Daniel Daddario: Last News

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Rupert Murdoch’s retirement from the boards of Fox and News Corporation is the event we’ve been waiting for. The most critically-acclaimed television series of the modern era, “Succession,” imagined a Murdoch figure struggling with the decision to let go of the reins.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic The documentarian Roger Ross Williams usually establishes trust by getting a meal with his subjects before shooting. In the case of “The Super Models,” he and co-director Larissa Bills were meeting four legends. Cindy Crawford hosted the pair at her Malibu home; Christy Turlington took them to a bookstore in Manhattan; Naomi Campbell Zoomed them from her closet.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis have found themselves in a position that those who’ve followed their Teflon trajectory might never have expected: Apologizing. The pair’s letters to Judge Charlaine Olmedo, prior to her sentencing of Kutcher and Kunis’ “That ‘70s Show” costar Danny Masterson to thirty years to life on two counts of rape, went viral after they were obtained by independent journalist Tony Ortega. And both the letters and apology video share an uncomfortable tone of supreme self-assurance.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic In December 2020, Cord Jefferson sat down with the novel “Erasure,” by Percival Everett, and saw his life reflected back at him. “It was like someone had written down a Christmas gift for Cord,” he says.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic As far as the-end-of-something symbolism went, this year’s Burning Man festival was about as sharp as it gets: A social-media optimized version of Woodstock ’99. Consider: The 2023 edition of the Black Rock Desert-based cultural festival in Nevada was disrupted by torrential rainfall that turned the sand of the “Playa” into quicksand-like mud — all of which cast into disarray not merely the planned revelry of dedicated “Burners” (who are only now making their exodus through traffic-clogged Nevada streets) but the downtime of various prominent celebrities.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Prince Harry is returning to Netflix. “Heart of Invictus,” produced by the Duke of Sussex’s Archewell label within the streamer, presents a view of Harry’s advocacy work. Director Orlando von Einsiedel and producer Joanna Natasegara — past Oscar winners for the 2016 documentary short “The White Helmets,” and nominees for the 2014 feature “Virunga” — knit together the stories of multiple participants in the Invictus Games, the athletic competition Harry founded for wounded veterans around the world.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” gave way to “Rhoda”; “Cheers” eventually brought us “Frasier.” Could the legacy of “And Just Like That” be the London-set dramedy “Samantha”? Yes, it’s unlikely; a potential spinoff based on the ongoing adventures of Kim Cattrall’s character from “And Just Like That” and “Sex and the City” necessitates the participation of, well, Cattrall, who’s been very clear that her cameo on the “AJLT” finale was a once-ever thing. But that cameo, too, once seemed unlikely-to-impossible, given the haze of bad feeling between Cattrall and her former castmates.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Wednesday night’s Republican debate on Fox News — the first of the 2024 election cycle — ended up, perhaps predictably, feeling like the undercard. After all, it isn’t just that the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for president, Donald Trump, wasn’t on the stage, by his own choice.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic “Telemarketers” may be summer TV’s oddest thrill ride. Co-director Sam Lipman-Stern begins the three-part docuseries, which launches August 13 on HBO, in retrospect.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac set social media on fire in 2021 due to their electric chemistry on the Venice Film Festival red carpet for HBO’s “Scenes From a Marriage.” The devastating limited series, based on Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 miniseries of the same name, cast the two actors as a married couple going through a grueling divorce. Chastain told Vanity Fair her and Isaac’s longtime friendship hasn’t been the same since. “‘Scenes From a Marriage’ was very tough,” Chastain said.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Zendaya sits at the bleeding-heart center of “Euphoria,” and Sydney Sweeney’s performance provides its raging, rollicking id. But the young actor Angus Cloud, who died July 31 at age 25, may have come as close as anyone to giving the show its soul. “Euphoria,” in its first two seasons, has been defined by its wild shifts in tone — tending always to head in one direction.