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      ‘Apples Never Fall’ Review: A Drama Wrapped in a Mystery Inside a Formula

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      This Peacock mini-series about a bitter family and a missing woman is TV’s latest adaptation of a novel by the author of “Big Little Lies.”“Apples Never Fall,” premiering Thursday on Peacock, is the third Liane Moriarty book to be adapted for television, following HBO’s “Big Little Lies” and Hulu’s “Nine Perfect Strangers.” But if you told me it was the 10th, I’d believe you, given how familiar it all feels. The seven-episode mini-series is so well-oiled and unsurprising, it just glides on by.Annette Bening and Sam Neill star as Joy and Stan Delaney, pillars of West Palm Beach, Fla., who are, as the central couples in these kinds of shows always are, seemingly perfect but secretly damaged. They’ve just sold their tennis academy and are balking at the alleged freedoms of retirement, which Joy thought she’d spend with her four adult children.However, the kids don’t want to hang out with their hovering mom and volatile, bitter dad; they want to have their own lives of not-very-quiet desperation. Troy (Jake Lacy) is the clenched-jaw rich brother, at the tail end of a divorce from a woman everyone else really liked. Amy (Alison Brie) is the “searcher,” as her mother puts it, an aspiring life coach who would be perfectly at home on any show set in California. Logan (Conor Merrigan Turner) wants to be beachy, not sporty, so he works at a marina and does yoga. Brooke (Essie Randles) is a high-strung physical therapist who is supposed to be planning her wedding but may be getting cold feet.They probably would have kept on like that, except Joy has disappeared. And hmm, now that you mention it, there was that weird con artist, Savannah (Georgia Flood), who ingratiated herself into Joy and Stan’s life under very dubious circumstances. She couldn’t have something to do with it, could she? Well, we better bounce between two timelines to make sure: The days since Joy’s disappearance tick ahead in one timeline as we excavate all the mean family dinners from eight months ago in the other.The show hits its steady simmer with tense competence and with some good lines. “I didn’t know how to fix it, so I broke it,” Troy says of his marriage, though it applies to all the siblings and their behaviors pretty equally.Annette Bening plays a mother whose disappearance sparks suspicion and resentment within her family.Jasin Boland/PeacockWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Former Trump Aide Alyssa Farah Griffin Becomes a Liberal Favorite

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      Now and then during an election cycle, a Republican pundit becomes something of a hero to Democrats.Peggy Noonan, a conservative Wall Street Journal columnist and former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, filled that role in the months leading up the 2008 election, after she had pilloried the second Bush administration over its invasion of Iraq and criticized Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee.Nicolle Wallace and Steve Schmidt, veterans of John McCain’s failed 2008 presidential campaign, reached pundit primacy on MSNBC excoriating the tea party activists then in ascendance.A rising star of the current season is Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former communications director for President Trump who is now a co-host of ABC’s “The View” and a regular commentator on CNN.Ms. Farah Griffin, who resigned from the Trump administration in December 2020, garnered wide attention with a tweet she posted on Jan. 6, 2021: “Dear MAGA — I am one of you. Before I worked for @realDonaldTrump, I worked for @MarkMeadows & @Jim_Jordan & the @freedomcaucus. I marched in the 2010 Tea Party rallies. I campaigned w/ Trump & voted for him. But I need you to hear me: the Election was NOT stolen. We lost.”Three years later, Ms. Farah Griffin, 34, spends many of her nights at the CNN headquarters in the Hudson Yards district of Manhattan, bantering with Van Jones, David Axelrod and other liberal commentators.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Sunday Read: ‘How Tom Sandoval Became the Most Hated Man in America’

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      Adrienne Hurst and Sophia Lanman and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | SpotifyAt the end of a quiet, leafy street in the Valley in Los Angeles, the reality TV star Tom Sandoval has outfitted his home with landscaping lights that rotate in a spectrum of colors, mimicking the dance floor of a nightclub. The property is both his private residence and an occasional TV set for the Bravo reality show “Vanderpump Rules.” After a series of events that came to be known as “Scandoval,” paparazzi had been camped outside, but by the new year it was just one or two guys, and now they have mostly gone, too.“Scandoval” is the nickname for Sandoval’s affair with another cast member, which he had behind the backs of the show’s producers and his girlfriend of nine years. This wouldn’t be interesting or noteworthy except that in 2023, after being on the air for 10 seasons, “Vanderpump” was nominated for an Emmy for outstanding unstructured reality program, an honor that has never been bestowed on any of the network’s “Housewives” shows. It also became, by a key metric, the most-watched cable series in the advertiser-beloved demographic of 18- to 49-year-olds and brought in over 12.2 million viewers. This happened last spring, when Hollywood’s TV writers went on strike and cable TV was declared dead and our culture had already become so fractured that it was rare for anything — let alone an episode of television — to become a national event. And yet you probably heard about “Scandoval” even if you couldn’t care less about who these people are, exactly.As “Vanderpump” airs its 11th season, Tom Sandoval reflects on his new public persona.There are a lot of ways to listen to ‘The Daily.’ Here’s how.We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at thedaily@nytimes.com. Follow Michael Barbaro on X: @mikiebarb. And if you’re interested in advertising with The Daily, write to us at thedaily-ads@nytimes.com.Additional production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Isabella Anderson, Anna Diamond, Sarah Diamond, Elena Hecht, Emma Kehlbeck, Tanya Pérez and Krish Seenivasan. More

