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      What Is ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ Doing to Soccer?

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      Hollywood has turned a perfectly good fourth-tier Welsh team into a TV show instead. That can’t be great.Last month, the Welsh soccer club Wrexham A.F.C. embarked on a buoyant tour of America that it called the Wrexham U.S.A. Invasion Summer ’23. The team packed stadiums from North Carolina to Southern California. It played against the megaclubs Chelsea and Manchester United. Its ticketholders enjoyed fan zones equipped with bustling merch stands and cardboard cutouts of Wrexham personalities — even a pop-up version of the Turf Hotel, a pub in the actual Wrexham, a city of 135,000 in the north of Wales. One popular activity was taking selfies with Wayne Jones, the Turf Hotel’s publican, a touring member of the summer jolly.Wrexham is a place with a familiar Rust Belt trajectory: mill and mine closures, job losses, economic depression. Before the season that began this month, its team played in the National League, the fifth tier of English soccer — a universe away from Chelsea and the top-flight Premier League. (The National League still includes a few teams that aren’t fully professional.) Typical attendance at Wrexham’s Racecourse Ground used to be less than 5,000 a game. In Chapel Hill, the team played in front of more than 50,000.The reason for the change is, of course, the FX docuseries “Welcome to Wrexham.” In 2021, the actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney bought the club and set about changing its fortunes, on camera. During the pandemic, the British actor Humphrey Ker had given McElhenney a viewing recommendation: “Sunderland ’Til I Die,” a docuseries about the decline of another soccer club in a postindustrial town. McElhenney loved it and, as Ker told The Athletic, formulated a plan to tell the same story in reverse: buy a struggling football team and turn it into a competitor. He wanted to reverse-engineer a feel-good sports documentary. He would also end up satisfying America’s love of underdog stories set in quaintly hard-up corners of Britain (like “The Full Monty,” recently revived as an FX series) and creating an odd real-life analog for the hugely popular “Ted Lasso.”The reverse-engineering project has, clearly, been a success. The show, with its portrait of the tight-knit community surrounding the club, attracted a devoted-enough audience that sales of the club’s jersey spiked wildly. (The team dropped its previous front-of-shirt sponsor, a Welsh trailer company, in favor of TikTok.) Wrexham matches — which, even in Britain, would have been considered obscure — can now play on ESPN. “It’s the real underdog thing,” one fan at the U.S.A. Invasion told The Evening Standard.It was an underdog thing. Since taking over, McElhenney and Reynolds have stocked Wrexham’s roster with players who are, frankly, too good to be playing in the National League. Paul Mullin, for instance, is a striker whose copious goal scoring helped get Cambridge United promoted a league; he instead jumped two tiers down to join Wrexham. (He was injured during the U.S.A. Invasion and stayed in the country to recuperate — in McElhenney’s Los Angeles home.) Last season, the four highest-paid players in the National League all played for Wrexham. At the season’s end, the club was promoted to League Two, the fourth tier of English soccer, for the first time since 2008. In the days that followed, Wayne Jones had to shut down the Turf Hotel: Despite his best efforts to prepare, he ran out of alcohol. When the show’s second season begins in September, streaming on Disney+, it’s a safe bet that every episode will be seen by far more people than will fill the Racehorse Ground for a whole season’s worth of Wrexham matches.In 2021, the sale of a different soccer club made international news. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund took a controlling interest in Newcastle United, a competitor in the Premier League. Unlike Wrexham’s story — which has been treated as a kind of homespun pushback to a world in which private-equity billions slosh around and sports teams are used as state propaganda — the Saudi purchase was castigated, internationally, as a new nadir in professional sports’ capitulation to the richest entity in the room. (The head of Amnesty International U.K. bashed the league for “allowing those implicated in serious human rights violations to walk into English football simply because they have deep pockets.”) Reynolds and McElhenney do not represent an autocratic petrostate and are implicated in no human rights violations, but the two takeovers do have one thing in common: Both the actors and the Saudi sovereign-wealth fund are operating in spaces where their wealth distorts everything around them.Longtime Wrexham supporters are certainly delighted by the team’s successes, but they must also recognize that the club has become something new and different: both an athletic behemoth and a pop-culture one. It’s not just that the roster is full of what are effectively ringers, being paid situationally outlandish amounts from what I can’t help imagining are the profits of the “Deadpool” franchise. Reynolds and McElhenney have created an ouroboros in which TV funnels fans and money to the team, leading to successes that in turn create more TV. It’s a clever gambit for endless expansion, but also one that, as the club’s U.S. tour underlined, risks turning Wrexham into more of a media project than a soccer team.It also feels directly opposed to the communitarian values that, ostensibly, made Reynolds and McElhenney interested in the team in the first place. For a decade before their arrival, Wrexham had been a community club owned by a coalition of fans called the Wrexham Supporters Trust. One of the club’s former board members, Spencer Harris, posted online this spring to take issue with the title of a BBC program about the club — “Wrexham: Hollywood or Bust” — and its suggestion that without the actors, Wrexham was doomed. “4,000 supporters trust members took over an insolvent business,” he wrote, “turned it around and handed over with cash in the bank after a global pandemic.” The trust didn’t even profit off the sale; in the interest of helping the club’s prospects, members essentially gave the team to Reynolds and McElhenney in exchange for a guarantee that they would add £2 million to the budget.That fan base now shares its connection to the team with all those who will binge-watch “Welcome to Wrexham” and feel their own sense of ownership — and with the actors, who sometimes overtake the club’s identity entirely. (One