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      ‘The Consultant’ Review: When Your Start-Up Goes to Hell

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      Christoph Waltz plays a very, very bad boss in a dark tech-industry satire from Amazon Prime Video.“The Consultant,” an amusing trifle on Amazon Prime Video that burns through most of its dark-comic capital before its eight episodes are up, is set during a critical moment at a tech company: when new, “competent” management takes over for the brilliant but callow founder.It’s a Tim Cook-Steve Jobs scenario — there’s even a scene involving a sledgehammer, to reinforce the Apple connection — with a twist that both gives the show its satirical energy and limits the reach of its dark humor. The evil new boss, a silver-haired suit named Regus (Christoph Waltz), is actually evil: He arrives, like Old Scratch, with a contract and finagles the leader of a struggling video-game company into signing it, thereby bartering away the business. (The young technocrat doesn’t appear to have a soul to give up.)“The Consultant” was created and written by the British screenwriter Tony Basgallop, based on a novel by Bentley Little, and it is in the vein of his previous American series, “Servant” on Apple TV+. Basgallop dresses up basic horror premises with curlicues of mordant, deadpan humor, and creates an ambient pea soup of unease that, for his well-employed but economically insecure young characters, constitutes a reign of terror. Key to the formula is the coy refusal to specify whether what we’re seeing is supernatural malevolence or simply really bad behavior.“Servant,” a creepy-babysitter drama that counts M. Night Shyamalan among its executive producers, succeeded in its early going largely on the basis of Lauren Ambrose’s antic, fearless performance as a frantic tiger mom. “The Consultant” doesn’t have that kind of energy at its center — Waltz, recycling his oddball cultivated-creepy persona for the umpteenth time, is amusing but not much more as the coldblooded, possibly diabolical capitalist.You can’t really blame Waltz, though, because there’s not much to the character beyond the idea of boss as devil. Basgallop and his collaborators, who include the director Matt Shakman (“WandaVision”), seem to have started with that notion and then worked, with diminishing results, to stretch it out in a way that didn’t answer any questions and left open the possibility of a second season.The satire of the tech industry is microchip thin, though often clever in its specifics. The almost entirely faceless staff of CompWare are uniformly indolent and feckless; Regus, who knows nothing about the product or the business, treats the office as a jungle and sets the workers against one another like players in one of the company’s games. In an industry that prides itself on its unconventionality, he’s the real chaos agent. But he’s also an unrepentant Luddite, or maybe just an ancient soul — he refers to a phone as “your hand device” and lovingly, manually sharpens a long row of pencils. (The pencils, like the stairs leading to Regus’s office, are a suggestive blood red.)Just a handful of performers, besides Waltz, have roles of any significance. His primary co-stars are Brittany O’Grady (“White Lotus”) and Nat Wolff (“The Stand”) as Elaine, an executive assistant, and Craig, a coder. They are the only employees who bother to act on their suspicions of Regus, whose plans appear to extend beyond CompWare in lurid and possibly apocalyptic ways.Their investigation of him provides most of the show’s plot as well as a semblance of thematic complexity. Elaine is a loyal corporate soldier who tries to temper Regus’s crueler impulses while angling for a better title; Craig is a smart but lazy man-child opposed to any exercise of authority that threatens his good times. (Wolff gives the show’s liveliest performance.) The ability of the two to work together for a larger good is a test of Regus’s beliefs about human nature.Some of Basgallop’s ideas pay dividends — Regus’s tone-deaf commitment to keeping his bargain with the CompWare founder has droll results — and there’s pleasure in the arch, offhand way Waltz puts across his character’s old-world weirdness. (When Regus discovers that one of his employees is lesbian, he tells the assembled work force, “Ursula lies with a woman.”) But Basgallop’s cross of “Silicon Valley” and “The Devil’s Advocate” doesn’t come together because he hasn’t invested sufficiently in the dramatic infrastructure. We’re left waiting for Regus’s mask to come off and wondering if there will be anything there when it does. More

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      Ricardo Darín: Argentina’s Lucky Charm at the Oscars

