The most 2026 element of the latest screen adaptation of 1847’s hottest novel, “Wuthering Heights,” is the scene in which Heathcliff repeatedly asks the young lady he’s undressing, “Do you want me to stop?” even as she writhes with lust, indicating an affirmative response is unlikely.

Previously understood as a notorious brute even by 19th-century standards, Heathcliff now exhibits signs of having earned perfect grades in today’s campus training modules.

There’s also a reference to septicemia, which is writer-director Emerald Fennell’s perhaps too-technical stab at explaining the nonspecific Victorian disease that afflicts one character.

Mostly, however, Ms. Fennell has done an admirable job of not modernising a dark and moody romance. If most of today’s filmmakers crave hearing, “This is not your mother’s (fill in the blank)” when adapting classic material, this pretty much is your mother’s “Wuthering Heights,” or at least one she will recognise.

Catherine Earnshaw, played with great soapy gusto by Margot Robbie, is still the same judgment-impaired social-climbing drama queen as ever, and Ms. Fennell frequently associates her with a rich, decadent red—the colour of the bordello—to suggest that she has unwisely traded her body for riches.

Ms. Fennell, who won an Oscar for writing the feminist parable “Promising Young Woman,” doesn’t bother suggesting that Catherine is a victim of society’s impossible expectations for women, which allows her to focus on the core story without intrusive mutters of disapproval for 19th-century mores.

The plot is a template for every Harlequin romance about a woman caught between a sexy beast and a languid but wealthy wimp.

Catherine, who lives with her frequently drunken father (Martin Clunes) on a struggling Yorkshire estate called Wuthering Heights, grows up with a wild, apparently orphaned boy adopted by her father after being found hapless in the street.

The boy at first doesn’t even talk, and seems to have no name, so Catherine calls him Heathcliff. As an adult, he is played by Jacob Elordi , an excellent match for Ms. Robbie, both in comeliness and star power.

The pair grow up best friends and even sleep in the same bed. The desperate attraction between them is evident to both, but Catherine has her sights set on a higher-status mate than this mere stable boy.

After much figurative and literal peering over the walls of the posh neighbouring estate, Thrushcross Grange, she twists an ankle and becomes a six-week houseguest of the gentleman who owns it, the wealthy Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif). He lives with his ward, Isabella (Alison Oliver). Heathcliff, in agony, moves away without notice while Catherine marries Edgar.

Ms. Fennell has greatly streamlined the complicated plot of Emily Brontë’s novel, eliminating the framing device, the supernatural element, several peripheral figures and a second generation of characters.

Other adaptations have made similar excisions, and yet the latest version is luxuriantly long, fully half an hour longer than the much-loved 1939 film by William Wyler that starred Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier and David Niven.

Ms. Fennell is a millennial who might have been expected to make the material slick, hip or at least fast; she has done none of that.

The story is a slow burn, as it should be, an extended sonata of moaning winds, crackling storms, smouldering glances and heaving bosoms. When you’ve got two actors as luminous as Ms. Robbie and Mr. Elordi, you don’t need them to say clever things, and they don’t.

Having simplified matters, Ms. Fennell sloughs off the psychological depth of the novel and instead lavishes attention on the heavy breathing and the decor, exhibiting much interest in the ornate mansion in which the Linton family lives (one room is set aside for ribbons only) and the costumes and accessories with which Ms. Robbie is gloriously draped.

Catherine essentially becomes a character in a Sofia Coppola movie who grows increasingly trapped and anguished in proportion to her cosseting. A slate of songs by Charli XCX captures Catherine’s tragic self-absorption without seeming jarringly modern.

The movie is very much aimed at female viewers, and Heathcliff (whose bare-chested form Ms. Fennell’s camera adoringly takes in) is less robustly drawn than in some previous iterations, driven mainly by carnal lust rather than a more all-encompassing rage.

Olivier’s demonic anger at the world came through clearly, whereas Mr. Elordi’s Heathcliff seems as though he’d be content to simply peel away Catherine from Edgar. And though Nelly (Hong Chau), Catherine’s maid and confidante, plays an essential role in developments, her character remains a bit frustratingly hazy.

Still, in the wake of adaptations such as 2012’s “Anna Karenina,” with Keira Knightley , and 2013’s “The Great Gatsby,” with Leonardo DiCaprio, that were all sizzle and flash, “Wuthering Heights” is a worthy throwback.

Deeply felt longing is its own kind of sizzle.

The elite athlete is capable of tremendous discipline. At the moment, though, he’s humping the competition.

