life

WASHINGTON — Twenty-two days into the government shutdown, California Rep. Kevin Kiley spent an hour of his morning in Washington guiding a group of middle school students from Grass Valley through the empty corridors of the U.S. Capitol.

Normally, one of his staff members would have led the tour. But the Capitol is closed to all tours during the shutdown, unless the elected member is present. So the schoolchildren from Lyman Gilmore Middle School ended up with Kiley, a Republican from Rocklin, as their personal tour guide.

“I would have visited with these kids anyway,” Kiley said in his office after the event. “But I actually got to go on the whole tour of the Capitol with them as well.”

Kiley’s impromptu tour is an example of how members of California’s congressional delegation are improvising their routines as the shutdown drags on and most of Washington remains at a standstill.

Some are in Washington in case negotiations resume, others are back at home in their districts meeting with federal workers who are furloughed or working without pay, giving interviews or visiting community health centers that rely on tax credits central to the budget negotiations. One member attended the groundbreaking of a flood control project in their district. Others are traveling back and forth.

“I’ve had to fly back to Washington for caucus meetings, while the opposition, the Republicans, don’t even convene and meet,” Rep. Maxine Waters, a longtime Los Angeles Democrat, said in an interview. “We will meet anytime, anyplace, anywhere, with [House Speaker Mike] Johnson, with the president, with the Senate, to do everything that we can to open up the government. We are absolutely unified on that.”

The shutdown is being felt across California, which has the most federal workers outside the District of Columbia. Food assistance benefits for millions of low-income Californians could soon be delayed. And millions of Californians could see their healthcare premiums rise sharply if Affordable Care Act subsidies are allowed to expire.

For the California delegation, the fallout at home has become impossible to ignore. Yet the shutdown is in its fourth week with no end in sight.

In the House, Johnson has refused to call members back into session and prevented them from doing legislative work. Many California lawmakers — including Kiley, one of the few GOP lawmakers to openly criticize him — have been dismayed by the deadlock.

“I have certainly emphasized the point that the House needs to be in session, and that canceling a month’s worth of session is not a good thing for the House or the country,” Kiley said, noting that he had privately met with Johnson.

Kiley, who represented parts of the Sacramento suburbs and Lake Tahoe, is facing political uncertainty as California voters weigh whether to approve Proposition 50 on Nov. 4. The measure would redraw the state’s congressional districts to better favor Democrats, leaving Kiley at risk, even though the Republican says he believes he could still win if his right-leaning district is redrawn.

The Senate has been more active, holding a series of votes on the floor and congressional hearings with Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. The chamber, however, has been unable to reach a deal to reopen the government. On Thursday, the 23rd day of the shutdown, the Senate failed to advance competing measures that would have paid federal employees who have been working without compensation.

The Republicans’ plan would have paid active-duty members of the military and some federal workers during the shutdown. Democrats backed a bill that would have paid all federal workers and barred the Trump administration from laying off any more federal employees.

“California has one of the largest federal workforces in the country, and no federal worker or service member should miss their paychecks because Donald Trump and Republicans refused to come to the table to protect Americans’ health care,” Sen. Alex Padilla said in a statement.

Working conditions get harder

The strain on federal employees — including those who work for California’s 54 delegation members — are starting to become more apparent.

Dozens of them have been working full time without pay. Their jobs include answering phone calls and requests from constituents, setting the schedules for elected officials, writing policy memos and handling messaging for their offices.

House Speaker Mike Johnson speaks about the shutdown at a news conference Thursday with other Republican House members.

(Eric Lee / Getty Images)

At the end of October, House staffers — who are paid on a monthly basis — are expected to miss their first paycheck.

Some have been quietly told to consider borrowing money from the U.S. Senate Federal Credit Union, which is offering a “government shutdown relief loan program” that includes a no-interest loan of up to $5,000 to be repaid in full after 90 days.

The mundane has also been disrupted. Some of the cafeterias and coffee carts that are usually open to staffers are closed. The lines to enter office buildings are long because fewer entrances are open.

The hallways leading to the offices of California’s elected officials are quiet, except for the faint sound of occasional elevator dings. Many of their doors are adorned with signs that show who they blame for the government shutdown.

“Trump and Republicans shut down the government,” reads a sign posted on the door that leads into Rep. Norma Torres’ (D-Pomona) office. “Our office is OPEN — WORKING for the American people.”

Rep. Ted Lieu, a Democrat from Torrance, posted a similar sign outside his office.

A sign is posted outside of the office of Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, in Washington on Wednesday.

(Ana Ceballos / Los Angeles Times)

Rep. Vince Fong, a Republican who represents the Central Valley, has been traveling between Washington and his district. Two weeks into the shutdown, he met with veterans from the Central Valley Honor Flight and Kern County Honor Flight to make sure that their planned tour of the Capitol was not disrupted by the shutdown. Like Kiley’s tour with the schoolchildren, an elected member needed to be present for the tour to go on.

“His presence ensured the tour could continue as planned,” Fong’s office said.

During the tour, veterans were able to see Johnson as well, his office said.

Shutdown highlights deep divisions

California’s congressional delegation mirrors the broader stalemate in Washington, where entrenched positions have kept both parties at a negotiation impasse.

Democrats are steadfast in their position that they will not agree to a deal unless Republicans extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits expiring at the end of the year, while Republicans are accusing Democrats of failing to reopen the government for political gain.

Kiley is one of the few Republicans who has called on Johnson to negotiate with Democrats on healthcare. Kiley said he thinks there is a “a lot of room to negotiate” because there is concern on both sides of the aisle if the tax credits expire.

“If people see a massive increase in their premiums … that’s not a good thing,” he said. “Especially in California, where the cost of living is already so high, and you’re suddenly having to pay a lot more for healthcare.”

Rep. Robert Garcia, the chair of the House Democratic Caucus, in a press event Wednesday with five other California Democrats talked about the need to fight for the healthcare credits.

Garcia, of Long Beach, said he recently visited a healthcare center in San Bernardino County that serves seniors with disabilities. He said the cuts would be “devastating” and would prompt the center to close.

“That’s why we are doing everything in our power to negotiate a deal that reopens the federal government and saves healthcare,” he said.

As the shutdown continues, many Democrats are digging their heels on the issue.

At an Oct. 3 event outside of Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, for instance, Rep. Laura Friedman held a news conference with nurses and hospital staff and said she would not vote for a bill to reopen the government unless there is a deal on healthcare.

Last week, the Glendale Democrat said her position hasn’t changed.

“I will not support a shutdown deal that strips healthcare from tens of thousands of my constituents,” she said.

Lío Mehiel has been working for a moment like “After the Hunt” for a long time.

Directed by Luca Guadagnino, this thorny morality play of a film set at Yale University pits well-liked professor Alma (played by Julia Roberts) against both her protegé, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), as well as her longtime friend and colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield) during a scandal that risks her entire academic career.

Amid that starry A-list cast, the actor plays Maggie’s partner, Alex. The film, which had its world premiere in August at the Venice Film Festival, is Mehiel’s most high-profile project yet.

“There is so much time as an artist where you are doing the work and nobody cares and you have to find within yourself the motivation and the commitment and the drive to keep going,” Mehiel tells The Times. “Because you know that when you are going to be able to reach people, it will be worth it.”

Such a step has been years in the making. Mehiel, who lived in Puerto Rico until they were 5 years old, began their creative endeavors almost as soon as they arrived in New York City, first as a salsa dancer and later as an actor. By the time they were in fifth grade they were attending Broadway auditions, eventually booking a role in the 2003 revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” starring Ashley Judd and Jason Patric.

(L to R) Lio Mehiel as Alex and Ayo Edebiri as Maggie in AFTER THE HUNT, from Amazon MGM Studios.

(Yannis Drakoulidis / Yannis Drakoulidis © 2025 Amazon Content Services LLC. All Rights Reserved)

But as they began finding their own sense of self and body, they also found the kind of opportunities that led them to “After the Hunt.” That began in earnest back in 2023, when they starred in Vuk Lungulov-Klotz’s film “Mutt” as Feña, a role they booked after cold-emailing the director and telling them they’d do anything to win that part. The film chronicled a particularly hectic day in the life of a young trans man in New York City, as he struggles to rekindle old relationships he’d severed since he’d transitioned. Mehiel’s soulful performance won them a Special Jury Award for Acting at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, putting them on the map as a trans Latine performer to watch.

“Moving forward from ‘Mutt,’ I was really interested in building on that momentum to what’s next,” they say. Not just in terms of their career but in the broader cultural conversation around contemporary queer and trans representation. The following year, they returned to Sundance with Alessandra Lacorazza’s “In the Summers,” which walked away from the festival with the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury prize — the first for a film directed by a Latina director. Like “Mutt,” that sun-dappled film found Mehiel breathing life into a trans character navigating a thorny relationship with their father (played by renowned Puerto Rican rapper Residente).

Mehiel has long been building a body of work that centers on the very work of having a body. Just this past summer, they visited the Salton Sea for a performance installation titled “angels of a drowning myth.” In photos from that day, Mehiel is seen naked and half-submerged into that so-called sea, posing alongside a bust of their own chest made six months after they’d received top surgery. A portrait of a body twice represented, Mehiel’s piece stressed the solidity and malleability of their own body, and the beauty they find within and around it. Their work moves past familiar ideas of the body in transition, gleefully embracing the messiness of the queer experience and refusing the easy siren call of visibility.

“‘After the Hunt,’ is such a beautiful example of that because Alex is a queer and trans character, but we just see them getting home from a run, taking their shirt off, being with their partner, dealing with stuff that has nothing to do with their queerness,” Mehiel says.

That moment Alex first appears on screen is quintessential Mehiel. Not just because of the honeyed intimacy their sweaty, bare chest exudes. But because their appearance immediately reframes everything audiences have heard about this seemingly militant, radical social justice warrior. Alex at first appears as a figure of “woke” culture there to defy the older generation Roberts’ Alma comes to stand for. But there’s more to them than that.

“Alex doesn’t represent all queer people who have a political orientation in the world, all queer people who might attend a protest,” they explain. “I think what Luca did and what Nora did in the script was to give us all an opportunity to move away from identity politics. Instead, they gave each of the characters enough meat on their bones that they get to be complex, messy characters.”

“After the Hunt” may focus on complicated ethical questions surrounding sexual assault allegations at a university, but within that plot, Mehiel sees also a chance for viewers to catch a glimpse of characters like Maggie and Alex who may not otherwise be centered in such stories.

“I’m just excited that there is more exposure that people are having to queer and trans people and to queer relationships, and how that can fit in the context of a ‘normative’ world,” they add. “This is a movie with Julia Roberts, one of our biggest stars and crown jewels of Hollywood and of American cinema. There’s going to be a lot of folks that are going to see it because Julia is in it. And then they’re also going to get to experience a queer and trans person on screen who is likable in some moments and unlikable in others, just as much as every other character.”

That’s been Mehiel’s purpose for years now: to expand what queer and trans characters can look like on stage, on screen and, in turn, in real life. At a time when these communities are vilified by those who wish to harm them, Mehiel insists on the importance of such normalized visibility.

Lio Mehiel seen at the Los Angeles Premiere of Amazon MGM Studios’ “After The Hunt” at Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on October 04, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.

(Photo by Stewart Cook / Amazon MGM Studios via Getty Images)

“Honestly, exposure to these experiences creates connection more than anything and allows people to feel comfortable,” they add. “Because the political climate right now — for the Latine community and for the trans community — is really hard and heartbreaking and challenging. And I think so much of it has to do with people feeling like they don’t know who these people are.”

A central kernel of the premise of “After the Hunt” is that you never know what someone is going through. And, more to the point, that making assumptions about other people’s experience can be extremely dangerous.

“This movie really serves as a mirror to the people that are watching it,” Mehiel insists. The film confronts audiences with their own biases and refuses any tidy conclusions.

But for Mehiel, the film will forever be remembered as a highlight of a career that is only bound to get bigger and more exciting. Just this year, they spent the summer at the Williamstown Theatre Festival starring in Jeremy O. Harris’ new play as well as serving as head of production for “Mother, Daughter, Holy Spirit,” a grassroots fundraiser for the Trans Justice Funding Project, all while continuing to pursue their various interests as artist, writer, and filmmaker. In that context, “After the Hunt” stands now less as a calling card than as a reminder of how far they’ve come and yet how much further they want to go. That film, now playing in theaters and coming soon to Prime Video, will widen the scope and reach of their artistry.

“Watching it, I was like, ‘I fit right into the fabric of the movie,’” they say. “On a personal journey level, I feel confident that I have the skill, the talent and the experience at this point to work with the masters that I dream of working with (if the sexy French filmmaker, Julia Ducournau, ever reads this interview, she should know that I want to work with her).”

Or, in much simpler terms that echo an ethos they’ve brought to bear on and off screen: “I just feel ready and able to actualize the things that I have been dreaming about for a long time.”

WASHINGTON — Kamala Harris isn’t ruling out another run for the White House.

In an interview with the BBC posted Saturday, Harris said she expects a woman will be president in the coming years, and it could “possibly” be her.

“I am not done,” she said.

The former vice president said she hasn’t decided whether to mount a 2028 presidential campaign. But she dismissed the suggestion that she’d face long odds.

“I have lived my entire career a life of service, and it’s in my bones. And there are many ways to serve,” she said. “I’ve never listened to polls.”

Harris has recently given a series of interviews accompanying the September release of her book “107 Days.” It looks back on her experience replacing then-President Biden as the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee after he dropped out of the race, in an election she lost to Republican Donald Trump.

In an interview with the Associated Press this month, Harris, 60, also made clear that running again in 2028 is still on the table. She said she sees herself as a leader of the party, including in countering Trump and preparing for the 2026 midterms.

Meanwhile, political jockeying among Democrats for the 2028 presidential contest appears to be playing out even earlier than usual.

Several potential candidates are already taking steps to get to know voters in key states, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear. Potentially 30 high-profile Democrats could ultimately enter the primary.

In Megha Majumdar’s new novel “A Guardian and a Thief,” a cataclysmic climate event in the Bengali city of Kolkata has wiped out shelter and food supplies, leaving its citizens desperate and scrambling for survival. Among the families beset by the tragedy are Ma, her young daughter Mishti and Ma’s father Dadu. They are some of the fortunate ones, with approved passports to travel to the U.S., where Ma’s husband awaits them in Ann Arbor, Mich. But a brazen theft threatens their very existence.

