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    What to Watch This Weekend: A Rapid-Fire Sitcom

    “Great News,” a gone-too-soon comedy on Netflix, descended from “30 Rock” and has a similar sensibility and jokes-per-minute rate.Like many TV fans, I was thrilled when Netflix saved the ridiculous and wonderful “Girls5eva” from cancellation at the hands of Peacock. A cheeky treat about a ’90s girl group reuniting, “Girls5eva” belongs to a category of show I like to call “30 Rock” Offspring. It’s not exactly a spinoff of that beloved, long-running NBC sitcom about the making of a sketch comedy show, but “30 Rock” alumni are involved and the quality and rapid pace of its jokes are similar. You barely catch your breath after one punchline before the next comes hurtling toward you.Not all children of “30 Rock” have cheated death, but the unlucky ones are still worthy of your viewing time. Once you’ve finished “Girls5eva” on Netflix you can stay on that platform to watch “Great News,” the sitcom created by Tracey Wigfield and produced (of course) by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock. The news is indeed “great.” You’ll have a blast.“Great News,” which premiered in 2017, lasted only two seasons on NBC, but its mere 23 episodes are gloriously funny. The premise centers on Katie Wendelson (Briga Heelan), a stressed-out cable news producer with an overattentive mother Carol (Andrea Martin). After one of Carol’s friends dies (she is described as “the other Carol”), she decides to go back to school and get an internship at Katie’s network. Katie is annoyed, but it turns out Carol is the only person who can handle the bombastic and self-involved anchor Chuck Pierce (John Michael Higgins).As in any good sitcom, the plot of the pilot just jump starts the action. Katie and Carol will continuously bicker and make up, but they are only one part of the newsroom. Chuck has a similarly delusional co-anchor in the vain Portia (Nicole Richie), and Katie develops a will-they-or-won’t-they with her boss, Greg (Adam Campbell).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘3 Body Problem’ Episode 2 Recap: The Warning

    Fans of spooky technology will have much to enjoy in this episode.Season 1, Episode 2: ‘Red Coast’For its second episode in a row, “3 Body Problem” saved the best for last.The year, via flashback, is 1977, and we’re following the continuing adventures of young Ye Wenjie. Decades later, as an older woman played by Rosalind Chao, she’s better known to us as the mother of the late researcher Vera Ye, and thus the woman who passes along her mystery headset to her colleague Jin Cheng.For the moment, however, she’s just a political prisoner turned valued member of a top-secret Chinese government program designed to contact extraterrestrial intelligence. “Valued,” however, is a relative term. Inspired in part by research gleaned from a verboten American source, she’s figured out how to amplify their signal exponentially by bouncing it off the sun, which will effectively turbo-boost it. But the idea is first stolen by one of her colleagues, then shot down by another as insufficiently doctrinaire. Though she takes a chance on aiming their exceedingly polite broadcast at the sun at least once, she and her team have heard nothing back.Until now. The oceanic whoosh of interstellar signals to which she’s been listening without cease for years suddenly shifts into something sharp and deliberate. The computers make it clear that this isn’t some fluke but an actual signal. Then the message comes in:“Do not answer. Do not answer. Do not answer. I am a pacifist in this world. You are lucky that I am the first to receive your message. I am warning you do not answer. If you respond we will come. Your world will be conquered. Do not answer.”Speaking personally, the terror-fueled adrenaline dump that would have ensued after I read that very first “Do not answer” would have reduced me to an insensate lump. But that’s not the kind of person Ye Wenjie is. Accustomed to keeping her true feelings hidden for years, she keeps it together well enough that no one else at the sleepy installation notices anything has happened. Quietly, she aims the transmitter back at the sun for maximum range.“Come,” she types out in reply. “We cannot save ourselves. I will help you conquer this world.”Wenjie has her reasons for this kind of cynicism. The installation is surrounded by endless miles of recklessly cleared forest. The only person besides her who appears to care about this at all is the handsome American environmentalist Mike Evans (Ben Schnetzer), who is single-handedly trying to reforest the region. This would come as a surprise to the present-day characters: By 2024, Evans (played as an older man by Jonathan Pryce) is an oil magnate and the world’s foremost purveyor of scientific disinformation.At any rate, the need to build a new installation will force Evans to shut down his Johnny Appleseed operation. Meanwhile, Wenjie’s attempt to find closure over her father’s murder by confronting his killer, an young former Red Guard radical (played by Lan Xiya) whom the revolution has since devoured in turn. (Almost literally: Guards forcibly severed her gangrenous arm at a labor camp.) Despite having been imprisoned and brutalized, the young woman snarls that she’d kill Wenjie’s dad all over again if she could.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘3 Body Problem’ Episode 1 Recap: The Final Countdown

