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      ‘Silo’ Creator on the Show’s ‘Cautionary Tale’ About Tech

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      In an interview, Graham Yost discusses the Apple TV+ sci-fi series and the mysteries and revelations of its twisty season finale.This interview includes spoilers for the first season of “Silo.”In the cliffhanger season finale of the dystopian saga “Silo,” streaming on Apple TV+, Bernard (Tim Robbins), the true power of the closed Silo community, gives the condemned protagonist, Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson), a secret peek at some hidden truths.First he reveals the surveillance machinery used to keep tabs on an unassuming populace. Then, sitting in her cell, before her banishment into the mysterious outside world — a supposed death sentence — Bernard tries to convince Juliette (and himself) that his authoritarian actions were for the good of all.“To me, that was a really important scene,” said the series creator and showrunner, Graham Yost (“Justified”). “It’s not easy being Bernard. You get the sense that this guy who we’ve come to believe is stone evil is someone who has his own burden. You realize he has the worst job in the Silo.”That word, “Silo,” refers both to the enormous subterranean city that shelters 10,000 people and to the practice of information siloing: filtering data through narrow, manipulative networks. Those living in the Silo — this one, at least — believe themselves to be the last people on Earth, having been convinced that life is impossible in the wasteland outside.The echo chamber is carefully monitored by Bernard’s I.T. team, themselves unaware of the extent of the lies told on the screens inside the Silo. While the image everyone sees is of a gray and toxic world inhospitable to life, a contraband version shows blue skies and green trees — supposedly evidence of the Silo leadership’s manipulation. Which is the true depiction of the world?When Juliette is cast out by Bernard in the finale, she sees the ugly truth: The outside is, in fact, desolate and poisonous. She also discovers that there are many more Silos beyond her own. But unlike her doomed predecessors — Sheriff Holston Becker (David Oyelowo) and his wife, Allison (Rashida Jones) — Juliette survives because of the spacesuit-sealing power of the superior heat tape supplied by her pals in the lower reaches of the Silo, the subject of a running subplot.“At its heart, this is a mystery show,” Yost said. “You’re trying to find out what the hell happened to force people to live underground, when it will be safe to go out, what’s going on and why.”In an interview last month, Yost was careful not to spoil the many mysteries, though curious viewers can find answers in the Hugh Howey novels that form the basis of the series. (Howey himself makes a brief crowd-scene cameo in the finale.)“At its heart, this is a mystery show,” said Graham Yost, left, with the author Hugh Howey.Apple TV+As for what the future holds for “Silo,” Yost said he has a four-season plan to cover the three books in the series so far: “Wool,” “Shift” and “Dust.” (Howey has said he is writing more “Silo” novels.) The second season is currently in production in England, but Apple TV+ has yet to announce further seasons.Speaking by phone while on vacation in Newfoundland, Yost discussed his “Silo” game plan, a useful note from Apple and the continuing Writers Guild of America strike. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Many television writers aren’t talking about their series right now, why are you doing so? And how does the strike affect your plans for Season 2?I’m on strike. But I ran this interview by the W.G.A., and I think it’s OK. We’ll see if I get yelled at. It’s a weird time. I did stop all producing activities as requested by the Guild, and I declined promotional stuff leading up to the launch of the show. Now it’s a month-and-a-half later, and if I get a chance to talk about the strike, I’m happy to do it.The reality is, we had to get started on Season 2 a long time before we would announce it. I imagine that if the show had done terribly, they might have pulled the plug. But scenes are being filmed in England as we speak because all the scripts were written for Season 2 long ago, and we did a mad dash before the strike to make sure we’d answered the actors’ and directors’ notes as best we could.In Howey’s first book, we learn early on that the greenery screen is a virtual reality simulation, but we don’t find that out in the show until the finale.At the end of the written story, when Holston takes off his helmet, he sees that the world is dead and that the display in the helmet is a lie, while the display on the screen in the Silo is actually telling the truth. That’s a really nice flip; that’s one of the things that hooked me on this. But we decided let’s hold off.Why?Frankly, that was a note from Apple. They said: “What if we don’t find that out until the end of the season? Let’s see how that feels.” The great thing is, when you write the scripts, you can read them all and go: “Yeah. Let’s hold off on that.” We could have gotten to the finale and said, “No, let’s not reveal it this season.” But we wanted to.Even before we brought the writers’ room together, we knew that Juliette going outside was a great end of the season. Then we went back and forth on how much to reveal. Do we reveal the other Silo berms, or do we hold off? In this instance, we wanted to reveal that the world really is dead out there. The stuff that Holston saw, the stuff that Juliette sees — it’s not true. It’s an augmented reality.We also wanted to add another big question with the additional Silos, which was something like the hatch in “Lost”: What does all this mean? That feels like a great thing to kick off another season.Juliette (Ferguson) spends much of the first season antagonizing powerful figures in the Silo and is eventually forced to leave.Apple TV+Now that you’ve established the world of the show, will there be more room for the story to breathe in Season 2? Perhaps more flashbacks, as in the second book?When I pitched Season 2, we thought we were going to be telling more of the deep back story than we are actually going to. It does appear, but I don’t want to say anything more about it. You have to put on the brakes and go, No, the audience isn’t going to enjoy that. They want to be able to focus on solving one big chunk of mystery at a time.The show is loosely blocked out for four seasons. I suppose there’s a world where we get into the fourth season and go, “Man, we’re going to need two more seasons,” but I honestly can’t see that happening now. We’re so far into it. We looked for things in the books like, “Wow, this would be a great end of Season 2”; “This would be a great end of Season 3”; “This is how the series should end”; and then worked backward from that.The story seems to be nervous about technology in general: I.T. is used for surveillance and manipulation, and even some of the “relics,” which seem initially like important clues, end up being misleading.Ultimately, be very afraid of technology. This is a cautionary tale: What happened to the world? Was it nuclear? Was it a disease? Was it A.I.?And that brings us back to the writers’ strike. A.I. was not a high priority on our agenda last year but then ChatGPT came out, and it was like, Oh my lord. It’s not great, but it can learn. We’ve got to figure this out, because A.I. is not the demon. It’s how you use it.If a studio or network wants to have A.I. write scripts and then just have one writer clean them up, I don’t think that would be good. And it’s not just because we’re afraid of being out of work: It’s also that we love the medium we work in. We want it to stay vital, humane, human, clever and groundbreaking. It would be a terrible shame if stuff was just churned out because A.I. is a cheaper way to do it: “We don’t need the writers. We don’t need the directors. And we can use digi-models of the actors, too.” That might cost $1.98, but what would it do for the human spirit? More

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      ‘The Idol’ Is Ending Sunday. Here’s Why That’s a Good Thing.