“A Guardian and a Thief” is Majumdar’s follow-up to her critically acclaimed bestselling debut “A Burning.” We chatted with the author about white lies, the pleasures of anthropology and teaching as a form of learning.

(Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.)

✍️ Author Chat

“A Guardian and a Thief” by Megha Majumdar

(Knopf)

Your novel takes place in Kolkata, which is your hometown. Why?

It’s one of the cities in the world which is most severely affected by climate change. I was reading about all of these grim predictions. Kolkata has grown significantly hotter and is predicted to endure more storms in the coming decades. Reading all of that was really sad, and it was really alarming. The book really grew out of these predictions about the future of the city.

Your character Boomba makes life very difficult for your family, yet he is really a victim of circumstance, right? Calamities can make good people do bad things.

This is the kind of question that got me into this book, which is, are there good people and monsters or do we contain elements of both in us? And is this revealed in a circumstance of scarcity and crisis? That’s the kind of question that I was very interested in. Boomba came to me initially as the thief of the title, but as I started writing more about him, I realized that it wouldn’t be truthful or interesting to simply make him the thief. He was more complex and I needed to write him with all of his complicated motivations and wishes and worries and regrets.

Everyone in the novel lies to some extent, whether it’s for self-preservation, or to protect their loved ones from being hurt.

I think it’s coming from love, actually, the loving function of lies and falsehoods. Anybody who has lived far away from home might find that this resonates with them: This feeling that when you are really far away from your loved ones, you need to assure them that you are OK, that things are all right. It’s a kind of love that you can offer them, because they cannot do anything to help you from so far away. So offering them falsehoods about how your circumstances are fine and they have nothing to worry about is an expression of love for them.

You studied anthropology in college. How did you move into fiction?

Anthropology is about the effort to understand [other people] while acknowledging that you can never fully know, that there are limits to how much any of us can understand another person’s life. That training, in listening for complexity in somebody else’s life story, and honoring the contradictions and intricacies of their life, and maintaining the humility to acknowledge that there are things about other people which will always remain mysterious to us — that space is so rich for a fiction writer.

You teach writing in the MFA program at Hunter College in New York. How does that feed into your work?

It’s what I loved about working as a book editor. Teaching feels beautifully related to editorial work, because, once again, I am close to other writers. I’m close to their text, I am thinking with them through the questions of what this text is accomplishing. And I love having the opportunity to think through failures of prose with other incredibly smart and creative and ambitious writers. When I say failure, there’s nothing bad or stressful about it. I fail in my writing all the time. Failure is part of the process. Being able to look at those failures and ask, what is happening here is very useful.

📰 The Week(s) in Books

Twenty-five years after “Almost Famous” put his origin story on movie screens, Cameron Crowe (left, with Robert Plant) reflects on his roots as a teenage music journalist.

(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

Valorie Castellanos Clark writes that “The Radical Fund,” John Fabian Witt’s book about a Jazz Age millionaire who gave his money away is a “meticulous” story of “the ways a modest fund endowed by a reluctant heir managed to reshape American civil rights in less than 20 years.”

Nine years after “Go Set a Watchman” published, Robert Allen Papinchak reviews Harper Lee’s latest, “The Land of Sweet Forever,” a collection of stories and essays from the late author, calling it “a rewarding addition and resource to the slim canon of her literary legacy.”

Leigh Haber is entranced with Gish Jen’s new novel “Bad Bad Girl,” about a fraught mother-daughter relationship, calling the book “suffused with love and a desire to finally understand.”

Finally, Mikael Wood chatted with filmmaker Cameron Crowe about his new memoir, “The Uncool.” Says Crowe of his journalism days, “I did an interview with Bob Dylan for Los Angeles magazine, and I got it so wrong that they didn’t publish it.”

📖 Bookstore Faves

Vroman’s Bookstore is on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Nine months after the Eaton fire, Vroman’s Bookstore continues to be a cherished haven for local residents. The store still vibrates with bookish energy as it continues its ambitious fundraising outreach campaigns for fire victims. We chatted with the store’s chief executive, Julia Cowlishaw, about how things are going at the beloved Pasadena institution.

Nine months after the fire, how is business?

Business has been steady this year and we’re pleased with that, given all the variables in the world.

What books are selling right now?

The new releases this fall are fabulous, and we are seeing a broad range of interests. In nonfiction there’s a lot of interest in trying to understand current events from historical perspectives and Jill Lepore’s “We the People” is one example on our bestseller list. Since it is fall, the list of cookbooks is amazing and Samin Nosrat’s new cookbook “Good Things” along with her older book “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” make great gifts. In fiction, Ian McEwan, Kiran Desai, Thomas Pynchon and Lily King’s new novels are popular, so literary fiction is alive and well.

How important has the store been for the community in such a challenging year?

Bookstores, including Vroman’s, have long been recognized as a third place in their communities. A third place gives people a space to come together with friends and family over a shared interest and a fine sense of community. That sense of community became even more important after the fires, and it was so important for us to be more than a bookstore and give back to our community in every way we could. Our community really responded by helping us raise money for several community foundations, and collect books and supplies for people impacted by the fires.

Vroman’s Bookstore is at 695 E. Colorado Blvd. in Pasadena.

The image of a grieving parent is not an uncommon sight on the dramatic stage. Euripides, whom Aristotle called “the most tragic of the poets,” returns to the figure of the grief-stricken parent in “Hecuba,” “Hippolytus” and “The Bacchae,” to cite just a few disparate examples of characters brought to their knees by the death of their child.

Shakespeare offers what has become the defining portrait of this inconsolable experience in “King Lear.” Cradling the lifeless body of his murdered daughter, Lear can do nothing but repeat the word “never” five times, the repetition driving home the irrevocable nature of loss.

In tragedy, the protagonist is often plagued by guilt for his own role, however inadvertent or inescapable, in the catastrophe that befell his loved one. Theseus in “Hippolytus” and Agave in “The Bacchae” both have reason to feel that they have blood on their hands. Lear, though “more sinned against than sinning,” recognizes only after it’s too late the error in judgment that led to the devastation from which there can be no return.

The difference with “Guac,” the one-man performance work at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, is that Manuel Oliver isn’t just playing a bereaved father. He is one.

Manuel Oliver in “Guac.”

(Cameron Whitman)

Oliver’s 17-year-old son, Joaquín, known as Guac to family and friends, was one of the 17 lives lost in 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. The production, written and performed by Oliver, turns a parent’s grief into a theatrical work of activism.

Co-written by James Clements and directed by Michael Cotey, “Guac” has been sharing the story of Joaquín’s short but vividly lived life with audiences around the country. Oliver didn’t just love his son. He liked him. Guac was his best friend. He was also his trusted guide to American culture.

Immigrants from Venezuela, the family had made a new start in a country that Guac helped them feel was their home. To convey the meaning of Guac’s life, Oliver introduces his family members through a series of photo images he has crafted into artworks.

The last picture, and the one that remains staring at us throughout the performance, is of Guac. Oliver continues to enhance the portrait. While adding flourishes to the background and making adjustments to what his son is wearing, he tells us about the life they shared before it was tragically stolen.

Manuel Oliver works on a portrait of his late son in “Guac.”

(Donna F. Aceto)

The tragedy is overwhelmingly real. Oliver bears the weight of it by transforming his grief into fuel for activism. The performance makes the case for stricter gun law in America with the heartbreaking eloquence of a father whose life changed permanently after dropping his son off at school on a Valentine’s Day that started so promisingly.

What happened to Joaquín could happen to any of us, anytime, anywhere, in a country that has allowed its elected officials to deflect responsibility for their repeated failure to pass common sense gun legislation. While taking money from the NRA, these cynical politicians offer empty “thoughts and prayers” in place of meaningful reform. The result is that no one can go anywhere in public without eyeing the emergency exits and scanning the crowd for trouble.

Oliver isn’t a polished theatrical professional. He’s a dad, first and foremost. But it’s his comfortable ordinariness that allows him to make such a powerful connection with the audience. He’s onstage but could very well be exchanging a few neighborly words with us on our street.

Oliver summons his son by joyfully remembering his virtuosity on air guitar. Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” resounds throughout the Douglas while he enlivens the portrait with impassioned strokes. The words “I wish I was here” are added to Guac’s T-shirt, and it’s a sentiment we all devoutly, agonizingly share as Oliver brings his wife, Patricia, onto a stage that has urgently become an extension of our national reality.

In honor of Joaquín, the couple formed Change the Ref, an organization dedicated to raising awareness about mass shootings and empowering the next generation of activists through “creativity, activism, disruption and education.” “Guac” is a potent example of what can be done in the wake of a tragedy that can no longer be described as unthinkable.

Welcome to Screen Gab, the newsletter for everyone who wore out their remote’s fast-forward button while watching the Season 9 finale of “Love Is Blind.”

In the wake of the news that Lauren Speed-Hamilton and Cameron Hamilton, the inaugural couple to get engaged on “Love is Blind,” welcomed their first child earlier this month (raising the already high bar their rom-com coded relationship had set), the latest season of Netflix’s addictive and maddening social experiment concluded with a dramatic first in the reality franchise’s history. And while the “Sparkle Megan” nickname reveal early in the season still feels like the biggest shock to our system, the outcomes of this season’s weddings will hopefully make next week’s reunion special interesting to watch. But maybe our “Love Is Blind” correspondent Kaitlyn Huamani was onto something when she chose to add some intrigue to her binge of the show. She leaned into the mystery the singles experience in the pods by obscuring her screen and strictly listening to the participants during that critical phase of the experiment to test her assessment of the matches.

But don’t fret, lovers of love. “Nobody Wants This” is back for its second season to help maintain Adam Brody’s grip on GIF-able kisses. For the uninitiated, the L.A.-set series revolves around the will-they/won’t-they relationship between Joanne (Kristen Bell), a woman who often regales about her single life on a podcast, who falls in love with Noah (Brody), a progressive rabbi. But can their relationship make it past hurdles that include their careers, family and religion? The new season takes us on their ongoing journey to figure that out. But there’s another complicated relationship coming into focus too. Joanne’s sister and podcast co-host, Morgan (Justine Lupe), has a boundary-pushing friendship with Noah’s married brother, Sasha (Timothy Simons), that continues to cause tension with his longtime wife, Esther (Jackie Tohn) — and unlocks some other issues about their union in process. Simons stopped by Guest Spot to discuss his character’s approach to marriage and platonic friendships.

Also in this week’s Screen Gab, our recommendations are a light comedy caper that’s a spinoff of the long-running British crime series “Death in Paradise,” and a documentary that gives an intimate look at the life and career of award-winning Deaf actor Marlee Matlin.

ICYMI

Must-read stories you might have missed

Actor Aidan Delbis, photographed in Beverly Hills in October. Delbis has a breakout role in Yorgos Lanthimos’ upcoming “Bugonia.”

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Friends of this L.A. teen will soon find out his big secret: He’s co-starring in ‘Bugonia’: Aidan Delbis is one of Hollywood’s overnight success stories, going straight from high school to the set of a Yorgos Lanthimos movie.

How the men of ‘Task’ see the show’s troubled fathers and the damage they’ve caused: Creator Brad Ingelsby and co-stars Mark Ruffalo and Tom Pelphrey reflect on the HBO crime drama and how Ingelsby considered connecting it with ‘Mare of Easttown.’

‘Iron Man’ to ‘Fargo’: Behind-the-scenes photos and stories from major movie sets: ‘Moving Still: A Cinematic Life Frame-by-Frame’ features behind-the-scenes photos set decorator Lauri Gaffin shot while working on high-profile movies.

For retired TV weatherman Fritz Coleman, it’s been a sunny return to the stage: A popular local TV news personality for almost four decades on NBC4, Fritz Coleman is celebrating the second anniversary of his comedy residency about aging and sex after 70.

Turn on

Recommendations from the film and TV experts at The Times

Kris Marshall as Humphrey Goodman and Zahra Ahmadi as DS Esther Williams in “Beyond Paradise.”

(Joss Barrett / BritBox / Red Planet Pictures)

“Beyond Paradise” (BritBox)

The third season of this spinoff from the island-set “Death in Paradise” has arrived. Following tall, awkward detective inspector Humphrey Goodman (Kris Marshall), transplanted from the Caribbean back to a small seaside town in Devon, England, trading blue skies for gray, it’s the coziest of cozy mysteries. Comedy and romance thread their way among its apparently impossible murders, always solved with a sudden inspiration in the final minutes of an episode. Sally Bretton plays Martha, Humphrey’s possibly permanent fiancee, who has moved her cafe to larger quarters; they’re still hoping to foster a child. Meanwhile, Martha’s previous fiance, Archie (Jamie Bamber), a well-heeled wine merchant, has crept back into the story, projecting a vibe of “I’m not your rival, rival” toward Humphrey. (I don’t trust him.) At the police station, in an old church, we find Zahra Ahmadi as Sgt. Esther Williams (not awkward), Dylan Llewellyn as PC Kelby Hartford (a puppy dog), and the great Felicity Montagu (known for playing Alan Partridge’s long-suffering assistant Lynne) as office manager Margo, uninhibited. Watch with a cup of something warm, with a shot of something stronger. — Robert Lloyd

Marlee Matlin in “Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore.”

(Courtesy of Sundance Institute)

“Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore” (PBS.org)

She didn’t set out to be a groundbreaker or an activist, but Matlin became both. This intimate documentary directed by Shoshannah Stern (who is Deaf like Matlin) that premiered at Sundance earlier this year provides a showcase for a talented woman whose star rose quickly, thanks to a breakout performance in 1986’s “Children of a Lesser God.” The role won her an Oscar, making her the youngest person to receive the actress award at 21 — a distinction she still holds — and the first Deaf performer to win an Academy Award. (Her “CODA” co-star Troy Kotsur would become the second, 35 years later.) The film examines her upbringing in a hearing family; how a meeting with Henry Winkler led to a lifelong friendship and a path to Hollywood; and how she became a spokesperson and activist for the Deaf community after her Oscar win. (Matlin lobbied Congress for closed captioning on televisions; the first time she watched “The Wizard of Oz” with captions, she says, was a “revelation.”) While she garnered success, she struggled to get more acting roles despite her Oscar win, but more came over time, including parts in “Picket Fences,” “Seinfeld” and, later, “The West Wing.” The film also details her battle with addiction and leaving an abusive relationship with actor William Hurt, her “Children” co-star. However, what makes the film unique is how it places its Deaf subject first, largely using sign language and captions to communicate to viewers. It’s an inclusive look at one of America’s most inspiring actors. — Maira Garcia

Guest spot

A weekly chat with actors, writers, directors and more about what they’re working on — and what they’re watching

Timothy Simons as Sasha and Justine Lupe as Morgan in Season 2 of “Nobody Wants This.”

