MEXICO CITY — 

They limited Patrick Mahomes to his least productive first half as an NFL quarterback.

They caught Kansas City on a night when wide receiver Tyreek Hill was injured early and contributed no catches and zero yards.

The Chargers also benefited from the Chiefs losing two of their top running backs — Damien Williams and LeSean McCoy — to injuries.

And they still couldn’t overcome their inability to make the necessary plays late to avoid another one-score loss.

The Chargers weren’t victimized by Mahomes or Kansas City’s celebrated speed as much as they simply failed to come through when it mattered most.

“At the end of the day, we gotta make one more play and we’re not making it,” defensive lineman Damion Square said after the 24-17 loss to the Chiefs. “It’s a red-zone league. It’s a league that comes down to the last score of the game.”

The Chargers are now 4-7, with each of the losses coming by one score. They’ve fallen by a touchdown four times, by a field goal twice and by two points once.

And they just lost to the Chiefs despite Mahomes throwing for only 63 yards entering halftime, his career low for a first half.

Mahomes finished 19 for 32 for 182 yards, with one touchdown and one interception. Chargers free safety Rayshawn Jenkins made a nice leaping play for the pickoff.

Mahomes did gain a team-high 59 rushing yards on five carries, scrambling for key yardage in key moments. He was sacked once, by Melvin Ingram, who finished with five tackles and knocked down two passes.

In all, the Chargers kept Mahomes, the reigning league MVP, from taking over the game.

“He got loose a couple times,” Square said. “But that’s Pat, man. I feel like the game we played against Pat today was big. I mean, the guy’s special. He does some special things with the ball.”

The Chargers outgained the Chiefs (438 yards to 310), ran 13 more offensive plays and forced six punts.

Kansas City’s other famously fast wide receiver, rookie Mecole Hardman, caught only two passes for 13 yards. He also returned two punts for 22 yards.

“I loved the way they fought at the end,” coach Anthony Lynn said of his defense, “kept giving us chances, got the ball back several times.”

After the Chiefs scored on four consecutive possessions — three touchdowns and a field goal — during a stretch in the second and third quarters, the Chargers forced them to punt four times in the fourth quarter.

Given those opportunities, however, the offense produced zero points. The Chargers instead punted twice and Philip Rivers was intercepted two times.

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Lifelong horse lover Opal Hagerty of Escondido didn’t want to die without a final trail ride

ESCONDIDO — 

When 95-year-old Opal Hagerty showed up last week for her horse-drawn carriage ride in Temecula, she was nattily dressed in a fringed suede jacket and a cowboy hat.

For much of the Escondido cowgirl’s life, horseback riding had been a hobby and a passion. But age and health issues forced Hagerty and her late husband, Donald Gale Hagerty, to sell their horses more than 20 years ago, so it had been decades since she even had the opportunity to pet a horse. So when she got the chance Friday to fulfill her bucket-list wish for one last ride, the widowed mother of three was determined to dress for the occasion, which came off without a hitch.

“It was the most beautiful ride I ever had,” she said afterward. “I’ll remember it for the rest of whatever life I have left.”

Hagerty is the latest recipient of the Dreams Do Come True program at Cypress Court Retirement Center in Escondido, where she has lived since 2011. Over the past five years, Cypress Court wellness director Judy Lucous has granted more than half a dozen residents’ wishes. Recipients, many of them in hospice care or disabled, have gone for bike rides, a hot-air balloon ride, a motorcycle ride, a boat trip and a shopping excursion.

Sometimes the residents have a hard time figuring out what they want most, but Hagerty has never wavered. For nearly 10 years, she has been telling anyone who asked that she wanted to ride a horse one more time. But because she has limited mobility and relies on an oxygen tank, the excursion didn’t seem safe or feasible. Then, Mark and Marika Matson of Temecula Carriage Co. offered Hagerty a free horse-drawn carriage ride through the city’s vineyards and the date was finally set.

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“I have wanted to ride horses all my life,” Hagerty said of her equine passion. “I always found it wonderful sitting up on a horse and being able to look at everything around me. I loved the freedom of it.”

Hagerty was born and raised in Long Beach, where she discovered her love of horses in junior high school when she took lessons in English saddle riding. Around the same time, she met her future husband, Don, a junior high classmate, but it would be some years before they were able to marry.

After Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941, he enlisted in the Navy and served in the submarine corps. While stationed at the Pearl Harbor base during World War II, he was injured and spent time in a hospital recuperating. During his hospitalization in January 1945, his submarine, the Seawolf, was lost at sea with 100 men aboard, making him the sub’s only surviving crewman, Hagerty said.

After the war, the couple married and had three children. They bought a home in Buena Park and bought their first horses, which they rode through the dry riverbeds of what was then mostly rural Orange County. Meanwhile, he worked for McDonnell Douglas, testing the strength and stability of airplane parts in wind tunnels. After raising their children, she worked in the office at a vocational school. In 1997, they retired and moved to Tehachapi, where they rode horses together every day.

As they got older and their health declined, the Hagertys were forced to sell their home and horses in Tehachapi and move closer to family in Escondido in 2010. A year later, they moved into Cypress Court, where Don Hagerty died in 2014 at 92. On Friday, Hagerty said being around a horse again brought back pleasant memories of her many happy years with her husband.

Mark Matson said he was touched by Hagerty’s story so he and his wife, Marika, wanted to make her wish come true.

They started their company in 2007 with one draft horse and a carriage and over the years the business has expanded to include 12 horses and eight carriages.

