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      ‘Love Island USA,’ Plus 7 Things to Watch on TV this Week

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      This reality competition show picks back up for its seventh season, and the Tony Awards celebrate Broadway on Sunday.Between streaming and cable, there is a seemingly endless variety of things to watch. Here is a selection of TV shows and specials that are airing or streaming this week, June 2-8. Details and times are subject to change.From yachts to villas.“Below Deck Down Under” just wrapped, and luckily for those of us who can’t get enough of life and drama at sea, the new season of “Below Deck” is setting sail with Capt. Kerry Titheradge at the helm this week. Fraser Olender is also back as chief stew on the show that follows the crew of a luxury charter yacht. In a preview released by Bravo, we already saw a crew member calling the maritime police and, well, everyone making out with everyone. Monday at 8 p.m. on Bravo.Toooonight (said in Iain Stirling’s voice): “Love Island USA” is back for its seventh season. Though there may be some flawed logic in sending a group of hotties to a remote island villa in an attempt to form long-lasting relationships, it does make for ridiculously fun TV. New episodes arrive every day of the week except Wednesdays, with Ariana Madix back as the host. Things are sure to be messy. Streaming starting on Tuesday at 9 p.m. on Peacock.Warning: If you watched the original seasons of “The Real Housewives of New Jersey,” this new show might make you feel a little old. Teresa Giudice’s daughter, Gia, who was 8 years old when she first appeared on that series, will be in “Next Gen NYC,” alongside adult children of other “Real Housewives” franchise stars, with some New York City influencers mixed in. As the cast members of other Bravo shows like “Summer House” and “Vanderpump Rules” age out of their hard-core partying days, maybe this new cast will fill those roles. Tuesday at 9 p.m. on Bravo.A big week for theater.From Tom Francis’s “Sunset Boulevard” walk to Cole Escola’s Mary Todd Lincoln in “Oh, Mary!” and Audra McDonald’s return to the stage in “Gypsy,” there has been a lot of theater to celebrate this season. And that is exactly what will happen at the Tony Awards. Alongside the usual performances from this year’s biggest shows, it was announced last week that original “Hamilton” cast will reunite for a performance during the broadcast. The New York Times theater critic Jesse Green saw all of the 42 eligible Broadway productions and ran through his predictions for the show. Sunday at 8 p.m. on CBS.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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      in Movies

      Best Movies and Shows Streaming in June: ‘The Bear,’ ‘Phineas and Ferb,’ and More

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      “Phineas and Ferb,” ”The Bear” and “The Gilded Age” are coming back, and “We Were Liars,” “Hell Motel” and “Stick” debut.Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to their libraries. Here are our picks for some of June’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)New to Amazon Prime Video‘We Were Liars’Starts streaming: June 18This adaptation of E. Lockhart’s award-winning young adult novel of the same name follows Cadence (Emily Alyn Lind), one of a group of teenage relatives known in the family as “the liars.” (Their parents and their billionaire grandfather, Harris Sinclair (David Morse) called them that because of all of the mischief they got up to and then lied about when they were little.) When one of the summers together at the Sinclair family’s oceanfront estate goes tragically awry, Cadence is left with only vague memories of what happened. She has to piece together the details, with very little help from her bickering aunts or her suddenly and inexplicably aloof cousins. The mystery winds through a flashback-filled story, covering the romances and the regrets of the very rich.Also arriving:June 12“Deep Cover”June 15“The Chosen” Season 5June 25“Countdown” Season 1June 27“Marry My Husband”Eric McCormack in “Hell Motel.”Anthony Fascione for Shaftesbury/ShudderNew to AMC+‘Hell Motel’ Season 1Starts streaming: June 17In the opening scene of the Shudder series “Hell Motel,” a newlywed couple stops on a stormy night at a remote roadside inn, where they are ritually slaughtered by Satanists. Thirty years later, a handful of true-crime enthusiasts and influencers are invited to the motel to promote its reopening. When the guests start dying in gruesome ways, the survivors have to figure out who among them might be responsible. “Hell Motel” was cocreated by Aaron Martin and Ian Carpenter, whose anthology series “Slasher” paid similar homage to classic horror and mystery tropes. Eric McCormack stars as a creepy celebrity chef, whose snide attitude exemplifies the kind of questionable characters who have gathered at this place, any one of whom could be a potential victim — or a potential killer.‘Nautilus’ Season 1Starts streaming: June 29A reimagining of Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas,” this adventure series has Shazad Latif playing the infamous Captain Nemo. In this version of the story, Nemo has been held in a prison in India, forced to do slave labor in helping to design and build a technologically advanced submarine, the Nautilus, for a tyrannical British mercantile company. When Nemo and several of his cellmates break out of jail and steal the ship, they embark on a mission to the farthest reaches of the seas, to find treasure and infuriate colonialists. “Nautilus” plays a little like an ocean-bound, steampunk “Star Trek,” following a motley crew of honorable outlaws as they explore the unknown.Also arriving:June 1“Dead Silence”“Insidious”June 2“Relative Secrets”June 5“The Killer Clown: Murder on the Doorstep”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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      Valerie Mahaffey, Actress in “Northern Exposure” and “Desperate Housewives,” Dies at 71

