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      Trevor Noah’s Optimism Set His Version of ‘The Daily Show’ Apart

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      Though his final episode made the mysterious reason for his departure a running joke, his specials and memoir suggest he was always comfortable with uncertainty.A talk-show host’s final episode is typically a celebration of their tenure, but in his last time at “The Daily Show” desk, Trevor Noah put the spotlight on others, giving sizable segments to each of his correspondents, doing a gushing interview with the comic Neal Brennan and expressing gratitude to everyone from the executives who hired him to the Black women who raised him to those who hate-watched.In a persistently sunny hour, Noah even had a kind word for Donald J. Trump, quieting his crowd by praising what the former president did for prison reform.Noah has always invited others to see him as an outsider because of his background as a South African comic, but his equanimity and preternatural calm also distinguished him. He’s got to be the only political comic alive who could emerge from seven years of regularly joking about the Trump administration and a global pandemic exuding optimism.“The Daily Show” is famous for its topical jokes, but Noah told very few on his final episode. He took a broader perspective. Outlining lessons learned, which included that people were friendlier than they appear on social media, he struck post-partisan notes and said, “Politics turns people’s brains to mush.”He told a story about Jon Stewart calling to offer him the job and saying, “I see you in me.” Noah seemed shocked, and honestly, why wouldn’t he be?Trevor Noah’s 7 Years on “The Daily Show”The host, who took the reins of the show from Jon Stewart in 2015, exposed America’s many blind spots through witty and passionate commentary.Time to Depart: Trevor Noah announced that he would be stepping down in September, citing a desire for a better work-life balance.Saying Goodbye: In his final episode of “The Daily Show,” Mr. Noah told viewers not to be sad and called the night “a celebration.”An Outsider: The talk-show host, who grew up in South Africa and represented a part of the world often neglected by American news, helped his audience see through his eyes.His Best Moments: Noah’s comic perspective set him apart from other late-night hosts. Here are the highlights.Whereas Stewart’s humor ran hot and righteous, Noah always maintained a cool composure. Stewart was at his best in antagonistic interviews, interrogating ideas and calling out nonsense. Noah always seemed eager to get above the fray and treated guests with deference and awe.One running joke on his last show was the mystery of why he was leaving. Discovering that he doesn’t have another job lined up, the correspondent Dulcé Sloan quipped about Noah, who has a Black mother and white father, “Wow, you really are half-white.”You get a hint about why Noah might have gotten restless from his comment that it might be better to wait before developing a take on something you see in the news. But you can learn more about the reason he left from his stand-up. Noah never stopped performing, putting out three Netflix specials during his “Daily Show” tenure, including one last month called “I Wish You Would.”He’s not an entirely different performer in his stand-up — his twinkly-eyed charm is a constant — but the distinctions are revealing. While his specials dig into politics, it’s not the main subject. That would be the slipperiness and meaning of language. Noah is clearly not just obsessed, but tickled by the way people talk and the eccentricity of languages (he speaks eight). His gift for impressions is the centerpiece of many bits.In fact, a premise often seems like just an excuse for him to show off verbal gymnastics, whether it’s pointing out the similarity between the ways Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama speak or showing that to be president you need a strange voice (cue a lineup of impressions). Even my favorite Noah joke, about how trap music sounds like a toddler complaining (from his special “Son of Patricia”), is a virtuosic display that turns ordinary human sounds into a kind of music.Noah’s stand-up aesthetic is also more subtle and wry than his talk-show punch lines. In a joke from his recent special comparing Will Smith’s character in “Independence Day” to his slap at the Oscars, he displays such a light touch that the actor might not have even noticed the jab. (In fact, Smith gave one of his first interviews after the awards to Noah, a booking coup.) There’s a wit to his voice that recalls an earlier era. I would not be shocked to see him become a regular humor writer for The New Yorker.Noah hit his stride on “The Daily Show” when he started speaking more off the cuff. The segments, released online, in which he did crowd work during commercial breaks were often long monologues culminating in metaphors. They showcased his gift for thinking aloud and in real time. What they don’t have is a ruthless appetite for getting belly laughs or winning an argument. The dearth of that hunger is also part of his legacy at “The Daily Show.”On “I Wish You Would,” you get a sense of his temperament when he talks about why people were so angry during the pandemic. His theory is not that Americans were hopelessly divided, but that we were scared. “As humans, we get so comfortable knowing,” he said, emphasizing that last word in his volume and timing, “that we forget how uncertain life is.”This is not just a more existential thought than is usually expressed on a talk show. It’s existentially fatal to a certain kind of talk show. Because as true as it may be, and it is, the job of daily commentator on political events is a lot easier if he at least keeps up the illusion of having a sure-minded, commanding take. Hamlet could never host “The Daily Show.”Noah is startlingly good at appearing confident and assured, which made him a natural at the job. But talent can be its own obstacle. What you’re gifted at is not necessarily what you should be doing. Watching his stand-up, and especially reading his excellent memoir, “Born a Crime,” you sense that he is most comfortable in the moments of not knowing.Talk shows are far more collaborative than they appear. And “The Daily Show” is a machine that can work with different hosts. We first learned that not with Noah but with John Oliver, who had considerable success filling in when Stewart took a summer hiatus in 2013. The years that followed were a catastrophic period for Comedy Central, when it lost a tremendous amount of funny correspondents, including Oliver, Stephen Colbert and Samantha Bee. Noah deserves credit for rebuilding an impressive roster with a more diverse cast.“The Daily Show” will now use temporary hosts, including Sarah Silverman, Al Franken and the former correspondent Hasan Minhaj. As for the permanent replacement, the understandable temptation is to aim for the shiny new toy, but clearly, overlooking your stable of talent has its own risks.Dulcé Sloan has enough spiky charm for a bigger platform. Jordan Klepper displays a bulletproof deadpan. And in their stand-up as well as on the show, Roy Wood Jr. and Ronny Chieng are cagey, argumentative and prolific joke writers who share a delight in the comic kill that would represent its own departure. To my eyes, they should be the favorites. But would either want this grind?In his goodbye to Noah, Chieng set up a joke by appearing to get emotional: “In all seriousness, on behalf of everyone watching right now and from the bottom of my heart, can I be the new host?” More

