The already highly decorated “Sinners” was among the top winners at the 78th Writers Guild Awards on Sunday in New York City.

The horror film, directed and written by Ryan Coogler, won the award for original screenplay, and its biggest competitor for the best picture Oscar, Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” clinched the win for adapted screenplay. “Sinners” star Miles Caton accepted the award for the former, and “One Battle” cast member Shayna McHayle for the latter.

In the TV realm, “The Pitt” made a splash with awards for drama series, new series and episodic drama.

As for lifetime achievement honors, Robert Smigel presented Stephen Colbert with the Walter Bernstein Award for critiquing the power elite on his late-night show, which will air its final episode in May. Terry George received the Ian McLellan Hunter Award for Career Achievement from Don Cheadle, and Diana Son earned the Richard B. Jablow Award for Devoted Service to the Guild from last year’s recipient, Kathy McGee.

Most years, the Writers Guild holds simultaneous ceremonies in New York and Los Angeles. But the East Coast edition became a solo affair after WGA West canceled its ceremony amid an ongoing strike by its own staff union, who claimed guild management had “surveilled workers for union activity, terminated union supporters, and engaged in bad faith surface bargaining.”

The L.A. ceremony was set to honor James Cameron with the Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement, Don Reo with the Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for Television Writing Achievement and Mstyslav Chernov with the Paul Selvin Award for “2,000 Meters to Andriivka,” which won the award for documentary screenplay Sunday evening.

While WGA West’s board of directors said the ceremony was postponed to give members “an uncomplicated celebration of their achievements,” the Writers Guild Staff Union characterized the cancellation as an attempt to sow division between management and unionized staff, which is ill-timed given upcoming contraction negotiations between the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents Hollywood studios and streamers. In 2023, the WGA went on its longest-ever strike, lasting 148 days.

Comedian and Emmy-nominated producer Roy Wood Jr., who this year hosted the WGA’s East Coast ceremony for the third time, during his opening monologue offered (in jest) his predictions for the negotiations, which begin later this month.

“First, I predict somebody’s gonna lose their s—,” the host said. “Cooler heads are gonna prevail, and then somebody else is gonna lose their s—.”

Here is the full list of Writers Guild Award winners:

Original screenplay: “Sinners,” written by Ryan Coogler; Warner Bro. Pictures

Adapted screenplay: “One Battle After Another,” screenplay by Paul Thomas Anderson, screen story by Paul Thomas Anderson, inspired by the novel “Vineland” by Thomas Pynchon; Warner Bros. Pictures

Documentary screenplay: “2,000 Meters to Andriivka,” written by Mstyslav Chernov; Frontline Features

Drama series: “The Pitt,” written by Cynthia Adarkwa, Simran Baidwan, Valerie Chu, R. Scott Gemmill, Elyssa Gershman, Joe Sachs, Noah Wyle; HBO Max

Comedy series: “The Studio,” written by Evan Goldberg, Alex Gregory, Peter Huyck, Frida Perez, Seth Rogen; Apple TV

New series: “The Pitt,” written by Cynthia Adarkwa, Simran Baidwan, Valerie Chu, R. Scott Gemmill, Elyssa Gershman, Joe Sachs, Noah Wyle; HBO Max

Limited series: “Dying for Sex,” written by Sheila Callaghan, Harris Danow, Madeleine George, Elizabeth Meriwether, Amelia Roper, Kim Rosenstock, Sasha Stewart, Sabrina Wu, Keisha Zollar; FX/Hulu

TV & streaming motion pictures: “Deep Cover,” written by Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow; Prime Video

Animation: “Shira Can’t Cook” (“Long Story Short”), written by Mehar Sethi; Netflix

Episodic drama: “7:00 A.M.” (“The Pitt”), written by R. Scott Gemmill; HBO Max

Episodic comedy: “Prelude” (“The Righteous Gemstones”), written by John Carcieri, Jeff Fradley, Danny R. McBride; HBO Max