recent headline assessed the team’s prospects like this: “Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney are on track for the League Two points record!”) As a new television season begins, it will surely become untenable for “Welcome to Wrexham” to ignore its own impact on the club it’s documenting.For what it’s worth, English football is full of less complicated tales of resiliency. Luton Town, for instance, is a small club from just outside London. The team’s nickname is the Hatters. Their home ground, Kenilworth Road, has its modest entrance stitched through a row of terraced houses. While not self-owned, its ownership consortium is made up of local fans who willingly ceded a small share and a set of veto rights to the Luton Town Supporters Trust. At its lowest ebb, the club played in the fifth tier. It doesn’t spend a lot of money, because it doesn’t have a lot of money. But the team has scouted well and hired good coaches, and this coming season, having won its way up the ranks, it will compete in the Premier League. Someone should make a documentary about that. Or, honestly, maybe they shouldn’t.Opening illustration: Source photographs by Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images; Christopher Furlong/Getty Images; Drew Hallowell/Getty Images; Jan Kruger/Getty Images. More

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      This Netflix Anime Uses Alt-History to Explore Gender Norms

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      “Ōoku: The Inner Chambers” tells a complex love story in an alternate-reality Edo Japan in which an illness upends gender roles.Gender is a trap. The binary is a lie. And flexible sexual politics can lead to real change.That’s some of the subtext in the fascinating Netflix anime series “Ōoku: The Inner Chambers,” which tells a complex love story in an alternate-reality Edo Japan in which an illness upends society’s gender norms and expectations.The show’s story, adapted from a popular manga that also spawned several live-action series and movies in Japan, is framed as a historical record of how this alt-Japan and the shogunate came to be.When the shogun, the last male heir to the Tokugawa clan, dies from an aggressive strain of smallpox that targets young men, he is secretly replaced by an illegitimate daughter, Iemitsu, who is taken to the palace and raised as a man. (Iemitsu is based on the real-life shogun of the Tokugawa clan with the same name; “Ōoku” cleverly builds up its world from select real historical characters and events.)As the male population dwindles and the economy fails, Iemitsu lives a life secluded in the palace with the ōoku, or the “inner chambers,” where thousands of beautiful men live as concubines for her. Forced to present herself as a man, Iemitsu grows into a brutal, violent misogynist. And although Iemitsu wants to live her life as a woman, she also resents her body; a few years into her reign, she is a victim of sexual assault, and a subsequent miscarriage debilitates her with rage and grief. She struggles to find her place within the limitations of the gender binary. Her manhood and womanhood are never in service to her understanding of her own identity; whether she’s passing as a male ruler or having a child to secure the Tokugawa bloodline, her actions must always be in service to the shogunate.Then a handsome monk, Arikoto, is abducted and forced to forsake his sacred vows so he can become the groom of Iemitsu’s bedchamber. Arikoto eventually becomes content with his lifetime sentence in the ōoku and falls in love with Iemitsu, who softens under Arikoto’s patient affections.Abduction, coercion, abuse, assault: Arikoto and Iemitsu’s romance isn’t exactly a Hallmark love story. Arikoto is not the traditional gallant prince; he is deeply dedicated to his life of chastity and charity until that life is upended and his spirit is broken in the ōoku. Nor is Iemitsu the lovely damsel; she’s embittered by the ways her station has dictated how she must see and use her body.But the most affecting moment in the love story between her and Arikoto is when they realize their love for each other while both in drag. Iemitsu doles out gendered punishments to the men around her: She gives the grooms of the ōoku women’s names and demands they dress up as women for her entertainment. But when she sees Arikoto, who isn’t shamed but instead embraces his femininity while dressed as a beautiful woman, she is dazzled by his fairness and grace. They hold each other, him as a woman and her as a man. The difference between their gender expression and biological identity is irrelevant; they are two people who have come to an understanding based not on gender but on love.What could have easily been a more traditional love story is instead an intriguing look at how two people are forced to negotiate their ideals, their identity, their politics, their relationships — sexual and platonic — and their position in a government hierarchy as the expectations of them as man and woman, as consort and shogun, bear down on them.The show also ventures beyond the ōoku to depict how different strata of society respond to the decreasing male population. Women adjust to being the workers and breadwinners. Lords who have lost their sons to the epidemic force their daughters to pass as their male heirs but then resent them for learning, perhaps even enjoying, stereotypically masculine activities like horseback riding and swordsmanship. The remaining young men, considered too valuable and fragile to work, are expected to stay home and lounge. For money they may prostitute themselves to women desperate to be impregnated.At first the series seems to be leading us in the direction of a completely gender-swapped society, but in one episode the voice-over narration declares outright: “It wasn’t that the status of men and women was reversed. To be precise, men ceased to do anything besides father children. Including child-rearing and house chores, all the labor in the world was placed on women’s shoulders.”So even though the shogun is a woman, she is still surrounded by advisers who are men. Though women keep the economy afloat with their labors and the realm going with their child-rearing, the men retain their titles and social superiority, reaping society’s rewards even as they are rendered impotent in every non-procreative sense of the word.“Ōoku” isn’t so fantastical that it completely sloughs off the ways gender and sex dictate how individuals live in a society, often for bad. Antiquated notions of gender roles are so entrenched, the show suggests, that society is determined to preserve them even as they become less and less feasible.So perhaps “Ōoku” can just serve as a thought exercise, particularly for Americans right now, as transgender rights and women’s rights are under threat: What might it look like when we decide our notions of gender no longer serve us? That may be the real love story waiting to happen. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: The Weeknd in Concert and ‘Praise Petey’

