Category: Television

Chris Rock on Covid-19, Blackface, and Cancel Culture

(p. 7) [Rock:] Part of the reason we’re in the predicament we’re in is, the president’s a landlord. No one has less compassion for humans than a landlord. [Laughs.] And we’re shocked he’s not engaged.

Did you ever see that movie “The Last Emperor,” where like a 5-year-old is the emperor of China? There’s a kid and he’s the king. So I’m like, it’s all the Democrats’ fault. Because you knew that the emperor was 5 years old. And when the emperor’s 5 years old, they only lead in theory. There’s usually an adult who’s like, “OK, this is what we’re really going to do.” And it was totally up to Pelosi and the Democrats. Their thing was, “We’re going to get him impeached,” which was never going to happen. You let the pandemic come in. Yes, we can blame Trump, but he’s really the 5-year-old.

Put it this way: Republicans tell outright lies. Democrats leave out key pieces of the truth that would lead to a more nuanced argument. In a sense, it’s all fake news.

. . .

[Itzkoff:] Jimmy Fallon drew significant criticism this past spring for a 20-year-old clip of himself playing you in blackface on “Saturday Night Live.” How did you feel about that segment?

[Rock:] Hey, man, I’m friends with Jimmy. Jimmy’s a great guy. And he didn’t mean anything. A lot of people want to say intention doesn’t matter, but it does. And I don’t think Jimmy Fallon intended to hurt me. And he didn’t.

. . .

[Itzkoff:] There’s been a wider push to expunge blackface from any movies or TV shows where it previously appeared. Have people taken it too far?

[Rock:] If I say they are, then I’m the worst guy in the world. There’s literally one answer that ends my whole career. Blackface ain’t cool, OK? That’s my quote. Blackface is bad.

For the full interview, see:

Dave Itzkoff, interviewer. “Chris Rock’s New Universe.” The New York Times, Arts&Leisure Section (Sunday, September 20, 2020): 6-7.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed names, added.)

(Note: the online version of the interview was updated Sept. 24, 2020, and has the title “Chris Rock Tried to Warn Us.”)

Monty Python’s John Cleese on Creativity and Open Offices

(p. D10) Creativity is almost always: unlearned. Ask young children, “Are you creative?” They’ll all raise a hand. By age 16, none of them will because they’ve had their creativity gently squeezed out of them by those who think conventionally.

. . .

One of the great mistakes is: the open-plan office. If I were starting a business—and this is a great time to reinvent the workplace—I’d give everybody an office. It’s essential you’re not interrupted when you’re working. And you must have lots of rooms for people to meet and play.

For the full interview, see:

Jeff Slate, interviewer. “20 ODD QUESTIONS; John Cleese.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Oct 31, 2020): D10.

(Note: ellipsis added. The questions from the interviewer, before each colon, were bolded in the original.)

(Note: the online version of the interview has the date October 28, 2020, and has the title “20 ODD QUESTIONS; John Cleese on Why Open Offices Are Among History’s Greatest Mistakes.”)

New York Times’s “Inexcusable” Reporting Ignored Sophia Farrar, Whose Actions Belied the Kitty Genovese Narrative

(p. A24) The story of Kitty Genovese, coupled with the number 38, became a parable for urban indifference after Ms. Genovese was stalked, raped and stabbed to death in her tranquil Queens neighborhood.

Two weeks after the murder, The New York Times reported in a front-page article that 37 apathetic neighbors who witnessed the murder failed to call the police, and another called only after she was dead.

It would take decades for a more complicated truth to unravel, including the fact that one neighbor actually raced from her apartment to rescue Ms. Genovese, knowing she was in distress but unaware whether her assailant was still on the scene.

That woman, Sophia Farrar, the unsung heroine who cradled the body of Ms. Genovese and whispered “Help is on the way” as she lay bleeding, died on Friday [Aug. 28, 2020] at her home in Manchester, N.J.

. . .

The murder was reported in a modest four-paragraph article in The Times. Two weeks later, its interest piqued by a tip from the city’s police commissioner, The Times produced a front-page account of the killing that transformed the murder into a global allegory for callous egocentrism in the urban jungle and undermined the innocent-bystander alibi.

. . .

That account — epitomized by one neighbor’s stated excuse that “I didn’t want to get involved” — galvanized outrage, became the accepted narrative for decades and even spawned a subject of study in psychology: how bystanders react to tragedy. Except that with the benefit of hindsight, the number of eyewitnesses turned out to have been exaggerated; none actually saw the attack completely; some who heard it thought it was a drunken brawl or a lovers’ quarrel; and several people said they did call the police.

