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      Jennifer Shah, ‘Real Housewives’ Star, Sentenced in Fraud Scheme

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      Ms. Shah, who appeared on “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” was sentenced to more than six years in prison for her involvement in a telemarketing scheme, prosecutors said.Jennifer Shah, who gained fame as a cast member on the reality television show “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” was sentenced on Friday to six and a half years in prison for her involvement in a telemarketing scheme that defrauded thousands of victims, prosecutors said.Ms. Shah used the scheme to finance her luxury lifestyle, which included a rented 9,420-square-foot mansion in Park City, Utah, that she referred to as the “Shah ski chalet,” a rented apartment in Midtown Manhattan and a leased Porsche Panamera, prosecutors said.The criminal case against Ms. Shah had been heavily featured on the Bravo reality series, which turned the charges against her into a dramatic plot point.In her tagline for the second season of the show, she declared, “The only thing I’m guilty of is being Shah-mazing.”In court papers, prosecutors cited that line to argue that Ms. Shah had mocked the charges against her.Ms. Shah’s lawyers wrote in court papers that the show was a “semi-scripted, heavily edited facsimile of ‘reality’ intentionally manipulated to maximize ratings” and that it did not accurately reflect her feelings about the case.Her lawyers blamed the show for making it seem, as her sentencing date approached, as if Ms. Shah was “intransigent, defiant, and often even unrepentant, about her actions here.”“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Ms. Shah’s lawyers wrote. “Just as Jen Shah has never been a ‘housewife,’ little else is real about her persona and caricature as portrayed by the editors” of “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.”A spokeswoman for NBCUniversal, Bravo’s parent company, declined to comment.The show, which premiered in 2020, purports to depict women living glamorously while negotiating issues like sex and religion in a city that is home to the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.At her sentencing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Friday, Ms. Shah said she was sorry for her role in the scheme, which prosecutors said had defrauded victims by selling them bogus “business services” that promised to help them make money online.She was ordered to pay about $6.6 million in restitution and to forfeit $6.5 million and 30 luxury items, including designer handbags and jewelry, prosecutors said.In addition to the 78-month prison sentence, Ms. Shah, 49, of Salt Lake City, was sentenced to five years of supervised release.“I want to apologize to all the victims and families and I take full responsibility for the harm I caused and will pay full restitution to all of the victims,” Ms. Shah said, according to NBC News. She added, “I recognize that some of you lost hundreds, and others lost thousands, and I promise to repay.”Prosecutors said that from at least 2012 until March 2021, when she was arrested, Ms. Shah had been a leader of the wide-ranging scheme and had facilitated the sale of leads, or contact information for potential victims.Victims were told during “coaching” sessions that the sessions would help them earn money from online businesses, prosecutors wrote in court documents.Instead, the coaching sessions were designed to convince victims that, to make their internet businesses succeed, they would need to buy additional products and services, which were of little or no value, prosecutors wrote.Many of the victims were over 55 and some reported losing tens of thousands of dollars, depriving them of much of their life savings, prosecutors said.Ms. Shah was not deterred by Federal Trade Commission investigations and enforcement actions or by the arrest of dozens of others involved in the scheme, prosecutors said.Instead, they said, she tried to cover up her criminal conduct by telling others to lie and delete text messages, placing businesses and bank accounts under other people’s names and taking steps to move some of her operations to Kosovo.Before she pleaded guilty in July to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, Ms. Shah sold “Justice for Jen Shah” T-shirts that featured “NOT GUILTY” on the front and “#justiceforjenshah” on the back, prosecutors said.“With today’s sentence, Jennifer Shah finally faces the consequences of the many years she spent targeting vulnerable, elderly victims,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.“These individuals were lured in by false promises of financial security, but in reality, Shah and her co-conspirators defrauded them out of their savings and left them with nothing to show for it,” Mr. Williams said.Prosecutors had asked the judge to sentence Ms. Shah to 10 years in prison. Ms. Shah’s lawyers had asked for a sentence of three years, writing in court papers that she was “an exceptional mother and a good woman who has already been punished extensively as a result of the sins of her past.”“Though Ms. Shah admittedly played an important role in the particular fraud in which she was involved, she was only one of many people involved, was not involved in all facets of the conspiracy, never communicated with any of the victims, and she clearly did not invent this particular fraud,” her lawyers wrote. “Nor was she a mastermind.”Claire Fahy More

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      Jimmy Kimmel Roasts Kevin McCarthy as He Falls Short, Again

