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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

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      ‘Jury Duty’ Becomes a Surprise Hit

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      “Jury Duty,” a unique comedy on the Amazon streaming platform Freevee, became a surprise hit thanks to word-of-mouth social media buzz.On the night of April 6, the creators of “Jury Duty,” a hybrid documentary-sitcom in which an ordinary man unwittingly participates in a staged trial among actors, came together in Culver City, Calif., for a cast and crew screening of the series.The atmosphere was muted. Early reviews had been unflattering — The Hollywood Reporter, earlier that day, had called it “a bad show for benign reasons.” And with it premiering the next day on Amazon Freevee, an ad-supported streaming platform few were familiar with, expectations for the show’s success were modest, if not outright low.“The vibe at the screening I would describe as very much like, ‘We made a show, we should be proud of that,’” Todd Schulman, an executive producer, said in a recent video interview. “I believed in what we had made. But there’s so much content out there, and this is on a platform that’s not as well-known as the other ones, so let’s be realistic about what’s going to happen.”“Then the next three weeks unfolded,” he continued. “And it felt insane.”After a slow start, “Jury Duty” rapidly found an audience, building ecstatic word-of-mouth buzz to become a bona fide social media sensation, with clips of the show racking up hundreds of millions of views on TikTok.Broader interest in the show spiked accordingly, more than doubling in the month after premiere, according to research by Parrot Analytics. (The company assesses the popularity of shows by analyzing audience demand — a combination of streaming, social media, search and other online behaviors.) Interest in “Jury Duty” remains higher now than it was during the show’s initial run, in April, suggesting that plenty of viewers are still discovering it, Parrot said.Like most streamers, Amazon declines to give viewing numbers, but it confirmed that “Jury Duty” has been Freevee’s most watched show since it premiered. Last week, seeking to capitalize and build on the popularity, Amazon released a line of “Jury Duty” merchandise as well as new versions of the episodes that include cast commentary.All of which has prompted a lot of people to ask the same question: How did this happen?“Jury Duty” feels like a minor miracle. The premise is fraught with peril: The nominal star, a contractor named Ronald Gladden, has no idea that he is in a sitcom — he had been told that some parts of the trial were being recorded as a documentary — and one of the thrilling things about watching is the constant sense that at any moment it could all implode. Ronald could have discovered the ruse; the actors playing the other jurors could have broken character or flubbed lines. But all involved managed to pull it off.Gladden, center, was the only non-actor in the series, and viewers were charmed by his agreeable demeanor.Amazon FreeveeSchulman and his team weren’t even sure that they could. When they were pitching the concept around Hollywood, they received little interest, with most networks passing on the grounds that it posed too much of a creative risk. It was ultimately Freevee and its head of originals, Lauren Anderson, who was eager to take that chance.“Usually when you say ‘They took a chance on us,’ it means they took a chance because the show could have been bad,” Schulman said. “But they could give us millions of dollars and not get a show — that’s a different scale of chance-taking.”In an interview, Anderson said that when she first heard the pitch, at the start of the pandemic, Freevee — which was known at the time as IMDb TV — hadn’t released any original content and was looking for “noisy, buzzy and unique” programming to set its slate apart. “I got the feeling that this could be really special,” she said.James Marsden was less confident. The star of “Westworld” and “Sonic the Hedgehog” has a recurring role in “Jury Duty,” playing an exaggeratedly arrogant, pretentious version of himself who is ordered to be a backup juror for the trial. While Marsden was initially intrigued by the idea, he said in a phone interview that his doubts set in once the production began.“I started thinking, ‘Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into? Can we even do this? Can we pull this off?” he said. Even if it worked, he didn’t think it would land: “I thought this would either be the end of my career or something that maybe a handful of people would see.”Even Gladden didn’t expect much to come from it once the production had wrapped. (That he was on a TV show was revealed to him in the final episode, but he had to wait months for it to make it to air.)