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      Five Stand-Up Specials for Memorial Day Weekend

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      Wanda Sykes, Sarah Silverman, Lewis Black, Zarna Garg and Greg Warren each deliver very funny hours worth your time.Zarna Garg, ‘One in a Billion’(Amazon Prime)Most comedy about the American immigrant family is related from the point of view of the assimilated son or daughter poking fun at the clueless, thick-accented parents. The beauty of our current moment is the many new perspectives on old jokes. In the fertile scene of South Asian comedians, Zarna Garg represents something fresh: the revenge of the Indian mom. She’s heard the jokes about the closed-minded Indian parents forcing their children to go to medical school. Now she fires back forcefully, with enough panache to subvert stereotypes even as she’s fully embracing them. Her ethnic and religious humor (she makes a convincing case for Hindu being the most chill religion) is unapologetically old-fashioned: quick setups, rapid-fire punchlines, her name in giant letters on the set behind her. There’s a genuine warmth behind the slickness. You believe her extreme pride in her daughter going to Stanford just as much as her operatic horror at the fact that she’s studying ceramics. Garg has the kind of presence that powers network sitcoms. Of the recent spate of specials produced by Amazon Prime, tentatively tiptoeing into competition with Netflix, hers is the best.Sarah Silverman, ‘Someone You Love’(Max)Have you ever wondered if porn ruined the Catholic schoolgirl uniform? Or about the relationship between Judaism and diarrhea? Or the many sexual sounds that go into the term “moral compass”? It will not surprise anyone that Sarah Silverman has. These are only some of the scatological and sexual premises she summons up in her new hour (debuting Saturday). Silverman is 52 but looks and sounds just like that virtuosic comic who rocketed to fame in the 1990s. She has evolved, of course, and the virtue of doing so is one of the themes of her characteristically funny special, but it plays a minor role next to bits about masturbation and Hitler. While she’s known for juvenile gags and political humor, what’s also essential to her comedy, and on full display here, is how distinctively loopy she can be. As influential as she has been, no other comic quite captures this aspect. She has one randomly charming bit about how when she comes home, she says hello in a booming voice over and over. “Sparkle peanut,” she tells herself before going onstage, right before an introduction by Mel Brooks, a spiritual forefather.She’s shambling and casual. Sometimes too much so. Did she need to keep in the part where she singled out a guy for leaving his seat, disrupting the flow of a joke? But her special is bracketed by two fun sketches: a final song about bad breath performed with incongruous and committed elegance, and an opening scene with her (fictional) children backstage. She thanks the woman standing next to them, says she has been amazing and adds: “Everyone said, ‘Don’t get a hot nanny.’” Then she pauses for an uncomfortably long silence.Wanda Sykes, ‘I’m an Entertainer’(Netflix)My favorite punchline in the latest special by Wanda Sykes is the title: “I’m an Entertainer.” It sounds banal or direct, but in the context of the joke, which involves her awakening sexuality (she came out as a lesbian after sleeping with men for years), it hits you with a jolt that is surprising and a little unsettling. That’s Sykes at her best. As it happens, Sykes is an old-school entertainer. She can act, improvise, do sketches, host awards shows and whatever else without losing her signature snap. In her stand-up specials, she tends to stick to a recipe consisting of a chunk of sharply topical liberal jokes (hit or miss), some personal bits about amusing tension with her cigarette-wielding French wife and white kids (solidly funny) and a few tense wild cards. Then for the crowd-pleaser, she brings on Esther, the roll of stomach fat she named after the “Good Times” star Esther Rolle. Mouthy, no-nonsense, up for some fun, Esther always gets laughs. But we learn in this new hour that Sykes is considering removing her breasts on the advice of her doctor, who suggested building new ones from tissue from her gut. (Sykes doesn’t explain why.) In other words, Esther is moving neighborhoods and will be close enough to her neck that Sykes worries about getting strangled.Greg Warren, ‘The Salesman’(YouTube)With the kind of puffed-chest intensity you tend to see in high school football coaches and motivational speakers, Greg Warren brags that he was “a big deal in the peanut butter game.” He worked in sales for Jif and shot this hour in Lexington, Ky., because that’s where the company made its products. Maybe he really was a big deal moving jars. Who knows? But after this special, he owns this nutty spread, comedically. Directed by Nate Bargatze, a clean comic of a far mellower temperament, Warren trash-talks rival brands (look out, Peter Pan), does on-brand crowd work (“What kind of peanut butter do you eat?”) and gets political in discussing how Smucker’s bought his old employer. It now owns peanut butter and jelly, he tells us, before adding with a mix of gravity and anxiety, “If they ever get ahold of bread.” By the end, Warren has made another sale: He has done for peanut butter what Jerry Seinfeld did for Pop-Tarts and Jim Gaffigan did for Hot Pockets.Lewis Black, ‘Tragically, I Need You’(YouTube)If a stand-up can tap into or channel the fury of an audience, he can light up a room. But maintaining that anger is tricky. It can curdle into shtick or just wear out its welcome. Lewis Black’s great gift is that behind that dyspeptic front, you could detect a thoughtful, introspective side, a little damaged perhaps. He shows us more of that vulnerable side here, in part because the isolation of the pandemic put him in a reflective mood. The title refers to the audience. Along with swinging sharp political elbows, in defense of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, say, Black beats himself up over past relationships and sings the praises of companionship. He talks about his failed career as a playwright, bringing up theater because “I like to feel the interest of the audience leave the room.” More

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      In ‘Succession,’ the Very Rich Are Very, Very Different

