About seven minutes into the new Netflix romantic comedy A Family Affair, Zac Efron, playing a conceited, not-too-bright movie star who’s just broken up with his girlfriend, is whining to his assistant (played by Joey King) that she needs to pick up his stuff from the ex-girlfriend’s place. He left treasured items there, he explains. He left his autographed Jordans! He left his Himalayan t-shirt! And then he says, gravely, as if it shows the urgency of the mission, “I left my copy of The Courage to be Disliked.” And I said, in my living room, “Ha!”

The Courage to be Disliked is a real book. It doesn’t actually endorse the practice of being a jerk; it’s more nuanced than that. But this character, without a pinch of self-awareness, bemoaning the disappearance of a book called The Courage to be Disliked? That’s a very solid joke, very solidly delivered by Efron. He follows it up with, “I have several underwears there. And people sell those.”

Eventually, the movie star, whose name is Chris, has one too many fights with the assistant, whose name is Zara, and he has to go find her to make amends. But when he goes to her house, he finds her mother, Brooke (Nicole Kidman), a beautiful widowed author who lives in the kind of gorgeous and classy house that starred in most of the best Nancy Meyers movies. (It’s sharply different from Chris’ house, which is equally fancy but also ugly and impractical, as seen in an effective little bit about his absurd front door.) Brooke and Chris start drinking tequila, they hit it off, and Zara, who lives at home and observes few boundaries with her mom, eventually walks in on them upstairs in Brooke’s bedroom.

Zara’s dismay over her mother’s relationship with Chris is not about the age difference (which goes mostly undiscussed), but about the fact that she’s seen Chris go through his girlfriend-dumping routine enough times to fear that her mother might get hurt. What follows in the script from Carrie Solomon is one part romance between Chris and Brooke, one part ongoing clash between Chris and Zara, and one part mother-daughter story about Zara and Brooke. And honestly, in this film from director Richard LaGravenese, it all works pretty well!

Joey King as Zara Ford and Zac Efron as Chris Cole in A Family Affair.

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Some of this — particularly an older woman getting involved with a younger male celebrity — may call to mind the recent movie The Idea of You, in which Anne Hathaway fell for a boy band member played by Nicholas Galitzine. I didn’t care for that movie at all, in part because it wasn’t funny enough, in part because the romance was unconvincing, and in part because the ending lacked emotional resonance. (It was based on a book with a completely different ending, and it turns out you can’t just take a carefully built story and flip the ending on its head and have the result make sense.) That book wasn’t written to be a romcom, but was adapted and wedged into the romcom box. This, on the other hand, is meant to be one — and it shows.

Efron is a much more successful, charismatic, and (especially) funny lead than Galitzine (whom I’d liked in Red, White & Royal Blue) opposite Hathaway in The Idea of You. And it’s refreshing to see Kidman happily making out with somebody, at least temporarily making her way out of the haunted-sad-person rut she’s been in for the past few years. Chris’ relationship with Brooke feels real and brings out nice things in them both, beginning when she explains the Icarus myth so he can understand its connections to his movie franchise, Icarus Rush, which she’s never seen. He certainly seems like a dope at first (“I’m Australian.” “Oh, do you know Margot Robbie?” “…No.” “I do.”), but as he gets comfortable, he grows on Brooke, in addition to being, you know, very hot.

All the way back in 2012, I wrote that Efron was making an interesting play to follow in the footsteps of somebody like Ryan Gosling. (At that time, in his mid-twenties, Efron was appearing in a Nicholas Sparks film.) Gosling was also once a Disney kid, and he managed to grow into a very good dramatic actor, a very good comic actor, and a very swoony romantic lead. Efron doesn’t have the Oscar nominations just yet, but he was excellent in a pure dramatic role in The Iron Claw in 2023, and he’s funny enough here as the willfully goofy hunk that he might have been a pretty terrific Ken if Gosling hadn’t been available — or a good Fall Guy.

King is an established Netflix romcom lead herself, but she does a very nice job here, too. Besides the romance, particularly welcome is the strand of the story about Zara figuring out that the world is not all about her, even in her relationship with her mother. In a scene with her grandmother, played (skillfully as ever) by Kathy Bates, Zara starts to figure out what we all eventually must: Your parents are not only your parents, they are also human beings with lives and thoughts and wants that have nothing to do with you. She has a truth-telling moment with her best friend (Liza Koshy), too, about her problems not lying at the center of the universe, which gives the whole last act a very nice “What if somebody had forcefully told Rory Gilmore to get over herself?” quality.

Nicole Kidman as Brooke Harwood in A Family Affair.