“It was on a brand-new streaming platform that no one had ever heard of, so I didn’t really think it was going to go anywhere,” Gladden said over the phone from Los Angeles. “I truthfully didn’t think anything was going to come from it.”Leading up to the premiere, the buzz was virtually nonexistent, but there were signs the show could resonate. A trailer put out by Freevee didn’t cause much of a splash, but then one of the show’s writers, Kerry O’Neill, shared the trailer to her Twitter account with the caption, “We truman showed a man,” and the tweet blew up. The idea that someone had recreated “The Truman Show,” the Jim Carrey movie about a man unknowingly living life on TV, “really contextualized everything for people,” said Nicholas Hatton, one of the show’s executive producers. The trailer embedded in O’Neill’s tweet received 1.3 million views.While middling reviews dampened expectations, show clips put out by Freevee found an immediate foothold on TikTok. “I’m a 44-year-old man; I’m not on TikTok,” Schulman said dryly. “I couldn’t believe how many people my age or older were telling me that they heard about the show from their teenage kids. It was working its way generationally upward.”The fan TikTok videos — which Freevee had no part in creating, though it also posted clips to its own TikTok account — were like short, self-contained advertisements for the series. Users shared scenes out of context with a line or two of explanation, and it proved more than enough for people to understand the conceit and get hyped.Marsden felt the impact immediately after the first episode aired. “I started getting texts from friends and random people I hadn’t heard from in years,” he said. “What I kept hearing was, ‘You’re blowing up on TikTok.’ I didn’t even know what that meant.” The excitement spilled over into real life: “I walked out of my hotel room in New York to get a coffee and literally every other person under 30 was stopping me to talk about ‘Jury Duty.’”James Marsden, right, played an arrogant version of himself in the series. “I thought this would either be the end of my career or something that maybe a handful of people would see,” he said.Amazon FreeveeAt the same time, Gladden — who returned to contracting work after the show and had a minimal online presence — was thrust into social media stardom. “I figured that on Instagram that I might gain a few thousand followers out of it,” he said. “But when I very quickly gained over 10,000, I realized it was actually becoming a thing.”Essential to the show’s appeal, especially on TikTok, has been Gladden’s warmth and positivity as the unwitting lead. Faced over and over again with oblique ethical quandaries engineered by the writers (such as whether to take the blame for an embarrassing bathroom accident caused by Marsden) and forced to endure the bizarre behavior of his fellow “jurors,” Gladden exuded an unflappable sweetness that viewers have found touching and inspiring.Not surprisingly, the more than 200,000 Instagram followers he now has have been flooding Gladden’s inbox with positive messages. “People have been telling me things like, ‘You’ve inspired me to be a better person,’ or ‘you make me want to be nicer to people,’” he said. “It’s the best reaction I could have gotten.”Every network hopes to cultivate this kind of grass-roots furor, and modern streaming content can feel as if it is actively courting viral success (consider the “Wednesday” dance). But no one involved with “Jury Duty” intended for it to be a TikTok hit.“This show took off in a way that you can’t buy,” Anderson said. “It took on a life of its own, in the way that you want to happen for every show you make but which you just can’t predict.”That it was a happy accident hasn’t stopped others in the industry from lusting after the recipe, of course. “I’ve had people who work at other platforms call me and say, ‘OK, what’s the secret? What did Freevee do to make this go viral?’” Schulman said. “It was completely organic.”As for what it was about “Jury Duty” in particular that resonated with audiences on TikTok, Marsden has a theory. “Young people go onto YouTube or their explore feed on TikTok or Instagram, and they watch people slipping on the ice or doing a silly dance,” he said. “They want to see what’s going on out there in all its absurdity or its hilariousness or its scariness. They want to watch something real, and not fake.”The centerpiece of “Jury Duty” is a real guy, and that edge of reality, Marsden feels, is what captures the imagination of the young. “Every 20-year-old can see themselves in that position and think, ‘What if that was me?’ There’s something kind of dangerous and exciting about that.” More

