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      ‘Jim Henson Idea Man’ on Disney+ Offers Lessons for Young Artists

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      This Ron Howard documentary doesn’t ignore the Muppet mastermind’s faults, but the tribute has a lot to teach creators everywhere.I don’t need to tell you that Jim Henson’s work is ubiquitous and beloved, foundational to childhood across several generations of “Sesame Street” watchers and stretching far beyond. It’s so important to us that when one of his creations, Elmo, “asked” an innocuous question about people’s mental state on social media this winter, the responses seemed … well, it was a lot.Clearly, his puppets and Muppets and stories and sense of humor do not lose their power with time. But to everyone other than Muppet obsessives, Henson the artist is still a bit shadowy. Good news: Now we have “Jim Henson Idea Man” (on Disney+), a tribute to the artist and a treasure trove of archival footage and interviews about his work and life. Though it borders on hagiography, it’s not blind to Henson’s faults, and it boasts a flair for the unexpected. The film, directed by Ron Howard, starts with Henson and two of his Muppet friends, Fozzie Bear and Kermit the Frog — Henson’s alter ego — being interviewed on TV by none other than Orson Welles. In his sonorous baritone, Welles calls Henson “Rasputin, as an Eagle Scout.” The movie sets out to show what he meant.A few years ago, Marilyn Agrelo’s documentary “Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street” (for rent on major platforms) — also very much worth watching — filled in some of the story, with digressions to illustrate the zany, hilariously violent sense of absurdist humor that Henson brought to his early commercial work. “Jim Henson Idea Man” spends longer in the same territory, while focusing on Henson’s life (he died in 1990 at 53), his creative collaborations (including those with his wife, Jane, and with Frank Oz) and his insatiable need to keep pushing his boundaries.There’s so much to love here: old, gut-splitting commercials; behind-the-scenes footage and stories from “Sesame Street” and “The Muppet Show”; and explorations of “The Dark Crystal,” “Labyrinth” and “The Muppet Movie.” But what struck me especially was that Howard has made a movie that every young artist should watch (and older ones, too), whether they’re making puppets, paintings, music, movies or anything that requires creative labor.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

    • 138 Shares99 Views

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      Carl Radke of “Summer House” on His Broken Engagement and Sobriety

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      From getting sober, grieving the loss of his brother and calling off his engagement, Radke has let viewers in on the most intimate moments of his life.The first time Carl Radke appeared on television screens was during an episode of “Vanderpump Rules” that was actually a backdoor pilot for a new Bravo show, “Summer House.”In the episode, Radke is 29, working in New York City and drinking copiously on the weekends in a Hamptons share house with his friends Kyle Cooke, Lindsay Hubbard and a few others.The spinoff became a Bravo phenomenon all its own, one that has now spanned eight seasons, with Radke one of the few constants as the cast around him changed. Viewers have seen his tumultuous 30s play out onscreen: He has been in messy relationships, confronted his drinking and gotten sober, mourned the death of his brother and, in the Season 8 finale, called off his engagement.Over coffee in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where at 6 feet 5 inches tall Radke was certainly the tallest person in the room, he imagined his life if it hadn’t been spent in front of cameras for the past several years. “I feel like I would probably be married and have a family, but living a very, like, a lower key life,” he said, before going through some of the moments that have defined his time on “Summer House” so far.Radke and Cooke in the early days of “Summer House.” Eugene Gologursky/BravoThe early seasons: drinking, drinking, more drinkingThough many Bravo reality shows involved quite a bit of drinking (look no further than early seasons of “Vanderpump Rules”), Radke, Cooke and Hubbard were known to make others look like lightweights.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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      ‘Hacks’ Showrunners Explain that Final Twist

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      In an interview, Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky discussed the Season 3 finale and if the anything-for-a-laugh ethos is worth it. (Short answer: Yes.)This interview includes spoilers for the season finale of “Hacks.”“Hacks,” the Max comedy about a famous (and somewhat infamous) Boomer comedian and her nervy Gen Z writer, has always stayed on the sunny side of realism. But in the penultimate episode of Season 3, the show moved into pure fantasy: A major network gave its late-night show to a woman, Jean Smart’s Deborah Vance.If that was the culminating event of the season, the finale, titled “Bulletproof,” landed a few more punchlines. After offering Hannah Einbinder’s Ava the head writer slot, Deborah, acting out of fear, walked that offer back. “I cannot give them any excuse,” she said of her network bosses. “This show has to be bulletproof. It has to work. I’ve lost way too much for it not to.”“And you’re OK with losing me, too?” Ava asks.Ava doesn’t stay lost for long. She wriggles back into the writers’ room by blackmailing Deborah over her brief liaison with Tony Goldwyn’s head of network. Which should make for great comedy in the show’s fourth season, announced earlier this week. Because in the world of “Hacks,” hurt people hurt people, and then they write a killer routine about it. “Hacks” insists you can only crack jokes if the world has cracked you first.So can a person with decent values and good boundaries still be funny?“We do our best,” Lucia Aniello, one of the showrunners said during a recent video call.Aniello was joined in the Zoom window by Paul W. Downs, her husband and a fellow showrunner. (They announced their marriage while collecting an Emmy in 2021 for best directing in a comedy series.) Downs also stars as Jimmy, Ava and Deborah’s put-upon manager. In another window was Jen Statsky, the third showrunner. Aniello and Statsky met in a sketch comedy group in 2009; Downs and Aniello met at an improv class that same year. Which is to say that their passion for comedy, with or without trauma, runs long and deep.In an hourlong conversation, they discussed ambition, addiction and whether the anything-for-a-laugh ethos is worth it. (Short answer: Yes.) These are edited excerpts from the 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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      ‘Ren Faire’ Is ‘Succession’ With Turkey Legs

