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      TikTok Made Them Famous. Figuring Out What’s Next Is Tough.

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      Before Charli D’Amelio became the most popular creator on TikTok — she currently has 132 million followers — she danced on the competitive contemporary-dance circuit in the Northeast, the sorts of theatrical styles you might know from “So You Think You Can Dance?” Once she began posting to TikTok in 2019, and especially after her videos began taking off and her family moved to Los Angeles to support the viral dreams of her and her older sister, Dixie (56 million followers), that sort of dance became an afterthought, a relic of an old life.The D’Amelios made a leap from the phone screen to the small screen this year with the Hulu docuseries “The D’Amelio Show,” which captures, in sometimes excruciating detail, the thrills and the wages of TikTok success. Its most curious subplot is about Charli’s side quest to return, at least temporarily, to her precapitalist self, squeezing in time to work with a coach to relearn what those old dances require of her body, and pushing herself to remaster them.For Charli, TikTok stardom is a rocket ship, and potentially a ceiling, too. The past year or so has been a kind of testing ground for what the app’s biggest creators — the D’Amelio sisters, Noah Beck (32 million followers), Chase Hudson (32 million followers), Addison Rae (86 million followers) and others — might do next, either voluntarily and enthusiastically, or simply to satisfy the insatiable maw of demand that their sheer existence occasions.It’s been a mixed bag, a chaotic blend of behind-the-scenes vulnerability, eager-to-please willingness, bro impudence and performed resistance. Navigating the chasm between the instinctual charisma that fuels the app and the long(er) form seriousness and vision that might make for a stable, sustainable career in entertainment has been playing out across reality television, pop music, film, books, other social media platforms — and even TikTok itself.What’s become clear is that the skill set that led to big-tent triumph on the app in 2019 and 2020 is, by and large, sized to the medium. Given more room to breathe in other formats, most of TikTok’s superstars are still figuring out how to create beyond the phone.Throughout many of these projects, what you sense is the offscreen number-crunchers hoping to hang potential franchises on the heads and necks of these young people, who are less fully formed creative thinkers than fan-aggregation platforms in desperate need of content.“Noah Beck Tries Things,” which appears on AwesomenessTV’s YouTube channel, is the ne plus ultra of this phenomenon — an entire series, two seasons deep, wholly devoted to figuring out what to do with this uncooked meal of a man.Beck, 20, is a deeply affable former soccer player who, of all of the current crop of TikTok crossover stars, appears most baffled about how to amplify it. “Noah Beck Tries Things” is a slapdash trifle of consequence-free content production. It simply winds Beck up, places him in unlikely scenarios — cooking a steak, dancing the tango, recording a dis track — and watches him gulp for air. In one episode, when someone shows him how to do a handstand on a hoverboard, his awe is genuine — not the practiced “gosh!” of someone used to being filmed for reactions, but more like the off-the-cuff “derp” of someone who understands he has landed somewhere near the deep end and has no idea how to swim.On his show, he’s mostly hapless, apart from the occasional athletic task. But what’s emerging as his calling card is his almost raging commitment to goodnaturedness. The only times Beck’s brow ever genuinely furrows are in scenes in the D’Amelios’ Hulu show when Dixie, his girlfriend — she refers to him as a “golden retriever,” a familiar TikTok good-boy archetype — can’t quite muster the optics of a reciprocative relationship. In those moments, he looks frazzled, as if an Apple IIc is being updated with this year’s operating system.Beck is genial and gentle — in short bursts on the app, he’s a palliative. But he never seems truly hungry. In stark contrast to that approach stands Addison Rae, or rather, revs Addison Rae. Of this generation of TikTok stars, she is the most intentional, the most iron-willed, the most determined. Off camera, she has been loosely adopted into the Kourtney Kardashian orbit. Her parents have been game TikTokers. (The D’Amelios play along, too, but much less so.) Even when Rae, 21, was focused more intently on her social media presentation — she’s now often comically late to trends on the app — she always appeared to have her eyes somewhere beyond the phone.Unsurprisingly, Rae’s star turn in “He’s All That,” the updating of the 1999 teen rom-com “She’s All That” (itself an update of “Pygmalion”/“My Fair Lady”) is the most vivid post-TikTok performance of the year. That’s because Rae understands viral stardom not just as a job, but as an archetype.Like “The D’Amelio Show,” “He’s All That” is a metacommentary about the falsity of viral fame, albeit fictionalized. Rae plays Padgett (pronounced, more or less, “pageant”), a social media influencer falsifying her bona fides. After a fall from grace, she sets about remaking a surly outcast classmate (who wears a G.G. Allin T-shirt) as her new hottie. High jinks ensue, followed by love.Beauty and popularity are inventions, and have been long before TikTok came along. “He’s All That” plays those constructions for chuckles and awws. And the end of the film savvily mimics the turn away from polished inaccessibility toward Emma Chamberlain-type relatability. Padgett returns to social media, but posting more naturalistic photos, taken by her new paramour: She found herself an Instagram boyfriend after all.