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      ‘Billions’ Season 6 Premiere Recap: Fire in the Hole

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      Chuck goes to war with a billionaire, but probably not the one audiences expected. Prince tries his best to be different from his predecessor.The Season 6 premiere of “Billions” was given a surprise early release on Friday morning, available free across multiple streaming platforms, including Showtime.com and YouTube. Future recaps will publish after episodes air on Sunday nights.Season 6, Episode 1: ‘Cannonade’A new season of “Billions” is upon us, and with it comes a new billionaire on Chuck Rhoades’s to-do list. It just isn’t the man you think it is — at least, not yet.Oh, sure, Mike Prince has conquered the business empire of his and Chuck’s one-time rival Bobby Axelrod, who has fled the country one step ahead of the law. (Damian Lewis, who played Axe, left the show at the end of Season 5, with the actor Corey Stoll taking over as Paul Giamatti’s co-protagonist.)But Prince and Chuck are currently in a sort of détente phase at the moment. Chuck has temporarily stepped away from his duties as New York Attorney General, vowing to return only if and when he can line up a big victory to offset his failure to collar Axelrod; by the end of this week’s episode, it’s not clear if he’ll return to the job at all. Prince, meanwhile, literally offers to become Chuck’s ally; the offer is rebuffed, but the fact that it was made says something about the man’s temperament.No, the filthy rich creep currently in Chuck’s cross hairs is Melville Revere, a descendant of a Revolutionary War hero played with magnificent snootiness by Michael McKean. (Anyone who witnessed McKean’s turn as Chuck McGill on “Better Call Saul” knows nobody in the biz does self-righteousness better.) Revere’s ancestral property — brought back into the family by the money Melville made as a security contractor, selling pepper spray and rubber bullets — is adjacent to the upstate farm to which Chuck has semiretired.The two blue-bloods might have gotten along just fine if it weren’t for the twice daily fusillade from Revere’s collection of antique cannons every morning and evening, disturbing Chuck’s peace. Unfortunately for Chuck, who has handed the reins of the attorney general’s office to his protégé Kate Sacker (Condola Rashad), he has nothing to do but perseverate on the irritating explosions, day in and day out.Chuck tries a variety of methods to shut the cannons down. Direct diplomacy with Revere fails, as does Chuck’s initial attempt to rally the townspeople to his side; many of them are just as irritated by the noise as he is, but they feel helpless because Revere’s largess has benefited everyone from the fire department to the local Boy Scout troop. So he gets creative and opens up a sluice on the creek that runs through both of their properties, flooding out Revere’s supply of gunpowder.In a fortuitous coincidence (or a storytelling sleight-of-hand, take your pick), Revere is an investor in the firm formerly known as Axe Cap, now Michael Prince Capital. Knowing that Chuck’s ex-wife, Wendy, is a macher in the company, he reaches out to see if she can somehow call off the dogs. This sets Mike Prince’s mind to work about what it means to keep his investors happy, though a sit-down with Chuck over glasses of Glenlivet — set to “Jurassic Park” — style shaking by the cannonade — fails to yield the alliance Prince was hoping for.In the end, Chuck’s path to victory is an easy one. After learning from an environmentalist that the creek into which Revere’s cannonballs land is an ideal habitat for endangered bog turtles, though none actually live there, he orchestrates the transfer of several of the reptiles to the site. This provides him with the legal basis he needs to shut down the cannons, though he makes a grand show of the thing by enlisting a mob of townspeople literally armed with pitchforks and torches. (Well, lanterns, anyway.)It’s then that Chuck makes a statement that could have huge ramifications for the future of his character, and the show. Speechifying to the assembled crowd and members of the press, he effectively writes off the law as toothless when it comes to reining in the lawless excess of the billionaire class. Does this mean he’ll relinquish his attorney generalship permanently, in favor of a more grass-roots approach to taking down Revere, Prince and their ilk? Stay tuned!And what of Prince? His name is now on the wall of what used to be Axe Cap’s hallowed halls, but his comparatively mellow, even vaguely do-gooding approach is a hard sell to Axelrod’s hard-charging staff. True, he saves the life of Axe’s former right-hand-man, Mike Wagner (David Costabile), by calling 911 when Wags’s high-tech heart-monitoring ring reveals that Wags is having a heart attack while using his Peloton.Wags is grateful for the save; “I’m not going out like Mr. Big,” he declares, in reference to another major TV character’s heart attack on a Peloton last month — and in what appears to be a brilliant bit of last-minute sound editing. But Wags is understandably resentful that he was being spied on through the ring, a gift from Prince to everyone in Axe Cap and Mase Cap. The incident only worsens relations between Prince and his new employees.Prince’s dilemma is twofold. Not only must he either win over the existing employees or fire them en masse and start anew, he also has to persuade the Securities and Exchange Commission that he, unlike his predecessor, is on the up-and-up. He contemplates firing Wags until the fiendishly clever reveals his indispensable in-depth knowledge of the firm’s traders. He turns to the unctuous compliance officer Ari Spyros (Stephen Kunken) for guidance in identifying borderline-illegal maneuvers from the company’s past that he can give up to the S.E.C. to prove his good faith. Spyros points to a wall of file boxes: Turns out the vast majority of Axe Cap’s wheelings and dealings fall under this umbrella.So, acting partially on the advice of Wendy Rhoades (Maggie Siff), he does what would have been unthinkable to Bobby Axelrod. He gathers all his employees and investors, including Revere and Charles Rhoades Sr. (Jeffrey DeMunn), and announces that he’s firing … the investors! From now on, he says, investors will have to prove themselves to the firm, not the other way around. Only the most pristine clients need apply to what he calls “The Prince List.” This is obviously a financial and reputational bloodletting in the short term, but Prince expects it to pay dividends in the end, both with the investor class and with his most recalcitrant, and most talented, employee, Taylor Mason (Asia Kate Dillon).Which