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      When the country has a nominated film, it has usually starred this veteran. But the actor says other people have believed in his talent more than he has.WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Fortune has long favored Ricardo Darín. More than the subjective concept of talent, it is providence, manifested as other people’s unwavering confidence in his abilities, that the actor credits for his storied career as Argentina’s most celebrated film star internationally.“I’ve had all the luck that my parents didn’t have as actors,” he said in Spanish during a recent interview at the Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood. “Many times, people have valued me far more than I value myself, and I often think, ‘Do I deserve all that?’”The latest example of his relationship with Lady Luck is his turn as the real-life prosecutor Julio Strassera in “Argentina, 1985,” a historical courtroom drama about the Trial of the Juntas, when military leaders were tried for human rights violations during the former dictatorship. Directed by Santiago Mitre, it earned Argentina an Oscar nomination for best international feature film.Darín seems to be his country’s lucky charm when it comes to the Academy Awards. He has starred in all four movies to earn Argentina a nod this century, including “Son of the Bride,” “Wild Tales” and “The Secret in Their Eyes,” which took home the statuette in 2010. And Argentina has also submitted several other Darín-led productions to the academy over the years — meaning that even though they didn’t all make the cut, the films in which he appears are almost synonymous with the best of Argentine cinema.From the first handshake, Darín, 66, radiates a welcoming aura. Casually dressed in bluejeans and a navy sweater, he speaks with a warmth and candor that most people reserve for their closest friends. That temperament translates onscreen.“Ricardo has an immense power to elicit empathy from the audience, and that’s rare,” said the director Juan José Campanella, who has collaborated with Darín on four features.“Ricardo has an immense power to elicit empathy from the audience, and that’s rare,” said the director Juan José Campanella.David Billet for The New York TimesThough the actor inherited a passion for performance from his parents, who were both working actors in Buenos Aires, neither was enthusiastic about his carrying on the family’s craft. “They didn’t fight me on it, but they also didn’t encourage me to do it,” he recalled.Darín thinks of his path as preordained. He was a regular on film and TV sets and theater stages in childhood, first acting professionally at 3 years old in the 1960 series “Soledad Monsalvo.” At 10 he debuted onstage alongside his parents. By the time he attended his first theater workshop at 14, Darín felt like a seasoned veteran who had already experienced many facets of the job firsthand.For a time in adolescence, he contemplated becoming a veterinarian, a psychologist or even a lawyer. But in the end, the world he had always been familiar with persuaded him to stay. Doors opened easily for him, with frequent invitations to participate in a variety of projects.The Run-Up to the 2023 OscarsThe 95th Academy Awards will be presented on March 12 in Los Angeles.Tom Cruise’s Gravitational Pull: Stars were starstruck when the “Top Gun: Maverick” headliner showed up at the Oscar nominees luncheon.Hong Chau Interview: In a conversation with The Times, the actress, who is nominated for her supporting role in “The Whale,” says she still feels like an underdog.Andrea Riseborough Controversy: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why the “To Leslie” star’s nod was controversial.The Making of ‘Naatu Naatu’: The composers and choreographer from the Indian blockbuster “RRR” explain how they created the propulsive sequence that is nominated for best song.That trust from notable people in the industry is what he calls fortune. Darín has dear memories of the television director Diana Álvarez, who got into a fight with a network in 1982 so that he could be part of the show “Nosotros y Los Miedos.” She saw in him potential that others couldn’t.“In our profession, luck is very important,” Darín said. “There are very talented people out there with lots to tell who can’t find opportunities.”In the 1990s, Darín found immense success as the co-star of the sitcom “Mi Cuñado” (“My Brother-in-Law”), playing an impertinent but charming screw-up. His contract restricted him from other TV ventures but allowed him to pursue films. Among them was his first outing with Campanella, “The Same Love, the Same Rain” (1999), which helped other directors see beyond his TV persona.Darín’s academy-nominated films, clockwise from top left: “Argentina, 1985,” “Son of the Bride,” “The Secret in Their Eyes” and “Wild Tales.” Amazon Prime (“Argentina, 1985)”; Sony Pictures Classics (“Son of the Bride,” “Wild Tales”); María Antolini/Sony Pictures Classics (“The Secret in Their Eyes”)One of them, Fabián Bielinsky, cast him in the thriller “Nine Queens” (released in Argentina in 2000) as a sleazy con man. “He told me, ‘I hadn’t thought about you for this role. You are too charismatic, and I don’t want the audience to have any empathy for him,’” Darín recalled.In Campanella’s view, “There’s only one thing Ricardo cannot be, and that is unlikable. The clearest proof is ‘Nine Queens,’ where he plays an amoral crook, but we still root for him.”Campanella’s heartfelt “Son of the Bride” arrived the next year and mined Darín’s comic sensibilities for the role of a restaurant owner dealing with his aging parents.“Once an Argentine critic called him ‘our Henry Fonda’ because he projects great integrity,” Campanella said. “But he has something that Fonda didn’t, which is a great sense of humor.”Darín maintains that it was the one-two punch of “Nine Queens” and “Son of the Bride” that cemented his film career.“It was a great calling card for an actor to have the possibility of showing two absolutely opposite facets almost at once,” Darín said. “Even though I was already well known for TV and theater, that’s when I started to feel my colleagues were seeing me in a better light.”Since then, Darín has enjoyed his choice of roles, including Campanella’s acclaimed “The Secret in Their Eyes,” in which he starred as an investigator haunted by a gruesome, unresolved case.Another of Darín’s personal favorites is the dramedy “Truman” (2017), centered on a terminally ill man spending his final days alongside his best friends — one human and one canine. His wry character reminded Darín of his late father, also named Ricardo Darín, whom he described as a peculiar Renaissance man with an acid sense of humor and wild ideas that others found difficult to digest.Hollywood has reached out a handful of times, but he has declined, mostly because the most difficult thing for an actor to do is to think in another language, he said, adding that close-ups reveal when someone is reciting from memory rather than inhabiting an emotion.“I’ve always trusted my gut, more than my heart or my head,” Darín explained, then added, motioning to his stomach, “I trust in how the material hits me right here.”Hollywood has come calling, but Darín is largely uninterested because, he said, thinking in another language is the most difficult thing for an actor to do.David Billet for The New York TimesIn Argentina, his turn in Damián Szifron’s “Wild Tales” (released stateside in 2015) as a frustrated citizen who fights back against oppressive bureaucracy was widely embraced by audiences. “Ricardo has a lucid outlook on the realities that affect his country,” Szifron said. “He is a popular figure while at the same time being a sophisticated actor.”For “Argentina, 1985,” Mitre and Darín agreed not to mimic the voice or exact mannerisms of the real Strassera, but instead took a degree of artistic liberty in their re-creation.Mitre, who had directed Darín as a fictional Argentine president in the 2017 political saga “The Summit,” said he admired how the actor produces a truthful performance through a synthesis of his own sensibilities and the character’s.“It’s as if the camera could capture him in his entirety, show him in all his complexity,” Mitre said. “Whenever you see Ricardo act, you know there will be great honesty onscreen.”Beyond the positive critical reception of “Argentina, 1985” — and its Golden Globe win — Darín said the film’s most significant effect was making a younger generation aware of a sorrowful chapter in the country’s history.“We can’t forget that behind this reclaiming of the historical event that has brought us a lot of praise and happiness, there’s a deeply painful story about the kind of suffering for which there is no balm,” Darín noted with a solemn expression.His family’s acting tradition is being carried on by his son, Chino Darín, with whom he has formed a production company. The two starred in and produced the 2019 comedy “Heroic Losers.” The elder Darín never opposed his child’s interest in the craft, only advising him to follow the path that would bring the most satisfaction.“I’m one of those people who believe the most important thing in life is to try to be happy,” Darín said. “The closer you are to your vocation, the better chance you have at being happy.” More

