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      Producer Ryan Murphy Is Expected to Move to Disney

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      Mr. Murphy, the force behind hits like “American Horror Story” and “The Watcher,” is coming to the end of his $300 million Netflix deal.Ryan Murphy, the television megaproducer behind hits like “American Horror Story” and “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” is poised to move his operation to the Walt Disney Company, five years after he stunned Hollywood by decamping to Netflix for a $300 million deal.The contract talks with Disney are not finished, according to three people briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations. No deal is expected to be completed until after the screenwriters’ strike in Hollywood is resolved, one of the people said. (Unionized film and television writers have been on strike since May 1.)But the talks between Mr. Murphy and Disney are advanced, the people said. Mr. Murphy’s contract with Netflix expires at the end of the month. Renewal talks with Netflix never got off the ground.Representatives for Mr. Murphy, Disney and Netflix either declined to comment or did not return calls. Bloomberg reported Mr. Murphy’s likely move to Disney earlier on Tuesday.A deal with Disney would formally reunite Mr. Murphy with executives he worked closely with for more than a decade. Disney owns the FX cable channel, which is home to his “American Horror Story” franchise, which started in 2011. (The series also runs on Hulu, which Disney controls.) ABC, the Disney-owned broadcast network, recently bought the rights to “9-1-1,” a drama that Mr. Murphy created for Fox in 2018.When Mr. Murphy signed his Netflix deal, in February 2018, it was just six months after another star producer, Shonda Rhimes, had signed her own nine-figure contract with the streaming company. The back-to-back signings were an emphatic statement by Netflix that it was in the business of paying any price for big-name writers. In the process, it set off a Hollywood arms race (which, amid broader concerns about the streaming business and the writers’ strike, has mostly cooled off).Mr. Murphy’s tenure at Netflix got off to a bumpy start. Misfires included “The Politician” and “Hollywood.” It was not until last September that Mr. Murphy served up bona fide hits in “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” and “The Watcher.” Both series are among the 10 most-watched Netflix originals ever, according to the streaming service.Mr. Murphy, who continued making shows for Disney even though he was under contract with Netflix — new seasons of “9-1-1” and “American Crime Story” continued apace — would likewise continue to make shows for Netflix after a move to Disney. The next edition of “Monster” will focus on Erik and Lyle Menéndez, the brothers serving life sentences for killing their wealthy parents in 1989, and “The Watcher” has been renewed for another season. More

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      in Theater

      Paxton Whitehead, Actor Who Found Humor in the Stodgy, Dies at 85

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      An Englishman with a deep, cultured voice, he played uptight snobs in films like “Back to School” and on shows like “Friends” and “Mad About You.”Paxton Whitehead, a comic actor who earned a Tony nomination for his role in a revival of “Camelot” and played the starchiest of stuffed shirts in films like the Rodney Dangerfield comedy “Back to School” and on hit 1990s sitcoms like “Friends” and “Mad About You,” died on Friday in Arlington, Va. He was 85.His daughter, Alex Whitehead-Gordon, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was complications of a fall.Mr. Whitehead, an Englishman with a modulated baritone voice, often coaxed humor from his sharp features and dignified bearing. His comic characters typically displayed subtly exaggerated versions of his own traits, which he executed with seeming ease.“He couldn’t help but be funny,” the critic Terry Doran wrote in The Buffalo News in 1997 of Mr. Whitehead’s time at the George Bernard Shaw Festival in Ontario, adding: “He didn’t sweat buckets striving to make us laugh. He just was amusing. It came naturally.”For Mr. Whitehead, finding the comedy was the key that unlocked a role.