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      The Best Mafia Show, According to Morgan Spector of ‘The Gilded Age’

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      The actor, who plays a railroad magnate on HBO’s period drama, is into Russian war novels, “lefty” podcasts and his home gym.Morgan Spector’s character on “The Gilded Age” always seems to have it together, even if, behind the scenes, his business empire is teetering on the brink of collapse.In real life, well — he’s trying.Speaking from his home in Hillsdale, N.Y., where he lives with his wife, the actress Rebecca Hall, he was sleep-deprived because his 7-year-old daughter had been up in the middle of the night. His 1-year-old Rhodesian Ridgeback, Stella, had vomited all over the house. His phone was acting up.“It’s been one of those days,” he said.Spector, 44, has become a fan favorite for his scene-stealing turn as the railroad magnate George Russell on HBO’s period drama about what happens when old money meets new money. His character has a crisis of confidence this season, as he allows himself to be swept along by a marriage plot hatched by his wife, Bertha (Carrie Coon), involving their daughter, Gladys (Taissa Farmiga), and the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Lamb) — a man George knows she doesn’t love.“It causes him to have a kind of existential reckoning,” Spector said. “Because despite all the sort of horrible robber baron-y things he does, he thinks of himself as someone with a moral code, particularly with regard to his family.”He shared his 10 cultural essentials, including the book that “made his entire personality” and the magazine he reads cover to cover. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.MomMy wife and I are both relatively busy working actors, which means our lives are logistically chaotic. That would make it extremely challenging to provide a grounded, consistent experience of childhood for my daughter, were it not for my mom. She jumped on board our crazy train early on and, as a result, it all functions pretty seamlessly.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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      Mark Snow, Who Conjured the ‘X-Files’ Theme, Is Dead at 78

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      It took a misplaced elbow, a quirk of Los Angeles geography and some whistling from his wife to produce one of television’s most memorable melodies.Mark Snow, a Juilliard-trained soundtrack composer who earned 15 Emmy Award nominations, including one for his eerily astral opening theme to “The X-Files,” a 1990s answer to the timeless “Twilight Zone” theme and the basis of a surprising dance hit in Europe, died on July 4 at his home in Washington, Conn. He was 78.The cause was myelodysplastic syndrome, a rare form of blood cancer, his son-in-law Peter Ferland said.Over an extraordinarily prolific five-decade career, during which he tallied more than 250 film and television credits, Mr. Snow excelled in a field that comes with built-in creative challenges.“Some producers describe their musical idea as ‘fast but slow,’” he said in a 2000 interview with Film & Video magazine. “The director might say he wants to hear music that’s ‘blue with a hint of green.’ Now, no one really knows what those terms mean. That’s a big part of my job, interpreting the search for a project’s musical voice.”Mr. Snow provided music for 90 episodes of “Hart to Hart,” which starred Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers as a jet-setting couple who double as amateur sleuths, and 40 episodes of “Falcon Crest,” the 1980s prime-time soap opera.Mr. Snow provided music for 90 episodes of the Robert Wagner series “Hart to Hart.”Columbia Pictures , via Everett CollectionHis many other credits included “Starsky & Hutch,” with David Soul (left) and Paul Michael Glaser.via Everett CollectionWe 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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      Was Murderbot Smiling in the Finale? Only the Creators Know for Sure.

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      This interview includes spoilers for the Season 1 finale of “Murderbot.”On the surface, Chris and Paul Weitz were in unfamiliar territory when they set about creating “Murderbot,” the darkly comic Apple TV+ series, which just wrapped its first season on Friday. After all, they hadn’t adapted a science-fiction story together before.But as the Weitz brothers noted in a joint video call last month, the cynical, soap-opera-obsessed cyborg at that show’s center (Alexander Skarsgard) isn’t entirely dissimilar from the carefree, selfish cad played by Hugh Grant in their 2002 film “About a Boy,” which they directed and co-wrote (with Peter Hedges).Like that man, the cyborg of “Murderbot” is inconvenienced by some of the messier aspects of human existence — particularly emotions. And like him, it must learn to resemble a responsible, loving human being.“Hugh Grant’s character was essentially self-medicating with television and didn’t really want to deal with people, and was kind of forced to by a hippie mom and her son,” Chris said. The title character — Murderbot is a name the cyborg privately gives itself — finds itself in a similar dynamic after it is hired to protect a motley group of scientists on an expedition to survey a distant planet.In “Murderbot,” Noma Dumezweni plays the leader of a freethinking group of scientists and Alexander Skarsgard plays the freethinking deadly cyborg charged with protecting them.Apple TV+“I think there’s a theme in both our work of people who aren’t actually equipped to provide emotional support for other people but who nonetheless figure out a way to do so,” Paul said — even if, strictly speaking, the cyborg’s pronouns are it/its.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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      ‘Rage’ Is a Wild Spanish Dramedy About Women Who Are Pushed Too Far

