The winds are shifting west. Season 4 of this excellent series set in the 1970s and based on Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn & Chee novels finds Navajo Tribal cops Joe Leaphorn, Jim Chee, and Bernadette Manuelito investigating the disappearance of a Navajo girl from the reservation. When their search reveals that she’s being pursued by a killer working for a crime boss, the trio ventures into unfamiliar turf—Los Angeles—in a rescue bid. Bosch’s Titus Welliver and Run Lola Run’s Franka Potente join Zahn McClarnon, Kiowa Gordon, and Jessica Matten in this season’s cast. Sunday, Feb. 15, at 9 p.m., AMC and AMC+

by Jason Zengerle

If you wonder how the GOP transformed from free-market champs to MAGA in less than 30 years, “you could do worse than using the arc of Tucker Carlson’s career as your lens,” said Jennifer Burns in The New York Times. “And if you’re looking for insight into the right-wing pundit’s transformations, you’ll definitely want to read Jason Zengerle’s breezy, entertaining, and ultimately disquieting” Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind. The veteran political reporter, currently a New Yorker staff writer, first met his subject when Carlson was a talented Weekly Standard writer and bow-tied rising young star of the center right. While the course that the 56-year-old Carlson’s career has taken since then should be disturbing to anyone who values responsible journalism, his story is “not so much a Greek tragedy as a particularly American one.” 

Zengerle’s book, published by a new imprint created by three former Obama White House staffers, is “the first to reckon critically with arguably the most dangerous media personality of the Trump age,” said J. Oliver Conroy in The Guardian. Carlson, in his current incarnation as the host of a popular independent podcast, has moved even further to the right than he had when his 2016–23 Fox News program became cable news’s most watched show. But he remains in regular communication with President Trump and is considered a potential future presidential candidate himself. Zengerle’s “smart, well-written” book tracks Carlson’s career closely, reminding us of the pundit’s flameouts at CNN, PBS, and MSNBC as well as his 2010 bid, with the launch of The Daily Caller, to create a news site he believed might become the Right’s answer to The New York Times. Hated by All the Right People leaves some important questions unanswered, including whether Carlson truly believes some of the tinfoil-hat views he currently espouses. But Zengerle leaves no doubt about how he judges Carlson’s ethics, writing that his subject has “descended into madness.” 

Was there “a definitive moment” when yesterday’s Carlson became the one we know today? asked Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post. Zengerle’s account suggests the shift happened in steps, as TV and then the internet began rewarding extreme positions and Carlson repeatedly chose that path to fame and power. “Once Carlson became a slave to virality, his extremism was all but assured.” Today, the son of a Ronald Reagan appointee chats amiably on his show with Holocaust deniers, slurs Volodymyr Zelensky, and praises Vladimir Putin. It hardly matters what Carlson actually believes, because millions of listeners, including Trump, take cues from him. Thanks to his long pursuit of influence, “he has become disastrously entertaining.”

The madcap actress who sparkled on SCTV and Schitt’s Creek

Catherine O’Hara portrayed ridiculous eccentrics with equal parts hilarity and humanity. Beginning her five-decade career as a member of Canada’s Second City troupe, which launched fellow stars like John Candy, Martin Short, and frequent collaborator Eugene Levy, she earned a reputation as a scene stealer who found the emotional heart of zany characters. These included Delia Deetz, a pretentious sculptor and malevolent stepmother in the film Beetlejuice (1988), and Moira Rose, a self-absorbed and bankrupt soap star who moves with her family to small-town Ontario in TV’s Schitt’s Creek (2015–20), which earned O’Hara her second Emmy. She was a highlight in a string of Christopher Guest mockumentaries, with roles including a travel agent cast in a small-town musical in Waiting for Guffman (1996) and an aging actress pining for an Oscar in For Your Consideration (2006). O’Hara found her highest-profile role in Home Alone (1990), as a harried suburban mom who accidentally abandons her 8-year-old son. It was a relatively straight role for O’Hara, who reveled in characters lost in their own vanity and delusions. “I love playing people who have no real sense of the impression they’re making on anyone else,” she said. “The more I say it, the more I realize that’s all of us.” 

Born in Toronto, Catherine Anne O’Hara was the sixth of seven kids in an Irish immigrant family that “prized storytelling and theatricality,” said The Telegraph (U.K.). Her jokester father worked for a railway; her realtor mother was a gifted mimic whose impressions of clients enlivened family dinners. O’Hara studied theater at Toronto’s Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute. After graduating she waitressed at the Second City revue theater, where she was inspired by her brother’s girlfriend Gilda Radner; eventually, she became Radner’s understudy. When Radner left to join the founding cast of Saturday Night Live, O’Hara replaced her, and the troupe became her “second university.” In 1976, it spawned Second City Television, the cult sketch series that “established her as a master of absurdist comedy and outsize characters,” said The Washington Post. She impersonated Katharine Hepburn and Brooke Shields, and played recurring characters including the “bespangled, melodramatic singer” Lola Heatherton and Sister Mary Innocent, a sadistic nun. 

After SCTV’s run ended in 1984, O’Hara began landing small film parts, said The Times (U.K.). She made a “scene-stealing appearance” as an ice cream vendor in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) and played a dishy journalist in Mike Nichols’ Heartburn (1986). But it was Tim Burton who “elevated her to the A-list” with the horror-comedy Beetlejuice, which showcased her bold comic energy. That led to her memorable turn as the frantic mom in Home Alone, which director Chris Columbus credited with giving the film its “emotional depth.” Some of O’Hara’s best work was done alongside Levy, who matched her “in oddball charm,” said The New York Times. The two “functioned as a de facto comedy team” in movies including numerous Guest mockumentaries. They were a married couple in Best in Show (2000), a dog-show send-up in which O’Hara played Cookie Fleck, a bottle-blond with an amorous past, and a former ’60s folk duo who reunite in A Mighty Wind (2003). 

Schitt’s Creek, created by Levy and his son Dan, proved a “career-capping triumph” for O’Hara, said the Associated Press. Her over-the-top portrayal of Moira Rose, a verbose narcissist with a unique, affected accent and extensive wig collection, was “the perfect personification of her comic talents” and brought her a new generation of fans. (“What have I told you about putting your body on the internet?” she tells her daughter in one scene. “Never without proper lighting.”) Her final roles were as a widowed therapist on HBO’s postapocalyptic drama The Last of Us and an ousted studio head in the Hollywood satire The Studio. A long-married mother of two and self-described “good Catholic girl at heart,” she called her humor an essential “survival” tool. “It’s one of God’s greatest gifts, because life is full of the dark and the light,” she said. “You gotta look for the light.”