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      ‘The White Lotus,’ Plus 9 Things to Watch on TV this Week

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      The HBO satire of the rich and well-traveled comes back for a third season. And “Saturday Night Live” hosts its 50th anniversary special.Between streaming and cable, there is a seemingly endless variety of things to watch. Here is a selection of TV shows and specials that air or stream this week, Feb. 10-16. Details and times are subject to change.An uneasy vacation.Since HBO’s “White Lotus” and “Succession” have been off the air, what has there been to discuss with your friends or post about on X on Sunday nights? Luckily, “The White Lotus” is back. In its first two seasons, viewers have gone on transcontinental journeys, including an indelicate hotel manager in Hawaii and a strange love square in Italy. And now, the third season is taking off to Thailand, where there promises to be stressful family dynamics, an off-putting couple and of course, lots of suspense and threats of violence and crime. Sadly, Jennifer Coolidge won’t be on this season after she met her untimely demise — or maybe she will be? With the director and writer Mike White at the helm, who truly knows what is going to happen? Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO and streaming on Max.50 years of ‘Saturday Night Live.’In lots of ways, this whole season has been a celebration of the 50th anniversary of “Saturday Night Live,” but the official pomp and circumstance is kicking off this week with “SNL50: The Homecoming Concert,” a live show from Radio City Music Hall in New York. Hosted by “SN.L.” alum Jimmy Fallon, the show will include performances from over 20 artists, including Arcade Fire, Eddie Vedder and Miley Cyrus. And the best part? You can watch live from the comfort of your home. Friday at 8 p.m. on Peacock.The 50th anniversary special of “Saturday Night Live,” hosted by Lorne Michaels, will look back at the show’s past.Will Heath/NBCLive from New York, it’s … Sunday night? Though the title doesn’t match the timing, “SNL50: The Anniversary Special” is the big three-hour event that rounds out a season full of trips down memory lane and will feature some famous alumni and a look into the show’s history. If you want to get prepped in a different way, the fictional retelling of the first night of the show, “Saturday Night” directed by Jason Reitman, is now streaming on Netflix. Sunday at 8 p.m. on NBC.A resurgence of romantic comedies.Sometimes you’re traveling to Italy for a very pragmatic, very grown-up reason, and all the sudden, you’re swept up into a romance that alters the course of your life. I mean, that’s what I’ve seen in movies; it’s never happened to me. In “The Dolce Villa,” things are no different. Eric (Scott Foley) travels to Tuscany to try to stop his daughter Olivia (Maia Reficco) from buying and restoring an old villa. The moment he arrives in town, he meets the mayor, Francesca (Violante Placido), and you know what they, say: colpo di fulmine. Streaming Thursday on Netflix.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      For Morris Chestnut, R&B Is Therapeutic

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      “It’s helpful in my work,” said the star of the new TV series “Watson,” “because it triggers thoughts, triggers memories, triggers emotions.”When Morris Chestnut first heard about “Watson,” a new CBS medical mystery set within the Sherlock Holmes mythology, he was interested. But once he read the script by Craig Sweeny — the show’s creator and one of the writers behind that other Sherlockian CBS series, “Elementary” — he grew even more excited.“He has so many crazy, creative ideas,” Chestnut, 56, said. “So I rushed to it. I said, ‘I have to do it.’”“Watson” opens as Chestnut’s character, Dr. John Watson, is rebuilding his life six months after the death of his dear friend and partner, Sherlock Holmes. Holmes has left Watson a parting gift: a medical clinic, in Pittsburgh, devoted to curing rare disorders.“He’s treating patients, and while he’s treating those patients, he somewhat also has to treat himself,” Chestnut said.Studying to be a doctor is stressful, but so is studying to sound like one, and it requires a certain level of sacrifice — especially for an N.F.L. addict.“When I’m doing the show, I literally have to pick one game on Sunday,” Chestnut said of learning the medical jargon that flows like honey from Watson’s mouth. “In the middle of commercial breaks, I’m looking at the script.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Greatest ‘Saturday Night Live’ Episode Ever*

