Breaking in news that mews: The Biden family announced Friday that they have a new pet cat.

Hailing from a Pennsylvania farm, the tabby charmed First Lady Jill Biden by jumping onto a stage while she was giving a speech on the 2020 presidential election campaign trail. The Bidens have named her Willow, after Jill Biden’s hometown.

Willow will be the first cat in the White House in more than a decade, since India the black cat’s tenure during the George W. Bush years, but will be part of a long tradition. Abraham Lincoln is considered to be the first President to have cats as family pets in the White House. In the modern era, the Fords and Carters had cats too. The Clintons’ cat Socks was a rescue, having come from Chelsea’s piano teacher, who found two stray kittens under her home.
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(In 1998, the Associated Press captured footage of a tense encounter between Socks and the Clintons’ Labrador Buddy, during a time of heightened political polarization and culture wars. Press secretary Mike McCurry joked that Middle East special envoy Dennis Ross might need to be called in to keep the peace.)

And we may never know exactly how many cats have lived on White House grounds, as historically cats have served as working animals used for rodent control, points out historian Katherine C. Grier, author of Pets in America: A History.

But cats are just the tip of the iceberg.

During President Taft’s administration, cows named Paulie Wayne and Mooly Wooly provided milk and cream for the White House kitchen. And Teddy Roosevelt’s White House was practically a zoo, where first cats Tom Quartz and Slippers lived alongside a one-legged rooster, a lizard named Bill, a small bear named Jonathan Edwards, and five guinea pigs with names like Father O’Grady and Fighting Bob Evans. The Bidens’ rehoming of Major the German Shepherd in December—after a few biting incidents—echoed the exile of Teddy Roosevelt’s Boston bull terrier Pete, who repeatedly bit and ripped staffers’ and visitors’ pants, including those of the French Ambassador.

Read more: The First Dogs of the White House

Presidential pets can help Americans relate to presidents and are “a way to see them as someone closer to you,” says Andrew Hager, who writes for the Presidential Pet Museum website (started by Claire McLean, who trained Reagan’s dog Lucky) and is writing a book on presidential dogs.

Time will tell how much influence the Bidens’ cat will have. Warren G. Harding’s dog Laddie Boy, by some measures the first celebrity presidential pet, attended cabinet meetings and was hounded by newspaper reporters who regularly covered his whereabouts. During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt’s dog Fala was the face of a PSA encouraging Americans to donate their dog toys to scrap-rubber collections. Fala received letters, too—enough to fill five document boxes.

But just as presidents are regularly the target of partisan attacks, so too are presidential pets. Responding to Republican claims that Roosevelt left Fala behind on a 1944 trip to Alaska’s Aleutian Islands and then spent millions of taxpayer dollars to return him to the White House, FDR denied the rumors forcefully in a speech: “Fala resents this. When he learned that the Republican fiction writers had concocted a story that I had left him behind on an Aleutian Island and had sent a destroyer back to find him—at a cost to the taxpayer of two or three or twenty million dollars—his Scottish soul was furious!” Some experts credit the speech with helping FDR win a fourth term.

And, in the grand tradition of Presidents promising to represent all Americans regardless of party, many have reached out to cat people and dog people alike by having cats and dogs together as pets in the White House—for better or worse. Now, with Willow in proximity to the most powerful man in the country, she may help cat people on both sides of the aisle, even just for a moment, to transcend paw-tisan politics.

A new genre of comedy has emerged: the funny whodunnit. Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building hit big with streaming audiences last year. Now we have another entry in the burgeoning genre, this time from producing duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the minds behind 21 Jump Street and The Lego Movie: Apple TV+’s The Afterparty, which premieres Jan. 28. The show centers on the murder of a pop star (played by Dave Franco) who is found dead at the afterparty for his 15th high school reunion. Tiffany Haddish plays a quirky detective investigating the murder. In each new episode, she interviews a different suspect. The possible murderers are portrayed by an enviable troupe of funny people, including Ilana Glazer (Broad City), Sam Richardson (Veep), Ike Barinholtz (Blockers), Ben Schwartz (Parks and Recreation) and Zoë Chao (Love Life).
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The Afterparty is a romp. Still, the rise of the murder-comedy may seem rather dark. But Haddish is no stranger to mining life’s tragic moments for art. While she may be best known for Girls Trip, she recently starred opposite Oscar Isaac in a rather somber Paul Schrader film, The Card Counter, about an Abu Ghraib interrogator-turned-card player.

In her standup, too, Haddish has mined the more difficult moments in her life. She spent time in foster care as a child and, in a quest to find out more about her past, discovered she had Jewish roots. She was Bat Mitzvahed on her 40th birthday and still celebrates Shabbat dinner every Friday. The late-in-life religious ceremony served as the basis for her standup record Black Mitzvah, which recently won a Grammy.

Haddish spoke to TIME about her spirituality and how her moral compass guides her through what jokes she feels she should and should not make as an influential comic.

You play a detective investigating the murder of a pop star at his high school reunion afterparty. It’s a whodunit but also a comedy. Was there a lot of improv?

Yeah, they let me add icing on the cake. Like, I brought these cute little trinkets to the interrogations to make the suspects feel more comfortable. In one scene, Ike [Barinholtz, who plays a suspect] and I were messing around, and I was really getting mad at him for talking mess about Steve Urkel, who I had a crush on. And that’s in the show.

Wait, you had a real-life crush on Steve Urkel?

Girl, for years. Him and Mr. T were the only Black men I know of that had their own series.

Did you know who the murderer was from day one of shooting?

No, I didn’t find out until two weeks before we shot the finale. I just hadn’t read the script, I think. [Laughs.] And I was like, “What?” ’Cause I was set on one person, but it was not that person.

You’re coming off a dramatic film, The Card Counter, with Oscar Isaac. What made you want to return to comedy?

Lord and Miller. I love Phil Lord. I love Chris Miller [who created The Lego Movie, 21 Jump Street and The Afterparty]. I want to do whatever they want to do, as long as it doesn’t compromise my morals.

Where do you draw that line?

Anything that I feel promotes hatred or extreme violence. I’m super against certain horror films. Right now, I’m shooting a Disney one, The Haunted Mansion, but it’s more in the thriller realm as opposed to the demonic realm.

And like a sex scene that’s not tasteful or when I’m exposing all my private parts, I just feel like that’s not me at this point in my life. That probably won’t be me at any point in my life, but who knows?

There’s been a debate recently about what comedians can say. How do you make that call?

There’s morality and ethics in comedy. I personally believe you can talk about anything, but how are you talking about it? Are you asking people to pay attention to other people’s experiences? Are you promoting love? Or are you promoting hate and violence?

If someone wanted me to play a role where I had been doing drugs, does that character get cleaned up and off drugs. Do you show the hardships of doing drugs? Or are we glorifying it. If it’s a character that pulled herself up by her bootstraps and got out of that life, I might be into it. But if I’m a dope dealer that’s just tearing down the community and not suffering any consequences, I don’t want to be a part of that.

In Black Mitzvah, you discuss having a bat mitzvah at 40. I think for many teenagers, the bat mitzvah is their last serious experience with the Jewish faith. What’s your post–bat mitzvah experience been like as an adult?

I give at least 30 minutes every single day to reading and learning. I have Shabbat dinners on Fridays. I hang out with my rabbi. I’m always asking questions. I’m getting emotional, but I think the things I’ve been through in life, I wouldn’t have been able to get through without my loyalty to God.

I feel like I would have appreciated my bat mitzvah experience more as an adult.

I wish I had done it when I was a teenager. That was a tumultuous time in my life. I was [in foster care]. I was moved around. All these adults were paid to be in my presence. Which, it’s actually kind of messed up even now, as a successful adult, people are paid to be in my presence.

Anyway, I wish I had a rabbi to talk to then, and a mama and daddy to make me go to Hebrew class. I remember when I was that little 12-, 13-year-old girl feeling excited to go to school because it was the only thing that was normal and the place I felt safest. I’m sorry. I feel like I’m in therapy! Anyway, I believe I’m here now to facilitate joy.

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Attending a high school reunion is like committing a murder in at least one respect: you need a compelling reason to do it. Whether it’s to show off or to reconnect with a first love or to confront a bully, everyone walks back into that fancied-up gymnasium with an agenda. In The Afterparty, an endearingly silly whodunit from creator and director Christopher Miller that comes to Apple TV+ on Jan. 28, it just so happens that someone’s high school reunion agenda is murder.

It’s at his very own afterparty for his graduating class’s 15th-anniversary shindig that the victim, sleazy pop star Xavier (Dave Franco), plunges to his death, rocketing off the terrace of his cliffside Marin County mansion and cracking his skull on the rocky beach below. Despite her boss’s orders to wait for reinforcements from L.A. and the skepticism of her sidekick (Search Party breakout star John Early), Tiffany Haddish’s quirky Detective Danner insists on starting her investigation immediately. She’s certain that after hearing every attendee’s version of the full night’s events—or, as she explains it, after they replay their “mind movies” for her—she’ll have enough information to identify the killer.
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While everyone present is a suspect, most fingers initially point in the direction of nice-guy protagonist Aniq (Veep and Detroiters alum Sam Richardson), an escape room designer whose efforts to make up for lost time with his recently divorced crush Zoë (Zoë Chao from Love Life) were repeatedly interrupted by Xavier’s overtures to the class sweetheart. That flirtation gives Zoë’s angry ex, Brett (Ike Barinholtz), his own reasons to resent Xavier. But, as we discover through Danner’s questioning, just about every person at the party has a motive, from Xavier’s fame-hungry former bandmate (Ben Schwartz) to the sloppy-drunk class president turned trainwreck (Ilana Glazer) to the slightly creepy guy no one remembers (Jamie Demetriou of the British cult comedy Stath Lets Flats).

There’s nothing original about this setup. It’s Agatha Christie via the Clue movie—an old murder-mystery format that got its latest A-list makeover in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out. (The Afterparty also calls to mind last year’s Hulu hit Only Murders in the Building, a quieter but similarly lighthearted streaming crime comedy built around charismatic leads.) Miller, who’s known for collaborating with Phil Lord on innovative franchise fare like The LEGO Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, also leans hard on his cast of comic actors. From Early and Barinholtz to Schwartz, Glazer and Demetriou, these are some of the funniest people on TV, and it’s a treat just to watch them play off of one another. As the cop whose investigation gives the show its structure, Haddish strikes a balance between eccentricity and insight.

