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      John Wilson Is Making the Least Predictable Show on TV

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.You might think that there’d be something uncanny about walking around New York with the filmmaker John Wilson, insofar as that’s what much of his HBO series, “How To With John Wilson,” consists of: We see footage he’s magpie’d from around the city while he muses, in his thoughtful-Muppet voice, along baggy themes. A morning stroll near his building, in Ridgewood, Queens, did not offer up anything with the kind of Wilsonian surreality the show specializes in — but our destination, a dollar store Wilson described as one of his favorites, did. He told me that he spends a lot of time in dollar stores when he has writer’s block. Nearby he pointed out a display of tools from Trisonic, a budget brand he investigated in a 2016 short film, before collecting the things he’d come for: sink strainers, a miniature folding chair, a toilet seat with a fluffy white Pomeranian printed on its lid. On the way to the checkout, he marveled at a product he said he’d already purchased from a different dollar store: a clock radio with a built-in fish tank far too tiny for a fish, a “cool dollar-store-only object.” The entire place suddenly felt like a tidy analogue of Wilson’s show: filled with things too mundane, too accidentally strange, too tacky or sad or flawed or lacking in panache, to actively star in anyone else’s account of the world.“How To,” now in its second season, is (nominally) a tutorial, offering advice on subjects like wine appreciation and parking, and (formally) a documentary, following its themes to a bowling-​ball factory or to interview a teenage real estate agent — and (ultimately) a form of memoir, a personal essay on video. But Wilson does magic with his staggering archive of street footage, all full of details that, if you encountered them yourself, you’d ponder for days: peculiar behaviors, dreamlike coincidences, strange omens and general “glitches in the Matrix,” as he puts it. Two workers mop a sidewalk in balletic unison; a man in a parked car idly sucks a woman’s toes; a woman places a live pigeon in a Duane Reade bag like a salad she’ll finish later. “Sharing your most intimate thoughts can be a disturbing and messy experience,” Wilson observes, as we watch a police officer pluck a sweater from a pool of blood on a subway floor. It would take a lot of footage to craft a timeline of romance from images of people publicly flirting, groping, proposing, marrying and bickering, and even more to end it with paramedics removing a corpse from an apartment building. Imagine the volume you’d need to be able to end it, as Wilson does, with paramedics dropping that body.There are highbrow precedents for Wilson’s close attention to the strange-and-ordinary, but what “How To” often resembles is the stuff you’d see posted to Twitter or TikTok in 20-second chunks, with glib captions about urban living or relatable moods. Wilson, who is 35, says that he loves seeing that kind of stuff online — “but I find it so tragic that it just kind of disappears.” He’d always felt compelled to build something larger from that material, lest it vanish into a “formless blob of content” or rot on an old hard drive. “The impulse to make the work like this to begin with,” he says, “was about giving a shape to all the stuff I was afraid of losing.”People talk about television’s capacity for novelistic depth, but surely the medium has more in common with pop music: We expect it to obey certain rhythms, resolve its motion in certain ways, pulse appealingly in the background even when our attention is divided. Part of what’s bewitching about “How To” is the extent to which it manages to replace those conventions with its own. “I get so bored watching something when I begin to realize the pattern,” Wilson tells me. Each of his episodes contains at least one moment in which you can scarcely believe the turn things have taken. The very first — “How To Make Small Talk,” which aired in October 2020 — leads Wilson from collecting a sweater from an ex to a vacation in Cancún, where he discovers MTV filming spring-break content; there he meets Chris, a weary-eyed party bro who eventually reveals that he came here in the wake of a friend’s suicide and is processing his grief in the least reflective environment imaginable. It’s one of a few remarkable turns in the episode. What’s more astonishing is that you might, watching it, have one of those rare TV experiences when you realize all the typical rhythms have fallen away, and what you’re watching has become unpredictable and alive — and somehow you’re not sure whether you’ve been watching it for 15 minutes or 45.Illustration by Nicolás Romero EscaladaWilson presents as having lived the life of a middle-class tristate Everyman, only marbled with an obsessiveness that pulls him in deeply weird directions. He was born in Queens, to city natives who soon moved the family to Long Island. One of the first things he told me was that he was grateful for his parents’ support, in part because he’d been “a bit of a tyrant — I was just very focused on making my little movies, growing up. Sometimes I would miss family vacations just to finish these pathetic little projects.” At one point, he says in the show, he made a movie every day. In a first-season episode he reveals a pile of notebooks in which he’s tracked everything he’s done each day for more than a decade, a grid of bullet points memorializing the four strips of bacon he ate or a train he took to Union Square.When he was young, he says in the second season’s “How To Remember Your Dreams,” his friends wouldn’t let him play Dungeons & Dragons with them, “because they said I wouldn’t take it seriously.” In response, he says, “I completely rejected fantasy from there on out. I started to only read books about real stuff and became obsessed with the authenticity of documentary filmmaking.” He struggled to fully enjoy fictional TV and was especially annoyed by things like dream sequences. (We see a shot of a barbershop named the Sopranos.) “While everyone else was going to Comic Con,” he says (as a man dressed like a wizard exits Washington Square Park), “I started going on court-TV shows to fill the void” (a 16-year-old Wilson appears, beaming, at the plaintiff’s table on an episode of “The People’s Court”).John Wilson in Season 2 of “How To With John Wilson,” a documentary series on HBO.Thomas Wilson/HBOHe studied film at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he made a documentary about balloon fetishists. Afterward, in the city, he worked a series of video-related jobs, each disillusioning in its own way: advertising, shooting infomercials, combing through a private investigator’s surveillance footage or serving