said.And an affinity for accents made him popular in the Arab-American community, said Ms. Vergollo, who called him “so spot on.”At the invitation of the Jordanian royal family, his sisters said, he performed at a comedy festival in Amman, Jordan’s capital. He was also featured in a comedy special for Showtime Arabia.The family is asking for memorial contributions to an organization that provides recreation and mentoring programs for youth in southwest Detroit.“He would voice to us how important it was and how good he felt when he went back home and talked to kids or mentored people who wanted to start out,” Ms. Vergollo said. She noted that Mr. Batayeh moved back to Michigan from California permanently in 2016 when his sister Jeannie was ill, but would travel back and forth for work.“He cared about his community and wanted to give back,” she said, “and that’s the type of person he was.” More

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      How Saycon Sengbloh of ‘The Wonder Years’ Unwinds

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      The “Wonder Years” star takes care of herself with satin pillows, costume dramas and food that connects her to her Liberian roots.When Saycon Sengbloh tried out for the role of Lillian Williams, the matriarch in ABC’s reboot of “The Wonder Years,” she was also auditioning to be her boss’s mother. The showrunner, Saladin K. Patterson, had decided that if he was going to remake the beloved sitcom — this time looking at the late 1960s through the lens of a Black family in Alabama — he was going to base the show loosely on his own family, starting with his parents, Bill and Lillian.The central character in “The Wonder Years” is a teenager named Dean (Elisha Williams), but the story lines often revolve around Lillian. During the audition, conducted over Zoom, Sengbloh read a scene inspired by Patterson’s childhood in which Lillian tells Dean that the pornographic magazines he found in the basement aren’t his father’s: “Those are mine.”“When Saycon read that,” Patterson said in an interview, “she was just magic on the screen.”Sengbloh, 45, is a Tony-nominated singer, dancer and actress with years of Broadway, film and television credits, but Lillian Williams is her first starring role in a TV series. To shoot “The Wonder Years,” which returns for its second season on June 14, Sengbloh moved back to her hometown, Atlanta, where she made sure she had a fireplace, a bathtub and access to good okra. These are edited excerpts from our interview last month.1Charlotte, N.C.I left New York during the pandemic and moved to Charlotte, N.C. Everybody was like, what are you doing? But a few months later, I booked a television series in Charlotte called “Delilah.” It only had one season, but work begets work and I swear it helped me get “The Wonder Years,” which brought me back home to Atlanta. Being in Charlotte taught me that making choices that feel right will serve me. It’s also a beautiful town with beautiful people and really good barbecue.2Epsom SaltI’m a bathing beauty and an ex-Broadway showgirl, so I like to soak in the bath with Epsom salt. People associate Epsom salt with our grandmothers or our great-grandmothers. That generation knew about the benefits of magnesium. It really helps to fire your nervous system and fire your muscles.3Fine TeaWith all the singing I’ve done in my life, I’ve gotten into the habit of taking time to wake up the voice and care for the voice — and, yes, I said “the voice” in the third person. All the singers drink slippery elm tea, but I got tired of it and I got into a bunch of different teas, like Earl Grey and rooibos tea, which is really popular in South Africa.4FireplacesI am obsessed with cozy fireplace vibes. It’s part of the hygge lifestyle, the art of cozy. I’ve got a gas fireplace in my home in Atlanta. When I have it on, my dog, she knows where to be. I look at her and I say: You make me look rich.5‘Little Soul’Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of channels on YouTube that have relaxing music accompanied by animated, calming scenes. My favorite is “Little Soul.” I have a lot of busyness going on, so I need to relax — hence the tea, the fireplace, the baths and the lo-fi music.6Le ColonialOne of my favorite restaurants is Le Colonial, which has a location in Atlanta. When you’re there, you feel like you’re on vacation because it has a beautiful view and they have banana trees and plants everywhere.7Vintage TVI love myself a good old vintage drama, honey. When I was living in New York, I probably moved to a new apartment every four or five years. I’d be in the kitchen just packing, watching “Downton Abbey,” “Dangerous Liaisons” or “Emma.”8Okra Soup, or StewMy dad was from Liberia, my mom is American, and my parents got married here in the ’70s. Okra soup is my favorite Liberian food. Like a lot of West African food that’s called soup, it’s actually more like a stew. Whenever I visit my sisters, who were born in Liberia, I try to get some okra soup. Or, here in Atlanta, there’s a spot called Bamba Cuisine that serves the Senegalese version of okra stew called soupou kandja.9Satin PillowsA lot of women have been into satin pillows in the last five or 10 years. It’s supposed to be good for your skin and good for your hair. When you turn your face at night, it feels soft and smooth, not rough.10New WorksWhen I was doing a workshop for a show called “Holler if Ya Hear Me,” Chadwick Boseman was my leading man. He didn’t end up doing the show, and we didn’t last long, but the opportunity to be in a show that’s premiering or originating — watching brilliant directors, writers and creators get a show off the ground and bring it life — is just amazing. More