brings us to the big question asked by the episode, and perhaps by the entire show: Is there such a thing as an ethical billionaire? “Billionaires break the laws of decency, even while obeying the letter,” says Chuck. “By definition, having that much is criminal.” Prince disagrees; he’s a billionaire himself, so what did you expect?But as a character, he represents a unique challenge to Chuck Rhoades’s entire raison d’être: He believes that, even as a billionaire, he can effectively police himself and his peers on the Prince List in the bargain. Somehow I doubt that the newly minted torches-and-pitchforks Chuck will agree.Loose change:The episode starts with Buffalo Springfield’s epochal protest anthem “For What It’s Worth” and ends with Public Enemy’s late-90s interpolation of that song, “He Got Game,” from the Spike Lee film of the same name. “Billions” never shies from big needle drops; this is a clever way of incorporating one of the most recognizable classic rock songs in the catalog.Also on the music tip: One of the episode’s funniest moments comes during a scene in which Wags and Prince haggle over what it will cost for Wags to quit the firm. Instead of making a deal, Wags simply says “Nope!,” and at that moment the composer Brendan Angelides’s score cuts out entirely. All it’s missing is a needle-scratch sound effect.It felt great to see the usual Axe Cap suspects throughout the show, but much missed were Kelly AuCoin as Dollar Bill and Dan Soder as Mafee. Will they resurface to make trouble for Prince?As interesting as Prince’s decision to sack his investors was, it’s hard to believe that all of them — except Melville Revere, who gets in high dudgeon about it — would simply take it on the chin and leave the office without saying anything in protest. For that matter, it’s hard to believe that all of them would come when summoned.The episode ends with Chuck firing one of Revere’s cannons himself as a sort of kiss-off. To me, this says a lot about Chuck: The rules are meant to be followed, unless it makes him feel good to break one. More

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      Louie Anderson and the Compassion of America’s Eternal Kid

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      He displayed an empathetic humanity that he shared offstage with his friend Bob Saget. The loss of both comics represents the end of an era.One of the first killer jokes in the stand-up act of Louie Anderson was about the meanness of older brothers. Imitating one of his own in an intimidating voice, he warned that there was a monster in a swamp nearby. With childlike fear in his eyes, Anderson reported that he avoided that area “until I got a little older and a little smarter and a little brother.”Pivoting to the future in an instant, he adopted the older brother voice, pointing to the swamp and telling his sibling: “That’s where your real parents live.”Anderson, who died Friday at 68 from complications of cancer, had five brothers and five sisters, but over the course of a sterling comedy career spanning four decades, he established a much larger family of colleagues. The comedian Bob Saget, who also died this month, was a younger brother of sorts. They started in stand-up on the West Coast around the same time and had breakthroughs in the same 1985 episode of HBO’s “Young Comedians Special” (hosted by Rodney Dangerfield), which back then was second only to “The Tonight Show” as a springboard for stand-up careers.Just last May, Anderson and Saget took part in a loving conversation on a podcast, reminiscing and laughing, and gingerly approaching topics with the sensitivity and warmth of intimates catching up during the long, isolating pandemic. It’s funny and now, considering the loss of both men, terribly heartbreaking. Both still prolific in their 60s, they sounded joyful about the current moment and were looking to the future. Saget talked about wanting to direct a movie that would appeal to everyone, and Anderson said he wished to play Fatty Arbuckle.None of that will happen, of course, and as these friends talked about their careers, it struck me that losing them represents the end of a key part of an era.Clockwise from top left, Yakov Smirnoff, Jeff Altman, Tim Thomerson,  Anderson, Jim Carrey, Pauley Shore, Mitzi Shore and Saget at a celebration of the Comedy Store’s 20th anniversary in 1992.Chris Haston/NBCUniversal, via Getty ImagesWhen you think of the 1980s comedy boom, the first artist that comes to mind for many is Jerry Seinfeld and his clinically observational brand of humor. For others, it might be the rock-star flamboyance of Eddie Murphy or Andrew Dice Clay. But in the days of three major networks, the culture incentivized a warmly inclusive, rigorously relatable comedy that could appeal to a broad mainstream and, at its best and most resonant, had an empathetic humanity.The outpouring of love for Bob Saget took some by surprise and was in part a testament to his good-natured, filthy humor and personal generosity. But it was also because of a vast audience that saw him as the friendly paternal face on “Full House” and “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” That comedy fans also knew him as one of the dirtiest joke tellers around burnished and deepened his reputation. But if Saget became one of the few cultural figures who could be described as America’s Dad (does any current star get described in such sweeping terms these days?), Anderson fit seamlessly into an equally idealized role as our culture’s eternal kid.There was a boyish innocence and sweetness to Anderson that never left him, even when he was playing a mother on “Baskets,” a remarkable and sincere performance that marked the start of his acclaimed second act (which included his turn in “Search Party”). Like Saget, Anderson had a broad résumé as an actor, author and television host, but he was a stand-up at heart who never stopped touring. I saw him do a 90-minute set in 2018, and he had the low-key improvisational, searching energy of someone still obsessed with finding an incredible new bit.There was a remarkable consistency in Anderson’s work from his early stand-up to his later performances, in spirit and also in subject matter. This included a focus on food: No one told more fat jokes, like his longtime opening line, which he used during his first appearance on “The Tonight Show” and again on “Conan” last March: “Listen, I can’t stay long. I’m between meals.”More prominently, his great topic was family, particularly his ever-optimistic mother and irate father. (As soft-spoken as he could be, Anderson could also yell as much as Sam Kinison.) While his early comedy featured plenty of punch lines, Anderson’s great gift was acting out stories, brilliantly