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      Richard Lewis and ‘The (Blank) From Hell’

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      The comedian, who died on Wednesday, said he coined the ubiquitous phrase. An episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” about a “nanny from hell” recounted his efforts to get credit for it.Go ahead and call Richard Lewis the comedian from hell. You’d be paying him a compliment.The stand-up comedian, who died on Tuesday, was known for his dark clothes, dark sense of humor and a recurring role as a, yes, even darker version himself on HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” He was a fixture in the comedy world for over half a century. But his most indelible legacy could be one simple phrase, spoken so often that its origin might never be questioned.“The (insert hated thing here) from hell.”It’s a phrase that seemingly has been around since time immemorial. The flight from hell, the day from hell, the lunch from hell. We’ve all been there, and we all know what it means, but where did it come from?According to Richard Lewis and the “Yale Book of Quotations,” it came from him.Posting on X, known then as Twitter, Mr. Lewis asked, “Where was my Nobel Peace prize?” and linked to a 2006 UPI article about his appearance in the “Yale Book of Quotations.”In a 2008 interview with Interview Magazine, Mr. Lewis said that “the truth of the matter is that whatever gift I have as a comedian, most of it was in the phrase ‘from hell.’”“I’m credited with popularizing that phrase because I felt victimized by everything,” he said.Mr. Lewis elaborated in a 2014 interview with the Nashville Scene.“I totally popularized the phrase in the late ’70s,” he said. “If you go on YouTube, you can see on Letterman, David would cut me off, and go, ‘You mean it was the bar mitzvah from hell?’ ‘That’s right!’ And I stopped saying it. I felt self-conscious. I was getting applause for it. I guess subconsciously I thought I was a victim of everything.”Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations” did not give him credit for the phrase, which became a story line in the episode “The Nanny,” during season three of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”The episode, which aired in 2002, weaves in Lewis’s attempts to get into Bartlett’s.“It was a real solid for Larry to do that for me,” he said. “That really immortalized it in some respects.” More

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      How to Manage Streaming Subscriptions As Service Prices Rise

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      Canceling is simple. The tough part is remembering to do it.The dream of streaming — watch what you want, whenever you want, for a sliver of the price of cable! — is coming to an end.With all the price increases for video streaming apps like Amazon Prime Video, Netflix and Hulu, the average household that subscribes to four streaming apps may now end up paying just as much as a cable subscriber, according to research by Deloitte.To name a few of the price jumps for streaming video (without ads) in just over the past year: Amazon’s ad-free Prime Video is now $12 a month, up from $9; Netflix raised the price of its premium plan for watching content on four devices to $23 a month, from $20; Disney increased the price of its Hulu service to $18 a month, from $15; and HBO’s Max now costs $16 a month, up from $15.If, like many people, you subscribe to all those services, you are paying about $70 a month, roughly the same as a modest cable TV package.More changes on the horizon will have people paying more for streaming. Disney announced this month that it would crack down on password sharing for Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+. Netflix told shareholders last month to expect more price increases.Streaming services still offer more flexibility and potential to save than a cable bundle. If that’s what drew you to streaming, the solution may seem obvious: You could be more judicious about managing your subscriptions — by canceling Netflix as soon as you’re done bingeing “Love Is Blind,” for instance.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Death of David Gail, ‘Port Charles’ Star, Was Drug Related, Publicist Says

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      The 58-year-old actor, who was also on “Beverly Hills, 90210,” died last month in a Tampa, Fla., hospital days after going into cardiac arrest.David Gail, the “Port Charles” and “Beverly Hills, 90210” actor who died in a Tampa, Fla. hospital on Jan. 16, had been intoxicated from a mix of drugs and alcohol that caused him to go into cardiac arrest, his publicist said on Tuesday.A number of drugs were found in Mr. Gail’s system, including amphetamines, cocaine, alcohol and fentanyl, according to a statement from the publicist, Linda Brown. The cardiac arrest led to a brain injury, which ultimately caused his death days later, she said.The Hillsborough County Medical Examiner did not immediately respond to a request for Mr. Gail’s autopsy report on Tuesday evening.The family previously said that Mr. Gail, 58, had died from complications from a sudden cardiac arrest.Paramedics who found Mr. Gail after he went into cardiac arrest performed CPR and used a defibrillator to try to revive him, but he ultimately wound up on life support at the hospital, according to Ms. Brown.Mr. Gail’s mother, Mary Painter, said in the statement that her son had for years been reliant on medication to manage pain from hand and wrist surgeries that kept him out of work for nearly a decade.“It breaks my heart to learn my son died this way,” Ms. Painter said, adding, “I can only assume that his former dependence played a part in self-medicating from uncontrolled sources.”Her son’s death, she said, highlighted victims of pharmaceutical addiction and the fentanyl epidemic.Mr. Gail had a bountiful television acting career in the mid- to late 1990s, including his most prominent role, as Dr. Joe Scanlon on the “General Hospital” spinoff show “Port Charles.” Mr. Gail played Dr. Scanlon in 216 episodes in one season, which ran in 1999 and 2000, according to IMDb.Years before that, Mr. Gail appeared on eight episodes of “Beverly Hills, 90210,” playing a minor part in an episode in the first season and returning to the show for the fourth season in a more established role.“When I came back it was such a shock, I was asking, ‘How could I possibly come back?’” Mr. Gail said about his return on the “Beverly Hills Show Podcast” in 2021.“But it worked,” he added.He also made dozens of appearances in a variety of television shows throughout the 1990s and several films in the 2000s. More

