On Friday, April 5, the documentary “Girls State” premieres on Apple TV+, the much-anticipated sequel to the lauded 2020 documentary “Boys State,” also on Apple TV+. Directed by accomplished documentarians Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, the film takes an anthropological approach to studying the inner workings of the weeklong political camps for American high schoolers sponsored by the American Legion. During each session the teenagers are required to create a fully working government through a series of elections, a microcosm of our own system.

While structured in the same way, with fly-on-the-wall cameras following a select few students during their experience, “Girls State” is naturally a very different film. Filmed at a Missouri university just weeks before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade, women’s rights and reproductive issues are a hot-button issue for the girls, among the other teenage troubles such as social anxieties, future worries and other personal issues that are thrown into stark relief in such a setting. But once again, it’s a fascinating documentary that argues that while the kids might be alright, there are certain aspects of the system that need an overhaul.

It’s yet another fascinating film from the duo of Moss and McBaine, who have collaborated on many documentaries, which intersect at the juncture of the political and personal.

Their most recent film was last year’s “The Mission,” a complicated portrait of the young American missionary John Chau, who was killed in 2018 when he attempted to make contact with the isolated Sentinelese tribe on North Sentinel Island. Using interviews with loved ones and John’s diaries and letters, the filmmakers offered a look at why Chau set out on such a dangerous trip, diving in headfirst to examine his complex motivation. Released by NatGeo, “The Mission” is streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.

McBaine has been a longtime producer for Moss, and before they collaborated as co-directors on “Boys State” and “The Mission,” she produced several films he directed including 2021’s “Mayor Pete,” a campaign trail doc about the presidential run of current Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. Stream it on Prime Video.

Moss’ breakout documentary was the 2014 Sundance hit “The Overnighters” (also produced by McBaine), about a North Dakota pastor offering shelter in his church to nomadic workers arriving in his oil boomtown looking for work. Once again a complex portrait of a complicated person whose life reflected a specific political reality, “The Overnighters” is a moving, surprising film that captures this moment in time in such granular detail because Moss immersed himself in the culture of this town. Stream it on Kanopy or rent it elsewhere online.

Moss also directed all five episodes of the 2019 Netflix documentary miniseries “The Family,” following the work of journalist Jeff Sharlet, who has written about a secretive conservative Christian group known as “The Family” and their influence on American politics. It’s a chilling and sobering uncovering of one of the shadowy organizations that has an outsize influence on our country. He also directed an episode of the 2018 Netflix miniseries“Dirty Money,” which looks at scandal and corruption in business, with Moss’ episode (Season 1, Episode 2) examining payday lenders. Stream both on Netflix.

Moss has an upcoming film called “War Game” on the way, but check out “Girls State” and “Boys State” on Apple TV+, and the rest of he and McBaine’s political docs, covering a wide array of fascinating topics.

———

(Katie Walsh is the Tribune News Service film critic and co-host of the “Miami Nice” podcast.)

©2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s novel about con man Ripley (the out British stage and screen star Andrew Scott) who’s sent to Italy by well-meaning but tragically wrong parents to find what’s up with their son Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn).

In Naples Ripley meets Dickie and his girlfriend Marge Sherwood (Dakota Fanning). She seems to have gotten an upgrade from Gwyneth Paltrow’s one-dimensional Marge in the 1999 “The Talented Mr. Ripley” with Matt Damon’s Ripley.

Fanning’s Marge is much more complex — a writer, artist, photographer, author.

“I was thrilled to do a really deep dive into the character of Marge,” Fanning, 30, said in a Zoom interview. “When you have eight episodes to explore a story and characters, you get to go deeper and I was happy that that was what we were doing.

“I think that was what attracted Steve Zallian to writing, directing and adapting Patricia Highsmith’s novel. He wanted a lot of time with these characters. What I — right off the bat! — was attracted to is that the series is really written from Tom’s perspective.

“You meet Marge through Tom’s eyes. That meant, for better or for worse, there was a lot of freedom to figure out who Marge was. It was really important to me to fill in those blanks because everyone has their own reality in this series. Tom Ripley has his narrative and Marge has hers and it was modulating where those realities intersect and where they diverge.

“What’s really important,” Fanning added, “Marge is the only character that has Tom’s number from the beginning. She just doesn’t trust him from the moment she lays eyes on him.

“I liked getting to be somebody that was able to go toe-to-toe with Ripley. Marge and Tom have quite the dynamic and Andrew and I had so much fun exploring that.”

Highsmith debuted Ripley in 1955. The now-classic French version “Purple Noon” made Alain Delon an international star in 1960. Why our enduring fascination with this sociopath?

“People are fascinated with the character, for sure. There is something about Tom — he’s not a professional at this, he is messy at the end. But he’s very good at lying and being able to manipulate his way out of things.

“There’s something weirdly relatable about how he does it. You see the mistakes he makes. Sometimes the viewer feels like they’ve been almost complicit in what he does, because you’re not exactly sure whether you’re supposed to be rooting for or against him.

“But totally, a fascinating character.”

Netflix streams all 8 episodes of “Ripley” April 4

Although as with all things “Star Trek” — is there ever a final anything? With conventions, personal appearances, maybe a not-so-distant future spin-off series?

“That’s exactly right,” Martin-Green, 39, began in a Zoom interview. “We’ve talked about this a lot — that there’s so much opportunity here for more connection with the franchise at large. Connecting with even the alumni from other iterations.

“The mothership of ‘Discovery’ was able to lay the groundwork for the expansion of the franchise from this point forward.  I do think that we all know that that is available to us and it makes us very happy. It’s bittersweet, but it’s exciting.”

Martin-Green’s Michael Burnham, the Star Trek captain, was specifically modeled on Nichelle Nichols in the original “Star Trek” series. That was the inspiration: To have Burnham’s breakthrough as the first starring Black woman.

How, she was asked, were the repercussions of that historical step for her personally?

“Oh man! I love that you use the word repercussions. Because there were repercussions to making television history in this way.

“Nichelle Nichols was a major inspiration for me. I remember learning that first of all, ‘Star Trek’ was coming back to TV and they were adamant about a Black woman at the helm of the show.

“I remember having to keep it to myself that this was a journey to the Captain’s chair.  Here I was, the first Black female lead of a ‘Trek’ — and then I had to make history again, as the first Black Captain.  So, it’s not just Nichelle’s shoulders that I stand on. It’s also Avery Brooks. It’s also Kate Mulgrew. It’s also LeVar Burton, Whoopi Goldberg. There’s so many people!

“But very few people in the entire ‘Trek’ franchise made as much impact as Nichelle did. So I just appreciate her.”

In the first episode, the Captain tells a character, “Find your purpose.” How does she feel that applies to her own life?

“I mean, that’s everybody’s journey, isn’t it? We see that with Burnham. We see her evolving from pain to purpose, from fear to faith.

“We see this woman find her true womanhood and find the leader inside her.

“I know for me personally, God really used ‘Discovery’ to teach me a lot about being a leader. About being a woman. About being a wife and a mother.  So my purpose, I believe, is a God-given right. And I take it very seriously.”

“Star Trek Discovery: Season 5 The Final Adventure” streams the first two of 10 episodes on Paramount+ April 4.

Each season is based on a specific book in Anthony Horowitz’s best-selling series; in this case “Scorpia,” about a criminal organization.

“What the show does so well,” Farrant, 27, said in a Zoom interview from London, “is that it stays true to the story of the books and the core values of the books. But it tries to expand on that world and that makes it feel fresh for both the younger audience and also an audience that have read the books and love them and love the characters.

“Scorpia in this one is Alex’s biggest threat yet. But in that there are some surprises along the way and I really hope that fans get excited by what we’ve got in store because there are some twists and turns.”

Farrant’s life has changed, of course, by playing Alex.  “We’ve shot this show through three seasons in five years. It was 2019 when we started — and you change so much in five years! I remember when I got the job, it was like looking up a mountain and thinking, How on earth am I going to climb this?

“But with the support of the great actors and the team around me, we all managed with a show we’re so proud of.”

Alex was unknowingly trained since early childhood to be a MI6 agent. Is he like a teenage James Bond, trained to kill? Is Farrant required to train before each season?

“I do a bit of training to prepare physically. I also have the most incredible stunt team in Jamie Stanley and all the rest of them. But Jamie specifically. He’s been more than a double since Season 1 and he’s taught me so much.

“We have such a good working relationship and a friendship. He’s really taken me on a long, long journey to learning how to make a fight great and how to do all the action.

“Also, stepping in when something’s maybe too dangerous for me.”

As to the show — and Rider’s — continuing appeal, “The thing I like is it appeals to anyone and everyone.  It doesn’t try to patronize its audience. It just presents a fun story that is emotional and is action-packed whenever it needs to be.

“And it has a good message, something everyone can relate to. Everyone wants to have fun when they’re watching TV sometimes. So it’s a good show for everyone.”

The first 2 of 10 episodes of “Alex Rider” stream on Freevee April 5. 

Streaming Friday, March 29, on Apple TV+ comes a revealing two-part documentary about beloved comedian Steve Martin, directed by Oscar winning “20 Feet from Stardom” director Morgan Neville. “Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces,” is a truly unique documentary project, the two halves distinctly different but fitting together to create an illuminating portrait of Martin and his relationship to fame and creativity.

The first half “Then” tracks his early life, through childhood, the budding of his comedy career, his boundary-pushing stand-up shows, and his meteoric rise to fame in the 1970s, becoming a pop culture sensation through his platinum-selling comedy albums, sold-out tours and many appearances hosting “Saturday Night Live.” The first part ends with Martin’s transition to a film career with “The Jerk,” and his first major stumble with the poorly received “Pennies from Heaven.”

The second half of the two-part film, titled “Now,” follows Martin in the present day, co-starring on the Hulu hit “Only Murders in the Building” with his longtime friend and collaborator Martin Short, living a private life with his wife and young daughter. In contrast to the chaotic frenzy of his life in the 1970s, Neville captures Martin in moments of quiet contentment, biking with Short through Santa Barbara, fixing easy meals on the road, and reflecting on his life. It’s a fascinating and riveting watch, in which the elusive star opens up like never before about the highs and lows of his personal life and career.

But while “Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces,” is an absorbing watch, it will likely make you want to revisit his filmography, especially the early titles from the late 1970s and ’80s on which the documentary focuses. So here’s a little primer of where to watch some of Steve Martin’s earliest films, as an accompaniment to the doc.

His breakout role was obviously in “The Jerk” (1979), which he wrote and Carl Reiner directed. Martin stars as a simple country boy who heads off for life in the big city. The film was a massive hit and cemented Martin as a star. Stream it on Showtime or rent it elsewhere. In 1982, Martin and Reiner reunited for the noir parody “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid”

The documentary also focuses on the 1981 flop “Pennies from Heaven,” a 1930s-style movie musical directed by Herbert Ross and co-starring Bernadette Peters and Christopher Walken. Martin in a sincere mode was not warmly received by critics and audiences, and the film explores how that failure was a deep wound for Martin. A fascinating object in his career history, rent “Pennies from Heaven” on all digital platforms.

Of course, there’s the iconic 1986 comedy “Three Amigos!,” which Martin wrote with Lorne Michaels and Randy Newman, directed by John Landis and co-starring Short and “SNL” star Chevy Chase. Stream it on AMC+, The Roku Channel, or rent it elsewhere.

But while he was making these rom-coms, he was also starring as a beloved movie dad, in 1989’s “Parenthood,” directed by Ron Howard, heading up an all-star ensemble cast including Mary Steenburgen, Dianne Wiest, Jason Robards, Rick Moranis, Martha Plimpton, Keanu Reeves and Joaquin Phoenix. Stream it on Netflix. He also starred in the 1991 film “Father of the Bride” opposite Diane Keaton and Kimberly Williams-Paisley (plus Short and a tiny Kieran Culkin). Stream it on Disney+ or rent.

There are so many more fantastic Steve Martin movies, but the documentary will inspire you to revisit these early favorites in his career, so consider this the companion guide to “Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces” on Apple TV+.

(Katie Walsh is the Tribune News Service film critic and co-host of the “Miami Nice” podcast.)

©2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

In a career spanning six decades, Esposito, 65, is best known for playing drug lord Gus Fring in “Breaking Bad” and its prequel, “Better Call Saul.”

As Gray Parish, he’s a man in crisis.  His only son’s death a year earlier remains devastating but now his limo business is going under and the family may be forced to move. Things get much worse when he answers a friend’s call to make a dangerous drive.