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      *Well, maybe only to me. “S.N.L.” fans all have their own idea of the show’s peak, and this is mine.As measured by the calendar, “Saturday Night Live” is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. But you could also say that 50 “Saturday Night Lives” are each celebrating an anniversary.There are, of course, those who watch the show every week, every year, and have followed its evolution for decades. But many of us have a singular personal “Saturday Night Live”: a particular season or group of performers that defines the show for us.Don’t take this from me. Take it from Lorne Michaels. “Generally, when people talk about the best cast,” he once said, “I think, ‘Well, that’s when they were in high school.’”I was in high school in 1984. Even back then — those freaks-and-geeks years when you define yourself by your pop-culture obsessions and nerds are most vulnerable to the wiles of sketch comedy — I was only a modest “S.N.L.” fan. I loved “S.C.T.V.” and David Letterman and Monty Python.In college and later, I would move on to “The Simpsons” and other comedy enthusiasms. Sometimes I’d enjoy “S.N.L.”; sometimes I’d hate it; sometimes I’d enjoy hating it. But honestly, for most of my life I’ve thought of it like a public utility — always there, but not something I’d be a “fan” of any more than I’d be a fan of the gas company.But there was a while when “S.N.L.” vibrated on my wavelength, when I was the right age to stay up, when my friends spent every Monday quoting lines to one another in the school cafeteria. I can narrow my “S.N.L.” of choice down to a specific season — in fact, to a specific episode: Season 10, Episode 9, airdate Dec. 15, 1984.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Going to Commercial During the Super Bowl Works

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      Television commercial breaks are the bane of every N.F.L. fan. They interrupt a game already riddled with stoppages, bombard viewers with come-ons and force fans and players in the stadium to stand around for about two and a half minutes, sometimes in the freezing cold.Yet commercials are the lifeblood of the N.F.L. Without them, broadcasters could not afford to pay the league billions of dollars for rights fees, money that goes to paying players’ salaries and much more.Most games have 18 commercial breaks. A few timeouts, like at the end of the first and third quarters and at the two-minute warnings, are fixed. The league and networks avoid taking breaks if a team’s opening drive of the game ends quickly, because they want fans to settle into the broadcast. If all goes well, the last commercials run at the two-minute warning in the fourth quarter.Most commercial breaks, though, are chosen in real time as league executives, network producers and officials on the field look for natural breaks in the action. Finding them is more art than science because every game unfolds differently, with long drives, three-and-outs, injury timeouts and coaches’ challenges.League officials sit in the press box during games and help determine when to take commercial breaks.Caroline Gutman for The New York Times“Our fans know that the commercial breaks are coming,” said Mike North, vice president of broadcast planning and scheduling at the N.F.L. “The whole idea from where we sit is to try to use those breaks to cover downtime: resetting the field after a score; if there happens to be an injury, hopefully a minor one; or an instant replay review when the referee goes to the sideline.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Critics Choice Awards Winners 2025: See the Full List

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      “Anora” scored big in the final minutes of the ceremony, while Demi Moore and Adrien Brody collected the top acting honors at the 30th annual Critics Choice Awards.See all the arrival photos from the 2025 Critics Choice Awards red carpet.“Anora” put some points — or, make that one big point — on the board at the Critics Choice Awards on Friday night, taking the top trophy for best picture just a month after it was totally shut out at the Golden Globes.Sean Baker, who directed the film, about an exotic dancer’s star-crossed romance with a Russian heir, used his acceptance speech to exhort the audience to support more independent movies released in theaters.“They’re going through some hard times,” Mr. Baker said. “We lost a thousand theaters during Covid — we lose them almost daily. That’s where we love to see films. Let’s see films in our local theaters, OK?”The Critics Choice ceremony, initially scheduled for Jan. 12, was postponed for several weeks because of the Los Angeles wildfires. This put the show, which was held in the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, Calif., in an unusual position: Voting had already concluded on Jan. 10, meaning the weeks that followed — marked by major events including the announcement of the Oscar nominations and a controversy over inflammatory tweets that engulfed “Emilia Pérez” and its star Karla Sofía Gascón — had no impact on the results.Ms. Gascón, who is under fire for posts that denigrated Muslims, George Floyd and the Oscars, was a no-show at the ceremony, though her co-star Zoe Saldaña, who won the supporting actress trophy, and the film’s director, Jacques Audiard, who accepted the foreign language film award, were both in attendance. “Emilia Pérez” also picked up a third trophy, for best original song.Ms. Gascón ultimately lost the best actress award to Demi Moore (“The Substance”), who won her second major televised prize after triumphing at the Golden Globes last month. The best actor award went to the “Brutalist” star Adrien Brody, furthering a comeback for the 51-year-old Mr. Brody, who has struggled to match his early success in the 2002 film “The Pianist,” for which he won the Oscar.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Best and Worst Super Bowl Commercials, Ranked