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      in Theater

      When Jewish Artists Wrestle With Antisemitism

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      In this unsettling moment, comedians, filmmakers, playwrights and others have been struggling against a long-ingrained American response to look away.Antisemitism has such a long, violent history that it seems absurd to claim it’s getting worse. Compared with when? And yet, there’s something about our current moment that feels different.Consider a recent Sunday. I woke up to news reports that two men were arrested at Penn Station with weapons, a swastika armband and a social media history of threats to attack a synagogue. After taking a shower, I opened my dresser to find my Kyrie Irving T-shirt. The Brooklyn Net was returning to the N.B.A. that evening after being suspended for tweeting a link to a documentary that cast doubt on the Holocaust.I didn’t expect getting dressed in the morning to turn into a test of loyalties between my favorite basketball team and my murdered ancestors, but here we are.That night, when I arrived at Barclays Center, scores of people belonging to what the Southern Poverty Law Center labels a hate group were handing out pamphlets with the blaring headline “The Truth About Antisemitism.” I opened Twitter and saw Elon Musk was making fun of the Anti-Defamation League and Ye was tweeting again. He had kicked off the recent cycle of discourse by leveling violent threats against Jews.Quantifying antisemitism right now by numbers of hate crimes is useful, but doesn’t capture the peculiar anguish and human complexities of its day-to-day pervasiveness. That’s a job better suited to artists, and more than any year in memory, some of our most accomplished ones have taken up the challenge, from the biggest names in comedy (Dave Chappelle, Amy Schumer) to the most celebrated storytellers in theater and film, like Tom Stoppard and Steven Spielberg. What resonates most in this impressive body of work are the Jewish artists exploring the challenge of antisemitism, and while they started these projects years ago, their hard-earned pessimism now seems uncomfortably prophetic.The thorniest recent work on these issues was the “Saturday Night Live” monologue by Dave Chappelle. He poked fun at Ye and Irving while speaking to the antisemitic idea of a Jewish conspiracy in Hollywood. In between myriad jokes, he shrugged off this stereotype as an understandable thought best not verbalized. One of the maddening traps of modern antisemitism is that it takes a source of pride — Jewish success in the arts, the rare field where we were welcome — and makes it seem sinister. This old tactic got a new hearing.There are a lot of Jews in Hollywood, Chappelle observed mischievously, before undercutting the comment with a joke that called the trope that they control show business “a delusion.” Unlike the blunt social media posts of Ye and Irving, this set was a work of art, elusive and layered, displaying finesse and paradox. It’s a prickly kind of funny with corkscrew punch lines that tickled the mind and bothered the conscience. (“If they’re Black then it’s a gang, if they’re Italian it’s a mob, but if they’re Jewish it’s a coincidence and you should never speak about it.”)Dave Chappelle on “Saturday Night Live.” His monologue was a prickly kind of funny that bothered the conscience.Will Heath/NBCArt can be formally beautiful and morally ugly. Despite what you have heard, good comedy can be built on lies as easily as on the truth. This is what makes Chappelle’s set so slippery: His storytelling and gravitas are so magnetic that you can miss how far he goes in making the old slur of a Jewish conspiracy seem reasonable. He whitewashed Irving’s tolerance for Holocaust denial with one good line. With another, he says you can’t “blame Black people” for Jewish pain, erecting a straw man with deftness. To suggest, as he does, that it’s dangerous for him to say “the Jews” is tiresome hyperbole.For as much controversy as this set provoked, it was also predictable. How often have we seen Chappelle bring up celebrity transgression, and then defend, mitigate and complicate it, while inviting us to admire the feat? This is his move. There’s no wondering where he will come down on the latest scandal. We know.Antisemitism in AmericaAntisemitism is one of the longest-standing forms of prejudice, and those who monitor it say it is now on the rise across the country.Perilous Times: With online threats and incidents of harassment and violence rising nationwide, this fall has become increasingly worrisome for American Jews.Donald Trump: The former president had dinner with Nick Fuentes, a prominent antisemite, at Mar-a-Lago, causing some of Mr. Trump’s Jewish allies to speak out.Kanye West: The rapper and designer, who now goes by Ye, has been widely condemned for recent antisemitic comments. The fallout across industries has been swift.Kyrie Irving: The Nets lifted their suspension of the basketball player, who offered “deep apologies” for posting a link to an antisemitic film. His behavior appalled and frightened many of his Jewish fans.EARLIER THIS YEAR, I wrote about the Jewish tendency to turn antisemitism into comedy. But there’s another coping mechanism that we like to talk about less: looking the other way. When asked about Chappelle’s monologue, Jerry Seinfeld diplomatically told The Hollywood Reporter that “the subject matter calls for more conversation.” When asked about it as a guest on “The Late Show,” Jon Stewart only became earnest when he pleaded for free speech. What’s striking about these responses from star comics is that they seem to be more interested in calling for debate than engaging in it.Then again, I get it. I’ve stayed quiet when peers wrote things that seemed, if not indifferent to Jewish pain, then at least to be applying double standards to it. I gave them the benefit of the doubt or concluded that a call-out would be counterproductive. But saying nothing in the face of such moments exacts its own cost. It eats at you. Several Jewish artists have been making work that explores such decisions with a skeptical eye.In “The Patient,” a sly, suspenseful FX series from Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg, creators of “The Americans,” a therapist played by Steve Carell awakens to find himself chained to the bed of a serial killer looking for help with his mental health. The title is a reference to this maniac as well as the way his therapist responds.The killer says he was looking for a therapist who is Jewish, a specific request that goes uncommented on. Small moments tip you off to a tolerated culture of antisemitism. In a flashback, the therapist, Alan, spots a swastika on a poster and, instead of making a fuss, keeps walking.Steve Carell as a therapist and Domhnall Gleeson as a serial killer in “The Patient,” which raises the urgent question of how to fight back.Suzanne Tenner/FXNow he has no such option. Imprisoned by a captor who wants something from him, he is faced with the urgent question of how to fight back. He chooses to use his skills in mental health to help his oppressor get better. The deeper he gets in dialogue, though, the more uncomfortable Alan grows, especially after he teaches the murderer the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, and then sees it being used to mourn his latest victims.In many ways, the relationship at the center of “The Patient” is a metaphor for both the lengths Jews will go to extend empathy toward their oppressors and for the existential toll that takes. Playing a man wracked by guilt, grief and doubt, Carell is extremely subtle illustrating how accommodation can be justified and yet wear you down. We also see scenes in his head of him talking to a shrink (David Alan Grier) who asks why he doesn’t fight back, attack the killer. To which Alan replies: “I’m using what I have.” Grier, a figment of his imagination, flashes a look that suggests he doesn’t believe that.Similarly, “The Fabelmans” and “Armageddon Time,” two personal movies by Jewish directors dramatizing their own childhoods, grapple with the question of what weapons Jews have. In both, sensitive boys facing antisemitism at school struggle with how to stand up for themselves.