That one job has huge consequences as Parish finds himself being brought back into the illegal, dangerous business he thought he’d left forever.

With his family exposed to harsh reprisals, Parish becomes enmeshed with Zimbabwean gangsters who, in their murderous ferocity, rival Mexico’s drug cartels for ruthlessness, torture and executions.

“This is the story of an Everyman, not a privileged Silver Spoon aristocratic kind of guy,” Esposito began in a Zoom interview. “A guy who found life to be tough. And through that toughness and that challenge, he was resourceful.

“You don’t see that guy right away —  but you meet him very soon. You see an Everyman forced under pressure to become an extraordinary man.

“Then you learn the secret he’s held back —  that he already had something that he did well. And now he doesn’t feel that way in his real life.

“This is a man who had lost respect for himself because he was unable to talk about what really bothered him in regard to the loss of his son and communicate that well enough to his wife and daughter.

“He’s really a guy in deep depression. Who didn’t know how to solve that depression, didn’t know where to turn or who to talk to. We layered this idea of this man on his journey with the fact that he had a past life where he did something that he was ashamed of. Something he thought he’d completely put behind him.

“Now, when the chips are down, he has to make a choice on what life he wants to live in.

“Gray Parish’s story is the story of ghosts. The ghost of a man’s past, a ghost of a man who could not really connect with himself today. And the gap widens and deepens the more he tries to bury it.

“I’m excited for people to see ‘Parish’ because,” he added, “I don’t believe anyone’s seen me like this before.  I do all my own stunts, all my own driving.

“This guy Gray is tougher than most —  he is not as calculated as most. He’s flying by the seat of his pants.”

“Parish” streams the first of six episodes on AMC and AMC+ March 31.

In the late 1990s, NBC ran a promotional campaign with the slogan, “If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you,” aimed at boosting summer reruns of such hits as “Mad About You” and “Frasier.”

Updated for 2024, the line would be, “If you haven’t streamed it, it’s new to you.”

Original series created to drive new subscribers to streaming platforms are showing up more frequently on linear broadcast and cable TV networks. Media companies are looking to expose the programs to broader audiences and fill out their lineups to help pay the freight as they battle to keep pace with Netflix.

This summer, CBS will be running the first season of the Taylor Sheridan crime drama “Tulsa King” starring Sylvester Stallone — a show that was made for streamer Paramount+. You can binge rival Peacock’s new reality series “The McBee Dynasty,” but if you want to kick it old school, individual episodes air weekly on parent company NBCUniversal’s USA Network.

In January, ABC aired the first season of the Hulu hit “Only Murders in the Building,” It performed well enough for the network to plan on airing another season at some point in the future.

The trend runs counter to the perception that viewers looking for non-sports entertainment programming have abandoned linear TV.

It may be true that many younger consumers who have grown up with streaming don’t even own a TV set, which they see as a gadget to bombard their parents and grandparents with pharmaceutical drug commercials all day. But for media companies, linear TV, while on the decline with shrinking ratings and cord-cutting, has turned into a marketing tool that expands public awareness of their streaming shows.

Meanwhile, the streaming businesses owned by legacy media companies such as NBCUniversal parent Comcast Corp., Paramount Global and Disney are all under pressure from Wall Street to generate profits. Turning to linear networks is a means of generating more revenue to help monetize their investments in streaming.

“These companies are hemorrhaging money [on streaming],” said Doug Herzog, a veteran cable and broadcast executive. “None of it is working great. That’s the issue. They are trying things out because that’s what they should be doing.”

Paramount Global Chief Financial Officer Naveen Chopra summed up the approach at an investor conference where he said his company aims to get “the most we possibly can out of every single dollar that we invest in content.”

Executives say viewers can expect to see more original programs created exclusively for streaming services pop up on broadcast and cable channels.

That’s because the broadcast networks have the ability to reach more than 95% of the homes in the U.S. While cord-cutting has reduced the number of homes getting pay TV, major cable networks are connected to about 70 million homes, still more than most subscriber-based streaming services. Peacock, for example, has about 30 million paying subscribers.

Streaming shows can become hits and cultural touchstones, but it’s harder for them to reach the kind of critical mass that big network TV series such as “Friends” once achieved. That’s why the legacy companies are finding that shows already exposed on streaming can pass as original programming on linear TV.

“It’s something we will continue to do because what you see in a fragmented marketplace — as popular as these shows are — there are still people who have not seen them,” said Craig Erwich, who as president of the Disney Television Group oversees ABC and Hulu. “Putting them in different places and telling people they are there is always additive. It’s never cannibalistic.”

With a cast that includes Martin Short, Steve Martin and Selena Gomez, “Only Murders in the Building” is a show with the kind of broad appeal linear TV networks still seek, requiring just a few edits of foul language.

Disney found that half of the viewers who watched “Only Murders” on ABC were not signed up to Hulu, which has almost 50 million subscribers. After the series aired on the broadcast network, viewers wanted more. The hours of viewing for the first two seasons of the program rose by 40% on its original streaming home.

“It was new to a lot of people,” Erwich noted. “It surprises me because the show is so wildly popular in both consumption and critical acclaim that you start to think that everybody who wants to see this has seen it. But it’s a big country and there are many different types of people who want to watch TV in many different types of ways.”

NBCUniversal similarly saw viewers flock to Peacock to watch the second season of the medical anthology drama “Dr. Death,” after episodes from Season 1 aired on NBC. Viewing of the show on Peacock rose 58%.

“Only Murders” came in handy for ABC, as last year’s strikes by Hollywood screenwriters and actors had shut down production for months and cut off the pipeline of fresh programming. But the network was looking for a way to deploy the show well before the labor stoppages became a factor, executives said.

Streaming shows are likely to show up on the networks during the summer months, when repeats can no longer draw a sizable crowd. Rather than investing in original series for a smaller available audience, CBS can turn to a streaming show with a high-profile star such as “Tulsa King,” which features Stallone as a crime boss.

Last week, NBCUniversal’s Peacock unveiled a new serialized reality show, “The McBee Dynasty,” which tells the story of a family ranch and the four brothers vying to take over the business from their patriarch. The entire series is available to stream on Peacock while individual episodes air Monday nights after “WWE Raw” on USA Network.

Funneling the nearly 2 million WWE fans per week into the Peacock series uses one of the most time-honored stunts in the TV playbook.

The notion of a TV schedule where viewers are compelled to make an appointment to watch shows has almost become an anachronism in the age of streaming video on demand. But pulling an audience from one time period to the next remains the most efficient way to drive millions of viewers into sampling a new program, especially following live events or reality competition shows that are best enjoyed by watching in real time.

“The concept of a show-to-show audience flow is real,” said Frances Berwick, chairman of NBCUniversal Entertainment. “There is still a tremendous amount of value in it.”

Bravo aired the first season of the Peacock reality competition “Traitors” ahead of the streaming debut of its second batch. It was an easy fit, Berwick noted, as several of the players on the program come from the Bravo slate of reality shows such as “Below Deck.”

“We’ll do it where it makes sense and we have the right content,” Berwick said.

Most streaming shows making it to linear TV are staying under the same corporate umbrella. But it may be only a matter of time before networks regularly provide a second window for original shows created for platforms that they do not own. It’s already happening.

Fox recently cut a deal with Amazon’s Prime Video to get a broadcast run of the game show “The 1% Club” a week after episodes make their streaming debut. The CW is currently airing the Canadian sitcom “Children Ruin Everything,” which was created for the Roku Channel.

Similar deals and experiments are probably ahead in the effort to get programs in front of enough viewers to build them into profitable assets.

“We’re going to see a lot of creativity,” Berwick said. “Good content is good content.”

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

LOS ANGELES — If there were a Mount Rushmore of true crime, the faces of Erik and Lyle Menendez would certainly be on it.

The 1989 murder case of the two brothers who gunned down their parents Jose and Kitty Menendez in their Beverly Hills mansion predates the era of podcasting and YouTube sleuths that saturate the internet today. But their sensational trials were inescapable in the 1990s and now resonate with a new generation of obsessives.

The public’s enduring fascination with the case — and the changing perceptions of the brothers’ defense that they were sexually abused by their father — is the focus of “Menendez Brothers: Victims or Villains,” a new documentary series that premieres Monday on Fox News Media’s streaming service Fox Nation.

“It’s the first such case in American media history that was something more than a legal story,” Jonathan Towers, vice president of development for Fox Nation, said in an interview. “It was a form of entertainment.”

The case’s powerful mixture of family dysfunction, money and violence has made it the subject of two made-for-TV movies, an upcoming Netflix series from Hollywood producer Ryan Murphy and a steady stream of documentaries over the years.

It’s easy to understand audiences’ insatiable appetite for stories about the brothers.

Entering the living room of the family’s Elm Drive home on Aug. 20, 1989, the brothers fired 12-gauge shotguns multiple times at their parents, creating a crime scene so blood-soaked even Sam Peckinpah would have looked away.

After telling police that their parents were murdered, the brothers went on a conspicuous spending spree before they were arrested for the crime. At their trials, defense teams said they were driven to kill after years of being physically and sexually abused by their father.

Their first trial in 1993 ended in hung juries. They were re-tried and convicted in 1996 and are serving prison sentences of life without parole at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego.

The first Menendez trial took place when cameras in the courtroom were still novel and cable TV was growing. Courtroom video became programming for Court TV, one of the early signature networks of the then expanding multi-channel universe.

Instead of sketches or print and TV journalism accounts, viewers watched the criminal justice system play out in real time. The shared experience of observing the proceedings made the Menendez brothers ubiquitous. Every facial expression was scrutinized, as “Victims or Villains,” produced by the Los Angeles-based Pilgrim Media Group, depicts with dozens of vintage video clips.

Los Angeles commuters heard KFI radio hosts John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou riff daily on the topic. Network news and tabloid shows such as “A Current Affair” featured the story every night. Loftier venues such as Charlie Rose’s PBS talk show and ABC’s “Nightline” with Ted Koppel weighed in as well.

The Menendez brothers paved the way for the live-from-L.A. legal saga of O.J. Simpson that began in 1994. The televised trial of the actor and former football star for the killing of his wife Nicole Brown Smith and her friend Ron Goldman was such a ratings draw it dealt a blow to network daytime soap operas from which they would never recover.

True crime sagas and court cases went on to become the main source material for network newsmagazines such as “Dateline” and “48 Hours.” They have proliferated on dedicated cable networks such as Investigation Discovery, supplied streaming platforms, and serve as a massive driver for podcasts such as Ashley Flowers’ “Crime Junkie.”

Murdoch family-controlled Fox News Media has turned to true crime to build its Fox Nation streaming business. The platform, which has 2 million paid subscribers, is stocking up on investigative documentaries that can attract a younger audience than that of the company’s conservative-leaning cable news channel.

But what may be the most jarring aspect of “Victims or Villains” is how the Menendez brothers were a source of laughs. They were depicted in sketches on “Saturday Night Live” and spoofed by Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show.” (Both shows lampooned the Simpson trial as well as Leno featured a dancing troupe of Judge Lance Ito lookalikes).

“It is fascinating to see how it was a matter of comedy back then,” Towers said. “It would not be today.”

“Victims or Villains” examines how the media frenzy around the Menendez brothers permeated through the public perception of the case. Their defense was called “the abuse excuse” by some legal pundits and critics.

“Are we on the verge of substituting a talk show empathy for our criminal code?” Koppel asked his “Nightline” viewers.

The documentary also explores how the ridicule the juries and prosecutors were subjected to after the mistrial affected the second trial that ended with a conviction. Those latter proceedings were not televised.

But the public understanding of the trauma sexual abuse can have on children, including among men, has evolved over the years. Various cases involving the molestation of children by members of the Catholic Church, the trial of Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky and actors speaking out about abuse have altered the once-taboo conversation.

Comedian and actor Rosie O’Donnell, a victim of sexual abuse, appears in “Victims or Villains” as an advocate for the brothers and the validity of their claims. She has been joined by the droves of young social media users who have discovered the case.

During the COVID-19 shutdowns, the current iteration of Court TV — a digital over-the-air network owned by Scripps — aired the Menendez trial in its entirety; it is also available via streaming.

Captive viewers tuned in and many took to TikTok to express support for the siblings and their contention that abuse drove them to kill.

The changing public sentiment comes as the current legal team for the Menendez brothers seeks a new hearing based on recently discovered evidence purporting to show their father had also molested Roy Rosselló, when the singer was a 14-year-old member of the boy band Menudo.

