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      How Hillary Clinton's MasterClass Shows a Very 2021 Way to Be

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      Hillary Clinton delivered an unused election speech. Jennifer Aniston cried at Central Perk. It was a year for watching celebrities reinhabit their past selves.MasterClass, an online platform where you can watch famous people deliver video tutorials for $180 a year, recently debuted a course on the topic of resilience. It begins with a close-up shot of a weathered oval desk. We hear papers shuffling, birds chirping, the voices of an ethereal choir. A woman’s hands drift across a policy document. As white light flares through a garden window, Hillary Clinton appears. She wears a serene smile and a magenta blouse. It feels like she’s back from the dead.Clinton’s 16 video lessons in resilience are largely tedious (one is about binder organization), but the whole exercise builds to a rattling unease. The course culminates with Clinton reciting her unused presidential victory speech from 2016. Holding the text in her lap like a storybook, she seems to be impersonating a lost version of herself. She is accessing a faintly smug, terribly naïve Hillary Clinton, as if practicing in front of a mirror for a moment that would never arrive. It’s the kind of humiliating growth exercise you might spy through the keyhole of a therapist’s office. Even as Clinton has styled herself as an influencer on the subject of carrying on, it feels as if she is being held hostage by the past, compelled to relive her defeat again and again.This is, actually, a very 2021 way to be. Popular culture is saturated with famous figures playing their past selves, revisiting old haunts and resurrecting buried personal histories. This year, Taylor Swift began releasing note-for-note re-recordings of her early albums in a bid to reclaim control of her catalog after her adversary Scooter Braun assumed ownership of her masters and sold them to an investment fund. The cast of “Friends” reunited in an eerie replica of Central Perk, while the original “Real World” roommates returned to the Manhattan loft they shared in 1992. And celebrities have flooded TikTok, groveling to fans with corny re-enactments: Ryan Reynolds poorly lip-syncs a bit from his 2005 rom-com “Just Friends,” while Zooey Deschanel eagerly replicates her song and dance from the “New Girl” opening credits.I thought we had reached peak pop culture nostalgia a decade ago, when an endless buffet of 1990s-kid ephemera was rewarmed for digital consumption and a sepia Instagram filter could convert last night’s party photos into an instant retrospective. But there is something unexpectedly charged about this development, which invites us to watch a person squeeze back into her old skin. The literalness of the exercise emphasizes the slipperiness of time, shining a garish spotlight on mortality and lending a tragic depth to the most venal of reunion specials. Even the cringey TikToks have a measure of profundity, as aging celebrities play their younger selves to appeal to even younger audiences, all set on a perpetual loop.The imperative of the streaming boom is to turn the content spigot to full blast, but that makes content seem forgettable and cheap. So now producers are resurrecting properties from when content was scarce enough to feel precious, and inviting us to watch as the associated celebrities reinfuse them with their auras. Like the doomed characters on “Lost,” who manage to escape their spooky island only to feel compelled to return, the financial pull of existing I.P. is often too strong for famous people to resist. These re-enactments and self-impersonations represent the latest turn in the entertainment industry’s rapacious churn, as it mines psychodrama from the very process of rebooting culture.On “Real World: Homecoming,” the original roommates returned to the Manhattan loft they shared in 1992.Danielle Levitt/MTVIt all reminds me of a different kind of re-enactment: this year’s documentary “Procession,” which concerns six men who survived child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. With the help of a drama therapist and the documentarian Robert Greene, they revisit the scenes of the crimes, act out fictionalized versions of their memories and film them. One of the men recreates a priest’s quarters, paints it all white, then destroys it with a sledgehammer; another hunts down a priest’s old lake house and walks the overgrown path that led to his rape. Their hope is that by physicalizing these traumatic incidents, they can reinscribe their memories and dispel their power.These Hollywood re-enactments also have a sheen of exposure therapy, conjuring old dramas through sense memory. “Friends: The Reunion,” on HBO Max, emphasizes the production’s precise rebuilding of sets, and as soon as Jennifer Aniston crosses the threshold of the replicated apartment of her character, Rachel Green, tears are in her eyes. Later, she would say that she was so walloped by memories — the end of “Friends” overlapped with the dissolution of her marriage to Brad Pitt — that she paused filming to pull herself together. Aniston’s tabloid persona is haunted by her past romantic lives, and the scenario felt designed to rouse dormant narratives. Part of the lurid appeal of the reunion is watching the lightly debasing spectacle of the cast assembling around a table to re-enact old scripts, as if in a celebrity support group for exorcising classic roles. Of course, the actual purpose is to prime viewers to revisit their own ’90s memories, via “Friends” episodes, which are now exclusively streaming on HBO Max.On “The Real World: Homecoming,” on Paramount+, the frisson of the reunion springs from their reoccupation of the loft they shared nearly 30 years ago. The housemates have hardly popped a bottle of prosecco when a tense 1992 argument about racism between Becky, a white songwriter, and Kevin, a Black activist, is replayed for the group. The cast seems prepared to calmly reprocess this exchange with the exception of Becky (now an alternative healer who goes by Rebecca), who instantly springs back to her familiar defensive posture, protesting that she “lost” her “skin color” through her experience dancing with a multiethnic troupe. So strong is the psychological pull of this place, she becomes convinced that she was actively set up as the scapegoat for white privilege, and she scurries from the loft for good.This messy display stands in contrast to Taylor Swift’s tightly controlled nostalgic exercise. Her re-recordings are deliberately unrevealing — she sounds as if she is performing uncanny self-karaoke — but the story she has spun around them is captivating. In April, she released “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” a rerecording of her 2008 album. On it, we hear a 31-year-old woman impersonating her 19-year-old self reflecting on her 15-year-old self, and doing it all to smite the men who hoped to seize control of her songs.Part of the lurid appeal of “Friends: The Reunion” is watching the spectacle of the cast (including Jennifer Aniston) re-enacting old scripts, as if in a celebrity support group for exorcising their classic roles.HBO MaxFor a time, the most indelible cultural artifact of this moment was a parenthetical bit of metadata, “(Taylor’s Version),” which Swift