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      Barry Newman, Star of the Cult Film ‘Vanishing Point,’ Dies at 92

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      Panned when it was released in 1971, the movie gained acclaim decades later. Mr. Newman also starred on TV in the legal drama “Petrocelli.”Barry Newman, whose terse integrity and understated rebelliousness made the 1971 movie “Vanishing Point” an enduring hit in the annals of American cinema about the open road, died on May 11 in Manhattan. He was 92.The death, in a hospital, which was not widely reported until this week, was confirmed by his wife, Angela Newman. While seeking treatment for back pain, she said, he came down with a lung infection that spread to his spine and heart.Mr. Newman was briefly a leading man in movies and television in the 1970s. He starred as a Harvard-educated defense attorney who moved to a small Southwestern town to work criminal cases in the 1970 feature film “The Lawyer,” and he reprised the character, Tony Petrocelli, in an NBC legal drama, “Petrocelli,” which ran from 1974 to 1976.Two decades later, he returned to prominence as a character actor, with small roles in memorable movies like Steven Soderbergh’s “The Limey” (1999); “Bowfinger,” also in 1999, alongside Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy; and “40 Days and 40 Nights” (2002), a romantic comedy starring Josh Hartnett.But Mr. Newman’s most notable performance was undoubtedly in “Vanishing Point.”In that film, he played Kowalski, a one-named car-delivery driver who makes a bet with his drug dealer while buying Benzedrine: If he can make it from where they are in Denver to San Francisco in about 15 hours, then Kowalski gets the amphetamines for free.“Vanishing Point” then becomes one long psychedelic car chase. Kowalski skillfully evades highway cops, nonchalantly accepts his deification by a rhapsodic radio D.J. named Super Soul (played by Cleavon Little), and befriends a succession of slender hippie-ish blondes. From conversations among police officers and Kowalski’s own flashbacks, we learn about his past as a decorated Vietnam War veteran, frustrated police officer and demolition derby racer.The bulk of the movie replaces dialogue with the sounds of a revving car engine, a police siren and a shredding electric guitar. The camera is often trained on Mr. Newman’s face — its shaggy hair, stubble, righteous sideburns, sharp jawline and watery blue eyes — as he stares ahead resolutely but wearily at desert highways that never seem to end.The other star of the movie is Kowalski’s car, a souped-up white 1970 Dodge Challenger that can go up to 160 miles per hour. It remains fairly pristine even as it kicks up enough dust to confound the highway patrols of several Western states.With characters making druggy proclamations about “the last American hero to whom speed means freedom of the soul,” the movie did not initially attract critical praise. Roger Greenspun, reviewing it for The New York Times, called it “a dumb movie that is nothing but an automobile chase,” and added, “I suspect that Barry Newman really can act, though in ‘Vanishing Point’ all he needs is a driver’s license.”Yet it is now regularly featured on lists of the best American road movies, car movies and action movies. Bruce Springsteen and Steven Spielberg have both ranked “Vanishing Point” among their favorite films.“It became a cult film without me even realizing it,” Mr. Newman told the movie journalist Paul Rowlands in 2019. “To this day, I’m always being asked to talk about it somewhere.”Barry Foster Newman was born on Nov. 7, 1930, in Boston, where he grew up. His father, Carl, managed the Latin Quarter nightclub. Barry visited on Sundays and saw performances by Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Milton Berle and others. His mother, Sarah (Ostrovsky) Newman, worked a variety of jobs, including saleswoman at Filene’s Basement and ticket seller at a movie theater.Mr. Newman earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Brandeis University in 1952. He then served in the Army until 1954, playing saxophone and clarinet in a military band.Several years later, while studying for a master’s degree in anthropology at Columbia University, Mr. Newman tagged along with a friend to an acting class being taught by Lee Strasberg. He was “mesmerized,” he told Mr. Rowlands, and soon began pursuing a career as an actor.He married Angela Spilker in 1994. They divorced in 2007 but got back together and remarried in 2018. She is his only immediate survivor.Mr. Newman lived in the same apartment in Midtown Manhattan from 1962 until his death.In portraying both the quick-witted lawyer Petrocelli and the stoic hot-rodder Kowalski, Mr. Newman became known for characters with opposing types of masculinity. That paradox, he told Mr. Rowlands, inspired him to take on the part of Kowalski in the first place.“I had just done ‘The Lawyer,’ where I was speaking nonstop for 90-odd minutes, and I got the script for ‘Vanishing Point,’” he said. “I wasn’t even thinking of the idea of the film or the existentialism of the character — I just thought it would be interesting to do a part where I am playing the antithesis of the character I had just played.” More