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      How It Takes an Old ‘Beast Wars’ to Make a New ‘Transformers’

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      The Canadian-made computer animated series “Beast Wars: Transformers” serves as the unlikely basis for the latest film in the popular franchise.This summer’s “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” is the latest of seven films in the long-running series of live-action films based on Hasbro’s hugely popular toy franchise; the first since the critically acclaimed 2018 spinoff, “Bumblebee”; and the first mainline installment since the Michael Bay-directed “Transformers: The Last Knight” (2017). Like all of the films in the series to date, “Rise of the Beasts” is based on characters first designed in 1984 as a line of children’s action figures, much like Mattel’s Masters of the Universe or Hasbro’s own G.I. Joe. But this new chapter also pulls from an unusual source: “Beast Wars: Transformers,” a somewhat obscure Canadian television show that ran from 1996 to 1999.A scene from “Beast Wars: Transformers.”Alliance Atlantis Communications“Rise of the Beasts” takes place largely in New York in the 1990s, and follows the action-packed exploits of a race of powerful robots who live in disguise as cars and trucks, including the series hero Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen, reprising his role as voice actor from all of the previous films). This time around, Prime and his allies are joined by the Maximals, time-traveling Transformers from the distant future who turn into animals rather than vehicles: They include the rhinoceros Rhinox (David Sobolov), the falcon Airazor (Michelle Yeoh), the cheetah Cheetor (Tongayi Chirisa) and the gorilla Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman), a descendant of Prime. All of the new animal Transformers have been faithfully lifted from “Beast Wars,” which featured these characters living on a barren alien planet and doing battle with the nefarious Blackarachnia (a spider) and Scorponok (a scorpion), among other foes with similarly literal names.“Beast Wars” was produced in Vancouver, British Columbia, by the animation company Mainframe Studios, which had previously developed “ReBoot,” a pioneering computer-animated series from the ’90s, for the popular Canadian children’s entertainment network YTV. Also fully computer-animated — at a time when that technology was still in its infancy — “Beast Wars” looked a little like a starker, more rudimentary version of “Toy Story,” with colorful, bulbous character models moving simply around sparse environments. The series ran for three seasons on YTV (under the more kid-friendly title “Beasties”) and in syndication across the United States, winning a Daytime Emmy for outstanding achievement in animation in 1998 and inspiring a TV sequel, several comic books and two video games — and now, almost three decades after its debut, a feature film (sort of).Were it not for some of its characters and designs resurfacing this month in “Rise of the Beasts,” it seems likely that “Beast Wars” would have continued to recede into a lasting obsolescence, forgotten to all but the most nostalgic ’90s kids and most dedicated “Transformers” fans. And while the somewhat tangential connection to the source material may prevent the movie from kicking off a sudden torrent of interest in the Canadian series — “Rise of the Beasts” has not been especially billed as a “Beast Wars” movie, and the show has scarcely come up during press for the film — it’s still a good occasion to give the series its long-awaited due. Happily, the entire original run of “Beast Wars” was released on home video by Shout Factory in 2011 and is now available for purchase on Amazon Prime Video. More