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      in Theater

      Samm-Art Williams, Playwright, Producer and Actor, Dies at 78

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      He challenged racial barriers in Hollywood, was a producer of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and earned a Tony nomination for “Home,” a paean to his Southern roots.Samm-Art Williams, who made his mark in several fields — as an executive producer of the sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” as an actor on both stage and screen and as a Tony-nominated playwright for “Home,” died on Monday in Burgaw, N.C. He was 78.His death was confirmed by his cousin Carol Brown. She did not cite a cause.An imposing 6-foot-8 (a lefty, he once served as a sparring partner to Muhammad Ali), Mr. Williams appeared in films including Brian De Palma’s Hitchcock homage, “Dressed to Kill” (1980), and the Coen brothers’ neo-noir, “Blood Simple” (1984). He had a memorable turn as Jim in the 1986 adaptation of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” part of PBS’s “American Playhouse” series.Mr. Williams as Jim with Patrick Day in the 1986 television version of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”Everett CollectionCommitted to expanding the Black presence in Hollywood, he was both a writer and an executive producer on “Fresh Prince,” the hit 1990s NBC comedy starring Will Smith as a street-smart teenager from West Philadelphia who moves in with his aunt and uncle in the moneyed hills of Los Angeles.He also served as a writer and a producer on the television shows “Martin” and “Frank’s Place.” He was nominated for two Emmy Awards — for his work as a writer on “Motown Returns to the Apollo” in 1985 and a producer of “Frank’s Place” in 1988.Raised in Burgaw, a former railroad town north of Wilmington, N.C., he moved to New York in 1973 to pursue a career in acting. It was his wistfulness for his small Southern hometown that inspired “Home,” a production of the celebrated Negro Ensemble Company that opened at the St. Marks Playhouse in Manhattan six years later before moving to Broadway.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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      in Television

      ‘Past Lies’ on Hulu Is a Swirly Spanish Mystery

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      The drama is the latest mystery about a group of now-grown women haunted by their teenage pasts.Elena Anaya, left, and Itziar Atienza star in the Spanish drama “Past Lies.”HuluGather ’round, old friends, for it is time to recall the big, terrible event of that night long ago — that night when we swore a solemn oath to bury this secret, and yet now, somehow, perhaps 20 full years later, the horror of it still affects us all! Why must every group have a prodigal troublemaker whose return dredges up these old memories? Can we not leave the past in the past? Maybe our recollections differ — we can confront this in flashback, or maybe just in the pounding rain. The first person who cries and says “But she was our friend!” loses.“Past Lies,” a six-part Spanish drama (in Spanish, with subtitles, under its original title, “Las Sambras Largas,” or dubbed) on Hulu, is the latest swirly mystery about a group of now-grown women haunted by their teenage pasts. “Lies,” though, is more frank than much of its brethren, more streamlined and grounded.Rita (Elena Anaya) is a well-known film director who reluctantly returns to her hometown, Alicante, Spain, to settle her mother’s estate. Despite initial dodges and awkwardness, she winds up folded back into her high school clique, starting with a brittle dinner party. The different kinds of hugs Rita exchanges with each of these former friends is one of the juiciest, most detailed scenes I’ve seen in ages — decades of longing and disappointment depicted in the twist of one shoulder blade.The reunion becomes even more strained when the police identify the remains of Mati, a classmate who vanished during a senior trip to Mallorca. Mati’s younger sister, Paula (Irene Escolar), is one of the investigators, though it’s hard to imagine how she finds time for police work when she is so busy scowling and chewing gum. Paula is convinced these women know more than they’re telling her, and she’ll comb through home videos the girls shot as teens to prove it.Part of what makes “Past Lies” intriguing, beyond its appealing chicness and gorgeous setting, is that the central mystery is not one agreed-upon lie. The women each have different suspicions, different secrets they wanted to keep back in the day or maintain now. The show is a saga not about simmering teenage blood lust or the freaky, warped horrors of girldom, but rather about the natural contours of regrets, the bittersweetness of regarding one’s youthful passions. More