The Menendez lawyers contend the new evidence corroborates the brothers’ claims and supports the argument that they should have been convicted of manslaughter instead of first-degree murder.

The doubters remain. Pam Bozanich, a member of the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s prosecution team for the first Mendendez trial, has sat for 14 documentary interviews over the years. In “Victims or Villains,” she still maintains the brothers fabricated the story of their father’s abuse.

“The facts in this case are irrefutable,” Bozanich said. “Except for the ones about Jose being a child molester.”

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

The news was confirmed to the Daily News by a spokesperson for Max, the HBO-owned streamer behind the New York City-set series.

“It has been a joy to have Karen Pittman play the smart and stunning Professor Nya Wallace on the first two seasons of ‘And Just Like That…,’” the rep said. “As we have thoroughly enjoyed working with this dynamic actress, so too have others.”

While “AJLT” producers and the Broadway alum had every intention of continuing the fan-favorite character into season 3 — with Deadline reporting that Nya had already been written into scripts — “due to her commitments to two other streamer series, it has become apparent that filming three shows at once isn’t possible.”

Pittman, 37, has already been a series regular on Apple TV+’s “The Morning Show” since 2019, and was tapped to star in the upcoming Netflix drama series “Forever,” which is currently in production.

“We are disappointed to announce that scheduling conflicts will not allow us to continue with this character,” the spokesperson added. “Karen and Nya will be missed, and her Max family and fans will all be cheering her on in her other endeavors.”

News of Pittman’s departure comes not long after Sara Ramirez, who starred as controversial character Che Diaz, was allegedly axed from the show for vocally supporting Palestine in the war between Israel and Hamas, according to the Tony winner herself.

Late last year, it was announced that the long-awaited third season won’t hit Max until 2025, presumably due in part to the months-long writers’ and actors’ strikes that left Hollywood on pause for a significant chunk of the year. Though “AJLT” was officially renewed in August, writers only resumed work in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, according to Deadline.

Q: Now that “The Goldbergs” has ended, ABC still has a good comedy lineup on Wednesday nights with “The Conners,” “Not Dead Yet” and their best show, “Abbott Elementary.” But the 9:30 p.m. Eastern time slot after “Abbott” has had a rerun of that show or “Celebrity Family Feud.” Why did ABC cancel a good, very funny show like “Home Economics” when it would have been a perfect fit after “Abbott Elementary”?

A: ABC did try the comedy starring Topher Grace in that time slot, without great success. By the end of its third season, the Hollywood Reporter said, the show “ had the smallest Nielsen-measured audience among the five ABC comedies that aired during the regular September-to-May season in 2022-23.”

Q: What can you tell me about the show I remember called “It’s About Time”? It was a comedy about astronauts who travel back in time to the era of cave men.

A: “It’s About Time,” as the theme song said, “It’s about space, about two men in the strangest place …” And thanks for pulling that out of my memory banks. The show originally aired on CBS for a single season in 1966-67. At first it had two astronauts (played by Jack Mullaney and Frank Aletter) accidentally transported back in time, where they encountered a Stone Age tribe (Imogene Coca, Joe E. Ross, Mike Mazurki and others). It was not a hit and midway through the season the astronauts got back to the present day — with some of the tribe accompanying them. That didn’t bring any more viewers. But we’ll always have that song.

Q: If I remember right, in the 1960s TV series “Lost in Space,” Dr. Smith stowed away on the Robinson family’s spaceship. Who is the actor who played his character? I heard quite a while ago that he was an accomplished Broadway actor. Is this true?

A: Jonathan Harris played the ever-amusing Dr. Zachary Smith, who sabotaged the Jupiter II and set the Robinson family on its three-season TV journey in 1965-68. When Harris died in 2002, his New York Times obituary mentioned “Lost in Space” first among his credits, as did the Los Angeles Times’ obit. He had done stage work — the L.A. Times said his early career included 125 plays with stock companies around the country, and his Broadway debut in 1942 was followed by several more plays. But the bulk of his work was in TV, both as an actor in various shows and as a voice actor in animated productions.

Q: Can you tell me anything about “Rising Damp”? I think it was on PBS perhaps in the late ’60s. It starred Frances de la Tour, who later appeared on Broadway.

A: The comedy, a British import carried by public TV stations here, originally aired from 1974 to 1978, with a movie following. Leonard Rossiter starred as the grouchy landlord of a shabby house; de La Tour was an especially interesting tenant. It was funny, although I admired Rossiter more in another ‘70s comedy, “The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.” I have seen DVDs for sale of “Rising Damp” on Amazon (although you need to check that they are U.S.-compatible), and subscription streamer BritBox lists it. There’s also a nifty website about the show, risingdamp.org.

Tribune News Service

Anthony Madu, born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria, has loved dancing, particularly ballet, since he was five.  A viral video of Madu dancing in the city’s mean streets prompted a bolt from the blue: The offer of a 7-year scholarship from London’s Elmhurst Ballet School where his dream as a ballet’s principal dancer could come true.

But for Madu, that meant there were inevitable sacrifices and surprises, as recorded by the documentary’s duo directing team of Matthew Ogens (Oscar nominated for his 2021 documentary short “Audible”) and Nigeria’s Joel Kachi Benson.

Madu, now “14 going on 15,” had the expected culture shock but also much more.

“I have to say when I moved to the UK,” Madu began in a Zoom interview from London, “it was quite hard because I was missing my family and things were fairly different. You’ve got the weather, the cultural shocks and foods. All that sort of thing.”

He had learned early on in Nigeria to ignore the bullying aimed at a boy doing ballet.

“Back in Nigeria, a lot of people said that I shouldn’t be doing this and made fun of me. Which was kind of really hard. Sometimes, I would have thought that maybe I shouldn’t do more of that. Then my mom encouraged me to keep going because it’s always been what I wanted to do. I think that’s really helped.”

Shortly after he began classes Madu revealed he had difficulty seeing in one eye.

Doctors discovered his left eye had been infected, probably at birth, and left untreated.

“My eye wasn’t particularly working and when I told my mom there wasn’t really that much to do about it because you didn’t get a really good treatment for that sort of thing.

“Only after did I find out what happened, what caused it. But there’s nothing they could do about it.”

At the end of his first year, Madu is evaluated by his teachers and learns he will be able to continue classes. We watch as the teachers say, “What we can see is you love to dance. This is what you were born to do.”

And the documentary ends with a dazzling display of Madu dancing. What is it about dancing that makes him feel better than when he does anything else in his life?

“It’s just different,” he answered softly. “Maybe I like weird things. Because I like the way you can really in different ways show how you feel, your expressions and stuff.”

“Madu” streams on Disney+ streams March 29

“TIME” began as an award-winning, ratings blockbuster series set in a men’s prison and distinguished by Sean Bean’s tour de force lead performance.

“The wonderful thing about this ‘TIME,’” Whittaker, 41, said in a Zoom interview from London, “is that it’s got the same creative team behind it. So everyone knows the quality. But as far as a standalone, it’s a completely individual piece. You don’t need to have seen one to have seen the other.

“But also it is fascinating to see how different in the UK the prison system is for male prisoners and female prisoners. They’re completely different because the systems are different. And also the storylines.”

This “TIME” rather than showcasing one prisoner intertwines the storylines of three: Whittaker’s Orla O’Riordan, a single mother, Abi (Tamara Lawrance), who is in for life and Kelsey (Bella Ramsey), pregnant, a heroin addict and repeat offender.

“This is a wonderful ensemble of characters,” Whittaker enthused, “whether it be the prison officers or the other inmates. Or the families of those people outside of prison.

“Orla is a single mom who finds herself in a situation that she’s completely unprepared for. And not just unprepared through naivete but badly advised as well. She is going to prison for something that really shouldn’t be something that put someone in prison.

“Also, she has not informed anyone that she was even going to court. So as this journey immediately starts, it’s like a horrific nightmare. You are unable to reach anyone. Unable to tell anyone and your entire controlled future is ripped from you in a moment.

“And the unraveling and the challenges that she faces in this new reality make her such a fascinating character to play.”

Whittaker, classically trained, graduated in 2005 from London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama.  Not for her the need to summon feelings of her own two children to play tortured Orla.

“The thing I can do is respond to the characterization and all the amazing scenes with the three children. Regardless of my own personal situation, responding to those three actors was just mind blowing.

“There were improvisations that those kids did that were phenomenal and absolutely heartbreaking. To me the most exciting things happen in the scene when I’m just listening, taking things in, because the way they say it, it can just totally change everything in a moment.

“I think,” she concluded, “the whole reason why my character’s journey really works is because of the casting of those kids.”

All 3 episodes of “TIME” stream on BritBox March 27.

Starring Annette Bening and Sam Neill, their marriage becomes the backdrop for a larger story about the ways families ignore unresolved fissures and buried resentments, often to our detriment. Joy and Stan might have continued this way indefinitely. The catalyst that changes their status quo is the arrival of a visitor, who takes up residence in the couple’s gracious, high-ceilinged home. Her name is Savannah (Georgia Flood) and she carefully sows seeds of discontent in every member of the family. Suddenly, all those repressed and bruised feelings everyone’s been nursing burst out into the open, like a piñata full of bad vibes. But their interpersonal drama just lays there, like a sagging tennis net. If only the series had characters worth investing in.

Savannah intended to stay for just a couple of days, but that turns into several months. She’s a welcome addition, as far as Joy and Sam are concerned, and a far more engaged presence than their self-involved children. “I raised kids who played hard and fought hard,” Joy says, but those kids also never lifted a finger around the house. It’s only now, in hindsight, that Joy has allowed herself to think about that with some irritation.

For the Delaney offpsring, life was intense growing up, where tennis greatness was the expectation they never attained. Troy (Jake Lacy) became a venture capitalist who doesn’t even bother to hide his simmering anger. Brooke (Essie Randles) is a struggling physical therapist. Logan (Conor Merrigan Turner) does something vague with boats and yoga. And Amy (Alison Brie) is “our searcher,” which is Joy’s diplomatic way of saying she’s flaky and doesn’t have a job. None of them are compelling, separately or together, but Lacy comes the closest with his bottled up rage.

Not long into Joy and Stan’s retirement, the kids come over for a meal and it is filled with tension-filled passive-aggressive barbs. Which is perhaps why nobody seems too alarmed when Joy stops answering their texts. Eventually, her silence becomes ominous. Something has happened, and their father hasn’t been entirely honest about the details.

Instead it settles for melodrama to tie up the story’s loose ends. The ending feels pat, its optimism unearned. The show comes from Melanie Marnich, who also worked on the recent Amazon series “The Expatriates,” which suffers from similar issues that undermine “Apples Never Fall.” The title is likely a nod to that old saw, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but I’m not so sure that fits. Joy and Stan’s children aren’t replicating the mistakes of their parents so much as floundering. Yes, those lingering dysfunctions tie back their childhoods. Maybe we all contend with that, to some extent. If only the Delaneys felt like actual people rather than stand-ins to be developed later.

“Apples Never Fall” — 2 stars (out of 4)

Where to watch: Peacock

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.

Set in 1969, she’s a former pageant queen named Maxine Simmons who is staring down middle age and desperate to be embraced by the Florida elite of Palm Beach, so she leverages a tenuous married-in connection: Her himbo airline pilot of a husband (Josh Lucas) is the nephew and sole heir of a Palm Beach grand dame Norma D’ellacourt (Carol Burnett) who is in a coma. With the old lady out of commission, Maxine borrows her last name and worldly possessions and she’s off to the races.

William Thackeray played around with similar themes in his 1848 novel “Vanity Fair” — of a social climber from humble means determined to break into high society — but that’s a tougher idea to hang a story on when the setting is the mid-20th century. Maxine is an outsider who wants in and the obvious question is why? What does she think will happen if she’s granted entry? When she finally offers a one-line explanation, it’s unpersuasive and nonsensical. Her resolve is admirable, her ambitions hollow.

The rich and insular group of women she gloms onto spend their days drinking by the pool at the country club. At the top of the heap is the caftan-clad patrician snob played by Allison Janney, surrounded by her equally insufferable pals played by Leslie Bibb and Julia Duffy. Everyone is a viper, but Maxine conspires to make herself a useful pawn and she’s not one to back down in the face of threats delivered through the gritted teeth of Palm Beach royalty.