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      The HBO drama, which ends on Sunday, updates past rich-people soaps like “Dallas.” But unlike those series, it argues that the problems of the hyper-wealthy inevitably become ours too.On Nov. 21, 1980, more than 83 million people — over three-quarters of the entire American TV viewership — watched “Who Done It?,” the episode of “Dallas” that revealed who shot the love-to-hate-him oil magnate J.R. Ewing. The mystery, which CBS milked for eight solid months, was a consuming obsession, a Texas-sized example of the power of 20th-century TV to focus the world on one thing.On Sunday, HBO’s “Succession” will answer the question (or not) of who inherits the media empire of the late tyrant Logan Roy in front of a viewership of — well, a lot less than 83 million. (The show’s final season premiere had 2.3 million same-day viewers; delayed viewing on streaming brings the total average audience to over 8 million.)Airing its finale to a much more dispersed audience is a fitting end to the saga of a family that got rich off the modern media market, whose final episodes are set against the backdrop of a country that is coming apart.But numbers aside, “Succession” is in many ways the premium-cable, late-capitalist heir to “Dallas,” a prime-time saga that uses delicious dialogue and sibling rivalries to explore the particular nature of wealth in its time. It’s “Dallas” after 40-plus years of wealth concentration and media fragmentation.The “Who Shot J.R.?” sensation was, in retrospect, the high-water mark of mass media’s reach. In 1980, three networks still controlled the entire TV audience, which they would soon have to share with cable. It was also a cultural turning point; prime time was becoming fascinated with the rich just as the Reagan Revolution was beginning.“Succession” is very different from “Dallas” in the details. There are no twangy accents, assassination attempts, cliffhangers or season-long dreams. Its plot turns are simply, devastatingly inevitable: The show sets up conditions, gives its characters motivations and lets them act in their interests. (“Yellowstone” is a closer heir to “Dallas” in both cowboy hats and murder plots.)And if the “Succession” audience is smaller, the money is, pointedly, bigger. Rewatched in 2023, the idea of luxury in “Dallas” looks quaint, almost dowdy. The aesthetic is Texan country club; the Ewing homestead, the size of a decent suburban McMansion, is a toolshed next to the Manhattan aeries, Hamptons manors and Italian villas that the Roys flitter among.“Dallas” was once synonymous with rich-family shenanigans, but its version of wealth was much more modest than the one in “Succession.”CBS, via Everett CollectionSome of this is a matter of modern premium-cable budgets vs. the grind of old-school network-TV production, of course. But it also reflects the changed, distorting nature of modern riches. In 1980, American wealth inequality was still near its postwar lows. Since then, the wealth of the top .01 percent has grown at a rate roughly five times as much as that of the population overall. Today, the very rich are very, very, very richer.The holdings of Waystar Royco — Hollywood studios, cruise lines, newspapers, amusement parks, a king-making right-wing news channel — make Ewing Oil look like a franchise gas station. We know only vaguely how Logan Roy built his empire, but it was enabled partly by the media-consolidation and antitrust deregulation, beginning in the “Dallas”/Reagan era, that allowed his real-life analogues like Rupert Murdoch to make their own piles.Meanwhile, the smaller TV audiences of the cable and streaming age have allowed “Succession” to thrive as a more specific and more niche entertainment. A series in the three-network era had to appeal to tens of millions of people just to stay on the air — “Dallas” needed to serve a crowd-pleasing spread of barbecue. “Succession” can afford to be a rarefied, decadent pleasure, like an ortolan, the deep-fried songbird, eaten whole, that was featured in a memorable Season 1 meal.“Dallas,” like its followers from “Dynasty” through “Empire,” was in the populist soap-opera tradition of letting the audience delight in the woes of rich people. Its characters were like us — jealous, envious, heartbroken — just with more money and less happiness.“Succession” has its crowd-pleasing and universal elements too. Logan was an irresistible brute, able to pack a Shakespeare soliloquy’s worth of emotion into a two-word curse. The Roy children — Kendall, Roman, Shiv and their half brother, Connor — have developed a survivors’ bond and survivalist cutthroat instincts; one arm joins the group hug, the other holds a dagger. At root, the series’s family themes are talk-show simple: Hurt people hurt people.But its voice, as set by the creator, Jesse Armstrong, is arch and referential; its details demand a range of knowledge or at least the willingness to Google. As Logan is laid to rest in a mausoleum that he bought for $5 million from a dot-com pet-supply mogul — one last cold and expensive residence — Shiv jokes, “Cat food Ozymandias.”Kieran Culkin in “Succession,” which laid Logan to rest in its penultimate episode.Macall B. Polay/HBOLike “Mad Men” before it, “Succession” is a drama that also happens to be the funniest thing on TV any given week. (Its earliest episodes tilted the other way, with the rhythms of a comedy disguised as a premium-TV drama.)But its showmanship is informed by a caustic clarity about the toxic business culture Logan Roy built. “He fed a certain kind of meagerness in men,” Logan’s brother, Ewan, says in a tender and damning eulogy at his funeral. Waystar’s offerings — mass entertainment and right-wing propaganda — have had America on a sugar and poison binge.Now, it’s time for the purge. I once wrote that “Succession” viewers “can enjoy it knowing that we have no stake, except for the tiny fact that people like the Roys run the world.” This final season has emphasized that that is a very big “except.”“Succession” has long hinted at the Roys’ willingness to play footsie with dark political forces for ratings and influence. Waystar’s right-wing news network, ATN, leaves a popular commentator on the air despite his Nazi sympathies. The family backs a far-right presidential candidate, Jeryd Mencken, who voices openness to the ideas of Hitler and Franco. (Mencken fittingly shares a surname with the American writer who said, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”)Late in the final season, the close presidential election is disrupted by a fire, apparently started by Mencken supporters, that incinerates thousands of ballots for his opponent in liberal Milwaukee. In exchange for Mencken’s regulatory cooperation in a struggle over control of the company, ATN declares the handsome fascist the winner, legitimizing his claim to power amid a legal challenge. The result leads to riots. But it’s great for ratings.As for American democracy — well, good luck! Part of the fantasy of past rich-family sagas was that none of the drama affected you, even by implication. When Ewings did each other dirty in the oil business, you were never asked to imagine yourself, somewhere offscreen, seeing your gas prices go up.“Succession,” on the other hand, argues that the problems of today’s hyper-rich inevitably become ours because they have so much influence and so little sense of responsibility. (Its main exception is the Pierce family, the owners of a rival media empire, whose blue-blood noblesse oblige comes across as patronizing and ineffectual.) We are swamped in the wake of their yachts and chopped up by the propeller blades, even if the billionaires, sitting on the top deck, scarcely feel a bump.And while the damaged characters are fascinating, even pitiable, there’s no one among the Roys or their enablers worth rooting for. As with “Game of Thrones,” if you think the important thing is who finally ends up in the big chair, you’re missing the point.The Roy children, including, from left, Roman (Culkin), Connor (Alan Ruck), Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Kendall (Jeremy Strong) share a survivors’ bond and survivalist instincts.Macall B. Polay/HBOThere are no heroes on the horizon. Mencken’s election opponent is a bloodless centrist who mewls about “process” while the country burns. (The election episode and its aftermath felt like a vicious inversion of a “West Wing” good-government fantasy.) In the streets, people are taking action, but all they can do is rage.Throughout the series, the constant has been that however the Roys might suffer, emotionally or on the corporate org chart, they never faced true material consequences. They might be more calculated than F. Scott Fitzgerald’s careless Tom and Daisy Buchanan, but they still smashed up things and creatures and retreated into their money.Up to now, at least. But the penultimate episode suggests that things could take a turn.As Logan is laid to rest, in a Manhattan funeral befitting a president, the streets are choked with crowds protesting Mencken’s smoke-scented victory. The menace circles closer: sirens in the distance, protesters banging on a limo, explosions rattling guests arriving at the St. Regis for a post-funeral reception. The Roys’ force field holds, but it quivers.In the final scene, Roman, having botched his shot at chief executive by having a breakdown at Logan’s funeral and misjudging Mencken’s loyalty, wanders outside, where a throng of demonstrators are coming up the street. He hops the barricade to pick a fight, gets hit in the face and is nearly trampled.The scene is disorienting after four seasons inside the protective bubble of wealth. It suggests that the Roys, fumbling to seize their father’s legacy, may have unleashed something beyond their control, capable of hurting even them.I still doubt that “Succession,” being “Succession,” will end with any true, proportional comeuppance. But it might just yet leave a mark. More