evoking moments with quick-change characterizations, displaying the depth and technique of a seasoned actor.Anderson in his much-praised turn as a mother on “Baskets.” Erica Parise/FXIn one lovely, unusually nuanced scene for his 1987 hour at the Guthrie Theater, near his hometown, St. Paul, he recalled his parents fighting. It begins with a teasing imitation of his father, a classic belligerent blowhard of an old-timer. In Anderson’s telling, he was the kind of guy who would say things like, “When I was a kid, they didn’t have schools. I had to find smart people and follow them around.”In the show, his father boasts in a brusque, nonsensical rant about being a veteran of “World War I, World War II, everything, Korea, everywhere.”Leaving the scene for an instant, Anderson explained that as a boy, he had to look to his mother for the truth — then he unfurrowed his brow, flattened his face and utterly transformed into a soft-spoken woman gently shaking her head. As the audience cracked up, he lingered silently before lowering his voice and saying: “World War II.” There’s something about the quietness of the way he has her explain this that is touching. His mother wants to correct the record but not humiliate. The scene escalates into a fight, and while it could have been incredibly dark, it somehow isn’t.The reason, I think, is that the core of Louie Anderson’s art has always been a bend-over-backward compassion, a grace for everyone, including (maybe especially) those he teases or criticizes, like his father.It’s a quality that can seem in short supply, but it’s one you hear so vividly in that podcast with Saget, who asked Anderson if he ever thought of being a therapist or minister. Anderson replied that he found therapy in comedy.Because they’re comedians, the talk eventually turned to death, specifically Dangerfield’s funeral in 2004. Saget officiated at the service and said he was actually heckled by Jay Leno. In the podcast, Saget thanked Anderson for sticking up for him. Anderson told him: “I know that must have hurt you, what he did. I wasn’t going to let you hang there. Jay probably just did it out of nervousness. Maybe he needed to do that to not burst out crying.”Leno is a polarizing figure for comics of their generation, and to his detractors, he’s an unsentimental joke-telling machine, which might have been part of the subtext when Saget quickly responded to Anderson’s suggestion that Leno was trying to avoid shedding tears: “I don’t think he does that.”In the gentle way a friend does, Anderson disagreed. “I bet he does.” Saget then immediately changed his mind, almost as if he recognized that the humanity of this thought outpaced the fun of his gibe.“All I ever want to do is hug you,” he said to Anderson at one moment.It was unusually sentimental for a comedy podcast, but that these old friends got to share this final moment of connection is no small thing. More

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      Brian Cox Takes Stock of His Eventful Life on Stage and Screen

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      I’m such a fan of the HBO series “Succession,” about a morally depraved, megarich media family, that I hum its theme song in the shower and have taken to wearing commanding pantsuits. So when I picked up “Putting the Rabbit in the Hat,” the new memoir by Brian Cox, who plays the family’s tyrannical patriarch, Logan Roy, I was desperate for tidbits to tide me over during the long wait for Season 4.Well, there aren’t many. Cox writes gruffly of a newcomer director on the show giving Kieran Culkin, who plays his youngest son and is an ace at mixing up the script, notes to “slow down.” “Now, this is an actor who’s calibrated the patterns of his character’s delivery over the course of two previous seasons,” the author thunders, or so I imagine (as Roy, he’s a big thunderer). “He’s not going to suddenly slow down just because you’ve given him a note.”Brian Cox, whose new memoir is “Putting the Rabbit in the Hat.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesCox confides furthermore that he doesn’t really relate to the intense, Method-like “process” that Jeremy Strong uses to get into the character of Kendall, Logan’s middle son. Fans already knew about Strong’s tactics from a profile of him in The New Yorker that was chewed over for weeks after it was published in December. Some perceived condescension in the article toward Strong’s working-class background, including an anonymous Yale classmate having marveled at his “careerist drive.”The heated discussion was fascinating and perplexing. When did acting become so bougie and aspirational? Wasn’t a working-class background once a key element of the Hollywood success narrative — getting yanked out, discovered and made over by the savior figure of agent or studio executive? Think Cary Grant (born Archibald Leach, son of a tailor’s presser), Lana Turner (miner’s daughter), Ava Gardner (child of sharecroppers) and all those other glamour figures of yesteryear.A humble background didn’t hinder Cox, who has gone from leading man of the British stage to one of America’s most prolific and consistent character actors — what is sometimes called a “jobbing actor,” though he now has the clout to negotiate a chauffeur, nice hotels and a double-banger trailer. Nobody rescued Cox, the consummate utility player. “I knew that simply wasn’t my ballpark,” he shrugs, on the subject of Hollywood stardom. “Besides, I’m too short.” He’s written two previous memoirs, one that tracks him to Moscow to direct “The Crucible” and another about the challenges of “King Lear.” Taking stock at 75, he’s not so much a lion in winter (indeed, he was fired as the voice of Aslan in the Narnia movies) as a seasoned workhorse finally able to enjoy a victory gallop.Cox writes eloquently about his origins in Dundee, Scotland, as the youngest of five children who occasionally had to beg for batter bits from the local chip shop. His parents met at a dance hall; his mother had been a spinner at jute mills and suffered multiple miscarriages and mental illness; his father, a shopkeeper and socialist, died when Brian was 8. Getting plunked in front of the telly rather than taken to the funeral was formative. So were later escapes to the movies, particularly ones like “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” (1960), starring Albert Finney: “a film that wasn’t all about the lives of posh folk in drawing rooms, or struggling nobly in far-off places, or having faintly amusing high jinks on hospital wards,” Cox writes. “It was all about working-class people — people like us.” A kind teacher told him about a gofer gig at the local repertory theater and boom, he was home.Brian Cox and his fellow cast members of the HBO show Succession.