“You always have to find the core of humor in a character — at least I like to, the same way some people will say, ‘I like to find the good in him, even though he is a villain,’” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1997.One such character was Philip Barbay, the uptight dean of a business school and the nemesis of Thornton Melon, Mr. Dangerfield’s character, in “Back to School” (1986). Melon, a crass but successful businessman, comes to Grand Lakes University to visit his struggling son and winds up enrolling at the school after making a sizable donation.Barbay hates Melon on sight and does his best to get him expelled, to little effect. Early in the movie he and his girlfriend, Diane, a literature professor played by Sally Kellerman, see Melon buying books for students at the university bookstore, and Barbay describes him as “the world’s oldest living freshman, and the walking epitome of the decline in modern education.”Melon goes on to disrupt Barbay’s class and date Diane. Mr. Whitehead infused Barbay with some pathos — the character seemed unable to keep himself from being a killjoy — which added another layer to the humor. While out with the free-spirited, poetry-loving Diane, Barbay proposes that they take their relationship to the next level through “a merger,” adding that they would become “incorporated, if you will.”From left, Rodney Dangerfield, Mr. Whitehead and Ned Beatty in the 1986 movie “Back to School.”Orion, via ShutterstockMr. Whitehead’s stodgy figure in “Back to School” was the archetype for many of his later sitcom roles. He played a stuffy neighbor on “Mad About You,” a stuffy boss on “Friends” and the stuffy headmaster of a prestigious school on “Frasier.”He was also a prolific theater actor. He appeared in more than a dozen Broadway productions, including the revue “Beyond the Fringe” (1962-64) and the 1980 revival of “Camelot,” in which his portrayal of King Pellinore earned him a Tony nomination for best featured actor in a musical. He played Sherlock Holmes opposite Glenn Close in “The Crucifer of Blood,” which ran for 236 performances at the Helen Hayes Theater in 1978 and 1979.Mr. Whitehead’s roles, especially onstage, were not always comic. One departure was his portrayal of the ambition-crazed lead in a well-reviewed production of Shakespeare’s “Richard III” at the Old Globe in San Diego in 1985.“Comedy, tragedy, pathos, spectacle — everything is swept along before the raging kinetic power of this Richard,” the theater critic Welton Jones wrote in The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1985.Francis Edward Paxton Whitehead was born in Kent, England, on Oct. 17, 1937. His father, Charles, was a lawyer, and his mother, Louise (Hunt) Whitehead, was a homemaker. His daughter said that his family and friends had called him Paxton since he was a child.He graduated from the Rugby School in Warwickshire before studying acting at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London. His early work was with touring companies, sometimes performing a new play every week. In the late 1950s he earned a stint with the New Shakespeare Memorial Theater, which is now called the Royal Shakespeare Theater and is part of the Royal Shakespeare Company.“But I was the lowest of lows,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1992, and after playing Shakespearean extras for a while, he decided to move to New York City. (His mother was American, so he was allowed to work in the States.)His Broadway career soon took off, and it continued into recent decades. He appeared in the original productions of the comedies “Noises Off” (1983-85) and “Lettice and Lovage” (1990) and in revivals of “My Fair Lady” (1993), as Colonel Pickering and later Henry Higgins, and “The Importance of Being Earnest” (2011), as the Rev. Canon Chasuble.In 1967, Mr. Whitehead became the artistic director of the Shaw Festival. He produced, acted in or directed most of Shaw’s plays, attracting actors like Jessica Tandy to the festival’s productions, before deciding to return to acting in 1977.His other films include “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (1986), which starred Whoopi Goldberg; “Baby Boom” (1987) which starred Diane Keaton and Sam Shepard; and “The Adventures of Huck Finn” (1993), which starred Elijah Wood and Courtney B. Vance. His other television appearances include “Murder, She Wrote,” “3rd Rock From the Sun,” “The West Wing,” “Hart to Hart” and “Caroline in the City.”His marriage to the actress Patricia Gage ended in divorce in 1986. The next year he married Katherine Robertson, who died in 2009.In addition to his daughter, with whom he lived in Arlington, he is survived by a son, Charles; a stepdaughter from his first marriage, Heather Whitehead; and four grandchildren.Mr. Whitehead told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1986 that he usually preferred to act in comedy, because “it interests me more, and actually I take it a great deal more seriously than I do tragedy.”“The last time I did a tragic role,” he added, “they laughed.” More

