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      How Liverpool Put on a Song Contest for Ukraine

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      This year’s event would be “Ukraine’s party,” a broadcasting official said. It just happens to be taking place in Britain.When Ukraine won last year’s Eurovision Song Contest, it gained the right to hold this year’s event. And despite Russia’s invasion, it insisted it would do it.Ukraine’s public broadcaster issued plans to host the spectacle in the west of the country, out of reach of Russian missiles, while politicians, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, said the nation would make it work.Even some foreign leaders backed its cause. Last summer, Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister at the time, told reporters that Ukraine won Eurovision “fair and square,” so it should host, regardless of the war.“It’s a year away,” Johnson said. “It’s going to be fine.”But Ukraine’s dream of staging this year’s Eurovision has failed to materialize. On Saturday night, the final of the glitzy contest — which is expected to draw a television audience of around 160 million — will take place 1,600 miles from Kyiv, in Liverpool, England.Last summer, after months of discussions, the European Broadcasting Union, which oversees the contest, agreed with Ukrainian authorities to the change of location. With Britain finishing second in last year’s contest, it was an obvious choice. Its public broadcaster, the BBC, agreed to organize the event.This is Britain’s ninth time hosting the contest since it began in 1956, but the BBC team knew this year would be different. Broadcasters that host Eurovision normally use the contest to advertise their country and its culture to a global television audience. This time, Britain would need to take a back seat.Commemorative merchandise on sale in central Liverpool.Mary Turner for The New York TimesThe Ukrainian flag displayed in a Liverpool branch of McDonald’s.Mary Turner for The New York TimesThe historic buildings on Liverpool’s waterfront were lit up in the colors of the Ukrainian flag on Wednesday.Mary Turner for The New York TimesMartin Osterdahl, the executive supervisor for Eurovision at the European Broadcasting Union, said in an interview that this year’s event would be “Ukraine’s party.” Britain just happened to be hosting it, he added, echoing a sentiment made by a British pop act.Shortly after the switch was announced, the BBC introduced a contest to select a city to stage the finals, eventually picking Liverpool over six other contenders. In October, the BBC hired Martin Green, an event producer who oversaw the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics, to oversee the event.In a recent video interview, Green, 51, said he flew immediately to Warsaw and met with Ukrainian broadcasting officials.Those officials said they wanted a Eurovision that was a huge “celebration of great Ukrainian culture — past, present and future,” Green recalled. They also wanted the reality of Russia’s invasion shown onscreen — something with the potential to strike a downbeat tone for the traditionally campy, showy spectacle. But they insisted the contest should still be fun, Green said.Alyosha, who was Ukraine’s Eurovision entry in 2010, performing in Liverpool on Wednesday.Mary Turner for The New York Times“It was really important to have that blessing — that permission — about the nature and style of the show,” Green said.Back in Britain, Green had just eight months to arrange the contest. He assembled a team — including outside agencies — to work on the event. (Over 1,000 people have contributed, he said.) Every week, his staff had video calls with Ukrainian colleagues to discuss and agree on aspects of the competition. Those included this edition’s slogan, “United by Music”; its stage design; and the special performances that take place onstage during breaks from the competition.Sometimes, Green said, the Ukrainian side had to delay scheduled calls at the last minute “because an air raid siren had gone off,” or cancel meetings entirely because of power cuts.“Those were incredibly sobering moments,” Green said. “Ukrainians have such a sheer force of will to carry on, that sometimes you could easily forget.”German Nenov, a creative director with Ukraine’s public broadcaster, was a vital sounding board for the British team, Green said. In a recent interview, Nenov said it was sometimes “surreal” to be discussing sparkly outfits and dance performances as Russian bombs fell on Ukraine. “These past six months have probably been the most emotional of my life,” he said. “But thanks to Eurovision, I was able to stay strong. It gave me the ability to go on.”German Nenov, a creative director with Ukraine’s state broadcaster, in Liverpool. “These past six months have probably been the most emotional of my life,” he said.Mary Turner for The New York TimesNenov, 33, is overseeing several special performances by Ukrainian musicians that will play during competition breaks. With those, he said, he wanted to change viewers’ perceptions of his country. When Ukraine hosted Eurovision in 2005 and 2017, he added, those broadcasts featured clichés of traditional life, including embroidered outfits and dancing girls with flowers in their hair. “That’s not Ukraine,” Nenov said; this time, he would show a more modern vision of the country.Both Nenov and Green declined to give details of Saturday’s grand final, insisting it should come as a surprise for television viewers, but both said the show included Ukrainian and British pop stars. The war would be mentioned, Green said, but in an elegant fashion that was appropriate for “a great big singing competition.”Osterdahl, the European Broadcasting Union official, said that this year’s collaboration between two countries to host Eurovision was “unprecedented.” But if Ukraine wins again on Saturday, he would need another country to step up to host Ukraine’s next party. One day, he said, he hoped the war would end, and Ukraine could host for itself. More

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      How the Last Writers’ Strike Changed Things Onscreen