appended to the titles of her newly recorded songs, and which became a meme anyone could use to signal a prideful ownership of their own cultural outputs, no matter how slight. But in November, Swift’s immersion in her past built to a breakthrough, as she released a 10-minute extension of her beloved 2012 breakup song “All Too Well.” With the new version, she interpolates the wistful original with starkly drawn scenes that play almost like recovered memories, recasting a romance as a site of trauma that so reduced her that she compares herself to “a soldier who’s returning half her weight.”Nostalgia is derived from the Greek words for “homecoming” and “pain,” and before it referred to a yearning for the past, it was a psychopathological disorder, describing a homesickness so severe it could actually kill. Nostalgia itself represented a form of traumatic stress, and now pseudo-therapeutic treatments have made their way into our cultural retrospectives. So while Serena Williams appears on MasterClass to teach tennis, and Ringo Starr to teach drumming, Clinton arrives to school us on “the power of resilience.”Resilience suggests elasticity, and there is something morbidly fascinating about watching Clinton revert to her pre-Trump form. The victory speech itself reads like centrist Mad Libs — a meditation on “E Pluribus Unum,” nods to both Black Lives Matter and the bravery of police, an Abraham Lincoln quote — but at its end it veers into complex emotional territory. Clinton recalls her mother, Dorothy Rodham, who died in 2011, and as she describes a dream about her, her voice shakes and warps in pitch. Dorothy Rodham had a bleak upbringing, and Clinton wishes she could visit her mother’s childhood self and assure her that despite all the suffering she would endure, her daughter would go on to become the president of the United States.As Clinton plays her former self comforting her mother’s former self with the idea of a future Clinton who will never exist, we finally glimpse a loss that cannot be negotiated, optimized or monetized: She can never speak to her mother again. Soon, Clinton’s MasterClass has reverted back to its banal messaging — she instructs us to dust ourselves off, take a walk, make our beds —  but for a few seconds, she could be seen not as a windup historical figure but as a person, like the rest of us, who cannot beat time. More

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      ‘Cowboy Bebop’ Beats and the Universe of ‘Dune’: What ‘Arcane’ Is Made of

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      Netflix’s new animated series is based on the popular video game ‘League of Legends,’ but the show’s creators added some ingredients of their own.A word of reassurance to those who have not played — or perhaps even heard of — the sprawling online game “League of Legends”: The new animated series “Arcane” may be inspired by it, but newbies can jump in cold and still be transported. Not only is the action breathless, but the visuals conjured by the French studio Fortiche are breathtakingly, beautifully detailed.The show takes place in a steampunk-ish world where magic functions as technology, with all the benefits and dangers this implies. The upper-crust denizens of Piltover control the so-called “hextech” and lord it over those scrounging in the depths of the city of Zaun. Stuck in the middle of a power play between haves and have-nots — further complicated by personal revenges — are the badass sisters Vi (voiced by Hailee Steinfeld) and Jinx (Ella Purnell). Their tormented relationship is one of the primary narrative engines in “Arcane.”The show’s showrunners Christian Linke and Alex Yee are creative directors with “League of Legends” producer Riot Games, but they have looked beyond the game world to create the series.In a video call from their office in Los Angeles, Linke, 34, and Yee, 38, discussed some of the inspirations behind “Arcane.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.‘Peaky Blinders’NetflixBoth men really like this stylish, violent British crime drama set in post-World War I Birmingham. “There is writing that’s realistic, where it feels like you just can step into that world, and then there’s a world where characters just sound so much cooler than anything we would hear in everyday life,” Linke said. “In ‘Peaky Blinders,’ there is such an art to those exchanges. I also feel like I genuinely don’t know what the characters will do, and I think that’s something where ‘Peaky Blinders’ really shines.”Yee singled out the way the show, created by Steven Knight, immediately gave a sense of its universe, something they tried to emulate in the “Arcane” pilot. “Really early on, we have this image of Zaun as this kind of thriving under-city black market,” he said. “The kids go down in the elevator, with this huge music drop — it’s dangerous, but it’s exciting.”‘Lord of the Rings’Pierre Vinet/New Line CinemaWhile working on “Arcane,” Linke referred to Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the Tolkien epic so much that his colleagues joked that he should start paying up every time he mentioned it. “You want to have things that are somewhat grounded and it’s giving characters arcs, even smaller characters with limited screen time,” he said of looking to Jackson’s dense tapestry as an inspiration. “It’s not easy to create rules around magic and this and that, and still create a relatable character arc.”Yee, for his part, tends to look at “Dune” (“In my head I’m thinking of the book,” he specified) for inspiration, noting how it and “Lord of the Rings” helped him figure out how to design sprawling fantasy universes. “What both of those properties do really well is they take a look at the entire world and try to figure out how all of the elements play with each other. They also both straddle the tone spectrum really well.” “Arcane,” for example, brilliantly handles the balance between epic action sequences and intimate scenes, complex political intrigue and thorny personal bonds (including that between Jinx and the villainous Silco).‘Cowboy Bebop’SunriseMusic plays a big part in “Arcane,” with many original songs often providing a jolting, surprisingly effective contemporary counterpoint to the story — as when Curtis Harding and Jazmine Sullivan’s vintage-sounding soul song “Our Love” plays over a montage slowly revealing that Vi is going to sacrifice herself for her sister’s sake. A big influence on this approach is this delirious anime series from the late 1990s (which has recently been remade as a live-action show).“The grittiness of ‘Cowboy Bebop’ was an inspiration,” Yee said. “And the integration of music with the visuals. We quickly discovered that Fortiche can really accomplish a lot when you set them free with a little bit of music, just sort of chase whatever visuals they like. In Episode 7, the fight between Jinx and Ekko was very different in the script,” he continued, referring to a scene scored with Denzel Curry, Gizzle and Bren Joy’s “Dynasties & Dystopia.”