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      Stephen Colbert Breaks It Down for Spring Breakers

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      “Hot tip for Miami authorities: If you want young people to stop partying, don’t instate a curfew, just invite a few dads,” Colbert joked. 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. We’re all stuck at home at the moment, so here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Spring Breaking the RulesCollege students celebrating spring break descended on Miami Beach over the weekend and flouted regulations about social distancing and wearing masks. On Monday night, Stephen Colbert chastised the city’s mayor, Dan Gelber, for saying those partyers were not “following the rules.” “Yes, he wants a spring break that’s not chaotic or disorderly, like in those famous videos, ‘Girls Gone Mild,’” Colbert said.“Things got so out of hand that on Saturday, the city was forced to declare a state of emergency and an 8 p.m. curfew. And, surprise, it didn’t work. Hot tip for Miami authorities: If you want young people to stop partying, don’t instate a curfew, just invite a few dads.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Yup, now there’s a curfew from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. so spring breakers will have to return to their motel rooms. The best way to guard against Covid is forcing drunks into small, confined spaces, that’s what I’ve always heard.” — JIMMY FALLON“You know things are out of control when Florida is worried about Covid.” — JIMMY FALLON“College kids were like, ‘It’s a shame, ’cause I flew to Miami during a pandemic to party very responsibly.’” — JIMMY FALLON“[imitating partyer] Wooo! I’m with you, my fellow younglings. The virus can’t catch us if we don’t stop dancing! I’m never going to die!” — STEPHEN COLBERT“This is what’s going to happen after Florida’s governor called the state a ‘freedom oasis.’ Like if I put a Starbucks sign above my apartment door, I can’t be mad when people show up and try to take a [expletive] in my bathroom.” — TREVOR NOAH“But let’s be clear here: Covid is not over, all right? Some random dude can’t declare the end of the pandemic by dressing up like the Joker and making it rain. It’s not a thing. Only Anthony Fauci can declare the end of the pandemic by dressing up like the Joker and making it rain.” — TREVOR NOAH“But still, there’s no reason that you can’t celebrate spring break and wear a mask. It could be part of the fun. I mean, just think how sexy a wet mask contest could be, hmm? I mean, we haven’t seen mouths in a year — what’s under there?” — TREVOR NOAH“And if we learned anything from Miami, this is just a preview of how much everyone is going to get loose once the pandemic is truly over. People have been locked up for too long. Once it ends, everyone’s going to be drinking and partying, hooking up with everyone. It’s going to be so much that it’s going to create the next worldwide virus. Yeah, guys are going to be waking up in bed next to a bat like, ‘Uh-oh, I think I did it again.’” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (Biden’s Trip Edition)“Our new president is on a roll, baby. Nothing can stop him now — except stairs.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“He’s facing a lot of challenges in his first 100 days — the vaccine rollout, the crisis at the border, and what happened to Ms. Frizzle. Whew. But over the weekend, he faced his biggest challenge yet: staying upright.” — TREVOR NOAH“I’m sorry, guys, I honestly can’t believe that this happened. The president got knocked over by wind. This is going to be the first president where the Secret Service needs to carry around paperweights: ‘Hold on, sir, hold on. We got you, we got you — someone sneezed.’“ — TREVOR NOAH“He’s fine! Can we blame it on his dog, Major? No? Do it anyway.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“It’s not like this just happened to Joe Biden, all right? It happens all the time. Biden tripped, Obama tripped, Mike Pence tripped. And the reason isn’t because they’re old — the reason is because they were running up and down stairs. You shouldn’t do that.” — TREVOR NOAH“That would never happen in Africa. I mean, mostly because our presidents fly commercial and they have to wait for their boarding group to be called, but you get what I mean.” — TREVOR NOAH“The point is we don’t think about it because we use stairs so much, all right? Nobody thinks about it, but stairs are basically an obstacle course. You take one wrong step and you’re going to eat [expletive]. And that’s one thing — one thing that my man Trump understood. You love him or hate him, but you’ve got to treat stairs with respect. He understood that. You walk up slowly, you hold the banister and you swear to God that if he lets you survive this, you will never walk up stairs ever again.” — TREVOR NOAH“It’s interesting — I feel like they’re the opposite with stairs and Covid. Like with Covid, Trump took no precautions; Biden took every precaution. But on stairs or ramps, Trump’s super careful, always holding the railing, going real slow. Whereas Biden throws caution to the wind, trips upstairs three times. So it’s interesting, you know? It just shows we all contain multitudes.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingTrevor Noah looked into the gender disparities taking place as part of this year’s March Madness basketball tournament.What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightMegan Mullally and Nick Offerman will catch up with Seth Meyers on Tuesday’s “Late Night.”Also, Check This OutPep band players can be some of the biggest basketball fans in the arena.Harry How/Getty ImagesOne noticeable difference for March Madness this year: no live bands. More

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      Filmmaker’s Suit Says A&E Networks Suppressed ‘Watergate’ Series