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic There’s a certain familiarity to the early going of “Praise Petey,” and not in an unwelcome way; as she did on “Schitt’s Creek,” Annie Murphy plays a child of privilege who is cast into a new, vastly more rural and isolated living situation by circumstance. Here, though, the character Murphy plays is animated, and the setting for her personal reinvention isn’t a small town but a compound we quickly learn plays host to a cult. Her late father’s cult, to be precise. Petey, a fashion-magazine functionary whom we’re told in Murphy’s charming voiceover is “a girl with a boy’s name, so you’re allowed to like me,” is living her best life in New York City. But in the midst of idle days of lunching and half-working, she’s treated as an obstacle and an annoyance by her mother (Christine Baranski). So it is that early in the first episode, she decides to learn a little more about the community her father (played, when he appears in video messages made before the character’s death, by Stephen Root) left behind. It’s called New Utopia, and the name hints at the many hopes its citizens have for what they’ll gain by giving up their lives for the cause.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic It’s hard to know who “Superpowered” is for. The newly rebranded streamer Max presents a three-part documentary on the history and impact of DC Comics — not coincidentally, an intellectual-property concern with films like “Won-der Woman” and “Aquaman” that are made by Max corporate sibling Warner Bros. “Superpowered,” coming in the midst of a yearlong celebratory jag as Warner Bros. marks its 100th anniversary, is too superficial to satisfy core fans, but so automatically assumes viewer buy-in that it won’t create any new converts. Directed by Leslie Iwerks and Mark Catalena and narrated by Rosario Dawson, “Superpowered” follows an odd structure, where a linear march through the history of a company that began in the 1930s is studded with promotional interviews for recent endeavors. We jump from footage of the campy late-1960s “Batman” TV show to an interview with director Matt Reeves discussing his 2022 film “The Batman” back to the ’60s. Dawson intones over footage of the Vietnam War and Civil Rights-era protests that, given national turmoil, “the DC characters seemed tone-deaf.” And the spirit of tone-deafness is kept alive by such transitions.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic In 2020, Jenna Lyons starred in “Stylish,” a thrillingly, almost decadently awkward reality series on the service then called HBO Max. This was putatively an “Apprentice”-style show intended to find Lyons, a recognizable face to style-watchers as the former creative director and president of the retailer J. Crew, an all-purpose consigliere. But the show leaned all the way into its star’s evident discomfort with having to make choices. Lyons, a striking but diffident presence onscreen, shrank from defining the role the series’ “winner” might play, or from revealing much at all about her vision for her own post-J. Crew future. The uncertainty the halting, abrupt Lyons left in her wake made “Stylish” a must-watch for historians of aughts fashion personalities, but seemed, too, to ensure that this would be Lyons’ first and last foray into reality television.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic It’s the spotlight Fran Drescher turned out, unexpectedly, to be born for.  Speaking at a press conference announcing the actors strike Thursday, the SAG-AFTRA president, still known best for her winsome and haphazardly charming protagonist of the sitcom “The Nanny,” looked stricken. Speaking at first deliberately and then with increasing passion, Drescher narrated her union’s attempt, initially, to avoid a strike, and then what she cast as the dawning realization that action was required.  It was a performance with build and emotional heft, culminating in an appeal to labor across the world: “This is a moment of history that is a moment of truth,” she declared — and if that reads a bit awkwardly on the page, well, you should have heard how she delivered it. She continued to excoriate “big business, who care more about Wall Street than you and your family.” On “you,” she gestured out into the audience; on “your family,” she gazed directly into camera, to the unseen viewers out there at home, proletariat and executive alike. 

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic HBO dominating the Emmy nominations is hardly a surprise, given both historical trends and the year they’ve had. But it couldn’t have come at a more crucial time. Amid endless media speculation around the cuts and bad P.R. missteps of Warner Bros. Discovery chief David Zaslav, HBO — notionally the jewel in the crown of the newly-formed WBD’s television empire — cleaned up. In the best drama race, HBO picked up a startling four nominations (for “House of the Dragon,” “The Last of Us,” “Succession” and “The White Lotus”). In a happy coincidence, those four nominations, which tie an all-time record, represented the two halves of what HBO has lately done well, between pushing IP-driven storytelling to new heights in the cases of “House of the Dragon” and “The Last of Us” and turning carefully wrought, creator-driven drama into organic zeitgeist hits with “Succession” and “The White Lotus.”