‘Metropolis’TriStar PicturesHere Linke and Yee are not referring to Fritz Lang’s Expressionist silent classic but to Rintaro and Katsuhiro Otomo’s anime movie from 2001. “It’s a noir-ish setting in a near future where we have sentient robots and ships that feel like they can leave the planet, but it’s also a very stacked, layered city — a big part of the story is about ascending the different floors of the world,” Yee said. “There’s this sort of vibrance in the world that makes you feel like, ‘I don’t know that I want to be there,’ but you can’t take your eyes away from it.”That balance came into play when, for example, creating the street kids’ cool hide-out, which looks like a cross between a theater’s backstage and a semi-abandoned arcade. “We had to figure out how to make it look like a home, even though it’s dangerous,” Linke said. “‘Metropolis’ did some very cool locations: It feels like it’s this vertical maze and then someone took a little corner and made it there.”‘The Dark Knight’Ron Phillips/Warner Bros.There have been many iterations of Batman, from the silly to the tragic, and these swings were familiar to the “Arcane” pair. “There was definitely a parallel in, How do you ground characters from our game that in some cases are closer to the Adam West Batman — an animated character that never had to answer to more realistic story and world considerations?” Linke said. “What Christopher Nolan did with Batman became more about these grounded, emotional journeys and stakes.”A particular challenge was how to handle the character of Jinx, who is playful and colorful, and a loose cannon. “She couldn’t just be this cackling, loud character that if you see for the fifth time, you’re just going to be like, ‘OK, I got it now — is there anything else?’” Linke said. “We had to make sure that we turn game characters into real people.”Yee also points out as an inspiration the various ways the characters are “manifested,” as he put it, in “The Dark Knight.” In “Arcane,” the disfigured Silco is the kind of tortured soul whose distorted dreams become lifelong obsessions — not unlike the Batman villain Two-Face, for example. “What he really missed, or what he really wanted his entire life, was this feeling of being whole, of being respected and seen as someone worth your time and respect,” Yee said of Silco. “He just never had that.” More

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      Naples, a City of Contradictions, Is Once Again a Home for Cinema

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      For “The Hand of God,” the director Paolo Sorrentino has returned to his hometown, whose cultural profile has been lifted in recent years by the Elena Ferrante novels and films like “Gomorrah.”NAPLES, Italy — Paolo Sorrentino’s latest film “The Hand of God” begins with a bird’s-eye view of Naples, his hometown, at dawn, with a lone vintage car traveling along a seafront road while the rest of the city uncharacteristically sleeps.As a backdrop to this autobiographical coming-of-age story, Naples is at turns fantastical and decadent, sunny and unpredictable, comfortably familiar and ultimately confining.Off camera, it is even more.In the 20 years since Sorrentino last made a film here — his directorial debut “One Man Up” — the city has also matured as a center of movie making in Italy. These days, film and television crews are a common sight on Neapolitan streets, both downtown but also in its rougher hinterlands. These productions have nurtured the formation of a local industry, including actors, specialized technicians and cinematographers.A mural of Peppino and Totò, the Italian comedy duo, in the Sanità district of Naples.Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times“The Hand of God” shot on location in Naples, with a view of Vesuvius.Gianni FioritoFabietto Schisa (Filippo Scotti) is Sorrentino’s character in the film.Netflix“There’s been enormous growth,” said Maurizio Gemma, the director of the local Film Commission of the Campania Region, which has focused on attracting and facilitating the work of film and television productions since 2005.Back then, Gemma said, there were 10 or 12 projects shooting in the area. Today, “we are shooting nearly 150 projects a year,” he said, including big-budget television shows like HBO’s “My Brilliant Friend,” based on the best-selling Elena Ferrante novels.“Our greatest satisfaction is that inside these important titles there’s the work of many professionals in our region,” Gemma said. But then, he added, “we’ve always had a propensity toward show business, culture; it’s part of our history, it’s in our DNA.”Naples is a city of contradictions, of ornate Baroque palazzos alongside derelict housing, of unrelenting and unruly traffic and an official unemployment rate of 21.5 percent, twice the national average. But it is also a city of culture, both highbrow and popular, and the birthplace of songs like “O sole mio” and “Santa Lucia.”“We’ve always had a propensity toward show business, culture; it’s part of our history, it’s in our DNA,” said Maurizio Gemma, the director of the region’s film commission. Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesIts shabby grandeur, narrow alleys and sweeping views of the Bay of Naples with Vesuvius as a backdrop make the city a natural open air film set.In recent years, production sets have been drawn to the suburbs of Naples, and its less salubrious underbelly. The bleak 2009 film “Gomorrah” by Matteo Garrone, who is Roman, and the popular TV series of the same name brought these derelict areas to a wider international audience.The director Antonio Capuano, who features prominently in “The Hand of God,” said at a recent screening of his 1998 film “Polvere di Napoli” — which he wrote with Sorrentino — that “Gomorrah” had become a “the postcard of Naples, and this is horrible.”Pasquale Iaccio, the author of several books about Neapolitan cinema, said that “Gomorrah” was merely one “aspect of Naples among many other” clichés about the city that still held court.He offered as proof an anecdote from the Neapolitan shoot for the film “Eat Pray Love,” where producers paid the residents of a downtown Naples alley to hang clothes and sheets from their windows, because an alley without them “just wouldn’t be Naples for the American script,” he said.A portrait of the Italian actress Sophia Loren in Naples. Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesThe 2009 film “Gomorrah” was set in the Neapolitan suburb of Scampia.Mario Spada/IFC FilmsA scene, filmed in Naples, from “Eat Pray Love.”Columbia PicturesThe cinematic attraction of Naples is keeping the city busy. “Let’s just say there’s a lot to do,” said Gea Vaccaro, a Naples city official overseeing the office that helps production companies navigate city bureaucracy and permits. “Naples is a complex city,” she said.One of the ways the city helps visiting productions is to provide them with office space, setting aside rooms in a massive palazzo in the city center — Sorrentino’s team for “The Hand of God” occupied an airy room with ceiling frescoes.Mayor Gaetano Manfredi, who was elected in October, said in an interview that the fertile cinematographic season “reinforced the international brand of Naples,” and permitted the considerable diaspora of Neapolitans living abroad to maintain a connection with their city.“The economic angle should also not be discounted,” Manfredi said.Last year, Italian regions set aside some 50 million euros ($57 million) to attract television and film productions, supplemented by other government funds and tax credits, according to Tina Bianchi, the secretary general of the Italian Film Commissions, the umbrella group for regional cinematic commissions.The staircase at the Palazzo dello Spagnolo, a popular filming location.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesThe industry’s rapid growth has been some time in the making, according to Francesco Nardella, the deputy director of the arm of Italy’s national broadcaster that co-produces “Un Posto al Sole,” (“A Place in the Sun”) a wildly popular Italian weeknight drama set in Naples, as well as other series here.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      The Best TV Episodes of 2021