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      The director, Charles Ferguson, said in a lawsuit that an executive was concerned about the “negative reaction it would provoke among Trump supporters and the Trump administration.”“Watergate,” a four-hour documentary examining the scandal that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency, had its world premiere in 2018 at the Telluride Film Festival, an event known to foretell future Oscar nominations. It went on to be shown at the New York Film Festival and several others, collecting positive reviews that highlighted allusions the series made to the Trump presidency.It aired on the History Channel over three days in early November, just before the 2018 midterm elections. To the filmmaker’s surprise, it was never broadcast on American television again.The writer and director of the documentary, the award-winning filmmaker Charles Ferguson, is now suing the company that owns the History Channel, A&E Networks, asserting it suppressed the dissemination of his mini-series because it was worried about potential backlash to allusions the documentary makes to the Trump White House.In the lawsuit filed Friday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Mr. Ferguson accuses the company of attempting to delay the documentary until after the 2018 midterm elections because a History Channel executive feared it would offend the White House and Trump supporters.“He was concerned about the impact of ‘Watergate’ upon ratings in ‘red states,’” the lawsuit said of the executive, Eli Lehrer, “as well as the negative reaction it would provoke among Trump supporters and the Trump administration.”Mr. Ferguson resisted that plan, and the mini-series ultimately aired shortly before Election Day. But the filmmaker contends the documentary was given short shrift, despite acclaim in the film industry and previous assurances that it would receive “extremely prominent treatment.”The lawsuit describes the treatment of the documentary as part of a “pattern and practice of censorship and suppression of documentary content” at A&E Networks, and cites several others that it says were subject to attempted manipulation for political or economic reasons.A&E called the lawsuit meritless and the assertion that the documentary was suppressed “absurd,” saying its decision to not rebroadcast it additional times was based on lower than expected ratings.In a statement, the company said it has routinely given a platform to storytellers “to present their unvarnished vision without regard for partisan politics.” It pointed to its partnership with former President Bill Clinton, formed during the Trump administration, to produce a documentary series about the American presidency and the fact that a subsidiary, Propagate, had produced the four-part docu-series “Hillary,” on the life of Hillary Clinton.“A&E invested millions of dollars in this project and promoted it extensively,” the company said of “Watergate” in its statement. “Among other efforts, we hired multiple outside PR agencies, provided advance screeners to the press, and submitted it to film festivals and for awards consideration.”Charles Ferguson, whose film “Inside Job” won an Oscar in 2011, says that A&E Networks did not fulfill a promise to fully promote his documentary on the Watergate scandal.Associated PressMr. Ferguson’s “Watergate” is a deep dive into events set off by the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters and the cover up by the Nixon administration. It includes interviews with people who were involved in the events — such as John Dean, President Nixon’s White House counsel — as well as reporters who covered them, including Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and Lesley Stahl. The New York Times’s co-chief film critic, A.O. Scott, wrote that the documentary tells a story that is “part political thriller and part courtroom drama, with moments of Shakespearean grandeur and swerves into stumblebum comedy,” though other reviews panned the film’s re-creations by actors.Mr. Ferguson, who is best known for his Oscar-winning 2010 documentary “Inside Job,” said that when he started pitching the project in 2015, he imagined it as a straightforward “historical detective story.” But, the suit says, a drumbeat of events involving the Trump administration made him realize the documentary’s renewed political relevance. In 2017, he watched as Mr. Trump fired his F.B.I. director, as the Justice Department appointed a special counsel to oversee the investigation into ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russian officials, and as the potential for impeachment loomed.The series — which Mr. Ferguson said cost about $4.5 million to produce — does not mention Mr. Trump’s name, but the documentary’s subtitle, “How We Learned to Stop an Out of Control President,” was a nod toward his administration.The lawsuit hinges on a conversation between Mr. Ferguson and A&E executives in June 2018, before the film was released. According to the lawsuit, Mr. Lehrer, executive vice president and head of programming at the History Channel, said at that meeting that he would seek to delay the premiere of “Watergate” and “sharply lower” its publicity profile, expressing concern about its relevance to the politics of the moment and the reaction it would provoke from the Trump administration and Trump supporters.Mr. Ferguson has worked to collect pieces of evidence to support his contentions, among them an email he provided to The New York Times in which Mr. Lehrer acknowledged discussing the bipartisan nature of the network’s audience. In the email, Mr. Lehrer also denied the network was trying to suppress the documentary, writing that the rationale for exploring different airdates was to avoid the series getting swallowed up by heavy sports programming and election coverage.Mr. Ferguson’s contract did not specify how many times the network would show the documentary or whether it would receive theatrical distribution, though successful ones are typically broadcast multiple times.Nielsen ratings from the time show that “Watergate” earned only 529,000 viewers when it aired, including seven days of delayed viewing, compared to History Channel’s other multi-episode documentaries like “Grant” which bowed in May to 4.4 million viewers, or “Washington,” which drew an audience of 3.3 million in February 2020.Had the ratings been stronger, A&E says, it would have broadcast the series multiple times and it would have had a greater chance of securing additional licenses either with a streaming service or with international distributors.“The fact is that Watergate, which premiered in prime time on Mr. Ferguson’s desired date, drastically underachieved in the ratings, which was disappointing to all of us,” the company said in its statement.Mr. Ferguson’s documentary chronicles the aftermath of the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, which started the downfall of the Nixon presidency.  Associated PressBut the lawsuit says A&E Networks damaged Mr. Ferguson financially by, among other things, failing to make any “meaningful” distribution deals or arrange for advertising outside of the network. It says Mr. Ferguson traded a lower-than-normal director’s fee in his contract for a higher cut of the royalties, believing that if the documentary was successful, the majority of the viewership revenue would stem from sales to streaming services, foreign cable channels and other customers.One of the A&E executives named as a defendant, Michael Stiller — the vice president of programming and development at the History Channel — had told Mr. Ferguson that there would be rebroadcasts and required him to make slightly shorter versions of the episodes for daytime slots, but those never occurred, according to the lawsuit.The company noted the documentary is available on several services, which include iTunes, Amazon Prime Video and Google Play, including its own video-on-demand platform, History Vault.Mr. Ferguson’s lawsuit argues that the company executives interfered with his contract, and defamed him by telling industry executives he was difficult to work with, thereby costing him work. In addition to Mr. Lehrer and Mr. Stiller, the other named defendants include Robert Sharenow, the network’s president of programming, and Molly Thompson, its former head of documentary films. Ms. Thompson declined to comment. Mr. Lehrer, Mr. Stiller and Mr. Sharenow did not respond to requests for comment.The lawsuit cites several examples where Mr. Ferguson said he learned about conflicts between A&E executives and documentary filmmakers, including a dispute concerning “Gretchen Carlson: Breaking the Silence,” a 2019 documentary on Lifetime about sexual harassment in working-class industries. The suit says A&E executives questioned including information about McDonald’s, an advertiser. The information was ultimately included after the producers fought for it, but the episode was only aired once, on a Saturday at 10 p.m., the lawsuit said. A spokeswoman for Ms. Carlson declined to comment.The lawsuit also says Mr. Ferguson learned about a dispute regarding a 2019 A&E documentary called “Biography: The Trump Dynasty” that examines Mr. Trump’s life and family history. According to the lawsuit, A&E executives wanted the production company behind the documentary, Left/Right Productions, to add in the voice of a “Trump apologist” who could “justify” aspects of Mr. Trump’s background, a request that the suit says generated “significant tensions” between the network executives and the production company executives.Left/Right, which works with The New York Times on some documentary productions, did not respond to requests for comment. The Times did not have a role in any of the programming cited in Mr. Ferguson’s suit.Jack Begg contributed research. More

