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      Ariana DeBose to Host This Year’s Tony Awards Ceremony

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      The nominees are to be announced on Monday, and the awards ceremony is to take place on June 12.Ariana DeBose will host this year’s Tony Awards.The Broadway League and the American Theater Wing, the two organizations that present the awards, announced the choice on Wednesday. The Tony Awards, which honor plays and musicals staged on Broadway, will take place on June 12.DeBose, 31, in March won the Academy Award for best supporting actress for her performance as Anita in last year’s Steven Spielberg-directed film adaptation of “West Side Story.”She has appeared in six Broadway shows, including “Hamilton” (in a dance number, she portrayed the bullet that killed the title character). She was nominated for a Tony Award in 2018 for her work in “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical” (she played “Disco Donna,” representing one of three stages of the singer’s career).The Tony Awards will be DeBose’s second high-profile hosting gig this year; in January she hosted “Saturday Night Live.”This year’s Tony Awards ceremony will take place at Radio City Music Hall, and is scheduled to last four hours. DeBose will host the three-hour televised segment, broadcast on CBS from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern; that segment, which is likely to be dominated by performances, will be preceded by a one-hour segment, streamed on Paramount+, at which many of the awards are likely to be announced. The streaming portion will have a different host who has not yet been named.The nominations for this year’s Tony Awards are to be announced on Monday. More

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      Stephen Colbert Reacts to the Supreme Court Leak

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      “Congratulations, ladies, your decisions are being made by four dudes and a woman who thinks ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is a rom-com,” Colbert said.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Roe NoLate-night hosts reacted to the news of the Supreme Court leak on Tuesday, lambasting the court’s still-unofficial majority decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.“Congratulations, ladies, your decisions are being made by four dudes and a woman who thinks ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is a rom-com,” Stephen Colbert said.“Personally, I got suspicious when Neil Gorsuch stopped wearing his ‘pussy hat’.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“That’s right, it looks like the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade. Apparently, they decided masks aren’t mandatory, but Mother’s Day is.” — JIMMY FALLON“Yeah, that means all across the country, women in places like South Dakota or Missouri or even Texas will have the exact same abortion rights as women in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Yeah, and just think about that: We just evacuated people out of Afghanistan, and now we’re going to have to evacuate them out of Tennessee?” — TREVOR NOAH“Most people thought the freedom to choose was just how America was. No one ever thought the G.O.P. could roll it back by playing a reverse Uno card.” — TREVOR NOAH“For perspective, consider this: It wasn’t until the year after Roe v. Wade that women in America got the legal right to have a credit card without a man. Think about that. Yeah. And I think we would all agree it would be a little weird if the court was suddenly like, ‘Look, if the founders wanted women to have credit cards, they would have said so. They would have.’” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (The Leak Edition)“Today, Chief Justice John Roberts condemned the leak and announced that there will be an investigation into how it got out. Americans are like, ‘Uh, the leak is not our main concern.’” — JIMMY FALLON“The conservative majority on the court has a fundamental right to choose when they want to release a decision into the world. Imagine having some random person violate your privacy and make that choice for you. Who would do such a thing?” — TREVOR NOAH“This leak is a clear violation of the court’s right to privacy. How dare someone make this decision for them.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“It’s crazy how conservatives always manage to make themselves the victim in any situation. I mean, they have just accomplished this thing that they’ve been working toward for 50 years, and their first reaction is ‘It’s so unfair what’s happening to us!’ I’m sorry, what, you wanted your ruling to be a big surprise and now someone ruined it?” — TREVOR NOAHThe Bits Worth WatchingThe “Late Night” writers Amber Ruffin and Jenny Hagel reacted to the Supreme Court news with concerns about Democrats’ getting anything done.What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightSheryl Crow will talk about her new Showtime documentary, “Sheryl,” on Wednesday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutEmma Galbraith as Angie Chen in “Inbetween Girl.”UtopiaMei Makino’s “Inbetween Girl” is a coming-of-age drama following an artsy, biracial high school student grappling with the guilt of sleeping with another girl’s boyfriend. More

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      David Birney, Who Starred on TV’s ‘Bridget Loves Bernie,’ Dies at 83