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      John Corbett on His Arrival in ‘And Just Like That …’

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      He was defined by his role in “Sex and the City,” not always comfortably. He’s reprising it in “And Just Like That …” because “I’ve made friends with the idea of, this is just what I do.”John Corbett at his ranch in California. He returns to his old TV Manhattan stamping grounds in the new season of “And Just Like That …”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesOver the years, people have cornered John Corbett on the street, at the grocery store, in coffee shops, to swear fealty. “Every [expletive] person I meet is just, ‘I was Team Aidan!’” he said. He assumes that those people are lying.“People don’t want to hurt my feelings,” he said. “They’re really careful with me.”In two seasons of “Sex and the City” and in brief cameos later, including in the improvident Arabian fantasia “Sex and the City 2,” Corbett, 62, played Aidan Shaw, a hunky furniture maker and the on-again, off-again, engaged to, off-again, still mostly off-again love interest of Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw.“He was warm, masculine and classic American, just like his furniture,” Carrie says of Aidan in voice-over.Aidan, a character designed to contrast Chris Noth’s withholding Mr. Big and originally scheduled for just three episodes, was also, like much classic American furniture, stolid and unyielding. He wouldn’t let Carrie smoke. He demeaned her interests. When she cheated on him, he punished her. Controlling, judgmental, manipulative — who wants a bedroom set like that?Carrie, apparently. Because as trailers have revealed, Corbett’s Aidan will return to the second season of the well-heeled “Sex and the City” revival, “And Just Like That …,” which premieres on Max on Thursday. And this time around, when people chase him down to declare loyalty to Aidan, Corbett thinks that they just might mean it.“Those fans that didn’t like Aidan — and I know exactly why they didn’t, he was wrong for her — there’s going to be no [expletive] help for those people,” he said.Corbett was speaking late last month, by telephone, from his home in a sleepy town about three hours north of Los Angeles. Actually it was “the wife’s” phone, the wife being the actress and model Bo Derek, as Corbett’s wasn’t working. A request for a video interview had been denied.“I can’t be myself because I’m performing,” he said. “An hour plus is a long time to suck your gut back.”This suggests that Corbett, who came to acting late and more or less by accident, has complicated feelings about performance even as he maintains, he said, a hands-off attitude to his career. To talk to him is to feel not only his shirttails-out, expletive-heavy intimacy, but also his deep ambivalence about his calling, his craft and the show that made him famous.Corbett didn’t always appreciate the way he was typecast by playing Aidan in “Sex and the City,” but he was happy to play the character again.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesCorbett grew up in Wheeling, W.Va., with his mother. After high school, he moved to Southern California to be near his father, a welder, taking a job at a steel plant. Sidelined at 22 by an injury, he enrolled in community college, which mostly bored him. But about a month in, he met some guys in the cafeteria who invited him to their improv class.“I’ve always been a guy that made my friends laugh, a class clown,” he said. “I saw 30 other people just like me in there.” That same day, he dropped his other classes and re-enrolled as an acting student. He took sword fighting; he took ballet. He has never felt that same excitement or that same freedom again.“It’s kind of like drugs,” he said. “You’re chasing that first high.”His transition into professional acting was wobblier. He posed for cheap headshots, whipped up a résumé full of fake credits and supported himself as a hairdresser while he botched almost every audition that came his way, hands shaking, scripts shaking. He had two goals: He wanted to be on television and he wanted to be famous.In 1990, he was cast as the serene, groovy Alaskan radio D.J. in the CBS comedy “Northern Exposure.” “Northern Exposure” ran for five seasons and 110 episodes. It didn’t pay much. But it gave him his first bittersweet taste of celebrity, and it taught him that while fans loved him, they loved him not for any histrionic skill but rather for his rumbling voice, sleepy smile and 6-foot-5-inch frame.“I was the hunky guy and women would gush,” he said. “I don’t think one person has ever come up to me and said, ‘Hey, I think you’re a good actor.’”He had a type, he discovered — handsome, sensitive, not quite a himbo. And in the years after “Northern Exposure,” he didn’t fight it. “You’ve got to go where the money is, right?” he said. The money back then came mostly from TV movies he described as “not great.”He had some standards, though. And in 2000, when he was first offered a role in the third season of “Sex and the City,” he turned it down. He saw himself as more than a guest star. But the showrunner Michael Patrick King, now the creator of “And Just Like That …,” tried to convince him otherwise, intuiting that Corbett could supply the affection and warmth so lacking in Noth’s Big.As one of the main love interests of Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie, Aidan was a nice guy with a manipulative side.Craig Blankenhorn/HBOCorbett and Parker insist the characters’ revived relationship will be healthier. “He’s really, really listening to her now,” he said.Craig Blankenhorn/Max“There’s so few actors that have a relaxed, strong sex appeal,” King said in an interview. “He also has that thing that some of the great male movie stars have, a really low vibration of confidence.”Since Corbett didn’t have HBO, he was sent episodes on VHS. He watched them, and he was still a no. (For one thing, the script required nudity, “and my sweet little mom watched everything I did.”) Eventually he agreed to a meeting with Parker and King, mostly for the free trip to New York. They met at King’s West Village apartment.