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      Three Times critics agree: The HBO pop fable is bad television. Ahead of Sunday night’s season finale, they break down its baffling missteps and occasional bright spots.Created by Sam Levinson, Abel Tesfaye (a.k.a. the Weeknd) and Reza Fahim, “The Idol” arrived five weeks ago amid mostly negative buzz and ends Sunday on HBO. (A second season has not been announced.) Ahead of the season finale, three New York Times critics — James Poniewozik, chief TV critic; Wesley Morris, critic at large; and Lindsay Zoladz, pop music critic — compared notes on the story of the unstable pop star Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp), the grimy Svengali Tedros (Tesfaye) and their various handlers and hangers-on.JAMES PONIEWOZIK A confession: I was ready for “The Idol” to be good. Yeah, I saw the reports about the catastrophic production. But there’s a history of HBO series that followed big hits and were trashed because they were trying different, ambitious things. (I will defend “Tell Me You Love Me” and “John From Cincinnati” until death.)But indeed “The Idol” is bad. Impressively so! In this era of smoothed-out TV mediocrity, you need pull to make a show this bad. You need big names who have, to quote Tedros, “cart-ay blan-shay.” “The Idol” is gross and leering in the way the set reports suggested, but it’s also inept in a way that Sam Levinson’s “Euphoria” would not suggest. The tone lurches erratically. Motivations are inexplicable. It features the least mesmerizing cult leader in screen history. Characters and story lines seem to exist only to express the makers’ gripes about the music industry or intimacy coordinators, like a porny, torture-y “The Newsroom.”I am open to arguments to the contrary, though! Or, at least, is “The Idol” saying anything about celebrity or pop music that’s worth a closer listen?WESLEY MORRIS I’m with you, Jim. Through four episodes, it’s a baffler. I think it suffers from that pull you identified. This is a 90-minute movie that doesn’t have the bonkers ideas, imagery or attitude to justify the five-plus hours it asks us to pay.But you know, that first episode seemed like it was really up to and onto something. As TV, it ran tight and focused while being busy and, in its lewd way, suspenseful. It was funny, strange, knowingly acted and — as ensemble comedy and because of that erotic choreography — enticingly physical. We’re taken inside the hothouse of American celebrity to watch as it wilts beneath the California sun. We meet an army of competing personalities and competing interests, all trying to figure out what then seemed to be a question of murder-mystery proportions: How did that image of Jocelyn’s semen-stained face get all over the internet? And who is its owner? Turns out, the leak is a white herring.An important joke is that the horror filmmaker Eli Roth is here, jittering in a small, pretty decent part. That’s because everything after the first episode, which ends with Tedros Tedros (yes, “Lolita” lovers) turning Jocelyn into a Magritte painting (tying her head up in a scarlet scarf) and then telling her to sing, is indeed a soulless trip to Ye Olde Torture-Porn Dungeon, albeit a bank-bustingly chic one.LINDSAY ZOLADZ Hello, fellow world-class sinners. Jim, I agree that there is something rare about a show this chaotically messy in our age of middle-of-the-road prestige, but I’m not sure that it’s compellingly bad enough that I would recommend it to anyone for rubbernecking purposes. Life’s too short. As attempted commentary about pop stardom, I find the show to be repellently smug — it really thinks it has something profound to say about celebrity and even (help us) female empowerment, but its big ideas all ring disappointingly hollow.And dramaturgically speaking — to quote Jeremy Strong, an actor I’d rather be watching on Sunday nights — “The Idol” is curiously inert. The story is muddled, the pacing is all over the place, the writing and performances can’t get me to care about the fates of any of the major characters. The best thing about the show by far is its stellar supporting cast: Rachel Sennott is hilarious as Leia, a kind of skittishly basic, Gen-Z Marnie Michaels who finds herself plopped down uncomfortably in the middle of this den of sin. But my favorite member of the entourage is Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who brings a knowingness and a killer sense of comic timing to the role of Destiny, one of Jocelyn’s managers. Cast her in everything, please.The flip-side of the supporting actors’ strengths, though, is also one of the show’s main weaknesses: “The Idol” is at its worst when its main characters are onscreen. Which, of course, is most of the time.Da’Vine Joy Randolph has brought excellent comic timing to the part of Destiny, one of Jocelyn’s managers.Eddy Chen/HBOThe question I keep asking myself: Why is the Weeknd doing this? (Excuse me: Why is Abel Tesfaye doing this?) Over the past decade, the Toronto-born crooner has ascended to a level of pop stardom more stratospheric than even the fictional Jocelyn’s; “Blinding Lights,” his glisteningly paranoid 2019 single, is now the longest charting song by a solo artist ever on the Billboard Hot 100 as well as the most-streamed song in Spotify history. That makes him successful in a way that even a misguided passion project like “The Idol” is unlikely to put too large a dent in, though I can’t help but wonder if this tarnishes his reputation just a bit moving forward. Jim, as someone less familiar with the Weeknd’s music, what impression is Tesfaye’s performance here making on you?PONIEWOZIK To my eye (and ear), Tesfaye is reading the role rather than acting it. His performance is flat, except when he overcorrects into outbursts. It’s the actorly equivalent of wearing sunglasses indoors; it doesn’t look cool, it just keeps us from seeing your eyes. And his “I meant to do that” defenses in his interviews don’t help matters. Why is he doing this? Search me, but maybe the answer is in the credits: Maybe he feels that there is an “Abel Tesfaye” side to his talent that “the Weeknd” persona does not sufficiently express. But if he’s willing to stretch in a new direction, he’s not yet Abel.In general, to bring up another bad HBO memory, “The Idol” has what I think of as the “Entourage” problem. For most of that show’s run, I could never quite tell if I was meant to think Vinny Chase was talented or just a pretty face who believed his own P.R. That issue is everywhere here. Is Jocelyn’s single … good? Is the remix? Is Tedros smart? Musically savvy? Charismatic? Good at sex? I don’t know, and if “The Idol” does, it also seems willing to reverse things on a dime to make the story go where it needs to, as when Jocelyn swerves within the space of an episode from being totally in Tedros’s thrall to calling him out and calling the shots. I would love to know what either of you think we’re supposed to think about Jocelyn.MORRIS Let’s talk about it! First of all, that song … It’s what plays while you make returns at Uniqlo. There’s not much that Mike Dean, the producer who makes an embarrassingly gonzo appearance in Episode 4, could do to make it more interesting. It’s a banger that doesn’t bang.My favorite farcical detail in this show is that a major pop star exists whose stage name is Jocelyn. “Jocelyn” is how you can tell nobody knew how to stop this thing before it was too late. This isn’t something I’d be thinking much about with a show that worked (I love all the Jocelyns in my life!), if that show’s lead actor could do more than leak a river from one eye at a time. But Lily-Rose Depp is a single-tear sort of performer. And yet! She does appear to be acting something like pain and insecurity. Somehow, she’s convincing me that Jocelyn is more than Sam Levinson’s idea of pop star. Depp is better at line readings