When William Shakespeare wrote “What’s past is prologue,” he wasn’t thinking about television. But the Bard’s wisdom certainly applies to the latest batch of Emmy-nominated series. Here are the spiritual predecessors to eight of this season’s most-lauded shows. (All of the older titles are available on DVD and/or streaming.) If you like “The Pitt,” check…

Sterling K. Brown is telling me about the underground bunker in his Ladera Heights home, a feature common to houses built during the Cold War, when fears of a nuclear holocaust ran rampant and kids were watching “duck and cover” films at school. Brown and his wife, Ryan Michelle Bathé, sealed the bunker when they…

Anja Steyn has three disparate loves: puzzles, horror movies and magic. And during her show at the Magic Castle two weeks ago, she not only predicted the horror film someone was thinking of — she produced an almost-finished puzzle of the movie poster, with the last piece in the unsuspecting audience member’s possession. “Some of…

Book Review The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley, and the Partnership That Rocked the World By Peter GuralnickLittle, Brown & Co.: 624 pages, $38If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. The popular perception of Colonel Tom Parker is…

I will say this: I should be watching more cartoons. It has been harder to indulge this passion for some of the best, most pleasurable work television has to offer with so many ordinary series fighting for my professional time and attention, but here and now I make a more or less midyear resolution to…

This is a story about a movie that saved a sport. OK, that’s a stretch, but only a little one. Scottie Scheffler is the No. 1 golfer in the world. Has been for a couple of years. He has won two Masters titles, one PGA Championship and the recent British Open, as well as an…

Aug. 2, 2025 12:28 PM PT It felt like 2022 all over again when Josh Gad took to Instagram to express his heartbreak about contracting a “virus known as COVID” and announce his decision to pull out of playing King Herod in the highly anticipated production of “Jesus Christ Superstar” at the Hollywood Bowl, which…

Thanks to a lazy pun that’s as uninspired as the jeans it’s meant to sell, a series of American Eagle Outfitters ads starring 27-year-old actor Sydney Sweeney have sparked a culture war. In one of several videos associated with the retailer’s campaign, the accomplished performer who also happens to be a blond bombshell says, “Genes…

For centuries, mythology looked to gods to explain a disquieting world. But in the new documentary “Folktales,” from “Jesus Camp” filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, which follows a trio of jumbled Scandinavian teens to a remote Norwegian school that builds character in the snowy wild, the answer to life may just lie in what…

In the late 1990s, Paula Deen was an independent restaurateur whose family-operated restaurant had just received a glowing review from USA Today. Her life and career were permanently changed. Now, over 25 years later, the Georgia native has announced the closing of the Lady and Sons — the iconic restaurant that made her a star…