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      Among the thousands of hours of television that came out this year, episodes of “Call My Agent,” “For All Mankind,” “Mythic Quest,” “Pose” and “WandaVision,” among others, stood out.From left, “Dave,” PEN15” and “Genius: Aretha” put out some of TV’s best episodes of the year.From left: Byron Cohen/FX; Hulu; Richard DuCree/National GeographicTelevision today comes in big portions, as anyone who spent seven-plus hours with the Beatles over Thanksgiving weekend can attest. But just as a marathon jam session can yield a few tight singles, the most memorable TV is still often the well-crafted individual episode. As Mike Hale, Margaret Lyons and I end another year’s binge as TV critics for The New York Times, here are a few of the installments from 2021 that topped our personal hit parades. JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘Call My Agent!’ (Netflix)‘Sigourney’More than 30 European actors — including stars like Isabelle Huppert, Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno — have graciously and often mercilessly lampooned themselves in this French dramedy, playing clients or prospective clients or angry former clients of the fictional talent agency ASK. In this Season 4 episode, an American stepped in, and Sigourney Weaver, speaking more than passable French and playing herself as an utterly charming manipulator, was flawless. (Streaming on Netflix.) MIKE HALE‘City of Ghosts’‘Bob & Nancy’Plenty of children’s shows are cute but “City of Ghosts” is also beautiful, and its poetic wistfulness about Los Angeles would be at home on a premium cable drama. Instead it’s in this plucky, naturalistic cartoon about ghost-hunting kids who have a podcast. I loved every episode of this show. But I picked “Bob & Nancy” because it’s about a marionette theater, and thus it toys with ideas of animating the inanimate — rich ground for a show in touch with the spirit realm. (Streaming on Netflix.) MARGARET LYONSHarley Quinn Smith in the finale of “Cruel Summer,” which offered both a happy ending and a surprising twist.Freeform/Bill Matlock‘Cruel Summer’‘Hostile Witness’This teen kidnapping mystery took all the hallmarks of prestige-y crime shows — split timelines, dark lighting, tangential secrets — and repackaged them with a kicky ’90s YA flare. It was one of the juicy highlights of the summer. But shows like this are only as good as their finales, and “Cruel Summer” managed the trick of both a happy ending and a thrilling, dark twist. (Streaming on Hulu.) MARGARET LYONS‘Dave’ (FXX)‘Somebody Date Me’Texting can be a crutch for TV shows, a way to use pop-up bubbles to give characters phone-enabled telepathy. Not so in this playful, smart half-hour, in which Dave Burd’s up-and-coming rapper made (and lost) a date with Doja Cat. As the two musicians courted with their thumbs, “Somebody Date Me” showed how context and time can change the meaning and reading of the smallest online (mis)communication. Thumbs-up emoji! (Streaming on Hulu.) JAMES PONIEWOZIKThe Season 2 finale of “For All Mankind,” with Krys Marshall, revolved around multiple white-knuckle missions.Apple TV+‘For All Mankind’ (Apple TV+)‘The Grey’Each season of this space-race alternative history is a multistage booster rocket. The slow-moving early episodes expend a lot of fuel, building energy and narrative force until the show reaches escape velocity. (My aerospace engineer readers, I beg you not to fact-check my metaphors.) The white-knuckle Season 2 finale moved with the deftness of a docking maneuver, as a U.S.-Soviet conflict on the moon and a threatened war on Earth required risk and sacrifice on two celestial bodies and points in between. (Streaming on Apple TV+.) JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘Genius: Aretha’ (National Geographic)‘Amazing Grace’‘Pose’ (FX)‘Take Me to Church’The music and community of the Black church co-starred in two praiseworthy hours of TV. The Aretha Franklin bio-series peaked as it focused on the recording of the 1972 “Amazing Grace” live album at New Temple Missionary Baptist Church, fusing the artist’s past and present in a crucible of soul. In “Pose,” a grim diagnosis led Pray Tell (Billy Porter) back to his hometown and church community, both to confront the homophobia that drove him from it and give voice to the music that sustained him. (Stream “Genius: Aretha” on Hulu; buy “Pose” on Amazon.) JAMES PONIEWOZIKPerry Mattfeld, left, and David Webster, in the “Somewhere Over the Border” episode of “In the Dark.” CW‘In the Dark’ (CW)‘Somewhere Over the Border’This CW drama about a blind woman and her buddies, who run a rescue-dog agency and get involved in drug dealing and murder, is no more than a serviceable thriller. But the rapport among its central characters, Murphy (Perry Mattfeld), Jess (Brooke Markham) and Felix (Morgan Krantz), has developed into one of the more believable and moving portrayals of friendship on TV. When Murphy found herself stranded in a strange country, the strength of those ties was the foundation of a taut and agonizing hour. (Streaming on Netflix.) MIKE HALE‘Line of Duty’ (BritBox)Season 6, Episode 5Tension and deception pump through the veins of this breakneck procedural about a British internal-affairs unit, and no show does cliffhangers better. You could point to just about any episode; this one, with one of the heroes following a possibly dirty cop into an abandoned industrial park because that’s what the job called for, was off the charts. (Streaming on BritBox.) MIKE HALE‘Love, Death & Robots’‘The Drowned Giant’In just 13 minutes, this elegant short about a giant’s corpse that washes up on a beach one day captures, in a perfect snapshot, humanity’s tendency to desecrate marvels, to behold a world-changing event and decide simply to carry on. Based on a short story by J.G. Ballard, “The Drowned Giant” is rendered here in mostly realistic animation, with the giant’s clean-shaven cheeks, tidy fingernails and muscular chest shown in aching detail. In an era when so many shows just blend together, this episode stands out for its light touch and sad imagination. (Streaming on Netflix.) MARGARET LYONSIn a memorable episode of “Making It,” contestants like Jessie Lamworth, (right, with the host Amy Poehler) made Halloween costumes.Evans Vestal Ward/NBC‘Making It’‘All the Holidays at Once’Post “Great British Baking Show,” lots of reality competition series have gone away from the cutthroat in favor of the warm and fuzzy, and perhaps no show is warmer and fuzzier than the craft competition “Making It.” Each episode has its charms but “All the Holidays at Once” was especially thrilling, because unlike some of the show’s grander projects, crafting your own Halloween costume is pretty standard fare, even for layfolk. The contestants’ giddy joy in presenting their creations to the judges was matched only by my own