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      ‘Party Down’ Gets It: Food Service Is No Party

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      The reboot of the Starz sitcom about the mundane lives of L.A. cater waiters comes at the right moment, when restaurant work has shed much of its glittery image.In their baby-pink bow ties and crumpled white shirts, the catering crew on the Starz series “Party Down” works event after wretched event across Los Angeles: dismal rich-kid sweet 16s and backstage parties for jaded superstars, awkward and unsuccessful suburban orgies, singles seminars for seniors, bland corporate retreats.But none of these workers take their jobs too seriously — catering isn’t their real life, it doesn’t count, it’s just keeping them afloat until their dreams of becoming screenwriters, actors and comedians come true. This means that there is always time for vodka shots (so many shots!), running lines and reading scripts, agonizing over auditions, making out and popping whatever pills might be hidden in people’s bathrooms.The series premiered in 2009, and was canceled after two seasons of abysmal ratings. But it found a cult following gradually, over the last 13 years, and returns this week with a new six-episode season. What really struck me, watching new episodes about my favorite bunch of food-service slackers, is how completely different “Party Down” feels from so much of the chef-focused TV and film that followed its initial run.Though Season 3 does introduce a tormented, misunderstood catering chef, played by Zoë Chao, who believes that food is art and it “should change the way you think and feel,” the show doesn’t fetishize food or cooking at all.Unlike, say, “The Bear” or “The Menu” in which a chef’s fierce intensity and ambition drive the business, “Party Down” features food workers who don’t really care about the job, and the food itself is almost entirely beside the point.In 2009, that seemed like a good read on a microcosm of the Los Angeles catering scene, but now it feels sharper, more perceptive and possibly more honest about food service as a whole. For a generation of workers who survived the pandemic and sought more balanced, healthy lives, the inequities, demands and tedium of the industry have never been clearer.“Party Down” is a goofy workplace sitcom, but it’s also that rare show that centers food-service workers, rather than chefs, owners or wealthy clientele. At the heart of the series is a crew of caterers and the mess of their ordinary, cringe-worthy, tangled-up lives — breakups, financial strains, humiliations. Henry, played by Adam Scott, is an English teacher in the middle of a divorce, who has given up on acting (or has he?). Roman (Martin Starr) is devoted to “hard sci-fi” and still working on his opus, which he started writing on a roll of toilet paper while very high. Ken Marino plays their impossibly optimistic and awkward manager, Ron Donald, who is always on the verge of unraveling.Adam Scott plays Henry, an English teacher going through a divorce, with Jennifer Garner appearing as a producer, catering client and love interest.Leroy and Rose Agency, via StarzIn earlier seasons, clients often romanticized the lifestyles of the young cater-waiters, and the freedom (read: insecurity) of working from gig to gig. “I could have been you,” a wealthy suburban dad tells Henry with a sigh, feeling trapped in his own cushy life. In another episode, a glam-rock star called Jackal Onassis confesses to Henry that he has “a fake life.”“You know what I wish I could buy?” he says. “This! Being you guys. A real guy with an ordinary job.”Henry, who notes that the star will be taken by his driver to a luxury hotel room to party with several women after the event, finds that hard to believe. But Jackal Onassis, out of his stage makeup, perfectly disguised in a white shirt and pink bow tie, loves playing bartender for the evening at his own party. He relishes being insulted by a guest, and later, even enjoys being fired.It’s painful for Henry to see the work he already resents treated like a fun little game, but the show is particularly great at drawing out the brief, intense tensions and alliances that can form over the course of one night between workers and guests. The caterers have a bad habit of getting involved, giving a 16-year-old a pep talk when her friends don’t show up to her party, or attempting to walk a very drunk and disoriented guest home.When the new season begins, years have passed and characters have aged, but they continue to reassure themselves, and one another, that their misery is temporary: Their real job and their real life are just around the corner.Or are they? “Party Down” doesn’t seem to believe in the vague, Hollywood dream of “making it.” The show is more interested in the unlikely sweetness and meaning and friendship that can come from all of the time that’s not supposed to count, moment to moment, day to day, year to year, before some imagined big break.Most of the show’s scenes take place in the liminal spaces of clients’ homes and venues — back kitchens, garages, tents, hallways and lots. The comedy unfolds as the characters cut limes and unpack plates and silverware, light the flames for chafing dishes, put the final garnishes on snacks, or pack up the van and break down the bar.The show, which premiered in 2009, refused to glorify the food industry.Leroy and Rose Agency, via StarzThe story is here, in the prep time and side work. It’s in all of the hours usually skipped over onscreen for being too boring, too repetitive, too unremarkable, so that viewers can get right to the glitter and speed of service — the cooks in fresh whites fussing at the pass, the servers deployed like clockwork.The beauty of “Party Down” is that it has always refused to glorify the food industry, pulling us instead into the endless, unglamorous, in-between time that adds up to, well, something. The profound comedy and tragedy of the absolutely mundane. Or at the very least, a hundred thousand limes, cut into wedges.Henry’s love interest in the first two seasons is Casey, another caterer played by Lizzy Caplan, and she once asked him a question that still drives the show: “How do you know the difference between a dumb job that’s legitimately a dumb job, and a dumb job that gets you somewhere?”The answer is in every episode, new and old: You don’t.Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. More