“I fell in love with both of those cats,” Corbett recalled. “After that hour, I wanted to be around them some more.”Parker also remembered an immediate bond. “I opened the door for him,” she said in a recent phone interview. “He did some sort of gallant, old-fashioned bow. I don’t remember the conversation, except that it was really pleasant and happy.”Once he was on set, she realized that the camera only magnified that charm. “It’s like he wrapped his arms around the camera and merged it into his body,” she said. “He absorbed it.”Three episodes became four. Then five. Then more. When Carrie and Aidan broke up at the end of Season 3, fans sent HBO Popsicle-stick furniture demanding that Corbett be brought back, and he was.He had what he wanted: He was on TV. He was famous. But the fame, more intense than what he’d experienced in “Northern Exposure,” changed his life, and “not in the way that I wanted it to, work wise,” he said.Corbett initially declined “Sex and the City” but changed his mind after meeting with Parker and Michael Patrick King. “I fell in love with both of those cats,” he said.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesThere were such strong associations between Corbett and the role that he struggled to be seen in any other way. He recalled being turned down for other roles he wanted, told that he would be too distracting. His work on “Sex and the City” and in the “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” movies, the first of which was released in 2002, affirmed and limited his type: the nice boyfriend. Then he became the nice husband. Lately, in projects like the “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” movies and their recent spinoff series, “XO, Kitty,” he has charmed a new generation of viewers as the nice dad.“I’ve made friends with the idea of, this is just what I do,” he said. “When the phone rings and it feels like the money’s right and the place is right and the time is right, I’ll go be this guy that these people want.”Colleagues who speak about Corbett tend to overlap him and his characters. “He is a very fun rapscallion who likes to have a good time,” said Nia Vardalos, the writer and star of the “Greek Wedding” films, which seemed to refer equally to actor and role.“He’s a big puppy — how can you not adore a puppy?” said Toni Collette, his co-star in the Showtime series “The United States of Tara.”For Corbett, the boundaries are equally fuzzy, particularly when it comes to Aidan. “The line gets blurry because when they clap the action board, there’s not a change,” he said. “I’m still living the same life.”In “Sex and the City,” that life, for all of Corbett’s warmth, had its darkness. If fans saw Aidan as comfortable and loving, the character was also judgmental and angry. (For Corbett, the line gets blurry here, too: “I get upset. I want to send a [expletive] chair through plate glass windows a couple times a day.”)So why bring him back? Initially, King didn’t. Because he planned to kill off Big in the first season of “And Just Like That …,” he felt he couldn’t immediately summon Carrie’s other major love interest. In 2021, Corbett told a reporter that he would be a part of it, but that was just a prank. (“John’s antic,” King explained.)“I’ve made friends with the idea of, this is just what I do,” Corbett said of the decent, hunky characters he is asked to play.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesBut Corbett did want to come back. “Especially when some of the photos would pop up of them shooting in the streets,” he said. “I would get a little jealous that I wasn’t asked to come back and do a cameo.”By Season 2, enough time had elapsed. King called Corbett and soon he found himself back at Silvercup Studios, where the original “Sex and the City” had filmed. He even brought some of the same clothes.But there were differences, allegedly. Max shared only a few minutes of Aidan screen time, but Corbett and Parker said that Aidan and Carrie’s relationship has mellowed and deepened. Aidan no longer argues with Carrie in the same way, Corbett insisted. He no longer controls her.“He’s really, really listening to her now,” he said.Parker, in her separate call, agreed. “It’s not fevered; it’s not demanding,” she said of the characters’ romance. “There’s so much heat between them, but there isn’t that urgency from him.”So could there be justification for Team Aidan this time? King put it this way: “I didn’t bring Aidan back to fail.”Corbett seemed to want a win for Aidan, though not in any passionate way. Aidan gave him the career he has, even if it has been more narrowly defined than the career he once imagined. But he has made his peace with it. He will likely never be seen as a serious actor, but there are worse things than being a classic American dreamboat.“It’s given me such a wonderful life, and asked so very little in exchange for that big sack of money that I got,” he said of his career. And then, though it wasn’t entirely true, he added, “I’ve gotten everything out of this life that I wanted.”“When the phone rings and it feels like the money’s right and the place is right and the time is right, I’ll go be this guy that these people want,” Corbett said.Chantal Anderson for The New York Times More

