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      Trevor Noah Feels for Trump as He Sits on the Sidelines

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      Ron DeSantis is stealing the ex-president’s thunder, Noah says — “he’s slowly becoming the Republican Party now.” 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.Twice the TrumpFormer President Donald J. Trump is reported to have expressed anger over the attention Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is getting for sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard — because Trump claims it was his idea.Trevor Noah said the Republican Party had “two Donald Trumps now.”“Oh man, poor Donald Trump. He is just sitting at home like, ‘You stole my idea! And by the way, stealing stuff is also my idea. Read the news!’” — TREVOR NOAH“Can you imagine being such a despicable creep, you’re mad at someone for being a despicable creep sooner than you? That’s like taking credit for being the first guy to put pineapple on pizza.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“But you know what’s really telling here is that, in a way, Trump has a point, all right? He is the guy who came up with the idea of turning all politics into a series of stunts. That is what he did — the Muslim ban, ‘build the wall.’ That [expletive] didn’t solve anything but got the people going, and now pulling stunts has become the driving force of the Republican Party, but Trump is stuck watching out on the sidelines.” — TREVOR NOAH“And I feel bad for you, Mr. Trump. But the fact is, Ron DeSantis, you see what he’s doing — he’s slowly becoming the Republican Party now, stealing your tricks, making it his own.” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (Just a Phase Edition)“Speaking of America, land that I love, President of America Joe Biden made big news on the ‘60 Minutes’ this weekend when he maybe kind of prematurely declared that the pandemic is over, which marks the first time that Joe Biden has ever moved too fast.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“President Biden claimed in a new interview that the coronavirus pandemic is over. Easy for him to say — he just had it. Of course it’s over when you’ve got the antibodies: ‘I’m off to Burning Man, then London for the Queen’s funeral. No masks, baby!’” — SETH MEYERS“Lawmakers and public health officials are concerned his comment could undermine the rollout of new booster shots, as well as funding from Congress. The White House says their Covid-19 policy is unchanged, despite Biden’s comments. It’s never a good sign when even the White House is trying to distance itself from the president, is it?” — JAMES CORDEN“Biden’s announcement took the White House by surprise, and they’re now trying to backpedal, saying ‘Sure, the president could have been more nuanced — he was simply saying we’ve hit a different phase.’ OK, saying something is over, kind of a misleading way to declare a new phase.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingThe “Late Night” writers Amber Ruffin and Jenny Hagel took on Black hobbits and lesbian rom-coms for Tuesday night’s “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightOlivia Wilde, the director of “Don’t Worry Darling,” will appear on Wednesday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutXavier Collin/Image Press Agency and Sipa USA, via AlamyColin Hanks is inspired by tacos, shaving his head and “What We Do in the Shadows.” More

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      Jack Charles, Grandfather of Aboriginal Theater, Dies at 79