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      An engrossing documentary debuting Sunday on HBO, it chronicles a Renaissance festival impresario’s effort to find a worthy heir.George Coulam, known as King George to his acolytes, in a scene from “Ren Faire.”HBO“Ren Faire,” an engrossing and inventive three-part documentary that debuts on HBO Sunday at 9 p.m., centers on George Coulam, founder of the Texas Renaissance Festival. King George, as everyone calls him, claims he wants to retire; he believes he’ll live for another nine years, and he has a vision for how he wants to spend this remaining time.“I wanna do art and chase ladies,” he says. If only he could find a worthy heir.Coulam comes across as part Logan Roy, part Joe Exotic — cruel, charismatic, driven and able to inspire fealty even as he dispenses bitter nastiness. (He has an assistant maintain his profiles on sugar-daddy websites and asks all dates, within moments of meeting them, if they have breast implants.)People on the show compare him to Willy Wonka and King Lear, and he says he followed Walt Disney’s playbook for land acquisition and political strategy. One employee weeps with glee upon meeting him, and others curtsy when he walks into their office. He’s not a king! you want to shout. He’s just some guy! But I guess someone wants to shout that about every king.George’s ambitious underlings strive for his intermittent approval and prostrate themselves, enduring petty humiliations only to crawl back and beg for more. The most debased and tragic is Jeff, who, with his wife, has worked at the fair for decades. He gets frustrated with her comparative lack of loyalty to the king, even as George pushes them both aside. “Just say that you serve George,” he insists, past the point of banter.Later, as Jeff schemes and stresses, she asks him earnestly, “Is it folly?”“Of course it’s folly!” he bellows, his voice shaking. Usually these kinds of lines are heard only in particularly farcical episodes of “Frasier,” but here they are both laughable and heartbreaking.There’s something ridiculous about renaissance fairs, and so there’s something ridiculous about “Ren Faire,” which blends hallucinatory nightmare sequences and fiery cinematic moments into its nonfiction. Those clever additions echo the agreed-upon dumb fantasy of renaissance fairs: Nay, my lord, this meager pub be all out of Red Bull.Directed by Lance Oppenheim and produced by Benny and Josh Safdie among others, “Ren Faire” depicts and embodies a Möbius strip of truth and grandiosity. The fair really is Jeff’s life’s work, as he says multiple times; it really is George’s gilded isolation chamber; it really is a business and a dream. Things can be silly and true and meaningful at the same time. Huzzah. More

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      Charles Barkley’s Barbs on ‘Inside the NBA’ Infuriate and Fuel Players

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      With the future of “Inside the NBA” in flux, athletes say their respect for Barkley means his unsparing evaluations are a rite of passage.When Charles Barkley, the quippy commentator on TNT’s “Inside the NBA” studio show, grew tired of Draymond Green’s aggressive on-court antics several years ago, he made it exceedingly clear that he wanted to punch Green in the face.Green responded during a postgame news conference by calling Barkley’s bluff, telling the Hall of Fame player known for his rebounding prowess to “shut up.” “No one cares what you would have done,” Green said. “You old, and it is what it is.”Verbal jousting in response to Barkley’s wisecracks has been commonplace during his two-decade tenure on “Inside the NBA,” which is in jeopardy of ending as soon as Thursday night because competing networks are negotiating for the N.B.A.’s media rights.Green, a four-time N.B.A. champion, said in an interview that any wounded feelings spoke to the reverence players have for Barkley and his colleagues, the former players Shaquille O’Neal and Kenny Smith, and the veteran host, Ernie Johnson.“It’s almost like a rite of passage,” Green said of being criticized or praised by basketball heavyweights on national television. “I think N.B.A. players look to that show for validation, and that’s a reason so many guys could get upset when things don’t go their way.”Shaquille O’Neal, Ernie Johnson, Kenny Smith and Barkley on an “Inside the NBA” broadcast in 2013. O’Neal and Barkley are Hall of Fame players.Issac Baldizon/NBAE, via Getty ImagesWe 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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      No Sophomore Slump for ‘We Are Lady Parts’