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      Christoph Waltz Has Some Thoughts

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      Christoph Waltz knows a few things about acting, and he has the Academy Awards to prove it. Yet in a recent conversation, he made light of the skills required.“I don’t believe in good actor, bad actor,” he said. “If you’re playing an interesting part in a worthwhile story and you’re cast properly, you’d have to be a complete idiot to not be good.”It is difficult to tell how serious Waltz is when he makes this type of deliciously arch grand statement, just as it is difficult to pinpoint what exactly drives his latest screen creation — the title character of the satirical new Amazon workplace thriller “The Consultant.”Adapted by the “Servant” creator Tony Basgallop from the 2015 novel by Bentley Little, the eight-episode series, debuting Friday on Prime Video, tells the story of a video game studio after the sudden, violent death of its young founder, which sends the company into a tailspin. Out of nowhere, an off-putting stranger named Regus Patoff (Waltz), who claims to be a hired consultant from Crimea, appears and takes over. It is obvious immediately that something is a little off — or maybe a lot.Like many of Waltz’s best known characters, Regus is unfailingly soft-spoken and courteous — even when firing a guy for how he smells — as was Waltz, himself, on a recent morning in the Drawing Room of the Greenwich Hotel, in Lower Manhattan. And yet there is usually a wry edge to what he does, which often plays as ruthless in his characters, not least the two for which he won Oscars: an SS officer in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” and a bounty hunter in Tarantino’s “Django Unchained.”His character stays true to form in “The Consultant,” which he described as “the first series that I’ve done.” That isn’t entirely accurate — he has had many guest spots and he had regular roles in a few European series decades ago — but it is the first time Waltz, 66, has carried a modern Hollywood series, and with a role so thoroughly Waltz-like. (A series of Quibi short-shorts in which he starred, “Most Dangerous Game,” has since been condensed into a film.) Regus is as seductive as he is ominous, a frightening mix of outwardly pleasant and subtly menacing, a balance that Waltz has perfected over the years.“On the page the character is very harsh and forthright, but onscreen there’s only so far you can go in being nasty,” Basgallop, who is also the showrunner, said in a video conversation. “You also have to have a lot of charm, which I think Christoph brought to it,”“He never says, ‘I am the boss,’” Waltz said of his character in “The Consultant.” “He just acts like a boss and everybody immediately accepts it,” Waltz said. Michael Desmond/Prime VideoIn person, that edge Waltz brings to his roles is the furthest thing from menacing, but it does make for good sport. He is intellectual, playful, a little mischievous — as likely to challenge a question as to answer it. A man of wide-ranging interests, he quoted or paraphrased Stanley Kubrick, Charles Eames, Albert Einstein, Timothy Snyder, Aristotle and Stephen Sondheim in the course of an 80-minute conversation.In a typical rally, he hit a deceptively gentle lob back over the net after being asked if he had ever felt he nailed a scene or role.“All this market-economy vocabulary: ‘nailed it,’” he said. “Well, if you nail it, where do you nail it to? What kind of nail do you use? Why nail it in the first place? It can’t go anywhere anymore. Wouldn’t it be the goal to keep it flowing?”He leaned back in his seat, smiling like the Cheshire Cat.Born and raised in Vienna, Waltz spent decades bouncing around Europe in the workaday worlds of theater and television, doing the occasional film before landing his breakout role, in “Inglourious Basterds,” which debuted when he was 52. At the time, he told The New York Times that after acting in a lot of comedies, playing the villain had become “sort of the flavor of the past few years.”Most of it wasn’t particularly rewarding, but his relationship with Tarantino freed him to combine his facility for both comedy and villainy in more interesting ways — and to be choosier. It also brought him to Los Angeles, where he has been living full-time since the mid-2010s. (Just before the pandemic, he added American citizenship to his Austrian and German ones: “I very much believe in this old dictum of no taxation without representation,” he said, “and I wanted to be represented because I pay a lot of taxes here.”)With a successful run of films with some of the world’s biggest directors under his belt (Wes Anderson, Guillermo Del Toro and Cary Joji Fukunaga among the most recent), he hesitated, at first, to sign on for a TV show. Television requires a particular leap of faith, he said, that films do not.“They ask you to do a whole series but you don’t get anything but the pilot,” Waltz said. It was an experience he had never had before, and he described it with an unlikely metaphor.“The fastest animal is an alligator, but only for five meters,” he informed me. “So I thought, ‘What kind of alligator is that, jumping at me?’”Waltz has credited his analytical approach to acting, in part, to the technique of script interpretation taught by Stella Adler, to which he was exposed during a stint in New York beginning in the late 1970s. In his analysis, the power of his character in “The Consultant” rests in little more than people’s eagerness to follow someone who assumes an air of authority.“He never says, ‘I am the boss’ — he just acts like a boss and everybody immediately accepts it,” Waltz said.He segued to Representative George Santos of New York, who has built a career on brazen lies and self-confidence — but is still standing, even after being exposed.“He should be sitting in a quiet corner, hoping that this thing passes,” Waltz marveled with a gleam in his eye, like a gourmand about to dig into a particularly elaborate dessert. “Now it is pathology, clearly.”Waltz is interested in what makes people tick, but that doesn’t mean he wants to find an explanation or a meaning behind every decision he makes as an actor. Or at least he doesn’t want to dwell on it publicly.“I don’t talk about the process — or sometimes have a, let’s say, ironic distance to disclosing the process — because it’s a very personal thing,” he said. “You follow inklings that you don’t know where they’re coming from.”Regus is the latest in a line of roles in which Waltz deploys an unshowy virtuosity: He does a lot with little. (“It’s about the viewer, not the actor,” he said. “I’m not interested in seeing the actor work; I’m interested in forgetting about the actor altogether.”) Still, getting there takes plenty of experimentation and conversation that you don’t see onscreen. Waltz’s colleagues described him on set as collegial, honest and down to earth.Waltz takes an analytical approach to acting, preferring not to talk too much about his “process,” or at least to have “an ironic distance” when disclosing it. Erik Tanner for The New York Times“When he speaks, you listen because you know it’s heartfelt — you don’t think he’s trying to sell you something or trying to convince you of something,” Basgallop said. “He brings that to his characters as well — someone who has a very strong intellect but is also very calm and measured.“For some reason I think human beings find that terrifying: We’re programmed to be scared of someone like that because they can outthink us.”It’s tempting to draw parallels between Regus’s hold on the video game company’s staff and the one the best actors have on their audiences — and, evidently, on some of their colleagues.In a phone conversation, Nat Wolff, 28, who plays a coder, recalled shooting scenes in which his and Waltz’s characters take off on a bonding expedition. At the end of a busy day, Wolff said, Waltz volunteered some feedback.“He turned to me and he said, ‘You were …’ He took a long pause while I felt my anxiety rising, and then he went ‘ … exquisite today,’” he said. “I really wanted to get his approval, like a paternal figure.”The anecdote illustrates Waltz’s dry humor and precise timing, as well as the way he envisions the best conversations: as impish dialectic. Wolff recalled telling Waltz that he had wanted to get a puppy.“And he said, ‘Think about it from the puppy’s point of view,’” Wolff said, imitating his co-star’s German accent. “‘You’re going to be off on set and the puppy is going to be thinking, Where’s Nat?’”“So I didn’t get a puppy,” he added, laughing. “Whatever Christoph says, you listen to and you follow.” More