as a production assistant for a reality show called “American Gypsy,” which offered “one of the first moments when I was like, this is all fake.”The impulse to hoard funny chunks of reality is reflected in Wilson’s apartment, the same rooms where he films his cat vomiting or his ruined risotto getting flushed down the toilet. (The toilet, he says, is a “very underrepresented image” on TV; he didn’t think it was weird to flush food down one until his show aired and people commented.) As he was showing me title cards from the series, which he paints on bits of newsprint, I realized that he was surrounded by stuff from the show: a chart of the “Mandela Effect” explored in the first season; a painting of a relatable amputee from the new “How To Throw Out Your Batteries”; some vintage Ray-O-Vacs from the same episode; he was even wearing a T-shirt from the parking convention in “How To Find a Spot.” A nearby shelf was stocked with those “books about real stuff,” including Studs Terkel with his interviews of ordinary Americans. Another of Wilson’s favorites is Susan Orlean’s “Saturday Night,” portraits of how various Americans spend the evening, from 1990. While hiring for his second season, Wilson kept mentioning wanting someone like Susan Orlean, until an HBO executive pointed out that they could probably just ask Susan Orlean, who came on board as a writer.Wilson’s show: filled with things too mundane, too accidentally strange, too tacky or sad or flawed or lacking in panache, to actively star in anyone else’s account of the world.Wilson told me about his love for the Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl’s “In the Basement” — “just a bunch of very slow portraits of people in their basements,” each space devoted to some unique purpose. He showed me a clip from one of his favorite artists, George Kuchar: “He made this series called ‘The Weather Diaries,’ where he would go to this motel in the Midwest every year and try to document extreme weather but then just get really distracted.” He’s an admirer of Louis Theroux’s BBC documentaries, of “Heavy Metal Parking Lot,” of the many hits of close documentary attention to how bizarre ordinary life can be.“Everything is such a performance these days,” he said. It’s not as if Wilson is above using shtick to shape his show — his voice-over is a beautiful one, deploying sinus noises and uncomfortable trailings-off to keen effect. But he does seem to have a fear of his reality being distorted. While constructing the show’s first season, he says, “I would break down and cry in the edit, just because I felt all these hands trying to shape this thing that was so intensely personal to me.” Working in advertising, he’d seen how you could degrade and commercialize someone’s work. His show’s format, he hoped, was protection from that — at the very least, he joked, he wasn’t about to be recast with Ryan Seacrest.If you want to see an Edenic, before-the-fall depiction of American adults, look for clips of Groucho Marx’s “You Bet Your Life” television broadcasts. They began in 1950, when you could find guests who hadn’t yet absorbed the norms of televisual behavior, and would present themselves the same way they might have addressed a new neighbor or an Elks lodge. They seem touchingly pure, while Marx, waggling his brows in the midcentury equivalent of “that’s what she said” jokes, might as well be from the ’90s.The people Wilson features on his show occasionally remind me of those guests. It’s not that they don’t understand proper TV behavior; these days we learn that before addition and subtraction. But even successful efforts to replicate it tend to be helped along by editing; Wilson likes to say that on reality TV, if you kept any shot rolling just a few seconds longer, the illusion would be shattered. “How To” is constantly finding people who crackle to life in those extra seconds. It’s important, Wilson says, to see these unpolished portraits, “because a lot of the stuff we consume makes us feel like we’re not enough, sometimes. Because we’re not cheery enough or sharp enough.” He uses the word “representation” here — the representation of ordinary American ungainliness.The people he focuses on do trend toward those typically neglected by television. They’re middle-aged with brusque local accents or wealthy but not in a worldly way; they have some kind of sales patter or nutty theory you’d normally tune out; they’re nerdy or goony or oversharers. Sometimes they aren’t trying to meet the expectations of televisibility; sometimes they’re trying too hard, and the effort is coming out lopsided. Sometimes they’re absurdly televisable, as with one Vivian Koenig, a no-nonsense older woman seen giving her husband a theatrical “can’t you see I’m busy” gesture that puts America’s top comics to shame. If TV works like pop music, seeing these humans on it is as recklessly thrilling as seeing Harry Styles pluck a random dad from an arena crowd and hand him a microphone.It must be exciting, I told Wilson, when amid the countless conversations he records, he realizes he’s stumbled across a real live one.“Do you not feel that,” he asked, “when you talk to someone that is slowly revealing a cascading story to you, or they don’t always realize how interesting it is?”Most of us, I said, are busy, and cautious, and when a stranger starts opening up about, say, their anti-circumcision concept album, we politely vanish.“I do that, too, sometimes,” Wilson said, “when I don’t have the time or the camera.” But when he’s seeking this stuff out, “you can tell immediately if someone wants to be recorded or not. And in that moment, when they give you an inch and you continue talking to them, and you raise the camera a little higher, a little higher, you begin to realize that oh, my God, so many people have a story.” Often, he told me, he would film someone for an entire day before they even asked what it was for; they just wanted to be recorded.Holding the camera himself, he says, “changes the energy of the room.” Part of Wilson’s charm is that he almost never lets this energy provoke a cringe, except at his own expense. That reversal is the point of astonishment in “How To Cover Furniture,” a rumination on how we try to protect things from harm. At its climax, an interior designer answers Wilson’s questions with a friendly evisceration of his whole vibe: His camera, she says, is a protective mechanism, which he uses to connect with people from behind a barrier. She looks into its lens and offers advice that feels both kind and situationally hostile: “I would love for you, sometimes in your life, in your head, to be like, ‘I should put the camera down in this situation. I should just be John.’”From “How To Cover Furniture.”HBOIn his 2017 short “The Road to Magnasanti,” Wilson observes that Brooklyn’s new condos “will often