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      What Did ‘The West Wing’ Do to Us?

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      As Aaron Sorkin’s political fantasy turns 25, its romance has aged better than its politics.“‘I am the Lord your God. Thou shalt worship no other god before me.’ Boy, those were the days, huh?”Thus do we meet President Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen), Democrat of New Hampshire, in the pilot of “The West Wing,” which premiered on Sept. 22, 1999.Having your protagonist’s first line be the literal words of the Almighty is, shall we say, a statement. This was a series that saw politics as civic religion. It was a work of patriotic evangelism that appealed to our better angels but failed to match up to earthly reality.But before it was all that, it was a well-crafted, emotional workplace drama. The pilot finds the White House amid a number of crises, personal, political and in between. A flotilla of Cuban refugees headed for Florida is in danger. Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe), one of the president’s aides, has unknowingly slept with a prostitute. Another aide, Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford), may lose his job after having embarrassed a prominent religious conservative in a TV appearance. And President Bartlet has injured himself crashing a bicycle into a tree.The episode, written by the creator, Aaron Sorkin, and directed by Thomas Schlamme, establishes the show’s signature look and energy. The camera races to keep up with the staff; the dialogue has the rat-a-tat brio of a ’30s screwball comedy. The score, by W.G. Snuffy Walden, sauces the action in star-spangled emotion. Smart, smart, smart!, the pilot says. Busy, busy, busy!Above all, the pilot establishes the show’s core fantasy: That the right thing and the politically effective thing are the same thing. Josh drags himself into a forced-apology meeting with a religious group. It goes badly: His main antagonist shows herself to be a sour, meanspirited antisemite, and the meeting devolves into a shouting match, interrupted by Bartlet, who corrects a guest’s misquote of the First Commandment.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: Lots of Medical and Police Dramas

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      ABC, NBC and Fox are all premiering new shows about doctors, cops or firefighters. The Voice is also returning, with Snoop Dogg joining the judges’ panel.For those who still enjoy a cable subscription, here is a selection of cable and network TV shows, movies and specials that broadcast this week, Sept. 23-29. Details and times are subject to change.Monday9-1-1: LONE STAR 8 p.m. on Fox. As we reminisce about “The West Wing” premiering 25 years ago and daydream about Rob Lowe’s Sam Seaborn (oh, just me?), it’s the perfect time to turn our attention to his current show about a fire station, which is returning for its fifth season.THE VOICE 8 p.m. on NBC. Gwen Stefani and Reba McEntire are back in their red swiveling judges’ chairs, this year joined by Snoop Dogg and Michael Bublé. While in Paris covering the Olympics, Snoop called the judges “a fearless foursome.”Zachary Quinto in “Brilliant Minds.”Rafy/NBCBRILLIANT MINDS 10 p.m. on NBC. If there’s something that we collectively can’t get enough of, it’s doctor shows. This one is inspired by the work of the famed neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, whose research and widely read writings illuminated disorders and cases he had studied or treated. The show stars Zachary Quinto as Dr. Oliver Wolf, a neurologist who works with his team not only to help solve their patients’ difficult cases, but also to deal with their own mental health.TuesdayMURDER IN A SMALL TOWN 8 p.m. on Fox. Based on the Karl Alberg books by L.R. Wright, this show follows Alberg (Rossif Sutherland), as he moves to a small town to become its police chief. And there is, of course, much more drama than expected in this seemingly idyllic community.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kelsey Grammer Analyzes 40 Years of Frasier: ‘I Have Nothing to Regret’