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      in Television

      ‘X-Men ’97’ Brings the Franchise Back to Its Roots

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      The Disney+ animated series builds on its 1990s predecessor, exploring themes of prejudice and change through the world of Professor Charles Xavier and his mutant pupils.Saturday mornings were sacred for me in the mid-90s. Watching “X-Men: The Animated Series” defined a five-year period that was the most formative of my life.The series, which was broadcast on Fox for five seasons from 1992 to 1997, introduced me and countless other millennials to the expansive world of Professor Charles Xavier and his mutant pupils, as they repeatedly saved humanity and aspired toward a future when they would be accepted as equals. With its classic characters — like the surly Wolverine, always ready with an angry quip, and the menacing Magneto — its steady stream of action sequences and ever-progressing plots, the show was riveting enough to draw in young viewers and yet loyal enough to the original comic books to appease older fans like my father, who would give footnotes on every episode as we watched.It set the standard for the X-Men franchise, which would come to include a tiresome span of uneven, often incoherent films held together in the mighty claws of the indefatigable Hugh Jackman. (That legacy continues this summer with “Deadpool & Wolverine.”) So when I say that the Disney+ series “X-Men ’97” not only meets but also surpasses that original series, I mean that as a commendation of the show itself, but especially of the writer-producer Beau DeMayo, who worked on two seasons before being fired ahead of the series premiere. In an age of constant reboots and sequels, DeMayo and his team built something fresh and innovative from a piece of pop culture nostalgia.“X-Men ’97,” which streamed its season finale on Wednesday, immediately picks up where the original left off: Xavier is dead and the X-Men are left floundering, with the lead couple Scott Summers (Cyclops) and Jean Grey wondering if it’s time to build a life apart from Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. The world is still a place of prejudice and conflict aimed at mutants, who are building a utopian homeland on the island of Genosha. But evil forces, familiar and new, threaten to start a war and mass extinction event that will result in both mutant and human casualties.From the very start, “X-Men ’97” shows an appreciation for, and understanding of, the best elements of the original animated series. It almost exactly replicates the classic opening theme, and the two series begin with first episodes that mirror each other: Both introduce a lost young mutant. The continuity shown to the plot, the characters’ arcs, the animation and even the music is refreshing, particularly because the series doesn’t pander to new audiences. It doesn’t get dragged down by exposition, instead assuming its audience is the same from 1997, ready to pick up where the original series left off.But “X-Men ’97” isn’t so evangelical that it disregards the original’s pitfalls; though forever beloved, “X-Men: The Animated Series,” now seems as stiff as the posture of a Sentinel. Those action-packed story arcs are awkwardly condensed, and the pacing is almost always ungainly. The fight sequences, dazzling at the time, are now jerky and robotic. The dialogue is stilted, and the accents in the voice acting — particularly Gambit’s confusing, inconsistent Cajun twang — are abominable.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 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      How the Language of TV is Influencing How We See Ourselves