than the Weeknd. She knows how to hold a closeup.The producer Mike Dean, right, who has worked with the Weeknd in the past, appeared as himself in the penultimate episode.Eddy Chen/HBOBut the part itself is madness: a clash of motivations, lusts, self-doubt and ambitions. It’s cri-de-coeur Britney mixed with Elvis under Col. Tom Parker’s thumb. But the prevailing influence, to my eye anyway, is Depp’s own mother, the singer, actor and Frenchwoman Vanessa Paradis. Jocelyn’s skinny, mile-long cigarettes seem more like a tribute to that kind of European insouciance than to anything conventionally American.Anyway, Jocelyn has been written as a mess, this victim (her abusers include her recently deceased mom and the maw of showbiz) whose post-traumatic stress has led her, we’re asked to believe, to a Svengali’s cult whose M.O. is basically “let Tedros Tedros make you suffer for your art.” But is she any kind of artist? The most irritating part of the show is maybe its point: Much stronger, more original talent surrounds Jocelyn, but her white blondness overtakes any determination to coax it.The show is chronically offering much better stuff than Jocelyn’s potential hit “World Class Sinner.” In the first episode it is prolonged exposure to Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”; in Episode 4 it’s the singing and songwriting of another of Tedros’s captives, a strawberry shortcake named Chloe (Suzanna Son) — in the show’s only feat of poignant emotional connection, she learns from Destiny how to use her tongue to produce stronger (perhaps Blacker) singing. But Destiny is supposed to be Jocelyn’s manager! Has she ever advised her client to do that?Lindsay, I like Destiny, too. Sometimes. But she spends a week watching an adult man do terrible stuff to all kinds of people, including her client, and says nothing of consequence. This isn’t management. It’s babysitting.ZOLADZ Jim, I am constantly coming back to the questions you asked: Are we supposed to think Jocelyn’s music is any good? And, more vexingly, are we supposed to think the music she’s making with Tedros is better than the music the label wants her to record? (Remember a few years ago when we were all arguing over whether or not the pop songs in “A Star Is Born” were supposed to be bad? “The Idol” has me desperately missing Ally and her alternate-universe banger “Hair Body Face.” Jocelyn could never.)I do think we’re supposed to find “World Class Sinner” to be cloying and superficial, but the music she’s making with Tedros is bad, too. Some of this is Depp’s performance: She’s a watchable screen presence, but she’s a weak vocalist, and it’s often hard to tell if the vacancy she projects when she’s singing these songs is written into the character or merely a limitation of her performance. Whether intentional or not, she’s certainly playing Jocelyn like a cipher, which can make for confusing and frustrating viewing.Is Jocelyn supposed to be good? Depp in “The Idol.”Eddy Chen/HBOWhat most gets on my nerves about the show’s philosophy about pop music, though, is that on some level it does feel like a self-aggrandizing commercial for the Weeknd. When Tedros wants to impress Jocelyn with his industry connections, he books a session with — cue the impressed gasps from basically everyone in Joc’s entourage — Mike Dean, a producer with whom the Weeknd often works.I mean, the show takes place in Tesfaye’s own Beverly Hills mansion and features innumerable characters telling Joc how dope her house is. Tesfaye has taken great pains to point out that Tedros is not a self-portrait, and of course it’s not: For one thing, Tedros isn’t a musician. But no amount of gauche rattail wigs and zipped-up wind-breakers can make this show the artistic risk or the expression of vulnerability that Tesfaye seems to think it is. The Weeknd’s songs tint the show’s atmosphere — Episode 4 centered, right on the nose, on his too-languid cover of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” — ultimately perfuming the show with an ever-present whiff of self-satisfaction.PONIEWOZIK So what is this show trying to say, from behind its red-fabric gag? It seems to buy big into the idea that authenticity in art comes from suffering. And it’s full of provocations about how carnality is the soul of music. These two concepts come together in the show’s S&M fixation: Rough sex, in its vision (or at least Tedros’s), is the hairbrush for the frozen sea within us. On top of that, there’s a lot of something-something about how the corporate music money machine wants to repress the artist’s wildest urges.It’s hard to see these themes play out in “The Idol” without thinking of the criticisms of how Levinson sexualizes his young female characters in “Euphoria.” Most of the first episode is about Jocelyn’s handlers trying to rein in her sexuality and using the language of “wellness” and “slut-shaming” and “revenge porn” as P.R. tools. It all feels like a straw-diva rebuttal: “You call it exploitation, but look, this fictional woman I created wants to show her nipples on camera! Woke capitalism won’t let her express herself!”Suffering for their art: clockwise, from top left, Mitch Modes, Tesfaye, Suzanna Son, Rachel Sennott, Moses Sumney and Troye Sivan.Eddy Chen/HBOThe stressed-out suits, however, are easily the best part of the show. Half of it is a caustic, “Veep”-style industry satire about the star-maker machinery, with strong work from Randolph, Hank Azaria and Jane Adams (the best part of “Hung,” that raunchy HBO train wreck of yesteryear). Say you gave the show a Jocelyn-ectomy; say she and Tedros and the entire Spahn Mansion high jinks were this offscreen problem that they had to talk about and manage (but also try to profit from). That could be brutally effective. But then what would the Weeknd do?MORRIS I love the idea of a starless “Idol.” It’s funny: There is no shortage of recent television about either famous artists or our obsession with them — “Dave,” Paper Boi in “Atlanta,” “Daisy Jones & the Six,” “The Swarm” — and not many of them are terribly enlightening about how fame feels. Mass culture enhanced and exacerbated its modern incarnation yet continues to be lousy at illuminating critiques of it.Not even the Weeknd really seems to have an answer for what celebrity is, what makes someone a star. (So many times in this show we hear someone say that so-and-so is a star, but it’s definitely not Jocelyn.) The one character who approximates the requirements is Tedros — in the world of the show, the outsize magnetism belongs to him. Of course, that fame is artificial; his worshipers are more afraid than admiring. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover his heroes are Ike Turner and Ron O’Neal’s Youngblood Priest in “Super Fly.” At some point, Tedros looks at up, searchingly, at an almost life-size photo of Prince, a star who is known to have had his own moments of Tedrosity.The show is strange about Black men and sex. And no one in the show talks about it. A funny intergenerational fender-bender happens when Azaria’s Chaim implores Leia to describe Tedros and she keeps identifying him as a person of color, and Chaim keeps asking whether she’s trying to say he’s Black. The whole show is like that about Tedros and Moses Sumney’s Izaak, its two Black male characters: tentative. It doesn’t know what more to do with a scenario that’s freighted with this country’s long history of racialized sex than to be a troll about it.I’m with you two: For all the sex and vulgarity we see and hear about, the show has no idea how to convey what’s pleasurable about it, about what we come to certain pop music to experience.I know we don’t know where this going, how it’s going to end. I don’t know whether anyone should care, or even what would be a satisfying outcome for Tedros in Sunday’s finale. All I know is that when Destiny proposed murder, I clapped. More

