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      ‘Perry Mason’ Season 2, Episode 5 Recap: Follow the Money

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      Paul is pushed to new extremes. Perry finds a hole in the prosecution’s case.Season 2, Episode 5: ‘Chapter Thirteen’Whodunit? Oh, we are so far past “whodunit” in this season of “Perry Mason,” folks.We know exactly who killed Brooks McCutcheon now. As put forth by the prosecution and confirmed last week, it was Mateo and Rafael Gallardo. Their motive may be complicated, including a payoff from an unseen puppet master and a personal desire for revenge — their apartment was cleared and burned to make room for Brooks’s baseball stadium, which killed their kid sister. But their guilt is beyond doubt.Fortunately for the second half of the show’s second season, there are now bigger questions to answer: Who paid whodunit, and why? Brooks’s unpopularity with, well, pretty much everyone who knew him doesn’t simplify matters. As Perry puts it regarding Brooks in his opening argument to the jury, “You won’t be asking who in this town wanted him killed, you’ll be asking who in this town didn’t.” To be fair, this is characteristic Masonic bluster, designed to create reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors without much to back it up … yet.That’s where Paul Drake, the ace up Perry’s sleeve, comes in. In many ways, this is his episode; his story is that of a decent and dogged man who is forced constantly into humiliating or outright morally compromising positions, emerging largely intact but increasingly scarred each time.For example, Paul is the fellow Perry dispatches to interview Councilman Taylor (Damian O’Hare), the influential brother of the mystery-shrouded Noreen Lawson. Perry’s team presumes that Brooks had something to do with Noreen’s current unresponsive state, but all the councilman will do is mindlessly repeat that she was injured in a car accident. Of course, he does this with a heaping helping of racial antagonism — an occupational hazard for a Black private investigator.Paul is also tasked with tracking down Ozzie Jackson (Terrence Hardy Jr.), a low-level gangster whose trademark Converse shoes make him a standout. With help from his no-longer-estranged friend and housemate Mo, Paul learns that Ozzie works for Melvin Perkins (Christopher Carrington), the relatively benevolent racketeer currently mired in legal trouble thanks to pictures taken by Paul while he was working as a stringer for the district attorney’s office.So Paul makes a deal with Perkins: He’ll render the photos useless in court by refusing to testify to their veracity in exchange for Ozzie’s location. When Perkins learns that Paul was the photographer in question, though, he forces the investigator to beat the info he needs out of Ozzie. Then he forces Paul to continue beating Jackson, even after the kid admits that he received the order from the husband of a rich woman to whom he used to sell heroin — until he was paid better not to.Paul winds up crawling into bed with his wife Claire, touching her skin with the same hand he used to beat Jackson. “Am I … good?” he asks her. She assures him he is. What else could she say?Unfortunately for the Mason team, a mysterious person — no really, that’s how he’s listed in the closing credits: “Mysterious Person,” played by Kyle T. Heffner — has eyes on Perry. He’s there when Mason visits the Gallardo family’s Hooverville to ferret out the initial tip about Ozzie and his Converse shoes.Worse, this mystery man tails Della and Anita to an underground lesbian club. I’ve been wondering how long it would be before Della’s sexuality would be weaponized against her the way the more externally obvious fact of Drake’s race has been used against him.It’s worth keeping in mind that District Attorney Burger is vulnerable along the same lines. Note also that he is under some kind of as-yet unidentified pressure to settle the case, despite seeming to be firmly in the driver’s seat. He offers a plea deal to Perry — not an exceedingly generous one, but still, a deal — over the obvious dismay of his ambitious lieutenant Tom Milligan. No one on Perry’s team can figure out why he would do this unless someone was forcing his hand. Who? Why?Milligan doesn’t seem to care either way. What he wants to do is win the case, one virtually designed to put him on the map; the vocal support of the radio firebrand Frank Finnerty could make him a political superstar overnight. (His verminous epithet for Perry has caught on to such a degree that a witness refers to Mason as “Mister Maggot” on the stand.) Milligan helps wrap up the episode by asking Perry’s old pal Pete to turn against him; knowing Pete, he’ll do it if the price is right.And the hits just keep on coming. Della is confronted by her girlfriend (Molly Ephraim) about her late night with Anita. Perry returns to his apartment after another assignation with the surprisingly forward schoolteacher Miss Aimes to discover that someone has set up his son’s model train set and left behind a still-burning cigarette. It’s one of the more whimsical ways of sending someone a warning that they can be gotten to, but it’s no less alarming for that.The message is clear: You can either get on board, or get run over.From the case files:I’m a broken record on this point, I realize, but good gravy, the lighting in this show. This time we can credit the director, Marialy Rivas, and the director of photography, Eliot Rockett, for the way Perry’s cigarette smoke obscures his face as light streams through his blinds; for the near-blinding morning light that similarly illuminates Milligan’s office when Pete pays his fateful visit; for the cold blue-gray glow of the small hours when Paul staggers in from the beatdown Perkins forces him to deliver, a smart, stark divergence from the lighting scheme of pretty much every other scene.I’m impressed with the way the show tied the Perkins story line, which seemed like a minor conflict driver for Paul, Pete and Mo, into the main plot. I didn’t see that coming — not that a mystery tyro like me ever sees anything coming on this show.The closing credits begin unspooling over an image of a little girl’s shoes catching fire and burning up, a grimly poetic metonymy of the Gallardos’ tragic back story.I enjoyed the contrasting demeanors of Burger and Milligan when they discuss the opposition. Milligan reacts with evident disdain when Burger tells him that Perry passed the bar with only a few hours’ preparation, a fact he imparts in order to impress upon the younger man how formidable his opponent is. Burger wears the unmistakable look of “I’ve made a huge mistake,” in terms of both tangling with Perry and relying on Milligan to take the matter seriously.It’s minor in the scheme of things, but a ton of fun in as a scene: Thanks to the fortuitous placement of his shot glass, Perry discovers that the print number on the crime-scene fingerprint photo is reversed. This helps him uncover the fact that the print was bogus, placed on Brooks’s steering wheel in order to more thoroughly frame the Gallardos. It wasn’t enough for the Gallardos to kill the guy — they had to do so in a way that was guaranteed to be found out. Whoever hired them gilded the lily, and now the case against the Gallardos is weaker. When the judge says that “the jury will disregard” Perry’s statement about the fingerprint’s being planted by the cops, Perry simply murmurs, “No they won’t,” under his breath, and he’s right.My favorite bits of physical acting this week: Chris Drake as Paul, wincing with misery every time he has to take a fist to Ozzie, and Katherine Waterston as Miss Aimes, matter-of-factly raising her leg to kick shut the front door when Perry shows up for a little romance.Oh yeah: Della and Anita are now officially in love. So that’s nice! Unless you’re Della’s girlfriend, I guess. More

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      ‘Saturday Night Live’ Tackles the Trump Indictment

