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    Hulu, HBO and Apple TV+ Know What You’re Going Through at Work

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    Workplace shows, a hit genre of the streaming era, are homing in on a knotty question: Do you have to sacrifice personal happiness to excel at your job?On a recent episode of Apple TV+’s “The Morning Show,” the television host Alex Levy is conducting a live television interview with a therapist when things take a turn toward the personal.With millions of home viewers watching, the therapist asks her to complete the sentence “I feel most alive when … ”“When I’m working,” Alex replies, with zero hesitation.The therapist responds: “Why only at work?”Alex, played by Jennifer Aniston, looks stunned. The interview has taken her into uncomfortable territory, and it takes her a moment to gather herself.The tension between personal needs and professional ambition is a common theme of the current crop of workplace shows, a dependable television genre that has found new popularity at a time when millions of people have changed their relationship with work — whether by switching jobs in the “Great Resignation,” organizing their workplaces or fighting for remote work flexibility.Alex and her fellow workplace TV protagonists struggle to separate their professional identities from their true selves. They’re wondering if they can excel in their chosen fields without letting their jobs eat them alive.On Hulu’s “The Other Black Girl,” the assistant editor Nella Rogers learns that there is danger in deciding to “bring your whole self to work” — contrary to the messaging of corporate diversity managers.On Apple TV+’s “Ted Lasso,” the perky soccer coach who gives the show its name has a series of panic attacks that seem to arise from the guilt he feels over having taken a job thousands of miles from where his son and ex-wife are living.Carmen Berzatto, the genius chef on Hulu’s “The Bear,” finds himself locked in a walk-in refrigerator at the end of the show’s second season, unleashing a stream of curses as he castigates himself for having allowed his personal life to get in the way of his ambitions.In many ways these characters reflect the feelings of millions of restless workers of recent years. Some 50 million Americans are now doing their jobs from home, at least part time, and many have grown attached to the flexibility. Others have been job-hopping or fighting for higher wages. And so far this year, some 472,300 workers have gone on strike, up from 58,100 two years ago.When managers began insisting that employees return to the office in the wake of the pandemic, hundreds of workers walked out of Amazon’s headquarters in protest, and dozens of Apple employees signed petitions demanding permanent flexibility.Across industries and companies, workers have been asking how much of their lives they are willing to give over to their bosses.Julia DufosséIn the years leading up to the pandemic, plenty of employers subtly and not so subtly communicated that a workplace could be a substitute for home. Silicon Valley executives offered their employees free meals, lavish happy hours and on-site Zumba. The underlying assumption seemed to be that workers didn’t have to leave the office to find community, which some interpreted to mean that they never should.Human resources executives encouraged employees to dress as “your authentic self” (per emails to Meta’s recruits), further blurring the boundaries between the private person and the worker who is expected to trade more than 40 hours a week for a paycheck.But is it wise to “bring your whole self to work” when you may be feeling sad, frazzled or in the mood to loaf? And what if the real you has values that don’t align with the aims of the company you work for?Those tensions are at the heart of “Severance,” whose employees come to realize the mysterious entity they work for is up to no good, and “The Other Black Girl,” in which Nella suffers professional consequences after confronting the publishing house’s literary star about a racist depiction in his latest book. Hazel-May McCall, the company’s “other Black girl,” had promised to support Nella’s righteous stance, only to step back at the crucial moment.