decorate their halls with murals of the street, and photos of a New York they’re trying to replace — which may actually end up coming in handy, because soon enough that city will only exist in pictures.” Preserving the texture of that city is one of Wilson’s fixations. He chooses wider shots that can “basically also act as a photograph, if people need to go back and reference what one corner looked like.” His prepandemic footage, he says, is very likely “one of the most comprehensive archives of what New York looked like right before it changed forever.”And yet one of the main impressions you get, watching his show, is that New York could hypergentrify itself into one continuous A.T.M. vestibule, or sink under rising oceans, and somehow you’d still go outside and find its residents, over by the deposit envelopes or oyster beds, doing their casually deranged thing.Television offers us both a chance to learn about the world around us and a chance to imagine other worlds entirely, but an unsettling amount of programming somehow combines the worst of these possibilities. It takes us to exotic worlds but insists on filling them with familiar narratives; or else it purports to show us reality but makes that reality offensively artificial. Wilson’s quirks and anxieties — the vexed relationship with fiction, the terror of impermanence, the hunger to observe — seem to have channeled him toward a lovely alternative. He wanted to be able to make his own entertainment, he told me, because so much around him felt straitjacketed, “trying to make different versions of the same thing.” He seemed sincerely baffled by all the repetition. “I don’t know why everyone feels like they need to chase these archetypes a lot of the time,” he said. “I don’t know why people are so afraid of just, like, doing something new.”Nitsuh Abebe is a story editor for the magazine. He has previously written for the magazine about the film “The Irishman,” devil’s advocates, “grifters” and the musician Richard Dawson. More

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      Trevor Noah Suggests Sending Marjorie Taylor Greene to Beijing

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      “If you want to get back at China, you have Marjorie Taylor Greene in the stands,” Noah said of the U.S. diplomatic boycott of the Olympics.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Icy Diplomatic RelationsPresident Biden on Monday announced that the U.S. would not be sending diplomats to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, citing China’s human rights abuses.Trevor Noah said that American diplomats would have to watch the Winter Games like the rest of us, “by turning on the TV and then getting bored after three minutes and then turning it off.”“He’s not about to fly across 12 time zones to watch a bunch of Norwegians sweep an ice rink.” — TREVOR NOAH, on Joe Biden“And that’s a real shame that the Americans officials won’t be at the Olympics, because you realize Kamala Harris was about to become the first Black woman to ever watch a hockey game.” — TREVOR NOAH“That’s the one cool reason to be president, right? Most of us, if we don’t want to do something, we have to come up with some lame excuse, and then everyone else shows up and talks about how he didn’t come. But if you are president, you can just be like, ‘Diplomatic boycott: No one is allowed to attend Emily’s birthday brunch.’” — TREVOR NOAH“If you want to get back at China, you have Marjorie Taylor Greene in the stands.” — TREVOR NOAH“Nothing will convince China to change their ways like not sending the secretary of agriculture to the Olympics.” — JIMMY FALLON“When the news broke, everyone’s mom was like, ‘The oiled-up flag bearer from Tonga will still be there, right?’” — JIMMY FALLON“It’s different from our last Olympic diplomatic boycott, which was just Mike Pence refusing to watch men’s doubles luge.” — JIMMY FALLONTalk About Man-SpreadingJimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers weighed in on news that Donald Trump came into contact with at least 500 people after testing positive for the coronavirus.“He’s like the Johnny Appleseed of Covid,” Meyers joked.“So, it turns out that Trump tested positive for Covid before a presidential debate with Joe Biden and kept it a secret. Although, in retrospect, I feel like maybe we should’ve known from that debate that he had something, based on his performance. It was either Covid or rabies.” — SETH MEYERS“That’s right — he could have knowingly infected hundreds of people with a deadly virus himself. You know, when you’re a star, they let you do it — you can do anything.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Trump took no precautions after testing positive. He didn’t cancel events; he was maskless inside the White House and on Air Force One. It’s almost like, you know, if you didn’t know him better, it’s almost like he doesn’t care about others.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Variations on a Theme Edition)“Everybody’s talking about it, but nobody really knows what the story is really about, because it’s all Omicron — Omicron this and Omicron that. But we don’t really understand if it’s going to change anything. We don’t ‘knowmicron’ about Omicron.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“So far, Omicron appears to be milder and more infectious than Delta, and that may be happening because, according to a new study, ‘It shares genetic code with the common cold.’ This pandemic has gone on so long, we’re officially in the remix stage. The next variant’s going to be Covid, featuring shingles, the Skrillex mix.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Well, here’s some good news. Dr. Fauci said that the first data on the severity of the Omicron variant is ‘encouraging.’ Yeah, that’s what passes for good news in 2021.” — JIMMY FALLON“Dr. Fauci says that while it’s still too early to know for sure, it looks like Omicron spreads more easily than Delta but may be less severe, yeah — which means Covid might have watered itself down so it could reach more people — like the Ice Cube of corona variants.” — TREVOR NOAH“The new deadly virus variant is only worrisome. People were like, ‘This calls for a tepid uncertain celebration.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Yep, it’s encouraging, which is positive enough to continue with your holiday plans, but vague enough to make you spend the entire time freaking out.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingTig Notaro talked about going back on the road for her “Hello Again” tour while on Monday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightKristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon will talk about their new “Sex and the City” reboot on Tuesday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutBradley Cooper, left, with Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim in “Licorice Pizza.” Once she mastered driving the truck, she said, “I felt like a badass.” MGM, via Associated PressAlana Haim is as surprised as anyone that she’s getting rave reviews for her acting debut in “Licorice Pizza.” More