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      She had memorable roles on TV shows like “Desperate Housewives” and “Northern Exposure,” and in the dark comedy film “French Exit.”Valerie Mahaffey, a character actress with a knack for playing eccentric women who sometimes revealed themselves to be sinister on television shows like “Desperate Housewives,” “Northern Exposure” and “Devious Maids,” died on Friday in Los Angeles. She was 71.The cause was cancer, her husband, the actor Joseph Kell, said in a statement.Ms. Mahaffey had worked steadily over the past five decades, starting out on the NBC daytime soap opera, “The Doctors,” for which she received a Daytime Emmy nomination for best supporting actress in 1980. Most recently, she appeared in the movie “The 8th Day,” a crime thriller released in March. She was also known for her guest-starring roles on well-known TV series such as “Seinfeld” and “Grey’s Anatomy.”She won an Emmy for best supporting actress in 1992 for her work as Eve, a hypochondriac, on the 1990s CBS series “Northern Exposure,” a drama set in Alaska. She was best known for playing seemingly friendly women who become villainous characters in dramas such as “Desperate Housewives,” where she appeared in nine episodes.In her “Housewives” role as Alma Hodge, she was a woman trapped in a loveless marriage who faked her own death to get back at her husband, hoping he would be blamed for her disappearance.She most recently won acclaim for her work in the 2020 dark comedy, “French Exit,” which saw her nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for her portrayal of Madame Reynard, a scene-stealing eccentric widow.In an interview in 2021 with the Gold Derby, Ms. Mahaffey discussed the role, saying: “I know how to be funny. I’ve done sitcoms. I know ba-dum-bum humor.”“Maybe it’s this point in my life,” she added, “I don’t want any artifice. And I wanted to play the truth of every moment.”She also said then that she often ended up playing characters who were “a little askew,” which she said was aligned with how people are in reality.Ms. Mahaffey was born on June 16, 1953, in Sumatra, Indonesia. Her mother, Jean, was Canadian, and her father, Lewis, was an American who worked in the oil business. Her family later moved to Nigeria before eventually settling in Austin, Texas, where she attended high school and went on to earn a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1975, from the University of Texas.The frequent moves made her family very close, she told The New York Times in a 1983 interview.“We had to leave friends behind all the time, and so we turned toward one another,” she said.In addition to her husband, Ms. Mahaffey is survived by their daughter, Alice Richards. More

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      Cory Michael Smith Burns Through ‘Mountainhead,’ by the Creator of ‘Succession’

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      Cory Michael Smith was disappointed. “I’m a big fan of pepperoni with a little more constitution,” he said, looking down at the slice of pizza on his plate. “These are tired. They’re tired cups.”This was the day after the premiere party for “Mountainhead,” the Jesse Armstrong movie that premieres Saturday on HBO. A Vantablack comedy of wealth, power and moral negligence, it evokes Armstrong’s earlier fable of the megarich, “Succession,” but is more explicitly attuned to current anxieties about Silicon Valley oligarchs.Smith stars as a social media mogul named Venis (rhymes with menace), a pampered edgelord holed up in a cartoonishly swank chalet (the Mountainhead of the title) with other tech machers, played by Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman and Ramy Youssef. Venis’s content creation tools have destabilized much of the global South, but he remains mostly unbothered.“Nothing means anything, and everything is funny and cool,” he tells his fellow founders, as they swipe past scenes of chaos.In person, Smith, 38, was not quite so nihilistic, though he had dressed the part, a man in black on black on black — pants, coat, shirt, tie, shoes. Offscreen, Smith is abidingly polite, with a wide smile that narrows his eyes to slits.He lives in the West Village, though increasingly work keeps him away. He had flown in for the premiere and soon he would fly out again, to Alaska where he is shooting a film that he was forbidden to discuss. Smith (“Gotham,” “Carol,” “May December”) is suddenly so in demand that he had to miss Cannes, at which “Sentimental Value,” a movie in which he co-stars, was awarded the Grand Prix.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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      5 Animated Political Satire Series to Stream