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      The sitcom, about an interfaith marriage, drew criticism from Jewish groups and was canceled after one season. He fared better onstage than in television.David Birney, a classically trained theater actor who found success on the stage, including on Broadway, but who was best known for his role in “Bridget Loves Bernie” — a short-lived sitcom about an interfaith marriage in which he starred opposite his future wife, Meredith Baxter — died on Friday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 83.The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, said Michele Roberge, who said she was his life partner.Mr. Birney had been in a handful of television series and movies when he was cast in 1972 as Bernie Steinberg, a Jewish taxicab driver and struggling writer. Ms. Baxter played Bridget Fitzgerald, a schoolteacher from a wealthy Roman Catholic family.“This is not a message show,” Mr. Birney, who was Irish American, said during an interview with The Kansas City Star before the series’s debut. “It’s not even an idea show.”CBS gave it a plum time slot between “All in the Family” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” on Saturday night; it consistently finished among the top 10 programs in prime time and was the highest rated new series of the 1972-73 season.But it attracted criticism from a broad spectrum of Jewish groups, which objected chiefly to its treatment of intermarriage between Jews and Christians as a positive outcome and complained that it used Jewish stereotypes. CBS publicly played down the criticism but, without an explanation, canceled “Bridget Loves Bernie” after 24 episodes.“One segment of the protesters is truly concerned about the dilution of their faith,” Mr. Birney told The Daily News several months after the cancellation. “But intermarriage is on the rise, nevertheless. The threat doesn’t come from a harmless show such as ours, but from within.”Mr. Birney and Ms. Baxter married in 1974.In 1976, Mr. Birney received acclaim for playing John Quincy Adams in the public television production of “The Adams Chronicles.” Later that year, he was hired to play Frank Serpico, the corruption-fighting New York City detective, in an NBC series adapted from the Sidney Lumet movie “Serpico” (1973), which had earned Al Pacino an Oscar nomination for best actor.Mr. Birney was cast in the role on the strength of his work playing an officer in two episodes of “Police Story,” another NBC series. But “Serpico” was canceled after less than a full season. Mr. Birney and Meredith Baxter in an episode of “Bridget Loves Bernie,” a short-lived CBS sitcom about an interfaith marriage. Jewish groups were critical of it. CBS via Getty ImagesDavid Edwin Birney was born on April 23, 1939, in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Cleveland. His father, Edwin, was an F.B.I. agent, and his mother, Jeanne (McGee) Birney, was a homemaker and later a real estate agent.After earning a bachelor’s degree in English from Dartmouth College in 1961, Mr. Birney turned down a scholarship from Stanford Law School and instead chose to study theater arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received a master’s degree a year later. In the Army, he was part of a program called the Showmobile, which entertained at military bases in the United States.Mr. Birney’s theater career began in earnest in 1965, when he won the Barter Theater Award, enabling him to spend a season acting in shows at the prestigious Barter Theater in Abingdon, Va. He moved on to the Hartford Stage Company in Connecticut, and in 1967 he played Antipholus of Syracuse in a New York Shakespeare Festival production of “A Comedy of Errors.”Mr. Birney made his Broadway debut two years later in Molière’s “The Miser.” And in 1971 he starred in a Broadway production of J.M. Synge’s “The Playboy of the Western World” at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. Mr. Birney played Christy Mahon, who enters an Irish pub in the early 1900s telling a story about killing his father.“Mr. Birney had a cock sparrow arrogance,” Clive Barnes wrote in his review in The New York Times, “that mixture of both confidence and certainty that seemed perfectly right.”At the opening of “Playboy,” the Clancy Brothers, the popular Irish singing group that Mr. Birney had befriended at a Manhattan bar, sat in the front row.“They had their Irish sweaters on,” Ms. Roberge said in a phone interview, “and their arms crossed as if to say, Come on, show us what you’ve got.”Over the rest of his theatrical career, Mr. Birney played a wide variety of roles, including Antonio Salieri, as a replacement, in Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus” on Broadway; Benedick in “Much Ado About Nothing” at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J.; Hamlet at the PCPA Theaterfest in Santa Maria, Calif.; and James Tyrone Jr. in Eugene O’Neill’s “A Moon for the Misbegotten” at the Miniature Theater of Chester, Mass.He also adapted some of Mark Twain’s short stories into a play, “The Diaries of Adam and Eve,” which he often performed and directed. In 1989, he starred in one of the productions, with Ms. Baxter, for American Playhouse on PBS.The couple divorced that year. In 2011, she wrote in her book, “Untied: A Memoir of Family, Fame and Floundering,” that Mr. Birney had been abusive during their marriage. He denied her accusation, calling it an “appalling abuse of the truth.”One of Mr. Birney’s biggest successes on television was a starring role as a doctor in the first season of the medical dramedy “St. Elsewhere.” But as the second season approached, he left the series because of his commitment on Broadway to “Amadeus.”He continued to work in television through 2007, when he was a guest on the police procedural “Without a Trace.”In addition to Ms. Roberge, Mr. Birney is survived by his children with Ms. Baxter, his daughters Kate and Mollie Birney and a son, Peter Baxter; a stepdaughter, Eva Bush, and a stepson, Ted Bush, Ms. Baxter’s children from a previous marriage; two grandchildren; and his brothers, Glenn and Gregory. Another marriage, to Mary Concannon, also ended in divorce. More

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      Seth Meyers: Trump ‘Can’t Be Bothered’ to Endorse Republicans Correctly