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      How Hard Is It to Paint Like Vermeer? TV Contestants Find Out.

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      Amateur and professional artists are competing to recreate some of the old master’s lost works in a Dutch reality show that coincides with a blockbuster Vermeer exhibition in Amsterdam.Here’s the assignment: Recreate a painting that doesn’t exist, based only on a description jotted down centuries ago. And also: Make it look like a Vermeer.That’s the starting bell for a Dutch reality TV show, in which two professional painters and dozens of amateur artists compete to reinvent the lost works of the 17th-century master. The results are judged by Vermeer experts from the Rijksmuseum, the Dutch national museum in Amsterdam, and from the Mauritshuis, a collection of old masters in The Hague.The show, “The New Vermeer” (“De Nieuwe Vermeer”), which began on Feb. 12, is timed to coincide with a blockbuster exhibition of the painter’s work at the Rijksmuseum, featuring the largest collection of his works ever shown. But the hourlong TV show is aimed, in part, at viewers who might not feel comfortable walking into a museum.The mash-up of highbrow culture and mass entertainment has been an instant sensation in the Netherlands, with 1.3 million viewers (in a country of 17 million) tuning in for the first episode. The six-episode series ends March 19.Two contestants, Maudy Alferink and Nard Kwast, center, conferring with Abbie Vandivere, right, a conservator from the Mauritshuis museum who is another of the TV show’s judges.Omroep MAX“This program scores better than most of the other programs we broadcast — documentaries and drama series included,” said Jan Slagter, chief executive of Omroep MAX, which broadcasts the series. “What’s important is that it’s about art and culture, but that it’s made in a very accessible way,” he noted.The success of “The New Vermeer” reflects surging interest in the artist during the Rijksmuseum run, said Pieter Roelofs, the exhibition’s curator and one of the TV show’s judges. “The idea that people from all around the globe are arriving for this exhibition makes the Dutch understand that this is really something special,” Roelofs added. Vermeer “is beloved, and now people want to know more.”The museum sold out the more than 450,000 tickets for the Vermeer show in less than four days — a response that Roelofs compared to a pop concert or sporting event.Roelofs said that the museum was working on finding ways to release more tickets, either by extending opening hours or by allowing more visitors through the doors for each time slot. Additional tickets will be released on March 6, and they’re likely to be snatched up quickly.The Rijksmuseum sold out the more than 450,000 tickets for its Vermeer show in less than four days.Melissa Schriek for The New York TimesThose lucky enough to get in will see 28 Vermeer paintings, about three-quarters of the 35 or so works that still exist. It is known that Vermeer painted at least six more paintings, which have subsequently been lost. Some of them haven’t been seen since the 17th century, and one was stolen from a museum decades ago and never recovered.The premise of “The New Vermeer” is for contemporary artists to bring those works back to life.There are two categories of artists who compete. For each episode, producers have chosen two professional painters, who go head-to-head to create a painting that looks like something Vermeer might have painted. They were given four months to complete the task, with guidance from art experts and curators who provided them with tips and clues about Vermeer’s painting techniques, materials, and the props he used.Each episode also features four amateur artists who create modern interpretations of the missing work, competing in what they call the “free category.” They can work in any style they wish, and the resulting images are judged on how well they reflect the spirit of Vermeer’s work.Two artworks — one from each category — are selected as winners in each episode. The judges are Roelofs, from the Rijksmuseum, and Abbie Vandivere, a Mauritshuis paintings conservator who has spent years studying that museum’s most famous item, “Girl with a Pearl Earring.”The show’s experts give contestants tips and clues about Vermeer’s painting techniques, materials, and the props he used.Mark de Blok/MAXWe know about five of the missing Vermeer works only because they were described in inventories or auction records from around the time of the artist’s death, in 1675, Vandivere said.Two famous urban scenes painted by Vermeer still exist, for example: “View of Delft” and “The Little Street,” both currently on display in Amsterdam. But a 17th-century auction catalog notes that he painted a third, described only as “a view of some houses in Delft.” In Episode 2, the contestants attempted to recreate this work, which they referred to as “The Second Little Street.”Another Vermeer painting, “The Concert,” hung in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston until 1990, when it was stolen in one of the world’s largest unsolved art heists. It has never been recovered. In Episode 4, artists will try to recreate that work based on photographs.Slagter, the broadcasting executive, said that focusing on Vermeer’s missing paintings allowed viewers to engage their imaginations. “Everyone who watches the show, young and old, can use their own fantasy to imagine a painting that doesn’t exist,” he said.Part of the fun of the show is cheering on the amateurs, who hail from across the Netherlands and work in different styles, using stained glass, printmaking and even Lego. To recreate the Vermeer street scene, one artist used small pieces of driftwood; another arranged knickknacks and childhood toys into a three-dimensional assemblage.The weekly live TV broadcasts are supplemented with a podcast, an online gallery of all the works featured on the show and an invitation to viewers to send in their own contemporary interpretations of Vermeer, which are shared on the show’s website.The six winning amateur artworks from each episode will be displayed at the Museum Prinsenhof, which is housed in a former church in Delft, Vermeer’s hometown. The winning paintings created by the professional artists will be exhibited at the Mauritshuis.Nard Kwast, a painter from the central Dutch city of Apeldoorn, won the professional category in the first episode with an oil painting of a domestic scene that Roelof said reminded him of Vermeer’s famous “The Milkmaid.”“What’s really Vermeer-like in this picture is the light, and you’ve done that so beautifully,” Vandivere commented when judging the work.Nard Kwast’s reimagining of a lost Vermeer painting that won him the professional category in Episode 1.DeNieuweVermeer.nlIn an interview, Kwast said that he had been fascinated with 17th-century painting techniques since the age of 8. He now works as a painter who produces pieces in the style of the 17th-century masters, creating replicas of paintings by Rembrandt and Ferdinand Bol, for example, on commission for private clients.Kwast said that he couldn’t really imagine a higher honor than to see his contemporary painting hang alongside the old masters.“It wasn’t my neighbor who was saying my work was good — it was experts from the Rijksmuseum and Mauritshuis,” he said. And to have his work compared to Vermeer’s? “This is the biggest compliment you can possibly get,” he said. More