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      One of Australia’s leading Indigenous actors, he had a resonant voice, a charismatic personality and a troubled personal life that often landed him in jail.MELBOURNE, Australia — Jack Charles, one of Australia’s leading Indigenous actors, who has been called the “grandfather of Aboriginal theater” but whose heroin addiction and penchant for burglary landed him in and out of jail throughout his life, died on Sept. 13 in Melbourne. He was 79.He died in a hospital after having a stroke, according to his publicist, Patrice Capogreco.Mr. Charles had a voice that made people stop and listen.Gravelly and majestic, with rounded vowels honed by elocution lessons in a rough-and-tumble boys’ home, it assured him an audience even over the scrum of the Australian prisons where he spent much of his life.“It’s very unusual for a crim or a screw to listen to a prisoner talk for very long,” he wrote in a memoir, using slang for fellow inmates and prison officers. “But for whatever reason, they’d let me run with whatever I was talking about and actually listen.”That voice catapulted Mr. Charles onto the stage, where he captivated Melbourne theatergoers, and helped make him one of Australia’s leading Aboriginal screen actors.He ascribed his talents to his Indigenous heritage. “We’re great orators,” he wrote in his memoir. “That is merely one element of our culture that white people never saw in our development.”Mr. Charles co-founded Australia’s first Indigenous theater company, Nindethana Theater, with the actor Bob Maza in 1971. He was known in Australia as Uncle Jack, an Aboriginal honorific denoting his status as an elder.His life was chronicled in an unsparing 2008 documentary, “Bastardy”; his memoir, “Born-again Blakfella”; and the 2010 one-man play “Jack Charles vs. the Crown,” which he co-wrote and performed around the world, despite multiple convictions that would ordinarily have limited his ability to travel.“Mr. Trump gave me a waiver to go to New York and perform ‘Jack Charles vs. the Crown,’” he said of the former president in an interview last year with the Australian news outlet The Saturday Paper. “That’s the ultimate for an old thief like me. I’m still thieving, stealing things. I’m stealing hearts and minds nowadays.”His road to stardom was a rocky one. Mr. Charles wrestled with heroin addiction, homelessness and an almost lifelong flirtation with burglary, for which he was incarcerated numerous times. He spent his 20th, 30th, 40th and 50th birthdays behind bars.It was also a journey of self-discovery: of who he really was, where he had come from, his homosexuality and what it meant to be an Aboriginal Australian and a member of the so-called Stolen Generation, Aboriginal people who for decades as children were removed from their families by the government and forcibly assimilated into white society.Raised in an almost entirely white home for boys, Mr. Charles had no knowledge of Aboriginal culture and did not even know he was Indigenous until other children bullied him for it.He would later use that self-knowledge to educate others about Australia’s history and race relations, whether from the back of a taxi cab or on the set of the 2015 Warner Bros. movie “Pan,” where he draped the Aboriginal flag over the back of his trailer. (He played a tribal chief in the film, alongside his fellow Australian Hugh Jackman.)“It became a talking point to discuss the social and political hopes for Aboriginal Australians,” Mr. Charles wrote, “as well as teaching people about the Dreaming,” an Aboriginal concept for the beginning of time.In his final years, after he had kicked his heroin addiction, he was a familiar and striking figure plying the streets of Melbourne atop a mobility scooter, an Aboriginal flag fluttering on the back.“He was someone that embraced everything, even the bad things,” said Wesley Enoch, an Australian theater director who had worked with Mr. Charles. “He embraced them so that he could understand them and incorporate them in who he was.”He added that to be embraced by Mr. Charles himself, who stood less than five feet tall and whose luxuriant white Afro and beard were perfumed with patchouli oil, was a memorable experience.Mr. Charles starred in the Australian superhero TV series “Cleverman.”Lisa Tomasetti/SundanceTVJack Charles was born in Melbourne on Sept. 5, 1943. He was one of 13 children born to Blanchie Muriel Charles, two of whom died at birth. The 11 survivors were seized from their mother in infancy. Mr. Charles was the only one of his siblings to meet her again.He was placed in his first children’s home at four months old. At his second, the Box Hill Boys’ Home in suburban Melbourne, he endured physical and sexual abuse, he said. The few Indigenous children there were forbidden to speak to one another.“I was whitewashed, if you will, by the system,” Mr. Charles told a state commission.At 14, he moved into a foster home and began a glass-beveling apprenticeship. But after a disagreement with his foster mother over a night out — when he met with other Indigenous Australians and learned his birth mother’s identity — he was removed from the home at 17 and taken into police custody.So began a troubled relationship with the law. Mr. Charles spent 22 years in prison, often on burglary charges. He favored homes in the wealthy Melbourne suburb of Kew, where his forebears had originated.Raised as a Christian, he had been taught that stealing was wrong, he told The Saturday Paper. But committing “burgs,” as he called them, on his ancestral homeland “felt great,” he said. “Very, very satisfying.”Incarceration was, for him, as productive as it was frequent: On behalf of fellow inmates, he wrote love letters to their wives in exchange for chocolate and tobacco. He read extensively, completed his high school education and learned and taught pottery.“You only lose your freedom in the nick,” he said in the documentary “Bastardy,” using a slang term for a jail. “You can’t go anywhere, but your mind can go wandering all over the place when you’re incarcerated. I might be locked up, but I’m free, still. Free inside.”Mr. Charles found his way onto the stage almost by accident. In 1964, representatives of Melbourne’s New Theater came to the Aboriginal youth hostel where he was living to cast an all-Indigenous production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun.” He was given a role as an understudy.It was a revelation. In the theater, Mr. Charles had found his people. “They threw great parties, and they didn’t seem to care about my sexuality or my Aboriginality,” he wrote in his memoir.For the next seven years he beveled glass in a factory by day and acted with the New Theater by night.But he slid deeper into addiction and ended up on the street. Stints in prison, he wrote, were a relief, as they offered stable housing and regular meals.From 1971 to 1974, he ran the Aboriginal theater group Nindenthana, whose first hit show, “Jack Charles Is Up and Fighting,” explored whether Indigenous Australians should assimilate or stand apart from the country’s white majority.He starred in plays across Australia, including “Cradle of Hercules,” “No Sugar” and, in 2020, “Black Ties,” at Melbourne’s largest theater, the Arts Center. He appeared in several Australian television series, including “Cleverman,” “Women of the Sun” and “Preppers,” and movies, including “The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith,” “Blackfellas” and “Wolf Creek.”He was eventually reunited with four of his siblings: his brother Archie, and his sisters Esme, Eva-Jo and Christine. He did not learn the identity of his father, Hilton Hamilton Walsh, until last year, when he appeared on the reality genealogy television show “Who Do You Think You Are.”He is survived by Christine Zenip Charles, the only one of his 11 siblings he knew to be still alive.In his last years, Mr. Charles was able to look back at his life with magnanimity, moving from a place of deep anger to one of conciliation.“It’s important to keep in mind my story is also about healing,” he wrote in his memoir. “That’s how I’ve been able to keep going.” More