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      The impact included promising shows that lost their audiences, films rushed into production with flimsy scripts and turbocharging reality programming.The 2007 writers’ strike couldn’t have come at a worse time for the screenwriter Zack Stentz. After three years of being unemployed, Mr. Stentz was happily ensconced in a new job as an executive story editor on Fox’s “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.” He was working with a high-caliber group of writers on a show he described as “dark, thoughtful and weird.”Before the strike, the staff had successfully completed nine episodes of the show, which tracked the aftermath of events depicted in the blockbuster film “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” When the hourlong drama debuted in January 2008, it earned solid ratings and a loyal fan base. Still, Mr. Stentz, who has gone on to write for series like J.J. Abrams’s “Fringe” and Greg Berlanti’s “The Flash,” believes the 100-day strike ultimately sealed the show’s fate: a truncated two-season, 31-episode arc.“It was heartbreaking because we felt like we were doing something really special,” said Mr. Stentz, who recalled the show’s budgets being slashed during the second season, after the extended break caused ratings to plunge. “The conventional wisdom on the show is that it was ahead of its time and if it would have come out in the 2010s, it probably would have been a much bigger success.”“The Sarah Connor Chronicles” is just one of many television shows and movies whose fate was altered by the last writers’ strike, which cost the Los Angeles economy $2.1 billion in lost revenue. Movies like the James Bond film “Quantum of Solace,” “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” and “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” were among those rushed into production with unfinished scripts.Daniel Craig acknowledged he rewrote scenes for the James Bond film “Quantum of Solace” while on set.Susie Allnutt/Columbia PicturesThings were so grim on “Quantum of Solace” that the star Daniel Craig later admitted to rewriting scenes himself while on set. The film’s director, Marc Forster, who declined to comment for this article, told the website Collider in 2016 that he considered quitting what was then his biggest budget movie to date.“At that time I wanted to pull out,” he said. “But everybody said, ‘No, we need to make a movie, the strike will be over shortly so you can start shooting what we have and then we’ll finish everything else.’”Not every project suffered because of the work stoppage. Take the series “Breaking Bad.” According to one of the show’s producers, Mark Johnson, the character of Jesse Pinkman, portrayed by Aaron Paul, was originally supposed to die in the final episode of the show’s first season.The strike, however, forced “Breaking Bad” to halt production after just seven episodes. And, Mr. Johnson recalled in a recent interview, once the show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, realized how well the character played against Bryan Cranston’s chemistry teacher-turned-drug dealer Walter White, he decided to let him live.Jesse Pinkman lasted the entire 62-episode run, and Mr. Paul won three Emmys. “Because of the strike, we learned a lot about the show,” Mr. Johnson said. (Others have said the decision to keep Mr. Paul’s character was made before the strike, though other key plot elements of the show were adjusted.)The strike halted production on the first season of “Breaking Bad,” allowing major changes to be made to the plot arc of the show.Doug Hyun/AMCThe entertainment industry of today is much different from what it was 15 years ago, of course, and all the lessons learned during the last strike may not be applicable. Broadcast networks have cut back on scripted programming. Streaming services aren’t obligated to assemble a fall schedule. The major film studios have said they have enough movies in production to keep releasing them at a steady pace through the middle of 2024.“The dynamics are different now,” said Kevin Reilly, a veteran television executive. “Really, the only choke point is that at a certain point your development pipe gets a little bit dry. But I don’t think that’s even a speed bump in the streaming world. It would have to go on for at least six months for that to really start to feel the pressure. The same at the box office.”Studios have been leaning heavily into this narrative over the past few weeks. Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-chief executive, told investors during the company’s first-quarter earnings that because of its “large base of upcoming shows and films from around the world,” the streaming giant “can probably serve our members better than most.” Paramount Global’s chief executive, Bob Bakish, also said that the strike would have little impact on the company’s business in the short term.“We do have many levers to pull and that will allow us to manage through the strike even if it’s an extended duration,” he said during the company’s post-earnings conference call.Companies have said they have enough content in the pipeline to withstand the strike, but a prolonged work stoppage could have unforeseen consequences.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesBut a prolonged strike could have unforeseen effects just the same. Just one week into the shutdown, television shows like Netflix’s “Stranger Things,” HBO Max’s “Hacks” and Apple TV+’s “Loot” have halted production.It remains unclear how the studios will adjust should the strike be prolonged. As one writer, Joe McClean (“Resident Evil: Vendetta”), noted from the picket line last week, the 2007 strike led to a renewed boom in reality TV shows, which are relatively inexpensive to produce and don’t need writers.“There’s a pretty nice thread that can show that the last writers’ strike led to Donald Trump becoming president,” Mr. McClean said, referring to “Celebrity Apprentice,” which debuted in January 2008 and intensified Mr. Trump’s already significant television presence. “Because we had no writers and no good content on television, that was where all of the viewers were going, and it just elevated his star.” More

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      Jacklyn Zeman, Nurse Bobbie on ‘General Hospital,’ Dies at 70