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      Netflix’s ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ Can’t Match the Original

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      Netflix’s latest attempt to capture the magic of a beloved animated series has some strong performances but falls well short of the original.Nickelodeon’s 2005 series “Avatar: The Last Airbender” was a sprawling odyssey that combined intricate world-building, meticulous references to Asian and Native cultures, lively humor and sharply plotted drama, all animated in a charming, anime-inspired style. It was an unqualified success, attracting millions of viewers and heaps of critical praise. The series introduced a world so rich, complete and full of its own histories and myths and traditions that it never needed a follow-up.But we know that’s not how things work.In 2010 there was the famously whitewashed live-action film “The Last Airbender,” which was, deservedly, met with a ferocious torrent of fan-fury. The sequel series, “Avatar: The Legend of Korra,” was more in touch with the original, but still unnecessary. And the same can be said for Netflix’s “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” the streamer’s latest big money, live-action adaptation that proves just how difficult it is to capture the magic of a beloved original.Like the original series, Netflix’s “Avatar: The Last Airbender” also takes place in a fictional Eastern world of four nations: Air Nomads, Water Tribe, Earth Kingdom and Fire Nation. In this world a select group of people from each nation are “benders,” able to manipulate their element. For a century the Fire Nation has waged a winning war against the others — during which time the only hope for peace, the avatar, the sole master of all four elements, disappeared. When two Water Tribe siblings, Katara (Kiawentiio) and Sokka (Ian Ousley), discover the prodigal avatar, a 12-year-old Air Nomad named Aang (Gordon Cormier), the three embark on a journey to complete Aang’s training so they can save the world from the threat of the Fire Nation.This “Avatar” attempts to condense several story lines, many of which are spread out across dozens of episodes in the robust sprawl of the original, into a tight eight episodes. Some of the economies the adaptation uses in fusing certain narratives — making new connections and throughlines among stories that were originally set in different locales, for example — is neatly done. And thanks to the involvement of the creators, Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, each subplot, even when moved or modified, remains faithful, if not exactly in detail then absolutely in spirit, to that of its animated counterpart. The show is also full of carefully placed Easter eggs from the original. Something as minor as a background character’s passing mention of the Avatar encountering some “canyon crawlers” in an episode will immediately clue fans in to the dangerous beasts Team Avatar faced in Episode 11 of the Nickelodeon version.But “Avatar” also tries so desperately to rework its stories that the pacing often suffers; adventures become a bit too convoluted, and there’s so much stacked action that it’s easy to lose track of the stakes and sense of urgency in any one plotline.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Founder of the New Christy Minstrels Randy Sparks Dies at 90

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      With a keen eye for young talent, he helped boost the careers of Steve Martin, John Denver, Kenny Rogers and many other performers.Randy Sparks, a creative impresario whose musical ensemble, the New Christy Minstrels, helped to jump-start the folk revival of the early 1960s and launched the careers of performers like John Denver, Steve Martin and Kenny Rogers, died on Sunday at an assisted-living facility in San Diego. He was 90.His son Kevin confirmed the death. Mr. Sparks had been living on his 168-acre ranch in Jenny Lind, Calif., northeast of San Francisco, until a few days before his death.Mr. Sparks in Los Angeles in 2006. He was well known as a singer, songwriter and actor in Southern California when he formed the New Christy Minstrels.Sherry Rayn Barnett/ Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesBefore Beatlemania and the British invasion revolutionized American popular music, folk music dominated the airwaves — and perhaps no group was more ubiquitous than the New Christy Minstrels. They were a nearly constant presence on television and sold an estimated two million albums in their first three years.Mr. Sparks was already well known as a singer, songwriter and actor in Southern California when he drew together nine other musicians in 1961 to form the group, which took its name from a popular stage show in the 1840s led by Edwin P. Christy. Mr. Sparks was quick to note that his group otherwise shared nothing with its namesake, a white group that had promoted the music of Stephen Foster in blackface.His group was a hit from the start; its debut album, “Presenting the New Christy Minstrels” (1962), won the Grammy Award for best performance by a chorus and stayed on the Billboard chart for two years.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More