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      ‘Andor’ Review: Star Wars Without the ‘Star Wars’

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      The franchise’s latest series on Disney+ sticks to the story but flushes a lot of the usual trappings out the airlock.As the big science-fiction and superhero franchises have proliferated, their mantra has been that television is a place for diversification and creative freedom — to do something different, within reason. Hence Marvel’s strenuously meta “WandaVision” or Paramount’s goofy, animated “Star Trek: Lower Decks.”“Andor,” the newest series in the “Star Wars” universe (premiering Wednesday on Disney+), doesn’t take one of those hard detours. But it’s different in its own way. In the four (of 12) episodes available for review, it continually feels as if the people who made it like a lot of things — “Blade Runner,” “Avatar,” “Casablanca,” Vietnam War metaphors — better than they like “Star Wars.”Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The defining feature of “Andor” is how it takes a “Star Wars” story and, without getting conceptual, transposes it in visual and tonal terms. Heavily latexed aliens, plastic-suited storm troopers and vast, exotic landscapes are, for the most part, out; humans (or humanoids) wearing nondescript uniforms in a battered, urban-industrial backdrop are in. Costume-heavy Saturday-serial space opera is replaced by straight-ahead sci-fi action with a real-world anti-corporate theme.And the good news about “Andor” is that the new look and feel are rendered meticulously and evocatively; a lot of effort, led by the creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy, has been spent on giving the show a gritty and realistic texture. Moment to moment, it’s easy to just relax and enjoy the change. The opening scene, a “Blade Runner” homage that leads into a dark, seamy version of the typical “Star Wars” cantina, is a witty example of the show’s method.But making “Andor” less like “Star Wars” means, in this case, making it more like a lot of other science-fiction dramas. And while its surface attractions are significant, you may find yourself looking for things that other sci-fi stories supply, like compelling characters and a narrative pulse.Following the general pattern of serialized franchise extensions, “Andor” goes back in time, fleshing out and coloring in a small, retrospective piece of the overall story. (Advancing the narrative is still the province of films.) In this case it’s an even smaller piece than usual. Cassian Andor, played by Diego Luna, was a character created for a movie, “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” that was a stand-alone time capsule in its own right. Giving him a back story in “Andor” is embroidering on an embroidery.Gilroy was brought in to do rewrites on “Rogue One,” and perhaps he had a sense of unfinished business, because the real challenge of putting Cassian at the center of a series is that he’s a cipher in that movie — a rebel operative with a ruthless streak and a shady past who’s just there as a foil for the film’s young heroine. When he joins her in a haze of self-sacrificial glory, his epiphany feels completely unearned.There’s no reason that such a character couldn’t be turned into something more interesting for the series, but through the early going, “Andor” doesn’t pull it off. Cassian’s antisocial tendencies, and his resourcefulness, are given a foundation in a childhood on a planet whose Indigenous people are exploited by an Empire-sanctioned mining company. (These forest-planet flashbacks are an unusually clear expression of the hoary colonialist clichés “Star Wars” falls back on when depicting the Empire’s reach.)Like many “Star Wars” projects, “Andor” includes a scene-stealing droid, named B2EMO.Lucasfilm/Disney+But that new information doesn’t make him any more interesting; neither does the attempt to make his adult character, a thief and black marketeer, into a Humphrey Bogart-style cynical romantic, declining to choose sides until his hand is forced. That’s the primary narrative thrust of the early season, as a covert rebel leader played by Stellan Skarsgard tracks down Cassian and enlists him in a dangerous mission against the corporation that ravaged his home planet.The scene in which Skarsgard’s character recruits Cassian while they’re pursued by corporate goons takes up much of the fourth episode, and it’s an exciting, well-executed action set piece. But the recruitment pitch is notably uninspiring, and that’s typical of “Andor,” in which action and design are more than satisfactory while the thinness of the characterizations leaves you unfulfilled. (The same could be said of old-school “Star Wars” films under George Lucas’s helm, of course, but they could make up some of the balance in emotion and sheer, propulsive entertainment value.)Luna, who shot to stardom in America with “Y Tu Mamá También,” in 2001, is a fine actor, but he’s still unable to bring much besides an air of juvenile grievance to Cassian, who’s just awfully hard to care about. Thin writing is an issue up and down the cast list; people seem less important than the depictions of political intrigue and corporate malfeasance, which are handled well but aren’t that different from any number of other dystopian dramas. Fiona Shaw stands out in a supporting role as Cassian’s rough-and-tumble mentor, and Adria Arjona is fun to watch as his sparring partner and probable love interest.It’s typical of “Star Wars” projects that the best performances tend to be given by robots. That was the case in “Rogue One,” where the hulking war droid voiced by Alan Tudyk was the best reason to watch. “Andor” has a small, decrepit, R2-D2-like figure named B2EMO, voiced by Dave Chapman and sort of a cross between a toolbox and a shop vac. He doesn’t have a lot to do in the early episodes, but he has signs of personality. Keep an eye on him when the fighting really breaks out. More