Sonny, the star Portuguese water dog, went nosing around for a girlfriend when he was supposed to be attending to press obligations in the Long Island living room of his professional dog-show handler, Kimberly Calvacca.

But there is much work to be done: In just a few days, Calvacca will load the freshly fluffed Sonny and five other crème-de-la-crème canines into a van and head to Manhattan to compete at the country’s biggest dog-sporting event: the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.

The pedigreed dogs are the epitome of their breeds, owned by enthusiasts who pay Calvacca $150 per show day for her more than 100 dog shows each year.

The circuit reaches divine heights Tuesday in Madison Square Garden with Westminster’s top award of best in show, a status symbol that has eluded Calvacca, a third-generation dog handler in her 50s who started showing dogs in high school.

Competing alongside Sonny are Valentina, a min pin and the only contender Calvacca partly owns; Tango, a pug; Estee, a canaan; Shindig, a vizsla; and Nala, a rambunctious toller who reacted to getting kicked out of this photo shoot by peeing on the floor.

When it’s showtime, the dogs perform. “It’s a lot of time, a lot of effort and making sure that this dog is raised right so it has the temperament to say, ‘Pick me!’” Calvacca says.

She trains them to stand stock-still when a judge inspects them nose to tail, or trot in a circle without getting distracted by the crowd.

At times, she recreates show conditions at home so her pageant queens and kings won’t be spooked by whatever the competition throws at them.

Most preshow work happens in her “dog room,” a basement utility space where pet scrubs and tinctures abound like makeup at Sephora.

She says the room is filled with the good juju of champions her grandfather groomed there when this was his house.

On her boombox, when Sade’s “Smooth Operator” switches to Britney Spears’s “Toxic,” the frantic synth reflects the chaos.

First, she must wash the dogs one by one in an elevated bathtub. Then she hoists each dog onto a work table, attaching the animal loosely to a loop she cheerfully calls a noose.

She trims their toenails with a repurposed woodworking tool, styles their fur with a $600 dog blow dryer and clips their coats with $1,000 scissors. She cleans their teeth with an electric toothbrush, a dental tool for plaque and a breath-freshener spray.

Each dog spends 15 to 30 minutes daily on treadmills, one of which costs $3,500 and is specifically for dogs.

Then come meals from 40-pound bags of dog food—she’s sponsored by Purina—and various biscuits and canned meats. In the ring, she gives them human treats such as salmon, steak and meatballs.

On a recent day, she heaved a 10-pound bag of frozen chicken from Costco onto her kitchen counter, then boiled breasts with onion powder and garlic powder.

She calls it her “winning chicken,” and during shows she’ll sometimes store a chunk of it between her teeth for quick access.

Calvacca doesn’t play favorites, she says, but she snuggles Valentina and calls Sonny Mister Handsome.

He is the exuberant frat boy, the alpha of the group. He licks, he yodels, he sleeps on a purple pillow. He plays it up in the ring. “Sonny always thinks he wins,” Calvacca says.

After roughly 85 years of television in American homes, viewers have collectively shared historical triumphs and unthinkable tragedies, from Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk in 1969 to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.

But lesser-known events in the world of television have also reshaped America’s cultural landscape in lasting ways.

From redefining suppertime to digitising games to symbolising sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, here are six examples of TV’s impact on the American psyche.

1950: Birth of the couch potato

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, television sets marched into American living rooms.

But like the venerable radios they replaced, TVs were incredibly inconvenient. Many viewers had to actually stand up and walk across the room just to change the channel.

In 1950, Zenith Radio addressed this gross shortcoming with its release of a remote control, albeit one with a long cord and only two buttons—one to change channels and the other to power the TV on and off. Zenith aptly dubbed its remote Lazy Bones.

Taking lazy to the next level, Swanson & Sons in 1953 introduced TV dinners, convenient bake-and-eat frozen meals in aluminum trays.

Clearly, suppertime had moved to the sofa, because in 1954, the first full year of production, Swanson sold 10 million TV dinners. We were becoming a nation of “couch potatoes.”

Of course, nobody knew it at the time because the term couch potato didn’t exist yet.

In 1976, a man named Tom Iacino called his friend’s house and flippantly asked the person who answered the phone if he could speak to “the couch potato.”

Another friend, cartoonist Robert Armstrong, later heard about the mocking moniker and went on to trademark it (with Iacino’s permission).

Armstrong co-wrote “The Official Couch Potato Handbook: A Guide to Prolonged Television Viewing,” and the term couch potato entered the nation’s vocabulary.