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      in Music

      Max Morath, Pianist Who Staged a One-Man Ragtime Revival, Dies at 96

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      A student of both music and history, he entertained audiences in the 1960s and beyond while educating them about a genre whose heyday had ended decades earlier.Max Morath, who stepped out of the 1890s only a lifetime late, and with syncopated piano rhythms and social commentary helped revive the ragtime age on educational television programs, in concert halls and in nightclubs for nearly a half-century, died on Monday at a care facility near his home in Duluth, Minn. He was 96.His wife, Diane Fay Skomars, confirmed the death.Having learned the rudiments of music from his mother, who played a tinkling piano in movie theaters for silent films, Mr. Morath — after false career starts as a radio announcer, newscaster and actor — found his calling in a fascination with ragtime, the uniquely syncopated, “ragged” style whose heyday spanned two decades, roughly from 1897 to 1917.A college-educated student of both music and history, Mr. Morath fell in love with ragtime’s dreamlike, bittersweet sounds. He researched the styles and repertoires of its era. He combed libraries, studied piano rolls and old sheet music, consulted historical societies, read antique magazines and talked to folks old enough to recall the work of the ragtime greats and the milestones of their age.What emerged was a new form of entertainment that combined showmanship with scholarly commentaries on ragtime itself, on its players and fans, and on the etiquette and tastes of a long-vanished age when horses pulled streetcars and women’s suffrage was still just a dream of the future.In a straw boater and sleeve garters, pounding an old upright with a cigar clenched in his teeth, Mr. Morath played Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” Jelly Roll Morton’s “Tiger Rag” and Eubie Blake’s “Charleston Rag.” In those moments he might have been a vaudeville copycat trading on nostalgia. But his mood grew serious — and strangely more engaging — when he paused to tell audiences what they were hearing.“Ragtime is the folk music of the city,” he would explain. “It represents 25 years of a music that’s been overlooked.“Classic ragtime isn’t the honky-tonk music you hear today. That’s just a popular misconception. Nobody has paid the classic ragtime much attention, because of the attitude that folk music had to come from the hills. We were looking in the wrong direction.”Mr. Morath made ragtime come alive again. In the 1890s, he said, people heard it in vaudeville houses or just walking around town. There were newfangled inventions: player pianos, phonographs and nickelodeons. Middle-class homes had upright pianos. Sheet music was booming. Tin Pan Alley, the Manhattan home of the songwriters who dominated popular music, was flourishing.After a few years in clubs and on radio and television in the West and in his native Colorado, Mr. Morath broke through in 1960 at KRMA-TV, Denver’s educational TV station. He wrote and produced “The Ragtime Era,” a series of 12 half-hour shows on the music and history of ragtime and the blues, as well as the origins of musical comedy and Tin Pan Alley, for the 60-station National Educational Television network, the predecessor of PBS.Reviewing that series for The New York Times, Jack Gould wrote: “In an uncommon mixture of earthiness, emphasized by his chewing of a big cigar and wearing of loud vests, and erudition, reflected in his knowledgeable commentary on music and the social forces that influence its expression, he presides over a wonderful rag piano and lets go.”The series was bought by commercial stations, greatly expanding Mr. Morath’s audience. He was soon juggling recording dates, college gigs (some 50 a year), and concert and club bookings. He also crafted another NET series, “The Turn of the Century” (1962): 15 installments that related ragtime music to its social, economic and political period, using lantern slides, photographs and other props.Mr. Morath in 1969. “Ragtime is the folk music of the city,” he said. “It represents 25 years of a music that’s been overlooked.”via Colorado Music ExperienceWith its wider focus — on life in America from 1890 to the 1920s — “The Turn of the Century” was a runaway success. In addition to being seen in syndication on commercial television, it became a one-man theatrical show. Mr. Morath presented it at the Blue Angel and the Village Vanguard in New York, brought it to the Off Broadway Jan Hus Playhouse in 1969 and then toured nationally for many years.“In a two-hour jaunty excursion, Morath gives us a look at the 30-year period that spanned the time of McGuffey’s Reader, women’s suffrage, the grizzly bear dance, Prohibition, legal marijuana and Teddy Roosevelt,” The Washington Post said when Mr. Morath opened at Ford’s Theater in 1970. “It was a time of sweeping changes in the moral climate of our nation, and Morath uses popular music, chiefly ragtime, as the centrifugal force for sorting out the different phases.”As the ragtime revival surged into the 1970s, it was given momentum by the musicologist Joshua Rifkin, who recorded much of Scott Joplin’s work for the Nonesuch label in 1971, and by the success of George Roy Hill’s Oscar-winning film “The Sting” (1973), starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford as con artists, which featured Joplin’s “The Entertainer” on the soundtrack.Mr. Morath appeared on “The Bell Telephone Hour,” “Kraft Music Hall,” “Today,” “The Tonight Show” and Arthur Godfrey’s radio and television programs. A series of Morath productions — “The Ragtime Years,” “Living the Ragtime Life,” “The Ragtime Man,” “Ragtime Revisited,” and “Ragtime and Again” — opened Off Broadway and were followed by national tours.“I must have played in 5,000 different places, and many of them were not all that classy,” Mr. Morath said in 2019 in an interview for this obituary. “Mostly they were saloons, and it wasn’t all ragtime either. Some of them were piano bars. When you work a piano bar, you’d better know 1,500 tunes. You’re playing requests. It was Gershwin. Cole Porter. Rodgers and Hart.”Mr. Morath continued touring until he retired in 2007. By then, he had long been known as “Mr. Ragtime,” the unofficial keeper of America’s ragtime legacy.Asked for a favorite memory from his life in music, he reached back to his childhood.“Actually,” he said after a moment’s thought, “it was when I was 7 and I heard my mother play something Joplin wrote, called ‘The Original Rag.’ It was published in Kansas City, and somehow my mother got ahold of it. We had a piano bench full of good stuff, mostly show tunes. But ‘Original Rag’ was my favorite.”Max Edward Morath was born in Colorado Springs on Oct. 1, 1926, the younger of two sons of Frederic Morath, a real estate broker, and Gladys (Ramsell) Morath. When Max was 4, his parents divorced. His mother became society editor of The Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, and his father went to Europe, remarried and spent his days climbing in the Alps and the Pyrenees.Max and his brother, Frederic, attended local public schools. He was active in choir and theater at Colorado Springs High School and, in his senior year, got a job as a radio announcer with KVOR (the call letters stand for Voice of the Rockies). After he graduated in 1944, he paid his way through Colorado College as a pianist and newscaster for the station. He majored in English and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1948.In 1953, he married Norma Loy Tackitt. They had three children before divorcing in 1992. He married Ms. Skomars, an author and photographer, in 1993.In addition to his wife, Mr. Morath is survived by two daughters, Kathryn Morath and Christy Mainthow; a son, Frederic; a stepdaughter, Monette Fay Magrath; five grandchildren; and a great-grandson. His brother died in 2009.In a recording career that began in 1955, Mr. Morath made more than 30 albums, mostly of unaccompanied piano solos, for Epic, RCA Victor, Vanguard and other labels. His original compositions were recorded by the pianist and composer Aaron Robinson and released in 2015 as “Max Morath: The Complete Ragtime Works for Piano.”Mr. Morath wrote an illustrated memoir, “The Road to Ragtime” (1999), and “I Love You Truly: A Biographical Novel Based on the Life of Carrie Jacobs-Bond” (2008), about the first woman to establish a music publishing firm in America. She had been the subject of a paper Mr. Morath wrote for his master’s degree, which he earned at Columbia University in 1996.In 2016, Mr. Morath was inducted into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame, along with the bandleaders Paul Whiteman and Glenn Miller. “It made me feel really great,” he said. “Of course, they’re both Colorado boys. I felt I was in very good company.”Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting. More