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      Colin Hanks Finds Perfection in ‘What We Do in the Shadows’ and Tacos at Every Meal

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      The actor, who moves out of his comfort zone in Peacock’s “A Friend of the Family,” talks about his love affair with soccer and the pleasure of a shaved head.When Colin Hanks learned that he was being considered for “A Friend of the Family,” he thought, “Awesome — it sounds fabulous.”Then the scripts arrived.“I went, ‘Oh, this is just the saddest show I’ve ever read, so I don’t know what to think if you’ve been thinking of me,’” he recalled. “It was one of those stories that was incredibly intimidating and my first instinct was just, ‘No, I can’t.’”But he couldn’t get the true-crime show out of his head. Debuting Oct. 6 on Peacock, Nick Antosca’s limited series is based on the real story of the Brobergs (who were also the subjects of the 2017 Netflix documentary “Abducted in Plain Sight”).Hanks plays Bob Broberg, a stalwart Mormon in bucolic Idaho whose family implodes when Robert Berchtold (Jake Lacy) — or Brother B, to his adoring neighbors — moves to town and perverts everything they thought they believed in. He also kidnaps the Brobergs’ eldest daughter, Jan. Twice.Before he took on the role, Hanks made it clear that he wasn’t interested in re-enacting a laundry list of all the bad decisions the Brobergs made while being emotionally and sexually manipulated by Berchtold, even as they questioned his growing fixation on their daughter. Rather, Hanks wanted to examine why they made these choices.The Vampire Antics of ‘What We Do in the Shadows’The FX series based on the 2015 film by the same name follows a crew of vampires and their struggles to settle down in Staten Island.The Movie: “At heart a dotty look at oldsters struggling to adapt to an unwelcoming modernity, ‘Shadows’ has the bones of an anarchic sitcom,” The Times wrote upon the film’s release.The Creators: Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi wrote, directed and acted in the mockumentary. Here is why they decided to return to the vampire world with a show.Series Review: “If ‘Shadows’ doesn’t seem entirely necessary, it’s perfectly fun,” our critic wrote when the TV show debuted in 2019.Harvey Guillén: The actor plays Guillermo, a human in a house full of vampires. Though it was supposed to be a minor role, he quickly became a fan favorite.“And that was exactly what Nick was wanting to explore,” he said.It has been a hectic year for Hanks, who played an F.B.I. agent in “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, and a studio executive in “The Offer,” about the making of “The Godfather.” A San Francisco Giants fan, he has also produced a documentary about Willie Mays, out November on HBO.Calling from London, where he’s shooting an independent film, Hanks ticked off 10 things that have kept him grounded during the hustle, including “What We Do in the Shadows,” his cast-iron skillet and the Atlanta BeltLine.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. “The Baseball 100” by Joe Posnanski I’ve been slowly reading this book because I don’t want it to end. They’re really more of a character study on players from all different points in baseball’s history, as well as players from Japan and players from the Negro leagues.2. My cast-iron skillet I’m not very skilled at cooking, not yet at least. But there’s something about the idea of using this one skillet and seasoning it and being able to cook almost anything in it and that’s all you need. In a strange way, it’s also a little bit like a baseball mitt. You’ve got to break it in. You’ve got to take care of it. You’ve got to clean it properly. It’s not something that you use and then throw in the sink and don’t think twice about.3. “Sunderland ’Til I Die” on Netflix I’ve made a bunch of documentaries. That’s sort of my show business side hustle. I did one about Tower Records. I did another about Eagles of Death Metal going back to Paris, playing after the Bataclan attack. Recently, I got obsessed with this fantastic sports doc called “Sunderland ’Til I Die,” about an English football team that’s been demoted. That’s just heartbreak, the likes of which I’ve not seen in sports in quite some time.4. Shaving my head I had to have a very specific hairstyle to play Bob Broberg. So half of my head has been shaved because I had a very serious wig process that I had to go through. I had to paint my head every morning and then do four layers of makeup and then put a wig on top. I’ve been wearing a hat every day since. I’m currently doing a job in which I had to have another wig made that looks like my normal hairstyle. I’m very much looking forward to about seven days from now, being able to shave my head and start all over again.5. Tacos The perfect food. Period. Exclamation point. They can be lunch, they can be dinner and, if you’re really lucky and you’ve got a good spot, they can also be breakfast as well.6. Discovering “new” music I find something really joyful in discovering music that’s new for you but might not necessarily be new for all. I found this record by this band called Jagwar Ma from 2013, and I’ve been listening to it nonstop walking around London. Wherever I travel, I go to local record stores, and I will label what city I’ve bought the records in. And so all of my records are sort of a memory, if you will, of where I was literally, physically, but also where I was in my life and what I was doing.7. Fall Fall is one of those moments that I really enjoy — you see the leaves change and you feel the temperature drop and everyone gets excited, for a little while at least, to button up their coats. It also means that the Fall Classic is right around the corner.8. The Atlanta BeltLine I live in Los Angeles, but I had to relocate to Atlanta for “A Friend of the Family.” It’s this fantastic walkway that circles the entire city. It is just this incredible conduit to Atlanta. Since I was staying right by it, I could throw some shoes on and go for a walk and see people and have dinner someplace and walk back. It’s not too dissimilar from the High Line in New York. It made me feel like I was part of the life there.9. Soccer They call it the beautiful game for a reason. The simplicity of it — a sport that is played everywhere around the world, and all you really need is a ball. I was actually supposed to see Liverpool play and it was going to be the first time I was going to see them live in person, and the match was postponed because of the Queen’s funeral. So it was very, very sad. Hence, now a Sunday spent at a pub drinking my sorrows away.10. FX’s “What We Do in the Shadows” It’s one of those shows where you might watch the first two episodes and your instinct is to say, “OK, I get it. They’re vampires. It’s a fake documentary. Everyone is speaking in funny accents.” Pardon the pun, but that show crept up on me in such a way that I am crying laughing practically every single episode. The concept of a vampire that sucks your energy by boring you to death, I thought that was so hilarious. Oddly, you wouldn’t necessarily think that a show that broad would be able to grip you and make you fall in love with the characters. But I absolutely have. More