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      , She played the same role on the popular soap opera for nearly half a century and was nominated for four Daytime Emmy Awards.Jacklyn Zeman, an Emmy-nominated actress who for nearly a half-century played the role of Bobbie Spencer, a nurse on the long-running soap opera “General Hospital,” died on Tuesday in Thousand Oaks, Calif. She was 70.Her death, at Los Robles Regional Medical Center, came after a “short battle” with cancer, according to her family.In announcing Ms. Zeman’s death on Wednesday, the show’s executive producer, Frank Valentini, wrote on Twitter, “Just like her character, the legendary Bobbie Spencer, she was a bright light and true professional that brought so much positive energy with her to work.”As Barbara Jean (Bobbie) Spencer, Ms. Zeman was among the longest-lasting cast members on the series, which since 1963 has centered around the lives of characters who work in the hospital and in the wealthy business community in the fictional New York town of Port Charles. Ms. Zeman first appeared on the show in 1977 and was featured in nearly 900 episodes.Bobbie was a student nurse who had moved on from her past life as a prostitute who gave up a baby for adoption in Florida; vied for the affections of a law student named Scotty Baldwin; and was the younger sister of Luke Spencer, played by Anthony Geary.She portrayed her character as a loving but tough nurse who had emerged from a difficult past. In one scene, she defends her hard-knocks upbringing to Mr. Baldwin, saying she never had anything handed to her.“I wanted Bobbie to be bouncy and have a positive aura and energy,” she said in an interview last year with TV Insider. “I wanted her to have intelligence, humor and a love of people. Bobbie came from a dysfunctional background but she wanted to have kids and be a mother.”“I wanted the character to be perky and to come in like a hurricane,” she said.Ms. Zeman was nominated for four Daytime Emmy Awards for her work on the show and received a fifth nomination in 2021 for her acting on the television series “The Bay.”Jacklyn Lee Zeman was born on March 6, 1953, in Englewood, N.J., and grew up in Bergenfield. She was the oldest of three daughters born to Richard Zeman, an engineer with IBM, and Rita (Duhart) Zeman Rohlman, who worked for Scholastic Magazine.She began training in ballet at the age of 5, said Cassidy Zee Macleod, one of Ms. Zeman’s two daughters. When she was 15, she moved to New York City to pursue dancing and attended New York University briefly, Ms. Macleod said. She was cast as Lana McLain in 1976 on “One Life to Live” before her move to “General Hospital” in 1977.In addition to Ms. Macleod and Lacey Rose Gorden, another daughter whom she had with her third husband, Glenn Gorden (they divorced in 2007), Ms. Zeman is survived by two sisters, Lauren Fischetti and Carol Kolb, and two grandchildren. In April, “General Hospital” celebrated 60 years on the air. Ms. Macleod said that one of her mother’s last appearances was on the show’s nurses’ ball in April.Ms. Macleod said that her mother, who lived in Calabasas, Calif., adored the “strong-willed” role of Bobbie and that she and her sister recognized how deeply their mother’s role had affected people when some of the nurses caring for her described how Bobbie had inspired them.“We recognized how many lives she touched,” said Ms. Macleod. “They said they became nurses because of her.” More

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      Striking Writers Find Their Villain: Netflix

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      Fear of protests prompted the streaming giant to shift an anticipated presentation for advertisers to a virtual event and a top executive to skip an honorary gala.Just over a week after thousands of television and movie writers took to picket lines, Netflix is feeling the heat.Late Wednesday night, Netflix abruptly said it was canceling a major Manhattan showcase that it was staging for advertisers next week. Instead of an in-person event held at the fabled Paris Theater, which the streaming company leases, Netflix said the presentation would now be virtual.Hours earlier, Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-chief executive, said he would not attend the PEN America Literary Gala at the Museum of Natural History on May 18, a marquee event for the literary world. He was scheduled to be honored alongside the “Saturday Night Live” eminence Lorne Michaels. In a statement, Mr. Sarandos explained that he withdrew because the potential demonstrations could overshadow the event.“Given the threat to disrupt this wonderful evening, I thought it was best to pull out so as not to distract from the important work that PEN America does for writers and journalists, as well as the celebration of my friend and personal hero Lorne Michaels,” he said. “I hope the evening is a great success.”Netflix’s one-two punch in cancellations underscored just how much the streaming giant has emerged as an avatar for the writers’ complaints. The writers, who are represented by affiliated branches of the Writers Guild of America, have said that the streaming era has eroded their working conditions and stagnated their wages despite the explosion of television production in recent years, for much of which Netflix has been responsible.The W.G.A. had been negotiating with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of all the major Hollywood studios, including Netflix, before talks broke down last week. The writers went on strike on May 2. Negotiations have not resumed, and Hollywood is bracing for a prolonged work stoppage.Last week, at a summit in Los Angeles a day after the strike was called, one attendee asked union leaders which studio has been the worst to writers. Ellen Stutzman, the chief negotiator of the W.G.A., and David Goodman, a chair of the writers’ negotiating committee, answered in unison: “Netflix.” The crowd of 1,800 writers laughed and then applauded, according to a person present at that evening who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the strike.The last time the writers went on strike, in 2007, Netflix was little more than a DVD-by-mail company with a nascent streaming service. But over the past decade, Netflix has produced hundreds of original programs, helping to usher in the streaming era and upending the