“Ever since my pageant days I’ve maintained a posture of relentless positivity,” she says jauntily. “The other contestants would always underestimate me.” Her delusional and indomitable spirit also involves elder abuse and writing bad checks to the tune of $75,000, and the show can’t decide if it finds these things plucky or horrifying.

Laura Dern plays a wayward rich girl cosplaying as a revolutionary who works at a feminist bookstore called Our Bodies, Our Shelves (I laughed) and she’s swept up into Maxine’s shenanigans. So is a bartender at the country club played by Ricky Martin (his performance of a guy quietly observing everything around him is the most nuanced thing the show has going for it). They are eventually won over by Maxine’s can-do spirit, but their incoherent friendships are less about human connection than narrative expediency. The one Black character in the ensemble, played by Amber Chardae Robinson, exists to roll her eyes at these self-involved Palm Beachers, but is given no interests of her own. Burnett is weirdly underused, but makes the most of her scenes when her character is revealed to be very much Maxine’s equal in the plotting and conniving department.

You keep waiting for a larger story arc to emerge, but each set piece feels like vamping and filling time until someone can figure out what this show wants to be about, which makes the 10-episode length baffling. Every so often, there’s a glimpse of President Nixon on a TV in the background talking about the war in Vietnam, which suggests the show is building toward some tangy observations about the emptiness of Palm Beach melodrama versus the reality of war. But no. Nothing of the sort transpires. A social satire lacking bite or even a point of view, “Palm Royale” is as substance-free as the froth and foam left by waves on the beach.

“Palm Royale” — 2 stars (out of 4)

Where to watch: Apple TV+

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.

The more willing you are to just go along with the new Netflix series “3 Body Problem” and not question its increasingly frequent leaps in logic, the more likely you are to enjoy it.

An adaptation of Chinese author Liu Cixin’s award-winning 2008 science fiction novel, “The Three-Body Problem,” the intriguing show is one of the first big projects of the Netflix deal signed by “Game of Thrones” showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who are steering this ship along with fellow executive producer, showrunner and writer Alexander Woo (“True Blood”).

The eight-episode debut season boasts an appealing and diverse cast, including some “Thrones” alums and recognizable faces in movie actors Eiza González (“Baby Driver”) and Benedict Wong, a Marvel Cinematic Universe mainstay.

Plus, it begins with great promise, presenting the viewer with “Lost”-ian-level mysteries begging to be solved. Unfortunately, after much is revealed, “3 Body Problem” loses a great deal of its early promise, revealing itself to be a show unable to give its huge story the scale it needs to be believable enough.

Its propulsive first episode, “Countdown” — penned by Benioff, Weiss and Woo and directed, like its solid follow-up installment, “Red Coast,” by Derek Tsang (“Better Days”) — establishes both the major players and the season’s multi-time-period narrative.

“3 Body Problem” begins in Beijing in 1966, during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and introduces the young version of Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng), a woman who has more than one reason to lose faith in humanity. The highly important character is portrayed in 2024 by Rosalind Chao.

It is in and around present-day London where we meet the members of the group the show’s production notes refer to as the “Oxford Five,” a quintet of young brainiacs who’ve remained in each other’s lives after college as they’ve applied their smarts to this and that. They are Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo), a physics research assistant who, around age 30, already feels it’s too late for him to reach his full potential; Jack Rooney (“Thrones” alum John Bradley), an outspoken chap who’s used his physics degree to develop a multi-million-pound snacks empire; Auggie Salazar (González), the chief science officer for a leading nanotech company; Jin Cheng (Jess Hong), a theoretical physicist with an insatiable thirst for answers to big questions; and Will Downing (Alex Sharp), who chose to teach physics after concluding he could not cut it in the scientific big leagues.

As Jin and Saul are all too aware, it is an uncertain time in the scientific community.

“About a month ago,” Jin tells Auggie at a bar, “all the major (particle) accelerators started generating results that make no (expletive) sense.”

Seconds later, as a man who’d just hit on them and is performing a horrendous rendition of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” on the bar’s karaoke stage, Auggie begins to see a countdown in her field of vision. No one else can see the numbers, which terrifyingly suggest Auggie has a little more than four days before something occurs.

Also, prominent scientists are dying from apparent suicides, which are being investigated by Wong’s Da Shi, an investigator working for a cloak-and-dagger organization run by the extremely confident Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham, another “GOT” vet).

As Auggie’s countdown ticks away and after she gets no answers from a neurologist, she is approached by a mysterious young woman we will come to know as Tatiana (Marlo Kelly), who tells her how to stop seeing the numbers.

“You don’t want it to get to zero,” Tatiana says.

We won’t say much more about the story, in part because Netflix has asked that several potential spoilers to be avoided before the series’ launch.

That makes it difficult to be specific about the mounting frustrations caused by the narrative, as so many of them arrive after the major revelation in “3 Body Problem.” We will note, however, that a virtual-reality component of the story — Jin and others use shiny VR headsets that appear to be far more advanced than anything on the market to play a game to try to address the series’ titular physics problem — seems to be rather pointless in the grand scheme of things.

Without having read the book, which already has been adapted into the Chinese series “Three-Body,” it’s hard to know which plot shortcomings to pin on Liu and which to attribute to the “3 Body” showrunners. Benioff, Weiss and Woo have made changes to the narrative, including the invention of the Oxford Five, but that is to be expected.

Liu penned two follow-up novels in what’s known as the “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy, and the show certainly ends with more tales to tell.

‘3 Body Problem’

Rated TV-MA. On Netflix March 21.

Grade: C+

King Kong teams up with Godzilla. The enduring “Apes” franchise continues with “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.” And Dev Patel dons a gorilla mask to step into a bloody fight club ring in Mumbai.

Not so much into primate-related cinema? No worries.

If that’s just way too sexy for ya, there’s the certain-to-be-a-crowd-pleaser “The Fall Guy,” with the unstoppable, unbeatable and just too darn handsome for words Ryan Gosling as a stuntman searching for a missing actor.

So, yeah, if you’re wondering what’s coming to theaters before the summer popcorn season arrives in mid-May, there is quite an assortment in the offing: dramas, comedies, tragedies, thrillers and even some more demonic stuff going down in Rome (“The First Omen,” April 5),

We studied the spring movie calendar (from now through May 10) and picked 10 movies (a couple we’ve seen in advance) that we think will be worth a trip to movie theaters to gorge ourselves on overpriced popcorn and top-rate entertainment, not necessarily in that order.

Here’s our roundup (arranged in no particular order). Note that release dates are subject to change.

“The Fall Guy”: Hollywood never tires of tinkering around with beloved — OK, even terrible — TV series by turning them into mostly forgettable movies. There have been a handful of good ones (“21 Jump Street,” the “Star Trek” films and “The Fugitive”), but more than a share of duds (“Starsky & Hutch,” “The Flintstones,” “S.W.A.T.”) and some utter clunkers (“Wild Wild West,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “The Dukes of Hazzard”). So where does “The Fall Guy” fall? The good news is it looks like a winner. Uber-athletic filmmaker David Leitch’s redo of that kitschy ‘80s series starring Lee Majors as a stuntman/bounty hunter earned raves in its South by Southwest Film Festival (SXSW) premiere earlier this month. A big reason why is its dreamy star Ryan Gosling, following up on his Oscar-nominated turn as Ken in “Barbie,” who struts his stuff as stuntman Colt Seavers. In this romance-laced blockbuster, Colt’s on the hunt for an action star (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who’s gone missing while shooting a film directed by Colt’s ex-girlfriend (Emily Blunt). Anyone who watched the Oscars on March 10 know that Gosling and Blunt have real chemistry together. Just take our money now. Opening: May 3.

“Challengers”: Oh, the games pro athletes play — on the field (or court, in this case) and in their bedrooms. In this steamy threesome drama helmed by Luca Guadagnino (“Call Me By Your Name”), Tashi, a former star player turned coach (Oakland native Zendaya) seeks to up the slumping game of her top-ranking client (Mike Faist, of “West Side Story”) who’s also her hubby. Trouble and temptation knock on their door in the strapping form of her hubby’s former bestie, who also happens to be Tashi’s ex-lover (Josh O’Connor of “Emma”). He happens to also be the on-court competition, leading to tangled emotions, ambitions and probably ethics. “Challengers” looks to be Zendaya’s bid for another winning title, and the versatile performer keeps on pushing herself and impressing critics and audience alike. She lands her biggest lead role in a theatrical release yet, and we think she’s more than up for the challenge. Opening: April 26.

“Civil War”: With a contentious presidential election advancing from the backburner to the disturbing forefront, Alex Garland’s “what-if” film proposes a sickeningly believable scenario, that our nation becomes so entrenched and divided and outraged that a civil war breaks out. As a filmmaker, Garland likes to engulf you, rattle you, then spit you out (the last 10 minutes of his “Men” made everyone squirm. EVERYONE). Here, Garland assembles an A-list cast that includes Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny and Nick Offerman for a nailbiter that follows journalists as they risk all to cover a volatile story about angry, heavily armed Americans squaring off with a totalitarian government. Call it the ultimate American Horror Story. Opening: April 12.

“Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire”: Coming hot off a first-ever Oscar win, that workaholic Godzilla is already back on the job, teaming up with that massive, cranky ape King Kong for Legendary Pictures’ latest MonsterVerse smackdown. But can returning helmer Adam Wingard’s focus on the historical legacy of these Titans and that monster haven Skull Island rival anything we witnessed in the Oscar-winning (for best special effects) 2023 extravaganza “Godzilla Minus One?” We have doubts, but that won’t stop us from seeing this effort starring Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry and Dan Stevens. Opening: March 29.

“Wicked Little Letters”: A serial letter writer spews LOL profanities and hurls spurious accusations at residents of a quaint 1920s English village. The anonymous extracurricular activity creates a ruckus and leads to pious fingers pointing directly at Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), an Irish migrant and raucous single mom who does indeed curse like a proverbial sailor. In stage director Thea Sharrock’s truth-based dark comedy, feisty Rose tangles with her nosy, buttoned-up, pursed-lipped neighbor Edith (Olivia Colman) while a smart female investigator (Anjana Vasan) runs smack into sexism wherever she turns. “Wicked Little Letters” might well be that pleasing antidote to make you laugh during these troubled times. The creative use of naughty words deployed in those scandalous letters sure had me cackling. Opening: April 5.

“Femme”: Two of the finest performances of 2024 power Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s provocative, unique queer revenge drama/thriller. When Black drag performer Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) runs into homophobe Preston (George MacKay of “1917”), who’s the tatted, tightly wound brute that violently gay-bashed him, a vengeance plan takes root. But as Jules enters Preston’s life, the power dynamic begins to shift in unexpected, dangerous ways. “Femme” never allows you to take one breath of air — one reason why this is the find of the indie spring season  The two performances gut you. Opening: In limited release April 5 in Bay Area theaters.

“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes”: Director Wes Ball had his work cut out for him, following in the ape prints of 2010’s sensational trilogy (“Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” and the exceptional “War for the Planet of the Apes”). But the filmmaker behind “The Maze Runner” trilogy gives the film and the franchise his best shot by leaping over generations to a new time where apes rule and humans acquiesce. When a power-drunk ape goes bananas and starts acting more and more like a dictator, a young ape emerges on the scene. Opening: May 10.

“I Saw the TV Glow”: A film that defies genre identification often turns out to be a head trip. And that pretty much sums up this Sundance Film Festival breakout, which received an enthusiastic response there and continues to draw sizable buzz. Jane Schoenbrun (“All Going to the World’s Fair”) takes us to the mid-1990s, where an isolated teen develops an intense connection with an eerie late-night TV show. Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Ian Foreman and Helena Howard star. We’ll certainly be tuning in. Opening: May 3 in select cities; May 12 nationally.

“The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare”: To try and figure what the heck Guy Ritchie’s comedic adventure is about, all you need to do is digest the title of the book that inspired the mayhem: Damien Lewis’s “Churchill’s Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of WWII.” That gives you the nuts-and-bolts of this “truth-based” exercise that stars a flotilla of hunks (Henry Cavill, Alan Ritchson, Alex Pettyfer, Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Henry Golding and so on). Let’s just hope Ritchie channels more of “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” (even if it bombed at the box office) and less of “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows” (which made oodles.) Opening: April 19.

“Monkey Man”: We’ve always loved Dev Patel the actor, and now we can extend that adoration to his skills as a filmmaker, co-screenwriter and producer, at least based on the word out of SXSW, where his directorial debut premiered. The violent fight club-adjacent thriller stars Patel as Kid and is set in Mumbai. Patel, who reportedly incurred numerous injuries during the film’s fight sequences, plays a gorilla-masked fighter who directs his rage not only at his ring competitors but also those who have kept him down for the count. The fight sequences are supposedly phenomenal. Opening: April 5.