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      The episode, hosted by Quinta Brunson, envisioned the former president going to unusual lengths to pay for his legal defense.Two days after Donald J. Trump was indicted in New York, marking the first time that a U.S. president, sitting or former, has faced criminal charges, “Saturday Night Live” envisioned Trump going to unusual lengths to pay for his legal defense by selling his own album of musical covers.“S.N.L.” also used its Weekend Update news segment to lampoon Trump’s legal predicament, as well as the reactions of his political supporters and rivals.This week’s broadcast, which was hosted by Quinta Brunson and featured the musical guest Lil Yachty, began with the show’s resident Trump impersonator, James Austin Johnson, addressing the audience directly.“Well, folks, it happened,” Johnson said as Trump. “I got indicted. Or as I spell it, indicated. Frankly, it’s time that I come clean. Admit that I broke the law and go quietly to prison.”He quickly added: “April Fool’s! That was a prank. I was doing a Jim from ‘Office.’”Johnson went on to pitch a satirical album titled “Now That’s What I Call My Legal Defense Fund,” purporting to offer his versions of hit pop songs.“I didn’t even sleep with Stormy Daniels, but in many ways I did,” Johnson said. “And isn’t it ironic that the first time I actually pay someone, they try to send me to jail?” He then sang a few bars of “Ironic” by Alanis Morissette.Later in the show, on Weekend Update, the anchor Colin Jost began the segment by announcing what he said was “great news for conservatives: New York Is finally cracking down on crime.”He continued, “Former President Donald Trump was indicted for his role in paying hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels. And the trial will be like a Stormy Daniels movie, because I’m deeply ashamed at how excited I am to watch it.”Given the unprecedented nature of the news events, there’s no exact blueprint for “S.N.L.” to follow here. The show made its debut a year after Nixon’s resignation, and in the time since, it has variously capitalized on or discounted other executive controversies depending on how near to airtime they occurred, as well as other factors in the cultural mix.In a Jan. 9, 1999, broadcast that aired a couple of weeks after the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Clinton, “S.N.L.” opened with a sketch that lampooned two Republican lawmakers who lost their posts during Clinton’s deepening sex scandal.In the sketch, Bob Livingston (Will Ferrell) and Newt Gingrich (Chris Parnell) meet at a bar and commiserate. “He lies about it, under oath,” Parnell laments. “Then we prosecute him and he’s still in the White House and we lose our jobs.”On that show’s Weekend Update, then-anchor Colin Quinn joked that Clinton should attend his own impeachment trial projecting confidence, “with a big-haired, tube-topped Ponderosa waitress with a Marlboro menthol hanging out of her mouth, just like, ‘Hey, what’s up, boys? Heard you talking about me. You don’t take me down — I take you down.’”Two decades later, in the first “S.N.L.” broadcast that followed the House’s vote to impeach President Trump for the first time, the show was more focused on the return of Eddie Murphy, a cast alumnus who had returned to host.That episode, on Dec. 21, 2019, opened with a parody of a Democratic presidential debate. On Weekend Update, Colin Jost delivered a somewhat time-sensitive joke about then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to not transmit the articles of impeachment to the Senate.“Now we’re all in this weird limbo where no one knows exactly what’s going on,” Jost said. “There’s this cast of wild characters making fools of themselves, and everyone is thinking, please God, just let this end. So basically, it’s ‘Cats.’” (Again, it was 2019.)Both the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and the House vote to impeach Trump for the second time took place during an “S.N.L.” hiatus. When the show returned on Jan. 30 of that year, Jost remarked on how distant these events already seemed in topical-comedy time.“Well, guys, a lot has happened since our last show,” he said on Weekend Update. “Some of it was good. The inauguration, that was nice. Christmas, I liked Christmas, and hey, now the terrorist watch list includes white people. So yay for diversity. Yay for diversity, it’s important to see yourself represented.”In this week’s opening sketch, Johnson sang duets with Don King (Kenan Thompson), Afroman (Devon Walker) and Donald Trump Jr. (Mikey Day). He went on to tell the audience, “Folks, if they can come for me, they can come for you too. Or in the case of Jan. 6, they can come for you and not for me. I like that one a little bit better.”Opening monologue of the weekBrunson, the creator and star of “Abbott Elementary,” used her first-ever “S.N.L.” monologue to take some apt potshots at “Friends” (“Instead of being about a group of friends, it’s about a group of teachers,” she said. “And instead of New York, it’s in Philadelphia. And instead of not having Black people, it does.”)Though Brunson lamented the fact that she’s now expected to solve any problems that come up in public schools, she also praised real-life teachers including her mother with a video assist from “my friend Barack,” also known as former President Obama.Fake commercial of the weekAt a time when true-crime documentaries about cults are providing the foundation of nearly every streaming TV library, “S.N.L.” added its own entry to this seemingly limitless trend.This fake filmed ad for a would-be Netflix mini-series chronicles another arcane American institution that demands total loyalty from its participants: being a bridesmaid. The ritual is described by talking heads played by Brunson, Heidi Gardner, Ego Nwodim and Sarah Sherman, who looks especially horrified as she recounts how a single text from a maid of honor — ending with a sparkle emoji — was enough to compel her to sell her car.Weekend Update jokes of the weekAfter rebounding from an April Fool’s prank in which Che had told the “S.N.L.” studio audience not to laugh at Jost’s jokes, the anchors continued to riff on the political response to a shooting attack at a Christian elementary school in Nashville.Che began:In the wake of the Nashville shooting, President Biden once again called on Congress to pass an assault weapons ban. Or, hear me out, stop-and-frisk for whites.Jost continued:Congressman Andy Ogles, who represents the district where the Nashville shooting took place, is being criticized for a Christmas card where he and his family are holding assault rifles. OK, even putting aside mass shooting, who are you psychos sending these cards to? If I received that in the mail, I would move. All that card tells you is, “I’m armed, I have terrible judgment and I know where you live.”Weekend Update desk character of the weekFollowing the news that the principal of a charter school in Florida was forced to resign after students there were shown Michelangelo’s David during a lesson on Renaissance art, Michael Longfellow could have responded in any number of ways.He could have appeared on Weekend Update playing an aggrieved parent or a student from the school. But instead, he chose to play David — not the biblical figure but the statue itself, for which Longfellow proudly went bare-chested with his face and body painted a marbly white. We applaud his commitment to the bit and we hope the coloring washes off in the shower. More

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      ‘Succession,’ Season 4, Episode 2 Recap: The Serious People