(Netflix)

Can men and women be just friends? It’s a question that has long been dissected, debated and downplayed by couples and friends — and in plenty of movies and TV shows. “Nobody Wants This,” the Netflix romantic comedy, offers its own complex and controversial portrayal of such a dynamic. While the show swirls around the hurdles in the love journey of its main characters — Joanne (Bell) and Noah (Brody) — the relationship triangle that’s been brewing between its supporting players comes more sharply into focus in Season 2, now streaming. As Sasha, Noah’s brother who is played by Timothy Simons, tries to place better boundaries with Joanne’s sister, Morgan (Lupe), their friendship places a strain on his marriage to wife Esther (Tohn), leading to more hard truths. Simons stopped by Guest Spot to discuss what interests him about exploring a lived-in marriage at a breaking point, his go-to L.A. spots for a perfect day and the unconventional movie picks on his comfort-watch roster. — Yvonne Villarreal

The season dives into the tough decisions or sacrifices people make when being part of a relationship, and the potential long-term resentments or buried feelings that may resurface later. In this challenging time in Sasha and Esther’s marriage, we get more insight into what those issues are for them. What intrigues you about exploring the rough patches of a lived-in relationship?

I think there’s something interesting about examining those challenges for both actor and audience because it reflects broadly what a lot of people go through as they age in a relationship. People grow and change and can learn to grow and change together, and it’s hard to ask a question like, “Would I choose this person or this life if I met them now,” because what if the answer is no? That’s a rough one to face. Falling in love is somewhat easy, but staying in love is hard. Specific answers to Esther and Sasha aside, I think it’s interesting for an audience to grapple with that question, cause they’ve probably asked some form of it in their real lives.

The bond between Sasha and Morgan has been controversial from the start, with viewers wondering if it was going to evolve into an affair or remain a questionable approach to a platonic relationship. What do you think is going on there and what has it revealed to you about Sasha and what he’s seeking or lacking at this stage in his life? Are there things Sasha and Morgan do or discuss that would be a hard no for you as a married person?

I think that there is a kinship with Morgan and Sasha that, despite very different upbringings, is based on a similar worldview and station in their respective families. I think they get each other in a lot of ways despite not fitting in with most of the world. They are misfits and I think they connect in that. As long as the communication is good and boundaries aren’t crossed, finding someone to discuss issues or seek advice from, I don’t think is a betrayal.

The show is set in L.A. What are three go-to spots you’d recommend to an out-of-towner for the perfect day in L.A.?

Oh man. A lot of ways to go here, but taking a hike in Elysian Park and then going to Jitlada and Jumbo’s Clown Room would be a fun day for everyone. I think with those three you get a wonderful cross-section about what makes the city so rad to live in day-to-day.

You appeared in the final season of “The Handmaid’s Tale” as loathsome Commander Bell. When I spoke with the showrunners, they said when they conceived that character, they used your “Veep” character, the incompetent and insufferable Jonah Ryan, as a model. What’s it like to be synonymous with a character like Jonah and to see how his name gets invoked in discussions of both fictional and real life matters of governance?

Hopefully I can convince people that I’m not as big of a scumbag in real life as those characters, and I love that I got to be a part of something that people hold as fondly in their hearts as I do. That was an incredible experience and a wonderful ensemble of writers, actors and crew all working together. It’s wild, though, to live in a world where Jonah Ryan seems somewhat aspirational.

What have you watched recently that you are recommending to everyone you know?

It’s horror movie season, so I’ve been recommending everyone watch “Pieces”(1982) [AMC+], which is my favorite slasher. A truly wild film with the best ending to any horror movie I’ve ever seen (and that includes “Sleepaway Camp” [Peacock, Prime Video, Tubi]). Also, no surprise here that I’m quite high on “One Battle After Another,” which I’ve seen three times and will go back for a fourth cause I haven’t been able to see it in VistaVision yet.

What’s your go-to “comfort watch,” the movie or TV show you go back to again and again?

Comfort films are an odd thing for me because I find myself rewatching movies like “Sicario” [Peacock] and “Zero Dark Thirty” [Paramount+], which you can’t argue are comforting in their subject matter. But they are so perfectly constructed, shot and performed that it’s comforting to watch them.

Ben Stiller has made a lovely, dreamlike film about his parents, the comedian-actors Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, which is also a film about himself, his sister, Amy Stiller, and his own fatherhood as reflected back by his children and his wife, the actor Christine Taylor. Premiering Friday on Apple TV, “Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost” is a show business story, in large part, but will be emotionally familiar to anyone who has had the occasion to wonder about their parents’ lives, in their parents’ absence.

Though both had set out to be actors — “I carried Eleanora Duse’s life under one arm,” says Anne, “and ‘An Actor Prepares,’ Stanislavski, under the other” — Jerry had been thinking of getting into comedy when he met Anne. They married in 1954, but it wasn’t until 1963 that the conjoined career of Stiller and Maera took off, with an appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” They might play the last two people on Earth meeting for the first time, or an Irish girl and a Jewish boy matched by computer dating. He was a fretful perfectionist who would endlessly rehearse; Anne was naturally funny; she flowed.

As documentary subjects go, the Stillers were not remarkably dysfunctional — no violence, no skeletons — past the not uncommon situation of parents whose work, or fixation on work, often took them away from their kids, physically or mentally, with the added fillip of that work having made them famous. (There are references to Anne’s drinking, which bothered Jerry, but this is not a hole the film runs down, and there’s nothing here to suggest it diminished her life or work.) As different people with different goals — “My mom wanted to be happy independent of performing,” says Ben, “and I think for my dad performing was so important to him it was part of his happiness” — there was tension, but they loved each other, and they loved their kids, and stayed married for 62 years, until Anne’s death in 2015.

Stiller frames the film with his and Amy’s return to the Upper West Side apartment where they were raised in order to clear it out to be sold, providing the opportunity to see what their parents had left behind. (Jerry died in 2020.) And it was a lot — nothing is lost if nothing is thrown away. There are love letters, diaries, scripts, manuscripts. (Anne: “I think Jerry has a need to keep his name going and for some reason he thinks that when we check out and pass over that the Smithsonian institute is going to want his memorabilia.”) Jerry had a habit, amounting to a compulsion, of documenting their life on film and tape; some of their conversations, and arguments, would turn into routines. (“Where does the act end and the marriage begin?” Anne wonders.) Raised voices in another room might be rehearsing or fighting. One routine consisted of escalating declarations of hate: “I hated you before I met you.” “I hated you before you were born.”

They quit playing nightclubs in 1970 (they drove her “meshuggah”), but remained in public view — in guest appearances, game shows and talk shows, where, unlike the highly managed appearances of today, they seemed ready to dish the dirt on themselves, providing Ben Stiller with material for this film. And they went to work as actors, each amassing a long list of screen and stage appearances. Jerry, of course, is now best known from “Seinfeld,” where he played George’s father, Frank Costanza, and “The King of Queens,” acting in nearly 200 episodes.

Much of it has to do with Ben and Amy as children of famous people, of family vacations that became working vacations, and growing up on display. In one clip from “The Mike Douglas Show,” the siblings perform “Chopsticks” as a screechy violin duet. Young Ben, already interested in film and asked by an interviewer if his parents will feature in his movies, says that they won’t: “I’ll be making adventure or a murder or something like that, but never a comedy. I don’t like comedy.”

We get glimpses of Stiller’s own prolific career — in comedy, mostly, as it turned out — as well as confessions of his own failings as a family man. (His children, Quin and Ella, get to have their good-humored but penetrating say, as does Taylor, from whom he separated in 2017, and with whom he reunited during the pandemic.) But there’s no evident resentment on the part of Ben and Amy, just curiosity and self-examination as adults whose own lives have taught them something about being adults, amid the knowledge that their parents had parents, too, and some of their imperfections became imperfections of their own.

Both Anne and Jerry had come from dark places. “Their lives were always reaching for the light,” says the playwright John Guare, whose black comedy “The House of Blue Leaves” Anne performed in off-Broadway. “Why don’t you become a stagehand?” Jerry’s father told him when Jerry first told him of his ambition. “Where do you get off trying to be Eddie Cantor?” Anne’s mother died by suicide. “Your father was kind of a saint, you know,” Christopher Walken tells Ben.

Stiller’s approach is musical; his assembly of clips and photos is musical — poetic, not prosaic. He ends his film with a conversation between Jerry and his aged father, Willie, cut to a montage of the family through time.

“Isn’t this better than anything, just being alive?” says Jerry. “When we go, we’ll go together, you and me”

Willie: “Yeah, OK, hold hands and everything else.”

“You’ll take me to shows again when we get up there?”

“Yeah, when I go I’ll take you any place. … What is this?”

“It’s a tape recorder. … Whatever you say is on that tape. They’ll hear you forever. You’ll never be lost.”

And we see young Ben, filming a camera that’s filming him, as his father steps in behind him.

Throughout the spring and summer of 2020, across the U.S. and the world, millions of quarantined citizens appeared nightly at their windows and balconies, offering thanks to the healthcare workers whose lives were dedicated to saving theirs. In my little corner of Silver Lake, 7 p.m. commenced a daily cacophonous communal concert of pots and pans banging, trombones and trumpets blaring, dogs and coyotes howling: a grateful group roar. I was 67 with a history of respiratory illness: extra high risk. My younger neighbors, knowing this, grocery-shopped for me, sweetening my mornings with fresh milk and fruit during those long, grim days.

“Sacrament” is Susan Straight’s homage to a small fictional band of ICU nurses battling the 2020 COVID-19 surge at a San Bernardino hospital. Her 10th novel follows the beat she’s been covering, and living, since her first. “Aquaboogie,” her 1990 debut, was set in Rio Seco, a fictional stand-in for Riverside, where Straight grew up and still lives. The first in her bloodline to graduate high school, Straight earned an MFA at the University of Massachusetts and brought it home to UC Riverside, where she’s been teaching creative writing since 1988. Her twin passions for her homeland and lyrical artistry bloom on every page. “All summer, there had been fewer cars on the road in Southern California, and everyone remarked on how with no smog, the sunsets weren’t deep, heated crimson. Just quiet slipping into darkness.”

As Susan Straight’s work invariably does, “Sacrament” challenges the prevailing notion that the overlooked Californians she centers in her work and in her life are less worthy, less interesting, less human than their wealthier, whiter, more visible urban counterparts.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

The Los Angeles Times dubbed Straight the “bard of overlooked California,” and “Sacrament” proves the praise. Straight’s African American ex-husband and three daughters; her Latino, Filipino, white, Native and mixed-race neighbors; and her immersion in overlooked California bring new meaning to the advice “write what you know.” Straight’s personal and literary missions extend to who she knows.

In “Sacrament,” Straight turns her singular focus to a handful of nurses camping in a wagon train of funky, sweltering trailers near the hospital they call Our Lady. Separated from their spouses and kids — “Six feet apart or six feet under,” Larette’s son Joey chants — Larette, Cherrise, Marisol and their colleagues are themselves underprotected from the virus, which they eventually contract, and from the domestic dramas that seep from home into their pressure-cooker days. Fearful that her mom will die, Cherrise’s teenage daughter, Raquel, convinces Joey to drive her to the hospital from the date farm where Raquel has been deposited into her Auntie Lolo’s care. The drive should take two hours, but the teens are MIA for two nightmare days. Having narrowly escaped a would-be captor, Raquel remains haunted by her near fate. “The fingers in her hair pulling so hard her scalp felt like it had tiny bubbles under the skin. Wait till I pull your hair for real, bitch. She heard him even now.”

Diving deeper than the quotidian insults of her characters’ loneliness, poverty and fear, Straight brings us inside their exhausted minds. Attempting a nap, Larette lies on the break room cot, eyes closed, to no avail. “Ghost fingers in her left palm. Her right hand holding the phone on FaceTime for the wives. The husbands. The children who were grown,” she writes. “All their faces. Stoic. Weeping. Biting their lips so hard.” Later, Larette tells her husband, “Everyone you see on TV, banging pots and pans, everyone doing parades, it’s so nice. But then I have to be all alone with — their breath. Their breath just — it slows down and it’s terrifying every time.”

Perhaps most painful among the nurses’ many miseries is their isolation: the secrets they keep in hopes of sparing their loved ones an iota of extra suffering. “None of us are telling anyone we love about anything, Larette thought. She hadn’t told [her husband] anything true in weeks.”

As Straight’s work invariably does, “Sacrament” challenges the prevailing notion that the overlooked Californians she centers in her work and in her life are less worthy, less interesting, less human than their wealthier, whiter, more visible urban counterparts. Programmed to equate “rugged independence” with success, many advantaged Americans first appreciated human interdependence (berries in our cereal, test kits on our porches) in lockdown. In Straight’s world, raising each other’s kids, feeding each other’s elders, keeping each other’s secrets, mourning the dead and fighting like hell for the living is not called exigence. It’s called life.

“Sacrament” broadens the reader’s understanding of community beyond flesh-and-blood friends, family and neighbors. The love and care that flow within her community of characters draws the reader into their bright, tight circle, making the characters’ loved ones and troubles feel like the reader’s own.

Spoiler alert: The nurses’ sacrifices, strengths and foibles; their families, robbed not only of their moms and wives and daughters but also of any shred of safety; and their patients — who have tubes stuffed into their urethras and down their throats, blinking their desperate last moments of life into iPads as they take their final breaths — will likely make the reader see and respect and love not only these characters, but the consistently brilliant author who gave them life on the page of this, her finest book.

Maran, author of “The New Old Me” and other books, lives in a Silver Lake bungalow that’s even older than she is.

Every night before going to bed, Ela Minus shuts off her phone.

Oftentimes, the Colombian artist-producer won’t even turn it back on until the following afternoon. One day, in mid-September, when Minus logged on, she received an unexpected flurry of messages from both close friends and people she hadn’t spoken to in years. Each notification was congratulatory, but Minus had no idea what had transpired the night before.