“The Fabelmans” isn’t a movie about being Jewish so much as it is suffused with Jewishness. But when its young protagonist, Sammy Fabelman, moves to California in the 1960s, he’s confronted with Aryan boys who mock his religion and with gentile girls intrigued by it. He happily prays with one girl but puts up a fight with the bullies, who at first seem like the cartoon villains from early Spielberg movies. The most dramatic way Sammy pushes back is by putting his antagonists in a movie. After filming his classmates on a trip to the beach, the footage, shown to the whole school, makes one bully look ridiculous and another glamorous, bigger than life. Oddly, being romanticized by the Jewish kid he beat up rattles the bully more than any insult. His discontent in the face of this attention is the most baffling section in the movie, one that has the ring of a point being made. But what is the point?Is the antisemite feeling shame? If so, Spielberg is working hard to extend empathy. But this exchange also rattles Sammy. When the bigot demands to know why Sammy made him look like a star, the response sounds pained and unsure: “Maybe I did it to make the movie better?”It’s a shockingly unsentimental moment to find in a Spielberg movie, one in which the young version of himself learns that pleasing the crowd might require turning an antisemite into the hero. No one loves the movies more than Spielberg, and in this intimate, morally probing film, he shows how they can move, inspire and reveal the truth. But in these more hardheaded scenes, he also makes it clear that their impact can be unpredictable, and like comedy, they can deceive just as deftly.Chloe East as a classmate intrigued by the religion of the Steven Spielberg stand-in, played by Gabriel LaBelle.Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment, via Associated PressIn “Armageddon Time,” a humbler, realistic and affectingly bleak portrait of the struggles of a young Jewish kid, James Gray digs into his 1980s Queens upbringing in the story of an 11-year-old boy named Paul Graff whose grandfather is the son of a refugee who fled pogroms in Europe. The patriarch tells him that changing his name (from Grasserstein) will help him in life. This same man urges him to speak up when other students make racist comments to a peer. These are the competing messages he grows up with: assimilate or fight back.A friendship with a Black classmate also makes clear to Paul how not all inequities are the same, that his privilege protects him in a way that other minority groups don’t experience. In a time when Black and Jewish communities are pitted against each other by entertainers like Ye and others, this movie feels exceedingly topical and depressing. It painfully dramatizes how antisemitism can lead Jews to overlook other injustices, protect your tribe and harden your heart to the plight of others.As with Spielberg’s movie, the new play by Tom Stoppard, “Leopoldstadt,” is being described as his most personal as well as a reckoning with his Jewish identity, which in his case he didn’t understand until middle age. It’s also one of his worst plays: intellectually thin, overly familiar, blandly generic. If the way you tell the audience it’s the 1920s is by a woman dancing the Charleston, you’ve become too comfortable with cliché. And yet, this sprawling portrait of a half century in the life of a Jewish family from Vienna is drawing sold-out crowds of weeping audiences.I suspect the reason is the timely and heavy-handed portrait of Jewish complacency and denial. We see this most nakedly in the stand-in for the playwright, a comic writer born Leopold Rosenbaum who now goes by Leonard Chamberlin (a name that evokes the prime minister famous for appeasement). In 1955, Chamberlin is glibly naïve about the Holocaust, a patriotic fool set up for tears when remembering the horrors of the Nazis. The play ends with a roll call of the dead. Of course, the audience cries.TWO THINGS STAND OUT about these dramas, whether onscreen or onstage: The first is that none of the Jewish protagonists are exactly triumphant in the face of antisemitism. Therapy, the movies, assimilation — nothing saves them. These characters are ambivalent, morally compromised or far worse. When it comes to their ability to protest an antisemitic culture, pessimism reigns.The second is how much these works look to the past, exploring the current moment through a historical lens. (That includes Bess Wohl’s play “Camp Siegfried,” a drama about a 1938 Nazi youth camp on Long Island whose themes are clearly meant to echo with today.) Even the contemporary “The Patient” borrows its most blunt power from flashbacks to the moral simplicity of concentration camps. Looking at history can be a useful way to understand the present, but it can also be a way to evade it. One wonders what Stoppard would come up with if he dramatized the more subtle Jewish denial of the cultural world he came up in, where he flourished as a playwright whose religion never seemed to come up. Or how Spielberg or Gray would capture the conflicts of Jewish life now.As usual, comics are the artists taking the earliest and most direct approaches. David Baddiel, a British comic, is receiving glowing reviews this month for a BBC documentary version of his book “Jews Don’t Count” that castigates the double standards applied to prejudice against Jews in progressive spaces today. Marc Maron’s next special, which recently taped in New York, begins a series of jokes on the increased prominence of conspiracies about Jews by saying that in this polarized country, antisemitism is one thing that brings everyone together. At the Kennedy Center Honors, Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as the antisemite Borat, skewered Ye and sang a brief parody version of U2’s “With or Without You,” switching the lyrics to “With or Without Jews.”Amy Schumer is one of the few sketch comics to dig into antisemitism today, lampooning the tentativeness our culture has for calling it out in the new season of “Inside Amy Schumer.” She imagines a workplace harassment seminar where everyone is hypersensitive to all kinds of slights except antisemitic ones. It’s a premise that not only counters the trope of a Jewish conspiracy but also taps into the paranoia of being gaslit by an entire culture. It hints at what a Jewish “Get Out” could look like.Part of the resilience of antisemitism is its resistance to critique. Jewish artists are obviously not going to end the lie that they control show business by making more movies, plays, TV shows or sketches about it. But they can illuminate its impact and capture the complex damage it does to the psyche. That matters. For a certain kind of Jew, art can be its own religion. And one lesson we keep learning and forgetting is that the greatest art is much better at portraying conflicted minds than changing them. More