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesCox went on to attend the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and perform in esteemed halls like the Royal Court, learning the classics but also grooving nicely with the rise of the angry young man and kitchen-sink realism led by the playwright John Osborne, with whom he became friends. Before very long he was working with his gods, including Finney.At a time when theater, the fabulous invalid, is straitjacketed by the pandemic, it’s heartening and a little wistful-making to have it recalled in all its messy midcentury glory. Cox fluffed a flustered Lynn Redgrave’s wig; got felt up by Princess Margaret backstage; narrowly escaped dying in a plane crash on his way to audition for Laurence Olivier. Years later, as Lear in a wheelchair, he “frisbeed” his metal crown into the first row at the National Theater, injuring an audience member. He once compromised his testicles during a naked yoga scene. In the leaner years, he booked bikini waxes and cohabited with an army of cockroaches in a sublet apartment. There was drunkenness aplenty; one actor playing the priest in “Hamlet” got so soused he tumbled into Ophelia’s grave.Cox, who prefers cannabis to drink, can ramble on a bit. If times ever get lean again, it’s easy to imagine him doing bedtime stories for a sleep app. He salts all the idolatry with disdain. On Kevin Spacey: “A great talent, but a stupid, stupid man.” On Steven Seagal: “As ludicrous in real life as he appears onscreen.” On Quentin Tarantino: “I find his work meretricious. It’s all surface.” (Though he’d take a part if offered.) He’s softer on Woody Allen, owning up to himself dating an 18-year-old when he was in his 40s. “It seems that everybody in this book is either dead or canceled,” he notes with some rue. He’s preoccupied with making a “good death,” cataloging friends’ ends with an almost clinical relish (cancer, emphysema, suicide, a heart attack so massive it threw the victim “clean across the pebbles”).Like many actors, Cox treads more nimbly on the boards than in his personal life. He admits he wasn’t fully present for family tragedies, like his first wife’s stillborn twins and their daughter’s anorexia. “And that’s my flaw,” he declares. “It’s this propensity for absence, this need to disappear.” He loves the part of Logan partly because, when not thundering, he’s “reined in and bottled up.” But on the page, at least, he is present, lively and pouring forth, though the hints of his distinctive burr may send you heading for the audiobook instead. More

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      Why the Costumer of 'The Gilded Age' Is Being Driven Out of Business

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      Helen Uffner has dressed Broadway, Hollywood and TV shows for more than 40 years. But high-rise developers and Amazon distribution centers are making it impossible to store her extraordinary vintage collection.Helen Uffner began her love affair with old clothes as a young teenager, wandering into estate sales near her family’s home in Queens, unnerving her father, who had immigrated to this country as a Holocaust survivor and worried that people would think he could not afford to outfit his daughter properly. As a high school student in the mid-1960s, she would go to auction houses in Greenwich Village to buy vintage clothes and antique jewelry, using her babysitting earnings. With the prospect of a career in period fashion lacking promise, she sensibly joined a management consultancy after college. Soon enough the sexism got to her so she quit and decided to monetize her passion, drawing from the large collection she had already amassed which, at the time, focused on Victorian lingerie.Over the next 40 years or so, Ms. Uffner established a celebrated business renting out vintage clothes to theater, film and television productions from an inventory considered unparalleled. Initially, she ran the business out of her apartment — supplying the wardrobe for “Out of Africa,” “Zelig,” “The Color Purple.” By the late 1990s, when that model was no longer sustainable, she moved to a 6,000-square-foot space in the garment district, which made it easy for Broadway costume designers to visit and for actors to come in for fittings. Within a decade though, the unforgiving pace of real estate development in New York would threaten her viability, and now, in an all-too-familiar scenario, the pandemic economy was taking an extinction-level toll.It was a paradox though because even as the performing arts have suffered immeasurably during the past two years, film and television production in New York City has mostly returned to prepandemic levels and is ramping up. In September, Netflix opened a 170,000-square-foot studio in Brooklyn, and Ms. Uffner has been involved with one of the most anticipated series of the year, “The Gilded Age,” Julian Fellowes’s follow-up to “Downton Abbey,” set in turn-of-the-century New York (and starting Monday on HBO).Challenges began for Ms. Uffner in 2006, when the landlord of the building she occupied in Midtown “invited” her, as she put it, to break her lease early. He was selling the building and wanted her out, but moving thousands of racks of clothing was going to be an ordeal. At the same time commercial rents were soaring and the city’s garment industry had all but disappeared, large loft-like spaces given over to corporate offices. Eventually, in 2008, Helen Uffner Vintage Clothing moved to Long Island City, after its proprietress faced fines of $1,000 a day if she did not vacate her existing space.The transition was not easy. Fashion houses, which also rent from the collection as a means of inspiration, began returning things by FedEx, Ms. Uffner told me, “as if we were in another state.” But over the next several years, Long Island City became popular enough that it was now a place where a marketing executive at Ralph Lauren might actually live. So by 2018, Ms. Uffner inevitably found herself in the same predicament she had faced earlier — the building she was in near Queens Plaza would be redeveloped and she would have to move. She ultimately settled into another space in Long Island City only to confront the drama all over again — her current building is planned for demolition to accommodate the construction of a high-rise.In the past, Ms. Uffner had several competitors, also independently owned, but nearly all have fallen away. If she shut down, the impact on the costume industry would be profound. Tom Broecker, an Emmy Award-winning costume designer who has relied on Ms. Uffner for decades described her collection of women’s wear from the early 20th century as