    Suicidal scientists and flashing stars highlight the first episode of this new series by Alexander Woo and the “Game of Thrones” creators, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss.Season 1, Episode 1: ‘Countdown’The plot of “3 Body Problem” is not going to be the thing that grabs you about “3 Body Problem.”Perhaps because of the actions of a rogue scientist at a Chinese installation in the 1970s, an alien intelligence has instituted some kind of countdown. The decreasing numbers appear in the minds of the world’s bleeding-edge scientists, who are driven by the countdowns to end either their life’s work or their lives. According to a secret code blinked out by the stars in the sky in a phenomenon that spans the globe, all of humanity may be headed for the same result. Also, a possibly evil virtual-reality video game is involved.See? It doesn’t take long to sum up what happens in “Countdown,” the premiere of the new series from the “Game of Thrones” impresarios David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and their collaborator, Alexander Woo (“The Terror: Infamy”), adapted from a trilogy of books by the Chinese novelist Liu Cixin. Nor is it hard to run down the characters, who at this point are primarily pieces moved from place to place to advance the aforementioned plot.Half the episode is set in Mao’s China during the 1960s and 1970s. Our viewpoint character here is Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng). She’s the brilliant daughter of a scientist whose adherence to concepts like relativity and the Big Bang puts him at odds with the values of the Cultural Revolution. As Wenjie watches, he is accidentally beaten to death by keyed-up teenagers during a struggle session, in which his own wife, Wenjie’s mother, denounces him.At first condemned to hard labor, Wenjie catches the eye of the architects of a nearby scientific project run by the government. They offer her a job working alongside them, but given her checkered political past, the job is a life sentence: Once she goes to work at the secret installation, she can never leave it. Wenjie is already on thin ice after taking the fall for a heterodox journalist who passed her a copy of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” and at risk of being physically forced to incriminate other innocent scientists if she stays in prison. She takes the deal.At the installation — a cliff-side redoubt overlooking vast deforested areas and topped with a gigantic transmitter — Wenjie quickly learns the truth. This isn’t a test site for some experimental weapon. It’s an attempt to communicate with worlds beyond our own.Decades later, in 2024, all of science is in sudden turmoil. Particle accelerators around the globe have spent weeks returning results that are either a complete contradiction of 60 years of physics or complete gibberish. The scientific establishment, and more important its financial backers, have to use Occam’s razor and assume the latter — that the particle-accelerator game has somehow become rigged, and is therefore useless. One by one, they’re shut down for failure to justify further funding.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Jimmy Kimmel Suggests Trump Take a Sip of His Own Medicine

    “If Donald Trump wants immunity, he should drink bleach like he told us to do when we wanted immunity,” Kimmel said.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.Has He Tried Bleach?On Tuesday, Donald Trump’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court to rule that he has absolute immunity from criminal charges stemming from his attempts to subvert the 2020 election.On Wednesday, Jimmy Kimmel joked that Trump “also wants immunity from chlamydia, just in case.”“His lawyers told the court, ‘Denial of criminal immunity would incapacitate every future president with de facto blackmail and extortion while in office and condemn him to years of post-office trauma at the hands of political opponents.’ Which sounds bad, right? And yet somehow, we’ve had 44 presidents before him — that never happened to any of them except for this one guy.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“A president could make some seriously crazy stuff happen. If you’re dumb and arrogant, you commit the crimes yourself on television, then you have a problem. Then you have to beg the Supreme Court for something preposterous, like immunity. But if Donald Trump wants immunity, he should drink bleach like he told us to do when we wanted immunity.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Turns out the guy who bragged to Billy Bush he can do whatever he wants thinks he should be allowed to do whatever he wants.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (March Madness Edition)“My hope is that we get all the madness out in March, so we don’t have any left for November.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Gonzaga tomorrow plays McNeese State, which, not only do I not believe Gonzaga is a real place, I don’t think there’s any such place as McNeese State, either. I know for a fact there are 50 states, and McNeese is not one of them, OK? This is a game between two imaginary teams they’re putting on. The A.I. has finally taken over.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Today, President Biden posted his bracket, and he picked a favorite, UConn, to repeat as national champions. Yeah, Biden relates to UConn ’cause they both have a 38 percent chance of winning again.” — JIMMY FALLON“That’s right, Biden has UConn, Houston, North Carolina and Tennessee in his Final Four, while Trump was able to identify all the mascots: [imitating Trump] ‘I see the duck, the bear, the lion.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Yep, Trump didn’t fill out a bracket ’cause he doesn’t have the 10 bucks to join the pool.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingKristen Wiig used an opera singer to answer Jimmy Fallon’s interview questions on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightThe “Shirley” star Regina King will appear on Thursday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutA letter from Eric Clapton to Pattie Boyd, who inspired his song “Layla.” It begins, “Dearest L.”Christie’s Images Ltd.Pattie Boyd, who was at the center of one of rock’s most mythic love triangles, is auctioning love letters that Eric Clapton wrote her while she was married to George Harrison. More

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    M. Emmet Walsh, ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘Knives Out’ Actor, Dies at 88