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      The Joan Rivers Card Catalog of Jokes Finds a Home

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      Take a look at some of the artifacts from her archive, which includes 65,000 cross-referenced gags and is headed to the National Comedy Center.When Joan Rivers died in 2014, ending one of the greatest careers in modern comedy, several groups were interested in acquiring her archives, which included a meticulously organized collection of 65,000 typewritten jokes.Her daughter, Melissa Rivers, recalled a conversation with a representative from the Smithsonian Institution who wanted the catalog of jokes but said it would not be on permanent display. Her mind instantly went to the final tracking shot of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” in which the golden Ark of the Covenant is locked inside a crate and placed in a vast warehouse with hundreds of other crates.“I couldn’t do that because so much of who she was is in those files,” Melissa Rivers told me on a video call from Los Angeles. For her mother, a pioneering stand-up and withering critic of celebrity fashion, “a view was always important.”Instead, Rivers is donating the extensive collection to the National Comedy Center, the high-tech museum in Jamestown, N.Y., joining the archives of A-list comics like George Carlin and Carl Reiner. The fact that the jokes will be accessible is only one of the reasons for Melissa Rivers’s decision.The museum is in the planning stages of an interactive exhibition that will center on Joan Rivers’s card catalog of jokes and include material covering a vast swath of comedy history, from the 1950s to 2015. The show will allow visitors to explore the file in depth.Jamestown is where Lucille Ball grew up, and “Joan Rivers was the first headliner I booked for the Lucille Ball Comedy Festival the year we announced to the world our intention to build the National Comedy Center,” Journey Gunderson, the executive director, told me by phone. Melissa Rivers, a television personality in her own right, was on hand for the groundbreaking in 2015.When it comes to the Joan Rivers joke collection, “I don’t know that another exists that is nearly as vast,” Gunderson said. In Carlin’s archives, by contrast, the jokes were “mainly scraps of paper organized into Ziploc baggies then put into a folder by topic.”Rivers, who wrote gags at all hours, paid close attention to setups and punchlines, typing them up and cross-referencing them by categories like “Parents hated me” or “Las Vegas” or “No sex appeal.” The largest subject area is “Tramp,” which includes 1,756 jokes.Along with this bounty of material, the collection includes snapshots of other aspects of this major cultural figure, including her sense of fashion, like the pearls and a little black dress she wore early in her career as well as the multiple boas from her later fashionista years. Here’s a look at a few of the artifacts headed to the center.Insults in CharacterThe jokes were categorized by topics like fashion and career, and even cross-referenced.Joan Rivers EstateAs you can see from these cards, Joan Rivers often made herself the butt of the joke, leaning on tight, snappy punchlines to describe herself as unwanted or ugly or old. Gunderson said the self-deprecating gibes emerged from a character “she was using as a position of power to comment on the plight of woman.” In real life, Melissa Rivers said that “every now