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      in Television

      Steve Martin Is Out. Who Will Play Walz and Vance on ‘S.N.L.’?

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      Steve Martin is out, and the roles of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump seem settled. But the internet has been busy dream-casting the rest of the “S.N.L.” election ticket.The approach of another presidential election brings with it many questions: In what direction is the United States headed? Who will be our next president and vice president? And, most crucially, who will play them on “Saturday Night Live”?Election-season comedy sketches are an “S.N.L.” staple, providing cast members with opportunities to gain visibility for their impersonations of prominent politicians and — increasingly — for the show to tap into its network of celebrity guests, friends and spouses to play these roles. When new political figures come to national attention, we can’t help but indulge our inner Lorne Michaels and imagine who we’d cast to imitate them.The show’s plans were likely scrambled last month when President Biden announced that he would stand down as the Democratic presidential nominee. That paved the way for Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place at the top of the ticket, and for Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota to join as her running mate. On the Republican side, former President Donald J. Trump offered his vice-presidential slot to Senator JD Vance of Ohio.These are all characters likely to appear on “S.N.L.,” whose 50th season will begin on Sept. 28. And while the show hasn’t officially announced who it intends to cast in these key roles (and NBC declined to comment for this article), there is plenty of history and wild internet speculation to sift through. Let’s take a look at where these races currently stand.Kamala HarrisHarris’s increased prominence in the campaign should lead to the same on “S.N.L.”Doug Mills/The New York TimesRudolph has already won Emmy Awards for playing Harris on the show.Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe front-runnerNecessity is the mother of invention, and now that “S.N.L.” needs a Harris impersonator to play a prominent role this fall, Maya Rudolph is clearly the mother to call on. An “S.N.L.” cast member from 2000 to 2007, Rudolph began playing Harris in guest appearances during the Democratic primaries in 2019, racking up some highly GIF-able moments and winning two Emmy Awards along the way. Rudolph appeared as Harris 10 times through 2021, and the woman herself, in social media posts, appeared to approve of the portrayal. “S.N.L.” has not confirmed that Rudolph will play Harris, but Deadline has reported that production on her Apple TV+ series, “Loot,” has been pushed back to make room for her return to the show — as everyone and their mother seems to be clamoring for.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

      This Debate, We Could Hear Biden Speak. There His Troubles Began.

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      The CNN presidential debate kept the volume down, for a change. That didn’t make it more intelligible.With the plans for the 2024 presidential debates, President Biden’s campaign appeared to get much of what it wanted. It got its preferred timeline, with Thursday night’s debate in Atlanta far earlier on the calendar than usual. It got the live audience removed. It got, above all, an agreement to mute the microphone on the candidate who wasn’t speaking, to avoid the cross-talk that made his first 2020 debate with Donald J. Trump a cacophonous mess.After Thursday night, Mr. Biden — and his party — might have wanted the cross-talk back.The changes that CNN instituted staved off the shouting matches and the competitive cheering that have marked past debates. But they could not prevent Mr. Biden from starting his rushed opening remarks in a papery rasp that, before the debate was over, his campaign was stressing to reporters was the result of a cold. It did not keep him from getting lost in the corn maze of his sentences, answer after answer.And it did not keep him from finishing an argument on tax reform and health care with a spiral that was surely saved instantly to the hard drives of Republican campaign operatives: “Making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with, the, uh, with the Covid, excuse me, with, um, dealing with, everything we had to do with, uh … look … if — we finally beat Medicare.”There was no interruption. Mr. Biden came across loud and unclear.You can at least credit Mr. Biden for one accomplishment: For perhaps the first time since Mr. Trump announced for president nine years ago, he managed to hold a debate in which Mr. Trump’s performance was not the biggest news afterward.The former president and challenger had his own issues. He blustered, dodged, made false statements and repeated his denials of his 2020 election loss. He cited his golf game as proof of his acuity and uttered the line, “I didn’t have sex with a porn star.” But Mr. Trump, kept to glowering between answers by the mute button, was outrageous and misleading in a familiar way; it was the standard man-bites-fact-checker story.The debate in Atlanta — sorry, the “CNN Presidential Debate,” as the ubiquitous branding emphasized — was fairly bare-bones. (It was also simulcast on the other major news networks.) The moderators, Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, spread questions across a variety of topics, not correcting candidates in the moment. The pushback they gave was limited to reminding the debaters of how much time they had left and firmly asking them, again, to answer questions they had sidestepped, as Ms. Bash did when asking Mr. Trump if he would accept the results of this election as he had not in 2020. (He gave the qualified answer that he would accept a “fair” and “legal” election.)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 Movies

