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      ‘Queenie’ Is a Fun Coming-of-Age Show

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      This smart and poppy British series melds the good parts of the semi-autobiographical sadcom with more predictable rom-com traditions.“Queenie,” based on the novel by Candice Carty-Williams (who also created and executive produced the show), follows a rough season for a bright, self-destructive 25-year-old Londoner. When we meet Queenie (Dionne Brown), she is at a crummy appointment with a rude gynecologist, the first of many characters we see treat Queenie with casual — and physically painful — disrespect.After a disastrous family dinner, Queenie’s boyfriend dumps her, which sends her into a spiral of booze, sex and lousy decisions. “Abandonment issues,” she cites, and the show slowly explains the exact nature of her estrangement from her mother and her tight but stressful relationship with her Jamaican immigrant grandparents and aunt. Yes, of course there is an episode told in gentle flashback that traces the torch relay of generational trauma. (All eight episodes arrive Friday, on Hulu.)Queenie has grim sex, too-rough sex, anonymous sex, sex with men who are not as single as they claim, and all her encounters leave her feeling worthless. Her girlfriends, in a group chat called “the Corgis,” offer support and sometimes tough love as the screen fills with sleazy messages from white dudes on dating apps. Despite the emphasis on Queenie’s sexual exploits and exploitation, the show is often prim: A car horn bleeps out a naughty word, and even the sex scenes are clothed and rather chaste.A friend — or maybe more than a friend? — tells Queenie that he admires how well she knew herself when they were kids. “I didn’t know who I was then, and I still don’t know now,” she says in voice-over. It’s one of many times the show uses voice-over to state what’s clear from Brown’s luminous performance and from the story in general. Beyond the vestigial interior monologue, other characters on “Queenie” also make the subtext the text. “You are going to have to face up to those demons at some point,” Queenie’s boss warns. Yeah, lady, that’s … that’s the show.The last decade of TV has brought us many messy 20-somethings bottoming out before finding self-actualization through embracing and metabolizing their greatest shame or insecurity. Often those shows are semi-autobiographical sadcoms, and “Queenie” captures the good parts of those shows in its humor and specifics. The show also pulls from rom-com traditions and from sweeter, tidy story styles; while its friction feels raw and authentic, its resolutions feel awfully pat in their sunniness.“Queenie” can feel “young adult” instead of young and adult, but the flip is that the show is never a miserable slog through trauma and degradation. It’s smart, poppy and fun — critical, but not cynical. More

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      ‘Becoming Karl Lagerfeld’ Seeks to Capture the Man Behind the Glasses

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      Set in the 1970s, the series depicts the designer’s personal and professional evolution and revolves around an intense love story.Daniel Brühl had just started shooting the series “Becoming Karl Lagerfeld” in Paris last year, and he could feel the French crew’s eyes on him. The German actor, who was playing the title role, was all nerves. After his first few days on set, he returned to his dressing room to find an enormous bouquet of, as he put it, “the biggest and reddest roses I’ve seen in my life.” There wasn’t any note.When Brühl put the flowers in a vase at home later, however, he spotted a small card tucked among them. “It said ‘For Karlito, from Jacquot,’” he recalled in a video interview. “Nothing else.”He realized the gift was from his co-star Théodore Pellerin, a Canadian actor who portrays Lagerfeld’s great love, Jacques de Bascher; Pellerin had signed the card with their characters’ nicknames. Brühl knew then that he and the series, which revolves around the intense love story between the two men, would be fine.“Becoming Karl Lagerfeld,” which premieres on Friday on Hulu, is set mostly in the 1970s, a decade that was key to Lagerfeld’s development as a fashion designer as well as his personal evolution. It was before he formed his distinctive look of a sharp-angled figure decked out in monochromatic costumes, high collars, black gloves — though the tinted glasses and signature ponytail make their appearance. Like Andy Warhol, another secretive pop-culture icon, Lagerfeld meticulously manufactured his public identity, Brühl said: “So who was the person before he was famous?”Brühl briefly met Lagerfeld, who died in 2019, about 20 years ago on a photo shoot and remembers him as “very charming.” When Brühl had to become the designer, he did a deep dive, reading up, for example, on the many artistic fields Lagerfeld had been interested in: “literature, arts, architecture, design, and fashion, of course,” Brühl said. “I wasn’t bored a single second spending time with Karl Lagerfeld.”Still, there needed to be a way in, and for the creator and showrunner Isaure Pisani-Ferry, it was de Bascher, who was 21 to the designer’s 38 when they met. “It was this moment in the ’70s when he falls in love, which means loss of control — and this is a man who needs to be in control,” Pisani-Ferry said of Lagerfeld in a video conversation.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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      30 Shows to Watch This Summer