Casting aside, the smartest choice Miller makes is to keep switching up the show’s genre and look. Each character’s mind movie gets its own episode, interspersed with scenes of their classmates comforting and irritating one another at Xavier’s gaudy house as the interrogation takes place. For Aniq, the reunion is a rom-com; for Brett it’s an over-the-top action movie, with people throwing punches left and right. There’s even a clever animated episode. Many of the show’s questions get their answers in a flashback to the Class of 2006’s senior year that takes the form of ’90s teen one-crazy-night comedies like Dazed and Confused and Can’t Hardly Wait.

The Afterparty is also, at heart, a one-crazy-night comedy, albeit in episodic form. The murder mystery just gives it a shape. As such, the show’s ambitions are modest. It’s not out to tease your brain or make you reflect on the criminal justice system; the plot is not what you would call complex, and Mitchell plays pretty fast and loose with the touchstones of mid-2000s teen culture. (From the ska revival to frosted tips, most of the nostalgic references point more to the late ’90s.) But within its limited lane, The Afterparty delivers. It’s pure, lively, slapstick fun—and, in the depths of January, with our third pandemic year fast approaching, who couldn’t use some of that?

(LOS ANGELES) — “Jeopardy!” champion Amy Schneider’s dazzling streak is over, snapped Wednesday by a Chicago librarian after 40 consecutive wins and nearly $1.4 million in prize money.

Schneider’s success put her in the ranks of Ken Jennings, who’s serving as guest host, and the quiz show’s other all-time greats. It also made Schneider, a trans woman, a visible symbol of achievement for often-marginalized people.

“It’s still a little hard to believe,” she said of her impressive run. “It’s something that I’m going to be remembered for, and that’s pretty great,”

New champ Rhone Talsma had the correct response to the final “Jeopardy!” clue for a winning total of $29,600. Schneider, who found herself in the unusual position of entering the last round short of a runaway, was second with $19,600.
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“I’m still in shock,” Talsma said in a statement. “I did not expect to be facing a 40-day champion, and I was excited to maybe see someone else slay the giant. I just really didn’t think it was going to be me, so I’m thrilled.”

Schneider told The Associated Press that Talsma played well and did a “great job of taking the opportunities when they came up and putting himself position to be able to win.”

The answer that stumped Schneider was about countries of the world: The only nation whose name in English ends in an “h” and which is also one of the 10 most populous. (Cue the “Jeopardy!” music — and the response is, “What is Bangladesh?”)

Among her immediate reactions when the game and her streak ended: She was sad but also relieved that “I don’t have to come up with anymore anecdotes,” the stories that contestants share during game breaks.

Contestants receive their winnings after their final game airs, and Schneider’s spending plans include clothes shopping and, especially, travel.

An engineering manager and Dayton, Ohio, native who lives in Oakland, California, Schneider’s regular-season play made her No. 2 in consecutive games won, placing her between Jennings with 74 games and Matt Amodio, winner of 38 games in 2021.

Schneider’s prize total of $1,382,800 puts her in fourth place on the regular-season winnings list, behind Jennings ($2,520,700), James Holzhauer ($2,462,216) and Amodio ($1,518,601).

Schneider, will be part of the show’s “Tournament of Champions,” and is the first trans person to qualify,

She was braced for her streak to end, she told AP.

“I had a feeling my time was winding down, even though it didn’t look that way in the scores,” Schneider said. The routine of traveling to Los Angeles for tapings — five shows a day, two days a week — was tiring, and that took a toll.

After she surpassed Amodio’s tally of consecutive victories, she added, the prospect of trying to break Jennings’ long-standing record was “hard to imagine.”

Schneider’s depth of knowledge, lightning-fast answers and gracious but efficient manner won her a devoted fan base. Comedy writer Louis Virtel, a former “Jeopardy!” contestant, tweeted earlier this month that Schneider was like a “case worker assigned to each episode, and when she’s done she picks up her briefcase, nods, and leaves.”

She was also admired for her handling of anti-trans trolls, with one measured reply prompting a shoutout to her from writer and Broadway star Harvey Fierstein.

“The best outcome of all of this always is going to be whatever help I’ve been able to offer the trans community,” Schneider said. “I’m here because of the sacrifices countless trans people have made, often to the extent of risking their lives. To do my part to move that cause forward, it’s really special.”

Schneider has a message for “Jeopardy!” viewers who will miss making her part of their daily routine: “I realized that I am really just so sad for all my fans. … I want to thank them for all their support, and tell them that’s it’s OK.”

For the season through Jan. 17, “Jeopardy!” ranked as the most-watched syndicated program with an average 9.4 million viewers – a substantial increase of 563,000 over the last season. The show averaged 11 million viewers for the week of Jan. 10-17, according to Nielsen.

The streaks by Schneider and Amodio have helped ease “Jeopardy!” past the mishandled replacement of its admired host, the late Alex Trebek. Executive producer Mike Richards was picked by Sony Pictures Television to replace Trebek last year, but quickly exited the show after old podcasts surfaced that included his misogynistic and other demeaning comments.

A permanent host has yet to be named, with Mayim Bialik, who was named host of prime-time “Jeopardy!” specials, and Jennings trading off this season. Jennings is also a consulting producer for the show.

When the news broke, in 2020, that Disney-owned Hulu was making a miniseries about Pamela Anderson, Tommy Lee and the purloined sex tape that shook the world, it came as a bit of a surprise. The platform had always been the streaming home for the company’s R-rated fare, but it seemed doubtful that Disney would be bold enough to do justice to a triple-X premise. Well, as a chorus of pre-release headlines trumpeting the fictionalized Lee’s animatronic talking penis confirmed, that particular worry was misplaced. And it turns out that the problems with Pam & Tommy go far beyond a shortage (or surplus) of raunch.
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The best thing this frustrating crime caper has going for it is its cast. Sebastian “Winter Soldier” Stan captures the manic machismo of Mötley Crüe drummer Lee in full, chaotic flower. If Lily James, the British period drama stalwart, leans into Anderson’s breathy ditziness to an extent that feels slightly mean, at least she makes an astonishing physical transformation into the Baywatch star. (The show’s hair and makeup deserve all the awards.) Seth Rogen, who developed the project with producing partner Evan Goldberg and writer Robert Siegel, dons a mullet as Rand Gauthier, the down-and-out carpenter who steals the couple’s honeymoon video after Tommy pushes him too far. Nick Offerman, Taylor Schilling and The White Lotus breakout Fred Hechinger round out Rand’s smut-saturated L.A. milieu.

There’s certainly more to this story, which figured prominently in the rise of internet pornography and presaged recent legal battles over revenge porn, than even many of us who were sentient at the time are aware. Some of it is even worth telling. But the show is wildly inconsistent, swinging from fratty exploitation romp to revisionist buzzkill to dramatized Wikipedia entry without bothering to smooth out the transitions. The central couple can come off as reasonably intelligent and reflective or deeply stupid and shallow. In some scenes, Tommy is a tender, loving, overgrown boy, blindsided by the rise of alt-rock and sensitive about Crüe’s fall from the top of the charts; in others, he’s a raging psychopath.

Based on a 2014 Rolling Stone feature, Pam & Tommy also stretches a short movie’s worth of material to eight episodes of up to an hour apiece. The Lees’ 96-hour courtship is rendered in such minute detail that it almost seems to unfold in real time. One of three episodes directed by Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya) opens with a seemingly interminable sequence in which Rand and adult entertainment icon Uncle Miltie (Offerman) pitch the tape to studio after litigation-averse studio. I guess it’s apt that the show fits Umberto Eco’s famous definition of porn: “If, to go from A to B, the characters take longer than you would like, then the film you are seeing is pornographic.”

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What pushes Pam & Tommy from inane, inconsistent but occasionally fun trifle into a more cynical realm is, ironically, its intermittent attempts to view the saga through a feminist lens. Midway through the series, after Rand and Miltie start selling copies of the tape online, the mostly male producing team brings in a few credible female storytellers, including writer Sarah Gubbins (Better Things) and director Lake Bell, to weigh the scandal’s disproportionate impact on Pam. Suddenly, a character heretofore depicted as a simpering bimbo is issuing such searing third-wave critiques as: “sluts don’t get to decide what happens to pictures of their bodies.”

The show’s creators may have been genuinely moved to give Anderson, who reportedly finds its existence “very painful” and resisted invitations to participate, her due. But even if that’s the case, their jumble of characterizations and tones—not to mention the laziness of churning out such a shoddy retelling of her public humiliation—does her a disservice. The same goes for the choice to paint the couple’s marriage as a whirlwind romance and relegate the six months Lee served in prison after pleading no contest to felony spousal battery charges to onscreen text.

Pam & Tommy is the kind of story that’s almost impossible to tell in the post-#MeToo era—one that combines the cheap pleasures of trash culture with a sober accounting of systemic misogyny. Rogen and his collaborators would not have been wrong to fear a backlash to a lighter, more glib depiction of Anderson’s ordeal. But what they’ve made instead is a cowardly compromise that, talking phallus and all, seems bound to disappoint viewers of every stripe.

Teen TV is a haven for outsiders. From Saved by the Bell’s resident nerd Samuel “Screech” Powers and the sardonic title character of Daria to, more recently, Stranger Things’ brooding misfit Jonathan Byers and Euphoria’s depressive drug addict Rue Bennett, they take a wide variety of forms. For every glossy mean-girl soap there is a cult classic in the Veronica Mars vein. It makes sense—has anyone survived high school without ever feeling like they didn’t belong? Which might explain why, when it comes to portraying female freaks and geeks, Hollywood always seems to get away with casting actors who meet its superhuman beauty standards.
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By virtue of its charming leads, Syfy’s lovable supernatural dramedy Astrid & Lilly Save the World (debuting Jan. 26) breaks that mold. Relative newcomers Samantha Aucoin and Jana Morrison play the eponymous best friends—two witty teens thrown together by the cruel calculus that so often relegates big girls to the sidelines of social life. Timid, sweet and self-conscious, Aucoin’s Lilly takes refuge in a bedroom plastered with posters of her pop-culture faves. Astrid (Morrison) is the bold, confident one, with a hyper-critical mom and a white-hot crush on gothy fellow outcast Sparrow (Spencer Macpherson).