      Trump Biopic ‘The Apprentice’ Nears Distribution Deal

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      “The Apprentice,” a dramatized origin story about Donald J. Trump, has faced fierce criticism from the former president and his allies.Hollywood executives love to characterize themselves as fearless. The truth is that they spend most of their time trying to minimize risk.It’s why theaters are clogged with vacuous sequels. It’s why so many Hollywood power players hide behind P.R. people. And it’s why all of the big movie studios and streaming services — and, in fact, most indie film companies — declined to distribute “The Apprentice,” a dramatized origin story about Donald J. Trump that the former president has called “malicious defamation” and showered with cease-and-desist letters.But the movie business still has at least one wildcatter: Tom Ortenberg.Mr. Ortenberg, 63, and his Briarcliff Entertainment are pushing to complete a deal to acquire “The Apprentice” for wide release in theaters in the United States in September or early October — close enough to the presidential election to bask in its heat, but far enough away to avoid final-stretch media overload. Briarcliff’s pursuit of the $16 million film was confirmed by five people involved with the sale process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private negotiation.“Tom’s got more courage than most people in Hollywood combined,” said Stephen Galloway, the dean of Chapman University’s film school. “His interest in this kind of movie involves business, of course. He sees money to be made by leveraging millions of dollars in free publicity. But part of it is wanting to do his bit. He’s liberal and cares about social issues.”Hurdles remain, the people cautioned. “Apprentice” producers cobbled together the money to make the movie from various sources. One was Kinematics, an upstart film company backed by Dan Snyder, the former Washington Commanders owner — and a Trump supporter. Kinematics, which invested about $5 million, would need to sign off on the Briarcliff deal and has balked, calling the offer subpar, according to the five people involved in the sale process. The Kinematics snag was reported earlier by a Puck newsletter.So producers have put together a package to buy out Kinematics at a premium. The sides are now haggling over terms, including the timing of payment.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

      On Live TV, a Historic Verdict Felt Both Enormous and Small

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      Donald Trump’s convictions made for a stunning moment of history, followed by hours of politics talk.Through most of the milestones of Donald J. Trump’s public life, he has managed to be in the center of the camera’s eye: Hosting 14 seasons of “The Apprentice”; running for and winning the presidency; firing up a crowd before the assault on the Capitol of Jan. 6, 2021; presumptively winning the Republican nomination for a second term.But on Thursday, as he became the first former president to be convicted of multiple felonies, he was offstage.Because video cameras were not allowed in the Manhattan courtroom where Mr. Trump was tried, this breathtaking turn in American history, like the entire run of the trial, was read to us by TV anchors, as if off a Teletype machine.When word broke that the jury had reached a verdict in the hush-money case late Thursday afternoon, the networks broke into coverage. And waited. There was that special, spring-loaded tension of the media apparatus readying to deliver big news after days of vamping.“Count 1 is guilty,” Jake Tapper declared on CNN, letting the last word land, then reading out the next 33 individually for several minutes. On NBC, Laura Jarrett read at a brisk clip as the numbers raced upward in the “GUILTY” column of the network’s scoreboard-like graphic. ABC conveyed the scope of the convictions with a crowded graphic that listed each count with “GUILTY” in a red rectangle, like a departures board at an airport.Americans have become used to seeing dramatic verdicts as they land in the courtroom, hearing from the jury and court officers, watching the defendants’ reactions. This time, it was up to the on-screen graphics to capture the moment.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