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      Predawn Picket Lines Help Writers Disrupt Studio Productions

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      Workers from other unions have shown solidarity with the strikers, catching entertainment companies off guard.At 5 a.m. on a recent weekday, a lone figure paced back and forth outside the main entrance to the Fox Studios lot in Los Angeles. Peter Chiarelli, a screenwriter, was walking the picket line.He held a sign reading “Thank You 399,” a message to the local branch of the Teamsters union, whose members he hoped would turn their trucks around instead of crossing his personal picket line to enter the lot, where Hulu was filming the series “Interior Chinatown.”“It’s passive-aggressive,” Mr. Chiarelli, who wrote the films “Crazy Rich Asians” and “The Proposal,” said of his sentiment — sincere if the Teamsters turned back and sarcastic if they entered.Since the Hollywood writers’ strike began on May 2, Mr. Chiarelli and others like him have been waking before dawn to try to disrupt productions whose scripts had already been finished.“We need to shut down the pipeline,” he said of the shows in production.The practice, which was not used to any real effect when the writers last went on strike in 2007, initially caught some studio executives off guard. And many of them — as well as plenty of people in the Writers Guild of America, the union that represents the writers — have been surprised that it has had some success.Mr. Chiarelli, taking a picture of a truck entering Fox Studios, hopes his presence will make Teamster drivers turn around.J. Emilio Flores for The New York TimesShowtime paused production on the sixth season of “The Chi” after writers gathered for two straight days outside the gates of the Chicago studio where it was filming. Apple TV’s “Loot” shut down after writers picketed a Los Angeles mansion where filming was taking place. The show’s star, Maya Rudolph, retreated to her trailer and was unwilling to return to set.Over 20 writers trekked from Los Angeles to Santa Clarita, Calif., to picket the FX drama “The Old Man,” starring Jeff Bridges. The overnight action kept Teamsters trucks inside the Blue Cloud Movie Ranch, Mr. Chiarelli said, and crews had difficulty working. The show soon suspended production.A Lionsgate comedy starring Keanu Reeves and Seth Rogen, with Aziz Ansari making his debut as a movie director, shut down last week after just two and a half days of filming in locations around Los Angeles after loud, shouting writers picketed all three of its sets.“While we won’t discuss the specifics of our strategy, we’re applying pressure on the companies by disrupting production wherever it takes place,” a Writers Guild of America spokesman said in a statement.Eric Haywood, a veteran writer who is on the union’s negotiating committee, put it more plainly. “If your movie or TV show is still shooting and we haven’t shut it down yet, sit tight,” he wrote on social media last weekend. “We’ll get around to you.”A representative for the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of the studios, declined to comment.Both sides have privately said a much greater sense of solidarity among unions than during the last writers’ strike has made it harder for workers from other unions to cross picket lines. Productions are also more geographically widespread than they were 15 years ago. In addition to fortified Los Angeles soundstages, writers have picketed locations in the New Jersey suburbs, New York’s Westchester County and Chicago. And social media has provided a way to alert writers to quickly get to specific picket lines.Each day, the writers send out calls for “rapid response teams” when they learn about a production’s call time and location.“Breaking: they’re shooting on Sunday … we’re picketing on Sunday,” a writer posted on Twitter, asking people to get together immediately in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn to disrupt a production. “Please amplify.”“I think everybody is getting behind us because they see that if we all stick together, we can make some real achievements,” said Mike Royce (“One Day at a Time”), who has joined Mr. Chiarelli in his some of his predawn pickets.“The Old Man,” starring Jeff Bridges, is one of several productions that stopped filming because of picketing by writers.Prashant Gupta/FXThe writers have disrupted other events as well. Netflix canceled a major in-person presentation for advertisers in New York amid concerns about demonstrations. The streaming company also canceled an appearance by Ted Sarandos, one of its co-chief executives, who was to be honored at the prestigious PEN America Literary Gala. A Boston University commencement address by David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, was interrupted by boos and chants of “Pay your writers!” from demonstrators and students.While the makeshift picket lines have disrupted individual productions, it’s not clear that they’ve had much effect on the strike itself. Negotiations haven’t resumed since they broke down on May 1, and the industry is bracing for the possibility that the strike could last for months.The writers contend that their wages have stagnated even though the major Hollywood studios have invested billions of dollars in recent years to build out their streaming services. The guild has described the dispute in stark terms, saying the “survival of writing as a profession is at stake.”But production shutdowns are affecting not only the studios. Crews and other workers — like drivers, set designers, caterers — lose paychecks. And if the shutdowns accumulate and more people are unable to work, some wonder whether the writers will begin to erode the current good will from other workers.Lindsay Dougherty is the lead organizer of Local 399, the Teamsters’ Los Angeles division, which represents more than 6,000 movie workers, from the truck drivers the writers are trying to turn away to casting directors, location managers and animal trainers. A second-generation Teamster, Ms. Dougherty is one of the union’s few female leaders. Her copious tattoos, including one of the former Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa, and her frequently profane speech have made her a bit of a celebrity to the writers during the strike.And she said the solidarity with the writers remained strong.“I think collectively, we’re all on the same page in that streaming has dramatically changed the industry,” Ms. Dougherty said in an interview. “And these tech companies that we’re bargaining with, during the last writers’ strike — Amazon, Apple, Netflix — they weren’t even part of the conversation.”Asked if the Teamsters were tipping off the writers about the timing and location of productions, she demurred.“The Writers Guild is getting tips from all sorts of different places — whether it’s members that are working on the crew, or from film permits, they obviously have social media groups and emails set up to send tips and information,” she said.In the meantime, Mr. Chiarelli keeps pacing outside Fox Studios each day, hoping he can turn some trucks around. Some days he gets results. On a recent morning he was joined by several other writers, and five trucks turned away, he said. During an overnight picket at Fox, a trailer carrying fake police cars destined for the shoot turned tail at 2 a.m.Other days, the picket line is much more sparse, especially if a tip takes a group to a different location.He and Mr. Royce talked fondly about their second day out in the darkness. It was pouring rain when two large trucks pulled into the turn lane, blinkers on, ready to enter the lot. Then they saw the writers. The trucks pulled to the side of the road, waited about 10 minutes, then turned around.They “blew past the entrance, honked their horns and waved at us,” Mr. Royce said. “It was thrilling.”Added Mr. Chiarelli, “I’ve been chasing that high ever since.” More