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      Logan Roy does not care about any of your social norms, and he lacks the patience for apologies.Season 4, Episode 2: ‘Rehearsal’Here’s what you need to know about Logan Roy: He does not care about any of your social norms or niceties. In last week’s “Succession,” while his kids were stealthily trying to outbid him for Pierce Global Media, Logan did not bother to play their little games. He demanded that Tom call Shiv to find out what was what — and he did it in a room full of Waystar executives, so Tom could not say no. Logan never minds coming off as rude or presumptuous. Manners are a waste of time, which is a waste of money.This week, the younger Roys are at it again, weighing a pitch from the maverick Waystar board members Stewy Hosseini (Arian Moayed) and Sandi Furness (Hope Davis) to gum up the works with the impending GoJo sale. So what does Logan do? He does not wait patiently and politely to see what will happen — heavens, no. He crashes a karaoke party.Logan spends a lot of this episode in places no one wants him to be. Apparently, without telling anyone — except for maybe Kerry and Tom — Logan has made a plan for how to spend the rest of his life. Once Waystar is officially sold to GoJo, he is going to dedicate himself to “fixing” ATN, because the only part of his business that he has every really cared about is the news.He shows up unannounced at the ATN offices late one afternoon and starts “terrifyingly moseying” around, according to Greg. (“It’s like ‘Jaws’ if everyone in ‘Jaws’ worked for Jaws.”) Logan complains to Tom about how much everything costs, from the air conditioning bill for ATN’s new hangar-style bullpen to the fresh pizzas being stacked atop the unfinished cold pizzas in the break room. (“There’s a sog factor,” Greg weakly explains.)In a stirring and terrifying speech — delivered to the assembled employees from atop some boxes of printer paper — Logan proclaims his vision for ATN. A state-of-the-art election package with spiffy new graphics? Who cares? What Logan wants is for his team not just to report the news but to make it. He wants them to start giving the audience “something everyone knows but nobody says.” It is time, at last, for brutal honesty.So it is inevitable really that Logan ends his night facing some of that honesty himself from two of the people with the biggest grudges against him: Kendall and Shiv. (But not Roman. We will get back to that.)The showdown is set up by a couple of typically petty Logan moves. The kids are supposed to helicopter into New York City for Connor and Willa’s wedding rehearsal, but their father cancels their Waystar chopper privileges with no warning. This infuriates Shiv, who is already fuming because he advised Tom to tie up every notable divorce lawyer in New York, so that they are all “conflicted out” from handling her case — a classic Logan breakup move. (“I got Mommed,” Shiv grumbles.)The vibes are even worse in the city, where just as Kendall, Shiv and Roman are walking in late to the rehearsal dinner, Willa is ducking out. Connor explains that when his fiancée rose to give a speech, she said, “I can’t do this,” and then disappeared into the bathroom. Connor is now mopey and anxious, and tracking Willa’s whereabouts via a locator app on his phone. Roman, incapable of letting a prime opportunity to needle a loved one go unheeded, revels in describing what kind of decadent escapades Willa might be up to. (Connor, when the app shows Willa at an aquarium supply retailer: “Is that a drug thing?” Roman: “It is.”)To cheer Connor up, they indulge his longstanding dream to sing karaoke at a “real” bar “away from the Fancy Dans,” just like people do in the movies. But while Connor is in the middle of an impressively miserable version of Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” — an impressively miserable song — the kids get the alert that Logan is on his way.Because Logan knows everything — in this case, thanks to Connor — he knows his children are thinking about squeezing GoJo’s Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) for more money. He is also convinced that deep down, this is personal for them not business. He needs to give them something they want more than money: an apology.But an apology for what? Logan wants to limit his regrets to some of his minor recent obnoxiousness. But Kendall and Shiv, who have had enough of their father’s pretending to atone one day then going back to being awful the next, want him to acknowledge his biggest sins: ignoring Connor, hitting Roman, weaponizing Tom against Shiv, conspiring with the kids’ mother to push them out of Waystar … everything, basically.Logan sees no point to this, so he abruptly ends his family reconciliation time with a gentle but devastating kiss-off: “I love you, but you are not serious people.” Only after he leaves the karaoke bar does Logan start raging, ranting to Kerry about how in New York there are “rats as fat as skunks.” He then pivots back into Logan mode, deciding to cancel the board meeting and to meet with Mattson again, with every major Waystar player there except Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron). He wants to skip the procedural hoo-hah and settle this person to person.Shiv and Kendall seem almost giddy that they got to tell the old man off to his face — though later as they ride home separately, only Kendall is still smiling. And Roman?Well, it turns out Roman has been texting little “hey how are you” messages to his father for weeks. So after the karaoke fiasco, he drops by his dad’s home and immediately gets roped into the big Mattson plan. Logan needs “pirates” like Roman to lead his new ATN. “Smart people know what they are,” he tells his son.This is something Shiv and Kendall have missed, as they have been dragging Roman from one Logan-skewering plan after another and treating him like their mascot. They think their brother is the George Harrison of their band. But when pushed, Roman stares them down and straightens them out, proclaiming — with a confidence that should frighten them — “I’m John.”Due diligenceThe best running gag in this episode — just edging out how Kendall keeps pestering Roman with snackable bits of Buddhist philosophy — involves Kerry’s audition to become an ATN anchor. She has produced a terrible tape. (For some reason she keeps smiling at all times, even when reporting on a child abduction.) Tom, tasked with figuring out what to do about this, gravely tells Greg that the situation is “like Israel-Palestine, except harder and much more important,” before passing the buck and offering a step-by-step guide for how Greg should handle it. But when Greg tries to follow those steps, he botches it. His best attempt to soften the suggestion that her tape is awful is to say, “It can happen that they shoot weird, the cameras.”A serious question for serious people: Why do the Roy children even want to be in the news business? News is Logan’s passion. The children, based on all available evidence, seem baffled by its appeal. While watching some PGM programming and brainstorming about how to improve it, they sound completely lost. Shiv only knows they should “broaden out and stop over-indexing to college professors.” Kendall tosses out jargon like “from global-global to hyperlocal” but when he tries to clarify what he means all he can come up with is, “Every day: What is happening in Africa?” And as a bit of possible foreshadowing, Roman comes closest to imagining something like his dad might want when he proposes info-dumps in the day and “A Clockwork Orange” at night.The younger Roys do a lot in this episode to torpedo any sympathy viewers might be nurturing for them. When they follow Connor into one of his non-Fancy Dan bars (where he sighs, “Ah, America! I’ve missed you.”), Roman mutters, “Do you think they know how to make a vodka tonic?” while Shiv chuckles, “House red? Do I dare?” Later, Roman seems bemused and repulsed by the plastic menus listing basic pub food like wings. The Roys’ contempt oozes … and it stinks. More

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      ‘Hot Ones’ Was a Slow Burn All Along