giddy joy at seeing their silly and spectacular costumes. Jess won with her superb alien-abduction costume but when everything is this fun, don’t we all win? As a bonus, this episode also included Melañio telling a story about a bat in a toilet, a tale that will haunt me for the rest of my days. (Streaming on Hulu.) MARGARET LYONS‘Mythic Quest’ (Apple TV+)‘Backstory!’Having come up with one of the best pandemic-inspired episodes of 2020, this video game-industry comedy is gunning for TV’s high score in stand-alones. This installment gave the back story-obsessed game writer C.W. Longbottom (a wonderfully blustery F. Murray Abraham) his own flashback as a struggling sci-fi author in the 1970s — a funny and poignant tale of irony, professional jealousy and success at a cost. (Streaming on Apple TV+.) JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘Nuclear Family’ (HBO)Episode 3Ry Russo-Young’s three-part documentary about her lesbian mothers and the sperm donor who sued them for parental rights, threatening to pull apart her family, built to a powerful and eloquent conclusion. It both affirmed the importance of the battle her mothers fought and questioned the assumptions of everyone involved. (Streaming on HBO Max.) MIKE HALEIn a March interview with Oprah Winfrey, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle discussed their separation from the royal family.Harpo Productions/Joe Pugliese‘Oprah with Meghan and Harry’One so rarely gets to receive or send a “turn on your TV right now” text, especially in my line of work. So for that dual thrill alone this interview earned a place in my heart. It was the kind of programming that barely exists anymore: a tell-all network special in which celebrities share genuine new information with Oprah, the patron saint of soul-baring. There were Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, aglow in the California sun, decrying racism and candidly discussing mental health crises. Which would have been enough, but they also reset the royal narrative, gave Oprah eggs, fought back tears and gazed lovingly at one another — all while sitting in chairs sold by Christopher Knight from “The Brady Bunch.” Television, baby! I love you! MARGARET LYONS‘PEN15’ (Hulu)‘Yuki’Mutsuko Erskine had never acted before her daughter, Maya, cast her to play Maya’s mother in Hulu’s brutally funny teen comedy. Sometimes daughter knows best. This showpiece episode, in which a chance meeting with an ex-husband led Yuki to look down a road not taken, was a rich vignette of an immigrant’s experience and a subtle performance to cap off the role, literally, of a lifetime. (Streaming on Hulu.) JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘The Simpsons’ (Fox)‘The Dad-Feelings Limited’Who would have thought that the origin story of Comic Book Guy, done partly as an affectionate sendup of a Wes Anderson film, would be so lovely? (Streaming on Disney+.) MIKE HALE‘Snowfall’ (FX)‘All the Way Down’This brutal and only-as-sentimental-as-it-needs-to-be drama about a rogue C.I.A. agent and a young Black entrepreneur, partners in the crack wars in early 1980s Los Angeles, still does not get enough attention. That’s especially true of the stories written by the novelist Walter Mosley, like this chilling, tightly packed episode about rage, revenge, gentrification and wanting to go straight. (Streaming on Hulu.) MIKE HALEIn “WandaVision,” Paul Bettany and Elizabeth Olsen channeled multiple eras of TV including, in the premiere, 1950s sitcoms.Marvel Studios‘WandaVision’ (Disney+)‘Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience’Several installments of this superhero psychodrama, set in a bizarro-world version of classic sitcom formats, could have made this list. But might as well start at the beginning, in which Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) played house on a 1950s stage set whose made-for-TV perfection turned horrifyingly (and ingeniously) wrong. (Streaming on Disney+.) JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘What We Do in the Shadows’‘Casino’“Shadows” is one of the funniest shows on TV right now, and “Casino,” where the gang heads to Atlantic City, was my favorite episode this season. Nandor (Kayvan Novak) becomes entranced by a “Big Bang Theory” slot machine — “‘bazinga’ is the war cry of Sheldon,” he explains — and in perfect, cascading horror, this leads to the total dissolution of his understanding of the universe. “Shadows” is its best when the vampires’ grandiosity clashes with their vulnerabilities, especially their excitability, and I’ll never see another in-house ad on a hotel TV without thinking that it’s Colin Robinson’s favorite show. (Streaming on Hulu.) MARGARET LYONS More

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      What’s on TV This Week: Kennedy Center Honors and ‘Insecure’

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      A recording of this month’s Kennedy Center Honors ceremony debuts on CBS. And HBO’s “Insecure” airs its final episode.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Dec. 20-26. Details and times are subject to change.MondayREOPENING NIGHT (2021) 10 p.m. on HBO. In this documentary, the filmmaker Rudy Valdez (“The Sentence”) follows actors, crew members and other employees of the Public Theater as they work to bring Shakespeare back to the Delacorte Theater in Central Park for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic — for this past summer’s production of “Merry Wives,” a Shakespeare adaptation. The film isn’t just about the challenges of bringing back live performances after a long period of dormancy; it also sees the artists working through questions around racial equity as they return to the theater for the first time since 2020.TuesdayIN PERFORMANCE AT THE WHITE HOUSE: SPIRIT OF THE SEASON 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Jennifer Garner is the host of this hourlong special, which was filmed at the White House this month. Musicians including Billy Porter, Andrea Bocelli, Camila Cabello, Eric Church, the Jonas Brothers and Norah Jones perform among holiday decorations in several White House rooms.WednesdayTHE 44TH ANNUAL KENNEDY CENTER HONORS 9 p.m. on CBS. This month’s Kennedy Center Honors ceremony was something of a return to normalcy, with a star-spangled audience and roster of performers gathering in Washington to celebrate this year’s honorees: Bette Midler, Joni Mitchell, Berry Gordy, Justino Díaz and Lorne Michaels. The performers who paid tribute to this group included Chita Rivera, Kelli O’Hara, Amy Poehler, Seth Meyers, Norah Jones, Ellie Goulding, Brandi Carlile, Brittany Howard, Herbie Hancock and Stevie Wonder.ThursdayBeanie Feldstein and Steven Yeun in “The Humans.”Wilson Webb/A24THE HUMANS (2021) 5:30 p.m. on Showtime. The playwright Stephen Karam won a Tony Award in 2016 for this one-act comedy-drama about a Thanksgiving dinner where turkey and familial tension are on the menu — and the house is kind of haunted, too. The film adaptation, directed by Karam, casts Beanie Feldstein and Steven Yeun as Brigid and Richard, a young couple who hosts the dinner in a new-to-them (but far from new) Manhattan apartment, where they welcome three generations of Brigid’s family. (The cast also includes Richard Jenkins, Jayne Houdyshell, June Squibb and Amy Schumer.) In his review for The New York Times, A.O. Scott wrote that