. . .

In several retrospectives decades after the murder, The Times reassessed the original account, concluding that more neighbors might have heard Ms. Genovese’s screams than actually witnessed the attack. But only one Times article, during Mr. Moseley’s trial, even mentioned Mrs. Farrar’s name, reporting that she and Ms. Zielonko found the victim in the vestibule.

Since Mrs. Farrar was interviewed on camera in “The Witness,” though, among those who criticized The Times’s failure to report her presence in earlier accounts of the crime was Joseph Lelyveld, who was the executive editor of The Times in the 1990s. He has called the omission “inexcusable.”

For the full obituary, see:

Sam Roberts. “Sophia Farrar Dies at 92; Belied Indifference to Kitty Genovese Attack.” The New York Times (Friday, September 4, 2020): A24.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Sept. 2, 2020, and has the same title as the print version.)

While Still “Dirt Poor,” Ulysses Grant Freed Slave Given to Him by His Father-in-Law

(p. 7) . . . like the Chernow book, “Grant” gives its subject his due for having fought ferociously as president against Southern Democrats, pursuing the Lincoln agenda, furthering the cause of Reconstruction, protecting blacks in the South and for crushing the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1870s.

He had been a champion of enslaved Americans long before the Emancipation Proclamation. Grant’s wife, Julia Dent, came from a slave-owning family; Grant’s father, Jesse, was a rabid abolitionist. While living with his in-laws, Grant invited the enmity of neighbors by laboring alongside his father-in-law’s field workers and, as explained by the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, freeing the enslaved person his father-in-law had given him—thus relinquishing his greatest financial asset at a time when he was otherwise dirt poor. He later saw that black troops would be an asset to the North and used them to deadly effect.  . . .

For all its warfare and violence, eloquent interviews and gorgeous photographs, viewers will discover that the real star of “Grant” is the character of the subject himself.

For the full television review, see:

John Anderson. “TELEVISION REVIEW; A Warrior’s Wisdom and Weaknesses.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, May 22, 2020): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the television review has the date May 21, 2020, and has the same title “TELEVISION REVIEW; ‘Grant’ Review: The Wisdom and Weaknesses of a Warrior.”)

The book, mentioned above as the basis of the “Grant” television mini-series, is:

Chernow, Ron. Grant. New York: The Penguin Press, 2017.

“The Better the Person, the Crumbier the House Is Going to Look”

I smiled at Jerry Seinfeld’s comment below that good people are too busy doing good to spend enough time for their house to look fabulous. (Admission: I have never been known for having a neat office.)

(p. C4) I like wearing the suit and having the crowd and the energy and the crackle — I like the magic. I don’t want to know who you really are. I don’t want to see how you really live. We’re all just sick of people’s houses. They’re all so depressingly normal. And the better the person, the crumbier the house is going to look. Because they’re too busy to do anything. The only people that have fabulous, fabulous places, stink. They’re horrible at what they do. They’re spending their money on the house instead of focusing on their art.

For the full interview, see:

Dave Itzkoff, interviewer. “He’s Now ‘Post-Show-Business’.” The New York Times (Tuesday, May 5, 2020): C1 & C4.

(Note: the online version of the interview has the date May 4, 2020, and has the title “Jerry Seinfeld Is Making Peace With Nothing: He’s ‘Post-Show Business’.”)

“The Traveling Loner Who Helps Locals Fight off Bad Guys”

(p. A9) The Mandalorian is an inscrutable masked mercenary who wears a blaster on his hip, rides speeder bikes and giant lizards across desert landscapes, and has a bit of mysterious theme music, like the trill that once announced Clint Eastwood’s “man with no name” gunslinger on screen. All this helped endear the spacefarer to viewers who grew up with a lot of characters from the same template.

“I enjoy the hell out of it,” says 72-year-old Dennis Burdick of Las Vegas, who has deep-seated memories of watching shows like “Have Gun Will Travel” during the peak of the genre, when 31 prime-time Westerns aired in the 1958-’59 TV season alone. “They weren’t really great guys, they were just great with their guns. Same with the Mandalorian. He’s not looking to save anybody, but he’s there, and he can and he will,” Mr. Burdick adds.

Among TV tropes, the traveling loner who helps locals fight off bad guys has been a sturdy one.

. . .