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      in Movies

      Can You Love a Stand-Up Special About Loathing?

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      James Acaster’s “Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999” is an outstanding show about the worst year in his life. (His girlfriend left him for Mr. Bean, and it went downhill from there.)In his superb new stand-up special, “Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999,” James Acaster describes the worst year of his life: After a shattering breakup, suicidal thoughts and a mental breakdown, he started seeing a therapist for the first time. “Because I’m British and that’s what it takes,” he says. “My whole life had to fall apart before I’d talk about my feelings.”Acaster’s show, which toured New York several years ago but only became available for purchase on Vimeo recently, takes aim at England’s famously stiff upper lip. The theme that emerges after two sprawling, ticklishly funny hours of his new show is not just the challenge of talking about mental health but also the perils of stoicism.There’s nothing worse than sweeping generalizations about the difference between American and British comedy, which is my way of excusing myself for making one: There’s a narrative and thematic ambition that you find in British comics like Daniel Kitson, Josie Long and Acaster that is less common among comics here. Perhaps it’s because they cut their teeth putting on hourlong shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe as opposed to doing short club sets. In any event, Acaster packs his jokes into a tricky structure in which ideas cohere through metaphors and digressions.In the first act — this is a special with an intermission — he tells of mentioning an emotional breakdown on his “Great British Bake Off” appearance that went viral. He mocks how quickly mental illness turns into entertainment in a way intended to make the audience laugh, and when they do, he gets angry at them. Then they laugh at that.There’s a self-awareness to the way Acaster needles the crowd, which he does repeatedly, mocking his fans and describing his relationship with them as demeaning. His irreverent comedy delights in insulting the audience. “Night after night, I’m the one in the room who knows the most about comedy and I’ve got to win your approval?” he says exasperatedly.There’s purpose to turning his British fans into part of the show. English icons are regular targets of his. He makes the sharpest comic attack on Brexit that I’ve seen and his agile skewering of the transphobia of Ricky Gervais has also gone viral. Acaster already has an almost stereotypically English brand of comedy: cerebral and word drunk, wrapped inside layers of irony and biting sarcasm. It’s rare to see a stand-up show filled with intimate stories that have the feel of a State of the Nation special.Until “Cold Lasagne,” Acaster was best known for four Netflix specials that he released on the same day in 2018. The first and best episode described a girlfriend leaving him after saying: “I love you but I don’t feel like I know you.” It’s the skeleton key to that show, and many of the rest of its jokes provide evidence for her claim. His playful observational comedy keeps the audience at a distance, even claiming at one point that he was actually a police officer in disguise as a comic, a line he stuck to throughout the show. Such commitment to ridiculous conceits is part of the fun of his work.His new special also finds laughs in personas, strutting onstage at the start in sunglasses and knocking cups off a table, swearing at the crowd before grabbing the microphone in a spoof of swagger: “Let’s start with the headlines: I curse now.” He describes another girlfriend’s explanation for a breakup, but this time, the reason is about his refusal to get help, how his sadness spreads. This show is far more confessional than the previous ones. Whereas his past work avoided his private life, this one digs uncomfortably deep.In the second act, Acaster tells three stories of unhappily severed relationships: with his agent, his therapist and his girlfriend. Each is a virtuosic set piece that leans on a certain anxiety over whether he is going to say too much.The highlight is the breakup, a tale that focuses on how his girlfriend went on to date Rowan Atkinson, the comedian best known for playing the English comic institution Mr. Bean, a specialist in bumbling physical pratfalls. In a sad-sack sulk, Acaster describes the peculiarly hilarious horror of being a young comic “left for Mr. Bean,” a phrase he says over and over again with the urgency of violins in a horror movie. It’s a masterwork of cringe comedy, one he consistently digresses from to anticipate the criticism that he is being bitter and petty.Acaster is no truth-telling comic who doesn’t care what people think. He seems concerned about coming off well, but uses his own sensitivity to add another layer of tension to his stories. In explaining the fallout with his agent, he makes a big show of being fair, so much so that he says he will only tell the story from his point of view. It begins: “The first thing you have to know is I ruined everything and I did it for a laugh.”It’s a familiar trick, making someone look ridiculous by imagining the terrible logic of their thinking, but few have committed to it so fully or for as long. Many of Acaster’s jokes have a theatrical quality, and he incorporates not just act-outs, but also elaborate pantomime with props. He even makes a short play out of ordering food at a restaurant to illustrate his opinion on Brexit.He acts out his fights with gusto, and in his dispute with his agent, he reminds you of his struggles with mental health that led him to the therapist, which results in the show’s most explosive fight. When he takes out his phone to read her private text messages to him, he smiles like someone enjoying the pleasure of playing dirty.This is a show that clearly has gone through many incarnations, which may be why with your purchase of “Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999,” you also get another 40-minute performance on similar themes. Cold lasagne is actually never mentioned but even “hate myself” seems odd, since there’s so much other loathing going on here.Muffled anger is sometimes a setup, other times a punchline, but always essential to this show. At one point, Acaster says he has toured all over the country, adding, “Let me tell you: I hate Britain, absolutely hate it.”Then he pivots, apologetically, ever alert to the precise arrangement of words. “I phrased that wrong,” he says, pausing. “I hate British people.” More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Coded Bias’ and ‘Tina’