Together, the girls undertake nightly spy missions, prowling their suburban hellscape by car to keep tabs on their peers. So when they finally end up at a cool house party and resident jerky jock Tate (Kolton Stewart) declares them the “Pudge Patrol,” they retreat to do what any teen weirdo worth their Doc Martens would do in their place: ritually burn various items associated with him while howling at the moon. They think they’re just blowing off steam, but then Tate doesn’t show up to school the next day and a hunky stranger named Brutus (Olivier Renaud) materializes to inform them that their spell, such as it was, opened a portal to another dimension. “Who hurt you?” he wants to know. “This portal is no joke. Only humans with severe pain can open that portal.” Also, if they don’t close it—something only they can do—“humanity sort of disappears.”

That quest entails vanquishing a series of monsters-of-the-week, with lots of campy special effects and story lines that draws parallels between the girls’ showdowns with evil and the battle to love yourself when you’re growing up different in a world that hates you for it. If that sounds a lot like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, minus now-controversial creator Joss Whedon‘s sexualized male gaze, rest assured that creators Noelle Stehman and Betsy Van Stone know what they’re doing; Brutus even invokes Buffy’s mentor Giles by way of introducing himself. Offbeat running gags (Lilly’s chronic leg cramps and Astrid’s oversensitivity to foul odors are the first signs the duo is developing superpowers) and sharp, foul-mouthed dialogue (“I refuse to let some idiot chode-bag tell us who we are!”) keep the show fresh. But what makes Astrid & Lilly unique is the authenticity of its lovingly written, endearingly portrayed outsider heroines.

We know way too much about Lena Dunham—about her upbringing, her neuroses, her health problems—but is that her fault or ours? We think of look-at-me personalities like Dunham as unavoidable, but as your grandmother may have said, it takes two to tango. As your grandmother may also have said, people can surprise you. And Dunham’s second full-length feature film, Sharp Stick—which made its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival last weekend—counts as a surprise, the sort of movie a writer-director makes when she shifts away from trying to prove something and seeks instead only to express something. This is a film made with tenderness, more an exploration than a definitive statement, and a reminder that awkward sex isn’t necessarily bad sex: if anything, it’s the ultimate proof of our bewildering, imperfect humanness.
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Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth) is a sheltered 26-year-old living with her deadpan, oft-divorced mother Marilyn (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and aspiring Instagram influencer sister Treina (Taylour Paige) in a cozy but unglamorous Los Angeles apartment. Treina, with her bodacious booty and expertly manicured talons, has everything she needs to sell her hotness on the Internet, so why not? But these sisters, a duo with a close, relaxed relationship, are painted as comic extremes: Sarah Jo may be 26, but with her quizzical, Keane-painting eyes and pillowy pout, she appears at least 10 years younger. Unlike Treina, who looks great in anything Spandex and sparkly, Sarah Jo favors frumpy-sweet cardigan-and-skirt combos straight out of the sister-wife catalog. Her mother has seen it all, and her sister has more boyfriends than she can count, but Sarah Jo’s exaggerated freshness makes her seem like a being from another world, a fantasy landscape of lily pads and rainbows.

Yet there’s a reason Sarah Jo seems to have simultaneously frozen herself in a kind of childhood, even as she presents herself as a prim, middle-aged matron. Painful health problems forced her to undergo a radical hysterectomy at age 15; she went through menopause at 17. She seems to have chosen “against” sex, instead cultivating her innate kindness and patience. She works as a caregiver to a child with disabilities, whose parents, Josh (Jon Bernthal) and Heather (Dunham), part of the upper-middle-class matcha-smoothie set, both value her and condescend to her.

Everything shifts when Sarah Jo comes on to Josh, a move that we don’t see coming, given Sarah Jo’s almost aggressive innocence. Josh seems to be a decent guy; he adores his son and is far more engaged with his upbringing than the boy’s mother is. (Then again, she appears to be the breadwinner of the family; she’s also heavily pregnant and stressed-out.) The affair that Sarah Jo and Josh tumble into opens a world of joy for Sarah Jo. Josh is a classic man-child, but he’s at least a gentle, considerate one—until he’s not. The inevitable end of this relationship sends Sarah Jo into a tailspin of uncertainty and exploration. She wonders if Josh turned against her because she was “bad” at sex, and so she sets out on a kind of fairytale journey, hoping to educate herself by exposing herself to a range of sexual experiences. (The list tacked to her wall, written out in magic marker on colored paper, begins with “anal” and moves through the alphabet from there.) She also trawls the Internet until she finds the porn star who’s exactly right for her. His name is Vance Leroy and he’s played, wonderfully, by Scott Speedman. Through the screen, he becomes a kind of guru to her, at one point declaiming words to live by: “Nobody is a sex genius!”

Sarah Jo is so unworldly that you fear for her—she’s hardly equipped to be meeting strangers for sex. But Sharp Stick isn’t a parable about the dangers of the real world. It’s a wish-fulfillment fantasy in which the wish is both simple and seemingly unattainable: Sarah Jo wants to open herself to pleasure, to understand herself better and to assuage her anxiety over her perceived lack of skills and experience. This is a story about a search for openness in a closed-off world—a world where the Internet is better at providing the illusion of interconnectedness than it is at actually connecting us.

Read more reviews by Stephanie Zacharek

Whether or not you care about Dunham’s semi-meteoric rise (beginning with her acclaimed, if self-conscious, 2010 directorial debut Tiny Furniture and moving through her HBO show, Girls, which allegedly reflected the sexual anxieties of a whole generation) and semi-dramatic fall (spurred by, among other things, an annoying memoir), Sharp Stick is an affirmation of one thing: it’s never a good idea to write off filmmakers or writers who have underwhelmed us in the past. Because as we change, they change too. Dunham has said she began writing the film as a way of dealing with her own health crises—among them, she underwent a hysterectomy in 2018, after years of suffering with endometriosis—though she has also said that at a certain point the characters took on a life of their own, wholly separate from hers. Sharp Stick is an imperfect picture—despite its title, it has very few sharp edges, and it could use a few more, or at least some mild dramatic tension—but it’s a searching one, a tentative examination of how risky it is to open ourselves to intimacy and happiness. And there’s so little sex in American movies; it’s refreshing to see sex scenes directed with both warmth and a sense of carnality. Sometimes, the most you can ask of an artist is to try something different. No matter what you think of her, Lena Dunham has done just that.

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Fabulous displays of wealth, high society scandals and power struggles at all levels fuel the opulent drama of HBO’s The Gilded Age, which premiered on Monday. The show, which comes by way of Julian Fellowes, the creator behind the 2001 film Gosford Park and the critically acclaimed historical series Downton Abbey, is a lavish period drama set in the 1880s—an era of rapid growth and change known as the Gilded Age.

The series centers on the introduction of a group of newcomers to New York City’s rigid high society, ranging from wide-eyed country ingénue Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson), who moves in with her aunts (Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon), who belong to one of New York’s oldest and most wealthy families, to the nouveau riche Russell family, headed up by George, a ruthless railroad tycoon patriarch (Morgan Spector) and his even more ambitious wife Bertha (Carrie Coon), who’s determined to climb to the top of the social ladder.
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Fellowes, who has made a career of parsing out the tensions that lie between upstairs and downstairs life, honing in on the maladies and melodrama of the ostentatiously wealthy, follows in the legacy of Edith Wharton. The American novelist, known for conjuring stories of high octane drama in the insular world of high society, is one of the foremost authors associated with the Gilded Age. (Fellowes himself has cited Wharton’s works, The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country as influences on his own work).

For Wharton, who was the first woman to win a Pulitzer in Literature for her 1920 novel, The Age of Innocence, the social mores and hyper specific accounts of luxury and scandal came from first-hand experience. Born Edith Jones to a wealthy, old money family (Wharton’s paternal family is related to the Astor family and are rumored to be the “Joneses” in the idiom, “Keeping up with the Joneses,”), Wharton, like many of her heroines, faced challenges in living life on her own terms as a woman in a society ruled by rigid rules and morals. This, however, provided rich fodder for her as a writer, helping her to create books that were filled with emotion, longing and plenty of drama.

With that in mind, here are five Wharton novels to read to get your Gilded Age fix after watching the new HBO series.

The Age of Innocence

In the Age of Innocence (1920), social mores and familial responsibility keep two star-crossed lovers apart over the course of three decades. Newland Archer, a wealthy lawyer and one of New York’s most eligible bachelors, is set to marry May Welland, an innocent girl from one of society’s top families. However, their soon-to-be marital bliss is disrupted by the arrival of May’s gorgeous and exotic cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, who has left her cruel husband, who is a Polish count. Inevitably, Newland falls in love with Ellen, leading to a wistful love triangle filled with longing and unfulfilled desire.

Custom of the Country

Neither low social standing or hapless partners can deter Undine Spragg, an ambitious young woman from the Midwest, from climbing New York City’s social ladder in Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913). In the novel, Spragg, navigates the rigid rules of high society, learning that her family’s newfound wealth doesn’t quite stack up to an old, blue blood social pedigree. While she cycles through husbands, affairs, Undine soon discovers that an old flame who’s just as ambitious and unconnected as her may be her best match in the end.

The House of Mirth

Wharton’s sharpest critique of how hostile high society could be to a woman, in spite of her social standing or wealth is her 1905 novel, The House of Mirth. Centering on the tragic tale of Lily Bart, a winsome and well-born, but financially struggling young woman who is wrecked by the stringent social mores and cruel slights of New York City’s high society. As Lily grows older and prospects of marriage to a wealthy and well-connected man begin to wane, she survives on wit and the hope of a life with more freedom—but in the end, the world as she knows it grows smaller and smaller, until she runs out of options for a viable future.

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The Reef

The Reef (1912), centers on a love affair rekindled between Anna Leath, a wealthy widow, and her former flame, George Darrow, an American diplomat. The affair is complicated when Darrow begins a secret liaison with a young woman named Sophy, who he later finds out is not only Anna’s daughter’s governess, but is also engaged to be married to Anna’s stepson, Owen.

Summer

In Summer (1917), Charity Royall, a young woman of low birth, is smitten when NYC architect Lucius Harney visits her small New England town for the summer. Lucius moves into the home of Charity’s guardian, Lawyer Royall, a widower who lusts for Charity. After Lucius and Charity begin an affair, she hopes for a marriage to him that will bring her love and a ticket out of town, but Lucius’ fickle affection and a life-altering event will change the course of Charity’s future forever.