Finally: Baby Yoda. That, of course, is the nickname the internet immediately bestowed on the breakout star of “The Mandalorian” after it appeared in the first episode’s final moments. The Child, as characters in the show refer to it, is a half-century-old toddler because of the slow aging process of its species. The bounty hunter was initially paid to capture or kill it, but something beneath his chest armor melted at the sight of the wrinkly green creature in a floating baby pram. Mando broke the code of his profession and became Baby Yoda’s protector.

For the full review, see:

John Jurgensen. “Old-School TV Tactics Propel ‘The Mandalorian’.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, December 26, 2019): A9.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 25, 2019, and has the title “The Old-School TV Tactics That Make ‘The Mandalorian’ Tick.” The last sentence quoted above appears as in the print version, and not as in the slightly longer online version, of the article.)

The Creative Destruction of Broadcast TV by Streaming, Increases Variety

(p. B4) It has been on a steep upward trajectory for years, and in 2019, it finally happened.

There were more than 500 scripted television series in the United States last year, a high. The estimated number: 532 comedies, dramas and limited series that were broadcast or streamed, according to the research department of the cable network FX, which tabulates and releases the figure every year.

It marked the first time the 500-show threshold had been crossed, representing a 7 percent increase over the number of scripted shows in 2018.

The 2019 total was 52 percent more than the 349 shows that existed in 2013, the year that streaming started to become a habit for many viewers, with the debut of “House of Cards” on Netflix. And it’s a jump of 153 percent over the 210 series available in 2009.

For the full story, see:

John Koblin. “It’s Not an Illusion: Peak TV Is Showing No Signs of Slowing.” The New York Times (Saturday, January 10, 2020): B4.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 9, 2020, and has the title “Yellow or Blue? In Hong Kong, Businesses Choose Political Sides.”)

Baseball Immigrants Learn English by Watching “Friends”

(p. D1) When he returns home from the stadium, Philadelphia Phillies shortstop Freddy Galvis often gets into bed and watches reruns of “Friends.”
. . .
For at least one generation of Americans, “Friends” endures as a cultural touchstone, a glowing chunk of 1990s amber. But its runaway popularity stretched far beyond the United States, and for some Latino baseball players it is something more: a language guide, a Rosetta Stone disguised as six 20-somethings commingling in a Manhattan apartment.
And also just a funny show.
“Now that it’s on Netflix, I always put it on and watch it,” said Mets infielder Wilmer Flores, 26, who is from Venezuela. “When I get up in the morning, I turn on the TV, and whatever episode is there I’ll watch and keep watching. I stop it when I come to the stadium. When I come home from the stadium, I pick up where I left off.”
What has the sitcom done for his English proficiency?
“It’s near perfect,” said Flores’s teammate, Jerry Blevins, who is from Tennessee. “When he doesn’t know something, it’s surprising.”
. . .
(p. D2) For Galvis, the English-language broadcast with Spanish subtitles on Venezuelan television, was an excellent learning tool. “You can compare what’s going on that way,” he said. “If they say ‘happy,’ you see he’s happy and the subtitle says ‘feliz’, then you can learn. You might not learn 100 percent, but you’ll learn to associate.”
. . .
Like Flores, Galvis is evangelical about “Friends.” He tells young Spanish-speaking players that he is living proof that consuming popular culture in English can help. And although he is now a capable English speaker, he still watches “Friends” with subtitles in Spanish so that his wife can learn English.
Marta Kauffman, one of the creators of the show, said she was delighted to hear about its unlikely and unintended impact on certain players. She compared the phenomenon to how Viagra was originally designed to treat heart problems but later was embraced for a very different purpose.

For the full story, see:
JAMES WAGNER. “For Some Major Leaguers, It’s Always Great to See ‘Friends’.” The New York Times (Mon., SEPT. 18, 2017): D1-D2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the title “‘Friends,’ the Sitcom That’s Still a Hit in Major League Baseball.”)

People Root for Billionaires If They Believe They Also Could Become Billionaires

(p. 22) “Billions” manages the feat of making you want the guy who has everything to have even more.
“People still root for billionaires because it reinforces the idea that they can do it too,” Mr. Kirshenbaum said recently. “People don’t want to be in a place where there’s not a lot of magic left in the equation.” Political analysts have long given this explanation for why poor or working-class people vote against tax increases for the wealthy: They want to believe that some day they, too, will have assets to guard.
. . .
Like the TV series, the film “The Big Short” puts you in the position of wanting the investors — or at least the investors depicted on the screen — to win. The movie channels your anger at the banks that came up with the perilous financial instruments that devastated the economy, but it leaves you no room to despise the charmingly eccentric rogue geniuses who made hundreds of millions of dollars shorting the housing market. All that hard work, the culling of documents and the fact-gathering trips to endangered Sun Belt real estate markets — it would be so wrong if they didn’t triumph in the end. Institutions are greedy; people are merely obsessed.