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      Returning favorites include “The Bear,” “House of the Dragon” and “Only Murders in the Building.” Among the new arrivals? Jake Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman.It’s dangerous to draw conclusions before all the evidence is in, but a long look at the roster of new and returning series this summer might convince you of the primacy of what my colleague James Poniewozik has identified as “mid TV.” A lot of pleasure, in the form of audience-tested favorites and star-studded new shows. Not a lot of adventure or experimentation or risk.Of course, TV has never had much of those qualities — we’re talking marginal differences here — so don’t feel guilty strapping in for something that sounds comfortable. Here are 30 possibilities over the next three months, in chronological order; all dates are subject to change.‘Presumed Innocent’David E. Kelley’s new adaptation of the Scott Turow legal thriller — following the 1990 film — has an enticing cast: Jake Gyllenhaal as the prosecutor suspected of murder, played originally by Harrison Ford; Ruth Negga and Bill Camp as his wife and his boss; as well as Elizabeth Marvel, Lily Rabe and Peter Sarsgaard. The victim, originally Greta Scacchi, is played by the Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve, star of Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World.” (Apple TV+, Wednesday)‘The Boys’The popular anti-superhero action-fantasy returns; Season 4 reunites the showrunner, Eric Kripke, with one of his “Supernatural” stars, Jeffrey Dean Morgan. (Amazon Prime Video, Thursday)A scene from Season 2 of the “Game of Thrones” prequel, “House of the Dragon.” Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney) is king, but for how long? Ollie Upton/HBO‘House of the Dragon’HBO executives heaved a dragon-sized sigh of relief in 2022 when the network’s “Game of Thrones” prequel was a big success (averaging 29 million viewers across all platforms in its first season). Now they just have to do it again. (HBO, June 16)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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      Erich Anderson, Actor in ‘Friday the 13th’ and ‘Felicity,’ Dies at 67

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      Mr. Anderson had a breakout role in “Friday the 13th” and went on to appear in more than 300 TV episodes, including a recurring role as the father on “Felicity.”Erich Anderson, an actor known for his breakout role in the “Friday the 13th” franchise and recurring appearances on television series like “Felicity” and “Thirtysomething,” died on Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 67.His brother-in-law, Michael O’Malley, said the cause was esophageal cancer.In the late 1980s and ’90s, Mr. Anderson played a recurring love interest on “Thirtysomething,” a drama about a group of friends navigating life and love in Philadelphia;the ex-husband of a detective on “NYPD Blue”; and the father to Keri Russell’s lead role on “Felicity,” a series about an introverted high school student who follows her dream guy to college in New York City.By 2013, he had appeared in roughly 300 episodes of television shows including “Boston Public,” “The X-Files,” “CSI,” “ER,” “7th Heaven,” “Star Trek,” “Monk,” “Tour of Duty” and “Murder, She Wrote.”But it was his first feature film role, in “Friday the 13th: the Final Chapter” — the fourth film in the franchise, which follows the serial killer Jason Voorhees — that stuck with fans throughout his career.When the film was released in 1984, Mr. Anderson thought, “I had a good time and really enjoyed the process and learning about it,” he told a “Friday the 13th” podcast in 2013. “This is out in the world now.”But over the years, especially as he began attending fan conventions, Mr. Anderson came to realize that his role as Rob Dier, who seeks to avenge his sister’s death only to be killed by Jason himself, was “by far the most enduring thing” he had done.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: ‘Fantasmas’ Journeys to the Center of Julio Torres’s Mind