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      Kelsey Grammer likes his raw meat cut very fine. On a recent afternoon, at the restaurant of a Midtown hotel, he requested that his steak tartare be put through the grinder twice. He wanted it, he said, like velvet. The tartare, topped with its quail egg, was presented roughly chopped. “I’ll deal with it,” Grammer said uncomplainingly.Frasier Crane would never. On and off for 40 years on several different sitcoms, Grammer, 69, has played Frasier, a dyed-in-the-cashmere-wool snob and psychiatrist about town. The character is indelibly associated with Grammer. He can’t shake him, though Grammer mostly sees this as a boon.“It’s wonderful to spend your lifetime entertaining people,” he said.In 1984, Grammer, a stage actor who had studied at Juilliard, was cast on the sitcom “Cheers” as Frasier Crane, a love interest for Shelley Long’s waitress character, Diane Chambers. He stayed with the show until it ended in 1993.That same year, Grammer starred in a spinoff, “Frasier,” which saw the character move from Boston back to Seattle, where he lived with his father (John Mahoney) and brother (David Hyde Pierce). Grammer was often a tabloid fixture in those days, with an erratic personal life. Much married, he would eventually father seven children with four different women. He was arrested for drug possession and for driving under the influence. He now believes his chaotic behavior was a response to the trauma of his early life — in separate incidents, both his father and his sister were murdered.The revived “Frasier,” which premiered last year on Paramount+, has included other past characters like Frasier’s ex-wife Lilith, played by Bebe Neuwirth.Chris Haston/Paramount+But he stuck with the show until the 2004 finale. After that, Grammer moved on to other projects, but none lasted very long. And then in 2023, a “Frasier” reboot returned Frasier to Boston, reuniting him with his son, Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott), and his best friend, Alan (Nicholas Lyndhurst). The second season premiered Thursday on Paramount+.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Norman Reedus, ‘Walking Dead’ Star and Hieronymus Bosch Fan

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      “We wanted to reinvent the show,” the actor said of his spinoff, “The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon.” Filming in Madrid gave him time to explore the Prado.When Daryl Dixon was introduced in the third episode of “The Walking Dead” in 2010, few viewers could have predicted this half-feral-looking character would end up leading the series. Or that Daryl, played by Norman Reedus, would headline a spinoff set in France.“We wanted to reinvent the show,” Reedus, 55, said in a video interview from Paris.“We just didn’t want to do the same storytelling as in Georgia,” he continued, referring to the location for most of the original series, “and we didn’t want to make an American tourist version of France. So we got French writers. We fought to have French as much as English.”Season 2 of “The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon” premieres Sept. 29 on AMC, but the new franchise is so successful that Reedus (who also appeared this year in the film “The Bikeriders” and has a second career as a photographer) is already working on the next installment in Spain.He talked about his connection with rock, art and food, as well as his 5-year-old daughter’s influence on his reading. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1‘Wild God’ by Nick Cave and the Bad SeedsNick Cave and Warren Ellis’s album “Carnage” was my go-to for the entire French filming portion of the first two seasons, and in Spain it’s this album. It just sings, full of life and stories and beautiful thundering bliss. I don’t know anyone that doesn’t love this band. Not one person.2‘Nina Simone’s Gum’ by Warren EllisI met Warren in Paris and we immediately hit it off. When he told me of this book, I immediately got it. I find it interesting to learn of the things that inspire the people that inspire me. He had noticed Nina Simone take out her gum before a show and stick it under the piano. As soon as the show was over, he bolted toward the piano and ripped the gum out. He had a gold cast made of it. He was wearing it as a necklace.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Penguin’ Review: The Dark Blight