entertainment industry in the process.Initially, Netflix was cheered by the creative community for creating so many shows, and providing so many opportunities.Demonstrations over the past week have underscored just how much writers have soured on the company. In Los Angeles, Netflix’s Sunset Boulevard headquarters have become a focal point for striking writers. The band Imagine Dragons staged an impromptu concert before hundreds of demonstrators on Tuesday. One writer pleaded on social media this week that more picketers were needed outside the Universal lot, lamenting that “everyone wants to have a party at Netflix” instead.People were passing out fliers with messages like “Please Cancel Netflix Until a Fair Deal Is Reached” on the picket lines.Frederic J. Brown/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOn Wednesday, demonstrators were out in force outside the headquarters. “Ted Sarandos is my dad and I hate him,” read one sign. Another said: “I shared my Netflix password. It’s ‘PAY ME’!”While the writers marched, the veteran television writer Peter Hume affixed fliers to picket signs that read “Cancel Until Contract” and “Please Cancel Netflix Until a Fair Deal Is Reached.”Mr. Hume, who has worked on shows like “Charmed” and “Flash Gordon: A Modern Space Opera,” said the streaming giant was responsible for dismantling a system that had trained writers to grow their careers into sustainable, fulfilling jobs.“I have 26 years of continuous service, and I haven’t worked in the last four because I’m too expensive,” Mr. Hume said. “And that’s mostly because Netflix broke the model. I think they put all the money into production in the streaming wars, and they took it away from writers.”Netflix’s decision to cancel its in-person showcase for marketers next week caught much of the entertainment and advertising industry off guard.The company had been scheduled to join the lineup of so-called upfronts, a decades-old tradition where media companies stage extravagant events for advertisers in mid-May to drum up interest — and advertising revenue — for their forthcoming schedule of programming.Netflix, which introduced a lower-priced subscription offering with commercials late last year, was scheduled to hold its very first upfront on Wednesday in Midtown Manhattan. Marketers were eager to hear Netflix’s pitch after a decade of operating solely as a premium commercial-free streaming service.“The level of excitement from clients is huge because this is the great white whale,” Kelly Metz, the managing director of advanced TV at Omnicom Media Group, a media buying company, said in an interview earlier this week. “They’ve been free of ads for so long, they’ve been the reach you could never buy, right? So it’s very exciting for them to have Netflix join in.”So it came as a surprise when advertisers planning to attend the presentation received a note from Netflix late Wednesday night, saying that the event would be virtual.“We look forward to sharing our progress on ads and upcoming slate with you,” the note said. “We’ll share a link and more details next week.”The prospect of hundreds of demonstrators outside the event apparently proved too much to bear. Other companies staging upfronts in Manhattan — including NBCUniversal (Radio City Music Hall), Disney (The Javits Center), Fox (The Manhattan Center), YouTube (David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center) and Warner Bros. Discovery (Madison Square Garden) — said on Thursday that their events would proceed as normal, even though writers were planning multiple demonstrations next week.After Ted Sarandos said he would skip the PEN America Literary Gala, the organization said, “As a writers organization, we have been following recent events closely and understand his decision.”Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesMr. Sarandos’s decision to pull out of the PEN America Literary Gala will not disrupt that event either. Mr. Michaels, the “Saturday Night Live” executive producer, will still be honored, and Colin Jost, who co-hosts Weekend Update on “Saturday Night Live,” is still scheduled to M.C.“We admire Ted Sarandos’s singular work translating literature to artful presentation onscreen, and his stalwart defense of free expression and satire,” PEN America said in a statement. “As a writers organization, we have been following recent events closely and understand his decision.”The writers’ picket lines have successfully disrupted the productions of some shows, including the Showtime series “Billions” and the Apple TV+ drama “Severance.” On Sunday, the MTV Movie & TV Awards turned into a pretaped affair after the W.G.A. announced it was going to picket that event. The W.G.A. also said on Thursday it would picket the commencement address that David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, is scheduled to give on the campus of Boston University on May 21.One of the writers’ complaints is how their residual pay, a type of royalty, has been disrupted by streaming. Years ago, writers for network television shows could get residual payments every time a show was licensed, whether for syndication, broadcast overseas or a DVD sale.But streaming services like Netflix, which traditionally does not license its programs, have cut off those distribution arms. Instead, the services provide a fixed residual, which writers say has effectively lowered their pay. The A.M.P.T.P., which bargains on behalf of the studios, said last week that it had already offered increased residual payments as part of the negotiations.“According to the W.G.A.’s data, residuals reached an all-time high in 2022 — with almost 45 percent coming from streaming, of which the lion’s share comes from Netflix,” a Netflix spokeswoman said.“Irrespective of the success of a show, Netflix pays residuals as our titles stay on our service,” the spokeswoman said, adding that the practice was unlike what network and cable television did.Outside Netflix’s Los Angeles headquarters on Wednesday, writers on picket lines expressed dismay that the company was beginning to make money off advertising.“If they make money doing ads, my guess would be that ads will become a bigger revenue stream for them,” said Christina Strain, a writer on Netflix’s sci-fi spectacle “Shadow and Bone.” “And then we’re just working for network television without getting network pay.”Sapna Maheshwari More