Contact Randy Myers at soitsrandy@gmail.com.

Right now, fans of sci-fi/fantasy films are going ga-ga over “Dune: Part 2” (which certainly is gorgeous).

But I’m here to sing the praises of another space opera.

I was a bit late jumping on the Star Wars bandwagon. (Spoiler: Darth Vader dies; who knew?) Sure, I couldn’t escape seeing the first two — er, Episodes 4 and 5, I mean — in theaters when they first came out back in 1977 and 1980. But really, I had little interest, didn’t know what it all meant and couldn’t appreciate how incredible it was that George Lucas created this fantastical dynasty.

Then, a couple of years ago, I met Dave, a sci-fi/fantasy geek who convinced me to give the genre a try.

After dipping my toe into the outer space pool with “The Expanse” series (2015-2021), and a lot of hitting pause and asking questions (“So where did this menacing blue goo come from again?”), I was ready to take the plunge.

We began with “Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope,” released in 1977. (Naturally, we watched them in the order they were made, like any purist would.) Little of it was familiar to me, so I was enthralled. And the best part of it all: I got explanations along the way, i.e., “Lucas based his air battles between the empire and the rebels on World War II dogfighting newsreels.”

“The trilogies are about the redemption of evil men becoming good again, against the backdrop of John Williams’ brilliant scores.”

“The Midi-chlorians (the foundational cells of the Force) were strong in the Skywalkers, and Anakin’s lightsaber tied Luke and Rey together through the Force.”

Wookies and jawas and banthas, oh my.

My pop culture memory banks are so much more complete now that I know the difference between a clone and a droid, and can identify a rancor and a dewback. Oh, what I have missed!

“The stormtroopers were named after the Sturm Abteilung of the Nazi party.”

“Just like his grandfather, Kylo Ren is manipulated by a Sith and wants to embrace the power of the Dark Side but he struggles against the pull of the Light Side from his Skywalker heritage.”

But all good things come to an end, amiright? After Star Wars episodes IV, V and VI, and then I, II and III, I was feeling bereft — until Dave showed me all of the Star Wars spinoffs: “Ahsoka,” “The Book of Boba Fett,” “Obi-Wan Kenobi.” It was so exciting that I burst into song: “A whole new worrrrrrrrld.” So much to look forward to.

At a recent book club meeting, I excitedly described my most recent obsession to my friends: “The Mandalorian” series, a Star Wars spinoff streaming on Disney, starring a mostly-masked Pedro Pascal and the cutest little puppet/CGI creature, Grogu.

When I told these worldly, intelligent women that I wanted to buy Baby Yoda figurines and place them all over my house, the look on their faces made me wonder if I had gone too far.

But I remain unapologetic. They’ll see how cute those little Baby Yodas are when they come over for our June meeting.

However, I think they would judge me if they knew about the Grogu adhesive bandages in my medicine cabinet.

Jedi and beskar and Leia, oh my.

May the force … you know.

London’s infamous 1888 serial killer had five victims, all female prostitutes who were murdered and then mutilated. He was never caught.

The Yorkshire Ripper, aka Peter Sutcliffe, led the police on a five year chase, beginning in 1975, with 13 victims and another seven who got away.

“The Long Shadow,” a new 7-part British series, examines this sordid history with an emphasis on the victims, women who left behind husbands, children, loved ones.

“There’s various documentaries made. What was interesting about this one is,” said David Morrissey, 59, who stars as the Yorkshire Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield who was in charge of the investigation, “it’s very much not about him. It’s about the effect that he had on the community. The effect that it was having on the women of Yorkshire in the north of England, and how the police investigated it.

“So it is very much a take that isn’t lionizing him or in any way adding to his renown. It is all about the victims and the victims’ families and how it devastated so many people over such a long time.”

What the series is meant to do, he added in a Zoom interview from London, “was really show you the fear and the circumstances that people were living in at that time because of what this one man did and how he slipped through the net of this major police force.”

“Long Shadow” also emphasizes the era’s widely held prejudicial attitudes against the women who were murdered or attacked because, while most of them were prostitutes, they were also mothers supporting their families, wives, daughters.

“Like all the policemen,” Morrissey allowed, “George Oldfield has a very damning opinion of these women — as the press did and the public. And even if they were prostitutes, they’re still people who are living lives — and their life is of value.

“They need to be protected and investigated in the law like everybody else. That is something, sadly, very much in our in our lives today: The condemnation of people because of the life choices they make. When we have no idea why they make those choices. Because we are never in their position.”

We see Oldfield age and the terrible toll years of investigating take.

“George and all the police worked really hard. They were in at five and left at midnight.

“So they were very incompetent, misogynistic, blind to the evidence — but they weren’t corrupt officers. They were just deeply flawed and incompetent men of the time.”

“The Long Shadow” premieres with two episodes March 21 on Sundance Now and AMC+, with additional episodes dropping weekly on both platforms. 

The more willing you are to just go along with the new Netflix series “3 Body Problem” and not question its increasingly frequent leaps in logic, the more likely you are to enjoy it.

An adaptation of Chinese author Liu Cixin’s award-winning 2008 science fiction novel, “The Three-Body Problem,” the intriguing show is one of the first big projects of the Netflix deal signed by “Game of Thrones” showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who are steering this ship along with fellow executive producer, showrunner and writer Alexander Woo (“True Blood”).

The eight-episode debut season boasts an appealing and diverse cast, including some “Thrones” alums and recognizable faces in movie actors Eiza González (“Baby Driver”) and Benedict Wong, a Marvel Cinematic Universe mainstay.

Plus, it begins with great promise, presenting the viewer with “Lost”-ian-level mysteries begging to be solved. Unfortunately, after much is revealed, “3 Body Problem” loses a great deal of its early promise, revealing itself to be a show unable to give its huge story the scale it needs to be believable enough.

Its propulsive first episode, “Countdown” — penned by Benioff, Weiss and Woo and directed, like its solid follow-up installment, “Red Coast,” by Derek Tsang (“Better Days”) — establishes both the major players and the season’s multi-time-period narrative.

“3 Body Problem” begins in Beijing in 1966, during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and introduces the young version of Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng), a woman who has more than one reason to lose faith in humanity. The highly important character is portrayed in 2024 by Rosalind Chao.

It is in and around present-day London where we meet the members of the group the show’s production notes refer to as the “Oxford Five,” a quintet of young brainiacs who’ve remained in each other’s lives after college as they’ve applied their smarts to this and that. They are Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo), a physics research assistant who, around age 30, already feels it’s too late for him to reach his full potential; Jack Rooney (“Thrones” alum John Bradley), an outspoken chap who’s used his physics degree to develop a multi-million-pound snacks empire; Auggie Salazar (González), the chief science officer for a leading nanotech company; Jin Cheng (Jess Hong), a theoretical physicist with an insatiable thirst for answers to big questions; and Will Downing (Alex Sharp), who chose to teach physics after concluding he could not cut it in the scientific big leagues.

As Jin and Saul are all too aware, it is an uncertain time in the scientific community.

“About a month ago,” Jin tells Auggie at a bar, “all the major (particle) accelerators started generating results that make no (expletive) sense.”

Seconds later, as a man who’d just hit on them and is performing a horrendous rendition of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” on the bar’s karaoke stage, Auggie begins to see a countdown in her field of vision. No one else can see the numbers, which terrifyingly suggest Auggie has a little more than four days before something occurs.

Also, prominent scientists are dying from apparent suicides, which are being investigated by Wong’s Da Shi, an investigator working for a cloak-and-dagger organization run by the extremely confident Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham, another “GOT” vet).

As Auggie’s countdown ticks away and after she gets no answers from a neurologist, she is approached by a mysterious young woman we will come to know as Tatiana (Marlo Kelly), who tells her how to stop seeing the numbers.

“You don’t want it to get to zero,” Tatiana says.

Another key character who enters the picture later on in the season is Mike Evans, portrayed as a younger man by Ben Schnetzer and in 2024 by Jonathan Pryce. (On “Game of Thrones,” Pryce played the religious figure the High Sparrow, and his wealthy Evans also has a major worshiping streak in him.)

We won’t say much more about the story, in part because Netflix has asked that several potential spoilers to be avoided before the series’ launch.

That makes it difficult to be specific about the mounting frustrations caused by the narrative, as so many of them arrive after the major revelation in “3 Body Problem.” We will note, however, that a virtual-reality component of the story — Jin and others use shiny VR headsets that appear to be far more advanced than anything on the market to play a game to try to address the series’ titular physics problem — seems to be rather pointless in the grand scheme of things.

Without having read the book, which already has been adapted into the Chinese series “Three-Body,” it’s hard to know which plot shortcomings to pin on Liu and which to attribute to the “3 Body” showrunners. Benioff, Weiss and Woo have made changes to the narrative, including the invention of the Oxford Five, but that is to be expected. And let’s remember that “Game of Thrones” was widely considered to be at its strongest when Benioff and Weiss were working from George R.R. Martin’s book series, not when they’d run out of source material after the author had fallen woefully behind in his writing. That said, some of the latter “3 Body Problem” episodes cause groans that feel at least a bit familiar when you make them.

Liu penned two follow-up novels in what’s known as the “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy, and the show certainly ends with more tale to tell. Shockingly, however, “3 Body Problem” fails to hit you with more than a little nugget of what’s to come. Do not expect anything to leave you waiting breathlessly for its potential return.

“3 Body Problem” has its moments, such as a jaw-dropping set piece when Auggie’s nanotech is used to achieve a rather questionable end. But based on the way this season all but runs out of momentum at the finale, its ticking countdown may come to an end sooner than later.

‘3 Body Problem’

What: Eight-episode debut season of hourlong science-fiction drama.

Where: Netflix.

When: All episodes available March 21.

Rated: TV-MA.

Stars (of four): 2.

Now at 57, the Boston native is showcasing her first standup special “Irene Bremis: Sweetie,” produced with “SNL” veteran Rachel Dratch.

“When I was maybe six or seven years old, I was making jokes. The reason was I have a severely autistic brother who was subject to ridicule. For me to get better along with people and not get angry when they were ridiculing my brother was to have a sense of humor. To make friends and use humor as a tool.”

Bremis went to Lexington High – where she and  Dratch were high school classmates – and then University of Superior (“There’s nothing superior about it, literally”) studying communication and arts.

“I wanted to move to New York City straight from college where I pursued writing and acting and fell into standup as a result.

“I was teaching a comedy cooking show, believe it or not, back then. It was called ‘Cooking Joes’ and I was pitching it to William Morris” – the talent agency. “They said to make a pilot and be in it. So that’s when I had to start doing standup.”

What did she find?

“You have to have thick skin. You have to be comfortable with rejection — which is different when you’re an actor.

“As an actor you may not be the type, the character has a different essence. But with standup you are showing your soul. You’re being personally rejected. That’s what makes standup unique.”

She was also starting in New York City, “which is of course,” she said in a phone interview, “the trenches of standup nationally. I remember bombing wildly at one popular comedy club and my friend Joey said to me, ‘You’ll never make it as a comic unless you bomb.’ I understand that now. Bombing happened a lot in the beginning because standup is all about finding your voice. Onstage you can’t grow unless you bomb.

“And if you keep bombing throughout your career,” she learned, “you might want to pivot to acting.”

Her breakthrough?

“I started cohosting weekly with John Fugelsang on Sirius XM, ‘Tell Me Everything,’ his own show. That opened up the world for me. I got my voice out there. It catapulted me to the next level.

“Finding your voice,” she discovered, “is just knowing who you are. It can be really hard for standups because we try to hide behind a certain persona onstage.

“I think my voice is unfiltered, truthful and, about my own family tragedy, through a personal lens. I’m a risk taker but it’s also important to be vulnerable and have sensitivity.”

“Irene Bremis: Sweetie” is available on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms

Martin, who’s been performing since he was 12, says he was amazed to be playing opposite Burnett. “The energy that she brought onstage every day, it doesn’t matter if the call time was at five in the morning — it was light, it was love. And every time they said, ‘Action,’ we were together… It was incredible. I will always be forever grateful just to have the opportunity to be with her onstage and on set, and it was very beautiful,” he says.

