James Poniewozik

1 week ago | nytimes.com | James Poniewozik

The creator of "Succession" skewers tech billionaires in a dark comedy that is intelligent but feels a bit artificial. Over four seasons of "Succession," the creator, Jesse Armstrong, told the story of people who control the world by selling ideas: the Roy family, who ran and fought over a media and entertainment empire. Toward its end, as their business was sold to a tech entrepreneur, "Succession" suggested that power was shifting, and that the future belonged to silicon hyperbillionaires.

1 week ago | flipboard.com | James Poniewozik

5 hours agoHe remembers the sweat trickling down his forehead, feeling the weight of his ambitions and the future he’d mapped out. Pablo Torre could see it: a spot in an esteemed law school, a summer clerkship for a Supreme Court justice, a corner office for a corporate law firm in midtown Manhattan. It wasn’t …

1 week ago | nytimes.com | James Poniewozik

A TV critic looks at George Clooney's play about CBS News standing up to political pressure, even as its current ownership might succumb to it. In the Broadway play "Good Night, and Good Luck," the CBS newscaster Edward R. Murrow (George Clooney) allows himself a moment of doubt, as his program "See It Now" embarks on a series of reports on the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s. "It occurs to me," he says, "that we might not get away with this one."It is a small but important line.

1 week ago | nytimes.com | James Poniewozik |Alissa Wilkinson

Times critics discuss the second season of Nathan Fielder's docu-comic series, which proposed a link between plane crashes and social discomfort and used cloned dogs, giant puppets and more to explore it. Times critics discuss the second season of Nathan Fielder's docu-comic series, which proposed a link between plane crashes and social discomfort and used cloned dogs, giant puppets and more to explore it. Credit...

2 weeks ago | nytimes.com | James Poniewozik

This fascinating though incomplete documentary tells Paul Reubens's story despite the subject's doubts about the project. The title of "Pee-wee as Himself," the two-part documentary that airs Friday on HBO, is a bit of a ruse, or maybe a riddle. Pee-wee Herman, the manic, bow-tied man-child, was the greatest creation of Paul Reubens, who died in 2023. But Reubens was someone else, a self whose nature was obscured, sometimes by the overshadowing fame of his alter ego, sometimes by his own choice.