Sept. 9, 1950: Forced laughter

The name Hank McCune may be lost to history, but his short-lived television sitcom will forever be remembered for its chuckles, chortles, giggles and guffaws. All of it canned.

Woven throughout the show’s jokes and sight gags was a laugh track—a first in American television—to “sweeten” the material and cue viewers at home when something was funny.

Countless other shows went on to use the technique, with Charlie Douglass soon becoming the undisputed “master of laughter.”

Douglass, formerly a technical director for various live shows, incorporated prerecorded laughter into shows that were filmed both with and without studio audiences.

To do this, Douglass built what he called the “Laff Box” and operated it somewhat like an organ. The upper keys were pressed to combine different types of laughter, from titters to belly laughs, and the foot pedals controlled the timing and duration of the laughter.

TV Guide published a two-part series on the Laff Box in 1966 in which industry executives explained why they went for the easy laffs: “Live audiences in from the street are tense and nervous and you don’t get their true reactions,” explained producer Don McGuire.

Arthur Julian, a writer on “F Troop,” noted that “real audiences sound phonier than the laugh track. Sometimes they freeze up and act unnatural.”

Today, television shows have mostly done away with laugh tracks. But Douglass still gets the last laugh—even though he died in 2003.

A recent study confirmed what previous research has already determined: Laugh tracks get people to laugh. In 2021, researchers concluded that a laugh track “may socially facilitate viewers’ responses and succeed in increasing the perceived humor and enjoyability of a television comedic sitcom.”

1959: Fired for being Black

At his first job in TV in 1959, Max Robinson was a voice without a face. As he delivered the latest headlines on WTOV in Portsmouth, Va., viewers at home merely saw a slide that read “News” on their TV screens.

Then one day before his broadcast, Robinson instructed the cameraman to remove the slide.

“I thought it would be good for all my folks and friends to see me rather than this dumb ‘News’ sign up there. Vanity got the better of me,” Robinson told the Washington Post in 1988.

When the slide was removed, viewers at home discovered that Robinson was Black.

The next day, the owner called him and apologetically fired him, Robinson told the Post. “He’d gotten these calls from some irate whites who’d found out that one of ‘those people’ was working there,” Robinson said.

Nonetheless, even though he lost his job, Robinson made history as the first African-American nightly news television anchor.

After his WTOV stint, Robinson went on to report the news and sit in the anchor’s chair at various stations until his big break came on July 10, 1978. ABC-TV premiered “World News Tonight” with three anchors: Frank Reynolds, Peter Jennings and Max Robinson.

Despite his success, Robinson continued to decry what he saw as racial inequities in both the media and in media coverage.

In a 1981 address at Smith College, he called the news media “a crooked mirror” through which “white America views itself,” the New York Times reported. “Only by talking about racism, by taking a professional risk, will I take myself out of the mean, racist trap all Black Americans find themselves in.”

Robinson was one of the founders of the National Association of Black Journalists and advocated for the cause until his death in 1988.

Oct. 18, 1979: A flood of BUDs

To encourage the expansion of satellite TV, the FCC voted to drop its costly and complicated licensing requirement for owning a satellite dish.

Now, cable and premium channels could more readily install giant satellite dishes to transmit and receive signals.

But the rule change also meant that Joe Schmo could install a behemoth satellite dish in his backyard and scoop up signals from cable and premium channels—all without having to pay monthly subscription fees.

Even so, Joe Schmo soon learned that saving money came at a price: All the neighbours hated him.

Some early models of the satellite dishes measured 16 feet in diameter, and hundreds of thousands of them sprouted up across the country. Technically, they were referred to as C-band satellite dishes after the range of wireless frequencies they received.

But they were better known throughout neighbourhoods as BUDs, or Big Ugly Dishes.

BUDs could capture premium programming at no cost because initially the analog-TV signals weren’t encrypted by broadcasters.

Still, even if homeowners got free programming, the upfront costs of buying and installing a satellite dish ran into hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.

The backyard BUDs shot up just as cable and satellite programming was just getting off the ground. Home Box Office was a pioneer on both fronts.

In 1972 it was the first pay-cable network, and in 1975, it became the first TV network to transmit programming via satellite.

Ted Turner in 1976 turned WTCG, a small, independent TV station into a national cable network and later rebranded it WTBS, for Turner Broadcasting System.

Other networks that were early to the cable game include the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN) in 1979, and Music Television—MTV—in 1981.