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      HBO airs the concert filmed in Los Angeles and the animated Freeform show wraps up its first 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, Aug. 14-20. Details and times are subject to change.MondayLaurence Olivier and Greer Garson in “Pride and Prejudice.”Everett CollectionPRIDE AND PREJUDICE (1940) 4 p.m. on TCM. Before we were introduced to Colin Firth or Matthew Macfadyen as the moody but endlessly charming Mr. Darcy, there was Laurence Olivier in the role. The story, based on the novel by Jane Austen, follows the Bennet family, who are excited by the prospect of two wealthy and eligible bachelors coming to town. Upon meeting, Elizabeth Bennet (Greer Garson) and Mr. Darcy fall into one of the most memorable enemies-to-lovers arcs of all time.TuesdayTHE LOVE EXPERIMENT 10 p.m. on MTV. If the many dating reality shows that already exist (see: “Love Island,” “Love is Blind,” “The Ultimatum,” “Are You the One?” “Bachelor in Paradise”) don’t tickle your fancy, MTV has a new one. This show is as if you were in a dating app and all the men are actually ready for relationships: the three best friends Marcia, Paige, and Tamara (who are in their 20s and 30s) are put inside a “dating utopia” where they go on dates, test compatibility and do some challenges to try to find their lifelong partners.WednesdayGORDON RAMSAY’S FOOD STARS 9 p.m. on Fox. On this show you can’t just be good at cooking — you also have to be an entrepreneur in the making. As this season wraps up, the three final contestants compete for Gordon Ramsay to make a personal $250,000 investment. Who knows, the person who wins this season could also have six restaurants in Las Vegas, just like Ramsay himself.TEMPTATION ISLAND: SECRETS REVEALED 9 p.m. on USA. Just like “Love Island” has its unseen bits episode or how “Big Brother” lets you watch livestreams inside of the house even when episodes aren’t airing, “Temptation Island” is releasing their own version of that. The finale of the fifth season will air later in August, but before that happens, they are showing bloopers and some interesting moments that happened between couples that were left out of the final edit of the show.Saycon Sengbloh in “The Wonder Years.”ABC/Matt MillerTHE WONDER YEARS 9:30 p.m. on ABC. This remake of the 1980s sitcom about a Black middle-class family in Montgomery, Ala., is wrapping up its second season this week. In the hour long finale, there is a birthday celebration, a trip to Florida and some classic family squabbles.ThursdayTHE WEEKND: LIVE AT SOFI STADIUM (2023) 8 p.m. on HBO. On Netflix you can throw on Taylor Swift’s “Reputation” tour. On Disney+, you can watch the BTS “Permission to Dance” concert. And now, The Weeknd has joined the ranks of many artists to come before him who have released televised versions of their concerts. Filmed in Los Angeles in November 2022, his set includes a pretty intense light show and performances of some of his most famous songs.FridayA still from “Praise Petey.”FreeformPRAISE PETEY 10 p.m. on Freeform. This show could be “Schitt’s Creek” in an alternate, cartoon universe. In this show, Petey learns that she has inherited a small town from her dead father, but it turns out he is still alive and running a cult in the town. The kicker is that both shows star Annie Murphy. The cartoon is wrapping up its first season and has not yet been renewed for a second.Saturday50 FIRST DATES (2004) 6:30 p.m. on TBS. Set in Hawaii, this movie follows Henry (Adam Sandler), a marine veterinarian, as he tries to woo Lucy (Drew Barrymore) every day. The problem? Lucy has short-term memory loss and relives every day over and over, which obviously makes it hard for Henry who has to reintroduce himself to her every single day. The movie is a comedy but a Psychology Today article points out that it is a pretty realistic interpretation of a condition called “anterograde amnesia.”HER NAME WAS GRACE KELLY 7 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Grace Kelly captured the attention of the world as she lived what seemed to be a real life fairy tale: After starring in popular films, she married Prince Rainier III and became the Princess of Monaco. A car accident in 1982 took her life, but she has remained in the public’s imagination ever since. This documentary features archival footage and home videos of Kelly, with tapes going back to three years old.BRIDESMAIDS (2011) 8 p.m. on Bravo. “I’m ready to party with the best of them” is what Annie (Kristen Wiig) says after she takes an Ambien and a glass of whiskey on the plane ride to the bachelorette party of her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph), before wreaking absolute havoc on the flight. (I say the same thing every time I watch this movie.) The story follows Annie as she reaches emotional rock bottom, all while trying to support her childhood best friend during her pre-wedding festivities. The plot almost takes a back seat to the amazing chemistry between Wiig and Rudolph.SundayFROZEN MARATHON 4:35 p.m. on Freeform. As we settle into the mid-August heat, I wouldn’t hate a trip to Arendelle. If you want to be transported to Elsa’s frozen land full of amazingly catchy songs, sisterly drama and, more important, sisterly love, you can catch both FROZEN (2013) and FROZEN II (2019) back to back on Freeform. More

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      As Hollywood Strikes Roll On, Viewers Catch Up With a TV Glut