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      From Ramy Youssef’s latest to a long-running series from Seth MacFarlane, these shows tackle the hot topics of their time.The state of American politics can feel so exaggerated and far-fetched that one of the best ways to represent it is through a medium made for such absurdity. Animated satirical series can depict our country’s political figures and moments at their most bizarre, sometimes taking aim at a particular party or politician, and sometimes lambasting the general idea of America as a fair, free and democratic nation. What follows is a guide to animated satires of American politics and politicians from the first Bush administration to the Biden administration.#1 Happy Family USA (2025- )This new series, created by the comedian Ramy Youssef and the writer Pam Brady, depicts a Muslim Egyptian American family in New Jersey who must learn to properly code-switch and project the image of a nonthreatening, properly assimilated family in order to carry on in the midst of the prejudice and jingoism of post-9/11 America.Much of the series focuses on the exploits and misadventures of Rumi (voiced by Youssef), who tries to find his place among his middle school peers. But beyond the more standard adolescent story lines, “#1 Happy Family USA” hilariously skewers the likes of Fox News and George W. Bush, and also offers a stringent critique of how American beliefs and values shifted at the expense of many Muslim citizens and people of color after 9/11.Streaming on Amazon Prime.American Dad! (2005- )The series creator Seth MacFarlane (who also created “Family Guy”) has said that “American Dad!” was inspired by his frustration with the 2000 presidential election and the Bush administration. The sitcom stars the Smith family, the patriarch of which, Stan, is a jingoistic far-right Republican who works for the C.I.A. Conservative politics take many of the satire’s hits, but characters like Stan’s hippie daughter and her boyfriend then husband represent leftist targets that get mocked regularly.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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      Nathan Fielder Calls F.A.A. ‘Dumb’ in CNN Interview

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      In a CNN interview to discuss the recent season’s focus on pilot safety, Fielder responded to a Federal Aviation Administration statement and criticized training standards.Nathan Fielder, the creator of the HBO comedy-documentary series “The Rehearsal,” extended his show’s commingling of performance and reality with a live appearance on CNN on Thursday.Fielder went on “The Situation Room With Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Brown” to promote the second season of “The Rehearsal” (whose finale aired on Sunday), and to raise awareness about airline pilot safety. Fielder had been closely examining safety in the season, including the communication between pilots and co-pilots, which he argued is poor and is a key factor in many plane crashes.In the finale, Fielder himself flew a Boeing 737 passenger jet with more than 100 actors on board in an attempt to simulate inter-pilot communication on real-world commercial flights.On “The Situation Room,” he fired back at criticism from the Federal Aviation Administration, which said in a statement to CNN that it “isn’t seeing the data that supports the show’s central claim that pilot communications is to blame for airline disasters.”“Well that’s dumb, they’re dumb,” Fielder said, sitting next to John Goglia, an aviation expert and former National Transportation Safety Board member who appeared as an adviser on “The Rehearsal” this season. Fielder criticized the F.A.A.’s training standards, which he said do not adequately prepare pilots and co-pilots to speak their mind if they have a concern.“The training is someone shows you a PowerPoint slide saying ‘If you are a co-pilot and the pilot does something wrong, you need to speak up about it,’” he said. “That’s all. That’s the training.”On Friday, the F.A.A. said in a statement that it “requires all airline crew members (pilots and flight attendants) and dispatchers to complete Crew Resource Management training,” which focuses on interactions among crew members.“They must complete this training before they begin working in their official positions and complete it on a recurring basis afterward,” the F.A.A. said.Over the course of six episodes, Fielder recruited several pilots to participate in elaborate role-playing scenarios that tested their ability to navigate sensitive conversations. In one episode, a pilot was encouraged to confront his girlfriend with suspicions of disloyalty while seated next to her in a mock cockpit. In another, several pilots were graded on their ability to deliver harsh feedback to contestants in a fake singing competition show.Although the scenarios are contrived and frequently involve actors, the show also regularly depicts what appear to be genuine interactions with nonactors. The fifth episode featured an awkward interview with a congressman, Steve Cohen of Tennessee, a member of the aviation subcommittee. And Goglia’s appearances are played completely straight.“It’s exploded,” Goglia said on “The Situation Room,” when asked about the public reaction to the show. “My emails exploded, my messages exploded, my grandkids were all over me — it’s unbelievable, the response.” More