extraordinary. “In the entire world, Helen is the only person who has cotton dresses from that period,” he told me.Even a move to Industry City, in Brooklyn, where the city has been trying to revive garment manufacturing, would be difficult from his point of view. In addition to film and theater projects, Mr. Broecker works on “Saturday Night Live,” where he might have to come up with a piece of old clothing in a span of two hours, making a trip from Rockefeller Center to a semi-inaccessible quarter of Brooklyn unfeasible.Understanding the importance of her enterprise to New York’s creative life, the city via the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment has said it is trying to help Ms. Uffner relocate, but without broad commercial rent regulation, there is little that can be accomplished. Over the years, she told me, landlords have added fees to monthly rent bills with impunity. In the beginning she was paying rent, electricity and property tax. In a subsequent space, the landlord added gas, and then came requirements to contribute to the local business improvement district.While Covid has tanked the price of office leasing, vast warehouse space of the kind Ms. Uffner needs is at a premium because of the demand coming from Amazon and other e-commerce sites that have become even more attractive to consumers during the pandemic. The city suggested a space in Hudson Yards, she told me, that was going to cost more than five times what she was paying.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Late Night Celebrates One Year of President Biden

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      “A year ago, Biden pledged to address Covid, the economy, climate change and racial injustice. And good news — after 12 months of tireless effort, we’re all getting three free masks,” Jimmy Fallon said.Welcome to the 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.One Long YearThursday marked the end of President Biden’s first year in the White House.“When asked what he’s learned, Biden said, ‘Being vice president was a hell of a lot more fun,’” Jimmy Fallon joked.“President Biden said yesterday that his first year in office has been ‘a year of challenges,’ but he’d rather focus on the positives, like your Covid test.” — SETH MEYERS“It seems like just yesterday our democracy was being held hostage by a cabal of obstructionists who didn’t want every vote counted. Oh, wait, that was yesterday.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“A year ago, Biden pledged to address Covid, the economy, climate change and racial injustice. And good news — after 12 months of tireless effort, we’re all getting three free masks.” — JIMMY FALLON“President Biden yesterday held a 1 hour 51 minute press conference. It was the first thing Americans actually wished Joe Manchin had stopped.” — SETH MEYERS“A lot of people are disappointed with President Biden. His approval rating just reached a new low after his press conference yesterday. The press conference was a success in that he went nearly two hours without having to pee.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“He promised no malarkey, but lawyers made him change it to ‘produced in a facility that also processes malarkey.’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Unvoting Voting Edition)“Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema believe so strongly in the power of voting that they use their vote to block voting rights for the entire country. They were unvoting voting by voting.” — TREVOR NOAH“I mean, say what you will about the Democrats, but never has a party been on a hotter streak of getting absolutely nothing done.” — JAMES CORDEN“The big takeaway is the people you voted for, voted to make it harder for you to vote.” — JAMES CORDEN“Republicans want to add restrictions to voting because they are worried about voter fraud, even though it’s almost completely nonexistent, voter fraud. Hey, you know what? You guys believe climate change is nonexistent, right? How about coming up with some restrictions for that? Let’s compromise on this.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“You can’t compromise with the side that’s doing the damage. When you’re putting out a fire, you don’t call the Fire Department and the arsonist, and see what they can work out together.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingJames Corden talked with Rachel Brosnahan and Ed Helms about the celebrities they are frequently mistaken for on Thursday’s “Late Late Show.”Also, Check This OutImages from the Barbed-Wire Kisses panel at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival.Sandria Miller for Sundance InstituteThis year’s Sundance marks 30 years since the festival held its first panel on New Queer Cinema, a sea change for L.G.B.T.Q. film. More

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      Michael Schur’s Unending Quest to Be Perfect

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      The comedy writer, known for shows like “Parks and Recreation” and “The Good Place,” has a surprising new project: a book about moral philosophy that explores how to be a good person.Several years ago, Michael Schur was stuck in Los Angeles traffic when he went into a philosophical tailspin. As he watched other drivers use the emergency lane to escape the gridlock, he started fuming about people who put their desires above everyone else’s, then wondered if such minor ethical lapses even matter.What started as a flash of irritation yielded an idea: What if there were a cosmic point system that tallied our good and bad behavior, and ranked people accordingly? From then on, when Schur saw drivers misbehaving, he would comfort himself by imagining them losing 15 points on their moral score cards.That fantasy helped shape the premise for Schur’s television series, “The Good Place,” a metaphysical comedy set in an afterlife where people are assigned to the Good Place or Bad Place based on their ethical ranking. The show, which starred Kristen Bell as a pathologically selfish pharmaceutical saleswoman accidentally sent to the Good Place, posed complex thought experiments and explored moral principles from philosophers like Aristotle and Kant, all in the framework of a 22-minute sitcom.“The Good Place” ran for four seasons on NBC and was a commercial and critical success. But when the final season aired in 2020, Schur, who’s also known for his work on comedies like “The Office,” “Parks and Recreation” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” felt unsatisfied.