It turns out the Latin Grammy nominations had been announced — and her song “QQQQ,” off her 2025 sophomore album, “Día,” was nominated for Latin electronic music performance.

“I was very confused. Nobody said what was going on in their messages. They were just telling me congratulations,” says Minus, who laughs about the moment over our Zoom call. She dialed in from Mexico City, a few hours before catching a flight to Italy to kick off a new leg of her “Día” tour.

“As soon as I figured out that I was nominated, I turned my phone off again. I needed a second to myself. To be completely honest, it was not even a little bit in my radar. I didn’t even know we submitted anything.”

Since its release last January, “Día” has left lasting impressions on critics and fans alike. In 10 synth-powered tracks, Minus channels her fluctuating emotional state as she navigated a period of reckoning — characterized by a life almost entirely lived in airplanes, hotel rooms and foreign studios — through ominous synthesizer chords and blasts of vigorous dance beats.

Much like her music, her path to Latin Grammy-worthy acclaim has been anything but linear.

“It’s not like I started singing on television, and now I’m at the Latin Grammys. It’s been an interesting path of continuous surprises and unexpected turns,” says Minus. “Not to praise myself, but every time I’ve taken an unexpected turn or been presented with it, something amazing comes out of it.”

“Every time I’m in L.A. for a longer period of time, I feel like I retire into myself more. Staying downtown too, felt very aggressive, yet familiar to me,” says Minus, of how L.A. influenced her latest record.

(Alvaro Ariso)

Minus was born as Gabriela Jimeno Caldas, in Bogotá, Colombia. She got her start in music as a drummer in a local punk band called Ratón Pérez, which she joined at the age of 12. Her percussion skills led to her leaving Colombia to attend the Berklee College of Music, where she double majored in jazz drumming and music synthesis. At school, she was introduced to hardware and software synths, and continued to explore her drumming abilities by experimenting with electronica.

After working as a touring drummer and helping design synth software, Minus’ solo career started to take off with the release of her 2020 debut album, “acts of rebellion.” She created the entire project by herself, from the depths of her at-home studio in Brooklyn. Composed of icy club beats and steadfast synthetics, she describes the album as “sonically concise,” in that she intentionally used limited instrumentation.

When approaching her 2025 follow-up record, she says that she yearned to pick up new instruments, switch up the process and hopefully end up with an entirely different result.

In a sudden turn of events, her rent in New York quadrupled because of COVID-19 inflation rates, and she had to leave the city. She says her life quickly became a “mess.” But her next steps were clear as ever — instead of settling into a new apartment, she took on a nomadic lifestyle, with making new music as her only goal.

“I wanted to start and finish a record in the moment, while all of this is happening, and when I’m feeling this way,” says Minus, who says she was feeling a self-imposed artistic pressure. “I figured I could postpone my personal life out of wanting to make this record.”

Over the course of six months, she hopped from city to city, living out of her suitcase and renting recording studios. She ended up in places like London, Mexico City and Seattle. The repetitious process of packing up and settling into new places allowed her to easily decipher which tracks she wanted to keep pushing and which ones she would leave behind.

Along her journey, she lived in downtown Los Angeles for a short period of time. She says she finds the city to be a bit “alienating” with a “uniquely heavy” energy. To her luck, the city’s ethos aligned with the sonic soundscape she was building out in “Día.”

“Every time I’m in L.A. for a longer period of time, I feel like I retire into myself more. Staying downtown too, felt very aggressive, yet familiar to me,” says Minus, who noted the lack of people walking, the amount of traffic in the streets and the boundless nature of Los Angeles.

The album began at a low point in Minus’ life, where she seems to be going through an identity crisis. Over spacey sirens and an accumulating bass line, on “Broken,” she admits to being “a fool / acting all cool” and being on her knees, without a sense of faith. Throughout the first several tracks, she confronts her inner monologue through candid lyrics, offering herself a reality check.

“Producing beats with really low bass lines feels comfortable to me. It makes me want to open up naturally to get to the point of writing lyrics and singing. When the production is more sparse, like with a guitar, it’s harder to write more vulnerably. It feels kinda cheesy,” says Minus.

“In myself, there’s this constant cohabitation of dark and light and aggressive and sweet sounds,” she continues. So when vulnerable feelings come out, the really hardcore, distorted sounds follow.”

Songs like “Idk” and “Abrir Monte” simulate the experience of being submerged as a muffled, yet pounding bass line takes charge. Other times, as in “Idols,” Minus’ dissected blend of club pop and dark ambient sounds lends a grimy, industrial feel to her mechanical melodies. She captures the commonplace (yet cathartic) experience of losing yourself in a sweaty mass of limbs on a dance floor.

The Latin Grammy-nominated track “QQQQ” marks a turning point in the album. It was a song she wrote in a matter of hours to depict her own mindset change. “I was very aware that [for] the first half of the record, there was a lot of tension. I just needed a moment of release for this [album] to land fully. I needed a moment of uncontrollable sobbing on the dance floor.”

The album ends with her resolving to confront her struggles with self-acceptance, with the frankly written “I Want To Be Better” — which escalates with the feverish punk pulse of “Onwards.”

To her, the album is equal parts apocalyptic and hopeful, reflecting both the chaos of the outside world and her newfound inner peace. Since making the record and performing it frequently, she says she’s internalized the lessons she learned along the way. “When you’re going through something, sometimes the only thing you can trust is time. Your perspective will change, maybe for better or for worse.

“Time heals,” adds Minus. “That’s something I learned for sure.”

Ela Minus will be headlining at the Echoplex in Echo Park on Oct. 29.

Eating dirt is usually not a good thing, but in the new Amazon Prime series “Cometierra,” it’s a superpower.

The supernatural crime thriller, which premieres on Halloween, is based on the 2019 Dolores Reyes novel of the same name. The book follows the story of a young woman who has the ability to communicate through visions with the dead and missing people of Argentina by eating the physical land they trod.

“Cometierra” stars Lilith Curiel with supporting roles from Oscar nominee Yalitza Aparicio and Gerardo Taracena. It follows the same outline of the book but is set in contemporary Mexico to address the themes of state violence, femicide and the missing persons epidemic.

The source material and its new twist were what drew Mexican singer-songwriter Natalia Lafourcade to perform the series’s title song, “La Cometierra.”

“We have this reality in Mexico, there’s violence against many women and there’s the disappeared. It’s a very sad situation that we have, but it’s a fact,” the singer said. “It’s inspiring the way the series develops and how this girl, alongside her neighbors, creates a [positive] tribal strength out of her situation.”

Lafourcade especially liked that the series provides an organic avenue for debate and serves as a call to action to recognize that these are all problems in Mexico, while also showing that there is a deep well of beauty within the country.

“We all have a talent that we can always put forward as a service for our family, our country, just for other people,” she said.

The 41-year-old artist’s recently released single channels the energy of the series and its themes by conjuring a spoken word cadence that culminates in a nursery rhyme chant about the powers of the Cometierra.

“I wanted to make a sound that would be very strong and that would present a reality and that the lyrics wouldn’t be smooth,” Lafourcade said. “But at the same time, it would have hope and light and this feeling of joy for the next generations. So I wanted to have this mix of girls singing in a very naive tone, but also mix in a straight voice telling hard truths.”

The song, while geared toward a Mexican experience, now has a striking relevance in the United States as Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids — largely targeting Latinos — continue to take place across the country and as hundreds of detained people have been unaccounted for.

“I hope that music has this capacity to make us wake up and be conscious of situations,” Lafourcade said. “I have realized there are many themes that you can take through music, but sometimes music can become something that you hear truths that probably are not so pretty.”

Regarding some of the ugly truths of the U.S. at the moment, the “Nunca Es Suficiente” artist said that it’s not right that people should feel shame of where they come from and that communities need to show up for themselves at this point in time.

“Nobody should take our pride for our roots, our culture, our people,” she said. “The young lady [in the show] reaches a point where she’s confused about if she should use her power and give it to her people or not. She feels very afraid and insecure and she’s going through all that. But I love how she becomes a hero of her own power and I think that’s the fate of many of us, the way we can make a twist in the story we’re living every day.”

Hollyoaks actress Ruby O’Donnell has been at the centre of some of the Channel 4 soap’s most dramatic storylines as fan favourite Peri Lomax over the past 12 years

Hollyoaks actress Ruby O’Donnell has tackled some of the Channel 4 soap’s most intense plotlines over the past 12 years.

Her character Peri Lomax has found herself at the centre of the drama but her time in the village has come to an end.

During Tuesday’s (October 21) episode, Peri got crushed by ship chimney which fell on her after an explosion went off and she attempted to save Tom Cunningham (Ellis Hollins).

Pushing fiancé Tom out of the way, Peri was struck by the chimney and fell to the ground.

The nurse was conscious for a while chatting with Tom about their daughter Steph Cunningham-Lomax (Isabella Hibbert) and but she sadly passed away wen her mum Leela Lomax (Kirsty Leigh-Porter) finally arrived in extremely emotional scenes.

Ruby previously revealed that certain scenes she’s filmed over the years were “hard to tackle” given she was “still quite young” when she first joined the show in 2013.

The actress confessed she “wanted to find out how teenagers actually react in these situations” and her commitment was worthwhile as she secured Best Young Actor at the 2016 British Soap Awards and has subsequently received numerous award nominations.

Ruby loves to share her escapades on Instagram and regularly posts pictures from her social events with friends.

She can be seen having a boogie with her mates, sometimes in fancy dress, while basking in the sun in a back garden or on holiday.

The soap star is also a regular festival attendee and keeps her fans updated with her on-set and behind-the-scenes action.

Ruby is currently dating Hollyoaks co-star Nathaniel Dass, who made his debut as Dillon Ray in 2023,

Their characters might not cross paths on screen often but off-screen their romance is blossoming since going Instagram official in 2024.

The actress marked their first anniversary on Instagram by sharing a series of loved-up snaps.

She delighted fans by posting a quartet of adorable pictures, alongside the caption: “1 year with u” capped off with a pink heart pierced by a blue arrow.

Hollyoaks airs Monday to Wednesday on E4 at 7pm and first look episodes can be streamed Channel 4 from 7am

CITY boy David Beckham has spent the best part of a decade becoming a country gent — and is now proudly sharing his new lifestyle in an iconic magazine.

He has turned a Cotswolds farmhouse into the perfect family home and is pictured wandering its idyllic sprawling grounds with his working Cocker Spaniels Sage and Olive.

The father of four, nicknamed Goldenballs in his playing days, has planted hundreds of trees, put up 27 bee hives and created a lake with duck house and wooden jetty.

In a special edition of Country Life, he tells how he keeps chickens and has a vegetable plot, where he tends onions, radishes, carrots and kale.

East London-born David tells how he counts fellow converts Vinnie Jones and Guy Ritchie among his country friends.

But he recalls: “My earliest memories of doing anything in the countryside are when I was a Cub, then a Scout, and we used to go camping in Epping Forest.”

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His kitchen fitter dad Ted and hairdresser mum Sandra did not have much time for gardening — though grandad Joe would tend to the roses, often damaged by the young David kicking a ball about.

The 50-year-old former Manchester United and Real Madrid star’s interest in country pursuits grew after meeting Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels director Guy, 57.

The ex-England skipper even made a cameo appearance in Ritchie’s 2017 flop King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword.

David says about Guy: “He’s a modern-day caveman, who has made me fall far deeper in love with the countryside and helped me to understand it even more than I did before.

“Sometimes, we sit for hours around a fire, just the two of us, and talk late into the night.”

Ritchie’s sweeping 1,100-acre estate Ashcombe House in Wiltshire is the inspiration for what David is trying to achieve.

And it was during late nights at the homely Georgian property that Becks got to know footballer-turned-actor Vinnie, who has appeared in a number of the director’s projects.

Guest editing 128-year-old Country Life, David admits: “When I was playing, he was one of those footballers you did not want to go near on the pitch.

“He would either grab you, throw you or kick you!

Sometimes, we sit for hours around a fire, just the two of us, and talk late into the night

David Beckham

“Back then, that was his thing and he made a successful career before becoming a pundit, when he did criticise me.

“I didn’t think he liked me. But when I met him later at Guy’s place, we didn’t stop talking.”

‘Solace in the country’

Former Wimbledon hardman Vinnie, 60, has a 147-acre farm in Petworth, West Sussex.

David adds: “He bought me a walking stick he’d made for me and he’s now a great friend, who, like me, has found solace in the country later in life.”

The three stars are now happiest in tweeds and welly boots, a world away from the glamorous lifestyles which made them famous.

Vinnie used to booze too much but tells how he prefers a teetotal life.

He comments: “You’ve got to commit. Do it on a Monday.

“Everyone who has done it says, ‘I wish I’d done it before’.

“You never hear anyone regret ­giving up booze.”

For the main article in the magazine — marking its 1,000th edition with a 288-page gold embossed issue — David, his tattooed hands ­poking from his cuffs, gives TV gardening expert Alan Titchmarsh a tour of the family estate

He and fashion designer wife Victoria, 51, bought the farm near Great Tew, in Oxfordshire, for £6million in 2016. It is now estimated to be worth twice that sum.

They have turned a 26-acre plot with one maple tree and a few derelict barns into a landscape of wildflower meadows, native trees and shrubland that form a home for insects and birds.

Proud David reveals: “I can still remember the morning when Victoria and the children were all due to arrive to see the refurbished barns for the first time.

The moment she walked in, she burst out crying

David Beckham

“It was still a complete mess. One of the guys, who was helping with the building work, and I were literally running around laying the rugs, sweeping up and getting all the dust out.

“Then I waited at the front door with a glass of wine for Victoria to arrive.

“And, the moment she walked in, she burst out crying because she couldn’t believe how perfect it was.”

Now the couple often serve their home-grown ingredients in meals served for friends and family.

And in the magazine, David gives the Queen’s son, Tom Parker Bowles, a taste of his culinary skills.

David, originally from Leytonstone, tells Tom: “There’s something so nostalgic about mashed potato, liver, bacon and lots of gravy.

“It’s one of those British comfort classics that my mum used to make for me and was also my grandad’s favourite dish.

“My gran was also a great cook, and it was always a treat going down to the pie and mash shop in Chapel Market.

“If I had to choose my last meal, it would be pie, mash, liquor and ­jellied eels.”

Previous guest editors of the Country Life have included King Charles, and the most featured face on the cover in the past was the late Queen Mother.