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      “You have to grovel and debase yourself to earn the endorsement of a guy who can’t even remember your name,” Meyers said.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Ringing EndorsementFormer President Donald Trump mistakenly endorsed “J.D. Mandel” for Senate in Ohio at a rally on Sunday, conflating his intended Republican choice, J.D. Vance, with Vance’s opponent, Josh Mandel.“This guy can’t even be bothered to remember the names of the people he’s endorsing. He went from ‘J.P.’ to ‘J.D. Mandel.’ If he kept talking, he would have endorsed J.K. Rowling,” Seth Meyers said.“This is how much you have to forfeit your dignity to succeed in today’s Republican Party. You have to grovel and debase yourself to earn the endorsement of a guy who can’t even remember your name.” — SETH MEYERS“That’s bad enough, but then he said, ‘J.D. Mandel will win or my name isn’t Donald Vance.’” — SETH MEYERS“[Imitating Donald Trump] ‘Great guy. J.P. Morgan is great. Can’t say enough about J.C. Penney — I don’t think you can. We love you, J. Lo, we love you.’” — JIMMY FALLON“I’m not sure if it’s a ringing endorsement when you’re like, ‘I fully support what’s his face — he’s the best.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Trump said even the best leaders make mistakes sometimes, like our great President Abra-george Lincoln-ton.” — JIMMY FALLON“You could see even the crowd was looking like, ‘Ah, man!’ They look like parents watching their kid bombing in a spelling bee.” — TREVOR NOAH“I feel bad for J.D. Vance because now he’s gonna have to change his name to J.P.J.D. Mandel. Yeah, ’cuz if you’re a Republican, Trump is never wrong. At the G.O.P. Starbucks, whatever name Trump calls, that’s you: ‘J.J.J. — J.D.J.P Mandel? Yeah, that’s me. I’ll take it.’” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (Things Are Looking Slightly Up Edition)“According to a new poll, President Biden’s approval rating has increased slightly over the last two months, and now the White House is scrambling like hell to figure out what he did: [Imitating White House staffer] ‘Did he change his hair? Different mask? What tie was he wearing?’” — SETH MEYERS“That’s right, President Biden’s approval rating has increased to 42 percent. He now ranks slightly above leaf blowers.” — SETH MEYERS“Biden was like, ‘Thank God, inflation finally got to me.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Even Biden was surprised by the results. He triple-checked it like an at-home Covid test. He was like: ‘This can’t be right. This can’t be right. Honey, look at this — is this right?’” — JIMMY FALLON“I’m not even sure what caused the spike, really. Apparently a lot of Americans thought, ‘I like how he handled Easter.’” — JIMMY FALLON“It’s great news for Biden, although it’s hard to celebrate when your approval rating skyrockets and it’s still only 42 percent.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingThe creator and star of Showtime’s “Ziwe,” the mononymic Ziwe, sat down with Trevor Noah on Monday’s “Daily Show.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightThe “Euphoria” breakout Sydney Sweeney will appear on Tuesday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutOscar Isaac has split his career between intimate dramas and mega-franchises. His latest, Marvel’s “Moon Knight,” wraps up on Wednesday.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesOscar Isaac has found satisfaction playing an unconventional Marvel superhero in “Moon Knight.” More

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      ‘Better Call Saul’ Season 6, Episode 4 Recap: The Wicked Flee