Since Friday’s ride was a wish fulfillment, the Matsons arrived in a Cinderella-style carriage drawn by Blossom, a 16-year-old Belgian draft horse. After giving Hagerty time to kiss and pet Blossom for a few minutes, they went on an hourlong ride through 109 acres of vineyards and olive groves at the Carter Estate Winery.

Lucous said she’s now working on fulfilling a wish for an 85-year-old resident who raced cars in her younger years and would like to drive a race car again before she dies. Most of the wishes have been fulfilled free of charge by local organizations and businesses.

“I don’t know how we’ll do that, but we’ll find a way,” Lucous said.

Kragen writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.

ORINDA, Calif. — 

Prosecutors said Monday that they won’t immediately file criminal charges against five men arrested on suspicion of shooting up a Bay Area Halloween party, killing five people.

The Contra Costa County district attorney’s office couldn’t meet the standard for filing charges by Monday’s deadline, spokesman Scott Alonso said.

“We need more information,” he said. “We are not ready to file charges, and we will not file charges until we can.”

“This is a very complex case,” he added.

But charges could be filed later, he said: “If there’s more evidence that comes to light, we will certainly reevaluate it as it comes in.”

Because of the filing deadline, the men must be released from custody unless they have parole violations or warrants, Alonso said.

After a series of raids in several Bay Area cities, four men were arrested Thursday on suspicion of murder. The party promoter was arrested on suspicion of being an accessory.

The Oct. 31 shooting at an Airbnb rental home in quiet, upscale Orinda was a bloodbath, Contra Costa Sheriff David Livingston said last week.

Members of rival gangs from San Francisco and Marin City were among the estimated 100 people at the unsanctioned party, which was advertised on social media, he said.

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Livingston said that an altercation started in the kitchen of the house, and witnesses told investigators someone had tried to steal someone else’s property, which may have precipitated the shooting.

Video showed some people tucking guns into their pants as they slipped past a front-door security guard, and some people went to the party “with intent of causing harm and conflict,” the sheriff said.

The shooting killed Tiyon Farley, 22, of Antioch; Omar Taylor, 24, of Pittsburg; Raymon Hill Jr., 23, of San Francisco and Oakland; Javlin County, 29, of Sausalito and Richmond; and Oshiana Tompkins, 19, of Vallejo and Hercules.

Two of the dead had guns, Livingston said.

Five people were injured, including one who jumped from a balcony to escape the gunfire.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has since said that the San Francisco-based company was taking steps to stop unauthorized parties in the wake of the deadly shooting.

In a now-familiar warning, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. notified hundreds of thousands of customers Monday that it may shut off power amid dry and windy conditions posing an increased fire risk.

The utility said 303,000 customers in parts of 25 counties in the Sierra foothills and north Bay Area — including Alameda, Butte, El Dorado, Marin, Mendocino and Yuba counties — may be without electricity starting Wednesday morning.

“PG&E will safely restore power in stages as quickly as possible, with the goal of restoring most customers by end of day Thursday, based on the current weather conditions,” the utility said in a news release.

The increased fire danger comes as a low-pressure system descends over the Bay Area and into Southern California, bringing gusts from 30 to 55 mph and dry weather to Northern California, according to the National Weather Service.

The utility said it will open resource centers with restrooms, bottled water, air conditioning and device charging in the areas where power may be cut off.

The potential shutoff is the latest in a handful of preemptive strikes by PG&E in an attempt to prevent fires caused by their electrical equipment. Despite the efforts, the utility has reported to the California Public Utilities commission it detected activity or equipment failure near several fires that have ignited in the last several months, including the Kincade fire, which grew to more than 75,000 acres.

PG&E continues to be scrutinized by locals and public officials for the widespread shutoffs. California regulators have opened a formal investigation into the preemptive power outages, and Gov. Gavin Newsom has threatened to turn the utility into a customer-owned cooperative run by state and local governments.

“They simply did not do their jobs,” Newsom said at a news conference as the massive Kincade fire burned through dozens of homes. “It took us decades to get here, but we will get out of this mess. We will do everything in our power to restructure PG&E so they are a completely different entity when they get out of bankruptcy. Mark my words. It is a new day of accountability.”

SACRAMENTO — 

With the threat of another power outage looming, state lawmakers hammered Pacific Gas & Electric at the state Capitol on Monday for botching shut-offs that left millions of Californians in the dark this fall and blamed the company for failing to upgrade its system over time.

During an all-day hearing that included testimony from California’s investor-owned utilities, state officials and representatives of communities affected by outages, state senators vented their frustrations as they tried to identify legislative solutions to problems caused by this year’s wildfire-prevention blackouts.

“I look at what happened on Oct. 9 as a big screw you: to your customers, to the Legislature, to the governor,” state Sen. Bill Dodd (D-Napa) said, adding that he felt the utility unnecessarily cut power to parts of his district last month. “It requires, again, that questioning: Who in the hell designed your system?”

Electrical utilities expanded the use of intentional outages during dangerous weather conditions over the last year to prevent their power lines from sparking the kinds of deadly fires that have become a way of life in California. The Legislature originally supported shutoffs as a method of last resort to save lives, and voted in 2018 to require the state’s three investor-owned utilities to annually submit outage protocols to the state.

But attitudes changed soon after widespread shutoffs began this fall — in some instances, without proper communication to government officials and customers that lost power. Among the many problems reported, residents complained of expired food, medically fragile customers struggled to find access to electricity to power life-sustaining medical equipment and businesses reported devastating economic losses.