NEW YORK — Ian Alexander Jr., the only child of award-winning actor and director Regina King, has died. He turned 26 on Wednesday.

“Our family is devastated at the deepest level by the loss of Ian,” a family statement shared Saturday by a King spokesman said. “He is such a bright light who cared so deeply about the happiness of others. Our family asks for respectful consideration during this private time.”

No further details were released.

The “One Night in Miami” director shared Alexander with her former husband, record producer Ian Alexander Sr. The two divorced in 2007 after 10 years of marriage. The younger Alexander was a DJ who often accompanied King to red carpet events.
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He told E! News at the 2019 Golden Globes: “She’s just a super mom. She doesn’t really let bad work days or anything come back and ruin the time that we have. It’s really awesome to have a mother who I can enjoy spending time with.”

The pair had matching tattoos reading “unconditional love” in Aramaic.

“We were taking Kabbalah classes,” King said on The View in 2017. “He said, let’s choose three designs each and not tell each other which ones they are and whichever one is matching, that’s the one we’re going to get tattooed — and we both chose unconditional love.”

For his mother’s 50th birthday last year, Alexander posted a tribute on Instagram that read in part: “To be able to watch you take this lifetime by its neck and make it yours is something i (sic) will forever be grateful for. But to have you as my mother is the greatest gift I could ask for.”

On Instagram a week ago, King shared a clip of her son’s latest track, “Green Eyes,” urging her followers to check it out. In an interview with People, she once called her son “an amazing young man” and spoke of the love between mother and child.

“You don’t know what unconditional love is. You may say you do, but if you don’t have a child, you don’t know what that is,” said the Oscar, Golden Globe and four-time Emmy winner. “When you experience it, it’s the most fulfilling (thing) ever.”

Word spread quickly on social media.

“Deepest condolences and prayers for strength to @ReginaKing. Sending back to her all the warmth and light and support she has extended to me and to so many others,” Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, posted on Twitter.

King, a star in “If Beale Street Could Talk” and numerous other films, is the recipient of two NAACP Image Awards.

Bernice King, the CEO of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Change and daughter of King posted on Twitter: “Praying for Regina King. She needs all the grace and light that can flow her way right now.”

Dad movies, at least among those who aren’t actual dads, tend to be undervalued pleasures; they pluck a certain satisfying, resonant chord, often without being particularly flashy. Munich: The Edge of War, directed by Christian Schwochow and adapted from Robert Harris’ 2017 novel, is the ultimate dad movie: its setting is the 1938 Munich conference in which European leaders met with Hitler in an earnest, if naive, attempt to stave off war. That part really happened. The more intimate story Munich weaves around that event—involving two young men, one German and one English, who attempt a risky plot to stop Hitler—is largely fiction. Yet the made-up narrative melts seamlessly into the historical one. If the movie is handsome in an oak-paneled-office way, there’s life in it too. You feel there’s something at stake for the two young would-be heroes, as there is for the world.
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Munich opens in 1932, at a champagne-fueled Oxford University garden party. Three friends gambol drunkenly on the lawn, noisy in their adamant youthfulness. One of them, whose slight accent marks him as someone-not-from-England, expresses his excitement about going home to what he calls the new Germany. His girlfriend, also German, protests that it’s a nation “of thugs and racists.” Their mini-argument ends with a flurry of sozzled kisses, but you know there’s trouble in this paradise. The third friend, who is English, teases them with amused annoyance, though he’s unsure of what to make of his best friend’s belligerent devotion to the fatherland. He also, it seems, likes the girl.

Fast-forward six years, and the young Englishman, Hugh (George MacKay, putting his scrubbed-clean innocence to good use), is a husband and father stuck in a demanding job as a secretary to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (Jeremy Irons, buttoned-up and terrific). At that point, plenty of people in power are still underestimating Hitler, and Chamberlain isn’t too worried. As Irons plays him, at least until the movie’s swerving finale, this PM is a likable doofus, certain that any problem can be solved with a handshake and a cup of tea.

Even so, Hugh sees that war is coming. And over in Germany, his old school friend Paul (Jannis Niewöhner, thoughtful-looking in a matinee-idol way) has an even better idea of how horrible and far-reaching that conflict might be. He’s now part of a resistance group plotting to stop, and maybe even kill, Hitler. The girlfriend—her name is Lenya, and she’s played by the marvelous, somber-eyed German actor Liv Lisa Fries, from Babylon Berlin—is nowhere on the scene; we’ll learn of her sad fate later. Paul and Hugh haven’t spoken in years, as Paul’s increasingly bullish nationalistic beliefs became too much for Hugh to bear. But when Paul comes into possession of a top-secret document—-it’s slipped to him by his secretary and lover, Mrs. Winter, played wonderfully by the sly German actor Sandra Hüller-—he and his old friend cross paths again, now united in a plan that seems as doomed as it is urgent.

Read more reviews by Stephanie Zacharek

Not everything in Munich is particularly subtle. Now and then you’ll hear a character note with alarm, “Hitler mobilizes tomorrow!” And the actor who plays the man himself, Ulrich Matthes, is a little too gaunt to convey much robust, dangerous charisma (even if his eyes do radiate a certain magnetic madness). But the movie gives a sense of what it’s like to be a human perched on a particularly sharp ledge of history. And its fictional elements spring from seeds of reality: Harris has said that Paul’s character was inspired by the anti-Nazi German diplomat Adam von Trott zu Solz, executed in 1944 for his role in Claus von Stauffenberg’s failed plot to kill Hitler. Even if Paul doesn’t suffer the same grim fate in Munich, its certainty hangs over him like a tense shadow. Sometimes the things you don’t see in a movie are as effective as those you do.

LOS ANGELES — Louie Anderson, whose four-decade career as a comedian and actor included his unlikely, Emmy-winning performance as mom to twin adult sons in the TV series “Baskets,” died Friday. He was 68.

Anderson died at a hospital in Las Vegas of complications from cancer, said Glenn Schwartz, his longtime publicist. Anderson had a a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, Schwartz said previously.

“’Baskets’ was such a phenomenal ‘second act’ for Louie Anderson. I wish he’d gotten a third,” Michael McKean said on Twitter. George Wallace wrote: “You’ll be missed, Louie. What an awesome friend. One in a million.”
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The portly, round-faced Anderson used his girth and a checkered childhood in Saint Paul, Minnesota, as fodder for his early stand-up routines.

In a 1987 interview with The Associated Press, Anderson compared himself to another comedian who mined his childhood for comedy.

“Bill Cosby and I had similar goals,” Anderson told AP. “I wanted parents to be able to bring their children and children to be able to bring their parents to my concerts. I feel a family that can laugh about family problems is better off. The difference between Cosby and myself is that he sees it from an adult perspective and I tell it from a child’s viewpoint.”

He had a life-long battle with weight, but said in 1987 that he’d put a stop to using his size as stage material.

“I’ve always been big,” he said. “But I don’t do fat jokes anymore.”

In later years, his life as one of 11 children in a family headed by a troubled father and devoted mother was a deeper source of reflection and inspiration for Anderson, both in his screen work and in his best-selling books.

His latest book, 2018’s “Hey Mom,” was a tribute in letters to the lessons he learned from her and how-to tips on facing life’s challenges. He also gave the late Ora Zella Anderson a shout-out for his “Baskets” role.

“I just started writing with one letter, saying, ’Hey Mom, I’m playing you on TV. I hope you see it. I hope you’re a part of it…” Anderson told The Associated Press that year.

He won the best supporting actor Emmy in 2016 for his portrayal of Christine Baskets, mother to twins played by Zach Galifianakis, in the FX series “Baskets.” Anderson, who received three consecutive Emmy nods for the role, credited his mom with elements of the character.

Anderson’s early jobs included counseling troubled children. He changed course after winning a 1981 Midwest comedy competition, where he was spotted by veteran comic Henny Youngman, who hosted contest, according to Schwartz.

Anderson worked as a writer for Youngman and then gained onstage experience while crisscrossing the United States. His big break came in 1984 when Johnny Carson, known for showcasing rising comedians on “The Tonight Show,” brought him on to perform.

He was a familiar face elsewhere on TV, including as host of a revival of the game show “Family Feud” from 1999 to 2002, and on comedy specials and in frequent late-night talk show appearances.

Anderson voiced an animated version of himself as a kid in “Life With Louie.” He created the cartoon series, which first aired in prime time in late 1994 before moving to Saturday morning for its 1995-98 run. Anderson won two Daytime Emmy Awards for the role.

He made guest appearances in several TV series, including “Scrubs” and “Touched by an Angel,” and was on the big screen in 1988′s “Coming to America” and in last year’s sequel to the Eddie Murphy comedy.

In a magazine interview, Anderson recounted getting the role after he spotted Murphy, who he knew working in comedy clubs, at a Los Angeles restaurant. Anderson said hello, then made a costly decision that paid off.

″Take Eddie Murphy’s check and put it on my credit card, but don’t tell him until after I leave,″ Anderson recalled telling a waiter. He ended up with a $600 charge, but Murphy called to thank him and offered to write a part for him in “Coming to America,” Anderson said.

His books included “Dear Dad – Letters From An Adult Child, ” a collection of letters from Anderson to his late father; “Good-bye Jumbo… Hello Cruel World,” a self-help book, and “The F Word, How To Survive Your Family.”

His survivors include sisters Lisa and Shanna Anderson.

(NEW YORK) — Meat Loaf, the rock superstar loved by millions for his “Bat Out of Hell” album and for such theatrical, dark-hearted anthems as “Paradise By the Dashboard Light,” “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad,” and “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That),” has died. He was 74.

The singer born Marvin Lee Aday died Thursday, according to a family statement provided by his longtime agent Michael Greene.

“Our hearts are broken to announce that the incomparable Meat Loaf passed away tonight,” the statement said. “We know how much he meant to so many of you and we truly appreciate all of the love and support as we move through this time of grief in losing such an inspiring artist and beautiful man… From his heart to your souls… don’t ever stop rocking!”
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No cause or other details were given, but Aday had numerous health scares over the years.

“Bat Out of Hell,” his mega-selling collaboration with songwriter Jim Steinman and producer Todd Rundgren, came out in 1977 and made him one of the most recognizable performers in rock.