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      This YouTube talk show’s premise is simple: Disarm celebrities with deep-cut questions and scorchingly spicy wings. Nearly 300 episodes later, the recipe still works.Bob Odenkirk was dubious when he walked onto the set of the long-running YouTube interview show “Hot Ones” last month. He was, after all, about to take on the “wings of death,” as the lineup of treacherously spicy chicken is called.“I’ve heard such good things about the show,” Odenkirk told Sean Evans, its even-keeled host, once cameras were rolling, but “I think I’m perfectly capable of talking without having a part of my body injured.”Despite peppering the interview with a couple of F-bombs, Odenkirk, the Emmy-nominated actor from “Better Call Saul” and “Breaking Bad,” underwent a familiar shift: He’d warmed up — emotionally. Particularly after wing three, when Evans, quoting a 1989 Chicago Tribune article, asked him about his one-man show “Half My Face Is a Clown.”“That was far more entertaining and fun than I thought it would be,” Odenkirk said in the closing credits through spice-induced coughs.“Hot Ones” — a breakthrough pop-culture phenomenon in which stars eat 10 progressively fiery wings (or, increasingly, a vegan substitute) while being asked 10 deeply researched questions — has built itself into an online pillar, holding steady amid the shifting tides of digital media.Since 2015, First We Feast, the food culture site that produces “Hot Ones,” has aired nearly 300 episodes, almost all of which have amassed millions of views. Guests this season, its 20th, include Pedro Pascal, Bryan Cranston, Jenna Ortega and Florence Pugh. In the early days of the show, guests were mostly rappers, comedians and athletes. Now Oscar winners like Viola Davis and Cate Blanchett often occupy the hot seat, as do headliners like Dave Grohl and Lizzo. The two most watched episodes, with Gordon Ramsay and Billie Eilish, both in 2019, have a combined 165 million views. The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson popped in to discuss our place in the universe, and its place in us.Bob Odenkirk, the star of “Better Call Saul,” conquered the “wings of death” in March, during Season 20 of the show. Peter Fisher for The New York TimesEvans uses his affable, unassuming approach to his advantage, with his deep-cut questions disarming guests, as the wings set them ablaze. Often visibly suffering, the guests are swiftly won over by Evans’s knowledge of their careers and his uncanny ability to keep conversations on track, even when they come dangerously close to going sideways.When he asked Josh Brolin why the Geva Theater Center in Rochester, N.Y., was special to him, Brolin responded, “Literally the greatest questions I’ve ever been asked. Seriously. I’m blown away. I don’t know who’s working for you, but don’t fire them.” (Turns out, it’s the small theater where he earned his stripes as a character actor.)In recent years, “Hot Ones” has edged itself into the big leagues: with spoofs on “The Simpsons” and “Saturday Night Live,” and Daytime Emmy nominations for Evans and the show. Its influence seems to have rippled down into the bevy of late-night or online segments that test celebrities one way or another: “Seth Meyers Goes Day Drinking” or Vanity Fair’s lie-detector series.Since its start, Evans said, “We’ve lived through like four different new media generations over that time, and we’ve been able to ride those rocky waters just in like the smoothest way.”The show could have easily been pigeonholed as a novelty or gimmick, but Evans and Chris Schonberger, the co-creator and executive producer of “Hot Ones,” say its steady ascent is a product of their dedication to the craft of interviewing and, perhaps unexpectedly, to linear TV: New 20-30 minute episodes drop on Thursdays. “‘Hot Ones’ is a little bit of like a sitcom from the ’80s or ’90s,” Evans said, comparing its cozy watchability with “The Office” or “Friends.”Schonberger calls “Hot Ones” a “true Venn diagram,” where today’s emphasis on viral formats overlaps with time-tested journalism. “It’s rooted in doing the research, trying to be factually accurate, trying to be broader than the gossip of the day,” he said. Its North Star has always been to answer the classic question, “What would it be like to have a beer with that person?”Peter Fisher for The New York TimesDomonique Burroughs, now a senior producer for “Hot Ones,” has been with the show since the start.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesThis is all so much more than Evans, 36, and Schonberger, 39, could have fathomed when the idea was born almost a decade ago.First We Feast, started by Complex Networks in 2012 and led by Schonberger, was struggling to catch up to legacy food brands like Gourmet Magazine or Bon Appétit, with their thousands of recipes or restaurant listings. Then, in 2014, digital brands pivoted hard to video. “It was this amazing flattening of the landscape,” Schonberger said. “Suddenly we were not way behind the starting line, and we also had this brand that could credibly speak to pop culture and not just food.”And with platforms like YouTube evolving, Schonberger said, “People were looking for something to puncture the veneer of celebrity — how interviews were becoming more experiential and gamified.”“‘Hot Ones’ was just the dumbest idea of all time,” Schonberger said, only half-joking. “How is it, philosophically, that the dumbest idea is the best?”“It’s like, well, we can’t just have people get drunk or high,” he went on, “but I think we can get people to eat spicy food, which might just be hilarious.”“Hot Ones” started selling its own hot sauces in 2016, and in 2022, it sold more than two million bottles.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesPeter Fisher for The New York TimesThe N.B.A. star Shaquille O’Neal was a guest on the show in 2019.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesCasting someone formally was not in the budget, Schonberger said, so he went hunting for onscreen talent “down at the end of the hallway.” And there was Evans, who had been hosting segments for Complex News, playing golf with Stephen Curry, for example, or eating Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson’s diet.In the beginning, the show had a more contentious, unhinged quality (like a “Wild West U.F.C. barroom,” as Schonberger put it). Publicists, Evans said, would bring in their client, “half apologizing for it in front of us.” Conversations that Evans had during Season 1 (which didn’t feature any women) — like when he used numerous expletives during a question to Machine Gun Kelly about his relationship with Amber Rose — would not fly today.In 2018, Charlize Theron’s episode kicked open the door for top-tier female guests, like Scarlett Johansson and Halle Berry, previously difficult to book in part because of the show’s unconventional, unproven concept, which hadn’t quite broken out of its bro-centric box.Evans, left, with the creator of “Hot Ones,” Chris Schonberger. “How is it, philosophically, that the dumbest idea is the best?” Schonberger has asked himself over the years.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesIf you’ve pictured Evans going into hiding for a week before each interview to consume every part of his upcoming guest’s career, you wouldn’t be wrong. But he also gets a lot of help from his brother, Gavin Evans, the show’s researcher, who compiles a dossier on each celebrity that might be 50 pages long — no magazine profile, podcast interview, IMDb entry, Wikipedia page or archived local news story is left unplumbed.Sean Evans, a Chicago native who grew up admiring Howard Stern, David Letterman and Adam Carolla, turns out to have a knack for demystifying celebrity. Near the end of his interview, the Oscar nominee Austin Butler, who told a touching story about riding roller coasters with his late mother, hugged Evans, saying, “I’ve made a new friend that I hope stays in my life for a long time.” The night after Grohl’s episode, in which the two drank an entire bottle of Crown Royal whisky, Evans attended a friends-and-family Foo Fighters show.Despite consistently trending on YouTube, the show has managed to maintain some level of underdog appeal. Maybe it’s that a team of around 10 people has worked on it since its inception. This includes a hot sauce curator: Noah Chaimberg, the founder of the Brooklyn-based small-batch hot-sauce shop Heatonist. The lineup of sauces changes every season, but a mainstay is the brutal Da’ Bomb Beyond Insanity, a turning point in nearly every interview. The final wing tops two million on the Scoville scale.Or maybe it’s the unchanging bare-bones set: an all-black liminal space akin to the Looney Tunes void.The set was “a byproduct of us being broke,” Evans said, but it’s been a boon to the show. Though it often films in New York or Los Angeles, “we can pop that set up wherever,” Evans said, as when they traveled to Hawaii to interview Kevin Hart or London for Idris Elba. “The restrictions of the show became a superpower,” Schonberger said.The bare-bones “Hot Ones” set was originally “a byproduct of us being broke,” Evan said.