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      Kimmel joked that the “last time a Kevin felt this abandoned in his house was in the movie ‘Home Alone.’”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Biden to the RescueAfter three more rounds of voting on Wednesday, Representative Kevin McCarthy still couldn’t get enough support to become speaker of the House.“Who would’ve guessed that a bunch of insurrection apologists would have trouble certifying a vote?” Jimmy Kimmel joked.“McCarthy needs 218 votes from his fellow Republicans to be speaker. He started with 203, he’s down now to 201. The last time a Kevin felt this abandoned in his house was in the movie ‘Home Alone.’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“The last time something like this happened was 100 years ago. And I’ll tell you something, damn it, Joe Biden solved it then, and he can solve it again.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Unpopularity Contest Edition)“As of tonight’s taping, Republicans still have not chosen a speaker of the House after Kevin McCarthy lost his sixth vote in Congress. To be honest, it’s hard to get every Republican on board. It’s like getting 218 friends to agree on where to have brunch.” — JIMMY FALLON“At this point, McCarthy is so unpopular, even Southwest Airlines feels bad for him, you know?” — JIMMY FALLON“You guys can’t even have a red wave amongst yourselves.” — SETH MEYERS“But this is interesting — according to the Constitution, if they don’t have a speaker by tomorrow, the top contenders have to compete in a dance-off.” — JIMMY FALLON“The White House said yesterday that President Biden has no plans to intervene in the House Speaker election after Republican leader Kevin McCarthy failed to secure enough votes during the second ballot to ascend to the speakership — at least not until it stops being hilarious.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingOn Wednesday’s “Late Show,” the country singer Shania Twain shared how isolated she needs to be to write her songs.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightThe actress Laura Dern will appear on Thursday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutMichelle Williams.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesMichelle Williams, the Golden Globe-nominated actress, says her varied career has prepared her to play a nuanced role based on Steven Spielberg’s mother in “The Fabelmans.” More

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      Good Fantasy Writing Is Pure Magic

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      All too often clunky dialogue breaks the spell of CGI-heavy TV epics. To be reminded what language can do by itself, try E.R. Eddison’s novel “The Worm Ouroboros.As I watched last fall’s showdown of TV’s big-money epic fantasy franchises, I was wincingly reminded that language is the most underrated special effect. Unforced errors of word choice — loose talk of “focus” and “stress” in HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” for example — kept pulling me down from my fantasy high and into the diction of emails from human resources. Case in point: “I have pursued this foe since before the first sunrise bloodied the sky,” says the elf warrior-princess Galadriel in Amazon’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.” “It would take longer than your lifetime even to speak the names of those they have taken from me.” She’s adrift on a life raft with a mysterious stranger after a sea-monster attack, and certain dark intimations suggest that eldritch evil draws nigh. So far, so OK, but then her speech reaches its climax: “So letting it lie is not an option.”Clangalang! Descending from a tagline fashioned by writers of the movie “Apollo 13” from something a NASA flight director said, “X is not an option” has become a staple of business-speak and coach-talk. The writers of Galadriel’s speech couldn’t have killed the buzz any deader if they’d followed up with, “I’m all about laserlike focus 24-7 on getting some closure on this whole Sauron thing.” It galls me that Hollywood spends zillions on C.G.I. dragons and cities and hosts on the march, but then from sheer tin-eared laziness or a misplaced desire for “relatability,” allows their wondrous spell to be undone by script screw-ups that any half-competent swords-and-sorcery writer — or reader — could fix overnight for a hundred bucks and a six-pack.With the limitless budget afforded by Eddison’s language, I can outspend even the most obscenely expensive production a thousandfold in my head.To be reminded what language all by itself can do, try E.R. Eddison’s novel “The Worm Ouroboros,” first published in 1922. At some point in the 1970s, I bought a plump Ballantine paperback edition for a dime or two in a used bookstore on the South Side of Chicago. I read it in a fugue state of mounting joy on my way home from school on the Jeffery 6 bus, as I walked from the bus stop to my house, and straight on into the night. Visions filled my head — King Gorice conjuring amid his alembics and grammaries in the Iron Tower of Carcë; wet sands gleaming with the lights of the besieged seaside castle of Owlswick — as I gorged on Eddison’s sentences. The words themselves, even more than the scenes they described, pulsed with possibility and invitation.“The Worm” ranks among the greatest epic fantasies of all time, keeping company with pound-for-pounders like the “Iliad” and the King James Bible, mostly on the strength of its diction, which resembles 16th-century English. So put aside for the moment the story it tells of a great war between the righteous Demons and the nefarious but far more interesting Witches, and put aside as well its characters, world-thinking, action set pieces and the like. They’re all gorgeous, though some readers claim to have trouble with trivial quirks like the merely gestured-at setting on Mercury; the framing device of a traveler from Earth who disappears after a few pages; or the naming of various peoples as Demons, Witches and Goblins. None of that matters anywhere near as much as the language Eddison concocted to take you somewhere extraordinary and keep you gloriously, deliriously there.The novel features the requisite euphonious place names (Zajë Zaculo, the Straits of Melikaphkhaz, Thremnir’s Heugh), swordplay (“Nor had they greater satisfaction that went against Lord Juss, who mowed at them with great swashing blows, beheading some and hewing some asunder in the midst, till they were fain to keep clear of his reaping”) and sorcery (“ ‘Abase thee and serve me, worm of the pit’”). But the book is at its best when characters just go about their daily business. They eat: “When the Lord Corund knew of a surety that he held them of Demonland shut up in Eshgrar Ogo, he let dight supper in his tent, and made a surfeit of venison pasties and heath-cocks and lobsters from the lakes.” They gossip: “ ‘Truly this foreign madam with her loose and wanton ways doth scandal the whole land for us.’” They look up at the sky: “A great wind moaning out of the hueless west tore the clouds as a ragged garment, revealing the lonely moon that fled naked betwixt them.”Hollywood keeps promising that further advances in computer-generated imagery will produce ever-braver new worlds of immersive experience. But our most enduringly potent fantasies consist of words, and part of their potency lies in inviting your imagination to do the work. The more work it does, the more capable it gets. If you had a choice between taking either J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” books or their movie adaptations