Fans fell hard for the roaring vocals of the long-haired, 250-plus pound singer and for the comic non-romance of the title track, “You Took The Words Right Out of My Mouth,” “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” and “Paradise By the Dashboard Light,” an operatic cautionary tale about going all the way.

“Paradise” was a duet with Ellen Foley that featured play-by-play from New York Yankees broadcaster Phil Rizzuto, who alleged — to much skepticism — that he was unaware of any alternate meanings to reaching third base and heading for home.

After a slow start and mixed reviews, “Bat Out of Hell” became one of the top-selling albums in history, with worldwide sales of more than 40 million copies. Meat Loaf wasn’t a consistent hit maker, especially after falling out for years with Steinman. But he maintained close ties with his fans through his manic live shows, social media and his many television, radio and film appearances, including “Fight Club” and cameos on “Glee” and “South Park.”

Friends and fans mourned his death on social media. “I hope paradise is as you remember it from the dashboard light, Meat Loaf,” actor Stephen Fry said on Twitter. Andrew Lloyd Webber tweeted: “The vaults of heaven will be ringing with rock.” And Adam Lambert called Meat Loaf: “A gentle hearted powerhouse rock star forever and ever. You were so kind. Your music will always be iconic.”

Meat Loaf’s biggest musical success after “Bat Out of Hell” was “Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell,” a 1993 reunion with Steinman that sold more than 15 million copies and featured the Grammy-winning single “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That).”

Steinman died in April.

Aday’s other albums included “Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster is Loose,” “Hell in a Handbasket” and “Braver Than We Are.”

A native of Dallas, Aday was the son of a school teacher who raised him on her own after divorcing his alcoholic father, a police officer. Aday was singing and acting in high school (Mick Jagger was an early favorite, so was Ethel Merman) and attended Lubbock Christian College and what is now the University of North Texas. Among his more notable childhood memories: Seeing John F. Kennedy arrive at Love Field in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, then learning the president had been assassinated and driving to Parkland Hospital and watching a bloodied Jackie Kennedy step out of a car.

He was still a teenager when his mother died and when he acquired the nickname Meat Loaf, the alleged origins of which range from his weight to a favorite recipe of his mother’s. He left for Los Angeles after college and was soon fronting the band Meat Loaf Soul. For years, he alternated between music and the stage, recording briefly for Motown, opening for such acts as the Who and the Grateful Dead and appearing in the Broadway production of “Hair.”

By the mid-1970s, he was playing the lobotomized biker Eddie in the theater and film versions of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” had served as an understudy for his friend John Belushi for the stage production of National Lampoon and had begun working with Steinman on “Bat Out of Hell.” The dense, pounding production was openly influenced by Wagner, Phil Spector and Bruce Springsteen, whose bandmates Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg played on the record. Rundgren initially thought of the album as a parody of Springsteen’s grandiose style.

Steinman had known Meat Loaf since the singer appeared in his 1973 musical “More Than You Deserve” and some of the songs on “Bat Out of Hell,” including “All Revved Up With No Place to Go,” were initially written for a planned stage show based on the story of Peter Pan. “Bat Out of Hell” took more than two years to find a taker as numerous record executives turned it down, including RCA’s Clive Davis, who disparaged Steinman’s songs and acknowledged that he had misjudged the singer: “The songs were coming over as very theatrical, and Meat Loaf, despite a powerful voice, just didn’t look like a star,” Davis wrote in his memoir, “The Soundtrack of My Life.”

With the help of another Springsteen sideman, Steve Van Zandt, “Bat Out of Hell” was acquired by Cleveland International, a subsidiary of Epic Records. The album made little impact until months after its release, when a concert video of the title track was aired on the British program the Old Grey Whistle Test. In the U.S., his connection to “Rocky Horror” helped when he convinced producer Lou Adler to use a video for “Paradise By the Dashboard Light” as a trailer for the cult movie. But Meat Loaf was so little known at first that he began his “Bat Out of Hell” tour in Chicago as the opening act for Cheap Trick, then one of the world’s hottest groups.

“I remember pulling up at the theater and it says, ‘TONIGHT: CHEAP TRICK, WITH MEAT LOAF.’ And I said to myself, ‘These people think we’re serving dinner,’” Meat Loaf explained in 2013 on the syndicated radio show “In the Studio.”

“And we walk out on stage and these people were such Cheap Trick fans they booed us from the start. They were getting up and giving us the finger. The first six rows stood up and screamed. … When we finished, most of the boos had stopped and we were almost getting applause.”

He is survived by Deborah Gillespie, his wife since 2007, and by daughters Pearl and Amanda Aday.

___

AP Entertainment Writer Andrew Dalton contributed from Los Angeles.

Former Vogue creative director and editor-at-large André Leon Talley, known for his rare combination of exuberance, intellect, and brilliant humor, died on Jan. 18 in White Plains, New York at the age of 73. So many, in and outside of the fashion industry, have shared memories of interactions with him, which is a testament to the kind of person he was; happy to hold forth and share his knowledge—and love—of fashion with anyone interested in hearing them.

I think he would have liked very much that these anecdotes—instances so commonplace in his life, I’m sure, that I wonder how many he would even remember—are spilling onto the Internet. Which is why I want to share my own.
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In a 2009 interview with Time Out New York pegged to the release of R. J. Cutler’s Vogue documentary The September Issue, Talley was asked about his legacy:

In your September column for Vogue, you ask Serena Williams how she’d like to be remembered. How would you like people to remember you?

I’d like to be remembered as someone who made a difference in the lives of young people—that I nurtured someone and taught them to pursue their dreams and their careers, to leave a legacy. You cannot live your life in the elitist world of fashion and not step out or you’re disconnected. You have to realize that fashion is not the endgame.

I am one of the many young people Talley helped. He was neither my mentor nor my friend and I’m not sure if he even thought of it as helping, but over the course of my roughly 15 years as a journalist, he made himself personally accessible to me whenever I reached out. I don’t recall a publicist ever standing between us. In an industry self-serious enough that a creative director recently issued a formal statement instructing people to call him by his first name only, this is so rare with a fashion personality as famous as he was.

I wasn’t asking for career advice, rather interviews for stories. Being a fashion journalist has always scared me—it does to this day. Talley, one of the industry’s major stars, of course intimidated me. But whenever our interviews would begin, that fear went away, because he was smart, warm, entertaining, and so happy to be talking about fashion.

Last year, I spent a long time talking to Talley on the phone for the biography of Anna Wintour I recently completed, which comes out in May. Wintour and Talley began developing a close relationship in the early eighties, when they both worked for then-Vogue editor-in-chief Grace Mirabella. He didn’t say yes to my interview request right away, instead asking for time to think about it. That made sense—his falling out with Wintour had been a major news story in recent months following the publication of his memoir The Chiffon Trenches, and I didn’t know if he would care to say anything more about their relationship.

Read more: ‘I Was a Quiet Advocate.’ Fashion Editor André Leon Talley on the Discrimination He’s Faced in the Industry

After about two months, he told me he had thought about it and would like to speak with me. He made time to talk on weekends that spring; I remember the weather being unusually sunny and gorgeous. He was, as he had been in the past, incredibly generous with his time and offered to be available to me for follow-ups. My first follow-up interview in April took more than an hour and a half; that was the last time we spoke.

I can only guess as to why he helped me. Perhaps he knew how hard of an assignment writing about Wintour could be. Certainly, he knew he was part of fashion history and maybe wanted to talk about it as only he could. He had such presence in the industry, in fact, that many others interviewed for the book asked if I had talked to him and wanted to share their memories of him too. Someone who worked with both him and Wintour at Condé Nast recalled one winter when the office had emptied out for the holidays. Talley and this editor happened to be working, though, and he gave her a beautiful designer gift, wrapped with gold ribbon.

Read more: Explore a Century of Fashion Photography at Condé Nast

While he was remembered in these conversations as being both sensitive and warm, he was also sometimes described as difficult. But he spoke openly about such moments without me even asking, seemingly aware of his personality and faults and in a way that is again rare in an industry where image is everything and therefore painfully calculated. He was also proud to discuss the work that he had done in fashion: assisting Diana Vreeland as an unpaid volunteer when she was curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute; styling prominent women, including Wintour and socialites like Anne Bass; helping John Galliano produce his famous fall 1994 runway show; writing the March 2009 Vogue cover story on Michelle Obama; adding comedy to The September Issue with memorable proclamations like, “It’s a famine of beauty.”

He was also known as one of the earliest, vocal advocates for diversity in the pages of Condé Nast magazines and the fashion industry more broadly, his efforts only sometimes successful. He famously cast Naomi Campbell as Scarlett O’Hara for a Vanity Fair story during a brief period in the nineties when he wasn’t employed at Vogue. In The Chiffon Trenches, he credited Wintour with making him “the highest-ranking Black man in the history of fashion journalism” when she gave him the job of Vogue‘s creative director after she became editor-in-chief in the summer of 1988. “If the importance of this is lost on you, please remember again that this was 1988,” he wrote,” and I was not superseded in that ranking until Edward Enninful’s momentous rise as editor in chief of British Vogue, thirty years later.”

And toward the end of The Chiffon Trenches, he recounted that day Enninful took over British Vogue from a white woman, writing, “I dashed off a simple e-mail to him with huge congratulations. He responded succinctly: ‘Thank you, André. You paved the way.’”

Read more: ‘This Is Not the Time for Tiptoeing.’ How British Vogue’s Edward Enninful Is Shaking Up the Fashion World

Talley had a way of making fashion meaningful in the world beyond Vogue, which is just one thing about him that many will miss. I was reminded of this when I dug up a post I wrote after his first episode of America’s Next Top Model—I had interviewed him on set during the taping of the show’s fourteenth cycle in 2011—premiered over a decade ago:

Finally, last night, after months of hype, André Leon Talley debuted on the America’s Next Top Model judging panel. And as we expected, he was the best part of the show. But coining the word “dreckitude” was only one of many highlights of his critiques. He was kind: “There’s definitely a vulnerability in your body.” Analytical: “There’s drama to it, but it’s just sort of a stereotypical kind of drama.” Brutally honest: “I don’t like the hair, the face—it’s a mess!” And he hammed it up for the cameras: “This would definitely hit the reject floor at Vogue. Slap! Next!”

Amy Odell is the author of ANNA: The Biography, which comes out in May from Gallery Books.