“He’s All That” still valorizes and reinforces Big Algorithm, even converting the punk skeptic. But the some of the young men who thrived on the app in 2020 decided to pivot in the opposite direction: refusenik. Most notably, this has been the direction taken by two stars trying to transition into music careers — Chase Hudson, 19, who records music as Lilhuddy, and Jaden Hossler, 20, who records music as jxdn.Unlike Rae, who this year released a peppy club pop single, “Obsessed,” a perfectly textureless workout anthem, Hudson and Hossler (nine million followers) swerved hard into dissident territory, embracing pop-punk and, in places, the grittier textures that emerged from SoundCloud in the late 2010s. They’re heavily tattooed, wear haute mall-goth clothing and paint their fingernails — their pushback against TikTok’s centrism is highly aestheticized (as opposed to, say, Bryce Hall, he of the Covid-era partying, drug arrest and boxing match, whose post-TikTok direction seems inspired by Jake Paul).For creators determined to make it clear they are not bound by TikTok’s cutesy videos and algorithm, it is a purposeful choice. Hossler’s debut album, “Tell Me About Tomorrow,” traverses anxiety and addiction. He has a reedy voice, and when he’s singing self-lacerating lines like “I don’t like taking pills, but I took ’em anyway,” he still sounds like an accessible teddy bear, albeit one whose stuffing is coming undone.By contrast, Hudson comes off as if he’s spoiling for a fight on his debut album, “Teenage Heartbreak.” He’s a sneerer: “I’m not sorry that I crashed your party.” In “Downfalls High,” the surprisingly puckish long-form music video-film that accompanies Machine Gun Kelly’s latest album “Tickets to My Downfall,” Hudson plays Fenix, a ghoulish loner with punk charisma — basically, the kind of guy Padgett tries to clean up in “He’s All That.” When his girlfriend, who is popular and rich and slumming it, asks him what he wants to be when he grows up, he replies sullenly but not terribly convincingly, “Dead.” It all feels like one long elaborate Halloween performance. (Hudson is also one of several TikTokers featured in the long-simmering reality show “Hype House,” which will have its premiere on Netflix next month.)Hudson’s and Hossler’s albums kill two urges with one groan: the need for these TikTokers to find a viable path forward in music, and the music industry’s need to amplify and reinforce the still-emergent revival of pop-punk, the music of white rebellion most readily available to new arrivals with little history or experience.Given the apparent craving for safe spaces, it’s notable how, on both “The D’Amelio Show” and in “He’s All That,” nonwhite characters are deployed as foils who are far more knowing and worldly than the white protagonists. Deliberately or not, they serve as reminders that the world beyond the app is far more diverse and complex. “Noah Beck Tries Things” undertakes a version of this as well with queer collaborators, striking given that one of the most frequent critiques of Beck during his rise has been of queerbaiting. (That said, the show’s first episode, where Beck learned how to apply makeup from James Charles, appears to have disappeared from the internet.)This year TikTok stars tried their hands at Hulu shows, streaming series and music careers.Simoul AlvaIt’s tough to know how purposeful these indictments about privilege are — they generally serve the narratives of the shows while reifying their stars, who are presented as being open to personal growth.“The D’Amelio Show,” however, often comes off as quietly ruthless toward its stars, whether in its array of more-experienced secondary characters, its lingering on the excruciating challenges of growing up in public on the internet, or even in the fish-out-of-water talking head shots juxtaposing the relentlessly normal family members against their relentlessly grand Southern California mansion.Ultimately, “The D’Amelio Show” is about the toxicity of viral fame and also about child labor. (Charli is 17 now, and was 15 and 16 when the show was taping. Dixie is 20.) It is presented as a moral victory, near the end of the season, when after a period of deep decompression by Charli, it is determined that she will only work three days a week, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.On TikTok, though, life itself is labor. You feel that burden perhaps most acutely in how Dixie navigates the fame that has arrived at her feet in the wake of Charli’s breakthrough. Dixie is older, a little more cynical and a lot less comfortable. For her next step, she chooses music, and the show captures, with discomfiting intimacy, just how challenging