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      in Television

      ‘Harry & Meghan’: What People Are Saying About the Netflix Series

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      Critics on both sides of the Atlantic found common ground in negative reviews of the first three episodes of the series.These days in Britain, very little unites the right and left. “Harry & Meghan,” the intimate Netflix series released Thursday, is quickly shaping up to be the exception.The first three episodes of the docuseries, directed by Liz Garbus and produced in conjunction with the production company of Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, were quickly skewered by a bipartisan group of critics, from The Sun to The Guardian. Although “skewered” may not actually capture the harshness of some of the commentary.Piers Morgan, who has been vociferously critical of the couple in the past, wastes no time laying into the series in his scathing review in The Sun, a tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch:Who are the world’s biggest victims right now? You might think it’s the poor people of Ukraine as they’re bombed, shot and raped by Putin’s invading barbarians. Or those whose lives have been ruined by the Covid pandemic that continues to cause widespread death and long-term illness. Or the millions battling crippling financial hardship in a devastating cost-of-living crisis that has swept the globe.But no. The world’s biggest victims are in fact Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, a pair of incredibly rich, stupendously privileged, horribly entitled narcissists.If you don’t believe me, just ask them!Later in his review, Morgan cautions viewers they may need a “sick bucket.” He was not the only one to evoke gastrointestinal distress. The headline for Lucy Mangan’s review in the left-leaning Guardian exclaims that the first three episodes were “so sickening I almost brought up my breakfast.”More on the British Royal FamilyBoston Visit: Prince William and Princess Catherine of Wales recently made a whirlwind visit to Boston. Swaths of the city were unimpressed.Aide Resigns: A Buckingham Palace staff member quit after a British-born Black guest said the aide pressed her on where she was from.‘The Crown’: Months ago, the new season of the Netflix drama was shaping up as another public-relations headache for Prince Charles. But then he became king.Training Nannies: Where did the royals find Prince George’s nanny? At Norland College, where students learn how to shield strollers from paparazzi and fend off potential kidnappers.Mangan does point out that the series so far has plenty of sweet moments — particularly of Prince Harry and Meghan “being charming and funny together” — but she ultimately finds the finished product wanting:But in the end — what are we left with? Exactly the same story we always knew, told in the way we would expect to hear it from the people who are telling it. Those who don’t care won’t watch. Those who do care — which is to say are voyeuristically invested in the real-life soap opera — will still read into it anything they want to and doubtless confirm all their previous ideas. There is plenty here to start another round of tabloid frenzy, particularly in Harry’s mention of members of the royal family who consider the pressure placed on anyone “marrying in” a rite of passage and resist allowing anyone else to avoid what their own spouses went through, and who bow to internal pressure to choose a wife who “fits the mould.” Which is to say — it is hard to see who, beyond the media, the villains of the piece, will really gain from this?The Independent, a more centrist player in British media, was less savage, but not exactly admiring, calling the series both “self-aggrandizing” and “wildly entertaining.” In her review, Jessie Thompson finds the couple, at times endearing and sympathetic, and the points about racism in Britain eloquently made.But while she writes that she respects their “right to share this stuff on their own terms,” she finds the protestations of love over the top (“We believe you! You are in love! There’s no need to show us any more of your WhatsApps!”) and their inability to talk like normal people when interviewed frustrating.She also wonders at moments in the series “if the couple are naïve or disingenuous”:Did Meghan really think it was “a joke” that she had to curtsy to the Queen of England? It might be an outdated request, but it surely can’t have been an unexpected one. “Like, what’s a walkabout?” she says of her first public appearance. They also seem to have a weird pathological need to document every aspect of their lives.The Financial Times, the more sober-minded and business-focused newspaper, finds the first three episodes of the much-hyped series something of a let down. As Henry Mance writes:Does this “Netflix Global Event” match up to, say, Diana, Princess of Wales on “Panorama,” Prince Andrew on “Newsnight” or even Harry and Meghan’s own conversation with Oprah Winfrey, in which they alleged a member of the royal family speculated about their baby’s skin colour? Bluntly, no. There have been explosive royal TV shows, but so far this is not one of them. Harry and Meghan do not drop bombs; at most, they point plaintively at existing craters. They have also bought into the successful Netflix formula: never say in one hour what you can stretch out over several. This is a show that makes you grateful that the streaming platform has the option to watch at 1.25x speed.In the United States, the reviews registered a similar sense of disappointment.As Stephanie Bunbury writes for Deadline:Three hours into Netflix doc series “Harry & Meghan” and still no tell-all truths from the darkest corners of the House of Windsor. Anyone who had expected the curtain to be lifted on the deep-state machinations of The Firm to protect the brand will be feeling shortchanged by Volume I which dropped today.Daniel D’Addario echoes that sentiment for Variety, lamenting the series’s unwillingness to push past the familiar: “As with the most recent, painfully dull season of “The Crown,” there seems a sort of narrative stuckness, an inability or lack of desire to find the next thing to say that we haven’t yet heard.”But he still holds out hope that the final episodes, which will be released on Dec. 15, will move beyond “the story of their courtship, wedding, and family feuds”:What they want to do now that they’ve overcome adversity may well lie ahead in the next batch of episodes, but speaking in their own voice about issues other than their personal experience would have represented a good start. But perhaps that’s not the remit, on a show for which the pair are engaged with a major streaming corporation to dish the dirt once more. Pity them, too — even after breaking free of Buckingham Palace, they’re still someone’s subjects. More