“You just have to be the person they want you to be,” Hazel-May tells Nella at one point.Workplace shows have long been a television staple, but the characters who populated earlier programs in the genre seemed to get very little work done. Jim, on “The Office,” sticks Dwight’s stapler in Jell-O; Kenneth, on “30 Rock,” insists that he has to marry an envelope before he licks it.There is less goofing off in the workplace shows that have been among the most talked about programs since the rise of streaming. The main characters tend to be dead serious about their jobs, nakedly ambitious. Carmy, of “The Bear,” desperately wants that Michelin star; Alex, of “The Morning Show,” would be crushed if her Nielsen numbers were to slip; even the sweet-natured Ted Lasso would be sorely disappointed if the people around him didn’t consider him the very model of the modern-day boss.A rare old show that focused on coldblooded strivers was the NBC series “L.A. Law.” Given the current appetite for workplace shows that actually show the work, it’s no wonder that it’s making a splashy return to Hulu next month, with all its 172 episodes remastered.The characters on that series have their 21st century equivalents in the members of the Roy clan and their acolytes on HBO’s “Succession,” probably the buzziest workplace show since “Mad Men.” In almost every episode up to its finale last spring, it presented one hideous variation after another on the theme of how people intent on corporate maneuvering end up cannibalizing their deepest relationships and betraying those closest to them.At one point, the back-room operator Tom Wambsgans, in the middle of a typically brutal argument with his wife, Shiv Roy, tells her that she would make a bad mother. He doesn’t realize she’s pregnant when he says this. In a milieu where the distinctions between personal and work selves are hazy at best, he seems unable to fathom who she might be when detached from her ruthless corporate persona.The notion that we might be able to separate the people we are at home from the people we are at work is made literal in the sci-fi series “Severance.” Its main characters have undergone brain surgery to sever their work and personal selves: the nonwork personas are called “outies,” the workplace versions are “innies,” and neither has any idea what the other is up to. When the protagonist’s two selves begin to bleed into each other, he is distraught — and he assumes a leading role in a workers’ revolt.For Carmy, on “The Bear,” there is little separation between life and work, and he seems to believe that excelling at his job must come at the cost of personal misery. Flashbacks to his family’s household Christmas celebration on Season 2 of “The Bear” show his mother making everyone around her suffer as she prepares a sumptuous feast. It’s clear that she’s a wonderful cook, but the ambience around her meal leaves something to be desired. (After much screaming, fighting, fork-throwing and tears, she crashes a car into the side of the house.) Carmy’s challenge is to push himself to greatness in the kitchen without repelling anyone who might want to get close to him.It’s a problem he has yet to solve by the season finale, when he is reciting a soliloquy of self-loathing in the locked walk-in refrigerator on the opening night of his restaurant. He blames the fact that he has been too involved with his new girlfriend — too content, too soft, too much in love — to give the workplace the intense level of attention it requires.When the slightly less tortured Ted Lasso faces his own work-versus-personal-life crisis, he goes in the opposite direction, deciding that he must leave his job in England so that he can be a better father to his son, who is in Kansas.The “Ted Lasso” team and Apple have been coy about whether the series will return for a fourth season. But if it does come back, and if it continues to follow the ups and downs of its titular character, it might be a tough sell. A show about a contented father who has hit upon the correct approach to work-life balance doesn’t seem like the kind of thing people want to watch these days. More