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      In the comic fabulist’s dazzling new HBO series, sketch comedy meets sketch fantasy.The title of Julio Torres’s new HBO series, “Fantasmas,” is a way of giving a name to a thing you can’t see. In an early scene Torres, playing a version of himself, pitches Crayola executives on a crayon for “the color clear,” which he suggests naming after the Spanish word for “ghosts.” The executives hesitate; clear, they say, isn’t a color. “Then what do you call this?” he asks, gesturing at the air. “The space between us. The emotional space, I mean.”The scene is typical Torres, absurd, fantastical, a touch wistful. It also suggests a good way to describe his hard-to-pin down comic sensibility. As the delightful “Fantasmas” reiterates, he’s drawing with crayons that are in nobody else’s box.Over the past several years, Torres has established himself as a premier comic fabulist. In “Los Espookys,” the unjustly short-lived supernatural comedy Torres cocreated for HBO, he imagined a fictional Latin American country where magic-realist mysteries unfolded. In the 2019 special “My Favorite Shapes by Julio Torres,” he imagined stories about a series of objects — cubes, toys, figurines — that rolled past him on a conveyor belt like whimsical sushi.The six-episode “Fantasmas,” which begins on Friday, lies somewhere between those two works structurally while borrowing elements of his earlier work as a writer for “Saturday Night Live.” It’s more digressive than a sitcom, more serial than a sketch comedy. Think of it as a sketch fantasy.“Fantasmas” places his character, Julio, in a stage-set version of New York City located a few parallel universes left of the one we know. In this one, the nightlife includes a club for gay hamsters; an “incorporeal services” company entices customers to “free yourself from the burden of having a body”; and the subway public address system announces that “the next F train will arrive in 178 minutes.” (OK, that one may roughly approximate actual New Yorkers’ experience.)Torres completists will note strong echoes of his recent film, “Problemista,” in which he played an El Salvadoran immigrant in New York scrambling to secure his work visa. The movie even began similarly, with his character pitching eccentric toy ideas to Hasbro, including a Barbie-like doll with her fingers crossed behind her back to create “tension.”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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      Stephen Colbert Calls the Focus on Biden’s Age Old News

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      “You heard that right, ladies and gentlemen: Joe Biden is old,” Colbert said of a Wall Street Journal article on the president’s aptitude.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.Old NewsThe Wall Street Journal published an article about the president this week with the headline: “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.”“You heard that right, ladies and gentlemen: Joe Biden is old,” Stephen Colbert said. “Which, of course, could disqualify him from being president. After all, being old is a felony.”“Pretty sure one of these guys had a bunch of felonies. Oh, it’s the other guy? Thirty-four? And he’s old, too?” — STEPHEN COLBERT“The Wall Street Journal published an article yesterday titled ‘Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.’ Yeah, we know. Sometimes he doesn’t even make it to the door.” — SETH MEYERS“The Wall Street Journal published an article yesterday that claims President Biden appears to be slipping in private meetings. He keeps saying crazy stuff that makes no sense like, ‘a convicted felon is beating me in the polls.’” — SETH MEYERS“This blockbuster lid-blower-offer also included this little nugget explaining that Biden is someone who has both good moments and bad ones, in a clear contrast with his opponent, who only has bad ones.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Still, I am confident that The Wall Street Journal knows ‘Old Man is Old’ is breaking news, but I’m sure they will balance that perspective in their article about their 93-year-old boss Rupert Murdoch’s wedding: ‘Young Buck Ready to [Expletive].’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Boeing in Space Edition)“The first-ever manned flight of the Boeing Starliner spacecraft launched today after multiple delays, with a pair of NASA astronauts onboard. Boeing seems to have trouble getting to Cincinnati. I don’t know, should they be going — should they be heading into space? I don’t know. They put extra duct tape on the doors just to be safe.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“They were aiming for Cleveland, but, still, good for them.” — JIMMY FALLON“Imagine being surrounded by bags of urine and then hearing ‘Don’t worry, there’s a Boeing on the way to help.’” — JIMMY FALLON, on the Starliner delivering a new urine processing pump to the space station to replace a broken one“Seriously, you thought it was rough when you forgot to change the filter on your Brita.” — JIMMY FALLON“I’ll tell you, that definitely isn’t on the list of activities at space camp.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I had no idea being an astronaut was so glamorous.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingThe comedian Joel Kim Booster remembered the first time he met Ronny Chieng on Wednesday’s “Daily Show.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightThe comedian and “Stress Positions” star John Early will appear on Thursday’s “Late Night.”Also, Check This OutJulia Fox.Miguel Medina/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.The actress, writer and New York icon Julia Fox dished on being an “It Girl” for the latest episode of Popcast. More

