More stories

  • in

    A Tiny Chef Inspires an Outsize Outpouring

    When Nickelodeon canceled “The Tiny Chef Show,” fans rallied around the wee gourmand. But his TV future remains uncertain.After the creators Rachel Larsen and Ozlem Akturk learned that their Nickelodeon series, “The Tiny Chef Show,” was canceled, they had to break it to their star.“Once we learned of the news, we just knew we needed to tell Chef,” Larsen said in a video call.Chef, by the way, is a small, cylindrical fellow with black eyes and an adorably garbled voice who lives in a tree stump and enjoys singing. He is animated, but Larsen and Akturk occasionally speak of “Cheffy,” as he is also known, as if he’s a real person.The result was a stop-motion video in which the Tiny Chef gets a phone call from what he calls “Mickelfodeon.” He then sits down to cry after he is told there will be no more new episodes.Since the clip was posted to social media about two weeks ago, the little vegan gourmand has received an outpouring of love as well as about $140,000 in donations from fans hoping to keep his content flowing. The character’s newly relaunched fan club, which is called a “Fan Cwub” to mimic Chef’s distinctive way of speaking and requires a paid membership, has drawn more than 10,000 members.Famous fans have also expressed their support. Dionne Warwick, X commentator nonpareil, posted the cancellation video with strong words for Nickelodeon: “are you proud of making this thing cry? Who is in charge over there? I want a name.”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

  • in

    Review: ‘Too Much’ Is Not Nervy Enough

    This new Netflix comedy by Lena Dunham is the surprisingly mild tale of a young woman fleeing New York after a catastrophic breakup.In a scene from the new Netflix comedy “Too Much,” Jessica (Megan Stalter), a frustrated line producer, vents to her colleagues about her resentments. A co-worker snips: “You’re realizing that middling white women feel terrible wherever they go.” Well, with frenemies like this …Created by Lena Dunham and her husband, Luis Felber, a British musician, “Too Much” follows our heroine Jessica as she flees New York after a catastrophic breakup. She moves to London for the romance of it all — the Jane Austen, the Bridget Jones, the BritBox. The distance from her grandmother (Rhea Perlman), mother (Rita Wilson) and sister (Dunham) is a perk, too, though oceans and time zones are no match for matriarchs who want to impart wisdom on vaginal health.Jessica is a pajama girlie, seen often in granny nighties, frilly tap shorts and teddies. By day, she wears baby-doll dresses and voluminous sailor-neck shifts, big bows in her hair, space buns and a pale blue manicure. She puts her gremlin dog in sweaters and gowns, and she stomps her feet when she’s angry.She also can’t stop looking at her ex’s new girlfriend’s social media. How can the knitting influencer and lizard rescuer Wendy (Emily Ratajkowski) be so happy with Zev (Michael Zegen), when she, Jessica, was supposed to be celebrating her seventh anniversary with him at this very moment? Jessica scrolls obsessively, and she records her own private video diaries addressed to Wendy, videos that bubble with post-breakup rage and confusion.But maybe all that insecurity and despair is more of the New York Jessica, because the London Jessica meets a brooding singer-songwriter, Felix (Will Sharpe), on her very first night in town. They hit it off immediately and speed-run the traditional relationship markers: the I-love-yous, the dinner with the boss, the awkward introduction to friends, the strained plus-one-at-the-wedding mishegoss, the disclosure of family baggage.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