Comedy/variety series – talk or sketch: “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” senior writers: Daniel O’Brien, Owen Parsons, Charlie Redd, Joanna Rothkopf, Seena Vali; writers: Johnathan Appel, Ali Barthwell, Tim Carvell, Liz Hynes, Ryan Ken, Sofía Manfredi, John Oliver, Taylor Kay Phillips, Chrissy Shackelford; HBO Max

Comedy/variety specials: “Marc Maron: Panicked,” written by Marc Maron; HBO Max

Quiz and audience participation: “Celebrity Jeopardy!”, head writer: Bobby Patton; writers: Kyle Beakley, Michael Davies, Terence Gray, Amy Ozols, Tim Siedell, David Levinson-Wilk; ABC

Daytime drama: “The Young and the Restless,” associate head writers: Jeff Beldner, Marla Kanelos, Dave Ryan; writers: Susan Banks, Amanda L. Beall, Marin Gazzaniga, Rebecca McCarty, Madeleine Phillips; CBS/Paramount+

Children’s episodic, long form and specials: “When We Lose Someone” (“Tab Time”), written by Sean Presant; YouTube

Short form streaming: “The Rabbit Hole with Jimmy Kimmel,” writers: Jimmy Kimmel and Jesse Joyce; YouTube

Documentary script — current events: “Trump’s Power & the Rule of Law” (“Frontline”), written by Michael Kirk and Mike Wiser; PBS

Documentary script — other than current events: “Forgotten Hero: Walter White and the NAACP” (“American Experience”), written by Rob Rapley; PBS

News script — regularly scheduled, bulletin or breaking report: “Devastating Flooding in Texas” (“World News Tonight with David Muir”), written by David Muir, Karen Mooney and Dave Bloch; ABC News

News script — analysis, feature or commentary: “Remembering Palestinian Journalists Killed by Israeli Forces” (“Ayman”), written by Lisa Salinas; MSNBC

Digital news: “An Isolated Boarding School Promised to Help Troubled Girls. Former Students Say They Were Abused.,” written by Sebastian Murdock and Taiyler Mitchell; HuffPost

Radio/audio documentary: “Jerry Lewis’ Lost Holocaust Clown Movie” (“Decoder Ring”), written by Max Freedman; Slate

Radio/audio news script — regularly scheduled, bulletin or breaking report: “ABC News Radio Top of the Hour News”, written by Robert Hawley; ABC News Radio

Radio/audio news script — analysis, feature or commentary: “The Life and Legacy of Jimmy Carter,” written by Gail Lee; CBS News Radio

On air promotion: “CBS Comedy,” written by Dan Greenberger; CBS

Times staff writers Stacy Perman and Cerys Davies contributed to this report.

The original title of “Heel” was “Good Boy.” The new title is probably more accurate, though an even more accurate title might be “Painfully Annoying Punk Idiot.” I jest (a bit), since the title of “Heel” is actually a verb. The film wants to tell the story of a budding hooligan who needs to be brought to heel. That said, does anyone seriously want to see a movie about a 19-year-old British sociopath who gets chained up in a basement so that the weird upper-middle-class couple who’ve kidnapped him can modify his behavior? “Heel” is like “A Clockwork Orange” remade as the year’s worst Sundance movie.

The opening sequence is actually promising. It depicts, in rapidly edited documentary-like montage, a reckless night out on the town by Tommy (Anson Boon) and his friends. They’re hopped-up club kids, and Tommy is their snarling, curly-haired, sexually coercive wastrel ringleader, living in the moment, pouring drinks down his throat, snorting coke and popping pills, dancing and carousing and puking and rutting in the bathroom, pushing himself to a higher and higher high, until he winds up collapsed on the sidewalk — a ritual, we gather, that has happened many times before. Only this time his crumpled body is gathered up by a mysterious stranger.     