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      PBS will air a documentary that examines the biases embedded in algorithms and other technology. And HBO to debut a documentary about Tina Turner.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, March 22-28. Details and times are subject to change.MondayINDEPENDENT LENS: CODED BIAS 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The filmmaker Shalini Kantayya (“Catching the Sun”) examines the ways biases and inequities have become embedded in algorithms and other technology in this, her latest documentary. Kantayya focuses on the M.I.T. Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini, who has done prominent work on the subject. (Buolamwini was a witness at a congressional hearing on facial-detection technology in 2019, an event that the documentary covers.) Kantayya also looks at how these digital biases play out in the real world using examples in the United States and abroad, where algorithms can determine who qualifies for certain housing or who gets stopped by law enforcement. The documentary “tackles its sprawling subject by zeroing in empathetically on the human costs,” Devika Girish wrote in her review for The New York Times last year. She added that the movie “moves deftly between pragmatic and larger political critiques, arguing that it’s not just that the tech is faulty; even if it were perfect, it would infringe dangerously on people’s liberties.”AFRAID: FEAR IN AMERICA’S COMMUNITIES OF COLOR 9 p.m. on CNN. Just days after killings at three Atlanta-area massage parlors amplified fears about the recent rise of violence against Asian-Americans, the CNN anchors Amara Walker, Anderson Cooper, Victor Blackwell and Ana Cabrera will host a discussion about the state of hate in America, and how crimes like last week’s terrorize communities of color.TuesdayBUGSY MALONE (1976) 8 p.m. on TCM. Pinstripe suits and potty-mouth language come together in this bizarre mobster musical satire, which casts a group of young actors (including Jodie Foster and Scott Baio) in a prohibition-era gangster story. The movie’s writer and director, Alan Parker, replaces bullets with whipped cream and Model Ts with toy pedal cars; and his story is injected with musical numbers by the songwriter Paul Williams. The results, Vincent Canby wrote in his 1976 review for The Times, are “wildly uneven but imaginative and stylish.”WednesdayA scene from “Fast-Forward: Look Into Your Future.”FLX Entertainment/Twin Cities PBSFAST-FORWARD: LOOK INTO YOUR FUTURE 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Hollywood makeup artists might get jealous of the technology used in this documentary, which follows several families who experiment with suits designed by M.I.T. researchers that allow their wearers to get a preview of what their bodies might feel like in old age. Narrated by Rosario Dawson, with original music by Andrew Bird, the documentary uses the technology as a tool to encourage the families to plan for the future.ThursdayCASINO (1995) 6 p.m. on VH1. If the whipped-cream Tommy guns in “Bugsy Malone” (airing Tuesday) are too childish for you, consider instead this over-the-top Scorsese mob movie, where the bullets are real and the liquor is consumed legally. The story, based on a nonfiction book by the journalist Nicholas Pileggi, spans years. It revolves around a mobster (Robert De Niro) whose gig managing a Las Vegas casino leads to murder and betrayal. “Scorsese has been here and done this already in ‘Goodfellas,’ but not with his new film’s blistering bitterness or its peacock extravagance,” Janet Maslin wrote in her 1995 review for The Times. “The long, astonishing Copacabana sequence in ‘Goodfellas,’” she added, “was only a warm-up for this.”FridayDanny Glover in “To Sleep With Anger.”SVC Films, via Kobal CollectionTO SLEEP WITH ANGER (1990) 10 p.m. on TCM. The filmmaker Charles Burnett paints a surreal portrait of a family in this poetic drama, which was Burnett’s third feature. Paul Butler and Mary Alice play a mother and father in Los Angeles. The couple’s relationship, and more, start to waver after an old friend, Harry (Danny Glover), who they haven’t seen in years, arrives at their doorstep out of the blue. When “To Sleep with Anger” was reissued by the Criterion Collection in 2019, The Atlantic’s David Sims referred to it as “one of the best movies of the 1990s, an American masterpiece that remains relatively unheralded almost 30 years after its release.”SaturdayA scene from “Tina.”Rhonda Graam/HBOTINA (2021) 8 p.m. on HBO. The life of Tina Turner — her rise to stardom, her escape from an abusive relationship, her cementation as a figure of rock resilience — is revisited in this new documentary from Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin (“Undefeated”). The film combines archival footage with present-day interviews, including with Angela Bassett, Oprah Winfrey and the playwright Katori Hall, who was the lead book writer for the recent musical “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical.” Expect Turner herself, who is also interviewed, to bring her legendary persona down to earth. “I don’t necessarily want to be a ‘strong’ person,” she told The Times in 2019. “I had a terrible life. I just kept going. You just keep going, and you hope that something will come.”THE 52ND N.A.A.C.P. IMAGE AWARDS 8 p.m. on BET and CBS. You’d be hard pressed to find an awards season event more wide-ranging than the N.A.A.C.P.’s Image Awards, which honor film, television, music and writing all at once. Nominees this year include Regina Hall, who is up for the best actress in a comedy series prize for “Black Monday”; Delroy Lindo, a best actor in a motion picture nominee for his performance in Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods”; and the writer Brit Bennett, whose novel “The Vanishing Half” is up for the top literary-fiction prize.SundayGREAT PERFORMANCES: MOVIES FOR GROWNUPS AWARDS WITH AARP THE MAGAZINE 8 p.m. on PBS. At 59, George Clooney probably isn’t quite old enough to qualify for senior discounts at his local multiplex yet, but he was still on the cover of AARP’s magazine earlier this year. He’s also slated to receive a career achievement award at this year’s edition of the AARP’s awards show, which recognizes films and TV programs. The NBC anchor Hoda Kotb will host. More