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      ‘The Idol’ Season Finale Recap: What Was the Point?

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      The season finale, like the rest of the series, had little of substance to say about either pop music or power dynamics.“The Idol” has concluded its five-episode run, and there’s one question I can’t help but ask: What was the point of all of that?The season finale of the series from Sam Levinson, Reza Fahim and the star Abel Tesfaye (the Weeknd) had shockingly little to say about either pop music or power dynamics. Well, maybe not shockingly. Nothing in the first four episodes suggested that there was going to be some brilliant revelation in the eleventh hour, but a girl could hope that we might get a bit more than an underwhelming ending in which the baffling character known as Tedros Tedros is both exposed for the creep that he is and ultimately forgiven by Lily-Rose Depp’s heroine, Jocelyn.Sure, if you want to, you can argue that there is a transference of who has the upper hand in their relationship. In the finale, Tedros’s back story as a pimp has been publicly revealed in a Vanity Fair article planted by Jocelyn’s manager Chaim. Tedros loses his club and is apparently being investigated by the I.R.S. And yet Jocelyn gives him a pass to her tour date at SoFi Stadium. Backstage he receives a strongly worded warning from her other manager, Destiny, before being embraced by Jocelyn.“None of this means as much without you,” she says. And then she introduces him onstage to about 70,000 screaming fans as “the love of my life.”We are ostensibly supposed to read this as Jocelyn now being in control. In her dressing room he looks at the wooden hairbrush she claimed her mother used to beat her. “It’s brand-new,” he says, realizing that she had deceived him. She addresses her fans as “angels,” the very thing he called her. And, after they make out in front of that audience, she tells him, “You’re mine forever. Now go stand over there.”Are we supposed to believe it was all a ruse on Jocelyn’s part? That she used her own story of abuse to manipulate him? That’s what I think Levinson and Tesfaye are getting at, but it’s more confusing than anything. If Jocelyn were a real pop star, aligning herself with a man who went to prison for holding a woman hostage would tank her career. That’s not power — that’s a man’s idea of what power looks like for a woman.But let’s back up for a second. For most of this episode it looks like Jocelyn is going to fully kick Tedros to the curb, a conclusion which would have been predictable but at least more satisfying than this one.Angry that their meeting was not organic but instead a product of his scheming, she calls him a “con man and a fraud.” She has a plan to take over his empire of young talent by making them all her tour openers. When her team arrives for a meeting about whether this endeavor is going to happen, Jocelyn has all the scantily clad singers put on a performance for the label. Despite initial skepticism, everyone is impressed by the vocals and the grinding. They are less so by Tedros, who is wasted and belligerent.At this point, it is unclear what it would take for Jocelyn to kick the patently useless Tedros out of her house. But we get the answer when it comes out that her ex-boyfriend Rob has been accused of sexual assault. The charge comes thanks to the photo that Xander orchestrated in the previous episode, which placed Rob in a compromising position with one of Tedros’s followers.Upon hearing the news, Jocelyn immediately recognizes it as Tedros’s doing and finally orders Chaim to take care of him. Chaim obliges, with Hank Azaria chewing his way through a monologue about Little Red Riding Hood. Meanwhile, Jocelyn performs a sexualized interpretive dance to one of her new songs as proof of concept for the tour.But once Tedros is gone, Jocelyn is back to being bored. She swims. She trains. She smokes, morosely. Fast forward to six weeks later: The tour is already underway, and the disgraced Tedros is invited back into the fold, much to the dismay of the suits who thought they had rid themselves of him for good.And that brings me back to the question of what “The Idol” wanted to accomplish. Speaking with The New York Times before the series debuted on HBO, Tesfaye said his pitch was “about celebrity culture and how much power they have.” But we never really see Jocelyn wield her celebrity power. Tedros may be hers “forever,” but she is still clearly beholden to him as evidenced by the fact that she welcomes him back.So I’m left believing that what Levinson and Tesfaye thought they were creating was a messed up love story, in the style of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread.” In that 2017 film, Anderson pulls off a switcheroo in which a demanding mentor is dominated by his adoring pupil. But over the course of that 130-minute movie we come to understand much more about the central couple than we do over five hours of “The Idol.”That is the greatest failing of “The Idol”: After all of this, I still don’t know what drives Jocelyn and Tedros. Music, I guess? But I have trouble believing even they care all that much.Liner notesHow does an entire tour get put together in six weeks on the basis of three singles? Yes, presumably some of it was in the works before Tedros came along, but these things are monstrous undertakings and Jocelyn has been a little preoccupied.What other songs is she going to sing during her set? One of the show’s biggest oversights is that we have no sense of who Jocelyn was as an artist before her crisis.One moment Nikki is trying to recruit Tedros and then the next she’s laughing about his demise. It is totally baffling character behavior. (Similarly, I still don’t understand why Xander has any allegiance to Tedros, unless he is supposed to be literally brainwashed.)Justice for Leia, the one character with any sense. I wonder what was in her note to Jocelyn.Nikki briefly mentions that Andrew Finkelstein’s employees walked out to protest Jocelyn’s misogynistic music. That seems like a bit of an attempt to acknowledge the potential backlash to the series, which has already come and gone.Will there be a Season 2? I have a hard time imagining what that would even look like unless Jocelyn and Tedros turn into Bonnie and Clyde. But don’t get any ideas, please, HBO. More

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      Prue Leith’s 2,200-Mile Road Trip From California to Florida

