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      In the Presidential Debate, Kamala Harris Produced the Show She Wanted

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      In Tuesday’s debate, the vice president made herself the studio audience for a cringe comedy starring her opponent.At the ABC presidential debate, Kamala Harris had a programming challenge. Working against an experienced reality-TV professional, a savant of live broadcasts, she had to pull off a successful reboot of Democrats’ least-favorite TV show of the 2024 season: the June debate that saw the self-immolation of President Biden.There were some hurdles. The same rules in place on CNN in June still held. There was no studio audience, and each candidate’s microphone would be turned off when the other was speaking. When Mr. Biden was still running, these guardrails were meant to avoid the dumpster fire of cross-talk and shouting that marked the first 2020 debate. But that would frustrate Ms. Harris’s campaign goal, which was to encourage Mr. Trump to be his own worst enemy.So she, and whoever prepared her for Tuesday’s showdown, did what prime-time producers have done since TV’s early days: They worked within the constraints of the medium to produce the show they wanted.If Mr. Trump could not bluster and shout over her, she would need to get him to melt down on his own time. If he could not stalk her onstage, as he did with Hillary Clinton in 2016, she would have to use the staging and the split-screen to create a dominance contest on her own terms.It began before the first question was asked. Ms. Harris crossed the stage toward Mr. Trump and offered her hand. The handshake was a small exercise of control, designed to be seen by a prime-time audience: She was the active party, initiating the encounter, and he the reactive one, accepting. She introduced herself — “Kamala Harris” — as if to anticipate his habit of mispronouncing her first name. Visually, she made herself the focus of attention, the protagonist of the drama.Then she set about making Mr. Trump into the antagonist she wanted, needling and baiting him, pulling his levers and pushing his buttons.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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      Fashion True Crime Documentaries to Stream

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      Four picks across television, film and podcasting that examine dark stories about some of the most trendy clothing brands.In recent years, several popular apparel brands have made news for troubling reasons. Most often, they have been accused of corporate greed, having predatory practices that exploit young women, and propagating abusive systems at all levels of production, promotion and distribution. These headlines have, in turn, inspired a string of documentaries, docuseries and podcasts.Here are four picks that explore the stories of such companies, all of which have been marred by corrupt leadership or sudden tragedy.Documentary“Brandy Hellville & The Cult of Fast Fashion”Having barely heard of the Brandy Melville brand, I wasn’t particularly eager to watch this documentary that was released in April on Max. But as it turns out, that is kind of the point. This film from director Eva Orner not only is a searing examination of the toxic culture at this Gen Z-targeted, social media-fueled label, but it also manages to expose the many unethical systems endemic to the global fast-fashion industry. Footage from Ghana, where mountains of clothing waste from the United States blanket towns and shorelines, chilled me to the bone.As for Brandy Melville itself — maybe most famous for selling only tiny clothing with disingenuous “one size fits most” labels — the film highlights many of the takeaways from the journalist Kate Taylor’s Business Insider investigation, including scores of allegations of racism and of widespread predatory practices by the brand’s shadowy leaders, Silvio and Stephan Marsan. It all becomes that much more grim with a rape allegation against a manager by an employee.Documentary Series“Victoria’s Secret: Angels and Demons”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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      Late Night Hosts Declare Harris the Winner in the Debate

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      Stephen Colbert said that the vice president needed to “rattle Trump’s cage. And now that it is over, they are still looking for pieces of his cage in low orbit.”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.Best in ShowOn Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump met for their only scheduled debate before the election. Three of the five late-night shows went live after it ended, with Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel and Jon Stewart offering their takes.Colbert said that Harris “came out swinging,” looking to “rattle Trump’s cage.”“And now that it is over, they are still looking for pieces of his cage in low orbit.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Harris got under his skin like she was stuffing in butter and rosemary. It was beautiful. By the end of the debate, the meat was falling off the bone.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Usually when Donald Trump gets a spanking like this from a woman, it’s with a Forbes magazine. Kamala was pushing his buttons like a 12-year-old playing Fortnite.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“He was so nonsensical that she looked at him the way a parent looks at a kid giving a presentation on why they should be allowed to get a pet tiger.” — STEPHEN COLBERTOn “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart called out Trump for his answer to a question about his involvement in the Jan. 6. insurrection.“You spent two months riling up your base that our country had literally been stolen from them through fraudulent means, that you could never even get a whiff of in a court of law, and let — let yourself just abuse them. You pressed on. You abused their trust. You showed up for a speech? You [expletive] tweeted ‘Join me on Jan. 6. It will be wild.’ But suddenly now: ‘I was just a hired magician to do the bar mitzvah! I didn’t do anything. I showed up with a hat and a rabbit and then the whole party went out of control!’” — JON STEWART“And this is it, ladies and gentlemen. I don’t know if this debate is going to change anything. I really don’t. People are awfully set in the manner that they view these proceedings. What I think is a home-run answer for one candidate, someone else views as a dodge or a lie or any of those other things. In some ways, it doesn’t matter what they say anymore, but one thing will always be true, and it is the quality of the former president I respect the least: Whenever he is cornered and forced to face even the smallest of consequences for his own mendacity and scheming, he reverts to the greatest refuge of scoundrels. As Shaggy would say, ‘It wasn’t me!’” — JON STEWART“[imitating Trump] OK, but you can’t believe a thing I say. I’m crazy! Everybody knows that! I’m the Hannibal Lecter whale guy. Immigrants are taking our cats and giving them operations to turn them into dogs and then eating the dogs. Whale!” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Lock Up Your Dogs Edition)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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      SNL’s Cast for the 50th Season Includes Ashley Padilla, Emil Wakim and Jane Wickline