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      How Geena Davis Continues to Tackle Gender Bias in Hollywood

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      “Transforming Spaces” is a series about women driving change in sometimes unexpected places.Geena Davis and her family were returning from dinner in their small Massachusetts town when her great-uncle Jack, 99, began drifting into the oncoming lane of traffic. Ms. Davis was about 8, flanked by her parents in the back seat. Politeness suffused the car, the family, maybe the era, and nobody remarked on what was happening, even when another car appeared in the distance, speeding toward them.Finally, moments before impact, Ms. Davis’s grandmother issued a gentle suggestion from the passenger seat: “A little to the right, Jack.” They missed by inches.Ms. Davis, 67, relayed this story in her 2022 memoir, “Dying of Politeness,” an encapsulation of the genially stultifying values that she had absorbed as a child — and that a great many other girls absorb, too: Defer. Go along to get along. Everything’s fine.Of course the two-time Academy Award-winning actress ditched that pliability long ago. From “Thelma & Louise” and “A League of Their Own” to this year’s coming-of-age drama, “Fairyland,” back-seat docility just wasn’t an option. Indeed, self-possession was her thing. (Or one of her things. Few profiles have failed to mention her Mensa membership, her fluency in Swedish or her Olympic-caliber archery prowess.) But cultivating her own audaciousness was only Phase 1.Next year will mark two decades since the creation of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. When her daughter was a toddler, Ms. Davis couldn’t help noticing that male characters vastly outnumbered female characters in children’s TV and movies.“I knew everything is completely imbalanced in the world,” she said recently. But this was the realm of make-believe; why shouldn’t it be 50/50?It wasn’t just the numbers. How the women were represented, their aspirations, the way young girls were sexualized: Across children’s programming, Ms. Davis saw a bewilderingly warped vision of reality being beamed into impressionable minds. Long before “diversity, equity and inclusion” would enter the lexicon, she began mentioning this gender schism whenever she had an industry meeting.“Everyone said, ‘No, no, no — it used to be like that, but it’s been fixed,’” she said. “I started to wonder, What if I got the data to prove that I’m right about this?”Amid Hollywood’s trumpeted causes, Ms. Davis made it her mission to quietly harvest data. Exactly how bad is that schism? In what other ways does it play out? Beyond gender, who else is being marginalized? In lieu of speechifying and ribbons, and with sponsors ranging from Google to Hulu, Ms. Davis’s team of researchers began producing receipts.Ms. Davis wasn’t the first to highlight disparities in popular entertainment. But by leveraging her reputation and resources — and by blasting technology at the problem — she made a hazy truth concrete and offered offenders a discreet path toward redemption. (While the institute first focused on gender data, its analyses now extend to race/ethnicity, L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+, disability, age 50-plus and body type. Random awful finding: Overweight characters are more than twice as likely to be violent.)Geena Davis accepting the Governors Award for her institute during the Primetime Emmy Awards last year. At her left are the screenwriter Shonda Rhimes and the actor Sarah Paulson.Kevin Mazur/WireImage, via Getty ImagesEven when braced for it, the institute’s findings are staggering: In the 101 top-grossing G-rated films from 1990 to 2005, just 28 percent of speaking characters were female. Even in crowd scenes — even in animated crowd scenes — male characters vastly outnumber female ones. In the 56 top grossing films of 2018, women portrayed in positions of leadership were four times more likely than men to be shown naked. (The bodies of 15 percent of them were filmed in slow motion.) Where a century ago women had been fully central to the budding film industry, they were now a quantifiable, if sexy, afterthought.“When she started to collect the data, it was kind of incredible,” said Hillary Hallett, a professor of American studies at Columbia University and the author of “Go West, Young Women! The Rise of Early Hollywood.” “This wasn’t a vague feeling anymore. You couldn’t claim this was just some feminist rant. It was like, ‘Look at these numbers.’”Ms. Davis is by turns reserved and goofy offscreen — a thoughtful responder, an unbridled guffawer. (At one point she enunciated the word “acting” so theatrically that she feared it would be hard to spell in this article.) On a recent afternoon in Los Angeles, she took a break from illustrating the children’s book she had written, “The Girl Who Was Too Big for the Page.”“I grew up very self-conscious about being the tallest kid — not just the tallest girl — in my class,” she said. “I had this childhood-long wish to take up less space in the world.”In time she began to look beyond her height — six feet — to the insidious messages reinforcing such insecurity.“Hollywood creates our cultural narrative — its biases trickle down to the rest of the world,” she said in “This Changes Everything,” the 2018 documentary she produced about gender inequity in the film industry. The documentary takes its name from the incessant refrain she kept hearing after the success of “Thelma & Louise,” and later “A League of Their Own.” Finally the power and profitability of female-centric movies had been proven — this changes everything! And then, year after year, nothing.Geena Davis, right, with the director Penny Marshall on the set of “A League of Their Own” in 1992.Columbia Pictures, via Everett CollectionIt was here that Ms. Davis planted her stake in the ground — a contention around why certain injustices persist, and how best to combat them. Where movements like #MeToo and Times Up target deliberate acts of monstrosity, hers would be the squishier universe of unconscious bias. Did you unthinkingly cast that doctor as a male? Hire that straight white director because he shares your background? Thought you were diversifying your film, only to reinforce old stereotypes? (Fiery Latina, anyone?)It’s a dogged optimism that powers Ms. Davis’s activism — a faith that Hollywood can reform voluntarily. When she goes to a meeting now, she’s armed with her team’s latest research, and with conviction that improvement will follow.“Our theory of change relies on the content creators to do good,” said Madeline Di Donno, the president and the chief executive of the institute. “As Geena says, we never shame and blame. You have to pick your lane, and ours has always been, ‘We collaborate with you and want you to do better.’”If a car full of polite Davises can awaken to oncoming danger, perhaps filmmakers can come to see the harm they’re perpetuating.“Everyone isn’t out there necessarily trying to screw women or screw Black people,” said Franklin Leonard, a film and television producer and founder of the Black List, a popular platform for screenplays that have not been produced. “But the choices they make definitely have that consequence, regardless of what they believe about their intent.”He added: “It’s not something people are necessarily aware of. And there’s no paper trail — it can only be revealed in aggregate. Which gets to the value of Geena’s work.”“Hollywood creates our cultural narrative — its biases trickle down to the rest of the world,” Ms. Davis said in “This Changes Everything,” the 2018 documentary she produced about gender inequity in the film industry.Magdalena Wosinska for The New York TimesUnique to the institute’s efforts is its partnership with the University of Southern California’s Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory, which uses software and machine learning to analyze scripts and other media. One tool born of that collaboration, Spellcheck for Bias, employs AI to scan scripts for stereotypes and other problematic choices. (Janine Jones-Clark, the executive vice president for inclusion for NBCUniversal’s global talent development and inclusion team, recalled a scene in a television show in which a person of color seemed to be acting in a threatening manner toward another character. Once flagged by the software, the scene was reshot.)Still, progress has been mixed. In 2019 and 2020, the institute reported that gender parity for female lead characters had been achieved in the 100 highest-grossing family films and in the top Nielsen-rated children’s television shows. Nearly 70 percent of industry executives familiar with the institute’s research made changes to at least two projects.But women represented just 18 percent of directors working on the top 250 films of 2022, up only 1 percent from 2021, according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film; the percentage of major Asian and Asian American female characters fell from 10 percent in 2021 to under 7 percent in 2022. A 2021 McKinsey report showed that 92 percent of film executives were white — less diverse than Donald Trump’s cabinet at the time, as Mr. Leonard of the Black List noted.“I think the industry is more resistant to change than anybody realizes,” he added. “So I’m incredibly appreciative of anyone — and especially someone with Geena’s background — doing the non-glamorous stuff of trying to change it, being in the trenches with Excel spreadsheets.”Ms. Davis has not quit her day job. (Coming soon: a role in “Pussy Island,” a thriller from Zoe Kravitz in her directorial debut.) But acting shares a billing with her books, the diversity-focused Bentonville Film Festival she started in Arkansas in 2015 — even the roller coasters she rides for equity. (Yes, Thelma is now Disney’s gender consultant for its theme parks and resorts.)“We’re definitely heading in the right direction,” she said. “Bill Gates called himself an impatient optimist, and that feels pretty good for what I am.” More