to the proverbial desert island, which would you choose? Would you take the Old Testament or the Charlton Heston version of it? The films would rapidly become spectacles you’d seen too many times, but you could keep coming back to the books and finding further dimensions, fresh visions, novel experiences in their language-generated imagery.I’m not eager to see a movie version of “The Worm.” With the limitless budget afforded by Eddison’s language, I can outspend even the most obscenely expensive production a thousandfold in my head. His prose can exalt anything into the stuff of epic fantasy, even the contents of a chamber pot: “A bucketful took Corund in the mouth, befouling all his great beard, so that he gave back spitting. And he and his, standing close beneath the wall, and little expecting so sudden and ill an answer, fared shamefully, being all well soused and bemerded with filth and lye.” I wouldn’t trade “bemerded” for all the special-effects magic in this world or any other.Carlo Rotella is a professor of English at Boston College and the author of “The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood” (University of Chicago Press, 2019). More

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      Stephen Colbert Is Thrilled Over Kevin McCarthy’s Troubles

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      “But remember, there’s more important things in life than winning or losing — there’s making fun of Kevin McCarthy for losing,” Colbert said.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Three-peatRepublicans were deadlocked on Tuesday after Representative Kevin McCarthy repeatedly lost his bid to become speaker of the House.Stephen Colbert opened his show by saying he was “0 for 2” on his New Year’s resolutions: “One was to drink less, and the other was to not gloat when bad things happen to Kevin McCarthy,” which he followed up with a big swig of bourbon.“It’s been a day of pure, uncut, Peruvian blue-flake schadenfreude, watching the G.O.P. stab each other in the throat,” Colbert said.“He needs 218 votes to win, but in the first two votes, he got only 203. OK, he lost twice, but you know what they say: ‘Third time’s the — he also lost.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Kevin McCarthy is being held hostage by a group of Republican extremists who don’t believe he leans far enough to the right. He lost three rounds of voting today, even though he’s made multiple offers to these lunatics. He even agreed to cut the Office of Congressional Ethics. This is one of their demands, which is basically like replacing seatbelts with fettuccine.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“You know, I looked it up. Technically, the Constitution does not require the speaker of the House to be an elected member of Congress — it could be any American, which, to me, sounds like the premise for a pretty solid Pauly Shore movie.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“But remember, there’s more important things in life than winning or losing — there’s making fun of Kevin McCarthy for losing.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Reportedly, interns in his office are already expected to call him ‘Mr. Speaker,’ and this weekend, staffers were seen moving his boxes into the speaker’s office. I wouldn’t be in a big hurry to unpack. He may not be great at counting votes, but he’s good at counting chickens before they hatch.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Catfish Edition)“George Santos was sworn in today as a member of the House of Representatives in the state of New York. And not, as he originally claimed, Pandora.” — SETH MEYERS“Santos just got elected in New York, and we recently learned that during the campaign, he lied about — and I’m rounding down here — everything.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“For starters, during his campaign, Santos claimed to have attended both Baruch College and New York University, but neither school could locate records to verify his claims. So, he may not have graduated, but he did get his B.S.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“He basically catfished an entire congressional district.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“He’s now being investigated by federal prosecutors who want to know how he was able to self-fund $700,000 of his campaign when he reported only making $55,000 a year. He must have one hell of an OnlyFans, is all I can figure.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“But despite all that, he did not resign. He showed up to his first day of work in Washington today where no one, not one of the many scoundrels wriggling around the House, wanted to sit with him. He just sat — imagine being so toxic not even Matt Gaetz wants to sit next to you.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Yep, it’s odd when a congressman holds up his right hand to be sworn in, and everyone’s like, ‘You know what? Don’t bother.’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingJimmy Fallon paid tribute to Barbara Walters on Tuesday’s “Tonight Show,” sharing a story of a time he asked her for advice.What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightThe country music star Shania Twain will chat with Stephen Colbert on Wednesday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutDionne Warwick performing in 2021. Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThe five-time Grammy-winning singer Dionne Warwick is the subject of a new career-spanning documentary, “Dionne Warwick: Don’t Make Me Over.” More

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      Wes Bentley Was at Rock Bottom. Now He Is on ‘Yellowstone.’