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      in Music

      In ‘Genius: Aretha,’ Respecting the Mind, Not Just the Soul

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      When she started preparing for the National Geographic series “Genius: Aretha,” the showrunner Suzan-Lori Parks did what one often does before tackling a biographical project: She crammed. Her approach was a little unusual, though.“I spent months and months reading about what she said, and also noting what she didn’t say,” Parks said of the singer, songwriter and activist Aretha Franklin in a video conversation last month. “Jazz musicians will remind us that the music isn’t just the notes, it’s the stuff between the notes, the silences.”And there were plenty of both during Franklin’s extraordinary life — the focus of the third season of “Genius,” which premieres on March 21 with the British actress and singer Cynthia Erivo in the title role. For Parks, that presented both an opportunity and a challenge: Franklin tried hard to control her public persona, which didn’t seem to be a huge priority for the subjects of the two previous seasons of “Genius,” Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso, whose sometimes less-than-stellar behavior might have even enhanced their mystique.But for Franklin, a Black woman who rose to superstardom amid the Civil Rights conflagrations of the 1960s, the stakes were different.“I think she very much wanted to be seen in a certain way,” said Parks. “As Black American people, we are very aware of our marketability, and as Black American artists, we are maybe even more aware of our marketability.”“My challenge,” she added, “was: ‘How do I tell the truth about this Black American woman who is a brilliant icon? And how do I tell the truth and be respectful?’”There was certainly a wealth of material, given Franklin’s decades in the spotlight as one of the world’s most famous singers. Franklin made her first album at 14, signed with Columbia Records at 18 and went on to record and perform well into her 70s, earning 18 competitive Grammies, a National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. By the time she died in 2018, at age 76, she had sold tens of millions records, scored 20 No. 1 R&B hits and was the first woman inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.Erivo, who won a Tony, Grammy and Daytime Emmy for her role in the musical version of “The Color Purple,” was tasked not only with portraying the woman whose undisputed nickname was “the Queen of Soul” but also with singing like her — Erivo performed the vocals for Franklin’s tracks. She tried to look at the bigger picture.Erivo, an accomplished singer and songwriter, worked with a vocal coach to capture Franklin’s essence in the studio and onstage. Richard DuCree/National Geographic“I was more interested in telling the story as truthfully as I possibly could, as opposed to mimicking,” Erivo said in a video call last month — though her interpretations are eerily spot on, too.“I would want to know: ‘Where are we right now? What is this coming out of or what are we going into? What is the feeling here?’” she added. Erivo and a vocal coach would begin by trying to zoom in on the finer details of Franklin’s technical virtuosity and her subtle emotional inflections.“Then you let it go,” Erivo continued. “No one wants to watch someone singing analytically. No one wants to watch someone doing the notes. You learn them, you understand them, and then you let that go so that there’s a freedom for it to just move through you.”For Parks, zeroing in on truth in a series called “Genius” began with reflections on the meaning of the word and what it implies. She has, herself, been given that label, having received a MacArthur Fellowship — known as the “genius award” — for her playwriting. She was the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, for “Topdog/Underdog,” and she recently penned the screenplay for the film “The United States vs. Billie Holiday.”Doing the series was an opportunity, she said, “to talk about Aretha Franklin’s genius, specifically, and what Black female genius might look like.” One important aspect was Franklin’s ability to build bridges, particularly during the Civil Rights era, often alongside Martin Luther King Jr., played by Ethan Henry. (King is the subject of the next season of “Genius.”)Another, which Parks contended was among Franklin’s most distinctive achievements, was the way she “alchemized her pain into sonic gold.”Parks said she drew from “mountains of research” to depict the biographical elements for that alchemy, toggling between Franklin’s adult life and her adolescent past. Central to the story is Franklin’s father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin (Courtney B. Vance), with whom the young Aretha (played by Shaian Jordan) had a close but complex relationship. The leader of the New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, C.L. was a celebrity in his own right and segued smoothly from indulging in earthly delights on Saturdays to preaching heavenly sermons on Sundays.Courtney B. Vance plays Franklin’s father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin, a man of enormous charisma and many contradictions.Richard DuCree/National GeographicAretha was 6 when her mother, a gospel singer and pianist, left C.L. because of his infidelities. (She died four years later.) Left in charge, C.L. cultivated his daughter’s talent and began taking her on rowdy gospel tours from age 12. The reverend could be domineering, but he loved his daughter, whom he affectionately called Little Re, and was supportive; in the series, he surrounds her with enviable role models, including the singer Dinah Washington and the jazz pianist Art Tatum.Still, life as a charismatic preacher’s daughter on the road could be fraught. Little Re had two of her four sons by the time she was 15.“I think I would be a mess if I had a child whilst doing all the things I’m doing right now,” said Erivo. “I don’t know how she did that, because I don’t believe she was ever half-doing anything.”The series doesn’t shy from less savory details of Franklin’s biography, including difficult relationships and the impact her ambitions sometimes had on loved ones. Her first husband and early manager, Ted White (Malcolm Barrett), is portrayed as petty, incompetent and physically abusive. Her sister Carolyn (Rebecca Naomi Jones), another gifted songwriter and performer, gets into a bitter dispute with Aretha after Aretha snatches away some promising material.Getting to the bottom of Franklin’s life has often proved difficult. She left so much out of her autobiography, “From These Roots,” that a frustrated David Ritz, who had been hired to help write it, went on to pen the much more detailed and revealing biography “Respect.” She condemned it as “a very trashy book.” A similarly contentious episode involving a Time cover story is enacted in the show: When the article is published, she feels betrayed by both the journalist and his sources — including her own husband.Aretha Franklin in 2015 at the New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, singing at a memorial service for her father and brother Cecil, who were ministers there.Elizabeth Conley/Detroit News, via Associated PressAttempts to put Franklin onscreen have been knotty, as well. Franklin sued multiple times to block the release of the Sydney Pollack documentary “Amazing Grace,” which chronicled the recording of her electrifying double-platinum 1972 gospel album of the same name before a live audience at a Baptist church in Los Angeles. (Asked after its wide theatrical release in 2019 why he thought Aretha disliked the film, Chuck Rainey, the bassist on “Amazing Grace,” said he believed the film was too focused on style and the celebrities in the audience, including her father and the singer Clara Ward. “It was like she was wallpaper,” he said.)A public and continuing feud among Franklin’s heirs has continued to muddy the waters since her death. Earlier this year, her son Kecalf Franklin said on Instagram that “Genius” did not have the family’s support. (He has similarly attacked MGM for its long-delayed biopic, “Respect,” scheduled for August, for which Aretha handpicked Jennifer Hudson to star.)However, Brian Grazer, an executive producer of “Genius,” said that before filming started, the production received the endorsement of Aretha Franklin’s estate through its trustee at the time, Sabrina Owens, the singer’s niece. “We had the estate 100 percent on board, and the trustee to the estate granted us this,” he said. (Owens, who resigned as trustee last year, referred queries to the current lawyer for the estate, who did not reply to multiple requests for comment.)Through it all, however, there is the music, which is the central, and perhaps most memorable element of the series — appropriately, given Franklin’s supersized influence on modern music.“She was able to redeploy the melisma by giving us these testimonies about Black womanhood, about Black humanity within the context of the soul-music genre,” said Daphne A. Brooks, the author of “Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound” and a professor of African-American studies at Yale. “It transformed the pop-music landscape: We now have a kind of standard form of pop singing that comes from Aretha Franklin.”As such, many of the most illuminating scenes in “Genius” deal not with Franklin’s private life but with the way the often shy, soft-spoken musician shaped her own work.Aretha Franklin’s drive sometimes created tension with loved ones, including her sister Carolyn (played by Rebecca Naomi Jones, left, with Erivo, Patrice Covington and Erika Jerry).Richard DuCree/National Geographic“When you start getting to know what it takes to make a hit song, to be in a recording studio, to work with musicians who, in the case of Muscle Shoals, are all white men in 1967 — that is a huge, brilliant triumph for her,” Parks said.The full scale of Franklin’s contributions to her own music has long been obscured. She was a gifted songwriter and a superb pianist. In the studio, she was a taskmaster, pushing herself and her collaborators until they captured the exact sound she heard in her head — not easy for a Black female musician of her time. In the series, we see her have to ask to be credited as a producer on her biggest-selling album, “Amazing Grace,” the making of which is given an entire episode.“I knew right when I started this project that that was going to be the place where the magic happened,” Parks said. “The story of ‘Amazing Grace’ revolves around something that is, again, not said. Watching the documentary, which is beautiful, I wanted to know the story behind it.”“Amazing Grace” is pure gospel, which was Franklin’s emotional and spiritual anchor. But the show also demonstrates her uncommon fluency in most dominant genres of her time, including jazz, blues, Tin Pan Alley, funk and pop — “Aretha is Black, female, American,” Parks said, laughing. In her music, as in her activism, Franklin tried to reach as many people as possible. It clearly worked.“This is the stuff, in my opinion, of Black female genius,” Parks said. “She brought people together for the greater good.” More