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      Gus sweats life in red-alert mode while Jimmy goes on a joyride.Season 6, Episode 4: ‘Hit and Run’Gus Fring is getting nervous.We get a de facto tour of his psyche in this week’s episode, by way of the elaborate surveillance system designed to spot Lalo Salamanca, the man Gus tried to kill, before Lalo can kill him. It’s a no-expense-spared operation. Seven cameras are pointed at Gus’s house; someone keeps an eye on nearby cars when he drives; a hired gun is working the fryolator at the Los Pollos Hermanos where Gus has an office; and two guys are trailing Kim, in case Lalo goes looking for her first.Also, he’s wearing a bullet proof vest and has a firearm strapped to his ankle. This guy is expecting the worst.“Two weeks and we haven’t had a tickle,” says Mike, toward the episode’s end.Nonsense, says Gus, in so many words. He’s in a game where your instincts get to fail you only once, and he will not be swayed from his conviction that Lalo is alive. As viewers, we know that he’s right, but we’re in the dark about everything else Lalo-related. He hasn’t been seen for the last two episodes, and spotting Tony Dalton’s name in the opening credits doesn’t count. The effect is to put the audience in the same mind space as Gus. We, too, know that Lao is on his way. Exactly when is a total mystery.If he arrives. When last seen, the suavest member of the Salamanca clan — not a competitive category, true — was on the hunt for proof that Gus was behind the failed, very bloody home invasion of Casa Lalo. He isn’t going to show that proof to Gus, of course. He’s going to show it to the cartel. Which may mean Gus will face a whole organization with many reasonably capable assailants in its employ.Thing is, we know that Gus is going to live, and that frames a conundrum for “Better Call Saul” writers this season. Given that Gus is a lead character in “Breaking Bad” and Lalo is not — OK, he’s mentioned once by Saul in that series, which does leave some narrative wiggle room — Gus’s survival, at least through the end of this series, is assured. Which is to say that the degree of difficulty faced by Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould and every other writer on this show is very high. They are betting that when a tale is told well enough, it is suspenseful even if the ultimate outcome appears to be known.The Return of ‘Better Call Saul’The “Breaking Bad” prequel returned April 18 for its final season.A Refresher: After the show’s two-year, Covid-induced hiatus, here’s where things left off.Serious Success: Bob Odenkirk was a comedian’s comedian — until “Better Call Saul” revealed him as a peerless portrayer of broken souls.Writing the Perfect Con: We asked the show’s writers to break down a pivotal scene in the ​​transformation of Jimmy McGill into Saul Goodman.Cast Interviews: Rhea Seehorn and Tony Dalton told us how they created the complex Kim Wexler and the murderous Lalo Salamanca.The success of this season thus resides not so much in what is going to happen, but how. And already there is plenty of intrigue. Your Faithful Recapper is riveted by Mr. and Mrs. Ryman, as they are identified in the credits, Gus’s bicycle-happy, hand-signal proficient next-door neighbors, played by real-life couple Kirk and Joni Bovill. There is a hidden tunnel between their homes, and the Ryman’s kitchen and living rooms are occupied by Gus’s underlings, some armed, others manning a video-screen installation. The Rymans appear to live in their basement, where they do jigsaw puzzles when not getting out for a ride.Who are these people? Until now, the number of noncombatants aware of Gus’s double life is, let’s see … uh, zero? At least at this point in the story. So, we have to assume the Rymans are on the payroll. But one of Gus’s video watchers refers to Mrs. Ryman as “ma’am” when he asks for some iced tea, suggesting he doesn’t know her well. And the Rymans seem intimately familiar with the local homeowners association, implying that they are longtime and authentic members of the community.What’s certain is that when Gus moved into 1213 Jefferson St., he purchased the house beside him, presumably a just-in-case measure that is now coming in handy.While Gus frets, Jimmy and Kim continue Operation Cockamamie, which in this episode involves briefly absconding with Howard’s Jaguar while he’s seeing his shrink. (The man has marital problems, we learn.) The plan involves a pantomime with the ever-amenable Wendy S. (Julia Minesci), whom “Breaking Bad” fans will remember as the meth head and prostitute who helped Jesse with a nutty scheme of his own. (She was supposed to deliver poisoned burgers to some especially wicked street-level dealers Jesse wanted dead in Season 3.)This time, Wendy pretends to get bounced out of Howard’s car, making it appear to a slack-jawed Clifford Main, who is the sole audience for this spectacle, that Howard is consorting with, and mistreating, a hooker.Like previous parts of this campaign to frame Howard, this one works without flaw, thus clearly foreshadowing that the entire plan will ultimately fail. There’s a jarring tonal shift in these scenes, as though “Better Call Saul” decided it can’t all be tense violins and deadly tangos and must switch occasionally to tubas and the cancan. This is certainly lighter fare than the anxieties of a man who fears imminent demise. But when Jimmy gets a spray tan, whitened teeth and a wig to pull off his Howard impersonation, the show seems a little goofy.In the courthouse, Jimmy is a pariah because of his success in springing Lalo. As reviled as he has become by security guards, clerks and prosecutors is exactly how sought after has become by criminals. So, welcome back Spooge! (David Ury) Looking far healthier and more lucid than he will be as a meth addict and stickup man in episodes of “Breaking Bad,” Spooge is blissfully unaware that in the not-too-distant future his drug-addled partner is going to crush his head with an A.T.M. For now, he has legal problems with an unidentified buddy, and Jimmy has become so popular that he is soon thrown out of his office at the nail salon.This leads to the episode’s last scene, in which Jimmy shows his new work space to Kim. It has a toilet in the middle of the room and not much else. As viewers know, this modest, odorous corner of an unpopular strip mall is about to get a spectacularly garish, patriotically themed renovation.Odds and EndsFor Your Faithful Recapper, the scene between Mike and Kim was the highlight of this episode, which was directed very deftly by Rhea Seehorn, her first time directing an episode. Mike is surely flattering Kim with his “made of sterner stuff” line. More likely, he is speaking to her instead of Jimmy because Kim noticed that she is being tailed and had the nerve to confront her tailers. It’s entirely possible — actually, it seems pretty likely — that Jimmy is being followed, too, and simply hasn’t noticed. Perhaps Mike decided to have a quiet word with Kim so that he could continue to keep two men hovering close by.Vintage Gus Fring perfectionism: He wants the bodyguard assigned to the kitchen at Los Pollos Hermanos fired because he is “not up to Pollos standards.”The opening song, “Best Things in Life” by the Dreamliners, is the perfect background music for that bike ride.And some questions for the hive mind, to be answered in the comments section:What’s with the tomato-red house? It seems unlikely that we linger on that peculiar building for no reason.Jimmy seems positively eager to admit to new clients that he helped Lalo, who in court went by the name Jorge de Guzman, something Jimmy refused to acknowledge to prosecutors. In this episode, when Deputy District Attorney Bill Oakley (Peter Diseth) accuses Jimmy of moral turpitude — “You scammed the judge. And for what? To get a murdering cartel psychopath back out on the street” — Saul says simply, “Prove it.” Well, isn’t proof unnecessary once you confess to half the criminals in Albuquerque?Oh, and one more: Who. Moves. Cones? More

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      David Birney, Who Starred in TV’s ‘Bridget Loves Bernie,’ Dies at 83