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      in Movies

      Jerrod Carmichael to Host Golden Globes as Broadcast Returns From Scandal

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      The tarnished ceremony will air on NBC in January after questions were raised about the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s diversity and ethics.The stand-up comedian Jerrod Carmichael will serve as host of the Golden Globes next month, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced Thursday. It’s the first time the tarnished film and television awards ceremony will be broadcast since a 2021 scandal over the ethics and diversity of the H.F.P.A., the group behind the Globes.Carmichael may be best known for his critically acclaimed HBO stand-up special “Rothaniel,” in which he came out as gay. He also was the star of an NBC sitcom, “The Carmichael Show,” that ran from 2015 to 2017.The Globes are trying to re-establish themselves as a must-watch evening. While the awards were never an indication of Oscar voters’ mind-set, the ceremony did provide studios and stars a high-profile opportunity to campaign before the Academy Awards. Or at least that was the case until 2021, when investigations by The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times revealed the nonprofit group’s lack of diversity (at the time it had no Black members) as well as members’ high compensation.NBC canceled the show later that year, and a much-reduced version of the ceremony was held last January. It was not broadcast; instead, at a Beverly Hilton ballroom where no stars were present, the winners were announced and then tweeted out.Since the articles appeared, the H.F.P.A. has taken steps to include more journalists of color and to tighten its ethics rules. This year, the group sold the Golden Globes to a private company, Eldridge Industries, owned by Todd Boehly, that also bought Dick Clark Productions, producer of the ceremony. In September, NBC said it would air the 2023 show in a one-year test.It remains to be seen who will show up for the ceremony, which once was known as an off-the-cuff affair. Brendan Fraser, the star of “The Whale” and a strong contender this awards season, has said he will not attend if nominated. In 2018, he said he had been groped in 2003 by a then-member of the H.F.P.A., who denied the allegation.The nominations for the Golden Globes will be announced Monday, and the telecast is set for Jan. 10. More

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      in Television

      Late Night Celebrates Raphael Warnock’s Win in the Georgia Runoff

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      Stephen Colbert said he was both “gratified and terrified” after Warnock narrowly beat Herschel Walker for a Senate seat.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.Warnock For the WinLate night hosts had taped their Tuesday shows before the results from the Georgia Senate runoff were in, so they shared their reactions to Raphael Warnock’s win on Wednesday.Stephen Colbert said he felt a swing of emotions. “Gratified, because Raphael Warnock defeated Herschel Walker, 51.4 percent to 48.6 percent, and terrified, because 48.6 percent of Georgians looked at Herschel Walker and went, ‘Yeah, that guy should be a U.S. senator.’”“Warnock has won Georgia! It’s fitting he’s a reverend, because when I hear that, all I can say is ‘Thank God.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“But despite that, it was close. It was really, really close. In fact, if I was Raphael Warnock, my victory speech wouldn’t have been me smiling. I would have been a lot more different. He’s a gracious man. He was talking about democracy and America’s promise. I would have been up there like, ‘Are you people kidding me with this [expletive]? You guys are giving me a two point win over this walking vasectomy commercial? Are you kidding me?’ He is a better man.” — TREVOR NOAH“This is a tough break for Walker, though it’ll take him a couple days to understand what has happened.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Walker was so deeply unqualified that much of the time it seemed like he didn’t even know what was going on. Even Walker’s fellow Republicans warned months ago that he could lose. The only reason he was even a candidate for the Senate in the first place was that he was once on Donald Trump’s game show. Donald Trump fired him from ‘The Celebrity Apprentice,’ but thought he might do better in the United States Senate. [imitating Trump] ‘Herschel, I don’t know if you’re ready to sell corn dogs in Times Square, so let’s put you in charge of the U.S. military first.’” — SETH MEYERS“Rafael Warnock defeated Republican Herschel Walker in the Georgia runoff last night, giving Democrats a 51-49 seat majority in the Senate. Experts say the key to Warnock’s victory was that he wasn’t Herschel Walker.” — JAMES CORDEN“When you take a moment, when you step away from a race, you understand how crazy this was? You had Raphael Warnock, a pastor — a pastor who is preaching at the same church as M.L.K., and Herschel Walker, a man who thinks M.L.K. is how you spell ‘milk.’” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (Herschel, What’s Next? Edition)“With this loss, Walker is expected to return to his previous job, lying about having previous jobs. But on the bright side, it gives him more time to spend with his family, and more time to figure out who that is.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“And with the election behind him, Herschel says he will now focus on his true passion, having more kids than Nick Cannon.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Herschel’s already working on his next project, which is desperately trying to learn to sing ‘Baby Got Back’ while dressed like an acorn on ‘The Masked Singer.’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Herschel has decided to step away from the spotlight to spend more time denying allegations from his family.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth Watching“The Daily Show” parodied holiday rom-coms with its political parody, “The Daily Show Christmas Movie: A Vote for Love.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightOn Thursday night, Trevor Noah will sign off with his last episode as host of “The Daily Show.”Also, Check This OutIce Spice’s “Munch (Feelin’ U)” introduces a new piece of slang. The track made all three of our critics’ lists this year.Edwig HensonWith 70 different songs spanning several genres, our critics share their picks for the best songs of 2022. More