The series is about the struggles to fit into an impenetrable elite society. And for Martin, whose career has been singing and songwriting, acting is an “elite society” that he’s not used to.

“Believe it or not, when I was 15 years old, I had the opportunity to do a TV series in Argentina for the first time, and for me, there was something about being in front of the camera and telling a story without music that really seduced me,” he recalls.

“And, obviously, music did its thing. And I just had to hop on the wave and surf. Then later on in life, I had the opportunity to do theater and a couple of times on Broadway, and then later on with working next to Penelope Cruz and Edgar Ramirez in another very important series (“The Assassination of Gianni Versace.”) At the end of the day, it’s about telling stories and owning the character and believing every word that you say,” he continues.

A drama series is a whole new world for Burnett too, who helmed her now-legendary variety show for 11 seasons. “I went to New York in 1954, and I didn’t have any jobs or anything — but I lived at a place called the Rehearsal Club, which was for young women interested in the theater, $18-a-week room and board. And I got to make the rounds and do things, and I auditioned in 1955 for Leonard Bernstein when he was doing (network TV series) ‘Omnibus,’” she remembers.

“He did it every week, and this one week they were doing a salute to musical comedy beginning in the early 1900s. And I sang for Lenny, and he said, ‘Take it up a key.’ Sang again, up a key, because he wanted me to belt. And he hired me to do a segment honoring (Broadway star) Ethel Merman … and that was my first experience.”

Her big break arrived when she auditioned for legendary director George Abbott for the musical “Once Upon a Mattress,” and got it. It was a resounding hit for Burnett, who earned a Tony nomination for the role.

“Then I doubled on (the talk show) ‘The Garry Moore Show’ for two years. I was young — 25, 26 years old — so I could work that hard,” she says.

“So I never thought I would be a television person, but once I got with Garry’s show, that was it, that solidified it for me. And so when I got the chance to do my own show, instead of doing a sitcom — which CBS wanted me to do — I had it in a contract that I could do a one-hour comedy variety show, which was what I wanted. I wanted music. I wanted dancers. I wanted guest stars. I wanted a rep company. And so we wound up doing an original musical comedy revue every week, and that was my love,” she sighs, “and I feel very fortunate that we came along at that time.”

Burnett thinks it would be impossible to present a show like that today. “We had a 28-piece orchestra, we had 65-to-70 costumes a week … the guest stars and so forth. No network would let us do that now with that kind of money. And I even hired Vicki Lawrence, who was right out of high school.

“I’d seen her at a contest, and we hired her. And no network today would let me do that, would let us do that, a girl right out of high school with no experience. So I feel very fortunate that our show happened at the time it did. I don’t think it could be done today.”

Tribune News Service

Q: I’m a Michael Connelly fan, both with his books and his TV series. Is there a chance that Harry Bosch will return on “Bosch” or “Bosch: Legacy”?

A: A third season of “Bosch: Legacy” began production in January for telecast on Amazon Freevee, which also has the first seasons as well as the seven seasons of “Bosch.” All are based on the characters in Connelly’s novels about troubled investigator Harry Bosch, played by Titus Welliver. The cast also includes Madison Lintz and Mimi Rogers.
And as long as we’re talking about Connelly adaptations, production has begun on a third season of “The Lincoln Lawyer” for Netflix.

Q: I am surprised that “The Real McCoys” does not have a higher place in America’s collective memory of TV shows. I don’t think it’s even shown on any of the nostalgia cable channels. At the time I thought it was pretty popular.

A: The comedy about a rural family in California was popular during its six-season run on ABC and then CBS in 1957-63. And it has not been forgotten. Peacock, Tubi and the Roku Channel are some of the streaming services carrying the program. There have also been DVD sets, including a complete-series package.

Q: In all the obits of Carl Weathers, no mention was made of his stint as Police Chief Hampton Forbes on “In the Heat of the Night.” Just curious why.

A: Weathers, who died on Feb. 1, reportedly after a long battle with heart disease, had an extensive and storied career for decades. Of course, there was Apollo Creed in the “Rocky” movies. There’s also “Predator” and “Happy Gilmore” and “The Mandalorian,” and a “Toy Story” voice — and still other memorable roles, as well as ones that proved short-lived. (I met him briefly when he was starring in “Fortune Dane,” a 1986 series that lasted just a few months.) Some of his obituaries did mention “In the Heat of the Night.” Still, sorting through a resume like this, people pick and choose (as I did recently with Lee Marvin, prompting some readers to bring up movies they loved but I didn’t list). And there was a lot to choose from.

Q: I think the original “Hawaii Five-0” has the best introductory scenes and music of any program of any time. I sometimes watch just to see that perfect introduction. How many years was the show on? I believe James MacArthur, who played Danno, left before the show ended. Do you know why?

A: First, about that opening: In his must-read book “Music for Prime Time,” Jon Burlingame says that montage “is still one of television’s most impressive,” a triumphant fusion of music (by Morton Stevens) and visuals, with images “cut in precise time to the beat.” There’s even more about the music and the images in the book.

As for the original “Five-0,” it first aired from 1968 to 1980. MacArthur left at the end of the 1978-79 season. “I grew bored,” he said. “The stories became more bland and predictable and presented less and less challenge to me as an actor.”

Tribune News Service

“I hadn’t seen her art until I was a freshman in college,” says Gutierrez, a film editor who makes her directorial debut with the new documentary “Frida.” “Then I found one piece, one painting in a book in the library.

“It was of her standing between the United States and Mexico,” she says. “You can see her full body – we actually use that painting in the film. And I was a pretty new immigrant. I had been in the States for, I think, two to three years.

“I really saw my experience reflected there,” she says. “A little bit of hesitation about my new surroundings and really missing home.

“So I feel like the story for me, it started back then,” says Gutierrez, who also co-edits the film, a role she’s previously done on such documentaries as “RBG” about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and “Julia,” about chef Julia Child. “When I came back to her story at 47 years old, I was actually the same age [she was when she died] when I started looking into her story. Which was kind of shocking to me.”

By then, Gutierrez had explored beyond Kahlo’s 1932 oil painting “Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States” that had originally inspired her.

“I spent a couple of decades or more, really connecting to some of her paintings,” she says. “Really following her life very closely.

“Then I went back to the material that had I read back then, and I realized that her voice existed in writing from a lot of different sources,” Gutierrez says. “The books that I was reading at that time just kind of showed me that a story about her could be told through her voice, some of it.”

“Frida,” a colorful, creative portrait of the artist told and illustrated in her own words and brush strokes, is streaming now on Prime Video.

Searching for Frida

Gutierrez says from the start she wanted to avoid the contemporary talking heads that populate many documentaries on historical figures.

“We never wanted to do interviews, or kind of look at her life from that historical perspective in the sense of art historians or artists who had been inspired by her,” she says. “We wanted for the film to feel as present and as much of her as possible.

“So that’s how it started, with this idea that we could offer an intimacy into her life that had maybe not been shown on film,” Gutierrez continues. “Like really, truly focusing on her words and her voice as much as we could.

“And then it surprised us that by leaning into mostly her emotions, and not necessarily a factual list of what happened in her life, she really took over,” she says. “We just started being guided by her writings as much as we could.”

While Kahlo’s fame as both artist and icon didn’t fully blossom until years after her death, the filmmakers were fortunate that she was nonetheless a well-known and well-documented figure throughout her life. Born in 1907 in a village on the edge of Mexico City, her father, a professional photographer, documented her childhood and young adulthood through the lens of his camera.

After her marriage to the Mexican artist Diego Rivera in 1929, she traveled with him extensively in Europe and the United States, where his fame and her striking looks and style made her a favorite of journalists and photographers.

For Gutierrez, the detective work the film required to track down both visuals and words for the film was a delight.

“The research that went into collecting all of her writings was really intense,” she says. “We not only collected all her writings, but we also did a lot of research on contextual material. We tried to gather every interview from people that knew her that we could find. And the research took us into some interesting places.”

Biographer Hayden Herrera, who wrote the seminal 1983 biography on Kahlo was an obvious choice for Gutierrez and her researchers. Her papers had been donated to the Smithsonian, Gutierrez says, but on going there they discovered that none of the material for “Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo,” including scores of interviews with people who knew Kahlo, was there.

“So then we very nicely asked if we could visit her house in Cape Cod,” Gutierrez says. “She’s about 85 years old. And we went up to her attic, and we cleaned her attic, and we found these enormous boxes with all the original research that she did on that book.”

Letters Kahlo sent her San Francisco doctor, who became a close friend, were tracked down in the Oaxaca Museum of Art, she says. Letters she wrote to her mother were located in the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C.

“There was a couple called the Crommies, who are in San Francisco, who made a film about Frida,” Gutierrez says of the 1966 short documentary “The Life and Death of Frida Kahlo as Told to Karen and David Crommie.” “They did a lot of interviews with people, like with the nurse that took care of Frida in the last years of her life.

“When I went to their house, they brought up a box full of quarter-inch tapes that hadn’t seen the light of day for 50 years,” she says. “We just lifted up every potential rock out there to find as much as we could.”

An intimate voice

Gutierrez says she started the project well aware of the outward facts of Kahlo’s life. Making the film, and focusing on Frida’s own words, most of which she never expected would be read by those outside her intimate circles, allowed Gutierrez to enter the heart and mind of the artist.

“I knew the facts of her life really well because of the books that I had read,” she says. “Really listening to the texture of her personality was special. That was really new and refreshing to get to know her in a new way, through her own words.

“Like, I knew about her feelings on America, and I knew some of her feelings of Paris intellectuals. But to be able to read everything that she had said about them, and the sharp language that she used was really special.”

That unfiltered voice, at different times funny, poignant or salty, adds greatly to the narration of Kahlo’s words delivered in the Spanish or English in which they were written.

“There were two letters, one written in Spanish, and the other one written in English, with a lot of flowery language about Parisian intellectuals,” Gutierrez says. “That the only thing they do is talk and talk and talk among themselves in cafes and parties. I don’t think she ever got tired of insulting them.

“So really, (we found) the intimacy of her voice itself, but also kind of the messiness of her feelings, and the messiness of being able to really read about her fragility and her fears,” she says. “For example, in the scene about her miscarriage, her letters talking about, or questioning, what decision she is going to make.

“Really, the tenderness of a woman just dealing with regular, but really heavy and important things in her life was really special.”

Art and movement

Beyond the choice to use Kahlo’s own words as the main narration of the film, Gutierrez’s second big decision was to animate some of Kahlo’s art, adding motion to paintings and sketches that had been static works of art on museum walls or artbook pages.

“It was a bold decision,” Gutierrez says. “It could be seen as a controversial decision to touch Frida’s art. But it was a decision I made at the very beginning because I knew that we were working in this cinematic universe. And we were thinking from the very beginning, you know, Frida’s paintings kind of carry her mind and carry her heart, so how do we immerse our audience in this kind of cinematic space into that internal world?

“I really wanted for the film to be able to highlight the emotions that we wanted to underline in the art,” she says. “As we’re talking about moments in her life that made art possible. It was essential for the film to make that really strong connection. What had her lived experiences brought to her art?”

Gutierrez, who was born and raised in Peru before immigrating to the United States, felt comfortable working with the culture of Latin America, but she wanted to find as many Mexican collaborators as possible, given Kahlo’s roots there, and ended up with a mostly Mexican, mostly female team of animators on the film.

She says none of the animations used in the film added elements to the artwork Kahlo had created. Instead, elements already in the paintings now move to underscore the words they accompany.

“For example, where you see the painting of her cutting her hair,” Gutierrez says. “You know it’s coming from a place where she actually felt a lot of self-hate for being in the situation. She didn’t love herself that much. There was desperation. There was a lot of hate. There was a lot of anger.

“So I wanted the movement that we created with the painting to really capture that,” she says. “Then you end up with a painting that really carries all of that anxiety and anger and, you know, desperation that she was living in that moment. So that was the decision.”

Now, with a new season kicking off on March 20, here are six ways to delve a little deeper.

1 — Let the winner of the first “Top Chef: All Stars” season teach you how to eat more plants. Richard Blais and his wife, Jazmin, filled last fall’s “Plant Forward” cookbook (Victory Belt Publishing, $39.95) with 100 recipes to help home chefs shift their cooking toward a more plant-centric diet. Recipes are built around both Blais’ creative food style, with approachable recipes for zucchini fritters, eggplant and chickpea samosas, jerk cauliflower steaks and a blended mushroom burger. 