In 1986, broadcasters began scrambling their signals in hopes of nipping their losses in the BUDs.

Some companies, including HBO, said homeowners could continue to use their backyard dishes, but in order for them to work, they would have to also buy a $395 descrambler and pay monthly subscription fee.

Needless to say, as more channels encrypted their signals, BUD sales withered.

1972: A whole new game in town

In September 1972, the world’s first home video game console made its debut, giving the words “What’s on TV?” a literal new meaning.

Named the Magnavox Odyssey, the console setup included translucent overlays that players stuck on the TV screen to create colourful game boards, such as table tennis, roulette and haunted house.

The underlying gaming technology itself was crude by today’s standards: Three white dots and a vertical line on a black background. Two of the dots were manipulated by players using hand-held controllers, the third by the system itself.

The console had dials that adjusted the placement of the vertical line and the speed of one of the dots.

With six game cartridges and plastic overlays, the Odyssey setup offered 12 different games when it first retailed for $100—or about $770 in today’s dollars.

While rudimentary, the Odyssey broke a barrier in the world of television. It changed the medium from a passive activity with a scripted outcome into an interactive pursuit controlled by users at home.

Today, the U.S. ranks No. 1 in the world videogame market, with revenue projected to exceed $140 billion in 2025, according to Statista Market Insights.

That figure includes the creation, publishing, distribution and monetization of PC, mobile and online games, as well as spending on related hardware and accessories. China holds the No. 2 spot, with a projected $137.8 billion in revenue in 2025.

1970s: Rock stars vs. TV sets

In the late 1960s, a peculiar new synergy emerged between rock ’n’ roll music and television: Put a rock star in a hotel room with a TV, and the TV wouldn’t come out alive.

Many in the music world trace the genesis of this phenomenon to Keith Moon, who was legendary both as a drummer for the Who and for trashing hotel rooms, including TVs.

A 1972 film recording documents Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones and saxophonist Bobby Keys throwing a TV off the 10th-floor balcony of Continental Hyatt House Los Angeles.

In the recording, one of them is kindly heard saying, “Let’s make sure there ain’t nobody down there,” before dropping the TV.

Not to be outdone, members of Led Zeppelin threw televisions from the windows of Seattle’s Edgewater Hotel into the waters of Elliot Bay.

The Brits weren’t the only bad boys. While visiting Asheville, N.C., for a show in July 1975, Elvis Presley reportedly shot to death the TV set in his motel room because the vertical hold setting wasn’t working properly, according to local historian Jon Elliston.

It didn’t take long for trashing hotel property to become a hallmark of the rock ’n’ roll mythology, with television sets seemingly taking the brunt of the abuse.

Still, destroying them was an expensive thrill, since the band was expected to reimburse hotels for the ravaged TVs and other damage to the rooms when checking out.

It could also be dangerous. After a night of heavy drinking, Black Sabbath’s former frontman Ozzy Osbourne and guitarist Zakk Wylde hurled a TV out of a sixth-floor window at the Four Seasons in Prague

Wylde, who recalled the incident in a 2024 interview, said it happened after Osbourne mentioned that he had never done it before.

Describing the TV drop in a 2019 interview, which has been edited for TV, Osbourne said, “I ripped the window open, picked it up and threw it out of the BLEEP window. It landed on the floor and BLEEP exploded. It went like a bomb. Little did I know that there was a guy smoking a cigarette, and I shudder to think if that had hit him on the head. I would have killed him stone BLEEP dead.”

Osbourne, who famously bit the head off a bat that was tossed onto the stage at a concert in Iowa (he said later he thought it was fake), died in July of 2025 of a heart attack at age 76.

On the opposite end of the safety scale: Guitarist Kelley Deal of the Breeders and Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic.

On tour in the early 1990s, the two musicians decided to toss a TV out of a hotel window, Deal told the Guardian.

Novoselic “called down to the front desk, got permission, paid for the TV and asked security to make sure nobody was below. This is the kind of sweet band they were. Then we shoved it through the window. It was fun, but the funniest bit was all the planning and anticipation.”

Today, rock ’n’ roll is past its heyday, and many icons of the genre are fading as well. But legends still have a soft spot for the old days.

Asked about artificial intelligence creeping into music, rocker Joe Walsh dismissed concerns in a 2023 video clip, saying: AI “can’t destroy a hotel room.

It can’t throw a TV off the fifth floor into the pool and get it right in the middle. When AI knows how to destroy a hotel room, then I’ll pay attention to it.”