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      After years of being inundated with new shows, some are using a pause in production to finally watch all the stuff they missed when it came out.With Hollywood’s labor disputes grinding on, and virtually all production stopped, anxiety began creeping into Zain Habboo’s house in Chevy Chase, Md.She and her husband had recently finished the latest season of HBO’s “The Righteous Gemstones,” but now they were worried that new episodes of favorite shows like “The Handmaid’s Tale” would be significantly delayed.What on earth were they going to watch?Ms. Habboo, 49, quickly realized she had options. She might revisit classics like “30 Rock” and “Arrested Development” with her 17-year-old son. She could join him in watching a show he’s bingeing, like all 62 episodes of “Breaking Bad.” She has also never seen any of the “Mission Impossible” movies, and she has barely made a dent in the Oscar-nominated films from the past four or five years.For many viewers, the writers’ and actors’ strikes in Hollywood will soon be felt in the form of altered film release schedules and prime-time lineups littered with game shows, reality TV and reruns.At the same time, the pause in new scripted material provides a moment for many viewers to catch up after the breakneck pace of the so-called Peak TV era, when dozens of shows were premiering each month.“I have a Netflix queue that is so deep and so long, it would take me months or a year or two to go through it all,” said Dan Leonhardt, a 44-year-old engineer who lives in Copenhagen. “And that’s just Netflix! I also have a Max subscription.”Dan Leonhardt subscribes to two streaming services. “I have a Netflix queue that is so deep and so long, it would take me months or a year or two to go through it all,” he said.Mathias Eis for The New York TimesThe slowdown will represent a major shift from recent years, when viewers were inundated with a fire hose of content — a record 599 new television scripted premieres last year.On almost a daily basis, audiences found themselves clicking past new shows on their TVs, often ones they had never heard of, trying to figure out from a one-sentence description whether a series like “Altered Carbon” on Netflix or “The Path” on Hulu was worth their time.For streaming services, the strategy was straightforward: The more shows they produced, the more chances they had to attract subscribers. The number of people who watched any one show wasn’t as important as the number of people who paid for the service.So the promise of a constant flow of new stuff became a hallmark of the streaming era. One of the outstanding questions as the labor stalemate goes on has been whether viewers would start to cancel subscriptions to streaming services en masse when fewer new shows and movies became available.For many, though, a slower output is just fine, giving them time to pick their way through streaming libraries, one missed TV series and movie at a time.Emily Nidetz, a 41-year-old in Madison, Wis., said she was relieved that production for reality series had not been affected and that there were still plenty of sports to watch. And though she is worried about a slowdown in prestige shows, she said she could always stop by a Facebook community page for The Ringer’s podcast “The Watch” to get some ideas.“If you go to the Facebook page and write, ‘Hey, I really loved “The Bear,” tell me what to watch,’ there will be like 400 replies,” she said.Tasha Quinn said she planned to take her time to enjoy shows without feeling pressure to keep up with the latest series.Obinna Onyeka for The New York TimesTasha Quinn, a 36-year-old therapist from Chicago, said there was a moment last year when she was so overwhelmed by the conveyor belt of new series that she finally had to take a break. HBO’s “House of the Dragon” was the breaking point.“I made it through two episodes, and didn’t finish it,” she said. “There was too much hype, and there were a lot of other things coming out at the same time. I was like, nope, I’m too overwhelmed, I’m too overstimulated, I’ll just go back to my comfort shows. I’m going to go watch ‘The Office.’”Ms. Quinn said that the labor disputes had worried her briefly because new episodes of the dystopian workplace drama “Severance” on AppleTV+ would be delayed — but that she then quickly thought of the upside.“I can take my time without everyone talking about what’s coming next,” she said, adding that she’s currently wrapping up “Succession.”The length of the labor disputes will determine the length of the disruption. Actors have been on strike since July 14. Writers have been walking picket lines for more than 100 days. Formal talks between the writers and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of the studios, were held on Friday for the first time since early May. No talks involving the actors are scheduled.Third-party researchers believe that most of the streaming services should be well insulated if the strikes last another month or two — though that risk rises the longer production is shut down. The amount of content in their streaming libraries was one reason the studios initially said they could weather the strikes, at least in the short term, a pointed message to writers and actors currently going without paychecks. (For instance, “Suits,” a USA Network show that went off the air in 2019, has recently surged in popularity on Netflix.)Leaders of the Writers Guild of America, the union that represents thousands of striking screenwriters, recently said it was “disinformation” that the strike would have “no impact because streaming services have libraries and some product in the pipeline.”“It is not a viable business strategy for these companies to shut down their business for three months — and counting — no matter how much they try and pretend it is,” they said in a note to members.Ms. Habboo said she sympathized with the striking writers and actors, but had no plans to cancel her streaming subscriptions.Samuel Corum for The New York TimesMany viewers say they support the striking writers and actors. Ms. Habboo said she believed they were not being fairly compensated, and “that is a huge bummer.”Still, when asked if she would cut any of her streaming subscriptions, she was emphatic. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “Canceling is never an option.”Mel Russo, a 56-year-old yoga teacher who lives in Brooklyn, said the Max service alone “could keep you busy for the next 10 years, to be honest.”“I think it’s disgusting what’s going on,” she added. “But I am not in dire straits about it as a watcher and as a lover of entertainment.”The streaming services seem keen to capitalize. Last month, Netflix rolled out a new banner, “10 Years of Netflix Series,” which presents viewers with dozens of older titles from its library.Eric Martinez, a 25-year-old video producer who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, had been a big fan of the HBO series “Euphoria.” But the earliest that show will return for its third season is now 2025, so he went looking for an alternative.On his Amazon Prime page, Mr. Martinez had been seeing a tile for the show “The Boys” for some time. The superhero series was one he thought he had no interest in. But with time on his hands, he finally took the plunge. “I’m enjoying it, and I’m glad I started it,” he said.Not all the viewers need a new old show to watch.Brenda Stewart, a 71-year-old Nebraskan, said she and her husband often fired up their Roku and watched reruns of older series including “CSI” and “Murder, She Wrote.” She’s also a big fan of rewatching movies like “The Lion King” and other Disney classics.Ms. Stewart, who has six grandchildren, said it was not uncommon to have “Bluey” episodes playing again and again in her house when the children were over. And, sometimes, it’s not exclusively for the little ones.“It’s a cartoon series for kids, but I’m not going to lie — it’s also for adults,” she said, laughing. “There’s stuff in there that just makes me chuckle.” More