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      in Music

      ‘Succession’: A Soundtrack Fit for a Concert Hall

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      Nicholas Britell’s score for the HBO series, which concludes on Sunday, has developed, episode by episode, into a classic theme-and-variations work.There comes a moment near the start of most “Succession” episodes when a faint beat enters the scene, right before some punchline or turn of the screw.Then the show’s theme music kicks in. Over snippets of vintage family videos, a piano fantasia as grainy as the footage unfurls like a sample for swaggering hip-hop alongside courtly, imperious strings.Like any effective theme, it lodges itself in your head immediately. But this music’s composer, Nicholas Britell, isn’t a mere tunesmith, and he doesn’t stop there. Over the four seasons of “Succession,” which ends on Sunday, he has written something unusual in television: a sprawling yet conceptually focused score that has developed, episode by episode, into a classic theme-and-variations work that would be just as fit for the concert hall as for the small screen.This is characteristic of Britell, who doesn’t tend to simply set the emotional tenor of a scene. A screen composer at the forefront of his generation — not a successor to John Williams and his symphonic grandeur but rather a chameleonic, sensitive creator of distinct sound worlds — Britell draws as freely from late Beethoven as he does from DJ Screw, and is as compelling in modes of aching sincerity and high satire alike.Britell is one of the foremost screen composers of his generation, drawing freely from a diverse array of influences including classical music and hip-hop.Clement Pascal for The New York TimesAnd in “Succession,” he evokes a classical music tradition in which a composer doodles at the piano to improvise on a theme, putting it through permutations based on mood and form. This could serve as good parlor entertainment, but also the basis for inventive, kaleidoscopic works; Britell’s soundtrack, in its pairing of piano and orchestra, has an ancestor in Rachmaninoff’s concerto-like “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” He would do well to adapt his score into a similar piece.With his theme and variations, Britell offers a parallel of the show itself: an idée fixe established at the start — a patriarch’s departure from the top of his business empire is more of a when than an if — and a circular (some would say static) plot about the ways in which three of his children maneuver to take over.It is a premise that carries on even after the father’s death early this season; the most recent episode, about his funeral, demonstrates the psychological hold Logan Roy still has over his children and how, united in grief, they nevertheless continue to scheme.The musical seed for all this couldn’t be simpler: not the theme for the main titles, but a lumbering, eight-chord motif that appears within it, and at the start of the “Strings Con Fuoco” cue.From there, variations surface with nods to Classical and Baroque forms: a dancerly minuet or rondo, a concerto grosso of angular strings, a wandering ricercare.Many cues have titles resembling those of a symphony’s movements, tempo indications like “Adagio” and “Andante Con Moto.” Others could blend in with a chamber music program, like Serenade in E flat, or Impromptu No. 1 in C minor, which shares its name with one of Schubert’s most famous piano solos.That can’t be a coincidence. Listening to Mozart’s Fantasia in C minor (K. 475), “Succession” fans might feel transported to the show’s soundtrack.An excerpt from Mozart’s Fantasia in C minor (K. 475)Mitsuko Uchida (Decca)In the first two seasons, Britell followed a fairly confined playbook of the eight-chord motif’s different guises: a beating piano similar to that Mozart fantasia, darkly regal strings and brasses.Generally, each variation was recognizably developed from the same cell. The biggest departures occurred whenever the Roy family left New York. For an episode at Connor’s New Mexico estate, Austerlitz, Britell interjected a guitar variation not heard before or since.Scenes in England took on a stately fanfare. And, at the family’s country house, preparations for a meal were accompanied by a Schubertian violin sextet.Something changed by Season 3. The music, like the story, became more openly emotional; for every cunning rondo, there was a doleful largo. Unsteady ground onscreen translated to surprises in the sound, such as Britell’s first use of a choir at the end of the season finale. Again the score swerved, stylistically, when characters were away from Manhattan. During the climactic episodes, set in Tuscany, he put his theme through an Italian prism for cues like “Serenata — ‘Il Viaggio.’”In the final season, Britell has expanded his palette of variations even further. Logan Roy’s authoritarian monologue on the floor of his news channel ATN is given a coda of chilling dissonance. Suspended chords conjure the in-between state of the children after his death. The irrepressible feelings at the most recent episode’s funeral might as well have a cue title like “Appassionata.”The question is, how will Britell’s theme and variations end? Historically, composers have gone one of two ways: by revisiting the beginning, as in the Aria of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations, or with the potential for further development, as in Beethoven’s “Diabelli” Variations.You could ask the same of the Roy children, who going into the series finale are behaviorally similar to where they started but also, on a deeper level, are not. Will they achieve resolution? Or will their cycles of intrigue continue? Chances are, the answer will be in Britell’s music.In the final season of “Succession,” Britell has expanded his palette of variations even further.Clement Pascal for The New York Times More