    His roles in films like “Knives Out” and “Blade Runner” were sometimes big, sometimes small. But he invariably made a strong impression.M. Emmet Walsh, a paunchy and prolific character actor who was called “the poet of sleaze” by the critic Roger Ebert for his naturalistic portrayals of repellent lowlifes and miscreants, died on Tuesday in St. Albans, a small city in northern Vermont. He was 88. His death, in a hospital, was announced by his manager, Sandy Joseph.The most enduring praise Mr. Walsh received also came from Mr. Ebert: He coined the Stanton-Walsh Rule, which asserted that “no movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad.”In “Straight Time,” a 1978 film featuring both Mr. Stanton and Mr. Walsh, Mr. Walsh played a patronizing parole officer to Dustin Hoffman’s teetering ex-con. Mr. Walsh’s performance caught the eye of two brothers who aspired to be auteurs and were writing their first feature-film script.The unknown Joel and Ethan Coen wrote the pivotal character of a detective in “Blood Simple” for Mr. Walsh. To their surprise, and despite offering little more in compensation than a per diem stipend, he accepted the role.A performance by Mr. Walsh in “Straight Time” led to a role in “Blood Simple” (1984), the first feature film by Joel and Ethan Coen.River Road Productions/Circle — Sunset Boulevard, via Corbis, via Getty ImagesReviewing “Blood Simple” for The New York Times in 1984, Janet Maslin said that Mr. Walsh had captured “a mischievousness that is perfect for the role.” Writing in Salon on the occasion of the release of Janus Films’ digital restoration in 2016, Andrew O’Hehir praised Mr. Walsh’s portrayal of a “sleazy, giggly and profoundly disturbing private detective.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Bill Jorgensen, Authoritative New York TV Newsman, Dies at 96

    Getting his start in the Midwest, he was best known for leading the New York broadcast “The 10 O’Clock News.”Bill Jorgensen, a serious-minded broadcast journalist who for 12 years anchored the pioneering, street-smart 10 p.m. newscast on New York’s Channel 5, died on March 13 at his home in Franklin, N.C. He was 96.His daughter Rebekah Jorgensen confirmed the death.Mr. Jorgensen, who came to New York from Cleveland in 1967, had some of the traits of a veteran anchor: a mane of graying hair, a deep, measured baritone and a tendency to lean into the camera with an intense gaze, as if to meet viewers head-on.“He was kind of a giant, aloof, powerful figure,” Victor Neufeld, who rose from production assistant to producer of the program, said in an interview. “He was the model of the Walter Cronkite style of anchoring — he carried himself with deep authority.”“The 10 O’Clock News” on WNEW-TV (now Fox 5 New York) was a gamechanger. As an independent station owned by Metromedia, it is believed to have been the first news program in the New York market to compete in prime-time against the entertainment programs on network stations. (WPIX, Channel 11, a rival independent station that had long started its newscast at 11 p.m., moved it to 10 clock in late 1967.)When “The 10 O’Clock News” debuted in March 1979, Channel 5 ran a full-page newspaper ad that proclaimed, “Jorgensen Can’t Wait To Give You The News,” and promised, “This man is going to change TV viewing habits.”And it did. With hard-hitting tabloid stories, with a significant focus on crime, covered in just 30 minutes by savvy reporters like Bob O’Brien, Chris Jones and Bill McCreary, “The 10 O’Clock News” found a strong audience against network shows and eventually expanded to an hour.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV’: 5 Takeaways

    The Investigation Discovery documentary takes a look at accounts of a problematic working environment at Nickelodeon.The Investigation Discovery documentary “Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV” is a four-part series about working at Nickelodeon, including the environment under the former producer Dan Schneider, and what some described as harmful situations that child actors and adult employees were put in. It premiered on Sunday and is streaming on Max.Schneider, who parted ways with Nickelodeon in 2018, doesn’t appear in the docuseries, but former writers, child stars, staffers and journalists paint a picture of the environment at the network starting in the 1990s, through his departure.Schneider responded to the series in a video on Tuesday. “Watching over the past two nights was very difficult, me facing my past behaviors, some of which are embarrassing and that I regret, and I definitely owe some people a pretty strong apology,” Schneider said in a nearly 20-minute video posted to his YouTube channel.In response to producers’ questions, the documentary said, Nickelodeon stated that the network “investigates all formal complaints as part of our commitment to fostering a safe and professional workplace” and has “adopted numerous safeguards over the years to help ensure we are living up to our own high standards and the expectations of our audience.”Here are the biggest takeaways from the series.Drake Bell publicly speaks about his abuse for the first time.Drake Bell, in 2018. He has spoken publicly about his sexual abuse for the first time, in “Quiet on Set.”Slaven Vlasic/Getty ImagesBrian Peck, a dialogue coach for Nickelodeon, was convicted of sexually abusing the “Drake & Josh” star Jared Drake Bell. Peck was arrested in 2003 in connection with the sexual abuse of a teenager over a four-month period. In 2004, Peck pleaded no contest to two felonies, according to public records. At the time of the abuse, Bell was 15 and Peck was 41; in court documents, Bell was identified as John Doe.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More