      Alice Stewart, a CNN Political Commentator, Dies at 58

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      She had appeared onscreen as a conservative voice since the 2016 presidential race. A political strategist, she had worked for Republican presidential candidates.Alice Stewart, a Republican strategist and political commentator on CNN, has died. She was 58.Her death was announced by CNN. The company said the police found Ms. Stewart’s body outdoors in Northern Virginia early Saturday morning. The authorities said they believe that she had a medical emergency but did not provide a cause.Mark Thompson, CNN’s chief executive, described her in an email to staff members as “a political veteran and an Emmy Award-winning journalist who brought an incomparable spark to CNN’s coverage.”Ms. Stewart had appeared on the cable news outlet as a conservative commentator since the 2016 presidential race. Before then, she had worked on several Republican presidential campaigns.She was the communications director for the 2008 presidential campaign of Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, and went on to serve in similar roles for Republican candidates in two following elections, including those of Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Ted Cruz.Ms. Stewart was the deputy secretary of state in Arkansas and was a fellow in 2020 at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics. She had also done work for the Republican Party and conservative organizations.At CNN, Ms. Stewart viewed herself as a faithful promoter of conservatism while the Republican Party reshaped itself under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump.“I don’t think everything that he does is great, and I don’t think everything that he does is bad,” Ms. Stewart said of Mr. Trump in a 2020 interview with Harvard Political Review. “My position at CNN is to be a conservative voice yet an independent thinker.”In an opinion piece published on CNN last year, Ms. Stewart asked Republican voters to reconsider their unconditional support for Mr. Trump’s 2024 election bid given the various criminal charges he faced.“This is a campaign about self-preservation, not selfless public service,” she wrote. “I’m not convinced that’s how you Make America Great Again.”Before transitioning to politics in 2005 with a job as press secretary in the administration of Mr. Huckabee, Ms. Stewart was a news anchor and reporter for seven years at an NBC television affiliate in Little Rock, Ark.“I loved covering politics. I loved courts. I loved breaking news,” Ms. Stewart said in a 2020 interview with Harvard International Review. “But, several years ago, I just realized that there might be something different for me to do.”She was born on March 11, 1966, in Atlanta and earned a degree in broadcast news and political science from the University of Georgia.Ms. Stewart last appeared on CNN on Friday on “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer.” Information on her survivors was not immediately available. More

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      in Television

      Colin Jost Falls Flat at White House Correspondents Dinner

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      The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner has occasionally featured some great stand-up comedy. This “S.N.L.” veteran’s set will not join that list.People in the media have long worried about the impact of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on journalism. The concern is that it makes the press look too chummy with politicians it’s covering. But what is the impact on comedy?A high-ceilinged hotel ballroom filled with television anchors and network executives is a tough room for stand-up, but no more so than an awards show. Trevor Noah was funnier two years ago at the dinner than he was at this year’s Grammys.A murderer’s row of comics, among them Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Kimmel and Wanda Sykes, has taken this assignment because it’s one of the most high-profile live comedy sets of the year. And there has been one truly great performance (Stephen Colbert), some very good ones (Seth Meyers, Larry Wilmore) and one so thrillingly biting (Michelle Wolf) that the next year they replaced the comic with a historian.Colin Jost’s set this year does not belong in that pantheon. Without his Weekend Update partner Michael Che next to him, he came off muted, vanilla, less assured than usual. With long pauses between jokes, eyes darting side to side, he occasionally took a drink of water and at least once acknowledged the lack of laughter in the room. His jokes leaned on wordplay more than a specific or novel perspective. “Some incredible news organizations here,” began one of his pricklier jokes, finished by: “Also, some credible ones.”He focused much fire on former President Donald J. Trump. “Now that O.J.’s dead, who is the front-runner for V.P.?” he asked. “Diddy?” Like Biden, Jost has always benefited from low expectations. No one that handsome could be funny, right? But he has grown into his role at “Saturday Night Live,” proving to be an especially strong straight man adept at the comedy of embarrassment. You could see his timing in one of the odder moments when he said Robert Kennedy Jr. could be the third Catholic president and the C-SPAN camera cut to President Biden (the second) clapping. Jost retreated on Kennedy’s chances one beat later: “Like his vaccine card says, he doesn’t have a shot.”For the third year in a row, President’s Biden’s age played a big role in the comedy (“Technology wasn’t invented when he was in high school,” Jost said of Biden), even in the president’s own set. Two years ago, Biden joked that he was friends with Calvin Coolidge. Last year, he referred to his “pal Jimmy Madison.” The president took a slightly different and more confrontational approach this time. “Age is an issue,” he said early. “I’m a grown man running against a 6-year-old.”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 Theater

      Nonprofit Theaters Are in Trouble. Lawmakers Are Proposing Help.