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      Rolf Harris, Disgraced British Entertainer, Dies at 93

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      His career as a musician and a painter over six decades ended abruptly when he was convicted of sexually abusing teenage girls.Rolf Harris, the Australian-born entertainer whose decades-long career on British television ended in disgrace after he was convicted of sexually abusing teenage girls, died on May 10 at his home in Berkshire, England. He was 93.His family announced the death in a statement released on Tuesday. The PA news agency reported that a death certificate gave the cause as neck cancer and “frailty of old age.”Mr. Harris’s career on British television spanned 60 years, but it collapsed in 2013 when he was arrested and charged with a total of 12 attacks on four young girls from 1968 to 1986. He was later sentenced to five years and nine months in prison. At the time of the offenses, the girls ranged in age from 8 to 19, although his conviction for the assault on the 8-year-old girl, an autograph hunter, was later overturned.One of Mr. Harris’s victims was a close friend of his own daughter, Bindi. He was convicted of abusing the girl over the course of six years, beginning when she was 13.“Your reputation lies in ruins, you have been stripped of your honors, but you have no one to blame but yourself,” Judge Nigel Sweeney told Mr. Harris at his sentencing in 2014.“You have shown no remorse for your crimes at all,” he added.Mr. Harris died without apologizing to his victims.The son of Welsh immigrants, Agnes Margaret and Cromwell Harris, Mr. Harris was born on March 30, 1930, in a suburb of Perth, Australia. He moved to Britain when he was 22 — with, he later said, “nothing but a load of self-confidence” — to study at the City and Guilds of London Art School. He made his first appearance on the BBC in 1953, drawing cartoons on a children’s television show.That kicked off a storied career that included everything from international hit songs to lighthearted television shows on which he would demonstrate his skills as a quick-fire painter (think Britain’s version of Bob Ross).“Can you tell what it is yet?” became his famous catchphrase as he brought the canvases to life. It also became the title of his autobiography, published in 2001.A 1964 album by Mr. Harris. He had several hit records in Britain and Australia, and his “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport” reached No. 3 in the United States.JP Roth CollectionOne of Britain’s best-known artists, Mr. Harris was even commissioned in 2005 to paint a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II for her 80th birthday — the whereabouts of which remains a great source of mystery. It was previously voted the British public’s second-favorite portrait of the queen, but it received a notably colder reception from critics.“I was as nervous as anything,” Mr. Harris told the British press in 2008, describing the two sittings he had with the monarch. “I was in a panic.”As a musician, he was known for his use of a colorful array of instruments, including the didgeridoo and the so-called wobble board — an instrument he invented. He featured it in his best-known song, “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport,” a novelty number about an Australian stockman’s dying wishes, which he wrote in 1957.His 1963 rerecording of the song, which reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, catapulted him to stardom in the United States. That same year, he recorded a version with the Beatles for a BBC radio show — the names of each band member playfully incorporated into the lyrics. (“Don’t ill-treat me pet dingo, Ringo.”)The song’s original fourth verse courted controversy because of its use of the word “Abo,” a derogatory slang term for Aboriginal Australians. The verse was included on Mr. Harris’s first recording of the song but omitted from later versions, and he later expressed regret about the lyrics.His career ultimately ended in disgrace a decade ago when he was one of several older media personalities arrested as part of Operation Yewtree, a British police investigation arising from the sexual abuse scandal involving the television presenter Jimmy Savile. Among the others convicted as part of the investigation were Britain’s best-known publicist, Max Clifford, and Stuart Hall, a former BBC broadcaster.After Mr. Harris was convicted in 2014, he was stripped of the honors he had been awarded throughout his career, and reruns of his television shows were taken off the air. He was released on parole in 2017 after serving three years in prison, after which he sank into a reclusive life at his family home in Bray, Berkshire, a quaint village west of London on the banks of the River Thames. Bray is said to have more millionaires than any small town in Britain.Mr. Harris’s survivors include his daughter, Bindi Harris, and his wife, Alwen Hughes. The two married in 1958 after meeting in art school, and she and his daughter stuck with him throughout his trial and prison term.After Mr. Harris’s sentencing in 2014, Judge Sweeney depicted him as an offender who had manipulated his fame.“You took advantage of the trust placed in you because of your celebrity status,” he said.Mr. Harris’s lawyer at the time, Sonia Woodley, pleaded with the judge to be lenient because of his age.“He is already on borrowed time,” she said. More

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      HBO Says “The Idol” Is Sleazy. You Be the Judge.