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      Jussie Smollett Tells Jury He Did Not Direct a Fake Attack on Himself

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      The actor, who is accused of asking two brothers to mildly attack him, and then reporting it as a hate crime, took the stand at his criminal trial on charges related to the 2019 assault.Jussie Smollett took the stand on Monday in an effort to convince a Chicago jury that he did not orchestrate a racist and homophobic hate crime against himself but, instead, was the victim of both a real attack and the police’s rush to judgment in charging him.Mr. Smollett, 39, submitted himself to questioning in his own trial to rebut the testimony of two key witnesses, Abimbola Osundairo and Olabinjo Osundairo, brothers who told the court last week that Mr. Smollett had instructed them in detail on how to attack him.The Osundairo brothers said Mr. Smollett took them through a “dry run” of the attack on the day before it was supposed to occur in January 2019 and asked one of them to bruise him without inflicting real injuries while the other put a rope around his neck and poured bleach on him.Prosecutors have argued that Mr. Smollett staged the attack because he was upset that the show on which he starred, the Fox hip-hop drama “Empire,” did not take seriously a threatening letter he had received at the studio.But Mr. Smollett sought to undercut the prosecution’s explanation, testifying that he had refused the studio’s offer of additional security, which would have driven him each day from his home to the set.“I’m a grown man,” Mr. Smollett said. “I don’t need to be driven around like Miss Daisy.”He also supported the defense contention that the brothers attacked him so that he might be scared enough to hire them as his private security. Mr. Smollett said that Abimbola Osundairo was persistent in trying to act as his bodyguard, at times behaving when they went out in ways that reminded him of the “Secret Service.”And Mr. Smollett’s version of what happened on Jan. 25, 2019, just days before the attack, when the prosecution says Mr. Smollett asked Abimbola Osundairo for help “on the low,” was completely different. He was seeking a meeting, not to plan his own assault, but to arrange to get an herbal steroid from Nigeria that helps people lose body fat and is illegal in the United States.“At any point in time did you talk to him about some hoax?” Mr. Smollett’s lawyer, Nenye Uche, asked.“No,” Mr. Smollett replied.During their car ride later, they did not plan the attack, as the prosecution argued, but smoked marijuana, Mr. Smollett said.“We drove around and smoked and that was that,” he testified.Olabinjo Osundairo, at the courthouse, where he testified Thursday that Mr. Smollett had orchestrated the attack.Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated PressAbimbola Osundairo, Olabinjo’s brother, told the court last week that Mr. Smollett was upset that a threatening letter he received had not been taken more seriously.Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated PressMr. Smollett also sought early in his testimony to indicate just how happy he had been with his role on “Empire,” and, when asked directly, said he had no problem with Fox. Instead Mr. Smollett, who is gay, testified that it had been a blessing to win the role of Jamal Lyon, a gay singer-songwriter, that so closely mirrored his identity and to eventually earn $100,000 per episode.“I had never seen a gay man — let alone a gay Black man — portrayed ever,” Mr. Smollett said. “I really, really wanted to do it.”Over the course of the trial, prosecutors have sought to paint a picture of the attack as a bid for publicity, pointing to how, days before the attack, Mr. Smollett had received the letter at the studio for “Empire.” It included a red stick figure hanging from a noose, a homophobic slur and the acronym “MAGA,” said Daniel K. Webb, the special prosecutor in the case, in the courtroom last week.“He devised this fake hate crime to take place so that the ‘Empire’ studio would take this more seriously,” Mr. Webb said, “because this fake hate crime would get media attention.”But the showrunner for “Empire” at the time, Brett Mahoney, testified earlier on Monday that the show had actually taken the letter “very seriously,” and sought to provide Mr. Smollett with additional security.As he began his testimony, Mr. Smollett depicted himself to the jury with a lengthy biographical summary of his career as someone who grew up in a middle-class family of performers, received some work as a child actor, became deeply involved in charity organizations and returned to acting, landing the major role on “Empire.”In January 2019, when the attack was reported, public sympathy for Mr. Smollett was immediate and widespread. But as the police investigation into the report stalled, suspicion grew about Mr. Smollett’s account, though the actor stood by it.Understand the Jussie Smollett TrialCard 1 of 5A staged hate crime? More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Landscapers’ and ‘Live in Front of a Studio Audience’

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      David Thewlis and Olivia Colman star in a true-crime mini-series on HBO. And an ABC special brings back the 1980s sitcoms “The Facts of Life” and “Diff’rent Strokes.”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. 6-12. Details and times are subject to change.MondayLANDSCAPERS 9 p.m. on HBO. Olivia Colman and David Thewlis star in this British true-crime mini-series. Mixing drama and dark humor, it centers on Susan and Christopher Edwards (Colman and Thewlis), a married couple who in 2014 were found guilty of the 1998 murder of Susan’s parents, whose bodies they had buried in the garden of their home in an English village.TuesdayLIVE IN FRONT OF A STUDIO AUDIENCE: ‘THE FACTS OF LIFE’ AND ‘DIFF’RENT STROKES’ 8 p.m. on ABC. This latest entry in ABC’s series of live recreations of classic sitcoms resuscitates two shows from the 1980s — “The Facts of Life” and “Diff’rent Strokes” — with the help of celebrity guests, including Jennifer Aniston, Gabrielle Union, Kathryn Hahn, Allison Tolman and Ann Dowd.A VERY HAROLD & KUMAR CHRISTMAS (2011) 5:15 p.m. on FXM. How should one introduce Kal Penn? “The comic actor Kal Penn?” “The former White House staffer Kal Penn?” Last month, Penn reminded the world of how novel his career has been with the release of a memoir, “You Can’t Be Serious,” which has anecdotes about his time working