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      The sitcom, about an interfaith marriage, drew criticism from Jewish groups and was canceled after one season. He fared better onstage than in television.David Birney, a classically trained theater actor who found success on the stage, including on Broadway, but who was best known for his role in “Bridget Loves Bernie” — a short-lived sitcom about an interfaith marriage in which he starred opposite his future wife, Meredith Baxter — died on Friday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 83.The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, said Michele Roberge, who said she was his life partner.Mr. Birney had been in a handful of television series and movies when he was cast in 1972 as Bernie Steinberg, a Jewish taxicab driver and struggling writer. Ms. Baxter played Bridget Fitzgerald, a schoolteacher from a wealthy Roman Catholic family.“This is not a message show,” Mr. Birney, who was Irish American, said during an interview with The Kansas City Star before the series’s debut. “It’s not even an idea show.”CBS gave it a plum time slot between “All in the Family” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” on Saturday night; it consistently finished among the top 10 programs in prime time and was the highest rated new series of the 1972-73 season.But it attracted criticism from a broad spectrum of Jewish groups, which objected chiefly to its treatment of intermarriage between Jews and Christians as a positive outcome and complained that it used Jewish stereotypes. CBS publicly played down the criticism but, without an explanation, canceled “Bridget Loves Bernie” after 24 episodes.“One segment of the protesters is truly concerned about the dilution of their faith,” Mr. Birney told The Daily News several months after the cancellation. “But intermarriage is on the rise, nevertheless. The threat doesn’t come from a harmless show such as ours, but from within.”Mr. Birney and Ms. Baxter married in 1974.In 1976, Mr. Birney received acclaim for playing John Quincy Adams in the public television production of “The Adams Chronicles.” Later that year, he was hired to play Frank Serpico, the corruption-fighting New York City detective, in an NBC series adapted from the Sidney Lumet movie “Serpico” (1973), which had earned Al Pacino an Oscar nomination for best actor.Mr. Birney was cast in the role on the strength of his work playing an officer in two episodes of “Police Story,” another NBC series. But “Serpico” was canceled after less than a full season. Mr. Birney and Meredith Baxter in an episode of “Bridget Loves Bernie,” a short-lived CBS sitcom about an interfaith marriage. Jewish groups were critical of it. CBS via Getty ImagesDavid Edwin Birney was born on April 23, 1939, in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Cleveland. His father, Edwin, was an F.B.I. agent, and his mother, Jeanne (McGee) Birney, was a homemaker and later a real estate agent.After earning a bachelor’s degree in English from Dartmouth College in 1961, Mr. Birney turned down a scholarship from Stanford Law School and instead chose to study theater arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received a master’s degree a year later. In the Army, he was part of a program called the Showmobile, which entertained at military bases in the United States.Mr. Birney’s theater career began in earnest in 1965, when he won the Barter Theater Award, enabling him to spend a season acting in shows at the prestigious Barter Theater in Abingdon, Va. He moved on to the Hartford Stage Company in Connecticut, and in 1967 he played Antipholus of Syracuse in a New York Shakespeare Festival production of “A Comedy of Errors.”Mr. Birney made his Broadway debut two years later in Molière’s “The Miser.” And in 1971 he starred in a Broadway production of J.M. Synge’s “The Playboy of the Western World” at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. Mr. Birney played Christy Mahon, who enters an Irish pub in the early 1900s telling a story about killing his father.“Mr. Birney had a cock sparrow arrogance,” Clive Barnes wrote in his review in The New York Times, “that mixture of both confidence and certainty that seemed perfectly right.”At the opening of “Playboy,” the Clancy Boys, a popular Irish singing group that Mr. Birney had befriended at a Manhattan bar, sat in the front row.“They had their Irish sweaters on,” Ms. Roberge said in a phone interview, “and their arms crossed as if to say, Come on, show us what you’ve got.”Over the rest of his theatrical career, Mr. Birney played a wide variety of roles, including Antonio Salieri, as a replacement, in Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus” on Broadway; Benedick in “Much Ado About Nothing” at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J.; Hamlet at the PCPA Theaterfest in Santa Maria, Calif.; and James Tyrone Jr. in Eugene O’Neill’s “A Moon for the Misbegotten” at the Miniature Theater of Chester, Mass.He also adapted some of Mark Twain’s short stories into a play, “The Diaries of Adam and Eve,” which he often performed and directed. In 1989, he starred in one of the productions, with Ms. Baxter, for American Playhouse on PBS.The couple divorced that year. In 2011, she wrote in her book, “Untied: A Memoir of Family, Fame and Floundering,” that Mr. Birney had been abusive during their marriage. He denied her accusation, calling it an “appalling abuse of the truth.”One of Mr. Birney’s biggest successes on television was a starring role as a doctor in the first season of the medical dramedy “St. Elsewhere.” But as the second season approached, he left the series because of his commitment on Broadway to “Amadeus.”He continued to work in television through 2007, when he was a guest on the police procedural “Without a Trace.”In addition to Ms. Roberge, Mr. Birney is survived by his children with Ms. Baxter, his daughters Kate and Mollie Birney and a son, Peter Baxter; a stepdaughter, Eva Bush, and a stepson, Ted Bush, Ms. Baxter’s children from a previous marriage; two grandchildren; and his brothers, Glenn and Gregory. Another marriage, to Mary Concannon, also ended in divorce. More

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      The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to HBO Max, Hulu, Apple TV+ and More in May