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      Years of addiction and struggle followed his breakout role in “American Beauty.” He lived to tell the tale, and get a major role on TV’s biggest show.It’s not easy being Jamie Dutton.The adopted son of the ruthless rancher John Dutton on Paramount Network’s wildly popular neo-western series “Yellowstone,” Jamie just wanted to be a cowboy. Instead the man who raised him sent him off to law school. He wanted to be governor of Montana, but John stepped over him in humiliating fashion. His sister, Beth, eviscerates him on a regular basis. He has spent four-and-a-half seasons desperate for the paterfamilias’ attention while also hating his guts.Nor is it easy playing Jamie Dutton. Wes Bentley can tell you all about that. Jamie has taken him to some dark places, the kinds of places he knows all too well.“He’s incredibly sad,” the actor said over brunch recently at an outdoor cafe in Los Angeles. “I’ve always dealt with my sadness with things like comedy, or humor, or drugs at one point, or trying to just ignore it and finding another way out of it. But you can’t do that when you’re trying to portray someone’s sadness. You have to let it be there. That’s been the hardest part of it all, and it’s weighed on my life a little bit.”Bentley, 44, makes it clear that he’s not complaining. He’s grateful to be a key part of the most popular drama on television, which had its midseason finale on Sunday amid a fresh batch of potential familial murder plots. More than that, he’s grateful to be alive.And yet, “The regrets are always going to be there,” he added.Most people are likely to have first encountered Bentley as Ricky Fitts, Kevin Spacey’s pot-dealing neighbor in the 1999 film “American Beauty.” He was 21 when the movie debuted, and he seemed like a handsome, soulful young man with a future. But he grew disillusioned with the roles that came his way next — “It was all vampires and underdeveloped young people,” he said — and found himself drifting into addiction. Heroin. Cocaine. Lots of booze. In 2008, he was arrested and pleaded guilty to heroin possession and trying to pass a counterfeit $100 bill. He was falling toward his bottom fast.Bentley (with Thora Birch) found his breakout role early, as the sensitive pot dealer Ricky in the Oscar-winning 1999 film “American Beauty.” Lorey Sebastian/DreamworksHe remembers taking a job on a cheapie Stephen King adaptation, “Dolan’s Cadillac” (2009), and mapping out his next steps: “This is probably my last acting job,” he told himself. “I’m going to be a drug dealer and a D.J.”Around this time he fell in love with the woman who later became his wife, the associate producer and assistant director Jacqui Swedberg. This didn’t get him sober; it rarely works that way. But it made him want to be better and made him realize that he had no control over his life, and that he might just have something to live for.“Before I was like, I’m partying, fine, but I can stop this,” he said. “Now it was like, ‘Man, I can’t stop this, and I really want to.’” A friend in the industry started taking Bentley to 12-step meetings. He liked what he heard. And he saw that a different kind of life was possible.Bentley has been sober since July 5, 2009. Today, with a beard and eyeglasses that accentuate his sharp features, he seems present, forthright and easygoing. He blows off steam playing soccer in a league and hiking. “I have a constant stream of energy,” he said. “That’s what led to my addiction. I needed something to react to that energy.”But Jamie is never far away. It’s the role that really put him on the map, after supporting parts in post-crisis movies like “The Hunger Games” and “Interstellar.” It’s the gig of his life.And sometimes, it hurts like hell.Jamie’s most frequent “Yellowstone” combatant is his sister, Beth, played by the English actress Kelly Reilly. There’s a brute force to their scenes together, emotionally and, in the midseason finale, physically. (Beth knows how to handle herself.) When they were teens, Jamie took Beth to get an abortion, without telling her she was also getting a hysterectomy. She never forgave him. Jamie blames Beth for their mother’s death (as does Beth). She takes every opportunity to emasculate Jamie.Much of the pain Jamie Dutton (Wes Bentley), left, feels as a member of the Dutton clan on “Yellowstone” is inflicted by his sister, Beth (Kelly Reilly).Paramount NetworkAs Reilly said in a recent phone interview, “There’s something about his weakness that appalls her.”It can be exhausting to watch, and to play.“Wes and I have been doing this now together for five years,” Reilly said. “We know each other quite well, and we take care of one another tremendously. We both have to be quite fearless in those scenes. They’re quite ugly sometimes.” When there’s a chance to laugh together between takes, they jump on it.“Then you try to go home without carrying it all into the rest of your day,” she said.But that’s not always easy, especially after living with a character for so long.“I’ve prided myself for most of my career on leaving it at the door, or like an athlete would say, leaving it on the field,” Bentley said. “But Jamie’s sadness permeates my life, even though I’m not sad. I’m very lucky to have a great family and be where I’m at in life, but he’s always there behind me, clawing at that, especially when I’m shooting.”He said his wife sometimes has to point out Jamie’s unwanted presence: “‘You’re letting him come home now,” she tells him. “‘Jamie’s coming home and we don’t want him here.’”This season, however, Jamie’s step has been a bit more lively. The Dutton family’s corporate foes unleashed a barracuda, Sarah Atwood (Dawn Olivieri), to turn Jamie against his family’s interests. It wasn’t hard; Jamie’s resentment had become a volcano waiting to erupt. But ever since Sarah seduced Jamie, and whispered, Lady Macbeth-like, in his ear, Olivieri has noticed a change in the actor as well as the character. Bentley had become more assertive, she said, less likely to apologize for things that aren’t his fault.“I have watched Wes change as a man, even in the short period of time that we’ve worked together,” she said in a recent video call. “It’s really hard as an actor to not absorb the character that you’re playing. You just become that person. When you’re a really good actor, it’s like you almost can’t even help it. And Wes is a really good actor.”Jamie’s sadness has always lived side by side with his capacity for evil. Under duress from Beth, he killed his biological father and, before that, a reporter who got too close to the family’s criminal ways. In the most recent episode, he began to consider the logistics of eliminating John and Beth. Through these developments Bentley has conjured a tricky mix of despair and cold, Machiavellian calculation.“Is Jamie evil?” the “Yellowstone” co-creator Taylor Sheridan wrote in an email. “In a lesser actor’s hands the answer would be easy, but Wes has crafted a vulnerable, honest and emotional character who allows the audience to understand the motivation behind his actions — even if there is no questioning the act itself.”Bentley went through a difficult period of alcohol abuse and drugs in the years after “American Beauty.” He has been sober since 2009.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesThe “Yellowstone” directors rave about Bentley’s commitment, sensitivity and ability to think on his feet. “It’s remarkable, his ability to make you mad at Jamie, make you hate him and have him break your heart at the same time,” Stephen Kay said in a phone interview. “He’s one of one, if you ask me.”Kay made the comparison to another famous fictional son and brother, this one from a different crime family.