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      in Television

      ‘The Idol’ Season 1, Episode 3 Recap: Tedros Has Notes

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      Turns out that cult-leader types have a lot of opinions about how the women in their lives should look and behave.Season 1, Episode 3: ‘Daybreak’In her 2022 memoir, “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” the actress Jennette McCurdy wrote candidly about her troubled relationship with her nightmare of a stage mother, who wielded power over every aspect of her life and career. Talking to The New York Times, McCurdy explained the somewhat shocking title she chose for her book, saying, “I feel like I’ve done the processing and put in the work to earn a title or a thought that feels provocative.”“The Idol” may not have taken inspiration directly from McCurdy’s story, but the parallels are evident as we are offered more details about Jocelyn’s past in the most recent installment. Like McCurdy, Jocelyn was a child star whose mother abused her. Like McCurdy, Jocelyn also lost that mom to cancer.But instead of offering a nuanced look at an upsetting and complicated parental relationship, where love intermingled with pain, this week’s episode of “The Idol” uses the revelation of what happened to Jocelyn in her childhood to push her deeper into a new abusive relationship: The one she is entangled in with Tedros. It goes for provocation, yes, but it hasn’t done the work to earn it.Tedros has now fully taken hold of Jocelyn. He has moved in and is micromanaging every aspect of her life. He wakes her up and demands they go shopping, telling her she doesn’t have any taste as they try on clothes in a Beverly Hills Valentino store. He threatens to “curb stomp” an employee there whom he perceives to be looking at Jocelyn. Back at home, Tedros makes Jocelyn fire her personal chef, who flirts with her after asking how her probiotic diet is working.His entire entourage has also taken up residence in Jocelyn’s mansion. So it’s not only Tedros who is pushing his ideology onto Jocelyn but also his followers, who preach his ideas that good art comes out of pain. They espouse the idea that one is not allowed to say “no” to anything because every experience, even a bad one, could yield a great song. This results in an insipid discussion in which Chloe and Izaak argue that the death of Robert Plant’s son was necessary because it led him to write Led Zeppelin’s “All My Love.”No one can deny that wonderful art has come out of terrible events, but Tedros’s group believes in an extreme version of that where the art is worth any suffering. They argue that the death of one person may have saved the lives of many more because of the beauty of the song that came from it. The exploitation they are engaging in is obvious. Even the sweet-seeming Chloe pushes Jocelyn to evoke her mother in her music — and this is before Chloe learns the full extent of what Jocelyn’s mom did.Those details emerge during a dinner party, which opens with Jocelyn sweetly thanking those gathered for being there, but devolves into an awkward scene in which Tedros, whom she thanks for teaching her “how to have fun again,” pressures her into divulging her secrets. And that’s after he pushes Xander to share his idea for using the semen-face selfie as an album cover — an image that prompted internet discussions she found humiliating, as she ultimately admits.After berating her that “you make superficial music because you think about superficial things,” Tedros pushes Jocelyn to tell everyone just how her mother hurt her. Jocelyn solemnly describes how her mom used to beat her with a hairbrush, careful to hit her only in places where the camera wouldn’t see. It was a tool of motivation — Jocelyn’s mother used the hairbrush to keep her awake, or to make her learn her lines or dance moves. It was also a tool for control, emerging when Jocelyn was caught smiling to herself. Her mother sometimes hit her hard enough to break skin.Tedros feigns sympathy but also immediately identifies another way to control Jocelyn. He asks her if she misses the “motivation” being hit gave her. She replies, “Sometimes.” He has a retort at the ready: “If you loved the music you were making, would you have felt like it was worth it?” With tears streaming down her face she says, “yes.” He commands her to go get the hair brush.The episode ends with Jocelyn, on all fours, being beaten by Tedros as his followers watch. The shots of her face as he brutally hits her with the hairbrush are interspersed with images of him bathing her. During what appears to be a scene set the next morning, she looks up at him and says, “Thank you for taking care of me.” Then the credits roll.What we are witnessing is obviously the start of an abusive relationship, and yet this show can’t resist titillation. In this finale sequence, Jocelyn is clothed in a see-through lace dress where her thong is visible. The bits in the bathtub are peppered with the nudity that is de rigueur by now. “The Idol” is itself a little bit like Tedros. It is sympathetic to Jocelyn up until a point.Mostly, however, it just wants to use whatever pathos it occasionally generates in service of what it considers entertainment. Jocelyn’s lingering need for her mom, despite the long history of abuse, is worth exploring. It’s not explored here. Instead, Tedros takes over and uses it for his benefit.Liner notes:It’s so distracting to have The Weeknd singing over various scenes. I get that Tesfaye wants to make music for the show, but it is odd to hear his voice in that context when he’s also playing Tedros.Is there some kind of award we can give Rachel Sennott for Leia’s disgusted face?We see a glimpse of Jennie as Dyanne performing in the music video that was supposed to be Jocelyn’s. Is “World Class Sinner” her song now?I feel like there is a real misread of present day pop music dynamics going on here. The genre is more confessional than ever, and the reigning queens of the industry, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, have both used personal experiences in their music to great effect. It’s hard to imagine that record execs would be opposed to letting Jocelyn mine her sadness for her songs, or that Jocelyn would assume that fans wouldn’t find anything relatable about her life.If you want a show that (hilariously) addresses how the pop industry actually sees a star’s mental health crisis as a marketing tool, may I recommend “The Other Two” on Max? More

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      The Outsize Genius of ‘I’m a Virgo’