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      The comedy about a Muslim punk band returns for a raucous encore.For the early punks, many of them white British blokes, their music was about declaring themselves outside the larger society. The Sex Pistols dreamed of “anarchy for the U.K.” The Clash howled for “a riot of my own.” To be punk was to give offense, to make one’s self unpalatable, to choose to stand apart.But what is punk when your society has already made you an outsider? This is the musical question that the raucous, cheeky comedy “We Are Lady Parts,” returning Thursday for its second season on Peacock, seeks to answer.The first season, back in 2021, introduced Lady Parts, a punk band of Muslim women in London: Saira (Sarah Kameela Impey), the caustic lead singer; Ayesha (Juliette Motamed), the fearsome drummer; and Bisma (Faith Omole), the earth-motherly bassist. Together with their manager, Momtaz (Lucie Shorthouse), a savvy Malcolm McLaren in a niqab, they recruit a reluctant lead guitarist, Amina (Anjana Vasan).Amina is no one’s idea of a rock star, least of all her own. She is an introverted microbiologist who worships Don McLean, with a severe case of stage fright that causes her to heave her guts while performing — and not in a defiant, Iggy Pop way. (Vasan gives Amina an engaging nerd-hero energy, similar to Quinta Brunson in “Abbott Elementary.”)Over the six-episode season, Amina finds that Lady Parts gives her a way of defining herself rather than being defined, whether by the conservative suitors who tell her “Music is haram” or by her free-spirited mother (Shobu Kapoor), who wishes Amina would wait to seek a husband.The root conflicts of “We Are Lady Parts” are familiar rock-band woes — having no money, having no gigs, being judged by family and by hipsters. This is where making the series about Muslim women rockers accomplishes more than representational box-ticking: It makes an old story new and nuanced.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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      The Best True Crime to Stream: ‘Dirty John,’ ‘The Puppet Master’ and More

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      Four picks across television, film and podcasting that explore a devastating, yet slippery, type of manipulation.The concept of “coercive control” entered the lexicon about a decade ago and has become an increasingly prevalent theme in the true crime genre. Pioneered by Evan Stark, a researcher and expert on domestic abuse, it refers to a pattern of abusive behavior and manipulation — including isolation, humiliation, financial abuse, stalking and gaslighting — used to dominate a partner. Men are most often, but not always, the abusers.Coercive control “is designed to subjugate and dominate, not merely to hurt,” Stark, who died in April, said in a London court in 2019 while testifying on behalf of a domestic abuse victim who’d murdered her husband. She, appealing her conviction, was subsequently released from prison.Here are four picks across television, film and podcasting that show how this form of psychological abuse, though hard to prove as a crime, ruins lives.Podcast‘Sweet Bobby’Because I’ve watched every episode of the MTV show “Catfish,” I thought that this six-chapter investigative podcast from Tortoise Media, which explores a true story in which coercive control overlaps with catfishing (tricking others, often into a romantic relationship, using fake digital profiles), was unlikely to shock me.But the saga — about Kirat Assi, a woman from London whose life was turned on its head for nearly a decade after she fell for “Bobby” via Facebook — still managed to test my tolerance for how little legal recourse the deceived parties have. The story also speaks to why the damage caused by coercive control and by the proliferation of catfishing should not be minimized.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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      ‘Star Wars: The Acolyte’ Goes Back to the Beginning

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      Her new “Star Wars” show is a dream come true, but she knows it carries enormous expectations. “I would be lying if I said I wasn’t scared,” she said.Leslye Headland has been telling “Star Wars” stories onscreen since she was a teenager. Ostracized at school for being different, she retreated inward, making stop-motion films starring her action figures.So when she found success as an adult in Hollywood — Headland helped create “Russian Doll,” the 2019 Netflix comedy starring Natasha Lyonne — and got the chance to create an actual “Star Wars” show, it was the realization of a lifelong dream.And a chance for humiliating failure. On a galactic scale.“I essentially cold-called Lucasfilm and, after a lot of conversations, found myself pitching a show — utterly elated, my ultimate career goal, the culmination of my fandom,” Headland said. “At the same time, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. There is so much pressure. It’s extreme. I had never done anything this big before.”Headland’s show, “The Acolyte,” will debut on Disney+ on June 4. Costing roughly $180 million (for eight episodes) and taking four years to make, it attempts two feats at once: pleasing old-school “Star Wars” fans — who can seem unpleasable — while telling an entirely new story, one that requires no prior knowledge of “Star Wars” and that showcases women and people of color.For the faithful, “The Acolyte” serves up scads of Jedi, a franchise fundamental that the other live-action “Star Wars” TV shows have depicted sparingly or not at all. The opening scene in “The Acolyte” takes place in an eatery crowded with colorful aliens, a callback to the Mos Eisley cantina from the first “Star Wars” movie, in 1977.Other shout-outs to core fans — we see you, we haven’t forgotten about you — are sprinkled into the dialogue: “May the force be with you” and “I have a bad feeling about this” makes an early appearance.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