“That role is so hard, so deceptively tricky,” Kay said. “We’ve been comparing it since Season 1 to Fredo in ‘The Godfather.’ John Cazale is arguably one of the best actors of all time, so if you’re building a show with a Fredo, you better hand the part to somebody who can play.”Christina Alexandra Voros, who directed the midseason finale, marveled at Bentley’s “courage to unravel himself.”“Everyone’s tortured on the show, but Jamie is in particular one of the more tortured characters,” she continued by phone. “He’s also interesting because you never really know if he’s a villain or a hero.”Bentley is more than happy to save his unraveling for the screen. He tried the other way, and he knows he was fortunate to survive.He lived to tell. Now he can take Jamie along for the ride.“I believe in fate, and I believe I went through all that, caused all that, and experienced all that, because I was going to get here,” he said. “There are many things that I regret, but I’m just so happy with my life.” More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Finding Your Roots’ and ‘Mayfair Witches’

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      Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s genealogy series returns on PBS. And a TV adaptation of an Anne Rice trilogy debuts on AMC.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, Jan. 2-8. Details and times are subject to change.MondayINDEPENDENT LENS: CHILDREN OF LAS BRISAS (2023) 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The aspirations and creativity of young musicians tug against political turbulence and humanitarian crises in “Children of Las Brisas,” a documentary that follows members of a Venezuelan youth orchestra coming of age during that country’s revolution and the fallout of the death of its former president Hugo Chávez. When the film played at the DOC NYC festival in 2022, its director, Marianela Maldonado, described the intent behind it. “It’s about the pain of growing up with dreams of being an artist while living in a dysfunctional society,” she said. “It’s a story of survival and redemption through music.”WHITNEY: CAN I BE ME (2017) 6:15 p.m. on Showtime. There’s a dramatized version of the singer Whitney Houston’s life in theaters right now: the biopic “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” For a nonfictional portrait, consider this feature-length doc, which pairs the voices of some of Houston’s friends, family members and collaborators with tour footage from the late 1990s. The result, Ben Kenigsberg wrote in his review for The New York Times, is “a surprisingly conventional, dutifully respectful behind-the-scenes portrait.”TuesdayFINDING YOUR ROOTS 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). In the first episode of the new season of his genealogy show, the scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. presents the actress Julia Roberts with a book filled with research about Roberts’s family history. Roberts, lifting the tome, looks at Gates with a smile. “This has got some heft to it,” she says. That’s often true — in more ways than one — of the research that anchors the series, which uses D.N.A. analysis and historical sleuthing to uncover the often-complicated backgrounds of its celebrity guests. Tuesday’s episode, which kicks off the show’s ninth season, features Roberts and Edward Norton. Other guests this season include the movie stars Claire Danes, Viola Davis and Danny Trejo; the pop star Cyndi Lauper; and the activist and scholar Angela Davis.WednesdayBULLITT (1968) 8 p.m. on TCM. When this now-classic neo-noir opened at Radio City Music Hall in the fall of 1968, the critic Renata Adler wrote in her review for The Times that it was “a terrific movie, just right for Steve McQueen — fast, well acted, written the way people talk.” But McQueen, the human celebrity, had to share the spotlight with a material co-star: a 1968 Ford Mustang, which has become as much a symbol of the movie as McQueen. Watch man and machine undulate and snap over San Francisco streets as McQueen’s Lt. Frank Bullitt chases mafiosos.ThursdayWes Studi, left, and Dale Dickey in “A Love Song.”Sundance InstituteA LOVE SONG (2022) 8 p.m. on Showtime. With a grand landscape and a modest story, this debut feature from the filmmaker Max Walker-Silverman centers on a widow, Faye (Dale Dickey), at a lakeside campsite in Colorado. She’s waiting on the arrival of her childhood friend Lito (Wes Studi), whom she hasn’t seen in years. Faye is isolated before Lito arrives, but things remain quiet even after he shows up; the chemistry between the two is expressed as much in silences and facial expressions as in words. It’s a “tender, laconic” movie, Jeannette Catsoulis said in her review for The Times. “More than one kind of love is being celebrated in that title, including the director’s affection for his home state, its wide-open spaces and wandering souls.”FridayRUPAUL’S DRAG RACE 8 p.m. on MTV. RuPaul’s mighty drag competition show moves to MTV from its old home, VH1, for its new, 15th season, which kicks off on Friday night with a two-hour special. The new season gathers 16 drag queens from around the country — the show’s largest cast ever — and is set to include guest appearances from Ariana Grande, Janelle Monáe and other celebrities.BOYS IN BLUE 8 p.m. on Showtime. In this four-part documentary series, the filmmaker Peter Berg (who brought “Friday Night Lights” to television) follows a high school football team in Minneapolis after the 2020 killing of George Floyd. The students had a unique and potent experience of that moment: Their team is mentored by Minneapolis police officers. Berg focuses on the tensions and conversations between players and officers.SaturdayPedro Pascal, left, and Nicolas Cage in “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.”Katalin Vermes/LionsgateTHE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF MASSIVE TALENT (2022) 9 p.m. on Starz. Nicolas Cage plays a fictionalized version of himself in this action comedy, which has its tongue stuck so solidly in its cheek that it would be hard to say “I’m going to steal the Declaration of Independence.” The plot, such as it is, involves Cage attending the birthday party of a mega-rich fan (Pedro Pascal). “It’s another Nicolas Cage joint, a romp, a showcase, an eager-to-please ode to him in all his sui generis Caginess,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. “That’s the idea, at any