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      ‘Mountainhead’ Review: While We Go Down, They Bro Down

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      The creator of “Succession” skewers tech billionaires in a dark comedy that is intelligent but feels a bit artificial.Over four seasons of “Succession,” the creator, Jesse Armstrong, told the story of people who control the world by selling ideas: the Roy family, who ran and fought over a media and entertainment empire. Toward its end, as their business was sold to a tech entrepreneur, “Succession” suggested that power was shifting, and that the future belonged to silicon hyperbillionaires.In his film “Mountainhead,” which premieres Saturday on HBO, that future has arrived, and it is both terrifying and ridiculous — not unlike our present. In the scabrous story of a weekend getaway for four tech-mogul frenemies, Armstrong finds that our new bro overlords are rich targets for satire, though when it comes to depth, nuance and insight, their story has nothing on the Roys’.As “Mountainhead” begins, countries around the globe are erupting in hatred and sectarian violence, fueled by A.I.-generated propaganda. This chaos is the whoopsie of Venis (Cory Michael Smith), a chuckleheaded social-media entrepreneur whose company pushed a half-baked software update that gave bad actors around the world the sudden ability to create unfalsifiable deepfake videos. (The name “Venis,” a seeming portmanteau of “venal” and “penis” that is pronounced “Venice,” is Armstrong’s sensibility in five letters.)The world is burning. But in the snowy, Randian-named retreat that gives its name to “Mountainhead,” Venis has arrived to chill with his boys. Jeff (Ramy Youssef) has developed possibly the only A.I. capable of weeding out the dangerous fake videos from Venis’s company. Randall (Steve Carell), a self-styled philosopher-exec, tosses around terms like “Hegelian” in a way that makes you wonder if he’s ever finished a book. And Hugo Van Yalk (a wonderfully debased Jason Schwartzman), the owner of the property, is a meditation-app developer nicknamed “Soup” — for “soup kitchen” — because his net worth is a mere half billion dollars.The edgy bro-down that ensues is fueled by unspoken rivalries and schemes. Venis wants Jeff to sell him his A.I., which would allow him to call off the apocalypse without having to do an embarrassing recall of the update. Randall, who has received a concerning diagnosis, is keen on Venis’s plan to usher in the “transhuman” era by uploading people’s consciousnesses to the cloud. Soup wants someone to fund his anemic wellness app and finally add a zero to his humiliating nine-digit wealth.The film centers almost entirely on this quartet. (Like the Roys, they mash up aspects of several real-life analogues — Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg and more.) The narrow focus matches their perspective: The four men see themselves as the only real people in the world, while the other eight billion of us are NPCs. At one point, Venis asks Randall, “Do you believe in other people?” The only reasonable answer is, “Obviously not!”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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      in Theater

      ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’ Remembers When TV Had a Conscience, and a Spine

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      A TV critic looks at George Clooney’s play about CBS News standing up to political pressure, even as its current ownership might succumb to it.In the Broadway play “Good Night, and Good Luck,” the CBS newscaster Edward R. Murrow (George Clooney) allows himself a moment of doubt, as his program “See It Now” embarks on a series of reports on the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s.“It occurs to me,” he says, “that we might not get away with this one.”It is a small but important line. We know Murrow’s story — exposing the red-baiting demagoguery of Senator Joseph McCarthy — as history. And history, once set down on the page and stage, can seem inevitable.But Murrow’s success was not preordained. It required hard, exacting work. It required guts. It required journalists to risk personal ruin and some of them to experience it.It’s a point worth remembering. And it hits especially hard at this moment, when CBS News, headquartered just blocks away from the Winter Garden Theater, is again under political and financial pressure to rein in its coverage of the powerful. History is repeating, this time perhaps as tragedy. (CNN is airing the play’s June 7 evening performance live, as if to give the news business a shot in the arm.)In “Good Night, and Good Luck,” adapted from the 2005 screenplay by Clooney and Grant Heslov, all ends well, more or less. (The “less” is implied in the stage production by a “We Didn’t Start the Fire”-like closing montage that ties the division and chaos of the past several decades to the cacophony of media.)Murrow ultimately received support — however nervous and limited — from his network. Its chief, William S. Paley (Paul Gross), fretted about pressure from politicians and from the “See It Now” sponsor, the aluminum company Alcoa. But while Paley complained about the agita Murrow brought him, he did not pull the plug on the McCarthy investigation.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