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      In ‘Reboot,’ Everything Old Is New, to Streaming

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      This new Hulu comedy pokes fun at TV’s obsession with bringing back past shows.At a recent meeting at Hulu’s offices, over coffee and luxury bottled water, half a dozen executives entertained a pitch for a new series. Well, not exactly new. The idea: Reboot the beloved early ’00s comedy about a blended family, “Step Right Up.” Though it ended abruptly after its lead departed, the show has, surprisingly, found a robust audience on streaming, particularly among, an analytics specialist notes, the family and “live-to-laugh” quadrants.“Are we sure that’s not just people leaving it on for their dogs?” a colleague asks.Her boss voices a further concern: Are reboots still a thing? His team answers him with a very long list, which includes “Fuller House,” “How I Met Your Father,” “Veronica Mars,” “Gilmore Girls,” “Gossip Girls,” “The Wonder Years,” “Party of Five,” “Party Down” and on and on and on.“What the hell,” the boss says, convinced. “Let’s remake something original.”This is the opening scene of “Reboot,” a Hulu half-hour comedy from the showrunner Steven Levitan (“Modern Family,” “Just Shoot Me!”) with a premise so flawless it seems bananas that no one has thought of it before. A turducken of a show, it features a multicamera family comedy, nested inside a single camera workplace comedy, shoved into a behind-the-scenes Hollywood spoof. The series is also a referendum — a pretty fun one — on the way that the sitcom has advanced in the past several decades and its migration from network to cable and streaming.“This really is an affectionate look at our business,” Levitan said, speaking from a home office with “Modern Family” cutouts in the background. “The bizarre characters, the weird situations, the important meetings you have over something that’s unbelievably trivial and embarrassing. It’s really such great fodder for comedy.”Levitan first had the idea for “Reboot” several years ago when “Roseanne” returned and then disappeared, following a racist tweet posted by its star, Roseanne Barr, and then returned again, sans Barr, as “The Conners.” The presumed backstage drama intrigued him.“I remember thinking to myself, Well, that’s the show I want to watch,” he said. “Modern Family” still had a few seasons to go. He assumed that someone else would dream up the same idea in the meantime, but no one did. Or no one was greenlit, anyway. So he took his pitch to Hulu. (He has an overall deal with 20th Television, which is, like Hulu, part of the Walt Disney Company.)Rachel Bloom, left, and Krista Marie Yu in “Reboot,” a show about a show reviving an old show.Michael Desmond/HuluI asked Karey Burke, the president of 20th Television, who helped to develop “Reboot,” if Hulu’s real-life executives had ever expressed any qualms about the show’s satire. (There’s a dazzling swipe at “The Handmaid’s Tale” in the pilot, for example.)“They love it,” she said. “And I don’t know that other platforms would be able to handle the zingers as gracefully as they have.”Craig Erwich, the president of ABC Entertainment, Hulu and Disney branded television streaming originals, confirmed this, saying that he and his real colleagues enjoyed being in on the joke. “We loved it,” he said. “It’s funny. And it’s funny because it probably rings true.”Not all of these jokes target streaming services. A bunch take aim at networks, where Levitan spent most of his career. Others go after changes within the form of the sitcom itself. Many of these last are voiced in the form of arguments between Paul Reiser’s Gordon, who created “Step Right Up,” and Rachel Bloom’s Hannah, the millennial writer-director who pitched the reboot.“Comedy has evolved since you last wrote for television,” says Hannah, tartly. “I mean, honestly, whole species have evolved.”Some of that evolution has pushed sitcoms away from the live-audience multicamera style, the province of a studio comedy like “Step Right Up,” to more visually sophisticated single-camera formats. The move from network to streaming, a move that “Reboot” explores, has wrought other changes. This new “Step Right Up” no longer need to adhere to a 22-minute format with A, B and C story lines and pauses for commercial breaks. More sexually explicit material is now permissible, as are obscenities.