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      For One of the ‘Bad Sisters,’ Things Have Gotten Even Worse

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      Anne-Marie Duff, who won a BAFTA for her performance in this black comedy last season, discusses her character’s darker turn in Season 2.This article includes spoilers for the first two episodes of the new season of “Bad Sisters.”The first time Anne-Marie Duff applied to drama school in London, it turned her away. When she applied a second time, she received a spot on the wait-list, and she called the school every day until it admitted her.“I think they just gave me a place to shut me up,” said Duff, the 54-year-old actress who describes herself as “London Irish.”Tenacity and grit characterize many of the women Duff has portrayed throughout her decades-long career, including the indomitable Fiona Gallagher in the British version of “Shameless” and the headstrong Queen Elizabeth I in the BBC mini-series “The Virgin Queen.”But those qualities are particularly evident in Duff’s depiction of Grace Williams, the troubled housewife at the center of an elaborate whodunit in the Apple TV+ black comedy “Bad Sisters.”For much of the first season, Grace trembles under the heavy hand of her husband, John Paul (Claes Bang), a jerk known by an unprintable nickname to her sisters. But beneath her timid exterior and obsequious demeanor, frustration builds and boils as her husband belittles and badgers her — until she finally erupts in a climactic scene that ends with her strangling him.Duff’s performance won her best supporting actress at the EE British Academy Film Awards and helped secure a second season of the show, which had a two-episode premiere on Wednesday.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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      Craig Melvin Is Named Hoda Kotb’s Replacement on ‘Today’

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      By selecting Mr. Melvin, a familiar face on the show, network executives chose to go the steadiest route possible.Craig Melvin, the veteran NBC News host, will succeed Hoda Kotb as an anchor of the network’s flagship morning show, “Today,” the company announced Thursday morning.Mr. Melvin will start in the new role, teaming with Savannah Guthrie, on Jan. 13.The position, one of the most prominent in television news, opened after Ms. Kotb, who has been at the network for more than two decades, announced in September that she would step down early next year. Ms. Kotb, who will remain as a contributor to the show, said at the time that she wanted to spend more time with her young children, and that it was “time to turn the page on what has been a dream book, a dream quarter-century.”Ms. Kotb, 60, will take her final turn as co-anchor of “Today” on Jan. 10.By selecting Mr. Melvin, 45, network executives chose to go the steadiest route possible. He has been the news anchor of “Today” since 2018, frequently joining Ms. Guthrie and Ms. Kotb on the set at some point in the 7 a.m. hour. He is also a co-host of the show’s 9 a.m. hour, and used to be an anchor of the weekend edition of “Today.”Mr. Melvin also was an anchor on MSNBC before leaving his daily 11 a.m. show on the cable network two years ago.“Dreams do come true,” he said in an interview before the news was announced on “Today.”“As someone said to me, this is an obit job,” he continued. “When you die one day, this is the first thing that gets mentioned in an obituary after it mentions you were a husband and a father.”Mr. Melvin said he found out about his selection several weeks ago. (NBC News executives kept it under wraps until after the presidential election.) Ms. Kotb said in an interview that it was such a secret that they had to develop a code term in order to toast his success, since so few people knew of it. The code? “Let’s Go Mets.”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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      With Aldis Hodge, ‘Cross’ Seeks Justice … for Its Title Character

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      If your idea of Alex Cross is Morgan Freeman from the movies “Kiss the Girls” (1997) and “Along Came a Spider” (2001), the Amazon series “Cross,” based on a best-selling series of novels by James Patterson, might come as a surprise.With his bulging biceps encased in sprayed-on sweaters, Aldis Hodge, who plays the title character in the series, cuts a rather different figure indeed.“They always had me in mediums,” Hodge said, laughing, in a recent video chat. “Actually, the only thing I really had for wardrobe was like, ‘Yo, I need these sweaters to be a little thicker because we are shooting in Canada in the winter.’”Fans of Patterson’s long-running franchise shouldn’t fret, though: The new series, which premiered Thursday on Prime Video, was only shot in Toronto — it is still set in Washington, D.C., like the books. But productions do that all the time. Perhaps more important, Hodge’s Cross lands closer than ever to the way the character is described on the page: tall, 38 in the first novel (like Hodge) and strong enough that, as described in “Kiss the Girls,” he can still pounce after being shot in the heart with a stun gun.Hodge’s character in “Cross” is a widower; one of the show’s central relationships is between Alex Cross and colleague and longtime best friend, Sampson (Isaiah Mustafa). Keri Anderson/Prime VideoObviously this is a helpful quality for a forensic psychologist.“I did tell the casting teams at Paramount and Amazon that as we started to search for our Alex Cross, I’d like to use Aldis Hodge as sort of the blueprint for that,” the series’s showrunner, Ben Watkins, said by phone.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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      Review: ‘Dune: Prophecy’ Is Still Looking for Its Voice