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      At Cannes, the sex-filled show is drawing plenty of controversy. That just means “we’re about to have the biggest show of the summer,” Sam Levinson says.In March, Rolling Stone published an article detailing the trouble-plagued production of “The Idol,” a new HBO drama from the “Euphoria” creator Sam Levinson. According to the magazine, nearly 80 percent of the show, about a pop singer (Lily-Rose Depp) who falls under the spell of a Svengali figure (the Weeknd), had been filmed with the director Amy Seimetz before Levinson stepped in to rewrite and reshoot the entire thing. As a result, said one crew member, it had transformed from a music-industry satire into a “rape fantasy” in which Depp’s character must endure a series of demeaning sex acts.At the Cannes Film Festival, where two episodes premiered this week, Levinson was asked what he made of the report.“When my wife read me the article,” Levinson said, “I looked at her and said, ‘I think we’re about to have the biggest show of the summer.’”When it comes to controversy, Levinson and his collaborators have clearly decided to lean in: Even HBO’s marketing for “The Idol” calls it the “sleaziest love story in all of Hollywood.” At times, the show seems reverse-engineered to generate think-pieces and indignant tweet-storms; if attention is oxygen, Levinson seems to have calculated that “The Idol” will burn brighter as long as people keep talking about it. Reviews from Cannes have been poor, but as long as they mention the outrageous scenarios and envelope-pushing sex scenes, won’t you be tempted to tune in?Is “The Idol” really as sleazy as has been promised/warned? Let me try to summarize the first two episodes, and you be the judge.The show begins with Depp’s pop star, Jocelyn, posing for a photo shoot, naked but for a barely cinched robe and a hospital wristband. The latter is a wink at rumors that Jocelyn experienced a nervous breakdown after her mother’s death, but it’s also meant to be a come-on, explains Nikki (Jane Adams), a cynical record executive: If men think Jocelyn is a little crazy, they might imagine they have the chance to bed her.Almost immediately, Jocelyn’s team is hit with twin crises. The first seems tailor-made to get the internet’s goat: Jocelyn’s robe keeps falling away to reveal her nipples, and a buzzkill intimacy coordinator keeps trying to halt the session, no matter how often Jocelyn and her team explain they’re fine with it. Eventually, Jocelyn’s manager, Chaim (Hank Azaria), locks the intimacy coordinator in a bathroom.As all of that is going on, a photo is leaked online that shows Jocelyn with sexual fluids on her face. But she seems utterly unbothered. Is this because she is so sexually self-possessed that she can’t be shamed? Given that she takes sensual showers while wearing false eyelashes and full makeup, it may owe more to Levinson’s depiction of the character as an always-on male fantasy.That night, freewheeling Jocelyn heads to a nightclub, where she meets Tedros, the establishment’s mysterious owner, played by the Weeknd (the series co-creator, born Abel Tesfaye, who is so flatteringly lit that he often looks more like an A.I. rendering). There is an instant connection between the two for reasons not depicted onscreen, and it isn’t long before they get together in a stairwell, an encounter she later thinks of at home while engaging in a bout of autoerotic asphyxiation.Jocelyn’s assistant (Rachel Sennott) is not a fan of this blossoming union: “He’s so rapey,” she tells Jocelyn. “I kind of like it,” replies the star, who invites Tedros to her mansion to hear her next single. He expertly negs Jocelyn, telling her the song isn’t sung with any sexual authority, but he has a plan for that: After running a tumbler of ice down Jocelyn’s frequently bare sternum, he pulls her robe over her head, chokes her with its belt, uses a switchblade to cut a mouth-hole in the material (the things this poor robe has been through in only one episode!) and orders Jocelyn to sing.In the second episode, Jocelyn proudly presents this orgasmic remix to her horrified team. Told it’s too late to make changes, Jocelyn is dismayed but still manages to add a cold tumbler to her usual afternoon solo sex session. A girl has needs, after all.But when Jocelyn shows up for a video shoot, makeup artists have to cover the cuts and bruises on her inner thighs that remain from that session. This makes her late to set, where she eventually dissolves into a crying mess. This also means that she’s particularly vulnerable to the machinations of Tedros, who kindly leaves a shock-collar orgy to move his entourage into Jocelyn’s mansion and engage in more kinky sex with her. There’s a lot of dirty talk so grossly delivered by the Weeknd that you may need to mute and switch to closed captioning when the show premieres on June 4.Is it all a little too much? Of course, and that’s the point. At the news conference for “The Idol,” Levinson was asked how he calibrated the sex scenes and near-constant nudity without going too far. For a second, he looked confused.“Sometimes, things that might be revolutionary are taken too far,” Levinson replied. More

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      ‘Ted Lasso,’ Season 3, Episode 11 Recap: Home