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      The “Great British Baking Show” judge steps out of the tent to sample the flavors of America. Is her 2,200-mile drive a showstopper or a technical challenge?​​Last fall, my husband and I set our hearts on renting an R.V. for a road trip from Los Angeles to Florida. We imagined picnicking on mountaintops in New Mexico, sleeping under the stars in Texas and barbecuing prawns (the R.V. would come with a grill, of course) on a Mississippi levee. In the end, our 2,200-mile American journey ended up being memorable, but for none of those reasons.“We can’t accept anyone over 70 with a British driver’s license,” insisted the woman on the phone. I’m 83, but in my head I’m a sprightly 60, and my husband, John, is 76. Nobody had warned us about this potential obstacle. If they had the same age cutoff for Americans, I thought, the R.V. business would collapse.We called another company. Their rep said he’d never heard of any age restriction. “No problem,” he said. “We’ve got the perfect R.V. for you.” Except it was 45 feet long. The thought of parking something the size of a London bus was too much, even for my gung-ho husband.Common sense prevailed, and we rented a Ford Explorer.New MexicoSalsa and sticker shockWe were overdue for a break. Aside from my usual job eating cake as a judge on “The Great British Baking Show,” I’d been doing trial runs of my one-woman stage show in Britain and the United States, and it had been exhausting.So, before we set off on our great adventure, we rented a mobility scooter for two and hit the boardwalk at Venice Beach, in Los Angeles. But our crawl through the deafeningly loud music, junk food and stands selling shorts emblazoned with vulgar words and messages like “Beat Me” did little to re-energize our spirits.On the day we left California, torrents of rain were falling. By the time we crossed into Arizona, the sun had exploded over the hills in a glorious display of opera lighting.We made it as far as Sante Fe, N.M., where our hotel, the Vanessie, a charming collection of wooden buildings around a courtyard was, like everywhere, suffering from a lack of staff. The single employee handed us a laminated notice: “Our restaurant, room service and bar are currently closed. A $30 service charge will be added to your bill.”Happily, Vara Vinoteca, across the street, was open. We ate tiny padrón peppers stuffed with cream cheese and cumin, tuna ceviche and pineapple salsa, and a small bowl of warm, slightly curried mussels in the shell, all served with a flight of four glasses of different California cabernet sauvignons.I’d have been happy to have all our meals in that simple little room. But Santa Fe brims with good restaurants, quirky architecture, art museums and shops stuffed with desirable things, so we set off to explore. John fell in love with a hatter’s shop, where he bought two authentic Stetsons. He also spent eye-watering amounts of money on two baseball caps for his grandsons. Is there a difference between a $41 and a $5 baseball cap? Apparently.John was equally dumbfounded at my lusting after an irresistible $150 necklace made from cut-up plastic water bottles and sprayed with red, black and gold paint. Vibrant, bouncy, light as a feather — it was a work of art. But apparently it was a piece that, at least for us, money couldn’t buy: The shop’s credit card system required a U.S. ZIP code, and cash was not accepted. We gave up.Prices constantly amazed us. The exchange rate has made the U.S. shockingly expensive for Brits, and taxes and tip on top of that? I’m already vaguely offended to be expected to tip when buying a coffee at a counter. And now with the touch screens suggesting tips of 15 percent and up, a latte feels like a major purchase. Only petrol seemed cheap, at half the U.K. price.Luis MazónTexasWhere astronauts dare to dine“Boring, flat, brown, goes on forever”: Everyone said we’d hate Texas. But we loved it. Maybe because I grew up in the wide-open spaces of South Africa, the little towns with not much more than a windmill and a church touched my heart.We stopped for lunch at Dirk’s, a Lubbock diner packed with locals eating chicken tenders, sticky ribs and burgers, all flooded with gloopy barbecue sauce and followed by doughnuts or pancakes in a lake of syrup.The waiter seemed puzzled when I asked, “Do you have any green vegetables?” Then he smiled and said, “Oh, yes, we have green beans.” They turned out to be canned beans in a cloying juice.We were also puzzled by the way American waiters routinely congratulate you on your menu choice, rewarding you with “Good choice,” “Excellent” or even “Awesome.” You want fries with that? “Awesome!”By the time we got to San Antonio, we were ready for a drink. A waterside cafe among the raised flower beds, paved walks and roving mariachi bands of the River Walk delivered first-class margaritas (freezing, salt on only one edge of the glass, not too sweet) and still-warm tortilla chips. Watching the young waiter make guacamole at a riverside table was a joy: knife razor-sharp, chile fresh, avocado and tomato perfectly ripe. And his judgment was fine — a smidge of chopped raw red onion, a decent squeeze of lime, and a generous grind of pepper and salt, all turned together gently rather than crudely mashed. I found myself eating very slowly, just to hold on to that flavor as long as possible.We had the worst meal of our whole trip not far away in the Texas Hill Country tourist town of Fredericksburg, which prides itself on its German heritage. We’d spent a happy morning touring the shops, museums and galleries of the town’s north end, and enjoyed a lunch of fried chicken sandwiches and banana walnut pancakes.So we had high hopes for the south side. But sadly its historic houses were full of tourist junk like plastic stein mugs and Barbie dolls squeezed into lederhosen. We retreated to a restaurant whose menu boasted of authentic German dishes. We were served pork chops ruined by oversweet gravy, tasteless sauerkraut, sweet and vinegary red cabbage, and potato mash obviously made with powdered mix that had not been brought to a boil. We abandoned our plates and went back to our motel to microwave emergency rations of Campbell’s tomato soup.The next day, on our way to Houston, we passed a roadside church whose huge hoarding exhorted us to “Give Up Lust — Take Up Jesus.” I thought that sign might be my most abiding memory, until I’d spent a few hours at the Space Center Houston. I never guessed I’d be so riveted by topics like the geology of the moon and how NASA astronauts train underwater.But the cafeteria! It is astonishing, the best I’ve ever seen anywhere in a public building: brioche or sourdough sandwiches, homemade soups, hot roasts and grills, fresh tortillas, a salad bar to tempt the most die-hard carnivore, and no junk food in sight. It was a long way from the usual NASA fare of freeze-dried food in pouches and tubes.Luis MazónLouisianaHow to nurse a hangoverLouisiana is famous for gumbos and étouffées, so I was expecting gastronomy as we crossed the state line and drove toward Louisiana State University’s Rural Life Museum, a Cajun heritage village in Baton Rouge. I guess I was overly optimistic. The jambalaya and blackened fish in the cafe were tasteless and dried out. I’ve had better Cajun food in London.Plantation Alley, along the Great Mississippi Road, with its half a dozen “Gone With the Wind”-style estates, now open to the public, swept me away. The most beautiful of them was Oak Alley, with its avenue of 250-year-old Southern live oaks, their branches creating a vast green tunnel. But I couldn’t understand how the magnificent trees were obviously much older than the house. It turns out that these oaks are native to the area, and had once grown all over the estate. When the house was built in 1836, enslaved workers were made to dig up 28 of the huge 60- to 70-year-old trees, with root systems equal to the size of their canopies, and replant them in an avenue down to the Mississippi levee.The Great Mississippi Road eventually leads to New Orleans and the famous French Quarter, with its balconies of elaborate wrought iron — a daytime picture of Victorian good taste. We, ignorant Brits, had no idea that at night on Bourbon Street, that “good taste” became the flavor of daiquiris, pizza and hot dogs against a backdrop of bands belting out rock ’n’ roll, small children beating dustbins, grown-ups playing jazz, and the raucous din of drunken tourists until 3 a.m.But I liked the party atmosphere, and I’m mighty partial to a daiquiri, so we set off on a pub crawl. I now know that the secret to a good mango daiquiri is fresh mango, and not bottled mango syrup. And the next morning, after one too many mango delights and little sleep, I learned that shrimp and grits, with a good grating of cheese, is the perfect hangover cure.FloridaTurkey, sweet potatoes and slice of modern EdenOur road trip ended, as it had started, at a beach. Only this one was a mercifully far cry from the Venice boardwalk.We had rented a house for the week in the small Florida Panhandle community of Seacrest Beach, on the Emerald Coast along Highway 30A. This eight-mile strip — a kind of manufactured, perfectly designed modern Eden — consists of 16 neighborhoods on white-sand beaches between Pensacola and Panama City. Developments with names like Rosemary Beach, Seagrove Beach, Alys Beach, Grayton Beach and WaterColor share the perfect sands and the desired 30A address.Everyone rides around on bikes, and perfectly tanned mothers gossip over kombucha and wheatgrass at sidewalk cafes. Even the children look straight out of an upmarket catalog.Friends of friends, on holiday, invited us to their Thanksgiving dinner — turkey with all the trimmings, sweet potatoes, pecan pie and ice cream. In thanking them, I said something about the pleasure of such generosity, family closeness and their children’s politeness. Our host laughed. It’s because we’re from the South, she said.I’m glad we failed to rent my dream Winnebago back in Los Angeles. If we’d succeeded, we’d never have experienced a traditional American family Thanksgiving. We’d have been in a trailer park, eating takeout. Thank you, Lady Luck.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2023. More

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      in Television

      What’s on TV This Week: Fourth of July Fireworks and ‘Moonshine’