rate. Mostly, though, it is a single joke sustained for 106 minutes, amid many rapid tone shifts, mood swings and set changes.”SundayAlexandra Daddario in “Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches.”AMCANNE RICE’S MAYFAIR WITCHES 9 p.m. on AMC. The novelist Anne Rice’s “Lives of the Mayfair Witches” book trilogy — “The Witching Hour” (1990), “Lasher” (1993) and “Taltos” (1994) — gets a TV adaptation with this new show, which casts Alexandra Daddario as Dr. Rowan Fielding, a neurosurgeon who learns that she is a descendant of a family of witches haunted by a menacing force. If “neurosurgeon” sounds like surprisingly scientific territory for a novelist whose primary interest lies in the supernatural, consider this point that Rice made in an interview with The Times in 2021, shortly before her death. “I think some might be surprised by the sheer volume of science writing I own,” Rice said. “When you invent alternate worlds and supernatural cosmologies, it can be incredibly inspiring to read about how little we still know about the underlying fabric of the universe.” More

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      10 Things Our Critics Are Looking Forward to in 2023

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      “Succession” returns, the Spider-Verse spawns a sequel, Kelela hits the road and Michael B. Jordan makes his directing debut with “Creed III.”Miguel and Carlos CevallosMargaret LyonsThe Scheming Roys of “Succession” ReturnBrian Cox as Logan Roy in Season 4 of “Succession,” which returns to HBO in the spring.Macall Polay/HBOWhile there are no sure bets in television, and plenty of once-great shows have fallen into bland disarray, I am counting the days until “Succession” comes back for its fourth season. (HBO says it will air in the spring.) Oh, I can hear the jangly piano theme now, and just knowing that the bereft and broken Roys, their gorgeously cruel dialogue and endless, joyless quests for power will soon be back on my screen fills me with elation. God, I hope Kendall sings in front of an audience again, and Greg stammers his way into failing up somehow, and Gerri and Roman’s erotic entanglement deepens and Shiv continues her reign of ecru terror. Logan will be grumbly! Connor will be a dingus! Tom will be in hapless agony! And I will be so, so happy, reveling in the show’s mastery of tension, its push-pull of crumbling and coalescing.Maya PhillipsThe Spider-Verse Slings Into a SequelBefore Michelle Yeoh faced off against Jobu Tupaki and her everything bagel of oblivion in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and before Doctor Strange fought bizarro Strange with weaponized music notation in “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness,” in 2018 “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” provided a much-needed shock to the multiverse concept in film. Though it introduced a whole gang of Spider-people, each with his or her own unique back story, universe and aesthetic, “Spider-Verse” made plenty of space for its protagonist, Miles Morales, a young Afro-Latino Spider-Man whose heartfelt, humorous character arc, along with the film’s stunning animation and killer soundtrack, wasn’t lost even amid the infinite vastness of the multiverse. In June the sequel, “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” will offer a more mature Miles and a new cast of Spider-variants voiced by a stellar cast, including Issa Rae as an Afro-wearing Spider-Woman, Daniel Kaluuya as Spider-Punk and Oscar Isaac as Spider-Man 2099.Jon ParelesKelela Hits the Road With Her Avant-Garde R&BThe singer and songwriter Kelela has floated on the avant-garde fringe of R&B since she released her first mixtape, “Cut 4 Me,” in 2013. Working with some of the most innovative producers around, Kelela often places her voice within eerie electronic backdrops, creating unexpected intimacy in virtual realms. But she has been elusive. She released her only full-length album, “Take Me Apart,” in 2017, and re-emerged with a few singles in 2022, starting with the enigmatic “Washed Away” and moving toward dance music and pop with “Happy Ending” and “On the Run.” Those songs are previews of her second full-length album, “Raven,” which is due in February, followed by a club tour — titled “Rave:N”—- that brings her to Webster Hall in New York on March 17. Both should reveal her latest convolutions and innovations.Mike HaleTwo Spins on the Mystery of the WeekNatasha Lyonne plays the crime-solving heroine of Peacock’s “Poker Face,” created by Rian Johnson.Phillip Caruso/PeacockTwo new crime dramas are taking different approaches to a venerable format, the mystery of the week. Fox’s “Accused” (Jan. 22) is a pure anthology, with 15 self-contained episodes set in different locales and featuring different casts. This presumably expensive venture — a lot of actors, including Wendell Pierce, Margo Martindale, Michael Chiklis, Rhea Perlman and Malcolm-Jamal Warner, need to be paid — is a joint venture of Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa (“Homeland”) and David Shore (“House”). Peacock’s “Poker Face” (Jan. 26), on the other hand, achieves its episodic structure by putting its crime-solving heroine on the road, where she finds new mysteries to tackle each week. Created by Rian Johnson (“Knives Out”) and starring Natasha Lyonne, it also requires an extensive cast, which includes Adrien Brody, Cherry Jones, Chloë Sevigny, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Nick Nolte and the busy Rhea Perlman.Jesse GreenA Rare Revival of a Hansberry DramaLorraine Hansberry, photographed in her apartment in 1959; her play “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” will be presented at BAM beginning in February.David Attie/Getty ImagesOnly two plays by Lorraine Hansberry were produced during her short lifetime. “A Raisin in the Sun,” in 1959, was the big deal: an instant classic, forever revivable. But “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” which opened on Broadway in 1964 and closed days before she died in 1965, has barely been seen again. Now it will be, in a starry production (Feb. 4 through March 19) directed by Anne Kauffman for the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan play a bohemian Village couple — much like Hansberry and her husband, Robert Nemiroff — struggling to align their racial, sexual and cultural positions within the treacherous crosscurrents of contemporary politics. In some ways a Black critique of white liberalism, it leaves no group unscathed in its portrait of do-gooders doing what, for Hansberry, they do best: making a mess with the