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      in Music

      Popcast (Deluxe): Ice Spice’s Munchkin Drink + Jann Wenner Backlash

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:The Ice Spice Munchkin Drink from Dunkin’, our snack of the week and a quick-turnaround marketing collaboration for the Bronx rapper who broke out last year with the hit “Munch (Feelin’ U)” — and whose fans are called Munchkins.The recent offensive comments by Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone magazine, about Black and female performers that got him removed from the board of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, an institution he helped create.The new album from Sean Combs, a.k.a. Puff Daddy, a.k.a. Diddy, a.k.a. Love, and behind-the-scenes anecdotes from the recent profile of him in The New York Times.Creatively cringey TikToks from Harry Daniels and DJ Mandy, and a striking use of music on Apple’s “The Morning Show.”Connect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      in Theater

      Billy Crudup Makes the Sale in ‘Hello Tomorrow!’

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      Billy Crudup’s father, Thomas Henry Crudup III, was a gambler, a hustler, an occasional loan shark and a bookie of questionable gift. Sometimes on the way to his son’s weekend soccer practice, he would stop the car on an interstate shoulder and deal king crab out of the trunk. He sold red-and-white-striped umbrella hats, coffee additives, Farrah Fawcett posters, an inflatable ice chest.“Which is not a flotation device,” the younger Crudup clarified in a video call on a weekday afternoon in January.Despite two and a half decades in entertainment, this Crudup, 54, has lived a somewhat more conventional life governed by rigorous professional ethics. The risks he takes are mostly artistic. To watch his early films — “Stage Beauty,” “Without Limits,” “Almost Famous” among them — is to see a performer making audacious choices, executed with deep feeling and meticulous control.He’s an indifferent gambler. (The actor Hank Azaria, a poker buddy, confirmed this: Crudup, a performer who often trades in inscrutability, apparently has no poker face.) Then again, his whole career has been a kind of gamble, a long game. Though he has movie star looks, he bet that they wouldn’t last, and so the parts he took, often character parts, were designed to secure career longevity by demonstrating his aptitude and range.In one way, he lost that bet. As I broke it to him, his looks have held up very well. “I appreciate that,” he said, strong-jawed and elfin beneath a Yankees cap. “A lot of niacin and B-root.” (Niacin and B-root? “Those are the first two things that came into my head,” he said.)But in another way, it paid off: In his 50s, he is enjoying the best roles of his life. Since 2019, he has played Cory Ellison, a bright-eyed, coldblooded network news exec in the Apple TV+ series “The Morning Show.” Now he has added Jack Billings, a fast-talking slickster who heads a lunar time-share concern in “Hello Tomorrow!,” another Apple TV+ show, which debuts on Feb. 17.In “Hello Tomorrow!,” Crudup’s character leads a team selling lunar properties in a development called Brightside. (With Haneefah Wood and Hank Azaria.)Apple TV+An evangelist, a huckster, a consummate salesman, Jack reminds Crudup of his father, who died in 2005. Traveling salesmen are akin to gamblers, Crudup argued, always playing the odds, always counting on the big win.“I get to be in some proximity to my dad, by playing a version of him,” Crudup said.There are two narratives that people like me tend to spin around Crudup: that fame has always eluded him and that he never wanted it anyway. He acknowledges that both are somewhat true. He didn’t avoid mainstream projects (see: “Watchmen”), as long as he could play flawed and fractured characters within them.But while acting is a kind of selling, Crudup has always resisted selling himself. For years, he wore his own clothes to award shows. He mostly skipped the talk show circuit. He has tried to keep his personal life private. (“Billy Crudup has a personal life?” his friend and “Morning Show” co-star Jennifer Aniston joked.) A decade or two ago, he would have submitted to an interview like this, if he submitted at all, only out of contractual obligation and under sufferance. A New York Times writer, interviewing him in 2004, wrote, “He shields his life from would-be inspectors as if it were a nuclear facility in North Korea.” This avoidance was partly in service of that gamble. He wagered that a public persona would make receding into roles more difficult. “I figured the more people knew about me, the harder it would be for me to convince them that I was somebody else,” he said. Avoiding publicity was, he said, “a protective mechanism.”It was also a way to protect himself when the tabloids swarmed. In 2003, Crudup left his girlfriend, Mary-Louise Parker, to pursue a relationship with his “Stage Beauty” co-star, Claire Danes. He has not spoken publicly about this, just as he doesn’t speak about what seems to be his current relationship, with the actress Naomi Watts. He could set a few records and Wikipedia pages straight, he said. But he prefers not to.