for President Barack Obama and his experiences acting opposite John Cho in the “Harold & Kumar” stoner comedy movies. This holiday-themed entry in that series is a case point: Penn took a pause from his Washington role to film it, swapping the White House Office of Public Liaison for a hot-boxed sedan.WednesdayDIRTY TRICKS (2021) 8 p.m. on Showtime. This documentary from Daniel Sivan (“The Oslo Diaries”) explores a scandal among elite competitive bridge players. At the film’s center is Lotan Fisher, an Israeli bridge champion who became the focus of a cheating scandal in 2015. The documentary looks at both that scandal and at the world of high-stakes bridge playing more broadly. It has a surprising and inviting sense of humor.ThursdayWill Smith, left, and Gene Hackman in “Enemy of the State.”Linda R. Chen/Touchstone PicturesENEMY OF THE STATE (1998) 6 p.m. on BBC America. Will Smith had an early dramatic starring role in this thriller from Tony Scott. Smith plays Robert Clayton Dean, a lawyer who gets framed for the murder of a congressman and teams up with a former intelligence agent (Gene Hackman) to prove his innocence. The congressman’s killing is orchestrated by a corrupt N.S.A. officer (Jon Voight), and carried out because of the congressman’s opposition to a piece of legislation that would expand the surveillance powers of intelligence agencies. In other words, the premise rests on the idea that “privacy is imperiled by runaway electronics,” Janet Maslin wrote in her review for The New York Times in November 1998, during the impeachment inquiry against President Bill Clinton. “In a week that finds the nation listening to surreptitiously taped Washington telephone calls,” Maslin wrote, “who’s to say that ‘Enemy of the State’ doesn’t have a point?” Obviously, the potential problem of tech privacy has completely died down in the decades since and is no longer a concern — nothing to see here.FridayAmir El-Masry, left, and Vikash Bhai in “Limbo.”Focus FeatuersLIMBO (2021) 8:10 p.m. on HBO. A Syrian musician seeks asylum in Britain and is sent to a very remote, very weird Scottish island to wait for a verdict on his request in this sweet satire. Directed by Ben Sharrock, the film follows Omar (Amir El-Masry), a talented oud player, whose experiences on the island include a comically elementary “Cultural Awareness” course and a somewhat lopsided friendship with a new housemate, Farhad (Vikash Bhai), who aspires to be for Omar what Brian Epstein once was for the Beatles. While many recent films about the migrant and refugee situation in Europe take a gritty approach grounded in the real tragedy, this one “takes an insinuating, poetic and often wryly funny approach,” Glenn Kenny wrote in his review for The Times. The results, he said, are “both heartbreaking and heartlifting.”WEST SIDE STORY (1961) 8 p.m. on TCM. “Nothing short of a cinematic masterpiece.” That’s how Bosley Crowther characterized this original big-screen adaptation of “West Side Story” in his review for The Times after the film debuted in midtown Manhattan in 1961. Make it part of a double feature this weekend by pairing this classic version — which stars Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer and Rita Moreno — with the new version from Steven Spielberg and the playwright Tony Kushner, which is set to hit theaters on Friday.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘Insecure’ Recap, Season 5, Episode 7: Questions, Questions

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      For Issa and the girls, a day of relaxation turns into a night of introspection.Season 5, Episode 7, ‘Chillin’, Okay?!’There is something about spending an entire day with your girls, in the house. Things come out, love is passed around, laughter is shared and there is a warmth that comes from all of that friction.“Chillin’, Okay?!” starts at Issa’s apartment, where Molly, Kelli and Tiffany have met up to start a day of relaxation for Molly, who has been stressed because of her mother’s health crisis. They had planned to meet at the house and then head to a spa, but when a pipe bursts at the spa, they are forced to stay home until dinner.Disappointed, the girls start drinking and forget about the spa. Tiffany starts to play “Last Night,” by Diddy and Keyshia Cole, Molly starts to dance and pretends her wine bottle is a microphone. Issa suggests they play Questions in a Hat, where anonymous questions are thrown in a hat and randomly selected by players, but Kelli is skeptical. “You know the power it has,” she says sinisterly.Questions in a Hat is less a game than an icebreaker exercise, designed to make the mind feel comfortable while exposing vulnerabilities. Even though the girls are friends and have become closer throughout“Insecure,” there are still things that need to be tugged out of them, like when Molly admits to having never seen “Love Jones” (guilty!) even though she bonded with Issa over the movie. Or when Tiffany admits to thinking about her husband when she masturbates.When deeper questions start to come up, Issa explains that she and Nathan are not in a good place. The girls listen and check Issa. That is what sisterhood is for: To let you know that yes, maybe you are inconsistent and maybe your boo is not wrong. The ladies are perfect at it — funny, calm and just harsh enough.Issa says she is willing to start over, to let go of what she has with Nathan, but no one believes her — not her girls and not the viewers. She also admits to feeling bad because Nathan has not returned her “I love you.”Molly then draws the “If you could have one do-over, what would it be?” question.Issa has been thinking about her own do-over since she noticed that Lawrence moved back to Los Angeles. She has been considering reaching out to him for closure, she says, which she hadn’t shared with her friends.“I just wish I figured out what I wanted to do sooner,” she responds to Molly’s question.Later on, while Issa’s friends are ranking her lovers — Daniel for the win — she tells the girls that she saw Lawrence, Condola and Elijah at the hospital. Condola and Lawrence seemed like they were doing well, so Issa assumed they had rekindled their affair. But Kelli lets her know that things were not great with them at Tiffany’s child’s birthday party.“Really?” Issa responds, as if she were trapped in a hot car and a window had just magically opened. She tries to make the case for how she feels to her friends.“You made the smart choice,” Molly reassures her.“Sometimes it’s not about making the smart choice — it just has to make sense to you,” Tiffany says.Issa’s eyes light up. Tiffany’s comment validates her feelings — she’s looking for any reason to run back to who she knows and what feels safe. Things are shaky with Nathan and that instability can be exhausting. Sometimes you just need to be loved and supported.After the girls decide to stay in for the night, they cute up the balcony with rugs and throws and pass libations around. When Dro, the messiest of all “Insecure” men, calls Molly, Issa sees it as an excuse to call Lawrence, though she has no plan for what to say. Molly snatches her phone and hangs up.