and again, she would say that for whatever age she was, she looked good. But that was that.” Rivers added that those jokes came from a real place. “That was a part of her, but maybe not as crippling as everyone assumed it would be,” she said. “But she also knew she looked good.”An Unparalleled CatalogIn a scene from the documentary “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work,” the comedian explains how she kept a record of her jokes and cross-indexed them.Break Thru Films/IFC“Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work” (from 2010 and available on major platforms) is one of the greatest documentaries about a stand-up comic ever made: candid, unflinching and alert to the brutal amount of work necessary to succeed in show business. It also introduced the world to the cabinet of jokes that Rivers kept in her home. Gunderson, of the National Comedy Center, described the catalog as one of “the crown jewels of comedy that exist on planet Earth.”Help With HecklersWhen Rivers was starting out, she planned her responses to hecklers.Joan Rivers EstateRivers, a fixture on television who never stopped performing live, loved sparring with a crowd. But early in her career, she prepared for rambunctious audience members with this list of comebacks that could be weaponized to mock hecklers without losing the tempo of her set. Melissa Rivers said she saw her mother upset by a heckler only once, when later in her career someone was offended by a joke about Helen Keller. “She spun around and said: ‘Don’t you dare! My mother was deaf. She lost her hearing early. Don’t tell me what’s inappropriate.’”Early AmbitionsRivers hoped for a career as an actress and regularly went to the theater.Joan Rivers EstateBefore Joan Rivers became a comedian, she wanted to be a dramatic actress. After graduating from Barnard College in 1954, she commissioned this series of head shots to display her range. She didn’t make her Broadway debut until 1972 with “Fun City,” which she co-wrote (with her husband, Edgar Rosenberg, and Lester Colodny) and starred in. It closed after nine performances. But Rivers remained a stalwart fan of the stage, a regular at shows and a savvy commentator on the television series “Theater Talk.” When she went to the theater, she always dressed up and insisted her family do the same. Melissa Rivers said: “She always said, ‘This is church.’”Ticket From a Momentous TimeThe short-lived late-night show proved both a high and low point in Rivers’s career.Joan Rivers EstateWhen Joan Rivers left her position as the permanent guest host of “The Tonight Show” on NBC to start her own version in 1986 on the then-fledging network Fox, she became the first woman in the modern era to host a late-night talk show. It was a bold move, a career landmark that also preceded a painful period of her life. She made an enemy of the “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson, who saw her departure as a betrayal. “That made her angry,” Melissa Rivers said. “Like she often said, if it had been a man, it would have been the great send-off to my protégé.” Rivers was banished from the Carson show and fired from her own the following year. Her husband, a producer on “The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers,” died by suicide months later. “It took a huge toll on their marriage and our family,” Melissa Rivers recalled, describing the period represented by this ticket as one of “great elation and great horror.” More