In his cover shot, David looks every bit the rural gent, leaning on a ram’s horn cane and dressed in a tweed jacket.

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American celebrities such as Beyonce, Jay-Z and Ellen DeGeneres have since followed the Beckhams to the Cotswolds — and it is easy to see why.

• David Beckham’s Guest Edit of Country Life is available now.

Beyond the Cuban diaspora, the genre known as reparto is overwhelmingly unknown. But on the streets of Havana and Hialeah, Miami, reparto is inescapable, pulsing from balconies and portable speakers on the beach.

Born in Cuba’s working-class neighborhoods — known colloquially as repartos — this hyperkinetic fusion of reggaetón, timba and Afro-Cuban rhythms has become the island’s score. In the mid-2000s, artists like Chocolate MC and Elvis Manuel built the genre’s sound on distorted synth stabs, shouted call-and-response hooks, and the distinct Cuban clave beat that makes your body move before your brain can even catch up.

It’s also become a platform for youth navigating scarcity, surveillance and dreams of escaping poverty. The lyrics, characteristically and unapologetically obscene, reflect the realities of life in marginalized communities. But alongside its rhythmic bravado, reparto’s explicit language often veers into the dehumanizing and misogynistic.

The music centers on women, but more often than not, as objects: the perra to conquer, the diabla to tame, the culo to catalog in explicit detail. And it’s no surprise: The genre’s blunt portrayal of women mirrors the machismo deeply embedded in everyday Cuban life.

It’s a refrain you’re bound to hear in any and every nightclub: “¿Donde están las mujeres?” But the next time 10 reparteros link up for a track, they probably won’t call a woman. Within a genre that revolves so heavily around their bodies, women’s voices still remain rare.

So, ¿dónde están las mujeres? Or, where are the women making reparto?

“Chocolate is the king, but who is the queen?” says Seidy Carrera, known artistically as Seidy La Niña. “There’s a space that needs to be filled with women. There’s no f—ing women!”

At the onset of reparto, early reparteras like Melissa and Claudia slipped brief female cameos into club anthems. More than a decade later, due to Cuba’s only recent, and still extremely limited, internet access, these artists and their collaborations have a seemingly untraceable digital footprint. Still, most playlists orbit male voices, and collaborations rarely invite women to the booth: “When reparteros come together on a track, they never call a woman,” she says.

Carrera, 32, was born in the reparto El Cotorro and raised in Miami since she was 6. The self-proclaimed queen of reparto, the paradox defines her career: She fights for space in a scene whose appeal lies in her raw neighborhood realism, but detractors question her authenticity as a gringa, or as they would call her, yuma.

“I feel resistance every day, every single day,” she says. In response, she reclaims the discriminatory language used against her; onstage, she chants “más perra que bonita,” flipping the curse-word from insult to empowerment.

“It’s empowering to say, I’m more perra than pretty. To me, being a perra is being a woman who’s exclusive, who makes her own money. In my case, … nobody opened the door for me, nobody gave me a hand.”

For Havana-based singer-composer Melanie Santiler, 24, the double standard hits her before she can even sing her first note: “I feel that I have to do twice as well. I have to put in double the thought, double the effort, double the talent, always having something more to say,” she says.

“It’s exhausting. It’s exhausting being a woman, having to get up and tell yourself, damn, I have to look pretty and put together. I spent my whole life in school with an onion bun because I didn’t want to do my hair,” Santiler says and laughs, messy bun flopping around her face.

Reaching almost 5 million YouTube views on her 2025 viral collab, “Todo se Supera” with Velito el Bufón, she’s broken into the reparto space as one of the genre’s most distinctive voices. Beside this rise, she’s faced a newfound pressure to dress a way she normally wouldn’t, a beauty standard her masculine counterparts don’t face.

Aliaisys Alvarez Hernández — better known as Ozunaje — says she doesn’t face the same criticism in the urban Cuban music scene, likely due to her sexuality and more masculine appearance. “Reparto is a genre for men, that’s how I see it,” she says. “I dress like a man, I practically live my life like a man, so what I write resembles what men are already saying. That also gave me an impulse, where I feel like more feminine artists, they have to work harder.”

A former rhythmic gymnast from La Habana, Hernández, 23, stumbled into music when friends recorded her singing a demo of “Cosas del Amor” in her living room. Someone uploaded the video, it went viral, and suddenly, she had a career. Since that start, Hernández refuses to only be compared with other reparteras.

Her goal has always been to be measured against men, since “that’s who people actually listen to.” Dressing in traditionally masculine clothing, paired with a deep, raspy delivery, helps her lyrics resonate with locals without the extra hurdle of hyper-sexualized expectations.

Hernández’s androgynous wardrobe and open queerness bring another layer of potential discrimination, but despite the rampant homophobia persistent in present-day Cuba, she doesn’t feel much resistance. “The worst word they throw at me is tortillera, but it doesn’t affect me,” she says, adding, “People like my style, they like that I dress like a guy. Everybody tells me, you have tremendo flow, I love your aguaje, so I haven’t faced any bullying. Never.”

Misogynistic currents in reparto mirror those in early reggaetón, reflecting the average street machismo. The genre’s marginal roots complicate blanket condemnations, since the same raunchy lyrics often encode critiques of class exclusion. Still, reaching bigger stages will require editing the most gratuitous slurs, if only to broaden the music’s export potential. At least, Ozunaje thinks so.

“Reparto came from people who were poor, who had nothing, who were desperate to get out. Nobody imagined it would get this big. Now it’s reaching the whole world, so the vocabulary has to evolve,” she says.

Santiler echoes this critique. “It’s become really repetitive. I think right now, everyone is talking about the same thing. It’s been really easy. Facilista,” she says, using the Spanish term for taking the easy way out. Santiler loves reparto’s swing, but calls most of it objectifying, pointing to Bad Bunny’s “Andrea” and “Neverita,” along with C. Tangana’s “El Madrileño,” as proof that urban music can expand beyond bedroom conquests.

“The street already says these things, and reparto just writes it. It’s an image of what’s happening. But I grew up with other types of music and other types of references, so I’d like to expand beyond that, to make something fresh.”

Santiler adds that the basis of reparto, both in her gratitude and her criticism, comes from pride.

“I love Cuba, I love my country. The current generation of Cuba doesn’t reject their identity — they’re doing the opposite. They want to create a new culture, to create a new movement, and they want the world to know Cuba again,” she says.

Imagine losing your home and belongings to a wildfire, then losing your best friend when he was killed by a suspected driver under the influence, all happening within months of each other.

Max Meier, a star defensive tackle for Loyola High who has committed to Stanford, dealt with that kind of awful adversity this year, losing his family home in the Palisades fire, then losing classmate Braun Levi in May when he was hit by a car while walking on a Manhattan Beach street.

To hear Meier’s response and wisdom while dealing with two tragedies offers hope for the future.

“I think in this life, everyone has demons in the closet,” Meier said. “Everyone has bad things that happen But we realize in these moments, as horrible as they are, losing your things in a fire, they’re replaceable, but losing someone who was like an older brother, can’t replace that. He’s somebody I’ll be be chasing to live like he did. As a teenager it was tough, but you learn about life and how every day you have to give it your all. I’ve actually started to live my life more fully and started to live every day the best I can.”

As a football player, at 6 feet 5 and 250 pounds, Meier is enjoying his best season as a senior with 9 1/2 sacks, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. Loyola lost close to a dozen players who abandoned the program one by one in the offseason. They gave up, thinking the Cubs were not going to be good or leaving because they disliked something. Those who stayed had to place their trust in themselves.

“There’s no better motivator knowing every single person left and you’re the ones left,” he said. “This summer, we’re like, ‘There’s 10 games left and you’re either going to give up or let’s show everyone what we got and why they wrote us off.’ We have some problems. Every team does. We’re really motivated to show what we can do.”

Playing at SoFi Stadium on Oct 19 and coming away with a 13-10 upset victory over Gardena Serra was a moment Meier and his teammates will cherish. The Cubs lost to Bishop Amat 30-14 on Friday night and are 4-4 and 1-2 in the Mission League.

“Warming up under all those seats is just ridiculous,” he said. “I thought it was the most awesome thing. That turf was super fast. You could hear things super loud and it gave you an idea what a college stadium might feel like, I thought it was the best experience all time. It was a thing on my bucket list. Getting a sack at SoFi never thought of something I want to do, but I did it. It was cool.”

Since Meier lost his home, he was eligible to switch schools this year and play immediately. His two sisters graduated from Palisades. He has friends at Palisades. But he was never leaving Loyola.

Everyone, from parents to classmates to alumni, banded together to help those affected by the fire. They provided food, clothing and emotional support.

“After the fires, I realized how special it is,” he said. “All that’s left in my closet is from Loyola. They’re the most amazing people to me.”

So understand what you’re getting each time you face Loyola this season — a team dedicated to each other and having each other’s backs. And in Meier, the Cubs have someone who’s going to represent Loyola values for years to come.

“Breathing on this earth is a humble thing,” Meier said.

Brad Ingelsby knew after the breakout success of HBO’s “Mare of Easttown” — a crime drama about a police detective (Kate Winslet) investigating the murder of a teenage girl in a fictional working-class town — he didn’t want his next series to be another whodunit.

“That’s Mare’s thing,” he says on a recent late afternoon. “So, you start to go, if you’re going to write another story in the crime genre, what would get the audience to keep clicking to the next episode? I just thought, ‘Well, maybe a collision course show, where [in] every episode, we get a little closer, a little closer, a little closer, until things collide.’ ”

In “Task,” which concluded Sunday on HBO, Mark Ruffalo stars as Tom Brandis, a priest-turned-FBI agent leading a task force investigating a series of robberies in Delaware County, Pa., an area commonly referred to as Delco that was also the setting for “Mare of Easttown.” (And with references to Wawa and Scrapple, along with visits to Rita’s Water Ice, it slips into its role of expanding the universe.) It leads Tom to Robbie Prendergast (Tom Pelphrey), a sanitation worker who robs drug houses at night to provide for his family. Both men are emotionally tortured by life events — Tom’s wife was murdered by their adopted son, who is incarcerated; Robbie’s brother was killed by a member of a motorcycle gang — that have set them each on different, but destructive paths.

In “Task,” Mark Ruffalo, left, Alison Oliver, Thuso Mbedu and Fabein Frankel portray law enforcement officers who are part of an FBI task force investigating a string of robberies.

(Peter Kramer / HBO)

“ ‘Mare’ was about the moms — the damage that all the guys have caused and the women are kind of having to pick up the pieces of that,” Ingelsby says. “This [show] is all about the fathers and being left behind, seeing the damage they’ve done to their kids, how they’re going to fix that in their lives — or not be able to fix it. The guys who are actually doing the damage without knowing.”

Ingelsby says his uncle, who was an Augustinian priest, helped inspire the throughline of the series.

“I’ve always been very intrigued by his idea of faith in God over the years, and how it’s changed over time, and what he believed once and what he believes now,” he says. “I was intrigued by the idea of a guy who, everything he held as truth, all the pillars of his life, have come crumbling down. And Robbie has a much different faith. And it’s through the gauntlet of the story, how their lives intersect, that they both get to navigate their own journeys of faith.”

Over dinner at a West Hollywood hotel, The Times sat down with Ingelsby, Ruffalo and Pelphrey to discuss their faith journeys, economic inequality, fatherhood — and Wawa, too. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation, which contains spoilers about the finale.

After the success of “Mare of Easttown,” creator Brad Ingelsby wanted his follow-up, “Task,” to feel connected, but not repetitive: “ ‘Mare’ was about the moms,” he says. “This [show] is all about the fathers and being left behind, seeing the damage they’ve done to their kids, how they’re going to fix that in their lives — or not be able to fix it.”

(Bexx Francois/For The Times)

The themes of the show involve forgiveness and faith. Every person has experienced something in life that has tested those ideas. How has your own relationship to faith and forgiveness evolved as you’ve lived more life or taken on roles that ask you to live different experiences?

Pelphrey: My faith, to me, is when I got sober. God willing, Oct. 1, which is three days from now, it’ll be 12 years. That’s truly by the grace of God — you hear that phrase, but I genuinely, I mean that. That’s how I’ve experienced faith, through my sobriety. I was raised Catholic, but the experience I had at 31 was like in a different dimension to what I thought of religion or ideas. It’s one thing to have an idea, it’s another thing to have your heart opened. It’s definitely an important part of my life. And I think Brad did such a beautiful job conveying that. My grandma used to have one of these things when I was a kid — not a real gem, but like a glass cut thing so if you put it in the window, the sun shines through a million different ways, and the color goes everywhere. I feel like you [Brad] did that with some themes in the show where you’re like, “Let me just hold it up, and we’ll just look at it a few different ways.”

Ruffalo: My journey with faith is probably very similar to Tom’s. When you get a job or something, it can take you on a journey that you’re ripe to take. It touches your life at a very moment where you need it. I’d say, after my brother died, the whole notion of faith just went out the window for me. But oddly enough, I have a lot of addiction, alcoholism in my family. I say, either you are one or you love one. When you love somebody who’s struggling with that, it takes a lot of faith to let them go and to trust it will be OK. My friend says to me, “They got a God and you ain’t it.”

My faith has been renewed, actually, through Tom [the character] — he is an alcoholic. It’s touched my life in so many ways, even with my brother, that it’s like where I lost my faith and where I gained my faith again has been through this journey with alcoholism and drug addiction. And I waver. You look at the world and you’re like, “Where is God in this? Please show yourself. ” But the thing about faith is it requires you to believe without any evidence of its existence. I’d rather believe in that than nothing. Although, I fought him [Brad] all the time. I was like, “He’s [Tom] not really praying here. He’s trying to pray. He’s going through the actions of praying, but he can’t quite get to the opening sentence, which is “ … God …” He does pray, eventually, but it’s a journey.

There’s the powerful moment in that car when Tom and Robbie finally meet in Episode 5. Robbie says, “I don’t think I’ve ever experienced God in my life.” This is a man that hasn’t felt hope, and he has this glimmer of it with this goal of escaping to Canada. Tom, how was it getting into the mindset of this guy just trying to get out of this life?

Pelphrey: It’s heartbreaking. We’re articulating an American dream that far too many people don’t get to experience, and maybe are starting to lose the hope of ever experiencing it. That’s a very real thing — unfortunately, way too real and increasingly way too common. It was just constantly reminding myself: What does this character want? And at the end of the day, regardless of how extreme some of the things Robbie’s doing, he just wants a decent life for his kids. And the fact that he’s having a hard time getting it is heartbreaking.