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      Baratunde Thurston Eats His Feelings (With Ice Cream)

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      The host and executive producer of “America Outdoors With Baratunde Thurston” talks about revolutionary librarians, vibe-setting music and the city he thinks is underestimated.The writer and cultural critic Baratunde Thurston wasn’t exactly a shoo-in for the PBS nature series that now bears his name.“I was known for race and technology and comedy,” he said in a video interview from his home in Los Angeles. “I had been at ‘The Daily Show.’ I was a very progressive political pot stirrer on the internet.”Still, Thurston — who hikes and surfs and still remembers his Boy Scout knots — was like, “Yo, they’re trying to have a Black person host a show about the outdoors,” he said. “I’ve never seen that show.”“America Outdoors With Baratunde Thurston” begins its second season on Sept. 6, and while there’s plenty of flora, fauna and water to behold, the focus is on the people who live, work and play in it. And Thurston gets to tag along: swimming and jet skiing on the Suwannee River in Georgia and Florida, riding with cowboys in Oregon, harvesting ice in Maine, even turkey hunting in New Mexico.Not that he bagged anything. “I think the turkeys got a memo that there was a newbie out on the hills,” he said while elaborating on Black men’s support groups and the healing powers of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams. “They weren’t trying to go out in a blaze of videotaped glory.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Public LibrariesLibrarians are heroes, and libraries are some of our last truly democratic public spaces, literally open to all. I first encountered the ferocious power that is a librarian in the early 2000s. With the Patriot Act and surveillance, librarians were on the forefront of fighting for our liberties.2Jeni’s Ice CreamThe Blackout Chocolate Cake flavor, oh my God. It’s chocolate within chocolate within chocolate. It makes me go a little crazy because you can’t just have a scoop. But if you’re feeling like maybe your society is tending toward fascism, Jeni’s ice cream can help you process that feeling.3Hydro FlaskI’m deeply committed to my water bottle. I can’t be having four-ounce, plastic, single-use bottles. If I check into a hotel and they don’t have a refilling station, I’m like, “Just so you know, I judge places based on this.”4Kings CornerOur culture doesn’t have many spaces for men to be vulnerable out loud or with each other. And for Black men, at times it can be even tougher. We carry a lot. And some of what we carry that is overly burdensome is the image of us that’s been promoted throughout the world: that we are always tough, that we are violent, that we can’t show emotion. Kings Corner is a safe space for us to check in with each other, to hold ourselves high and hold ourselves accountable. We have cried so much.5Being in WaterEvery Thanksgiving we would go to a body of water — the Chesapeake Bay, the Outer Banks, the eastern shore of Maryland. When my mom was dying in Portland, Ore., my sister and I took her out to Astoria Beach as the kind of last hurrah. Every time I’m near the ocean, I have to touch it.6Lofi Study BeatsLofi has emerged as the Muzak of now. To take old-school hip-hop and slow it down or to remix things — it’s about vibe setting. There’s one I watch that’s like, what if 1990s hip-hop stars all hung out together in a diner? It’s got Tupac and Biggie and Nas all chilling. It helps me open up when I’m in a creative space.7CompostingComposting is cocktails with soil and dirt and leaves and grass — you make a mix and you get something delicious out of it. Composting takes allegedly useless things and turns them into useful things. That action becomes symbolic when you apply it to human beings.8Old FashionedsIt is not my first experience of a cocktail, but it’s the first experience that made me say, “Oh. Yeah.” It blew my mind when I learned you could make an old fashioned with rye, as is classic, or bourbon or scotch or gin or tequila or rum. Just spirit plus sugar and bitter. That’s it. People muddling cherries in them are committing a sacrilege.9Washington, D.C.It is so much more than the seat of the federal government. Despite economic development and gentrification and displacement, it’s still a very Black city. There is a texture to D.C. — to the architecture, to the physical layout, to the fashion, to the street names and signs. It loves New Balance to a totally unreasonable degree and has go-go music that has never really achieved escape velocity from the planet of D.C. No one in Los Angeles has ever or will ever rock go-go music, and that makes it even more special.10adrienne maree brownShe is this extraordinarily intelligent and experienced political organizer, and she is spiritually aware and developed and enlightened. She appreciates the power of rest and self-care in the midst of a struggle. She reminds me of my mother. More

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      ‘Billions’ Season 7 Premiere Recap: Axe Is Back

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      A certain redheaded maniac returns to the scene for the series’s concluding season. Let the final showdowns begin.Season 7, Episode 1: ‘Tower of London’He’s back.Bobby Axelrod, the hard-charging, take-no-prisoners billionaire who served as the antagonist-cum-co-protagonist for the first five seasons of “Billions,” returns at the end of the show’s seventh and final season premiere. Like a demon out of an esoteric’s grimoire, Axe (Damian Lewis) been summoned by three of his closest associates — Wendy (Maggie Siff), Wags (David Costabile) and Taylor (Asia Kate Dillon) — to rise from legally mandated oblivion in order to defeat a devil far worse than the devil we know.That devil is Mike Prince (Corey Stoll), who served as the stand-in during the show’s sixth season for the role once played by Axelrod. A breed apart from his predecessor, he spent the bulk of Season 6 as something of a do-gooder … to an extent.Prince created a universal basic income program known as Mike Money — but the program was paid for by untaxed cryptocurrency, which believe it or not was once