2 — Pre-order a copy of the new Viet-Cajun “Dac Biet: An Extra Special Vietnamese Cookbook” (Knopf, $38), due out this August. It’s by Nini Nguyen, a chef-testant from seasons 16 and 17, who brings her unique Vientamese-New Orleans fusion sensibilities to her new cookbook, co-written with Sarah Zorn. It draws on the Vietnamese concept of “dac biet” — which means special and luxurious — and promises recipes for dishes like charbroiled oysters in chile butter, a Viet-Cajun seafood boil, crispy fish sauce-caramel chicken wings and coconut crispy rice crepes.

3 — Get the latest “Top Chef” analysis, broken down episode by episode. Pack Your Knives, a “Top Chef”-inspired podcast by sports analysts Kevin Arnovitz and Tom Haberstroh, will be back this season, Haberstroh confirmed. The die-hard fans interview contestants, discuss what’s happening in the restaurant industry and break down each episode of the show. There are whispers that a related Substack may also be in the works.

5 — Take a hands-on cooking class taught by Preeti Mistry, a chef-testant from season six and the chef behind Oakland’s now closed Juhu Beach Club. Mistry will be teaching a cooking class ($225) at Wind & Rye, a Sonoma County cooking school. Learn to make garam masala, use the spice blend in two vegetarian dishes, then enjoy a full meal prepared in class and paired with drinks; windandrye.com/classes/p/garam-masala.

6 — Or tune in for more foodie TV. This season, Bravo will debut a new digital aftershow called “The Dish with Kish,” with new judge Kristen Kish breaking down each episode with a “Top Chef” alum and offering a behind-the-scenes perspective. Guests lined up so far include Gregory Gourdet (seasons 12 and 17), Stephanie Izard (season 4) and Buddha Lo (season 19). Find more details at BravoTV.com.

With the 2024 Oscars in the books, some cinephiles might be ready to move on to new films, but others may want to catch up with the winners they have yet to see. Fortunately, many of the winningest films from Hollywood’s biggest night are available to stream, so it’s easy to watch (or rewatch) the best films of 2023.

The big winners of the night were Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” about the making — and political fallout — of the atomic bomb, and “Poor Things,” Yorgos Lanthimos’ fantastical and outré odyssey of a woman on a journey through the world to find herself.

Both films picked up several craft awards as well as acting prizes, though “Oppenheimer” walked away with the Academy’s top honors, for best director and best picture. Adapted from the book “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, the bombastic cinematic experience stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, and follows his life as a young student and professor, through the development of the atomic bomb, and the Senate hearings years later stripping him of his security clearance. Robert Downey Jr. won best supporting actor for his performance as Lewis Strauss, and Murphy won best actor. The film also won for best editing for Jennifer Lame, best cinematography for Hoyte van Hoytema, and best score for Ludwig Goransson. Stream “Oppenheimer” on Peacock or rent it on other digital platforms.

“Poor Things” started the night with a run of craft awards, taking home the Oscars for best costumes, makeup and hairstyling, and production design for the artisans who crafted the inventive, colorful and heightened Victorian world of the film. At the end of the night, Emma Stone’s win for best actress was a surprise upset over Lily Gladstone in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” though the race was neck-and-neck, as the two actresses traded top prizes back and forth all season. “Poor Things” is available to stream on Hulu, or for purchase on other digital platforms.

The incredible “Killers of the Flower Moon” may have gone home empty-handed, despite 10 nominations, but the film is a monumental achievement by an American master, Martin Scorsese. Gladstone, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro (also nominated for supporting actor) do jaw-dropping work in this film that reckons with the genocide of indigenous people in the United States and the ways in which we tell those stories. It finds the 80-year-old Scorsese making films just as vibrant and vital as anything he did in his youth. Stream it on Apple TV+ or purchase it on other digital platforms.

Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest,” which was also nominated for best director and best picture, won the best international film and best sound Oscars. This piercing Holocaust drama imagines the domestic life of Rudolph Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, and his wife, Hedwig, and their children. The sound design of the film, by Johnnie Burn, creates the dramatic dissonance between their home life and the atrocities of the Holocaust happening just on the other side of the wall. Purchase “The Zone of Interest” on all digital platforms (it is not yet available to rent).

Partnered writing team Justine Triet and Arthur Harari won the award for best original screenplay for their “Anatomy of a Fall,” which Triet directed. The French film stars German actress Sandra Hüller as a woman accused of murdering her husband, and the courtroom drama that ensues is an exploration of partnership, jealousy, gender roles, and the ethics of creative professionalism. It’s a fascinating dissertation on these topics wrapped up in a dishy “Snapped”-style narrative. Rent “Anatomy of a Fall” on all digital platforms.

First-time feature writer/director Cord Jefferson won the adapted screenplay award for his literary satire “American Fiction,” based on Percival Everett’s book “Erasure.” Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K. Brown were also nominated for their performances, and the film was nominated for best picture and best score. Jefferson’s speech became one of the big moments of the night, as he implored Hollywood to greenlight more mid-budget features instead of expensive blockbusters. Stream “American Fiction” on MGM+ or rent it on other digital platforms.

In more big moments of the night, “Barbie” won best song — “What Was I Made For?” — for Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell, and Ryan Gosling rocked the Dolby Theater with a cavalcade of Kens for an “I’m Just Ken” performance. Stream “Barbie” on Max.

Finally, the powerful documentary “20 Days in Mariupol” won best documentary — the first Ukrainian film to win an Oscar — with director Mstyslav Chernov delivering an impassioned, grief-filled speech about the ongoing invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Stream it on PBS Frontline or rent it on all platforms.

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(Katie Walsh is the Tribune News Service film critic and co-host of the “Miami Nice” podcast.)

©2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

It’s not a pair that one would expect on television but Puerto Rican singer Ricky Martin and comedy legend Carol Burnett are cozy co-stars in Apple TV’s next series, “Palm Royale,” premiering March 20.

Martin, who’s been performing since he was 12, says he was amazed to be playing opposite Burnett. “The energy that she brought onstage every day, it doesn’t matter if the call time was at five in the morning — it was light, it was love. And every time they said, ‘Action,’ we were together… It was incredible. I will always be forever grateful just to have the opportunity to be with her onstage and on set, and it was very beautiful,” he says.

The series is about the struggles to fit into an impenetrable elite society. And for Martin, whose career has been singing and songwriting, acting is an “elite society” that he’s not used to.

“Believe it or not, when I was 15 years old, I had the opportunity to do a TV series in Argentina for the first time, and for me, there was something about being in front of the camera and telling a story without music that really seduced me,” he recalls.

“And, obviously, music did its thing. And I just had to hop on the wave and surf. Then later on in life, I had the opportunity to do theater and a couple of times on Broadway, and then later on with working next to Penelope Cruz and Edgar Ramirez in another very important series (“The Assassination of Gianni Versace.”) At the end of the day, it’s about telling stories and owning the character and believing every word that you say,” he continues.

“And for me, music will always be there. It’s something that I will always be forever grateful for, but when I walk onstage telling my stories, the music that I write — or music that I don’t write — it’s about owning the script, which is a song, at the end of the day, without wearing a mask. It’s about being honest. This is how I feel every time I’m on set. It’s about being honest. It’s about being real and to also have a little bit of fear… I’m in love with this work, and I hope this is only the beginning.”

A drama series is a whole new world for Burnett too, who helmed her now-legendary variety show for 11 seasons. “I went to New York in 1954, and I didn’t have any jobs or anything — but I lived at a place called the Rehearsal Club, which was for young women interested in the theater, $18-a-week room and board. And I got to make the rounds and do things, and I auditioned in 1955 for Leonard Bernstein when he was doing (network TV series) ‘Omnibus,’” she remembers.

“He did it every week, and this one week they were doing a salute to musical comedy beginning in the early 1900s. And I sang for Lenny, and he said, ‘Take it up a key.’ Sang again, up a key, because he wanted me to belt. And he hired me to do a segment honoring (Broadway star) Ethel Merman … and that was my first experience.”

She says she was thrilled with the opportunity. “There was no billing or anything. I was just hired along with all the other young people to do scenes for a musical comedy, so that was my first one.”

Her big break arrived when she auditioned for legendary director George Abbott for the musical “Once Upon a Mattress,” and got it. It was a resounding hit for Burnett, who earned a Tony nomination for the role.

“Then I doubled on (the talk show) ‘The Garry Moore Show’ for two years. I was young — 25, 26 years old — so I could work that hard,” she says.

“And I realized when I did Garry’s show — at first I wanted to only be on Broadway in musicals like Ethel Merman and Mary Martin — and then I got on Garry’s show, and we started doing sketches, comedy. One of the writers on Garry’s show was Neil Simon, and so we had some pretty good sketches to do,” she recalls.

“And I realized that I would rather do different things every week than to be doing the same thing eight times a week on Broadway.

“So I never thought I would be a television person, but once I got with Garry’s show, that was it, that solidified it for me. And so when I got the chance to do my own show, instead of doing a sitcom — which CBS wanted me to do — I had it in a contract that I could do a one-hour comedy variety show, which was what I wanted. I wanted music. I wanted dancers. I wanted guest stars. I wanted a rep company. And so we wound up doing an original musical comedy revue every week, and that was my love,” she sighs, “and I feel very fortunate that we came along at that time.”

Burnett thinks it would be impossible to present a show like that today. “We had a 28-piece orchestra, we had 65-to-70 costumes a week … the guest stars and so forth. No network would let us do that now with that kind of money. And I even hired Vicki Lawrence, who was right out of high school.

I’d seen her at a contest, and we hired her. And no network today would let me do that, would let us do that, a girl right out of high school with no experience. So I feel very fortunate that our show happened at the time it did. I don’t think it could be done today.”

‘Masterpiece’ misfires

PBS’ “Masterpiece” show, which airs every Sunday night, has struggled to maintain its incomparable reputation ever since Susanne Simpson took over as executive producer in 2019. The show, which imports the best of British television, has suffered from COVID but also from some sure-fire misses like the humorless “Tom Jones,” the tepid “World on Fire,” (now canceled) and a sluggish attempt to reconstruct Jane Austen’s unfinished manuscript, “Sanditon.”

“Masterpiece” is the source of such past greats as “Downton Abbey,” “I, Claudius,” the original “House of Cards,” “Prime Suspect” and “Pride and Prejudice.”

While the series looks promising, unfortunately you can’t understand a word Riseborough says, though Gleeson is loud and clear. Another example of a British import desperately in search of subtitles.

Simpson also promises some gems for the future: Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis will be back in their roles as Thomas Cromwell and King Henry VIII in the final chapter of Cromwell’s story in “Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light.” The drama is based on the book by the late Hilary Mantel.

“MaryLand,” due May 5, stars Eve Best and Stockard Channing, with another series circumventing Austen, “Miss Austen.” Here Jane is dead and her sister is in search of some letters left by her famous sibling that may compromise her reputation. We’ll see.

Garai co-stars in ‘One Life’

Romola Garai is one of the stars in “One Life,” arriving in theaters Friday. It’s the story of a young man who, in 1938, tries desperately to save Jewish children before the Nazi invasion. Garai plays a member of the British Committee for Refugees in Czechoslovakia. Anthony Hopkins portrays that young man who, in older age, regrets he couldn’t save more. Garai (“The Crimson Petal,” “Atonement”) tells me that she didn’t intend to be an actress.

”Acting is play, just pretending, and I think that is something that’s always attractive to me,” she says.

“I did get taken to the theater a lot when I was growing up and my parents enjoyed the theater and would take us and I loved it. I always really loved it. And I remember seeing ‘The Seagull’ when I was 12 and thinking it was extraordinary — even if I didn’t understand it. I didn’t really think about doing it as a career until I was in my early teens. I kind of fell into it. I was in a school play and the casting director from a London agency had come to see her niece who was at my school in the same play and afterward she said, ‘Oh, you could come in and audition for something.’ So I did and it seemed like an accident really.”

Catching the moment on film

Ever wonder how those National Geographic photographers manage to create such enduring images? Jimmy Chin is one of them. When Alex Honnold was scaling El Capitan without a rope, Jimmy Chin was right behind him recording the mission with his camera for the doc “Free Solo.”

Chin admits his feats can be daunting. “I think not about the images that I’ve made, I often think about the images I missed,” he says, “because there have been some images in my life that I know I missed.

“Oftentimes when I’m in the mountains, I have to be a climber first … If you aren’t covering those bases, you’re dead. I’m a climber first, I get into these places and into those positions to take those photos, but I still have to make my decisions up there as a climber. When things are too dangerous or when I need to contribute to the climbing team in order to get us up or to get us down, I have to do that before I can take out the camera and shoot.”