“I had this nagging feeling, like I wasn’t done talking about it,” Schur said in a video interview from his home in Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife J.J. Philbin, their children William and Ivy, their dogs Henry and Louisa, and a guinea pig named Coco. “I didn’t want to try to do another TV show on the same topic, because that just seemed weird. I’m not sure there’s another TV show that’s explicitly about moral philosophy that anyone would be interested in.”So, in a somewhat surprising pivot, he decided to write a book about ethics.Schur’s debut, “How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question,” which Simon & Schuster will release on Tuesday, is likely the first book about moral philosophy to feature endorsements from Steve Carell, Amy Poehler, Ted Danson and Mindy Kaling. Jeff McMahan, a philosophy professor at Oxford, called it “an enjoyably boisterous guide to the moral life.”From ‘How to Be Perfect’Listen to an audiobook excerpt from “How to Be Perfect,” featuring Michael Schur along with Kristen Bell, William Jackson Harper, Ted Danson and D’Arcy Carden, stars of his TV show “The Good Place.”In about 300 pages, Schur covers some 2,500 years of Western philosophical thought, breaking down concepts like virtue ethics, deontology, utilitarianism and contractualism, analyzing principles espoused by Aristotle (“a good salesman, and he gets us all excited about his pitch”), Kant (“a pretty rigid dude”) and Camus (“a stone-cold hottie”), and examining arguments from contemporary philosophers like Judith Thomson, Peter Singer, T.M. Scanlon and Johann Broodryk. He raises quandaries that are easy calls (“Should I Punch My Friend in the Face for No Reason?”) along with more challenging thought experiments like the Trolley Problem (“Should I Let This Runaway Trolley I’m Driving Kill Five People, or Should I Pull a Lever and Deliberately Kill One (Different) Person?”) and fraught issues like whether it’s wrong to enjoy art and literature created by people who behave reprehensibly.As a philosophical layman taking on some of the most profound questions humans have pondered, Schur is, naturally, nervous about how the book will be received. “I’m terrified of people who know what they’re talking about reading it and saying, ‘You fool,’” he said. “That’s my greatest fear right now, is that someone is going to read it and out loud, alone in his or her office, say the words, ‘You fool.’”“How to Be Perfect” is out on Jan. 25.At the same time, he felt that as a comedy writer, he could bring a unique lens to the subject.“The smartest people who ever lived have been working really hard for thousands of years to try to explain to us how we can be better people, and how we can improve ourselves, but they wrote so complicatedly and densely and opaquely that no one wants to engage with it,” Schur said. “It’s like a chef had come up with a recipe for chocolate chip cookies that were both delicious and also helped you lose weight, but the recipe was 600 pages long and written in German, and no one read it. And I thought, if we could just translate that to, like, a human language, this would be very helpful.”In some ways, the topic felt unavoidable. Schur, 46, has been preoccupied with how to be a good person for as long as he can remember.“I have been interested-in-slash-obsessed with the concept of ethics my whole life,” he said. “There have been moments when I’ve confronted something about my own behavior, where I realized I was behaving in a ethically questionable way, or had wandered into some complicated situation, that seemed like I would be better equipped to handle it if I knew what the hell I was talking about, ethically speaking.”Writing a book about the quest for ethical perfection, Schur risked coming across as unbearably pedantic or worse, sanctimonious, but he grounds his overviews of abstract doctrines in self-deprecating digressions. He confesses he still has books by Woody Allen on his shelves and hasn’t been able to renounce him even after allegations of sexual abuse came to light. He describes the self-loathing he would feel whenever he left a tip at Starbucks but paused to make sure that the barista saw him do it. He agonizes over his privileged status as an educated, affluent white man, worries that his hybrid car is still bad for the environment and frets that the money he spends on baseball tickets and other luxuries could have gone to people in need. (He’s donating his earnings from the book to several charities and nonprofits, he said.)Born in Ann Arbor, Mich., and raised in Connecticut in a casually Unitarian family, Schur has had a charmed career that he attributes to a series of lucky accidents, beginning with the day he stayed home sick from school and his mom let him watch Allen’s movie “Sleeper.” At Harvard, where he majored in English, he joined the Lampoon, a comedy magazine that has served as a pipeline for TV writers, and those connections helped him land a job as a writer for “Saturday Night Live” in 1998.He was later hired as a writer for “The Office,” and around the third season, he signed an overall deal with NBCUniversal. He went on to cocreate “Parks and Recreation” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” both wholesome workplace comedies. When the network gave him free rein to make a show about anything he wanted, he pitched “The Good Place.”Early on, he ran into a problem: He didn’t know much about moral philosophy. So he started a self-taught course in ethics, reading works by Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Bentham, Rawls and others, and devouring academic papers he found online.When he found concepts to be impenetrable, he sought out professionals. He asked Pamela Hieronymi, a philosophy professor at U.C.L.A, to be an adviser for the show, and she gave lectures in the writers room and guided writers through conundrums like the Trolley Problem. “He wants it to be digestible, but he doesn’t want to water it down,” she said of Schur.Schur also brought on the philosopher Todd May as a consultant after reading his book, “Death.” Schur would sometimes send May an urgent email with a “philosophical emergency” when he was worried he had bungled some ethical nuance.“He is extraordinarily precise, and it’s really important to him to get the theories right,” said May, who also advised Schur on his book.Kristen Bell, William Jackson Harper and Ted Danson in a scene from “The Good Place” that explored the Trolley Problem.Colleen Hayes/NBCThe production sometimes felt more like a grad-school philosophy seminar than a sitcom set. William Jackson Harper, who played a conflicted philosophy professor on “The Good Place,” recalled having conversations with Schur about thorny variations on the Trolley Problem that made his head spin. Bell, who studied the long document that Schur prepared outlining different ethical theories that the show covered, remembers having a discussion with Schur about whether it was OK to eat almonds.