“It’s the world of sitcom, but it’s streaming,” Reiser said in an interview, speaking of the move to streaming generally. “So you can say whatever you want, and you’re not going for the laugh, necessarily.”But old constraints die hard. Though “Step Right Up” has taken on a new look, most of the episodes of “Reboot” do still honor a three-act structure. And if the set-up-punchline, set-up-punchline form has given ground, A, B and C plots remain. “It’s inherent,” Levitan said. “It’s baked into my bones right now that shows will have a certain sense of structure and plot.”And yet, as “Reboot” demonstrates, and as a rewatch of most ’80s, ’90s and ’00s comedies will prove, content has changed. Jokes that punched down at women, queer people, disabled people, people of color — rarely make it to air now. Levitan framed this as a limitation, if a good one.“The whole #MeToo, woke culture, it has changed where you can go, and by and large, in a positive way,” he said. “Where it gets tricky is when everybody is so scared of offending somebody that you don’t even go anywhere near the line anymore.”Bloom, who cocreated the sitcom “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” sees this new sensibility as an opportunity rather than a curb or a cause for angst. “There’s a mindfulness that’s being asked of people now that wasn’t being asked of people before,” she said. “I think it’s making us all better people, better comedians.” And she enjoys playing Hannah, even in her occasional humorlessness.“A girl who wears baggy sweaters with anxiety?” Bloom said. “I know that person.” Reiser, who described himself as “a little bit more aware than Gordon” agreed with his co-star. “I never understand people who say, ‘You couldn’t make that joke anymore,’” he said. “I go, ‘Why would you want to? How much do you want to make a joke?’ It’s kind of not cool and insensitive.”Levitan first had the idea for “Reboot” during the controversy in which Roseanne Barr was fired from her own revived sitcom.Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesSome of the strongest scenes of “Reboot” are the ones set in the writers’ room that dramatize this tension. The writers whom Hannah has hired — a queer man and two women of color — clash openly with the older Jewish writers of Gordon’s acquaintance. In one scene, a younger writer critiques a joke pitched by the TV veteran Selma (Rose Abdoo, the series’s stealth M.V.P.).“I thought gay people were supposed to be fun,” Selma snaps back. But eventually they find a joke everyone likes. It involves a pratfall. Pratfalls are funny no matter what.But “Reboot” isn’t only funny. There’s a persistent sweetness to it and a sense that people can change, usually for the better.“That’s something that’s quite thrilling about the show,” said Keegan-Michael Key, a “Step Right Up” star. “It’s a Steve Levitan hallmark, isn’t it, that sense of people being open?”“Step Right Up” is the reboot at the center, but nearly all of the characters are rebooting themselves in one way or another, recovering from divorce, addiction, regional theater. Levitan mentioned how fans had told him how “Modern Family” had helped them work through difficult moments in their own lives. He hopes that “Reboot,” a show about Hollywood elites with Bentleys and real estate portfolios and connections to Nordic royalty, can do the same.“Bringing a little laughter into people’s lives is a really joyous thing to do,” he said.“Reboot” remains agnostic on the question of the worth of reboots themselves. Many real-world ones seem like little more than cheap intellectual-property grabs, and few improve on the original. Some are so dismal that they actually poison their predecessors, retroactively. The creators and stars of “Reboot” had varying opinions on the form. Or no opinion at all.“I don’t think that’s for me to say,” Levitan said. “Yeah, I would rather not draw the ire of comedy writers.” Reiser survived the reboot of “Mad About You” pretty much intact and seemed optimistic about the form. Bloom was less so.“The most exciting part of a reboot for me is the headline of a reboot coming up,” she said. The reboot itself was usually a disappointment.Key sounded more hopeful. He thought that reboots might work, at least notionally, and could even be innovative if the animating idea were persuasive enough. “I really think that is possible,” he said. “It’s all about angles.”Until Hollywood figures out those angles, we’ll just have to make do with something original. Like “Reboot.” More

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      Late Night Recaps the Queen’s Funeral