best of intentions.Salamishah TilletMichael B. Jordan Gets Back in the RingShot on IMAX cameras, “Creed III” promises to get extremely close to the frenzied action of a boxing match. Michael B. Jordan, making his directorial debut, is back as the light heavyweight champion Adonis “Donnie” Creed, now a thriving family man with Bianca (Tessa Thompson) and their daughter (Mila Davis-Kent). While Sylvester Stallone doesn’t star in this installment of the franchise, Jonathan Majors plays Donnie’s childhood friend Damian, who leaves prison after nearly two decades and turns into his fiercest competitor. Both men are among the most charismatic, talented and nuanced actors of their generation and I expect they’ll deliver some powerful performances inside and outside the ring. Look for the movie on March 3.Zachary WoolfeA New Staging of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at the MetA design sketch for a new staging of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at the Metropolitan Opera, with Piotr Beczala in the title role.via Metropolitan OperaOf the core repertory, the 25 or 30 titles at the center of the Metropolitan Opera’s history, none has been absent from its stage longer than Wagner’s “Lohengrin.” This is strange, since “Lohengrin” is probably the most performed Wagner work worldwide; it’s done all the time. But the Met’s radically minimal, painstakingly still Robert Wilson production posed extreme demands on singers and technicians alike, and was last seen in 2006. So it’ll be a major event when, on Feb. 26, the opera finally returns to New York in a new staging, directed by François Girard, whose thoughtful “Parsifal,” set in a stylized present day, was a success. (His muddled “Der Fliegende Holländer” early in 2020, less so.) Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, conducts a cast that includes the plangent tenor Piotr Beczala in the title role, the budding Wagnerian Tamara Wilson as Elsa, Christine Goerke as the aggrieved Ortrud, Evgeny Nikitin and Günther Groissböck.Gia KourlasPina Bausch Takes a Trip to BrazilIn “Água” by the choreographer Pina Bausch, Tsai-Chin Yu, foreground, spins with Nicholas Losada behind her.Ursula KaufmannThe choreographer Pina Bausch found inspiration in places and in cultures in the latter part of her career, transforming those experiences into shimmering, visceral dances. While they don’t have the darkness and bite of her earlier works, they do have the potential to wash over you like a vacation — albeit one in the theater. This spring, from March 3 to 19, the Brooklyn Academy of Music will host one such trip to Brazil. In “Água,” created by Bausch during a 2001 residency, the radiance of the landscape is celebrated with voluptuous, exuberant dancing and sumptuous color. It’s been six years since Tanztheater Wuppertal, now under the artistic direction of Boris Charmatz, a French experimentalist, performed at the Academy. As usual with a Bausch work, the hair will flow, the dresses will shimmer and the soundtrack will be eclectic. This one includes music by PJ Harvey, St Germain and Tom Waits. Strap yourself in.Jason FaragoTangled Webs of Modern Invention at the GuggenheimGego installing “Reticulárea” at Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas in 1969.Fundación Gego; Juan SantanaHer birth certificate read Gertrud Goldschmidt — but the German-born Venezuelan artist always preferred Gego, a shrinking of her first and last names that reverberated with an art of slender brilliance. Born to a Jewish family in Hamburg in 1912, she studied architecture before fleeing to Caracas in 1939, and only in her 40s did she begin gathering copper wires, aluminum rods and plastic dowels into striking yet splintery abstract clusters. Beguiling and forbidding by turns, her works could be suspended like a mobile, or stream from the ceiling, or else could propagate across a room like a massive spider’s web. On one point Gego was uncompromising: These metal assemblages were not sculptures, she insisted, but “drawings without paper” that took a very different route to abstraction than the clean geometries many other Latin American artists favored. (They’re also delightfully resistant to social media transmission, their finely interlaced wires beyond the ken of even the highest-resolution cameraphone.) “Gego: Measuring Infinity,” opening March 31 at the Guggenheim, will fill the museum’s white spiral with her spindly aggregations — and, amid extreme refugee crises in both Europe and Venezuela, her themes of fragility and enmeshment have lost none of their force.Jason ZinomanSara Schaefer Spoofs the Comedy WorldSpoofing the cult of comedy in the language of Scientology, the wry, incisive stand-up Sara Schaefer adopts the pose, jargon and microphone of a guru in her new solo show about how to make it in the stand-up business. “Going Up” (a riff on the Scientology term “Going Clear”), which has been performed a few times but will get a wider hearing in 2023, is ambitious and nimble, sneakily personal with enough inside-baseball jokes to make it a must-see for comedy nerds. The most impressive example of this, and the bit I am most looking forward to revisiting, is when Schaefer illustrates every kind of modern stand-up by doing the same genre of joke, over and over again, in a multitude of styles. It’s a feat of comedy as well as criticism that captures an entire scene in just a few minutes. Her show should be a staple of festivals, but early in the year, it will stop in, among other places, San Francisco, Austin and New York when she performs at Caveat on April 6. More

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      Dave Attell Bids a Heartfelt (and Hilarious) Farewell to Carolines