viewed as the wave of the financial future. He tried to bring the Olympics to New York City — though as any resident of a host city can tell you, that’s stretching the definition of “do-gooding” quite a bit, given the tax incentives and indigent sweeps typically preceding the Games.Most important of all, though? Mike Prince is running for President of the United States of America, sooner rather than later. (Perhaps because this is now the show’s final season, his timeline has been accelerated from 2028 to, gulp, 2024.) As he tells Wendy in the episode’s quietly chilling opening scene, he is doing so because he believes only he has the gimlet eye and the force of will required to save the dying nation from itself. If the people scream for mercy as he rescues them? Let them scream, he says. He knows best.In a maneuver that places Wendy at the center of the action in a way she hasn’t been in years, the premiere casts her as the Christopher Walken character in “The Dead Zone” — the person who sees most clearly that Prince is literally a Hitler-quoting clear and present danger to the republic and the world at large. Even as she strings him along, promising to performance-coach him all the way into the White House, she has decided to work toward his downfall.She’s hardly alone in that. In order to clear the decks for his coming campaign, Prince has stepped back from the day-to-day operations of Prince Capital. He’s got not one but two major-domos, Wags and Scooter (Daniel Breaker), to serve as his eyes, ears and voice. He has the absurdly intimidating and unflappable Kate (Dola Rashad) to serve as his legal mind. And as far as he’s concerned, he has his successors, the young(ish) brainiacs Taylor and Philip (Toney Goins) to run the place in his stead, ensuring that the money keeps rolling in.But Taylor and Philip don’t see this as a promotion. They see it as the deliberate dismantling of Taylor Mason Carbon, the independent in-house shop they had dedicated to E.S.G. (environmental, social, and governance) investments. You know, the kind of do-gooding Mike Prince was once interested in?For Prince, though, having a separate carve-out within his empire indicates that the empire itself doesn’t care about these issues, and he cannot allow himself to be seen as someone who doesn’t care. By sunsetting Taylor and Philip’s shingle and putting them, his smartest people, in charge of the whole operation, Prince hopes he can kill two birds with one stone.But all the while, Wendy — terrified of Prince’s dark potential after a chilling tête-à-tête in which the depths of his egomania are revealed — is mounting a counteroffensive. Though Axe’s best bud, Wags, and his merciless lawyer Orrin Bach (Glenn Fleshler) plead ignorance as to Bobby’s whereabouts, Wags nevertheless gets a message to his old master. Axe then relays his willingness to entertain their request for help via a trade pattern only an old associate like Taylor’s pal Mafee (Dan Soder) can spot. (With the help of the best legal weed New York money can buy, naturally.)So, in a meeting before the bright lights of the Tower of London, Wendy and Wags and Taylor — and we in the audience — are reunited with the redheaded stepchild of the series. Never one to let a 1970s New Hollywood Cinema movie reference go unstated, Bobby Axelrod compares the crew here assembled to Luke, Leia, and Chewbacca, leaving himself as both the Han Solo and the Millennium Falcon. Let the war against the emperor commence!But there’s a second front opening up in the war on Prince. Though he’s both down and disgraced, to the point where his adolescent children no longer want to be seen eating with him in public, Chuck Rhoades is by no means out. At the end of last season, he accepted exile from the legal community and extensive legal troubles of his own as the cost of helping his colleague, Attorney General Dave Mahar of New York (Sakina Jaffrey), take Prince down.But c’mon, this is Chuck we’re talking about here. You think he’s going to sit idly by as his reputation is dragged through the mud to the point where his own kids are embarrassed by him? With the help of the obnoxious journalist Lucien Porter (Matthew Lawler), he becomes the beneficiary of a P.R. campaign in the press that paints him to be a Robin Hood figure — the lone man willing to stand up to the billionaire class with deeds rather than mere words, and who paid for it by losing his government jobs not once but twice.The resulting turnaround in the public imagination might well be Chuck’s masterstroke to date. Suddenly this old-money Yalie’s fever dreams of being championed by the socialist likes of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez don’t seem so far-fetched. Sure, it irks Dave, who all but tells him their nonaggression pact is off by episode’s end. But to Chuck’s mind, she didn’t tell him what her full plan was, so why should he return the favor?All of a sudden “Billions” has a sense of urgency it hasn’t had since the really monomaniacal days of the Chuck/Axe conflict. Keep in mind that this episode begins with a five-months-later flash-forward in which an enraged, borderline psychotic Prince storms into his place of business, tracks down Wendy and shatters the glass walls of her office, demanding to know what it is that makes her so sure he shouldn’t be president. In that act, he answers his own question.Considering the time of its creation — pre-Brexit, pre-Trump, pre-Bernie and A.O.C., pre-Covid — “Billions” has been fairly adept at keeping pace with the times. The one-two punch of Clancy Brown’s good-old-boy attorney general Jock Jeffcoat and Danny Strong’s sleazeball treasury secretary Todd Krakow demonstrated the series’s deftness at reflecting its surroundings. But it’s inarguable that the political and economic reality of America and the wider world has gotten weirder, faster, than even Hollywood’s brightest minds could conceive.So kudos to the “Billions” team for drilling down on perhaps the most important lesson to be drawn from the past seven years: The mega-rich are freaks, and belong no closer to the levers of power than a chimpanzee to the controls of a Ferris wheel. Aligning virtually all the characters we like against the embodiment of all the cultural trends we don’t — from naked oligarchy to progressive lip service — is unbelievably shrewd. That this season is airing as the working writers and actors who make “Billions” possible man the picket lines against Hollywood’s ruling class makes it all the more pointed and poignant.Long one of the most purely entertaining shows on television, “Billions” has always preferred to let its message about the robber barons who rule our world play out amid the beats of a well-made financial