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      Ashley Padilla, Emil Wakim and Jane Wickline will be the show’s new faces in its landmark season.The cast for Season 50 of the NBC sketch comedy series “Saturday Night Live” is in place, with the up-and-coming comedians Ashley Padilla, Emil Wakim and Jane Wickline joining as featured players, the network announced on Tuesday. The new season is scheduled to premiere on Sept. 28.Chloe Troast, who joined “S.N.L.” as a featured player last season, was not asked to return, she said in an Instagram post on Monday.“Unfortunately I was not asked back to ‘S.N.L.’ this season,” Troast wrote. “I wish I was going back to be with all the amazing friends I made there, it truly felt like home. But it wasn’t in the cards.”Padilla, like many “S.N.L.” alumni before her — including Will Ferrell, Maya Rudolph, Kristen Wiig and Phil Hartman — comes from the Los Angeles improv and sketch comedy troupe the Groundlings. She also appeared this year in a final-season episode of HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and in an episode of the NBC revival of “Night Court.”Chloe Troast, pictured playing Mama Cass in 2023, will not be returning to “S.N.L.”Will Heath/NBCWakim, a Lebanese American comedian who grew up mostly in Indiana, made his late-night stand-up debut in 2022 on NBC’s “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” That year, he was named the New Face of Comedy at the Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal and has opened for the comics Roy Wood Jr., Nikki Glaser, Hasan Minhaj and Neal Brennan.Wickline is probably most recognizable from TikTok, where she has nearly a million followers and contributes regularly to “Stapleview,” a live TikTok comedy show.Also returning are the main cast members Michael Che, Mikey Day, Andrew Dismukes, Chloe Fineman, Heidi Gardner, James Austin Johnson, Colin Jost, Ego Nwodim, Sarah Sherman, Kenan Thompson and Bowen Yang. The former featured players Marcello Hernández, Michael Longfellow and Devon Walker — all of whom joined “S.N.L.” for its 48th season — will move up the ranks to the main cast.In August, Punkie Johnson, who had been a part of “S.N.L.” since 2020, confirmed that she would not return for the coming season. Among the characters Johnson played was Vice President Kamala Harris. Maya Rudolph, an “S.N.L.” cast member from 2000 to 2007 who has returned to play Harris 10 times through 2021, seems poised to reprise the role as Harris vies for the White House as the Democratic candidate.Molly Kearney, the show’s first nonbinary cast member, announced in August that they would not be returning after two seasons with the program. “It was such a dream come true,” Kearney wrote in an Instagram post. “So incredibly grateful for this period in my life.” More

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      ‘Emily In Paris’ Goes on a Roman Holiday

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      The frothy Netflix show frustrated Parisians with its portrait of their city. Now its heroine is heading to Rome — and the showrunner doesn’t care if residents there feel the same way.“Emily in Paris,” the hit Netflix series about a young American living a life of romance and luxury in France, has ignited a blaze of indignation since it premiered in late 2020.Emily’s clumsy grasp of the native tongue, brash designer clothes and exaggerated encounters with dashing chefs and flamboyant artists left some Parisians irate and American expatriates embarrassed, even as it became one of Netflix’s most popular comedies.Now in its fourth season — split into two installments, with the second arriving Thursday — the show continues to both charm and vex with its sunny vision of what the French newspaper Liberation has called “Disneyland Paris.”But in the new batch of episodes, Emily (Lily Collins) departs Paris and heads to Rome. Invited by her new Italian love interest Marcello (Eugenio Franceschini), she zooms around on his scooter, offering a picture-postcard view of the Eternal City with stops at touristic hallmarks like the Trevi Fountain, the Colosseum and the Spanish Steps. As he entices Emily to move on to a new European capital, Marcello makes a pitch that doubles as the season’s mandate: “Forget about crepes. We’ll be eating pizza.”Darren Star, the creator and showrunner of “Emily in Paris,” said that Emily “was becoming very comfortable in Paris. I wanted to throw her into some unfamiliar waters.” He added that “we were able to live Emily’s life in Paris, and now we’re going to do the same thing in Rome.”Lily Collins as Emily, exploring her new surroundings.Giulia Parmigiani/NetflixWe 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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      Super Emmy: Is the Time Now Right for This Former Disaster?