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      The behaviors are extreme and exciting, but the show itself isn’t bleak. It is bright and funny, colorful and surprising.The Spanish dramedy “Rage” (in Spanish, with subtitles), debuting on Friday night at 8 on HBO Latino, is a distinctive anthology of female anger. Each episode includes a true plate-smashing meltdown, the culmination of decades of frustration and neglect. People rip cabinets off the wall, light fires, destroy entire kitchens. And while the show has an amped-up soapy lilt, all the indignation is grounded in real despair and grief.The stories connect and coincide; some of the women are neighbors, or catch glimpses of each other on television. Some of the women are rich and impulsive while others scrounge for each rent check, but disappointment knows no tax bracket. A prized pig wanders through the chapters connecting the arcs, too.Marga (Carmen Machi) is a visual artist and hobbyist markswoman whose slick husband is sleeping with their housekeeper, Tina (Claudia Salas). Tina’s mom, Adela (Nathalie Poza), struggles to make ends meet while taking care of her own ailing mother. Nat (Candela Peña), prim and stylish, loves her job at a high-end department store … until she is forced out by a blasé boss who prefers to hire less-qualified Instagram influencers.Vera (Pilar Castro), a celebrity chef, vents to her pal Marga about how hopeless she feels, how sinister the world seems to her. But it isn’t just perception, it is also projection: She winds up torturing a journalist who antagonizes her. “We’re all just selfishness, meanness and madness,” she tells him while he’s tied to a table.When Victoria (Cecilia Roth) realizes the award she is getting is sponsorship nonsense and not a belated recognition of her work, the humiliation overwhelms her, and we watch this tidal wave of self-recrimination crash on shore. Have I been a fool this whole time? How much of my life have I wasted operating under these misapprehensions about myself, about the world?Everything on “Rage” escalates, quickly, and the behaviors are extreme — and exciting. While the characters are motivated by pain, the show itself is bright and funny, colorful and surprising. Two episodes air on Friday and the remaining six air weekly after that. More

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      Meet the French Game Show Contestant Who Won 646 Times in a Row (and 23 Cars)

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      He also won TVs, musical instruments, a parachuting session, makeup, household appliances and much, much more. “It’s a lot,” he acknowledged.Much feels in flux in France these days. Will yo-yoing tariffs hit businesses? Is Perrier really that natural? And don’t even get started on the volatile summer heat.But for the past 21 months, fans of a popular French game show have lived by a simple, ironclad certainty. Tune in at noon on any given day, and without fail, there he was: a soft-spoken young man named Émilien, with wiry round glasses and an astonishing depth of trivia knowledge.Just as reliably, Émilien beat the other contestants. Again, and again, and again.Although he has declined to reveal his last name for privacy reasons, Émilien is now a celebrity of sorts in France for his record-breaking winning streak on a show called “Les Douze Coups de Midi,” or “The Twelve Strokes of Noon.” Starting on Sept. 25, 2023, he competed 647 times and netted 2.56 million euros, about $3 million, in cash and prizes.But it came to an end on Sunday, when a single defeat ended his reign.Émilien, now 22, is as incredulous as the rest of us that he got that far.“It’s a crazy story,” he said by phone this week. “I never expected it to last that long.”Broadcast on the TF1 television network, each day’s show has four contestants compete in a series of trivia quizzes. The winner — le Maître de Midi, or Master of Noon — defends that title the next day.“My goal was always the same,” Émilien said. “Every day, from the first to the 647th, to still be there at the end of the show, to do my best and come back the next day.”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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      Ronny Chieng Ponders Iran’s Threat to Kill a Sunbathing Trump

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      The “Daily Show” host called the threat “an attack on all of America, because now we all have to picture him with his bare belly glistening in the sun.”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.Navel GrazingA senior adviser to Iran’s supreme leader issued an assassination threat against President Trump on Wednesday, remarking that Trump should be careful while sunbathing at Mar-a-Lago, because a small drone might hit him in the navel.Ronny Chieng called the threat “an attack on all of America, because now we all have to picture him with his bare belly glistening in the sun.”“Is this really a threat, though? What, you’re going to hit his navel with a small drone? Like, Iran went from building a nuclear bomb to ‘We’re going to turn his outie into an innie.’” — RONNY CHIENG“Are they threatening to assassinate him or poke him like he’s the Pillsbury Doughboy?” — RONNY CHIENG“Also, Iran, are you the only people in the world that can’t tell Donald Trump uses spray tan? He’s not in the sun, OK? Are you looking at pictures of him, like, ‘Damn, this guy must have spent all week at the beach.’?” — RONNY CHIENG“Wow, I didn’t think a threat like that would unlock his core childhood memories. Maybe keep asking him about this stuff. Like, he might have an emotional breakthrough: ‘Yeah, last time I sunbathed was when I was 7, and my mom said she didn’t love me. And I forgive her. Oh, my God, I’m healed! Let the immigrants stay!’” — RONNY CHIENG, riffing on Trump’s responding to a question about the threat by recalling that he last sunbathed around age 7The Punchiest Punchlines (Back to Biden Edition)“Joe Biden’s former doctor refused to answer a single question about the ex-president’s poor health. Wow, he seems like the perfect doctor to treat my secret warts.” — GREG GUTFELD“Yep, he pled the Fifth to all questions, claiming doctor-patient privilege, which I get. It’s the only thing stopping my doctor from telling the world about my birthmark that looks like Brit Hume.” — GREG GUTFELD“When asked about Biden’s decline, he simply referred them to the coroner’s report.” — GREG GUTFELDThe Bits Worth WatchingAnthony Anderson’s mother celebrated her 72nd birthday in style during her son’s last night as guest host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This Out“Self-Portrait” by Beauford Delaney. In a 1964 self-portrait, the artist renders himself as a coloring book come to life. Estate of Beauford Delaney and Derek L. Spratley; Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLCA new exhibition of Beauford Delaney’s work on paper showcases the paradox at the heart of his art. More