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      TikTok has spawned a curious new way of understanding ordinary life: villain arcs, main character energy and seasons. Last summer, I was struck by a video I came across on TikTok. In it, a 20-something flops faceup onto her bed. Her roots are grown out, her eyeliner is heavy and her gaze, vaguely forlorn, is intensified by a key light tinted blue. Her hand gropes around the adjacent night stand to silence her vibrating phone. Then the Netflix logo flashes, followed by a credit line: “A life written and directed by Beatrice Harrods.” A stop-motion sequence follows the passage of time: a vase of chrysanthemums, then roses; one candle, then another; an unfurling rug and the text “Season 2.” Cut back to Harrods: Her roots are touched up, and her gaze, now pointed at the camera, seems to relish being watched.You see a lot of this on TikTok now: videos that describe ordinary life using the language of television. Scroll through, and you’ll find users charting the different “seasons” of their lives or highlighting the emergence of plot “arcs.” You may find users referring to the people in their lives as “casts” — including both passing encounters with “paid extras” and recurring appearances by “guest stars.” A friend’s unexpected appearance might be tagged “NOO! Ur not in this episode” or described, as one user had it, as the moment “when someone from Season 2 of my life somehow crosses over into Season 4.”There is a certain permeability between art and life, and pleasure in perceiving it: We take satisfaction in recognizing our lives in onscreen plot lines, as we thrill to real-life moments that feel “just like a movie.” But TikTok’s video-based format has wildly amplified the impulse to collapse the distance between the two and imagine yourself as an onscreen character. The app’s tools make it easy for people to film and edit footage of themselves, narrating their own stories in breezy narrative beats — making life look like an episode of television. The result is a perfect ecosystem for watching and being watched, where once-passive audiences are encouraged to see themselves as the writers, directors and stars of their own motion pictures. Perhaps there is therapeutic value in conceptualizing your life as a coherent story — one you can not only analyze but direct. One key piece of televisual jargon that has thrived online feels especially suited to this purpose. The “canon event” describes a crucial, sometimes traumatic occurrence that activates or shapes a person’s character. This kind of thinking may be related to therapy, but it has since been extrapolated wholesale into Hollywood tropes. Last year, the popularity of “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” — with its talk of critical “canon events” shaping the lives of heroes — inspired TikTok users to embrace the term. But in the transition from big to palm-size screen, the idea became a deadpan punchline, identifying not superheroic origin stories but the formative trials of ordinary youth. One video applied the term to “every teenage girl getting into her first situationship with a medium ugly guy that bears a striking resemblance to the rat from Flushed Away.”The challenge, for a narcissist, is to realize that we are all our own protagonists.There’s a related genre of video that encourages viewers to use the visual language of TV to romanticize their lives. This often involves footage of quotidian activities — waiting for the subway, restocking a fridge, pouring a beverage — elevated through production techniques: flattering close-ups, curated props, the amateur’s equivalent of dedicated hair, wardrobe and makeup departments. By reframing mundane activities as the well-lit choreography of a story’s protagonist, these videos render the everyday with a kind of glamour and gravity. If all the world is now a set, “main characters” like these are rewarded by the attention economy — a fact that has inspired some users to turn “main-character energy” into something like a life philosophy. One woman, in the first of 22 “episodes” dedicated to proselytizing her “seasons theory” on TikTok, described how she improved “Season 3” of her life by asking herself what Serena van der Woodsen and Carrie Bradshaw would do. (Those main characters, of “Gossip Girl” and “Sex and the City,” narrativized their own lives for a blog and a newspaper column.)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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      in Television

      Late Night Looks Forward to the Trump-Biden Debates

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      “Just like that, they’re going head to head, toe to toe, mano a mango,” Stephen Colbert said of two forthcoming presidential debates in June and September.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.‘Mano a Mango’President Biden and Donald Trump agreed to two forthcoming presidential debates on Wednesday.Stephen Colbert joked that “the debate over debating is finally over.”“Just like that, they’re going head to head, toe to toe, mano a mango.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Yeah, Trump agreed to the debate. He said, ‘I’ll be there, assuming it’s OK with my parole officer.’” — JIMMY FALLON“The first debate will be next month, which is the earliest a presidential debate has ever been, and, if we’re being honest, an early-bird debate feels right for these guys.” — JIMMY FALLON“It’s really quite something to challenge your opponent to a debate anytime, anywhere, anyplace while you’re standing behind barricades at a mandatory court appearance for your criminal trial.” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (Let’s Get Ready to Ramble Edition)“Yep, Biden and Trump will meet June 27 on CNN, and one of Biden’s debate conditions was not having an audience, so that explains why it’s on CNN.” — JIMMY FALLON“Biden is looking forward to laying out his 2024 agenda, while Trump is just happy to go somewhere where nobody will draw him while he sleeps.” — SETH MEYERS“Trump jumped right on the offer, posting, ‘Just tell me when — I’ll be there. Let’s get ready to rumble!’ Rumble? I’ve seen your rallies. I think you mean, ‘Let’s get ready to ramble.’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingCast members from the new Broadway adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” performed the song “My Green Light” on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightThe actor and humorist Nick Offerman will appear on Thursday’s “Daily Show.”Also, Check This OutJoel Grey and Eddie Redmayne each have played the Emcee in the Broadway classic “Cabaret”New York TimesJoel Grey and Eddie Redmayne discussed their shared history of playing the Emcee in “Cabaret” several times over. More