A four-day outage in early October had an estimated impact of $50 million to $70 million in Sonoma County alone, said Mark Bodenhamer, the chief executive of the Sonoma Valley Chamber of Commerce.

“People are exhausted. They are fed up and deserve better,” Sen. Mike McGuire (D-Healdsburg) said. “I’ve never seen food bank lines like what I saw two weeks ago. It’s like what you see on television in Third World countries, and it’s unacceptable.”

Lawmakers also heard testimony from representatives of San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison. While some implored Edison to do more to help elderly and medically fragile customers pay for generators and prepare for outages, the tone of the questions was relatively cordial and much of the focus remained on PG&E.

Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) said it was time to rethink the future of the state’s largest electrical utility.

“This company, in my mind, has forfeited its right to operate as an investor-owned utility,” Wiener said. “We need fundamental structural change at PG&E because the status quo just isn’t working and hasn’t worked for a long time.”

William Johnson, the chief executive of PG&E, acknowledged that the company fumbled the shutoffs last month but said the outages were necessary to protect public safety. He said that wildfire threat in PG&E’s service territory has increased at a “rate that few could imagine,” from less than 15% of its area at elevated risk of wildfire in 2012 to more than 50% today.

“Let’s just think about that for a minute. The risk exposure in this energy network that serves 16 million people has more than tripled, a 300% increase, over a period that most companies in this industry would consider the blink of an eye,” Johnson said. “And so we have to cope with this heightened risk the best that we can and turning off power for safety is an effective tool.”

Johnson, who joined the company this year, pushed back on the perception that the electrical system is in shambles due to neglect.

PG&E has invested more than $30 billion in its electrical transmission and distribution assets over the last decade, Johnson said. The company more recently inspected all of its equipment in high-fire areas and its vegetation management — including trimming more than 7 million trees in two years and removing 500,000 dead trees — exceeded state requirements, he said.

“But the fact is no amount of vegetation clearing can prevent catastrophic wildfires or wind-blown debris from hitting and impacting our wires,” Johnson said.

Lawmakers raised concerns about vulnerable residents, particularly the elderly and disabled whose lives may depend on access to refrigerated medications or electrically powered medical equipment, and the need for more back-up power options.

Officials also criticized the California Public Utilities Commission, the entity charged with regulating the state’s three largest investor-owned utilities, for what they said was weak oversight in the past.

“I believed that de-energizing power lines in advance of a severe windstorm would be a rare, strategically targeted and a last option against a utility ignition of a wildfire,” said Dodd, who wrote the state’s marquee wildfire bill, SB 901, last year. “Unfortunately and unacceptably, in this case the PG&E shutoffs have been applied broadly and with little to no strategic planning.”

PG&E pledged to speed up the timeline to fully update and harden its infrastructure, which the company previously said would take up to 10 years.

“I want to assure you of this: We do not expect an annual repeat of what we went through this October,” Johnson said. “We’re working to narrow the scope and duration of future safety shutoffs and minimize the customer impact as much as possible.”

As lawmakers questioned the utilities, PG&E began notifying 300,000 customers in 25 Northern California counties on Monday that it could shut off the power again as early as Wednesday morning in anticipation of high winds and dry vegetation.

The company said Sunday that its meteorologists anticipate sustained winds of 25 miles per hour with peak gusts of more than 55 miles per hour in some of the potentially affected areas, which include Alameda, Amador, Butte, Contra Costa, Colusa, El Dorado, Glenn, Lake, Marin, Mendocino, Napa, Nevada, Placer, Plumas, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Shasta, Sierra, Solano, Sonoma, Tehama, Trinity, Yolo and Yuba counties. The company said the high winds are expected to last through Thursday morning, at which time its employees could begin inspecting power lines for any damage before turning the electricity back on.

The problem of so-called public safety power shutoffs represents a test for the political and policy acumen of legislators and the governor, who will be responsible for holding the utilities accountable and keeping the lights on across the state.

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In the middle of wildfire season, a majority of Californians said they were concerned about the threat of fires and shutoffs, according to a poll conducted earlier this month by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. The poll found that 46% of likely voters disapprove of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s handling of wildfires and outages, compared with 42% who approve.

The Legislature reconvenes for the second year of its regular session in January, when it will be forced to address ongoing issues related to wildfire prevention and mitigation.

But after Monday’s marathon hearing, at least one lawmaker struggled to find any immediate remedies to lessen the effects of the outages on his constituents.

“At the end of this eight-hour hearing, I simply don’t know what kind of solace or solution I can point to in the near term for the hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people, businesses and local government we work for to survive the next blackout,” Sen. Henry Stern (D-Los Angeles) said.

Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Tuesday, Nov. 19, and I’m writing from Los Angeles.

Wilma Mears was fed up when I talked to her a few weeks ago in Marin City.

This was during the last Pacific Gas & Electric Co. blackout at the end of October. It was chilly out, and we were sitting at a folding table in a big, white resource tent — the same kind of generator-equipped resource tent that had popped up in church and school parking lots around Northern California that week, as an intentional blackout of unprecedented scale darkened wide swaths of the state.

Mears, who is 67, was wrapped in a fuzzy blanket and cuddling her small dog while she charged her cellphone and electric mobility scooter at the tent’s outlets.

“This is just degrading,” she said. “It’s embarrassing.”

By that point, she’d been without power or hot water for three days. All the frozen Lean Cuisine meals that her son had purchased for her the previous week had long since spoiled. Mears, who is disabled and gets by on a fixed income, was concerned about the cost of purchasing more food and whether her muscle spasms would act up without her Epsom salt baths. And without a full charge, her scooter was just barely working. She worried it might not even have enough juice to get her back home.