That scene and in the car, the first time I read it, I was like, “Oh, he’s [Brad] got some balls.” You have so much s— boiling over — the plot lines, the violence, the stakes are through the roof for everyone now in the show, and we are going to sit in a car for half an episode? And two dudes are gonna talk?

In Episode 5, Robbie Prendergast (Tom Pelphrey), left, and Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo) finally meet.

(HBO)

Ruffalo: There’s no chase! And when they finally face each other, they’re not even [actually] facing each other! They’re both pushed to the edge and you don’t know where it could go. Tom certainly doesn’t know where it will go. Tom’s kind of at that point, like, “F— it. Go ahead.” We talked about it a lot, I was like, “I think Tom should die.”

[They break into laughter]

Ingelsby: Every single day he was pitching it.

Ruffalo: I was pitching Tom should have a heart attack at the end and he literally sees God and he says to God, “I’m ready.” He finally finds his faith. It’s finally paid off and he says [gasping], “I’m … reaaady.”

Ingelsby: Enough people die here. But that particular episode has always been very special to me. That’s when the show is operating at the peak of its powers. It just felt like, how do we subvert the expectations of the audience and do that in a way that still feels true to who these characters are? I remember talking to you [Tom] about this. You were like, “As soon as I know Cliff’s done, I’m on a one-way street. I have a plan.” But with you [Mark], once they get out of the car and you feel like you’re going to die, you’re like, “I want to call my family.” That’s when you get activated in a way. You’ve been going through the motions in life, but that’s when it gets very real.

Ruffalo: It’s like being reborn. It opens his heart. He sees how life can be taken away.

We’re in a political and cultural moment where the mood of the country is simmering — there’s anger and rage on all sides, and a lot of it stems from class and systemic issues that are in place that put people in certain positions. There’s that layer, but there’s also the grief element both these men are facing.

Ingelsby: With Robbie in particular, I was interested in a guy that felt really stuck. What I liked about Robbie was, if he didn’t take action, what would happen to Robbie? He’d be a trash man in too deep his whole life. Who cares about Robbie and his family? Nobody. He was left behind. In early versions of the script, I very explicitly said, “He wants his bite of the apple.” There are lots of people like that now. I loved writing Robbie because it felt like he was raging against being left behind and and I felt, in many cases, in the script, why wouldn’t you do something? Whether you agree with the actions or not —

Pelphrey: He had his f— life stolen from him. What he’s going after is a very specific thing. He’s not lashing out blindly against anybody to get any money at any cost. He’s like: “I’m gonna take it from these mother f—, who are bad dudes.” Even within that, he has principles. No one’s gonna die — obviously, the rules all go out the window Episode 2, but we’re not going to take the drugs, we’re not going to sell the drug. We’re going to destroy the drugs. We’re going to take the cash. Even within his brand of lashing out, he actually has a set of principles that he’s operating by.

Mark Ruffalo, left, and Tom Pelphrey star as two troubled men on a collision course in “Task.” Ruffalo portrays an FBI agent recovering from a family tragedy, while Pelphrey plays a garbage collector and criminal involved in a series of robberies. (Bexx Francois/For The Times)

Mark and Tom, as sons and fathers, how did you think about the father-child relationships of these two men and the collateral damage of their choices?

Ruffalo: It’s so hard to be a father, especially now because this generation is like, “We’re not going to do it the way our parents, our fathers did. We see that there’s another way to do it. We’re actually talking about it.” At the same time, we don’t exactly know what it is that we should do differently, plus we have the responsibility of, financially, keeping it together. It’s obviously hard to be a mom too. These guys are doing the best they can.

Pelphrey: Becoming a dad two and a half years ago now, it’s just the most f— awesome, wild, intense, crazy s— I’ve ever experienced in my life. It’s like getting struck by lightning. I’m so in love and I feel so vulnerable and I feel so happy — it’s all the feelings. Then suddenly, when you’re thinking about how you feel, you go, “How do I balance this? How do I protect her, but make sure that she’s brave and experiencing things? And you quickly realize there is so much to this that I will have no power over and the realization of that, in the deepest sense — and I’ve already had moments of that and we’re just getting started here. You imagine what it’s like, when you don’t have kids, but you have no f— clue. One of the things I could say without blinking, ever, is, “I totally understand why he’s doing what he’s doing.”

Was there a version where Robbie lived?

Ingelsby: No, I felt like structurally what needed to happen was Tom had to witness Robbie’s kindness, then his sacrifice. It felt very necessary to be like, “Oh, wait. Robbie — he went up to the woods…” Because he’s always like, “What’s the plan?” Tom realizes, “Oh, I know what the plan was. He went there to die.” Part of Tom’s journey to getting rid of the anger and to believing in something at the end, was to have witnessed the goodness in Robbie. He [Robbie] also gets in so deep eventually, he has pushed himself into such a corner and there’s no good way out of this. What’s an audience gonna think if he gets out of this unscathed? Even if he were to survive, he’s gonna be in jail for the rest of his life. The idea of sacrifice would speak to Tom as a character and get him to his ultimate decision to give the boy [Sam] up, but also forgive his own son and, quite literally, get the house ready for him.

Mark, how did you feel about the statement that Tom winds up giving at the hearing in the finale?

Ruffalo: He had to sit down and write that. I don’t think he really knew what he was going to be writing. He’s taking stock of his life and his son’s life and the story of the life. It’s connecting him to the whole story. It’s not just the loss of my wife, but also we raised that boy. We made this life together and, even in the hard part of it all, that’s where we learned what love is. Then when he gets in there, he doesn’t even know that he’s gonna say it. He doesn’t know he’s going to confront him with it and say [to his son], “Look at me.” But the whole journey, leads us there.

There’s something, too, about his composure in that moment.

Ingelsby: That’s the genius of Mark. That was the first or second take, what we used.

How many versions of it did you write? Was there an overly emotional or dramatic version?

Ingelsby: There was a longer version. But I think what was important about it was — and Mark does such a beautiful job — was that he had to be honest about how hard it was. I was always worried it would be a bit maudlin, if he just went in and said straight away, “I love you.” It was almost like he had to be really honest with everybody, like, “Hey, this was f— horrible.” And the shame of changing your name —

Ruffalo: Yes. To be that honest and to say that I pretended like I wasn’t his father. It’s so shameful. It’s so honest.

Ingelsby: I think because he’s so honest, it makes the forgiveness even more impactful. When he says, “I forgive you,” you believe because he’s earned the trust in the speech by admitting the things that were so shameful .

Ruffalo: It doesn’t just go one way — forgiveness. There’s a lot of shame on it on the other side, that’s where the anger comes from. There’s always this question: What could I have done? The backstory was I left, knowing that he was in an episode, but I had to go. I left her with him, thinking it would blow over. And it didn’t. He has to also be honest about his part in it. What dad says, “That’s not my kid. You’re in retreat already.”

Ingelsby: That’s what we want the ending to be. It’s not that everything’s going to be easy. I think the same for Mare — it wasn’t like Mare’s life was so great at the end of the show. There was a lot of going on.

Ruffalo: She’s going to an AA meeting. Tom and Mare can meet at an AA meeting.

Tom Pelphrey as Robbie Prendergrast, a garbage collector trying to avenge his brother’s death by hitting trap houses belonging to a local gang before getting caught in a deadly standoff. (HBO)

Mark Ruffalo, Silvia Dionicio and Phoebe Fox in “Task.” Ruffalo plays a priest-turned-FBI agent who hasn’t confronted his feelings about the murder of his wife at the hands of their adopted son. (HBO)

To that point, was there thought about whether to incorporate “Mare” characters in this show, if they’re in the same universe?

Ingelsby: It’s funny you say that. [In] one of the early scripts, we had a scene where Emily (Silvia Dionicio), at the end of the show, went to a concert with her boyfriend, Leo, the guy that’s a magician. And Mare’s daughter, Siobhan (Angourie Rice), was playing. And there was another connective piece I’m missing. I think Leo’s brother was in the band. And they had a moment together, because I felt like Emily and Siobhan were very, very similar. That they had the weight of the world on their shoulders in some way, Emily especially —

Ruffalo: They’re well suited for each other. They could just sink to the bottom of the lake together.

He’s got a crossover season mapped out for you.

Pelphrey: If we hold hands, we can sink faster.

Ingelsby: But we did have something connecting them. But I’m glad HBO read it and were like, “Is it a bit much?” It felt like maybe we were reaching to do something that the story didn’t require. And when we took it out, I felt like this story exists on its own, and we didn’t need that. If we had threaded it through the story in a more interesting way, maybe it would have worked, but it would have felt really tacked on and kind of just fan service for the sake of fan service, which I didn’t want.

Can we talk about the Phillies cup? It’s seems like such an obscure detail, but that cup triggered me. I know it well. A father trying to hide his vice.

Ingelsby: That’s another detail of my own life that I can repurpose, steal. That’s my dad. He drinks out of that. He watches every Phillies game. There’s 162 games. And if he can’t watch, he’s listening to it in a radio in the car. I feel like we always talk about in the specific, is the universal. And Mark did the swirly thing.

Ruffalo: That’s what made me want to do the show. That he was drinking out of that. And then he swirled his hand. I said, “This guy is writing character like nobody is doing that I’ve seen in television.” I only read the first episode and I was like, “I want to go. I trust this journey with him.” And it was from that nuance thing. I know that guy. He’s a priest who swirls his vodka and tonic with his finger. In a Phillies cup. And he thinks he’s pulling it over. That’s my family. It’s so honest.

The accent was such a feature of “Mare of Easttown.” I imagine that had its own expectations or pressure for this show.

Ingelsby: “Mare” was more a community — very, very specific community. I felt like, in that show, we had to go all in and Kate did. A lot of Mark’s character was driven by my uncle, who has no accent at all. Because he went to the seminary, then he went to Merrimack College, he was a teacher — he bounced around. And even me, there’s a couple words I’ll say that you can’t pick up a heavy accent. There’s a couple words, where maybe you could pick it up.

Ruffalo: We tried. I tried it. I kept kicking it out, it just didn’t feel right. He does hit some of those words. He does say wooder — cheery wooder ice. We kept some of it in, but we didn’t go as hard at it because he goes another way. I feel like he might have ended up in South America at some point. I was thinking he traveled the world.

Did you pay many visits to Wawa? I remember Kate telling me about her Wawa experiences.

Pelphrey: I grew up going to Wawa. I was Wawa all the time because I was living out in the suburbs.

Ingelsby: I think Kate ate hoagies or something.

Pelphrey: They make a good sandwich.

Ruffalo: Oh, bro. I started with a fat suit and then I had to take it off. I just kept getting fatter. My wife saw me and she’s like [to the kids], “huh, your father’s eating his way through Philly.” But, man, I’d be like, “How about a sandwich for the scene?” [Mimics scarfing down a sandwich.] Like a troll.

Ingelsby: He is an amazing sandwich eater. We were talking about it.

Pelphrey: We were.

Ruffalo: Oh, I knew I was going to be eating a sandwich that day [in a scene], so I starved myself so I could just plow that thing.

Are you interested in a Season 2, Brad?

Ruffalo: No one wants a Season 2. [the trio laughs] No, I’m kidding. That would be amazing.

Ingelsby: It would be amazing. If people respond and we get a chance to do it.

Could we get that “Task”-”Mare” crossover?

Ingelsby: A lot could happen.

Ruffalo: Some “Mare” people could show up. There could be a love affair.

Dame Penelope Keith has spilled the secrets of The Good Life as she claimed a sequel would be ‘tedious’ and would not work

Dame Penelope Keith has revealed how she turned down the chance to star in a spin-off of The Good Life as she claimed it would be ‘tedious’ and would not work. The actress, who is now 85, became a household name in the 1970s BBC sitcom which drew audiences of up to 20 million viewers.

She starred as the snobbish social climber Margo Leadbetter who was married to the poor hen-pecked husband Jerry (played by the late Paul Eddington).

Every week fans tuned in to see her disapproving sneers as she struggled to deal with her suburban neighbours Tom and Barbara Good (portrayed by the late Richard Briers along with Felicity Kendall) who had swapped the rat race for ‘the good life’ of make-do-and-mend sustainability – trying to grow their own food and keep chickens, pigs and a goat in their garden.

The show – which ran from 1975 until 1978 – ended after four series and a TV special filmed in front of the royal family. However, soon after, the idea was raised about writing a spin-off series for her and Paul featuring just The Leadbetters.

But she explained: “People mentioned ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a Leadbetter spin-off and I said ‘No. It’s a situation comedy and the situation is strong because of the two couples’.

“Can you imagine how tedious it would have been having Margo and Jerry having their own series?”

A year after The Good Life ended, instead Penelope landed another huge BBC hit playing posh Audrey fforbes-Hamilton in To The Manor Born from 1979 to 1981. Later she appeared in sitcoms Executive Stress and Next of Kin and No Job For A Lady before embarking on a highly successful theatre career.

The Good Life ran for 30 episodes in total and its 50 ^th anniversary this year is being marked by a forthcoming TV special called The Good Life: Inside Out fronted by Penelope.

It reveals how, when the show first launched, the TV critics and audience were lukewarm and did not find it that funny.

Penelope even admits that the ‘green theme’ was a brave choice of plot line adding: “It was a sort of fantasy. People weren’t packing up and thinking ‘Oh there must be more to life than this daily grind.’”

One reviewer even risked causing a tense atmosphere on-set by claiming that The Leadbetters ‘stole the show’. Briers, apparently, saw the review but brushed it aside joking that he was the one with the top billing and getting all the money.

But soon viewers fell in love with both couples as The Goods struggled to deal with surviving on growing their own dinners and milking Geraldine the goat for milk in their tea.

Meanwhile posh middle class Margo would look on disdainfully at their antics which she felt brought down the neighbourhood. The plots included a touch of sauce too.

In one episode, both couples get drunk and Jerry admits to fancying Barbara and Tom tells Margo she is a good looking woman.

Penelope says about this: “There was flirting and all those sorts of things but you never felt that there was any wife swapping or anything like that. It was a very strong bond between them and I think that was again in the writing that was so clever.”

In another episode, Margo decides to add some spice to an afternoon by playing the seductress to Jerry – but he is distracted and completely blanks her, leading her to utter the immortal line ‘That’s the last time I play the tart for you, Jerry’.