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      in Music

      How MTV Broke News for a Generation

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      MTV News bridged a gap between news and pop culture without talking down to its young audience. As it prepares to shut down, Kurt Loder, Tabitha Soren, Sway Calloway and others reflect on its legacy.A little over a year into his first term, President Bill Clinton made good on a promise to return to MTV if young voters sent him to the White House. The town hall-style program in 1994 was meant to focus on violence in America, but it was a question of personal preference that made headlines and helped put MTV News on the media map.Boxers or briefs?“Usually briefs,” Mr. Clinton responded to a room full of giggles.Now, a generation after MTV News bridged the gap between news and pop culture, Paramount, the network’s parent company, announced this week that it was shuttering the news service.The end of MTV’s news operation is part of a 25 percent reduction in Paramount’s staff, Chris McCarthy, president and chief executive of Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios and Paramount Media Networks, said in an email to staff that was shared with The New York Times.MTV News and its cadre of anchors and video journalists were the ones to tell young people about the suicide of Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, and the killings of the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. They brought viewers on the presidential campaign trail and face to face with world leaders like Yasir Arafat, and took them into college dorms in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. They also embraced the messy chaos of 1990s and early 2000s celebrity, as when Courtney Love interrupted an interview with Madonna. They always put music first.Through it all, MTV News never strayed from its core mission of centering the conversation around young people.“There were no comparisons, it was one of one,” said SuChin Pak, a former MTV News correspondent. “We were the kids elbowing in. There just wasn’t anything out there for young people.”SuChin Pak, left, an MTV News correspondent, with Fergie, of the rap group the Black Eyed Peas, and Snoop Dogg. Ms. Pak said of MTV News, “We were the kids elbowing in.”Jason Merritt/FilmMagic, via Getty ImagesMTV News broke up the television news environment “in terms of young versus old, hip versus square” rather than the conservative-versus-liberal approach of many cable news networks today, said Robert Thompson, a professor of television and pop culture at Syracuse University. Its influence can be seen in the work of Vice News, the brash digital-media disrupter that is preparing to file for bankruptcy, and in the hand-held camcorder style of reporting that some CNN journalists have embraced.MTV was able to corner a young audience who could name the entire catalog of the band Flock of Seagulls but also had a curiosity about current events, he said.The Music Television network debuted in 1981 like a “fuse that lit the cable revolution,” Mr. Thompson said. Six years later, MTV News came on air under the deep, sure-footed voice of Kurt Loder, a former Rolling Stone editor, who co-hosted a weekly news program called “The Week in Rock.” But it was his interrupting-regular-programming announcement of Cobain’s death in 1994 that cemented Mr. Loder as “the poet laureate of Gen X,” Mr. Thompson said.“It was live TV at its best, I suppose, for an awful event,” Mr. Loder, who now reviews films for Reason magazine, said in an interview.MTV News tried to set itself apart from other cable news operations in a number of ways, Mr. Loder said.For starters, its anchors and correspondents did not wear suits. They also weren’t “self-righteous” and tried “not to talk down to the audience,” he said. That became especially important as rap and hip-hop seeped into every fiber of American culture.“We didn’t jump on rap at all as being a threat to the republic; we covered that stuff pretty evenhandedly,” Mr. Loder said. MTV then started adding more hip-hop to its music programing “and suddenly there’s a whole new audience.”Sway Calloway was brought into the MTV News fold to “elevate the conversation” around hip-hop and pop culture, and to do so with credibility.“MTV News took news very seriously,” he said. “We all wanted to make sure that we kept integrity in what we did.”Mr. Calloway, who now hosts a morning radio program on SiriusXM, said he knew respect for hip-hop culture had reached a new level when he was sitting in the Blue Room of the White House with President Barack Obama.“When Biggie said, ‘Did you ever think hip-hop would take it this far?’ I never thought that the culture would be aligned with the most powerful man in the free world, that we would be able to have a discussion through hip-hop culture that resonates on a global basis,” Mr. Calloway said. “That’s because of MTV News.”From its inception, MTV News saw itself as a critical connector for young voters. Tabitha Soren, an MTV News correspondent in the 1990s, saw that first hand on the campaign trail with MTV’s “Choose or Lose” get-out-the-vote campaign, and in the White House.“People were very earnest and sincere in wanting young people to be educated voters, not just willy-nilly, get anybody to the ballot box,” she said. “I felt like we were trying to make sure they were informed.”For Ms. Soren, who was 23 when she first appeared on air for MTV News in 1991, being able to connect with a younger audience was made easier because she was their age, she said. That meant asking Arafat about the role of young people in the intifada and going to Bosnia to follow American troops, many of whom were the same age as MTV’s viewers.“I was empathetic because I was their age,” said Ms. Soren, who is now a visual artist in the Bay Area. “My natural curiosity most of the time lined up with what the audience wanted to hear about.”During a town hall-style forum on MTV in 1994, President Bill Clinton was famously asked about his preference in underwear.Diana Walker/Getty ImagesThat rang especially true for Ms. Pak, who was born in South Korea and filmed a docu-series for MTV News about growing up in America with immigrant parents.“It was a culture shift for me personally, but with an audience that suddenly was like, wait, are we going to talk about this version of what it means to be American that is never shown and never talked about, and do it in the most real way possible?” said Ms. Pak, who was with MTV for a decade and now co-hosts a podcast. “Where else would you have seen that but MTV?”Just as Mr. Loder and Ms. Soren became cultural touchstones for Generation X, Ms. Pak, Mr. Calloway and others filled that role for millennials. Racing home after school to catch Total Request Live, they watched video journalists report the day’s headlines at 10 minutes to the hour during the network’s afternoon blocks and between Britney Spears and Green Day videos.“A lot of people were getting their news from us, and we understood that and knew it,” Ms. Pak said. “For all of us it was, OK, what is the audience, what’s our way in here that feels true? You do that by sitting down with them versus standing over them.” More