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesSchonberger and Evans said that cable networks and other platforms have expressed interest in buying the “Hot Ones” brand, but they have prioritized their control over it, staying with YouTube and expanding their reach by creating and selling hot sauces (first conceived as a keepsake for superfans, then broadened exponentially to meet demand). They have had collaborations with Shake Shack, Reebok and Champion sportswear. And in 2021, Hot Ones started selling chicken bites in the freezer aisles of Walmart.And while “Hot Ones” wasn’t created with social media in mind, it is “made for it,” Schonberger said, with each wing being its own two- to three-minute segment designed to have a beginning, middle and end. Then come the reaction GIFs and compilations, which rack up millions of views on TikTok, along with videos of fans trying the sauces themselves.“We’ve just continued to focus on making the whole as good as possible and having faith that once it’s out in the world,” Schonberger said, “it belongs to the internet, and they’re going to find their ways to have fun with it and amplify it.” For the duo, who are admittedly bullheaded about their vision, the future will look a lot like the present.“I don’t really have these world takeover plans or aspirations. I think I’m just happier being a duke or being a baron on my little corner of the internet,” said Evans, who has eaten thousands of wings onscreen. “Hopefully I can just sustain this as long as my stomach will allow.”Peter Fisher for The New York Times More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘La Frontera’ and ‘The English Patient’

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      This week we’re watching a docuseries about the U.S.-Mexico border, the Oscar-winning 1996 film starring Ralph Fiennes and lots more.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, April 3-9. Details and times are subject to change.MondayBill T. Jones, right, in “Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters.”Rosalynde LeBlancCAN YOU BRING IT: BILL T. JONES AND D-MAN IN THE WATERS 8 p.m. on WORLD. “AfroPop: The Ultimate Cultural Exchange,” a documentary series about life across the African diaspora, is kicking off a new season with an exploration of the legacy of the choreographer-director Bill T. Jones’s seminal ballet, “D-Man in the Waters.” At the height of the AIDS epidemic, the disease ravaged the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, taking the lives of its co-founder, Zane, and the dancer Demian “D-Man” Acquavella; this dance was inspired by a series of group improvisations as a reflection of the troupe’s struggles and losses. Through the intercutting of vintage recordings of the Jones/Zane company and present-day footage of students learning the ballet — Jones drops into rehearsals to offer feedback — the film is a “passionate and moving” exploration of the dance piece’s endurance, writes Glenn Kenny in his Critic’s Pick review for The New York Times.LA FRONTERA WITH PATI JINICH 9 p.m. on PBS. This award-winning docuseries featuring stories from the U.S.-Mexico border is back for a second season, with the show’s Emmy-nominated host and executive producer, the chef Pati Jinich, expanding her travels to the Mexican states of Baja California, Sonora and Chihuahua. In addition to showcasing the culture and cuisines of these areas, the series will also cover how timely issues like L.G.B.T.Q. rights, climate change and immigration play out in the regions.TuesdayMartin Smith, right, with Taliban officials in “America and the Taliban.”FRONTLINE (PBS)AMERICA AND THE TALIBAN 10 p.m. on PBS. This three-part documentary series from the award-winning producers and directors Marcela Gaviria and Martin Smith (“In Search of Al Qaeda”) draws upon 20 years of reporting and new interviews with American and Taliban officials to tell the story of modern U.S.-Afghanistan relations. The series begins with the Sept. 11 attacks on New York City and follows the U.S.’s attempt to destroy Al Qaeda, ending with the Taliban’s 2021 takeover of Kabul.WednesdayGROWING BELUSHI 9 p.m. on DISCOVERY. The actor and comedian Jim Belushi (younger brother to the late actor comic John Belushi), his family and his team of farmers at Belushi’s Farm are back after building a cannabis business in southern Oregon from scratch in the first two seasons of the show. The third season follows Belushi and his crew as they work to turn their business into a national brand, documenting the high jinks and hiccups along the way — like a fire that destroys the farm’s barn, drying facility and half a million dollars’ worth of cannabis.ThursdayRalph Fiennes in “The English Patient.”Phil Bray/Miramax FilmsTHE ENGLISH PATIENT (1996) 5:15 p.m. on FLIXe. Based on the 1992 Booker Prize-winning novel of the same name by Michael Ondaatje, this Oscar-winning film is set in WWII-ravaged Italy in a bombed-out monastery, where a combat nurse, Hana (Juliette Binoche), is caring for an amnesiac, English-accented burn patient (Ralph Fiennes), scarred beyond recognition. The film intersperses scenes of Hana’s budding love for Lt. Kip (Naveen Andrews), a Sikh sapper in the British Indian Army, with the English patient’s flashbacks of his own tragic love affair. In her review for The Times, Janet Maslin described the movie as a “dreamlike, nonlinear tale” that “swoops gracefully from past to present, from one set of lovers to another, from the contours of the body to the topography of the desert sands.”FridayTHE LEGACY OF J DILLA 10 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. on FX. This feature from The New York Times Presents series is a portrait of the revered rap producer, J Dilla, who died in 2006 at the age of 32. Born in Detroit as James Dewitt Yancey, J Dilla was a prolific music producer who left an indelible mark on the hip-hop landscape through his original work and collaborations with artists like Erykah Badu, Busta Rhymes, A Tribe Called Quest and D’Angelo. Through exclusive interviews with his family and those close to him, the documentary explores J Dilla’s life and why he has been celebrated far more since his death than during his life.SaturdayHumphrey Bogart, left, and Ingrid Bergman in “Casablanca.”AP FILE, via Associated PressCASABLANCA (1942) 8 p.m. on TCM. Set during World War II, this Academy Award-winning film focuses on Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), an American expatriate and the owner of Rick’s Café Américain, a shady but popular nightclub in Casablanca, Morocco. The film follows the dilemma that arises when the thief Guillermo Ugarte (Peter Lorre) gives Rick travel papers he plans to sell later, only to die in police custody before doing so. Now Rick must decide whether to give them to the woman who broke his heart, Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), and her husband, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), a Resistance leader escaping German officials. Bosley Crowther described the film as “a rich, suave, exciting and moving tale,” in his review for The Times.SundayFrom left, Weezer band members Brian Bell, Patrick Wilson, Rivers Cuomo and Scott Shriner at the “Grammy Salute to The Beach Boys” in Los Angeles.Sonja Flemming/CBSGOSPEL SUPERFEST EASTER JAM 5 p.m. on BET. Some of the biggest names in gospel music are coming together in Ohio to celebrate Easter Sunday. This worship and music event will feature performers such as Pastor Donnie McClurkin, Deitrick Haddon and Le’Andria Johnson.A GRAMMY SALUTE TO THE BEACH BOYS 8 p.m. on CBS. Members of the Beach Boys — Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, David Marks and Bruce Johnston — are featured guests at this event celebrating the group’s win of the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. The tribute event at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles will feature live performances by Andy Grammer, Beck, Fall Out Boy, Weezer and John Legend, in addition to appearances by Tom Hanks, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen and John Stamos. More

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      Heidi Gardner Celebrates Easter … Candy