Penelope loved the script and admits she is shocked that fans come up to her wanting her to say the line.

She said: “When I saw the line ‘That’s the last time I play the tart for you Jerry’ I thought ‘Wow that is a humdinger’.

“I had people coming up to me and saying ‘Will you say that line for me please?’ which I thought was most peculiar – but I said it!”

Penelope salutes the writers of the sitcom John Esmonde and Bob Larbey for creating such wonderful characters – with all their flaws – for the viewers to take to their hearts.

She points out that Tom could be quite beastly and selfish to wife Barbara but he got away with it (‘You love Richard. You adore him. You laugh at him even when he is being an absolute horror because he does with a sense of humour’.)

Barbara was cute and long-suffering but adored Tom and everyone felt nothing but sympathy for poor Jerry. However it was Margo – a Conservative-supporting, Telegraph-reading domineering social climbing wife – who got the most attention and some of the funniest lines.

Penelope explains: “Margo was the prime lady of the avenue with all the dinner parties and whatever she took part in, she had to do it perfectly and had to be top dog and sometimes she was terribly disapproving. She had no sense of humour but she was terribly kind and didn’t want to offend but she engaged mouth before brain so often.

“She had enormous warmth and adored the goods and likewise jerry but he infuriated her. There is a line where she says ‘I am the silent majority’ and she said it dead pan and that is what she felt and that is what half the country felt at the time as well.”

As its popularity grew, so did the laughs especially at the expense of Margo. Fans loved the scene where she tried to help The Goods with planting in the garden and decked in yellow oil skins and boots she slipped over and fell knee deep in mud.

Penelope recalls: “Someone actually asked me the other day – ‘Was it a mistake?’ and I said ‘No. I did five times’. I couldn’t walk for about three days afterwards because of my back and of course every time I fell over I was covered in mud and so I had to be hosed down afterwards.”

And another of her favourite scenes was when one of The Good’s pigs was in labour and Tom asked Margo to go and fetch some brandy as ‘a stimulant’.

The actress recalls: “I walked out of shot and then back into shot and asked Tom ‘Remy Martin or VSOP?’ I mean what a wonderful line. It was so witty and so funny. It is one of my favourites.”

It seems Margo also got the most attention when it came to wardrobe. Since The Goods always wore the same clothes and Jerry was always in a suit, it did not take a genius to work out where the majority of the clothes budget went.

Fans loved seeing what dress or gown Margo would be sporting during each episode. They usually came from Harrods and some were even the high end fashion label Frank Usher.

Penelope said: “There was a budget I remember and the person who got the most spent on them as far as clothes were concerned was me. I don’t think I would have worn any of those dresses but Margo loved them.

“Everybody wanted to see what Margo was going to wear next. Monday used to be my one day off but I used to spend it in Harrods occasionally Harvey Nicks looking for beautiful clothes. Silk gowns in such lovely vibrant colours.”

In the TV special, Penelope visits a replica of Margo and Jerry’s drawing room which has been painstakingly recreated by designers.

She laughs: “I remember the sofa being so low. That was alright 50 years ago but I don’t know if I can get up today.”

And she revisits the garden in Northwood in west London which was used for all of the outside filming shots for Tom and Barbara’s farm and allotment.

She comments: “What a garden! It’s all trees now but back then it was all dug up. It looks a totally different place now. Must be good soil here – all that animal excrement because we had pigs and chickens and Geraldine the goat! But we loved it here – being released into the open air was freedom after working in the studio.”

One little known secret which Penelope does uncover delving back into the archives is that when the BBC planned a special to be filmed in front of the royals called When I’m Sixty Five, they asked playwright Alan Bennett to have a cameo role in the episode as a bank manager.

However he turned them down. He told them he was too ‘worn out’ and needed a holiday having committed to making a series of plays for ITV.

Instead an actor called George Cole got the role – just weeks before he was cast as Arthur Daley in Minder. The Good Life ended in 1978 and all the main stars thought it was the right time to bow out.

Penelope confessed: “I remember saying to Paul ‘I don’t think we can do any more. I think we have squeezed this orange to the pips really’ and I know Richard felt like that and Felicity too.”

But fans expecting a finale which ended on a high with a load of laughs were in for a shock. The episode ended with burglars ransacking The Goods’ home and turning it upside down and leaving everything in tatters.

Jerry tells Tom he must now give up ‘the good life’ and go back to work – but it is Barbara who says they must carry on and not be beaten. Penelope called the episode a stroke of genius.

She added: “When we got the script for the last episode we were all amazed, but in wonder, what a brilliant way to finish. When we came to the studio we did the beginning and then they had curtains which they drew across the set and then they sprayed (paint) all over the set and then the floor manager talked to the audience but said nothing about what was going on behind the curtains.

“Then the curtain went up and the audience gasped, absolutely gasped. It was extraordinary. People were in tears at the end.”

Asked about her time on the show, she now says: “I look back on it as one of the happiest times. It was of its time at the right time.

“It was as good as it was because of everything else behind it. Everybody cared. The laughter, the joy it brought and the fact that people liked it so much and believed in it so much is reward.”

After starring in the BBC sitcom for four years, Richard Briers continued his TV career, landing a lead part in another BBC sitcom a few years later. He played the unsympathetic Martin Bryce on Ever Decreasing Circles from 1984 to 1989. His character Martin was the polar opposite of Tom from The Good Life. He died in 2013.

Felicity Kendal has enjoyed a varied career on stage and screen including on TV a starring role in the thriller Rosemary and Thyme from 2003 to 2006, to guest appearances in Doctor Who in 2008 and Pennyworth in 2019. Paul Eddington played Jerry, who worked with Tom until he and his wife decided to make this life change.

Just two years after The Good Life he took on the title role of Jim Hacker in the comedy series Yes, Minister. He starred in the series until 1984, before taking on a main role in its spin-off Yes, Prime Minister.

Paul later reunited with his co-stars from The Good Life, starring opposite Felicity in The Camomile Lawn in 1992, and then alongside Richard in the play Home in 1994. The actor sadly passed away at the age of 68 in 1995 after a cancer battle.

* The Good Life: Inside Out airs on U&Gold on Tuesday October 28 at 9pm.

Welcome to Screen Gab, the newsletter for everyone who spent the week belting “You Don’t Own Me” with the same gusto as an empowered ex-wife dressed in white.

Diane Keaton died this week at age 79 at her Los Angeles home. The L.A. native had a career that spanned more than five decades and included a wide-ranging and indelible list of performances in films such as “The Godfather” saga, “Annie,” Baby Boom,” “Father of the Bride” (and its sequel), “The First Wives Club,” “Something’s Gotta Give,” “The Family Stone” — the list goes on and on. Take a moment to read film editor Joshua Rothkop’s illuminating snapshot of Keaton’s life. Of course, her legacy goes far beyond the performance. Times film critic Amy Nicholson wrote how Keaton showed us how to dress up our insecurities and embrace the kooky. And if you want to take a dive into her oeuvre, we have a roundup of 10 Keaton performances worth watching. Pluto TV is featuring an on-demand collection called “Remembering Diane Keaton,” with 15 of her most beloved films available to stream anytime.

And speaking of women who leave a lasting impression — this week saw the return of Keri Russell as Kate Wyler, the highly competent seasoned foreign service officer, with the arrival of “The Diplomat’s” third season. The Netflix series has spent its time tracking the career diplomat’s journey being primed to assume the role of vice president. Its backdrop storyline of an aging president who is expected to pass the torch to a younger female vice president — and the chaos that ensues when the plan is upended — may have real-world parallels, but the show’s creator, Debora Cahn, whose other credits include “The West Wing” and “Homeland,” insists the series is not a commentary. She stopped by Guest Spot to discuss the political thriller.

Also in this week’s Screen Gab, our streaming recommendations are an eclectic pair: a documentary that chronicles the 60-year movement to convert abandoned railroads into public spaces around America and, for those looking to make their viewing of Guillermo Del Toro’s take on “Frankenstein” a double-feature kind of night, we make the case for a ‘90s gory horror-comedy twist on the legend.

ICYMI

Must-read stories you might have missed

Diane Keaton arrives at a news conference at the 40th Cannes Film Festival to introduce her feature directorial debut, “Heaven,” in 1987.

(Michel Lipchitz / Associated Press)

Diane Keaton, film legend, fashion trendsetter and champion of L.A.’s past, dead at 79: The Oscar-winning star was known for films including ‘Annie Hall’ and ‘The Godfather.’

Can the DMV make you laugh instead of cry? With Harriet Dyer, it’s possible: The Australian actor plays a sunny driving examiner in ‘DMV,’ the new CBS workplace comedy premiering Monday that’s set in East Hollywood.

What’s there left to say about the Murdaugh murders and ‘killer clown’ John Wayne Gacy? A lot: Hulu’s ‘Murdaugh: Death in the Family’ and Peacock’s ‘Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy’ are based on notorious slayings that received reams of news coverage in their day, but each tells a captivating story.

‘Grey’s Anatomy’ reaches its 450th episode. Meet the people who’ve been there from the start: The long-running ABC medical drama reached a rare milestone this week. Meet three cast and crew members who have been with the show from the beginning.

Turn on

Recommendations from the film and TV experts at The Times

A view of the Island Line Trail in “From Rails to Trails.”

(PBS)

“From Rails to Trails” (PBS.org)

Trains ran close to where I grew up, and I’m still stupidly excited whenever I see one in action. There are fewer now than there were then, but part of their romance is the alternative routes they carved through the land. “From Rails to Trails” documents the 60-year movement to transform abandoned rail lines — which is to say, most rail lines — into paths for biking and hiking, turning them into linear public parks, making the countryside accessible but also remaking urban spaces. It’s a movement not without its opponents, its reversals and consequences, including the gentrification that can follow them. But this often moving hour-long documentary is a paean to old-fashioned coalition building and community activism — needed now more than ever — and the success of a new idea many now take for granted. Former Vermont governor Howard Dean and former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg chime in. New voice of the everyman Edward Norton narrates. — Robert Lloyd

“Frankenhooker” (Pluto TV, Tubi)

The lament of “The Bride of Frankenstein” is that the heroine herself is only onscreen for a few minutes. Get your fix by watching Frank Henenlotter’s “Frankenhooker.” This sleazy-brilliant 1990 romp is so clever it ranks (severed) head and shoulders with the black-and-white classics. An inventor, Jeffrey (James Lorinz), is bereft over losing his fiancée Elizabeth (Patty Mullen) to a freak lawnmower accident. He vows to rebuild his future bride — but hotterr. “I can make you the centerfold goddess of the century,” Jeffrey says with a leer. The real vanity is his. He wants a sexy, mindless babe. Henenlotter (also of the schlock hit “Basket Case”) claimed he didn’t think deeply about the subtext of his horror movies, a feint that dates back farther than George A. Romero pretending “Night of the Living Dead’s” martyred Black hero wasn’t a comment on race. They’re both fibbers. “Frankenhooker” is a giddy, popcorn-chomping comment on the disposability of women, especially the sex workers Jeffrey murders for spare parts. But what brings it to life is Mullen’s uproarious resurrected sexpot. Stomping around wearing a purple bra and a ghastly sneer, she belongs to no man — ring on her finger or not. Make it a double feature with Guillermo Del Toro’s terrific new “Frankenstein” in theaters this week. — Amy Nicholson

Guest spot

A weekly chat with actors, writers, directors and more about what they’re working on — and what they’re watching

Allison Janney as Grace, Rufus Sewell as Hal Wyler and Keri Russell as Kate Wyler in Season 3 scene from “The Diplomat.”

(Alex Bailey / Netflix)

Will the U.S. ever be ready for a female president? Time will tell. But “The Diplomat” has provided its contribution to the list of fictional ones. The Netflix drama, a fast-paced look at the art of diplomacy, stars Keri Russell as Kate Wyler, a newly-appointed U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom who is tapped from the ranks of career diplomats to be quietly prepped to become vice president. The plan, of course, hasn’t gone as expected. In the whirlwind final moments of last season, the president dies and suddenly the person Kate was enlisted to push out, Vice President Grace Penn (Allison Janney), is whisked into duty — just as Kate has discovered the VP is responsible for hatching a terrorist plot. The show returned for its third season earlier this week and explores the aftermath as Penn is sworn in as president. Here, creator Debora Cahn shares what she was interested in unpacking in Season 3’s marriage dynamics, orchestrating a “West Wing” reunion and the time she met former Vice President Kamala Harris. There are some mild spoilers ahead, so bookmark for later if you haven’t begun the season! — Yvonne Villarreal

What did you want out of Kate’s journey this season? Her professional ambitions are once again tested by her marriage. Hal keeps claiming it’s Kate’s time to be in the spotlight and yet he manages to steal it.

We wanted to look at how it happens that someone like Hal winds up in the spotlight even when he’s desperately trying not to; the circumstances that surround decisions like this, which make it such that even the people in the middle of them don’t really have any control over it. You can look at what Grace is doing, and you can understand why she thinks Kate is fantastic, but that the choice, in terms of what’s going to make it easier for her to get through the day, is Hal. And we didn’t want to have a science fiction White House where there are two women happily running the country. That’s just not the world that we’re living in. And it felt like the most honest thing that we could do is tell a story about what it means to be really qualified and really experienced and really ready, and then watch it all slip away at the last second.

The season includes a delightful “West Wing” reunion, a show you wrote for. Allison Janney returns as VP-turned-President Grace Penn and Bradley Whitford portrays her husband, Todd. What was it like to see them back together onscreen? And what did you want their marriage dynamic to say?

It was like first day of school jitters for the first day that each of them was on set. We really wanted to make sure that this was something new and it wasn’t a reference to the work that we’d done together in the past. And the second they started, it was just clear that we were watching a new relationship that these two great actors were building together and informed by the fact that they know each other quite well and that they’ve been good friends for 20 years, but using that to create something new and fresh and really, really satisfying.

This is a marriage that has some very similar structural dynamics to Kate and Hal, but there are some fundamental differences, which is, there was never an assumption that Todd’s career could continue to function alongside Grace’s once she became vice president; and certainly when she becomes president, there’s no question that will become the focus for both of them. And so there are dynamics that Kate and Hal still wrestle with, which we see are kind of absolved with Todd and Grace. And in some ways that helps, and in some ways it doesn’t help.