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      Fifty years ago, the Emmy Awards implemented a change deemed such a disaster it was quickly eliminated.For the 1974 ceremony, the Television Academy created a “Super Emmy” that pitted winners in the comedy and drama balloting against each other. For example, the “M*A*S*H” star Alan Alda took home two trophies that year: one for best comedy actor and a second in a head-to-head showdown with Telly Savalas, who had already won the drama lead acting award for “Kojak.”The stated goal was to streamline the televised ceremony — the category honors were given out before the telecast and only the Super Emmys were awarded on air. But Alda and his fellow winner Mary Tyler Moore joined critics like John J. O’Connor of The New York Times in panning the stunt, and organizers retreated.Yet a half-century and a reshaped television environment later, the Super Emmy, that strange visitor from the 1970s, might be one of those once-bad ideas whose time has finally come.Not that the Emmys are looking to prolong the show, which will air Sunday on ABC. Unlike the Oscars, TV’s most prestigious award remains pretty rigidly held to its allotted time, so adding a category would likely require pushing another out of the main broadcast.But a Super Emmy would do more than merely add a “Highlander”-style bolt of excitement — “There can be only one!” — to a generally predictable telecast. It would also acknowledge the blurring of lines in TV’s categorical designations, which often makes it hard to differentiate between drama, comedy and limited series.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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      Late Night Observes ‘Debate Night Eve’

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      Jimmy Kimmel predicted Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will face questions “on all the big issues: the economy, immigration, electrocution, sharks.”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.The Night BeforeVice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump will meet for their only scheduled debate on Tuesday night.On Monday, Jimmy Kimmel predicted the candidates will field questions “on all the big issues: the economy, immigration, electrocution, sharks — everything we care about.”“It’s Debate Night Eve, so don’t forget to put out some milk and cookies for Santa and then give him two minutes for a rebuttal.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Of course, both candidates are very busy with last-minute preparations. Right now, Trump is trying to decide which shade of bronzer: jack-o’-lantern orange or burned corn on the cob?” — JIMMY FALLON“How could you possibly prepare to debate Donald Trump? This is a man who, if he doesn’t like the direction a hurricane is going, just draws a new hurricane on the map — you can’t debate that.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Trump, of course, is claiming that the debate is rigged against him, even though it hasn’t happened yet. Over the weekend, he announced that no boxes or artificial lifts will be allowed for Kamala — who is 5-foot-4 — to stand on because he says, ‘It would be a form of cheating, and the Democrats cheat enough.’ That’s right. You know, cheating is only allowed when it comes to wives, taxes and every round of golf that he’s ever played.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“There’s a lot riding on this. If Kamala doesn’t do well, you know, come January, our national bird might be the Kentucky Fried Chicken.” — JIMMY KIMMEL‘An Honor Just to be Nominated’An article in Rolling Stone said that while Trump was president, he tried to persuade Justice Department officials to use campaign finance laws and equal-time broadcast regulations to rule that anti-Trump jokes on late-night shows were illegal. Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel were among those on Trump’s list of targets.“Finally, I made an enemies list!” Colbert said. “I mean, obviously, there’s no guarantee I’ll be arrested, but it’s an honor just to be nominated.”“I’m now imagining me and all the other late-night hosts in prison together like the mobsters in ‘Goodfellas.’ I’m stirring the sauce, Colbert’s slicing the garlic with a razor blade.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“No doubt it’ll all be decided this weekend in Los Angeles — whoever wins the Emmy for best talk show will be sent to a camp: ‘And the gulag goes to …’ So, to my old colleague Jon Stewart, I just want you to know, I voted for you.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“How would this work for Jon Stewart? Would he only go to jail on Mondays?” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Change of Heart Edition)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 Life-Changing Journey of ‘My Brilliant Friend’

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      The four actresses who played Lenù and Lila from adolescence to middle age discuss the end of the HBO series.In the fourth season of “My Brilliant Friend,” premiering Monday on HBO, the childhood friends and fierce rivals Lila and Lenù navigate marriage and divorce, motherhood, loss and middle age.This is the final chapter, catapulting the protagonists from the 1970s to the 21st century against the background of Italy’s upheavals, and is based on “The Story of the Lost Child,” the fourth book in Elena Ferrante’s wildly popular Neapolitan series.Writing in The Times, James Poniewozik called the show “one of the most incisive portraits of a lifelong relationship ever made for TV.” But this final season also ends a production project that started in 2016 and which all of its lead actresses agreed was the most important of their careers.Margherita Mazzucco, 21, played Elena “Lenù” Greco, and Gaia Girace, 20, played Raffaella “Lila” Cerullo, through three seasons — from the characters’ adolescence to their 30s. Neither had acted before they were cast in 2017, but they are both now stopped on the street at home and abroad.For the seasoned actress Irene Maiorino, 39, who plays Lila in Season 4, the show offered a chance to become better known outside Italy. And the already internationally acclaimed Alba Rohrwacher, 45, who narrated the series before being cast as the grown Lenù. Rohrwacher described the role as an “incredible journey” that “can only happen once in a lifetime.”The four women met together for the first time on a recent muggy afternoon in Rome, to discuss passing the baton from one pair of Lenùs and Lilas to the next and whether there were heightened expectations now that Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend” had been named the best book of the 21st century in a recent New York Times survey. (They all laughed: They’d heard.)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