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      When she isn’t making audiences laugh on “Saturday Night Live,” she’s hanging out with girlfriends, admiring the flowers at 30 Rock and cheering for the Kansas City Chiefs.Heidi Gardner has developed a knack for portraying women in troubled relationships, dialing up the melodrama until she gets a laugh. On “Saturday Night Live,” where she has been a cast member since 2017, she sometimes plays Angel, “every boxer’s girlfriend from every movie about boxing ever,” according to the show’s Weekend Update anchors, who is perpetually threatening to take the kids to her sister’s.“I was around a lot of interesting characters growing up that were going through pretty intense things in life,” Gardner, 39, said in a phone interview last month. “But when that’s your life, there’s some comedy in that, too.”The same can be said of the Apple TV+ series “Shrinking,” which stars Jason Segel as a grieving therapist. One of his patients is Gardner’s Grace, who is in an abusive relationship. Both of them get plenty of chuckles.“I happen to find a lot of comedy in tragedy,” she said.Gardner, who grew up in Kansas City, Mo., talked about her go-to comedian, the decades-old TV show she discovered during the pandemic and why Easter candy is the best candy. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Brownies From a BoxFoods are constantly being elevated, but I never want a brownie that’s not from a box. When I have a brownie that’s from outside of the box, I’m like, yeah, this just isn’t it. And I have a feeling that most people agree with me. A brownie is to be made at home from a box with burnt crispy edges. Yeah, try and elevate it, but the box is still going to be better.2‘The Virgin Suicides’I first read the Jeffrey Eugenides novel when I was a teenager, almost like proving myself: I read the book, and I’ve seen the movie, and it’s this cool thing. But I loved it. Reading it as an adult, the language he uses stuck out to me from a more mature place. The way he describes things are feminine, they’re nostalgic, they’re girlie, they’re womanly, and they bring me so much joy.3Jack BlackHe’s my guiding light of comedy. When I was in college, he started blowing up in “Orange County” and “Saving Silverman,” and I was a massive fan of his band, Tenacious D. To this day, if I really need to laugh, I’ll go on YouTube and look up, like, his first Conan appearance. I can’t not laugh at him and find him completely enjoyable. He’s the most reliable source of comedy I think I’ve ever had in my life.4Girls Night Out, Let’s Have Fun ClubWhen I was a kid, my mom had a group of five friends who called themselves the Girls Night Out, Let’s Have Fun Club. They’d go to a bar on a Friday night, they’d take trips to San Francisco, and sometimes they’d have lingerie parties where a saleswoman would come to one of their houses with a rack of lingerie, negligees and teddies. They would try things on, have drinks and have so much fun. I’ve had a couple hangs like that recently with some friends, and I’ve thought: Oh, this is Girls Night Out, Let’s Have Fun Club. This is what my mom was doing. Part of my essential life is having good girlfriends.5‘Dallas’ RerunsWhen I was stuck at home during the pandemic, I started watching “Dallas” for the first time. I loved it. So many of the plot twists shocked me. I’m so jealous of people that were watching it as it was happening, back at a time where there were so few channels. It’s amazing that now we can watch whatever we want any time, but back then there was some limit to conversations. A lot of people were doing the same things, and I like that.6CowgirlOutside Times Square, there’s not a lot of accessible chain restaurants here in New York like I grew up with in the Midwest. But Cowgirl in the West Village has a lot of the comfort food we would get when we went out to dinner when I was a kid. They have a chicken fried steak, they have onion rings, and I love the tartness of their frozen margaritas. They taste like you’re drinking straight concentrate.7Stargazer LiliesGrowing up, my parents were divorced, and my dad used to take me to the flower shop in Kansas City to pick out flowers for his dates and get me flowers as well. We would step into the walk-in cooler full of flowers, and it was the best smell ever. I loved how chilly it was. His go-to flower was the Stargazer lily, a big, blooming, excessive pink and white flower. Every few weeks at 30 Rock, they change out the flower display at one of the main entrances with Stargazer lilies. If I see them when I walk in on a Saturday, I think, ‘Ooh, this is going to be a good show.’ I get why my dad would buy them for a woman he was trying to impress.8Easter CandyI think Easter candy is just the best and most joyful candy: It’s bright, it’s colorful, and the things that you get for Easter are more rare and better than the candy you get for Christmas, Halloween and Valentine’s Day. I think a Cadbury Creme Egg is an incredible, rare gem, and the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in egg form are better than any other formation of Reese’s.9Le Grand StripC.C. McGurr, the owner of this vintage store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, pulls things for me that I wouldn’t immediately think will look good on me, but I always try them on because it’s neat when someone sees something in you that you don’t see. She hits estate sales and gets the back story on some of the clothes. So, when I’m trying on a feather robe that I don’t have any use for except that I like how I feel in it, she’s telling me about the previous woman who owned it — about the woman’s closet and how she arranged her scarves.10Kansas City ChiefsI have a few tattoos that I got when I was, like, 21, but I really have no reason for them now. Lately, I’ve been thinking maybe I’ll get the number 15 — Patrick Mahomes’s number — just somewhere really small, because the Chiefs are something I’ve never grown tired of. I love them. More

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      In ‘Beef,’ Road Rage Is Only the Beginning

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      LOS ANGELES — In the upcoming Netflix series “Beef,” Steven Yeun plays Danny Cho, a struggling handyman in Los Angeles who becomes embroiled in a road rage incident with Amy Lau, a wealthy entrepreneur played by Ali Wong. Over 10 episodes, their simmering hatred fuels an escalating series of poor decisions, setting off a bizarre chain of retribution including but not limited to robbery, vandalism, catfishing and bad Yelp reviews.The show was created by the writer Lee Sung Jin (“Dave,” “Two Broke Girls”), who first worked with Yeun and Wong on the animated series “Tuca & Bertie.” (Yeun and Wong played a robin and a song thrush who are lovers.) Around the same time, Lee was involved in a road rage confrontation in Los Angeles that would inspire his new series.“Beef” is Lee’s first outing as a series creator and showrunner. It also features Yeun’s first regular role on live-action TV since his character, Glenn, was killed off “The Walking Dead” in 2016. Glenn’s gruesome murder sparked viewer outrage but things worked out great for Yeun, who has since appeared in acclaimed films like “Minari,” which brought him an Academy Award nomination for best actor, and “Burning.”Lee and Yeun are set to work together again on Marvel’s forthcoming “Thunderbolts” movie, their first forays into the MCU: Lee as a writer, Yeun in a yet-to-be-revealed role.On an afternoon in March, Yeun and Lee got together at the Apple Pan, a beloved hole-in-the-wall burger joint on L.A.’s west side. Over hickory burgers, fries and slices of pie, they talked about how they met, the inspiration for “Beef” and their Korean church connections. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.In “Beef,” Yeun and Ali Wong play strangers who become embroiled in a bitter feud.NetflixTell me about the “incident.”LEE SUNG JIN I was getting on the 10. The light turned green and I didn’t go right away, and a white BMW X3 starts honking like crazy, pulls up next to me and [the driver] says a bunch of [expletive] at me. I was like, That’s not OK — I’m going to follow him home. In reality, I wasn’t actually going to follow him; I’m not that courageous. But back then I lived in Santa Monica — when we both got off at Fourth Street, I’m just commuting home, but I’m sure he was like, Oh my God, this guy is following me.I thought there was something interesting there, how we’re all locked in our subjective world views, and we go around projecting a lot on the other person and not really seeing things for what they are.How did you two first meet?LEE We actually met through Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. I was doing their pilot “Singularity” for FX, and I had really wanted to work with Steven. Seth and Evan are huge fans of his. [To Yeun] I don’t know how they knew you.STEVEN YEUN I don’t either. I guess maybe comic book worlds? Just me being in “Walking Dead” and them being fans of that world. And being gracious people, too, they invited me over to their house one time and properly smoked me out.LEE So Seth and Evan [introduced Lee and Yeun]. And after that first meeting, we had you and your wife over at our place. I was with my now-wife, and I remember feeling like we were going to know each other for a while. There was just something very comforting and familiar. We have very similar backgrounds.YEUN We’re not from the coasts. And we’re Korean. And we’re working in this business.Playing his character in “Beef” was “almost therapeutic,” Yeun said. “How do we see the world when you’re living in this space of, like, This place is designed to crush me?”Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesLEE And we both came up in the Korean church.How did you come up with the character of Danny?LEE I’m sure there’s a lot of me in Danny, but I think there’s a lot of all of us in Danny. I knew I wanted this guy to have a chip on his shoulder. I knew he lived in Reseda. I had just bought a home, and I was hearing a lot of funny stories about handymen and contractors shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to their work.YEUN Danny was an interesting thought experiment — it was almost therapeutic. How do we see the world when you’re living in this space of, like, This place is designed to crush me? I’m pretty sure all of us feel that way to some degree.What was that like to play for 10 episodes?YEUN I was pretty exhausted most days; you’re kind of living in a hypervigilant state. But I also relate to that life. I never dreamed I would be in this position in this business, and I think that makes you learn how to avoid things that could potentially harm you. For me, that seems like a very immigrant lens.Have you had road rage?YEUN Oh for sure. I think anybody who tells you that they haven’t is a liar. But my road rage is usually contained in my car.Yeun plays a handyman with a chip on his shoulder.Andrew Cooper/NetflixWong plays a wealthy entrepreneur.Andrew Cooper/NetflixThe series revolves around this relationship between Danny and Amy, but you aren’t together physically for much of it. What was that like?YEUN It was exciting, because you would hear the rumblings of how shooting was going on the other side. And I’m sure she was also hearing the other side. But then every time we would get together, it was very electric.I could see you and Ali getting into it, just as people.YEUN There’s good electricity between Ali and I.LEE They’re very similar, but opposite in a lot of ways — I mean that in the best way. We’re all close friends but I think when you have that, it does cause electricity.Much of the series takes place in parts of Los Angeles you rarely see on TV, including a Korean church in the Valley, complete with a praise team.LEE I’ve actually known Justin Min [who plays the praise team leader] since he was a kid, because his older brother, Jason, was my best friend in college. When Jason moved out to L.A., Steven, before “The Walking Dead,” went to the same church as him and was in the praise team.Jason actually arranged all the praise team songs in the show, and we prerecorded the music with this amazing producer, Ariel Rechtshaid, who does, like, Beyoncé and Adele. Jason is a pastor now, and he pulled his actual praise team from his church, and there were extras from that church who knew you, remember? There were these little kids going, “Uncle Steven!”YEUN That week was really fun, because we shot at an actual Korean church in Chatsworth. There was something very nostalgic about that week.“I thought there was something interesting there, how we’re all locked in our subjective world views,” Lee said about the incident that inspired the show.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesL.A. has always had plenty of road rage, but the problem got even worse during the pandemic. To what extent is this a Covid series?LEE We wrote it during Covid, and we were seeing headlines like: “Because of Covid, road rage up.” So yeah, it was in the air.But even aside from the rage, the thing that gets exacerbated with Covid is this sense of isolation and loneliness. When Amy talks to George in the intimacy exercise scene about this feeling she’s had forever, that came from me telling the writers’ room about my own low points. I was talking about my goddaughter, Lily — she was 4 at the time — and how I just hope she never has this feeling, and I started crying because it was very sad to think that she’s going to have to deal with it. I think that the show is really getting at the core of this feeling that a lot of us can’t escape.Do you ever wonder why you got so mad during the encounter that inspired this show? Or is it a common thing for you?LEE Um, yeah, I think I should probably reflect on it more.YEUN I think you’ve done quite a lot of reflecting!LEE Well, I’ve definitely thought a lot about not just that incident but why I am the way I am. And why any of us are.It’s easy, in writing, to point to one thing and be like, Oh, it was this trauma in my past, like, A leads to B leads to C. But that’s just not how we work. The lines aren’t straight — it’s very wiggly, and there’s a lot of stuff. I think that’s what the show wants to explore: That it’s not one thing. It really is about how hard it is to be alive.Is that BMW driver going to see a picture of you and go, Hey, that guy made this into a TV show?LEE No, I was wearing sunglasses.YEUN Also, that guy probably gets into five of those a day. He’s telling somebody off because they didn’t go fast enough? That guy lives in that space. More

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      Netflix’s ‘Transatlantic’ Tells of World War II Rescues

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      A Netflix series dramatizes the efforts of Varian Fry, an American who helped save some 2,000 people from the Nazis without his government’s support.When Anna Winger, the co-creator of the new Netflix series “Transatlantic,” relocated to the vibrant French port city of Marseille last year, she found a dilapidated villa awaiting her. The “relic,” as she called it, was ideal for her purpose: the recreation of the Villa Air-Bel where, early in World War II, a dapper American named Varian Fry oversaw an extraordinary rescue operation for artists and writers, most of them Jews, hounded by the Nazis and the Vichy government of occupied France.Arriving in Marseille in mid-August, 1940, determined to help those in danger after witnessing the abuse of Jews in Berlin in 1935, Fry had to battle not only the French authorities and Nazi ideology, but also his own risk-averse United States Consulate in Marseille.Improvising at a time when the United States had not yet entered the war, Fry, a rebel in a suit, navigated a narrow path until his forced departure in late August 1941. He was determined to secure safe passage and overseas visas for the thousands of “foreign undesirables” who soon came knocking on his door.Among the some 2,000 people he rescued were the artist Max Ernst, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt and the German novelist Heinrich Mann.In his book “Assignment: Rescue,” written after the war, Fry wrote of Nazism that “I could not remain idle as long as I had any chance at all of saving even a few of its intended victims.”For many years, Winger had been obsessed with the story of “this man alone doing something very brave,” she said in an interview. In 2018, she started working on the project, and in 2020, she optioned Julie Orringer’s novel “The Flight Portfolio,” which