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      in Television

      British Spies, Japanese Teens and a German Cop’s Wild Ride

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      Recent international series of note include “A Spy Among Friends” on MGM+ and “Sam: A Saxon” on Hulu.It has been a quiet season for international television on American screens — nothing has grabbed attention on a “Squid Game” or “Downton Abbey” scale. But barely a day goes by, in the streaming age, without an interesting series washing up from some foreign shore. Here are four recent shows worth tracking down, from an elegant British thriller to a Chinese dramedy about a demon god and an immortal warrior who meet cute on the mortal plane.‘A Spy Among Friends’Alexander Cary, a writer and executive producer on “Homeland,” wrote this six-episode spy thriller as a leisurely, literate, three- or four-dimensional game of chess. Based on the nonfiction book of the same name by Ben Macintyre, it tells the story of Kim Philby (and the other high-level Soviet spies known as the Cambridge Five) by focusing on a set of intertwined sparring matches: Philby’s with his friend and MI6 colleague Nicholas Elliott, sent to Beirut to bring the disgraced Philby home; Elliott’s with a (fictional) agent, Lily Thomas, assigned to interrogate him when he returns to London alone; and Elliott and Thomas’s with the MI6 hierarchy once he brings her around to his side.Made for the British streaming service ITVX and available here on MGM+ and Prime Video, “A Spy Among Friends” is smart, complicated (at times overly so) and saturated in a particular Cold War blend of tragic romanticism and kitchen-sink class politics. What makes it stand out, though, is its casting. Anna Maxwell Martin and Guy Pearce are excellent as Thomas and Philby, and Damian Lewis is outstanding as Elliott, the colorless spy’s spy whose skills and motives are in question until the end. Tightly controlled yet somehow relaxed, Lewis gives a performance in which the coldblooded manipulator and the sentimentally loyal bro coexist at every moment.Malick Bauer is an East German policeman tossed around by history in “Sam: A Saxon” on Hulu.Stephan Burchadt/Disney‘Sam: A Saxon’As triumph-of-the-spirit stories go, “Sam: A Saxon” is notably low on triumph. Sam Meffire, the subject of this German biographical mini-series from Hulu, grew up in Dresden, both acutely aware of how his skin color set him apart and fiercely loyal to his East German homeland; shortly before the Berlin Wall fell, he became the country’s first policeman of African descent. His life since then — he’s only 52 — has been a carnival ride that no screenwriter would be likely to dream up: first a poster boy in a national ad campaign designed to humanize the police, and then a fugitive fleeing to Africa to avoid arrest for armed robbery.Jörg Winger, a creator and the showrunner of “Sam,” was also a creator of “Deutschland 83” and its sequels, and the shows share a knack for embedding engaging characters in real-world events in a way that feels both credible and suspenseful. In this dramatized telling, Meffire, played by the imposing actor Malick Bauer, is a true believer who finds himself continually and perversely acted upon by history. He is tossed about by the fall of Communism, and by the ravages of capitalism, racist nationalism and crime that the collapse unleashes. “Sam: A Saxon” stands firm against streaming-video bloat: Its seven episodes barely contain the story it sets out to tell.“Skip and Loafer” presents an expressionistic depiction of the life of a high-school girl.Misaki Takamatsu,KODANSHA/”Skip and Loafer” Production Committee‘Skip and Loafer’This sweet, lightly sentimental slice-of-life anime, halfway through its 12-episode season on Crunchyroll (and available for purchase on Prime Video), is an example of something that Japanese animation provides more consistently than American live-action TV: a comic, even expressionistic depiction of high-school life that still feels unforced and natural. Mitsumi, the star student of her small seaside town, moves to Tokyo to attend an elite prep school. Ferociously single-minded, very impressed with herself and determined to take her new school by storm, she’s also a quick-to-embarrass country bumpkin, a classic setup for teenage comedy.An early scene of Mitsumi’s childhood friends chasing after her departing train is a ruse, a poke at the conventions of this sort of story in traditional anime and Studio Ghibli-style films. And the bending of perspectives continues: While Mitsumi runs a gantlet of welcoming ceremonies, classroom presentations and karaoke parties in Tokyo, we and everyone around her — new friends, old friends and family — can see the anxieties and mortifications that she thinks she is hiding. The show (whose cryptic title, taken from the manga on which the anime is based, probably alludes to Mitsumi and her slacker crush, Sousuke) is a lighthearted essay on loneliness and the life-or-death nature of every decision a 15-year-old makes.In “Till the End of the Moon,” Luo Yunxi and Bai Lu play characters who are entangled across time and space.Rakuten Viki‘Till the End of the Moon’While a demon god is in the process of destroying the world, the resolute mystical warrior Li Susu (Bai Lu) is sent back in time 500 years to find the demon while he is still in mortal form and kill him. Arriving in the kingdom of Sheng, she discovers that she is in the body of a headstrong, very poorly behaved princess who is married to — do I have to spell it out?“Till the End of the Moon,” which is 35 episodes into its 40-episode run on Rakuten Viki, was a major hit in China, where it wrapped up this week; its premiere reportedly drew the highest numbers in three years for a xianxia (immortal heroes) drama. It’s an excellent example of the Chinese streaming-video industry’s capacity for making slickly disposable, highly enjoyable entertainment that combines elements of costume drama and special-effects-laden fantasy action with a healthy portion of romantic comedy. The humor will largely translate for a Western viewer, and Luo Yunxi (“My Sunshine,” “Ashes of Love”), who plays both the annihilating god and the possibly sympathetic human prince, is a hypnotic camera subject. More

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      Striking Writers Are Worried About A.I. Viewers Should Be, Too.