Nobody watched How I Met Your Mother for its protagonist Ted (Josh Radnor). They tuned in for Neil Patrick Harris’ Barney, the quippy playboy, or for the way that Jason Segel’s Marshall and Alyson Hannigan’s Lily doted on one another. Ted was a drip. A bummer. He complained about not being able to find love. Worse still, he seemed to feel entitled to a partner.

Thankfully, the central character in Hulu’s long-awaited How I Met Your Mother spinoff, How I Met Your Father, is not only a woman (Hilary Duff’s Sophie), but a woman who remains unflaggingly optimistic about her prospect of finding love in the big city, even in the face of repeated rejection. And yet, somehow, a whiny Ted-like character has still snuck his way into this new ensemble. Christopher Lowell plays Jesse, Sophie’s new friend—and, based on the puppy-dog looks the two often exchange, inevitable love interest. Jesse reveals in the first episode that he proposed to his girlfriend on stage in front of hundreds of people, but she turned him down. A video of the incident has gone viral, and he has turned bitter. His defining character trait in the first few episodes is “man dumped by woman.”
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Jesse is far from the first self-styled good guy to get dumped in the pilot episode of a sitcom. In fact, he’s the inheritor of a dated and sexist trope. He’s the latest in a long legacy of lovelorn men who are a tiresome staple of these ensemble casts. Many of the comedy shows that aired from mid-1990s to the early 2010s fall into one of two categories: hangout comedies that are, essentially, riffs on Friends (How I Met Your Mother, Happy Endings, New Girl) and workplace comedies (The Office, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation). The workplace comedies were filled with zany personalities, and while some among them may have been mopey (hello, Toby Flenderson), they were supporting players, not romantic heroes. But if the show fell into the former classification, it probably had a Ted in the group.

Read More: 10 Delightful Hangout Shows for People Who Miss Hanging Out

The formula was always the same: In the first episode of the show, a woman humiliates this guy in some public and devastating way, thus engendering the audience’s sympathy. That guy then spends the next several seasons moping and dating. He tends to be so fixated on his own pain that he remains blithely oblivious to the feelings of the women he dates. The audience is supposed to excuse his behavior because of the hurt he suffered, which established him as one of the “good guys” who actually wants to settle down (often in contrast to his lothario friend—think Joey on Friends, in contrast to Ross, or Barney on How I Met Your Mother, juxtaposed with Ted).

Yet despite his good guy status, he usually winds up cheating, lying or dumping the more serious of these girlfriends in pursuit of the “one true love,” a female friend in his 20-something friend group (see: Rachel Green and Robin Scherbatsky). They eventually end up together, and the dude’s faith in love is restored.

In the years since Ted and Ross made their marks on television, comedy writers have—to their credit—riffed on the character type and created more self-aware and evolved versions of this rather irksome romantic lead. But almost every iteration of the hangout comedy has inexplicably clung on to the sad sack. Seeing a Ross-like figure crop up in a 2022 show like How I Met Your Father, 28 years after the debut of Friends, is disheartening. Our cultural obsession with rehashes and reboots has shackled comedy writers to some problematic formulas. Jesse’s mere existence warrants a look back at this toxic trope, as well as a plea to hold our sitcom dudes to higher standards.

Ross on Friends: The ur text

Ross may have once been a genuinely nice guy. But we never get to see that version of him. In the very first episode of Friends, Ross’ wife Carol leaves him for a woman, and it seems to break him. Disturbingly, he appears to be more upset by the challenge to his masculinity than the breakup itself. As many people who rewatched Friends in recent years have observed, Ross is not only homophobic, fretting over what Carol’s sexuality means for the sexuality of the son they share together, he’s outright bitter: He often makes disparaging remarks about Carol and, particularly, her partner Susan.

Ross even develops a rage issue after he is rejected by another woman, his second wife Emily, and has to go to anger management therapy. (It’s worth noting that Emily leaves Ross after he says “I take thee Rachel,” instead of “I take thee Emily” at their wedding. Her decision to end the short-lived marriage is quite understandable. If anyone should be angry about the incident, it’s Emily.)

Throughout all this relationship turmoil, Ross moons after Rachel. Rachel rejects him over and over again before finally relenting. She’s rewarded with a boyfriend who yells at her for prioritizing her career, becomes possessive when he learns of Rachel’s friendship with a male coworker, and then cheats on her. And yet when Rachel dumps Ross after learning of the affair, we as an audience are supposed to be sad. They will, inevitably, end up together, though Ross will mope quite a bit more, especially when Rachel, pregnant with their baby, rejects his advances yet again.

Any casual survey of the Friends fandom will find that Ross is the least loved character, for all the reasons listed above. In each Friends knockoff, certain aspects of the original Friends characters would crop up again and again: A girl next door like Rachel, a quirky friend like Phoebe, a seducer like Joey, a happy couple like Monica and Chandler. But the characters would grow beyond those bounds, evolving into new creations in their own right. Puzzlingly, though, Ross has received a simple copy-paste treatment in so many of these iterations…which brings us to Ted.

Read More: 16 Shows to Watch When You Run Out of Friends and The Office

Ted on How I Met Your Mother: The center of the story

Debuting in 2005, How I Met Your Mother may have been the most obvious Friends copy-cat—just sub out a coffee shop for a bar, and throw in a high-concept voiceover. But it was also arguably the most successful, routinely achieving high ratings and running for nine seasons.

Curiously, How I Met Your Mother chose to center its story on its Ross-like figure, Ted. And while it eventually became a true ensemble show, Ted’s quest to find a wife always drove the plot. True, the central character on a sitcom is often its least-interesting person: Someone had to play the straight man to Neil Patrick Harris’ antics. But with the lovelorn dude’s story taking up the majority of screen time, rather than just 1/6th of every episode as it did on Friends, Ted’s self-pitying became more than just an annoyance. The show was embracing toxic behavior.

In the first episode of How I Met Your Mother, Ted fantasizes about his imaginary wedding to a bride he has yet to meet. He later meets and goes on a date with Robin (Cobie Smulders). When he misses his chance to kiss her at the end of the night, Ted stages a grand, romantic gesture for the woman he just met, stealing a blue French horn for her and telling her he loves her. Robin, understandably, freaks out because “I love you” is an insane thing to say to a person you’ve known for a few hours. Ted makes one last-ditch effort to plead his case as someone who will make a great husband and dad. It still doesn’t happen. For the next nine seasons, he mopes, and we are meant to empathize with his plight.

Ted would often complain to his friends about his single-dom. He actually wanted to get married, unlike Barney. Who were these cold, heartless women who would reject him? Don’t women want to get married to someone who just wanted to treat them well? But upon my rewatch of the show, “nice guy” Ted didn’t strike me as so nice. He broke up with a woman on her birthday—twice—cheated on his long-distance girlfriend and continued to pursue Robin even when she repeatedly told him to stop. Once Robin and Ted did, inevitably, get together, he behaved jealously and repeatedly ignored her desires, asking her, for example, to get rid of her dogs because they reminded him of her exes, while refusing to dispose of his box of mementos from old relationships.

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In the years since How I Met Your Mother went off the air, the jokes have not aged well and many viewers have pointed out that Barney, a character largely defined by his misogyny, was problematic and retrograde. But the show at least poked fun at Barney. The writers made it abundantly clear that the way Barney treated women was wrong, and the character did eventually see the error of his ways. Upon rewatch, Ted’s toxicity proves more insidious because the series fails to interrogate the fact that he feels entitled to a girlfriend and possessive of Robin in particular. The show even conjured up and then killed off a wife for Ted so he could have even more reason to mope and—conveniently—his happy ending with Robin, a move that irked fans even as it was happening. Women were disposable and interchangeable, all for the sake of Ted’s happiness.

Gradual improvements upon the trope

By 2011, sitcom writers lucky enough to get a Friends-like show on the air wisely poked fun at the series that started it all. There’s perhaps no more irreverent hangout sitcom than Happy Endings, a self-conscious show that leaned into absurdity and consistently upended the typical tropes of the genre. At one point, the show’s characters even debate which of them is which Friends character. The Ross equivalent is obviously Dave (Zachary Knighton), the friend left at the altar by his fiancée Alex (Elisha Cuthbert) for a dude who scooted into the ceremony on roller skates. But unlike Friends or How I Met Your Mother before it, Happy Endings doesn’t try to pretend that Dave’s heartbreak is a compelling plot point. In fact, it embraces the fact that Dave, Alex and all their friends are pretty terrible and annoying people: Dave takes up guitar and grows a goatee in his post-breakup phase, and his friends roast him for his self-pity.

New Girl, which premiered the same year, also wisely flipped the script. It’s a woman, Zooey Deschanel’s Jess, who discovers her partner cheating on her at the beginning of the series and is forced to start a new chapter of her life. But instead of spending season after season bemoaning her bad luck—the relationship grieving is condensed into one episode of watching Dirty Dancing on a loop—Jess largely remains hopeful that she will find love. She does, with her roommate Nick (perhaps the closest thing New Girl has to a Ted). Nick is also dumped in the first episode of the series, but his character is defined by his ineptitude rather than his sadness. The two go through the typical will-they-or-won’t-they plot points, accidentally sabotaging their relationships with other people because they’re in love with one another. But, for once, the affection, jealousy and immaturity is mutual. They’re both a mess in their own ways, and eventually they’re a mess together, a refreshing change from the pathetic dude pursuing the seemingly perfect girl.

The show that most directly takes aim at the toxicity of this trope is the brilliant British series Lovesick, where Emma. star Johnny Flynn got his start. The series centers on Flynn’s Dylan, who learns he got an STI and must revisit all his past partners in order to report the news. In doing so, he reviews what went wrong in each relationship and why he’s been unable to find love. In the first episode, Dylan thinks back to the time he got dumped at a friend’s wedding. He was such a pathetic pushover, he even gave up the hotel room he’s splitting with his girlfriend so she can have sex with someone she picked up at the reception, which is such a Ross move.

Each episode recalls Dylan’s relationship with a different ex-lover. And in reflecting on his past romances, it becomes clear to Dylan that, like Ross before him, he has always held a candle for a friend, Evie (Antonia Laura Thomas). As is typical of the genre, Dylan and Evie blow up their own relationships by admitting that they have feelings for one another. But unlike Ross or Ted, Dylan suffers the consequences of his emotional duplicity. In most shows, a betrayed ex would disappear, making way for the main couple’s happily ever after in the final episode. I won’t spoil the series, but Dylan and Evie’s path to one another is not simple or totally celebratory.