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      “There is no iPhone at the end of that line, all right?” Trevor Noah said of the long lines of mourners on Monday.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.Fit for a QueenQueen Elizabeth’s funeral took place on Monday, with crowds waiting in line for up to 24 hours to pay their respects.Trevor Noah called the wait “no joke,” saying, “There is no iPhone at the end of that line, all right? It’s just a box and you don’t even get to open the box.”“The line to see the queen’s coffin stretched for miles, similar to what goes on here in America when Popeye’s comes out with a new chicken sandwich.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“The procession was lengthy, with King Charles and siblings walking behind the coffin for nearly one and a half hours. That’s not easy. For years, the royal family’s only form of exercise has been walking back statements from Andrew.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“And it was a three-mile march from Westminster Abbey to Windsor Castle, also known as the long walk. Yeah, or as Kylie Jenner calls it, ‘Why didn’t they take the jet?’” — TREVOR NOAH“Leaders, dignitaries, and politicians from around the world gathered in London for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth. Meanwhile, Trump showed up at a Burger King and said, ‘Sorry for your loss.’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Freddy Krueger Edition)“In an interview yesterday, President Biden said while we still have a problem with the virus, quote, ‘The pandemic is over.’ Yes. Yeah. But I get why Biden said this. I mean, he just had Covid. Everyone — everyone who gets Covid is over Covid.” — TREVOR NOAH“Biden then announced that skinny jeans, neutral tones, and chrome nail polish are also over.” — JAMES CORDEN“He said ‘the pandemic is over,’ which is weirdly not reassuring at all. It’s like saying ‘Freddy Krueger is dead and he’s never coming back!’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It’s kind of huge news to mention so casually, you know? I wasn’t expecting the end of a two-and-a-half-year nightmare to be announced on the floor of the Detroit Auto Show.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingJimmy Fallon and his “Tonight Show” guest Margot Robbie got blasted in the face with an air cannon for every wrong answer in a guessing game called “Blow Your Mind.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightBilly Eichner will talk about his new movie “Bros” on “The Late Show.”Also, Check This Out“M*A*S*H,” which debuted in September 1972, feels both ancient and current. With Jamie Farr, seated, and, from left, Mike Farrell, David Ogden Stiers, Alan Alda, Loretta Swit, Harry Morgan and William Christopher in a later season.CBS Photo Archive/Getty ImagesAfter 50 years, “M*A*S*H” holds up as a precursor to modern-day comedies that are more than just funny. More

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      Chris Redd Is Latest Cast Member to Leave ‘S.N.L.’

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      Redd, who contributed impersonations of Kanye West and Mayor Eric Adams, is leaving “Saturday Night Live,” where four new featured players are joining the show.The number of departing “Saturday Night Live” cast members has now risen to eight: Chris Redd, who has been with “S.N.L.” since fall 2017 and has played characters including Kanye West and Mayor Eric Adams of New York, will not be returning this season, NBC said on Monday night.Redd said in a statement: “Being a part of ‘S.N.L’ has been the experience of a lifetime. Five years ago, I walked into 30 Rock knowing that this was an amazing opportunity for growth. Now, with friends who have become family and memories I will cherish forever, I’m grateful to Lorne Michaels and to the entire ‘S.N.L.’ organization. From the bottom of my heart, I can’t thank you all enough.”Redd has also co-starred in the NBC sitcom “Kenan,” with the longtime “S.N.L.” cast member Kenan Thompson; in the Peacock comedy series “Bust Down”; and in movies like “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping.” His standup special “Chris Redd: Why Am I Like This?” will be released on HBO Max later this year, NBC said. Redd is one of several “S.N.L.” veterans who have exited the show ahead of its coming 48th season. Kate McKinnon, Aidy Bryant, Pete Davidson and Kyle Mooney all left “S.N.L.” at the conclusion of its 47th season in May. Earlier this month, Melissa Villaseñor, Alex Moffat and Aristotle Athari also departed the cast.Last week, NBC announced that “S.N.L.” had hired four new cast members. Those performers — Marcello Hernandez, Molly Kearney, Michael Longfellow and Devon Walker — will all begin as featured players when the new season begins on Oct. 1. More

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      One Last Broadcast for Queen Elizabeth II