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      A.I. screenwriting, a point of contention in the Writers Guild strike, may not yet be ready for prime time. But streaming algorithms and derivative programming have prepared the way for it.Television loves a good sentient-machine story, from “Battlestar Galactica” to “Westworld” to “Mrs. Davis.” With the Writers Guild of America strike, that premise has broken the fourth wall. The robots are here, and the humans are racing to defend against them, or to ally with them.Among the many issues in the strike is the union’s aim to “regulate use of material produced using artificial intelligence or similar technologies,” at a time when the ability of chatbots to auto-generate all manner of writing is growing exponentially.In essence, writers are asking the studios for guardrails against being replaced by A.I., having their work used to train A.I. or being hired to punch up A.I.-generated scripts at a fraction of their former pay rates.The big-ticket items in the strike involve, broadly, how the streaming model has disrupted the ways TV writers have made a living. But it’s the A.I. question that has captured imaginations, understandably so. Hollywood loves robot stories because they make us confront what distinguishes us as human. And when it comes to distinguishing features, the ability to conjure imaginary worlds is simply sexier than the opposable thumb.So the prospect of A.I. screenwriting has become potent, both as threat and rallying cry. Detractors of the striking writers taunted them on social media that software was going to horse-and-buggy their livelihoods. Striking WGA members workshopped A.I. jokes on their picket signs, like “ChatGPT doesn’t have childhood trauma.” (Well, it doesn’t have its own. It has Sylvia Plath’s, and that of any other former unhappy child whose writing survives in machine-readable form.)But it shouldn’t surprise anyone if the TV business wants to leave open the option of relying on machine-generated entertainment. In a way, it already does.Not in the way the WGA fears — not yet. Even the most by-the-numbers scripted drama you watch today was not written by a computer program. But it might have been recommended to you by one.Algorithms, the force behind your streaming-TV “For You” menu, are in the business of noticing what you like and matching you with acceptable-enough versions of it. To many, this is indeed acceptable enough: More than 80 percent of viewing on Netflix is driven by the recommendation engine.In order to make those matches, the algorithm needs a lot of content. Not necessarily brilliant, unique, nothing-like-it content, but familiar, reliable, plenty-of-things-like-it content. Which, as it happens, is what A.I. is best at.The debate over A.I. in screenwriting is often simplified as, “Could a chatbot write the next ‘Twin Peaks’?” No, at least for now. Nor would anyone necessarily want it to. The bulk of TV production has no interest in generating the next “Twin Peaks” — that is, a wild, confounding creative risk. It is interested in more reboots, more procedurals, more things similar to what you just watched.TV has always relied on formula, not necessarily in a bad way. It iterates, it churns out slight variations on a theme, it provides comfort. That’s what has long made strictly formatted shows like “Law & Order” such reliable, relaxing prime-time companions. That’s also what could make them among the first candidates for A.I. screenwriting.Large language models like ChatGPT work by digesting vast quantities of existing text, identifying patterns and responding to prompts by mimicking what they’ve learned. The more done-to-death a TV idea is, the greater the corpus of text available on it.And, well, there are a lot of “Law & Order” scripts, a lot of superhero plots, a lot of dystopian thrillers. How many writers-contract cycles before you can simply drop the “Harry Potter” novels into the Scriptonator 3000 and let it spit out a multiseason series?In the perceptive words of “Mrs. Davis,” the wildly human comedic thriller about an all-powerful A.I., “Algorithms love clichés.” And there’s a direct line between the unoriginality of the business — things TV critics complain about, like reboots and intellectual-property adaptations and plain old derivative stories — and the ease with which entertainment could become bloated by machine-generated mediocrity.After all, if studios treat writers like machines, asking for more remakes and clones — and if viewers are satisfied with that — it’s easy to imagine the bean counters wanting to skip the middle-human and simply use a program that never dreamed of becoming the next Phoebe Waller-Bridge.And one could reasonably ask, why not? Why not leave the formulas to machines and rely on people only for more innovative work? Beyond the human cost of unemployment, though, there’s an entire ecosystem in which writers come up, often through precisely those workmanlike shows, to learn the ropes.Highly formatted shows like “Law & Order” could be among the early candidates for A.I.-generated scripts. NBCThose same writers may be able to use A.I. tools productively; the WGA is calling for guardrails, not a ban. And the immediate threat of A.I. to writers’ careers may be overstated, as you know if you’ve ever tried to get ChatGPT to tell you a joke. (It’s a big fan of cornball “Why did the …” and “What do you call a …” constructions.) Some speculations, like the director Joe Russo’s musing that A.I. some day might be able to whip up a rom-com starring your avatar and Marilyn Monroe’s, feel like science fiction.But science fiction has a way of becoming science fact. A year ago, ChatGPT wasn’t even available to the public. The last time the writers went on strike, in 2007, one of the sticking points involved streaming media, then a niche business involving things like iTunes downloads. Today, streaming has swallowed the industry.The potential rise of A.I. has workplace implications for writers, but it’s not only a labor issue. We, too, have a stake in the war with the storybots. A culture that is fed entirely by regurgitating existing ideas is a stagnant one. We need invention, experimentation and, yes, failure, in order to advance and evolve. The logical conclusion of an algorithmicized, “more like what you just watched” entertainment industry is a popular culture that just … stops.Maybe someday A.I. will be capable of genuine invention. It’s also possible that what “invention” means for advanced A.I. will be different from anything we’re used to — it might be wondrous or weird or incomprehensible. At that point, there’s a whole discussion we can have about what “creativity” actually means and whether it is by definition limited to humans.But what we do know is that, in this timeline, it is a human skill to create a story that surprises, challenges, frustrates, discovers ideas that did not exist before. Whether we care about that — whether we value it over an unlimited supply of reliable, good-enough menu options — is, for now, still our choice. More

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      Whose Queen? Netflix and Egypt Spar Over an African Cleopatra.