When Tommy wakes up, he’s in the basement of a stately stone house somewhere in the British countryside. He’s got a metal collar around his neck, and it’s chained to the ceiling. The film has barely gotten started, and already it’s cut to the second half of “A Clockwork Orange”: Can this monster delinquent be rehabilitated? Theoretically, that’s an interesting question, except that the way this happens is so garishly contrived that we can only go with the movie by putting any plea for reality on permanent hold.

Who are the people who have kidnapped Tommy? Chris (Stephen Graham) is a mild chap in a toupee who goes about his mission with a puckish vengeance disguised as gentility. His wife, Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough), is so neurasthenic she’s like a ghost. (She has suffered some trauma that isn’t colored in.) The two have a cherubic preteen son they call Sunshine (Kit Rakusen). And why, exactly, are they doing what they’re doing? We have no idea. Trying to make a bad person into a good person is not, in itself, a terrible notion, but the conceit of “Heel” — that Tommy is locked in a dungeon, being treated like a dog, because that’s what it will take to change him — is like a toxic right-wing fantasy that the film somehow reconfigures into an implausible liberal “family” allegory.

Ah, plausibility! How unhip to gripe about the absence of it. Yet watching “Heel,” I found it impossible to suspend my disbelief for two seconds. The entire movie, directed by the Polish filmmaker Jan Komasa (“Corpus Christie”) from a script by Bartek Bartosik and Naqqash Khalid, is just a grimy monotonous conceit. It’s been thought out thematically but not in terms of recognizable human behavior. It’s like a film-student short stretched out to an agonizing 110 minutes.

Anson Boon, a charismatic actor who did an okay job of playing Johnny Rotten in Danny Boyle’s TV miniseries “Pistol” (though he never conjured Rotten’s homicidal gleam), infuses Tommy with a loutish energy that in the early scenes, at least, makes him a convincing candidate for either prison or the contemporary equivalent of shock therapy. And yet the character is exhaustingly obnoxious. As a filmmaker, Komasa doesn’t dramatize — he uses one-note traits to clobber the audience. Stephen Graham’s Chris is as quiet and circumspect as Tommy is abrasive. He tries to train Tommy by showing him motivational tapes, and by subjecting him to Tommy’s own depraved TikToks. He then rigs up an elaborate system of gutters on the ceiling so that Tommy, in his metal leash, can wander around the house, a sign that he’s been housebroken.

Tommy has to grow and change, since there wouldn’t be a movie otherwise. In the process, he gets less annoying but also less interesting, because “Heel” sentimentalizes his transformation. Komasa seems to have missed the key irony of “A Clockwork Orange”: that the behavior modification of Alex is as brutalizing as his original state of punk anarchy. In “Heel,” Tommy’s evolution is singularly unconvincing — by the end, he’s practically ready to be the suitor in a Jane Austen drama. But that’s all of a piece with a movie so false it puts the audience in the doghouse.

In “Rooster,” a genial comedy premiering Sunday on HBO, Steve Carell, comfortable as an uncomfortable person, plays Greg Russo, the author of a best-selling series of books whose hero is named Rooster. He has come to leafy, fictional Ludlow College to give a reading, but also because it’s where his daughter, Katie (Charly Clive) teaches art history, and because it’s all over school that her husband, Archie (Phil Dunster), a history professor, has left her for Sunny (Lauren Tsai), a graduate student in neuroscience. He’s a concerned father.

“They are light; they are fun. The characters that you like have sex, the ones you don’t get shot in the face,” Greg tells poetry professor Dylan (Danielle Deadwyler) of the “beach read” books he writes, as she ushers him to an auditorium. Unlike his fictional alter ego, Greg is by his own account a self-conscious introvert, heightened by the fact that his ex-wife, Elizabeth (Connie Britton) — “a philanthropist, a pioneer in corporate gender equality and an accomplished CEO” whose name adorns the school’s new student center — left him five years earlier and he never moved on. Additionally, Greg likes nuts and cocoa, can toss a penny into a jar from across a room, and played minor league hockey, which will put him back on skates here.