“Because that’s a lifelong pursuit, constantly trying to manage how people think about me as opposed to thinking about my work,” he said.The work has been consistent, but in the 2010s it became less visible. In films like “Jackie,” “20th Century Woman” and “Spotlight,” he inhabited characters so fully that he didn’t seem to be acting at all. It was easy to admire his performances without thinking much about them. That changed with “Harry Clarke,” a 2017 Off-Broadway play about a diffident, pansexual con artist. The play has a dozen roles. Crudup played all of them.Leigh Silverman, who directed the play, was surprised at how much Crudup struggled during rehearsals. In his films, he had made it look so easy. “I was so captivated, really, by his suffering, and his continuing to show up every day,” Silverman said in an interview. But during previews, Crudup began to suffer less, abandoning himself to the various roles, switching fluently between them. To anyone watching him alone onstage, his reach and capacity were irrefutable, as was his charisma.“He’s both holding you at a distance and beckoning you forward, which is so sexy,” Silverman said.In “The Morning Show,” Crudup (with Jennifer Aniston) plays a charismatic news executive. “Billy has an intensity to him, an energy to him, that felt really right for the character,” Kerry Ehrin, the original showrunner, said.Apple TV+One of those watchers was Aniston, who immediately turned to her producing partner, Kristin Hahn, and told her that Crudup had to be in “The Morning Show.” Cory had been originally envisioned as a 30-year-old villain. But when Crudup flew out to Los Angeles to meet with Kerry Ehrin, the original showrunner, she was quickly convinced.“Billy has an intensity to him, an energy to him, that felt really right for the character,” Ehrin said.Cory is staunch in his determination to win the ratings game. But there’s a volatility to the man, an unpredictability. “The Morning Show,” like “Harry Clarke” before it, allows Crudup to live in the contradictions that have made him a thrilling performer: his boldness and precision, his childlike enthusiasm married to a coolness that borders on opacity. Crudup enjoys these tensions. His co-stars do, too.“It’s electric,” Aniston said of acting opposite him. “Every time, I’m going, Oh, I wonder what’s going to happen next?”This electricity impressed Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen, the creators and showrunners of “Hello Tomorrow!” Set in a retrofuturist world in which hovercrafts are a given and travel to the moon commonplace, the show centers on a group of salesmen hawking lunar properties in a development called Brightside. They’re led by Crudup’s Jack, who attacks the project with missionary zeal. Other actors had shown interest in the role. They’d seen Jack as a smoothie, a charmer. Jansen recalled Crudup’s take: “He said, ‘Oh, this guy isn’t a salesman; he’s a priest.’”The truth about those lunar properties remains elusive though much of the season. What’s important is that Jack believes in them, and his belief is so unswerving and sincere that it has a way of inspiring those around him.“Jack’s a genuine believer that providing somebody with a little bit of hope during the day is a true commodity worth valuing,” Crudup said.Here are some of the things that make Jack a good salesman: his energy, his flexibility, his superlative people skills. These are qualities Crudup’s father shared. They are also among the abilities that make Crudup a great actor. Like an actor, Jack is selling people on a story. He believes in the dream so that others can believe it, too.Crudup has generally sought to avoid publicity. “I figured the more people knew about me, the harder it would be for me to convince them that I was somebody else,” he said.Philip Cheung for The New York Times“Good salesmanship is truly believing what you’re saying,” Crudup said. And Crudup has that belief. It’s why he can deliver a line like “Chaos, it’s the new cocaine” in “The Morning Show” with absolute conviction. It’s why his Jack can conjure intimacy even when surrounded by computer-generated automatons.“Sometimes giving folks a new dream to dream can make all the difference,” Jack says. And in Crudup’s mouth it sounds just about plausible.His co-stars Azaria and Haneefah Wood noticed this early in the shoot, during a scene in which Jack delivers a seminar-style version of his moonage daydream. Even having read the script, Azaria found himself weeping during the performance. His character, an insider on Jack’s team, would not have wept.“I had to hide from the camera that he had made me cry,” Azaria said.After the director called cut, Wood, who plays the team’s savvy accounts manager, approached Crudup. “And I was like, ‘[Expletive] you, Billy,’” she recalled. “‘Now my game has to step up so far, to be on just the same level.’”“But he gives you that energy,” she added. “He gives you the desire to just want to go all the way.”Whether or not Crudup has gone all the way, he has come pretty far. His career has been the opposite of a Ponzi scheme: He put the work in early on and he kept working. It’s only now, in these rich continuous roles, that he is seeing the return on his investment. And knowing he has made good has allowed him to hold himself a little more lightly. He’ll wear anyone’s shirt to an awards show now, he told me.“I feel less protective because I’ve been able to establish the career that I hoped to,” he said. Raking in the chips feels good. Maybe not as good as cornering the highway king crab market, but pretty good all the same.“It is miraculous to me,” he said. More