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      Networks air specials for Independence Day, and the CW premieres a Canadian comedy about a dysfunctional family running a summer resort.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, July 3-9. Details and times are subject to change.Monday‘ROAD TO …’ MARATHON various times on TCM. Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour star in the seven movies in the “Road to …” series, known for their minimal plot and lengthy high jinks. On Monday night, TCM is airing the first three: “Road to Singapore,” “Road to Zanzibar” and “Road to Morocco” beginning at 8 p.m.TuesdayMACY’S 4TH OF JULY FIREWORKS SPECTACULAR 8 p.m. on NBC. For almost five decades, Macy’s has been responsible for the iconic firework show that lights up New York’s skyline on Independence Day — and this year isn’t any different. The broadcast will also feature performances by Ashanti, Brett Young, the Roots and the U.S. Army Field Band.A CAPITOL FOURTH 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). While fireworks fly over Manhattan’s East River, they will also be going off behind the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Boyz II Men, Renée Fleming and the Muppets are all set to perform during PBS’s broadcast.WednesdayMila Kunis and Jason Segel in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.”Glen Wilson/Universal PicturesFORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL (2008) 7 p.m. on E! Peter (Jason Segel), a heartbroken puppeteer/musician, meets Rachel (Mila Kunis), a hotel concierge, at a Hawaiian resort. Throw in Peter’s ex (Kristen Bell) and her new rocker boyfriend (Russell Brand), who are staying at the same resort, and this rom-com becomes a perfectly hilarious dumpster fire. The movie “does not entirely play by the established conventions of its genre,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times. “Its willingness to explore states of feeling and modes of behavior that tamer romantic comedies never go near is decidedly a virtue, though this same sense of daring and candor also exposes its limitations.”HUMAN FOOTPRINT 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). This six-part series, hosted by Shane Campbell-Staton, a professor at Princeton University, is a travel-meets-science show that discusses the ways humans are transforming the planet — the good and the bad parts.ThursdayFORREST GUMP (1994) 8 p.m. on Paramount. Though classified as a “comedy,” this movie packs an emotional punch. The story follows Forrest (Tom Hanks) who can pretty much do anything he sets his mind to — except winning over his childhood love, Jenny (Robin Wright). “Structured as Forrest’s autobiography, and centering on his lifelong love for an elusive beauty named Jenny, ‘Forrest Gump’ has the elements of an emotionally gripping story,” Janet Maslin wrote in her review for The Times. “Yet it feels less like a romance than like a coffee-table book celebrating the magic of special effects.”FridayTHE DEVIL WEARS PRADA (2006) 7 p.m. on VH1. Andy (Anne Hathaway) pivots from her journalistic dreams to take a job as an assistant to Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), the editor in chief of a glamorous fashion magazine. Come for the outfits and shots of Paris; stay for Stanley Tucci’s amazing line read of “gird your loins.” If you want to spice up your movie watching experience, take a sip of your drink every time someone says “a million girls would kill for this job” — by the end of the movie you’ll be very well hydrated.Peter MacNeill plays Ken Finley-Cullen, a business owner deciding which of his children could succeed him, in the comedy “Moonshine.”Michael Tompkins/Entertainment OneMOONSHINE 9 p.m. on The CW. This Canadian comedy is as if you took an Elin Hilderbrand beach read and mixed in a tiny bit of “Succession.” The story follows Bea and Ken Finley-Cullen who are trying to decide if any of their individualistic children are ready to take over their business, a summer resort, which could use some love. There is small-town drama, illegal businesses and secrets people are trying to keep hidden.Saturday1982: THE GREATEST GEEK YEAR EVER 8 p.m. on the CW. In 1982, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” was released, “Cats” opened on Broadway and the first episode of “Late Night with David Letterman” debuted on NBC. This CW documentary features those big moments in pop culture as well as interviews with writers, producers and directors from blockbusters that year, including “E.T.,” “Blade Runner” and “Poltergeist.”SundayA still from “Last Call,” a documentary about a serial killer in New York City in the 1990s.Courtesy of HBOLAST CALL 9 p.m. on HBO. In 1990s New York City, as the L.G.B.T.Q. community coped with the AIDS crisis and hate crimes, a serial killer known as the “last call killer,” entered the scene. His name comes from his pattern of luring intoxicated men from piano bars before taking their lives. This documentary focuses on the deep-rooted discrimination that existed within the criminal justice system and how the community had to work to ensure the N.Y.P.D. took the crimes seriously.LUANN & SONJA: WELCOME TO CRAPPIE LAKE 9 p.m. on Bravo. With the help of two “Real Housewives of New York City,” Bravo is adding another reality show to its roster. In a modern day version of “The Simple Life,” Luann de Lesseps and Sonja Morgan head to Benton, Ill., after its City Council invites them to help revitalize the town of 7,000.SEE IT LOUD: THE HISTORY OF BLACK TELEVISION 9 p.m. on CNN. Executive produced by LeBron James and Maverick Carter, this docu-series explores the 80-year journey of Black television, with shows like “Amos N’ Andy,” “The Jeffersons” and “Roots.” The series will also feature interviews with Gabrielle Union, Sherri Shepherd, Jimmie Walker and others. More

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      in Movies

      Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Great ‘Indiana Jones’ Adventure

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      There’s a photo of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, taken at an Emmys afterparty in 2019, that captures, better than any other contemporary celebrity photo I’ve seen, the enduring allure and glamour of Hollywood success. In it, the British writer-actress is wearing a glittering low-cut dress, sitting in a high-back chair, a cigarette in one hand, a vodka […] More

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      in Television

      John Early and His Dizzying New Special, ‘Now More Than Ever’