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      Egyptians say the influential streaming service is dragging an ancient queen into a modern, and decidedly Western, debate — about Black representation in Hollywood — in which she has no real place.On this much, at least, everyone can agree: Cleopatra was a formidable queen of ancient Egypt, the last of the Macedonian Greek dynasty founded by Alexander the Great, who went on to even greater posthumous fame as a seductress, immortalized by Shakespeare and Hollywood.Beyond that, many of the details are fuzzy — which is how one of the world’s dominant streaming services ended up in an imbroglio with modern-day Egypt recently, called out by online commenters and even the Egyptian government for casting a Black actress to play Cleopatra in the Netflix docudrama series “African Queens,” which airs on Wednesday.Soon after the show’s trailer appeared last month, Netflix was forced to disable comments as they turned into a hostile, and occasionally racist, pile on. Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, the government agency in charge of heritage, declared the show a “falsification of Egyptian history.” A popular television host accused Netflix of trying to “take over our Egyptian culture.” An Egyptian lawyer filed a complaint demanding that the streaming service be shut down in the country.For the show’s makers, the four episodes about Cleopatra were a chance to celebrate one of history’s most famous women as an African ruler, one they portray as Black. But for many Egyptians and historians, that portrayal is at best a misreading, and at worst a negation, of Egyptian history.Despite her Macedonian Greek lineage, the producers of the show say question marks in her family tree leave room for the possibility that her mother was of another background: The identities of Cleopatra’s mother and grandmother are unknown, leading some experts to argue that she was at least partly Indigenous Egyptian.“We don’t often get to see or hear stories about Black queens, and that was really important for me, as well as for my daughter, and just for my community to be able to know those stories because there are tons of them,” Jada Pinkett Smith, who produced “African Queens,” said in a Netflix-sponsored article about the show.Cleopatra was descended from a line of Macedonian Greek kings who ruled Egypt from 323 B.C. to 30 B.C., when it was annexed by Rome, and many scholars say she likely had little, if any, non-Greek blood. The Ptolemies — as all the dynasty’s kings were called — tended to marry their own sisters or other relatives, leaving few openings for new blood, though there is some evidence that she had a Persian ancestor, according to scholars.A sculpture of Cleopatra in the workshop of the Egyptian artist Ibrahim Salah in Giza in 2020.Mohamed Hossam/EPA, via Shutterstock“Statues of Queen Cleopatra confirm that she had Hellenistic (Greek) features, distinguished by light skin, a drawn-out nose and thin lips,” Egypt’s government said on Twitter on April 30.Modern battles over Cleopatra’s heritage and skin color have erupted time after time, finding fresh fuel with each new Hollywood casting, from Elizabeth Taylor, who played her in 1963, to Angelina Jolie, Lady Gaga and Gal Gadot, all recent contenders to portray her in various projects.Netflix’s casting of Adele James, a biracial British actress, is a reflection of Western arguments over Black representation in Hollywood and whether history is too dominated by white narratives that revolve around European primacy.But it stirred up a very different debate in Egypt, where many view identity and race through another lens. For many Egyptians, the question is whether Egyptians and their ancient ancestors — geographical location notwithstanding — are African.“Why do some people need Cleopatra to be white?” the show’s director, Tina Gharavi, wrote in a piece defending the casting in Variety last month. “Perhaps it’s not just that I’ve directed a series that portrays Cleopatra as Black, but that I have asked Egyptians to see themselves as Africans, and they are furious at me for that.”Egypt sits on the northeast corner of Africa. Its relationship with the continent, however, is deeply ambivalent.Today, it holds membership in the African Union and other continental groups. But in Greek and Roman times, historians say, Egypt was seen as a major player in the Mediterranean world, the gateway to Africa, rather than fully African.Since Arabs conquered Egypt in the seventh century, bringing the Arabic language and Islam with them, Egyptians have shared more cultural, religious and linguistic ties with the predominantly Arab and Muslim Middle East and North Africa than with the rest of Africa.Elizabeth Taylor during the filming of the movie “Cleopatra” in Rome.Associated PressThe ancestors of today’s Egyptians include not only Arabs and native Egyptians, but also Nubians, Greeks, Romans, Turks, Circassians, Albanians, Western Europeans and other conquerors, traders, slaves and immigrants who landed in Egypt at various points over the last two millenniums.For all its diversity, Egyptian society often prizes light skin and looks down on darker-skinned Egyptians. But many Egyptians and historians say the racist slurs hurled online at Ms. James, while abhorrent, distract from the real issue. The show is dragging an ancient queen into the middle of contemporary Western debates in which she has no real place, they argue.“How can someone who’s not even from my country claim my heritage just because of their skin color?” said Yasmin El Shazly, an Egyptologist and the deputy director for research and programs at the American Research Center in Egypt.Ancient Egypt and its wonders have long been a trophy in Western culture wars. In 1987, Martin Bernal’s book “Black Athena” argued that European historians had erased Egyptian contributions to ancient Greek culture. Though many scholars agree that much of the evidence it cited was flawed at best, the book became one of the canonical texts of Afrocentrism, a cultural and political movement that, among other things, seeks to counter ingrained ideas about the supposed inferiority of African civilizations.According to some Afrocentrists, ancient Egypt was the Black African civilization that birthed not only African history and culture, but also world civilization until Europeans plundered its technologies, ideas and culture. The pyramids and the pharaohs became sources of pride for these Afrocentrists — and Cleopatra, for all her Greek blood, a potential heroine of the movement.“Cleopatra reacted to the phenomena of oppression and exploitation as a Black woman would,” according to the Hamilton College classicist Shelley Haley, a professor of Africana and an expert on Cleopatra who consulted on the Netflix show. She argued that Cleopatra’s potentially mixed background made her a person of color: “Hence we embrace her as sister.”A still from “Queen Cleopatra,” which stars Adele James.NetflixThis kind of thinking frustrates many Egyptians, historians and Egyptologists. Egyptians, too, are fiercely proud of the pyramids and the pharaohs, even if they are two millenniums removed, and they would like Afrocentrists who hold such views to back off.For many Egyptians, the pharaohs — whose skin color and ancestry are still a matter of scientific debate — were Egyptian, not African. The Black American comedian Kevin Hart was forced to cancel a planned show in Egypt in February after an uproar over his past comments that the pharaohs were Black Africans.It does not help that some Afrocentrists hold that modern-day Egyptians descend from Arab invaders who displaced the Black Africans of ancient Egypt, a theory many Egyptians consider both offensive and inaccurate.“An African-American who’s never been to Egypt saying that ‘this is our heritage and modern Egyptians are these Arab invaders’ is very insulting,” Ms. El Shazly said.Some historians say the modern fixation on whether Cleopatra looked more like Elizabeth Taylor or Ms. James would have felt alien to the ancients.In Cleopatra’s time, Alexandria, the capital of her kingdom, was a cosmopolitan port city bustling with Greeks, Jews, ethnic Egyptians and people from all over who, the Cambridge University historian David Abulafia said, largely saw themselves as part of the Hellenistic world. They identified by culture and religion, he said, not by skin color.“Race is a modern construct of identity politics that’s been imposed on our past,” said Monica Hanna, an Egyptian Egyptologist. “This use and abuse of the past for modern agendas will just hurt everyone, because it’ll give a distorted image of the past.”Though Egyptian critics of the show have denied any racist motives, some Egyptian commentators say their society’s internalized racism and inferiority complexes turned up the volume of the Cleopatra outcry.Unable to take pride in modern-day Egypt’s political repression and cratering economy, some Egyptians “link their identities to ancient glories” or attempt to signal their superiority to the rest of Africa by emphasizing their European roots, said the Egyptian writer AbdelRahman ElGendy.Seizing the chance to whip up Egyptian pride, government-owned media dedicated airtime on three different evening talk shows recently to slamming “African Queens.”The same day, a government-owned media conglomerate announced that it would produce its own Cleopatra documentary. Its film, it pointedly noted, would be based on the “utmost levels” of research and accuracy. More