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      Here is our critic’s evolving survey of this year’s Super Bowl commercials, from best to worst.Here is my annual critical ranking of the Super Bowl commercials. This is the pregame edition, with all the available national ads that I could track down; the list will be updated after Sunday’s game.The trends so far? Nothing controversial, as you would expect, but also — and perhaps for associated reasons — very little creativity. It’s a bad year for ads; the ones at the top of this list aren’t much better than average. More spots than usual depend entirely on the appeal of a relatable celebrity (who is almost certainly male). Concepts beat ideas — there is a lot of fussy, overly complicated silliness and not much in the way of simple, effective storytelling or mood setting.(You may not see every commercial listed here during the game, and you may see commercials not listed here. The various broadcast and streaming platforms will carry different selections of ads, and some ads will only be shown in certain regions.)No. 1National Football LeagueN.F.L.The N.F.L.’s own feel-good promo, “Somebody,” is affecting in a highly produced, can’t-we-all-just-get-along manner. Its implicit endorsement of diversity and inclusion offers a muted contrast to the league’s decision to forgo the “End Racism” end-zone slogan.No. 2Stella ArtoisWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Katt Williams Interview Made Shannon Sharpe’s “Club Shay Shay” a Hit

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      “Club Shay Shay” became a must-stop destination for Hollywood after Katt Williams aired his grievances. “This was our ‘Thriller’ album,” said the host Shannon Sharpe.Shannon Sharpe won three Super Bowls in a Hall of Fame career and once recorded 214 receiving yards in a game, the most ever by a National Football League tight end. Another crowning achievement came long after he was outmuscling bulky defenders, when he convinced a 5-foot-5 comedian to open up while sipping cognac on a brown leather sofa.When that comedian and actor, Katt Williams, aired his grievances against prominent Black celebrities, including Sean Combs and Kevin Hart, it instantly turned Sharpe’s podcast “Club Shay Shay” into a must-stop destination in Hollywood and beyond. In the months after the episode aired in January 2024, Sharpe secured interviews with the rapper Megan Thee Stallion and the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.“‘Club Shay Shay’ has become the modern-day talk show,” said Lillian Xu, a top podcast executive for Vox Media, which produces a handful of rival series.Sharpe has cut through in a saturated podcast ecosystem where Alex Cooper and the Kelce brothers command nine-figure contracts. In addition to “Club Shay Shay,” Sharpe makes twice-weekly appearances on “First Take,” ESPN’s popular morning debate show, and hosts a secondary podcast, “Nightcap,” with the former N.F.L. receiver Chad Johnson.Before a live taping of a “Nightcap” episode in New Orleans this week ahead of the Super Bowl, Sharpe exercised his vocal cords in a backstage greenroom as a makeup artist prepared to pat his face. Moments later, his voice, laced with a country-twang accent, soared throughout an auditorium. The friends debated N.F.L. award winners, Johnson’s relationship issues and other topics.In the past year, Sharpe has interviewed Megan Thee Stallion, Kamala Harris, Mo’Nique and Kai Cenat on his podcast “Club Shay Shay.”Emily Kask for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ralph Macchio on Getting In His Final Kicks in ‘Cobra Kai’

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      When Ralph Macchio was first approached about doing a “Karate Kid” series about the adult lives of Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence, he was skeptical.“I was like, ‘I’m a car salesman?’” said Macchio, who starred in the original 1984 film as Daniel, a teenage transplant to Southern California, who learns karate and defeats his bully, Johnny (William Zabka), on the mat.“They didn’t have me at hello,” he said.But at a meeting that lasted over three hours in the courtyard of the Greenwich Hotel, in Lower Manhattan, the creators Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg won him over with their vision for that series, “Cobra Kai.” It wasn’t only a nostalgia play. It also looked to introduce a whole new generation of karate kids.“As they started talking about the younger characters — Miguel, Samantha, that next generation — and the parenting part,” Macchio said, “I started leaning forward.”Now, six seasons later, “Cobra Kai,” which is set in the San Fernando Valley approximately 30 years after the events of “The Karate Kid,” will release its final five episodes on Netflix on Thursday. The series, which stars Macchio and Zabka, puts a new lens on Johnny, who begins as a deadbeat dad, haunted by his fall from grace in the 1980s, but finds new purpose in reopening the Cobra Kai dojo and reigniting his rivalry with Daniel.Macchio in the sixth and final season of “Cobra Kai.” “It ends in a way that has all those ’80s movie feels and cheers and tears, and yet sees it through a ‘Cobra Kai’ kind of lens,” Macchio said.Curtis Bonds Baker/NetflixWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More