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      Television introduced Queen Elizabeth II to the world. It was only fitting that television should see her out of it.The queen’s seven-decade reign almost exactly spanned the modern TV era. Her coronation in 1953 began the age of global video spectacles. Her funeral on Monday was a full-color pageant accessible to billions.It was a final display of the force of two institutions: the concentrated grandeur of the British monarchy and the power amassed by television to bring viewers to every corner of the world.“I have to be seen to be believed,” Elizabeth once reportedly said. It was less a boast than an acknowledgment of a modern duty. One had to be seen, whether one liked it or not. It was her source of authority at a time when the crown’s power no longer came through fleets of ships. It was how she provided her country reassurance and projected stability.The last funeral service for a British monarch, King George VI, was not televised. For one last time, Elizabeth was the first. She entered the world stage, through the new magic of broadcasting, as a resolute young face. She departed it as a bejeweled crown on a purple cushion, transmuted finally into pure visual symbol.Americans who woke up early Monday (or stayed up, in some time zones) saw striking images aplenty, on every news network. The breathtaking God’s-eye view from above the coffin in Westminster Abbey. The continuous stream of world leaders. The thick crowds along the procession to Windsor, flinging flowers at the motorcade. The corgis.Viewers also saw and heard something unusual in the TV news environment: long stretches of unnarrated live action — the speaking of prayers, the clop of horse hooves — and moments of stillness. This was notable in the golf-whisper coverage on BBC World News, which let scenes like the loading of the coffin onto a gun carriage play out in silence, its screen bare of the usual lower-thirds captions.The commercial American networks, being the distant relations at this service, filled in the gaps with chattery bits of history and analysis. News departments called in the Brits. (On Fox News, the reality-TV fixtures Piers Morgan and Sharon Osbourne critiqued Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s media ventures.) “Royal commentators” broke down points of protocol and inventoried the materials and symbolism of the crown, scepter and orb like auction appraisers.The queen was the first British monarch to have a televised coronation, in June 1953.AFP via Getty ImagesBut even American TV fell still during the funeral ceremony. The cameras drank in the Gothic arches of Westminster Abbey, bathed in the hymns of the choirs, goggled at the royal jewels, lingered on the solemn face of Charles III during the performance of — it still sounds strange — “God Save the King.” Finally, we watched from above as bearers carried the coffin step by step across the black-and-white-diamond floor like an ornate chess piece.The quiet spectating was a gesture of respect but also a kind of tourist’s awe. We had come all this way; of course we wanted to take in the sights.Elizabeth’s reign was marked by unprecedented visibility, for better or worse. Her coronation in 1953 spurred the British to buy television sets, bringing the country into the TV age and inviting the public into an event once reserved for the upper crust.This changed something essential in the relation of the masses to the monarchy. The coronation, with its vestments and blessings, signified the exclusive connection of the monarch to God. Once that was no longer exclusive, everything else in the relationship between the ruler and the public was up for negotiation.The young queen resisted letting in the cameras. The prime minister Winston Churchill worried about making the ritual into a “theatrical performance.” But Elizabeth could no more stop the force of media than her forebear King Canute could halt the tide.TV undercut the mystique of royalty but spread its image, expanding the queen’s virtual reach even as the colonial empire diminished. There were other surviving monarchies in the world, but the Windsors were the default royals of TV-dom, the main characters in a generational reality-TV soap opera. They became global celebrities, through scandals, weddings, deaths and “The Crown.”The coronation had worldwide effects too. It began the age when TV would bring the world into your living room live — or at least close to it. In 1953, with live trans-Atlantic broadcasts still not yet possible, CBS and NBC raced to fly the kinescopes of the event across the ocean in airplanes with their seats removed to fit in editing equipment. (They both lost to Canada’s CBC, which got its footage home first.)The next day’s Times heralded the event as the “birth of international television,” marveling that American viewers “probably saw more than the peers and peeresses in their seats in the transept.” Boy, did they: NBC’s “Today” show coverage, which carried a radio feed of the coronation, included an appearance by its chimpanzee mascot, J. Fred Muggs. Welcome to show business, Your Majesty.The one limit on cameras at Elizabeth’s coronation was to deny them a view of the ritual anointment of the new queen. By 2022, viewers take divine omniscience for granted. If we can think of it, we should be able to see it.The hearse was designed to allow spectators to see the coffin as it passed by.Molly Darlington/Getty ImagesSo after Elizabeth’s death, you could monitor the convoy from Balmoral Castle in Scotland to London, with a glassy hearse designed and lit to make the coffin visible. You could watch the queen’s lying-in-state in Westminster Hall on live video feeds, from numerous angles, the silence broken only by the occasional cry of a baby or cough of a guard. The faces came and went, including the queen’s grandchildren joining the tribute, but the camera’s vigil was constant.After 70 years, however, television has lost its exclusive empire as well. Even as it broadcast what was described — plausibly but vaguely — as the most-watched event in history, traditional TV shared the funeral audience with the internet and social media.Elizabeth and the medium that defined her reign were both unifiers of a kind that we might not see again. Though not all of the British support the monarchy, the queen offered her fractious country a sense of constancy. TV brought together disparate populations in the communal experience of seeing the same thing at once.Now what? Tina Brown, the writer, editor and royal-watcher, asked on CBS, “Will anyone be loved by the nation so much again?” You could also ask: Will Charles’s coronation next year be nearly as big a global media event? Will anything? (You could also ask whether an event like this should be so all-consuming. While American TV news was wall-to-wall with an overseas funeral, Puerto Rico was flooded and without power from Hurricane Fiona.)Monday’s services felt like a capstone to two eras. For one day, we saw a display of the pageantry that the crown can command and the global audience that TV can.American TV spent its full morning with the queen. (Well, almost: CBS aired the season premiere of “The Price Is Right.”) The day’s pomp built toward one more never-before-broadcast ceremony, the removal of scepter, orb and crown from the coffin, which was lowered into the vault at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor. Then followed something almost unimaginable: A private burial service, with no TV cameras.Television got one final spectacle out of Elizabeth’s reign. And the queen had one final moment out of the public eye. More