“Girl, you know I love you right?” she asks, and then reminds Issa about the earlier discussion of her inconsistency. “You’re doing it — like how is this going to help?”While Issa was thinking about backsliding toward Lawrence, the man himself was trying to repair his relationship with Condola. Issa has not realized — or is choosing not to consider — that Lawrence has a world of his own to take care of right now. A baby doesn’t care about Issa’s need for closure or even what Lawrence wants at all. It isn’t like before; starting over for Issa now means leaving safety totems like Lawrence behind.The next morning, Nathan calls and tells her that he loves her and that he knows he can be avoidant and childish. (I cannot confirm that calls like this happen in real life.) He promises to do better and she hangs up with a smile on her face. Then Lawrence returns her call from the night before. She does not pick up because she does not need a security blanket anymore.While there’s still part of me that secretly would like to see Issa and Lawrence end up together in the series finale, what I really want is for Issa to choose herself and the things she wants out of love, not desperation. I want her to chill, OK? More

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      ‘Succession’ Season 3, Episode 8: Italian Ice

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      Kendall didn’t come out of the last family wedding so well. His mother’s Tuscan nuptials don’t look any more promising.Season 3, Episode 8: ‘Chiantishire’At the end of this week’s episode of “Succession,” Kendall Roy is floating on an inflatable raft in a swimming pool, face down and clearly intoxicated. From underwater, in a shot aimed toward the pool’s surface, we see Kendall drop his bottle of beer into the water. From the camera’s perspective, it appears his face is also submerged. He looks … dead?Whether this is a literal or figurative death remains unresolved when the closing credits roll. (Surely the show wouldn’t kill off a major character in such an ambiguous way?) We do know, though, who is responsible — in a roundabout way — for putting Kendall into that pool. It’s the same people who brought him into this world: his mother, Caroline (Harriet Walter), and his father, Logan.This week, Kendall joined his family in scenic Italy for the wedding of Caroline and her old flame Peter Munion (Pip Torrens). He appears to be on a mission to straighten out his life after last week’s calamitous birthday party. His hair is buzzed down to stubble — “stripping down,” he says — and he seems determined to make peace with his siblings and to settle his Waystar business.But as soon as Kendall arrives, his mother pulls him aside and tells him about Peter’s awful “itinerary of events,” asking if her son can help divvy them up in such a way that he won’t be in the same space as Logan — per Logan’s request. That is the first blow to Kendall’s confidence.The second comes when Kendall is talking with Comfry about some last-ditch opportunities to keep his crusade against corporate malfeasance alive in the media. A popular podcast is investigating “the Curse of the Roys” and would love to have him participate. The problem? The hosts are going to dig deep into all the family scandals … including the death of the cater-waiter whom the media thinks Logan bullied to death but whom Kendall actually drove into a lake at Shiv’s wedding.The third strike to Kendall’s psyche — the finisher — comes when he has dinner with Logan. Kendall has given this meeting a lot of thought. He consulted with Logan’s doctor to make sure the menu fit with his dad’s restricted diet. (“Afraid I’m going to Jim Jones you with an olive?” Kendall jokes.) And he prepared a reasonable proposal. He will cash out of Waystar for two billion dollars while keeping one of the company’s media assets for himself. He also promises to stay out of Logan’s life forever. “I won’t even speak at your memorial,” he says.But Logan won’t play along. He calls in Kendall’s autistic son, Iverson, to taste his food, to make sure it isn’t poisoned. This is icy not only because it demonstrates a lack of trust but also because Logan seems blithely willing to sacrifice his grandson. (In a further dig, he then asks Kendall of Iverson, “Is he getting better?”) And although he seemed willing to buy his son out before, he hesitates now that he has a counteroffer in hand.This whole scene — intense and emotional — neatly encapsulates the whole Logan Roy mentality. He wants his family and his employees at his beck-and-call, but he doesn’t want to grant them any real boon. Whenever someone he is negotiating with seems satisfied, Logan gets restless.Like nearly every other one of his corrosive personality traits, this combination of greed, envy and paranoia has been passed on to his children — and to Shiv, in particular. While Logan is having a miserable dinner with Kendall, Shiv is stuck at a “girls night” with Caroline and some of her future in-laws. The conversation she has with her mother is just as revealing about “the Curse of the Roys.”Shiv has long kept Caroline on the list of childhood disappointments she had to overcome. But Caroline won’t let her get away with this revisionist history. In Shiv’s memory, her mother took a payout from Logan and then pushed her and her brothers to go live with their dad when she was 10 years old, all because Caroline didn’t want to play mommy any more. The real story? Shiv was 13; and she made an active decision to move in with Logan. (“I’ll have the carbonara and daddy,” is how her mother describes her daughter’s casual cruelty.)This revelation fires up Shiv, who heads back to her room and tells Tom that she is ready to fight for the top Waystar job — and to have a baby with him. But their night of passion goes poorly, as she slips into a curious bit of dominatrix-style role play, which sees her seducing Tom while purring, “You’re not good enough for me,” and, “I don’t love you.”The next day he wants to discuss this, wondering, “Should I maybe listen to things you say directly in my face when we’re at our most intimate?” But Shiv insists none of it should be taken seriously. (“What happens in Sex Vegas …?,” she offers weakly.) She also modifies their pregnancy plan, offering to freeze their embryos instead, and then wraps up the conversation with, “I may not love you, but I do love you.” Such is the way a Roy expresses affection.This deep fickleness is evident also in the way Logan handles the continuing negotiations