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      A long-gestating prequel, about the women who seek to guide a galaxy, is splashy, somber and insufficiently spicy.“Dune,” the multi-novel, multi-movie saga, is in part about the battle for a precious commodity hoovered up from a desert planet to enrich the rapacious nobility. It’s called spice.“Dune: Prophecy,” the six-episode prequel series beginning Sunday on HBO, also concerns a valuable resource hoarded by empires and processed through machinery. It’s called intellectual property.Spice is a dangerous substance, controlled through violence, but at least the universe gets something out of it. Its mind-expanding properties make hyperspace travel possible and can induce prescience in the user.I.P., on the other hand, tends to simply give us lavish, lesser copies of things we already have. “House of the Dragon” is “Game of Thrones: Blonder and Blander”; “The Rings of Power” substitutes the mystic wonder of “The Lord of the Rings” with C.G.I. and metalsmithing.“Dune: Prophecy” is set 10,000 years before Timothée and Zendaya strode the sands. Its action unfolds shortly after an uprising against “thinking machines” that enslaved humanity. But the series itself is securely in the control of the I.P. machine.Its focus is the Sisterhood, the precursor to the Bene Gesserit of the films, now overseen by the ruthless and subtle-minded Mother Superior Valya Harkonnen (Emily Watson). A combination of deep-state apparatus and deadly yoga colony, this secretive society of female mentalists provides “truthsayers” (human lie detectors) to the ruling nobles while guiding history with a genetics program designed to breed ideal rulers. (Humankind may have faster-than-light spaceships, but the galaxy remains a patriarchy that women can influence only by stealth.)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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      Late Night Chides Biden for Keeping His Cool With Trump

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      “I’m not saying booby-trap the place, but you don’t have to be overly helpful,” Seth Meyers said after the president welcomed Donald Trump to the White House.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.Smooth OperatorsOn Wednesday, President Biden hosted President-elect Donald J. Trump at the White House, where they exchanged pleasantries and promised a “smooth transition.”Seth Meyers called Biden’s accommodation “just a little confusing.”“You correctly called him a criminal fascist and threat to democracy. I’m not saying booby-trap the place, but you don’t have to be overly helpful. I mean, how are you going to accommodate him anyway — upgrade all the toilets so they can handle more classified documents?” — SETH MEYERS“Trump said they had a ‘really good’ meeting. He said that Biden was ‘gracious’ and that they ‘really enjoyed seeing each other.’ Last week, Joe Biden was an evil force who weaponized the justice system to put Trump in prison for the rest of his life; today, they had fun.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Joe complimented Trump on overcoming many obstacles that he has also faced, like stairs.” — GREG GUTFELD“Now that’s a man who appreciates a smooth transition of power, as long as it’s transitioning toward him. If it’s transitioning away from him, there’s going to be some Jan. 6-ing, but if it’s toward him, smooth.” — JORDAN KLEPPER“I mean, they did both try to hang Mike Pence, just out of tradition, but other than that, it was very cordial.” — JORDAN KLEPPERThe Punchiest Punchlines (New Low Edition)“During the campaign, I thought if Trump won, he would do the worst things I could imagine. Turns out, I don’t have much of an imagination.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Matt Gaetz as attorney general — this is a new low. I mean, not as low as our age-of-consent laws are about to be, but pretty low.” — JORDAN KLEPPER“Quick question: the Department of Justice isn’t within 100 feet of a school, is it?” — JORDAN KLEPPERWe 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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      Amazon Is Phasing Out Its Freevee Streaming Service

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      Its shows have moved to Amazon Prime, where they will remain free.Amazon is folding Freevee, its ad-supported streaming service, into Prime Video, where its shows will remain free to viewers who don’t subscribe to Prime.The move had been expected, after Amazon started including advertisements this year on Prime Video, which already hosts free original programs and movies. All Freevee programming will be available on Prime Video for free, the company said.Freevee began in 2019 as IMDb TV, an offshoot of Amazon’s IMDb film site. Some of its original shows were hits, including the social media sensation “Jury Duty,” “Bosch: Legacy” and “Judy Justice.” The service will be phased out within weeks.Amazon already has a streaming behemoth in Prime Video, and the company decided to put all of its entertainment content on one platform “to deliver a simpler viewing experience for customers,” an Amazon spokesperson said Wednesday.An ad-supported version of Prime Video is included with Amazon’s delivery service, which costs $14.99 per month, or $139 per year. An ad-free version of Prime Video is also available for an additional $2.99 per month. A stand-alone streaming subscription costs $8.99 per month.Like most streamers, Amazon mostly declines to give viewing numbers, but Freevee had built up its audience to about 65 million monthly active users in the United States in the first half of 2022. Amazon Prime has at least 180 million users, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.“Judy Justice,” starring Judge Judith Sheindlin, known as Judge Judy, quickly became Freevee’s No. 1 original show when it debuted in 2021. Viewers watched more than 150 million hours of it over its first two years, according to Amazon data. Judge Sheindlin’s success in her first streaming show allowed her to spin off additional shows on Freevee.Freevee’s most unexpected hit, however, was “Jury Duty,” a hybrid documentary-sitcom in which an ordinary man unwittingly participates in a staged trial among actors. It became Freevee’s most-watched show after it premiered in 2023 and earned four Emmy nominations, including one for outstanding comedy series.“Bosch: Legacy,” which premiered in 2022, was based on the popular police detective book series by Michael Connelly. It became a New York Times Critic’s Pick, with the reviewer Mike Hale writing that the series came with “cleverly interlocking story lines and the general lack of pretense and contrivance.”Other free, ad-supported streaming platforms, like Pluto TV, Tubi, and Roku Channel, have enjoyed significant growth. Viewers have flocked to them as many other subscription-based streaming services raised their prices. While the free services are built on a stable of older TV programs and movies, many consumers are seeking cost savings, nostalgia and even terrible movies.There are at least 170 million ad-supported subscriptions in the United States, up from at least 93 million at the end of last year, according to Antenna, a subscription research firm. More