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It’s too early to declare some golden age of streaming romcoms, because the ones we get are still wildly uneven, and because on cable, it’s not as if they ever went away. But there’s some star power here, and some budget, and some writing and directing, that suggests interest in the genre is picking up steam and getting good results.

Jimmy Dunne hopped off his electric bike, hung his helmet on the handlebars and hurried over to the three bocce courts at Veterans Gardens just in time to offer his usual Tip of the Day.

“Think strategically,” the commissioner of the Palisades Bocce Club told the 50 amateur players who had gathered at the park on this chilly gray morning. At 68, he was a relative youngster compared with most of the assembled crowd. “If you’re playing against a master like Bill Skinner and you’re down in the last quarter, go hard.”

Everyone laughed. Skinner, who is 90 and plays for the OBG (Old But Great) Rollers, beamed. And the tournament began.

Pickleball may have exploded in the wake of the pandemic, but in Pacific Palisades bocce is king. More than 900 people have joined the Palisades Bocce Club since it began in June 2021. In the spring season, which ended this month, 542 people played regular matches. Games take place three times a week, and while winning is nice, it has never been the point. The league prizes community over competition, bringing together neighbors of all generations to connect in the outdoors.

“None of this was ever about bocce,” said Dunne, a longtime Palisades resident and songwriter who has written for Whitney Houston and Kenny Rogers. “It’s about celebrating the wonder in our backyard and the simple pleasure of having friends in town.”

The stakes were high on this Tuesday in May — the winning team would head to the championships — but the vibe was decidedly relaxed. Roger Stewart, who’s in his 90s, rolled his ball while remaining seated on a bench. The ladies of La Bocce Vita, who wore matching black caps featuring their team name in sparkly pink letters, were more interested in planning a weekend getaway together than beating their opponents. And Skinner, a 40-year member of the local Optimist Club, wove through the crowd cracking jokes until someone told him it was his turn to roll.

Dunne, dressed in navy blue pants and a navy blue sweater, cheered them all on, his blue eyes twinkling beneath a pale pink baseball cap.

“Great shot! Just spectacular,” he called out. “Beautiful! Just a little long!”

Bocce dates back at least as far as the Roman Empire and has long been popular in Italy, but interest in the game appears to be surging in the United States.

Scorekeeper Sean Barnett uses a digital measuring tool to figure out which team’s colored balls are closest to the smaller pallino.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

League Commissioner Jimmy Dunne watches play in-between the bocce courts during Thursday league night at the Veterans Gardens bocce courts. The courts in the pubic park were put in two years ago and currently 545 people are signed up to play.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

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“Our explosion is not quite to the pickleball level, but there has been a serious uptick since COVID,” said Alex Gara, co-founder of the American Bocce Company, which runs a league with 3,000 players in Chicago as well as national tournaments. “Often there’s this magical moment where things all come together and a sport grows exponentially very quickly. A lot of people feel like that’s happening for bocce right now.”

There are several reasons why bocce has become such a sensation in the wealthy seaside community of Pacific Palisades, according to Dunne. It’s less physically demanding than tennis or pickleball, making it an accessible social activity for the Palisades’ growing senior population. It’s easy to pick up, and because it relies more on skill and strategy than strength or speed, it’s one of the few sports where a 90-year-old might easily beat a 30-year-old.

The neighborhood’s relatively temperate climate makes it possible for seniors to play outside year-round. It’s also an excuse for older players to get out of the house and for younger players to take a break from the relentless churn of parenting and work. It costs only $75 a person to join for a season.

“Nobody has a credit card in their pocket, and aside from taking pictures, nobody’s looking at their phones,” Dunne said. “It’s time off from life, and God, do we need it.”

Dunne’s love affair with bocce began in the summer of 2010, when he stumbled across a park in the French countryside where people of all ages were gathered around what looked like a bocce court. (This being France, they were likely playing a similar game, petanque). As he took in the scene, a wedding party streamed out of a local church and joined the game.

“I had never played bocce and I had no idea what it was, but what was magical about it was that it was drawing all these people in the community to come out at sunset,” he said. He vowed to create something similar in Los Angeles.

Dunne, who was a writer and producer on “Happy Days” and counts former L.A. mayoral candidate Rick Caruso among his closest friends, is the kind of guy who gets things done. Soon after returning from his trip he convinced the Bel-Air Bay Club in Pacific Palisades, where he’s a member, to put in two bocce courts. Within months, 250 people had joined its league. Word got out and Dunne helped the game spread to Hillcrest Country Club in Beverly Hills, the Griffin Club in Cheviot Hills and the California Club in downtown L.A.