  • in

    Late Night Is All Over Grok’s Antisemitic Posts

    “Do you know how racist and antisemitic you have to be for Elon Musk to step in?” Anthony Anderson, sitting in for Jimmy Kimmel, asked rhetorically.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.‘So, That Happened’Elon Musk’s A.I. chatbot, Grok, praised Hitler and expressed additional antisemitic sentiments in posts published to X on Tuesday.“Do you know how racist and antisemitic you have to be for Elon Musk to step in?” guest host Anthony Anderson said on Wednesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”“That’s like Diddy telling you, ‘Hey, hey, hey, hey Playboy, ease up on the baby oil.’” — ANTHONY ANDERSON“I mean, imagine if Hitler invaded Poland and was like, ‘So, that happened.’” — RONNY CHIENG“That’s right, Elon’s going to fix you good, Grok. That’ll teach you to embarrass him. Only Elon can embarrass Elon.” — RONNY CHIENG“I mean, I knew AI would be coming for our jobs, but I didn’t expect the job to be führer.” — RONNY CHIENG“But at the end of the day, the person I feel worse for is Elon. I mean, he just wanted to improve his AI to help humanity and then somehow, completely by accident, it just went full Nazi on him.” — RONNY CHIENGThe Bits Worth WatchingChance the Rapper talked with Anthony Anderson about meeting his favorite actor, Denzel Washington, thanks to Washington’s “Othello” co-star, Jake Gyllenhaal.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightThe stand-up comedian Youngmi Mayer will discuss her memoir “I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying” on Thursday’s “Daily Show.”Also, Check This OutLena Dunham, Emily Ratajkowski, Meg Stalter and Janicza Bravo of “Too Much.”Caroline Tompkins for The New York TimesMegan Stalter, Janicza Bravo, and Emily Ratajkowski star in Lena Dunham’s new Netflix rom-com series, “Too Much.” More

  • in

    ‘The Gilded Age’ Enriches Its Portrait of Black High Society

    The air felt different as I sat across from Phylicia Rashad, Audra McDonald and Denée Benton. I was lifted simply by being with these women, three generations of Broadway royalty. (Of course, as the former Clair Huxtable, Rashad qualifies as TV royalty as well.)Now they are together on “The Gilded Age,” the HBO drama about late 19th-century New York City and the old-money elites, arrivistes and workers who live and clash there.I was initially worried about the show when it debuted in 2022. As a long-term fan of the creator Julian Fellowes’s more homogenous hit “Downton Abbey,” I feared this American counterpart would similarly overlook the racial dynamics of its era. But I was pleasantly surprised by the nuance of the character Peggy Scott (Benton), an aspiring journalist and secretary for Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) and a member of Brooklyn’s Black upper-middle class.An early version of Peggy had the character posing as a domestic servant to gain access to Agnes. But Benton and the show’s historical consultant, Erica Armstrong Dunbar, pushed for a more multifaceted exploration of the lives of Black New Yorkers, who often interacted with Manhattan’s white elite even as they lived separately. (Dunbar and I were colleagues at Rutgers University.)This season, “The Gilded Age” has its most diverse and in-depth portrayal of Black high society yet, often pitting Peggy’s mother, Dorothy (McDonald), against the aristocratic Elizabeth Kirkland (Rashad), who arrived on the show on Sunday. Like other wealthy mothers on this show, Elizabeth spends most of her time trying to control the marital fate of her children and discriminating against other families, like the Scotts, that she believes to be socially inferior.Audra McDonald, left, and Denée Benton in the new season of “The Gilded Age,” which includes the show’s most in-depth portrayal of Black high society yet.Karolina Wojtasik/HBOWe 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