thriller over the more direct and unmissable approach preferred by heavy-handed satires like “Succession” and “The White Lotus.” If what we’re seeing in this premiere holds true for the series’s remaining episodes, though, the show seems to have well and truly gotten religion at last. It will spend its final hours depicting our heroes, and many of our villains too, battling to prevent a dictatorial billionaire from becoming the leader of the free world.Loose changeWith his clipped American accent, crisp body language and twinkling eyes that radiate both mirth and malevolence in equal measure, Lewis’s Bobby Axelrod is legit one of the great character creations of the Peak TV era. I’m so glad to have him back.For that matter, Giamatti has always made Chuck’s contradictory blend of for-the-good-of-the-Republic earnestness and knife-in-the-back craftiness sing. And hey, let’s also give props to Siff’s investment of Wendy with hard-earned arrogance and Stoll’s portrayal of Prince as the kind of maniacally self-confident weirdo you only find in finance, tech, politics or an unholy amalgam of all three.My fave real-world cameos in this episode: the billionaire Mark Cuban and the former Obama/Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri. I’ve never been quite sure what to make of the show’s visits by the actual rich and powerful, given how I feel about their equivalents within the series, but it’s undeniable that they’re part of that old “Billions” charm.Another special shoutout must be reserved for Kelly AuCoin’s gleefully profane “Dollar Bill” Stearn. Though Taylor and Philip dislike Dollar Bill’s attitude (the feeling is mutual), they recognize that he’s the kind of earner they need to boost company profits, and thus keep Prince happy, while they secretly work to thwart their boss’s ambitions.The funniest bit about Dollar Bill’s return? The only guy who’s happy to see him is Victor (Louis Cancelmi), the only trader with even fewer scruples than Dollar Bill himself.“Billions” showrunners and music supervisors, hear my plea: It is not too late to score an epic scene with the appropriately named pre-“Dark Side of the Moon” Pink Floyd psych-rock juggernaut “Careful with That Axe, Eugene.” Granted, you might have to insert a character named Eugene to balance the “Axe” part, but I’ve come to trust in your ingenuity.As a fan of professional wrestling, or as I like to call it, “The Sport of Kings,” I found it very funny to hear Cuban refer to himself as “a Terry Funk guy.” The Funker, if you’re not aware, is the god of hardcore wrestling, the subgenre that involves barbed wire, razor blades, and gallons of very real blood. No wonder this dude helped run the Shark Tank.Male nerds of a certain vintage have long resigned themselves to the idea that there are two types of guys in the world: Luke Skywalkers (noble, incorruptible babyfaces) and Han Solos (roguish, unpredictable antiheroes). It’s revealing that even as he’s being called in to defeat the show’s Darth Vader equivalent, Axe refers to himself as Han rather than Luke.While we’re on the subject, this means Taylor is Luke (the chosen one gifted with special mind powers), Wendy is Leia (the steely commander who’s also a pale brunette knockout), and Wags is Chewie (the sidekick defined by his specific brand of hirsuteness). More

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      Striking Writers and Studios Agree to Restart Negotiations

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      The two sides in the Hollywood stalemate will formally meet on Friday, after an informal sidebar session last week.As television and movie writers started their 101st day on strike on Thursday, the leaders of their union said they had agreed to formally restart negotiations with studios for a new three-year contract.“Our committee returns to the bargaining table ready to make a fair deal, knowing the unified W.G.A. membership stands behind us and buoyed by the ongoing support of our union allies,” the Writers Guild of America negotiating committee said in a statement. The session will take place in Los Angeles on Friday.The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of entertainment companies, declined to comment. Carol Lombardini, the alliance’s president, contacted the Writers Guild on Wednesday with a request to return to formal negotiations. Her appeal followed an informal sidebar session between the two sides late last week.After that meeting, the Writers Guild sent a note to its 11,500 members saying Ms. Lombardi had indicated a willingness by studios to sweeten their contract offer in some areas, including finding ways to safeguard writers from artificial intelligence technology. The note added, however, that Ms. Lombardini had said studios “were not willing to engage” on other Writers Guild proposals, including success-based residual payments from streaming services. The note said guild leaders would not return to negotiations until studios were willing to engage on all proposals.The announcement of a return to the bargaining table was the first positive development in a dual labor walkout — tens of thousands of actors went on strike in mid-July — that has brought Hollywood production to a halt. Late-night television shows immediately went dark, and broadcast networks have retooled their fall seasons to include mostly reality series.Last week’s session, which lasted about an hour, was the first time the lead negotiators from each side had sat down in person since May 1, when talks collapsed. Both sides had characterized it as a meeting to determine whether it made sense to restart talks. With a strike starting to hurt companies and writers alike, was there a give-and-take to be had? Pressure has been increasing from multiple directions to reach an agreement.