Now, more blackouts are likely to be coming to Northern California. On Monday, PG&E notified hundreds of thousands of customers that the utility may shut off power amid dry and windy weather conditions that pose an increased fire risk.

The utility said 303,000 customers in parts of 25 counties in the Sierra foothills and north Bay Area — including Alameda, Butte, El Dorado, Marin, Mendocino, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, San Mateo and Yuba counties — may be without electricity starting Wednesday morning. Here’s a map that shows where PG&E may shut off power.

[Read the story: “Another power outage: PG&E may shut down grid to 303,000 customers in Northern California” in the Los Angeles Times]

The announcement came on the same day that state lawmakers hammered Pacific Gas & Electric at the state Capitol for botching shut-offs that left millions of Californians in the dark this fall and blamed the company for failing to upgrade its system over time.

As of now, it looks as if the Marin City apartment where Mears and her dog Papa live may be spared from losing power in the latest round of outages. But those like Mears — seniors, the disabled and other vulnerable populations — will undoubtedly be among the most burdened if and when the lights do go dark again.

Here’s some of our previous coverage on the topic:

• PG&E power outages bring darkness, stress and debt to California’s poor and elderly. In Lake County, one of the most impoverished in the state, many encountered steep challenges when utilities cut power to people already living on the edge. Los Angeles Times
• Power outages leave those with disabilities especially vulnerable. Help remains a work in a progress. Los Angeles Times

And now, here’s what’s happening across California:

TOP STORIES

More details have emerged about a Fresno shooting that left four dead and six wounded at a backyard party on Sunday night. The shooting appears to have been a targeted act. Police believe that at least two gunmen, who remain unknown, entered the backyard through an unlocked gate. Two of the victims were well-known singers in the Southeast Asian Hmong community. (Fresno is home to one of the largest Hmong communities in the United States. Many of the elders fled Laos in the wake of the so-called Secret War and began resettling in the Central Valley in the late 1970s.)

“It’s a dark day in our community, not only in our Hmong community but in our Fresno community,” Pao Yang, head of a Fresno nonprofit agency focused on Hmong residents, said at a news conference Monday. The shooting was the second in Fresno over the weekend and comes days after two other high-profile shootings in California. Los Angeles Times

California is taking Juul to court: California and Los Angeles County officials announced a lawsuit against the vaping giant on Monday, alleging that Juul targeted young people through advertising and failed to give warnings about health risks posed by using e-cigarettes with nicotine. Los Angeles Times

L.A. STORIES

The first storm of the season is set to roll into Southern California this week, bringing rain and the potential for snow at higher elevations. But the area isn’t completely in the clear for fire danger. Los Angeles Times

The so-called Paramount decrees — the regulations that have governed Hollywood since the heyday of Marilyn Monroe — are taking their final bow. The Justice Department has moved to terminate the longstanding consent decrees, which lay out rules for the distribution and exhibition of motion pictures, as part of the department’s broader effort to scrap regulations it views as obsolete. Los Angeles Times

“A love letter to the Lynwood pizza parlor that raised me.” A native son’s moving ode to a southeast L.A. neighborhood institution as community space, and the unpretentious, ultra-thin crust, shredded pepperoni pizzas at Chico’s. LAist

Robert Towne and David Fincher have reportedly closed a Netflix deal to team up on a “Chinatown” prequel pilot script. Towne wrote the screenplay for the 1974 classic. Deadline

Stop saying you can’t find real bagels in L.A. It makes you sound like a condescending idiot. Also, here’s a 1,912-word story about the Los Angeles bagel scene. Enjoy. Tablet

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POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT

In case you were wondering, L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti says that he has no regrets over his decision to not enter the presidential race. “Take the fires a week and a half ago here in Los Angeles. If I was in Iowa, I would not be doing my duty and it would’ve eaten me alive, my conscience, not to be here,” Garcetti said during a podcast taping. Sacramento Bee

CRIME AND COURTS

Hundreds of current and former San Francisco Police Department officers and staff are suing a Hunters Point Naval Shipyard contractor over health problems. The shipyard, which is owned by the Navy, was named a Superfund waste site in 1989. San Francisco Chronicle

In his sentencing of a Del Mar father, a key judge in the college admissions scandal offers insight into future decisions. In U.S. District Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton’s first sentencing in the case, he delivered a withering dressing-down and a penalty to match. Los Angeles Times

HEALTH AND THE ENVIRONMENT

In the Sierra, scientists bet on “survivor” trees to withstand drought and climate change. Los Angeles Times

CALIFORNIA CULTURE

Nic’s sandwich shop is the only new business to open in Paradise since the devastating Camp fire one year ago. It’s a place where Paradise residents can have a beer, bump into friends and feel OK. Los Angeles Times

California unemployment has fallen to its lowest rate in more than four decades. This is the state’s longest expansion on record. Los Angeles Times

Silicon Valley is churning out new paper millionaires. Nearly all are men. Bloomberg

A 17-mile hike to unite San Francisco? A sixth-generation San Franciscan sets out to walk a new crosstown trail that sprawls across an increasingly fractured city. New York Times

CALIFORNIA ALMANAC

Los Angeles: partly sunny, 77. San Diego: rain, 71. San Francisco: windy, 59. San Jose: partly sunny, 62. Sacramento: partly sunny, 68. More weather is here.