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic In my earliest years, the evening didn’t end until Vanna White said good night. I was in one of the parts of America where “Wheel of Fortune” comes on after “Jeopardy!” (the only proper order — a roughage-filled meal, then dessert). And I’d insist on staying up past the last ad break to hear the chat between White and “Wheel” host Pat Sajak for 45 seconds or so, wrapping on a sincere-sounding sendoff that gave me the all-clear to trundle up the stairs. Why did I have to wait for the last moments with Vanna? Well, part of it was a child’s literalism: she hadn’t said good night, so it wasn’t yet that time. But part, too, was an attempt to wring out every last moment of White’s particular charm from “Wheel’s” half-hour. White — perhaps even more than Sajak, a consummate emcee of the old school — seemed to represent in one person what “Wheel” was all about. A model for an endless array of spectacular gowns and an ornament on a show whose gameplay didn’t strictly require a letter-turner as technology improved, she represented all the glamour and luxurious promise of cash prizes, free vacations and the gilded sunlight of California. And yet presenting in complete earnest, from her glee or sorrow for a contestant who won the game or who bought the wrong vowel to her utter commitment to trading pleasantries with Sajak, she was a fabulous contradiction — a quintessentially middle-American celebrity.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic Each episode of the new season of “Project Greenlight” begins with a worthy mission statement. “We’re choosing a woman director,” executive producer Issa Rae tells us, “because ‘Project Greenlight’ has never had one before.” Gina Prince-Bythewood, the director of films including “The Woman King” and also an executive producer here, adds, “It’s about time the world sees how many dope women directors there are just waiting to get their shot.” These are statements that are hard to argue with — “Project Greenlight,” this season, did choose a woman director, the first-time filmmaker Meko Winbush, to pull together a feature film, the sci-fi family drama “Gray Matter,” in just 18 days of shooting. And Winbush, who is Black, is one of many who deserve a chance of the sort the industry doesn’t tend to hand out freely to women of color, something both “Insecure” creator Rae and Prince-Bythewood surely understand well. (They’re two of three putative “mentors” for Winbush on the show, along with actor Kumail Nanjiani, who also co-wrote “The Big Sick.”) And yet the show is purpose-built not to elevate or to celebrate Winbush but to somewhat ruthlessly pull apart the ways in which she might be made to look unready for the job and unsteady on her feet. It’s a shockingly watchable series that evinces that sickly feeling of humiliation from a past, crueler era of reality TV — “The Comeback,” but make it indie.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic The current backlash against queer and trans people, led by a vivified cultural right, may have come as a surprise to younger people who assumed their rights and protections wouldn’t backslide. For this potential audience most of all, “Last Call,” a rigorous yet emotionally vivid documentary series on HBO, will come as a startling depiction of all-too-recent history, and a call to stand united in the face of a world’s worth of threats. Produced by, among others, recent Oscar nominee Howard Gertler (“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”) and directed by Anthony Caronna, “Last Call” tells a set of stories that tend to begin at a piano bar. In the early 1990s, a cohort of gay men, often in culturally forced heterosexual marriages and living their true lives only after dark, frequented various drinking establishments in New York City; time and again, one of this set would turn up not merely dead but dismembered, in a sort of brutal testament to antigay feeling. 

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic What’s NBC nowadays? Even before the ongoing writers strike scrambled the network’s fall schedule, its identity — historically quite strong as a place for chewy, grown-up dramas and chic, cerebral sitcoms — had seemed hazy. Promising comedies, the sort that might have grown to fulfill the role recently played by “30 Rock” or “Superstore,” got unceremoniously booted from the air after barely a chance to thrive; new dramas, from “Ordinary Joe” to “The Thing About Pam,” seemed painfully undistinguished.  It’s been a tough few years. And as much as the departure of former NBCUniversal chairman Susan Rovner, a career TV executive previously known for her work at Warner Bros. Television, is just latest bit of media industry consolidation, it’s also a moment to observe that the legacy network and its corporate siblings have struggled to find a way forward. (Rovner’s replacement, Donna Langley, will oversee both film and television for the company.) In the years since Rovner came into the job in 2020, there have been limited bright spots — the “Night Court” revival on NBC, “Poker Face” on streamer Peacock. But there’s been a general tone of a lack of faith in the core of what NBC is and does, one that makes today’s news feel like less of a surprise than it otherwise might.