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      Each year, the comic headlined the club during the holidays. With the space closing, his final show there was a mix of deadpan and melancholy notes.How do you honor the death of a comedy club? First, you kill.Walking onstage late Friday night at the final headlining show at Carolines on Broadway, which after three decades is closing its doors, Dave Attell handled that job quickly, spraying punch lines, roasting the front row and making sure the raucous audience knew it was part of history. In one galloping tangent, Attell urged anyone not laughing to leave. “Take a table and chair with you, because we have to clear this place out,” he said.Attell has performed at Carolines between Christmas and New Year’s for 13 years, a holiday tradition for audiences who wanted something significantly dirtier than the Rockettes. This time, he mixed in a few heartfelt, even melancholy notes into his virtuosic deadpan rhythms to eulogize the passing of a legendary comedy room. But comedians mourn differently. When a waiter walked past the stage toward the door, Attell, dressed in a characteristic black jacket and baseball cap, asked him where he was going, pausing before the joke: “Unemployment.”Like a drama queen writing her will, New York is perpetually and loudly dying. Hardly a day goes by without teeth gnashing over a beloved part of this city calling it quits. Every closed diner is the end of an epoch. The most mundane and predictable demise, the end of a Broadway run, receives extended soul-searching and public autopsy. To me, this seems (mostly) sensible. It’s healthy to mark the end of things, and what is better than a great finale? But I’ve been covering show business in this dynamic city too long to get too sentimental. We shouldn’t overly fetishize institutions. One of the legacies of “Stomp,” which closes next month after a 29-year run, is all the shows that did not get produced in its theater. Change is good.Dave Attell performing at Carolines on Friday. For 13 years, he played the club over the holidays.And yet, I couldn’t help but feel a little melancholy walking down the steps into Caroline’s for the last time, a steep descent that gave you a chance to adjust from the gaudy lights of Times Square. Caroline’s isn’t technically gone; after a final show on New Year’s Eve, it is producing the New York Comedy Festival and other unnamed projects. Still, with the stage backdrop, stools and other parts of the club soon to be shipped to the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, N.Y., the loss of this room is significant.When Caroline’s opened in Chelsea in 1981 (it had two homes before moving to the theater district in the next decade), New York comedy clubs were essentially dive bars with stages, featuring packed bills of short sets by lowly paid or unpaid comics desperate for performing time to work out jokes. Caroline’s introduced a new model: hour sets by more established talent, bigger pay days and a more upscale atmosphere. There was plush carpeting and a dressing room. Instead of a brick wall, the comics stood in front of a checkerboard pattern artfully missing a few pieces. In a 1985 story in The Times, Robert Morton, a producer on “Late Night With David Letterman,” described Caroline’s as “the first yuppie comedy club,” becoming maybe the last person to use that word as a compliment.Memorable performers at the club have included, from left, John Mulaney, Tracy Morgan and Leslie Jones.The stairs down into Carolines allowed patrons a chance to adjust after the gaudy lights of Times Square.Many were exposed to the club via the television show “Caroline’s Comedy Hour,” which ended in the mid-’90s. Its impressive lineups offer a history of modern stand-up. On one 1992 episode, Attell performed with Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K., Jon Stewart, Susie Essman and Colin Quinn.That Caroline’s was located in the heart of Broadway mattered, adding a touch of class to stand-up, an art form rooted in vaudeville and minstrel shows that was then rarely afforded the critical respect of theater and film. Caroline Hirsch, the founder of the club, played a key role in raising the stature of stand-up. You can even make the case that she helped set the stage for the transformation of Times Square, opening just a few years before Disney arrived in the neighborhood.On Friday before the show, when I asked about her most memorable nights at the club, Hirsch recalled the time Robin Williams took over a Jeff Garlin set with some inspired heckling and a string of performances by Kevin Hart. She also told a story about how Don King walked into the club when John Witherspoon was telling a joke about him. Her recollections underlined the real importance of Caroline’s: the staggering number of memorable experiences had there. I had more than my share.Caroline Hirsch opened the club in 1981; it moved a few times before settling into the Theater District. Caroline’s was the only place where I saw veteran stars like Dick Gregory, Richard Lewis and Damon Wayans. Before he was on “Saturday Night Live,” I caught Michael Che there. And years before he had a special, I knew that Ricky Velez would get one after watching him do an electric opening set. The most memorable part of a Tiffany Haddish show was when she spotted Whoopi Goldberg in the audience and tearfully described how important it was as a child to see the veteran star on television.Caroline’s was not dogmatic about the kinds of comics it booked. It didn’t have a house style, which might have hurt its brand but made it unpredictable, featuring talent from an array of ages, backgrounds and styles. Bo Burnham cut an album there early in his career, and Phoebe Robinson got her start by taking a comedy class at Caroline’s.One of the all-time funniest shows I ever saw was Rory Scovel doing an hour at Caroline’s. A decade before John Mulaney toured arenas with bits about fame and addiction, he performed a hilarious hour at Caroline’s in which he told jokes about his marriage and his alcoholism.Caroline’s was also not above oddball bookings (Larry “Bud” Melman performed there). I once saw a 13-year old do a standup act and also made the error of taking my 7-year-old daughter to a Ron Funches show, only to rush out when the jokes became too dirty.The audience at Attell’s final show at Carolines. The club didn’t have a house style and the bookings were eclectic.Toward the end of the night, Attell asked his opening acts, Ian Fidance, Jordan Jensen and Wil Sylvince to join him onstage. They riffed with one another, before Attell turned to the crowd and asked with an odd formality: “May I?” Then he took out a blue recorder, which he described as “somewhere between a flute and a bong.”In between raunchy jokes, he played simple, wistful songs. He remarked on the sadness of the instrument’s sound. Then he opened his jacket and brought out a second recorder, a yellow one. Seeing this gruff, grizzled legend wield two colorful pipes was its own sight gag. It was also a reminder that while Attell’s much imitated delivery has its own musicality, when it comes to expressing certain kinds of emotion, no joke can really match a few notes played with conviction.Then he beckoned Caroline Hirsch to the stage, called her “a force” and thanked her for “making us all better.” Describing the moment as “bittersweet,” she said she would be producing more shows in the future. Then everyone took selfies onstage to commemorate the moment and awkwardly shuffled off the stage. More