AND FINALLY

Today’s California memory comes from Glenn Barton:

“Growing up in Los Angeles in the ‘70s, my sisters and I would go to Beverly Park (Kiddieland) at the corner of La Cienega and Beverly boulevards, where the Beverly Center stands today. Hard to believe a small-town amusement park in the vast city of Los Angeles. There were multiple rides, and pony rides too! Such a unique memory when being in that area today knowing such a magical place existed. A special memory for those of us fortunate to grow up in such a great town! After visiting the park we would go across the street to Standard Shoes, where we would play in the big shoe house, and pick out a new pair of shoes.”

If you have a memory or story about the Golden State, share it with us. (Please keep your story to 100 words.)

Please let us know what we can do to make this newsletter more useful to you. Send comments, complaints, ideas and unrelated book recommendations to Julia Wick. Follow her on Twitter @Sherlyholmes.

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Tony Marsh, the high-idling engine of the remarkable ceramics program at Cal State Long Beach, has been an articulate and impassioned voice within the world of clay. He has received wide recognition for his work in the studio and classroom, but 10 years have passed since he’s had a solo show in L.A. The 11 recent pieces in the show “Like Water Uphill” at the Glendale gallery the Pit, bring us, thrillingly, up to date.

Marsh is best known for his perforated vessels filled with objects distilled to archetypal simplicity: spheres, bones, rings, rods, pods. Contents and container have matching skins of eggshell-like glazed stoneware, punctuated at regular intervals with small holes. Elegant and delicate, the sculptures appear almost weightless, their permeable membranes shaped of air as much as clay.

While those perforated works from the 1990s into the 2000s are tangible objects passing as lyrical suggestion, the new pieces flaunt their physical nature with conviction. Each piece is a basic cylindrical vessel, 13 to 19 inches in height, with more-or-less straight walls, thick and impenetrable. Gone are the grace and restraint of the perforated vessels. These pieces are unleashed, primal.

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One is lava black throughout, its exterior teeming with pitted bulges and extrusions, its inside walls cracked and veined. Another is a ghostly blue-black within, its bowl littered with an assortment of melded clay chips, its outer surface a fierce gold. One piece has a glossy, milky-aqua petaled pelt; another a volcanic crust in all the hues of heat.

Marsh is fearless in his explorations of texture and color, applying multiple glazes and mineral coatings. He subjects each piece to numerous firings, letting chemistry and chance have at it, over and over again.

He calls these recent works “Crucibles” and “Cauldrons,” after functional instruments of transformation, vessels designed for fire and for catalyzing change. Each title carries an apt metaphorical load in addition to its descriptive one: A crucible is a rigorous test, just as these works are trials, under severe conditions; and a cauldron stands for an unstable, tempestuous situation, again not unlike what these pieces face in the kiln, what Marsh generates in the process of making them.

The materiality of these vessels is riveting. What they do share with Marsh’s earlier work is a kind of reduction to essence, and an exhilarating beauty, this time rugged rather than refined, improvisational instead of meticulously ordered. Each “Crucible” and “Cauldron” is a singular topography, earth inexhaustibly reinvented as earth.

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During the filming of “Unbelievable,” an eight-part true crime series on Netflix, showrunner Susannah Grant was often presented with options from the on-set consultant, a former crime scene investigator from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department who’d been a technical advisor on enough films and TV shows to be familiar with the dramatizing tricks of the medium. Did Grant want to keep it real, the expert wanted to know, or was she fine with close-enough-for-TV standards? “We kept saying to her, ‘Forget about getting away with it on TV,’” Grant recalls telling her. “‘It has to be 100% authentic.’”

Grant’s burning need to get even the tiniest aspects right speaks to the very heart of the series’ source material, “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2015 article from ProPublica’s T. Christian Miller (a former Times reporter) and the Marshall Project’s Ken Armstrong. At the center of their reporting on a string of rapes in the states of Washington and Colorado that occurred between 2008 and 2011 lay the tragic story of teenager Marie Adler, whose account of being held at knifepoint and bound by her own shoelaces by a masked man was viewed suspiciously by friends, former foster parents, and the assigned male detectives, who, after hours of skeptical questioning, drew a false confession of lying from their browbeaten victim.

When Grant (the screenwriter of “Erin Brockovich”) co-created “Unbelievable” with married novelists Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, they realized that to do right by their subject matter, accuracy was paramount. “This piece without credibility, it could be dismissed,” Grant says. “And believe me, victims of sexual assault, you don’t need much for this culture to dismiss them.”

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Sitting in her Culver City office, dressed in black slacks, a black blouse and black Vibram-soled boots, Grant spoke of putting in calls to the real-life Adler, who has an executive producer credit. “The props people would say, ‘These are four phones used in that era,’” and I’d think, ‘OK, I could make one up or just ask her what feels right.’” And through those little details you are just going to find your way to something that’s as truthful as it can be.”

Grant initially toyed with the idea of being sole director on “Unbelievable,” but ultimately the episodes were split among her and two other top directors: Lisa Cholodenko (“Olive Kitteridge”) and Michael Dinner (“Justified”). Filming the rape scenes — shown in short, almost shadowy flashbacks, per the script’s narrative — required a lot of forethought, says Cholodenko, who wanted the depiction of sexual assault to be terrifying yet not voyeuristic.

That meant lots of conversations with Quyen Tran, her director of photography, and lots of self-confessed apprehension. “My biggest challenge was, ‘How do I get underneath the skin of this woman and her trauma?’ We know how to [shoot rape scenes] in an objectifying way, which for me, doesn’t really work. It typically feels melodramatic or contrived or from the filmmaker’s point of view,” Cholodenko says. “So my biggest challenge was getting into her psyche as much as possible — without it being a freaky art film, you know? I wanted to keep it grounded in the story and in realism. I wanted the camera to have a point of view that wasn’t fussy or fancy, that was in sync with Marie’s.”