with Lukas Mattson and GoJo. At the start of this episode Logan brings Stewy and Sandi into the office to inform them about the acquisition, pretending it’s a courtesy but really wanting to rub it in their faces a little. But he also insists that he will kill the deal if they don’t like it; and truth be told, he is a little nervous about the way Mattson seems to be driving up his share price with reckless, emoji-filled tweets. (“I’m not used to negotiating via eggplant,” Logan sighs.)So Roman is dispatched to the Mattson compound to find out whether the GoJo boss is mentally unstable or just making “a move.” The two men have an unsettling discussion about the thrill of failure; and Roman may have come away from this meeting with the impression that Mattson is a flake. But he hedges his bets with Logan regardless, telling his dad that their potential business partner really wants “a merger of equals” — something he figures will torpedo the deal.Instead, surprisingly, Logan is open to the idea of letting GoJo be the acquirer while Waystar runs the business — so long as he knows that Mattson is “a serious person” and not “a Twitter panty flasher.” (“I can win any bout with a boxer,” Logan says. “But I don’t know how to knock out a clown.”)What does give the old man pause, though, is that while Roman is celebrating what he thinks is another big win for himself, he accidentally texts a picture of his penis to his father, thinking that he is harassing Gerri. Now Logan has reason to question Roman, Gerri … really his whole command structure.Amusingly, when Roman tries to explain the whole concept of sending photographs of genitalia, Logan reassures him that he is aware of this phenomenon, saying, “We do publish a number of popular newspapers.” This echoes something he says to Kendall as they wrap up their bitter meal together with nothing settled. Kendall tries to deliver a closing statement on his time at Waystar, telling his dad, “You won because you’re corrupt and so is the world,” and, “You’ve turned black bile into silver dollars.” Logan smirks and says, “Just noticed, did you?”Logan counters Kendall’s self-righteousness first by standing up for his revolutionary vision for the news: “A bit of spice, a bit of fun, a bit of truth.” Then he stabs his son through the heart, referencing the dead waiter again by asking, “How long was that kid alive before he started sucking water?”And so, as day follows night, Kendall ends up sucking water himself, mired in self-loathing in a Tuscan paradise. Dead or not, at this moment, he certainly isn’t alive.Due DiligenceGreg’s budding romance with Comfry seems to be stalling as he watches her getting constantly distracted by “phone stuff.” He says to Tom and Shiv, “I do wonder, is there depth there?” Following their suggestion, he decides to use his time with Comfry as a “date ladder” to something better and flirting with an honest-to-goodness European countess who is also the online brand ambassador for a fermented yogurt drink. But he gets flustered while talking to her, and the best he can think to say is that her beverage of choice is “a gut-cleansing treat.”Everyone is very worried about the true intentions of Caroline’s beau, Peter — even the bride-to-be herself, who admits, “He is awful, I can obviously see that.” (Roman, pretending to be indignant: “That’s my stepfather you’re talking about.”)In the past, through Kendall’s many coups and calamities, Roman and Shiv have maintained a special bond, connected by their shared relief that they are not their brother. That rapport now seems to be in jeopardy, thanks to Roman’s open glee at Shiv’s exile from the inner circle. He tries this week to win her back by recruiting her to help him take down Peter, but instead she asks — sincerely and bitterly — what is wrong with Roman. He mutters: “We’re working on it. An ongoing process.”Leave it to Connor to ignore one of the cardinal rules of social etiquette as he drops to a knee in front of Willa: Never propose at a wedding. More

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      Eddie Mekka, a Star of ‘Laverne & Shirley,’ Is Dead at 69

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      As Carmine Ragusa on the hit sitcom, he got to show off his singing, tap-dancing and gymnastic skills — and to croon “Rags to Riches” many times.Eddie Mekka, the actor best known for his role as the aspiring entertainer Carmine Ragusa on the hit television series “Laverne & Shirley,” died on Nov. 27 at his home in the Newhall area of Santa Clarita, Calif., northwest of Los Angeles. He was 69.His death was announced on Mr. Mekka’s Facebook page. No cause was given.Mr. Mekka was a regular cast member on “Laverne & Shirley” (1976-83), a sitcom about two young single women working at a Milwaukee brewery in the 1950s. His character, known as the Big Ragoo, was the high school sweetheart and on-again, off-again boyfriend of Shirley (Cindy Williams).If anyone was upset with Carmine, all he had to do was sing the words “You know I’d go from rags to riches” — in Tony Bennett style — and all was forgiven. Mr. Mekka got to show off his singing, tap-dancing and gymnastic skills in talent-show and other episodes. In the final episode of the series, Carmine found success: He went to New York, auditioned for the Broadway musical “Hair,” and got the job.Mr. Mekka was the second veteran of the “Laverne & Shirley” cast to die in less than a year. David L. Lander, who played Squiggy, died in December 2020.Mr. Mekka began and ended his real-life career on the stage, even earning a Tony Award nomination. He was nominated for best actor in a musical for his performance as Lt. William L. Calley Jr., who perpetrated the My Lai massacre of civilians during the Vietnam War, in “The Lieutenant” (1975). Mr. Mekka at the 2006 TV Land Awards. In his later years, he appeared in regional theater, playing the part of Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” and Harold Hill in “The Music Man.”Paul Mounce/Corbis, via Getty ImagesClive Barnes, reviewing the show for The New York Times, said Mr. Mekka displayed “an honesty and openness that proves very attractive” in his portrayal of “a puzzled kid with a gun who has been told to kill.” The musical, with its difficult subject matter, closed after nine performances but received four Tony nominations.He also appeared in more than 50 film and television roles, including small parts in “A League of Their Own” (he jitterbugged with Madonna at a bar) and “Dreamgirls” (as a nightclub manager). His last screen appearance was in the 2018 film “Hail Mary!” (originally titled “Sushi Tushi”), a comedy about a football team that recruits sumo wrestlers.Edward Rudolph Mekjian was born on June 14, 1952, in Worcester, Mass., to Vahe Vaughn Mekjian, an Armenian-born factory worker who served in the U.S. Army