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      in Television

      Netflix and the N.F.L. Sign a Three-Season Deal

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      Football joins pro wrestling and comedy specials in an expansion of the streaming service’s live offerings, a key step in the company’s overall live TV strategy.Netflix is no longer simply in the “sports-adjacent” business. On Wednesday, the streaming giant announced a three-season deal with the National Football League that will include showing two Christmas Day games on its service this year. It’s the first time Netflix has become partners with a major sports league, and it likely won’t be the last.The move follows Netflix’s increasingly aggressive push into the business of live events. In the past two weeks, “The Roast of Tom Brady” was its most-watched English-language TV show; a quirky six-day John Mulaney talk show went viral as part of the Netflix Is a Joke live comedy festival in Los Angeles; and the stand-up special “Katt Williams: Woke Foke” was viewed 4.3 million times.“Last year, we decided to take a big bet on live — tapping into massive fandoms across comedy, reality TV, sports and more,” Bela Bejaria, Netflix’s chief content officer, said in a statement. “There are no live annual events, sports or otherwise, that compare with the audiences N.F.L. football attracts.”The two Christmas games will pit the Houston Texans against the visiting Baltimore Ravens and the Pittsburgh Steelers against the visiting Kansas City Chiefs (raising the odds for greater viewership with a potential Taylor Swift sighting).The streaming business has matured in the United States, and though Netflix is the dominant service, it still needs to keep growing. With subscriptions relatively maxed out in America, the growth of other revenue streams has become crucial to the company’s success. Advertising is chief among them.At a time when more people are dropping their traditional cable subscriptions, live sports remain catnip for advertisers because they are one place where audiences are guaranteed in real time. That is especially true for the N.F.L., which remains a ratings juggernaut.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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      in Music

      With Church Bells and Hashtags, the Netherlands Backs Its Eurovision Act

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      The details of an incident that led to the singer’s disqualification remain elusive. But many Dutch fans have already made up their minds.At noon on Tuesday, some church bells and carillons in the Netherlands didn’t sound like they usually do. Rather than solemnly tolling, they played the melody of “Europapa,” the song that was supposed to be the Dutch entry in the Eurovision Song Contest final this past Saturday.Dutch radio stations are also regularly playing the three-minute pop song, and some fans have added the hashtag “JusticeforJoost” to their social media accounts.Support is strong in the Netherlands for Joost Klein, the singer behind “Europapa,” who was a preshow favorite among Eurovision fans and bookmakers until he was disqualified just hours before the final in Malmo, Sweden.Eurovision’s organizer, the European Broadcasting Union, barred Klein from taking part after an “incident” during which he showed “threatening behavior directed at a female member of the production crew,” it said in a statement.The E.B.U. called in the Swedish police to investigate, although details of the incident remain elusive. But support for Klein seemed to get only stronger in the Netherlands since Saturday’s bombshell announcement, thanks to a general belief, promoted by the Dutch public broadcaster, that Klein did not commit an offense large enough to justify the disqualification.AVROTROS, the broadcaster that had picked Klein to represent the Netherlands, responded to the E.B.U.’s decision on Saturday with a statement calling it “very heavy and disproportionate.”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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      Luke Newton Steps Cautiously Into the ‘Bridgerton’ Spotlight

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      Luke Newton has been in the sexy Netflix hit from the start. But a new series, premiering Thursday, will be his first as co-lead — or chief hunk.Luke Newton is yet to experience what it means to be a “Bridgerton” leading man, but he has been trying to prepare himself.He has played Colin Bridgerton on the ornate, sexually charged Netflix show for two seasons, but for the third — which premieres on Thursday — Newton is following in the footsteps of Regé-Jean Page and Jonathan Bailey and stepping into the role of a co-lead — or chief hunk.“I feel slightly overwhelmed,” Newton, 31, said in a recent interview, adding that he was only just starting to appreciate the responsibilities of being a “Bridgerton” lead, rather than a co-star.After watching both Page and Bailey navigate successful seasons and, later, careers in Hollywood, Newton asked both actors for advice. Page just suggested he take a vacation as soon as the season wrapped, Newton said, but Bailey — who continues to play Anthony, Colin’s older brother, in Season 3 — was around to support him throughout. “Whatever stress there was, whatever situation, I could just call him,” Newton said.After the last season aired, Bailey’s status — both as a celebrity and a sex symbol — skyrocketed, leading to an “extraordinary change” in his life, Bailey said. But he wasn’t worried about how his co-star would handle the same shift: He said Newton could deal with the “absurd” nature of a sudden rush of fame.“Bridgerton,” which is based on a series of novels by the author Julia Quinn, follows eight siblings as they pine for love and reckon with relationships in early-19th-century London. The show, produced by Shonda Rhimes, has been praised both for its inclusive casting and raw approach to intimacy onscreen.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