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      Carl Reiner’s Archives Will Go to the National Comedy Center

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      The collection of papers, artifacts and memorabilia spans Reiner’s career and work on “Your Show of Shows,” “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and beyond.When Carl Reiner died last June, he left a hole in the comedy firmament that no performer, writer or director will be able to fill.Reiner, who would have turned 99 on Saturday, also left behind a trove of documents, artifacts and personal memorabilia, working on TV programs like “Your Show of Shows” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and films like “Oh, God!” and “The Jerk.”Now this personal archive will live on: his family is donating it to the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, N.Y., so that current fans and future generations can appreciate the breadth of his accomplishments.“It’s a lot there,” said Rob Reiner, the actor and filmmaker who is Carl Reiner’s oldest child. “We’re talking about an 80-year career. He lived to 98 and he started when he was in his late teens. As I like to say, my father was on television before we owned a television.”Carl Reiner’s archives contain writing and versions of scripts from just about every project he worked on and every phase of his career. They include sketches he composed as a cast member on “Your Show of Shows,” where he worked with writers like Mel Brooks and Neil Simon, as well as early drafts of “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” which Reiner created and originally titled “Head of the Family,” intending it as a starring vehicle for himself.Reiner, right, with Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke on the set of their TV series.Carl Reiner Collection/National Comedy CenterOther materials include Reiner’s annotated screenplays for “The Jerk,” “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid,” “The Man With Two Brains” and “All of Me,” which he directed and which starred Steve Martin.“It’s hard to overstate Carl Reiner’s impact on comedy as an art form,” said Journey Gunderson, the executive director of the National Comedy Center.“I can’t tell you how many writers and comedians have told me that they were inspired, in particular, by ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’ because that was the first time they saw comedy represented as a craft,” Gunderson said. “Generations of comedy writers learned that was an occupation via that show.”Reiner had been a member of the National Comedy Center’s advisory board of directors. Gunderson said that after his death, the center approached his family about ways in which it could pay tribute to him. Among these plans, the center will rename its department of archives and preservation for Reiner.Reiner’s archives include unproduced projects and annotated screenplays.Carl Reiner Collection/National Comedy CenterGunderson said that this conversation led to further discussion with Reiner’s family about providing a home for his creative and professional possessions.“We just thought it was a natural thing to do,” Rob Reiner said. “We felt that he had a connection there and he was trying to help launch the place and give it some credibility. When he passed away, we thought this is the place where all of his artifacts, materials and awards should go.”Carl Reiner’s archives also include his Emmy Awards and his Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, many autobiographical writings and drafts of unproduced projects, and even the chairs and TV trays that he and Brooks used in recent years when they sat together in Reiner’s home and ate dinner in front of the television. Gunderson said that the National Comedy Center is planning an exhibition for next year, to mark what would have been Reiner’s 100th birthday.Rob Reiner said he was particularly fond of the archival photographs that chronicle his father’s development as an actor from very humble beginnings.“They used to perform Shakespeare plays at high schools and the kids would sit in with the scripts in their hands so they could follow along,” Rob Reiner said. “While he was up onstage, he’d hear, whoosh, the sound of the pages turning.”Rob Reiner continued, “He told me that one time, he forgot his lines and he started doing Shakespearean double-talk. And you heard this — whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh — people trying to find out where the heck he was in the script.” More

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      ‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’ Recap: Lost in America

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      The often thrilling first episode of this Disney+ series is likely to satisfy Marvel fans who’ve invested years in keeping track of these characters and their many, many problems.‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’ Season 1, Episode 1Although the title of the latest Marvel Comics television series is “The Falcon and the Winter Solder,” the show is defined by another superhero entirely: the absent Captain America. Both the high-flying military operative Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) and the brainwashed, ageless assassin Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) spent time as sidekicks to the original Captain, Steve Rogers, who at the end of the 2019 Marvel movie “Avengers: Endgame” retired from the hero business, leaving his old friends without a partner — or a mission. The question haunting Sam and Bucky now is, “What’s next?”That’s also a good question for the bosses at the streaming service Disney+, who are coming off the recent success of “WandaVision,” their first big post-“Endgame” Marvel TV project. The highly assured, often thrilling first episode of “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” is different from “WandaVision” — in that it’s an international action-adventure and not a surreal riff on classic sitcoms. But Episode 1 is likely to satisfy Marvel fans who’ve invested years in keeping track of these characters and