in World War II, and Mariam (Apkarian) Mekjian, a dry-cleaning presser.He performed with the Worcester County Light Opera and attended the Boston Conservatory for a year before dropping out to take a job with a regular weekly paycheck in dinner theater.He married the actress DeLee Lively in 1983; they divorced in 1992, and he married Yvonne Marie Grace two years later. His survivors include a daughter, Mia Mekjian, and a brother, Warren Mekjian; complete information on survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Mekka returned to the New York stage in 2008, starring in the one-man Off Broadway comedy “My Mother’s Italian, My Father’s Jewish and I’m in Therapy.” He also continued to appear in regional theater. He was Harold Hill in “The Music Man,” Pseudolos in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” Seymour in “Little Shop of Horrors” and Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof,” his favorite role, which he said in 2003 he had already played more than 20 times.He had a unique take on the character, as he told The Boston Globe in 2014: “I play him like an older, grumpier and slower Jackie Mason.” More

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      in Movies

      At Long Last, Onscreen Portrayals of Lesbian Relationships Are Getting Complex

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      The shift comes after decades of stories that minimized romantic love between women as fruitless, or as some kind of phase.In most parts of the world, to be gay or transgender is to at some point realize that you’ve been taught, to varying degrees, to deny who you are and to feel shame about your desire to love and be loved — to be entitled to a full life. This is true, as well, of queer lives onscreen, where, until very recently, most narratives centered around death, whether it was the trans person too tragic to continue living — either as a result of murder (“Boys Don’t Cry,” 1999) or suicide, a trope that has existed since “Glen or Glenda” (1953), one of the earliest films to highlight transgender issues — or gay men felled by their own murderous impulses (“Cruising,” 1980) and, later on, complications from AIDS, representations of which have regularly treated the disease as a form of punishment.Then there were lesbian characters. They, too, were subjected to countless onscreen deaths, from Tara on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” in 2002 to Poussey on “Orange Is the New Black” in 2016, but queer women have also been disappeared in a different way: For nearly a century, affection between two women has often been depicted as unrequited, predatory, transient or otherwise unserious. Just think of the menacing, lonely Mrs. Danvers in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” (1940), a famously queer-coded character; or, on a lighter note, Roseanne Barr and Mariel Hemingway on the former’s sitcom in 1994, or Calista Flockhart and Lucy Liu on “Ally McBeal” five years later. All these stories seemed to argue that the ultimate tragedy of lesbianism was that it was a choice, and that smart women, wanting marriage and children, chose otherwise. Such “lesbian kiss episodes,” as they’re derided today, were usually (and unsurprisingly) dreamed up by straight male Hollywood showrunners as a kind of titillation, according to Sarah Kate Ellis, 50, the chief executive officer of GLAAD, who says, “Lesbian storytelling has historically been told through the eyes of men and their experience of that, of their own desire.”Tara (Amber Benson), left, and Willow (Alyson Hannigan) on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”© 20th Century Fox Film Corp./courtesy of Everett CollectionNow, some two decades later, lesbian portrayals onscreen are finally starting to become deeper, more varied and more inclusive, moving beyond the aspirational (mostly rich, mostly white) women who dominated programs like Showtime’s “The L Word,” which debuted in 2004, or Todd Haynes’s 2015 film, “Carol,” based on “The Price of Salt,” Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel of mannered glances, and starring Cate Blanchett as a housewife who must choose between her female love and her daughter.In the past two years, there have been “The Wilds” (2020), Sarah Streicher’s Amazon Prime video series about a group of teenage girls that doesn’t overly conflate coming out with conflict, as well as indie films like Céline Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” (2019) and Miranda July’s “Kajillionaire” (2020), wherein love stories orbit around mutual desire rather than shared sexual frustration. In late 2019, when Showtime rebooted “The L Word,” the show was celebrated by fans for its more diverse cast — and more authentic writing, which didn’t shy away from the realities of menstruation, cunnilingus or seething jealousy. Gone was the tragic lesbian, forced to choose between love and a full life; instead, we got unpredictable, messy, complicated lesbian lives. “The ultimate privilege is being able to do anything we want,” says its 36-year-old showrunner, Marja-Lewis Ryan. “We’re getting closer to being able to have characters who are deeply [flawed] and not have them represent all of us.”The third season of “Master of None” focused on the marriage and relationship between Alicia (Naomi Ackie), left, and Denise (Lena Waithe).© Netflix/courtesy of Everett CollectionAnd what is the point of queer representation if not that? Not just that there’s less death and despair, or that there are happier endings, but that the misery and pathos of life is rendered with more complexity, because everyday life is sometimes miserable, too. “It’s so important to us to have characters [being] weird and crazy,” says the queer writer, producer and actor Lena Waithe, 37, when discussing the BBC thriller “Killing Eve,” soon to air its fourth season, which has thus far subverted the “will they, won’t they” clichés of the past — and, too, the murderous impulses — by layering each episode with chaotic, bizarre sexual tension.Waithe accomplished something similarly complex when, earlier this year, she co-wrote and starred in Season 3 of Netflix’s “Master of None,” a five-episode arc that centered on two women who are selfish, who step out on each other, who watch their dreams crumble but still manage to move forward. After their marriage eventually fractures, they bend, break and then start to heal themselves, offering a radical depiction of queerness that both references decades of downtrodden lesbian narratives and yet somehow still feels hopeful. Making the piece was, as Waithe says, a matter of “life and death,” as much for herself as for the other L.G.B.T.Q. creators it might someday inspire. “We spend our lives trying to fit into a world we don’t want to fit in,” she adds. “We don’t need to.” More