David Beckham was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday with Bank of America chief executive Brian Moynihan to promote their new partnership. But all anyone wanted to talk about was his son.

After the obligatory questions about business and the World Cup, a host on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” lobbed Beckham an out-of-left-field query about how young people can preserve their mental health in the age of social media.

“Children are allowed to make mistakes,” Beckham, 50, said. “That’s how they learn. So, that’s what I try to teach my kids, but you have to sometimes let them make those mistakes as well.”

Just a day earlier, his 26-year-old son Brooklyn Beckham had posted a series of accusations about his soccer-famous father and pop-star-turned-fashion-designer mother, Victoria Beckham.

He said that his parents had controlled him for years, lied about him to the press and sought to damage his relationship with his wife, Nicola Peltz Beckham. Their goal, he said, was to affect the image of a “perfect family.”

“My family values public promotion and endorsements above all else,” he wrote on Instagram. “Brand Beckham comes first.”

That brand has been burnished over decades of professional triumphs, tabloid scandals and slick dealmaking.

Recently, both David and Victoria Beckham put their legacies on-screen in docuseries that cast them as hardworking entrepreneurs and devoted parents. Their image appeared stronger than ever. Now their firstborn child is throwing stones.

Representatives for David Beckham, Victoria Beckham and Brooklyn Beckham did not respond to requests for comment. A representative for Nicola Peltz Beckham declined to comment.

In the U.K., the Beckhams are as close as you can get to royalty without sharing Windsor DNA. David is perhaps the most famous English player in soccer history, while Victoria parlayed her Spice Girls fame into a career as a respected fashion designer.

Their partnership was forged in the cauldron of 1990s celebrity gossip, with their every move—in their careers, their bumpy personal lives and their adventurous senses of personal style—subject to tabloid scrutiny.

“They were Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce before Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce,” said Elaine Lui, founder of the website Lainey Gossip.

Over time, the couple became savvy managers of their own brand, a sprawling modern empire including a professional soccer team, fashion and beauty lines, investment deals and commercial partnerships.

In recent years they each released a Netflix docuseries—“Beckham” in 2023, “Victoria Beckham” in 2025—featuring scenes from their private family life. (Brooklyn and Nicola appeared in David’s series, but not Victoria’s.)

“The way they’ve performed their celebrity has been togetherness,” Lui said: Appearing and engaging with the world as a happily married couple, in both relative calm and amid scandal. And as their family grew, their four children became smiling ambassadors for Brand Beckham, too.

Until Monday night. In a series of Instagram Story posts, Brooklyn accused his parents of “trying endlessly to ruin” his marriage to Nicola, an actress and model, and the daughter of billionaire investor Nelson Peltz . Brooklyn declared, “I do not want to reconcile with my family.”

Where Victoria and David seemed to see press scrutiny as part of the job, Brooklyn and Nicola are operating in a manner more typical of their own generation. Brooklyn’s posts call to mind the “no contact” boundaries some children have enforced with their parents in recent years to much pop-psych chatter.

Andrew Friedman, managing director of crisis communications at Orchestra, said he’d advised many clients through family drama. “Going public,” he said, should be a “last resort.”

He’s also warned clients that using social media to air grievances opens a can of worms. “Nuance is not welcome in social-media feeding frenzies,” Friedman said. “Sensational and unusual details will overshadow the central issue.”

Brooklyn, the eldest of the Beckhams’ four children, has built a following in his parents’ image, though without the benefit (or burden) of a steady career.

He’s worked as a model, photographer, cooking-show host and most recently founded a hot-sauce brand. Brooklyn and Nicola went public with their relationship in 2020 and married in a lavish 2022 ceremony at her family estate in Palm Beach, Fla.

Rumors of a family feud flared almost immediately after the wedding, including whispers about the fact that Nicola didn’t wear a dress made by her fashion-designer mother-in-law.

Brooklyn on Monday recounted further grievances related to a mother-son dance and the seating chart. In the months and years that followed, celebrity journalists and fans closely tracked both generations of the family, looking for cracks in the relationship.

But official dispatches from Beckham World suggested that things were just fine. In a scene from the final episode of David’s Netflix series, the Beckham family, including Brooklyn and Nicola, joke around on a visit to their country home. It’s a picture of familial bliss.

“We’ve tried to give our children the most normal upbringing as possible. But you’ve got a dad that was England captain and a mom that was Posh Spice,” David says in voice-over.

“And they could be little s—s. And they’re not. And that’s why I say I’m so proud of my children, and I’m so in awe of my children, the way they’ve turned out.”