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      In his new Max special, “Now More Than Ever,” the comedian mixes cringe comedy and cabaret to dizzying effect.John Early’s boundary-blurring new Max special, “Now More Than Ever,” has the perfect title. The hyperbole, salesmanship and euphony of the expression match his literate satirical persona. And it also hints at the main asset and flaw of his hour: the too-muchness of it all.Early is a triple threat in the old-school sense (singing, dancing, acting) as well as in the comedy one (stand-up, sketch, improv). And by improv, I don’t mean the Second City variety so much as the art of vamping, which he jokes is the one thing members of his generation, millennials, were taught to do. Perhaps. But anyone who has seen Early glamorously filibuster (a paradoxical phrase that also suits him) while hosting a live show knows this can be as entertaining as anything.While he might be best known for his scene-stealing flourishes on the series “Search Party” or his long-running double act with Kate Berlant, Early, whose influence can be seen on a whole generation of comedians, shows off a little bit of everything he does here. Using the frame of a behind-the-scenes pop music documentary (Think “Madonna: Truth or Dare”), he mixes goofy comic scenes in which he plays the vain, jerky star with observational stand-up and sultry cover songs.Unlike comics whose music punches up a joke, Early commits to his songs, using a lovely falsetto and pumping bass line in strutting performances of work by everyone from Britney Spears to Neil Young. It’s unusual for a special to toggle between cringe-comedy punchlines and triumphant cabaret exhilaration. And it’s a tricky mix, because the music slows the comedy, and the jokes don’t necessarily complement the music. Early likes being elusive, conflating sincerity and parody, while Ping-Ponging between broad subjects (Donald J. Trump, Silicon Valley) and rarefied references. (He’s the first comic to ever make me cackle at the word “plosive.”)He has more than enough charisma to fit together this jigsaw puzzle of a show. It’s coherent if not easy to access. The key to his persona, I think, can be found in the joke he tells about the always-be-selling vanity of his generation, presenting himself as its avatar. “Here’s what it boils down to,” he says. “I don’t know how to do my taxes, but I do know how to be a badass.” Then he clarifies, “A shell of a badass.”That’s the role Early plays here. In black leather pants, he dances across the stage, flirting with the crowd with as much ingratiation as the camera fawningly displays toward him. This shell is fun to look at, in part because it’s full of cracks. And you don’t just see it when he introduces his parents in the crowd and reverts to a bratty, insecure kid, or when he does a very funny take on the “Access Hollywood” tape that compares Trump to Early as a closeted 12-year-old in the locker room trying to convince his friends he likes a girl. “If we’re honest,” he says, “Donald Trump is not a sensual person.” It’s the way he says “If we’re honest” that cracks me up.One of the many reasons Early is so hard to pin down is that while he leans on swagger and gusto, his most distinguishing moments mix in another register, his bookish alertness to language. My favorite bit is an inspired mountain-out-of-a-molehill joke about how Apple manipulates you into giving up personal data by offering these choices when you try to download an app: “Allow,” a word he describes as “pillowy,” or “Ask App Not to Track,” which he terms “the single most suicidal sequence of monosyllabic sounds.” There’s no way I can do this justice in text, but it’s essentially five minutes of close-read literary criticism that ends in tears and hysteria. If, like me, that’s your kind of thing, you’re in luck.There’s also a strain of comedy here that lampoons the virtue-signaling language of the overly online. Early taps the microphone: “Check, check. You guys can hear me, right?” he asks before adding: “I just want to make sure this is amplifying queer voices.”While Early defines himself as the quintessential millennial, he has the Generation X obsession with a romanticized version of the culture of the 1970s. The grainy film stock and chunky red font of this special remind me of a Tarantino movie. In one revealing nostalgic riff, Early yearns for the days of Bob Fosse, when louche choreographers were on talk shows and dance could be “kinky and mysterious.”Fosse could also be both sexy and ridiculous. While I wish “Now More Than Ever” had a bit more precision and ruthlessness in its direction (by Emily Allan and Leah Hennessey), and there’s a visceral energy lost in the translation from live performance to film, at his best, Early evokes a gyrating, deliriously decadent razzle-dazzle.Toward the end, Early invites his band members to teach him how to play instruments so he can flirt and sexually harass the band, which leads to a visit from the channel’s woman from Human Resources.You get the sense that Early is annoyed by such bureaucratic scolds, but you would never find him responding to it with something as boring as complaining about cancel culture. Instead of defending himself, he flashes a guilty look and rushes into a final song. It’s a hypnotic, joyful performance of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.”As the camera swirls and splotches of yellow light flare, Early, sweat glistening under a disco ball, loses himself in reverie. At the start of the special, titles on the screen instruct you to turn the volume up, and it’s good advice. You can’t recreate the feel of a New York dance party by watching a special at home, but why not try? This is comedy that wants you to get up and dance. More