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      George Newall, a Creator of ‘Schoolhouse Rock,’ Dies at 88

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      He was the last surviving member of the team that produced the educational cartoon for ABC-TV that informed Generation X.George R. Newall, an advertising executive who was the last surviving creator of “Schoolhouse Rock,” the animated musical snippets that taught young Generation X television viewers grammar, math, civics and science for a few moments during otherwise vacuous Saturday-morning commercial programming, died on Nov. 30 at a hospital near his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. He was 88.The cause was cardiopulmonary arrest, his wife, Lisa Maxwell, said.“Schoolhouse Rock,” series, which ran from 1973 to 1984 and was revived in the 1990s, used quirky cartoons and upbeat music to furtively transform rote learning into euphonious fun during regular programming and before the government, in the 1990s, mandated that stations broadcast a modicum of educational and informative fare.The show won four Emmy Awards.The series spawned books, recordings, live singalong shows and a nostalgia cult that will mark the show’s 50th anniversary next year when the Walt Disney Company presents a prime-time television special; rereleases “The Official Schoolhouse Rock Guide,” written by Mr. Newall and Tom Yohe; and publishes an adult coloring book featuring all of the program’s characters.Among the show’s perennial favorite songs were “Three Is a Magic Number,” celebrating tripods, triangles and even a couple producing a baby; “Interjection!” which depicts a cartoon character getting stuck in the posterior with a big needle; and Mr. Newall’s “Unpack Your Adjectives.”“Schoolhouse Rock” originated in the early 1970s when David McCall, president of the McCaffrey & McCall advertising agency, complained to Mr. Newall, a creative director there, that his young sons couldn’t multiply, “but they can sing along with Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones.”Could Mr. Newall put the multiplication tables to music? he asked. Mr. Newall’s search for a quirky musician who might help led him to Ben Tucker, who played bass at the Hickory House in New York, which Mr. Newall frequented regularly.“I asked Ben, and he said, ‘Oh yeah, my partner, Bob Dorough — he can put anything to music!’” Mr. Newall told The New York Times Magazine in 2018.‘He told me Bob had written a song based on the words on the mattress tag that say, ‘Do not remove under penalty of law,’” Mr. Newall recalled. “So I brought Bob in, and David gave him the assignment. He came back about two weeks later with ‘Three Is a Magic Number,’ and we were all knocked out by it.”The song inspired Mr. Yohe, the agency’s art director and a cartoonist, to start doodling. What was originally conceived as an educational phonograph record morphed into a series of three-minute films that the creative team presented to Michael Eisner, then the director of children’s programming at ABC, a client of the agency.Mr. Eisner happened to be meeting with Chuck Jones, the immortal Warner Bros. animator.“After we played the song and Tom showed them the storyboards, Eisner looked at Jones and said, ‘What do you think?’” Mr. Newall told The Times in 1994. “And Jones said, ‘I think you should buy it right away.’ It was probably the quickest deal in television history.”The first season was followed with themed series on grammar, government (to coincide with the American Bicentennial celebration), science and computer technology.In 1976, Carol Rinzler wrote in The Times, “The ‘ABC Schoolhouse Rock’ animated bits, which teach math and reading concepts and, this year, American history, are a joy. It’s worth sitting in front of your TV all morning to catch the one in which the Constitution is set to music.”Three-minute “Schoolhouse Rock” cartoons like “Conjunction Junction” tried to teach children grammar, math, civics and science.ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty ImagesMr. Eisner later became chairman and chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, which acquired “Schoolhouse Rock” in 1996 (including new segments produced in the 1990s with J.J. Sedelmaier Productions) when it bought Capital Cities/ABC.Mr. Newall and Mr. Yohe were the executive producers and creative directors of the original episodes and worked with other collaborators. Mr. Newall composed 10 of the songs.In 1996, Atlantic Records released an album featuring alternative musicians like Moby (who croons a brassy version of “Verb: That’s What’s Happening”), and in 2002 the Disney Company issued a DVD of all the “Schoolhouse Rock” episodes and a timely lyrical explication by Mr. Newall of why some states in a presidential election are more equal than others.In 2013, Mr. Newall spoke about the show and Mr. Dorough performed “Schoolhouse Rock” songs at a free concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington.Mr. Yohe died in 2000, Mr. Dorough in 2018.George Robert Newall Jr. was born on June 17, 1934, in Lakewood, N.J. His father was a builder. His mother, Louise (DeNyse) Newall, worked for the school board in Brick Township.After attending Point Pleasant Beach High School and serving in the Army’s 11th Airborne Division Band at Fort Campbell, Ky., Mr. Newall graduated from Florida State University with a bachelor’s degree in music composition in 1960. He moved to New York City, where, starting in a mailroom at $50 a week, he worked for a number of ad agencies, including Ogilvy & Mather and Grey.At McCaffrey & McCall, he conjured up the Hai Karate brand of men’s toiletries for Pfizer with an advertising campaign that parodied the industry’s customary romanticized appeal to raw sexual passion by including self-defense instructions to fend off libidinous women.In 1978, he and Mr. Yohe started a company to produce animated educational programming. They won another Emmy for “Drawing Power,” an animated series for NBC, and awards for cartoons that promoted nutrition, cartoons that urged young viewers to read (“When You Turn Off Your Set, Turn On a Book”) and cartoons that were praised for being neither sexist nor racist.In the 1980s, Mr. Newall joined Wells Rich Greene, where he produced TV commercials in which Alan Alda pitched Atari computers.Mr. Newall is survived by his wife, the artist and singer Lisa (Chapman) Maxwell; a stepson, Lake Wolosker; and his sisters, Jessie Newall Bissey, Kathy Newall Hogan and Anne Newall Kimmel. More