Jesse on How I Met Your Father: Let’s put the lovelorn guy to bed

How I Met Your Father feels retro for a show debuting in 2022—and not just because its breathless references to dating apps and ring lights read like the writers’ room was playing zeitgeist bingo. The first few episodes are stuffed with Easter Eggs for fans of the old series. The show even has a laugh track, a corny feature that’s fallen out of favor in the modern comedy landscape.

So I can’t help but approach Jesse, our latest iteration of the dumped dude, with skepticism. He certainly doesn’t seem as bitter or jealous as, say, Ted. Nor as angry as Ross. But, like his predecessors, he’s by far the least interesting part of the ensemble of characters. I found myself longing to learn more about Sophie’s callous roommate, her wealthy British boyfriend or Jesse’s sister, out on the prowl after divorcing her wife. I had little patience for Jesse’s musings on how his ruined proposal proves love is doomed. After a few episodes, Jesse’s character has evolved very little beyond “the bummer.” It takes several episodes for sitcom writers to nail the chemistry in an ensemble cast, and I want more for Jesse than acting as the pessimist to Zoey’s optimist. But, according to decades of television history, opposites attract, so I’m not holding out hope.

It’s high time the writers behind these sitcoms rethink the long-held assumption that being dumped is an interesting or worthy personality trait on which to hang a character. Could a breakup be a relatable form of adversity to drive a storyline or character’s arc toward a more enlightened, fulfilled version of themself? Sure! But for nearly decade shows like New Girl and Lovesick gave us more evolved versions of single characters looking for meaningful relationships. And in the age of male comedy characters like Ron Swanson, Johnny Rose and above all Ted Lasso, all of whom seem to be almost consciously built in rejection of toxic masculinity, it’s time to retire the lovelorn sitcom dude. His love interests deserve it.

Ronnie Spector’s voice made pop songs into pop symphonies. You could feel the angst and passion in every note. You can sing great but if you don’t have that passion; that heart and soul, it means nothing.

Spector, who died on Jan. 12, at 78, had it all. You felt it. When she sang, you felt every word. She led the girl group The Ronettes, which had 1960’s pop and rock hits such as “Be My Baby” and “Walking in the Rain;” she later released almost half-a-dozen solo albums and collaborated with other high-profile artists such as Patti Smith and Keith Richards. Her songs are so evocative; they always take me back. I hope people will remember her as the great artist she was, though I hate saying the word ‘was.’

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Spector was strong, too, having survived a four-year long abusive marriage to Phil Spector, who had also been The Ronettes producer. In her memoir, she wrote about fleeing their home barefoot in 1972, worried that he would kill her if she left. This [was a time] when people weren’t even talking about domestic abuse. She not only survived that period, she still had a great life. She’s a strong woman and you could always hear that strength in her voice.

I was thrilled when she agreed in 1987 to sing a song that I co-wrote with Desmond Child: “Love on a Rooftop.” When we wrote it I knew that I wanted her to do the woooahs that only she could do. “I invented those,” she once told me. And you know what? She did. No one does those like Ronnie Spector. The fact that she sang one of my songs was the fucking coolest thing ever.

Read more: Songwriter Diane Warren Is Ready for Her Prize

Last year, I heard that a biopic was being made about Spector’s life and I told her that I would love to do a song—to honor her. She said she wanted me to as well; I remember I told her that I had been nominated 12 times for an Oscar but never won and she told me that she wanted to break my losing streak.

She’s one of the best singers ever in pop music—a voice of her time and a voice for all time. That’s a fact.

—As told to Sanya Mansoor

A version of this article appeared in the Jan. 31—Feb. 7 issue of TIME

There is a question that is asked of all stand-up comics. And it is asked most frequently of comics who are being newly discovered by the press. It is seen as the perfect way to really get to know the comedian: “Who were your favorite stand-up comics when you were growing up?”

It’s a simple question. But when the press was first discovering me in the early 2010s, it felt really complicated, because the stand-up comic I loved the most growing up was Bill Cosby. He had been a part of my entire life, from his cartoon Fat Albert and The Cosby Kids in the ’70s to his stand-up, and of course through The Cosby Show in the ’80s. For my high school graduation I wore a “Cosby sweater” instead of a suit jacket.

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But when major media first took interest in me following the premiere of my FX show Totally Biased, there were already stories of women accusing Bill Cosby of sexual assault. They weren’t getting much traction in the press—and wouldn’t until several years later when the #MeToo movement ignited in full force—but it was enough that I couldn’t just say his name without reservation. On the other hand, if I didn’t say that I had loved Bill Cosby, I would be lying. And I would also look like the one Black kid who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s who didn’t like Bill Cosby.

So I tried to get clever with it. I would mention other comics and at the end I’d say, “and the artist formerly known as Bill Cosby.” It was my way of telling the truth but also acknowledging that there was something else going on that I couldn’t ignore. The interviewer always seemed to get this and move on to other questions. But it left a bigger question in my mind that has only grown since then: How do we talk about Bill Cosby? How do we do it in a way that is honest to our own personal experiences and acknowledges the experiences of others? How do we hold these incredibly divergent truths? The gap from “my hero” to “my rapist” is unfathomable. But we have to try. I try to start to reckon with all this in the four-part docuseries I directed, We Need To Talk About Cosby, which premieres at the Sundance Film Festival before coming to Showtime on Jan. 30.

I think the first tape I ever rented from a video store was the stand-up comedy special Bill Cosby: Himself. It was the early ’80s, I was 10 or 11, and I was already falling in love with comedy. Before the Internet, the only way you could watch comedians was to stay up late to watch The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson or Saturday Night Live. So when video stores opened and I discovered that I could just rent a tape and watch comedy whenever I wanted to, it felt like magic. The other tape I rented was Eddie Murphy’s comedy special Delirious, although because of his R-rated reputation, I had to get my mom’s permission for that one.

But I didn’t need my mom’s permission to watch Bill Cosby. She knew that one would be family-friendly. By the time Himself came out, Bill Cosby had more than 20 years in the spotlight as a G-rated comedian. And more than just being a clean comic, Cosby was already known as someone whose content was not only good to listen to but also good for you. Even more relevant to Black folks, he was someone to look up to at times when we needed heroes the most. Bill Cosby was someone who had his hand extended to pull you up with him. When I watched him—especially on his shows aimed at kids like Fat Albert, Picture Pages and The Electric Company—I saw a Black man who wanted me to be smart, like he was. He wanted me to be successful, like he was. He wanted me to be a good person, like I thought he was.

Throughout his career, Bill Cosby was the kind of Black entertainer Black folks were happy to support. He was successful without “bowing or scraping” or “shucking and jiving,” as it was called back then. And though he was loved and celebrated by white folks, he didn’t lose himself in the process. He was beloved by white America at a time when other Black folks were getting beaten up by police every night on the news. In the 1960s, when Martin Luther King Jr. was advocating for a world where Black and white could live together, Cosby was doing his part to make that a reality by integrating TV and night clubs. Martin Luther King Jr. was being called uppity and under constant threat. Cosby was accepting Emmys and Grammys by the handful. And what most of us didn’t know is that some of his most important work was being done behind the scenes. He revolutionized the stunt industry for Black performers by insisting his stunts be done by a Black man and not by a white man who was painted black. (Yes, that was a thing.) Cosby made sure to hire Black people behind the scenes before we all understood how important that is.

I didn’t know all that when I was a kid. So much of the Bill Cosby story for me is about what I didn’t know then, and what I do know now. I also didn’t know that if you go all the way back to the early years of his career, there are women who have accused him of sexual assault or rape. These allegations are consistent throughout his career. When you look into the stories of the more than 60 women who have come forward, you see all kinds of women, of different races and backgrounds. Some who knew him for one night and some who knew him for years. Some worked for him. Some looked at him as a mentor. Some only sort of knew who he was when they met him. The only common thread they have is their stories of Bill Cosby assaulting or raping them. Admittedly, I didn’t look deeply into their stories until I worked on this project. My “artist formerly known as Bill Cosby” thing feels especially feckless and mealymouthed now.

When Bill Cosby was sentenced to prison, I thought, “Well, the story is over now. He’s 81, maybe now is the time to talk about all this.” I started working on the docuseries in 2019. I reached out to the comedians I knew had a stake in the conversation. That list is pretty much every comedian I knew, and maybe even every comedian, period. I quickly found out that I was among the few who wanted to have the Bill Cosby conversation. Very few of the people who worked with him wanted to talk, either. And of course since this is about Bill Cosby, many of these people who didn’t want to talk are Black. This is a third-rail conversation for Black folks. Whether you believe the women, whether you think Cosby is (or ever was) a hero, there are too many land mines. This is combined with the fact that no matter what you think about Cosby, Black folks in the U.S. are always living under a deficit of role models and representation. Consider all that alongside the fact that America has a well-earned reputation for criminalizing and killing innocent Black men. There is no perceived gain in taking a Black man down.

I wondered if I was making a mistake taking this on. (I have wondered that many, many times, even as I type this.) Then COVID-19 hit, making production impossible. And then on our last day of filming, in June 2021, the crew and I were in Philadelphia, waiting for our last interviewee to arrive, when I got a text message from a friend: “Your film just got way more interesting.” Bill Cosby was being released from prison, less than an hour’s drive from where we were. I’m sure that everybody who had said no to me before this moment breathed a sigh of relief. The third-rail conversation had just gotten another shot of electricity.

This docuseries feels like it could be the end of my career. Many times while making it I hoped it would just go away. Get canceled or permanently shelved. It had certainly happened to other Bill Cosby documentaries. But then every time I would have that thought, I would think about the women who have alleged harrowing encounters with Cosby and their bravery when they talked to me for this project. These are women who have gone through the ringer since they came forward. Lili Bernard, who claims Cosby drugged and raped her during the time she appeared on The Cosby Show, says there has been constant “blaming and shaming.” Most of these women have learned to distrust the media as a whole. But they trusted me with their stories. I couldn’t leave them on the shelf, even if my career is in the balance. We have to be able to at least have the conversation. So much more is at stake.

This is bigger than Bill Cosby. America has a reputation for not listening to women who have been sexually assaulted. America has a history of allowing powerful men to take women as the spoils of their power. America has done an awful job of dealing with racism and rape. I sincerely hope that we can do a better job of dealing with both those issues in the Bill Cosby conversation. I believe there is one more thing to learn from him, whether he wants us to or not.