that decision is, artistically and emotionally. Her voice is rough, her confidence is low and she is besieged by online naysayers. (The persistent Greek chorus of negative online comments, represented on the show in on-screen pop-up graphics, is both effective and perverse.) Her worldview is encapsulated in the opening lines of her first single, “Be Happy”: “Sometimes I don’t want to be happy/Don’t hold it against me/If I’m down just leave me there, let me be sad.”Perhaps this heartbreaking transparency will be the ultimate legacy of this era of TikTok crossover. It’s there in Charli’s book “Essentially Charli: The Ultimate Guide to Keeping It Real,” which came out in late 2020, which juxtaposes workbook-esque pages about friendship and style with confessions about anxiety and therapy. (An even more involved discussion of this fundamental viral-stardom tension is in “Backstory: My Life So Far,” the memoir of the TikTok superstar Avani Gregg, 19, a close friend of Charli’s (38 million followers). Gregg’s book is striking for its matter-of fact-conversations about self-doubt and mental health.)Charli’s anxiety is a recurrent topic on “The D’Amelio Show,” which can often feel like crisis footage: Charli having a panic attack in the car when she spies paparazzi waiting for her, or Dixie breaking down after being bullied online.But Charli’s most revealing content may well be in the form of her secondary TikTok account, @user4350486101671, which she began in April, during a trip to Las Vegas for, of all things, a Jake Paul boxing match. It has a mere 15 million followers, and Charli treats it far more casually. The videos are in general looser than those on her main account, with a broader range of emotions, from exuberance to exasperation. The dancing is a little smoother, a little less performed.Sometimes the gap between the two accounts is as vast as the one between burden and freedom, and sometimes it’s just enough for her to zestily lean into lip-syncing a curse word that might not fly on her main account. She might owe the most commodified version of herself to TikTok, but here she’s trying on different selves, and in nearly every video, her smile is broad and relaxed. She looks like someone fully at home. More

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      ‘And Just Like That’ Recap, Episode 4: New Friends

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      Charlotte wants to change L.T.W. from a mom friend into a real friend. Carrie and Miranda nurture new connections.If Miranda was the white lady buffoon in Episode 1, it is Charlotte’s turn in Episode 4.Despite being a classic “‘Rules’ girl” and a master of playing hard-to-get (“I invented that game,” she once declared in the original “Sex and the City”), all that self-discipline Charlotte once reserved to pique men’s interest goes out the window when Lisa Todd Wexley says she is free for dinner on Thursday night — just two days away. Charlotte drops everything, even canceling Harry’s colonoscopy for the next morning, to throw an impromptu dinner party at her house.(Can’t Harry just book his own colonoscopy?)Charlotte desperately wants to morph L.T.W. from a mom friend into a real friend — a distinction actual moms, like me, will relate to. But it occurs to Charlotte that at the soiree she’s about to host, L.T.W. and her husband, Herbert (Christopher Jackson), will be the only Black people in attendance.Horrified that it will appear as if she and Harry have no Black friends (they don’t), she makes it her mission to recruit at least one fringe friend of color to invite. Just as she gets a bite from a fellow P.T.O. mom, L.T.W. abruptly backs out.But she and Harry still attend Herbert’s birthday party at L.T.W.’s house, and in a twist, they’re the sole white couple there. Charlotte has come prepared, having forced a cram session about contemporary Black authors on herself and Harry. It’s all for naught, though, when Charlotte walks in and immediately mistakes one of L.T.W.’s guests for a different Black woman they both know.It turns out, however, that Charlotte didn’t really need to study. When Herbert’s mother, Eunice Wexley (Pat Bowie), takes jabs at the seemingly frivolous art collection L.T.W. has amassed, Charlotte defends her, calling out the notable Black artists by name and talking up the importance of each work hanging on the wall — to the delight of L.T.W., who relishes taking her mother-in-law down a peg.Somewhere during these awkward scenes, Charlotte remembers who she is. She’s far more than the demure wife and mom she has been made out to be since she quit gallery life in the original “Sex and the City.” She’s highly educated and cultured, and she knows art impressively well. All she really had to do at that dinner party was be herself.I hope to see more of this multidimensional version of Charlotte as the series progresses, especially because she hasn’t been given a substantive story line since her struggles with infertility — a topic that comes up over dinner between Miranda and her law professor, Nya.