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      The HBO series starring an unrecognizable Colin Farrell is further proof that there is no fun in the Batman universe.When was fun banished from Batman’s world? Certainly the tide turned with “The Dark Knight Returns,” Frank Miller’s 1986 series of comics. As exciting as they were, Miller’s books enshrined a claustrophobic, dystopian approach that has smothered many subsequent screen treatments.In the immediate aftermath of the books, the Tim Burton films “Batman” and “Batman Returns” found thrills in the darkness. But when I sit through the subsequent Christopher Nolan blockbusters, or Todd Phillips’s “The Joker,” or even Matt Reeves’s recent reboot film, “The Batman,” I feel as if I were being punished for not being a serious enough (or depressed enough) viewer.Reeves (“Dawn of the Planet of the Apes”) is a very talented director, and “The Batman” was easier to sit through than some of its ballyhooed predecessors. But it was ruinously long at three hours, its small store of familiar ideas about revenge and social decay running dry well before the movie ended. And Reeves’s Batman was such a stone-faced mope that poor Robert Pattinson spent the whole movie looking as if he were wondering where the bathroom was, not that he would have been any happier had he found it.But the movie was beautifully shot, and Zoë Kravitz was the latest in a line (Julie Newmar, Eartha Kitt, Michelle Pfeiffer) of great Catwomen. And it had an odd, sideshow-like bonus: a beautiful movie star, Colin Farrell, rendering himself unrecognizable under a reported 50 pounds of latex to play a battered, ugly, all too human variation on a classic villain, the Penguin. The performance wasn’t fun, exactly, but it was definitely something to look at.Now Farrell and his latex are back in “The Penguin,” an HBO series spun off from “The Batman.” (It premiered on Thursday night; its second episode will not appear until Sept. 29.) Even though the show is set in the immediate aftermath of the film, and the story features large-scale chaos, Batman is nowhere to be seen; apparently he’s taking a long vacation. So “The Penguin” is not a superhero show.Instead, as developed by Lauren LeFranc (“Impulse,” “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”) with Reeves as an executive producer, it is a particularly self-conscious gangster saga. Farrell’s Oswald Cobb (shortened from Cobblepot) is a midlevel mobster who sees an opportunity when his boss is killed and sets out to take over the Gotham City drug trade, peddling a new high called Bliss. Alternately opposed to him or allied with him is the boss’s daughter, Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti), recently released from Arkham Asylum with designs of her own on the top spot.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Natasha Lyonne’s Success Is Driven by a Sense of Mortality

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      Natasha Lyonne has her funeral all planned out.Not just planned, really, but choreographed, produced and directed, complete with music cues and writing prompts, to calibrate the emotion just right. “Otherwise it can run long,” she explained. So Lyonne, the downtown vivant actress, writer and director, has diligently assigned her passel of famous friends “jobs that they didn’t want.”There will be a month of commemorative screenings at Film Forum and songs by Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs (“I have a sworn promise that she performs; I’m very grateful”) and the “Color Purple” star Danielle Brooks, because her voice “breaks my heart.” The comedian John Mulaney will be on hand to punch up material. “I actually tasked him with writing speeches for people that wouldn’t want to get onstage,” Lyonne said, like her BFF Chloë Sevigny. “I was like: You need to give Chloë some jokes.”The plot she acquired, at the Hollywood Forever cemetery, alongside her boyfriend at the time, Fred Armisen, she has now graciously ceded to his wife, Riki Lindhome. “I probably don’t want to be buried in Los Angeles anyway, if I’m honest,” she allowed. But she’s still making him the funerary musical supervisor.That Lyonne, at 45, has thought at length about her own demise is, to anyone who knows her or her oeuvre, not surprising. All of her recent, most celebrated projects — including “Russian Doll,” the Emmy-winning Netflix series; “Poker Face,” the retro crime procedural on Peacock; and her latest role, in the Netflix drama “His Three Daughters” — find her confronting life’s end. She does it with a spectacular, bewitching buoyancy. Even in “His Three Daughters,” in which she displays an unexpected reserve (but exuberant hair) opposite Carrie Coon and Elizabeth Olsen as estranged sisters caring for their father in his last days. It’s earning her Oscar talk.As a producer, Lyonne “likes the grind and the hustle, and the hard work that comes with it,” said Amy Poehler. “That’s not always the case.”OK McCausland for The New York TimesSo, when we found ourselves in an East Village restaurant on a drizzly Friday night, ordering a dessert made of Pop Rocks and talking about death, it felt just as the universe — or New York City, same difference — intended.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Happy Clothes’ Review: Patricia Field Doc Is Pleasantly Chaotic