Karam uses “the freedom of film to open up and underscore his already powerful material.”FridayA CHRISTMAS CAROL (1938) 10 p.m. on TCM. How do you take your “Christmas Carol?” Sweet? Bitter? Brooding over ice, with a contemporary twist? Different decades have seen different screen adaptations of the Charles Dickens story, some warm, some dark. This classic 1938 version, directed by Edwin L. Marin and starring Reginald Owen as the killjoy Ebenezer Scrooge, falls on the warmer side of the spectrum. (“Good Dickens, good cinema and good for the soul” is how it was described by the critic and screenwriter Frank S. Nugent in a 1938 review in The Times.) On the other end is FX’S A CHRISTMAS CAROL, airing at 4:20 p.m. and 9:40 p.m. on FXM, an icy adaptation from Steven Knight (“Peaky Blinders”) that stars Guy Pearce. This mini-series, from 2019, explores Scrooge’s psychology; it co-stars Andy Serkis as the Ghost of Christmas Past. Also on FXM, at 7:50 p.m., is the 1951 version with Alastair Sim, directed by Brian Desmond Hurst, which has been held up as being particularly faithful to Dickens’s words.CHRISTMAS EVE MASS 11:30 p.m. on NBC. A week after turning 85, Pope Francis will lead Midnight Mass from St. Peter’s Basilica. This broadcast will air some hours after it’s recorded in Vatican City, to compensate for the time difference.SaturdayA scene from “The Lion King.”DisneyTHE LION KING (2019) 8 p.m. on FX. The African savanna has an uncanny-valley flavor in this hyper-realistic computer-animated adaptation of the Disney and Broadway musical classic “The Lion King.” It is rendered here with photo-realistic fur and lighting, giving its cast of very famous voices — Beyoncé, Donald Glover, Alfre Woodard, Chiwetel Ejiofor and James Earl Jones among them — an opulent digital space to retell the story of a lion’s quest to reclaim a stolen throne. “If a movie could be judged solely on technique, ‘The Lion King’ might qualify as a great one,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The Times. “And it kind of wants to be judged that way — for its technical skin rather than its dramatic soul.”CALL THE MIDWIFE HOLIDAY SPECIAL 2021 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). You’d be hard pressed to find a warmer place to spend Christmas night than Nonnatus House, the fictional London convent where the nuns of “Call the Midwife” practice their craft. This holiday special finds the sisters with their hands full, caring for an influx of expectant women.SundayIssa Rae and Kendrick Sampson in “Insecure.”Merie Wallace/HBOINSECURE 10 p.m. on HBO. After five seasons, “Insecure” will air its series finale on Sunday night. This season has seen the two best friends at the show’s center, Issa Dee (Issa Rae) and Molly Carter (Yvonne Orji), recommitting to their friendship (there were some struggles earlier) while Issa’s career begins to move to a new level. The show has been transformative for Rae herself — when the series debuted, she was best known for the web series “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl.” It has also had a meaningful impact on how Black people are represented on television. “True representation is the ability to show your vulnerability and be able to say, ‘I don’t have it all together, just like the next white person doesn’t have it all together,’” Rae said in a recent interview with The Times. “I think the show gave Black people permission to also be like, ‘You’re right: We are insecure.’” More

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      ‘Insecure’ Recap, Season 5, Episode 9: Confession Time

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      In the penultimate episode of the series, several characters let out what they have been holding inside.Season 5, Episode 9: ‘Out, Okay!?’Almost everyone is carrying around some kind of emotional burden. Most of us have learned to compartmentalize, if only to move forward. What happens when people let go and take a chance? When you tell the person you love how you feel? When you decide to leave everything behind for a chance at something different? Life is what happens.In “Out, Okay!?,” the penultimate episode of “Insecure,” several characters let out what they have been holding inside. Lawrence confesses that he loves Issa. Tiffany says goodbye to her friends in Los Angeles to start a new journey with her family in Colorado. Molly and Taurean cross the line from work friends and casual hookups to something else.While everyone is making big moves, Issa is still pretty grounded. She has not yet decided if she is going to take MBW’s offer or take her chances with Crenshawn. She is looking at apartments with Nathan but has not signed a lease yet. She seems to be in a limbo of her own making. They’re leaving all the resolution for the final episode, and it is enticing.We know that she still has some type of feelings for Lawrence, because she has not been able to stop thinking about him since she learned that he moved back to Los Angeles. We know that she wanted to reach out for closure until Molly stopped her.At Tiffany and Derek’s goodbye party, Nathan and Lawrence meet for the first time. There is obvious tension. The two go back and forth over whether Los Angeles or Houston has better barbecue. It is a petty argument that is more about ego. It is Lawrence sticking his chest out to the man Issa is planning to move in with.Lawrence did not go to the party alone — he showed up with Elijah and Condola. When Condola heads to the kitchen to grab a bottle for Elijah, she bumps into Molly, Kelly, Tiffany and, potentially most awkward, Issa. But the girls are cordial: Issa congratulates Condola on Elijah and Condola congratulates her on her latest community walk. Lawrence and Condola had started seeming like a blended family but when they arrived at the party, Condola noticed Lawrence looking at Issa with his swoon eyes on. She seemed disappointed, so I’m not calling Condola, Lawrence and Elijah the Smiths just yet.Molly and Taurean take edibles without telling anyone. (Molly eventually confesses to the girls.) It seems to be what the doctor ordered — I don’t see how they would have dropped their guard with one another otherwise. When they do, it’s beautiful. Taurean softens; Molly becomes a bit goofy and honest. After bingeing the hors d’oeuvres in secret, they find themselves inside a pantry.“A part of me is kind of worried how much fun I am having with you,” she tells him. “This is easy and feels real natural, and that scares me.”“Why?” Taurean asks.“Because at some point when people get close, I mess things up,” she answers earnestly.“With me, it’s the opposite,” he reassures her. “I hated you at first, but now I’m starting to like you. I’m not going to get tired of you, Molly,” Then he kisses her and they hook up.I’m not mad at this for Molly — Taurean did send her wine and Postmates after a very hard day, which is the modern equivalent of a sonnet and flowers. They might get some trouble from their colleagues, but I think they can make it work if Molly can find a way to let herself be loved.At the end of the party, things finally come to a head between Lawrence and Nathan, who get into a sort of fisticuffs after Nathan finds Lawrence professing his love for Issa. Issa repeatedly asks Lawrence to maybe talk to her another time but Lawrence can’t contain himself. He lets it all out.“When you ended things, I understood,” he tells her. “But things are different now; I’m different now. I would hate to leave here tonight knowing that I didn’t say something that I should have, like I didn’t fight hard enough for you.”“I don’t know that fighting will even matter,” she replies.After Taurean breaks up Lawrence and Nathan’s confrontation, Nathan yells at Issa. She reaches for his arm and he pulls away from her, asking her to give him a minute to cool down. It did not feel right that he yelled at her, regardless of how hotheaded he may have been. It felt like in that moment, she stopped being the woman he loved; she too was the opposition.Here’s hoping Issa stops playing the middle of the road soon. More