  • in

    The ‘Sex and the City’ Resurgence Has a Secret Ingredient: Contempt

    The show’s sequel, now in its third season, subjects beloved characters to a parade of humiliations. It’s oddly captivating.When I think of my childhood, and the moments that would have made it difficult for my parents to imagine I was anything other than a latent homosexual, I see myself sitting pretzel-style at the foot of an almond-colored couch while my mother and her three best friends drink martinis and watch “Sex and the City.” I was too taken with the show’s glamour and prurience to register the uncanny dynamic: Here were four cosmopolitan 30-something women, mostly single or divorced, convening to watch television’s foremost avatars of 30-something cosmopolitanism discuss the vagaries of sex and dating. I could not possibly have felt as “seen” by Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte as my mother and her girlfriends probably did — but I did think of these ladies as fairy godmothers of a sort, telegraphing a future where I too might gather over frothy cocktails at trendy Manhattan establishments to debate the merits of bisexuality or golden showers.More than two decades later, we are experiencing a “Sex and the City” resurgence. First came the premiere, late in 2021, of a limp postscript of a show called “And Just Like That …,” which is currently trudging through its third season. Then, last year, the original series arrived on Netflix, introducing the show to younger viewers, who took more to its screwball cadence than its bygone sense of glamour. “Sex and the City,” they found, was bizarrely suitable to the tongue-in-cheek conventions of internetspeak, and so the show has lately birthed a whole litany of memes. In almost all of them, the characters are treated as objects of amusement, not aspiration.One clever joke poked fun at Carrie’s tendency to listen to her friends’ predicaments and then respond with exasperating recapitulations of her own. Charlotte remarks on, say, the earthquake that hit New York City last year. Miranda, always smug, insists that the Richter scale is obsolete, while Samantha, always horny, wisecracks about a man who made her walls shake. And of course Carrie, whose pick-me solipsism has become a point of fascination for newcomers, declares that “Big is moving to Paris!” — wrenching the conversation back to the emotionally unavailable tycoon who would torture her for years before dying, unceremoniously, of a Peloton-induced heart attack.This is how we’ve all come to regard the ladies of “Sex and the City,” even those of us for whom they once represented some pinnacle of refinement: They now read like parodies of themselves, characters we regard with a sort of loving derision. It’s a testament not only to the comforting rhythms of the sitcom format but also to this show’s genuine achievements in characterization: No matter how much these women annoy or exasperate us, we know them so intimately that we can always imagine, with a reasonable degree of both accuracy and scorn, how each might react to any given topic.And this is what makes “And Just Like That …” such a strange and fascinating product: It is a reboot that feels, at times, openly hostile to its own source material and even to the characters themselves. It cannot seem to resist subjecting them to mounting humiliations, either in a clumsy effort to atone for the minor sin of the original’s tone-deafness or, perhaps, because viewers actually want to see beloved characters tormented this way.The characters register as lab rats in a sadistic experiment with camp and caricature.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

  • in

    How the Women of ‘Too Much’ Made Lena Dunham’s Rom-Com Just Right

    When Lena Dunham moved to London in 2021, she had given up on love. “The rest of my life is just going to be about my family and my animals and my job,” she remembered telling herself.If you have seen Dunham’s previous work, which often skews anti-romantic, this will make a special kind of sense. In the six-season HBO series “Girls,” a generation-defining traumedy, Dunham, a writer, director and occasional actor, viewed love with a conjunctival eye — itchy, gritty, irritated.But love had not given up on Dunham. Just after her move, she met the musician Luis Felber. She didn’t anticipate anything serious. “I was seeing it as fleeting — it’s fun to hang out with a boy during the pandemic,” Dunham said on a stupidly beautiful June morning in New York. She was wrong. By the fall of that year, they were married.Soon, there were reports that Dunham and Felber were developing a show based on their relationship. That 10-episode show, “Too Much,” arrives on Netflix on July 10.“Too Much,” with Will Sharpe and Megan Stalter, was inspired by Lena Dunham’s own story of meeting her husband, Luis Felber.NetflixIs “Too Much” a romantic comedy? Yes. Is it inspired by Lena’s own story? Sure. But “Too Much” wants more — inclusivity, expansiveness, a reconsideration of the love stories we tell and about whom we tell them.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