We’re looking at a couple that’s 10 years farther down the road in their marriage and have made, in some ways, a more pragmatic decision about what it means to have two smart, capable people with careers existing at the same time. Their decision is that one of them isn’t going to exist right now. I think the thing that I enjoy most about both Hal and Todd is that these are people who really, really, really love their wives and really want to be supportive and they still fail or they struggle so, so mightily. We’ve talked about this before: I don’t like writing villains. I don’t want to write politicians that have bad values or selfish goals. I also don’t want to write people in a marriage who don’t give a s— about each other. I would much rather look at the much larger problem, which is, you do really care about each other. You do really want the best for each other, and you still can’t manage to make it happen.

Allison Janney as President Grace Penn and Bradley Whitford as First Gentleman Todd Penn in “The Diplomat.”

(Clifton Prescod / Netflix)

“The Diplomat” premiered in a different political climate from the one it’s in now. The show is not a direct commentary on what’s happening now, but how does the current reality, particularly as it relates to what those in civil service are facing, inform how you think about or build stories moving forward? What sorts of questions are you asking now of people who work in the government?

We write a story two years before the audience watches it, so we we don’t want to be making a direct commentary. Even if we did, the world is moving so fast, we couldn’t try and keep up. But we do want to be in the foreign policy headspace that the world is in, and try to be looking at what are the bigger questions and bigger conflicts that face people who are working in this field. We think a lot about the fact that 300,000 people were fired from the federal government. We think a lot about what it’s like to work for this administration and — I’m trying to figure out what to say without getting into Season 4, which I don’t want to do. It doesn’t inform the specifics of any of the stories that we’re telling, but it does inform the worldview and the bigger questions that face people in this field as the field changes. As the world changes.

You’re writing about people whose job it is to make hard decisions every day. What was the hardest decision you had to make for this third season — either in the writing phase or the production phase?

We moved the base of production from the UK back to New York. The first two seasons we were based in the UK, and then for Season 3, we did half and half. There were a lot of really good reasons for that. It also meant that we had a crew that grew this organism with us — and we were very close to them; they had huge influence on the show — and leaving them behind was really, really terrible. It’s a tough time in the film and television industry right now, and we felt pretty good about bringing jobs back to this community. That was something that was important to us and we really wanted to do. So, we are comfortable with the decision that we made, but, boy, it sure wasn’t fun making it and going through it. It’s people’s livelihood. It’s not a small thing.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris recently released a book chronicling her whirlwind and brief campaign as a 2024 presidential candidate. Have you read it?

I have not read it. But did I tell you about when we met her?

No. Tell me. You were also filming this third season during the election, right?

We were we were shooting it during the election. We were writing it during the election. And we we were worried about how it was going to look. We didn’t want it to look like a commentary on this presidency. But we did have a female vice president that we liked a whole lot, and a male president that we really loved and was of a certain age and didn’t make it through the process — the dynamics kept getting more and more troubling.

Keri and I were at the [White House Correspondents’] Dinner. And there was a receiving line, and we met and shook hands with the president and the first lady and the vice president and the second gentleman. And I said, “Ma’am, I’m writing a story about what it’s like for a woman who’s really experienced and really smart and really capable and really ready to do a job who then gets passed over for someone who is perhaps less qualified.” And she laughed. Then she said, “Call me.”

Have you called?

I have not called. I felt like she had some stuff going on. I didn’t really want to bother her and say, “Heyyyyy … let’s talk about how that went …”

What have you watched recently that you are recommending to everyone you know?

“Dying for Sex” [Hulu, Disney+]. It was brutal and intense and very funny and extremely well-written. And I just thought what they did from a public health service perspective, sharing practical information about what it actually means to go through the process of death, I thought it was just a huge public service.

What’s your go-to “comfort watch,” the movie or TV show you go back to again and again?

“Postcards from the Edge” [VOD] — it is just so smart and so funny and both Shirley MacLaine and Meryl Streep are just absolutely to die for.

The KnuckleHeadz may just be the thing to save America’s youth. They’re categorized too neatly as a punk band from Whittier, but they’re actually a movement: Southern California’s most raucous self-help program and hardcore band. The members are built like dockworkers and dressed like a deleted scene from “The Warriors”: black-and-green leather vests with a spiky-haired skull back patch. They are also the driving force behind the Punk Rock Fight Club, a Southern California-based organization dedicated to improving young men’s lives through fitness and structure. The rules are as strict as they are simple, and in this topsy-turvy world, truly radical: no hard drugs, no crime, no racists, no abusers. Respect yourself, your brothers and your community.

The KnuckleHeadz achieved a moment of internet fame after hosting a completely unsanctioned show in an unsuspecting McDonald’s for a hundred people. The viral clip of the show is the convenient entry point, but it sells short what the gentlemen have built. Onstage, the KnuckleHeadz are all sweat and spectacle: profanity-laced breakdowns, fans crowd surfing on boogie boards riding a human tide, and the green-and-black army in the pit pulling strangers upright. The absurdity of a fast-food slam pit, bodies and burgers briefly airborne — suggests anarchy. Look closer and you see choreography: Men catching falls, clearing space and enforcing a code. Punk has always promised salvation by noise. The KnuckleHeadz add a footnote: Salvation requires reps, rules and someone mean enough to care. Offstage, they run an infrastructure for staying alive.

The KnuckleHeadz in Whittier

(Dick Slaughter)

Founded in June 2021 by frontman Thomas Telles of Whittier, better known as Knucklehead Tom, and with the help of guitarist and tattooer Steven Arceo, aka Saus, of El Monte, the Punk Rock Fight Club (PRFC) has grown in a few years to six chapters and more than 200 members across Southern California. What started as a tight circle around a band hardened into a movement: discipline for kids who never got it, structure for men who need it, and a community without substance abuse . Prospects earn their way through mornings, sweat and commitment before they’re trusted with the skull back patch. The rules read like a brick wall and function like a doorway.

“I started the club because I wanted to do good in the scene,” Knucklehead Tom said “I wanted to create a tribe where we all supported each other, a family for people from all walks of life, especially those who came from broken homes. I wanted people to know they have somewhere to go and a family they can count on.”

Knucklehead Tom of The KnuckleHeadz puts his mic in to the crowd while performing with the band from Whittier.

(Dick Slaughter)

I first ran into the KnuckleHeadz and a few club members by accident three years ago in a London train station en route to the Rebellion Punk Rock Music Festival in Blackpool, a yearly event featuring more than 300 veteran and emerging bands. They were impossible to miss — part wolf pack, part brotherhood, pure energy. That year the KnuckleHeadz struck a chord with me, not just through their all-in, no-holds-barred performances, but also through their message, their obvious love for one another and their mission to better their community. Since then, I have taken a hard look inside both the band and the club; I visited their gym and attended many of their shows. I have met and talked with families and those the KnuckleHeadz and the club have helped. They have indeed, in many cases, worked miracles. But the guys don’t call them miracles. They call it Tuesday.

“Since we founded Punk Rock Fight Club, we paved way for what we knew was the movement and lifestyle many people in our scene needed,” Arceo said. “We’ve changed so many lives and with that our lives changed as well. We made a family built on brotherhood, loyalty with the camaraderie that can only be achieved through martial arts and punk rock. That’s something many of us grew up without. So to be able to bring this into the world is worth every sacrifice. We’re going on five years strong and will keep going till the day we die.”

The band’s ascent mirrors the spread of the club: a steady climb from underground slots to punk’s biggest stages. They earned a place on the final NOFX show and graduated from Rebellion’s side stage to the festival’s main stage. They’ve organized benefits for causes that don’t trend and for people who can’t afford to be causes. The Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas recently added a piece of PRFC memorabilia, one of the club’s cuts — a leather vest with the skull back patch — to its collection, a true museum piece that still smells faintly of sweat. Next, KnuckleHeadz prepare for a U.S. run with punk legends GBH, the sort of tour that turns rumor into résumé.

Saus, co-founder of the KnuckleHeadz, wearing the band’s signature vest.

The Whittier dojo, KnuckleHead Martial Arts, is where the KnuckleHeadz code gets practical. It’s where guys run martial arts drills and where the mats serve double duty as community center flooring. During the band’s “F Cancer” benefit for 17-year-old Cesar “Little Cesar” Lopez II, the driveway became an impromptu slam pit. Inside, kids tumbled on the mats while guitars shook the walls. Families brought food, local businesses donated services, and more than $6,000 went toward treatments. In the carnival-like atmosphere outside, Little Cesar grinned and hyped the pit from the sideline, proving that joy, like violence, can be contagious.

One member, Bernard Schindler, 55, of La Mirada, came in after a life of ricochets: rehab, prison, relapse, repeat. The club gave him a schedule first and a future second, and now with the support of the club, he’s been clean and sober for more than two years.

Saus performing with the KnuckleHeadz during a Punk Rock Fight Club benefit show outside the KnuckleHeadz gym in Whittier.

(Dick Slaughter)

“Tom and the Punk Rock Fight Club completely turned my life around,” Schindler said. “It gave me purpose, discipline and a new family of brothers that push me to be better. I went from being a broken down drug addict to the healthiest I’ve ever been mentally, physically and emotionally in the 55 years I’ve been alive.”

Since getting involved with the KnuckleHeadz nearly three years ago, Schindler says he’s gotten closer to his family, including his three sons and his girlfriend, in addition to staying sober. “I can honestly say that I couldn’t have done it without Tom and our God-given club, the Punk Rock Fight Club,” he said.

The bassist known as Knucklehead Randy performs while riding on the shoulders of a fellow club member at a benefit show in Whittier.

(Dick Slaughter)

The PRFC trophy case is full of medals and awards, sure, but the real accomplishments are much quieter and miraculous. There are pay stubs where rap sheets used to be, text threads that start with the question “You good?” at 3:17 a.m., and apartment keys handed over when a kid can’t go home.

Hip-hop synth-punk artist N8NOFACE, now a fixture on lineups from the annual L.A. festival Cruel World tours with Limp Bizkit and Corey Feldman, calls Tom “my brother” and credits that code with keeping him aligned. “I was getting clean, and I’ve always believed that if you follow the right people, it helps you stay on your path,” N8 says. “Tom was about health, about not getting all messed up, about being a fighter and a warrior and taking care of your body first. To find that in punk was very different.”

When asked about his hopes for the future of the band, Tom says, “I just want to keep having fun. We love doing it and are grateful for all the love and support.“ The band is currently playing shows across SoCal with gutter punk legends GBH, including a show Friday at the Ventura Music Hall.

“With the club, I want to keep changing lives. It makes me happy to know that my son Nieko has an army of goodhearted uncles if anything were to happen to me. The righteous men in this club make me so proud.”

That’s the trick. That’s the point. In the noise between those truths, a lot of young men hear something they’ve never believed before: a future they’re allowed to keep.

Slaughter is a photographer and writer who has covered music and culture for countless outlets, including the OC Weekly and L.A. Times. He is a founding member of In Spite Magazine.

IF you ski down through the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise.

Especially when you are in Hundfjallet — one of four ski areas in the Swedish mountain resort Salen.

A magical beginner slope winds through a Troll Forest where dozens of wooden statues protrude from the snow, singing and telling folk tales.

My young kids liken this enchanted realm to the lands of Elsa and Anna in Disney movie Frozen.

And there’s even a ski-thru McDonald’s too — see right.

It is the first time I’ve taken my family skiing and the children are spellbound from the get-go.

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Making their way through the mythical woods of Trollskogen, they look in wonder.

The only things that stop them begging to return immediately to the top of the run are a log cabin serving hot chocolate near an open fire — and an open-air theatre with a dance show featuring the resort’s mascot, Snowman Valle.

Aside from it being wonderfully child-friendly, one of the best things about Salen is how quickly you can get there.

The resort, in west-central Sweden, near the Norwegian border, is just a two-hour flight from the UK then a ten-minute transfer.

Within an hour of landing at the airport, we had dumped our bags, got completely kitted out — including with ski pass, part of our deal from operator Sunweb — and were gliding down the pistes.

All of this was made even easier by our 4H “ski in and ski out” SkiStar Lodge apartment hotel, which has everything you could wish for within a short walk, from ski school, ski rental and sledging hill, to luxury spa, restaurants, playroom, creche and supermarket.

Salen is generally suited more to beginner and intermediate skiiers. But with 101 runs, including some nice off-piste, back-country routes, and a 45-degree black run called The Wall, there is enough to keep even the most advanced occupied.

If you are looking for an alternative to downhill skiing or boarding, the area also offers dog-sled rides, Ski-Doo snowmobile trails, and superb cross-country skiing.

After a tiring day on the mountain you can simply slide back to the hotel — which has a vast storage room for all your gear — and head to the bar for authentic Swedish apres ski.

Yes, that means Abba songs, as well as lots of sing-along tunes for the kids — while they energise on their slush puppies with marshmallows, and the adults relax with a beer and bowls of hot, salty chips.

Another great way to unwind after all that exertion on the mountain is the on-site Frost Spa, where you can look at the ski slopes from a steaming outdoor pool, relax in two tingling-hot Jacuzzis, melt away in the sauna and steam rooms, and get a Swedish massage — before a drink at the bar.

Salen also comprises the busier Lindvallen ski area — 20 minutes away on the free bus — where you can grab a burger and chips in the world’s one and only ski-thru McDonald’s.

Lindvallen also has a ten-pin bowling alley, arcade and the SkiStar Experium fun pool with surf simulator and two exciting waterslides for the kids to go wild in.

At day’s end, back at the hotel, the children can also enjoy free table tennis, pool and shuffleboard until they are ready to drop.

And when they are finally tucked up in bed, adults can settle down in front of the apartments’ giant TVs  and watch Frozen or listen to Abba songs.

Just Gimme, gimme, gimme another Swedish ski holiday.

AS I look down into the valley below, I spot the unmistakable outline of the Golden Arches gleaming in the snow.

Peeling off my gloves, I unlock my phone screen and hit the McDonald’s app, ordering two Happy Meals, a Big Mac and a McChicken sandwich.

I’ve never seen my children ski as quickly as they did to the hatch to collect our order.

The world’s only McSki in Sweden’s Lindvallen, is decked out like an Alpine chalet with stone and wood features and can seat up to 170 people.

It offers all the same menu items that can be found in other McDonald’s around the world and the prices are comparable to back home in England – with main meals costing around £7.

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This means you can get a pretty cheap lunch compared to other mountain restaurant options.

Who can say no to that?