“It is critical that this gets resolved immediately so that Los Angeles gets back on track, and I stand ready to personally engage with all the stakeholders in any way possible to help get this done,” Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, said in a statement last Friday.Screenwriters and actors are worried about not receiving a fair share of the spoils of a streaming-dominated future. They say streaming-era business practices have made their profession an unsustainable one.Many streaming shows have eight to 12 episodes per season, compared with more than 20 made for traditional television. Writers are fighting for better residual pay, a type of royalty for reruns and other showings, which they have said is a crucial source of income for the middle-class writer whose compensation has been upended by streaming.The Writers Guild also wants studios to guarantee that artificial intelligence will not encroach on writers’ credits and compensation. The studios rejected the guild’s proposed guardrails, instead suggesting an annual meeting on advances in technology. (In recent weeks, studio executives have said in interviews that they made a mistake by not taking the union’s A.I. concerns more seriously.)The studios defended their offer after negotiations broke down, saying in a statement that it included “generous increases in compensation for writers.” The primary sticking points, studios have said, are union proposals that would require studios to staff TV shows with a certain number of writers for a specified period, “whether needed or not.”Caught in the crossfire of the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA, as the actors’ guild is known, are tens of thousands of crew members and small businesses (dry cleaners, caterers, lumber yards) that support movie and television production. The 2007-8 writers’ strike cost the California economy more than $2 billion, according to the Milken Institute, which recently estimated that losses this time could be double that figure. More

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      ‘And Just Like That …’ Season 2 Episode 9 Recap: Budding Expectations

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      Lisa has big news. So does Carrie. OK, so do a bunch of characters.The first time Carrie started dating Aidan, back in Season 3 of “Sex and the City,” she found herself routinely waking up with a gasp in the middle of the night. Something felt off. Something felt wrong. But after scouring for whatever unchecked item on her to-do list was giving her this anxiety, she found that, in fact, she “hadn’t so much as missed a teeth cleaning.”It was Aidan who was messing with her head. Carrie couldn’t relax because, for the first time, she was in a relationship where no one was, well, messing with her head. Unlike Big, who was the king of, as Carrie named it, the “seductive withholding dance,” Aidan was a good man, and he was good to her.“It’s smooth sailing,” Carrie said of their relationship. “Nothing but calm seas, blue horizons as far as I can see.”Fast forward to the present, when Carrie and Aidan are once again coupled up after a two-decade hiatus. Just like before, it’s smooth sailing. Everything is working. They just fit.But this time around, while Carrie has never felt more certain that she is in the right relationship with the right man at the right time, it’s others who are having anxiety about it.It began with Miranda, who in last week’s episode asked Carrie if she should “take a beat.” Carrie and Aidan went from zero to cohabitating at warp speed, and Miranda couldn’t help but worry.Even though Carrie assures Miranda that the past isn’t repeating itself, you can still see the look of concern cross Miranda’s face, as well as Charlotte’s, when Carrie shows her friends the giant new apartment she is angling to buy in Gramercy Park. It has plenty of room for Aidan and his three sons, and most important, it is not her old place, in which Aidan won’t set foot. She tells her friends she is ready to sell it.“Are you really that sure, Carrie?” Charlotte asks with distress on her face. But once again, Carrie sings her song. She is sure. She is ready. She is happy.But the doubters keep on coming. Later, it is Aidan’s ex-wife, Kathy (Rosemarie DeWitt), who presents as a harbinger of heartbreak. “I know your history with Aidan,” Kathy says bluntly to Carrie. “You can’t hurt him again.”“Of course you’ll hurt me,” Aidan tells Carrie when he finds out about that conversation. And he will hurt her, and things will get messy, but they will work it out. Aidan is just as sure as Carrie. Everything seems to be going right.So, if the aim of this episode is to convince us, the audience, not to worry that Carrie and Aidan won’t make it work this time — and yet that our doubts are well-founded — well, it’s working.And I hope that the writers, executives and everyone else involved at Max understand that if Aidan and Carrie fall apart in the final two episodes of this season, after all this building of trust — between them, and between them and us — that some of us (me!) will sink into a hole and perish.Meanwhile, not everyone else is so self-assured in matters of the heart. For starters, Anthony has been having dinner, but not sex, with Giuseppe (Sebastiano Pigazzi), the young Italian poet who recently ended his brief stint as a Hot Fella.Maybe it’s his pending divorce from Stanford Blatch (Willie Garson), or maybe it’s just that he can’t figure out what would make a fox like Giuseppe want someone like him. But for whatever reason, Anthony just can’t seem to relax and embrace it. It isn’t until Anthony confronts Giuseppe about what he believes is an obvious scheme to get a green card that he finds out Giuseppe already has dual citizenship. He really does just want to shag. Within moments, they do.Nya, however, has absolutely no issue showing a younger man around her bedroom. She is reveling in hot, casual sex until a gut-punch of an Instagram post crosses her feed: a photo of her ex-husband, hugging a woman we can assume is the hat-wearing songwriter Nya caught him with before. And she is pregnant.Nya, who ultimately ended things with Andre over not wanting to have his child, immediately kicks out her beau — don’t worry, he’s cool with it — so that she can stew over this alone.It’s not the only unexpected pregnancy we get in this episode. Lisa, who has become borderline narcoleptic, falls asleep in her closet and nearly misses Herbert’s big campaign speech at his event at the Goldenblatts’. Lisa tells Herbert, just as he is about to make his remarks, that she is pregnant. It’s a plot twist that neither Herbert — nor, most likely, any of us — saw coming.Maybe the most surprising and delightful development in the episode, though, is the coupling of young Brady Hobbes and Lily Goldenblatt. Is it just a spring fling, or could this be the start of “Sex and the City: The Next Generation”? Mostly I hope not, but considering this franchise clearly has no intention of stopping, you never know.Things still taking up space in my brainAs infallible as Aidan is to me, personally, I have to ding him on this: He absolutely refuses to enter Carrie’s apartment, but when she tells him she is selling it, he tells her, “You don’t have to sell it for me.” Obviously she does?I’m calling it right now: Seema is going to be engaged by the end of this season. It has already been established that some part of her aches to have at least one great love. It should also be noted that she has written off her new beau, Ravi (Armin Amiri), as not being “marriage material.” That’s meant to throw us off the scent, I think. More