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      The giant teenager in Boots Riley’s new Amazon Prime series is among television’s boldest moves in a while.Brobdingnag is somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. On the map included in Volume II of his 1726 satire “Gulliver’s Travels,” Jonathan Swift depicts it as an enormous peninsula somewhere north of California. Brobdingnag is the land of the giants: When Gulliver is shipwrecked there, he finds a race of people nearly 60 feet tall, wise and moral, repulsed by his descriptions of a venal and warlike British society. The West Coast no longer teems with such gentle giants, but according to the writer, director and musician Boots Riley, there remains one well south of Brobdingnag, near the spot Swift designates P. Monterey — there’s a giant living in Oakland, Calif.Riley’s new Amazon Prime series, “I’m a Virgo,” is a Swiftian fable by way of Charles Dickens, Ralph Ellison, Alan Moore and Spike Lee. It is, centrally, the tale of Cootie, a once-in-a-generation giant who becomes both a folk hero and a public enemy. As someone tells him in an early episode, “People are always afraid, and you’re a 13-foot-tall Black man.” Cootie’s adoptive parents keep him as sheltered as they can; he grows up watching the action on his block via a periscope. He’s a learned giant — his father requires him to read 10 hours a day — but he’s also electrified by screens, parroting lines from his favorite reality-TV shows. (His mantra — “from that day forward, I knew nothing would stop me from achieving greatness” — is a quote from a “Bachelorette”-style program.) His parents, trying to persuade him to stay in the safety of the two-story apartment they’ve built, show him a scrapbook of giants throughout history, many Black, enslaved or lynched for their gigantism; he will, they clearly fear, be a too-visible man, a projection screen for the fears and desires of others. (This is not a fate reserved for giants alone.) But when Cootie finally leaves the house as a teenager, he falls in love with this world, in all its sublimity and stupidity. Hearing bass for the first time, thumping from a new friend’s trunk, he becomes an angry poet: “It moves through your body like waves,” he tells his parents. “And it sings to your bones.”Riley’s Oakland, like Swift’s own West Coast, is rendered surreal by allegory. It has a housing crisis, police violence and rolling blackouts, but it also has a community of people who shrink to Lilliputian pocket size (they wear receipts for clothes) and a fast-food worker named Flora who can work at a Flash-like hyperspeed. There’s also a rogue white comics artist called the Hero who exacts vigilante justice on his largely Black neighbors — but even the idea of the fascistic law-and-order superhero seems pedestrian here. This show is not subtle about its vision or its allegories. “As a young Black man,” Cootie says, repeating his parents’ warnings, “if you walk down the street, and the police see that you don’t have a job, they send you directly to jail.” His new friends all laugh at his credulousness until one replies, “Metaphorically, that’s how it goes.”One of Cootie’s first rebellions is his insistence on trying a Bing Bang Burger, whose comically unappealing commercials he sees constantly on TV. We’re shown slack-jawed observers making videos before we see Cootie himself, standing in line, hunched over, his back pressed against the fluorescent lights of the burger joint. The actor Jharrel Jerome shows us Cootie’s trepidation by always playing him small, tilting his head against his shoulder, collapsing his frame inward, his lips in an expectant pucker. But when he sees Flora, assembling burgers with blurry speed, there’s a moment of connection. Cootie expands as she hands him his order and calls him “big man.” He bumps into the exit sign on the way out.It is fastidiously, hilariously committed to the bit, constantly doubling down on the logistics of Cootie’s bigness.“I’m a Virgo” comes on the heels of a few ingenious experiments in TV surrealism, from “Atlanta” to “Undone” to the recent farce “Mrs. Davis.” Perhaps Amazon and Riley were emboldened by these examples or energized by the idea of transcending them, because this series has the courage of its confabulations. Its fantastical concept works in metaphor just the same way it works in fact, as it reminds us with proud bluntness. Drunk in the club, Cootie waxes poetic to his friend Felix: “Friends,” he says, “can help you feel the inside of yourself and the rest of the world at the same time.” Felix takes a minute to soak that in before he nods his head and responds, more or less, “Hey, bruh, that’s real.”Premium cable networks and streamers have long built their brands around boundary-pushing and risk, even as their prestige series often settle into safe, predictable formulas. Then there are properties like the ever-expanding Marvel Universe, which might once have used superheroes to dramatize truths about our own world but has now disappeared into its own multiverses, swallowed up by digital battles and green-screen vistas. “I’m a Virgo” is a visual and ideological counterpoint to all this. It uses the conceit of a 13-foot-tall Black man to reach for insights about race, class and injustice, and it is fastidiously, hilariously committed to the bit, constantly doubling down on the logistics of Cootie’s bigness. Plenty of series mess around with television’s narrative structures or genre conventions, but this show is willing to break the most basic visual conventions of how you put humans together onscreen.Its fantastical concept works in metaphor just the same way it works in fact.And so Cootie has to be as real as television can make him. Most of his scenes are filmed using elaborate forced-perspective shots and scale models, not green screens or CGI. You can feel the difference. Cootie tends to look as if the walls are closing in, because they are. The show’s ramshackle, claustrophobic genius can be thrilling. I remember being stunned watching Christopher Nolan depict the depths of a wormhole using only practical effects; my awe was not dissimilar watching Boots Riley figure out how to shoot a slapstick, ultimately pretty sexy love scene between a normal-size woman and a 13-foot-tall man without leaning on digital effects for every frame. We see Flora and Cootie largely in close-ups, Flora centered neatly in her frame while Cootie fills his to the edges. There are occasional two-shots that use dolls as stand-ins, but mostly the scene uses sound to keep the actors in contact. The scene occupies nearly half its episode, as they work to figure out how their act of love can even be consummated, and Riley figures how to show it to us, and we learn how to see it — but it’s sweet, not leering. Usually, in Riley’s frame, the giant man is the real thing, and the world around him is either distorted or built anew. With Flora, whose own strangeness the show also honors and protects, the world reimagines itself in relation to the giant.The visual gags exist alongside other spectacular fantasies. One of Cootie’s friends organizes a general strike to protest the inequities of the health care system. There’s a guerrilla attack on a power plant. A vigilante cop is converted to communism. (What’s a wilder pitch: that the power of argument persuades a law-and-order ideologue to abandon carceral capitalism or that one kid in Oakland turns out to be really, really tall?) Riley, himself an avowed communist, has always been an unabashedly political artist, but what’s radical here isn’t the politics alone; it’s what the politics free the show to do. “I’m a Virgo” makes the idea of tearing up systems of power feel less destructive than boundless, and it does this by tethering its political vision to a revolution in the way we see human bodies onscreen. Its narrative feels almost spontaneous, teeming with strange and unexpected life. Riley has made his radicalism feel verdant, generative, self-sustaining. In the land of the only living giant, that’s real.Opening illustration: Source photographs from Prime VideoPhillip Maciak is The New Republic’s TV critic and the author of the book “Avidly Reads Screen Time.” He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Below the Belt’ and a Juneteenth celebration