The reaction from critics when “Unbelievable” dropped in September confirmed the series’ fact-based complexities and genre professionalism. How do you categorize a show that is a searing human story, a gripping crime procedural and a social-issue eye-opener about how sexual assault is given short shrift within the justice system?

One thing that was never disputed: The cast was packed with talent. Emmy winners Merritt Wever and Toni Collette play detectives who by way of example show that a softer touch with the newly traumatized doesn’t get in the way of effective crime-solving. Kaitlyn Dever, as Marie, conveys Adler’s determination to lead a happy life despite the startling unkindness shown to her. Even the secondary actors included up-and-comer Danielle Macdonald and the reliable Dale Dickey.

When Dever first received the pilot script for “Unbelievable,” she was on her last week of playing a brainy do-gooder in Olivia Wilde’s coming-of-age comedy “Booksmart” and wondering what was next. “I was getting a little worried because I didn’t have work for the rest of the year and then this project came to my email in-box,” Dever says by phone. “I read [Marie’s] story and my heart immediately broke for her.”

When asked if she ever reached out to Adler, Dever said no, adding that she created her slump-shouldered, messy-haired character by studying Armstrong and Miller’s article, as well as their book, “A False Report: The Chilling True Story of the Woman Nobody Believed.” “I didn’t want to be a carbon copy of her,” Dever says. “I wasn’t trying to memorize her mannerisms or the way she speaks or talks. It was all about achieving her emotions and state of mind.”

Dever, perhaps best known as Loretta McCready, a wily backwoods drug dealer on FX’s “Justified,” has been acting for 10 years but has rarely found herself wondering about a real-life counterpart and how she might react to her performance.

“That was constantly running through my head,” Dever says. “This was the toughest thing I’ve ever had to do in my career. I put so much pressure on myself because I knew it was an important story to tell. I just knew I had to do her justice.”

NEW YORK — 

The Broadway fall season is in full swing, and Times Square, the “crossroads of the world,” is virtually impassable. At peak performance times on weekends — meaning all day and all night — the congestion makes the 5 Freeway on a Friday evening seem like a joy ride.

While returning to the Ethel Barrymore Theatre after the dinner break during my marathon day at a press preview for Matthew Lopez’s “The Inheritance,” I found myself trapped in a thronging nightmare. Weaving around the stocky steel barriers set up to prevent the next car attack, I navigated an obstacle course of selfie-taking tourists, bullying SUVs, police officers scanning for trouble and an army of pedestrians resembling extras in a dystopian thriller. A mere three blocks felt like 30. P.S. I was born in Brooklyn.

A good many brave souls were scrambling like me to make a curtain for a play or musical. But countless others were plunging into the whirlwind to catch a movie at one of the multiplexes or purchase a pair of sneakers before leaving town for those places that apparently don’t sell any.

The Times Square area was never the exclusive preserve of theatergoers, but Broadway culture elevated the neighborhood’s rough and raffish character. Today, not even all Broadway theaters have Broadway theater happening inside them.

Martin Scorsese “The Irishman” has taken over the Belasco Theatre for November. Some call this sacrilege, but theater purists have already had to come to terms with Broadway houses being turned over to rock stars, magicians, stand-up comics and fashion designers.

Everyone out to make a creative buck wants a piece of Broadway’s billion-dollar action. But it’s not all about greed. “Springsteen on Broadway,” taxonomy aside, was among the best shows I saw in 2017. One of the most coveted tickets this fall is David Byrne’s “American Utopia,” an artfully staged concert that doesn’t need to palm itself off as a musical to win over theatergoers.

The production, shimmering with monochromatic style, has a topnotch creative team that includes production consultant Alex Timbers, the in-demand director whose Broadway productions of “Moulin Rouge!” and “Beetlejuice” are still open for business, and choreographer Annie-B Parson, who knows how to maximize minimalist electricity. Enough praise can’t be heaped on the music-making ensemble, which seems to have sprung directly from Byrne’s ageless genius — an effect heightened by the barefoot company’s matching gray suits.

The 90-minute production flows with music from the Talking Heads to Byrne’s recent solo recording that gives the show its title. This is a hybrid work, loosely constructed around a theme: the lost and found of America’s promise.

Does it need to be on Broadway? When “American Utopia” was in L.A. last year, it played at the Shrine Auditorium, where it was apparently right at home. Yet this show was the one my fellow theater critics kept urging me to check out as we bobbed past one another in the churning sea of the theater district. I second their recommendation.

A Saturday 5:30 p.m. curtain allowed me to sandwich “American Utopia” between two choice dramas, the sensational Tom Hiddleston-led revival of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre and the equally gripping production of Adam Rapp’s “The Sound Inside” at Studio 54.

I confess that when it was announced that Broadway was importing Pinter’s sinewy drama of marital infidelity, I let out a groan. It wasn’t that long ago that Mike Nichols’ production of “Betrayal” with Daniel Craig, Rafe Spall and Rachel Weisz was failing to live up to all its Broadway buzz. Before that, there was the misfire of many accents with Juliette Binoche, Liev Schreiber and John Slattery. Pinter’s pauses haven’t lost their menacing luster, but these two previous Broadway revivals, smacking as they did of prestige showcases for restless screen stars, didn’t shore up the standing of this 1978 play as a modern classic. Another “Betrayal” seemed to me a failure of producing imagination.