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      Proposed legislation would allocate $1 billion annually for an industry coping with rising expenses and smaller audiences.The financial crisis facing nonprofit theaters in America has captured the attention of Congress, where a group of Democratic lawmakers is introducing legislation that would direct $1 billion annually to the struggling industry for five years.That money could be used for payroll and workforce development, as well as other expenses like rent, set-building and marketing. But the legislation, which lawmakers introduced on Tuesday, faces long odds at a time when a divided Congress — where Republicans control the House and Democrats lead the Senate — has had trouble agreeing on anything.Nonprofit theaters around the country have reduced their programming and laid off workers to cope with rising expenses and smaller audiences since the coronavirus pandemic began. There are exceptions — some nonprofit theaters say they are thriving — but several companies, including New Repertory Theater in suburban Boston, Southern Rep Theater in New Orleans, and Book-It Repertory Theater in Seattle, have ceased or suspended operations in response to the crisis.“It hasn’t been a recovery for the nonprofits — they’re really lagging compared to many other sectors in the economy, and it’s for a lot of reasons,” Senator Peter Welch of Vermont, one of the legislation’s sponsors, said in an interview. “So they do need help.”Mr. Welch argued that the organizations merit government assistance because they strengthen communities and benefit local economies.The legislation, which is called the Supporting Theater and the Arts to Galvanize the Economy (STAGE) Act of 2024, is also being sponsored by Senators John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Jack Reed of Rhode Island. Representative Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon is sponsoring it in the House.Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, who is the majority leader and who led the fight to win government aid for performing arts organizations during the pandemic, is supportive of the proposed legislation and is also open to other ways to assist nonprofit theaters, according to a spokesman.The pandemic aid package that Mr. Schumer championed serves as a precedent: In 2020, Congress passed the Save Our Stages Act, which led to a $16 billion Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program that made money available to a wide array of commercial and nonprofit performing arts organizations.Mr. Welch said the earlier aid program succeeded despite initial skepticism.“With everything else that was going on, the expectation was this would die on the vine, but it didn’t — as this started getting momentum, there was excitement about being about to do something concrete,” he said.The new legislation is narrower, benefiting only professional nonprofit theaters, and only those that have either seen a decline in revenues or that primarily serve historically underserved communities.“This is a beginning,” Mr. Welch said. “There are obstacles, but let the effort begin.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Girls State’ and ‘Boys State’ Document Politics Through Teenagers’ Eyes

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      Though both documentaries follow programs for rising high school seniors, their differences speak volumes about the challenges the participants face.Documentaries about the American political system are legion, and grow every week. You can bet we’ll be seeing dozens more by the time this year’s presidential election rolls around. But “Boys State” (Apple TV+), the 2020 documentary directed by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, came at government from a different and very refreshing angle. That film chronicles a few participants in the Boys State program run by the American Legion in Texas and every other state except Hawaii. It’s an immersive mock government approach, designed to give rising high school seniors a taste of campaigns, diplomacy and the structure of American government.“Boys State” is charming for a few reasons. The participants are terrific onscreen, but more important, their relative youth means even the more politically savvy are still balancing — and in some cases, clinging to — an idealism and optimism about the American democratic process. A week isn’t enough to turn anyone into a hard-bitten cynic; instead, it feels like we, the adults in the audience, are the ones learning lessons, being reminded of what we hope, or wish, our system could be.To my delight, McBaine and Moss followed up this year with “Girls State” (Apple TV+), this time set at the Missouri Girls State in 2022. (Here’s my colleague Natalia Winkelman’s full review.) That year, Missouri’s Girls State and Boys State took place on the same college campus, though they’re separated, with little contact between the two groups.I initially expected “Girls State” to mirror “Boys State,” but it’s a whole different animal and, I think, maybe an even better movie. For one, filming just happened to coincide with the week following the leaked draft of what would ultimately be the Dobbs decision, which struck down Roe v. Wade. The program’s girls, many from small Missouri towns, seem genuinely diverse politically — and that means that matters like abortion law and bodily autonomy are frequent points of discussion.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