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      Looking for something new to watch? Here’s a roundup of the most promising titles coming to most major U.S. streaming services (except Netflix) this month.Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of May’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)New to Amazon Prime Video‘Bosch: Legacy’ Season 1Starts streaming: May 6It’s not often that a new TV series begins with a “previously on” recap; but so it goes for “Bosch: Legacy,” a sequel to Amazon’s long-running crime drama “Bosch,” which adapted several of Michael Connelly’s popular novels about the Los Angeles police detective Harry Bosch (Titus Welliver). A flagship title for Amazon’s newly rebranded, ad-supported Amazon Freevee service (previously known as IMDb TV), “Bosch: Legacy” follows the title character after he quits the force and becomes a private investigator. While Bosch is working a case involving a dying billionaire (William Devane) who is looking for a living heir, his daughter, Maddie (Madison Lintz), follows in her dad’s footsteps and becomes a cop — although she struggles with the grind of being a lowly rookie on patrol.Also arriving:May 6“The Unsolved Murder of Beverly Lynn Smith”“The Wilds” Season 2May 13“The Kids in the Hall”May 18“Lovestruck High”May 19“Bang Bang Baby” Season 1May 20“Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks”“Night Sky” Season 1“Troppo”May 27“Emergency”“Kick Like Tayla”Claire Danes and Tom Hiddleston in a scene from “The Essex Serpent.”Apple TV+New to Apple TV+‘The Big Conn’Starts streaming: May 6The writer-director team of James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte follow up their offbeat true crime docu-series “McMillions” with another strange-but-true story: “The Big Conn,” a four-part documentary about a Kentucky lawyer who masterminded a half-billion dollar Social Security swindle. The attorney is Eric C. Conn, a media-savvy hustler who became something of a local celebrity thanks to his kooky commercials and his ability to get his clients paid quickly. All the while, he was burning through wives, running multiple barely legal vice dens and entangling the witting and the unwitting in a scheme to defraud the government. Hernandez and Lazarte capture the odd turns this tale took, with the help of the investigators and journalists involved with this case — many of whom question how and why Conn eluded justice for so long.‘The Essex Serpent’Starts streaming: May 13Based on the 2016 Sarah Perry novel, the mini-series “The Essex Serpent” stars Claire Danes as a late 19th century English widow whose scientific curiosity leads her to the countryside to investigate rumors of a lake-dwelling monster she thinks might actually be a dinosaur. Her fervor puts her at odds with two men: a progressive young doctor (Frank Dillane) and a congenial local minister (Tom Hiddleston), both of whom are skeptical of the creature’s existence but for different reasons. The screenwriter Anna Symon and the director Clio Barnard explore the eerie possibilities of their premise in a community prone to superstition and to mistrust of outsiders. The show is about the relationships between smart, well-meaning people who disagree about the very nature of the world.Also arriving:May 6“Tehran” Season 2May 20“Now and Then”May 23“Prehistoric Planet”“Obi-Wan Kenobi” (starring Ewan McGregor) tells a story set between Episode III and Episode IV of the “Star Wars” movies.Lucasfilm Ltd.New to Disney+‘The Quest’Starts streaming: May 11Although it ran for only one season on ABC in the fall of 2014, the sword-and-sorcery themed reality competition series “The Quest” is fondly remembered for its inventive concept, clever execution and lovably sincere contestants. The new Disney+ revival makes a few changes. The competitors are now can-do teenagers instead of earnestly geeky adults; and the show’s overall visual style looks more like a movie, obscuring the line between fantasy and the real-life game these kids are playing. But the basic contest remains the same. The participants are playacting as “paladins,” roaming through a fictional medieval world filled with magic and conflict, where they try to succeed at various challenges. Combine “Game of Thrones,” “Survivor” and an escape room, and that’s “The Quest.”‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’Starts streaming: May 27The latest addition to the “Star Wars” TV universe fills some of the gaps between the movie trilogies, telling a story set between Episode III and Episode IV. Ewan McGregor reprises his big-screen role as Obi-Wan Kenobi, a disillusioned Jedi Master living in hiding on the planet Tatooine, where he stews over the corruption of his student Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) and keeps a distant eye on Anakin’s young son, Luke. “Obi-Wan Kenobi” was originally developed as a stand-alone film, which later evolved into this six-episode mini-series. The show should answer some longstanding fan questions about what the eccentric old hermit Kenobi was up to for all those years in exile while waiting for Luke to grow up.Also arriving:May 13“Sneakerella”May 20“Chip ‘n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers”May 27“We Feed People”Theo James and Rose Leslie in a scene from “The Time Traveler’s Wife.”Macall B. Polay/HBONew to HBO Max‘Hacks’ Season 2Starts streaming: May 12In Season 1 of “Hacks,” we met Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), a hip comedy writer who landed a job writing jokes for the fading Las Vegas stand-up comic Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and then settled into a love-hate relationship with her wealthy but demanding new boss and mentor. In Season 2, Deborah will head out on tour to get back in touch with her roots as Ava caters to her whims, pushes her to try harder and tries to avoid making her too angry. In addition to the terrific performances by the leads, “Hacks” is often a frank interrogation of the cruelties of show business, as experienced by two talented women at different points in their careers.‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’Starts streaming: May 15Audrey Niffenegger’s best-selling 2003 novel “The Time Traveler’s Wife” has been adapted to the screen before, for a hit 2009 movie. But the new TV version — created by the “Doctor Who” and “Sherlock” producer Steven Moffat — has the room to sprawl out a bit and cover more of the premise’s metaphysical nuances. Theo James plays Henry, who has a genetic condition that yanks him unpredictably back and forth through time, often landing him near Clare (Rose Leslie), the woman he marries. The couple nearly always meet while they’re at wildly different places on their respective timelines, such that sometimes she knows more than he does about what’s happening, or vice versa. Moffat and his creative team lean into the humor, tension and irony of this situation while hewing to Niffenegger’s central idea that these two are inextricably linked because they are hopelessly in love.Also arriving:May 3“Spring Awakening: Those You’ve Known”May 5“Las Bravas F.C.” Season 1“Queen Stars Brazil” Season 1“The Staircase”May 10“Catwoman: Hunted”May 12“Who’s by Your Side” Season 1May 26“Navalny”“That Damn Michael Che” Season 2“Tig ‘n’ Seek” Season 4Jessica Biel as the real-life murderer Candy Montgomery, in a scene from the Hulu series “Candy.”HuluNew to Hulu‘Candy’Starts streaming: May 9In June of 1980, a woman named Betty Gore was found murdered in her suburban Dallas home, with 41 ax wounds on her body. The prime suspect? One of her best friends, Candy Montgomery, who had an affair with Betty’s husband. The mini-series “Candy” begins on the day of the murder and compares the life of the charismatic, churchgoing Candy (Jessica Biel) with the depressed, exhausted Betty (Melanie Lynskey). The “Candy” creators Nick Antosca (best-known for his horror anthology “Channel Zero”) and Robin Veith (a multiple Emmy nominee for her work on “Mad Men”) cover the ensuing criminal investigation and trial while also flashing back to the years leading up the event, considering how these intertwined lives went so awry.Also arriving:May 6“Hatching”May 10“Breeders” Season 3May 15“Conversations With Friends”May 20“The Valet”May 26“A Taste of Hunger”May 27“Shoresy” Season 1May 31“GameStop: Rise of the Players”“Pistol”Ethan Peck as a young Spock in a scene from the new “Star Trek” series “Strange New Worlds.”Marni Grossman/Paramount+New to Paramount+‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Season 1Starts streaming: May 5In Season 2 of “Star Trek: Discovery,” that show’s starship crew had an adventure alongside some Federation comrades, including Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) and Science Officer Spock (Ethan Peck) of the U.S.S. Enterprise. “Star Trek” fans raved about Mount’s commanding and charming performance, playing a key character from the franchise’s mythology; so now he and Peck’s Spock are returning in “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” which follows the journeys of the Enterprise in the years before Captain James T. Kirk (the hero of the original 1960s TV series) took command. “Strange New Worlds” retains the serialized elements that have become common to modern “Star Trek” series; but it also hearkens to the older shows by featuring more episodic stories.Also arriving:May 11“The Challenge: All Stars” Season 3May 15“Joe Pickett” Season 1May 20“RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars” Season 7From left, Busy Philipps, Sara Bareilles, Renée Elise Goldsberry and Paula Pell in a scene from the new season of “Girls5Eva.”PeacockNew to Peacock‘Girls5eva’ Season 2Starts streaming: May 5The first season of the delightful “Girls5eva” offered a witty and insightful peek inside the modern music business from the perspective of four middle-aged singers — formerly a chart-topping girl group — who attempt a comeback at a time when MTV matters less than TikTok. As Season 2 begins, the ladies seem to be on an upswing, ready to record a new album after a breakout moment at a national showcase. But family obligations and the limitations of their aging bodies threaten to stall their momentum. Once again, the creator Meredith Scardino and her writing staff keep the jokes and the savvy pop culture references flying while always honoring the dignity and the dreams of these four friends. The women of Girls5Eva are often ridiculous, but never hopeless.Also arriving:May 13“Firestarter”May 19“Angelyne”“Dragons Rescue Riders: Heroes of the Sky” Season 3May 24“Sins of the Amish” More