their many, many problems.Directed by Kari Skogland and written by the show’s creator Malcolm Spellman, this first episode opens with a rousing aerial chase sequence, reminiscent of some of the better set pieces in Disney+’s “The Mandalorian.” The Falcon and his U.S. Army handler Lt. Torres (Danny Ramirez) pursue enemy agents through the hills, deserts and canyons of North Africa, trying to nab their target before they fly into Libyan airspace and touch off an international incident.Skogland and Spellman provide minimal setup to what’s going on, beyond loosely identifying the bad guys: a band of criminals known as “the L.A.F.,” who’ve kidnapped an Army officer. Most of this show’s first 10 minutes is pure visceral excitement, as we watching Sam in his high-tech flying outfit, dodging bullets and blades, attacking dudes in jumbo jets and helicopters and diving after them when they bail out in glider suits. It is super-heroics at their niftiest, culminating in a daring midair rescue.Sam then gets another moment of triumph before he returns to his post-Captain America existential crisis. While sitting in a Tunisian cafe, Sam talks (in perfect Arabic) to a stranger who thanks him for helping to restore reality, after “the blip” that sent half of the sentient creatures in the universe into limbo for five long years. Like “WandaVision,” “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” isn’t just set in a world still recovering from the trauma depicted in “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Endgame.” It’s also directly about how both the superpowered and the ordinary have been coping with all the loss and the confusion.A big case in point for Sam: After his covert mission in Africa ends, he returns to his family home in Louisiana, where his sister Sarah (Adepero Oduye) has been struggling to turn their parents’ beat-up old fishing boat into a viable business. Sam hopes that his fame and prestige as an Avenger will help swing them a bank loan. But like billions of other people who disappeared in the blip, he hasn’t earned any income for five years, which — perhaps coupled with some old-fashioned institutional racism — means the Wilson siblings don’t get help.Bucky has even bigger troubles. He spent a half-century as a mind-controlled killer, before finally regaining consciousness not long before being blipped away. Since returning, he’s been trying to make amends for the harm he caused, hoping to push back some of the nightmarish memories that torment him at night. But he’s finding that even being kind can be complicated.Bucky doesn’t see as much action this week as Sam does. He’s at the center of one big fight sequence, in a flashback to an old mission from his international assassin days. Instead, most of his story line involves him going on his first date in about 80 years, at the urging of an elderly Asian-American neighbor. The twist? Bucky murdered that neighbor’s son, after the kid witnessed the hit depicted in the flashback.Sebastian Stan in “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.”Marvel StudiosMuch of this episode is about the sense of disconnection and alienation these two title heroes feel — not just because they were absent from Earth for a half-decade, but because they have weird jobs. Bucky, who fought in World War II before he was captured by the enemy and turned into a monster, ruefully notes at one point that he probably hasn’t danced with a girl “since 1943.” Sam is a wizard with the advanced Stark technology he works with every day, but he fumbles when it comes to getting his family’s boat motor cranking. When Bucky’s therapist tries to ease his troubled mind by reminding him, “You’re free,” he mutters, “To do what?”By the end of this initial 45-minute chapter, the series’s plot begins to kick in, on two fronts. Early in the episode, Torres tells Sam he’s on the trail of an underground revolutionary group called “the Flag Smashers,” who think life was better during the blip years. Torres locates their leader in Switzerland — sporting a creepy mask with a red handprint across the face — and gets beaten brutally for his troubles. Meanwhile, Sam — who was offered the job of Captain America at the end of “Endgame” by Steve Rogers himself — is rudely surprised when the shield he donated to the Smithsonian is retrieved by the U.S. government and handed to a new guy.We’ll surely learn more about this new Cap (played by Wyatt Russell) next week, seeing whether he lives up to the idealistic comment Sam makes when he donates the shield: “Symbols are nothing without the men and women who give them meaning.” Clearly, in between the white-knuckle action sequences, “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” is going to leave space for some thoughtful rumination on what the American dream means in a world where, as Sam also says, “Every time things get better for one group, they get worse for another.”For now though, he appears to be a living embodiment of that trade-off. When he opted out of becoming Captain America himself, Sam may have thought he could control the legacy of his old friend, by letting his iconography pass into history. Instead he’s finding that whatever he doesn’t take, someone else will — and maybe at his own expense.The All-Winners SquadThe Smithsonian’s Captain America exhibit includes what looks to be the Jack Kirby-drawn cover from 1941’s “Captain America Comics” #1.Fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe surely perked up when Don Cheadle appeared as James “Rhodey” Rhodes, counseling Sam at the Smithsonian. But this episode also featured a more deep-cut M.C.U. character in the kickboxing mercenary Georges “the Leaper” Batroc (Georges St-Pierre), who appeared as the main villain in the opening action sequence of “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” and serves a similar function here, as the man behind the kidnapping the Falcon foils.Speaking of parallels to “The Winter Soldier,” in that movie Captain America nonchalantly jumps out of the back of a plane, and the Falcon does the same thing at the start of this episode … but with a little more flair. More