“I took on this odd role of being the pied piper of bocce,” he said. “But my interest wasn’t in bocce, it was in whether this could create belonging.”

Nancy Myers reacts with her “I Liff Bocce” teammates as they win during play for the Pacific Palisades Bocce League.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

After a string of successes with country clubs, Dunne decided to experiment with building a bocce community that was open to the public. In 2016 he and a group of friends began fundraising to build three courts on a patch of dirt near the Palisades Recreation Center. Bill McGregor, an old friend and an architect and real estate developer, drew up the plans for what became Veterans Gardens. Today it is a beautifully landscaped park with several picnic tables and barbecues in addition to the bocce courts — all of it paid for and maintained by private donations including from the local American Legion post. The park opened in 2021 at the height of the pandemic.

“I knew bocce was a thing, but this exceeded our expectations,” said McGregor, who oversaw the construction of the former Sony Music headquarters designed by I.M. Pei, among other local developments. “So many people have not used their public park since their kids were little. Now they’re using it again.”

Scorekeeper Sean Barnett walks in-between the bocce courts during Thursday league night at the Veterans Gardens bocce courts.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Dunne is relentlessly optimistic, but even he was surprised by the league’s success. “In the country clubs people are eating and drinking the whole time,” he said. “What’s wild to me is here people come out with no cocktails and no food.”

Despite the Palisades Bocce Club’s folksy, all-American vibe, a lot of time, thought and energy has gone into making it the community hub it has become. To keep players engaged off the court, Dunne sends out a weekly newsletter with photos from recent games and announcements about who is celebrating the birth of a new grandchild or recovering from surgery.

He hired another friend, Carlyn Peterson, to manage the logistics of the league, placing people on teams, scheduling games and organizing the end-of-season dinners where awards like “The Snappies (Best Dressed in the World)” and “Happiest Campers (A Team So Full of Life)” are given out. A handful of certified bocce professionals are paid to referee the matches.

“It’s the one-two punch of providing the courts and professional programming that’s the secret sauce,” said Dunne, who volunteers most of his time but is compensated to run and manage the league. “That’s what makes it work really well.”

Diane Gallant sports two awards at the Palisades Bocce League Awards Dinner.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

League founder Jimmy Dunne, presents awards at the Palisades Bocce League Awards Dinner.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

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Dunne would like to see the success of the Palisade Bocce Club replicated across Los Angeles, especially in neighborhoods with fewer resources than Pacific Palisades, where the average price of a house is over $3.5 million according to Zillow.

“To me there is a path to get those projects done, not by the city, but by donorship from folks who have the ability to fund it from other communities,” he said.

He’s already reached out to the City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks.

In the meantime the league is gearing up for the summer and fall seasons, and because there are more players and teams than ever before, there will be an extra spot for games on Sunday afternoons.

Skinner will be there. The ladies of La Bocce Vita have already signed up.

“When people crab about this and that and say everything is wrong in the world, I just want to say, ‘Come to the park and see,’” Dunne said. “There are some wonderful things going on.”

The hugely popular Netflix reality show Love is Blind purports to be an experiment where contestants have a chance to fall in love — sight unseen. After “dating” through a wall in small pods, the men and women get engaged, meet in person and then decide at the altar whether or not to commit to a real, legally binding marriage.

But some members have accused the show’s production company of exploitation, and two former cast members have formed a group to help connect reality show contestants to legal and mental health resources.  

“There are a lot of problems with this show,” TV critic Emily Nussbaum says of Love is Blind. “The problem with it is the way the show is run, and frankly, the way that almost all modern reality shows are run. Dating shows, I think specifically, have a lot of these dark qualities that viewers and fans of them don’t know about.”

A staff writer for The New Yorker, Nussbaum wrote about the show in her May 2024 article, “Is Love is Blind a Toxic Workplace?” She chronicles the origins of the genre and its importance to our culture in Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality Television.

Nussbaum says reality television is a “genuinely powerful modern genre” that developed over decades, and which affects everything from personal relationships to politics. She notes that it’s common for contestants to sign extremely aggressive non-disclosure agreements that prevent cast members from discussing the making of the shows.

“They can’t talk about what their producer did, if their producer lied to them, if their producer made them cry by asking them numerous personal questions based on their psychiatric evaluation forms, and then took that crying out of context in the edit,” Nussbaum says. “They can’t talk about any of that, or they may get sued.”

Nussbaum notes that there have been a series of lawsuits related to Love is Blind. One suit, which has been settled, accused the show’s creators of underpaying, underfeeding and pushing alcohol on contestants. In another suit, a cast member accuses the show’s producers of facilitating false imprisonment and sexual assault.