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      Paul Rudd Hosts a Year-End ‘S.N.L.’ Disrupted by the Omicron Variant

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      “Saturday Night Live” sought to persevere with an episode featuring special guests, but no musical performer and only two regular cast members.In a week when the rapid spread of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus had disrupted Broadway shows, concerts, sports and numerous other entertainment events, “Saturday Night Live” inevitably found it challenging to broadcast live from New York.Hours before a year-end holiday “S.N.L.” episode that was to be hosted by Paul Rudd and feature the musical guest Charli XCX, NBC suddenly announced several changes to this sketch variety show’s familiar format: citing “an abundance of caution,” the network said on Saturday afternoon that “S.N.L.” was pulling its live audience and would have “limited cast and crew.” A short while later, Charli XCX said that she would be unable to perform on the program at all.Even so, “S.N.L.” tried to persevere, as it has throughout the pandemic. The onset of the coronavirus had forced the cancellation of several live broadcasts in its 2019-20 season, which the show finished out with episodes consisting of sketches its cast members recorded from their home quarantines. Since the beginning of the 2020-21 season, in October 2020, “S.N.L.” has aired a full run of live shows from its Manhattan home in Studio 8H in 30 Rockefeller Plaza with many new protocols in place but little apparent interruption.But this week’s episode, which offered a mix of new segments filmed earlier in the week and vintage sketches from past years, was bound to come across differently. As Rudd told viewers at the end of the night, “I know it wasn’t the Christmas show that you expected but that’s the beauty of this place. Like life, it’s unpredictable.”However, the first performer to cross the show’s threshold tonight was a surprise guest: The opening sketch, which took place on the Studio 8H stage with no set, began with Tom Hanks, who was wearing his smoking jacket from the Five-Timers Club.Hanks offered his gratitude to the program’s “surviving crew members,” adding that it was his intention to induct a new member into the club tonight “but Covid came early this year,” he said.Though many “S.N.L.” cast members would be absent, Hanks said, “I came here from California, and if you think I was going to fly 3,000 miles and not be on TV, you’ve got another thing coming.”He was joined by Tina Fey, an “S.N.L.” alumna, who explained that this was not the smallest audience she had ever performed for, “because I have done improv in a Macy’s,” she said.When Rudd entered, he glanced into the studio audience and said brightly, “I’m extremely disappointed.” He was nonetheless inducted into the Five-Timers Club by Kenan Thompson, one of only two current cast members to be seen onstage tonight. (The other was Michael Che.)Rudd then explained to viewers that the rest of the show would feel “a little bit like that new Beatles documentary: a lot of old footage but enough new stuff that you’re like, OK, yeah, I’ll watch that.”Commercial Parody of the WeekIt may be long and shaggy and constructed of variations on, basically, just one joke. But after the week that just transpired, how can you not be charmed by Aidy Bryant and Kate McKinnon as two senior moms (and frequent customers at HomeGoods) whose participation in a TV commercial boils down to telling its director (Rudd), over and over, the truth about what they really want for Christmas? (It’s grandchildren, by the way. They want grandchildren.)Unexpected Scorsese Homage of the WeekMany of Pete Davidson’s sketches now are about the fact that Pete Davidson is Pete Davidson, and still this latest one proved to be a worthy entry in that surprisingly abundant genre.Beginning with a sendup of the bookend segments from “Raging Bull,” this mostly black-and-white film imagines an aging Davidson in the year 2054, with a gut and a receding hairline, now the star of a meager nightclub act in which he tries to recapture his past “S.N.L.” glories. (At least things appear to have turned out better for him than they did for his pal Machine Gun Kelly.)Weekend Update Jokes of the WeekIn what had to be the loosest, most low-fidelity production of Weekend Update since the Chevy Chase era, the news-satire segment this week featured Che and Fey sitting on the stage in directors’ chairs as they read jokes to Rudd, Hanks and Thompson. (Fey explained that, though she was filling in for the regular co-anchor Colin Jost, “It’s not what you think — he’s having work done.)Among the highlights from their routine:Che: “Well, it’s Christmas, so let’s start with some good news, Tina. O.J. Simpson has been released from parole two months early because of good behavior. Said O.J., ‘I can’t believe I got out of parole early but I did it. I did it.’”Fey: “Time magazine has named Elon Musk ‘Person of the Year.’ You can read more about it on your phone while your Tesla is self-driving you into a lake.”Che: “It was revealed that on January 6, three Fox News hosts all texted Mark Meadows to urge him to get Trump to call off his supporters. And you know you’ve gone too far when Fox News is like, somebody better calm these white people down.”Vintage Sketch of the WeekSeveral of the classic sketches resurfaced tonight were tried-and-true “S.N.L.” Yuletide gems, like “D*** in a Box” and “Christmastime for the Jews.” But then there was this curveball: a 1990 segment called “The Global Warming Christmas Special,” which if nothing else proves that, like climate change, the show’s predilection for bits in which its cast members play random celebrities is not a recent phenomenon.Watch for impersonations of Carl Sagan, Dean Martin, Sally Struthers, George Hamilton and many more. And see if you can keep it together when the late, beloved “S.N.L.” stars Phil Hartman and Jan Hooks walk onstage to perform a duet, as Isaac Asimov and Crystal Gayle. More

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      How ‘Succession’ Turns Getting What You Want Into Hell