But the new production, directed by Jamie Lloyd with a fashionable sleekness containing genuine depth, may be the best I’ve seen. Hiddleston, an actor of uncommon intelligence and Pre-Raphaelite beauty (if the Pre-Raphaelites had access to the best Pilates trainers), is ably joined by Zawe Ashton and Charlie Cox in a glamorous production that resonantly draws out the geometric configurations of the drama.

“Betrayal,” the story of an adulterous affair between Emma (Ashton) and Jerry (Cox), a literary agent who’s the best friend of her book publisher husband, Robert (Hiddleston), unfolds in clipped remarks and swallowed sentiments as the play travels back in time from the end of the extramarital romance to its besotted beginnings. Pinter burns away exposition to reveal the alarming mystery of human relations and the way communication is used to conceal the truth from those with the power to inflict the most pain.

A sign of the success of this “Betrayal” is the attentiveness with which the audience tracked the tense love triangle. I can’t remember ever hearing a Broadway audience listen so loudly. This energetic silence was an enthralling sound, affirming that language in the hands of a master playwright is still all that’s needed to seize the imagination of theatergoers.

An elegant cast certainly doesn’t hurt. Posh English actors in a lauded London import are a familiar sight on Broadway, and they don’t get much posher than Hiddleston, whose distinguished stage resume (he was the best Coriolanus I’ve seen) exists on a parallel track with his Marvel Studios film credits.

But one of the fascinations with this “Betrayal” was taking in the changing aspect of British acting, the subtle variations in self-presentation that reveal not only character but changing mores. The ensemble lets slip more emotion in the cracks of the characters’ reserve than is customary for Pinter.

Tears glisten from time to time in the eyes of Cox’s Jerry and Ashton’s Emma, but you’ll have to pay close attention because almost as soon as they appear, they disappear. Hiddleston’s Robert, a wall of cool masculinity in the well-cut suit of a literary businessman, doesn’t weep. But he does provide a glimpse into what Robert’s implacable façade costs him.

The precision of the actors, sharpened no doubt by their film training, is mesmerizing as their characters zigzag back in time. The reverse chronology of the plot can induce a detachment in the audience, but the movement into the past is shattering here. This “Betrayal” honors Pinter by making his style seem both of his own era and of ours.

“The Sound Inside,” a play by Adam Rapp, asks audiences to tune in to words arranged and rearranged with scrupulous care. Like “Betrayal,” which was shaped by the verbal posturing of two men in various ends of the book business, “The Sound Inside” unspools in sentences choreographed by Bella (Mary-Louise Parker), a creative writing professor at Yale who has recently learned she has cancer, and Christopher (Will Hochman), a freshman in her fiction writing workshop who is as troubled as he is precocious.

So much of what is spoken in “The Sound Inside” is the prose ceaselessly being composed by characters who are more alive when communing with the voice inside them than when forced to converse with the workaday world. Such literate language could come off as stilted, but this two-hander is performed with unerring suppleness by Parker (in her best stage performance since her Tony-winning turn in “Proof”) and Hochman, a scene partner of invigorating freshness. Their naturalness never wavers even as the play becomes a hall of narrative mirrors, stories revealing stories revealing stories, so that the “real” and the “represented” become increasingly difficult to distinguish.

Rapp, a prolific “downtown” playwright making his Broadway debut, hasn’t a commercial bone in his body. “The Sound Inside” may be his most emotionally accessible work, yet the storytelling (much of it conducted in direct address) isn’t as straightforward as it seems.

The production, directed with shadowy grace by David Cromer, is one of the sneakier Broadway successes this fall. The staging at Studio 54, never the most intimate of legit venues, works remarkably well. That said, “The Sound Inside” strikes me as a winning off-Broadway drama, one of those works I used to stumble upon long ago as a subscriber at Manhattan Theatre Club or Circle Rep.

The official designation of a theater shouldn’t matter, but I found myself wishing I was seeing this satisfying drama not with a Broadway audience conscious of a critically acclaimed hit but among a community of adventurous theatergoers whose dedication to off-Broadway had yielded this rare treasure.

My longing for off-Broadway culture was satisfied by a night at Playwrights Horizons, where I caught the tail end of its acclaimed run “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” a new play by Will Arbery that exposes sophisticated liberal New Yorkers to a group of youngish conservatives airing out their ideological conflicts during their Catholic college reunion in Wyoming. An oratorio of voices, the play unfurls in breathless monologues gripping more for their ideological content than for the dramatic arrangement of the arguments. The personal relationships are less fully developed than the political points of view. Still, I felt grateful to be eavesdropping with an audience that hung on to every syllable as though it might shed light on the forces hijacking America’s soul.

The savviest producers have been recognizing, however belatedly, that playwrights today aren’t writing for conventional Broadway audiences. If the line between off-Broadway and Broadway seems to be blurring, it has as much to do with the richness of the nonprofit pipeline as it does with the Great White Way’s lure of media attention and money. But it’s not enough to simply relocate the work: The theatrical environment must change.

No play is better demonstrating how this can be pulled off than Jeremy O. Harris’ “Slave Play,” which made the leap uptown from New York Theatre Workshop not simply to provide a higher-profile showcase for this fiendishly inventive piece but to create a pathway for innovative African American drama in the commercial marketplace. On the stage of the Golden Theatre is a wall of mirrors compelling the audience to look at its own reflection, to take in the collective image composed of tightly packed individuals — playgoers hungry for real confrontation, who can also appreciate a few high-voltage injections of Rihanna’s “Work.”