“All of these lawsuits are dealing with a mixture of things: the extremely oppressive contracts, … abuse and exploitation on the show and dealing with the labor conditions,” Nussbaum says. “And [the lawsuits] don’t only have to do with Love Is Blind. [They are] addressing terrible labor conditions and terrible legal conditions and … the people who go on these shows and who work on these shows as worthy of decent treatment.”

Interview highlights

On reality shows as “dirty documentaries”

When I call them “dirty documentary” what I mean is they take documentary techniques and they create formats that put pressure on the people inside them. And the less the people inside [the shows] know about what’s going to happen, the more powerful, and to some degree authentic, their emotional responses are.

On how the earliest form of reality programming took place on radio

The earliest form of reality television that I talk about was actually before TV. … There was this explosion of shows on radio that also cast just regular people, and that created a similar kind of moral outcry, where people were sort of appalled that regular people were going on the air. And I’m talking here about shows like Candid Microphone, which was the first version of Candid Camera, Allen Funt’s prank show, and Queen for a Day, where a bunch of ordinary women went on and told really distressing stories about their personal suffering in their marriages, their poverty, abuse, sickness and things like that. And so people were very upset about the fact that ordinary people were going on the air. There was no such thing as reality casting at the time. I mean, this was just an opportunity for regular people to go on radio, and later on TV, and participate in these shows, sometimes for prizes. Like, on Queen for a Day, the person who won [was] based on a clap-o-meter, like other women rating them [on] who had the ugliest life — their motive for going on the show was obviously that they could win these prizes.

On Love is Blind contestant Renee Poche being hit with a lawsuit for talking about her bad experience 

She definitely, as time went by, wanted to back out of the whole thing. But as on all reality shows, it’s a collaboration between the cast and the crew, and there’s all sorts of psychological things that keep you moving forward, even if you have doubts. Essentially, I think the message that she got was that she should keep going because … part of the show is that at the end of it, you’d go to the altar and you can say no to it. So it just kept rolling forward. …

She felt threatened by [Carter, her fiancé on the show]. She was only going to film scenes with him when she went over there to be with him. But ultimately they did move forward to the altar. I mean, the bigger deal is that Renee wasn’t allowed to talk about what happened on the show. She wasn’t actually featured on the season. She and Carter were treated as kind of side characters. Their story was cut down very much at the last minute, and once she began to talk about what Carter was like, that she had felt threatened by him, that she felt pressured to move forward with the show, that’s when she got slammed with the lawsuit.

Nobody’s allowed to talk about the negative aspects of what they experience on the show, because there is a threat of these lawsuits. Generally, people haven’t been sued. Renee was, and I feel that that was a message to everybody. If you experience anything that’s exploitative or abusive while making a reality show, not just Love is Blind, but any show and you speak out about it, you’re at risk of getting sued.

On the private arbitration that keeps controversy out of the public eye

Emily Nussbaum TK

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Essentially, it keeps the public, including fans of these shows, from understanding the actual conditions in which they’re made. And most of the time when people talk about their experiences on the show, they’re not sued. But the one person who was sued recently, who I wrote about in my article, was sued for $4 million. And I think that sends a significant message. There are multiple motives for people not to speak out about any of this. And frankly, these conditions in these contracts are absolutely standard for the industry. I think people who watch the show not only don’t know about that, but they often just don’t sympathize with it. The dominant feeling is: You decided to go on it, so anything that happens, you should have expected it. I think that shows a lack of compassion, but also I think it shows a lack of understanding of exactly what the conditions are that we’re dealing with here.

On how reality show participants have few protections

One thing I found while I was working on this piece was about a workplace category that they’re in, in terms of Hollywood unions. They’re called “bona fide amateurs,” which is to say, they’re not scripted performers. That would be in SAG, like actresses, and they’re not unscripted performers that would be in SAG, like, say, TV hosts and things like that. But they’re also not the subjects of documentary, who are in a different category and have a little control. They’re essentially contestants on game shows. They’re designated as a category that is sort of non-official and has no protections or rights of any kind. And so what I was writing about in this piece was that the first glimmerings of a movement to try to win protections, and also just to try to educate the general population about how these shows are made and what these issues are, and to improve things, because I think some of the people at the center of this movement, it’s not like they’re saying you couldn’t make an ethical reality show. They’re saying that right now, the way reality shows are made is non ethical, really, both for cast and crew. They’re non-unionized sets. People don’t have a lot of rights. And the conventions and history of the genre have a lot of ugly things about them.

Thea Chaloner and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.