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      in Television

      Karen Pittman Isn’t the New Samantha on 'And Just Like That'

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      The actress, who stars in “And Just Like That,” finds peace at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.“World peace,” the actress Karen Pittman said, placing one penny beneath a stone fox. “And my peace.”This was on a misty Sunday just after New Year’s and Ms. Pittman had paused at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden to set some intentions for the new year, leaving pennies alongside the coins and oranges offered by other visitors.The garden stands near her apartment in Prospect Heights. When she returned from Los Angeles, where “The Morning Show,” on AppleTV+, is filmed, to Brooklyn for HBO Max’s “And Just Like That,” she rented it for this exact reason.Most weekday mornings, after Ms. Pittman sees her two children off to school, she slips into the garden to decompress from the stresses of life and work. “I used to be able to meditate,” she said. “Now it’s just too stressful trying to figure out how to meditate in a pandemic.” So she sits in the garden instead. “It just immediately replenishes,” she said.That Sunday she had found a new space for replenishment. The shrine, hidden among conifers, is dedicated to Inari, the Shinto spirit who blesses the harvest. For Ms. Pittman, who declined to give her age, the harvest of the past few years has been plentiful.After lead roles on Broadway (“Disgraced”) and off (“Pipeline”), she has graduated to major roles on television: as Mia Jordan, an overextended producer on “The Morning Show,” and as Nya Wallace, a Columbia law professor contending with infertility on “And Just Like That.”Ms. Pittman plays a law professor in “And Just Like That,” opposite Cynthia Nixon, right.   Craig Blankenhorn/HBO MaxNya is one of four new characters devised, it seems, to correct the overwhelming whiteness of “Sex and the City,” the predecessor of “And Just Like That.” The show’s creators had promised that Nya — along with Che (Sara Ramirez), Seema (Sarita Choudhury) and Lisa (Nicole Ari Parker) — would join Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte as main characters.The ‘Sex and the City’ UniverseThe sprawling franchise revolutionized how women were portrayed on the screen. And the show isn’t over yet. A New Series: Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte return for another strut down the premium cable runway in “And Just Like That,” streaming on HBO. Off Broadway: Candace Bushnell, whose writing gave birth to the “Sex and the City” universe, stars in her one-woman show based on her life. In Carrie’s Footsteps: “Sex and the City” painted a seductive vision of Manhattan, inspiring many young women to move to the city. The Origins: For the show’s 20th anniversary in 2018, Bushnell shared how a collection of essays turned into a pathbreaking series.In the early episodes, Nya’s scenes mostly abetted Miranda’s journey toward self-actualization. But later episodes have offered Ms. Pittman more substantial material and even a sex scene of her own. “I don’t feel like I need 10 episodes to tell a great story about my character,” she said. “I am much more interested in the ensemble work.”Whether the role is large or small, casting directors typically don’t hire Ms. Pittman for frivolous or lightweight parts. She almost always gets cast as hyper-competent professional women with messy inner lives.“That’s certainly been my life experience,” she said. As a woman who juggles co-parenting with her former husband with a successful career, she can relate. “I bring that deeper, resonant emotional life to the characters that I play,” she said. “This thing of having it all, like, it actually doesn’t work.”On that morning, however, Ms. Pittman seemed to be giving it a try. The garden was dressed for winter — bare branches, untenanted beds, patches of dirt. But Ms. Pittman had dressed for spring in a lilac Altuzzara coat and spindly gold heels with eye shadow to match, mixing meditation with glamour. (Sensibly, she switched to flats after posing for a few photos.)After entering the garden, she made her way through the cherry esplanade, where she stopped to compliment a toddler on her bright blue boots. She then headed to the water garden, passing an installation for the garden’s winter lightscape, which she had visited with her children on Christmas Eve.“It was all very festive,” she said. “There was mulled wine and hot chocolate. We were in the middle of that surge. And people were trying to stay away from each other. But it was very Christmas-y.”And just past the children’s garden, she lingered to admire some winterberries, which appeared scarlet and orange against the gray sky, and a Norwegian spruce that seemed to be extending a branch to her. “A tree that comes out and gives you a hug,” she said.Did she need a hug? Last year had been difficult, she said. Shooting “The Morning Show” in the middle of the pandemic had meant constant testing and frequent stoppages. (She and some colleagues had taken to calling it “The Next Morning Show.”)Olivia Galli for The New York Times“There were days where I was like, definitely going to catch this thing today. Definitely,” she said. And the turbulent emotional life her character Mia, a producer who had a consensual relationship with the disgraced former host played by Steve Carrell, hadn’t helped.“My character went through so much,” she said.A child in a stroller seemed dazzled by Ms. Pittman. The child stared at her, then offered her a rock, which she kindly let the child keep. Past the lily pads and the magnolias and the hill of daffodils, all resting for winter, she paused at the Shakespeare Garden, which contains every botanical mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays.Opposite some lemon balm, she recited a line of Cleopatra’s — “The poison is as sweet as balm, as soft as air” — which she remembered from her classical training in the graduate acting program at New York University. Shoes aside, she looked every inch the queen.Finishing her walk at the Hill-and-Pond Garden, she admired the koi rippling just below the pond’s still surface. Even though she didn’t have extra pennies, she set one more New Year’s intention for herself.“I love ensemble work, but I need to lead a story,” she said. “Power is being able to tell the story you want to tell. That’s real power. I’m ready.” More