“There aren’t a lot of people that have a commitment to examining their role in the world as deeply as he does,” she said.Danson, who played an immortal being and bureaucrat who operates the Good Place, said Schur brought seriousness and intensity to the set, an atmosphere that was unusual for a show that also trafficked in bathroom humor and physical comedy. “I don’t think there’s a casual bone in his body,” Danson said.After creating a show that seemed to defy the boundaries of a sitcom, blending heady concepts with extreme silliness, Schur felt he had discovered a winning formula that he could deploy in a book. He sold “How to Be Perfect” to Simon & Schuster in early 2020, just before the pandemic arrived and shut down much of the entertainment industry.As its release approaches, Schur is aware that he faces higher expectations than most debut authors. “I wanted the book to be conversational and engaging and funny enough so that people who had watched ‘The Good Place’ or anything else I’ve ever done felt like the same guy was talking to them, and I also wanted anyone who knows anything about philosophy to read it and think, like, hey, not bad,” he said.He’s somewhat reassured by the fact that “The Good Place” was so well received, suggesting that there’s an audience for goofy riffs on ethics, and said he’s gotten positive responses from friends and colleagues who loved the show and the dilemmas it raised.“And if they were lying, then that’s their problem,” Schur added, “because they’ve been unethical.” More

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      Sari or Lehenga: Difference Between the Traditional Indian Garments

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      Worn at weddings, festive occasions and most recently on an episode of the “Sex and the City” reboot, these traditional Indian garments are not the same.When the sixth episode of “And Just Like That,” the reboot of “Sex and the City,” aired earlier this month, it garnered a lot of attention from the South Asian community. Named after the Hindu festival Diwali, the episode used the celebration as a plot point and provoked strong reactions to a faux pas that is now being called sari-gate.In one scene, Carrie Bradshaw, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, and Seema Patel, a real estate broker played by the Indian-British actress Sarita Choudhury, are shown buying outfits for a Diwali party at what Ms. Bradshaw calls a “sari shop.” After the episode aired, many viewers pointed out that the store was actually stocked with Indian garments beyond the sari, and that Ms. Bradshaw ultimately bought a lehenga, a three-piece garment worn at Indian weddings and celebrations.In the episode, Seema Patel, who is played by Sarita Choudhury, takes Ms. Bradshaw shopping for a Diwali party at what Ms. Bradshaw calls a “sari shop.” Some viewers noted that the show did not seem to point out the difference between a sari and a lehenga.HBO MaxLater in the episode, Ms. Patel and her mother are seen wearing saris, which consist of an uncut piece of fabric that’s wrapped around the body and draped over a shoulder, along with complimenting blouses. But the script never makes an effort to distinguish between their saris and Ms. Bradshaw’s lehenga, an oversight that disappointed some viewers who were otherwise heartened to see Indian culture and fashion enjoy prime real estate on a mainstream TV show.In an Instagram post shared the day after the episode aired, Imran Amed, the founder and CEO of Business of Fashion said “I think it’s really cool” that Ms. Bradshaw wanted to wear Indian clothes to the Diwali party. “The issue is that there are now millions of people out there who think what Carrie is wearing is a sari,” said Mr. Amed, who lives in London. “It’s not.”The ‘Sex and the City’ UniverseThe sprawling franchise revolutionized how women were portrayed on the screen. And the show isn’t over yet. A New Series: Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte return for another strut down the premium cable runway in “And Just Like That,” streaming on HBO. Off Broadway: Candace Bushnell, whose writing gave birth to the “Sex and the City” universe, stars in her one-woman show based on her life. In Carrie’s Footsteps: “Sex and the City” painted a seductive vision of Manhattan, inspiring many young women to move to the city. The Origins: For the show’s 20th anniversary in 2018, Bushnell shared how a collection of essays turned into a pathbreaking series.What’s in a name, really? In this case, centuries of cultural history.The lehenga (or ghagra) is believed to have emerged in popularity around the 10th century, during the Mughal reign over India, and is more predominant in northern India.“The lehenga set is typically made of three elements — the voluminous floor-length skirt called the lehenga; the blouse or choli, often like a crop top; and a dupatta or stole-like drape,” said Divyak D’Souza, a stylist in Mumbai and the host of the Indian edition of “Say Yes To The Dress,” a reality TV show.Ms. Bradshaw’s much-discussed lehenga is a burgundy skirt and midnight-blue blouse ensemble from the spring-summer 2020 collection of Falguni Shane Peacock, a line founded by husband-and-wife designers Falguni Peacock and Shane Peacock. The ornate ensemble, made at the designers’ atelier in Mumbai, features colorful embroidery and gold thread accents on a jacquard fabric, and also comes with a matching tulle net dupatta that Ms. Bradshaw does not wear in the episode.“The motifs on the lehenga feature architectural domes, inspired by the palaces of Udaipur, Rajasthan,” said Ms. Peacock, whose brand enjoys popularity with several celebrities of the diaspora — its lehengas were also recently worn by Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Mindy Kaling for Diwali celebrations in 2021. Mr. Peacock added that he and his wife approach their lehengas almost like gowns, which also makes them a hit with a younger crowd.The sari is an even older garment. K.H. Radharaman, the creative director of Advaya, a brand that is known for its technical innovations of the sari, said that the drape has a rich history. “The sari is one of the oldest surviving garments in human history, with its origins going back to the Indus Valley civilization.”A sari from Advaya, a brand that is known for its technical innovations of the traditional drape. via Advaya“The nature of our ceremonies has changed, but the sari has stayed constant,” said Mr. Radharaman, who lives in Bengaluru. “It represents centuries of continuity in thought, tying us to our past and its traditions.”Saris, he said, are paired with a stitched blouse and mostly worn by women, though some men also wear them. “The commonly depicted way of wearing one is that it’s wrapped around the waist down in concentric pleats, while the extended part — the pallu or tail piece — is thrown over the left shoulder,” said Mr. Radharaman. More contemporary ways to style a sari include wearing it with a tailored jacket, crisp white shirt or even a cape.In its undiluted form, the sari is a textile that assumes the form of a wearer, which means there are as many ways to drape it as there are communities in India.