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      In ‘I Love That for You,’ Vanessa Bayer Sells Out

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      The “Saturday Night Live” veteran’s new sitcom draws on her experience of childhood cancer and her obsession with home shopping TV.Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.According to Vanessa Bayer, being diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia as a 15-year-old wasn’t all bad.It got her out of gym class. The attendance lady at her high school never marked her as tardy. She told a boy she didn’t like that she couldn’t be his date for the homecoming dance because she had chemo that weekend. (She didn’t). Her father talked his way out of a speeding ticket by using her illness as an excuse, a tactic he referred to as “dropping the L-bomb.”Bayer survived the L-bomb. The experience didn’t change her, she said, but it did intensify characteristics that were already inherent — determination, resilience, a borderline delusional sense of optimism. Who receives a diagnosis of cancer and accentuates the positive? Bayer does.“I was always a person who loved attention,” Bayer said chirpily. “This allowed me to get so much attention.”Bayer is getting attention now. On Sunday, Showtime will premiere the first episode of “I Love That for You” (the Showtime app will have it on Friday), a sitcom that draws on Bayer’s pediatric cancer and her longtime obsession with home shopping shows. She stars as Joanna Gold, a sheltered young woman and leukemia survivor who auditions to become the newest host on the Special Value Network. Nearly fired after her disastrous first hour on camera, she saves her job by telling her colleagues that her cancer has returned. (It hasn’t.)Bayer’s character pretends to have cancer in order to keep her job at a home shopping network.Tony Rivetti Jr./ShowtimePlaying Joanna isn’t cathartic for Bayer — she doesn’t seem to need catharsis — but it does offer her a chance to work through her past, this time with even more jokes. “It’s really nice to be able to have some distance from that time and to be able to laugh at it even more,” she said.Bayer grew up in a Reform Jewish family in the suburbs of Cleveland. A star student and a cross-country runner, she decided that she wouldn’t let her illness mess with her G.P.A., even when teachers told her she could coast.“It lit this fire under me,” she said. “It was important to me that everybody saw me as someone who wasn’t weak.”Diagnosed in the spring of her freshman year, she spent time in the hospital, then in outpatient treatment, completing chemotherapy just before her senior year. She graduated on time. As prom queen.She first performed comedy as a member of Bloomers, an all-female troupe at the University of Pennsylvania. After graduation, she moved to Chicago and studied and performed at various improv theaters, which eventually led to a spot on “Saturday Night Live” in 2010. There she created characters such as Jacob the Bar Mitzvah Boy and Dawn Lazarus, an anxious meteorologist. But long before she got paid for it, Bayer had relied on jokes as a coping mechanism.“I had to use humor to make everyone, including myself, feel OK,” she said, speaking of her time in treatment. Here comes that optimism again: “I also think it made me funnier.”She was speaking, from a bench on the fringes of Central Park, on a recent Friday afternoon. The temperature had climbed to nearly 70 degrees, but Bayer, who had just flown in on a red-eye from Los Angeles, was bundled against the spring in a belted coat, a knit beanie and Rag & Bone fleece sneakers. She had a green juice in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. A medical-grade mask had left a red mark high on each cheek.Even sleep-deprived and apparently very cold, Bayer radiated positivity. She smiled approvingly at the gamboling dogs, the sweating men, the woman who had arrived for a constitutional in high heels and full makeup. “Nothing like New York birds!” she said, when a flock of pigeons flew over, Hitchcock close. In high school she was voted Most Likely to Succeed. Most Likely to Bake a Mean Casserole would have tracked, too — even sitting in the middle of Manhattan, she emanated Midwestern normalcy and niceness.Over seven years on “Saturday Night Live,” Bayer (with Michael Che) was a dependable utility player with many memorable appearances on Weekend Update.Dana Edelson/NBC“She almost doesn’t seem like an actress,” said Molly Shannon, an “S.N.L.” veteran who now co-stars opposite Bayer as SVN’s superstar host. “She’s very steady and calm and grounded.”The comedian Aidy Bryant, who worked with Bayer in Chicago before they both found their way to “S.N.L.,” noted that Bayer has a way of turning that mildness into a strike force. When it comes to comedy, Bryant said, “She is a quiet, smiling assassin.”“Vanessa has a real reserved, polite, wonderfully Midwestern energy,” she added. “Then she hits with a punchline or a funny reaction or her truly incredible smile, which she can weaponize as a force of pain.”On “S.N.L.,” Bayer became a dependable utility player, often infusing characters (football widow, early career Jennifer Aniston) with a manic intensity — eyes overbright, speech a tick too fast. Taran Killam, another “S.N.L.” co-star, noted how calm the offscreen Bayer seemed, a composure he attributed to her history.“It must have given her incredible perspective,” he said. “‘S.N.L.’ is a very passionate job, a dream job. It feels like it matters more than anything in the world. She would always be the first one to say: ‘Who cares? No big deal. So they didn’t like the sketch? Move on.’”“S.N.L.” has a famously punishing schedule. But Jeremy Beiler, a former “S.N.L.” writer who joined around the same time Bayer did, noted how she met the stresses of the job with buoyancy.“She only looks in one direction,” he said. “It’s only forward.”In 2017, after seven seasons on “S.N.L.,” Bayer moved on. Another comedian might have worried about what would come next. Unsurprisingly, Bayer stayed positive. “My attitude is just that stuff kind of works out,” she said. And it did work out, more or less, with guest spots, voice work, supporting roles in a few movies.“I had to use humor to make everyone, including myself, feel OK,” Bayer said, speaking of her time in cancer treatment as a teen. “I also think it made me funnier.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesAs she was leaving “S.N.L.,” her management team asked her about dream projects, and her mind somehow flashed on home shopping TV. She had watched the channels often as a child: The peek into adult life fascinated her, and she loved the elegance of the hosts and the ways in which they would spin seemingly extemporaneous stories in their attempts to entice buyers.She described the hosts’ particular rhythms and vocabulary as “the first foreign language I ever learned,” and the network most likely provided her first taste of improv, too. (In college, when it came time to write her first sketch, she wrote one set in the world of home shopping, in which the host was selling cardboard with a hole in it. It killed.)A few months later, over brunch, Beiler mentioned that he had, by coincidence, begun a series pilot set in the world of home shopping. They began to collaborate, even arranging a field trip to QVC’s headquarters in West Chester, Pa., where they met with two hosts, Jane Treacy and Mary Beth Roe, whom Bayer had idolized as a child, and also managed to score some free soft pretzels. (Everyone I spoke to mentioned Bayer’s enthusiasm for snacks, and most of them mentioned her gift for scamming her way into free ones.) In the gift shop, they bought matching QVC mugs.Back at work, with Jessi Klein as showrunner, they began to build out a back story for Bayer’s character, Joanna, that would give her stakes and drive. They decided to borrow from Bayer’s own story, particularly her diagnosis and treatment and the way that those years of chemo and radiation stunted her emotional growth for a while.“I didn’t understand dating at all,” she said. “It was just playing catch up. Even out of college and into my 20s, I always was trying to fake being an adult.” In an hour’s conversation, this was the closest she ever came to acknowledging that pediatric cancer hadn’t been entirely a walk in the park.Bayer didn’t mind lending Joanna her medical chart — she has never been shy about her diagnosis. As a teen she used it to win her family a trip to Hawaii courtesy of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. (She had thought about asking to meet Jared Leto, but she eventually decided she would prefer to meet him as a peer. Years later, she did.) Colleagues at “S.N.L.” have heard her introduce leukemia into the conversation just to get free ice cream, which jibes with advice she offered during our interview: If you are sick, use it to get whatever you can.Bryant said, “She always takes the things that are hard and makes them something that she can use to empower herself or use to her advantage.”Gradually, Joanna took shape, a woman more guarded than Bayer and more stunted, with her same love of snacks and her same gift for antic improvisation but none of her obvious success. A woman who lies about having cancer shouldn’t be a woman you root for, but Bayer has a way of communicating a kind of desperate brightness that makes terrible things seem less terrible, just because she does them with such enthusiasm.What the camera recognizes is what Shannon, who also survived a major childhood trauma (her mother, youngest sister and a cousin were killed in a car accident), identified as a shared joy and determination to wring the utmost out of life.“We don’t take it for granted,” Shannon said. “We feel so lucky that we’re alive. For real.”There are many stories about illness. (Admittedly, there are fewer of them set in the world of home shopping.) But this is one — with its snacks and its sunniness and its heroine’s determination to exploit her fake diagnosis for all she can — that seemingly only Bayer can tell.“I always wanted to do something about when I was sick,” she said contentedly, as the gentle chaos of Central Park swirled around her. “Specifically, the fun I had.”Audio produced by More