became the basis for the fictionalized events in the series.Winger, who created the shows “Unorthodox” and “Deutschland 83,” lives in Berlin, where “as a Jew you think of these stories all the time,” she said. Her parents, both anthropologists, were Harvard professors and “a lot of people in the generation above them were refugees from Europe.” For her, “the impact of the emigration made possible by Fry is immeasurable in its influence on midcentury American thought.”Filming on “Transatlantic” began in Marseille in early 2022; war broke out in Europe just a few days later. With millions of refugees eventually pouring out of Ukraine, the moral dilemmas of conflict that the series explores felt particularly pertinent. “For all of us, it was top of mind and seeped into our daily lives in Marseille,” Winger said. She would go home to a Berlin dealing with a vast influx of refugees.The show captures not only the life-or-death seriousness of Fry’s mission to save refugees of another war, but also something of the louche, living-on-the-edge drama of a city that has always been a crossroads, and in 1940, unlike the northern half of France, was not directly occupied by German troops.Filming on “Transatlantic” began in Marseille in early 2022, and war broke out in Europe not long after.Anika Molbar/NetflixThe Marseille that Fry and his motley team of driven young anti-Fascists encountered had something of the freewheeling intrigue captured in “Casablanca,” another story of people suspended by war in a foreign place, aching in limbo for love and visas. Inevitably, money and sex — the currency of clandestine escape — have their place in “Transatlantic.”“We try to be true to the history but also make fun by working with it in a heightened way,” Winger said. The degree of fictionalization in the series has already caused controversy; Sheila Isenberg, the author of a book on Fry, called the show a “travesty.”Much of this pushback has been focused on the decision to depict Fry having a gay relationship. In 2019, James D. Fry, his son, wrote a letter to The New York Times stating that “My father was indeed a closeted homosexual.” He was responding to a New York Times review by Cynthia Ozick of the Orringer novel that said of Fry, “there is no evidence of homosexuality,” contrary to the novel’s portrayal of him.“We consider the letter from his son, James Fry, to The New York Times to be the last word on the subject,” Winger said via email.In the show, Fry, played by Cory Michael Smith, works closely with Mary Jayne Gold (Gillian Jacobs), an American heiress who brings her money, energy and connections to the mission, as well as with Albert O. Hirschman (Lucas Englander), a German Jewish intellectual who would become a distinguished American economist.Their activities meet the stern disapproval of the American consul general in Marseille, Hugh S. Fullerton (renamed Graham Patterson in the show), who is played by Corey Stoll. Fullerton, hewing to the then-neutral State Department line, wants to keep the United States out of the war. His vice consul, Hiram Bingham IV (Luke Thompson), thinks otherwise, however, and he quietly helps Fry with travel documents, some of them fraudulent.The interactions between these characters, their relationships and ruses, their hopes and hypocrisies, form the narrative backbone to “Transatlantic.”Mary Jayne Gold (Gillian Jacobs) and Graham Patterson (Corey Stoll) have a dalliance on the show, even as he is resistant to the team’s rescue efforts.Anika Molbar/NetflixOne night last spring, Winger shot scenes featuring Jacobs and Stoll in the recreated Villa Air-Bel, on the outskirts of the city. The consul, a loyal diplomat incapable of an act of rebellion against State Department policy, has a dalliance with the heiress, “that has a transactional nature to it, a question of getting people out,” Stoll said.They embrace. They argue. He wants to spend the night with her. She asks him to leave. Over and over the actors played the scene until Winger was satisfied that the exchange between the pair achieved the right degree of sparring and sexual tension.Fry and Gold may be on the same side, but they bicker a lot. To play the central character, “I spent a lot of time reading about Fry, going to Columbia University, where all his papers are,” Smith said in an interview in Marseille. “He was unassuming and demure, which I appreciate, yet he burned with a contrarian courage that led him to row against the tide.”A literary journalist, enamored of European writers and artists, Fry was 32 when he arrived in Marseille. He had been sent to France from New York by the newly formed Emergency Rescue Committee (the forerunner of the International Rescue Committee), established by American and German intellectuals. With him he brought a list of people to rescue, including Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton and Alma Mahler, who would eventually escape across the Pyrenees carrying Symphony No. 10, the last work of her former husband, Gustav Mahler.Fry thought he could get the job done quickly. But as Alan Riding wrote in his book “And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris,” Fry found himself in a “no man’s land of Gestapo spies, corrupt French police and refugees galore.”Initially installed at the Hôtel Splendide, Fry quickly gathered a talented team of volunteers. Continuously hounded, detained for several days in late 1940, Fry faced off with Fullerton, the American consul, who repeatedly advised him to leave or face arrest, and in January 1941 refused to renew Fry’s passport unless he returned to the United States.To the U.S. authorities at the time, Fry was a troublemaker, his effort to protect Jews and anti-Nazis a renegade operation undermining a craven official policy.The events portrayed in the show are many-faceted, Smith said, but a core truth is inescapable: “There were civilian heroes before our government was ready to step in.”Initially installing himself at a hotel, Fry far right, quickly gathered a talented team of volunteers.Anika Molbar/NetflixJacobs, who plays Gold, a sometime pilot of impetuous courage, said she found the part fascinating for its multiple dimensions. Gold makes mistakes, and her relationship with Fry is sometimes tense. He “views her as too impulsive, while she sometimes thinks he is too cautious,” Jacobs said, and yet, Gold’s moral core is clear: “She knows what she does is the right thing to do.”Englander, the Austrian actor who plays Hirschman, another of Fry’s volunteers, said in an interview on set that filming the show made him reflect on his family’s own history.“We never spoke of our Jewish past,” he said. “Grandpa had to run away — that was all we said in my family.” When Englander came to lines in which Hirschman speaks about his past before fleeing Germany, he said: “I felt my grandfather so strongly. I needed minutes of crying and coffee and cigarettes to recover. Now, I feel a compulsion to give something to life and help today’s refugees.”Fry never ceased in his search to find ways out, until he was hounded out of the country after 389 days. He was told by the Vichy police, with the apparent backing of the American consul general, that he had “gone too far in protecting Jews and anti-Nazis,” Riding wrote in “And the Show Went On.”Back in the United States, Fry wrote a groundbreaking article for The New Republic in 1942 titled “The Massacre of the Jews.” It had little effect. The slaughter continued, with Western powers doing their best to look away.Anna Winger, a creator of the show, left, was obsessed with Fry and his story for many years before she started working on the project.Anika Molbar/NetflixWriting and teaching, Fry lived out the rest of his life in relative anonymity, and died at the age of 59. It was only in 1967 that France honored him with a Légion d’Honneur, the country’s highest order of merit.During production, Smith found himself thinking about Fry as an American hero defying his own government.“There’s a real fight in America about exceptionalism, about what it means to be an exceptional nation,” he said. “Is it loving your country unyieldingly? Or is it taking a scalpel to it and looking at it honestly. This show is asking people to look realistically at our history.” More