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      In ‘White Lotus,’ Beauty and Truth Are All Mixed Up

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      This season focuses on the willful delusion of the wealthy — and how easily preyed upon people who evade reality can be.Early in the second season of “The White Lotus” — Mike White’s HBO satire of the leisure class, currently set in a five-star Sicilian resort — there’s a sequence that offers an overt, shot-for-shot homage to a scene in “L’Avventura,” from 1960, the first film in Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Trilogy of Decadence.” Coolly removed and virtually plotless, Antonioni’s three films were intended as an indictment of the entropic passivity of wealth. All starred Monica Vitti, the glamorous Italian actress with whom Antonioni was romantically involved. In “L’Avventura,” she plays Claudia, a young woman whose best friend, Anna, disappears during a yacht trip off the coast of Sicily. As Claudia and Anna’s boyfriend, Sandro, search for the missing girl, they drift into an unconvincing relationship. When they arrive at the lone hotel in the town of Noto, Claudia, suddenly worried about facing her friend, tells Sandro to search inside without her.What we are looking at is the experience of being looked at.The scene “The White Lotus” recreates takes place outside, in the piazza, where Claudia is accosted by a horde of leering men. The aesthetics are disconcerting: Antonioni uses the town’s baroque architecture to pile men around and atop Claudia. She looks afraid, for a moment, but then has a sort of detachment from reality. Walking slowly through the crowd, she seems to give herself over to the experience, allowing herself to become a spectacle, subject to the men’s (and the audience’s) scrutinizing, consuming gaze.Welcoming You Back to ‘The White Lotus’The second season of “The White Lotus,” Mike White’s incisive satire of privilege set in a luxury resort, begins on HBO on Oct. 30.Michael Imperioli: The “Sopranos” star is enjoying a professional renaissance after years of procedurals and indies. In the new season of “The White Lotus” he tries his hand at comedy.Season 1: The series scrutinized the interactions between guests and staff at a resort in Hawaii. “It’s vicious and a little sudsy and then, out of nowhere, sneakily uplifting,” our critic wroteUnaware Villain: The actor Jake Lacy plays Shane, a wealthy and entitled 30-year-old on his honeymoon, in the first season. Here is what he said about bringing to life the unsavory character.Emmys: The series scooped up five Primetime Emmys on Sept. 12, including for best TV movie, limited or anthology series, and best supporting actress for Jennifer Coolidge’s breakout performance.Even before “The White Lotus” fully replicates this image, though, we see one character — a batty gazillionaire named Tanya McQuoid, played by Jennifer Coolidge — explicitly name-check Vitti. Describing her fantasy of a day in Italy to her husband, Greg, she stays resolutely on the surface: “First, I want to look just like Monica Vitti,” she says. “And then this man in a very slim-fitting suit, he comes over and he lights my cigarette. And it tastes really good. And then he takes me for a drive on his Vespa. Then, at sunset, we go down really close to the sea, to one of those really romantic spots. And then we drink lots of aperitivos and we eat big plates of pasta with giant clams. And we’re just really chic and happy. And we’re beautiful.” Greg obligingly rents a Vespa. But Tanya is not the character who will feature in the Antonioni homage.“L’Avventura” is not the only film referenced in “The White Lotus,” which is positively haunted by movies and the fantasies they engender. As Tanya casts herself in her superficial version of an Italian film, Bert Di Grasso — a grandfather whose family trip to Sicily has been upended by the women in the family’s refusing to come — is exalting the ethos of “The Godfather,” in which he sees men who are free to do as they like. After her ill-fated Vitti cosplay leaves her alone and betrayed, Tanya takes up with Quentin, part of a group of “high-end gays,” as she calls them, who recast her as a tragic heroine. Quentin tells her about his own lost love, but it sounds like the plot of “Brokeback Mountain,” and he takes her to the opera to see “Madama Butterfly,” which, in this context, can’t help but call to mind “M. Butterfly,” and a very specific form of romantic deception. As the line blurs between stories and lies, the vibe shifts closer to “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” If the first season of “The White Lotus” was about the casual destructiveness of wealth, this one seems to be about its willful delusion — and how easily preyed upon people who evade reality can be.In Antonioni’s film, Vitti’s wealth and beauty grant her character access to a world of glamour, but they also trap her in a lie, concealing a real world of rot and corruption. “L’Avventura” means “the adventure” — ironic, since nothing much happens in the movie, and its central mystery is never solved — but an “avventura” is also a term for an illicit affair, often one entered out of boredom, for kicks. This is precisely how everyone in this season of “The White Lotus” gets into trouble. For both show and film, “love” is a dance of deception and self-delusion, in which it’s hard to tell who’s the mark.The only character who still clings to purity — the only innocent left to corrupt — is Harper Spiller, played by Aubrey Plaza. And she is the one who ends up in Noto, recreating the Monica Vitti scene in the piazza. Like Claudia, Harper has drifted here by accident — by virtue, another character observes, of being pretty. The newly rich wife of a tech founder, she has come on a luxury vacation at the invitation of his college roommate. Harper is suspicious of the whole endeavor: of getting rich quickly, of old friends who materialize suddenly after you get rich, of rich people who spend their lives disengaging from the world and drifting from one fantasy locale to the next. In Noto, she finds herself alone and surrounded by men, exactly like Vitti. Just as in the film, the scene feels over the top and surreal — part paranoid fantasy, part dissociative experience, and even stranger now that it’s 2022, not 1960, and Aubrey Plaza doesn’t cut quite so otherworldly and surprising (for Noto) a figure as the statuesque blonde Vitti did.As we watch Harper drift through the crowd, what we are looking at is the experience of being looked at. Along with Tanya — who aims to imitate Vitti but is instead brutally compared, by a tactless hotel manager, to Peppa Pig — she offers a metaphor for how thoroughly we can give ourselves over to imposture.Antonioni started working during the Italian neorealism movement, when films were shot on location, making use of nonactors, telling stories about working-class people and poverty and despair. But it was “L’Avventura,” with its focus on the alienation of the moneyed, that made him internationally famous. I know this because I took an Italian-neorealism class during a junior year abroad in Paris, and — not surprisingly, I suppose, for the kind of person who takes an Italian-neorealism class during a junior year in Paris — I, too, preferred Antonioni’s trilogy about disaffected rich people to the stuff that had come before: children stealing bicycles, Anna Magnani worrying about unpaid bills, that sort of thing. Struggle is hard to watch; it is much more pleasant to have our moral judgments projected into a world of aestheticized, escapist pleasure.We carry a desire to inhabit images we’ve seen, reified symbols of love, glamour, happiness, success. The “White Lotus” scene in Noto is a perfect representation of this recursive fakery and its nightmarish endpoint. Like so many travelers in the Instagram age, the show’s characters drift through their adventures without any real purpose other than to reproduce the pretty scenes and special moments they’ve seen elsewhere, trying to locate themselves in endless reflections. Among them, it is only Harper who remains unaffected by visual culture. Her scene in Noto feels like an inflection point. It is easier than ever to mistake beauty for truth — or pretend to. Which, the show asks, will Harper choose?Source photographs: HBO; Cino del Duca/PCE, Lyre. More