Bell is an Emmy-winning producer, stand-up comedian and host of CNN’s United Shades of America

All the women on the original series were white, straight, cisgender and wealthy. Were you surprised that the sequel included two nonbinary characters, Che (Sara Ramirez) and Rock (Alexa Swinton)?

Much has been made of the show’s heavy-handed attempts to update its themes. Sometimes watching the show it feels as if Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Nixon) and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) were cryogenically frozen for 20 years and just emerged and were like, “Wow, the world has changed.” How realistic do you find their naïveté about issues surrounding gender in particular?

A major plot line this season has been Charlotte struggling with her child, Rock, coming out as nonbinary. What do you think of that story line?

In the first episode, Charlotte insists on her child wearing a dress. Charlotte’s inflexibility is hard to watch.

Rock tells their teachers and friends at school that they want to be called Rock instead of Rose and use they/them pronouns before they tell their parents. What did you think of that development?

How did you think the school handled that situation?

During the conversation with Rock’s teachers, Charlotte and Harry assert that Rock is too young to know what they want. What would you say to a parent who has that initial response to their child coming out?

Charlotte also suggests to Rock that they want to identify as nonbinary because another kid at school changed their pronouns. How do you respond to parents who believe that kids might want to change their pronouns because a friend did so?

Do you think this portrayal of the Rock and Charlotte relationship is good or helpful for parents watching at home who might one day navigate the same conversations with their kids?

Julian Fellowes conquered American television with Downton Abbey, transforming PBS’s sleepy Masterpiece time slot into appointment TV. So maybe it was inevitable that the Oscar-winning screenwriter and Conservative peer of the House of Lords would cross the Atlantic to meet his constituents. HBO’s The Gilded Age, premiering Jan. 24, is the product of that sojourn.

As its title suggests, this lavishly made, eminently watchable but mostly uninspired period drama takes on Manhattan high society in the late 19th century. Times are changing, just like in Downton (whose bittersweet eulogy for the landed gentry has long been undermined by its extension into an unkillable franchise). And with the self-made robber barons of the Machine Age invading their neighborhoods, multimillion-dollar fortunes and gaudy aesthetic preferences in tow, New York’s so-called old people, whose families have wielded power there since it was New Amsterdam, sense a threat to their social hegemony.
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Addresses are of paramount importance to both crowds, and The Gilded Age inhabits the upscale intersection of Fifth Avenue and 61st Street. Widowed socialite Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski, serving Violet Crawley sass) has lived there for decades, reigning over her meek spinster sister Ada (Cynthia Nixon) and playboy son Oscar (Blake Ritson). “We only receive the old people,” Agnes declares. But she can’t stop a Beaux-Arts palace from going up across the street, to house railroad magnate George Russell (Morgan Spector), his ambitious wife Bertha (a ferocious Carrie Coon), Harvard-grad son Larry (Harry Richardson) and daughter Gladys (Taissa Farmiga), for whom the couple longs to make an advantageous match.

Into this silent standoff stumbles the obligatory ingenue, Agnes and Ada’s niece Marian (Louisa Jacobson), penniless in Pennsylvania following her father’s death. She arrives at the sisters’ home with a new acquaintance: Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), a Black woman with literary aspirations, whom Agnes (a snob but not, by 19th century standards, a bigot) hires as a secretary. As willful, progressive young women in a home governed by old customs, Marian and Peggy present another set of challenges to the status quo.

If Downton is the greatest story Evelyn Waugh never told, then The Gilded Age kicks off Fellowes’ Edith Wharton era. It applies his addictive formula to a landscape that extends beyond the walls of one house, infusing big-budget costume drama with soapy plotting. At its best, it sheds light on how the social lives of Manhattan’s most prominent families influence their patriarchs’ world-historical careers.

But for the most part, it entertains without illuminating. Fellowes recycles too many of his favorite archetypes, from the closeted gay couple to the scheming servant. And while he includes two households’ worth of “below stairs” characters, their story lines go largely undeveloped in the five episodes sent for review. It’s as if their presence alone is meant to satisfy some sort of writerly noblesse oblige.

Downton Abbey, with its water cooler twists, brought the TV period drama into the 21st century. Its success paved the way for funnier, sexier, more irreverent historical shows, from Bridgerton to Dickinson to The Great. (Alas,The Gilded Age fails to generate enough heat to rival Lady Mary’s lethal affair with a Turkish diplomat.) Now it seems that, like so many of his characters, Fellowes is struggling to keep pace with progress.

Spoiler alert: This piece discusses plot points from the Yellowjackets season 1 finale.

If ever you need your faith in humanity restored, just remember this: Yellowjackets ended its first season a hit. Showtime’s teen-girl survival chiller owes a good bit of its popularity to its Lost-style mysteries, which have had obsessive Yellowjacketologists dissecting those puzzle-box elements in various online forums. (Misty would be so proud.) I, too, have lost hours debating whether Adam is grown-up Javi and trying to identify the girl who gets skewered in the pilot’s cold open. And yet, I came out of Sunday’s finale—which confirmed that the victim was neither Jackie, who froze to death, nor Lottie, who is apparently still alive—far more eager to talk through the season’s sneakily subversive themes.
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Because adolescence is a gauntlet, and because women are still the second sex, almost every story pop culture tells about teenage girls is also in some way a story about the horrors, physical and emotional, society inflicts on them. That includes many roles that made Yellowjackets’ stars famous. Juliette Lewis played a notorious spree killer scarred by sexual abuse in Natural Born Killers. Christina Ricci portrayed a beautiful young hostage in Buffalo ’66. Melanie Lynskey made her debut, in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, as a sick child turned delusional murderer. What we rarely see are depictions of young women cut off—or liberated—from their social context.

Yellowjackets corrects that failure of imagination by stranding its team of soccer champs in a wilderness so remote, it practically qualifies as the hypothetical “state of nature” that political philosophers dreamed up to imagine how humans behaved before the dawn of civilization. A few male passengers survive the crash, but one is a child, one is a nervous virgin (well, until Doomcoming) and the third is a gay amputee; they pose no physical threat to the ascendant matriarchy. Instead, the most vocal opponent to this new way of living is the team captain, Jackie, who quickly devolves from suburban golden girl to nihilistic woodland outcast. Her death from hypothermia in the season finale severs the Yellowjackets’ last tie to the old social order.

No matter how many cliques they sketch out, most stories about high school presume a binary between winners and losers—cool kids and nobodies, jocks and geeks, mean girls and their prey. That includes Yellowjackets. But, as is its tendency, the show has a darker read than its predecessors. Back in New Jersey, even among these extraordinarily talented girls who are the pride of their school, only Jackie really thrives. She has the beauty, the wealth, the planned-out future, the supportive sidekick in Shauna and the devoted boyfriend of four years, Jeff, who doesn’t push her to put out. Sure, Jeff and Shauna are hooking up behind her back, but Jackie only learns about that after she’s lost everything else in the crash. When reality doesn’t jive with her desires (see also: Shauna’s early acceptance to Brown), no one dares shatter her illusions. To reference another ’90s touchstone, it’s like she’s the star of her very own Truman Show.

Her flourishing comes at a cost to the others. In the series premiere, Travis and Javi’s dad explains that he made her captain not because she’s the strongest player (“Shauna’s faster, Lottie’s got the best footwork by a mile, and Taissa…”), but because she alone possesses “influence.” She’s steady and charismatic enough, under normal circumstances, to keep her teammates grounded. If pragmatism of that sort is rare in teen girls, that’s probably because it can take a lot of magical thinking to get through female adolescence. But Jackie never needs to dissociate because the world she inhabits revolves around her. When she stops Shauna from pulling Van out of the burning plane, the implication is that Jackie—for whom Shauna is just an extension of herself—instinctively prioritizes her own survival over that of anyone else.

Meanwhile, what do the surviving Yellowjackets have to go home to? (R.I.P. Laura Lee, who had Jesus.) Misty was a friendless creep, hence her surreptitious dismantling of the plane’s black box to prolong her adventure with the popular girls and her beloved coach. Lottie, the once and perhaps future Antler Queen, has super-rich absentee parents; in one early scene, we watch her swallow antipsychotics under the cold eye of a uniformed maid. Bleak! Van’s mom drinks, Taissa’s outward calm conceals a well of subconscious rage, and the two of them are also, by all appearances, still closeted. Natalie’s family is a tragedy of true-crime proportions. As minor as Shauna’s pre-pregnancy problems are by comparison, it’s clear she’s going to lose it if she has to spend much longer hiding her own light so an inferior student and athlete can shine.

This is the kind of suffering that makes people seek out something beyond their material circumstances to give their lives meaning. Remember the scene in the pilot where Jackie teases Shauna about that time she “tried to be Catholic”? (It also draws teens to brooding music, and never more so than in the ’90s, when alt-rock invaded the Top 40 and suddenly you could hear Kurt Cobain or PJ Harvey screaming about abjection on the radio. Even the MOR hits that show up in Yellowjackets, like Seal’s “Kiss From a Rose,” drip with morbid romance.) Whatever this violent new pagan cosmology turns out to be, that emerges during the psilocybin frenzy of Doomcoming and develops into a faith after Lottie predicts an end to their hunger and then kills an eerily submissive bear, the spiritual appetites it satisfies probably predate the crash.

And this is where Yellowjackets becomes more than just a smartly written, well-cast survival thriller. Over the course of its first season, the show also inverts our assumptions about the trauma these middle-aged women carry. At first, it looks as though they bear the scars of 19 months in the wilderness, regardless of whether cannibalism was part of the experience. But for a while now, I’ve been getting the sense that the players who outlived Jackie and Laura Lee never felt freer or more alive than they did while ensconced in their bloodthirsty matriarchy. Nat is a teenage drinker and an adult alcoholic, yet in the penultimate episode she mentions to the coach that she hasn’t been tempted by the bottle of liquor she found.

It‘s the civilized, patriarchal world that drives her to drink—and Shauna to despair, and Taissa to compartmentalize her political aspirations into one box and, er, blood sacrifice into another. (Misty was probably never not on a path to derangement.) Although I’m also pretty certain that Van is still alive and working for Lottie, this is the only fan theory I can wholeheartedly endorse.