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      Jamie, Nate and Ted find their paths forward.Season 3, Episode 11: ‘Mom City’Just as last season’s eighth episode, “Man City,” was an exploration of the wounds inflicted by poor fathering, this week’s focuses on the healing power of maternal love. It was in that earlier episode that we first learned that Ted’s dad had killed himself; this time, he and his mom find at least a modicum of long-belated closure. And Ted has what appears to be the long-simmering revelation that … But I get ahead of myself.I noted last week that with so many story lines and just a couple of episodes to go, “Ted Lasso” would need — in a strategy adopted by fourth graders since time immemorial — to write the remaining words smaller and smaller to get them all to fit on the page. What I overlooked, of course, is that streaming television now offers the alternative of simply making the pages bigger.When “Man City” came out last season, it was the longest “Lasso” episode to date, at 45 minutes. “Mom City” puts that number to shame, clocking in at one hour and nine minutes (the show’s latest longest run time). Yet in contrast to several episodes this season, the extended length is spent not hopping among unrelated subplots but developing a relatively uniform theme. In keeping with that mood, this week I will abandon my own typical subplot-by-subplot format as well.We open with a typical Ted morning, in which he ambles down his street exchanging pleasantries with everyone he passes, even the longstanding semi-antagonist who insists on referring to him as “wanker.” And then the morning suddenly turns atypical: On a bench at the end of the street is none other than his mom, Dottie Lasso (Becky Ann Baker).When we return to the two of them after the title sequence, Dottie explains that she’d decided on a trip to England as a “Mother’s Day gift to myself.” She is staying in a hostel filled with backpacking Australians who engage in “so much sex,” and she has already been in town a week. This is obviously no typical maternal visit, and Dottie and Ted will spend the episode circling one another, with mother, like son, deflecting every question about what’s wrong with some variant of “Don’t you worry about me.” (Mae sees right through it in the pub, reciting Philip Larkin’s poem “This Be the Verse” to Ted over the pinball machine.)In the meantime, Dottie will regale the team, the pub and pretty much anyone else within earshot with substantially exaggerated tales of Ted’s youth. (No, that was not him dancing onstage with Bruce Springsteen in the “Dancing in the Dark” video.) She will also demonstrate where Ted got his resolutely chipper demeanor, as the two of them trade lyrics from “The Sunny Side of the Street” on the way out the door to his apartment. Perhaps most importantly, she will at last speak for all of us when she informs Trent Crimm that his hair is “fabulous.”Nate and Jamie, meanwhile, have both fallen into ruts of self-doubt. For Nate, this consists of leaving his wunderkind coaching persona behind in favor of a job waiting tables at A Taste of Athens and refusing an invitation from Colin, Will and Isaac to rejoin Richmond as an assistant coach. “It didn’t really end for me too well there,” he explains to Jade guiltily.Jamie is a still greater mess, declining kudos for winning Premier League player of the month and apologizing for a goal he scored accidentally while trying to pass to a teammate. With the team on a 15-game winning streak and an upcoming match against their nemesis Manchester City standing between them and a shot at the league championship, this wilting flower is not what the team needs, as Roy explains in typically salty fashion.But Jamie merely blubbers in response. He can’t eat, he can’t sleep, he’s even given up on using conditioner when he showers. He’s like the fellow from the Red Bull ad, but with his wings plucked off. Roy, sensing that Jamie needs greater emotional I.Q. than he can provide, quickly enlists Keeley to help. Her first effort is a flop, reminding Jamie how brutally he’ll be booed back in his hometown, Manchester, where he also played. (His description of a suitcase as “a drawer without a home” underscores the point.) Things go from bad to worse when she tells him his hair is being mocked on social media.So after a team viewing of “You’ve Got Mail” at which Dani says how nice it is to see them together again — I’ll have more to say about the movie and the couple below — Keeley and Roy surreptitiously follow Jamie across Manchester to the home his mother (Leanne Best) shares with her partner. In her maternal embrace, he explains that his drive has all been a product of his rage toward his father, whom we got to know all too well in the aforementioned “Man City” episode.The visit with mom gets Jamie partway back, but it falls to Ted to complete the recovery. After Jamie injures himself in the midst of a brilliant game against Man City, Ted refuses to sub him out. If hating his dad — who, surprisingly, is nowhere to be seen in the stands — no longer inspires Jamie, Ted suggests he instead try forgiveness: “When you choose to do that, you’re giving that to yourself.” Needless to say, it works, with Jamie sprinting his way to a solo goal to ensure the win. (And, yes, that’s James Tartt Sr. whom we see watching the game appreciatively from a rehab facility.)Wingless in Richmond: Brett Goldstein, left, and Phil Dunster in “Ted Lasso.”Apple TV+For Nate, a bid at redemption comes not from his mother but from Jade, who blackmails the A Taste of Athens manager, Derek into firing him. But like Jamie, Nate too needs a second intervention. Beard had been violently opposed to Nate rejoining Richmond, until Ted showed him video proving that even at his black-clad, Rupert-influenced worst, Nate was still a wounded innocent. So Beard relents, telling Nate the story of the “Les Mis”-like second chance Ted once gave him. (Careful viewers will note that this is the second vehicular theft we learn of from Ted and Beard’s past, following the former’s joyride in the family car as a 12-year-old.) And so, with the gentlest of head butts — a clear callback to Roy and Jamie’s hug in “Man City” — Nate is welcomed back into the Richmond fold.Which finally brings us back to Ted himself. Tired of waiting for Dottie to spill why she has come to England, he erupts in a litany of “Thank you”s and “[Expletive] you”s that echo Jamie’s words on the pitch. Like Ted, she masked her grief at his father’s death beneath a facade of perpetual cheeriness; like him, she “pretended I was OK.” (As the Larkin poem Mae quoted earlier goes, parents “fill you with the faults they had.”) The ice finally broken, Dottie tells Ted what she has crossed an ocean to say: “Your son needs you.”We knew this, and Ted knew this. But like Nate and Jamie, Ted needed to hear it. He needed to let go of his pain — the divorce, the jealousy — to see his path clearly.The episode closes with Rebecca and Ted alone in his office. In a charming inside joke, she tells him that this is the time for her big revelation. (In Season 1, it was that she had been deliberately undermining him; in Season 2, it was that she was sleeping with Sam.) Alas, she has nothing, “no truth bomb this year.” “Well, that’s OK,” Ted responds. “I have one.”The end credits roll before he can declare it. But for anyone uncertain of Ted’s revelation, the credits are accompanied by a Brandi Carlile cover of “Home,” from the 1978 movie “The Wiz.” And we all know where it was that Dorothy needed to get back to.Odds and endsSo perhaps I jumped to the conclusion that Roy and Keeley were back together after the former showed up conspicuously underdressed in the latter’s apartment following his “stuck” revelation and subsequent letter. At the “You’ve Got Mail” viewing, they tell Dani that they are merely there as friends. At first, this seems like it could just be a taking-it-slow maneuver. But later, alone in Jamie’s childhood bedroom — where a prescient Jamie had long ago placed posters of the two of them on the wall nearly side by side — Roy tells Keeley he doesn’t want to be “just friends.” She’s interrupted before she can reply. And, unlike Ted, it’s far from clear what she intends to say.Speaking of “You’ve Got Mail,” someone in the “Ted Lasso” brain trust is awfully fond of the movie. This is at least the third reference I’ve noticed, following Sam and Rebecca’s Bantr handles back in Season 2, Episode 5 (LDN152 and Bossgirl, respectively) and the choice of the Cranberries’ “Dreams” to score the opening scene of Episode 7 this season. And given the closing-credits song this week is it a coincidence that we see the team watch the “Over the Rainbow” scene? No, it definitely is not.Also at the “You’ve Got Mail” screening, there’s a significant glance between Sam and Rebecca to follow up their hallway encounter last week. Should our Dutch houseboater be worried? I think I’m probably worried enough for both of us.But enough “You’ve Got Mail.” I’m with Ted: “Sleepless in Seattle” is a far superior film.The idea that Freddie Mercury once owned Richmond AFC and tried to make the team theme song “Fat Bottomed Girls” (played later in the episode) was amusing. But better was the gag that back in art school Mercury considered his greatest talent to be “flipping straights.” And no, that’s not a poker strategy.How great is it that Jamie’s hair color is Walnut Mist? I say pretty great.And speaking of great, I don’t know what Rebecca, Bex and Ms. Kakes will be up to in next week’s season finale. But I can’t wait to find out. More