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      Stephen Colbert Thanks Santa After Trump Organization Is Found Guilty

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      Late night hosts were thrilled after the former president’s company was convicted on all 17 counts it faced, including tax fraud.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.A Christmas MiracleOn Tuesday, the Trump Organization was convicted on 17 counts of tax fraud and other crimes.“Oh, Santa, you got my letter!” Stephen Colbert riffed on the news.“Trump is bragging it’s the most counts ever.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“And you know what that means? Donald Trump is going to prison — to visit all the lower-ranking people that did this without his knowledge or his permission.” — TREVOR NOAH“Nothing ever happens to Donald Trump. He’ll probably try to convince us he’s never even heard of the Trump Organization.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“All the successes and Trump’s organization, they are due to the genius of Donald Trump. All the crimes, he had no idea. He’s like, [imitating Donald Trump] ‘That’s right, folks. I have zero control over the things I run, which is why you should vote for me to run the country so I can run it like one of my companies, which I don’t even run. I don’t even run.’” — TREVOR NOAH“What happened was, top execs in the organization got around paying their fair share of taxes through a series of schemes that included off-the-books perks like luxury cars and free apartments. Because nothing makes you look less guilty than giving all your execs a getaway car and a hide-out.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“There’s no word yet on how this is going to impact Trump’s re-election campaign. The reason for that is that it probably won’t.” — JAMES CORDEN“Executives in the organization received fancy apartments, Mercedes-Benzes, even private school tuition for relatives, none of which they paid tax on. I just have to ask: Are they hiring?” — JAMES CORDEN“I don’t get this — how is the organization guilty, but not Donald Trump? This is like if McDonald’s got in trouble, but the Hamburglar got off scot-free.” — JAMES CORDENThe Punchiest Punchlines (Herschel Walker’s Last Push Edition)“In Georgia, Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker are going head-to-head injury in the Senate runoff.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Walker spent the day making one final push, which is unusual for him. Usually during the final push, he’s miles away from the hospital at a Waffle House telling a waitress she could be ‘the one.’”— JIMMY KIMMEL“Voters were out at the polls all day, and at 11:35 Eastern time, with 0 percent of precincts reporting, because we taped the show at 5:30, ‘The Late Show’ is ready to project that Herschel Walker does not belong in the Senate.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“The U.S. Senate is no place for people whose brains don’t work because of football injuries; it’s a place for people whose brains don’t work because they’re 1,000 years old.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“It’s not like Herschel didn’t try — he spent years fathering as many voters as possible.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingAmy Poehler and Maya Rudolph appeared on Tuesday’s “Late Night,” where they challenged Seth Meyers to ask them a tough question.What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightThe Linda Lindas will perform on Wednesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This Out“Who am I?” asks Orlando, played by Emma Corrin, in a new production at Garrick Theater in London.Marc BrennerEmma Corrin straddles genders and centuries in Neil Bartlett’s breezy adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando,” now playing at the Garrick Theater in London. More