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.Amid the bustle of a hip, crowded restaurant, Nya surprises herself (“Maybe it’s the hormones,” she quips) by telling Miranda that she’s undergoing her second round of in vitro fertilization, but that’s not her biggest revelation. She also says that when her first attempt failed, she felt a deep sense of relief. It’s a fair assumption that anyone going through the effort of fertility treatments must very much want a baby, but Nya isn’t so sure. She likes her life as it is and asks Miranda to confirm that motherhood is worth it. Miranda can’t quite make that promise.What unfolds between them is one of the more astute conversations about the plight of modern womanhood that I’ve seen on TV, maybe ever. Pushing beyond the trite topic of whether working mothers can “have it all,” the two characters grapple with the hard truth that no matter what kind of life is chosen, there are always roads not taken, and probably some level of regret. Reaching the pinnacle of your career doesn’t erase that, nor does having children. Despite coming from two rather different worlds, Miranda and Nya connect on this, and they move from acquaintances to confidantes.All the while, Carrie (whose real name is apparently Caroline! Who knew?) is wrapped up in selling the apartment she shared with Big. She taps the hotshot real-estate agent Seema Patel (Sarita Choudhury) who waltzes in and immediately replaces the colorful character Carrie has woven into the home’s décor with boring beige. Seema must erase anything that feels too much like the current owners, she explains, so that buyers can see themselves in the space.“It’s like we never lived here. Our life is just … gone.” Carrie tells Miranda over the phone, dejected.Oddly, that’s exactly why Carrie feels good when she’s around Seema. Seema never knew Big, so Carrie can tuck away the sad stuff when she is with her and simply enjoy the moment.That is until Seema accidentally breaks the frame that holds an old photo of Carrie and Big.Seema is ready to replace it, not thinking the broken glass is much of an issue, but Carrie is heartbroken. That frame was on Big’s side of the bed, she explains. He touched that glass over and over, and now one of the final connections she had to her late husband is in pieces.Seema sees she’s being insensitive, but in a slightly contrived fit of whataboutism, she brings up a recent moment when she felt Carrie had done the same. When Carrie commended Seema for “still putting herself out there” in the dating world, it stung. Seema has never really found love, and Carrie unwittingly rubbed that in. What’s more, Seema doesn’t feel all that bad for Carrie, she says, because at least Big was the love of her life, and she had him for years.Carrie is taken aback. Is Seema right? Is it actually better to have loved and lost?In a sense, we could all be asking ourselves the same question about Big.In recent days, two women have accused Chris Noth of sexual assault, as detailed by The Hollywood Reporter. Noth, who was enjoying some reupped fame from this reboot, as well as a viral Peleton ad — itself a response to some ill-advised product placement in Episode 1 and since taken down — has denied the accusations.I was never a fan of Mr. Big. Maybe he conjured up too many personal ghosts, and I wanted Carrie to see through that kind of whiplash-inducing lover faster than I had. Plenty of viewers adored his mystique, and if you were in that camp, or you at least loved the love they shared, that’s almost certainly tainted — it’s nearly impossible now to separate Big’s sleazier tendencies from this troubling new context.As for me, I thought Big deserved the boot long ago. I’m not sorry I don’t have to see his face, or Noth’s, on my screen anymore.Carrie may never see things that way, though, so a new beginning with new people may be just what she needs. As she and Seema exchange apologies and dig into takeout sushi, the agent-client relationship begins to dissipate and a genuine friendship starts to blossom.In case it isn’t abundantly clear, that’s the theme of this episode: Each main character advances her friendship with her new pal (over dinner, in each case, to really tie it all together). The producers promised these new characters would be layered and do more than simply serve as window dressing for the returning leads. This episode seems to be a bridge to those new story lines that will, I hope, continue to deepen.The show must go on without one more of its recurring characters, though, and that is Stanford, because the actor Willie Garson died in September while the series was filming. The disappearance of Carrie’s steadfast friend is accounted for when she opens a melodramatic letter from him explaining that he has jaunted off to Japan on tour with the TikTok cash cow he manages. Anthony got a letter as well, except in his, Stanford asks for a divorce.Stanford always had a catty side, which was one of his more endearing traits, but it is hard to imagine he would have Dear John’d both Carrie and Anthony in such a hardhearted way. Perhaps the writers didn’t want us dwelling in sadness over the loss of Garson, but it’s hard not to feel like we never knew Stanford at all. The Stanny we knew would have at least wanted to share one last cigarette with Carrie.Oh yeah, she’s smoking again. More

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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