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      ‘Star Trek: Picard,’ Season 3, Episode 2 Recap: Another Next Generation

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      Jean-Luc Picard has not traditionally been much of a family man, but that may be changing.Season 3, Episode 2: ‘Disengage’Um, wait, what? WHAT?!A lot happened in this episode, but I’m mostly focused on the ending.Jean-Luc Picard and Beverly Crusher had a kid together?And that son, Jack, is named after Beverly’s first husband? The one who died and was a close friend of Jean-Luc’s?Let’s break this down, because it is an interesting revelation on several levels. Before “Picard,” Jean-Luc had long kept his career at the forefront of his existence, at the expense of family and love. The closest he came to embracing a family came in the classic episode “The Inner Light,” where Picard is struck by an energy beam and somehow lives the life of someone completely different. It showed Jean-Luc what his life could have been. Romance has historically been rare for him, though there have been some brief flings, including Anij from “Star Trek: Insurrection,” but never officially with Beverly.Also, Jean-Luc has generally hated children. In “Encounter At Farpoint,” the “Next Generation” pilot, he lectures Beverly that children aren’t allowed on the bridge — which is amusing now given that in the future, she will be the mother of one of his children. (Let’s not forget one of the worst written lines in “Trek” history: Picard yelling, “Shut up, Wesley!” to Wesley Crusher.)There was the time Jean-Luc was turned into a child, in the hilarious “Rascals” episode. And he also seems to be a father figure to his nephew René, who dies in “Star Trek: Generations.”Picard was married to the Enterprise. He never seemed to want more than that.But people grow and change. Look at Beverly, who has spent several years traversing the galaxy as a rogue doctor with her son. In some ways, she was the most levelheaded member of the Enterprise crew. She was rarely impulsive and always thoughtful, which made her an ideal match for Jean-Luc. So it must have taken something serious for her to evolve to this.In “Picard,” Jean-Luc appears to be more interested in being a father and family generally. He has a romance with Laris and is essentially a father figure to Dahj, her twin Soji and Elnor.But Jack being Jean-Luc’s son raises many questions. Did Jean-Luc know this whole time about Jack? Or did he find out when he and Beverly exchanged looks on the bridge of the Titan? (This is something likely to be addressed in upcoming episodes, but given the tendencies in the previous seasons of “Picard,” we shouldn’t assume anything.) If Jean-Luc didn’t know, why in the world did Beverly keep the knowledge of a child from his own father and one of her closest confidantes? (In the episode “Attached,” Beverly learns about Jean-Luc’s feelings for her, and that he never acted on them out of respect for her late husband. It’s possible that Beverly kept the knowledge of Jack Jr. from Jean-Luc because of that respect.)Does Jack know? I would guess no based on their conversation while in the brig. (But Jack is professional liar, so again, the assumption thing.) When Jean-Luc asks, “Who is your father?” Jack replies, “I never had one.” I thought I saw a hint of knowing remorse in Patrick Stewart’s face in response, and one could easily interpret Jack’s response as a dig at Jean-Luc for being an absentee father.And what about Wesley?There’s also the matter of Jean-Luc and Beverly actually having been together. That’s never been confirmed until this season of “Picard,” although the creative team more or less revealed this publicly in the summer.Odds and endsCaptain Vadic (Amanda Plummer) makes a solid debut as this season’s villain — she has a sinister cadence, a predatory ship and an apparent unusual familiarity with the old Enterprise crew, as well as Shaw.Maybe this is a reflection on Todd Stashwick’s charming performance, but despite the show’s best efforts to make Shaw seem like a jerk, he really is an admirable captain. Shaw agrees to save Riker and Picard from Vadic’s Shrike at great personal risk to the Titan, even though the pair had duped the ship’s crew and taken them outside of Federation space. Shaw also declines to throw Riker and Picard in the brig, though he would be in the right to do so. (Not to mention the shuttle that Riker and Picard stole, leading to its destruction.) Shaw also continues to let Seven of Nine serve aboard the ship, despite her betrayal of him. And repeatedly, he expresses — very rightfully — his concern for the lives of his crew members.Raffi, apparently now a member of Starfleet Intelligence, has been trying to figure out who attacked a lower-tier Starfleet building. She chooses her profession over her son Gabe — again. But what happened to her relationship with Seven?And it turns out Raffi’s handler is Worf, who promptly beheads the Ferengi Tony Soprano. Quite an entrance, though I fear this may be an example of “Picard” writers opting for short term payoff and forgetting who these characters actually are. Worf moderated the Klingon penchant for violence, particularly as he rose in command in “Deep Space Nine.” So much so that he was actually named ambassador to the Klingon home world at the conclusion of the series. (Then again, Worf did murder the Klingon chancellor Gowron, so maybe he is whatever the plot needs him to be.) I am certainly curious how one of the most famous Klingons in the galaxy — renowned in both Starfleet and among Klingons — ends up working in intelligence.The episode ends with a classic “Trek” trope: An outgunned Starfleet ship sneaking into a nebula to hide. More