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      “Happy Clothes” covers her work on “Emily in Paris” and “Sex and the City,” as well as her time as a tastemaker in the 1970s and ’80s underground.Patricia Field likes, as she puts it, “happy clothes.” If you’ve seen her work, you get it; if you’ve watched TV, you have probably seen her work. The fashion maven is one of the most celebrated and influential costume designers of the past three decades, with “Emily in Paris,” “The Devil Wears Prada” and “Sex and the City” among her credits. Michael Selditch’s new documentary, “Happy Clothes: A Film About Patricia Field” (in theaters and on demand), follows Field as she works on the second season of the Starz comedy “Run the World,” but the feature is really a celebration of her long career.A movie like this can head in a lot of directions, and a possible weakness of “Happy Clothes” is that it tries to go in all of them. There are conversations with Field’s friends and collaborators, including the “Devil Wears Prada” director David Frankel, the “Sex and the City and “Emily in Paris” creator Darren Star, and the actresses Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall and Lily Collins. Field’s work in the past as the owner of a well-known boutique that bears her name comes to life through archival footage and interviews, while observational images show her working with assistants, shopping for pieces and going to sets.There’s just a lot here. But with a subject like Field, the mild chaos feels pleasantly appropriate. Her taste runs toward the conspicuous and bold, and several interviewees — particularly Parker, who became a fashion icon partly because of her willingness to wear anything Field selected — note that her choices can be shocking at first. Prints and patterns, gems and silhouettes, neons and bold accessories: You never really know what you’ll get when you work with Field.But that’s why people love her. Her style, as she says, is happy. “I like clothes that don’t die,” she explains, a statement that reveals she’s always thinking about longevity. Field is amazingly energetic — her 80th birthday approaches as the film begins — and she’s interested only in the future, telling someone at one point that she doesn’t keep an archive because she’s always looking forward.It’s probably ironic, then, that the most illuminating element of “Happy Clothes” is a sequence in which her taste now is linked to her history as a central figure in New York’s underground culture of the 1970s and 1980s. Former employees and customers attest to what it meant to have a place — her store — where they could be unapologetically queer or trans or just interested in fashion, where they didn’t have to hide their identities. Field was ahead of her time in more ways than one, and this history suggests that she has been practicing an exuberant joy her whole career. That, “Happy Clothes” says, is her real legacy. More

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      A Concert Celebrates Jimmy Carter’s 100th Birthday, With Music and Thanks

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      The night included gospel hymns and “America the Beautiful” and the B-52s lighting up the Fox Theater, one of the oldest auditoriums in Atlanta, with a performance of “Love Shack.” In one moment, the crowd was on its feet as Angélique Kidjo, the acclaimed Beninese musician, sang and danced. In another, they shimmied and sang along to a cover of “Ramblin’ Man.”The collection of artists and performances transcended generations, genres and geography. But one thread bound them together on Tuesday night: affection for former President Jimmy Carter, which they were eager to express in celebration of his coming 100th birthday.“You can see he had a relationship to music — look at how we gathered here together tonight,” said the country singer Carlene Carter, who is not related to the former president but said he still feels like kin. “He used it as a powerful tool to bring people together.”The civil rights leader Andrew Young, seated, and his wife, Carolyn, standing, share a laugh with, from left, Thomas and Henry Carter, great-grandchildren of Jimmy Carter and Jason Carter, his grandson.Dustin Chambers for The New York TimesCarter’s actual birthday was still almost a couple of weeks away, and Carter himself was 160 miles away, at home in Plains, Ga., where he has been in hospice care for the past 19 months. But the concert was intended as a gift, one that will be broadcast as a special on Georgia Public Television on Oct. 1. The family said he plans to watch as part of his birthday festivities.The concert in many ways mirrored the scope and ambitions of the man it was celebrating: Global and idealistic in its reach, but firmly planted in Georgia, molded by religious and cultural traditions as well as the rich but complicated history of the rural South.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More