“Every region has its own sari and corresponding visual design vocabulary, with motifs and techniques whose lineage and origin are steeped in history or mythology,” Mr. Radharaman said. “It is deeply symbolic of the culture of both the wearer and its maker — thus representing different cultural sensibilities in a way few garments around the world can.”Between it and the lehenga, is one more popular or more appropriate for certain occasions than the other? In a country as culturally diverse as India, it’s hard to generalize, as both have been part of Indians’ collective sartorial lexicon for centuries (alongside other garments like anarkalis, kurtas and shararas to name a few). Every community has its own mandate on their preferred silhouette or drape for festivities, though Mr. D’Souza said the lehenga is often a choice when an event calls for more formal dressing.“The sari is common garb for many Indian women even for everyday wear,” he said. “The lehenga, in comparison, tends to be brought out more for festive occasions and weddings; seen on both the bride or the guests.”A lehenga’s “colors and surface ornamentation are often linked to the bride’s cultural context,” added Mr. D’Souza, who noted that not every version is spice-colored or high on bling and floral patterns. “The silhouette has evolved immensely. Many designers are taking a modernist approach; experimenting with traditional weaves, contemporary updates and modern styling.” More

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      Jimmy Kimmel Not Surprised by Trump Fraud Allegations

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      “The walls appear to be closing in on Trump — big, beautiful walls,” Kimmel said, as new details emerged from an investigation into the ex-president’s family business.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.‘Male Pattern Fraudness’Late-night hosts were not surprised to hear that New York State’s attorney general, Letitia James, is accusing Donald Trump’s family business of repeatedly misrepresenting the value of its assets.“One year ago today, Donald Trump was still in the White House, throwing chicken nuggets at the TV, and one year from today, he could be in jail,” Jimmy Kimmel said.“According to documents filed by the attorney general in New York last night, they’ve uncovered evidence that indicates the Trump Organization repeatedly engaged in ‘fraudulent or misleading’ practices. The walls appear to be closing in on Trump — big, beautiful walls.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“James says that her office has uncovered significant evidence that the former president fraudulently valued multiple assets, including his own private residence. He claimed the triplex apartment was 30,000 square feet in size, but the actual size was just under 11,000 square feet. Yeah, that’s no surprise — he’s known for falsely tripling the size of his assets.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“You know how when people are shocked, they spit out their water? When I heard Donald Trump exaggerated the value of his assets for the purposes of lying to banks and the I.R.S., it was so the reverse of shocking, I sucked the water back into my mouth.” — SETH MEYERS“But this is nice, they’re interviewing Donald Jr., Ivanka, and have already talked to Eric, making this the first time Tiffany was happy to be excluded.” — JAMES CORDEN“But it’s a fairly straightforward case. To find fraud in a business, you just have to look for the signs — particularly the signs at the top of the building that say ‘Trump’ on them — and you will find it there. There is where you will find his male pattern fraudness.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I mean, at the same time, Donald Trump does not give a [expletive]. Let’s be honest: This dude will brag about himself even if it gets him in trouble. I bet when a cop asks him if he knows how fast he was going, he’s like, ‘Yeah, I do, 400 billion miles a second, the fastest anyone has ever gone. I was so fast. So fast.’” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (How Long Was It? Edition)“President Biden today gave his first press conference in a long time, and it went on for a long time. It may be still going, I don’t know.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It comes one day before his presidency hits the one-year mark, and he used the opportunity to highlight his administration’s key successes — successes such as vaccinating millions of Americans, low unemployment, and casually hooking up with Pete Davidson.” — JAMES CORDEN“And this was smart: to make Biden look good, they had the C.D.C. director go out first and open for him.” — JIMMY FALLON“The press conference kicked off at 4 p.m. You can tell it was really important for Biden because that’s right in the middle of dinner.” — JIMMY FALLON“Yeah, it was his first formal press conference at the White House since March of last year. In Biden’s defense, that one just wrapped up a few days ago.” — JIMMY FALLON“For almost two hours, Biden took question after question about Russia, Covid, voter rights. He really got into why Denny’s breakfast menu is so sticky all the time.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“The president took a lot of questions, too many questions. You know how at the end of most press conferences, the reporters are yelling ‘Mr. President, Mr. President!’? At the end of this one, they were like, ‘Goodbye. We’re good. We got plenty.’” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingOn Wednesday’s “Tonight Show,” Christine Baranski said fans who mistake her for her sophisticated characters wouldn’t believe how loud she gets when watching the Buffalo Bills.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightTwitter legend Dionne Warwick will pop by Thursday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutSince the Trump mask incident, Griffin has been trying to make her way back, brushing up against obstacles like partisan rage, sexism, pill addiction, lung cancer and her own reputation.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesKathy Griffin’s career hasn’t recovered from a 2017 Trump joke, and now she’s hoping to find her way back onto the D-list. More