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      Richard Belzer Had a Ball With the Relationship Between Comic and Crowd

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      Unlike his TV characters, his live shows were marked by spontaneity and physicality. He could even keep up with Robin Williams line by line.When Richard Belzer did stand-up on “Late Night With David Letterman,” he always entered to the opening riffs of “Start Me Up” by the Rolling Stones, dancing his way onstage, looking like the life of the party in dark shades. Once he arrived at the microphone, he made a point of engaging with the studio audience in a way you rarely saw on television. More than once, he asked, “You in a good mood?” and waited for a cheer. Then his tone shifted: “Prove it.”With that opening pivot, he turned the relationship between comedian and crowd upside-down. The expectation was now on the people in the seats: Impress me.Belzer, who died Sunday, is best known for his performances as a detective on TV, but his acting career was built on a signature persona in comedy, as a master of seductive crowd work who set the template for the MC in the early days of the comedy club. Often in jackets and shirts buttoned low, he cut a stylish image, spiky and louche. He could charm with the best of them, but unlike many performers, he didn’t come off as desperate for your approval. He understood that one of the peculiar things about comedy is that the line between irritation and ingratiation could easily blur.Throughout the 1970s, he ran the show at the buzziest of the New York clubs: Catch a Rising Star, stand-up’s answer to Studio 54. He roasted the crowds while warming them up, quizzing them about where they were from and what they did, establishing rapport and dominance. Long before Dave Chappelle dropped the mic at the end of shows, Belzer regularly did so.If the crowd wasn’t laughing, he could lay on a guilt trip: “Could you be a little more quiet? Because I’m going to have a nervous breakdown.” And if someone heckled, look out. According to a story from the comic Jonathan Katz, one night someone in the crowd yelled, “Nice jacket!” and Belzer responded that he got it on sale in his mother’s vagina.Belzer didn’t get famous as quickly as many of his peers, but he was a cult figure with wide influence in comedy. You can hear his clipped cadences, not to mention his use of the word “babe” as a nickname, in the act of Dennis Miller, who once referred to him as “the dark prince” of Catch a Rising Star. Andy Kaufman’s alter ego Tony Clifton was partly inspired by Belzer (notice the glasses).Even as an MC, Belzer was his own star attraction. He became famous for taking an incredibly long time to introduce a comic. In an interview for a documentary on him that has yet to be released, Belzer recalled once taking an hour and forty-five minutes to bring up the next comic. The writer Bill Scheft, who is producing the movie, said Belzer ad-libbed many lines “that became stock MC lines for others.”Few of Belzer’s live shows were taped, but you can find traces online. An all-purpose showman who could sing and dance, he even did pratfalls while spoofing a hipster pose. One wonderfully goofy bit involved getting his hand stuck while running it through his hair, dragging his whole body down to the ground. He leaned hard on flamboyant impressions including those of Ronald Reagan, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and especially Mick Jagger. There’s a wonderful competitive moment from the 2011 show “Green Room” when, in the middle of a conversation, Belzer gets into a “Jagger-off” with the comic Rick Overton. He triumphs, doing an impression he always called “peacock on acid.”More than any joke, what stands out from a deep dive into Belzer’s online comedy was an attitude: impatient, sarcastic, friendly but quick to jab. There was a percussive sound to his running retorts to the crowd: “Yeah, right, sure.” These move-it-along interruptions had a rhythm and sound that was quintessentially New York. When he dove into a familiar premise, his voice could move from dry to wry in a blink, mocking himself. It’s no wonder that Letterman, another ironist whose attitude perpetually commented on and upstaged his own jokes, booked him so often.Today, crowd work is much easier to see, in specials but also all over social media, where it has become a critical part of marketing and selling tickets for young comics. But in the 1980s, unless you went to a club, you didn’t often find people turning “Where you from?” into spontaneous comedy, so it’s striking that in his 1986 HBO special, he included plenty of such basic interactions. “There’s a lot of parts of New Jersey that are very nice,” he said, responding to one guy from the state. “I can’t think of any right now.”As early as 1978, he opened sets with a touch of hostility, looking up and asking, “Could you make these lights brighter? I’d like to go blind.”Nothing on video displays his stature as much as a 90-minute show celebrating the 10th anniversary of Catch a Rising Star that aired on HBO in 1982. It’s a terrific portrait of New York comedy at the time, with a long bill including Andy Kaufman, Billy Crystal, Rita Rudner and David Brenner, along with the singer Pat Benatar, who was managed by the club’s owner, Rick Newman. Belzer introduces them all, keeping things just sarcastic enough to prevent anyone from taking themselves seriously. Once Joe Piscopo finished a Frank Sinatra impression in full costume and makeup, Belzer marveled: “What an honor. What a surprise. What a man. What a toupée.”At the end, Robin Williams heckled Belzer from the crowd, before going onstage and improvising a series of scenes to close out the night. Whereas Belzer was relatively unknown to the mainstream then, Williams was a giant television star and powerhouse live performer, frenetic and wildly unpredictable. Williams riffed punch lines effortlessly, but Belzer kept up and matched him, line by line. That some don’t land only adds gravitas to the feat, since it proves this was not an act polished for HBO but a real attempt to translate high-wire improv to television.This ephemeral work is not the part of comedy you tend to see in movies or specials, but when done well live, it can be thrilling. And part of the job of the MC is to be alert to the value of spontaneous moments. Belzer understood this as well as anyone.“The greatest thing for me is when I make the audience laugh in a moment that could only happen that night with that audience,” he said in a recent interview. “Sometimes I laugh with the audience because I’m hearing the joke the same time they are.” More