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      ‘Tucker on Twitter’ Is Equal Parts Fox News and Fox Mulder

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      The low-fi “Tucker on Twitter” finds the former prime-time host at the intersection of Fox News and Fox Mulder.Most of the time, it does not qualify as newsworthy to see a man in your social media feed staring into a camera, asking “What exactly happened on 9/11?” and demanding to know why the media isn’t digging for the truth about J.F.K.’s assassination. Usually, it’s just a sign that you should not have accepted so many friend requests from high school classmates you barely remember.But when that man was recently paid millions of dollars by Fox News to say much the same things on one of the most popular shows on cable TV, attention is paid. In Tuesday’s debut episode of “Tucker on Twitter,” the new home-brew show from Tucker Carlson, the ousted prime-time star’s brand of resentment, insinuation and dog-whistly mocking finally gets the guy-ranting-from-his-den visuals that suit it.There’s a touch of echo in the audio; there are wall hangings, wood paneling, a bit of woodsy green through a window. Carlson holds his own Teleprompter controller and wears a suit with a pocket square. The overall look is talk-show “Green Acres,” or Ron Swanson if he shaved and went to prep school.As a production, “Tucker on Twitter” looks less like a newscast than one of the improvised lockdown shows that late-night talk hosts recorded from home in the early Covid days of 2020. But in this case, Carlson’s quarantine is self-inflicted.Fox abruptly let him go in April, after the investigation in its now-settled litigation with the voting software company Dominion turned up a racist text message and misogynistic slurs from him, as well as statements disparaging Fox executives. It’s not clear whether streaming on Twitter violates Carlson’s contract with Fox, which lasts until early 2025.But commentators gotta commentate, and the time off in the woods has not mellowed Carlson. He gives the barest intro —“Hey, it’s Tucker Carlson!”— before giving a rundown of the dam explosion in Ukraine that would go down in the Kremlin like the smoothest vodka. “Any fair person would conclude that the Ukrainians probably blew it up,” he says, given that the dam, located in a region taken by Russia in an invasion, was “effectively Russian.”Carlson also called Volodymyr Zelensky, the Jewish president of Ukraine, “a persecutor of Christians” and described him as “shifty, dead-eyed” and “sweaty and ratlike.” For years, Carlson laundered far-right fringe rhetoric and bigotry on Fox, and there is no sign that, in the anything-goes regime of Elon Musk’s Twitter, the laundry is shutting down.Carlson’s rhetoric has not diminished, but his production has. In the 10-minute first episode, there are no guests, no produced segments, a handful of news-footage clips. It’s pure monologue, from the opening Ukraine comment to the offhand swipes at diversity and transgender women to a closing bit on a whistle-blower who contends that the U.S. government possesses material from extraterrestrial aircraft.It’s a Tucker Carlson show, in other words. A big question is whether Carlson can be what he once was without the Fox News platform and production resources.Fox has ideology, of course (which has cycled through different flavors of conservatism over the decades), but it also has an aesthetic. Its shows are produced to be glossy and urgent, to convey a sense of slick confidence. Fox News is designed to look like it is broadcasting from the top of the world; “Tucker on Twitter” looks not unlike something livestreamed after the apocalypse.Others — Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck — have failed to reclaim their peak influence after losing their Fox perches. Carlson could be different; Fox News has yet to recover in the prime-time ratings from his sudden departure.But Carlson, for all his anti-elite posturing, is wholly a creature of legacy TV, having hosted shows on Fox, CNN and MSNBC. He is a houseplant grown under corporate studio lights, even when they were installed in his rural Maine town for him to broadcast remotely to Fox.On the other hand, it’s possible that the pivot to low-fi Twitter is more of a match for the current incarnation of Carlson. Whether he is holding forth on Russia or immigrants or the Jan. 6 riot, he has one persistent meta-theme: The elites are controlling your information and telling you what you’re allowed to say. “Go ahead and talk about something that really matters and see what happens,” he says at one point, seeming to allude to his firing by Fox while casting himself as a free-speech martyr. “If you keep it up, they’ll make you be quiet. Trust us.”Within this rhetorical framework, it is not necessary to prove that aliens have been discovered on Earth or that Ukrainians blew up a Ukrainian dam. It is enough for Carlson to say They don’t want you to believe it, and the viewer can accept the idea for the sake of sticking it to them. They say you’re wrong, you’re crazy, you’re a racist. Well, what do they know?It is a premise made for social media, as many a red-pilled YouTuber and Facebook proselytizer has found. The premise of his appeal — that he is the one teller of truth, and you the one critical thinker, in a world of shepherds and sheep — dovetails with the idea of booting up your computer to seek out a man giving speeches from his den.It also dovetails with the interests of Twitter’s owner, Musk, who styles himself as a heterodox freethinker — whose heterodoxy happens to be expressed through reinstating right-wing trolls and hosting the Republican presidential campaign announcement of Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor.But since 2017, Carlson has made himself likely the most influential broadcaster in conservative politics by posturing as an outsider on the inside. However well he can monetize a Twitter audience, it’s another matter to retain as much political-cultural power as an outsider on the outside. Nor do we know if this is a real transformation or just a stopgap until Carlson is contractually free to go back on TV.Until then, the truth is out there, and so is Tucker Carlson — whether or not they are necessarily in the same place. More