The challenges facing some of the National Geographic photographers will be featured on the series, “Photographer,” premiering next Monday on the National Geographic channel and streaming on Hulu and Disney+.

(Luaine Lee is a California-based correspondent who covers entertainment for Tribune News Service.)

©2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Loughlin, the “Full House” actress who served two months in prison for paying to get her daughters into the University of Southern California as fake crew recruits, made a surprise appearance on “Curb” during Sunday’s episode.

Larry David during the beginning of the show runs into Ted Danson, who asks David for a favor. Danson in the show is doing a play about Abraham Lincoln, and Loughlin is his wife in the play.

“Here’s the thing: She (Loughlin) loves to play golf, and I was just hoping that maybe you could sponsor her at the club,” Danson says to David.

“There’s nobody else who could sponsor her?” David asks.

“Because of that whole college admissions scandal thing, no club will touch her,” Danson responds.

“That’s not fair,” David says. “She’s being blackballed from clubs? Terrible. I’ll sponsor her. Yeah, happy to do it. You know I’m a champion of the underdog.”

Then in a later scene, the golf club is reviewing Loughlin’s membership application. Members at the club are aghast, with people whispering, “Really? After what she did?”

David steps up to speak on her behalf, giving a passionate speech in front of the golf club’s board. David has been practicing Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and brings that energy to the speech for Loughlin.

“I highly resolve that she shall not have served her time in vain, and that this exclusive club of specific people, by specific people and for specific people shall have a new specific member,” David says in his fiery speech.

He gets a standing ovation, and then gives Loughlin a hug after she gets in.

Loughlin still has to play two rounds of golf with some of the committee members, and David plays with her.

Before one of the rounds, David tells her that they shouldn’t take a cart because it’s cart paths only.

“Oh, no problem,” Loughlin says, placing a blue flag on the cart. “We can drive anywhere. We can even drive right up to the green.”

“Wait a second, you got to have a doctor’s note to get one of those,” David responds.

“Oh yeah. Well I have Epstein-Barr,” Loughlin responds.

“You have Epstein-Barr?” David asks.

“One hematologist thinks so,” Loughlin responds, as David skeptically looks at her.

After the round, David sees that Loughlin’s Porsche has a handicapped sticker.

“It’s fantastic,” Loughlin says. “I can park anywhere.”

Then before the second round of golf, Loughlin was able to get their tee time switched to 10:45 a.m., and David learns that Loughlin bribed the golf starter for the change.

Following one of the holes, Loughlin said she scored a 5.

“How did you get a 5?” David asks her.

“I found my ball,” Loughlin responds.

“How’d you get it out of the woods? You were pretty deep in there,” David says.

“I had a good lie,” Loughlin responds.

“Yeah, you had a good lie all right,” David says to himself.

Back in 2020, Loughlin and her husband Mossimo Giannulli pled guilty to wire fraud charges in the college admissions scam.

Prosecutors out of the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s Office said the couple paid a combined $500,000 to secure their two daughters’ admissions to the University of Southern California as crew recruits. Loughlin served a two-month prison sentence, paid a $150,000 fine and did 100 hours of community service.

“Killers of the Flower Moon” actress Lily Gladstone is the first Native American to be nominated for an Oscar and is the odds-on favorite to win Best Actress. She would be the first indigenous woman to win an acting Oscar.

Greta Gerwig, Colman Domingo, Martin Scorsese and many others are poised to set milestones at this year’s ceremony. See our full rundown below for everything you need to know heading into Sunday.

How to watch the 2024 Oscars

This year’s Oscars broadcast will air on ABC and will also be available to stream via Hulu Live TV, YouTubeTV, FuboTV and AT&T TV. This year the ceremony will begin an hour earlier than usual at 7 p.m. EST.

The red carpet pre-show begins at 1 p.m. EST with “Countdown to Oscars: On The Red Carpet Live,” until 4 p.m. EST, when the live show will start and celebrities will make their way into the Dolby Theatre. You can catch the action on ABC, or stream it via ABC’s website and app or the red carpet Facebook and YouTube pages.

Who’s hosting the 2024 Oscars?

Late night host Jimmy Kimmel will emcee the awards show for the fourth time. Among returning hosts, he now trails only Bob Hope (19 times), Billy Crystal (nine times) and Johnny Carson (five times) for the most.

The 56-year-old comedian added that it might be his last time hosting. “I don’t presume that I’ll be asked to do it again … but I don’t know. I’ll say four seems like a solid number to me,” he said.

Who is favored to win at the 2024 Oscars?

Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” is heavily favored to win several major categories and leads the pack with 13 total nominations, followed by Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Poor Things,” which has 11 nods.

Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor are all predicted to go to Nolan’s three-hour historical drama, with awards for cinematography, editing and sound possible as well.

Both Lily Gladstone and Emma Stone are considered the frontrunners for Best Actress and Oscar predictors say either could win.

Da’Vine Joy Randolph is expected to run away with the Supporting Actress award for her role in Alexander Payne’s “The Holdovers,” and Billie Eilish’s hit “What Was I Made For?” from “Barbie” is anticipated to win Best Original Song.

Potential upsets at this year’s Oscars

While this year’s ceremony is looking fairly predictable with the dominance of “Oppenheimer,” much has been made of Sandra Hüller’s performance in “Anatomy of a Fall” and some say she could make a last-minute push for Best Actress over both Stone and Gladstone. 

“Poor Things” is also considered to be a favorite for Best Makeup and Hairstyling, but many bettors are staking their claim on Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro” to make the upset, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Who stands to make history at this year’s Oscars?

Gladstone, hailing from a Blackfeet Indian Reservation in northern Montana, has already made history as the first Native American acting nominee and could become the first ever Native American to win a competitive Oscar.

“This is for every little rez kid, every little urban kid, every little native kid out there who has a dream who is seeing themselves represented in our stories told by ourselves,” she said in her Golden Globe acceptance speech in January.

Her main competition for Best Actress, Emma Stone, is nominated both for acting in and producing “Poor Things,” reports BBC News.

She’s only the second woman to do so, after Frances McDormand, who was nominated for producing and acting in 2020’s “Nomadland.”

Cillian Murphy, who stars in “Oppenheimer” as the eponymous father of the atomic bomb, and his co-star Emily Blunt both received their first Oscar nominations this year. Their on-screen nemesis, Robert Downey Jr., is expected to win his first Oscar for his supporting role in the film.

If Murphy wins Best Actor and “Oppenheimer” takes Best Picture (as predicted), it will mark the first time since 2012 that the same film has won both Best Actor and Best Picture. The last was “The Artist” and actor Jean Dujardin in 2012.

While Greta Gerwig herself isn’t nominated for Best Director, she has already made history. She is the only director — male or female — whose first three feature films (“Lady Bird,” “Little Women” and “Barbie”) received Best Picture nominations.

“Killers of the Flower Moon,” which holds the third-most nominations (10) this year, also makes Martin Scorsese the oldest directing nominee ever, at 81.

“American Fiction” actors Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K. Brown are both up for awards. It’s the first time in history Black actors from the same film have been nominated for both lead and supporting categories.

Colman Domingo is also making headlines as the first Afro Latino and first gay Latino nominated for Best Actor, for his depiction of civil rights activist Bayard Rustin in the biopic “Rustin.”

Domingo and “Nyad’s” Jodie Foster are the first openly gay actors nominated for playing openly gay characters.

Who was snubbed?

Much has been made over the snubbing of Margot Robbie for her starring role in “Barbie,” as well as the film’s director Greta Gerwig.

The box office hit smashed records and combined with “Oppenheimer” to create the viral phenomenon which was the talk of Hollywood this year. Many were left scratching their heads (including Hillary Clinton) over their omission in the Best Actress and Best Director categories. However, the film still has eight nominations, including supporting acting nods for Ryan Gosling and America Ferrera.

Many fans of Todd Haynes’ scandalous psychodrama “May December” were surprised to see it only receive one nomination for its screenplay by Sammy Burch despite strong performance from Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore and breakthrough star Charles Melton.

Three other notable films: Andrew Haigh’s “All of Us Strangers,” Sean Durkin’s “The Iron Claw” and Aki Kaurismäk’s “Fallen Leaves,” were considered by some critics to be worthy of nominations but were completely shut out from this year’s ceremony.

Contributing: Associated Press

©2024 New York Daily News. Visit nydailynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Tobias Menzies, an Emmy winner as Prince Philip in “The Crown,” stars as Edmund Stanton, Lincoln’s Secretary of War, who just weeks after the Civil War ended pursued Booth whose escape was aided by unbowed Southern white supremacists.

“I found that we just basically have an amazing story. Which I knew a bare minimum about. Then at the heart of the story is a really interesting man who, again, I didn’t know a lot about,” noted the British Menzies, 50, in a Zoom interview.

“The opportunity to dive into that world to tell this story and to explore this man,” he added, “was one that I couldn’t turn away from.”

Stanton, close to Lincoln personally and politically, became obsessed with bringing Booth to justice, ruining his health in the process.

“There’s obviously something quite heroic,” Menzies allowed, “about the sacrifice of what he put his body through.

“But one wonders — what other alternative there was. Given that he was the man in that position at that moment, when arguably the country needed to be brought back together and justice to be served.

“That’s one of the interesting things about him: There’s strength but also a physical frailty. That’s a big contradiction.”

What’s disturbing is how, nearly 160 years later, the issues of white supremacy and Black equality remain in sharp focus.

“There are modern echoes and references. It does feel like a relevant story for us to consider in that the story obviously is a moment in American history where the Union, and arguably democracy, was in a very fragile place, thrown into doubt in some way.

“And there are certainly people that feel the election coming up in November is similarly very consequential potentially. So yeah, that’s why it’s an interesting story to be revisiting.”

The most serious consequence of Lincoln’s death: It would be another 100 years before the end of racial segregation.

“The Great Man theory is hard to avoid with someone like Lincoln. Because yes, arguably with his death, African American rights were set back 100 years.

“That’s actually one of the things we’re looking to explore in this show is how much can turn on individuals? And on the moment?

“One of the shocks that stayed with me in the making of this was when Lincoln’s coffin comes out of the boarding house, it’s met by a sea of African American faces. It eloquently tells you what was at stake in his death.”

AppleTV+ streams 2 episodes of “Manhunt” March 15

The 10-episode MAX series follows four women covering a national political campaign. Among them, Gugino’s veteran reporter Grace Gordon Greene is acknowledged as “Queen of the Scoop.”

“Girls on the Bus” is based on “Chasing Hillary,” Amy Chosick’s 2018 nonfiction book about covering Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

“This is a story,” Gugino explained in a Zoom interview, “about four women who are from different backgrounds, different generations, different political beliefs, different ideologies, who find themselves thrust together on this adventure in very close quarters.

“Ultimately, they have to figure out how to do it together. How to put themselves in the other person’s shoes and realize that ultimately supporting someone in a belief that might be different than yours is not sacrificing your beliefs. It’s actually just putting human connection first.

“All of those themes are things that I really believe in.”

She also realized, “That I’m at the point in my career in which I’m the ‘seasoned older’ veteran.”

Gugino, 52, laughed.  “Yes, I’m where you’ve got to wake up to these realities.”

But her Grace is neither bitter, caustic or nasty. Grace’s positive attitude was essential for this veteran whose career began in her early teens.

“Yes, Grace has been there and done that. But really key to me is that she’s remained curious,” Gugino.  “Curious and incredibly passionate. Journalism — and certainly in political journalism — is an unpopular profession. In the sense that much like a detective you’re finding out information about people that they may not want you to know. And your job is to, as accurately and quickly as possible, get that information to the public.

“That takes a certain kind of personality. It takes a pretty tough skin. And Grace has that. But it was very key to me that she also has an incredibly generous heart.

“She ultimately is there to help these younger women find their path. For me, that’s something as a young actor that I really appreciated from those that I got to work with.

“I really noticed the ones I got that from — and those I didn’t. And I knew that I never wanted to be that kind of person who didn’t try to help.

“I always wanted to be there to help usher people into a new world.”

She continues to discover new worlds from her roles. “The most interesting aspect of ‘Girls on the Bus’ wasn’t about me. It was more the mechanics and lifestyle of what it is to be on the road as a journalist in a political campaign.”

MAX streams the first 2 episodes of 10 of “The Girls on the Bus” on March 14.