This certainly isn’t the first time such a mirror tactic has been deployed. (Jean Genet, a writer with whom Harris shares a formal fearlessness, made valuable metatheatrical use of a looking glass in “The Balcony.”) But what’s different is revealed in what is seen: an audience that doesn’t look like a traditional Broadway audience, an audience conspicuously more diverse in age and race and social background.

As Harris’ play holds the mirror up to interracial America, the production (boldly directed by Robert O’Hara) demands that the Great White Way reexamine itself to see what it’s capable of becoming. In a bustling Broadway fall season wrestling with the future of the art form, “Slave Play” offers evidence that tomorrow has already arrived.

“Guillermo Del Toro once told me that Terry Gilliam had sat him down at Cannes when [Del Toro] presented ‘Pan’s Labyrinth,’ and said, ‘You’ll never get close to awards with this type of movie,’ ” recalls “It Chapter 2″ producer Barbara Muschietti. “That’s changed.”

Muschietti is on to something — for one thing, in 2007, “Pan’s” went on to earn Del Toro his first Oscar nomination (for original screenplay). And last year, his “Shape of Water” swam away as best picture and saw Del Toro win the directing Oscar. But just what did Gilliam really mean when he warned against “this type of movie”?

Short answer? Horror. Cue screams from studio executives and marketing experts alike.

“A lot of people don’t think horror is a legitimate storytelling method,” says John Palisano, author and president of Horror Writers Assn. “They’re associating it with slasher films, and not seeing it for the conduit of great storytelling it can be.”

Yet horror — or dark fantasy, or dark thrillers; the phrasing changes often to make it more palatable to audiences and awards voters — has been undergoing a fresh wave of acceptance. This year, such films as “The Lighthouse,” “Joker,” “Midsommar,” “It Chapter Two” and “Us” are all in the awards season mix, discussed as potential nominees for their direction, story, costumes and acting — all of which provides a new spice to the oh-so-serious dramatic year-end prestige fare that’s usually on offer.

Still, many people recoil from the idea of horror movies.

“At some point in everyone’s life they see a horror movie that isn’t for them,” says “Us” director Jordan Peele, whose 2017 “Get Out” shattered both box-office and awards expectations last year, earning a best picture nomination and an original screenplay win for Peele at the Oscars. “That experience can make some people declare that they ‘don’t like horror.’ What they don’t get to find out is that there is a spectrum of horror … and that there is probably a horror movie for them.”

“Lighthouse” director Robert Eggers is ambivalent about how to classify his film. Focusing on two clashing lighthouse keepers stranded at their rocky outpost, the film “uses many horror genre tropes,” he says, “but I personally don’t see it as a horror movie. We need genre definitions to be able to talk about things, but people interpret things differently. It’s certainly a genre movie. Not a drama. Not run of the mill.”

However classified by the filmmakers themselves, well-made, thoughtful and well-acted horror films are not unheard of during award season: “Psycho” (1960) earned four Oscar nominations, “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968) won one, “The Exorcist” (1973) won two, and “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991) won five, including best picture. But more dark films are making waves each year, distinguished in part from their schlockier cousins, thanks to better budgets and an undercurrent of metaphor or social commentary.

“Horror is speaking to all generations in a way it never has before,” says Palisano. “In the 1950s, it gave people a way to deal with atomic fears; in the ’60s, horror addressed societal change; again in the ’70s, with consumerism, and the ’80s, with AIDS. Now, the entire country is unified in a threat we’ve never had to face before: the threat from within. And it speaks to both sides [of the political divide].”

“Genre films tend to be overlooked when it comes to awards,” says director Ari Aster, whose “Midsommar” is a trippy take on a vacation to a rural Swedish cult’s midsummer festival that goes very wrong. “But films that tend to be more politically minded, or serve explicitly allegorical purposes are often the exception, and we’ve seen a lot of those exceptions lately. The horror genre is an exciting filter through which to pass more personal material.”

Muschietti agrees. “‘Get Out’ was a fantastic tool to deliver a message in a way that in a drama in another format would have been overlooked,” she says. “It hit the nail on the head.”

About 10 years ago, says Eggers, a shift happened. Filmmakers discovered that “you could get a personal story film financed if you wrapped it in a genre package,” he says, and then cites such quality scary films as 2014’s “It Follows” or 2010’s “Black Swan,” both of which did solid box office (and in the case of “Swan,” earned star Natalie Portman an Oscar).

In addition, multiple generations of genre fans have grown up absorbing the extensive oeuvre of Stephen King, the master of modern horror. It isn’t possible to pin the surge in dark, well-made stories on one author — but the fact that adaptations of his work now draw Oscar- and Golden Globe-nominated acting talent shouldn’t be underestimated.

“Having Jessica Chastain and Bill Hader headlining a film like ‘It’ makes all the difference in the world,” says Palisano. “That brings an entirely different class of viewer, who’ll want to see what they’ll do with material like this. And when people see it’s not just all blood and guts and screwdrivers to the thumbs, they’ll see it’s more like a dark fairy tale.”

That, in turn, can encourage filmmakers and studios alike to give horror the respect, and financing, it can deserve.

“More and more audiences are now comfortable with some of the cinematic vocabulary that filmmakers are bringing to wide releases,” says Eggers. “That’s really a change in the climate.”

Whether acceptance translates into statuettes, though, is still a great dark unknown. “I’m not sure what that means for awards,” he continues. “But it certainly means there are a lot of high-quality genre films being made.”

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