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      in Theater

      Timothy West, Who Portrayed Kings and Prime Ministers, Dies at 90

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      Timothy West, a versatile actor who portrayed a parade of historical and classical figures onstage and onscreen, and in between became a household name in Britain as a sitcom and soap opera regular, died on Tuesday in London. He was 90.His death was announced by his family on social media. They did not specify where he died but thanked the staffs at a London care home and a hospital for “their loving care” during Mr. West’s final days.With arched brows, narrow eyes and a strong jaw, Mr. West brought a commanding presence to historical figures like Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin and King Edward VII, and to notables of classic theater like King Lear, Macbeth and Willy Loman.He was perhaps best known to American audiences for his performances in British television imports: the mini-series “Edward the King,” the movie “Churchill and the Generals” and the acclaimed mini-series “Bleak House,” an adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel that was shown on PBS’s “Masterpiece Theater” in 2005.Mr. West, kneeling, in 1970 in “Edward II” with Ian McKellen. He was known to bring a commanding presence to historical figures.AlamyMr. West, left, with Ian Richardson in the BBC drama “Churchill and the Generals.” It was the first of his three career portrayals of the British prime minister.RGR Collection/Alamy Stock PhotoAlthough Mr. West was a staple of British television, had dabbled in radio drama and had several small film roles, his lifelong passion was the theater.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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      ‘Cross’ and ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ Offer Different Spins on the Same Formula

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      Within the boundaries of the crime-solving genius genre, “Cross” represents the dark yin and “The Lincoln Lawyer” the bright yang.On the page, Alex Cross, the embittered psychologist created by James Patterson, leads his fellow fictional crime solver Mickey Haller, the flamboyant lawyer created by Michael Connelly, 32 novels to seven. On the small screen, the tables turn: The Haller series “The Lincoln Lawyer” debuted its third season last month on Netflix while the first season of “Cross,” announced nearly five years ago, finally arrives Thursday on Amazon Prime Video.But who’s counting? There appears to be endless space in the current marketplace for brilliant but wounded investigators, and Haller and Cross share an essential marker of the contemporary crime-drama hero. Their personal traumas — Cross’s loss of his parents and wife, Haller’s issues with his father and with addiction — generate much of the tension in their stories, reducing the need for real complexity of personality or the clever unraveling of mystery.Formulas can be executed in different ways, however, and the two shows provide radically different viewing experiences. Within the boundaries of the problematic-genius formula, “Cross” represents the dark yin and “The Lincoln Lawyer” the bright yang. “Cross” goes for self-consciously heavy, “The Lincoln Lawyer” for perilously light. Most significant, perhaps, “Cross” is out to sanctify its protagonist; “The Lincoln Lawyer,” while it provides Haller with a full allotment of anguish, never asks us to feel sorry for him.The creator of “Cross,” Ben Watkins, previously created the eccentric neo-noir “Hand of God,” also for Amazon. The penchants he demonstrated then for hair-raising imagery, and for throwing together tones and styles, carry through to the new show. Choosing not to base “Cross” on a specific Patterson novel (unlike film adaptations including “Kiss the Girls” and “Along Came a Spider”), Watkins frees himself to cook up a lurid but not very exciting stew of serial-killer horror, buddy-cop action, social-justice point-making and sentimentality.Cross, played by Aldis Hodge (“Leverage”), is a District of Columbia police detective with a Ph.D. in psychology. We meet him on the occasion of his wife’s murder, and for eight episodes the character shuttles between dour grief and bellowing anger; Hodge, usually a magnetic performer, settles on a glaring, unmediated intensity.The A plot, in which Cross investigates the murder of a defund-the-police activist, blossoms into a richly nonsensical “Silence of the Lambs”-style fantasia. Common sense is left far behind, in matters large and small; at one slap-your-forehead juncture, a cop yells, “He could be anywhere!” seconds after the killer escapes, while his car can still be heard in the near distance.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