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      in Theater

      John Beasley, Late-Blooming Actor Known for Playing Sages, Dies at 79

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      A former railroad clerk, he didn’t became a full-time actor until his 40s, but he made up for lost time in films like “Rudy” and TV shows like “Everwood.”John Beasley, who left his job as a railroad clerk in his mid-40s to pursue acting full time, bringing an understated power to films like the inspirational 1993 football movie “Rudy” and television series like the WB drama “Everwood” and the TV Land comedy “The Soul Man,” died on May 30 in Omaha. He was 79.His son Michael said his death came after he was admitted to a hospital for liver tests, but he did not specify a cause.Mr. Beasley’s tenure at the Union Pacific Railroad marked just one stop on a long journey toward a Hollywood career. “I was a longshoreman,” he said in a 2002 interview with The Associated Press. “I even worked one day as a bill collector and knew that wasn’t for me. All I wanted to do was be an actor.”His perseverance paid off. Mr. Beasley became an in-demand character actor in the 1990s and went on to appear in nearly 70 movies and television shows, often playing steady, dignified men of integrity.He first drew notice for his work with Oprah Winfrey in four episodes of “Brewster Place,” a short-lived spinoff of the 1989 television movie “The Women of Brewster Place,” based on a novel by Gloria Naylor about the intertwined lives of Black women living in tenements on a dead-end street.He also earned plaudits for his work in “The Apostle,” a 1997 film starring Robert Duvall (who also wrote and directed) as Sonny, a fiery Pentecostal preacher who flees trouble with the law to start over in Louisiana. “John Beasley is especially good as the retired Black preacher who is suspicious of Sonny at first,” Janet Maslin wrote in a review for The New York Times. “‘I tell you what,’ he says, ‘I’m going to keep my eye on you. And the Lord keep his eye on both of us. And we all three keep an eye out for the Devil.’”His many other film credits included the 1992 family hockey comedy “The Mighty Ducks,” starring Emilio Estevez; the 1999 John Travolta drama “The General’s Daughter”; the 2002 Ben Affleck terrorism thriller “The Sum of All Fears”; and the 2014 gore-fest “The Purge: Anarchy.”He is perhaps best remembered for his role as a kindly school-bus driver on “Everwood,” which starred Treat Williams as a New York neurosurgeon who starts a new life in the mountains of Colorado after his wife dies in a car accident. Mr. Beasley was in every episode from the show’s debut in 2002 until it ended in 2006.Starting in 2012, Mr. Beasley also turned heads for five seasons on “The Soul Man” as the father of the R&B star turned preacher played by Cedric the Entertainer.Last fall, Mr. Beasley scaled a personal peak as a stage actor with a prominent role as the older incarnation of Noah, the love-struck male protagonist, in a musical adaptation of the 1996 Nicholas Sparks novel “The Notebook,” and the 2004 film based on it, at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. He died before the production could make its anticipated move to Broadway.John Beasley was born on June 26, 1943, in Omaha, the oldest of five sons of John Wilfred Beasley, who owned an electrical supply business, and Grace (Triplett) Beasley.He was active in theater in high school, and after graduating he briefly studied the subject at the University of Nebraska Omaha before dropping out to join the Army.After being discharged, he married Judy Garner. She survives him. In addition to his son Michael, Mr. Beasley is also survived by another son, Tyrone; his brothers Gary, Steven and Leon; and six grandchildren, including the basketball player Malik Beasley.By 1968, he had became active in the civil rights movement, and he ended up moving his family to Philadelphia because of threats he faced after participating in protests of policing practices in Omaha’s Black community.After returning with his family to Omaha in the early 1970s, he kept his acting dreams alive by appearing in industrial films and stage productions, honing his talent locally before being cast in regional theater roles in Minneapolis, Chicago and Atlanta. Through it all, however, he stayed focused on his home life — and on Omaha.“We were going through some ups and downs early in our relationship, my wife and I,” Mr. Beasley said in an interview last year with American Theatre magazine. “There were things to work through — and we did. I felt it would be better for me to stay here with my wife and family. It turned out to be the best decision I made.” More

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      in Music

      Popcast (Deluxe): Taylor Swift and Matty Healy, Plus ‘The Idol’

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:The premiere episode of HBO’s “The Idol,” a maybe(?) satirical psychodrama about a troubled female pop star and the Svengali figure, played by the Weeknd, who worms his way into her orbitNew collaborations from Latto and Cardi B, and Central Cee and DaveRecent developments in Taylor Swift’s world, including blowback from her relationship with Matty Healy of the 1975, and her collaboration with Ice SpiceThe pop music documentary explosion of the last few yearsConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. More