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      A new documentary from Hillary Clinton about living with endometriosis is on PBS, and a commemoration of Black survival and culture streams live on CNN and OWN.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, June 19-25. Details and times are subject to change.MondayBLACK POP: CELEBRATING THE POWER OF BLACK CULTURE 8 p.m. on E! The N.B.A. star Stephen Curry is an executive producer and the actress La La Anthony the narrator of this four-part docu-series exploring the influence of Black celebrities and entertainers on pop culture. With a spotlight on Black icons including Muhammad Ali, Serena Williams and Spike Lee, the series demonstrates how figures like these have shaped music, film and sports — and American culture at large.JUNETEENTH: A GLOBAL CELEBRATION FOR FREEDOM 8 p.m. on CNN and OWN. The second iteration of this commemorative celebration of Black culture and survival aims to educate and uplift viewers. The presentation includes preshow coverage of Black trailblazers and creators (beginning at 7 p.m.), and performances from artists like Miguel, Kirk Franklin, SWV, Davido, Coi Leray and Jodeci. The three-hour special will be streamed live from the Greek Theater in Los Angeles.TuesdayChristopher Lloyd, left, and Michael J. Fox in “Back to the Future.”PhotofestBACK TO THE FUTURE (1985) 6 p.m. on AMC. Set in 1985, this Oscar-nominated film turned cult classic follows the teenage Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) after he is accidentally sent back in time, to the year 1955, and encounters his parents as high schoolers who haven’t fallen in love yet. After inadvertently causing his mother to fall for him instead, Marty must find a way to secure his future existence by bringing his parents together — while also figuring out how to get back to the year 1985. “In less resourceful hands, the idea might quickly have worn thin,” Janet Maslin wrote in her review of the film for The New York Times. But the film’s director, Robert Zemeckis (“Forrest Gump,” “The Polar Express”), she writes, “is able both to keep the story moving and to keep it from going too far,” concluding that “one of the most appealing things about ‘Back to the Future’ is its way of putting nostalgia gently in perspective.”WednesdayMike Ricker, left, and Eric Tumbarello in “LA Fire and Rescue.”Chris Haston/NBCLA FIRE & RESCUE 8 p.m. on NBC. This new docu-series from the producers of the fire and rescue squad drama “Chicago Fire” tells the real-life stories of members of the Los Angeles County Fire Department. Through footage of rescues and interviews with firefighters, the series documents the lived experiences of those working on the front lines of California’s (and the nation’s) most populous county.CHINA’S CORPORATE SPY WAR 10 p.m. on CNBC. Featuring interviews with government officials and lawmakers, including the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, and the U.S. Senators Mark Warner and Marco Rubio, as well as a number of intelligence experts, this hourlong documentary explores the world of economic espionage, focusing on China’s campaign to steal trade secrets from some of the biggest businesses in the United States. Reported by Eamon Javers, a veteran Washington correspondent and author of a book on corporate spying, the documentary argues that the campaign is more malicious than a desire for information in order to compete with American companies — maintaining that it’s rooted in China’s wish to destroy key businesses in its pursuit of global economic domination.BELOW THE BELT: THE LAST HEALTH TABOO 10 p.m. on PBS. Four women ranging in age and background share their stories in this feature-length documentary about the struggles of patients with endometriosis, a chronic condition that the World Health Organization has said affects 10 percent of women and girls. Hillary Clinton is one of the executive producers of the film, which explores how patients often fight to have their symptoms believed, diagnosed and treated in a broken healthcare system.ThursdayAnthony Anderson, left, and his mother, Doris Hancox, in “Trippin’ With Anthony Anderson and Mama Doris.”Simone Padovani/E! EntertainmentTRIPPIN’ WITH ANTHONY ANDERSON AND MAMA DORIS 10 p.m. on E! In this eight-episode mini-series, the Emmy Award-nominated actor Anthony Anderson (“Black-ish,” “Law & Order”) takes his mother, Doris Hancox, on a six-week vacation through England, France and Italy. The mother-son duo navigate new cultures, and their clashing personalities, in a series of adventures — like walking in African Fashion Week and hunting for truffle — as their relationship deepens.FridayTauba Auerbach in “Art in the Twenty-First Century: Bodies of Knowledge.” Art21ART IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: BODIES OF KNOWLEDGE 10 p.m. on PBS. This Peabody Award-winning series about contemporary visual art follows a group of 12 artists who share their thoughts and creative processes while painting, designing and sculpting pieces of artwork inspired by the current moment. The second episode of Season 11 — which premiered in April — focuses on the artists Anicka Yi, Tauba Auerbach, Hank Willis Thomas, and the Guerrilla Girls as they explore the concepts of truth and historical record through art.SaturdayMarlon Brando in “On the Waterfront.”Turner NetworksON THE WATERFRONT (1954) 8 p.m. on TCM. Inspired by a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning articles by Malcolm Johnson on terrorism and racketeering on New York’s waterfront, written for The New York Sun in 1948, this Academy Award-winning crime drama focuses on union violence and corruption among a group of longshoremen in Hoboken, N.J. The film stars Marlon Brando (who won Best Actor for his role) as Terry Malloy, a boxer turned dock worker who becomes embroiled in the murder of his colleague Joey (Ben Wagner). With the rest of the longshoreman afraid to speak out after rumors spread that Joey was killed because he planned to testify against their corrupt boss and the union, the film follows Brando’s Malloy as he wrestles with how to move forward. A review in The Times described the drama as “an uncommonly powerful, exciting and imaginative use of the screen by gifted professionals.”Sunday2023 BET AWARDS 8 p.m. on BET. Streaming live from Los Angeles, the BET Awards — an annual ceremony that celebrates the work of Black artists and athletes — will commemorate hip-hop’s 50th anniversary with a lineup of hip-hop performances spanning decades and styles. Featured artists include Fat Joe, Soulja Boy, DJ Unk, E-40, and Lil Uzi Vert, among many others. More

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      Samantha Irby Says It’s OK to Hate Your Body

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      As far as descriptions of writers go, “humorist” has an old-fashioned, almost quaint ring to it, the literary equivalent of haberdasher or lamplighter. But across four book-length collections — the newest is the best seller “Quietly Hostile” — Samantha Irby has always brought scabrously honest, never pat and, it must be said, operatically scatological vivacity […] More