College president Walter Mann (John C. McGinley) decides it would be “a feather in his cap” to hire a reluctant Greg, “a best-selling author that the parents have actually heard of,” as an artist-in-residence — a deal he makes impossible to refuse by agreeing to keep Katie on staff after she accidentally burns down Archie’s house. (She was only trying to burn his first edition of “War & Peace.”) It’s a role quite like the one McGinley played/plays on “Scrubs,” but more politic and better dressed, when dressed — he takes meetings in his backyard sauna.

And they’re off.

The series was created by Bill Lawrence (“Ted Lasso,” “Shrinking,” “Scrubs,” “Bad Monkey”) and frequent collaborator Matt Tarses, and as men of at least a certain age, the view is slanted from experience back toward innocence; students play a secondary, though not insignificant role in the story. There are some pro forma jokes about the sensitivities of the young, with Greg getting into not-very-hot water over misunderstood references to “white whale” and the Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian.” (“Liberal arts college used to be havens for free thought, Greg,” says Walt. “When did you and I become the bad guys?”) Not that the olds are reliably smart about life — the ways in which they’re not power the series — but they have a better notion of where they’re stupid.

“No one must be humiliated,” Greg says to Archie, quoting Chekhov, as Archie goes off to talk to Katie. (The quote is in the animated opening titles as well, so you can take it as important.) But no one here is out to humiliate anyone, which is nasty and unkind and not at all the sort of humor Lawrence trades in. Of course, characters will be put into embarrassing positions, or embarrass themselves, embarrassment being the root of all comedy, or near enough. (There’s a good bit of slapstick knitted in.) And though we’re told that “there are real villains lurking around this place,” niceness reigns — at least through the six episodes, of 10, available to review — with the possible exception of Alan Ruck as the dean of English. (“There’s no way she wrote all these poems,” he says of Emily Dickinson.)

Though there are couples, and ex-couples and new couples, one doesn’t necessarily feel invested in their getting together, or staying together, or getting back together. Indeed, as in other Lawrence projects — which typically feature divorced or separated characters — romance is a sort of side dish, less the issue than whether people are managing to treat one another well. We knew Ted Lasso wasn’t going to get his wife back, but it wasn’t the point (nor was winning games, really); kindness was what mattered. Greg’s possibly pre-romantic friendship with Dylan is no more significant than his cross-generational friendship with a group of goofball students (led by Maximo Solas as Tommy); they treat each other as peers, while knowing they aren’t. He teaches them that peanut butter can make celery better, and they teach him that he’s cooler than he thinks.

Katie, who says she still loves Archie — who says he still loves her — will also call him “a run-of-the-mill narcissistic a— who sometimes smells like wildflowers.” (As for Sunny, practical and deadpan — that no one gets her jokes is a running joke — not even Archie can see what she sees in him, a problem you might have as well, but, as is true of most everyone here, we’re not meant to merely write him off. Funny secondary characters, who get some of the best business, notably include Rory Scovel as a cop who can’t keep track of his gun, Robby Hoffman as Sunny’s intense, anti-Archie roommate and Annie Mumolo (co-writer of “Bridesmaids”) as Walt’s arch assistant.

Old-but-not-that-old-fashioned, “Rooster” has a tinge of Gen X nostalgia, underscored by the ’80s college radio classics that line the soundtrack. (R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe co-wrote and sings the series’ theme, and Greg, drunk and in a mood, will kill a party getting the DJ to play “Everybody Hurts.” Directed by Jonathan Krisel (“Portlandia,” “Baskets”), it’s low stakes, soft-edged, humane, basically gentle, a little fantastic, a little farcical, well cast and well played in every instance — qualities I happen to like, and maybe you do, too.