For the full commentary, see:
GINIA BELLAFANTE. “Big City; Rooting for the Robber Barons, at Least Those Onscreen.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., MARCH 20, 2016): 22.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date MARCH 18, 2016, and has the title “Big City; Rooting for the Robber Barons, at Least on the Screen.”)

Disney Used Money from His Cartoons to Fund the “Audacious” Breakthrough Snow White

(p. C2) The 1920s were no doubt a time much like our own, full of people who could see ways to advance and exploit new technologies, and Disney was one of those. But plenty of people have ideas; only a few manage to make them reality. Like many an Internet entrepreneur, Disney was able to do so because of a combination of serendipity and tenacity. You can read a lot into that sketch of a mouse he came up with.
“He doesn’t have the financial backing to support what it is he’s doing,” Carmenita Higginbotham, an art historian who teaches at the University of Virginia, says of his early career. “He wants to be a bigger voice than he is. And it’s a perfect metaphor, him being this small mouse, this seemingly insignificant figure or individual within this big industry that he wants to break into.”
The parallel to the Internet age is also evident in the speed of his ascension. His “Steamboat Willie” cartoon featuring Mickey Mouse in effect went viral after its premiere at the Colony Theater in New York in 1928, propelled by its innovative merging of image and sound.
That gave him enough credibility and money to try something audacious: “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” a project that, we’re told, he outlined to his staff in 1934 by calling a meeting and enacting all the parts himself.
“What Disney was proposing had never been done, never even been tried: a feature-length, story-driven cartoon,” says the narration, read by Oliver Platt. There followed a typical Hollywood story of cost overruns and jeopardized deadlines — the animation technique used required more than 200,000 separate drawings.

For the full review, see:
NEIL GENZLINGER. “The Mind that Built the House of Mouse.” The New York Times (Sat., SEPT. 12, 2015): C1-C2.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date SEPT. 11, 2015, and has the title “Review: PBS’s ‘Walt Disney’ Explores a Complex Legacy.”)
(Note: Genzlinger is reviewing the two part documentary on “Walt Disney” that aired on the “American Experience” series of PBS on Mon., Sept. 7 and Tues., Sept. 8, 2015.)

Producer of “The Godfather” to Make Six Hour TV Version of Atlas Shrugged

(p. D1) LOS ANGELES — It took a while — more than 40 years, actually.
But Albert S. Ruddy, a movie and television producer who does not like to quit, has landed rights to make his passion project: a screen version of “Atlas Shrugged,” Ayn Rand’s Objectivist bible.
Mr. Ruddy, whose canon includes films as varied as “The Godfather” and “The Cannonball Run,” almost had a deal back in the early 1970s, when he wooed Ms. Rand personally while sitting on a small couch in New York.
But Ms. Rand, who had left the Soviet Union in the 1920s and feared the Russians might acquire Paramount Pictures to subvert the project, wanted script approval; Mr. Ruddy, as adamant as she was, declined. “Then I’ll put in my will, the one person who can’t get it is you,” Mr. Ruddy recalls being told by Ms. Rand, who died in 1982.
. . .
The main thing, Mr. Ruddy said, is to honor Ms. Rand’s insistence on making a film for the future. That means redrawing its capitalists and creators, who go on strike against creeping collectivism, as figures more familiar than the railroad heiress and industrial titans who figured in a book that was first published in 1957.
“When you look at guys like Jeff Bezos, he’s not only doing Amazon, he wants to colonize Mars,” Mr. Ruddy said. He spoke by telephone last week of his plan for a mini-series in which an Internet blackout led by Bezos-like figures might shut down cellphones, banks and almost everything else.

For the full story, see:
MICHAEL CIEPLY. “Film Producer Lands Rights to ‘Atlas Shrugged’ Novel.” The New York Times (Mon., NOV. 2, 2015): B8.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date NOV. 1, 2015, and has the title “Producer of ‘The Godfather’ Lands Rights to ‘Atlas Shrugged’ Novel.”)