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      Barbara Bosson, 83, Dies; Brought Family Drama to ‘Hill Street Blues’

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      She received five consecutive Emmy nominations for her role as Fay Furillo, the frenetic ex-wife of a police precinct captain.Barbara Bosson, who starred in a half-dozen TV crime dramas from the 1970s to the ’90s but who is best known for her five seasons on “Hill Street Blues,” for which she was nominated for five consecutive Emmy Awards, died on Saturday in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 83.Her son, Jesse Bochco, confirmed her death, in a hospital, but said the cause had not been determined.Ms. Bosson was a relatively unknown actress when she burst through the doors of a police station in the pilot episode of “Hill Street Blues,” the much-lauded police drama that ran from 1981 to 1987. She played Fay Furillo, the frenetic ex-wife of Capt. Frank Furillo (played by Daniel J. Travanti), and she had come to demand alimony, which he was chronically late in paying.Fay’s was supposed to be a one-off appearance, but producers, critics and audiences liked her so much that the writers — including her husband, Steven Bochco, the show’s producer and co-creator — quickly made her a part of the main cast.With its busy camera work and overlapping story lines, “Hill Street Blues” is widely considered a landmark in TV history. Set in a gritty (but unnamed) American city, the show offered a textured take on working-class life that struck a chord with a country in the midst of stagflation and deindustrialization. It was nominated for 97 Emmys, a record at the time for a one-hour drama (it has since been surpassed by “The Sopranos,” “Mad Men,” “ER” and “Game of Thrones”), and won 25.Ms. Bosson’s performance as Fay was central to that success. Her character was difficult and self-pitying, but she was also a hardworking single mother struggling to make ends meet.“Fay is one of those transition women,” she told The Washington Post in 1987. “She grew up in one kind of set of values — she’s not unbright, but she never thought she’d have to support herself. And then she found herself divorced, poor, with a child and real angry.”Ms. Bosson faced accusations that she had won the role because she was married to Mr. Bochco. She brushed them off, but she also said they drove her add depth to the character as a way of showing her creative independence. It was her idea, for example, to make Fay a victims’-rights advocate.Mr. Bochco left the show over creative differences at the end of the fifth season. Ms. Bosson left soon after, claiming that the producers were trying to strip Fay of the endearing qualities she had worked so hard to add.Ms. Bosson went on to star in several more crime shows, including the Bochco creations “Hooperman,” “Cop Rock” and “Murder One,” Her performance as a deputy district attorney on “Murder One” earned her a sixth Emmy nomination.Ms. Bosson at a Screen Actors Guild event in 2005.Mark Sullivan/WireImage, via Getty ImagesBarbara Ann Bosson was born on Nov. 1, 1939, in Charleroi, Pa., about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh. Her father, John, was an aspiring tennis coach who made ends meet as a milkman, and her mother, Doris, was a homemaker. When Barbara was a teenager, her family moved to Gulfport, Fla., where she graduated from high school in 1957.She gained admission to the drama department at Carnegie Tech (today part of Carnegie Mellon University), but it was too expensive for her parents. Instead she moved to New York, where she worked as a secretary and took acting classes at night. She also worked for a time as a hostess at the Playboy Club in Midtown Manhattan.“I put up with a lot of leering men to be able to study acting,” she told The St. Petersburg Times in 1990.She eventually saved enough money to enroll at Carnegie Tech in 1965, but left before graduating to pursue acting. Her classmates included several future “Hill Street Blues” colleagues, among them Mr. Bochco and the actors Bruce Weitz and Charles Haid.Mr. Bochco was married, but he had divorced by the time they met again, in Los Angeles, in 1969. They married at the end of the year.They divorced in 1997. Mr. Bochco died in 2018. Along with her son, Ms. Bosson is survived by a daughter, Melissa Bochco; two grandchildren; and her brother, Richard.Ms. Bosson’s first screen credit was in the 1968 crime thriller “Bullitt,” with Steve McQueen, and through the 1970s she was seen in a series of small TV and film roles. She was also a member of the Committee, an improv troupe.Though she continued to find work in the 12 years between leaving “Hill Street Blues” and her retirement in 1997, she found it increasingly frustrating, with good roles for women her age few and far between.“There’s this wonderful tradition in Hollywood where men as old as 60 or 70 play opposite women of 20,” she told The Washington Post. “The only time you’ll see an older woman with a younger man is if she’s so knock-them-down-dead gorgeous that anybody would go for her.” More