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      in Theater

      Alan Arkin, Comic Actor With a Serious Side, Dies at 89

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      He got laughs and won awards on Broadway in “Enter Laughing” and in movies like “Little Miss Sunshine.” But he also had a flair for drama.Alan Arkin, who won a Tony Award for his first lead role on Broadway, received an Academy Award nomination for his first feature film, and went on to have a long and diverse career as a character actor who specialized in comedy but was equally adept at drama, died on Thursday in San Marcos, Calif. He was 89. His son Matthew Arkin said that Mr. Arkin, who had heart ailments, died at home.Mr. Arkin was not quite a show-business neophyte when he was cast in the 1963 Broadway comedy “Enter Laughing,” Joseph Stein’s adaptation of Carl Reiner’s semi-autobiographical novel about a stage-struck boy from the Bronx. He had toured and recorded with the Tarriers, a folk music group, and he had appeared on Broadway with the Second City, the celebrated improvisational comedy troupe. But he was still a relative unknown.He did not stay unknown for long.In a cast that included established professionals like Sylvia Sidney and Vivian Blaine, Mr. Arkin stole the show and won the hearts of the critics. “‘Enter Laughing’ is marvelously funny, and so is Alan Arkin in the principal role,” Howard Taubman wrote in The New York Times.Mr. Arkin won a Tony. The show ran for a year and made him a star.Mr. Arkin, left, with his fellow cast members Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson and the director Mike Nichols, right, preparing for the opening of the play “Luv” on Broadway in 1964.Leo FriedmanReviewers were again enthusiastic, and Mr. Arkin again found himself in a hit show, when he returned to Broadway in 1964 as a woebegone misfit in Murray Schisgal’s absurdist farce “Luv,” staged by Mike Nichols and co-starring Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson. With two Broadway triumphs under his belt, it was a confident Mr. Arkin who moved from the stage to the screen in 1966.“I never had any doubts about making it in movies,” he told The Daily News a year later. “I just knew I had to, because there was no alternative.”His confidence proved justified. He was nominated for an Oscar for his first feature film, “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming,” an offbeat comedy about the hysteria that ensues when a Russian submarine runs aground on an island in Massachusetts. As the frantic leader of a landing party sent ashore to find a way to refloat the vessel, he earned a place in cinema history with a riotous scene in which he teaches his non-English-speaking crew to say “Emergency! Everybody to get from street!”That led to a series of roles that established him as a man of a thousand accents, or close to it. He played a French detective in “Inspector Clouseau” (1968), putting his own spin on a role created (and subsequently reclaimed) by Peter Sellers; a Puerto Rican widower in “Popi” (1969); a Lithuanian sailor in the television movie “The Defection of Simas Kudirka” (1978); and many other nationalities and ethnicities.Mr. Arkin in the 1966 film “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming.” His performance as a Russian submarine commander earned him his first of four Academy Award nominations.United Artists, via Photofest“I could play any kind of foreigner,” he told The Times in 1970. “But I can’t play any kind of native of anywhere.”But he soon became even better known for playing likably hapless Everyman characters. The ultimate Arkin Everyman was Captain Yossarian in “Catch-22” (1970), Mike Nichols’s film version of Joseph Heller’s celebrated World War II novel.“Catch-22” received mixed reviews and was a disappointment at the box office, but Mr. Arkin’s performance as Yossarian, a panicky bombardier constantly looking for ways to avoid combat, was widely praised. In his Times review, Vincent Canby said of Mr. Arkin that “because he projects intelligence with such monomaniacal intensity, he is both funny and heroic at the same time.”By that time Mr. Arkin had also successfully ventured outside the realm of comedy, establishing a lifelong pattern. In “Wait Until Dark” (1967), a suspense drama starring Audrey Hepburn as a blind woman who is terrorized by drug dealers looking for a secret stash of heroin, he was convincingly evil as the dealer in chief.In “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” (1968), based on the novel by Carson McCullers, he played a deaf man drawn to help the disadvantaged in a racially divided Southern town. That performance earned him his second Oscar nomination.Mr. Arkin with Sondra Locke in “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” (1968). His performance as a deaf man drawn to help the disadvantaged earned him his second Oscar nomination.Warner Brothers PicturesIt would be almost 40 years before his third nomination, and his only Oscar, for his portrayal of a crusty and heroin-habituated grandfather in the indie comedy “Little Miss Sunshine” (2006). His fourth and final nomination was for his role as a cynical movie producer in “Argo” (2012), Ben Affleck’s based-on-a-true-story account of the made-in-Hollywood rescue of hostages in Iran.The years between nominations were busy ones.Alan Wolf Arkin was born on March 26, 1934, in Brooklyn to David Arkin, a painter and writer, and Beatrice (Wortis) Arkin, a teacher whom he later remembered as “a tough old Depression-style lefty.” The family later moved to Los Angeles, where his father lost his job as a schoolteacher when he refused to answer questions about his political beliefs.Mr. Arkin studied acting at Los Angeles City College and later at Bennington College in Vermont, which was a women’s school at the time but accepted a few male theater students.His first professional experience, however, was not as an actor but as a singer and guitarist with the Tarriers, a folk group that had hits with “The Banana Boat Song” and other records. “I thought it was going to be an entree into an acting career, like the naïve young man that I was,” Mr. Arkin said in 2020 when he and his son Adam were guests on “Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast.” “It didn’t, so I quit them after two years.”Mr. Arkin with, from left, the writer Murray Schisgal, the producer Marc Merson and the actor John Gielgud on the set of the 1966 television movie “The Love Song of Barney Kempinski.”Sam Falk/The New York TimesHis first notable work as an actor was with the Second City in Chicago, which he joined in 1960. “I took the Second City job because I was failing in New York,” he told The Times in 1986. “I couldn’t get arrested. When I got there I wasn’t funny at all. But slowly I built one character, then another, and the audience helped teach me what was funny and what didn’t work.”He made his Broadway debut in 1961 in the company’s revue “From the Second City.” From there, it was a short step to “Enter Laughing.”It was also a relatively short step from acting to directing. In 1966 he directed the Off Broadway play “Eh?,” which featured a young Dustin Hoffman. In 1969 he directed a successful Off Broadway revival of Jules Feiffer’s dark comedy “Little Murders.”He also directed the 1971 movie version, which starred Elliott Gould and in which Mr. Arkin played a small role. It was one of only two feature films he directed. Neither “Little Murders” nor “Fire Sale,” released in 1977, was a hit.By far the most successful of his dozen or so stage directing credits was the original Broadway production of the Neil Simon comedy “The Sunshine Boys” (1972), which starred Jack Albertson and Sam Levene as two feuding ex-vaudevillians reunited against their will, and for which he received a Tony nomination.Mr. Arkin played a mild-mannered dentist dragged into an insane adventure by a mysterious character played by Peter Falk in the 1979 comedy “The In-Laws.” Warner Brothers PicturesMr. Arkin told The Times in 1986, when he was staging an Off Broadway revival of the 1937 farce “Room Service,” that he much preferred directing for the stage to acting on it.“I’m always grateful that I don’t have to do it,” he said. “I haven’t been onstage for 20 years, and there have been maybe 15 minutes when I wanted to go back.”But he continued to stay busy in the movies. His memorable roles in the 1970s included a sympathetic Sigmund Freud coping with the drug-addicted Sherlock Holmes (Nicol Williamson) in “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution” (1976), and a mild-mannered dentist — another quintessential Arkin Everyman — dragged into an insane adventure by a mysterious character (Peter Falk) who may or may not be a C.I.A. agent in “The In-Laws” (1979).Among his later film roles were a worn-out real estate salesman in the film version of David Mamet’s play “Glengarry Glen Ross” (1992), a psychiatrist treating a professional hit man (John Cusack) in “Grosse Pointe Blank” (1997) and an overprotective father in “Slums of Beverly Hills” (1998). But from the 1980s on, much of his best work was done on television.“There was a period of a year or two when I wasn’t getting many good offers,” he said in 1986. “And a television show came along that I thought was exceptional, and within two weeks there was another one.” He added, “Although I’m more impressed by movies, I find I’m more moved by television.”Mr. Arkin with Abigail Breslin in “Little Miss Sunshine” (2006). His portrayal of a crusty and heroin-habituated grandfather won him his only Oscar.Eric Lee/Fox Searchlight Pictures, via Associated PressIn addition to numerous made-for-TV movies, Mr. Arkin’s small-screen roles included the title character, a scheming hospital administrator, on the short-lived sitcom “Harry” (1987); a judge on the cable drama “100 Centre Street” in 2001 and 2002; Grace’s father in a 2005 episode of “Will & Grace”; and, most recently, the cranky agent and best friend of an aging acting coach (Michael Douglas) on the first two seasons of the critically praised Netflix comedy “The Kominsky Method,” for which he received Emmy and Golden Globe nominations in 2019 and 2020.He was nominated for six Emmys in his career, including for his performances in two TV movies based on real events, “Escape From Sobibor” (1987) and “The Pentagon Papers” (2003), although he never won.In 1998 he returned to the stage for the first time in more than 30 years, to good reviews, when he teamed with Elaine May for “Power Plays,” an Off Broadway program of three one-acts. In addition to directing all three and writing one of them (the other two were written by Ms. May), he appeared in two: his own “Virtual Reality,” the surreal story of two men awaiting the delivery of a mysterious shipment, with his son Anthony Arkin; and Ms. May’s “In and Out of the Light,” in which he played a lecherous dentist alongside Anthony, Ms. May and her daughter, Jeannie Berlin.Mr. Arkin in an episode of the Netflix series “The Kominsky Method,” for which he received Emmy and Golden Globe nominations.Saeed Adyani/Netflix, via Associated PressMr. Arkin’s first two marriages, to Jeremy Yaffe and the actress Barbara Dana, ended in divorce. In addition to his sons, Matthew, Adam and Anthony, he is survived by his wife, Suzanne Newlander Arkin, and four grandchildren.Mr. Arkin was also an occasional author. He wrote several children’s books, among them “The Lemming Condition” (1976) and “Cassie Loves Beethoven” (2000). In 2011 he published a memoir, “An Improvised Life”; he followed that in 2020 with “Out of My Mind,” a brief history of his search for meaning in the universe and his embrace of Eastern philosophy.Toward the end of “An Improvised Life,” Mr. Arkin reflected on his chosen profession. Noting that a lot of actors “are better at pretending to be other people than they are at being themselves,” he wrote, “When things get tense, when I start taking my work a bit too seriously, I remind myself that I’m only pretending to be a human being.”Robert Berkvist, a former New York Times arts editor, died in January. Shivani Gonzalez contributed reporting. More