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      The characters in HBO’s prestige hit let us set aside judgment and just marvel at how ardently, how comically, people will chase after the worst thing for them.Two years ago, as HBO’s “Succession” finished its second season, we saw Logan Roy, the head of a right-wing media empire, looking for someone in his inner circle to serve as the scapegoat for a corporate scandal. One candidate was his hapless son-in-law, Tom Wambsgans. But Shiv, Logan’s daughter, asked him to spare her husband, and Logan’s sights turned instead to his second-born son, Kendall. For once, though, Kendall would not do the old man’s bidding: He showed up at a news conference and, instead of taking the heat, blamed his father.The pandemic kept “Succession” from continuing the story until this fall; its third season, nine episodes in all, ended Dec. 12. But it featured, midway through that run, a remarkable moment that captured the series’ great trick: Whenever these One Percenters succeed, the outcome is worse than if they had failed.Because with Kendall gone rogue, it is indeed Tom who volunteers for sacrifice and resigns himself to facing criminal charges. He assumes he has few days left as a free man, so he spends them reading prison blogs and trying to get used to cheap food. It’s only in the seventh episode that he learns the federal investigation he was afraid of will most likely end in a financial penalty. Suddenly spared years behind bars, he heads to the office of his wary sidekick Greg and destroys it in celebration: Screaming, he flips over a desk and leaps atop some filing cabinets, pounding his chest. But his ecstasy is short-lived. An episode later, Shiv — under the guise of role play — tells him she doesn’t really love him, though she would consider having the child he wanted. Having avoided prison, Tom gets to remain in a loveless union, trapped in a cage of wealth he lacks the audacity to leave. He wins, and he may well be worse off for it.Tom’s fate seems to have taken a very different turn in the season’s finale. But those earlier scenes reminded me, more than anything, of “Peep Show,” the sitcom that Jesse Armstrong, the creator of “Succession,” made in Britain between 2003 and 2015. The series, which used point-of-view shots and voice-overs to reveal its protagonists’ inner thoughts, centered on two characters: Mark, a cynical and awkward loan manager, and Jez, his perpetually out-of-work roommate. Its humor derived from many things — Mark’s repressed fury and anxious conservatism, Jez’s sexual carelessness and delusions of cool — but the writer Jim Gavin, creator of the AMC show “Lodge 49,” reported in 2016 that he had discovered the “central narrative conceit” beneath all of it. “Mark and Jez,” he wrote, “ALWAYS get what they want” — and it inevitably turns out to be terrible. “Getting what you want is a form of hell,” he wrote, “and ‘Peep Show’ is nothing if not a complete and terrifying vision of hell.”“Succession,” a prestige hit, attracts far more attention in America than “Peep Show.” Perhaps that’s why, amid obsessive discussion of each episode’s winners and losers, it’s not often noted how much this tradition continues among the Roys. Look at both shows together, and you sense a creeping, overarching worldview. Each sets its characters in looping environments where it’s rare for them to face lasting consequences. Instead, they are constantly humiliated by their own desires — and then, even more so, by the fulfillment of those desires.Throughout the early seasons of “Peep Show,” for instance, we watch Mark pine after a co-worker named Sophie, played by Olivia Colman. But when he finally succeeds in his romantic pursuit of her, it becomes clear that they have little in common — a fact that Mark, clinging to what he suspects is his sole chance to be a normal man, strains to ignore. The two become engaged based on a miscommunication, and Mark spends an entire season trudging toward a wedding he dreads, fearing it will be too embarrassing to back out. But there, again, he gets what he wants, in the worst way: After a catastrophic ceremony, Sophie flees, seeks an annulment and convinces all their co-workers that Mark is a monster.“Peep Show” was unquestionably a comedy, an unglamorous half-hour of laughs. “Succession” is an hour long, with remarkable acting and an HBO budget. As a result, critical discussion around it has often focused on form: Is this a comedy? A drama? A “sitcom trapped in the body of a drama” (as Slate had it)? “Seinfeldian in its cyclical efforts” (The New Yorker)? Has its repetitive nature made it boring? The Nation said the show has a “repetition compulsion”; The Atlantic explained its stasis by asserting that “late capitalism will always insulate the extraordinarily privileged from real consequences.”It’s true that the patterns of a sitcom, in which hardly anything ever truly changes, run the risk of disappointing prestige-TV viewers who tune in anticipating real stakes or didactic punishment for the superrich. But the circularity of such comedy is, typically, cozy. Sitcoms assure us that their worlds will remain stable, that the characters will arrive each week to behave in exactly the manner we’ve become so fond of. This was true of “Peep Show,” but in the most unsettling way possible. Mark and Jez were self-aware enough to realize how hopelessly stuck with each other they were; they knew full well that whenever either of them achieved what he wanted, the other would promptly help ruin it. As Gavin noted, “Virgil makes clear to Dante that all the souls in Hell remain there by choice,” unable to let go of the very thing that damned them in the first place. Mark and Jez will repeat their mistakes forever.It’s as if he literally can’t perish, as if hell cannot exist without the devil.What makes “Succession” a variety of sitcom is the way it, too, relishes this vision of the afterlife. The Roy children’s battle for status mostly immiserates them, yet they can’t abandon it. Each time they help save the family empire, their father lambastes or humiliates them for their trouble. Even Logan’s death scares repeat: It’s as if he literally can’t perish, as if hell cannot exist without the devil. As the show’s third season ended, we saw his children scramble once again to maintain family control of the company — to remain in the very cycle they’ve all toyed with escaping. They failed. But can there be much doubt that the situation will reset, as it has in the past, just as surely as a sitcom character’s new adventure will resolve itself in 30 minutes, leaving things right where they began? In Armstrong’s hands, character flaws are not simply quirks to be blithely repeated for our amusement. They are anchors that are constantly degrading the characters’ own lives. “Peep Show” let that degradation sit, awkwardly and hilariously, on the screen. “Succession” finds the tragedy at the heart of the sitcom form, the structure whose characters can never break free of it.The Roys’ corporation feels like their show’s Sophie. I’ve never had any trouble imagining what would happen if Kendall or his siblings wrested control of it from their father, or what they would do to address its many failings: They’d have absolutely no idea. Like Mark on “Peep Show,” they’d struggle to admit their victory was hollow from the start. This is the joy of Armstrong’s shows: They let us set aside judgment and just marvel at how ardently, how comically, people will chase after the worst thing for them. People, each season suggests, do not change that much. What we share with the Roys and two inept London flatmates might be, simply, that we only think we want them to, and would probably hate it if they ever did.Above: Screen grabs from HBO and YouTube.Alex Norcia is a writer in Los Angeles. He last wrote for the magazine about John Krasinski’s YouTube show “Some Good News.” More