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      Stephen Colbert Is Skeptical of Putin’s Best Wishes for Biden

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      “That is ominous,” Colbert said of Vladimir Putin’s wishing the president “good health” on Thursday. “But then again, when Putin says anything, it kind of sounds ominous.”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. We’re all stuck at home at the moment, so here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.From Putin, With LovePresident Vladimir V. Putin of Russia responded to President Biden’s comments this week about his being a killer by saying on Thursday that “it takes one to know one” and that he wished Biden “good health,” clarifying that it was without irony or insinuation.Stephen Colbert took glee in the trading of barbs, saying, “Someone dust off Dolph Lundgren and get him hunting for Red October because the Cold War is back on, baby, and this time we’re gonna waterboard Billy Joel until he tells us who started the fire.”“Putin is famous for being a killer. It’s kind of his thing, along with horses and nipples.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“So not going with a denial. Interesting.” — JAMES CORDEN“He’s killed so many people that in 2017, The Washington Post was able to publish a list of 10 critics of Vladimir Putin who died violently or in suspicious ways. His greatest hits are hits.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“As if the pandemic wasn’t enough, let’s throw in tension with a nuclear enemy into the mix.” — JIMMY FALLON“That is ominous. But then again, when Putin says anything, it kind of sounds ominous.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Putin has poisoned infector sushi, he’s thrown journalists out of windows, he’s tried to assassinate his most vocal domestic critic, Aleksei Navalny, by putting the lethal nerve agent Novichok in his underpants. It was an episode of Putin’s prank show, ‘Murdered.’”— STEPHEN COLBERT“But it is funny that Putin had to clarify that he is not joking when he wishes Biden good health. Because, let’s face it: The man has killed so many people, everybody assumes that is what he means.” — TREVOR NOAH“In other words, if you know what’s good for you, don’t drink the chamomile tea.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (March Madness Edition)“The N.C.A.A. March Madness basketball tournament began today, and it’s extra exciting because there was no tournament last year. So this is my first chance in two years to get furious at 19-year-olds I hadn’t heard of five minutes ago.” — SETH MEYERS“This is the year that answers the question, ‘How do you have an office pool when there’s no one at the office?’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“That’s right, everyone is doing their office pools. Of course, this year that means it’s you against your wife, your 2-year-old and your dog. ‘Rusty, you picked Gonzaga, too?’” — JIMMY FALLON“President Obama went out on a limb. He took No. 1 seed Gonzaga to go all the way, which is interesting when you consider that Gonzaga, as I have pointed out in the past, is not even a school. it doesn’t exist — it’s imaginary. They made it up to win basketball tournaments. It’s a pretend place. It’s like Wakanda for white people.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingMichelle Obama and Jimmy Fallon crashed random Zoom meetings on Thursday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutCynthia Erivo, a Grammy and Tony winner, portrays Aretha Franklin in Season 3 of “Genius,” including all the singing.Richard Ducree/National Geographic, via Associated PressCynthia Erivo shines as the soul singer Aretha Franklin in Season 3 of National Geographic’s bio-anthology “Genius: Aretha.” More