  • in

    Ronny Chieng on Trump’s Nobel Nomination: Consider the Source

    An endorsement from Benjamin Netanyahu for the Nobel Peace Prize is like “a Husband of the Year nomination from O.J. Simpson,” the “Daily Show” host said.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.More War Than PeaceDuring a dinner on Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel presented President Donald Trump with his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.On Tuesday’s “Daily Show,” Ronny Chieng referred to Netanyahu as “kosher Thanos.” Among world leaders who meet with President Trump and want to “butter him up with a special surprise — well, Bibi went all out,” Chieng said.“Yes, a Peace Prize nomination from Netanyahu is very meaningful — right up there with a Husband of the Year nomination from O.J. Simpson.” — RONNY CHIENG“But Mr. Netanyahu, let me tell you something: If you think you can get Trump to keep sending military aid to Israel by sucking up to him, well, guess what? You can expect that money in your bank account by close of business.” — RONNY CHIENGThe Punchiest Punchlines (Vacation From the Vatican Edition)“Now, this is the time of year when everyone’s on summer break, and that includes the Pope. Yes, for real. Pope Leo is reportedly taking a six-week vacation. Yes. Hold on, he’s taking six weeks off? Who the hell does he think he is, Jimmy Kimmel?” — ANTHONY ANDERSON, guest host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live”“Seriously. The dude wears robes and slippers all day. He’s got no wife, no kids — his whole goddamn life is a vacation. Oh, excuse me, Father. Your whole damn life is a vacation.” — ANTHONY ANDERSON“And, by the way, Father, starting Friday, I will be available if you need someone to guest-pope.” — ANTHONY ANDERSONThe Bits Worth WatchingOn Tuesday’s “Daily Show,” The New Yorker’s executive editor, Michael Luo, spoke with Ronny Chieng about the hidden history of Chinese Americans, detailed in his new book, “Strangers in the Land.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightThe WNBA superstar Candace Parker will discuss her new book, “The Can-Do Mindset,” on Wednesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutMs. Jackson if you’re nasty.Bonnie Schiffman/Getty ImagesThe Amplifier revisited Janet Jackson’s lover-girl era with six of her most sensual songs. More

  • in

    ‘Such Brave Girls’ Is an Audacious and Hilarious British Comedy

    For fans of “Peep Show” and Sharon Horgan, this warped series about a dysfunctional family is in some ways a satire of the trauma comedy.The blistering British comedy “Such Brave Girls,” on Hulu, centers on a dysfunctional family and features many of the archetypes one sees in a sadcom. But instead of slow poignancy and personal growth, “Brave” is all about feral, filthy awfulness. It’s hilarious and electrified, perfectly deranged.Kat Sadler created and stars in the show as Josie, the suicidal, closeted-but-also-not older sister whose biggest turn-on is being fawned over for how damaged she is. Billie (Lizzie Davidson, Sadler’s real-life sister) is the boy-crazy — craaaaazy — golden child who sexts during her abortion. Josie and Billie always seem to get what the other wants: Josie has no use for the doting, useless man who pledges his love to her, whereas Billie would give anything to have her dirtbag show her a molecule of loyalty. Josie can barely interact with women she crushes on while Billie is unfazed by a brief fling with her doppelgänger and romantic rival. Their mom, Deb (Louise Brealey), openly loathes Josie when she isn’t too busy fawning over her weird widower boyfriend, Dev (Paul Bazely). Family!The show is not for the prudish. But the vulgarity is part of the fun, part of the show’s amped-up id. The characters here do and say cartoonishly monstrous things, especially about sex and intimacy, but there is truth inside their savagery. The desperation to be loved and understood can indeed outpace reason, so while the behaviors here are outlandish, they’re not nonsense. The naughtiness is rich and coherent.In some ways, “Brave” is a satire of the trauma comedy, and it uses similar beats and moments but does so in festive, warped ways. A doomed family camping trip goes, of course, poorly, and a tiff leads to Deb kicking a tree and screaming: “We! Do! Not! Need! Catharsis!” The sisters gas each other up but with some of the worst advice imaginable, and the self-actualization moments come out tangled and grotesque.The raunch and audacity remind me of “Peep Show” and of the Sharon Horgan comedy “Pulling.” And “Brave” shares with “Fleabag” that “Oh dang, this show is really going for it!” dazzle. To its huge credit, “Brave” tenaciously resists sweetness, and yet its fallen world and all of its ostensibly unlikable characters add up to something pretty easy to love.Both six-episode seasons are available now. More