If you’re feeling a little peckish as you open this week’s letter from the editor, our latest cover subject, “Hacks” star Hannah Einbinder, has a recommendation for you: a breakfast burrito from Historic Filipinotown’s Doubting Thomas, home of her favorite in the city.
And while you wait for those eggs to cook up, let’s unwrap the foil on our Aug. 14 issue and chomp down on some highlights.
Cover story: Hannah Einbinder’s next act
(Bexx Francois / For The Times)
No, “Hacks” is not over. As of this writing, Season 5 is not even officially its last. But with a stand-up comedy special under her belt, Jane Schoenbrun’s “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” in the can and another hush-hush project already underway, it’s clear that the “Hacks” star isn’t planning to rest on the laurels of four Emmy nominations.
As former competitive cheerleader Einbinder tells Margy Rochlin in this week’s cover story, the prospect of leaving the “Hacks” nest is “emotional,” but the novelty of new challenges scratches its own itch: “I’m an adrenaline seeker,” she says. “I just have always liked the feeling of flying.”
Accompanying the story online is the debut of our new short-form series “In the First Place,” in which we ask cover subjects about life and career “firsts” — including, in Einbinder’s case, her first stop at the Americana, the first comedy album she listened to on repeat and more.
Inside the year’s most ambitious TV episode
(Matthew Lewis / Netflix)
As a result, perhaps, of my particular lens — former high-school teacher here — it wasn’t the destabilizing premiere, the wrenching finale, or Owen Cooper and Erin Doherty’s riveting two-hander that left me most awestruck when I watched Netflix’s “Adolescence” this spring.
It was only after the second episode, which weaves a murder investigation into a chaotic school day, that I found myself muttering under my breath, “I need a diagram of how they did that.”
Thanks to Emmy-nominated director of photography Matthew Lewis for obliging my curiosity (see above), and for speaking to contributor Bill Desowitz for his story about the extraordinary choreography required to piece a fire drill, a police chase and a drone shot into a single continuous shot, all with 350 young extras to corral.
For logistical stress, that puts even chaperoning prom to shame. And trust me, I’d know!
A real ‘Somebody’
(The Tyler Twins / For The Times)
“Somebody Somewhere’s” Jeff Hiller is having the time of his life — and not just in the photo above, snapped last month in the courtyard of his Manhattan apartment building.
As Tyler Coates writes in his profile of the first-time Emmy nominee, the surprise and delight of the announcement allows Hiller to keep basking in gratitude for the role of lovable queer Kansan Joel even though the series ended its three-season run last fall: “If I could play a role like that for six weeks once a year, for the rest of my life? I’d be more than fulfilled.”
It also allows him entree to HBO’s vaunted after-party, though my fingers are crossed that “Somebody Somewhere” doesn’t inspire any trays of “St. Louis sushi.”