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      ‘Clipped’ Is a Juicy Sports Docudrama

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      The latest gossipy sports show, it recreates the scandal surrounding Donald Sterling, the former owner of the Los Angeles Clippers who was banned from the N.B.A. for life in 2014.“Clipped,” which begins Tuesday, on Hulu, is the latest gossipy sports docudrama, this time about the scandal surrounding Donald Sterling, the former owner of the Los Angeles Clippers who was banned from the N.B.A. for life in 2014 after recordings of him making racist comments became public. Remember? The lady who wore the face visor?I’m not sure if “Clipped” hopes you know the details of this story or hopes you don’t, but vague familiarity is baked into its very being: The show itself seems familiar because of the glut of sports shows that followed in the documentary and scripted footsteps of “O.J.: Made in America” and “The People v. O.J. Simpson,” and basketball stories in particular had a surge after “The Last Dance,” including the recent, similar “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty.” Sports-related series aside, “Clipped” also resembles fellow mildly prestigious podcast-to-TV shows like “Gaslit” or “The Dropout,” and it has a similar behind-the-headlines premise to “Pam & Tommy.” (“Clipped” is based on the ESPN 30 for 30 podcast “The Sterling Affairs.”)“This story has a girl, a tape, sports, racism, money,” says a crisis public relations manager in Episode 5. “There is something in it for everyone.” Fair enough! “Clipped” does indeed have those things going for it, as well as strong, anchoring performances from Laurence Fishburne as Coach Doc Rivers, Cleopatra Coleman as V. Stiviano, Ed O’Neill as Sterling and Jacki Weaver as Shelly Sterling.At the show’s highs, you can practically hear a coach reminding his players to focus on the fundamentals: voice, stakes, heightening, details. It nails those aspects (and in some cases fingernails them — manicures get a lot of screen time), giving everything an admirable, almost hygienic momentum. The characters here are either smart, savvy, gifted or cruel, and they say what they mean. That’s a rarity in current dramas, lending “Clipped” a refreshing clarity. But it can also ring a little immature, and what the show gains in aerodynamics it loses in nuance and texture.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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      ‘Hitler and the Nazis’ Review: Building a Case for Alarm

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      Joe Berlinger’s six-part documentary for Netflix asks whether we should see our future in Germany’s past.Hitler’s project: “Making Germany great again.” The Nazis’ characterization of criticism from the media: “Fake news.” Hitler’s mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden: “It’s sort of like Hitler’s Mar-a-Lago, if you will.”Donald Trump’s name is not mentioned in the six episodes of “Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial,” a new historical documentary series on Netflix. But it dances just beneath the surface, and occasionally, as in the examples above, the production’s cadre of scholars, popular historians and biographers can barely stop themselves from giving the game away.The series was directed by the veteran documentarian Joe Berlinger (“Paradise Lost,” “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster”), who has a production deal with Netflix and has given it popular true-crime shows like “Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich” and the “Conversations With a Killer” series.In promotional material, Berlinger explains his decision to step up from true crime to total war and genocide: “This is the right time to retell this story for a younger generation as a cautionary tale,” he says, adding, “In America, we are in the midst of our own reckoning with democracy, with authoritarianism knocking at the door and a rise in antisemitism.” In other words, you can’t make a documentary about Germany in the 1930s and ’40s without holding the United States of the 2010s and ’20s in your mind.To that end, Berlinger has made a deluxe version of the sort of history of Hitler, the Third Reich and the Holocaust that for years has been a staple of American cable television. The information is not new, but the resources available to Berlinger are reflected in the abundance of material he deploys across nearly six and a half hours: archival film, most of it meticulously colorized for the series, and audio; staged recreations with a sprawling cast of actors; and the copious roster of interviewees.A new telling of an old story requires a twist, of course, and Berlinger has several. The American journalist William L. Shirer serves as the series’s unofficial narrator, despite having died in 1993 — an A.I. recreation of his voice recites passages from his many books about the period, and occasionally his actual voice is heard in excerpts from radio broadcasts. He is also represented onscreen by an actor in scenes recreating the series’s other primary framing device, the first Nuremberg trials in 1945.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