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      ‘And Just Like That …’ Season 3, Episode 7 Recap: Double Standards

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      Guiseppe’s mother has opinions about her son’s new relationship with Anthony. Carrie gets defensive about seeming to flirt with her neighbor.Season 3, Episode 7: ‘They Wanna Have Fun’The woman wondered if she should have invited him to the party.In this scenario, that woman is me, and the man in question is Aidan. Why, pray tell, did Carrie not invite him to “their” house for Charlotte’s birthday party? Last we left our lovers, Carrie had agreed not to return to Virginia, but Aidan was still free to come to New York. (I can’t believe I just typed that sentence as if this were a normal relationship dynamic, but here we are.)Perhaps Carrie was more interested in inviting Duncan, her downstairs neighbor, to the soiree instead of her “boyfriend” (still using quotes!). If Aidan isn’t there, she is free to flirt with Duncan. And she does. But more on that in a bit.The big birthday party that is the center of this week’s episode is really just a ruse to get Charlotte to have a little fun and forget, at least for a night, about Harry’s prostate cancer — which, at this point, no one else knows about but Carrie. After a lunchtime chat in which Charlotte alludes to having a lot on her plate, and a subsequent near-slip of the secret by Carrie, Miranda gets suspicious. So Carrie tells Miranda she wants to throw a big shindig for Charlotte because her dog, Richard Burton, is terminally ill.Miranda — now a huge dog person, apparently, after the introduction of Sappho and Socrates into her life — is simply heartbroken for Charlotte, and goes wild with the party planning. Decked in a silver jumpsuit and toting pink confetti balloons and a karaoke machine no one asked for, Miranda shows up to Carrie’s house ready to party like it’s 1999. To borrow a phrase from O.G. Carrie, I couldn’t help but wonder, how much more over the top would Miranda’s party favors have been if she knew it was Harry who had cancer?By the end of the episode, though, she does. Rumors begin flying among party guests until Harry can’t take it, and he summons Carrie, Miranda and Lisa into a back room to confess his diagnosis. (Yes, Carrie already knows, Charlotte admits to Harry; but Harry told his personal shopper! He has no room to be mad!)Ultimately, Charlotte says, this is the best birthday gift Harry could have given her. That, and the public admission that asking her to keep the secret in the first place was wildly unfair. Because it was.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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      James Carter Cathcart, Voice Behind Memorable ‘Pokémon’ Characters, Dies at 71

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      Mr. Cathcart was known for playing the characters Professor Oak and Meowth in the long-running franchise. He also made appearances in other popular animated series such as “Yu-Gi-Oh!” and “One Piece.”James Carter Cathcart, a voice actor who portrayed some of the most indelible characters in the “Pokémon” franchise and became a familiar presence in several other popular animated series, died on Tuesday. He was 71.His wife, Martha Jacobi, confirmed in a social media post that he died at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. His ex-wife, Jeanne Gari, said in an interview that the cause of his death was throat cancer.For more than two decades, Mr. Cathcart was the voice of several popular characters in the “Pokémon” series and movies, including the genial Professor Oak, his grandson Gary, the antagonizing James and the wisecracking feline creature Meowth, one of the few Pokémon who could speak.Mr. Cathcart joined the cast of “Pokémon” in 1998, just as the franchise exploded into a global craze. While many of the characters cycled in and out through the series’s more than 1,000 episodes, his voice remained a steady presence.Mr. Cathcart also had roles in an array of other anime series, video games and animated shows, including “Yu-Gi-Oh!,” “One Piece” and “Shadow the Hedgehog.” He retired from voice acting in 2023 after he was diagnosed with cancer. Mr. Cathcart appeared in more than 100 roles, according to the entertainment database IMDb, but his work in “Pokémon” is his best known.The voice actors who also had roles in the “Pokémon” universe acknowledged his death on social media. Erica Schroeder, who played Nurse Joy and the creature Wobbuffet, said: “The community will miss you. The world will miss you.”James Carter Cathcart was born on Jan. 4, 1954, in West Long Branch, N.J., and graduated from Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan.He is survived by Ms. Jacobi; his daughters Nicole Zoppi, 41, and Mackenzie, 30; and his son, Carter, 31.Mr. Cathcart said in an interview in 2017 that he was grateful the “Pokémon” franchise had continued to thrive and that he wanted to keep voicing the characters for as long as he could.“Who could imagine 20 years ago that we would still be doing the show and it would be doing so well, but there’s a new generation of kids that loves the Pokémon?” Mr. Cathcart said.Sheelagh McNeill More